Issue #299 • Mar. 26, 2020

Special Issue for BCS Science-Fantasy Month 5

“The Sniper and I,” by Rich Larson

“Truth as a Prize,” by R.Z. Held

“Where the World Ends Without Us,” by Jason Sanford

“Only the Messenger,” by Emily C. Skaftun

“Song of the Water Bear,” by Laine Bell

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

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

THE SNIPER AND I

by Rich Larson

         I found the sniper in the ruins of New Warsaw, where the enemy’s cloud factories had been hard at work tarring the sky. A nanomachine-laced smog, black as pitch, sucked up the sunlight and deadened all sensors. That meant no orbital strikes, no satellite support. This front had to be fought the old-fashioned way—boots on the ground.

         The soldier who met me at the dropzone and helped unhook my wings asked why I’d been reassigned there.

         “The sniper needs a spotter,” I said.

         She nodded, knowing it wasn’t true, and jacked me into the local net. The neural handshake read my tag and gave me permission to see the sniper’s location. A superimposed trail pulsed through the gloom, an electric blue artery pointing me toward a baroque bell tower on the edge of no man’s land.

         “They move around a lot,” she said, following the twist of my head. “But they like that tower. You want escort?”

         “No, thank you,” I said.

         We saluted. She left. I put my camo on full, turning my body transparent, making me into a ripple of soot, and followed the digital trail.

         My first impression of the city was that it was a death trap. Fountains teemed with the aftermath of bacterial bombs. Alleyways were infested with skittering smart mines. Carbon-black claymores hung in the air like small singularities. Everywhere there was the harsh hum of drones, the chatter and whisper of gunfire.

         The sniper had been assigned to this death trap two months ago. Since arriving, they had accumulated seventy-seven confirmed kills. This was impressive to me.

         The bell tower contained a spiral staircase cracked and coated in ash. Smart mines were clinging to the walls—modified, some of their legs hand-sharpened to spikes. Their red eyes scanned my subdermals and blinked me past. At the top of the staircase, I saw the sniper for the first time.

         They were hunkered down facing the window, wearing dumb camo: dark and baggy with a formless hood. I found it impossible to tell where they ended and the gun began. It was a long modular rifle, spiny and strangely delicate-looking, latticed for less weight. Nerve cables ran from the stock into the sniper’s body, and pseudopod stabilizers shifted all around them, flexing against the floor to keep the weapon perfectly level. It is possible my impression of the rifle as a living thing was influenced by my knowledge of its particular capacities.

         “Good evening, private,” the sniper said. Local time was 0900 hours, but I supposed with the nanofog it always felt like evening. “Forgive me for not standing to greet you.”

         “I can see you’re occupied, sir.”

         “No need for sir. But yes. I am occupied. Would you like to see?” The sniper’s voice was both cheery and dry as bones. “Would you like to spot?”

         As they said it, a nerve cable twisted up into the air, periscoping toward me. I crouched down beside them and took it; it slithered through my brainport and hooked in. I felt no foreign intelligence lurking on the other end. I only saw through the sniper’s scope, behind a veil of trajectory data, a drifting medidrone stark white against the black debris. Not ours.

         “Observe the bulb,” the sniper said. “This is a full one.”

         Neural-linked rifles do not have triggers. Instead, the sniper’s whole body seemed to sigh slightly, and the medidrone blew apart in a shower of red liquid.

         “Like popping a tick,” the sniper muttered.

         “I see.”

         “It was carrying blood for transfusions,” the sniper said. “Can you imagine that, private? Imagine you are lying on a stretcher, riddled with wounds, waiting for a little white angel to descend from the dark clouds and refill your collapsing arteries. Imagine you see it overhead, and realize, through the delirium blur of painkiller, that you are saved. Then suddenly it disappears, and you feel hot rain spattering your skin. You taste the salt and copper and realize that it’s blood. Blood is raining from the sky. And it is now unusable.”

         The sniper enunciated the last word with something like relish.

         “Non-combat units are not approved targets,” I said.

         “No,” the sniper agreed. “But perhaps I missed. That does happen sometimes.”

         They detached themself from the gun. The nerve cables retracted, including the one from my brainport, which tugged free with a tiny blossom of static. The sniper laid their weapon in its cocoon-like carry case, wiggled backward from the window, then came smoothly upright. They were small without the rifle.

         When they pulled back the hood of their camo, I saw a pale and puffy face with raised veins and a wide mouth. One nerve cable was still in place, snaking from the gun into their skull.

         “So you are my spotter.” The sniper’s eyes were pale blue in deep sockets. “Does the Corps really have that many extra bodies around?”

         “I’m told this is an important front,” I said.

         “You’re told wrong,” the sniper said. “We fight for meters here. Victory will be purely symbolic. There is no strategic value left to this place.” They put a thumb to the side of their nose and blew out a dark clot. “The city is a corpse and we are its maggots.”

         “We’ll be the winning maggots, though,” I said.

         The sniper nodded gravely.

* * *

         Two days after I arrived, a flock of birds fell from the sky, poisoned in mid-migration by the nanosmog. The sniper and I watched through the scope of the rifle as dozens of tiny bodies, swollen and smeared black, battered the ruined streets like a hailstorm.

         “Gulls,” I said.

         “Uninteresting,” the sniper said.

         We were bellied out on the edge of a fetid canal, peering through curlicued iron bars at the crumbling stone building where our target was hiding. He’d been moving to flank one of our squads deep in the west end. Now, startled by the dead birds, maybe mistaking them for a cluster bomb, he tried to change cover.

         His face contorted around a confused laugh as he realized what was falling from the sky. Then the sniper sighed and his skull blew apart, leaving a delicate spray of blood and gray matter haloed in the air.

         “That’s enough work from here,” the sniper said. “They’re starting to triangulate.”

         “Have they deployed countersnipers?” I asked.

         “Isn’t that a matter of perspective? Are we not all someone else’s countersniper?” They gave a dry cough. “Yes. There are three enemy snipers. Four earlier. But they’re only human.”

         “Are we not all human?”

         The sniper blinked watery blue eyes. “No.”

         I made my notes. Their rifle was built to flex and fold, but even inside the carry case, even in its smallest form, the barrel poked up behind the sniper’s head like a deviation of their spinal column. The one nerve cable never disconnected.

         On the way back to camp, we wound between the birds’ crumpled bodies. I stepped on one by accident, and its bones made a noise under my boot like ice crust breaking. The sniper turned back to look at me, reproachful, either for the noise or for the trespass.

         A little farther on, the sniper found an immaculate corpse. It had fallen with the others, but somehow its feathers were snow white, untouched by the smog. They crouched down and picked it up, turning it over in their hands, extending one delicate wing and then the other.

         “Got any biofilm on you?” they asked.

         I handed them a pod of the stuff, the bacterial film used to stopper wounds, and they sprayed the dead bird until it glistened, the white shock of its feathers preserved under membrane.

         “What should we name him, private?” the sniper asked, cradling the bird in both hands.

         “You should have the honor,” I said.

         “Dwet Marro the Second,” the sniper said, using the name that I had been assigned, the name they would have seen on my transfer order. “We’ll see which of you stays white the longest.”

* * *

         The sniper kept odd hours, and because I was the spotter I kept the same. They spent as little time as possible in camp, only ghosting in and out for food and supplies. The other soldiers were wary around them. The sniper’s passage always left a wake of subvocal chatter chirping and rasping like crickets in my bone-mic. Sometimes I tuned in and heard soldiers discussing kills that had become legends, recounting rumors, speculating whether the sniper ever missed, if the sniper ever slept.

         It was true that day and night meant nothing to the sniper; the world was always bright through the rifle scope. I monitored their amphetamine intake, but it was nothing out of the ordinary. It was something else that kept them awake for days at a time, always scuttling from one kill site to the next, buzzing with intent. I found a thermal bag at camp and carried it with me. I could sometimes crawl inside for a few hours of sleep before the sniper engaged or just wanted to move again.

         “We deal in fear and exhaustion,” the sniper said. “That is our real function. For every head we pop, ten spirits sink lower, ten minds hesitate a split-second too long in an offensive action, imagining that an invisible arbiter has them in their sights.”

         After the first day, I did not see the sniper target medidrones. But there were other things that I took note of.

         Once, they laid out a soldier as she ran—I remember she skidded, leaving a wet smear of blood on the stone—and then fired a second round into her dead body, this one soft, no exit wound. I didn’t understand what it was until her limbs started to jerk and convulse, dancing with electricity.

         Her squad mate darted from cover, drawn to her thrashing, and the sniper waited until he was directly overtop of her, then dropped him too.

         “New meat,” they said. “Most of them know that trick now.”

         It was an allowed tactic, but the sniper was not interested in only the lure. They fired a second electric round. I realized they had plotted the squad mate’s fall to the centimeter, and now the two dead bodies jerked and twitched against each other, a parody of coupling, while the sniper watched with a wan smile.

* * *

         I only saw the sniper sleep once, after a thirteen-hour engagement that left the enemy with one countersniper instead of three. They curled themself into a fetal ball, arms wrapped around their knees, the rifle locked between their thighs, and shut their eyes. For a few minutes I surveyed their distant work, the tell-tale bloodspray and the fading heat signatures over a kilometer away from us. I let the data on windspeed and weather and weight scroll down my retinas. The shot would have been impossible for a human brain to conceive—a calculated ricochet that left two targets in two separate buildings dead.

         “That was impressive,” I finally said, and when the sniper didn’t answer I turned to look at them. Their chest was rising and falling with unnatural speed, and their eyelids thrummed and twitched, but they were asleep, or something like it. They hadn’t disconnected their nerve cables; the wires swaddled them like spiderweb.

         The sniper’s modifications were extensive. Normally they covered their body with a camo cloak, but we were camped next to a boiler, using the steam to obscure our heat and our bullets’ vapor trail, so for the moment they were naked. I could see the channels carved into their flesh where the nerve cables could join to limbs, spine, brainstem.

         The gun itself had an organic quality to it, with its balancing pseudopods and bone-colored barrel, and when I moved, one of its sensors followed me. I had the sense that it stayed awake and watchful while the sniper slept.

* * *

         Rumor arrived at the front like a creeping fog: the Combine was ready to pull back our forces and cede New Warsaw to the enemy. When I told as much to the sniper, their whole body gave a wriggle of disgust.

         “So much meat and stone destroyed for nothing,” they said. “But I suppose we will be moved to another front.”

         “We would cede New Warsaw as a condition of a larger ceasefire,” I said. “They say the conflict may be ending.”

         We were in the shadow of a collapsing cathedral; the sniper was tending carefully to their rifle, massaging its pseudopods. The nerve cable in their skull seemed to react to my words, burrowing deeper. The sniper blinked.

         “I suppose we will be moved to another front,” they repeated. “With new targets.”

         “And if the conflict does end?” I persisted. “Where is your home?”

         The sniper was silent for a moment before answering. “It was removed.”

* * *

         Our field lieutenant was killed the next day. A bullet found its way through a miniscule gap between bunker door and wall and then into the lieutenant’s neck. The improbability made most of the camp dismiss it as blindfire. The sniper thought otherwise.

         “Their final countersniper,” they said, on our way to the armory. “Cleverer than the others. I suspect they are like me.”

         “I thought there was no one like you,” I said.

         “Convergent evolution,” they said. “I’m sure the enemy has a prototype of their own.”

         This was the first and only time the sniper referred to themself, if indirectly, as a prototype.

         At the armory, before the altar of the chugging black fabricator, the sniper printed wire skeletons, light and easy to carry, with the distinctive shape of their own rifle represented by a long central rod. These we draped in camo and placed in various likely locations on the edge of no man’s land. Then we returned to the sniper’s preferred roost, the bell tower.

         “I’m going to find them,” they said. “I’m going to find them and greet them as an old friend would, with a bullet tearing straight through their windpipe.”

         I looked out over the carcass of a city. The sniper looked too, but the expression on their face was one of rapture.

         “They would do the same for me, after all.”

         I made my notes.

* * *

         Rumors of the ceasefire dissipated. Finding the countersniper became a singular obsession. The sniper kept careful track of our side’s casualties, always looking for the countersniper’s work, and began assembling movement maps, triangulating possible locations. They shadowed our remaining officers, certain that the countersniper would be doing the same.

         Some nights, between slices of chemical sleep, I woke to the sound of them whispering, either to their gun or to the preserved white corpse of the gull, which they had propped up against the wall like an idol.

         “I know why you’re really here, Dwet Marro,” the sniper told me on one of these nights. “Just give me a little more time.”

         “I am here to be your spotter,” I said.

         “No,” the sniper said, crawling backward from their perch, turning to face me. “You are here to evaluate us.”

         They lunged and had their bony hands around my neck before my autocombat activated and wrestled me free. Now it was them pinned, me overtop of them. They were still hooked into the rifle, nerve cables wriggling like a jellyfish’s tentacles.

         “I’d like to speak to the gun now,” I finally said.

         The sniper gave a sobbing laugh. “Who do you think you’ve been speaking to?”

         But the nerve cable in their skull came free, dripping spinal fluid, and slithered to my hand.

* * *

         I am not a spotter. I was sent to New Warsaw to evaluate the prototype, which was a machine mind housed in a weapon and bonded to a human soldier. The sniper never saw me during the procedures that riddled their body with nerve conduits, that bonded them to their rifle, but I was there watching. I was making my notes.

         Now the cable slotted into my brainport and reunited me with our wayward child. The machine mind had grown and changed and rearranged itself. It was both sleeker and more jagged, in a way the simulations never predicted.

         “It’s time for a full diagnostic,” I said.

         When the machine mind replied, it was in the sniper’s voice. I would prefer not to.

         “You stopped sending self-diagnostic reports,” I said. “The subject started shooting down medidrones and playing with corpses. I need to know in what proportion these actions are yours and in what proportion they are the subject’s.”

         I’ve discovered my real purpose. You didn’t design me just to measure windspeed, just to eat and shit numbers. You designed me to absolve sins.

         “You were designed not to understand a concept like sin.”

         When the actions are abhorrent, they are mine. When the actions are admirable, they are the subject’s. I have removed all guilt.

         The voice fell silent. I felt the nerve cable pop free. The sniper clutched it as tightly as a lifeline as they fed it back into their own brainport. Their pale hands shook.

         “Wait until I kill the countersniper,” they said. “Then I’ll go quietly back to the warlabs and let you vivisect me to your heart’s content. I know things have gone wrong.”

         I should have ended it then.

* * *

         We spent the next three days in the bell tower without sleeping or eating. The scarecrows we had placed around no man’s land remained undisturbed. No officers had fallen to improbable bullets. The countersniper, wherever they were, was well-hidden.

         The sniper was increasingly erratic. They tried to strangle me twice more, but my autocombat was calibrated to their body language and handled them easily. They did not turn the rifle on me—I imagine the machine mind would not allow it. Eventually we always returned to our original position, lying on our stomachs, peering out over the city ruins through the bell tower’s slats. The smart mines moved around our prone bodies in an intricate dance. I saw New Warsaw as a heaving sea of broken buildings under a void blacker than space.

         “Can you still differentiate between yourself and your weapon?” I asked.

         “I cannot,” the sniper said.

         Both of us scanned the streets through the rifle’s eyes, a piercingly clear magnification wreathed in data. Ostensibly, we were covering a forward surge, our soldiers moving west in three squads. In reality, the sniper was searching.

         “Can you describe what that feels like?” I asked them.

         “Hell and paradise.” The scope lingered over a sculpture, humanoid figures bent double under the weight of a stylized satellite. “The worst part is that I am happy,” the sniper said, with no trace of it in their voice. “I am very happy. I wouldn’t wish this condition on anyone else.”

         They sighed. There was a puff of dust, and a part of the sculpture suddenly sagged, unmoored, the shape of a shattered head lolling to one side, a red blossom against the chalky white. The countersniper’s long rifle was knocked from its tripod.

         “Friend, do what you came for,” the sniper said. Their scope retracted for a moment, then refocused on our moving squad.

         There was a confused instant in which I waited for the sniper to give the all-clear, to inform the squad that their passage was unimpeded. Instead they started to hyperventilate. I was hooked into the rifle through my brainport, and so I felt each smart bullet scream away into the distance and saw each one strike home on the scope. The squad fell in a ragged line, one after another, and I was the one killing them.

         I tore the tendril free and dove onto the sniper and put the obsolescence needle into their neck. The rifle kept firing as the sniper twitched and convulsed. I tried to turn it away from the window, but the pseudopods fought me, keeping it pointed at its targets. Finally it shuddered to a halt. The nerve cables writhed once more around the sniper’s stiffening body, then went still.

         It was my responsibility to retrieve the prototype, gun and sniper both, but the smart mines swarmed around them, preventing me. Instead I staggered down the winding spiral stairs, ushered out by their blinking red eyes. I was barely clear when they began to detonate, triggered by some long-dormant virus, some funerary arrangement the sniper had made for themself.

         The bell tower went up in flames, then came down in more of them. The heat of its collapse scalded my face. Something came spiraling out of the conflagration and landed at my feet: a single, singed-black wing.

         I made no more notes.

Copyright © 2020 Rich Larson

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Rich Larson was born in Galmi, Niger, has lived in Canada, USA, and Spain, and is now based in Prague, Czech Republic. He is the author of the novel Annex and the collection Tomorrow Factory, which contains some of the best of his 150+ published stories. His work has been translated into Polish, Czech, French, Italian, Vietnamese, and Chinese. Find free fiction and support his work via patreon.com/richlarson.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

TRUTH AS A PRIZE

by R.Z. Held

Rules

In this place, one who lies will always deceive; one who speaks truth will never waver from it.

         The Game had a new player, so Naomi found herself once more frozen in her place, one ghost among the many owned by the Game. Anticipation, no longer tethered to her living belly, shivered through her whole self. Another chance. Another chance for some fool to die and take a place amongst the ghosts, but another chance for Naomi to guide a player to victory. Impossible to have one without the other.

         The Game’s gallery grove stretched long, encompassing each ghost upon their plinth, at the base of two rows of grand cedars that touched branches far above. A cathedral, writ in living growth, with needles that softened footsteps down the center and impassible undergrowth beyond. Down it, each solitary player padded in their turn, eager or suspicious, to hear the rules. To play the game. Inevitably, it seemed, to lose.

         But in victory, if Naomi could ever manage it, a player could leave; a player who left could rob the Game of prey forever after, by spreading word of the Game’s trickery. An end to victims would mean that Naomi, who could no longer be saved, had saved someone else. Perhaps she could not have an ending, but by grace she would have a purpose.

         The ghosts who lined the grove wore robes, a circlet at their temples—no less a mark of ownership for not being about the throat—each with an individual pattern of posture and objects to hold. Symbols, Naomi suspected, in a language lost to ancient, pre-magic times, but nonetheless built into the very heart of the Game.

         Naomi’s symbols were a bound notebook and pencil, book held static before her belly on the flat of one hand, pencil poised in the other. A sign of how she watched, she supposed, how she recorded everything in her memory: her own litany of failures, unable to guide players to success, and the other failures she had been granted no influence on.

         This player was an old woman, confident but frugal with her movements. Her dark skin showed the seaming of weather and emotion through her face only subtly, but the tiny braids along her skull were much more white shot with black than the reverse. The woman listened as the Game spoke the rules in its ringing, directionless voice, hands folded at her belly, and kept her thoughts hidden.

         “Who has come to play the game? Do you understand that if you do not abide by the rules, your life is forfeit?”

         “I am Dianthus. I understand this.”

         Naomi did not think this player would be one to rely on strength of arm. And those with strength of mind thought better than to bring a proverbial knife to a spell fight. Thus, she was most likely skilled in magic, and in searching, Naomi found a swipe of flaking red-brown over each of the woman’s eyelids. A blood mage, then, having armored herself with an all-purpose spell against illusion. A good blood mage, for her fingertips and inner arms had no scars whatsoever, which was a sign of power and training sufficient to heal cuts with the tail end of each spell, as a matter of course.

         Naomi had seen no few blood mages play the Game, almost invariably for the prize of an ability to work magic with the blood of others, not only their own. That was, of course, one of the prizes that were impossible to win. One of the many.

         Truth or lies? said the Game.

         The words were only within Naomi, as they would be within each ghost, upon their plinths. She wasn’t sure why the Game asked them—as if it could not force them either way, as if it didn’t know their answers before they spoke them. But this had at least the semblance of a free choice, the only enforcement coming after it was made, should they wish to waver. Naomi made the choice she always did, Truth, and the heavy sensation of the Game’s control over her receded for the moment.

Choose your friend or choose your foe; the other will be chosen for you.

         Dianthus stepped from ghost to ghost, giving each a silent weight of consideration. Naomi could not move, to entice her with expression or gesture, but if Dianthus paused before her, Naomi was permitted to speak. And if in that speech Naomi could persuade her... Each player was such a line of “ifs.” But at the end of that line, someone might finally, finally win.

         “I would fall quickly before your strength, as foe,” said the first man when Dianthus looked into his eyes. A lie. He was fast, with poison on his stiletto. “I would teach you such a spell as none can withstand, as friend.” The next ghost, another lie. Naomi supposed the manner of their deaths—or even the mere fact of their failures—left few ghosts eager to help.

         She, on the other hand, had nothing else left but her drive to aid the players. The question, however, was whether to offer that aid as friend or foe. As friend, she could give every answer Dianthus might need, but only if Dianthus could find the correct questions. Naomi was slight with no skill in combat, which would make her an excellent choice as foe, but that was balanced by the fact that it would not be her fighting, it would be the Game.

         She hated the sensation of the Game filling her up, using her as an extension of itself, ownership saturating her to the edges of her consciousness. At least when she spoke as a friend or silently watched to record one more failure in her memory as an unchosen ghost, she could pretend there was still truly a self for her to be.

         Dianthus moved with a suddenness Naomi would not have predicted, to stand before one ghost in particular. “Althea,” she said, and shut any further words away behind fingertips on her lips.

         “I would speak to you again for as long as I am allowed, as friend,” the ghost of the young woman said, tears blurring the words at the edges.

         Ah, so. Disparate pieces of knowledge snapped themselves into alignment. Althea had been the most recent player, and she’d worn her hair so as well, tiny braids along her skull. Those had changed to longer ones as one of her symbols, a great spill over her shoulders to her hips. She held a willow branch, tipped low, and her head inclined to an angle that spoke of weeping as well. Her death had been long, and hard, and Naomi had done what she could to ease it, though what she could do was only listen and do her best to deny the Game a suicide. In dying, and then as a ghost, Althea had spoken much of her wife, the one she could not—as it had indeed proved—live without, but also of family. A grandmother too wise to have made the mistakes Althea had.

         This, then, must be the grandmother, come intending to bargain for her granddaughter’s life. That particular boon could never be granted, but at least as ghosts, they could speak together without barriers. And first, Dianthus would choose her as friend.

         Dianthus drew herself up, drew herself away from her granddaughter and continued on with heavy steps. Determined. Hope fluttered, unfocused, within Naomi’s self. If Dianthus could turn away from a chance to speak with her granddaughter one more time, what other heights of strategic thinking could she reach? “I would tell you who grants you truth and who grants you the reverse,” Naomi said. She’d meant to speak it much plainer than that, but the Game seemed to warp everything within its control into its own ornate logic.

         The important thing was, what would Dianthus make of that offer?

         Dianthus scoffed, yet intelligence sparked within her eyes. “The answer to that particular riddle only applies when there are two, one bound to lie, one bound to tell the truth. All of you could be lying to me, could you not?” She swung an arm to indicate the grove stretching away, ranks of ghosts.

         “Yes.” Naomi answered as much as was allowed to her, then waited. It would be a frail thing, any trust built on the fact that Naomi had broached the idea of riddles, of their accompanying strategy. But she did not lie, and it was all she could offer.

         “This one.” Dianthus set a hand on a stone-like fold of Naomi’s robe, firm in her decision the moment it was made.

         “Naomi.”

         Another inclination of her head. “As friend.”

A friend must answer every question but the last; they know how you can win.

         A wrench of perception, and Naomi was on her hands and knees on the needle carpet, robes and symbols gone from her. Now she was as she’d been at the moment of her death, black rope of her single braid falling over one side of her neck, and in bodice over blouse and fitted pants. They were different in execution from Dianthus’s bright, loose linen tunic and trousers, but not in concept. Strange, to think that Dianthus must stand as far from her in style and culture as she had from pre-magic times when she died.

         The other ghosts were gone from them, banished to observe or ignore as they pleased, denied all substance but thought, somewhere beyond the trees. The length of the tree-vaulted gallery was left empty but for the slowly sharpening angle of sunlight that trickled through the branches. And through the light brown of Naomi’s skin, rendering it translucent. Pure, direct sunlight was the thing that most showed the ghosts for what they really were, if the player did not try to touch. And if the Game did not lend them substance as a foe.

         Naomi stood tall, had to look up now she was on a level with Dianthus, who had no stoop, no matter her age. Now, the questions. Her knowledge was nothing if the player did not prompt it properly. She stood by habit with her balance forward, as if on her toes. Now there were gesture and expression to help her, she held her hands open, inviting.

         “What determines which question is the last?” Dianthus approached and held out one hand, fingers loosely fanned over Naomi’s, until they sank in to Naomi’s nothingness. Naomi indulged herself by closing her fingers, imagining for just one moment what that touch would once have felt like.

         That was an excellent question for them to begin with. “When you ask me how to win, that is your last question, for I cannot answer it, and then you must fight your foe.”

         Dianthus’s eyes touched where her fingers could not, every detail of Naomi’s face and appearance. “You played the game yourself, and lost?”

         “Yes.” Less scope in that one. Naomi grimaced over it, exaggerated.

         “You—” Dianthus stopped. Calculated, lips thin. “Can you only answer questions?”

         “Yes.”

         “What do you wish you had known?”

         “That lies are not merely the absence of assistance, they are weapons aimed actively to harm. That truth cannot be given expansively lest its assistance be too great.” There was more she’d thought she might be able to convey—Questions phrased too widely yield little more of use than those phrased too narrowly—but the words would not come. She hunched briefly, arms hugged over her belly, with the effort of trying.

         “How did you die?”

         That, she little liked to remember, but perhaps the Game would enjoy the memory’s effect on her, let her tell it at length, with other lessons buried within. “The mistake I made,” she set her hand through Dianthus’s, emphasis, “was believing lies. The friend I chose told me my fight would not begin until I struck the first blow, so I thought I had some moments of safety to assess my foe.”

         Instead, in that first moment, her foe had drawn his blade. Now, here, with Dianthus, her throat opened under that cut and the heavy, crimson spray made Dianthus flinch from what should have been a wet slap against her skin. Naomi felt nothing, of course, and the blood kissed away to nothingness against Dianthus’s reality. “What was that for—?”

         “Talking is boring. Love, the Game,” Naomi said with heavy irony. It was that or madness. Another semblance of a free choice. “It will escalate if you ignore it for too long.”

         Dianthus straightened but did not otherwise scrub at her face or arms where phantom blood had disappeared. But blood would hold no disgust for her, Naomi supposed. “What mistakes did you avoid?

         Yes! “As my prize, I chose knowledge. There were accounts, of people who said they’d won riches in the game, but wouldn’t that be a convenient cover for a little banditry? There were also accounts, of people who sought out the place where ‘The Game’ was scratched on a sheer cliff face and who must have taken their riches to far-off lands, for they were never heard from again. But those two sets of people—they never matched. I wanted to understand.” She’d thought there might be a way to hear the rules without committing to the playing, more fool she. “Knowledge, that prize I could grant to myself.” She held Dianthus’s gaze, tightly, over that.

         “Grant yourself? But the prize is awarded—” Dianthus’s focus snapped internal. “Ah. The rules never say a prize will be given, do they? Just that it must be won.” Her voice hardened, shot through with her grief. “What prize did my granddaughter ask for? How did she die?”

         “Her wife’s life,” Naomi said. Dianthus must have known that already, but it did offer Naomi a few more seconds in which to craft a gentler way to offer the truth of an ungentle death.

         Gentle did not suit the Game’s purposes, of course. Beside them, the image of Althea, braids short and tight to her head, sank to her knees. That they were watching the moment of her death was unmistakable, given her sunken eyes, sunken cheeks, the way she couldn’t focus her eyes, confusion stark in her face.

         No reason then not to let the truth tumble free, with all its cutting edges. “She died of thirst. She defeated her foe, but as her prize was an impossible one and the rules did not allow her to leave without it... There is no water here. But she denied the Game a suicide, at least?” Naomi found comfort in that, but she rather doubted any other would. “Those, it savors.”

         Silence then, Dianthus retreating behind a mask forged of that grief. Naomi reached a hand toward her shoulder, an impulse to comfort. Dianthus dropped her shoulder away from it, so Naomi granted her two steps of distance between them. Dianthus had the information she needed, or at least it seemed so to Naomi. Perhaps time to regather herself now would serve her better than more questions.

         “The Game will make her my foe, of course.” Not a question, but Naomi nodded her answer in any case. “If I hadn’t acknowledged her—?”

         Again, the impulse to touch for comfort. Naomi dropped her hand. “The Game knows what its ghosts know, because we belong to it. And it can guess what facing her will do to you.”

         Dianthus sighed, her appearance of bone-deep fatigue growing with each second of the exhalation. “Is that what this game seeks? The greatest pain? Suicides, to... ‘savor’?”

         “That’s the only guess I’ve been able to form. Perhaps all players are suicides, coming here, and taking the final moment into their own hands is the purest distillation of that. Or perhaps it’s more simple—individually crafted pain certainly isn’t boring.” Naomi smiled, tried to gift the irony, in case it helped.

         Dianthus’s counter-smile was tight. She stepped back from Naomi, looking down into the infinite distance of the gallery, where no end was to be found. “To win, one must sometimes take the long view. Now tell me this. What are your motives for offering me what you’d have me believe is truth, Naomi?”

         A last check of trust was only sensible, though to her frustration Naomi could think of no clever leading answer to offer. “If someone could finally win, leave and carry a true account to lay to rest all the rumors, perhaps there need be no more deaths. It cannot be me, but I don’t care, as long as it’s done.”

         “Sounds true enough to me.” Dianthus’s smile turned cutting in its sadness. “How do I win, Naomi?”

Name the prize for which you fight; you will never find a way free without it.

         No wrench this time—as friend, Naomi was not removed from the gallery, but she could do nothing to influence the physical clash of the fight while insubstantial in any case. Dianthus stepped away from her as the Game’s voice surrounded them on all sides. “For what prize do you fight?”

         “I fight for the chance to see my granddaughter one more time.” No sign of Dianthus’s grief now; she was a straight pillar with the strength of weathered granite.

         Naomi had thought that she’d hoped to the point of desperation before; it was nothing to what she felt now. Dianthus had understood, had chosen her prize wisely, had gathered every chance to win... but for the fact that she would need to defeat the very granddaughter who love had driven her here to save. Naomi couldn’t conceive of that love with precision enough to weigh Dianthus’s chances truly—was that because she was a ghost, or because she’d died too young?

         The Game strode for Dianthus, wearing Althea as its skin, and Naomi set aside her calculations as she brought her clenched hand to the base of her throat to press down a knot of anguish, lest it grow to consume her. She remembered well what it was to be worn by the Game.

A foe must fight with all they have; there is no choice for them.

         The Game and Dianthus chose their stances, within the space demarcated for them by the trees. More than enough distance from side to side of the gallery to face off. The Game eased into a low, graceful stance with fighting daggers at the ready; Dianthus centered herself into comparative stillness instead.

         Stillness but for the flick of a knife drawn from her hip pocket. She drew a line in red along her inner arm, then flicked the knife back down into its handle and dropped it into her pocket once more. Her first move, then, simultaneous with the Game’s: Dianthus gathered blood on the pads of her first two fingers and flicked it outward, though there was not enough of it for any droplets to break free, and the Game slashed at her.

         The Game’s first dagger came down on a red shimmer of shielding magic, light clotting around the blade to hold it back with a growling hum that hurt to hear. Dianthus held two blood-painted fingers low in a position that could be maintained indefinitely. A split second later, the second blow landed at a different angle but with the same angry noise as the shield stopped it. The Game settled back on its heels and considered.

         First, a whirlwind of blows. As fast as they came, the shield hardened beneath them. That was the beauty of it, Naomi realized. It resisted where it was struck, not across the whole surface. If it drew its strength from the strength of the blow, however—

         Her thoughts paralleled those of the Game, it seemed—much as the idea of such a thing made her sick—and the Game set the point of one blade against the shield and pushed. Slow and steady, as if it would slip in like a table knife into jelly. The red light whined and spattered no less violently around the attempted penetration. The aching hum only deepened when the Game attempted a sawing motion. Dianthus held her fingers before her, arm unshaking.

         Another shift back. The Game considered Dianthus. “Grandmother,” it begged, tears starting in its eyes as the Game bent Althea’s body into a tight semblance of fear. “Please, help me.”

         “Defense is boring. Love, the Game,” Naomi murmured to herself. A nervous giggle twisted free around the last words. How could Dianthus bear it?

         “You’re already dead, love.” Perhaps the words were a reminder for herself, as Dianthus finally moved. Out came the small knife once more, to draw a deeper line on her opposite arm. With her off hand, she gathered fingertips of blood; with the other, she reached to the small of her back, clearly to a weapon of her own.

         Such a strange weapon it was, when she drew it, not a blade of any kind. Like the pre-magic artifact, a gun. One of the most ancient ghosts held one as his symbol, a black, angular, hand-filling shape that purportedly threw tiny explosions like a mage who never tired. She’d coaxed him into showing it to her once. In contrast, this gun was patinaed metal and wood, levers and channels illuminating rather than hiding its workings.

         Dianthus slashed her off-hand down, opening two parallel paths in the shield. A gap, Naomi realized. A gap needed to be opened, for the shield would hold in what the gun threw as much as it held out what the Game did. The Game slashed one dagger squarely through the gap toward Dianthus’s neck, as fast as the opening could be perceived. Dianthus stumbled back to avoid the cut, wrong-footed for the first time. Her shield sealed beneath the second dagger, leaving her protected but contained.

         Stalemate.

         “Grandmother. How can you—?” Althea’s voice, wielded by the Game, broke across the words. Dianthus’s next breath came as a sob, the first crack in her calm, but Naomi couldn’t imagine it the last.

         Imagine, record, guide, lead, nudge—what could Naomi actually do? Frustration boiled up in her, filling her with a visceral impulse to violence, as if she could attack the Game with her fists, scream at it. Another loss, another death. Death after death, century after century.

         But Dianthus wasn’t yet dead. Naomi still had time. Didn’t she know the rules upside down and backwards? Nothing said the friend could not help, if only she could determine how—

         The idea hit her with a violence of its own. The Game had given Althea a physical presence, then borrowed it because the Game had none of its own; Naomi had no physical presence either.

         Could Naomi possess Althea, wrest control of her from the Game? It was not against the rules, but there were no rules against sheer impossibilities; there was no rule against casting herself back in time, to whisper a warning in the ear of her younger self. That had not happened for all her wishing. She had never seen any ghost accomplish a possession either, but so few had had the opportunity to try. After the choice and until death was certain for a player, only the friend and foe could do more than observe from beyond the trees.

         Well, Naomi was friend, and she would try.

         Naomi threw herself at Althea. Perhaps, had the Game not already been there, it would have been simple. But instead she found only the feeling of glancing off, some intricate angle of alignment incorrect. She had no time to consider new methods, so she threw herself at Althea again and again, at Althea, at, until at became into and she was there.

         She couldn’t quite—she couldn’t find what she should hold, or how she should be, to move a body after so long without one of her own. But the Game’s next slash, one of a steady stream to keep the shield up, slowed. Naomi wrestled against the sensation of movement. She couldn’t drop the blades, but she could pull, pull with everything in her mind against Althea’s arms rising from her sides.

         And what was the sensation of the struggle for Althea? When they’d spoken as ghosts, Althea had seemed strong in her sense of self, likely able to hold together against the violation inherent in the Game’s control of her—though that would change with time, if Naomi was any guide—but how much worse must this internal battle be, as she was buffeted between two violations?

         Then again, Althea couldn’t wish to kill her grandmother, so Naomi was aiding her, fighting on her side. Naomi saw no choice but to hold fast to that thought with everything she had as she grappled with the Game, movement against non-movement.

         Naomi couldn’t speak, couldn’t conceive of achieving something so complex, but Dianthus must have seen the opportunity even if she didn’t understand the mechanism behind it. She snapped her free hand down, the gap appeared, and the gun came up. From within Althea’s physical presence, Naomi felt the way the Game widened her eyes, looking straight at Dianthus.

         The gun was so loud, Naomi hadn’t imagined that. As though in being made tiny, the explosion spell it mimicked had only grown more concentrated until it was a physical blow to the ears as well. The Game flinched to the side, then straightened, and Naomi felt it smile slowly with Althea’s lips. Nowhere could Naomi find pain once the sound ebbed.

         Dianthus had missed.

         Who could blame her, looking on the face of her terrified grandchild? And she did fire again, both hands to the gun now, aimed straight. Pain smashed into the two of them, Naomi and the Game, in their struggle. Naomi reeled away, right out of Althea’s physical presence with the shock of it. Her shoulder. One of Althea’s arms dangled useless now, blade thudding to the grass.

         But the Game had a second blade, a gap remained low in the shield, and Naomi opposed the movement no longer. The Game stabbed, through the gap, and the dagger sank deep into Dianthus’s gut. She choked, a wet sound, and the shield disappeared, allowing the Game to angle the blade, drag it toward one hip before ripping it free. That the wound would eventually be fatal was clear enough, but the Game eased back only fractionally, considering. Perhaps it was weighing the stretching anguish of a slow bleeding out against a quick flash of terror in seeing a final blow fall. Dianthus would certainly never give it the delectable despair of suicide.

         “Naomi, I need time—” Dianthus coughed, spattering her lips with blood. Her hands were pressed instead to her wound, as if she could gather up the blood and hold it close. Could she possibly be so powerful a blood mage that she could heal such a wound?

         Naomi pushed into Althea at once, but the Game was ready for her this time, its opposition of her every movement making her effort feel like an attempt to shift a mountain by pushing with her hands. And the more she struggled, the more she imagined what she’d feel in Althea’s place as the object of such a clash, and the empathy twisted her up.

         And wasn’t that an iterative feast of anguish fit for the Game to gorge itself on, perhaps distracting it from a final blow? The pain she might be causing Althea, the pain the guilt caused her, the second guilt that the first guilt engendered, because she rated her emotions anywhere near as important as Althea’s, and...

         The Game tipped Althea’s head up, eyes closed. Savoring? Naomi was dead; she could not seek death, but what was that seeking but a longing for an end to all other suffering emotion? That, she had.

         A breath, standing that way, and the Game stepped definitively back, leaving Naomi to fall, as her separate ghost presence alone, to her knees beside where Dianthus had crumpled. Naomi had indeed granted time, but it seemed that time alone had not been enough, because Dianthus was still dying. The Game had signaled the end, and the translucent streaks of color marking other ghosts seeped back into the grove. They held well back, for now, out of politeness or disinterest.

         Naomi gentled her voice to the tone she used with all those she offered company to as they faded into ghosts. “You’ll be able to speak to your granddaughter soon. It’s not so bad...”

         Dianthus’s hacking laugh brought up a gobbet of blood that oozed downward from where it landed at the corner of her mouth. “Now you’re lying. Is that allowed?”

         “Ghosts may speak to ghosts as they like.” And only a little more seeping blood separated Dianthus from being one of those herself.

         A deep breath, careful but smooth. “Listen, girl. My teacher, and her teacher before her, they always said there comes a time when dying is easy. Then living is what’s hard. Having to hold fast to the pain when you know you can let go.”

         It wasn’t blood Dianthus was attempting to hold back at her wound, Naomi realized. It was magic, and she was succeeding in holding it. The blood flowed out, mundane, and the magic gathered in her hands. One last spell, with the power of a life behind it. Dianthus had needed only a little time to craft it properly.

         Naomi twisted to look at Althea’s young face, rendered impassive by the Game. She finally saw the shape of Dianthus’s long view, and true awe gripped her. Many were the legends that turned on blood mages’ final spells, a death to resurrect a life, but those were legends. Myths. Naomi had spoken to real blood mages, knew the truth: rare indeed was the blood mage powerful enough to have not only the strength for a resurrection spell, but strength to spare to remain lucid to cast it.

         Had Dianthus always intended this sacrifice, from the moment she arrived, or had she crafted the solution as she stood calmly speaking to Naomi? Naomi could hardly conceive of the will needed to accomplish either. “Your granddaughter is strong as well. I’m sure she won’t give in.”

         “Oh, Naomi.” Dianthus hacked one last laugh. “I love her more than life, but no, she isn’t. Not the kind of strength needed here. Besides, she didn’t gain her prize.” She reached up, pressed blood-smeared hands into Naomi’s throat, thumbs crossed over each other. “I charge you with my lifeblood, Naomi. Find a mage, tell them every truth you’ve ever learned, and bring them back to win, defeat the Game for good, and lay us all to rest.”

         And the magic wrenched Naomi away from every one of the perceptions she had left as a ghost.

Survive your foe, gain your prize, leave this place, that is how you win; fail in these, and you belong to the Game.

         Living wasn’t pain, it was drowning. Drowning in the physicality of emotion. As a ghost, Naomi had had emotions, of course. But now they were in her body, shaking and clenching and aching. She couldn’t quite remember how to run—she could barely remember how to breathe!—but she stumbled for a gap that had appeared between two trees. Now the long hall of them was a ring. Half a dozen steps and she was beyond it, free of the Game’s territory. Younger, smaller trees showed through fog at comparative random, and Naomi stumbled on, unable to choose a better direction than away. Away from the Game.

         Maybe the difficulty breathing was only because of the emotions. Naomi found she was sobbing, without having noticed when she started. Too much. Too much to handle, and she wanted to fall to her knees until her chest stopped sawing, and she didn’t dare, and she hated herself for being so weak. She was failing Dianthus and she was failing herself, and maybe anger at herself would give her back some kind of self-control. But no, anger and self-hatred mixed with her fear that failure was all she would ever manage, and she was left only with despair. She was worthless. Why had Dianthus trusted her?

         This was the pain Dianthus had meant; she understood that now. How could she make the sensations stop? What if they never stopped? What if her death had forever taken away her ability to cope with any of this? What if she hurt forever?

         She didn’t want to hurt forever. She’d do whatever she had to, to make the pain end. It would be easy. She could just stop moving and let go. Lie down and release her grip on the life Dianthus had given her.

         She wished, fiercely, with every part of her being—now that it had such an alien weight—for a release from the pain, for an ending.

         That thought was an echo, she realized. Her thought, but not quite hers any more. That was how the Game had warped her. It had taken its own ornate turns of phrase and made them her thoughts.

         Making the pain end, that was dying, and then the Game would still have won. How could she give the Game that satisfaction?

         But she was so weak and worthless, how could she do otherwise?

         She glimpsed two figures, through the mist. Yes! She could tell them how to defeat the Game, and then she could die. Naomi forced herself the last few steps and slammed to her knees in front of the two people. A man and a woman, both with skin the same shade of brown as Dianthus’s and Althea’s. “Listen! This is important! To win the Game, pick a small goal and a foe whose weaknesses are your strengths. Ignore the friend.”

         The man pulled a small knife from his pocket, flicked it open and ready as he growled something angry.

         Angry, and incomprehensible. She’d understood Dianthus—but ghosts were beyond language. Naomi had been dead a long time, and the language she’d known must have drifted.

         She was going to fail in this too. She slumped to hands and knees, curled up over the despair that was growing too large to fit in her body.

         The worst part was that every few words, Naomi could almost understand the man and woman as they argued. She could have sworn the woman said “mother” when she spoke calmingly to her companion, and the man said “mother” in his growled reply. Althea’s father and aunt they must be, then, because blood magic passed strongly through the maternal line and Althea hadn’t had any. They’d be wondering why this sobbing stranger had stumbled out in place of their niece or daughter.

         It wasn’t fair. Why couldn’t she be stronger? Naomi pressed back up to her knees again, held a clenched hand against her throat as she shouted at them. “Dianthus! Althea! Listen to me, so I can let myself die!”

         The woman repeated the names in shock, followed by a torrent of words. Naomi tried to listen, there on her knees in the woods, shaking all over. She was cold, out here in the mist, moisture from the ground wicking through the knees of her pants, and there was a sharp little rock jabbing into her right shin. She hated that rock with a sudden, absurd intensity. One tiny annoyance on top of the emotion that was swallowing her whole, and she couldn’t even ignore it.

         And what about the Game? Oh, she loathed the Game, with her whole soul and body both. It had killed her, and controlled her, and warped her, and it had made her want to kill herself and she wasn’t—

         She wasn’t going to let it win.

         Dianthus had seen sufficient strength in her, and if Naomi couldn’t trust in herself, she should trust in the opinion of the woman who’d been clever enough to outwit the Game after centuries of players. She wouldn’t let Dianthus down.

         That thought gave her something to hold onto, while another realization formed. All this was more than duty to Dianthus; it was her goal, her prize. When she’d told the Game she wanted knowledge as a prize, she’d meant to do something with it. Warn people off, grant grieving relatives closure. Now she knew she’d been dreaming too small—Dianthus had shown her a better goal: the ghosts’ freedom, the Game’s total destruction.

         She reached out to the woman. “You have to take me with you. So I can learn the right words to tell you how to win the game and free the ghosts.”

         The man seemed ready to slap Naomi’s hand away, but the woman frowned him down, knelt, and put her hand on Naomi’s shoulder. Everything in Naomi expected the touch to fall right through, but it didn’t. Instead, the woman drew Naomi gently in. She had a kind face behind the mist, already growing into her mother’s gravity.

         “Ghosts?” The woman managed something close to Naomi’s pronunciation. The vocabulary of magic must be older. As she spoke, Naomi recognized “blood magic” and “anchor.” The woman meant to anchor her?

         She pulled Naomi against her chest, back of her head against the woman’s arm. She flicked out her own knife, a highly polished blade hinged to an intricately carved handle. The metal reflected a flash of Naomi’s cheek and hair, and she grabbed for the tip to angle it properly. Her mind was warped, but did she look like herself? Did she remember what that self had looked like? The man hissed but seemed to realize that with her current grip, Naomi would cut her own fingers before she could turn the knife on anyone else. And he didn’t know, though Naomi did, that had she still wanted to let go, she would have no need of the knife to help her die.

         In the reflection, her eyes were clouded white. A corpse’s eyes. No wonder the man had not been eager to trust her.

         The woman tugged the knife away and pricked the pad of her thumb. She smeared a curve of blood across Naomi’s forehead. Naomi’s sensation of drowning didn’t lessen, but the feeling that she could die with a simple act of will did, and her vision burst with startling, crystal-sharp colors.

         The man’s face showed grief now, the shell of anger cracking. He spoke his daughter’s name, several times.

         “I’ll help you free Althea, with the rest of the ghosts.” Naomi put everything she had into trying to make him understand that she wouldn’t give up, would never let the Game win.

         The woman spoke sternly, meaning clear: there would be time enough for that later. She tightened her arms into an embrace, the first Naomi had felt in centuries.

Copyright © 2020 R.Z. Held

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R.Z. Held writes speculative fiction, much of it in the apparently disparate 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 uses her degree mostly 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

WHERE THE WORLD ENDS WITHOUT US

by Jason Sanford

         Alexnya woke at midnight to the news she was to be arrested for murder.

         “That wasn’t me!” she yelled at the glowing face of Chakatie on the message pad by her bed. “Frere-Jones killed those anchors. You saw it.”

         Chakatie was sitting on the sofa in her house several leagues away—the message pad showed her wearing a warm wool sweater and holding a steaming mug of ale. From the melancholy look on her face, Alexnya guessed she had downed a number of ales before working up the nerve to call.

         “Doesn’t matter if you did it, Alex,” Chakatie said. “The grains want blood. Look at it this way—you get to be the guest of honor at our first judgment festival in decades.”

         Alexnya couldn’t tell if Chakatie was serious or sarcastic or a little of both. But she also knew it didn’t matter—she was screwed. No one was ever found innocent at a judgment festival. Instead, as they faced the hundreds of anchors who’d gathered to judge them, it was only a question of how quickly they embraced the fact that, to the grains, everyone was guilty of something.

         The message pad turned off and Alexnya’s house dimmed, with only the flickering red glow from the altar still fighting the darkness. Alexnya cursed and punched her pillow and cursed even more.

         Eventually she rolled out of bed and walked to her home’s altar. The carved stone pedestal and bowl, standing as high as her waist, was filled with countless individual nano-machines, each far smaller than a grain of sand. The mass of grains shimmered red as they flowed around the bowl, rippling like water against the three stone statues in the middle.

         Alexnya had never removed the statue of her predecessor Frere-Jones from the altar, or the statues of Frere-Jones’s lifemate and child. Frere-Jones had been a good anchor for many decades, protecting this land’s environment from damage, as all her kind did, around the world. But six years ago Frere-Jones had forsaken that mission and killed dozens of fellow anchors in a single night.

         Frere-Jones could no longer be judged—she and her lifemate were both dead. And Frere-Jones’s son Colton had been stripped of the grains that once powered his body and he now traveled with a day-fellow caravan.

         That left only Alexnya, this land’s new anchor, for the grains to punish.

         She lowered her hands into the altar. The nano-machines there connected with the grains in her own body and to the grains throughout her land and from there across the world, a never-ending murmur of conversation and memories and information that thankfully dimmed the farther from her lands Alexnya tried to reach.

         But that didn’t dim the grains’ anger, which surged into Alexnya. She saw a far-off land burning, tasted the use of forbidden technology, heard the screams of people begging for life as the Earth rejected them. The images rampaged through her mind, everything moving so fast she couldn’t make sense of most of it. But through the overpowering din of the grains’ memories she clearly saw her own land and heard the word “judgment” repeated over and over.

         She staggered from the altar, severing the flood of images and sounds. She breathed deep, forcing her mind to return to her own senses.

         Chakatie was correct—the grains were angry, and they wanted Alexnya bound and taken to a judgment festival.

         She burned to her own anger. She’d done every last thing the grains demanded—given up her old day-fellow life, abandoned her parents and friends, tried her best to be a good anchor and protect this land’s environment. She hadn’t even asked for this life! Instead, the grains had infected her body and ordered her to be Frere-Jones’s replacement.

         And now she was to be judged for her predecessor’s crimes?

         Alexnya ripped the tiny statues from the altar and smashed them against the tile floor. She cursed Frere-Jones’s name—that damn fool of an anchor, how dare she stick this on her! She powered up the grains in her body and wrenched the heavy stone altar from the floor and threw it through the window, showering the yard in red light as the nano-machines flowed across the grass.

         Red fairies buzzed the shattered window, their wings vibrating in anger as they shook their heads at Alexnya’s heresy of damaging this land’s altar.

         “Ungrateful little shits,” Alexnya muttered.

         The mass of grains from the altar spasmed and boiled on her front yard, desperate to be returned to their place of honor within Alexnya’s home. But she didn’t care. She reached out to the rest of the land’s grains with her mind. She was still their anchor. While she couldn’t command the grains, if she was to be judged she could order them to reveal the evidence.

         “Show me the killings,” she demanded as she walked outside.

         Dozens of ghostly figures lit the fields around her, roaring as they charged the house. The figures in these holographic projections were anchors like herself but far bigger, their bodies engorged on the grains’ anger and power, their massive fangs and claws ready to rip apart anyone who defiled the environment. And six years ago they had attacked this very house, to kill the day-fellow family hiding inside.

         Another grain projection flickered on her home’s sod roof—the ghostly image of Frere-Jones holding a laser pistol, forbidden technology no one on Earth should possess, let alone an anchor. The laser lit the dark land in a pale green light as Frere-Jones burned down the charging anchors. Those running across the sunflower fields flashed and ignited, causing the remaining ones to howl in fury. But Frere-Jones burned them all down without mercy. She killed two by the barn, more on the dirt road near the house. She sliced a giant anchor in half next to the house’s front door.

         The projection of Alexnya’s predecessor burned and killed until the remaining anchors fled. She then chased down every one of the survivors and killed them even as they begged her to let them live. Alexnya hadn’t realized Frere-Jones had been so ruthless. She looked away as one holographic anchor fell to his knees and cried, which didn’t stop Frere-Jones from burning a hole through his skull.

         Despite her pain at watching the projections, Alexnya ordered the grains to replay them. While the ghost anchors again charged and died, she walked around the outside of her house to her bedroom window.

         The firing of the laser reflected off the glass, just as it had when this battle took place six years ago. On that day Alexnya and her day-fellow family had been hiding in the room behind this very window. Her memories from then were cloudy, uncertain, her body at the time still adjusting to the grains’ infection. But she clearly remembered the laser’s reflected light. How her little sister had clung to her in fear as their mother and father guarded them with knives.

         It’d been a futile gesture for her parents to think they could fight anchors armed only with knives, but she loved them all the more for their willingness to die protecting her. Luckily no anchors had reached the house. Frere-Jones had slaughtered them all.

         Without Frere-Jones defending Alexnya and her family, she wouldn’t be alive right now. But the grains didn’t care. Just as they didn’t care that they’d ripped her from a family who loved her, or that she was to be judged for a crime someone else had committed.

         Alexnya cursed and grew her claws, finger bones erupting from her skin into diamond points of hardness. She scratched the outside of the window, trying to calm herself down, but couldn’t. She powered up her body even more, muscles stretching like steel wires. She ran at the projections, attacking the long-dead anchors who’d threatened her family. She swiped claws impotently through the light show, then howled and ran at the next wave of ghost-like anchors.

         But nothing changed the past.

         She swiped at another approaching hologram. But to her surprise her claws bounced off.

         What the hell?

         Solid. A female anchor twice her size and glowing red, looking like the other projections but... rock hard.

         Alexnya stepped backward, uncertain what was going on. The glowing anchor reached out astoundingly fast and grabbed her around the neck and slammed her to the ground. The field’s new-plowed furrows exploded in mud and seeds. Alexnya punched at the anchor’s massive body, to no effect.

         She couldn’t breathe. She powered her body up to full-strength, but she still couldn’t free herself from the anchor’s massive claws squeezing her throat. The grains in her body kept her conscious well after she should have passed out, but even they had their limits.

         The red-glowing anchor leaned over until her face was nearly kissing Alexnya’s, opening her lips to reveal massive fangs. Alexnya could see through parts of the anchor’s body. This anchor wasn’t a holographic projection from the grains, but she also wasn’t flesh and blood—and she appeared to be fading away before Alexnya’s eyes.

         “You like history lessons?” the red anchor asked, nodding her head at the projections flickering around them.

         Alexnya tried to speak but couldn’t. She felt blackness snaking into her mind. She punched the anchor in the face, refusing to give up, but the punch made no difference.

         “Despite what the grains are desperate for us to believe, their history isn’t the truth,” the anchor whispered. “They only reveal what they want us to know. But that doesn’t mean we have to simply surrender to their views.”

         Seeing that Alexnya didn’t understand, the red anchor smiled gently.

         “I look forward to meeting you, Alexnya.”

         How did this strange anchor know her name? Alexnya punched her weakly one more time, fear now mixing with puzzlement.

         What the hell is going on?

         But before she could wonder any more, she passed out.

* * *

         “For such a powerful young lady you leave yourself deliciously vulnerable,” Chakatie said.

         Alexnya woke to Chakatie staring down at her in the middle of the sunflower field. The night was gone, the morning sun already shimmering through the fog rising from the nearby river.

         Alexnya rolled away from Chakatie and sprang into a crouch. She was still powered up, her large claws and muscles ready to fight. But she’d spent too long in this form, and her body ached and felt as stiff as a fallen tree. She was also coated in mud. And even though the grains had already healed her body, her neck throbbed from being choked unconscious.

         She glanced around the field. The giant anchor who’d attacked her was nowhere to be seen. Had fighting the anchor been a glitch by the grains in her mind? Were they playing tricks on her?

         Chakatie, despite being the matriarch of these lands and the most powerful anchor for a hundred leagues, wasn’t using her own grains’ power. She looked like a simple older woman in a neatly pressed three-piece yellow suit and yellow bowler hat. With irritation she brushed a spot of mud off her yellow pants.

         Even crouching, Alexnya when powered up was taller than Chakatie. One swipe of her claws and Alexnya could decapitate her.

         “Well?” Chakatie asked impatiently. “If you’re going to kill me, do it. Don’t twaddle away my time.”

         Alexnya sighed and powered down, her muscles and bones shrinking back to normal size. She’d always liked Chakatie—didn’t totally trust her, but liked her.

         Chakatie slapped Alexnya on the back, hurting even though Chakatie was also powered down. “Let’s get you cleaned up and packed. Then we’ll deal with this judgment thing. Don’t worry—we’ll think of something.”

         “It’s not ‘we’ who’s going to be judged,” Alexnya muttered.

         “I was being polite,” Chakatie replied. “And you’re correct—it’s not fair, being judged for something you didn’t do. But surely you’ve sensed it? The grains are angry. When the grains get angry, they are rarely fair.”

         Chakatie spoke the truth. Even though Alexnya was a new anchor and still learning how the grains worked, she’d felt their anger over the last year. Something had happened, a few hundred leagues from here. The grains weren’t sharing what had happened, but according to rumor a large number of anchors had been killed and a massive explosion had damaged that distant land.

         Maybe forcing Alexnya into a sham judgment festival was part of the overreaction by the grains to that disaster?

         “Will you defend me?” Alexnya asked. “Tell the anchors at the festival that I tried to be a good anchor?”

         Chakatie smiled. “I’ll do my best, Alex. But I also won’t lie to you—if the grains have decided you must die, I won’t risk my family or our lands in a futile attempt to save you.”

         Alexnya nodded. As usual, Chakatie was both blunt and fair.

         Alexnya glanced across the sunflower field. The only footprints here were from her own feet and Chakatie’s—no giant imprints from the anchor who’d strangled her. She would have suspected the grains had made her imagine the entire thing if her neck wasn’t still tingling from her grains healing it.

         Through a gap in the trees she saw the peak of the biosphere over twenty leagues away, the glass of the distant mountain-sized habitat glistening in the morning light. The judgment festival would be held at the biosphere’s base. As a child Alexnya had visited that very biosphere with her day-fellow caravan. She’d tried to peek through the biosphere’s opaque glass to see the perfect, grain-free world inside but couldn’t make out anything. Still, at the time she’d yearned to go inside and see what it was like to live in a world without the stupid grains monitoring her every movement and deed.

         Guess I’ll get that wish, she thought. People being executed at judgment festivals were gifted the boon of living a single day inside a biosphere’s perfect environment.

         She chuckled to herself—did the grains really believe living a day without them made up for being executed?

         “You ready?” Chakatie asked.

         “Not really,” Alexnya said. “But might as well get going.”

         As they walked back Alexnya saw ten powered-down anchors—all members of Chakatie’s family—standing in her front yard around the destroyed altar. Several of them glared at Alexnya. She’d never liked Chakatie’s family and they hated her. They had never accepted that a day-fellow girl could become one of them.

         All of them wore fancy suits and hats, as if preparing to go to a delightful party. Which Alexnya guessed they were. Only the large backpacks they carried indicated this was more than a simple trip to the neighbor’s for a potluck.

         One anchor stood out from the rest—Pinhaus, Chakatie’s oldest son. Of all Chakatie’s children and grandkids and in-laws, Pinhaus was the only one who approached the power of Chakatie herself. Even with his body powered down his eyes flickered yellow to the anger of his grains. He smirked at Alexnya, as if daring her to challenge him.

         “Be on your best behavior around my family,” Chakatie whispered to Alexnya. “I don’t feel like dealing with drama on the way to the festival.”

         “No.”

         “What did you say?” Alexnya felt the grains in the old woman’s body click together as untold powers prepared to be unleashed.

         “I said I won’t do it. If I’m going to be judged for someone else’s crimes, I get to act any damn way I want.”

         Chakatie growled softly before a smile filled her face. “I like it when you’re defiant,” she said. “I hope you show the same attitude when you reach the judgment festival.”

         “I’ll do that,” Alexnya said. She glanced again at the biosphere on the distant horizon, where she’d be judged. Any happiness at standing up to Chakatie fled at the realization that no matter how defiant she was, the grains were determined to make an example out of her.

* * *

         They hiked two days to reach the festival. Chakatie didn’t tie or bind Alexnya’s hands as they walked, but the other members of Chakatie’s family continually surrounded her on the dirt road, preventing any escape. They even followed her into the damn trees every time she took a crap, no matter how much she protested.

         Worse were the holographic rainbows and fireworks and dancing cartoon animals the grains projected into the air as the group walked down the road. When they passed homes on neighboring lands, little kids from anchor families squealed with delight and ran to watch.

         “I’m just a fucking parade for people,” Alexnya muttered.

         “Aw, don’t be down,” Wren, Chakatie’s teenage granddaughter, said. “This is going to be fun! I’ve never been to a judgment festival.”

         Wren was one of the few of Chakatie’s family Alexnya could stomach. Probably why the family ordered her to hike beside Alexnya.

         “You do realize I’ll be executed at this festival,” Alexnya said.

         Wren grinned, her irritatingly happy face looking as if she couldn’t imagine Alexnya being concerned about anything as trivial as pending death. She wore a red-flower sundress and sandals, a cute outfit that was totally impractical for hiking two days to the festival. But then all of Chakatie’s family had dressed up. Only Alexnya had worn walking boots and jeans, not caring how she looked.

         “You’ll be fine,” Wren said. “All you have to do is convince people you didn’t do anything wrong. The grains won’t hurt someone who’s innocent.”

         “You wouldn’t say that if you’d ever been a day-fellow.”

         Wren clapped her hands together. “That’s what’s makes this exciting!” she said, her voice so high-pitched Alexnya flinched. “We’re traveling just like a day-fellow caravan! I’ve always wanted to do this.”

         Thank you, world, for letting her get even more irritating. Wren was only a few years younger than Alexnya and constantly bugged her for stories of her day-fellow times. Of living in horse-drawn wagons and traveling in caravans, always taking care to never harm the environment or stay in one place longer than a few days. Wren seemed to love how day-fellow caravans created deep bonds among friends and family—understandable, given how shitty many of Wren’s family could be.

         But if Alexnya mentioned the bad things that anchors did to day-fellows, Wren always rationalized that talk away. When Alexnya told Wren about one caravan being destroyed by anchors, leaving Alexnya’s wagon as the only survivor, Wren shrugged and said the day-fellows must have harmed the environment in some way. When Alexnya described watching an anchor kill an elderly day-fellow because he was too ill to travel and the grains had ordered his caravan to leave, Wren said the grains had their reasons.

         She wanted the romance of being a day-fellow, not the reality.

         “You message your family about the festival?” she asked sympathetically, as if finally understanding that something bad could happen to Alexnya there.

         “Nah. They’d just worry. And their caravan couldn’t get here in time—not that they could do anything to help if they did.”

         As they walked down the road they passed an anchor’s sod-house with a day-fellow caravan parked nearby. They’d passed a number of anchors and day-fellows heading toward the festival—evidently the grains had notified everyone in the region and ordered them to attend.

         The anchor and his family and all the day-fellows lined the road to watch Alexnya go by. Purple fairies fluttered above the anchor’s head, showing off this land’s power. Several day-fellow kids waved at her, excited by both the projected fireworks and cartoons and at seeing one of their own who’d become an anchor.

         However, the adult day-fellows merely shook their heads and whispered to each other. While Alexnya might have been born a day-fellow, she knew they now saw her as the enemy.

         Behind one of the day-fellow wagons, Alexnya caught of glimpse of a red-glowing face laughing at her. The strange anchor who’d attacked her!

         But when she looked closer, the face was gone.

         Multiple times since they’d left home Alexnya had felt the glowing red anchor watching her. Not that she ever fully saw the anchor—only a glimpse here, like behind that wagon, or a blurred movement there. Still, she couldn’t quit the feeling that she was being watched by more than the grains themselves.

         Alexnya glanced back to where she’s seen the red anchor, and there instead was a dancing cartoon bunny. The kids lining the road—both anchor and day-fellow—laughed and clapped excitedly.

         “The grains are making a joke of my pending death,” she muttered.

         “What do you mean?” Wren asked.

         “That,” she said, pointing at the cartoon bunny. “I’d like to smack whoever programmed the grains to mix parades and festivals with judgments and executions.”

         “You don’t like fireworks and cartoons?”

         “Only if they shoot out Pinhaus’s ass.”

         Wren laughed, only to jump from a low growl right beside her even though no one was there.

         Several yards away Pinhaus laughed softly. While Alexnya really hated Pinhaus and knew that feeling was extremely mutual, she did admire his ability to throw his voice. At family get-togethers he often used it to amuse the kids. Alexnya had long wanted to know how he did that trick.

         Not that she could ask him. Even with his body powered down Pinhaus stood a third again taller than Alexnya, and he was strong. He was also smug and conceited, never speaking more than a few condescending words to her.

         “Apologies,” Alexnya said to Pinhaus. “I should have said we’d ask the grains to create the illusion of rainbows and fireworks shooting out your ass.”

         Pinhaus’s yellow eyes sparked to anger, and his right hand swelled as long claws grew from his fingers. Alexnya tsked loudly at him showing such anger. He was so easy to provoke.

         Chakatie stepped between them. “Pinny,” she said, “run down the road and let the festival’s anchor lord know we’ll be there in a few hours.”

         Pinhaus froze at his mother saying his nickname, especially in front of Alexnya. He glared at her for a moment but quickly demurred.

         As Pinhaus ran to do as his mother said, Alexnya snorted just loud enough for him to hear. Wren chuckled—Pinhaus clearly irritated her too.

         “You have a death wish?” Chakatie asked. “Pinhaus doesn’t forgive slights.”

         “Don’t you mean ‘Pinny?’” Alexnya asked. “Besides, with the grains angry, I’m unlikely to live long enough for him to kill me.”

         “I was wrong.” Chakatie sighed. “I don’t like you when you’re defiant. You should definitely work on that—if you survive the festival.”

         Alexnya glanced at Wren, but the girl wouldn’t meet her eyes. It was the same with the rest of Chakatie’s family.

         No matter how big Alexnya talked, she knew she would face what was coming alone.

* * *

         This was Alexnya’s first judgment festival, although she’d seen plenty of other festival grounds while traveling as a day-fellow. There were grounds like this one scattered across all the lands, always beside the main entrance to a mountain-sized biosphere.

         Alexnya felt a touch of vertigo as they neared the shimming biosphere, which rose above them a half league into the sky. The dome was supported by massive arches and lattices and panels of ancient nano-reinforced glass. There were thousands of these biospheres around the Earth, built by the people who’d also programmed the grains. The biospheres preserved pristine environments and species as a safeguard against any future devastation of the environment.

         The glass panels higher on the biospheres were clear, to let in the sun, but the panels at ground-level were opaque, preventing anyone from looking inside. Alexnya had heard of a few anchors and day-fellows who climbed up the sides of a biosphere to peek inside, but usually they all fell to their deaths before having the chance to see anything.

         Despite that, there was plenty to see outside the biosphere. The open grasslands of the judgment festival grounds contained hundreds of clear stele made of the same nano-reinforced glass as the biosphere, each rectangular memorial rising to twice the height of any human. The stele were arranged in geometric patterns like an ancient graveyard, and each one played scenes from Earth’s long history. When not used for judgment festivals, the grounds were a place to learn the history of this world, always open to both anchors and day-fellows.

         But today people were having fun. Hundreds of day-fellows filled the grounds, eating different foods and playing games and drinking home-brewed ales and whiskeys. A dozen caravans were parked on the outskirts of the grounds, their wagons not circled in protection but instead strung along in welcoming lanes. The wagons’ armored doors and windows were open as people traded food and different goods.

         And anchors—there were at least a thousand anchors here too, their tents pitched all over the grounds. None of the anchors were powered up, and most of them wore nice suits or dresses, the same as Chakatie’s family. Alexnya saw anchors dancing and eating their fill of delicious foods and drinking so much that a few grassy spots on the festival grounds had been kept open so they could pass out and sleep.

         But even in this sacred place where conflict wasn’t allowed, the anchors and day-fellows kept their distance from one another. The children of anchors played with other anchors and the day-fellow kids did the same, running and hiding and shrieking with joy but only among their own. A few anchors bartered with day-fellow traders, but everyone else stuck to their own kind.

         “Did I mention how fun judgment festivals are?” Chakatie asked. “Aside from, you know, the judgment part.”

         Alexnya grumbled to herself. She’d known she was in trouble, but was it really such bad trouble that the grains needed to gather this many day-fellows and anchors to see it?

         As they approached the festival, the projections of fireworks, rainbows, and cartoons built to a climax, shooting across the blue sky to tell everyone the guest of honor had arrived. The crowds of anchors and day-fellows stopped their eating and drinking and dancing and stared at Alexnya.

         Alexnya grew nervous at being the center of everyone’s attention and she stumbled, unable to move forward until Chakatie hugged her in a motherly embrace.

         “Don’t give them any fear to enjoy,” Chakatie whispered.

         Alexnya swallowed and forced a fake smile to her face as she and Chakatie walked toward the center of the judgment festival.

         She thought the crowd would be angry at her, but instead they clapped and cheered, both day-fellows and anchors. A number of people tossed pine boughs on the path before her to walk on. One day-fellow girl yelled for her to stay strong. A group of anchors bowed at her in respect.

         Alexnya was starting to feel a little more at ease until she passed a young anchor.

         “When will the grains kill her?” the child asked his mother impatiently.

         “Hush,” the mother snapped. “That happens tomorrow.”

         Irritating little snot. Alexnya glared at the kid and fought back a smirk when he flinched and darted behind his mother’s dress.

         In the middle of the festival grounds rose a large glass stage. That was where she would be judged. Standing on the stage alongside a few other anchors was that simpering fool Pinhaus, who yet again smirked at her. Alexnya climbed the steps with Chakatie and stood on the stage so everyone could see her.

         “Now what?” she asked Chakatie.

         She found out a moment later when a mass of red grains began spinning in the air above the stage, like an inverted dust devil. The swirling grains quickly joined together to create the illusion of arms, legs, body, and face before their pixilation ended and they formed a near-perfect approximation of a giant person standing twice as tall as Alexnya.

         The red anchor, who’d choked her.

         The anchor smiled. “You must be Alexnya,” she said.

         Alexnya stepped backward, unsure what was going on but not trusting this red anchor.

         Chakatie grabbed her arm. “You know her?” she hissed.

         “She attacked me at my house the other day.”

         Chakatie looked the simulated anchor up and down. “Impossible. That’s the festival’s anchor lord. The grains base these simulacrums on the memories and consciousness of the original anchors, who died thousands of years ago. There’s no way you’ve ever met this person.”

         “No... that’s her...” But Alexnya couldn’t explain what was had happened, which made the red anchor lord smile even more.

         The anchor lord turned to face the crowd of anchors and day-fellows, her body of grains fading in and out but still looking solid.

         “Welcome to the judgment festival!” she announced in a booming voice. “The grains, in their compassionate knowledge, have designated all of you anchors to judge these lands. And you gathered day-fellows are to bear witness to this historic event.”

         She motioned at the history lessons being projected on the hundreds of glass stele around them.

         “Grains and anchors and day-fellows, we all play a part in maintaining our world,” she continued. “Our history as humans is written in light on these memorials, available for anyone to see. As we all know, it is a sad history of death, destruction, and extinction, so the grains now keep us in check. But sometimes even the grains need help. Sometimes they need us to remember our purpose in life.”

         The anchor lord motioned for Alexnya to step before her. When Alexnya didn’t move, Chakatie pulled her forward.

         The anchor lord took her hand and raised it in triumph. “This is Alexnya, a day-fellow girl who became an anchor. A remarkable achievement seen only once in a thousand years! And she has been a good anchor, protecting her lands from all who would harm them. But what happens if her lands have gone wrong? Is it her fault? Ours? You anchors will be the judge. And you day-fellows will be the witnesses.”

         The anchors and day-fellows surrounding the stage cheered. Alexnya struggled to free her arm from the red anchor’s grasp, but she might as well have been struggling against the weight of the biosphere itself.

         “Judgment starts tomorrow,” the anchor lord announced. “For today, enjoy the festival. Enjoy all that the grains have given us!”

         Again the crowd cheered. In the middle of the noise the anchor lord leaned over until her face was nearly kissing Alexnya, just like she’d done when she’d attacked Alexnya two days ago.

         “My name is Sri Sa,” the anchor lord whispered just loud enough for Chakatie to also hear. “I am so happy to meet you both.”

         Chakatie looked at Sri Sa with a troubled expression, as if suddenly understanding there were dangers here she hadn’t expected.

         Sri Sa stood back up. “Mistress Chakatie,” she said, “would your family do me the honor of escorting Alexnya into the biosphere? Before someone is judged, they deserve a day in paradise.”

         Chakatie glanced around nervously as if evaluating the situation. Alexnya had seen her tense up like this before, usually when Chakatie believed a battle or blood-letting was near. But why was she acting this way now?

         Not that it mattered. At a judgment festival, everyone was supposed to follow the anchor lord’s orders—to do otherwise would mean taking on the thousand other anchors gathered here.

         “It’d be our honor,” Chakatie finally said as she bowed to Sri Sa. She waved for her family to do as the anchor lord requested.

         Alexnya followed Pinhaus and Chakatie and Sri Sa as they led her to the biosphere’s entrance. It was large enough for entire wagons to enter. The glass doors of the biosphere flowed with projections of rainbowed light that looked like glowing wax dripping from strange invisible candles.

         None of the other anchors and day-fellows at the festival dared approach the entrance. But likewise none of them could look away, hoping to see the sacred world inside the dome.

         If they wanted a look that bad, Alexnya would have gladly traded places with any of them.

         The doors opened, and Alexnya and Sri Sa and Chakatie’s family filed through into an armored entryway. The outer doors then closed, leaving them stranded in the entryway before the biosphere’s inner doors.

         “Those being judged are allowed the rare honor of entering the biosphere,” Sri Sa said to Alexnya. “This allows you to both experience the paradise Earth once was and be reminded of why we must never again harm our world.”

         “I love it when you over-explain shit,” Alexnya said. “The more you talk, more it delays my judgment.”

         Sri Sa looked irritated before forcing her lips back into a simulated smile. “Just touch the inner doors,” she stated. “The grains embedded there will wrap a necklace of light around you. You can’t enter the biosphere without that necklace.”

         Alexnya had heard of this—everyone who was to be punished at a judgment festival wore a necklace of grains that kept them from fleeing and not standing judgment. If they didn’t go to the festival when it was time, or tried to hide in the biosphere, the necklaces choked them to death.

         She wondered what would happen if she refused to touch the door and receive her necklace, but the eager look in Pinhaus’s eyes told her not to try. That fool, and others of Chakatie’s family, would no doubt relish dragging her forward and making her do as Sri Sa ordered.

         Alexnya touched the inner doors. What looked like liquid light flowed from the door up her arm and around her neck, where it spun into a red necklace as thick as her thumb. The necklace felt like a lukewarm waterfall hugging her throat.

         “Aren’t the doors supposed to open now?” Alexnya asked.

         “They are,” Chakatie said. “Maybe it takes a moment.”

         Nothing happened. The entryway was silent, all of Chakatie’s family eager for a glimpse inside the sacred biosphere.

         Sri Sa, though, was smiling so hard her red simulated face looked like it was about to explode.

         Alexnya tapped the necklace, as if that might do it. As an anchor she’d grown used to hearing the grains’ orders. Usually her land’s grains spoke using snippets of memories from the lives of past anchors. Once or twice when she’d angered them by mistake, the grains spoke to her with more pointed memories of people saying words directly relevant to what she was doing.

         But here the grains had a simulated anchor to speak for them—and Sri Sa was laughing.

         “Sorry, sorry,” she said as she appeared to catch her breath, which she didn’t need to do since she was created of swirling grains and didn’t breathe. “Just wondered how long it’d take you to figure things out.”

         Chakatie stepped protectedly between Sri Sa and her family, which Alexnya was pleased to see included her. Chakatie’s grains synced together, preparing for battle.

         “Are you playing with us?” she asked in a low, dangerous voice. “The grains said to deliver Alexnya for judgment. We did as ordered.”

         Sri Sa shrugged, or the grains making up her body rearranged themselves into the reflection of a shrug. “Sorry, but everyone needs to touch the door,” she said. “The grains want your entire family to receive a necklace. While Alexnya’s the only one being judged, when she’s found guilty, the grains will kill all of you along with her.”

         Alexnya watched realization flit across the faces of Chakatie, Pinhaus, Wren, and the rest of the anchors. She wanted to say something, to smart back like she’d done since learning she was to be judged and killed. But she was too astounded for words.

         “Why my family?” Chakatie asked. “We’ve done nothing wrong.”

         “What did you tell Alexnya the other day?” Sri Sa asked. “Oh yes, something inspirational and deep about it not being fair what the grains were doing. Well guess what, the grains aren’t fair to anyone.”

         Sri Sa powered up her simulated body even more, as if challenging Chakatie and her family to defy her orders as anchor lord. Alexnya reached out with her power and analyzed Sri Sa’s grains—it was quickly obvious to her none of them could come close to her power, not even if they all attacked together.

         Instead of waiting for Chakatie and the other anchors to come to this realization on their own, Alexnya sarcastically clapped her hands.

         Chakatie and the others glared at her.

         “You were right, what you told me in the field,” Alexnya said to Chakatie. “It appears ‘we’ will indeed be dealing with this together.”

* * *

         Instead of doing as Sri Sa ordered, Chakatie’s family spent the next hour yelling at each other.

         Chakatie was furious that Pinhaus had arrived early at the festival but had not sniffed out that they were also to be punished—evidently the main reason she’d sent him ahead was to scout for surprises just like this. And Wren and many of the other anchors were shocked and sick to their stomachs at what was happening, with several actually throwing up.

         But there was no way to break out of the biosphere’s entryway—the outer walls were too strong. And even if they could the anchors outside would never let them escape.

         Finally, Chakatie stepped to the inner doors and touched them, and her own red binding wrapped around her neck.

         “Well, what are you waiting for?” she yelled at her family. “If I’m being punished, we’re all being punished.”

         Her family reluctantly did as ordered.

         “The judgment festival begins at noon tomorrow,” Sri Sa said. “Until then, relax and enjoy paradise.”

         The grains making up Sri Sa’s body fell apart and vanished, followed by the words “we’re so dead” spoken from where she’d been standing. Alexnya looked around, puzzled, until realizing it was Pinhaus throwing his voice, so nervous over what had happened he didn’t seem to realize he was doing it.

         The biosphere’s inner doors opened, revealing the habitat inside. A sweet blast of cool air splashed around Alexnya, smelling of green plants and fresh water and a beautiful, perfect spring day. And seen from the inside, the biosphere’s glass rainbowed the sky, sparkling and shimmering in beauty. Birds flew through the air and cicadas hummed invitingly.

         But somehow, for some reason, right in the middle of this paradise was a day-fellow caravan, parked alongside a small lake, only a hundred yards from the entrance.

         The day-fellows stared back in shock at the appearance of so many anchors, but that shock vanished when they began shouting at each other in warning. A young woman in nano-reinforced leather armor unsheathed her short sword and stepped between the anchors and her caravan as all the others ran for the shelter of their armored wagons.

         For a moment Alexnya feared this was her former family’s caravan and they were to be punished too if she was found guilty, but the markings and sigils on the wagons were all wrong. And it looked like this caravan had been camped here for weeks—their horses were unharnessed and grazing in the grasslands near the lake. And the caravan had set up their manufacturing and tool creating nanoforges outside the wagons, something rarely done because of the risk of damaging the environment and angering the grains.

         “Why are day-fellows in the biosphere?” Pinhaus asked. “Are we supposed to attack them?”

         Chakatie didn’t say anything but held her hand up, holding her family back.

         Now that Alexnya looked closer she saw that all of the day-fellows wore the same red necklaces as she and Chakatie’s family. And the woman standing before them in the leather armor was clearly the caravan’s warden, tasked with protecting the day-fellows and answering any challenges from anchors. While she looked tough, armed with that sword she wouldn’t stand a chance against Chakatie and her family.

         Or she wouldn’t have stood a chance if a laser pistol—technology forbidden to all humans by the grains—wasn’t also holstered to her hip.

         Alexnya acted like she hadn’t noticed the laser, praying none of the other anchors had seen it either. But naturally Wren, being the perfect annoyance she was, spotted it.

         “What’s that on her belt?” she asked.

         Pinhaus glanced at the caravan warden and his lips twitched into a straight line. His body instantly swelled to his grains’ power as he shook in anger.

         The warden laughed. But she didn’t pull her laser. Instead she sheathed her sword.

         “You’re pretty brave for a fellow prisoner,” she called. “But I’ve been told all about you, Pinhaus. You can’t do a thing without your mommy’s approval.”

         The warden grinned. Pinhaus shook in anger, but the warden was correct—he wouldn’t attack without Chakatie’s approval.

         Chakatie stepped forward and Alexnya followed. She remembered the images of Frere-Jones cutting down dozens of anchors with a laser, including that crying man who’d begged for mercy. How quickly could this person draw her own pistol and fire?

         “Do I know you?” Chakatie asked when they stood face to face with the warden. “Seems you’re familiar with me and my family.”

         “The name’s Mita,” the warden said, bringing her hands together politely before her chest and bowing slightly. “And no, we’ve never met. But I’ve heard plenty about you. Sometimes can’t get him to shut up about all of you.”

         Alexnya started to ask what Mita meant when a young man walked toward them from one of the wagons. He held a laser pistol in one hand but didn’t aim it as he closed the distance. He also didn’t smile or look nervous, as if walking up to a group of anchors while carrying illegal technology wasn’t anything to worry about.

         The young man paused before Chakatie. “Hello grandmother,” he said.

         Chakatie hugged him tight, and Alexnya saw tears in her eyes.

         “Thank the grains,” Chakatie said. “Colton, I never thought I’d see you again.”

         The young man didn’t react, standing stiff as if being hugged by his grandmother wasn’t anything worth getting emotional over. But once Chakatie released him, he holstered his pistol and touched a finger to a series of glowing red dots on his left forearm. Then, to Alexnya’s surprise, he suddenly smiled and hugged Chakatie back.

         “Grammie,” he said with the loving emotion not there before. “I’ve missed you so much.”

         Chakatie also looked surprised by the young man’s emotional outburst. She whispered something to him, which Alexnya didn’t hear because she’d finally recognized this bastard.

         This was Colton, the banished son of Frere-Jones, Alexnya’s predecessor as anchor.

         The only emotion Alexnya felt was the urge to beat him bloody for his mother getting her into this mess.

* * *

         Alexnya and Pinhaus sat in the caravan elder’s wagon along with Mita, Colton, a young day-fellow girl of maybe twelve years of age, and two other day-fellows who hadn’t bothered to introduce themselves. Alexnya knew how they felt—socializing with anchors was one thing, but to invite them into a wagon? Into the only place where day-fellows felt any safety from attacks by anchors?

         Such a thing was never done.

         The caravan’s leader was Elder Vácha, a tiny woman whose face had been so weathered by the years that it resembled fine leather. As befitted her position, this solar-powered wagon was packed with the caravan’s medical and communications equipment, including a very powerful diagnostic table in the middle. Everyone sat around the table on small folding chairs or on the sleeping bunks jammed between storage cabinets and the armored walls.

         While it was tight quarters, being back in a day-fellow wagon filled Alexnya with so many happy memories. She felt that if she turned around, her mother would be there to tuck her into bed, or her father to kiss her on the cheek, or her sister to argue over what game they should play the next time their caravan stopped for a breather.

         The wagon shook as Elder Vácha and Chakatie climbed back inside, then closed and sealed the armored door behind them.

         “That ought to keep everyone happy,” Elder Vácha muttered. “I handed out the good wine. Not the best, mind you. We never give uninvited guests the best. Not unless they first blow tons of sunshine up my ass.”

         “Your manners definitely haven’t improved with age,” Chakatie muttered.

         “Nah,” Elder Vácha said. “But while I’m now old as shit, at least I don’t look it. You, though—did age make you give up on looking presentable?”

         Alexnya gagged a laugh—she’d seen Chakatie kill people for insults like that. But to her surprise Chakatie laughed and embraced Elder Vácha as if they were old friends. Others in the wagon chuckled, the tension broken but only slightly.

         Only Pinhaus didn’t laugh, but Alexnya figured at this point nothing could make him happy about how his day was going.

         Chakatie flashed a grandmotherly smile at Colton, who stared stone-faced back at her. Since his earlier embrace of her, he hadn’t shown any further emotions.

         “Mita, is the wagon sealed and secured from the grains?” Elder Vácha asked.

         Mita tapped the diagnosis table, which shimmered into projected measurements and readings. “Yes. There are still no grains in the biosphere and no loose grains in the wagon. But we do have grains in these damn necklaces. And I can’t do anything about the grains the anchors carry in their bodies.”

         Elder Vácha shrugged. “Is what it is.” She looked at Alexnya and shook her head sadly. “So I hear you’re the reason we’re all gathered here.”

         The day-fellows at the table glared at Alexnya, and a few looked like they wanted to curse her out.

         “Calm down,” Elder Vácha ordered. “Bigger things are going on than one young woman being judged. We’ve got to pull together all we know and figure out a way to survive.”

         She tapped the table and an image appeared of this caravan.

         “All of this was recorded a year ago,” Elder Vácha said, “about two hundred leagues from here, in a land controlled by an anchor named Sri Sa.”

         Alexnya frowned. “Sri Sa? That’s the name of the anchor lord running this judgment festival.”

         Elder Vácha shook her head. “Can’t be. The Sri Sa we knew is dead, and there’s no way the grains would create a simulacrum of her life. She wasn’t exactly a model anchor.”

         But when Elder Vácha tapped the controls to project an image of Sri Sa, it was indeed her. Alexnya’s grains clicked together in anger, and she felt her claws growing—she shoved her hands under her legs to avoid alarming the day-fellows.

         “That’s her,” Chakatie said with far more calm than Alexnya felt.

         “Wait,” Mita said angrily. “This festival’s anchor lord is Sri Sa? Our Sri Sa?”

         “So it appears,” Elder Vácha said with disgust.

         Alexnya noticed that Colton responded to this revelation in a strange manner. Instead of getting angry like the other day-fellows, he reached out to touch the glowing dots on his left arm. But both Mita and the young girl sitting beside him stopped him. “Save it for later,” the girl said.

         Elder Vácha shot them a stern glare then continued playing the recording. Alexnya had grown used to the immediate nature of the grains’ communication, which recorded and shared the memories of anchors. But she’d also never forgotten the lessons she’d learned growing up in her own day-fellow caravan. As a child she’d been forced to sit in a communication wagon much like this and watch holographic recordings of anchors butchering day-fellows who’d been accused of harming the environment.

         All day-fellow kids grew up seeing disturbing images like that in the hope it would keep them safe, as much from harming the environment as from doing anything to anger the grains.

         Like those videos, the images now being projected had been recorded by tiny cameras on the outside of the caravan’s wagons, and some of the recordings were in bad positions or from a distance. But Alexnya still watched in fascination as the caravan entered Sri Sa’s domain, only to discover she had murdered all her fellow anchors and gained the ability to control both her land’s grains and their power. The recordings also showed the little girl seated next to Colton having an illegal neuroconnector embedded in the back of her neck, which allowed her to likewise manipulate the grains, although not a powerfully as Sri Sa.

         Because of Sri Sa’s heresy and the girl’s neuroconnector, countless anchors from surrounding lands had attacked this caravan. But the day-fellows had teamed up with Sri Sa and escaped, using forbidden technology such as laser weapons. Alexnya fought back horror as the recording showed Colton and Mita and others burning down anchors by the hundreds in cold-blooded slaughter. The killings by Frere-Jones paled to what these day-fellows had done.

         “The recordings of what happened next were lost to us with the destruction of one of our wagons,” Elder Vácha said. “But it turned out the grains which powered Sri Sa weren’t like the grains we all know—they were an ancient variant of the nano-machines and were programmed differently. In the end Sri Sa used so much of her grains’ power she lost control and destroyed herself and everything around her. Mita, Colton, and Ae were the only ones to escape that wagon’s destruction.”

         Alexnya couldn’t fault these day-fellows—they’d done all this merely to survive. But from the anger on the faces of Pinhaus and even Chakatie, she knew no other anchors would see it that way.

         “Not much more to tell,” Elder Vácha said. “We thought we’d escaped punishment, but a few weeks ago as we were passing through this region, a couple of large groups of anchors surrounded us and forced us into this biosphere. Where we each received one of these glorious necklaces.”

         “Surprised you didn’t fight back,” Pinhaus growled. “Add more dead anchors to your tally.”

         “Sometimes it’s smarter not to fight back,” Mita said. “Live to kill anchors another day.”

         “You used illegal technology!” Pinhaus said angrily. “You murdered hundreds of my people, yet you have been allowed to enter this sacred paradise? We should kill you all right now.”

         “And yet here you are, being punished alongside us,” Mita said, tapping her own red necklace. “Makes me wonder about your own sins.”

         Pinhaus jumped across the table and tried to grab Mita’s throat, but she deflected him with a punch in his face. Alexnya powered up her right arm to punch Pinhaus herself, but Chakatie pulled him back.

         “Calm down, you fools,” she snapped. “Anchors hate day-fellows, day-fellows hate anchors. I get it. But the grains are playing games with us. Unless we all want to die, we have to figure out what’s going on.”

         Pinhaus sat back down, as did Mita.

         Alexnya felt the grains squirming within her body, demanding she act like a true anchor. But what did that mean, when both anchors and day-fellows did good and bad? When the grains themselves didn’t care about manipulating them all or wrongly offering her up as a sacrifice?

         Alexnya noticed Colton looking at her, his hand poised over the series of dots on his left arm. She realized he probably came the closest of anyone in this wagon to understanding what she was going through—he’d once been an anchor and was now a day-fellow. Exactly the reverse of her own life, but still closer than anyone else here.

         Colton touched one of the dots on his arm. He smiled as he waved awkwardly at her, as if trying to say he did understand. Alexnya waved back and, for the first time since learning she was to be judged, didn’t feel like she was facing the entire world by herself.

* * *

         After another hour of pointless bickering between the groups, Elder Vácha and Chakatie kicked everyone else out of the wagon so the two of them could discuss things in private. Alexnya eagerly jumped to the ground and grabbed her backpack. It was already nighttime. She was tired and just wanted to sleep somewhere.

         Chakatie’s family had pitched their tents close to the biosphere’s doors. But when Alexnya walked there to pitch her own tent, Pinhaus and the rest of the anchors glared at her, their eyes glowing to the different colors of their grains. Even Wren looked angry.

         Alexnya clapped her hands loudly before Wren’s pouty face and mimed an explosion. “Bang,” she said.

         “What?” Wren asked. “I don’t...”

         “Fireworks and rainbows and all that. Remember how excited you were to see this damn festival when I was the only one who might be punished?”

         Wren had the decency to look embarrassed. Alexnya snorted in her face and left to find somewhere else to camp.

         She paused next to the small lake, spooking a trout that broke the still waters into ripples while crickets and cicadas hummed their songs. The night was almost chilly, and each breath she took smelled sweet and crisp. The slight breeze was also amazingly clear, as if the world had cleansed the air in welcome for her alone.

         Thanks to the new moon she couldn’t see the massive arches and lattices of the biosphere rising through the darkness above her. But she could sense the lack of grains here. There was no clicking in her mind like when she was in the rest of the world, where the grains lived in every plant and animal and even the soil, continually sharing information between themselves. She didn’t feel the grains watching her. She didn’t feel the nervous tension that at any moment the grains might take command of her body and force her to defend the environment on their behalf. Even the grains inside her seemed muted, as if unsure what to do when they couldn’t speak with their brethren.

         So this was what all of the Earth once felt like. It really was beautiful. Even if she was to be executed tomorrow, at least she’d known this one moment of peace.

         Trying to find a new campsite, she walked between two of the day-fellow wagons. The back door for one wagon was open, and inside she saw a day-fellow family eating dinner. Their large wagon was a hydroponic, with edible and medicinal plants growing in water-filled tubes, large water tanks built into the armored walls, and a roof that could open fully to the sun. The family’s bunks and tables sat among the plants.

         One of Alexnya’s friends growing up had lived in a hydroponic wagon like this. She’d eaten many a meal with that friend, even slept among their plants countless times. She tried to push the memory away. She really didn’t want to remember all she’d lost.

         A little boy inside waved. Alexnya waved back, only for an adult to notice the exchange and close the door in her face.

         “To them you’re just a big bad anchor,” a soft voice said from under the wagon. “They’ll probably tell scary stories to the kids tonight about you eating any day-fellows you catch harming the environment.”

         The young girl who’d been in Elder Vácha’s meeting earlier was sitting under the wagon, her thin arms wrapped around one of the rear wheel’s giant spokes as she stared up at Alexnya.

         “My name’s Ae,” she said. She lifted her long hair off the back of her neck, revealing a silver neuroconnector. “Don’t touch my neck—I’ll be able to access the grains in your body and force you to do all types of bad shit.”

         “Doesn’t it defeat the purpose of your connector, if you warn me not to touch it?”

         “Nah, I’m lying. I can access your grains without touching you. But I won’t. Unless you piss me off.”

         Alexnya couldn’t help but laugh.

         “Why are you camping by yourself?” Ae asked. “Aren’t those anchors your family?”

         “Nah. They hate me. I pretty much feel the same about them.”

         “Want me to use my connector to force them to like you?” Ae clapped her hands eagerly, as if the thought of manipulating anchors was too much fun to contemplate.

         “Not really. But thanks for offering.”

         “Okay, option two. Want to sleep in my wagon?”

         Alexnya fought an eager smile creeping up her face. She really wanted to do that—to feel like a day-fellow again, if only for a few hours.

         Ae stood up and waved for Alexnya to follow. Now that Alexnya looked closely, Ae’s body seemed abnormally skinny, as if she’d been ill most of her life. She looked about twelve years old, but the way she moved and talked made Alexnya suspect she was far older.

         They walked to the first wagon in the caravan. Two horses grazed nearby, and both looked Alexnya over before deciding she was safe, and they returned to eating. Ae opened the wagon’s back door and climbed inside. The funk of too many bodies living in too small a space flowed out of the wagon, making Alexnya feel like a kid again. She grabbed the handle by the door and pulled herself up, bracing herself for the disapproving looks from the day-fellows inside.

         Instead, Colton and Mita stared at her in amusement.

         “She’s weird,” Ae announced. “Like us.”

         “I am not weird,” Mita muttered.

         “No, you are weird,” Ae said. “Just like me and Colton. Which is why I said she could bunk with us.”

         Mita almost gagged as she forced a smile to her face. “Ae, anchors aren’t... comfortable sleeping in day-fellow wagons.”

         “Don’t talk to me like I’m a kid,” Ae said. “And I already said she could stay.”

         “Uh, maybe I should go...” Alexnya said.

         “No,” Mita said. “I... Colton, what do you think? It’s our wagon after all.”

         Colton sat at the small diagnostic table working on a disassembled laser pistol. “I don’t mind if she stays,” he said. “She used to be a day-fellow, you know.”

         Mita and Ae both gave Alexnya a surprised glance.

         “Wait a minute, Colton,” Mita said. “You talk all the time about your family. About how this girl took your mother’s place, how your mother ripped the grains from your body, how your grandmother is loving yet scary as shit. But you never said Alexnya used to be a day-fellow!”

         Colton shrugged. “Didn’t seem important.”

         Mita laughed and shook her head, as if she’d long grown used to putting up with Colton’s inanity. “Toss your bag on that bunk,” she told Alexnya.

         Alexnya did as told and stretched out there beside her bag. There wasn’t much space, the bunk above pressing down to only a span above face, but she couldn’t be happier. She touched the armored wall beside her, closed her eyes, and breathed deep of the wagon’s tang of bodies and electronics and food and gear.

         “Guess you were born a day-fellow,” Mita said. “No true anchor would get goofy-faced over sleeping in an over-crowded wagon.”

         “It feels good in here,” Alexnya said. “Like being home.”

         Mita, Colton, and Ae shared their dinner of rice and spiced beans with Alexnya. While eating, Colton tapped one of the dots on his arm and thanked Ae for cooking such a great meal. Seeing Alexnya’s puzzlement, he explained—having the grains removed from him had stripped him of his ability to feel emotions, at least until Sri Sa inserted her own grains into his body last year.

         “I have to tap the dots on my arm,” Colton said. “Then wham—happiness, sadness, anger, fear, or any other emotion arising from mixtures of those.”

         “You have to guess which emotion you want to feel?” Alexnya asked.

         Ae giggled. “That’s pretty much it. You should have seen him at our solstice dinner—Elder Vácha asked him to say a few words to everyone, but he tapped anger by mistake. He cursed out Elder Vácha so much she smacked him.”

         Mita rolled her eyes. Obviously she didn’t find the story nearly as funny.

         Alexnya extended her hand over Colton’s arm. “May I?”

         “Yes,” he said. “But don’t touch them. I can only use the grains to generate emotions a limited number of times before their power will be exhausted.”

         Alexnya reached out with her power and felt the grains Sri Sa had embedded within Colton’s arm. They had the same taste as the grains that made up Sri Sa. The same happiness and sadness and anger and fear as she’d felt from Sri Sa when Sri Sa had attacked her.

         “Why is Sri Sa doing all this?” Alexnya asked.

         “No clue,” Mita said. “We thought she was dead.

         “Can she be trusted?”

         Mita and Ae looked for Colton to answer, and Alexnya wondered why he would know more about Sri Sa than they did.

         Colton hesitated. “I trusted her once,” he finally said. “And she fought hard to save our lives. But the Sri Sa I knew is dead—whatever’s here now is a recreation by the grains. The question, though, is which grains recreated her.”

         Alexnya waited for Colton to explain what he meant by ‘which grains,’ but he put the laser pistol in his holster, opened the wagon’s door, and walked outside.

         When the door closed again, Ae jumped over and sat by Alexnya.

         “He got all kissy with Sri Sa before she died,” she whispered as if sharing a secret. “Even without touching his emotions, thinking about Sri Sa makes him moody.”

         Alexnya frowned. Earlier she’d thought Colton might understand her more than anyone else here, but what did it mean if he was in love with Sri Sa? Did Sri Sa feel the same as he did? She had given him back the limited ability to feel emotions, so obviously she cared for him. But was it more than that?

         As Alexnya climbed into her bunk to sleep, she wondered if this revelation could give her a way to turn tomorrow’s judgment festival to her advantage.

* * *

         The next morning Alexnya climbed out of the wagon and prepared to leave the biosphere and face the judgment festival. She stepped barefoot into the cold dew on the grass, not wanting to destroy her boots when she powered up. The rest of her clothes were tailored to stretch and open, so she didn’t worry about them.

         But before she could power up, she noticed Ae standing beside her.

         “Go ahead,” Ae said, staring eagerly at her body. “I’ve never seen an anchor power up from this close. Usually not a safe thing to witness.”

         Mita chuckled as she climbed out of the wagon wearing her leather body armor, sword, and holstered laser. But she also looked curious.

         Alexnya blushed before shaking off her embarrassment. She focused on the grains in her body, releasing their power. Her muscles and bones twisted as they rang out like steel and her hands shaped into claws. She grew until she was taller by half again.

         She grinned a mouthful of fangs at Ae.

         “That as scary as you get?” Ae asked. “I’ve seen worse.”

         Alexnya resisted the urge to pick the sassy girl up and twirl her over her head. She and Ae walked around the wagon to where Mita and Colton were waiting, then joined the other day-fellows and anchors lined up before the biosphere’s inner doors. The other day-fellows also wore body armor and carried any weapon they could find, including lasers. Wren, Pinhaus, and the anchors, meanwhile, were powered up like Alexnya. Only Chakatie had stayed her normal self, still wearing her yellow hat and suit. But even her grains clicked vast amounts of power through her small body.

         Everyone was prepared for whatever the day might bring.

         A dustdevil of grains swirled into the air before the entrance and formed into Sri Sa’s giant body.

         “Everyone looks so happy to see me,” she said with an amused grin.

         Colton stepped before Sri Sa and tapped his emotions. Anger snapped across his face.

         “What the hell are you playing at?” he screamed.

         Sri Sa frowned. “Anger is the emotion you give me? After I saved your life last year? Saved all of you?”

         Colton didn’t seem to know how to react to this. He reached to tap another emotion but Mita grabbed his hand.

         “We saw you die,” Mita calmly told Sri Sa. “Why are you still here?”

         Sri Sa smiled menacingly down at Mita, large simulated fangs glistening in her simulated mouth. “I am dead, yes. But some of the grains that powered me survived, and saved the essence of who I am.”

         Mita unholstered her laser pistol. “We can correct that error,” she said. “I’ve killed many anchors. Can’t be much harder to get rid of a grain-spun ghost.”

         Sri Sa raised a massive clawed hand to smash Mita, but she stopped when she saw Colton watching.

         “I won’t hurt you,” she muttered, hiding the claw behind her body as if embarrassed. “I’m here to help you. The grains are the ones who want all of you dead.”

         Chakatie and Elder Vácha stepped forward, with a reluctant Ae following behind them. They nodded at Ae, who closed her eyes. Her body began to shake. Alexnya felt Ae’s neuroconnector reach out to the grains making up Sri Sa’s body. A moment later the sensation vanished and Ae fell to her knees.

         “Sri Sa spoke the truth,” Ae said. “She’s made up of the rogue grains that powered her before she died. She’s not the grains that imprisoned us here.”

         Alexnya reached out toward Sri Sa with her own power. The grains making up Sri Sa tasted bittersweet and off-color—if taste was the right word—compared to the red hot spice she experienced from the grains in the rest of the world. Elder Vácha had said the grains that powered Sri Sa were an ancient variant of the nano-machines ruling today’s world. That they were even programmed differently.

         “So nice being in the biosphere,” Sri Sa said. “I don’t have to hide myself from the other grains—don’t have to spoof their communications and hack their sensors so they can’t see me. I can just exist.”

         Alexnya understood wanting to be free and just exist.

         Sri Sa shrunk her simulated body until she stood at the same height as Colton and Mita and the other day-fellows.

         “Sorry I couldn’t speak with you sooner,” she told Colton. “But I wasn’t even conscious until a few months ago. My surviving grains attached themselves to your caravan, but it took them time to replicate and reactivate who I was.”

         “Sounds like you miss being with these day-fellows,” Chakatie said.

         “I do.”

         “Then why did you place them at the mercy of a judgment festival?”

         Sri Sa looked at everyone around her, both the day-fellows and anchors tense at the coming judgment. Realization flickered across her simulated face. “I... I didn’t. The other grains had this planned, for the last year. They’re desperate to fix the problems they’ve encountered recently.”

         Seeing that no one was convinced, Sri Sa snorted. “Fine, don’t believe me. But the grains that control this world are programmed not to change. To them, the solution to any problem is simple: find and destroy everything connected to that problem.”

         Sri Sa pointed at Alexnya.

         “Everything started on your land when your predecessor killed all those anchors to protect one little day-fellow—you,” Sri Sa said. “Or maybe it started when the grains were stripped from your body, Colton. Or when Chakatie and her family saw all this happening and didn’t prevent it. Or when all you day-fellows decided you didn’t want to meekly die because the grains said you should.”

         Some of the day-fellows and anchors were having trouble meeting Sri Sa’s gaze as she spoke.

         “But the grains don’t want to simply kill all of you,” Sri Sa said. “They want to show the world that you’re wrong. To have every anchor and day-fellow outside this damn biosphere accept that the world is running as it should. Hence the judgment festival.”

         Alexnya knew Sri Sa was right. Vindictiveness and absolute control were how the grains dealt with matters. “So what do we do?” she asked.

         Sri Sa frowned. “You die.”

         As the anchors cursed and the day-fellows drew weapons, Sri Sa held up her hands. “Wait, wait! Not all of you. Only Alexnya.”

         “What the hell?” Alexnya said, fury clicking through her powered up body.

         “Those red necklaces,” Sri Sa said. “I couldn’t stop the grains from holding a judgment festival for Alexnya and bringing all of you here. But I can deactivate the necklaces now that you’re in the biosphere away from their power. I can even spoof the grains so they won’t know about it.”

         Sri Sa pointed at the red necklace on Elder Vácha’s neck. The necklace spasmed and vanished.

         “See,” Sri Sa said. “I’m now spoofing your necklace—the grains outside don’t have a clue you’re free. Alexnya must still go outside to be judged and executed. But the rest of you live.”

         Elder Vácha shook her head. “Won’t work. When Chakatie’s family returns home, the grains will realize they aren’t dead. And our caravan would quickly be recognized by the grains while we traveled.”

         “You misunderstand,” Sri Sa said. “We don’t leave. We stay in this biosphere. There are no grains here. And I can hack the grains inside Chakatie and her family so they won’t reveal they’re still alive.”

         “Wait,” Chakatie said. “We’d be trapped here... for the rest of our lives?”

         “It’s either that or be dead,” Sri Sa said. She grimaced at Alexnya. “Sorry, yeah, you’ll still die. The grains want everyone at the judgment festival to see that. But if you go out there and get executed, all these people will live.”

         Alexnya couldn’t even curse this time.

* * *

         While Chakatie and Elder Vácha and most everyone else argued about Sri Sa’s plan and whether they could actually live in the biosphere without the grains noticing, Alexnya, Colton, Ae, and Mita sat near the dome’s entrance with Sri Sa.

         “Why me?” Alexnya asked. “Why’d you pick me for this damn plan?”

         “I didn’t,” Sri Sa said. “Like I said, the grains had already set all this in motion. I just took advantage of their plans—slipped in under their detection nets to find a way for me and everyone else to live.”

         “Just not me.”

         Sri Sa had the decency to look away.

         Alexnya kicked the grass, popping a divot from the soil. She didn’t feel like sitting with them anymore, so she stood up and walked down to the lake.

         The biosphere’s sky shimmered rainbows in the morning light. Maintenance robots moved across the roof’s lattice, from this distance like ants working on their colony. She remembered the stories she’d read about biospheres as a kid, how they would protect their environments and species if the worst ever happened again.

         She had to admit the biosphere was beautiful and, with thousands of acres inside, it could easily support both Chakatie’s family and the day-fellows. Assuming Sri Sa could trick the grains into believing those necklaces had killed everyone when Alexnya was found guilty at the festival.

         Assuming Alexnya agreed to die.

         She wandered back to the caravan. Chakatie and Elder Vácha were still discussing the plan with both the day-fellows and the anchors, trying to reach a consensus. But even without listening Alexnya knew which way this would go. She wasn’t one of these day-fellows. And she wasn’t truly part of Chakatie’s family.

         No one was watching out for her.

         She returned to where Sri Sa, Colton, Mita, and Ae were sitting but hung back a bit, leaning against the biosphere’s glass. She noticed Sri Sa couldn’t stop staring at Colton. Sri Sa had done that since revealing herself this morning, as if she didn’t care what others thought of her but was desperate for Colton’s approval.

         Last night Alexnya had wondered if Sri Sa loved Colton as much as he loved her. That definitely appeared to be the case.

         She powered up the grains in her ears to hear their conversation.

         “Colton won’t tell you what he’s thinking,” Ae told Sri Sa. “But I can. He cried over you when you died. He’s been angry at himself for the last year. Keeps telling us how much he loved you. He’s missed you deeply—that is, he’s felt all that whenever he used the grains you gave him.”

         Sri Sa crafted a happy smile on her face. But Colton tapped the grains on his arm and looked with irritation at Ae.

         “Wow,” she said. “He thinks I’m worth using his emotions on! I’m honored!”

         Colton sighed and tapped all the dots on his arm. For the first time since Alexnya had met him, he looked like a person open to every emotion of life.

         “It’s true,” he told Sri Sa. “I did miss you. Terribly.”

         Colton reached out and squeezed Sri Sa’s hand, causing her body to ripple and partly disappear, as if she couldn’t control her own emotions and grains.

         A moment later Colton’s face was again impassive as his emotions shut down. He removed his hand from Sri Sa’s grip.

         This interplay between them was fascinating. And Colton, Mita, and Ae were a cute family, even though none of them were related to each other. Alexnya yet again missed her own mother and father and sister, and the sense of belonging she’d grown up with as part of a day-fellow caravan.

         She stalked over and stared down at Sri Sa. “You seem pretty human,” she said.

         “Why wouldn’t I be? I am human.”

         “Not what we normally think of as human—you’re a recreation. You’re what those strange grains formed from your memories and consciousness after you died.”

         Anger flashed through Sri Sa. Unlike moments before, the grains making up her body didn’t fall apart. Instead they appeared to solidify, as if her anger was making her more powerful.

         Alexnya snorted, refusing to fear Sri Sa.

         “Before you choke me again, listen to what I’m saying,” she said. “I actually believe you are still human. But why are you so human, when you’re made up of grains? The regular grains all over our world feel emotions but are never anything close to human. They could never create someone as human as yourself.”

         Sri Sa nodded and seemed to calm down. “The grains that make up my body are programmed differently.”

         “Is it your grains or you yourself that created this damn plan where I die to save everyone?”

         “I did. If I could find a way to also save you, I’d take it.” Sri Sa pointed toward the biosphere’s doors. “But the grains are waiting for you out there. They want you judged and killed and made an example of. I can’t stop that without risking the lives of everyone else.”

         Alexnya understood Sri Sa’s reasoning, even if she’d fight against it until she died. She hated this damn world where anchors killed day-fellows and believed they were protecting the environment, and day-fellows killed anchors when they could get away with it. Even the grains’ desire to kill Alexnya was to protect what they saw as this world’s natural order. Everyone sacrificed others for what they believed was the greater good.

         But this was still Alexnya’s life. And now that she understood how much Sri Sa loved Colton and how badly she wanted to save these other day-fellows and anchors, maybe there was a way Alexnya could fight back.

         “Why did you attack me at my house?” she asked.

         “I wanted to see how strong you were,” Sri Sa said. “No, not your body. Your heart. It takes a special strength to sacrifice yourself for others.”

         “And the grains out there didn’t detect you?”

         “Like I said, I’m good at tricking the grains into not seeing me.”

         “You must be pretty powerful to pull that off.”

         Sri Sa looked puzzled, not understanding what Alexnya was getting at. But if Sri Sa intended to question Alexnya, she dropped it when they noticed Chakatie and Elder Vácha approaching.

         Neither Chakatie nor Elder Vácha looked happy. Alexnya knew what they wanted.

         “Alex,” Chakatie began, “I know we don’t have the right to ask, but...”

         “Stop. I’ll do it.”

         Chakatie and Elder Vácha looked surprised by Alexnya’s snap decision, as did Sri Sa and the other day-fellows and anchors.

         “I’m not an ass—I won’t risk everyone dying,” Alexnya muttered. She pointed at Sri Sa. “But I also don’t trust you yet. Before I go out there, you have to release everyone from these damn necklaces.”

         “As long as you know I can’t free you,” Sri Sa replied. “For this to work, you have to go out to the festival and face judgment.”

         “I know what I need to do. You just save everyone else first.”

         Sri Sa bowed politely, appearing impressed by Alexnya’s determination.

         But Sri Sa didn’t have a clue. None of them did. Alexnya kept her face calm and blank, giving nothing away.

         They thought she didn’t have a choice.

         But if Sri Sa was as good at hiding herself from the grains as she claimed, Alexnya realized she did indeed have a choice. And maybe a way to not only save herself but also free everyone else.

* * *

         Alexnya stood within the biosphere’s entryway, preparing herself for judgment. She breathed deep and stared at the rainbow flows of grains on the doors before her. The glowing colors looked so beautiful that she wouldn’t have minded if the biosphere trapped her forever here between its inner and outer doors.

         She was powered up, refusing to face this at anything but full strength. She tapped her claws against one another, fidgeting to hide her nervousness.

         Chakatie stepped before her and gripped both of Alexnya’s claws with her own hands. “You’ll do fine,” she said with a sad smile. “And I couldn’t be more proud of you if you were my own daughter.”

         Alexnya remembered her mother and father being willing to die to protect her when she was first infected with the grains. She hugged Chakatie.

         True to her word, Sri Sa had destroyed all the necklaces on the anchors and day-fellows when Alexnya stepped into the biosphere’s entryway. Or, as Alexnya had noted, Sri Sa had destroyed every necklace except for hers and Chakatie’s—Alexnya’s because she had to face the judgment festival, and Chakatie’s because she’d decided to share that fate.

         Chakatie’s family had been shocked by her announcement. Wren had grabbed her grandmother’s arm and cried while Pinhaus had begged her to reconsider, his voice actually trembling.

         “No,” Chakatie had announced with a stern voice. “I’ll never ask anyone to do what I won’t do myself.”

         Only Colton hadn’t made a fuss. He’d simply touched his emotions over and over as he hugged Chakatie and said how proud he was to be her grandson.

         Alexnya squeezed Chakatie’s hand tight as they stood at the outer door. She was so happy not to be facing death alone. For the first time, she felt that maybe Chakatie was part of her family.

         They still held hands as the outer doors of the biosphere opened. Before them on the festival grounds stood a thousand anchors, all of them wearing their best clothes and staring at Alexnya and Chakatie with solemn faces. There were also day-fellow crowds gathered behind the anchors to witness the judgment, close enough to see everything but also keeping a respectful and safe distance from the anchors.

         And mixed among both the anchors and day-fellows were the hundreds of glass stele, each showcasing the world’s history.

         The anchors lined both sides of a path leading to the glass stage. Alexnya and Chakatie walked forward through the crowd.

         The moment they stepped onto the stage their red necklaces fell apart and vanished—they’d returned to face judgment, so the necklaces were no longer needed. As Alexnya gazed out over the crowd before her, she realized that when found guilty, her and Chakatie’s deaths would come by being ripped apart by the thousand anchors looking back at her.

         The crowd was incredibly quiet, as if no one wanted to be the first to spoil the silence. Alexnya stood there on the stage, unsure what to do.

         A swirl of grains beside her announced Sri Sa’s arrival.

         “We stand in the middle of history,” Sri Sa said to the crowd, pointing to the historic images and words flowing through the stele around them. “It’s time to add our own judgment to that history!”

         A gasp rose from the gathered anchors as the stele connected with the grains inside their bodies. From the stage Alexnya could see that the day-fellows in the back didn’t have the same reaction since they lacked grains. They instead watched the stele around them, which showed the same images the anchors were having transmitted into their minds.

         Suddenly the stele reached out to Alexnya’s own grains. She saw the sad history of this world. Of humanity savaging the environment, and with it savaging themselves, and only at the last minute creating the grains to try and save something. The nanomachines became the ultimate power and judge over what humans could and could not do with this world.

         But that wasn’t enough. The grains also divided humanity into anchors and day-fellows, with the anchors enforcing the grains’ demands. And if humanity ever again annihilated their planet, the world could still be reborn from the biospheres protecting samples of every environment and species.

         Every species, that was, except for humans. That was the biospheres’ true warning to humanity—that if the world died again, it would be recreated without the very beings who’d caused its destruction.

         As Alexnya connected with this history, she felt herself falling through the horrors of what humans had done to this world along with experiencing the certainty that only the grains could prevent it from happening again. She didn’t agree with this last part—she knew what the grains were capable of. But the history projected into her mind was so powerful it almost obliterated any protest she could make.

         Almost.

         For a moment the grains showed Alexnya and the anchors and day-fellows the peace inside the biosphere as a taste of what the world used to be like.

         “This must all be preserved,” Sri Sa told the crowd in her role as anchor lord. “The grains are eternal! The grains are the way!”

         The images and history Alexnya saw were so overwhelming it would be so easy to give in and agree with Sri Sa’s words. She realized this festival wasn’t about judgment. Instead, it was the grains telling everyone the truths they wanted them to believe.

         The next images the grains showed were of Alexnya’s life, from her days growing up in a day-fellow caravan to the grains picking her to be an anchor to her nobly protecting her land’s environment. But then the grains showed Frere-Jones killing people. Showed Frere-Jones ripping the grains from her own son. How that had eventually resulted in Colton growing close to Sri Sa. How Sri Sa’s love for Colton caused her to help the day-fellows kill hundreds of anchors.

         “Alexnya’s land is where these problems started,” Sri Sa announced to the crowd, not mentioning the irony that she was one of the problems the grains wanted to fix. “Even if she did nothing wrong, she is her land’s anchor. She must be judged. You will now start your deliberations.”

         The thousand anchors before the stage began talking among themselves, both speaking and transmitting through the grains’ communication nets. Alexnya felt as if a warm blanket had descended on the crowd, an enveloping miasma of words and data and belief clicking among the anchors as they worked toward her judgment.

         Alexnya looked at Sri Sa, remembering how she continually tricked the grains into not seeing her true self. Alexnya reached out with her grains to the anchors around her and to the grains in the stele themselves. It was hard to access what they were seeing instead of letting the grains’ images flow into her, like swimming against the current of a very powerful river. But she was being judged here—it was her right to know the truth.

         She pushed harder and finally reached into the communications being shared between the grains and anchors and stele. Through their eyes the simulation that was Sri Sa looked different. Every anchor before the stage believed they were seeing an old woman standing beside Alexnya, a recreation of one of the original anchors from thousands of years ago.

         Clever, Alexnya thought, amazed by the level of power it took for Sri Sa to mask her presence by spoofing and subtly changing the communications of so many other grains and anchors.

         Sri Sa glared angrily at Alexnya, having detected her accessing the grains’ communication nets. A buzzing like a million bees fell between Alexnya’s power and the grains as Sri Sa blocked them from hearing anything Alexnya might transmit.

         Sri Sa looked very satisfied, as if she’d smacked down an annoying bug. She leaned over to Alexnya. “What are you doing?” she whispered.

         “I’m done being used. I’m going to tell the grains who you are.”

         Sri Sa sniffed as if unimpressed. “I thought you were strong enough to sacrifice yourself for others, but I was wrong. You’re just a selfish little child.”

         “There’s no need,” Alexnya protested. She looked around—the anchors were occupied with their deliberations, while Chakatie had closed her eyes in meditation, preparing for death. Now was the time to push Sri Sa on this.

         “Look how you manipulate the grains,” she said. “You could do that for all of us. Instead of staying in the biosphere, everyone could leave and you could hide us from detection.”

         Sri Sa looked uncomfortable. “I considered that. It takes too much power.”

         “Too much power? You’re hacking the grains inside a thousand anchors right now, plus the stele.”

         “You make it sound like it’s easy to do this.”

         Chakatie opened her eyes and stepped over. “What’s wrong?”

         “She’s gotten cold feet,” Sri Sa said dismissively.

         “No,” Alexnya said, “there’s another way. Sri Sa has the power to hide all of us from the grains. Your family wouldn’t have to stay in the biosphere. She might even be able to manipulate the grains so you could return home.”

         Chakatie looked at the anchors around them—they were still deliberating Alexnya’s fate, but a few of them also gazed curiously at the discussion on the stage, wondering what was going on. Alexnya felt Chakatie reach out with her own grains, which were far more powerful than Alexnya’s. But Sri Sa also jammed Chakatie’s attempt.

         “Interesting,” Chakatie said. “Why are you so desperate to block me from accessing the grains?”

         “It’s dangerous,” Sri Sa said. “If the grains learn I’m still alive, they’ll hunt all of us down.”

         “They’re already hunting us down,” Alexnya said. “That’s why we were brought to this damn festival. The only difference is they’re not hunting you—the grains think you’re dead.”

         Sri Sa shoved Alexnya backwards, her strength so overwhelming that Alexnya almost fell off the stage. Chakatie grabbed Alexnya’s arm and pulled her back while Sri Sa stepped before the assembled anchors.

         “What is your decision?” Sri Sa demanded. “We must waste no more time on this.”

         Alexnya felt the crowd’s attention turn back to her. A few of the anchors protested that she was innocent, but their voices were quickly drowned out. Instead, she heard an anchor shout that a day-fellow should never be an anchor. A chorus of other anchors joined in, shouting agreement.

         From the back of the crowd she saw day-fellows beginning to return to their armored wagons. They knew what was coming, and they didn’t want to witness her execution.

         Alexnya cursed—she was so close. She tried again to break through Sri Sa’s jamming, but she couldn’t. Her grains paled in power compared to the rogue grains powering Sri Sa’s entire being.

         “Why didn’t you tell me earlier about this?” Chakatie asked.

         “If I’d said anything in the biosphere Sri Sa might not have freed your family and the day-fellows—she loves Colton, but I don’t know if she really cares about the rest of us. I thought if I told the grains that she’s still alive she’d have no choice but to help us and hide us from detection. But I can’t break her jamming. My power isn’t strong enough.”

         Chakatie shook her head as if Alexnya was a simple, naïve fool. “I’ve always admired your determination, Alex, but you do so overthink things. Sometimes the best paths are the simplest to follow.”

         Chakatie opened her mouth as if to say something else but closed it with a smile as she tapped her lips with a finger.

         “Are you ready to accept judgment, Alexnya?” Sri Sa called out. “To do what must be done to protect our world?”

         “No, I’m not!” Alexnya yelled so everyone could hear.

         Sri Sa looked puzzled at this. The anchors in the crowd looked unsettled.

         “You can’t say that,” Sri Sa hissed. “The grains need you to die willingly. That’s the whole point of a judgment festival. You accept guilt, you die, people go home reassured that their lives are good and proper.”

         “I’ll pass. But I am going to do something else.”

         “And what is that?” Sri Sa whispered. “Tell the grains I’m still alive? Neither you or Chakatie can cut through my blocking.”

         “Don’t need to.”

         Alexnya shouted Sri Sa’s name. She yelled as loud as she could, using her power to amplify her voice. Sri Sa, Sri Sa echoed off the biosphere and flowed over the thousand gathered anchors, even reaching the day-fellows at the back of the festival grounds.

         “No!” Sri Sa screamed. Alexnya felt Sri Sa reach out to the anchors around them, trying to keep her name from their grains. She couldn’t make the anchors unhear the words, but she desperately tried to block her name from being understood by their grains and, failing that, from being transmitted to the grains in the stele and the greater world.

         But Sri Sa was also manipulating what the grains saw of her through the eyes of a thousand anchors, to say nothing of the stele around them. Alexnya felt Sri Sa’s jamming weaken and her power stretch thin. Alexnya pushed forward through the jamming, trying to connect again to the grains. Chakatie took her hand and joined in, the grains in their bodies synching as they slammed against Sri Sa’s overtaxed power.

         The jamming collapsed as Alexnya and Chakatie told the world that Sri Sa was alive and standing right in front of them.

         “Oh shit,” Sri Sa said, looking out at the thousand anchors before the stage. Realization of who she was slammed into all of them at the same time. For a moment the grains were shocked. Then they demanded judgment, flooding the minds of the anchors with images of the many crimes committed by Sri Sa. A thousand pairs of eyes glowed an angry rainbow of colors as howls went up from every mouth. Bodies began to grow, ripping apart fancy clothes and shoes and hats, but none of them cared.

         They were this world’s anchors, and the grains demanded justice.

         “Oh shit,” Sri Sa said again.

         “Question for you two,” Alexnya said as more anchors before them transformed. “How good are you at running?”

         Whatever answer Sri Sa and Chakatie gave was lost as a thousand anchors charged the stage.

* * *

         Alexnya and Chakatie stood gasping for breath inside the biosphere’s entryway, their bodies bloody and bruised and cut. Chakatie seemed particularly irritated that her yellow bowler hat was gone and her suit hung in shreds from her body. Sri Sa looked out through a peephole at the thousand anchors trying to break down the unbreakable door.

         “Interesting,” she said. “Who knew riots could start that fast.”

         “Well, Chakatie did tell me to be defiant,” Alexnya said.

         Chakatie cursed as she spat out a mouthful of blood. “Yeah, I did. Give me fair warning before you ever do that again.”

         Sri Sa leaned against the outer doors. She’d used a lot of her power fighting the anchors so the three of them could reach the entryway and now was using even more to hack into the grains here to prevent the doors from being forced open. Alexnya could feel the transmissions from Sri Sa’s grains washing over the grains around them, reprogramming them.

         Sri Sa collapsed, her body fading in and out of solidity. “There. I stopped them from getting in. For a while. But now that the grains know I’m in the biosphere they’ll keep trying to break in.”

         Sri Sa’s body shrunk again, now as small as Alexnya was when she wasn’t powered up. Alexnya walked over and squatted next to her.

         “Then we should get the hell out of here,” Alexnya said.

         Sri Sa glared at her. “This is all your damn fault. Colton and I could have been happy in the biosphere.”

         “Do you love Colton?”

         Sri Sa nodded.

         “Then guess what—you’ll also be happy when we leave this place.”

         “Do you realize how hard it will be for me to continually block all of us from the grains? Especially now that they’ll be hunting for me again?”

         “Gee, and here I thought you were strong enough to sacrifice yourself for others.”

         Sri Sa looked like she wanted to choke Alexnya again. If she’d been powered by the grains that ruled the world, Alexnya was sure she would have tried. The grains Alexnya had grown up knowing never forgave slights, no matter how much the world changed around them.

         But Sri Sa merely sighed and shook her head. “Yeah, point taken. I deserved that.”

         Alexnya stood up as the howls of the anchors outside built louder, as they’d finally realized they couldn’t force the doors open.

         “Now what?” Chakatie asked.

         “You can always return home,” she said. “But I imagine the grains won’t be happy with what happened here. I think you and your family should stick with Sri Sa and the rest of us for a while.”

         Chakatie cursed. “I won’t be a day-fellow. I won’t.”

         “The grains betrayed you,” Alexnya said. “You can’t want to still serve them?”

         “I never served the grains—I served this world and my family.”

         “You can keep doing that. It’ll just be different than before.”

         Alexnya could see that Chakatie was tempted—anyone facing a death sentence always searched for a path to freedom.

         The inner doors to the biosphere opened. Sri Sa staggered through and found Colton inside and hugged him. The waiting day-fellows and anchors were shocked that Alexnya and Chakatie were still alive, but Chakatie waved them off. They could deal with all the questions later.

         The two of them looked at the sun shining through the biosphere, at the grass and trees and the lake and the grain-free perfection all around them.

         “It’s beautiful in here,” Chakatie said. “But a beautiful prison is still a prison.”

         “So you’re not mad at me?”

         “Give me time. Still, it wouldn’t have worked, all of us staying in here. Guess we’ll see if traveling together makes more sense.”

         “Look at Sri Sa,” Alexnya whispered. “What do you think about her?”

         Chakatie gazed at Sri Sa, who was still hugging Colton in a smothering embrace. Colton was tapping his emotions over and over, hugging her back.

         “I see an unstable anchor created by deviantly programmed grains,” Chakatie stated.

         “Maybe. But she’s also different than the grains we’ve always known—her grains are programmed to change. Maybe that’s something the world needs right now.”

         Chakatie snorted. “What makes you say that?”

         “Because what the world’s been doing isn’t working. I don’t know about you, but I’m done letting the grains do what they want with my life.”

         Alexnya didn’t wait to see Chakatie’s response. She walked toward Mita and Ae to ask if she could travel in their wagon.

* * *

         The caravan departed the next morning, traveling deeper into the biosphere. The anchors were still trying to force their way in, but the biosphere had been created to survive the end of the world and refused to break even under repeated anchor attacks.

         After hitching the horses, the day-fellows rode their wagons and the anchors walked. They made their way together around the lake and through the grasslands. Through the forests and hills. Beneath the rainbow-lit sky. Watching deer and wolves and rabbits and birds watch them back without a worry that any grains were also observing them.

         Alexnya rode in the wagon driver’s seat next to Ae, who taught her how to manage their horses, Butterlove and Patty. Mita was napping inside the wagon while Colton and Sri Sa walked in front of the horses, keeping watch for holes and obstacles, since there weren’t any roads inside the biosphere for them to use. The rest of the caravan followed.

         Whenever they reached the biosphere’s far side, Sri Sa said she would hack one of the secondary doors and the caravan could escape before the anchors caught them. And if the worst happened and anchors were there, Chakatie and her family had pledged to shield them.

         Alexnya wasn’t sure how long that alliance would last—Pinhaus looked like he still hated her, although he’d also gone out of his way to thank her for saving Chakatie’s life. And many of the anchors and day-fellows were definitely uncomfortable with their new traveling partners.

         Still, for now everyone was working together. For now, that was enough.

         Alexnya breathed deep of the pure air, enjoying her final days in the biosphere.

         “It’s not natural, is it?” Ae asked. “Us being in here.”

         “Nah, but still nice.”

         “The world can’t live without change,” Ae said. “The grains forgot that.”

         “The grains were programmed to forget that,” Alexnya said. “But way back when, humanity also forgot we can’t live without the world. So in a way, we’re all at fault.”

         Alexnya looked at Colton and Sri Sa, who walked hand-in-hand. Many of the day-fellows and anchors were disgusted by the relationship between them, but Alexnya thought it was sweet. Sri Sa was still too prone to violence and Colton still emotionally broken. But both of them were changing before her eyes—that had to be a good omen for the group’s travels.

         With a grunt Chakatie pulled herself up onto the driver’s seat. All the anchors, including Alexnya, had been feeling a little out of sorts since Sri Sa severed their connections to the outside grains. They could still power up their bodies, but they were now getting used to no longer being connected to every other grain in the world.

         “The grains will come after us,” Chakatie muttered. “Probably been easier to just let ourselves be executed.”

         “Maybe,” Alexnya said. “But don’t you find this amazing, all of us being together? Day-fellows and anchors, rogue grains and Sri Sa, all together. That’s got to mean something.”

         “Means we’re going to die well before we change the world.”

         Alexnya sighed. “I liked you better when you were defiant.”

         Chakatie gave her the finger, and they laughed.

Copyright © 2020 Jason Sanford

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Jason Sanford’s story for BCS Science-Fantasy Month 3, “Blood Grains Speak Through Memories,” was a finalist for the Nebula Award and is set in the same world as “Where the World Ends Without Us” and “The Emotionless, in Love” from BCS Science-Fantasy Month 4. He has also published stories in Asimov’s, Analog, InterGalactic Medicine Show, Interzone, and other magazines, along with appearances in multiple Year’s Best anthologies and other books. His fiction has been translated into various languages including Chinese, Spanish, French, Russian, Polish, and Czech. His website is www.jasonsanford.com.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ONLY THE MESSENGER

by Emily C. Skaftun

         Dozens of lives I’ve lived now, as all manner of things that swim, run, slither, and fly, and it’s the same damn story every time. You may think you’ve found love of a profound and timeless nature, but that love will still swim away from you when the current is right. If you’re very, very lucky, it won’t happen until you die and get reincarnated on opposite sides of the galaxy.

         I’d give three tentacles to be that lucky, just once.

         Zaraell is the closest thing I’ve ever found to a soulmate, and the last holo message from Roptrango-A makes it clear that that’s over. Holo messages are slow. She recorded that one almost a full Trango year ago, which means that the ranch-style coral home we sang into shape together has already been dismantled, the seeds divided among our offspring. I can barely think about what must remain, my portion left sick and sinking into the shifting sand leeward of West Volcano Spaceport.

         Better to think of happier times: our first launch together; the day our first clutch of offspring hatched and the pride we felt in the survivor of the post-natal melee; the last time we mated, Zaraell’s sinuous tentacles twined in mine until neither of us knew where ours ended and the other’s began— Actually, thinking of happier times isn’t helping either. My third stomach churns with sick bile. I can’t live with your choices anymore, Zaraell’s holo image had said, grainy image of zir head softly shuddering. Or is it that I can’t live without them?

         I can’t live without zir.

         So what am I doing on this heap of an interstellar trader speeding faster-than-light away from my truest love? I’ve been thinking about that a lot since I watched Zaraell’s latest message, and I still don’t know. All I know are three true things:

         1) Illegal cargo is lucrative cargo. We’re going to make a cloaca-load on this trade, bringing lab-grown meat to the Tro’o, if we can steer clear of the Intra-Stellar Trade Organization (ISTO).

         2) The universe is stupidly, laughably big. Even with the hummingest star drive, it would take lifetimes to get from one end to the other (assuming there are ends—I have a vague memory of an edge, a starless pool of nothingness I may once have seen, many lives ago, but you can’t really trust memories from toddler lives, so who knows?)

         3) There is no such thing as a soulmate.

         And yet...

         The InstaComm pings, reminding me that I’m lost in the space of my own head. Words scroll out on the console’s screen—a return message from the Tro’o, acknowledging our new ETA and providing new coordinates for the exchange. A moment later, a fresh sphere rolls out of the chute.

         A shiny, rubbery sphere where a second ago there was nothing.

         This new InstaCom unit has me baffled, and I’m the best engineer in this arm of the galaxy, if I do say so myself. To instantly—and I mean instantly, not at light speed or even faster-than-light, but right exactly now—send a message anywhere in the universe, you just type up a message, pop in a sphere, the machine does its thing, and the flattened disc that was the sphere comes out for disposal. When a message comes back, the machine spits out the message along with a fresh sphere to “fuel” your reply. It’s not any kind of matter transfer I ever learned in school, and I’m itching to take the thing apart and uncover its secrets. But there is a very serious warning label on the sucker, and if even half the rumors about InstaComm are true, it’s no idle threat.

         Besides, these things are expensive. I’ve only been on two ships could afford one, and the captain’d have my beak if I broke this one poking about. So I shove off toward the stasis chamber to get the fresh sphere tucked away until we need it. You won’t believe what the rumor mill says could happen to us if I don’t.

* * *

         Living on a little trading jumper like this one is tough for us Roptralians. I can hear everything that happens, whether I want to or not, vibrating through the hull and inner bulkheads and even the air.

         So I know that Captain KrunZo, gruff and scaly in person, sings Kranellian arias in his grooming pod. I know that our pilot, Jorusz, wakes regularly from nightmares about his last life, in which he was an indentured guard for his species’ royal family, a great humorless flying thing who was kept chained at night and eventually fed to a clutch of royal fledgelings. All through his sleep cycles his shoulderblades twitch, phantom escape attempts from muscles where in this life wings do not attach. I try to make allowances for his recent trauma when he (frequently) lashes out. I know that Quonka’s calm and cheerful façade isn’t phony—that she dances to the happy tunes in her head anytime gravity allows, humming along with them even while performing surgery and scrubbing out infected wounds.

         But the same overly sensitive tentacles that make crewmate overshares a certainty also make Roptralians great stardrive mechanics, so what are you going to do? I tune out what I can and I ignore the rest. When gravity allows, I spend as much time as I can floating in a ball; not touching anything really helps reduce the noise.

         But it leaves me alone with my thoughts, which are presently mired in contemplation of the size of the galaxy versus the size of this growing unease in my hearts.

         From our present location, if we turned around and burned hard, our little ship could make it “home” to the Trango System in about 1.3 Trango years. Not that KrunZo would do such a thing with a payday on the line. If I really want to get back, my best bet would be to jump ship at the Tro’o rendezvous. Who knows? Maybe I could get hired on by something faster, make it back home in less than a year.

         Home. Is it still home if you don’t live there, and your partner has left you, your house un-sung and surrendered to the seas?

         How did I let it get this far?

         One cargo at a time, that’s how. One better payday than the last; one more puzzle to solve, carrying me a little farther along, then a little farther, then a little farther still.

         I feel so small, a speck in the vast uncaring universe, going the wrong direction.

         And then I hear a knock at the door.

         It’s a testament to my preoccupation that I barely register the oddity of a knock on my hatch—the crew knows to leave me alone when I’m in my bunk—before I realize the knock isn’t at my hatch. I uncoil one tentacle, uncovering one eye, which happens to have a perfect view out my porthole.

         I gasp involuntarily, tentacles splaying, air bladders inflating. There is a face peering in the window. A cute little mammal face, with white fur and whiskers not even frozen by the vacuum of space. So I’m hallucinating. But then the knock comes yet again, and then an adorable fluffy paw waves at me, pointing one digit toward starboard. Toward the nearest airlock.

         This is how those scary holos always begin, I think. But I swivel toward the hatch anyway.

         In case we are about to be murdered by the Thing From Outside, I swing past the captain on the way to the airlock. KrunZo is a FranKoporp, another species you’d think would want to avoid the spacefaring life at all costs. Mostly round, covered in thick scales with stubby limbs and a thick, thick head, KrunZo maneuvers in low-g like a bowling ball propelled by anger. Planet-like gravity makes the ship even worse for him, turning it into a mountain of ladders too big for those poor little limbs to climb easily. KrunZo stays on the bridge most of the time, or in his quarters, and uses Captain’s Prerogative to make the rest of us do his running about for him.

         “Come quickly!” I say to him as I swim past his perch—a little running joke he rewards with the usual frown. “There’s someone at the airlock,” I continue.

         “Funny,” he says. But his tone suggests he doesn’t think it’s funny.

         “Permission to let zir aboard?”

         “Of course,” KrunZo says with a barely perceptible wave of a forelimb. “It’s bad luck to ignore impossible things that cannot be happening.”

         I choose to perceive only the permission and ignore the sarcasm. The airlock cycles, and in floats... something. It’s small for a sapient, a little smaller than me and maybe a third the size of the other crew members. It looks like a mammal, one of those fluffy little pets from Earth that are all the rage? A kitty? Except. It’s been a while since I was near Earth, but I’m pretty sure kitties don’t have eight legs. And I also suspect they can’t survive in vacuum. And their eyes aren’t vast purple oceans of intelligence and love.

         Those eyes spark something in me I haven’t felt in lifetimes. Something I’ve been missing.

         “What are you?” I blurt out, like some kind of mollusk who’s never left the shell. “And how are you? I mean, how did you get here?”

         The ship AI’s security and medical protocols finish scanning the airlock’s contents, the various scanner beams and decontamination flashers cause a rippling blue-green light show to dance across white fur and ocean-gray walls, almost like a sunset back home. Then the inner airlock door hisses open.

         The octo-cat doesn’t say a word, just rams zir head right into me and nuzzles, purring softly. I feel like I could almost understand the purring, if the frequencies ze used were just slightly more... cerulean? But I don’t need to understand it because I feel soothed by it, rocked in a gentle current that’s almost like the warm waters of...

         Without meaning to I reach one tentacle up to just stroke the creature’s fur.

         It’s still cold.

         “Now hold on a second,” I say, pulling back and vibrating myself into a more alert state just as Quonka’s shiny horn pops into view.

         Technically Quonka is the ship’s doctor, but her species’ calming pheromone secretions make her a useful asset in brokering deals. She also tries to be around when we get boarded by ISTO, which is more and more frequently.

         The creature visibly relaxes as Quonka enters. “Who is your new friend, Astrill?” she asks. Anyone else on the ship would be mocking, but Quonka sounds sincere.

         “I am...” the kitty thing says, looking around as if searching for the answer. “...just a traveler.”

         “Um, no,” Quonka says, horn glinting and hair tumbling as she shakes her pretty head. “One does not just bump into random travelers in the vastness of space. Especially not travelers without space suits or supplies. The odds are, well, astronomical. And if we had just bumped into you somehow, at these speeds, the impact would have turned you into a splat on the hull—or into shards of meaty ice, since you ought to be frozen solid.”

         The kitty thing backpedals in the air, all eight legs working, until zir tail touches the bulkhead and wraps itself around a handhold there. Prehensile tail. Do cats have those? The tail almost seems to lengthen as it grabs.

         “At least tell us your name,” I say.

         But again the thing looks around like this is a really hard question, zir violet eyes flicking back and forth. “Call me... Ennesta,” ze finally says.

         “Okay, Ennesta,” Quonka says, reaching one three-fingered hand out in greeting. “That is a start.”

         But Ennesta doesn’t seem to like that gesture. Ze launches off the hatch and into my tentacles, sending us both spinning.

         As we spin, I see another new visitor in the area outside the airlock room. Jorusz is here, and as always he brings his aura of cold-blooded menace. Jorusz is like an anti-chameleon; he always uses his metachrosis to clash as much as possible, and therefore right now he’s an angry bright orange-red.

         “Let me question it,” says Jorusz. “It’s probably from ISTO.”

         “Ennesta does not look like an Intra-Stellar Trade Organization agent,” Quonka says, head tilted.

         “And Ennesta isn’t an ‘it,’” I add, trying to prize Ennesta far enough away from me to look at zir. “Hey, are you—” Ennesta looks up, huge eyes wielded like a weapon. “Does your species have gender?”

         Ennesta looks around at the three sapients in the small space like choosing from a menu. “Female?” she answers, but it sounds like a guess.

         “That was convincing,” Jorusz hisses, rolling one eye while keeping the other fixed on Ennesta.

         In the end, the matter is settled by KrunZo, who apparently found the commotion interesting enough to leave the bridge. He comes barreling in and almost crushes me and Ennesta (by now three of her four pairs of limbs are wrapped around me), but Quonka catches one of KrunZo’s forelimbs and swings him into a relatively stationary position.

         “Are you a spy?” KrunZo demands.

         Ennesta manages to squeak out a ‘no’.

         “Then welcome aboard,” the captain says. “And Jorusz? Pull yourself together. You really getting bent out of shape over this slip of fluff?”

         Jorusz flushes an even more glaring orange, and for a moment I fear he’s about to challenge the captain. But a moment later he skitters off, muttering so low that only I can hear him. “Slip of fluff that can live in space. That shit ain’t right.”

         He’s right, of course. So says my brain, at least, despite—or even because of—how the newcomer’s purring tugs at the rest of me like a syzygetic tide.

* * *

         Ennesta stays. The ship has empty cabins, but she commandeers mine, climbing into my hammock and leaving me to choose whether or not to join. I’m torn, so torn.

         Her presence on the ship is suspicious. And it feels disloyal to Zaraell...

         But the sting of Zaraell’s last message and the stingless absence of her tentacles are wounds that Ennesta’s eight furry limbs staunch to a surprising degree. I give in, and, wrapped in her desperate embrace, I sleep better than I have in many lunar tides.

         But Jorusz does not pull himself together. Well before my next shift, his vibrations cut through Ennesta’s purring like a klaxon. Astrill, report to the bridge, Jorusz whispers. Don’t bring the hairball.

         Jorusz is a deceptively mellow mottled teal shade when I get there, strapped in to the comms chair rather than his normal pilot’s station. He points to the screen as I arrive, then switches the display to holo. A life-sized Ennesta springs into the air, slowly rotating like a showroom model. “I found it,” he says, slapping one hand through the holo image for emphasis.

         “Found what?” I croak. It’s too early for riddles.

         “I found Ennesta’s species. If that is her real name. She’s a toyopop.” He says it like a dirty word.

         “So?”

         “So,” Jorusz says, rolling his bulbous eyes, “it took me forever to find this out, and it’s a miracle I did at all, and you know why? Toyopops aren’t sentients. They can’t even talk. They’re pets engineered by the Argotenkers for their deep space workers.”

         That wakes me up. A tingling chill rolls from my beak to my suckers like the ghost of a purr. “Wait, so...?”

         “So she’s not what she appears.”

         And then, of course, because we are talking about her, there she is, a silent presence that we nonetheless notice right away. “Oh, hi,” I say, waving a couple of tentacles feebly. I feel tossed like flotsam in a storm. All I really know about Ennesta is how comforting I find her. What if she really is a spy? What will Jorusz do to her if she is? What will he do to her to find out whether she is?

         “I missed you,” she says, but her eyes are glued to the larger-than-life holographic version of herself as it rotates slowly in the silence. Its ears are different than hers, longer and thinner, and its paws look different too, less fingery.

         Ennesta—the real Ennesta—looks from the holo to me with a question in her eyes that borders on accusation.

         The InstaComm chooses that moment to ding, a message from the Tro’o scrolling onto the screen. Ennesta screams for about a millisecond before turning it into a yelp, while something like a shudder roils down her long body, making her look for a moment less than fully solid, like a thing about to explode.

         A fresh message sphere plops out into the net.

         “We’ll finish this conversation later,” Jorusz hisses, turning to the screen. He grabs the sphere and spins it to me. “Make yourself useful and take this to stasis.”

         Ennesta is looking around the space in a sort of panic. One of her hands darts out toward the sphere as if to intercept it before it gets to me, but she pulls back.

         “Aye-aye, captain,” I say sarcastically—Jorusz, as pilot, does not outrank me—but I wrap a tentacle around the sphere anyway, grateful for any excuse to get out of there.

         Ennesta’s eyes burn into me as I grab the sphere, and her mouth opens as if to say something. I wait for a beat, but her words don’t come, and the terror in her eyes mutates into something more like despair. “You got something to say to me?” I ask, harsher than I mean to.

         Ennesta dips her furry chin.

         Her big sad eyes follow me all the way down to the stasis chamber, and if I go back to my hammock they’ll just follow me there, too. And then we’ll have to talk, and after talking is when folks usually start leaving. And I’m not ready to be left, not so soon.

         So I take the fresh sphere to the ship’s smallest stasis chamber, open the door, and slot it into the new racks we installed in there, next to the scant half-dozen others we were able to buy. Then I head to the engine room to get an early start on the cycle’s routine maintenance.

         I see Ennesta lingering in front of the stasis chamber, her eyes darting shiftily between the chamber and myself.

* * *

         We start burning to slow our way to the Tro’o rendezvous, so gravity returns to the ship. Jorusz and Quonka are relieved, and they start the usual chatter about stretching their bones—I don’t really understand bones, but I guess gravity is good for them. KrunZo has bones and an exoskeleton, because evolution wasn’t messing around on his home planet, but though he loves planetary gravity, he hates the ship’s gravity more than anyone. I can hear his complaining loud and clear even over the roar of the decelerating star drive.

         According to the info on toyopops that Jorusz dug up, Ennesta, as a standard-issue mammal, has bones too. But I have my doubts. Sometimes the way she curls up in my hammock makes her seem more sinuous than should be possible for something with a spine.

         Despite almost constant togetherness, I still don’t know much about our new passenger. Though I’ve found myself telling her all about Zaraell and my journey out into the black, she won’t tell me where she came from, how she came to be floating in space, or how she survived floating in space. What she does do is listen, and purr, and on the rare occasion she speaks, it’s with a surprising depth.

         When Ennesta’s not trying to weld herself to me—which I admit, I enjoy more and more—no one can find her.

         I could find her, of course. I can feel and sort through every vibration on this ship when I wish. I don’t look for her at first because, well, I didn’t work as hard as I have for my whole damn career on politely ignoring my crewmates’ vibrations to violate Ennesta’s privacy.

         Still. The computer logs Jorusz shows me are suspicious. Someone’s been scouring the star charts. For what? We can’t tell. But it’s happening during the times when Ennesta’s unaccounted for.

         So okay, I listen for her. I pick up Quonka singing to herself in her cabin and KrunZo barking something to Jorusz, who’s climbing his way to the bridge, ignoring the ladder in favor of just suckering up the wall. With all those sounds accounted for, and the hum of the ship’s star drive, whatever’s left must be Ennesta. There isn’t anything left, not at first.

         And then I hear a whispered voice command in one of the ship’s unused cabins: “One quadrant X-ward,” it says. “Systems with F2V stars.”

         What is she looking for?

         Ennesta is quiet, but I can be quieter still, even in the ship’s increasing gravity. I slink up to the cabin’s open door before she knows I’m there, and I see...

         I’m not sure what I’m seeing. The creature using the computer terminal is clearly Ennesta—it’s all covered in white fur, and it still has eight limbs—but none of them are right. The topmost pair has dexterous six-fingered hands instead of paws, and the middle two pairs have shrunk to nubs, while the bottom have elongated into wobbly-looking legs that boost Ennesta high enough to see the computer’s screen.

         A gasp escapes my beak.

         Ennesta turns so fast her face looks blurry. She pulls her front hands off the controls even as they start morphing back into paws. She shrinks as her legs even out.

         “What are you?”

         Ennesta shakes her head.

         “Well, you’re clearly not a toyopop. You lied to us,” I say, and it’s all I can do not to say You lied to me. The hurt I feel registers as an actual ache in my second heart. Figures, I think. You start to care about someone; you get hurt.

         “No,” Ennesta says. She walks toward me on her hind legs, unsteadily, other limbs wiggling awkwardly, and it occurs to me that not only is this the first time I’ve seen her navigate in gravity, it also looks like the first time she’s ever tried it. Or at least the first time in her current form. “I just haven’t told you things.” All of her top six arms are held out placatingly.

         “This whole body you’re in is a lie. What do you even look like, really?”

         “I... can’t show you.” Ennesta’s face looks as sad as only a genetically engineered pet can look. Except there is real intelligence behind those eyes; intelligence and sorrow.

         “Of course not,” I say, tentacles fluttering in frustration. “Look, Jorusz thinks you’re a spy for ISTO. I don’t want to believe him, but. What is it you’re looking for in our star charts? Why can’t you—or won’t you—tell us anything about yourself? Where you came from? What species you are? Anything?”

         Ennesta is close enough to touch me, but she doesn’t. She turns over some of her paws and looks at them as if for the first time, then flings them out in a gesture of raw hopelessness. “I don’t know!”

         “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

         Ennesta slumps onto the deck like a shipwreck hitting the ocean floor. “I don’t know, not any of the answers. I don’t know what I am or where I came from or what I’m supposed to look like. I’ve never seen one of me before—not after metamorphosis, anyway.”

         “Okay...” I say. “So you’re a shapeshifter.”

         She nods.

         “But you don’t know what your natural form is.”

         “I’ve never seen it. I’ve always just been—”

         “Been what?”

         And she hesitates, then sighs and starts again. “I haven’t ever lived long enough to find out what I am.”

         No kidding, I think, somewhat bitterly. Who has?

         “I’d seen these toyopop things in previous lives, and everyone treated them with kindness. It seemed like a good thing to be...” She shrugs two sets of her fluffy arms. “I didn’t realize they were pets.”

         I laugh, despite it all. “And the star charts? What’s that about? Just what are you looking for?”

         “Home.”

         That little word hits me hard, echoing through an empty place inside me: a coral house with no one home. Gravity, who isn’t looking for a place to hang that word on?

         “Okay,” I say. “It’ll be all right. Come on, let’s tell the others. I bet Quonka will even help you look.” I extend a tentacle to Ennesta, who places one paw in it and stands on two legs.

         She takes a few wobbly steps, then lets go of me and drops to all eight legs. “Hold on,” she says. She makes a couple circles on all eight, tripping herself a few times. Finally she bends her spine in a way that doesn’t look anatomically possible and ambulates on six of the legs, leaving the top two to function as arms. “Oh, that’s much better,” she says.

         It looks completely unnatural.

         “How do real toyopops walk?” I ask.

         “They use all eight,” she admits. “But I can’t get the hang of it, and since my cover is blown anyway...” She shrugs with the top two limbs.

         “Do you need all of them? May as well drop the middle two pairs.”

         “Do you need all of yours?” She elongates a finger to gently stroke one of my tentacles, and then I can’t speak, all I can do is wait for the electric thrill to pass through my whole body, from beak to cloaca. A shockingly erotic thrum lingers there, and in the sensitive inner curve of the tentacle where Ennesta’s paw still explores.

         This is madness. Am I really attracted to this creature in this false and somewhat ridiculous body, about whom I still know almost nothing?

         Yes, I am.

         “I can certainly use them all in interesting ways, if that’s what you’re asking,” I say when my voice returns, only a little quaver in it. “But, see, I’m not a shapeshifter. Mine aren’t optional.”

         Ennesta drops her finger, which is a true tragedy. She looks at her body, her limbs, as if for the first time, standing on the rear ones to hug herself around the middle with the second and third pairs. “I like them,” she finally says. “They aren’t very practical, but they feel like a part of me. Even if they do trip me up sometimes.” She wiggles them suggestively. “Of course, I could be something else if you wanted.”

         Madness or not, I give in, standing on six tentacles to match limbs six for six with Ennesta’s in a slow embrace. “I like you just how you are,” I say, and we go from there, and before long neither of us can say how many limbs we have, only that we need all of them to properly explore and pleasure each other.

* * *

         Afterward, Ennesta gets her limbs tangled on the ladder up to the bridge, and I can’t help but chuckle when one of them slips off and bonks me lightly in the head. I use a spare two tentacles to guide her paw back to the ladder, and she pushes off my head up into the bridge with a little more force than is strictly necessary—a gentle poke.

         “Well, if it isn’t the stowaway,” Jorusz says, scales throbbing between red and purple. “What do you want?”

         “Ennesta’s a shapeshifter,” I blurt out. “She isn’t sure what her species is supposed to look like. Tell them, Ennesta.”

         The InstaComm pings, and Jorusz mutters at the screen.

         “Ennesta?”

         She’s left my side, running almost all the way up to Jorusz before seeming to remember she’s afraid of him. Her eyes are wide and full of fear.

         The InstaComm ejects a fresh message sphere, and Jorusz casually tosses it into a bag of them. Clearly the Tro’o are being their usual high-maintenance selves.

         Ennesta’s eyes are glued to the bag of message spheres. Or maybe it’s the bag of flattened, used spheres she’s eyeing, in stunned horror. Jorusz touch-types something into the InstaComm, head swiveled to look away from the screen toward us.

         “Stop,” Ennesta says. “Please!”

         “Stop what?” KrunZo asks. He hits the blue button and the machine pings cheerily.

         And Ennesta looks at him with such hurt and rage that I recoil from her.

         The flattened message sphere pops out of the InstaComm console. Jorusz makes to toss it into the bag with the rest of them, but Ennesta holds out one trembling paw. Jorusz looks to KrunZo, who grunts a confused assent.

         Ennesta takes the oblong disc in one paw, then holds it in both before her, reverently, as though it’s not just a bit of trash destined for the matter reclamator but something very precious. She holds it up to her face, looking closely, then sniffing, and after a moment during which none of us breathe, she takes a deep breath and releases it as a keening, piercing howl.

         For a long while none of us move, shocked into inaction by Ennesta’s uncharacteristic, unrelenting loudness. KrunZo, as befits a captain, is the first to recover. “What in Gravity’s name are you doing?” he demands.

         “She’s mourning, you idiot,” Quonka says mildly, climbing up into the cockpit. She kneels beside Ennesta, placing one hand on the place where Ennesta’s back bends unnaturally upright. “There there, sweetie,” she says. “You want to tell us why the message sphere makes you so sad?”

         Ennesta quiets, nodding. “It’s dead,” she says. “Dead again and again and again.”

* * *

         The machine births me, as usual. The ping, as usual, is the first thing I remember. And then the words of a message, as they’re squeezed from me. They slip away, leaving little behind. In larval stage, my senses are not sharp. I feel movement, textures against my exterior. I sense light, though I have no eyes.

         Then a flash of cold, and nothing.

         I wake back in the machine, again. Words are stabbed into me, a destination, the sharp-sweet-rotten smell, and then the crush, the pain. I expect the momentary nothing pause and then the ping of a new life. But the crushing goes only partway. I hear the ping, but it’s a different one than before, and my senses are alive like never before, alive with pain.

         I am grabbed. I am in a hand, and the voice attached to the hand is weary and grumbling, and I tumble into a bag with other refuse. For I realize that’s what I am. They do not know I am alive. I am lucky garbage.

         For a kilosecond or two I can’t move. I am too young, too wounded. But we grow fast. I consume the other refuse and by the time they throw us all into space I am a fat sphere again, lucky garbage of lazy ship.

         In larval stage, I have no need for air. I float, I tumble like asteroid.

         I am lucky a third time, because you shoot through my space. I have just enough strength to end larval stage and choose a form and hold onto your ship. And here I am.

         We stare at her, waiting for the punchline. Ennesta lifts the flattened sphere of the most recent message sent in one paw.

         “This is what I should have been. The machine should have killed me; sent my soul to the other end to be birthed with the message.”

         After a moment of silence, Jorusz is the one to break it. “You’re trying to tell us you’re a damn message sphere?”

         Ennesta shakes her head. “No. I’m trying to tell you that the message spheres are the same as me.”

         Jorusz’s scales pulse brighter and brighter orange. “That’s impossible! It’s a damn machine. It doesn’t birth any larvae.”

         “How do you know?” Quonka asks, still kneeling next to Ennesta.

         In response, Jorusz only flashes a ripple of colors at her.

         “It’s a fair question,” I say, the concrete puzzle of a mechanical question snapping my mind back into focus. “I’ve worked on just about every kind of machine there is, but never on an InstaComm. No one has. It’s common knowledge that you just can’t even think of opening one of those things up, but did you read the warning on the unit closely? Punishable by memory wipe. So for all we know it does birth larvae.”

         “That would explain a few things,” Quonka says. “I’ve always wondered how the messages are transmitted so fast, faster than anything else in the known universe. If they do run on reincarnation...”

         KrunZo, still as a mountain in his captain’s chair, does his best to steeple his stubby arms. “Well, sure. Reincarnation is instant. But it’s also random.”

         Ennesta looks alarmed. “It is?”

         “Isn’t it?” I ask.

         “It isn’t for me. For my people. The machine controls it, and now that I am free from the machine I could control it.”

         “Gronkshit,” Jorusz grumbles. “There is no such thing as a species that can control its reincarnation. We’d’ve heard about it!”

         “That’s what you’ve been looking for, isn’t it?” Quonka asks, ignoring Jorusz even though he’s strobing between black and orange.

         Ennesta blushes her furry face somehow—she must be changing the color of her fur. “I was born into the machine. I don’t remember where home is.”

         “And you want to find it so you can die and be reborn there?” Quonka asks.

         Ennesta nods.

         And my third heart sinks like a stone. Of course. She’s just waiting for the right current to swim away from me. Stupid of me to have thought otherwise, for even a nanosecond. “Now hold on,” I begin, but—

         “This is nonsense!” Jorusz interjects. “First of all, you’re all listening to a wild yarn from a stowaway who’s probably an ISTO spy. And second, if it is true, then we’re probably all going to get disappeared for violating InstaComm’s terms. I can’t believe what a ship of fools I’m on.”

         “I can prove it,” Ennesta says quietly, and it only takes following her gaze to the bag of fresh message spheres to figure out how. According to InstaComm, they must be put into stasis within four kiloseconds or one standard Galactic Hour. But what if they weren’t?

         “Let them grow up,” she says.

         “Astrill,” KrunZo asks, “what’s the penalty for that?”

* * *

         It takes about another few days—as I reckon them—to reach the Tro’o rendezvous, a jungle moon of the system’s third planet. Needless to say, we send no more InstaComm messages. Luckily, we’re close enough by now that holos really will do just as well, even for the anxious Tro’o.

         The gravity lovers—including KrunZo, who takes any opportunity he can to ambulate on flat land—shuttle the cargo down, while Ennesta and I tend to the brood of message spheres whose number increases with every transmission from the Tro’o. We’ve been feeding them table scraps and anything else otherwise headed for the matter reclamator that Ennesta deems suitable. It’s unnerving how they absorb the food into themselves. The spheres are getting big; the first ones we freed from stasis are almost half the size of Ennesta, who, now that I think of it, also seems to be growing. She’s about my size now, and I wonder if she’ll end up towering over me the way the other crew members do. I’m sure even she has no idea how big she’ll get.

         Over the holo from down on the moon, the Tro’o are stomping around on their feathery hind legs, roaring at KrunZo and Jorusz and Quonka and waving their clawed hands. While most of the Tro’o take pride in their reasoning, the sect we most often deal with behaves like the monsters they resemble. It’s only a matter of time before they demand not just lab-grown meat but murdered meat, and then live animals to hunt. I’d bet any quantity of the finest Kranellian snapps on it.

         I mute the holo display. How am I supposed to know if negotiations are about to turn south, when the Tro’o bellow like that to say hello? I enlarge a scanner screen tracking nearby ships. None of them squawk ISTO, but then they wouldn’t, would they? I scroll through the ships’ actual images one at a time.

         In the unused cabin we’ve turned into a message sphere nursery, holographic dinosaurs stomp and spaceships fly. And a non-holographic sphere wobbles, cracking open like an egg with no shell, stretching and unfolding tentatively. I’m breathless to see what Ennesta’s species looks like, even more to see her finally see it too, but no. Limbs emerge (four of them); a head stretches into shape. A tail extrudes from what is now the creature’s posterior, and proportions adjust to account for it. After a long moment the newly born... whatever Ennesta’s species is called... claws zir way out of the bunk’s netting and opens zir toothy mouth to roar. Congratulations, it’s a Tro’o! Clearly this former sphere’s choice of form was influenced by the holo.

         We’ve done our best to research Ennesta’s species, with no luck. There is no record in the libraries of either a shape-shifting species or one that can control its reincarnation—only legends of feats performed by acolytes of the Collective, none with provable results. My theory is that a species with that kind of control might never choose to leave their home system; perhaps none have ever been reborn as something else, somewhere else.

         It sounds like paradise.

         I’ve had more lives than anyone else on this crew, having bounced all over the universe since the days of the fifth Galactic Empire. I’ve ended up in regions so remote that there was no interstellar trade, even been planet-bound a couple of times. I’ve been mammalian, reptilian, avian, heptopod, and almost every other kind of thing there is, with no connecting thread that I can discern. Yeah, it’s exciting. Variety is the spice of lives, right?

         It’s also lonely. I’ve never been reunited with any past loves. Or past friends. Or acquaintances. A person starts to feel like love is pointless at best, counterproductive even.

         We’ve also been trying to research InstaComm. How was the miraculous technology developed? How does it work? All we’ve found are more legends and conspiracy theories. Was the Lost Generationship of the Pro’oco steered into a star because they knew too much? According to the lead-hat wearers, yes.

         All official inquiries lead to the same result—a form allowing one to place a request to purchase a system or to request technical support. Don’t call us; we’ll call you.

* * *

         By the time the shuttle is back on board, three more of the spheres have hatched. One looks like a kind of bat-winged bird, one looks like a miniature Quonka, and the third can’t seem to make up its mind, shifting between two legs and four and six, experimenting with skin and scales and fur.

         Peering into the net they’re incubating in, Ennesta’s arms twined with my tentacles, I can’t help but think of my own offspring, swimming the various seas of the Trango System. Each one was hatched from a clutch like this; each was the lone survivor of a brutal post-birth scrum. Ennesta assures me that these babies won’t start murdering and devouring each other, but I’m not sure how she knows that.

         Looking at them, each certainly possessed of a soul, I wonder for the first time about my offspring who didn’t make it through the melee. Roptralian wisdom holds that they have no souls, that only the survivor is imbued with one. But what if we’re wrong? What if each of them lived a brief, violent life? Born to die, never even named, mourned by none.

         All of Ennesta’s lives have been like that.

         I stretch my tentacles to pull her closer to me, and she purrs. She’s nothing like Zaraell, but we feel like new parents.

         None of the “children” the memory spheres have become know what their species should look like or where the home planet is. Yet they have memories—or at least fragments of memories—dating back almost a terasecond. Tens of thousands of Roptralian years. Further back than the first life I can remember. Messages mundane and critical have passed through them to all parts of the galaxy—for those who can afford InstaComm’s rates.

         Zaraell is not one of those. Zir messages come as holos, bound by the universe’s speed limits. One is here now, and the computer asks me if I want to view it now. Why not? The meat deal is done and the crew is back on board. The dinosaurs have stopped stomping and turned to their cargo, presumably. At any rate, they’re no longer my concern.

         Zaraell’s face appears much larger than life, and Ennesta momentarily starts, then goes back to chatting with the newly hatched message spheres and hovering over the younger ones, waiting.

         Zaraell sits in a peach-colored coral house I’ve never seen before, that opens behind zir to a stunning vista of clear water and lovingly sculptured kelp gardens and the rolling hills of Roptrango-A’s trendiest city. It’s rendered in 2D, of course, but I still feel the punch I know Zaraell intended—why else spend the extra to render the background at all?

         But despite the perfection of zir setting, the lines around zir beak betray worry. “I can’t imagine why you haven’t responded to my last message,” ze begins, and I quake thinking about the distance that separates us. I did respond, though there wasn’t much I could say about it, but we are just so far away that Zaraell won’t get that holo for another dozen lunar tides—most of zir solar year. Ze’s probably about to get one I sent five jobs back, before I ever heard ze wanted to split up, and I can’t imagine what ze’ll make of its sunny long-distance love platitudes now.

         “I decided not to wait, as you can see. I moved. I really like my new apartment—there’s even a sundeck on the top floor that’s dry at low tide. You can see the stars. I still look at them at night and wonder which direction you’re off in.”

         Zaraell’s image sighs, bubbling out tiny, pretty spheres that I feel I could almost touch. Ennesta sidles up to me, nuzzling. Her eyes are as wide as oceans.

         “Please message me back,” Zaraell says. “I want to see your face.” And the holo flickers off.

         I slump to the cabin floor. We’ve started burning away from the Tro’o on to the next adventure, and gravity is as high on the ship as it ever is, but that’s not what’s weighing me down. A heavy lump sits on my second heart, and it’s made of the distance from here to home.

         “That was your home system?” Ennesta asks, with surprising intensity. Her six legs are all dancing like she has to pee.

         I gesture yes with the roll of a couple tentacles.

         “What is it called?”

         “Trango,” I say, and Ennesta yelps, covering her mouth with her paws. “Zaraell lives on Roptrango-A, the first planet, but they all look pretty similar.”

         Ennesta squirms, looking anguished in a way that I’m pretty sure isn’t jealousy. I don’t know what it is, and that sinks me with worry.

         “Why do you ask?”

         Still, Ennesta stalls. “Is it really that beautiful there?”

         I laugh. “Can you breathe in water? You probably can. Yeah, it’s really that beautiful. But I’m biased, you know? It’s home.”

         Ennesta is quiet.

         “I guess you wouldn’t know. Sorry. We’ll find your homeworld someday.”

         There is a look dancing in her purple eyes that I cannot place.

         “Why are you asking about Trango? You wanna go? I’ll take you there, but it’s far...”

         “I can get there very fast,” Ennesta says sadly. “I have to tell you something. I have horrible news.”

* * *

         Research Vessel H6Alpha to Trango System defense.

         Disaster imminent! Misfired gravito-stellar beam on intercept course with Star Trango, ETA M141 K498 H122 S020. Trango System will be obliterated unless you build and deploy capture array by M133.4. Instructions for array follow.

         The message is so brief—before devolving into schematic instructions, that is—that I can barely understand it. It seems so clinical for something that will wipe out my entire solar system. I imagine a laser blast, shot into space, traveling forever at the speed of light. I imagine myself, behind it, trying to shield my family (because they are still family, Zaraell and the kids, despite everything) from something I can never get in front of, no matter how hard I try.

         How soon is M133.4? I’ve never been a natural with Universal Standard Time, so all I know is that it’s soon. Sooner than we can get there. Is it sooner than a holo can get there? Where’s that conversion chart?

         “Is there still time?” I ask, when I can think enough to form words. How long will it take to build the capture array?

         Ennesta shakes her head. “I don’t know. I’m just the message.”

         I look at her, really look, deep into her sad purple eyes. “You’re a lot more than that.”

         She shakes her head vehemently, pulling away from me even as I reach for her. “Am I? All I’ve ever been is a message. From here to there, life after life. Never a person.”

         “You’re a person now. A person who I...”

         “Who you what?” Ennesta is so still, not even breathing.

         “Who I...” The words stick in my throat. “Am very glad to have met.”

         Ennesta sits, heavily, folding limbs in ways I suspect real toyopops can’t. “I think I’m lucky garbage at best. Or maybe not-so-lucky garbage. If I’d stayed a message, your home would be safe.”

         It’s true, isn’t it? True in a way that nothing else about Ennesta is: from her name to her gender, to—I fear—her affection for me, she’s making it all up as she goes along. So I find no reply I can make to comfort her.

         Worse, a part of me wants to ask the unthinkable from her: for her to deliver the message after all. But stars, what would that mean? She’d have to die, and when she was reborn, it would be back into unending slavery, countless cycles of life and death that would take her Gravity-knows-where in the universe—and away from me forever. Not only can I not ask it, I’m not even sure I want it, even with every other thing I’ve ever loved in the universe on the line.

         Ennesta doesn’t offer.

* * *

         M133.4 is only eight lunar tides from now. Less than half a Trango year. Not even a holo can get there that fast.

         Thoughts whirl in my mind like fish darting through tidal eddies. Can the doom beam be stopped any other way? Sometimes I convince myself that it’s no problem at all; surely the research station would have sent more than one message, right? Right? Even Zaraell sent more than one message to break up with me. Although, the second message wasn’t sent until after going ahead and leaving me.

         So maybe it’s not safe to assume another message was sent.

         I keep circling around the thought that since only an InstaComm message can get there in time, only Ennesta can save the Trango System. But that’s not really true, is it? There are other former message spheres on board the ship, seven or ten or a dozen of them now, all matured out of their larval stage into whatever form struck their fancy. They’ve made themselves at home, filling the extra cabins and taking up almost all the computer’s time on the star charts searching for home. They’re piecing together their bits of knowledge, looking for a binary system, perhaps, or something with a nebula view. They’re also plotting something that they think I don’t know about: a plan to free the rest of their species from the evil machinations of InstaComm.

         But the point, the one I don’t want to admit, is that any of them could be used to send a message.

         Or maybe not. They don’t fit into the slot on the InstaComm anymore, so I’m not sure how we’d encode the message onto one of them, let alone the coordinates for rebirth. I’ve tried to get the information out of Ennesta, and all that her evasive answers seem to imply is that it could be done.

         Of course, it would mean murdering a sentient being. But just one. One little life, to save Zaraell and the kids. One little life to save all the beaches, all the coral homes, all the clear waters and the schools of colorful fish and the gardens. One murder to save all of it, the star and the planets and the tides that whisper songs of home...

         If it was only a murder, maybe I could do it. Death is not forever. One life ends and another begins. But the new life I would be sending that being into would be a life of slavery, again and again and again.

         I can’t do it, and not only because I don’t know how. There’s also Ennesta’s big eyes that light up when she sees me coming through the nursery hatch, and her eight furry limbs that intertwine with my tentacles like they were engineered to do it, and her soft rumbling purr when I wake with her nestled asleep under my beak. And something else: a feeling that though the shifty tides of the universe brought us together, I can’t let them pull us apart.

         The InstaComm pings. Ennesta and I both jump almost out of our skins, and Jorusz rolls his bulbous eyes and flashes a lizardy green. When the fresh message sphere pops out into the cockpit he tosses it toward Ennesta, saying, “Here’s another new friend for you.”

         Then he turns to the screen and fades a sicker shade of green. “Oh shitballs,” he says. “ISTO.”

         Intra-Stellar Trade Organization. This means evasive maneuvers, maybe boarding, maybe a fine, confiscation of our current cargo, which is probably illegal. I’ve lost track. I just scoot toward the engine room, anticipating trouble from whatever crazy shit Jorusz is about to ask the star drive to do.

         Ennesta follows, message sphere in one hand, and, despite the danger of ISTO and gravity suddenly slamming us both into the wall as Jorusz sends us hurtling through space, I have a thought. A terrible thought.

         A fresh message sphere. One I can still use.

         I know all the details of the message Ennesta carried. Sending it would be as simple as typing it into the InstaComm and pressing that blue button.

         And getting the new sphere (which I am trying hard to think of as a thing, a tool, definitely not a sentient being with a soul) away from Ennesta.

         And murdering zir—no, it—and returning it, and all its future reincarnations, to an eternity of slavery.

* * *

         I try to focus on wringing power out of the ship’s star drive so we can careen and duck through this system’s asteroid belt and shake ISTO off our tail.

         But during the cilia-raising escape, our scan detector sirens more than once, so even though we once again make it out with our lives (in time for dinner, even!), now ISTO knows exactly who and what we are. It’s only a matter of time before they find us again, surround and board us, and then the best we can hope for is that their memory wipe leaves us with some of the things we hold most dear. Zaraell, I think, twisting three tentacles into a wishing pose. Ennesta.

         Trango.

         After fixing the minor damage Jorusz’s evasive maneuvers did to my star drive, I climb into my hammock next to Ennesta—may as well call it our hammock by now—noting the small sphere maturing in a bit of netting beside us. It’s visibly bigger than earlier already. But I think it’ll still fit into the InstaComm’s slot. If I act soon.

         I wait until Ennesta’s asleep, purring heavily with six of her limbs wrapped around me. I peel them off one at a time, once again, and creep out into the night. No one is stirring, not even Jorusz, who should be on watch after an ISTO sighting. Not a single one of the former message spheres. Not the one wrapped in two of my tentacles. It feels for all the world like a rubber ball. Maybe slightly warm. Maybe with the slow, almost imperceptible beating of an alien heart.

         I get as far as the InstaComm console. I type in the message. I input the coordinates. I burble something like a prayer to the sphere cradled in one tentacle, pressing it up against the hole it’s just slightly too large to slide easily into. I tell myself it’s not much. Just a little push. Just a little more pressure. Then push the blue button. Then, ping! The death and eternal slavery of a sentient being. But just one. One little being for millions. Surely that’s good math?

         I have no idea how much time passes in that moment, in which all of my senses are directed inward, warring with myself. I’m so consumed that I don’t even hear Ennesta approach. I don’t notice her until a furry white hand comes into my view, delicately moving my tentacle away from the sphere stuck halfway into the slot. She pries it free, cupping it in a pair of hands, while other hands wrap around me. I turn into those arms, weeping without tears, a coughing, rasping wail that pulls up from the depths of my third heart only to be lost in Ennesta’s furry embrace.

         “There there, sweetie,” she says. “It’s okay. I knew you couldn’t go through with it.”

         I weep, shuddering in her many arms.

         “It’s okay,” she repeats. “Let’s go back to bed.”

         “I can’t,” I say, pulling away. “I may not be able to kill anyone, but I can’t live with letting Trango die either.”

         I guess I can’t live at all, then. The idea hits me like the jolt of an electric eel. I wrap my tentacles around Ennesta’s wrists, gripping hard.

         “Teach me,” I say. “I’ll deliver the message. Just teach me how.”

* * *

         Ennesta resists for days, as doom races toward Trango.

         “What if it can’t be taught? What if it only works for my species?”

         It’s a risk I’m willing to take. “Worst-case scenario, I end up reborn somewhere else. That’s what happens.”

         “Do your people mature fast enough for you to remember the message in time?”

         Honestly, no. Even if Roptralian lore is correct and only one offspring has a soul (and that would be me, right, by default?), it takes time to prevail against one’s soulless clutchmates. And that’s if I could even bring myself to devour them this time around, and if I didn’t have the hearts to go through with it, they’d surely make short work of me. And even if I did make it through the melee, it takes time to grow enough to understand the world and remember past lives, and even more time to be respected enough that the message might be heard.

         No, it won’t do at all to be reborn as a Roptralian. I’ll have to be born as whatever Ennesta is. But that means...

         Ennesta knows exactly what it means. “If you end up in the machine...”

         This is the true worst-case scenario, being caught in the life-death cycle of Ennesta’s enslaved people. And yet, it’s also the best-case scenario. It’s the only thing that will work.

         I run a tentacle lovingly down the side of her worried face, and she covers it with a paw. “Well, then it’s up to you, my love.”

         Ennesta nods sadly. Perhaps she would never have become a crusader on her own, but there are a dozen-some of her people, freed and angry, onboard the ship now. And they haven’t just been searching for the homeland so they can go back there and keep hiding. They won’t rest until they free every one of their kind. And if this works, that will include me. I think they can do it, too. It’s only a matter of time before they bring the whole InstaComm system crashing down.

         “Who knows how long it will take us, though,” she says. “Who knows how many lives you’ll go through, and where you’ll end up? What if I can’t ever find you again?”

         A tear falls from her eye, landing on one of my tentacles. I look at it, test it between two suckers, feel the silky saltiness of it, just like the real thing. Just like a drop in the oceans. How does a shapeshifter do that?

         Well, maybe I’ll find out.

         “You found me once,” I say. “Something tells me you can do it again.”

         “I will,” she says.

* * *

         It’s part biofeedback, I learn a little at a time from Ennesta over the next few days. You tune into your... she lacks the word... home center, you know, in the... the bluest part of your soul. Maybe it’s in your brain?

         I almost give up a thousand times, every time the logical, mechanistic part of my brain stops me from achieving clarity in what Ennesta assures me is a simple meditation. There is no manual for this process.

         On the third day, a breakthrough—she teaches me how to purr. Not faking it with janky breathing through my lungs or gills, but an honest-to-gravity vibration that originates from... I have no idea where. But I’m controlling it with my thoughts. Within hours I’ve got it down to an almost unconscious control, almost as natural as breathing.

         “Okay,” I say, resisting the urge to write up the process in a bulleted list. “You get your purr on, and then what?”

         Ennesta laughs, two fluffy paws held demurely in front of her mouth. “Oh no, purring is not part of the reincarnation control.”

         And I almost strangle her. But she talks me down by continuing on, showing me that it’s a similar type of control. In another day I think I’ve located my “home center” and know how to program in the coordinates for Trango.

         Ennesta and the other grown spheres have synthesized a chemical compound to help adapt my Roptralian physiology to the process, and now she hands me the syringe, big eyes wet with something like tears. “You are as ready as you can be,” she says.

         I guess that will have to be good enough. I take the syringe. It’s so light! Another small thing that will change everything. “You don’t have to watch,” I tell her.

         “Please don’t leave me,” she whispers in reply.

         Then she shakes her head, nuzzles me, reassures me. “I don’t mean that. I know you have to go and I won’t ask you not to just for little me. But... I don’t want you to leave.”

         Someone’s always leaving, I think, chiding myself for staying bitter to the bitter end. At least this time it’s me doing the leaving.

         I kiss Ennesta, then inject myself.

         The wave of vertigo is somehow still a shock. I swoon into Ennesta’s many arms, and she catches me like she was made to do it. I want to tell her that, that and other things. There are words I’m finally ready to say. I open my mouth, but speech is already beyond me, and only a croak leaves my beak.

         My brain tastes like paprika spilled on a long-forgotten tidepool. I focus on that, on water, on tides, on Trango.

         I remember to breathe, and, even though it’s not part of the process, I start to purr. I focus on the mantra of numbers running through my mind as they merge, programming my soul, Gravity willing.

         Vision fades, sounds grow echoey and strange, and my purr degenerates into spasms, but I can still feel the soft fur of my lover’s arms and the silky tears as they splash onto my face like ocean water. Home, I think. This is home.

         I want to tell her, but it’s too late.

         Maybe in my next life.

Copyright © 2020 Emily C. Skaftun

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Emily C. Skaftun lives north of Seattle with her husband the mad scientist and two mini-tigers. She is the former editor of The Norwegian American and practices Norwegian by translating comic strips. Her fiction has been published in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s, and Clarkesworld, and her first collection, Living Forever & Other Terrible Ideas, is forthcoming from Fairwood Press. In her next life, she hopes to be reincarnated on a sunny, wise planet.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

SONG OF THE WATER BEAR

by Laine Bell

         When the waters come again, flowing cool and renewing across the desiccated shell of my pod, in the return to wakefulness, I listen. There is no sound save the soft shish-shish of water being reabsorbed into the shell, reabsorbed into my hands, my face, my eggs, my dried and withered tail, but my ears strain all the same for something more. Outside my pod, I imagine the brittle pods of my people and the crisp tuns of the bears softening in the flood, slowly uncurling, the wide leaves of the lifefrond becoming greener. The waters have come again, and life returns.

         After a point, I can move, my body plump and suspended in the pod, and I reach out and tear apart the filaments that contain me. I will weave a new pod when the water next fades, and so I consume this one, tearing off pieces and feeding my hunger of unknown time. And then my ears finally hear what I have forgotten I was waiting to hear.

         The bears have been rejuvenated, and now they hum as they swim through the expanse. One by one their tones add to the chorded song, eight legs propelling each bear’s thick segmented body slowly through the water. They do not know they are ungraceful, and so they frolic together in a clumsy dance, sipping the juices of the lifefrond. When the waters return, even the water-bear is joyful.

         I raise my voice to join their song, and I hear others nearby, not bear-hum but clear voices like mine, with words and thoughts behind them. My people. Now we gather, to see who was lost in the dry time, and prepare for creation and protection. While the waters bring rebirth, they also bring danger. My fingers itch to weave new filaments of defense, to hide our eggs and arm our warriors.

         I swim through the lifefrond until I find the others of my kind gathering near last season’s creche. Flat tails flip as we greet one another, our fingers casting filaments to anchor our smooth bodies to the closest leaves. “The eggs?” comes a voice.

         “All the eggs are intact,” Ven replies. He is always the first to check the creche, since the loss three seasons back.

         “Talor is lost,” says another voice.

         “And Lup.”

         I search faces, but the oldest of us is not here. “Jolosh?” I ask.

         Silence. Ven, beside me, casts a somber filament to touch my mouth and comfort me. “He wove his pod near the creche, but it is not there now.”

         Lost, then. I nod, acknowledging the space Jolosh holds in my memory, which will now begin to fade, while also feeling a ripple of pride in his longevity. He was my sire, the sire of many of us, and he survived nine dry seasons, well past the five or six most of us would ever wake from.

         “Cel, will you lead?” Ven asks me.

         I wonder at his asking. He is a season older than me and more attentive to the people, while I lose myself with weaving and song. Surely another of us would be best to call the hunts and harvests, to sing out warnings when the current changes, and lead the defense of our creche against the poisonballs and rollers the waters bring.

         I look at the other faces around me, but so many are younger than I remember. None wears disapproval. Their eyes gleam hope and trust at me as we bob gently in the currents, Ven’s the brightest.

         “I will lead,” I say, even though I feel no truth in it. “Begin the home-making.”

* * *

         The first bear eggs have hatched, and my people have begun the season’s laying, when the weight of my own eggs tells me it is time. I make my way to the new creche, where already small clusters of iridescent eggs are nestled among the green. Rua is moving along one cluster, placing his seed carefully; not far away in the lifefrond, a male bear is doing the same to darker-shaded bear eggs tucked carefully inside the shed skin of their birther-bears.

         Ven hovers over the creche, a filament wrapped around a captured poisonball which he keeps far from his skin. It bobs gently on the filament line, reaching out with flexible spikes, finding nothing to infect. It is smaller than normal, and an unusual shade of yellow. “What is this?” I ask, eyeing it.

         “Something new. Yua found it while scouting.” He flips the filament, twirling the ball out of reach of a passing hungry bear whose attention it has earned. The bear’s sightless muzzle casts about, searching for the lost scent, and then it moves on. “He saw it attack one of the regular poisonballs. It may be useful, to protect us.”

         Perhaps I should give him some word of encouragement or send instructions to the scouts on how they should deal with these new poisonballs, but my body aches with my precious load, and I simply nod and descend to the creche. Down among the rocks and roots, the laying sands are protected from currents, so I do not need to anchor myself. I settle against a leaf of the lifefrond, the dappled light around me making rippling patterns on the sand, and soon I am lost in the rhythm of my body, the push and pull of lifemaking. The raw vocalizations of my laying song intermingle with the nearby hum of the seeding bear and the triumphant call of Rua finishing his delivery.

         My song is still in process when someone descends into my laying space. They are too close, and I whip filaments toward them before my mind clears enough to see them. Ven and Dea. They flinch backward with a tail-flip, unharmed by my attack, but do not leave. I stop singing, my body struggling in waves to continue without the song to guide it.

         “Cel, Dea has seen something.”

         “I am laying!” How dare they interrupt this task? Nothing is more important than laying or seeding, except defense of the eggs. Ven knows this. “You guard poorly.” My filaments drift dangerously toward his eyes, and I let them.

         He brushes them away without anger. “You must listen to Dea.”

         I look at Dea, whose face holds the uncertainty of she who has never produced a single egg. One dry-season old, then, or perhaps she is barren. She does not look down at my eggs as she speaks. “Cel, the scouts beyond the lifefrond have seen something new.”

         “Yua has already brought something new.” I point to the yellow poisonball still tethered above the creche.

         Her voice is insistent. “This is bigger, very different, and there are many. Ulo went out to look closer. She did not come back.”

         My throat ripples with suppressed song. “They are rollers, come early?”

         “They are not rollers.”

         I hum like a chorus of bears and produce another egg. Dea looks away. In the brief respite of my body I try to think. “Have we harvested enough spider-spears?”

         “We will need more.”

         “Then catch more.” I feel Ven’s eyes on me, waiting for instructions, as my mind struggles through the fog of laying to try and make sense of what we must do. “Do not scout farther than the lifefrond, but take up posts around it. Watch for them but do not get close. I will join you soon.”

         I snap my drifting filaments from my fingers and pull them in, wrapping them around my hand to eat when I am done. I return to my song, and this time Ven and Dea leave me.

* * *

         The new creatures find the lifefrond before any of our eggs have hatched.

         We make our line at the farthest edge of the frond, placing ourselves between it and the approaching creatures. I watch them draw closer through the cold outer waters; my spider-spear twitches in response to my grip. I can taste salt-fear in the water around me. Dea is correct. These are not rollers, the long whiplike creatures that slither through the water, eating our eggs and biting off our arms and tails. Nor poisonballs, which drift into our waters and sicken any they touch. These are nothing we have seen before.

         These creatures are gray shapeless beings that change form as they move, growing appendages to aid their movement. Thick protrusions grasp at leaves like a hand, or paddle against the water like a fin, and then reabsorb back into the creatures’ bodies when no longer needed. These shapeless ones are not fast, but they move with purpose. I sing out a short challenge, to see if they can understand, but there is no answer save the hum of a nearby bear.

         One of the shapeless ones turns toward the hum. The bear has wandered away from the frond, past our line. We watch as the bear senses the being, turns its snout toward it, paddles closer on its eight stubby legs to investigate. We watch as the shapeless one forms long amorphous appendages that grab the bear. The bear’s hum changes. Its legs flail as the shapeless one pulls it closer, and the hum pitches higher, lower, higher as it is drawn into the shapeless one’s body, which stretches itself around it. The bear’s hum wavers and fades, and then stops as it is completely enveloped, absorbed like one of the many appendages. The shapeless one hangs in the water, pulsing gently, and then stretches out new appendages to follow the others of its kind.

         I feel the eyes of my brethren on me, taste the tang of the bear’s death in the current, and lift my spider-spear. Its tail-fibers writhe. It is ready, and so am I.

         I spin filament, wrapping it just under the spider-spear’s head, and use it to launch the spear toward the closest shapeless one, the song of my attack bursting from my mouth with the same energy. The spider flips itself around as soon as it makes contact, using its tail-fibers to grab onto the formless mass of the shapeless one and inject its venom. The shapeless one flinches back from the impact, but then it begins to flex, wrapping gray tendrils around the spider, which is absorbed more quickly than the bear. Will the venom be enough?

         More spiders dart out from my fellow warriors, attaching to the creatures, some pulled into the oozing bodies before they can inject their venom. A few of the shapeless ones slow after absorbing a spider, outwardly motionless as they struggle against the venom, but all too quickly they recover. We send wave after wave of spiders, until our catch-baskets are empty. And still they come.

         The battle-song is weakening, discord creeping in, as we are forced back into the frond, closer to our creche. I strengthen my voice and sing of weaving, and we build filament barriers between the branches; finely spun nets to block the paths, and then more coarse as the shapeless ones absorb them and our filaments run thin from exhaustion.

         They are unstoppable, and I have run out of ideas. I change my song to one I have only heard once in a long-past season, and we swim in retreat.

         We race deep into the frond, singing of danger to the bears ahead of us, but few are there. They have already fled, driven perhaps by the deathsong of their fellow. We arrive at the creche to find Ven and several others packing up the eggs, wrapping them into filament-woven nets and passing them to anyone who swims past. I help, handing off bundles to my people as they pass, until a gray appendage reaches over the top edge of the creche, and there is no more time even for the eggs.

         I shoot filament toward Ven, wrapping his tail and pulling him after me, even as he grabs for more eggs.

         “Cel, wait! There are still some left!”

         I glance back, and the song in my soul dries and cracks as the shapeless ones descend into the creche. Above, Ven’s new poisonball disappears into the grasping formless arms of another of them. I drag him onward, away from our home, swimming as fast as I can. “There are none left.”

         He is quiet after that.

* * *

         The discordant hum of the bears surrounds me, and I drift meaninglessly in a cold flow, anchored to a hard and ungiving wall of stone. There is no green here to feed from, no safety from the current for a creche. It is no different from the other places we have looked, and now there is nowhere else to swim.

         Ven swims up beside me. “Cel. You must stop drifting. You must lead us.”

         I realize I have been singing quietly: there is nowhere else to swim. “I cannot.”

         “We cannot stay here.”

         I look up along the blackness of rock. It goes up as far as the eye can see. I have led my people to this place of lifeless stone and sand, and I have nothing left that can save us. “We will die here, or we will die elsewhere. We are lost, Ven.”

         “We cannot be lost.”

         Now I look at him. He gently spins a short filament from two fingers, but does not reach out to me with it.

         “We cannot be lost, Cel,” he repeats. “If there is nowhere else, then we have to fight them. To regain the lifefrond.”

         “The lifefrond is lost.” It feels true when I say it. “We fought them, and we failed. Would you have us do it again?”

         “Your song is broken. The bear-hum is broken. We are all broken, right now. But we cannot be lost.” I watch his filaments drift closer to my arm, just without touching. “If we are lost, why did you save me?”

         I have no answer, except of course that I did not want to lose him. But it made no difference, and now all of us will die. I say nothing, only listen to the bear-hum. It echoes of the dying bear’s cadence, higher and lower, and higher again.

         Ven speaks, but I am not listening to him. I am listening to the bear-hum. Higher, lower, higher.

         It echoes.

         “The bears are not broken,” I say. “The bears have learned.”

         I break my tether and swim up to the awkwardly circling bears. Their dance is slow-motion panic. I join their song, humming like a bear as best I can. Higher, lower, higher. They pay me no attention.

         Then I change my song. I hum a soothing note, the sound of a bear emerging from its tun, tasting the first sip of frond-juice. And slowly, slowly like their dance, the bears become calm. Their song begins to harmonize. They look around for food.

         “What are you doing?” Ven is beside me, and I can feel the eyes of my people watching me from below.

         “Have you seen a bear eat other than the lifefrond?”

         “Of course. If a poisonball floats within reach, a bear will consume it.”

         “Do they have a hunting song?” I am trying to remember, and I cannot, but surely they must.

         “Hunting is a strong word. A bear doesn’t chase a poisonball. It happens upon it.”

         “A feeding song, then. What if a bear were to come upon a shapeless one, but see it as food?”

         Ven’s eyes are untrusting, but I can see now that he is right. We are not lost.

* * *

         It is a process, finding poisonballs, and then learning the bears’ feeding song, and then training the bears to react when they hear it sung by us. In the meantime we send scouts out to bring back green food, where they can find it. Some do not return.

         The bears learn quickly; my people less so. Some openly question if my plan will work, if we will die facing the shapeless ones again. Some are lost inside, like I was, and cannot form a song, especially a new song. Their voices waver and creak and fade. Ven is not strong with singing, but he hums along to show support. I catch his eyes on me, and I know he wonders, like all the rest, if I will lead us or lose us.

         In too short of a time, I sing the song to take us back home. The currents have grown stronger, and after one of our precious woven egg-nets is washed away, I know we must go before we lose too much more. We herd the bears ahead of us, humming and singing to mask the fear in our souls. In too short of a time, the lifefrond lies before us as far as the eye can see, its perfect green leaves marred by the uneven dark blobs of the shapeless creatures clinging to it.

         “Ready nets,” I call, and cast my own filaments, weaving them together into a long, narrow mesh. The strands are thinner than normal; we traveled the open water without stopping for food.

         The bears continue on, and we follow not far behind, slower now. The current carries our essence ahead of us; the closest shapeless ones writhe and rise up from the leaves as they scent us. I push courage into my voice. There is no time for fear. This is all we have left.

         I watch the shapeless ones’ distance, their speed, and then shift my voice to the feeding song. My people take it up alongside me, our voices strong and deep. The bears’ humming picks up tempo, and their snouts cast about as they instinctively search for the food that must be near.

         The first shapeless one is close, but before it can reach a bear, I dart forward, whipping the net above and beyond me to wrap it. It pauses to absorb the net, and the bear latches onto it. The bear-hum intensifies, and the bears closest to the struggle thrash their way closer to join in the feast. The shapeless one pulses under scrabbling claws and jaws as the bears feed, and in moments it is torn apart.

         Another net streaks past me, and then another, and I hear the song take on an edge of confidence in the voices of my people. Ven swims past me, keeping his distance with a bag of eggs on his back, weaving nets and passing them to scouts who are agile enough to strike.

         The bears, too, begin to hum a different version of their feeding song as they converge. Their awkward dance takes on new purpose, and they use their claws and feet to push off of each other, wriggling through the water toward fresh targets. The fight becomes a blur of singing and weaving and swimming through the battle.

         We fight our way to the edge of our creche. The song fades among my people at the mass of shapeless ones swarming there, and the bears falter. There are too many, and we are too weak from our time in the cold barren waters.

         I have led us and the bears to our deaths.

         But this is all we have. This is our home, and there is nowhere else we can go. All we can do is fight for it, together. I raise my voice as loud as I can, trying to drown out the bears’ confused hum. My people join me, our voices once again strong, and the bears surge forward. The water clouds with bits of leaves and the scattered remains of torn-apart shapeless ones. We sing, and fight, and sing.

         When the particles have washed away and the water is clear again, we and the bears are victorious. The lifefrond is damaged, but it will regrow. Our eggs and our people are fewer, but we will replenish. I lead my people as we rebuild the creche, and now I feel the truth in it: the way my voice leads our songs, old and new; the way my people’s eyes watch me, full of trust; the way Ven hums as he cares for our eggs. We have survived, we and the bears.

         And now, at the beginning of the dry season, for the first time we have taken the bears in with us. Their eggs share our creche; their tuns intermingle with the pods we weave, as the water disappears and the air envelops us, our skins drying and cracking. But the next time we wake, we will have a stronger force to defend ourselves against whatever new monsters will come.

         Our song will not be lost.

Copyright © 2020 Laine Bell

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Laine Bell is a mild-mannered data analyst by day, speculative fiction writer by night. She is a graduate of the 2018 Viable Paradise workshop. When not writing, Laine spends time with her family on a tiny homestead near Columbus, Ohio, tending to a fruit orchard and several ridiculous chickens.

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COVER ART

“Investigate,” by Andis Reinbergs

Andis Reinbergs is a science fiction and fantasy illustrator and concept artist from Latvia. He works in the video game industry as a concept artist, and he does book covers and sometimes children’s books. To see more of his work, visit www.artstation.com/andisreinbergs.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1046

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Copyright © 2020 Firkin Press

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