Issue #324 • Feb. 25, 2021

“Quintessence,” by Andrew Dykstal

“Cleaning Up After the Blackout Boys,” by Evan Marcroft

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

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QUINTESSENCE

by Andrew Dykstal

        Loren’s brother-in-law fell sick six weeks after the last rack-and-pinion train departed for the base of the mountain and three weeks after winter closed over the mine like a frozen diamond pane. A layer of cloud hid the world far below, gray and silver in the winter-long night. Thunderheads drifted past, stately as tall ships under starshine, and you could watch them rise and collide and throb with lightning until your eyes froze over. Which took about eight seconds.

        And in the stone hollow of a second-shift barracks within the mountain’s peak, Loren tried to do what he’d seen the old witch do. Start with the pulse, he thought. That’s simple enough.

        But when he took hold of Clyde Greer’s wrist, the arm shifted with a crackling autumn leaf sound, and Clyde, his brother-in-law, flinched, eliciting a round of soft grinding noises. “It’s spreading,” Clyde muttered, trying to speak without moving his mouth. “It’s growing out from the bones into the muscle tissue. Left leg is the worst.”

        “Don’t talk,” Loren said, because that’s what the old witch would have said. He peeled back Clyde’s eyelids and shined his helmet’s gas lamp into each eye, wincing a little when he saw the shatter of light behind the pupil and the slow response of the brown iris. Crystals were forming in the eye jelly. The old witch had had a fancy name for that jelly: vitreous humor. She’d also had a fancy name for the crystallization that was killing Clyde: fatal cascade precipitation. Loren called it crack-up. All the miners did. A name you could say was less frightening.

        “Bad luck,” Clyde said through stiff lips. He sounded like a novice ventriloquist. “They say it’s a one in a thousand chance as long as you take your shots. Just bad luck, Loren. Bad luck.”

        He’d been saying that for three days, sometimes to his sister, Loren’s wife, who was five hundred miles south. A mantra of bad luck; all the worse for being half true. Getting crack-up couldn’t be anything but chance. Dying of it was another matter.

        The old witch—the old old witch—would have fixed him up in a day. It would have taken a massive injection of red, and it would have been expensive, but she’d always been the one to give the Company the rough side of her tongue, usually with a hint that she could give the coin-counters worse if she put her mind to it. “You want to mine Q,” she’d say, “you need workers. And you want to keep signing your paperwork, you need your thumbs.”

        She was the genuine article, the old old witch, all the lifers said—the men who’d spent forty years working this mountaintop and still insisted she’d been an old crone from the day she arrived until the morning two months ago when she was transferred away, and never mind the decades in between.

        Loren slouched back into the bedside chair. “We can fix this,” he said. “You’re going to be all right.”

        Clyde made a scraping noise deep in this throat. A rivulet of blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth to mat his beard. His next breath had a hard, musical tone. A crystal had broken through his throat and made a whistle of his voice box.

        There were no choices left. There’d been no choices since the first hints of pain in Clyde’s bones.

        “Stay put,” Loren said, then flinched back as Clyde’s attempt at laughter ejected a fine red mist.

        For the third time in as many days, Loren went to see the new old witch, and it was only with the utmost of self-restraint that he didn’t bring a pickaxe.

* * *

        The atlases called this peak Highfall, likely because cartographers have perverse senses of humor. It rose like a shoddy brick thirty-five thousand feet above sea level and more than twenty thousand above the surrounding plateau. Its sisters marching away to north and south were lesser peaks, the tallest half a mile shorter than Highfall. The support camp at Highfall’s base serviced all six mountaintop quintessence mines in the chain, its trio of specialized locomotives dropping cogwheels when the tracks grew too steep for mere friction to hold the engines to the rails. But even the cog-driven trains couldn’t run in winter, which at this latitude was three months of freezing night.

        It was more than the mundane cold, which could kill you in minutes if the thin air didn’t asphyxiate you first, and it was more than the wind, which screamed through the night like God’s own wolf out to howl down the moon. It was the aether. This high, the aether that flooded the world’s nightside from the far depths of space was a hungry, invasive thing. It tore the warmth from anything it touched, anything not shielded by several feet of solid rock or panels of quintessence-treated insulation. There were rumors that even these precautions weren’t always enough; that if the aether got your scent, it would bore through anything to find the heat of your blood. There was no surety against it but the light of day or a few thousand feet of good air over your head. Winter at Highfall offered neither.

        Which was why there was no climbing or descending Highfall in winter, which was why the rack railway always loaded the mine to the rafters with supplies during the last weeks of autumn, which was why there were crates of medicine that could save Clyde’s life in the new old witch’s keeping—medicine she was refusing to dispense. Which was why Loren was stalking through the upper reaches of the mine with a slow-growing desire to break her already crooked nose.

        The witch lived at the far end of the vault everyone called Main Street, in a tidy series of chambers adjacent to the oldest shafts. Main Street was lit up with gaslights but poorly; a lamp post or artificial stalagmite stood every thirty paces and cast a circle of weak, chilly light. Lamps cost oxygen. Fuel cost train space and coal. In some regions of the mine, they posed a fire hazard.

        But without them, everyone went insane, so the Company groused and grumbled and ate the expense.

        Perhaps in a gesture of twisted corporate solidarity, the new old witch kept her chambers even dimmer than Main Street. Her name was Gristle, which suggested either a cartographer’s wit or parents who had lost a bet. Then again, the old old witch’s name had been Lurga, so perhaps it was just a witchy tradition. She looked, when she opened the door at Loren’s knock, like ninety years of old leather topped off with a wig stolen from a tallow maker. Only her eyes were lively: a hard, piercing green.

        “Mistress Gristle,” Loren said, and he said it respectfully. He liked having two legs, and an irate witch was apt to change that situation.

        “Loren McCully,” she ground out. Her voice was like broken glass. “Here begging for red again, are you?”

        “He’s dying,” Loren said. “Clyde’s dying. He needs the shot. Look, it’s what, twenty days’ ration? That’s inside the margin. We can spare it.”

        Gristle’s jaw worked, warts and all. “How do you know we can spare it?”

        “We can always spare it.” Desperation was slipping into his tone. Clyde handled the manifests for the supply shipments, and he’d not been shy about sharing that knowledge with Loren, rules be damned. “I can pay. Cut it out of my share, for all I care.”

        Gristle studied him, and there was something brittle in her eyes that he couldn’t read. Frustration? Fear, even? “Go home, Loren,” she said. “You’re young. Patience takes time to learn. I’m finding alternatives. Trust me. He has a little time yet. In the worst case, I can put him in stasis and buy another few days. People wake up from that almost half the time.”

        He hesitated, looking for an angle. “I could skip a few doses—a bunch of us would, for Clyde. If twenty of us skip a day—”

        “No,” she said sharply. “Nobody skips. Red’s a better prophylactic than a cure. If people start skipping the injections, we’ll have twenty Clydes, and maybe you’ll tell me what to do then, too.” Her eyes bored into him. “If I hear you’ve been balking your medicine, Loren McCully, I’ll have you tied down and inject you myself.” A watch appeared in one liver-spotted hand. “You’re a second-shift man? Then you’re running late. Go on, now.”

        For a moment, he wanted to dart past her, seize what he needed, and run. But the impulse faded. Gristle and old Lurga one quality in common: power. They hummed with it, the same reedy whine you got from standing too close to a Q outcrop. He’d felt it when Lurga sang a man’s broken bones back together, and when she’d cleared a rockfall with a snarl of something that wasn’t quite sound. And that power wasn’t all benign. There’d been a murder in the mine ten years back, in Loren’s first days here as a miner, and when they’d caught the killer, the old witch hadn’t waited for the noose. She’d mumbled something, and the man’s head had burst.

        “The hell with you,” he said to Gristle, but he said it quietly, and he left to start his shift.

* * *

        The preparations were second nature. Helmet, light, treated gloves, surveyors’ gear. An injection of red to stave off crack-up, a Locksley pill for extra oxygen, a swallow of Norton’s Patent Winterizer for the cold. The last was the worst. It kept you warm, but it made you crave fats. Midway through his shift, Loren would eat a cup of vegetable shortening or lard, and he’d like it. Then, after his shift, he’d remember the feel of it coating his mouth and throat, and he’d like it a hell of a lot less.

        Nielsen, the senior engineer and second shift supervisor, moved down the line of miners, checking gear. He was a stern-looking man with severe features and a manner far older than his forty years. “How is Clyde?” he asked quietly when he came to Loren.

        “The same. Gristle won’t treat him.”

        Nielsen’s mouth tightened, and he nodded. “There are four other cases,” he said. An edge crept into his voice. “We will figure this out. Everything will be all right.”

        Loren could almost believe him. There were stories about what Nielsen had been before he studied engineering: a sailor, a politician, a lawman, a thief. They changed every year. The men loved him, and they loved inventing lies about him even more.

        But what Nielsen was now was worried. He kept tossing uneasy glances at the cloud chamber set against one wall, a man-high glass case filled with alcohol vapor and meant to measure the threat of crack-up. Tiny trails of condensation flickered through it every few seconds, marking the paths of objects too small for even a microscope to reveal: aethersleet, particles of condensed aether shed by violent events in remote reaches of space, streaming down in a constant barrage throughout the months-long winter night. Now and then, they struck ordinary rock just so and triggered the crystallization reaction that produced quintessence in great jagged seams within the peaks of high mountains. Now and then, they struck human flesh and left a brother-in-law breathing raggedly and trying not to move as his flesh went glass-brittle and lifeless.

        As Loren advanced down the newest shaft to set survey reflectors and ensure the shaft was running true, he imagined he could feel that sleet slashing through him. Invisible bullets. Invisible, slow-killing bullets.

        There were two firearms in the mine. One was locked in a case in the administrative offices. The other was locked in Nielsen’s desk. But that wasn’t what would make Nielsen dangerous. The man was smart. He wouldn’t brook with theft—not of coin, tools, provisions, or red. Anyone who posed a threat to the well-being of his men would find himself bleeding out or hanged from a handy cross-brace.

        Dimly, Loren realized that he was already seeing Nielsen as an adversary.

        He spent his shift like a clockwork man, thoughtless of his tasks, hardly even noticing the tooth-rattling buzz of the Q formations as he inspected the survey markers meant to guide the next shaft extension. The shafts were perilously near the surface here. A degree off, and the shaft might break through the mountainside into near-vacuum. He ate his lard in silence and cleaned his gloves with detergent. All through those ten hours, he could think only of the blood on Clyde’s chin and, in feverish conflation, drops of blood welling in Deirdre’s eyes and drawing pink tracks down her cheeks. Spring would come, and he would descend the mountain with death in his mouth. It tasted like rancid fat.

        Only one event broke through his anxiety. In the last hour of his shift, an outer seal blew, exposing the mine to the outside world. The overpressure sent a howl of wind down the shaft. There was cold, and there was cold, and the sudden pressure drop could freeze your bits off; or so the lifers said, usually with a few crude gestures and an invitation to see for yourself.

        Then the gaslights, starved of oxygen, went out.

        Nielsen reacted immediately, shouting for everyone to stop and hold still, dammit.

        Against every instinct, against the force of panic, Loren did. He couldn’t breathe. His face was going numb. The blackness was absolute, and noises had a strange, thin quality. Muffled curses as someone blundered into a wall. He stood there listening in the dark, and a strange sound drifted down from the outside world, cutting deep.

        Then came the ratcheting snarl of freed clockworks, and a spring-run arclight blazed to life. Nielsen held it up and pointed down the tunnel, then raised four fingers. There was no fear in his face, merely irritation. Of course: there was an emergency cache of lights and oxygen four cross-tunnels away. They’d all trained for this. It just took a second or two—sometimes a fatal second or two—for the training to kick in. They withdrew up the shaft in single file, Nielsen at the tail of the line, his free hand on Loren’s back, light held high to send their shadows on ahead.

        They cleared the first airlock just as darkness began to play around the edges of Loren’s vision. At Nielsen’s signal, he put his shoulder to the door and shoved, then spun the wheel to lock it. The wind stopped. Safety crews were already coming to meet them, bearing more Locksley pills and Winterizer and emergency oxygen tanks—none of which worked because the cheap rubber masks and hoses had degraded after years of disuse.

        So the last hour of the shift was spent in grumbling and swearing that the Company was out to kill them all and sell their contracts off at cheaper rates. Loren hardly heard any of it, even when Nielsen threatened bloody revolt against any pencil-pusher who’d never set foot above twenty thousand feet. Loren fixated instead on the sound he’d heard the moment the pressure dropped. For a bare second, he’d heard the wind flowing over the breached seal and sounding a perfect musical tone. It touched his memory, harmonizing with the whistle in Clyde’s throat.

        There was no logic to what came next. He realized that the tone had made up his mind. Powers and Nielsen be damned, he was going to take what he needed from Gristle’s cache. The Company might not care, but he still did. He’d lost enough—Deirdre had lost enough.

        So he went home to the chambers he shared with Clyde and a dozen other second-shift men, and he made sure Clyde was as comfortable as possible, and then he lay awake, waiting and listening as the lamps went out.

* * *

        Three hours slid by. Adrenaline sang in his blood and honed his hearing. He imagined he could count the distinct snores. He might even know which ones went with which men; he’d shared quarters with them for long enough, with only occasional breaks to descend the mountain and spend a week or two with his wife Deirdre. The difference made him ache inside. When he was with her, he slept in silence and warmth, her body soft and smooth against him, her breathing a regular sigh over his chest. He always slept well, either because they’d made love or because she’d read to him. He could read but not like she could—not with feeling, like she could get at the life under the words.

        Here, it was a ragged chorus of men snoring and farting and reeking of sweat—if it was a good night, only of sweat,.

        A thin, high sound. Clyde’s breathing whistling past the crystals growing in his throat. He had even more formal education than his sister. Hell, he’d landed Loren this job, back when Loren had been a free-climbing prospector with minimal qualifications and a bare handful of years left in his life expectancy. He’d introduced him to Deirdre with an odd, knowing look.

        I owe him, Loren thought. I owe him everything.

        When he counted thirteen distinct snores, he rose, dressed, and slipped out, carrying his boots and trying not to cringe at the cold eating up through his thick socks into his feet. He brought a few tools tucked into his belt: a lamp, a ghostlight, a probe for locks, a chisel for bigger locks, a crowbar, a rag to deaden the sound of his work. He could not imagine that Gristle slept any way but lightly. Maybe with one of those hard green eyes wide open.

* * *

        Nobody was on Main Street. Third shift was the worst, the agreed-upon night shift, and the living areas of the mine were deserted. He picked the lock on the old witch’s door easily, which was frightening in itself. The simple lock was a sign of perfect confidence. Or that the Company was as cheap about locks as it was about everything else.

        He left his boots inside the door and passed through into darkness, feeling his way, reaching carefully with feet and hands. Soft carpeting muffled his footfalls. Gristle’s predecessor had let him all the way into the inventory room a few times, even made him a cup of tea there. Lurga had been kindly. Chatty, even, when the mood took her. He remembered the way, but remembering it in fear and the dark was another matter. Every time his foot tapped something, he thought his heart might blow a gasket.

        But there were other sounds: the rumble and hiss of the steam engines that ran pumps to kept parts of the mine pressurized. The almost subsonic crunch of the Q grinders that processed the crystal for loading into train cars when spring came. The plink plink plink of a distant graywater trickle raising fantastic ice sculptures no one would ever see. The night was not altogether silent. He had a chance.

        He slipped through an inner room and immediately kicked something unyielding. At this rate, he’d kick his toes black before he reached the inner room, never mind the noise he’d make. He forced himself to crack the ghostlight, tapping one end to break the glass vial inside and fill the tube with faint blue-white luminescence. It was just enough to keep him from stumbling—and just enough to reveal the silhouette of a head and shoulders less than a yard away. The cry of alarm died in his throat when he saw it was a dummy, like the ones he’d seen in dressmakers’ shops down in the warmer world. This one, though, had a reproduction of the witch’s face on it, lifelike but lifeless, blank eyeholes mocking him for his panic. A fetish, he supposed, though why she’d want one in her own likeness was beyond him.

        “Dammit, Gristle,” he breathed. “Just when I thought I couldn’t like you less.”

        He held tight to the ghostlight and made his way to the inventory room. There, he risked lighting his lamp, hooding it to a narrow beam. Crates were stacked on floor-to-ceiling shelves, arranged and labeled with librarian precision. There were cabinets with drawers of fine powders and metal flasks of other chemicals—precursors to various witchy brews, he supposed. The previous Company witch had been open about what she could and couldn’t cure, and she’d even shared a few of her methods. Most of them hadn’t sounded like magic at all. Then again, she’d once mumbled a man’s head into blowing up. She could afford a bit of demystification.

        He pried up the top from a crate of red with his crowbar. The nails squeaked, and he went still. No sound followed—no footsteps, no crone’s shriek of alarm, no thunderclap inside his own head that left his brains all over the walls. He finished prying, plucked out two glass vials, and tucked them into his pockets. They’d be missed when Gristle opened the crate herself in a month or two, but what could she prove? They might have been omitted from the shipment. And when Clyde recovered, Loren would just claim he’d prayed extra hard. It would be thin, but it would fly. It had to. He couldn’t contemplate the alternative.

        Now came the hard part: resealing the crate. He lowered the lid, positioned the first nail under his rag, and set to tapping with the flat side of the crowbar. It was slow work, and it sounded like thunder in his ears. Only when he was halfway done did he realize he just might be all right. Gristle didn’t sleep with one eye open. She was an old woman. She probably slept like the dead, being halfway there already. He began to relax.

        A sharp intake of breath and flood of light from behind snapped his head around. There was Gristle, a small, stooped silhouette in the door, backlit by the lamps in the room beyond. She was drawing breath, preparing a spell—

        Panic overrode thought. She’d caught him, she’d caught him, and he’d die now or by the noose, and Clyde was dead too, would go all brittle and die when his lungs couldn’t draw breath or when his heart shredded itself on a thousand crystal needles.

        He lunged and swung the crowbar overhand. It was a clumsy blow, but the points punched into Gristle’s collarbone, and his weight bore her backward through the door, driving her to the ground. Her head cracked hard against the stone. He pulled the crowbar free in a spray of blood that flashed red in the sudden brilliance of the gaslights, blinding after his hour’s work in the dark. He raised the crowbar again even though it weighed a thousand pounds and his muscles had gone all liquid, like in those dreams where you had to fight but all the strength had drained out of you, and he had to squint through watering eyes to see—to see—

        He stopped. Bright green eyes stared up at him from a young woman’s face. She was pretty in a girlish sort of way, with delicate features and long black hair fanned out on the stone floor. Her mouth worked soundlessly, and her eyes darted, frightened. Blood still leapt in spurts from the wound in her neck. She was trying to inhale but couldn’t. He’d crushed the wind from her with his tackle. One small, long-fingered hand groped toward his face. He pushed it aside. He had to explain himself. If he could just tell her why—if he could make her understand—

        The fear in her face was giving way to something else. Hairs on his neck rose as power gathered.

        “I’m sorry,” he tried to say.

        Sudden pain bit into his chest and rocketed up into his head, but he kept his grip on the crowbar and brought it down one last time, and Gristle lay dead beneath him.

* * *

        The next hour passed in a strange calm, as though he’d decided the entire affair was a persistent dream. He found rags with which to clean up the blood. He wrapped Gristle in the one ruined carpet, trying not to touch her, flinching every time his hands brushed the thick flannel of her nightgown. Fully lit, the room’s function was obvious. Half was a simple laboratory. Half was a dressing room. The mannequin wearing Gristle’s false face stood before a three-panel mirror. Stacked cases held cosmetics of all sorts: powders, pastes, fake warts, little clusters of bristles. Pads and brushes and mixing trays. Three pairs of brushy, winglike eyebrows stared accusingly at him from their compartment. When he opened her closet, he found that her coats all had a wood and whalebone apparatus to raise a hump across her shoulders. Gristle hadn’t been old and bent; she’d just been short.

        He also found a single case of red in her closet, half-empty. The seal on every vial was broken. He didn’t know what that meant, but it broke his dreamy calm and set his hands shaking. He couldn’t administer the stolen drug now. If Clyde recovered just after Gristle was robbed and murdered, well, there was no story that would convince people to turn a blind eye. And when they found her body, saw what she’d really been....

        Would he have felt better about killing an old woman? Yes, he would have, and the thought twisted his guts.

        But he had a little hope left. With Gristle gone, the senior-most shift supervisor would take over what parts of her job he could. And that meant Nielsen would be in charge. He’d treat Clyde. He had to, didn’t he? He cared.

        Just not enough to intercede sooner.

        Loren replaced the stolen vials, tacked the crate closed, and stood for a long time in Gristle’s dressing room, considering the shapeless roll of carpet.

* * *

        Nothing but dumb luck preserved him from discovery when he bore the wrapped body down to the inactive shafts. He carried her—it, he told himself, it— to the deepest of the old shafts, the one that ran straight down almost half a mile before corkscrewing off, and tipped the body over the edge. It fell and fell. If it raised a sound when it struck bottom, it was too far away for him to hear. He wanted to say something, one more apology, but he didn’t know her name. The realization raised a bark of rotten laughter. Of course Gristle had been an alias. Nobody would name their child Gristle. Just another part of a disguise for a young woman who had to spend years alone in a company of sexually frustrated men and command their respect and obedience.

        He ran his gloved hands over his face and jerked them away, suddenly sure that he’d smeared blood all over himself. But when he unhooded his lamp, he saw that his gloves were clean. It didn’t matter. Anyone who saw him would know what he’d done. They’d see it in his eyes, in the crook of his hands. He had to leave. Escape. There were handcars in the little roundhouse outside the main mine entrance—there might even be one or two inside the airlock. It was easier to keep them inside than to break the ice off in spring, wasn’t it? If he kitted himself out, took a few extra Locksleys, brought an oxygen bottle—

        —he’d freeze to death in an hour. It was that three-month winter night, that three-month rush of aetherfall, and it was more than mere cold. The aether fed. It would reach through whatever he wore and suck the life from him. Assuming that the winds didn’t blow the handcart from the tracks, his brittle corpse would arrive in the support village, where the skeleton crew would have a morbid conversation piece.

        There was no escape. Just this cave—the one in the mountain and the darker one behind his eyes. When he crept back to his barracks, stripped, and slid into his cot an arm’s length from Clyde, he fought to keep the crunch of that second blow from his mind, along with the vision, just before the stroke fell, of the terror and rage that had twisted the girl’s face. An impulse to confess blossomed and died inside him.

        “I have to live,” he murmured to the unconscious Clyde. Then, soundlessly: if only so I can go down the mountain in spring and tell my wife I let her brother die.

        He could already see Deirdre’s tears, taste the salt on her cheeks. She was twenty-six, four years younger than he, but she’d already seen more loss than he cared to think about. Dead parents, dead sister, a string of miscarriages that had burned into her in ways he knew he couldn’t understand. Grief had twisted inside him at each one. He’d seen that same grief inside her, but also guilt, shame, and maybe feelings that didn’t have names. And now her brother was dying. She would forgive him—that was the worst part—and sink a little deeper into the silence that had punctuated their visits more and more over the last few years.

        When he went home, he would have his own silence, a dead space around Gristle’s final expression and the feel of a crowbar striking bone. The sensation clung to him as consciousness faded, and she was waiting in his dreams, smiling coldly and whispering, her breath hot and close in his ear.

* * *

        “I hadn’t expected this,” Nielsen said. He stood in Gristle’s dressing room with the lamps turned all the way up. He frowned at Loren. “Though I see the rationale. Do you think all the Company witches do likewise?” He prodded at the false face and gave a low whistle. “What do you suppose she really looked like?”

        Loren kept his face neutral. The rumors had reached him with the morning’s injection: Gristle was missing, Gristle was dead, Gristle had been found staked up in an old tunnel. The summons had come soon after, and he’d been transfixed with anxiety, sure that he’d left some obvious clue, like a glove with his name sewn into it or a somnambulist’s confession painted on a wall in blood. But Nielsen had merely waved him into the witch’s quarters where another shift supervisor—Jackson, his name was—and a miner Loren didn’t know were peering in perplexity at the trappings of Gristle’s hidden life. “No way to know, I guess,” Loren said.

        Jackson held up a roll of clean white rags. “If these are what I think they are,” he said, “she was a lot younger than she made out.”

        Nielsen averted his eyes.

        “Oh, be a man,” Jackson said. “Don’t you have sisters?”

        “Do you think she just... left?” Loren asked.

        Nielsen shook his head. “All her cold-weather gear is still here. From the dust on the floor, there’s a carpet missing. It’s roughly the right size for wrapping a body. So either she liked that carpet far too much and thought she could climb down Highfall in winter without so much as a coat, or she’s dead.” He caught Loren’s questioning stare and added, “I did a stint as sheriff in a copper mining town about ten years ago. I knew a little law, I could read and was sober, and that made me the best-qualified soul in a hundred miles. In the matter at hand, I’m given to understand I’m the best we have. So now we have a hundred and forty men who were not in the active mines last night, and the question of who would want our only witch dead.”

        “She was doing a shit job,” Jackson said. “So there’s that. Five men down with crack-up, and her sitting on the red. Fair enough, she did good work on the ones that got their hands mangled when that steam drill gutted itself, but who’s going to say no when a man’s bleeding out right there? I’ll say it if nobody else will: this was one frosty bitch, and nobody liked her. The old witch left big shoes.” He pointed to where Gristle’s boots stood beside the door. “This one had tiny feet.”

        Loren rubbed at his eyes, trying to find a pattern that would point away from himself. “Is anything missing?” he asked. “If it was about how she was handling the crack-up, somebody might’ve robbed her for a heavy dose of red.” He hesitated, then added, “I was tempted myself. With Clyde and all.”

        Nielsen gave him a long look. “I’d wondered,” he said. “But breaking into a witch’s quarters would have been suicide. Correction, breaking into Lurga’s quarters would have been suicide. This was done in either folly or desperation. No one here is either of those—not yet. Right. Time to take inventory.”

        So they did, Loren contriving to inspect the crate he’d already opened. Four hours later, with nothing missing, Nielsen sent them away with instructions to share what they knew and quash any rumors that followed. “We don’t know what happened,” he said, “but we have all her supplies and some halfway decent medics. We should be fine.”

        The miner Loren didn’t know, a squat, scraggly looking man named Wilson, held up a slim book from the shelf in Gristle’s bedroom. “Who gets her stuff?” he asked. “Spare me the righteous looks. You’re all thinking it too.”

        “That’s evidence,” Nielsen said. Then, without heat: “And you are unseemly.”

        Wilson snorted. “You picked me.”

        “I did. Because your supervisor is Shoemaker, who has three men down with crack-up and is growing desperate about meeting his quota. Your task is to watch him.”

        Wilson sobered. “All right. So. We going to get the red and treat our men, or what?”

        Nielsen hesitated. Loren fought the weightless feeling in his stomach, the painful mingling of hope and doubt. “I don’t know,” Nielsen said at last. “It’s possible that our Gristle was callous or outright evil, but I don’t see that. It is more likely that she lacked social skills. What if she had a reason for not treating those cases?”

        “What if she didn’t know what she was doing?” Loren countered.

        Nielsen gestured at the storage room around them, his precise, mechanical movements highlighting its organization. “Does this look like it belongs to an incompetent? Now spread the word, go back to work, and for the love of God, keep your eyes open.” He drew a deep breath and let it out in a hiss. “I have thinking to do.”

* * *

        Clyde’s condition continued to deteriorate. His pulse came faster and weaker. He couldn’t speak. The whites of his eyes had gone bloody. Whenever he moved, he gasped, and his face tightened in pain.

        And Loren could do nothing but tip water and broth down his throat. Soon he’d have to worry about bedsores, and he hadn’t a clue about how to handle those. Rolling Clyde over would tear him up inside, wouldn’t it? Moving him enough to get at the bedpans was torture enough.

        He lost himself in the immediate practical questions. With Clyde in front of him, he could almost forget what he’d done in trying to save him. Trying, and probably failing, unless Nielsen had a change of heart damn quick.

        But after his shift in the mine, when the lamps went out and sleep closed around him like a cyst, there was nothing between him and the memory. He dreamed her face, her weak struggle, her reaching hand. Then pain in his chest and head, and now, in the strange drift of dream country, a brightness that passed between them, joining them in a luminous braid.

        He jerked awake to a flash of pain and found himself sitting on cold stone and gripping a utility knife. When he groped at the burning in his left arm, he discovered three parallel cuts like claw marks down his bicep and blood sheeting his arm to the wrist. Then he realized that while his right hand was exploring the cuts, his left had picked the knife back up. He made himself drop it. It clinked on the floor beside a portable gas lamp.

        Nobody can see this, he thought. Nobody. I can’t explain it.

        He looked around for witnesses, suddenly frantic, but he was no longer in his barracks. He sat in a disused shaft beside an airlock. Someone had broken the welds and opened the lock. A narrow exploratory tunnel opened beyond, one just broad enough for a slim man’s shoulders. When he raised the lamp, he could make out the clutter of an imperfectly cleared passage—and there, at the far edge, the eerie glint of Q. His teeth ached, and nausea pooled in his guts. The far end of the tunnel had to be fifty feet away. For the Q to feel like this, it had to be a massive seam.

        He dropped back behind the shelter of the half-open airlock and waited for the nausea to subside. He was woozy from either blood loss or half-remembered pain. And he was starting to shiver. He’d shed his jacket to get at his arm, and now he was breaking out in goosebumps. If he hadn’t woken up, he might have died. Blood loss or hypothermia: dealer’s choice.

        He groped his way to the infirmary, found it unmanned. Unsurprising. There had been a lot of accidents this winter, mostly problems with the machines. The medics were always out. He stole a roll of bandages and doused the arm in alcohol, gasping at the new shock of pain.

        You deserve this. The thought came sudden and sharp-edged.

        He did. He deserved worse.

        He grabbed enough rags to—he hoped—clean up the blood before he returned to his barracks. A few of the men were awake, whispering together in the dark. “Bad dream,” he mumbled.

        “Small bladder,” somebody replied.

        A single weak laugh answered. And no wonder. Their witch was dead. The medics were good, but they weren’t Gristle, and everyone knew it.

        He fell into his cot and tried to claim a few more hours sleep, first making sure his footlocker was shut and locked. If his guilt wanted to cut him in his sleep, it would have to find his keys first. His arm throbbed with his pulse, the pain somehow soothing, and he slid toward sleep.

        It won’t matter. The thought was clear against the fog of fading consciousness. It was all for nothing, Loren McCully. You still don’t understand what you’ve done.

        Funny, he thought as the next dream took him; it sounded like a woman’s voice.

* * *

        Nielsen decided to treat the crack-up cases. Two were worse off even than Clyde. Which made no sense. “We shouldn’t have five cases of fatal cascade at all,” he said to his impromptu investigators in Gristle’s receiving room. “I’ve been monitoring the cloud chamber. The aethersleet rates are holding at normal levels. With the red regimen, I would expect a single case every two years. That’s what we’ve seen in the past. That’s what we’ve always seen. Five cases in a week means that something has gone wrong.”

        “Six,” Jackson said grimly. “I’ve got another man down. Can we up the daily dosage?”

        Nielsen spread his hands in helplessness. “I’m unsure what side effects that could cause. That’s what Gristle was for. I don’t even know how red works. We’ll have to administer horse-sized shots to save the sick ones. If they pull through without, say, growing an extra head, we can start taking more ourselves. That said, there’s only so much margin. We could run out before the trains start running again. If that happens, we die up here.” His gaze slid around the room. “Something’s wrong,” he said again. “Too many crack-ups, and our witch is gone. Dead, in all likelihood.”

        “Too many equipment failures,” Wilson cut in. “You know we had one of the pump engines throw a rod? Haven’t seen that in years. Damn near took a man’s head off.”

        This is good, Loren thought. This is what I need. They’re looking everywhere else.

        You selfish, clueless son of a bitch.

        “I heard about that,” Nielsen said. He wore a faraway look. “Was it a new rod?”

        “Eh, no. New fix, though. New bolts, maybe?”

        Nielsen nodded. “Trace the shipment of spare bolts. I want to know when it arrived.”

        “You thinking something, boss?”

        Nielsen knocked the top off a crate and pulled out a vial of red. “I might be. I sincerely hope I’m wrong.”

        Unsure why, Loren went with Wilson to check the lot and shipping numbers for the replacement bolts. This used to be Clyde’s job, he thought. He used to have his own little room off the office, not a spare cot in a barracks full of second-shifters.

        “Here we go,” Wilson said, holding up a typewritten page defaced with a scrawl of notes. “Came up on the last train. Why’d you suppose the boss cares?”

        “Don’t know,” Loren said. Then his mouth added, “Check what else came up on the last train.”

        “Sure. We’ve got rations, a hell of a lot of veggie fat—God, I hate that stuff—the winter stock of red, spare hoses for the oxygen tanks, all the usual shit. Why?”

        “The winter stock of red,” Loren’s mouth said. It seemed to have gotten ahead of his brain.

        “Yeah. Want to dose Clyde yourself? You’re buddies, yeah?”

        He did, even though he couldn’t stop thinking about the separate stock of red that Gristle had kept in her closet. He kept on thinking about it even as Nielsen signed out the prodigal injections and as the medic guided him through the first dose. “Two more in the next six hours,” the medic said. “It’ll work fast. It’s supposed to, anyways. I’ve never seen a case go this far.”

        Still panicking, still not thinking. It’s all right in front of you.

        He sat by Clyde’s cot that night, waiting for the whistle in his breathing to subside. He kept his boots on and knotted the laces together. There’d be no sleepwalking tonight. He drifted off that way, head drooping down to his chest, fully dressed and wrapped in a blanket on the cold floor. Everything might still be all right. All he had to do was spend his life never telling anyone, never telling Deirdre, what he’d done to buy Clyde’s life.

* * *

        He woke in the middle of the night. He was sitting in an equipment closet, his boots neatly re-laced. A cracked ghostlight lay beside him, and a notepad of coarse paper was open on his knee. He trousers had been pushed down to his knees, and his right hand held a knife under his crotch.

        A faint sense of exasperation fluttered in his mind before fear took over and shriveled his testicles back from the immediate danger.

        His hand dropped the knife, took up a fountain pen, and wrote in a neat, looping script on the notepad:

        Do I have your attention?

        It wasn’t his handwriting, but he recognized it from row after row of neat labels. “Gristle?” he whispered.

        The written answer seemed to take forever:

        Obviously. I should have killed you.

        The full-stop was a spreading blot where the pen had stabbed the page. “I’m sorry,” he said. He tried to move his right hand, found that he could. “I—”

        His hand jerked, resumed writing:

        I still could. Stop fighting me. No matter what, you have to sleep sometime. Remember that, Loren McCully.

        “What did you do?”

        What I had to. I was dying. You were there. I crossed over. It’s not a smooth process. I wasn’t even sure why they taught us that spell.

        More ghost sensations crossed his mind: regret, pain, nostalgia, gratitude. A vague impression of quiet halls and rooms full of books. Stern but not unkind voices.

        “You can’t kill me,” he whispered. “You’d die, too, wouldn’t you?”

        His hand hesitated over the paper. Then:

        I could make you wish you were dead. There are parts of you you’d miss.

        He tried, with some success, to pull his pants up left-handed. “I might bleed out.”

        There are other parts of you I could take away. You expect to see your wife when spring comes. I’ll still be here. Think on your sins, Loren.

        His breath caught. “You wouldn’t.”

        You killed me.

        This time, the words echoed in his head like a fading scream. A flood of fear and anger burst through him—not his, he realized now. Gristle’s.

        Carefully, and of his own volition, he added an exclamation mark to her last sentence. “Clyde was dying,” he said.

        I know.

        He could hear her voice more clearly now, as though the notepad were merely a synchronizing gear between the two minds caught in his head. She sounded sick and frightened and tired—like a young woman trapped alone in a strange place, not like a witch threatening to castrate him or murder his wife. Guilt blossomed in his mind, followed by pity.

        Keep your pity.

        He took a deep breath. “I know you’re desperate,” he said. “But if you threaten Deirdre again, I’ll kill myself.”

        Well, look who’s decided there’s something he’ll die for after all.

        Then somehow he was up and striding out of the closet, one hand awkwardly holding his trousers up. He recognized the tunnel at once: two sets of rails ran down its length, and its far end flared into a loading bay. This was the outer edge of the mine, just below the western side of the peak. There was an airlock less than fifty yards away. And Gristle was marching them towards it. He could already imagine the aethersleet flashing invisibly, imperceptibly through him. This near the surface, he had to be getting a higher dosage. And the aether itself would be pouring down outside the airlock doors in a silent roar.

        He tried to stop walking, managed to make himself stumble. Gristle released control at once.

        I thought so. I’m in here, too, remember? I know you. You don’t have the courage.

        She was right—almost right. “I’d turn myself in, though. They’d either hang me or lock me up. They’d never let you near Deirdre. Never.”

        He held up the notepad, waiting. The pen didn’t move. A suggestion of doubt from Gristle.

        “What’s your real name?”

        The pen remained motionless, but he heard the name anyway: Rose.

        Then: Damn, I didn’t mean to say that.

        “Rose. What are you going to do? What do you want from me?”

        No answer. Her presence faded. His right hand was his own again and shaking like mad. He tore the used page from the notebook and shredded it. Then he went to check Clyde’s condition. It was still worsening.

* * *

        Morning came, and he took the most awkward piss of his life.

        I’ve already seen it all.

        “Not helping,” he muttered, keeping his voice low and hoping no one else at the urinal trough would notice. “Why isn’t Clyde getting better?”

        Because the red you injected is saline and dye. The whole winter shipment is. I’d been diluting the regular doses to make the real supply last as long as possible, but a higher incidence of crack-up was inevitable.

        “You have the real stuff? Oh. The crate in your closet.” He buttoned his fly. “There’s enough for—”

        There’s enough to keep some of you alive all winter. Possibly. Or you can use it all to temporarily cure six men, who will then sicken again and die without daily prophylactic injections. Just like the rest of you. There’s a reason I showed you that abandoned exploratory shaft two nights ago. Think about it. A promising vein, abandoned. An increase in illness and accidents, compromising your quotas. I think John has almost figured it out, by the way.

        John? he thought. Ah, yes: John Nielsen.

        A few faint thoughts that were most assuredly not his own floated to the surface of his mind, all to do with Nielsen, who had strong hands sometimes a bit of shyness in his face, a depth under that stern exterior, and clear blue-gray eyes—

        “Stop it,” he muttered, louder than he’d meant to. A couple of heads turned toward him, in clear violation of urinary etiquette.

        I’m circumstantially celibate, she said, not dead. Well, now I’m dead. A girl can look.

        An upwelling of frustration, of lost possibilities. An anger already fading into deep, deep grief. He wanted to scream, or Rose did. Or maybe the difference between them was starting to break down. That was a disturbing thought, and a true one. He remembered, now, that the spell which had jammed Rose into his head did nothing to preserve the integrity of either mind.

        “We don’t have much time,” he murmured, imagining both the crystallization of his body and the muddling of his mind with Rose’s.

        No. Not much time at all. It’s about time you troubled to read your contract carefully and maybe had a look at the records room. Recall our first excursion together?

        A rich vein of Q that someone had hidden and left untouched even as the rest of the mine began to peter out.

        “Aw, hell,” he said.

* * *

        The administrative offices were five hundred feet below the barracks and accessible only via an open-cage elevator. They were also deliciously warm. A gas fire burned in a grate, and bear skin rugs covered the floor. Loren wanted nothing more than to strip, don a soft robe, and stretch out on one of those rugs with a stack of those medical journals Rose had been meaning to read for weeks.

        He caught himself. Stop it, he thought again.

        Mocking, feminine laughter in his head. I don’t see how you’re the victim here.

        Nielsen was already sitting in the records room. The administrator, a mousy man named Kurtz, had been displaced from his chair and was slumped against the wall, wearing a broken nose and a stunned expression. “McCully,” Nielsen said quietly. “Please shut the door behind you.”

        “It’s the Company,” Rose said through Loren’s mouth. “If the mine falls short enough of its target yields this year, they have the option to cut all our contracts and renegotiate or hire new crews.”

        I already knew that, Loren wanted to say, and Nielsen had to know it too. Get on with the rest, he thought.

        “If we’re all dead or sick, or enough equipment breaks, we’ll miss those targets. The question is, why now? I had a look around last night at what are supposed to be dead ends.” She paused expectantly.

        “We’re being lied to,” Loren said, taking up the thread. “There’s a tunnel, one marked as an exploratory dig that came up dry. Airlock was sealed up. But it didn’t come up dry. There’s Q there. A lot of it, I’d guess. But someone must have known....”

        Nielsen nodded, then prodded Kurtz with a foot. “Tell him,” he said.

        Kurtz cringed, and a fresh drop of blood wobbled from the tip of his nose. “It was just two or three records,” he said. “Just the Q concentrations in the new northeast shaft. I only... adjusted some of the numbers. It happens all the time. Can’t saturate the market, you know? It’s standard practice. Then in a short year, prices would jump, and I’d just ‘discover’ the mistake, and we’d all be better off. See? It’s good for everyone.”

        “And your bosses knew about this?” Loren said.

        “Of course. It’s standard.”

        “How much Q?” Loren asked. When Kurtz hesitated, he kicked him under the ribs. “How much?”

        Kurtz pulled himself upright. “It’s—it might be the largest vein ever discovered. There’s no way to be sure. And we were so sure this mine was close to played out, so....”

        So they gave you all a higher percentage of the revenues than they normally would have. Now that this will be the most lucrative mine in the hemisphere, they have to take it away. They arranged for bad luck with your replacement parts and supplies, including the red. The Company will have already arranged for one of its suppliers to take the blame for the counterfeit treatments. It will be tragic and highlight the unprofitability of the mine. The contract with your replacements will feature much higher flat rates to balance the risk and virtually nil points on revenues—the typical hedge to keep the mine open while they hold out for a price spike. The Company will make a fortune once they re-open that vein. Such a shame we’ll all be dead.

        Loren realized that he was spilling this analysis in his own words, stumbling whenever Rose added an aside. “And you didn’t see this coming,” he finished, rounding on Kurtz. “You’re up here too, you know. I wonder how many days until you start showing symptoms. The cascade runs faster in rats, I’m told.”

        “I didn’t know,” Kurtz said, his eyes wide. “I swear to God, I didn’t know.”

        “I believe you,” Nielsen said. His voice was gentle. “But you knew something. So did several others, starting with at least one of the miners who drilled the shaft. Who else saw the original concentration studies?”

        Kurtz spilled the names. Loren recognized only two, but Rose knew them all. Seven of the ten had been rotated to other mines before the trains shut down for the winter. Two had suffered accidents. One—a logistician named Clyde Greer—was dying of crack-up five hundred feet above their heads.

        It had to be a mistake. Or Kurtz was lying. Or Loren was hallucinating. He’d been hearing voices, after all. “He couldn’t have known it would go this far,” Loren said. “He couldn’t have. He never—” But there was no making an argument based on Clyde’s character. Not anymore. And of course they’d have needed someone in the supply office to sign off on suspect parts, someone to make sure no one opened crates and inspected the contents too soon. It was obvious in hindsight. He rubbed at the heat in his eyes.

        Still not thinking, I see. Why would Clyde have wanted a handsome payment now, of all times? The memories are here, Loren McCully. Noticed anything different about your Deirdre these last few months?

        Loren shut her out. “He wouldn’t have stayed if he’d known. Or let me stay. Sabotaged equipment to force a slowdown, all right, maybe, but the counterfeit red—”

        All it means is that he’s dying in denial.

        “Interesting you should mention that again,” Nielsen said. “I finished testing a vial an hour ago. You’re correct. It’s basically salt water. How did you find out?”

        Ooh, he’s smart. Smarter than you, anyway. I see why Lurga liked him.

        “I—figured it out. Clyde’s not getting better. None of them are, I’ll bet.”

        Nielsen sighed. “You’re right about that, too. Come on. We need to convene the other shift supervisors and the senior men. We have another problem now, too.”

        “What?”

        “Isn’t it obvious? Gristle. The Company has a plant here. He killed her before she could realize what was wrong with the red. Perhaps she could have made more, or found a way to keep us alive through the winter.” His voice hardened. “That means he knows about the red, and so unless he was on a suicide mission, he has his own supply. After the speech you gave, I’m surprised you didn’t figure it out.”

        Loren wasn’t. He felt numb, foggy, caught at the threshold where a good drunk starts to go bad. “I’m... not a detective.”

        No shit. You’re on the other side of the law, aren’t you? What would happen if we confessed now? Do you think it’d be a clean drop or a slow rope? There’s a daguerrotype of me hidden away in my rooms. I could make you tell Nielsen about it, show him who you really killed. Maybe I should. Otherwise some poor scapegoat will take the blame, won’t he?

        Loren bit his tongue, felt Rose twitch away from the pain. “What about Kurtz?” he asked.

        “Leave him. We’ll find a solution, or we won’t. If we don’t, he dies too.” Nielsen’s eyes slid to Kurtz. “I trust you consider yourself well-incentivized to help?”

        But here was a scapegoat, and not an innocent one, not by half. “He could have killed Gristle,” Loren said. “He could have a locker full of red down in the old shafts and we’d never find it—”

        Kurtz sat up straighter. “Now, wait—”

        “Look in his eyes,” Nielsen said.

        Loren looked. Then Rose extended his hand, took Kurtz by the chin, and tilted his face towards the light. Tiny points of light shimmered in his pupils. Crystallization.

        Kurtz must have read their expression, because he began to cry.

        Nielsen said nothing during the elevator ride back to the living areas. But he did lean against the cage and fold his arms, and his coat shifted to show that he was wearing a revolver.

        Sheriff indeed, Rose said. Hold it together, McCully. I still need your body.

        Loren didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing at all.

* * *

        The conference went poorly. There was shouting. There was a fistfight. There was no clear decision, just a circle of accusations and compounding doubts. Loren held his peace throughout, though he had to endure Rose’s running commentary in his head. She could be funny in a snide, pitch-black sort of way, and her mental voice had taken on an edge of giddy desperation. She was funny when she borrowed his voice to pitch in to the argument, too, and people were starting to give him odd looks.

        The worst problem was the inferred cache of red—not enough to save everyone, but maybe enough to save someone. Rose argued Loren’s throat hoarse insisting that it probably didn’t exist, and even if it did, they’d never find it. Nielsen reinforced her point with absurd reasoning framed in irrefutable gravitas.

        But it does exist, Loren thought. The real stuff is crated up in your closet, and you know it. So does Nielsen.

        Not enough to matter, and he knows that, too. Imagine three men in a lifeboat, a thousand miles from shore, with no hope of rescue. They have a single ladle of water among them. What is humane?

        Find someone to give it to, he answered. Draw lots, or pick the man with a family, or—I don’t know.

        Tip it over the side. There’s a time when letting go of hope together is the best thing you can do.

        The thought echoed through his head—their head, he supposed—all through the rest of the debate. I want, he thought, to say you’re wrong. I just can’t see why.

        Me too.

        When the fight broke out, he backed Nielsen by pure reflex. So did Rose. He hadn’t known how to dislocate a pair of shoulders with a touch and whispered word, but she did, and she took him through the motions in a single violent blur that left Nielsen’s attacker screaming on the ground.

        I’m getting good at wearing you, she said, and then there was blessed, blessed silence in his head.

        I’m lucky I got in that first lick with the crowbar, he thought. Then: No, no I’m not.

        Cooler heads eventually prevailed, aided by a dozen or so concussions. Night found Loren by Clyde’s cot. Clyde’s breathing was uneven, ragged, undercut by dissonant chords. When he tried to call Rose in his mind, she didn’t answer.

        He bent as though speaking to Clyde. “Rose,” he murmured.

        What do you want?

        “I could ask you the same thing,” he muttered. “We’ll all be dead in a month. You knew it. Why didn’t you tell us? And why are you riding me around like—like—”

        A sedan chair. An ugly sedan chair that ought to shave and wipe itself down and that hasn’t heard of soap.

        “Whatever.”

        I didn’t know what to do. I tested the red, but I was still assessing options.

        “You could have told somebody.”

        And then we’d have had two hundred panicked souls underground. We have that now. How is it working out for you? You’ll all kill each other trying to survive. I had to find a source of hope before I told you a word.

        “And you didn’t, I guess.”

        Not so much. There should be supplies staged in the support village, but we can’t descend the mountain in winter, and even if someone reached the village, there’s no way the Company would send a train back. The trains are insulated against aether, insofar as that’s possible, but the wind or ice are still likely to derail it.

        Despite himself, he smiled. “You’re still trying to save us.”

        Don’t ask me why.

        But he could feel why. The miners were her responsibility. That had been drilled into her again and again, and she believed it with the certainty of axiomatic faith. It was the same conviction he’d sensed in the old witch, just rougher, rawer, like new wine.

        The realization broke over both of them at once.

        I was part of their plan. They installed a novice witch because they knew I couldn’t handle this crisis. Those motherfuckers.

        He had to stifle a laugh. With slow horror, he realized that he rather liked Rose. And why not? She was lively, driven, and she wasn’t really dead.

        You’re still a murderer. I haven’t forgotten. You want to know what that crowbar felt like?

        Remembered agony ripped into his shoulder, and he gasped.

        I still haven’t decided what to do with you.

        “A moot point,” he hissed through the pain. “We’ll just die together, won’t we?”

        Probably. The pain faded. Probably, we will. I’m scared. I shouldn’t be. The worst has happened, but I’m still scared.

        Deirdre would have known what to say. Hell, Clyde would have known what to say. Loren just sat there, feeling stupid, then awkwardly wrapped his arms around himself.

        Nothing happened. Then Rose’s laughter rang through his head, no longer mocking, and he joined in: great, shuddering gales of laughter at the absurdity of the situation and his weak attempt at comfort. Low conversations subsided all around him as men turned to stare at him as though he’d gone mad. Perhaps he had.

        The laughter subsided, and when Rose spoke again, she sounded breathless:

        I didn’t tell anyone because I was scared and didn’t know what to do. That was it. I just didn’t know what to do.

        “I know,” he murmured. “Hell, I might even understand.”

        They sat together in silence. Then Clyde jerked with a sharp crackling noise, like footfalls on snowcrust, and went slack. Blood began to leak from a thousand lacerations where the crystals inside him had punctured his skin in that final convulsion, but it was only a slow ooze. Clyde’s heart was no longer beating.

        I suppose you never really know someone.

        He flinched as though slapped. When he found the words, they spilled out in a torrent: “He wasn’t worth what I did to you. He risked us all. He had to know. Dammit, Rose, he wasn’t worth it.”

        You still don’t see it—how very like you he was. But it’s better not to use terms like worth, I think. Because soon you apply them to everyone, and eventually you examine yourself, and what will you do then?

* * *

        By the next day, there were seven new cases of crack-up and three of the first round had died. Jackson was among the newly afflicted and didn’t stop screaming until the medics doped him.

        “We can narrow down our suspect pool,” Nielsen said over lunch. Not a slab of fat, thankfully; no one was digging anymore, and that meant no Winterizer. “Third shift was all accounted for on the night Gristle disappeared. That’s seventy-one men. We can eliminate anyone showing crack-up symptoms. Much of first shift was awake. If we discount everyone who had at least two steady witnesses to their whereabouts, we can reduce the list of suspects to ninety-two.” He pushed a list across the table, then sat back and rubbed at the dark circles under his eyes. “And no, I didn’t sleep much last night. I’ll need your help with more interviews today.”

        Loren glanced down the list. “I’m still on here. Why are you trusting me?”

        I’m not on the list, Rose said smugly.

        “I’ve met Deirdre,” Nielsen said. “You have too much to lose to risk something like this. I could almost see you doing something foolish for Clyde, but for money... I don’t see it, no.”

        Rose reached out and put a hand on Nielsen’s arm. “For what it’s worth, you’re doing a fine job with the information you have.” A moment too late, Loren turned the gesture into a manly slap. “But we need to know more. Shouldn’t we concentrate on the crack-up situation?”

        Nielsen gave his own arm a puzzled look, then shook himself. “I... don’t know how to fix that. If our killer has a supply of red, and we find it, it might buy us time.”

        Time to do what? Rose said bitterly. I couldn’t do anything. It’s why they put me here.

        “My God, that’s it,” Loren said.

        “What?”

        “They got rid of the old witch—transferred her—and gave us Rose. It was part of the plan. So Lurga must have been able to do something Rose couldn’t, something that would have let us survive.”

        “Rose?”

        “Gristle,” Loren said hastily. “Gristle. She let her real name slip once. A different name, anyway. You didn’t think her parents named her Gristle, did you?”

        “I don’t know. It did seem to fit.”

        Jackass. Why are the pretty ones always rude?

        “But you’re correct,” Nielsen went on. “I admit, it’s hard to picture her as anything but old and worn down. Those eyes, though... her eyes make me wish I’d seen her without the mask.”

        All right. He gets to live.

        “So,” Loren said, a bit louder than necessary, “what’s the key differentiator between Lurga and Gristle?”

        I met Lurga a few times. She was brilliant at the quick-and-dirty physical magics. Give her enough Q and mundane chemicals, and she probably could have blasted a tunnel down to a livable altitude. It might have set off a chain reaction and leveled the mountain, but she might have tried anyway. She always was determined. Ah, here’s a memory of her exploding a head. Yes, she had a well-developed sense of justice. Better than mine, seeing as you’re still breathing. But there’s no point to asking the question. By definition, I can’t do whatever she could have done.

        “I don’t know,” Nielsen said. “We don’t know as much about Gristle—Rose—as we’d thought. Perhaps we don’t know as much about Lurga, either. She must have started out the same way: wearing a mask and a wig, almost never coming out, keeping the lights dim. No wonder the lifers claim she was an old lady for forty years. She must have been lonely. It does make me feel better about always imposing on her for coffee or tea. She had real coffee....”

        “I remember,” Loren said, but it was Rose’s memory: coffee and cookies with bits of candied ginger, taken in leisure and the bright, stately quiet of the monastery library with its tall windows and warm papery smell. Lurga’s voice, rough but kind. A little unpolished but intensely practical advice about how to stay sane when spending a year in crowded isolation. Find one you don’t like, she’d said, it’ll be a stupid one, and you just tell him that when the air hits forty below, it makes railroad track taste like whiskey. Just have warm water ready to get his tongue off the rail. There’s good fun, and there’s maiming, and they’re the same thing less than half the time.

        He wanted to weep and could not. Rose was holding herself together, and him too. That library was the living world, and it was so far, far away from both of them.

        “Are you feeling all right?” Nielsen asked, a little unease creeping into his voice. “Need the medic? You’re looking white as the dead.”

        Anger. He had Rose’s anger to back his own. That was easier than sorrow. He’d killed her, and the Company had killed Clyde and put them all in this situation. “Fine. Forget the question.”

        Nielsen took a wild guess and guessed wrong: “Clyde couldn’t have known it would go this far,” he said.

        “Forget it.” Loren turned inward. Can you still work magic? he asked. You popped that man’s shoulders right out with it, didn’t you?

        I can do some. This is kind of new to me, you might have noticed.

        “They still killed Rose,” Nielsen said, visibly groping for safer ground. “She was still a threat to them. We should pull her rooms apart and see if there’s anything we can use.”

        Don’t you dare.

        “It’s better than doing nothing,” Loren said. He had to fight Rose for control of his legs to follow Nielsen back to Main Street, but he won in the end, and with a minimum of stumbling. She still fired a parting shot before sliding into the back of his mind:

        Did you notice he’s stopped talking about interviews to narrow down the suspect pool?

        Loren cursed violently, cursed again under Nielsen’s questioning look, and said, “Stepped funny. Bad ankle.”

* * *

        They had to pass through a milling crowd that wasn’t quite a mob, not yet, to reach Rose’s rooms. The lamps on Main Street were burning brighter. Someone had decided that dead men didn’t need light, so why not enjoy a little more illumination? A few of the miners shouted questions at Nielsen, who fielded or evaded them. “There’s a solution,” he said with easy confidence. “We haven’t died yet. It’s what we have in common. We’re survivors.”

        This front crumpled inside the witch’s receiving room. “Search,” he said shortly. “Find out what she could do and whether there’s a way to copy it.”

        Thus began one of the stranger hours of Loren’s life. Rose explained the uses of her various chemical and alchemical compounds, her simple laboratory equipment, her Q-fed instruments and tools. Loren managed to keep any of her monologue from reaching his mouth. Now and then she snarled at him not to touch something, and she lapsed into irate, sullen silence when Nielsen found a leather-bound journal under her bed and read the first few pages. He frowned, flipped to the middle, reddened, and put it away. “Not relevant,” he said.

        Loren, who had ghostly memories of writing in that journal, didn’t press the point. Besides, Rose might have cut his throat or spontaneously combusted with mortification.

        “It’s almost all medical.” Nielsen was holding up a typewritten page. “These spells are strictly biological, even the ones with temporal effects. None of her magics concerned fire, force, telepathy, or transport.”

        He was almost right. Loren reached out and tapped a line of characters. “This one’s different. It’s entropic. Think of it as the genus that includes fire magics.”

        “Correct,” Nielsen said. He sounded impressed. “Lurga used to talk my ear off about how laymen always misunderstood the categories.”

        Then Loren was flat on his back, head ringing, and Nielsen had a knee on his chest. The barrel of the revolver was a black cave blotting out half the world. “What—” he began.

        “I know that,” Nielsen snapped, “because I spent hours keeping Lurga company. But Loren doesn’t know that, on account of him being, and I mean this kindly, not burdened with an overabundance of formal education. ‘Entropic?’ You might have slipped that one past me, Rose, but you used ‘differentiator’ earlier, and I’d lay odds Loren would think that’s a piece of a steam engine.”

        “Dammit,” Loren said. At least, he was pretty sure he was the one who said it.

        “There is another possibility we didn’t discuss,” Nielsen said. The eye behind the revolver’s sights was flat, expressionless. “That our witch was in on this from the beginning. What was the plan, Rose? You would switch bodies repeatedly, keep a healthy one all the way to the end? Play the odds that a few of us would survive the aethersleet unprotected? Not much of a plan.”

        “I concur,” Rose said. “Which is why I didn’t make it. This oaf murdered me, trying to save Clyde. Ask him.”

        Slowly, Nielsen swung the revolver aside and lowered the hammer. “That was my second theory,” he said. He settled back on his haunches. “Goddammit, McCully—you’re still in there?”

        “Yes. You knew?”

        “I suspected. Clyde was the only sick man with anything like kin. Usually, it’s friends and family who lose perspective in a crisis and do idiot things. Why do you think I involved you in the investigation? I had to keep you close. Either you’d murdered Rose, or someone was going to accuse you of it. Or both. I’m told that sometimes happens. Wilson, too. The man sees himself as the zeitgeist of the mining world. I thought he might have killed Gristle—sorry, Rose—just because of the feeling in the air.” He squinted at Loren, fingering the revolver. “But you’re not shilling for the Company. That’s clear enough.”

        “No,” Rose said, sitting up, “the Company would have picked someone competent.”

        Nielsen gave them a helpless look.

        “It’s Rose speaking,” she added. “I could do a falsetto if you’d like.”

        “No. God no. This is strange enough.” He laid aside the revolver and put his face in his hands. “McCully, how could you do this?”

        “It was an accident.”

        “Some accident,” Rose added, taking their voice up a third. “He just tripped and put his crowbar through my brachial artery, and then, oops, he tripped again and cracked my skull.”

        Gaping, empty silence. “I’m sorry,” Loren said. The words didn’t feel real anymore, perhaps because they’d never meant much to begin with.

        “Never mind that,” Nielsen said. “No one is allowed to collapse. Not now. Vexing as it is, the truth changes little, except that now I know the only genuine red is the few hundred doses in Rose’s closet. We still need to decide what to do.”

        “Simple,” Rose said. “We see if Lurga told you anything I don’t know. Then we find a way to keep our people alive. That’s our job, isn’t it?”

* * *

        Six hours later, they had nothing, and word came that two more men were nearing the terminal stage. “I can try putting them under a stasis spell,” Rose said. “It might kill them, or it might preserve them for a few hours.”

        “Why not just leave them in stasis until spring?” Loren asked.

        “Because if the crystallization doesn’t kill them, the spell will, in about three days,” she snapped. “The human body isn’t meant to be suspended out of time like that. The ones that survive more than three days tend to come back insane. If I can do the spell at all. The meat I’m wearing isn’t tingling with magical potential.”

        “Try it anyway,” Nielsen said. “Even if it accomplishes nothing else, it will feed more material into the rumor mill. As long as the men are asking questions, they won’t be attempting to kill each other for a pittance of red.”

        “Or,” Loren said, “we could tell the truth. There’s no Company spy. There was just... me. What I did and why. They’ll believe it. You know they’ll believe it.”

        Nielsen stared at him for a long moment. Then he gripped Loren’s arm and nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, we will. But not yet.”

        “Why not?”

        “Because we can’t know what they’ll do, and I still need Rose. And we might need you, too.”

        “But we’ll tell them?” Suddenly, that seemed important.

        “Yes, if we can’t save them. Better to go knowing the truth.”

        Loren let out a long sigh. A pressure in his chest he hadn’t noticed eased. “We’ll write it all down, then, too. We can leave the whole truth behind. Maybe the right people will find it. It wouldn’t feel right, dying without, I don’t know, a testimony.”

        It’s a shame you killed me. I’m beginning to think we might have been friends.

        We might have to be if we get through this, he thought, trying to keep the idea quiet. Seeing as we’re stuck together. Then, absurdly: How the devil do we explain this to Deirdre?

* * *

        Both men went into stasis, and Rose pronounced them stable.

        “How stable?” Nielsen asked.

        She waggled a hand. “Not particularly. A blow from, for example, a crowbar would still kill them, but they won’t die of disease, anoxia, hypothermia, old age... anything that degrades the body on a small scale, if you will. But no, before you ask, you can’t put a man in stasis on a handcar and roll it down the mountain. Someone would have to recover him at the other end, and the Company obviously isn’t worried about us trying to send messages. Either the support village is deserted, or the only people there are complicit.” She bit their lip. “The former, I think. It’s simpler. And cheaper.”

        “You’re likely right,” Nielsen said slowly. “You can’t put yourself in stasis and wake yourself up?”

        “Have you ever tried to lick your elbow?”

        He paused in mock consideration. “My own elbow?”

        He’s flirting with her, Loren thought, and it’s working. Fascinating.

        Are you taking notes? You should be. Ten years of marriage, and you still don’t know what you’re doing.

        He felt their cheeks burning.

        “What?” Nielsen asked.

        “You don’t want to know,” he said. “Is there a point?”

        “There might be. Tell me more about your body-switching spell, Rose.”

        So she did: “I was dying. The spell carried my mind into Loren’s, preserving my memories and personality alongside his. In wounding me, he’d opened a conduit, and there’s power in death, or more precisely, in sacrifice—”

        “What I need to know,” Nielsen said, “is whether you could make the leap several times in a row?”

        A pause, a fleeting image as Rose pictured bodies arranged like the rungs of a descending ladder. And Loren felt her comprehension—a sweet, sad thing—spreading like sunrise through them both.

        “That can’t be the only way,” he said. “It can’t.”

        You said were willing to die to protect Deirdre from me. Will you not die to protect two hundred men from a slow and painful death?

        “They’re not mine.”

        No. But they are mine. If I still had my body, this would have been my sacrifice to make. Now it’s yours, too. This is your doing. Accept it.

        Their right hand cupped his cheek. Their other reached out and gripped Nielsen’s hand, interlacing their fingers. “It’s the best we can do,” she said aloud, half to Loren, half in answer to Nielsen’s puzzled look.

        “What happened to giving up hope together?” Loren asked.

        We both know that was bullshit.

        He let out a strangled laugh and squeezed Nielsen’s hand. Or maybe Rose did. It mattered less, now.

* * *

        They found eight volunteers, most of them in the earliest stages of crack-up. The last was Kurtz, the little administrator, who had not been initially enthusiastic.

        “Would you like a chance at redemption?” Rose had asked him.

        He’d answered with a look like a frightened deer.

        “It’s a rare thing,” she went on. Their voice took on a strange harmonic, almost musical. “So many need it, so few find it. Your name will be written somewhere, Kurtz. The question is where, and how people will read it.”

        He’d jerked a nod then. “I’ll die?”

        “Mostly,” Rose said. Then, in a blatant lie: “It doesn’t hurt.”

        Nielsen’s insistence on coming was the hardest to accept. He had to do it, he maintained. Otherwise how could he expect it of anyone else? The conversation left a twisting coil of pain in their chest. It was love. Loren recognized it: a younger, sharper iteration of what he felt for Deirdre now that he had to leave her behind.

        Iteration, he thought. I’m starting to sound like Rose even on the inside.

        Let’s get this over with.

        But he still stopped halfway to the mine entrance and wrapped his arms around himself; around them. There was no laughter this time. Just quiet.

        “I’m so sorry,” he murmured.

        I know. I feel it. I don’t know whether I can forgive you yet.

        “You should have given Nielsen your picture.”

        It would only make things worse.

* * *

        Nine men, Nielsen included, were bundled tight and stacked like cordwood on the handcar and the small flatbed car trailing behind. Bottles of oxygen and gas heaters were racked within reach of the operator’s perch, right next to the handbrake that was the only control they’d need on the descent. The airlock door was still shut, but it shivered and hummed with the force of the wind outside.

        Nielsen and Loren had drawn up designs for a crude enclosure to protect the handcar and flatbed from the wind, and they’d covered the finished product in panels of aether insulation. It wouldn’t help much, but it was all they had. The trade-off was a higher profile. A strong enough wind would rip the car from the tracks and send it tumbling down the mountain.

        One by one, Rose put the men into stasis, then buttoned and tied their masks closed. They wouldn’t suffocate, not while their metabolisms were suspended. She was almost as sure that the aether and mundane cold wouldn’t affect them. “They’re not altogether in the world,” she said as Loren buttoned their outermost coat closed and pulled on a final pair of gloves. “They should be fine.”

        The last word came out muffled as he fixed their own mask in place and then tied a scarf around it.

        That was rude.

        She was whistling in the dark. Hell, after that episode with the knife at his groin, she’d spent the last couple of days whistling in the dark. She’d whistled right through her own funeral. Graveyard whistling.

        That was almost funny. Time to go.

        He threw the bolts and starting turning the crank to open the outer airlock door. Air fled with a thinning scream, and their ears popped. A chill began to eat at his bones—not air, but aether. The ordinary cold would start in on him later.

        He kept cranking, then climbed aboard the handcar, shut the crude hatch, and set it rolling with a single, laborious cycle of the lever. It rolled onto the tunnel downgrade and began to pick up speed. He clung tight to the handrail and brake, peering out through the eyeslit. Too slow, and they’d run out of bodies before they reached a habitable altitude. Too fast, and they’d fly off the tracks on a switchback.

        Then the car broke from the tunnel, and the night winds were upon them.

        Screaming eternity followed. There was no room for thought, scarcely room for fear. Time and pain were far away. The car ground to a halt against ice after the first mile, and they had to leave the sheltered cabin to chip the rails clear. Outside, the wind and aetherfall tore into them, flooding their body with a cold mindlessness that persisted even when they resumed the descent. Only Rose’s constant, snarling force of will kept Loren anchored, kept him aware of their body, and of when it began to fail. Now, she said. It has to be now. We’ve made it almost two thousand feet down, I think.

        I’m afraid, he thought back.

        I was too.

        He pulled the handbrake, and the handcar ground to a stop. He hauled Kurtz from the pile and started oxygen flowing to his mask. He relaxed his mind, and Rose summoned a final burst of will to drag Kurtz up from stasis.

        Kurtz sat up, thrashing, grabbing at his face. Loren gripped his wrists until he calmed. Kurtz was trying to shout over the wind outside, but he might as well have been a thousand miles away. So Loren ignored him and pressed the revolver into his hands, hoping the cold hadn’t damaged it. Then Rose tapped their chest.

        Kurtz’s eyes were wide behind his goggles, but he nodded, aimed, and fired.

        Pain. Then a rushing sensation, like flying down a tunnel of lights. Rose was taking him along with her, he realized. Had she meant to? Then the weight of unfamiliar flesh closed around him.

* * *

        They—Kurtz/Rose/Loren—descended another two thousand feet before the false warmth that signaled the final stages of hypothermia began to set in. So they woke the next man in line and gave him the revolver, and again there was a moment of pain, of flight, and it was almost a relief to have that fleeting moment out of the wind, to feel like they were flying and not being torn away.

        Seven more times they changed bodies, a growing committee of ghosts. They took Nielsen’s last. The outpost was still three thousand feet below, but the wind was weaker here and the aether less deadly. Through the fading wind, they could hear themselves all too clearly, a cacophony of desperation and pride and fear and sadness.

        We’ll make it, we have to make it—

        Can we tell Jane what happened to me and what I did—

        At least these knees don’t ache, God what a morbid thought—

        If that bitch had just asked for help in the first place—

        I think I could have loved her—you—in time or another life—

        There’s a picture I wish I’d shown you—

        If I could take so many things back—

        The handcar drifted to the end of the line and stopped. They piloted Nielsen’s body out and into one of the outbuildings. It was empty. They opened gas valves until they found the right ones and lit the heaters. The cellars, Loren thought through the noise. If there’s red, they’ll have stowed it down where it stays warmer.

        And we’ll need coal and heating oil and a hundred other things. That sounded like Kurtz. They fill the pipes in the locomotives with oil for the winter so nothing freezes. We’ll have to flush it out.

        I can show us how, someone else said. I used to service those engines. Anybody operated one? No? Well, we’ll figure it out.

        They did. It took two days, but they did. And when the train began to climb—slowly, slowly, with the wind ripping and clawing at it—they had four crates of red, all the vials headspaced to allow for freezing. They left their spent bodies outside. The cold would preserve them, for what little it was worth. After two days, even perfectly preserved in the cold, none of them looked like home anymore.

        I won’t get to go home to Deirdre this spring, what remained of Loren said. His memories persisted. They just didn’t feel like his. He was one of eleven drifting minds, all beginning to blur together.

        I can tell her what you did, another part of them said. It felt different than the others—feminine, wry, quiet, a little weary. Rose. Most of it. I might leave one part out.

        Thank you.

        She was pregnant when you last left her, you know, she went on. Clyde must have known. He thought he was buying you all a new life. He was a fool, but an understandable fool. Also, you are remarkably unobservant.

        She’s had five miscarriages.

        That doesn’t mean she’ll have six. Life always has a chance. Sometimes it’s a strange chance.

        Another ghost cut in. Nielsen. The strangest. This isn’t over. If we bring the red to the mine and see the men through the winter, we’ll still have to prove what the Company did. The winners in all this will be the lawyers. As is tradition.

        If and if, the wry part said. Her tone was sour, but they could feel their face trying to smile under the mask. That happened whenever these two ghosts spoke to each other. It was the damnedest thing, but there was a warmth to it. They all held to that warmth.

        We’ll make it, he (Loren?) said. It’ll be cold, that’s all.

        I’d give us one chance in three, the feminine voice said, but it sounded untroubled.

        Together, they rose into the howling wind. But the sky above was clear, and the moon hung vast and warm against the night, and they were unafraid.

Copyright © 2021 Andrew Dykstal

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Andrew Dykstal lives in Arlington, Virginia, where he writes across all manner of speculative genres. In 2003, long before the associated meme, he took an arrow to the knee, which was about as much fun as it sounds. His fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and his novelette “Thanatos Drive” won the 35th Writers of the Future contest. Find him online at andrewdykstal.com.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

CLEANING UP AFTER THE BLACKOUT BOYS

by Evan Marcroft

        Posters were going up all along Beetlebrass Street that morning. Some enterprising sergeant had put the city’s street children to work, paying them perhaps in haepennies to dash along its undulating cobblestones and paste writs of requisition across every storefront. Ustuus Creeg stopped to retrieve a loose one before the wind took it. Save the last bite for Private Cly it read, referencing the bashful soldier shown accepting a slice of pie from a pretty girl. The dictate below was still legible, ordering a tenth of every household’s organic intake reserved for military seizure, and offering examples such as breadcrusts, fruit cores, soup bones, anything nutrient-rich.

        Ustuus balled the paper in his knotty fist. It didn’t matter who ruled the city of Sabot; the taking never ended. All he wanted was for the drownéd coup to end. As long as it continued, the government would keep confiscating the scraps of every meal to fuel the gut-engines of its zooefacted war machines. To most, breadcrusts were garbage. To one starving, that last bite was everything.

        His belly rumbled like an idling engine.

        He obeyed and moved on.

* * *

        Though it would have been a hovel amongst the mansions uptown, the Peshtodi house was perhaps the finest in the Tarfort District. Its door was always open, always a scrum of hungry bodies shouldering out and in, its dining room crammed with long benches like the hall of some bygone chieftan-king, a humidity of steam and spice clotting the air.

        It was a near-dead tradition, the Neighborhood Kitchen, where anyone hungry could stop in, day or night, to escape the weather and enjoy a hot meal. Only Kashaya “Mama” Peshtodi had kept it alive into this young era of industry, asking nothing in return but a heartfelt thank-you, perhaps a favor if one felt so inclined, and one always did.

        It was this latter addendum that had scuttled Ustuus’s heart to the floor of his belly.

        He squeezed inside to find Mama Peshtodi at her range of flaming pots and pans—a small, plump, dark woman of indeterminate years, her hair pulled back from her face into a black raincloud, her forearms gloved in flour. She laughed as she served that morning’s guests, filling their bowls as generously as the Giver Sea herself and greeting them by name. Ustuus, as he did every morning before going to work, joined the line to receive his meal, and she greeted him with her usual g’morning dear while she ladled out his basketfish stew. Her fingers touched his beneath the bowl and left floury prints.

        He accepted the food with eyes downcast and squeezed into the nearest table to eat. It was delicious, as always. Ustuus adored her cooking more than that of his own late wife. Fishfat and sea-chili and squeezed citrus intermingling to mask the bitterness of obligation. Savory and salty on a tongue that would have been grateful for hardtack.

        Halfway to through the bowl an elbow prodded his ribs. Ustuus froze as the diner beside leaned over to murmur, “Mama wants a word.”

        Ustuus’s belly twisted itself into a knot that would not admit a morsel. He finished his meal anyway, never-minding the ache in his guts. When Mama Peshtodi asked a word, you gave her as many as she wanted.

        She smiled when he returned his bowl. “Come here a moment Ustuus,” she said, leading him into her parlor. Her husband, Albrin, sat by the window, glowering over the edge of a newspaper. Ustuus had never heard the man speak. The scars on his massive knuckles probably satisfied most inquiries.

        “What trying times these are, with this ugly coup business,” Mama Peshtodi remarked. “Flecter folks versus Staymer folks. Brother savaging brother. Sabot ripping itself to pieces. How’s that little lad of yours? Denly, aye?”

        Ustuus had never forgiven himself for letting that name slip. Of course, that had been before he’d known the price of eating from her kitchen. “I heard you wanted a word.”

        Her smile pierced her ample cheeks. “As I said, we’re in trying times. A woman must work so hard to feed all her friends in the neighborhood. Sometimes she can’t help but rely on the kindness of others. Sometimes, even though it shames her, she’s got to ask a favor.”

        Ustuus knew what to say. “Let me do something for you, Mama Peshtodi.”

        “What a lovely young man you are.” She stood on her toes to pluck a crumb of something from his moustache. “Do you know Unkillable Grimsby, who lives down the way?”

        How could he not? Deltweth Grimsby was the boss of the Tarfellows, the biggest of Sabot’s gangs, and had been for sixty-some years, surviving everything his rivals could muster. Many of his footsoldiers were his own grandkids, raised hard and ruthless.

        “I had me a constable in here the other day. He was keen to do me a favor too, at least after my Albrin helped him realize it. Boy let it slip to me that Old Unkillable is a Flecterist on the sly. I’d never have figured him as politically inclined, but they caught him disseminating rebel propaganda, so, as you may expect, that’s earned him a house-call coming from the Blackout Boys. And when I heard that, why, I thought of my friend and neighbor, professional housepainter Ustuus Creeg.”

        Ustuus watched the seconds hand spin around the clock above the door. He’d be late to work if he didn’t get a move on. Each tick was a rasp on his nerve, a threatening tap on a delicate life. “Please just tell me what you want from me.”

        Mama Peshtodi’s eyes flared like coals. “Old Unkillable’s slapped off the wrong folks this time. They’re taking him tomorrow night; you be there after they do. Everyone knows the bastard keeps a map of every cache he’s got in the city. A lifetime of ill-gotten gains, jealously hoarded. Bring me that treasure map before his own lads get it, and it’ll be a favor done. Without those doubloons, why, I fear I shan’t be able to keep my kitchen open. Not for everyone, at least.” Her gaze never broke from his, and from over his shoulder, Ustuus heard the newspaper crumple between Albrin’s powerful hands.

        He had no time to let the silence fester.

        “I’ll do it.” There was no other choice. He’d known this day was coming. “Just... I’m not... this sort of man, Mama. I want to live right and peacefully, is all.”

        “I know you do, dear. That’s why I got you something.” Mama Peshtodi rummaged through her apron’s pockets and then folded Ustuus’s fingers over something small and cold and sharp. “In case you run into any... trouble.”

        Ustuus squeezed her gift into his fist, hoping in vain to crush down to nothing. “You can count on me, Mama.”

        Mama Peshtodi patted his shoulder. “The two great feet of War and Politics stomp over all, while us little people scuttle below. We must work together to avoid being crushed. I know you’re with me, Ustuus. I know you won’t let me down.”

* * *

        Ustuus arrived at Günner & Blough’s Professional Housepainters a minute past late to his shift, his throat sore and his armpits dripping. The foreman luckily took no notice, and Ustuus had hardly caught his breath before he and his partner Vagn were back on the road to their first assignment, rattling along in a company herczécar whose tired old heart-engine sounded ready to give out at any moment.

        The blood was still sticky when they arrived at the house. Ustuus found it first on the inside doorknob, where it dripped and slashed its way towards a sunburst against the opposite wall. “Blackout Boys gettin’ sloppy,” Vagn muttered, pushing past with the cart of paints and plasters into the kitchen. “Gonna be here the whole drownéd day.”

        Ustuus scoured the halls for bloodstains, pail and sponge in hand. He’d never been here before, but it was easy to tell who’d called it home. The framed pictures upon the mantle described a family of two parents, a son and a daughter. The toys cluttering the upstairs bedroom suggested a self-sacrificing love, judging by the threadbare state of the mother’s wardrobe. Four plates had been set at the table, where the blood was festooned most thickly. The pot of thin seafood soup on the stovetop was growing cold. Each room told a fragment of a story.

        His job was to silence them.

        “You heard the news, yeah?”

        He and Vagn worked side by side to slice the paper off the walls. Two heaps of the stuff already filled the sacks at their feet. “They say the Third Battalion got bushwhacked by Flecter’s at Butcher’s Creek,” Vagn went on. “Six hundred fighters, and he had them scampering up and down those hills for dear life. Don’t tell nobody I said nothing, but I’m startin’ to think Flecter might take this thing.”

        “It’ll be Staymer,” Ustuus muttered.

        Vagn looked up at him quizzically. “How do you figure, Mister Creeg?” Vagn, a younger man grown burly lugging cargo until the war effort commandeered the port, did a lot of talking, a lot of boasting, but not a lot of thinking.

        “Because we’re his,” Ustuus replied. “For all the back and forth, never once has it been a question if his men can come to your house at night and take away your family. Have you ever once felt like that wasn’t true?”

        Vagn pinched his lips and glanced at his feet.

        It hadn’t surprised a soul when Louhinia Staymer appointed her son Brugan the next Quartermaster of Sabot. She’d gone from a Quartermaster’s silent wife to a silent widow, to a silent ruler, and anyone who could say how she’d done it had been made dead. That sort, Ustuss knew, didn’t let go of power—they swallowed it and passed it on through blood.

        That wasn’t to say it made folks happy either. People called it the coup for ease of reference, Ustuus among them, but in truth it was a war from the first shot fired, which was from an assassin’s gun into Brugan Staymer’s gut. Harald Flecter, speaking for a coalition of generals, had claimed responsibility, and declared that power should be returned to the populace. Brugan Staymer, as silent as his mother, made no statement of his own and had returned fire with the terrible force of his military.

        Sabot’s youth might wonder who between the two would win, but Ustuus never doubted Staymer, for if that youth did wonder, it was always in a whisper.

        The killing would continue, both abroad and at home. Where Brugan Staymer’s informants smelled Flecterist sympathy, the Blackout Boys were sure to come knocking. Ustuus shivered at the thought.

        Day or night, it mattered none; no respite from fear was permitted by law. They would arrive as randomly and inescapably as a heart attack and depart just as swiftly, propelled by a dispassionate efficiency. And for Brugan Staymer, it was not enough to disappear his dissidents, as his mother commonly had. His administration required the total subordination of reality itself. Those who were taken were not just gone, they had never been, which was where Günner & Blough’s Professional Housepainters came in.

        The terms of their government contract were exacting. Ustuus had memorized them in his bones. Every article of clothing, along with any toys, photographs, and heirlooms, was to be disposed of in the nearby River Bile, that fetid water their unwitting accomplice. Gold was to be set aside; all valuables belonged to the state, and theft was an offense not worth the risk. With the house barren, Ustuus’s penultimate chore was to dig the bullets from the walls and plaster over the holes. This time, the Blackout Boys had been careful and left none behind.

        Lastly, they were to slather the house in a coat of colorless paint, each room, floor to ceiling. When they were through it would be a white-sided hollowness, all evidence of its Former Individuals lovingly erased. The only untouchable impressions would remain locked by behind tongues frightened into silence. Filling in holes, painting over scuffs, wringing blood from a sponge until the water ran clear; this was Ustuus’s living: unhappening the lives of others.

        “Another perfect Brugan Box,” Vagn remarked afterwards, as they packed back into the herczécar. Though they could not afford to be caught hoarding jewelry, not all that was valuable was precious. Vagn liked to collect spoons. He’d stowed half a dozen down his bootlegs. Ustuus thought that morbid, though he was no better. He’d turned the pantry out and filled his boots with dried sweetfigs. The foreman would think only to inspect their work satchels, and neither would report the other’s harmless transgressions so long as they both looked the other way. It felt like stealing crumbs from a giant’s picnic.

        Ustuus climbed into the pilot’s cab but kept his hand off the starting switch. “Vagn, I need your help with something.”

        “Sure, alright. What is it, Mister Creeg?”

        Vagn was solid. Worked hard. Ustuus already regretted saying anything. “The foreman don’t ken it yet, but there’s going to be an assignment tomorrow night. I’m fixing to be on the job, and I’d like to have you with me. Stay with me at the office for the night shift. Even if nothing comes up, it’ll be a favor done.”

        Vagn’s brow crumpled. “Sounds like some murky business, if you don’t me saying.”

        “Might be,” Ustuus admitted. “You still box at the Cannonball Club?”

        Vagn grinned and made his biceps dance. “Every Thassersday night.”

        Ustuus glanced back at the house. “Shit. We forgot one thing.” He pointed, and Vagn hopped from the vehicle to pry the nameplate off the front door. Ustuus glanced it over, sighed, and tossed it into the back of the ‘car with the other river-bound things. Shouldn’t have looked, he scolded himself. The government would take anything, no matter how small—a crumb, a life, an existence.

        “There you are, Private Cly,” Ustuus muttered as they drove away. “The last bite.”

* * *

        It was darkening when Ustuus clocked out. Half a league of aimless streets divided him from his flat in the heap of tenements called the Crumbling. The herczécar belonged to Günner & Blough’s. He was not allowed to drive it home. He could have shelled out five haepennies for a ride on a public galvapede, but no. Best save his coinage for more dire needs. His own two feet worked for free, and besides, the arrhythmic churning of a galvapede’s many legs made him nauseous. Or so he insisted to himself.

        Up five flights of creaking stairs he climbed to collect his son. Katirja, the girl who took care of him during the day, answered the door in her housecoat, her hair knotted up for bed.

        “You’re supposed to be watching him,” Ustuus said.

        “Ain’t you supposed to be here sooner than now?” she retorted with a sneer. “Your boy’s conked too. Wait here, I’ll fetch him.”

        She returned minutes later guiding a knackered Denly by the hand. “There,” she said, and held out her hand to be paid. “Three tipels then.”

        Ustuus frowned. “We agreed on two.”

        “Aye, we did. But a girl with a husband in the war has got to take care of herself. Lookin’ after someone else’s pups is a luxury, ain’t it? I ain’t the fuckin’ Giver Sea, what can milk pearls from my teats.”

        Katirja couldn’t have been seventeen by his estimation. A War Wife, bedded on the eve of deployment and then left to fend for herself. Even odds her husband never came home again.

        “Two and a half,” Ustuus said.

        “Three.”

        She knew she had him over a barrel. That he couldn’t trust anyone else with Denly. He paid her in haepennies and pulled his son close. “You feed him?”

        “Ask him your own drownéd self,” Katirja said, and shut the door.

        Ustuus carried Denly back to their flat another two floors up. By then the boy was awake enough to eat what Ustuus set at the table for him. “I don’t like sweetfigs,” Denly complained, watching Ustuus peel off their thorny outer hulls.

        He’d have liked to pilfer a tin of beans, but that wouldn’t fit down his boots. “Well, I like them even less,” Ustuus countered, “which is why they’re all for you.”

        “I guess that’s fair,” Denly glumly conceded. He’d turn five in the winter, but he had brains in him that most men ten times his age were sorely lacking. He would tear through school once he reached that age. Assuming Ustuus could afford it.

        But those were tomorrow’s worries. Today had plenty. “Eat up now,” Ustuus said, ruffling his fingers through Denly’s dense locks. His son had a good head of hair on him; that meant he was eating right, and Ustuus could be proud of that. “Get big and strong, so one day you can make your old man eat the sweetfigs.”

        “I wouldn’t do that,” Denly replied, mortally offended.

        Ustuus laughed so hard his chest hurt. He’d waited all day for the chance.

        The life that Ustuus had cobbled together for he and his son was balanced upon three crooked legs: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. One set of all three was a tall order in the slums of Sabot, let alone two. He’d worked out a system, a survival machine, and maintained its components with the devotion others saved for worship. Breakfast for himself at Mama Peshtodi’s, then a free lunch at the company canteen. For supper he’d subsist off whatever Denly didn’t finish, which was hardly ever much. This freed up enough coin to pay Katirja to feed Denly during the day and to put a meal in him before bed. Like any machine, it performed its function so long as all its gears were in place.

        Remove one, however, and everything would fall apart.

        Once Denly could show him a spotless plate, Ustuus took him to his bed and read him a story from Astelchus’s Book of Fables, the one about the Picaroon Queen and the Wyrm-’O-The-Moon. There was no time left in the day for more. “I hope I see you tomorrow,” Denly said, his lips the last part of him still awake. The next sound he made was a soft snore.

        The night draped down hard upon Ustuus, its silence leaden, claustrophobic. Tomorrow. Tomorrow he’d stop being such a miserly fool and pay the drownéd galvapede fare. Too few hours had he with his boy to fritter them away on Sabot’s streets. A son ought not to wonder if he’d see his father every day. Maybe he’d let Denly hold the book and start to teach him how to read. Maybe they’d walk down to the Garsmouth Street Night Market to ogle the queer fishes that were for sale. Then he winced, remembering the task that lay before him, that he could not afford to shirk. The tomorrow after next then, he promised his son with a kiss to Denly’s cheek.

        Tomorrow’s tomorrow for sure.

        With Denly sound asleep, Ustuus crept over to his own bed to examine Mama Peshtodi’s gift under his gas lamp. He hadn’t dared look at it outside of these four walls, but he’d felt its outline through his trousers, and known.

        The heart of Sabotine technology was flesh. The science of zooefaction had stuck a prybar in the cycle of natural selection and retrofitted life with purpose. Boiling blood, not steam, drove the pistons of this new industrial epoch. The thing on his bedside table was an outlawed and truly devious piece of biological engineering. It resembled the spiraling shell of a cone snail. Indeed, it had been derived from that blueprint. Its poison was not as literal but no less deadly. When inserted into the ear canal and stroked just so, the drip of toxin it secreted would numb the center of the brain that connected the human face with the word human. Two eyes, a nose, and a mouth would cease to constitute a person.

        In case you run into any trouble, she’d said.

        It was called a Garwulf Switch, and it made men into monsters.

* * *

        Ustuus observed the motions of his workday from three feet behind his body. He’d never taken a good look at himself. What was he? A fathom of working-class muscle, aye. Muscle going soft, his bones eroding in the blowing years. His hands knew the texture of blood, but had they spilled a drop? No, not a one. This body of his wanted peace. To do its work and quietly rust away. It was not the tool for monkeying with gangland politics.

        He’d pled his case to Mama Peshtodi earlier that morning. “Is there nothing else I can do? I’m good with my hands, Mama. I can paint your house if you want. Fix something up for you. Whatever you want.”

        She had stabbed her ladle into its pot like a knife into a chest. “What I want is to eat, same as you. Do you think this here bounty of the sea comes from nothing? You think I’ve no appetite myself?”

        The wall of muscle named Albrin had manhandled him into the other room, where Mama Peshtodi was free to unsheathe her teeth. “There’s no surviving on favors forever, Ustuus,” she’d growled, her fingernail between his ribs. “All this giving I do depends on folks giving back, and with the coup on, its only getting harder every day. I want to do more than tread water. I want to thrive, not just survive. Do this for me and I’ll keep your belly full. Run, and I’ll cut it out of you. Raise me up, or I drag you down with me, like the Taker Sea herself. Understand?”

        Ustuus could only nod.

        “Then get the map.” Her eyes could have turned steaming broth to ice.

        Take pride, he’d told himself later. No bigger fool will ever come through her door. He’d known her game from the start, and yet. Everyone knew how Mama Peshtodi kept her pantry stocked. One ate at her table knowing that sooner or later, she asked everyone a favor. A favor to be done with a smile, unless one wished to have their knees smashed to pieces. His mistake had been thinking that later would never come.

        The call came in an hour short of midnight, right when Ustuus had begun to hope it never would. A squall blundered in from the sea not long after, pie-eyed on brine, to batter the city with saltwater fists. The herczécar itself shivered as it slogged up the hairpin slopes towards their destination, the downpour seeping through its steel carapace to bite at Ustuus and Vagn inside. Ustuus would be amazed if the poor thing didn’t catch cold and get put down before week’s end.

        A bone-rattling drone like the humming of some giant wasp scudded low overhead. Blue-green lights swam like drowned spirits through the rain. Ustuus glimpsed a thorax suspended on bulbous flight-sacs, a black-garbed figure manning the controls, before the aeropolzat banked up over the rooftops and slipped out of view.

        “Reckon that’s the last anyone’ll see of Old Unkillable.” Vagn contorted to watch the aeropolzat go. Ustuus said nothing, only shivered in time with the herczécar. Vagn had not felt that cold shadow slither over them—the war against sedition taking a colossal step over their insignificant strivings below. This time it had ignored them, having other foes to crush. Next time, it might not.

        The Garwulf Switch burned like ice against Ustuus’s thigh.

        Unkillable Grimsby made his home in the heart of Tarfort, where modern tenements clung like brick burls to ancient black battlements. The Blackout Boys had left the lights on; the highest window of the four-story townhouse smoldered through the liquid evening. Ustuus parked the herczécar in the shelter of the alley opposite, and Vagn brought their cart in through the unlatched front door.

        “So, we’re looking for something, aye? That’s what this is about then?”

        “No,” Ustuus said. “All we’re doing is our job. One more Brugan Box. But if you should happen to come across anything interest, don’t hesitate to shout it out. You ken?”

        Vagn returned a snappy salute, and the two set to work.

        The late Deltweth Grimsby had been a man of humble tastes. His carpets were threadbare, his curtains thoroughly moth-holed, his wallpaper peeling in long curls like sunburnt skin. His ill-gotten wealth must have gone into his hidden trove, hoarded for an unknown purpose never to be fulfilled. Ustuus found no trace of blood on the first or second floors. Might be Grimsby had been taken for interrogation. Either way he was dead, whether in truth or practicality.

        With Vagn working downstairs, Ustuus went in search of the map. Where would a man so paranoid as to be called Unkillable conceal the key to his fortune? Nowhere so obvious as the false bottom of a drawer, though Ustuus checked for that anyway. With a prybar he tore out the baseboards, the sconces, anything inconvenient for a burglar. The only holes to be found were for mice.

        His search led him to the fourth floor—the master bedroom, where Grimsby’s sheets had been strewn about the room. Ustuus turned the bed over, turned the wardrobe out on the floor. The nightstand concealed a Kraumtausser-brand double-action toothgun with a full mandible of twelve sharp incisors but nothing more. The zooefacted firearm hadn’t helped Grimsby, and it wouldn’t help Ustuus either.

        He pawed the sweat off his neck. Where had the bastard stowed the drownéd thing? He and Vagn didn’t have all day. By the Giver Sea, they didn’t even have all night. He could be sacked if the place weren’t wiped in time. Loss would trigger loss: of his home, of his future. The survival machine would irreparably collapse, and as for Denly...

        Pinned between obligations, Ustuus could not breathe.

        A jag of light sliced through his worries. Ustuus tripped over to the window and squinted through the curtains. A second herczécar had pulled up across the street, its eyelights blazing a queasy green. Ustuus’s heart began to play a marching beat as three wet shadows filed out of the zooefacted vehicle and converged on the house.

        “Mister Creeg?” Vagn called out. “I think someone’s at the door.”

        Ustuus raised his voice to warn him, and what came instead was the roar of a gunshot.

        His hands clamped themselves over his mouth to trap the scream that would have brought death on him too. For a moment he envisioned Vagn’s earnest features brightly imposed against the darkness of his mind—he hadn’t known him long, but Vagn had been a hard worker, eager to please—and then, just as quickly, that image began to fade, Ustuus’s subconscious hurling unnecessary luggage overboard. He cursed himself for his own callousness even as his thoughts turned away towards the matter of survival.

        The next sound he heard was boots on the stairs.

        With nowhere to turn, Ustuus crammed his bulk into the wardrobe and held the door shut. He watched through the crack, with breath held in his chest, as a youth in the red tatters of a Tarfellow came into the room. His forearms had been tattooed tar-black from fingertips up past the elbows; from one hand dangled a glinting half-moon stained red—a gutting knife for slitting the innards out of fish.

        “You find him?” asked a voice from downstairs.

        Ustuus feared they meant him until the black-handed man spoke up. “Granddad Grim ain’t here. Bastards really done it. Taker Sea drown ‘em all. They finally got Old Unkillable.”

        Aye, he’s gone. There’s nothing for you here. Get in your ‘car and go.

        “Mum’ll be crushed,” the man downstairs said.

        Black-hand turned, his brow furrowed to a point. A shaven head and scarified lips gave him the semblance of a skull. That corpse’s gaze swept past the wardrobe, and Ustuus felt the ripple of death swimming by.

        “Let’s cheer her up then, brother,” Black-hand said with a dawning grin. “How early’s too early to read the will?”

        Ustuus feared to so much as blink as Black-hand ransacked the room, presumably on the hunt for that same drownéd treasure map. It occurred to him only then that the two men didn’t know he was there, had not heard Vagn call up to him. Vagn’s death had not been entirely pointless, then; it had bought Ustuus a few extra moments of life.

        Moments that were almost used up. It was only a matter of seconds before Black-hand examined the wardrobe. Time seemed to slow to a sadistic crawl to watch Ustuus sweat. The Taker Sea, in her cruel generosity, had blessed him with two choices, to flee or fight, and he’d squandered the former already.

        Far too late, Ustuus recalled the weapon in the bedstand. And what good would it do him anyway? He’d never struck a blow in anger. He didn’t know the art. He’d shouldered through life with his eyes to the ground lest the city take notice and snap him up. Yet it noticed him now.

        And once it had him, it would leave Denly a seal pup alone in a hungry sea.

        Something in his subconscious took a hold of his frantic thoughts and bent them, snapped them, like fingers, towards Mama Peshtodi’s gift. Ustuus dug out the Garwulf Switch and held it to his eye. In the dark of the wardrobe, its nacreous white shell shone like an ill star. His only guide home.

        This body of his wanted only peace. It had no killing edge. But like any blunt tool, it could crack a skull when swung hard enough. And though he could not imagine taking another human life, even he could swat a wasp before it stung.

        It strained his arm, this leaden choice to become monstrous. But he made it. The Garwulf Switch screwed neatly into his ear. The venom, when it came, bled like icewater through his head.

        Tomorrow’s tomorrow for sure.

        A creature with all-black hands swung the wardrobe open, and Ustuus hammered four knuckles into the brittle bone between its eyes. The thing reeled backwards, blood jetting out of its face like a squeezed tomato. Ustuus’s stomach convulsed—its features were uncannily like his own, and so much more horrific for it. He stowed his revulsion and charged, slamming the creature onto the cot that Grimsby had called a bed, which collapsed beneath the weight.

        Ustuus had no art for fighting, only instinct, a wolf in the brain, and it was loose. He came down upon the creature with fists whirling, battering its mandible shut whenever it tried to cry out. He locked his hands air-tight around the creature’s throat and hardly felt anything when it struck him with its knife and carved away a peeling of cheek. Some emotion approximating terror flooded its alien eyes, and Ustuus’s blood frothed in animal glee.

        The creature arched its knee into Ustuus’s groin. The pain pierced his adrenalin mania and forced him to relinquish his death-grip. Whatever the thing was, it faced the same choice he had, to fight or flee, and in the heat of the moment, it chose the latter. It was two steps towards the door when Ustuus rose, hooked its neck in the crook of his arm, and stumbled back against the wall with the creature on top of him.

        The sound of the blood stampeding through his skull, the creature angry spluttering, the knocking of their boots against the floor, all of it spiraled together in Ustuus’s head into a high-pitched whine. The flailing knife scored his arm, his nose, the dulled pain only goading him to end it quickly. His free hand scrabbled across the nightstand, found the toothgun’s weighty grip.

        Three blows to the side of its temple, and the black-handed creature went limp.

        “—gulls take your giblets, Beor. You fixing to wake the drownéd neighborhood?”

        A second creature appeared on the stairs outside. Ustuus met its gaze and froze. It reacted first. The toothgun on its belt seemed to melt like quicksilver into its hand. Three shots pounded all their sound into the same flat ringing; three hammer-blows struck Ustuus in the chest, but not three teeth. The dead muscle and bone of the creature draped over him had absorbed that lethal ivory like a suit of armor.

        Everything in Ustuus’s vision was in shades of red. To the animal within him, the toothgun in his hand was as primal a weapon as a jagged stone. His heart flexed, his finger contracted, and metabolically catapulted teeth bit holes in the walls, the door, the rafters. A single, red spot welled up on the creature’s cheek. The lips below it continued to move, struggling to sputter out some final thought, until they at last realized the futility and fell still. The body collapsed like a doll packed with sand.

        Ustuus inhaled for the first time in what felt like years—in, then raggedly out—and remembered there had been three of them. Wait, three of who? His skull suddenly felt too cramped. The bedroom swayed like a ship at sea. He could have sworn he’d seen three men entering the house. But then, where had these monsters come from?

        Ustuus stood dizzily. His memories were unraveling like rope into contradictions, but he was still in danger; that much was clear. He stumbled to the door. The stairs were empty but dark at the bottom. Whoever—or whatever—was down there would have heard the commotion, and they’d be smarter than to bumble into a gunfight. They would be waiting for him to come creeping out, and they’d be waiting with a loaded fang.

        The stairs were a deathtrap. Instead, Ustuus turned to the window. The downspout outside was rusted along its length but seemed securely fastened to the brick. He had not the time for another idea. With the gun stuffed down his trousers he shimmied down the pipe, praying for the Giver Sea to bless him with strength.

        The moment his boots touched cobblestone, the lights came back on inside. Through the open door he saw Vagn’s body splayed out like a pelt and, standing over him, a creature with arms blackened down to the fingertips. Ustuus’s hand moved faster than his thoughts, raising Grimsby’s gun and squeezing off a handful of blind incisors into the house. The creature ducked for cover, and that was opportunity enough to turn tail and run.

        The company herczécar awaited him in the alley across the street. He all but flew the distance as hot enamel slugs sang past his ears. Through the pelting he rain he could swear he glimpsed Denly in the back of the cab, urging him on through the rear window.

        Ustuus dove inside the herczécar, pulled the door shut, and shoved the starting switch into its socket. A synaptic jolt to its stunted notochord shocked it awake; it shuddered, pistons hauling on zooefacted muscles, its heart-engine thrumming up horsepower. I’m on my way, Denly, Ustuus thought, stomping the spur-plate into the floor.

        The herczécar lurched forward half a fathom and then died with a cough.

        His giddy heart plummeted like a thing harpooned.

        Footfalls on cobblestones. The creature ran up to the pilot’s side window and discharged its gun in three small explosions. Then—

        A wet, shearing sound—slickened bone grinding on gunmetal.

        Ustuus opened his eyes.

        The black-handed thing gawped at its own toothgun, dumbfounded to find its mandible empty as an old man’s and Ustuus alive. Ballistic fangs had bit deep into the dashboard, the leather seat, the window behind him, but missed him entirely.

        Ustuus aimed his toothgun at the creature’s chest, but before he could squeeze the trigger, a fist as solid and black as a cannonball nearly tore his head off his neck and smashed his thoughts to smithereens. Ustuus fell back into the passenger’s seat with hardly the wits to keep hold of his weapon. The pilot’s side door flew open, and clammy hands seized him by the feet. Ustuus could not fight back as the creature dragged him out into the alley.

        The electric pain of his tailbone cracking against the street shocked the sense back into him. He swung blindly, struck something— a chin by the grunt it elicited—and received a ringing blow in return. A grit-studded bootheel ground his gun-hand into the side of the ‘car, but still his stubborn fingers refused to give it up.

        The creature stepped back for another stomp, and in that moment Ustuus lunged, hooking two fingers under its beltbuckle and pulling it into the snout of his toothgun. To Ustuus’s rattled mind it was the weapon’s shout, more than the tooth, that scorched skin and tore through muscle, that deafening, convincing, perforating boom.

        The creature hit the alley wall and skidded down onto its haunches, while Ustuus’s skull bounced back against the herczécar. The Garwulf Switch came unplugged from his ear and fell between the cobblestones.

        With that release, that slow drip interrupted, came clarity. The blood sheeting down his lips. The lingering tremor in his gun hand. The moaning of gut-shot man across from him. Ustuus took it all in like a virgin to life, all at once. He choked on a scream, coughed instead, and bent double to heave up all the nothing in his belly.

        His memory was immune to the switch’s poison. The Tarfellow in the bedroom with bruises ‘round his throat like a black choker; his brother, dead on the floor with a tooth in his brain—when Ustuus closed his eyes, he could see them in perfect clarity—boys, not monsters, boys—and knew that he forever would. He’d killed them, and they would remain in him like dye between glass.

        “Please,” a weak voice rasped; Ustuus reflexively jabbed his gun at the sound. Blood pulsed from between the Tarfellow’s clenched fingers. Peering fearfully out from between the scars and the stubble was a little boy pleading for his life. The echo of someone’s son. Ustuus found himself utterly and terribly lucid, his inner animal asleep. Whatever he did next would be his choice alone. There would be no other self to catch the spray of blood.

        “Don’t,” the Tarfellow begged. A plea for mercy. A promise of harmlessness. I’m not a threat anymore, that one word said. This time I mean it.

        Ustuus wished he could believe him.

* * *

        The lights in Mama Peshtodi’s front hall came on, and from the top of the stairs, she let out a shriek. Albrin came barreling onto the landing behind her in his underclothes, a sawed-off scattergun comically small in his brawny hands. Ustuus remained where he was, in the chair beside the window at the bottom of the stairs, shards of glass about his feet. From that range the scattergun might not kill, and the toothgun he had trained on them still had a molar or two left in the can.

        “I broke a window,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’ll fix it.”

        Mama Peshtodi set her jaw. “What do you think you’re doing, Ustuus Creeg?”

        Blood dripped off his chin, staining the table before him. His brain bobbed on choppy waters, but his aim stayed steady. “I remember when there were Neighborhood Kitchens all over,” he said. “They were different, then. There wasn’t nothing attached. Just folks helping folks as best they could. Do you remember how that was? Aye, it’s hard out there. But I think we make it harder too.”

        Albrin raised the sawed-off. Mama Peshtodi placed her hand on his arm to stay him a moment yet. “You look something a dog spat out. What happened?”

        Ustuus laughed, though it came out half a sob. He licked his lips. Tasted salt and iron both. Like a tool used for the wrong job, he’d been ruined in some internal way he hadn’t even begun to comprehend.

        “The short of it is I ain’t got your map, Mama. I’m sorry.”

        “Well nothing ain’t what I asked for, is it? You’d best get your bleeding arse back—”

        “No, Mama,” Ustuus interjected. “I won’t do that. I searched that house from top to bottom, two times over. If your map was there, it’s long gone now. Maybe it was never there at all and no-one will ever find Grimsby’s gold.” He dipped his free hand into his pocket and slapped the Garwulf Switch on the table. “Either way, you ain’t going to get what you want. You just ain’t. And I’m real sorry for it.”

        A blister of silence swelled between them. Mama Peshtodi, defiant of his weapon, trod further down the stairs. In the wavering lamplight she seemed older than the morning had presented her. She’d concealed tired eyes beneath grease and flour makeup. Her unbound hair was veined with gray. It must have taken strength to present strength throughout so much of the day.

        “I love you, Mama,” Ustuus said. “Honest. You’re the reason I can feed my boy. I do want to do you a favor. I’d love to paint your house. I saw your stoop has got some rot. I could fix that, if it’d make you happy. But if all you want’s a treasure map, well I can’t help that. I can’t raise you up, Mama. But we can keep each-other afloat. Ain’t that how it’s supposed to be?”

        She came to sit with him at the window table. She glanced once at his gun and then put her herself in front of it. “What do you suppose is a fair wage for a sturdy new stoop?” she demanded. “We talking haepennies, tipels, doubloons?” A heat had bled into her voice. Ustuus heard scorn caked over mounting desperation. “What is the best you can do for me worth? Is it worth a drownéd fucking thing?”

        “Probably not,” Ustuus said truthfully. “I could do that forever and never get rich.”

        Mama Peshtodi nodded to herself, then reached past his gun and took the Garwulf Switch. She turned it over between her fingers, studying, perhaps, the choice that he had made in the street outside. The other, unkind him that could have come in through her window.

        Ustuus watched tears well up around her eyes. Her taut jaw trembled as if struggling to hold on to something; an aspiration perhaps, that was slipping away. For all she’d put him through, he wished there was something he could say. It shouldn’t be so hard, Ustuus felt, for a little person to reach for a little dream, like hers. If he knew anything though, it was that there was nothing that was too small for the city to take away. No meager fortune, no dignity. All one could do then was try to desire something smaller, and love the hand that gave it.

        “This old house does need a new coat of paint,” she admitted at last, in a small voice. “Albrin can’t get up there the way his knees are. You can do that for me?”

        “Yes Mama. I’ll fix your window too. Whatever you need. I’m good for it.”

        Mama Peshtodi swallowed, then sighed in utter defeat. “All right, then. I’d like that. Thank you, Ustuus.”

        He let the gun tumble from his fingers, and an anchor’s weight fell off his arm. “Can I come in for breakfast tomorrow?”

        She could not look him in the eyes, but she reached out and squeezed his fingers.

        “Sure, dear. I’d miss you if you didn’t.”

        Ustuus let her fetch some rum to disinfect his wounds and bandages to bind them. She offered to fry him up an oilcake to take for the walk home, but he feared to impose. He felt ashamed to have pulled her out of bed. He did let her usher him to the door, and the goodbyes they exchanged were not unkind.

        The galvapedes wouldn’t be awake and running for an hour yet. It would be a walk back to the office then. Time, at least, to think on how to explain away his injuries, his lack of Vagn. It was true the herczécar had died; they’d find it where he’d abandoned it. Vagn had run off and not come back. Perhaps he’d turn up later. As for Ustuus’s wounds, he’d simply tripped down the stairs; the foreman would not care enough to dig deeper. And if they looked, they’d find Grimsby’s house a perfect Brugan Box, spotless from top to bottom, not a drop of blood out of place.

        As ever, the River Bile had been a perfect accomplice. It could swallow a herczécar whole and not ask what was inside it.

        In the eyes of Günner & Blough he’d done his job. He would be fine. Work would wear away the stains upon his soul, and tomorrow he would eat before his shift.

        At the intersection of Bouleswille and Cod Street, Ustuus glanced back at Mama Peshtodi’s before it turned out of view.

        On softly droning flight-sacs the aeropolzat descended. Its simian hands anchored its buoyant frame to a lamppost, and from the hatch in its underbelly emerged a black-garbed procession, who entered the house through its latched front door with the ease of specters come to shepherd away the dead. It happened so smoothly, with such calibrated efficiency, that Ustuus could not be sure it was real until he blinked and the aeropolzat was still there.

        A tremble began in his hands and traveled to his heart. His breath razored through him. This was dangerous for him to see, and so his panicked subconscious decided that he would not see it. His feet turned him about and marched him into the nearest alley, where he took off his vest, wadded it into a ball, and screamed into it until his throat tore.

        In due time Ustuus returned to the offices of Günner & Blough’s. He reported his lies, and the foreman accepted them. The crew were shorthanded that night with a new assignment just in, and so Ustuus volunteered like a good employee should. They gave him a new herczécar, a new partner whom he’d never met, and sent him straightaway to Mama Peshtodi’s Neighborhood Kitchen.

* * *

        Blood was the language of empty houses. Mama Peshtodi’s house spoke tersely but effectively. There was but one spatter against the parlor wall, which ended cleanly in the outline of a body. What it said was that one person had been shot here, and the other, close beside the first, had begged for their life.

        Ustuus acknowledged the house’s dying words, swallowed something cold and unsettling they had stirred in him, and then fetched a sponge to scrub them away.

        I had me a constable in here the other day, you know, Mama Peshtodi had said. He was keen to do me a favor too. Ustuus wondered if that was really all the constable had needed. A single brush with the law. A tiny mosquito, nibbling on Staymer’s lumbering beast. With just that, the government had become aware of her activities and had decided dispassionately, bureaucratically, to crush her. The fact of which was even now diffusing into the soapy water of his bucket.

        Dawn would find a more orderly Sabot. A house where a criminal had never lived and a government who still did not kill its people, much less people who had never existed. The truth would run pink and then clear.

        Ustuus moved next into the kitchen. He walked quietly between the long, empty tables, ran his fingers over the cold lip of a soup pot where dust would soon accrue. The house echoed his every step as if starving for sound. It had never been so quiet there. At every hour the room had been raucous with conversation, with gossip, the clatter of forks and knives, the kind of laughter that boomed from full bellies. Mama Peshtodi had perverted the Neighborhood Kitchen, had forced charity to turn a profit, but it had still been the last of what it was. A place that pulled people together to eat, to rest and be warm, to be close in a city that preferred its citizens alone.

        And now it was gone.

        Private Cly had claimed Ustuus’s very last bite.

        Ustuus left that room to his new partner and went upstairs to dismantle Mama Peshtodi’s bedroom. Her pillows jingled as he stripped apart the bed—a queer sound for feathers to make. As it happened, she’d sewn a dozen gold doubloons into the lining. He checked the underside of her mattress and found a line of stitches there. His knife disgorged a whole litter of doubloons.

        All told, Mama Peshtodi had hidden nearly fifty doubloons throughout her bedroom. If he had to guess, it was all the coin she had that hadn’t been invested in her kitchen and its cycle of favors. A tidy sum for a queen of the slums.

        A treasure trove for one like him.

        Ustuus filled his palms with coin, marveling and despairing. It was enough to keep Denly fed for months. If fifty doubloons were all the cost of bringing the kitchen back to life, he’d have gladly paid it. It was a power of the impoverished to stretch gold like taffy, but sooner or later it ran out. Kindness, on the other hand, gave birth to kindness and was therefore infinite.

        It was too late now. There was no morsel too small for the city to seize. All Ustuus could do now was all he could ever do: want something smaller, and love the hand that gave it.

        “Thank you Mama Peshtodi,” he whispered as he packed his boots with gold.

        Ustuus would have liked to remain and remember. To absorb memories before they drowned in the quiet. But the sooner this job was done, the sooner he could go home. The sooner he could hold Denly and find something to eat.

        In this lost house of plenty, his belly rumbled.

        He obeyed and moved on.

Copyright © 2021 Evan Marcroft

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Evan Marcroft is a speculative fiction writer from Sacramento, California, currently operating out of Chicago with his wife. Evan uses his expensive degree in literary criticism to do menial data entry and dreams of one day writing for video games, though he’ll settle for literature instead. His works of science fiction, fantasy, and spine-curdling horror can be found in a variety of venues such as Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, and Asimov’s SF. You can find a complete list of his published works at evan-marcroft@squarespace.com and reach him on Twitter at @Evan_Marcroft.

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COVER ART

“Spirit Village,” by Tyler Edlin

Tyler Edlin is a freelance illustrator and concept artist for the entertainment industry, creating epic fantasy and science fiction worlds. He gives back to the community providing regular classes and tutorials on such popular subjects as the fundamentals of character and environment design. View more of his work online at tyleredlinart.com.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1076

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Compilation Copyright © 2021 Firkin Press

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