TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 89, October 2017

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: October 2017

SCIENCE FICTION

Longing For Stars Once Lost
A. Merc Rustad

The Walk Up Nameless Ridge
Hugh Howey

Crossing the Midday Gate
Aliette de Bodard

What I Told My Little Girl About the Aliens Preparing to Grind Us Into Hamburgers
Adam-Troy Castro

FANTASY

The Tale of Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle
Sofia Samatar

The Dragon of Dread Peak (Part 1)
Jeremiah Tolbert

The Dragon of Dread Peak (Part 2)
Jeremiah Tolbert

Becoming
Rachel Swirsky

NOVELLA

The Breaker Queen
C.S.E. Cooney

EXCERPTS

Peter Cawdron | Retrograde
Peter Cawdron

John Crowley | Ka
John Crowley

NONFICTION

Book Reviews: October 2017
Christie Yant

Media Reviews: October 2017
Christopher East

Interview: Tade Thompson
Christian A. Coleman

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

A. Merc Rustad

Hugh Howey

Jeremiah Tolbert

Adam-Troy Castro

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2017 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Reiko Murakami

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: October 2017

John Joseph Adams | 775 words

Welcome to issue eighty-nine of Lightspeed!

We have original science fiction by A. Merc Rustad (“Longing for Stars Once Lost”) and Adam-Troy Castro (“What I Told My Little Girl About The Aliens Preparing to Grind Us Into Hamburgers”), along with SF reprints by Hugh Howey (“The Walk Up Nameless Ridge”) and Aliette de Bodard (“Crossing the Midday Gate”).

We’re enjoying a change of pace in our fantasy department as we serialize an original novella (in two parts) from Jeremiah Tolbert (“The Dragon of Dread Peak”). We’ll also have fantasy reprints by Sofia Samatar (“The Tale of Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle”) and Rachel Swirksy (“Becoming”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns, and a feature interview with Tade Thompson.

John Joseph Adams Books News for October 2017

This month, we’re publishing Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey, a short story collection including three stories set in the world of Hugh’s mega-hit Wool and two never-before-published tales, plus fifteen additional stories collected together for the first time. You can read “The Walk Up Nameless Ridge” (in this issue) to get a feel for the kind of stories that appear in the collection.

“I devoured this book! The wildly imaginative tales in Machine Learning tackle everything from AI and aliens to video games and VR, and Howey infuses each one of them with the perfect mix brains, bravado, and heart. Reading the stories in this collection is like discovering an entire lost season of The Twilight Zone in which every episode was written by either Rod Serling or Richard Matheson. They’re that good.” —Ernest Cline, bestselling author of Ready Player One

“Like a knapsack of compact grenades, exploding insight, unexpected innovations, and sci-fi heat. Each one the core of something larger.” —Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired

“Hugh’s stories keep me turning pages not just to find out what happens, but because of the deep common threads of humanity within. I don’t just want to know the ending, I care about every moment.” —Annie Bellet, USA Today bestselling author of The Twenty-Sided Sorceress series

Next month, we’ll be publishing Molly Tanzer’s Creatures of Will and Temper—a Victorian-era urban fantasy inspired by The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which an épée-fencing enthusiast and her younger sister are drawn into a secret and dangerous London underworld of pleasure-seeking demons and bloodthirsty diabolists, with only her skill with a blade standing between them and certain death.

“Tanzer mixes Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray with queer romance and demonology in this subtle, beautiful Victorian-era fantasy novel. [. . .] The perfectly depicted relationship between the sister [protagonists] takes center stage in a complex (though never overplayed) web of art, swordplay, romance, and, much to the sisters’ surprise, actual demons. Gorgeously portrayed three-dimensional characters and sensual prose propel this smoothly entertaining story to an emotionally affecting end.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“An artful, witty, Oscar Wilde pastiche with the heart of a paranormal thriller.” —Diana Gabaldon, bestselling author of Outlander

“A delightful, dark, and entertaining romp with serious intent behind it. The writing is so smart and sharp—Molly Tanzer is at the top of her form in this beautifully constructed novel. Sure to be a favorite of readers and critics alike.” —Jeff VanderMeer, bestselling author of the Southern Reach trilogy

“There has never been a better time for a spirited, feminist reinvention of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Molly Tanzer has taken a wickedly sensuous classic and transformed it into a lively supernatural tale featuring lovestruck teenagers, diabolical botanicals, mysterious paintings, and—oh, yes—demons. Creatures of Will and Temper is a wild ride from start to finish, beautifully and boldly written, and a most worthy successor to Oscar Wilde’s scandalous novel.” —Amy Stewart, author of Girl Waits With Gun

“Decadent Victorians clash with dueling demon-hunters in this page-turning reinvention of Oscar Wilde’s classic tale. I loved it!” —Charles Stross, award-winning author of The Delirium Brief

That’s all the JJA Books news for now. More soon!

• • • •

Well, that’s all there is to report this month. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy the issue!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Lightspeed, is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, a new SF/Fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, as well as the USA Today bestselling editor of many other anthologies, including The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent projects include: Cosmic Powers, What the #@&% Is That?, Operation Arcana, Loosed Upon the World, Wastelands 2, Press Start to Play, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been a finalist eleven times) and is a seven-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Nightmare Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

Longing For Stars Once Lost

A. Merc Rustad | 4540 words

The ship dies in orbit above an abandoned world.

Kitshan curses. Metal bones shudder around him as the last of the ship’s breath is sucked into vacuum. His skill at the helm and hasty patch jobs have kept the engines together, but luck is scarce out here, and his is gone. The ship is unminded. Lifeless metal, basic programming, and manual flight operations are things he can tolerate better than another consciousness wrapped against his.

The viewscreen flickers and a cold vista stretches across the interior curve of the cockpit: the small star, bright and distilled against the void, clutching a trio of uninhabited planets in its aura. His ship is poised over the third in orbit.

Scanners glitch as they lose power, but he picks up the faint readings of energy clusters on the surface; flickers of possibility.

Gravity summons the ship down toward the planet’s surface in an uncontrolled descent. A flutter on the dying sensors catches his attention: the smooth, deadly ripple of the Arbiter of the Suns’ pack as it glides from subspace on the other side of the star. A dreadnought flanked by a dozen mindless fighters, painted in shadow against the dark of space.

Adrenaline spikes through exhaustion. Even on the edges of the Principality, he can’t outrun the gods. They want his death, and nothing less will satisfy.

Kitshan guns the thrusters, pushing the ship down into the atmosphere. If he can hide the emissions signature in the radiation of the planet, he might buy himself time. Find the energy blips on his sensors, repair his ship, jump back into subspace.

He’s promised himself he’ll live, that he’ll return to find his wraith. He can’t fail now.

The ship jolts as heat swallows its outer skin. Then he is burning bright, falling.

• • • •

Before he was a general, Kitshan had never killed.

Before he left the Violet Sun’s side in search of Rebirth—a world untouched by the gods where he hopes to find a way to see Forever Brightness once more—he promised himself he would not kill again.

Before Mere was taken away from him, he believed that time would bring him peace.

• • • •

Kitshan lives, battered from impact and heat, his armor compensating for the thin oxygen levels. This world is parched blue-gray stone and dust. The impact burn runs through old crumbled walls, shattered towers, and rubble-mounds.

He examines the extent of damage to his ship. With enough energy, the ship’s programming can repair the majority of its physical structure and he can take the helm again. He pats the ship’s scorched side.

It’s dusk, the last lip of starlight bleeding away into night. Kitshan pulls up a map on his vambrace, a screensnap of the readouts he saw from above. Southwest, buried in the toes of a mountain, is the first energy spike.

He squints up at the charred sky.

Without his ship’s sensors, he has no scope to follow the Arbiter’s path, to know how long he has before he’s found.

While he can’t mask his crash site, he needs to get to cover before nightfall. The cold from the dark phases of the planet will tax even his war armor. Come the dawn, he’ll find a way off this world.

• • • •

All it had taken for the Arbiter of the Suns to discover him was a visit to the Burial of Worlds. Kitshan had stood in that vast crater full of dead ships and cut open his arms on his longsword. The armor tried to seal the wounds, and he overrode its programming. Forever Brightness, Burning Dark, his warship, had been such a part of him, blood is the only hope he has to feel its familiar neural contact.

Yet there is nothing. He did not even know if his ship’s body was scrapped here, or left to drift cold in the debris fields over ravaged worlds no longer named.

That he lived was condemnation enough. He and Forever Brightness were among those chosen to self-destruct during the Decommission as tribute to peace. Forever Brightness refused to obey, and Kitshan thought they would escape. But his ship had lied to him. Forever Brightness lured him down onto Nishu Atar, then ripped its consciousness free of his before it obeyed its orders and self-destructed. He was supposed to have died with his ship.

(He cannot forgive what Forever Brightness did.)

For so long he survived in obscurity, forced into cryo and hidden inside the Violet Sun’s influence. Even she, the God of War, can tire of endless destruction.

Within the Burial of Worlds, he had not found the pieces of his ship’s soul.

But he’d heard a different voice, braided from the memories of ancient dead, a voice that promised hope: In the making of the Universe, there lay a single unused shard of Life. It curled itself into a world and hid far from the death-lust of the other galaxies. Still it waits, offering Life within its skin.

Kitshan’s blood seeped down into the shredded metal and rusted bones of all the dead ships piled in this crater on Ara Desino. “Is it still there?”

It is there. Life always is.

“Where?” he begged. “Tell me where.”

The voice wove coordinates like musical entropy: incomprehensible colors spun in ribbons through the Universe, the remembrance of Life.

He let his armor close the wounds, sheathed his sword, and followed the currents imprinted against his awareness. It’d taken him cycles before he could untangle understanding and discern a flight path beyond the Principality’s borders.

If there was a place in the universe that held Life, he needed to try and reach it. To see if Rebirth would grant him a small piece of itself he could use to revive Forever Brightness, wherever it lay.

• • • •

Dust-scarabs scuttle around the edge of the tunnel entrance marked on his map. He flicks the beetles away as they crawl towards his armor, drawn by its powered hum.

The networked caves are lit with crystalized snails still bright from radiation. The map pings: The energy source detected is seven kilometers down a narrow branch of mountainous veins. A reading that intense could fuel his ship and his armor, with energy to spare.

He’ll need all he can get to outrun the Arbiter.

The snails fade the deeper into the mountain he trudges. He continues in darkness, guided by the infrared veil in his helmet. The tunnel abruptly yawns into a wide, arched cavern painted with ancient hologlyphs that brighten at his entrance. He stops cold. Abyss take him—he’s walked into a tomb.

The stone melds closed behind him, sealing him inside.

Kitshan trembles.

In the center of the cavern is a pillar of gray translucent energy. Binding sigils wind along its shimmering surface. Within the sarcophagus, the faint outline of a humanoid being is lit by starlight.

Under the Violet Sun’s command, he studied the old starkin legacy. His god had a fond recollection of her cousins: demigods spawned from the remnants of the universe’s first breath, scattered in stardust and radiation, adrift on solar winds until they grew voices and sang to each other in the dark. She wanted him to defeat the Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf; to know one’s enemies is power. So he learned.

The tattoos along Kitshan’s back and ribs burn. They were carved by the Violet Sun’s hand, his subservience made manifest on skin. Only those favored by a Sun Lord will be able to see this path and find this place. The Arbiter will see it, too.

Sol?

The voice is tiny, faint, and . . . vulnerable. It comes from within the sarcophagus. It is nothing like the power of the Violet Sun. It sounds too much like Mere.

Kitshan edges nearer, his heartbeat rapid.

Sol? the starborn calls. Did you come back?

He rests his hand just above the sheathing on the sarcophagus. “I’m not Sol.” His throat is raw, word-scarred.

Who, then?

“No one.”

A long silence. The shape inside the gray shield curls in on itself.

Let me go.

Kitshan drops his arm. “Can’t. There’s no way out.”

The cavern is lit like moonlight seen on Osirin V—his once-home. Crystals in constellation patterns brighten across the ceiling. He knows them from old star maps, from the planetside-views.

Yes there is, No One.

Kitshan grimaces. His armor’s temperature regulation is fritzing, letting cold sink faster into his bones. It’s worse in here. Pain paints the nerves through his limbs and skin.

How close is the Arbiter?

He needs a way out of this chamber. Find another source of power.

Help me, No One? You have Their fingerprints. You can open the cage.

The constellations shift, unfolding a new skyscape: Rampant Hand of Dawn in Battle, the Antlered Hound of Omega Prime, the Vines Embraced by Eternity, Skin Drawn Verdigris in Sand. He hasn’t seen these stars since Forever Brightness, Burning Dark died. Since he lay hospitalized on the battlefield of Nishu Atar, before the Violet Sun found him again.

He limps around the cavern. Its sides are polished smooth, a glossy prison. There are no seams to let him pry open. He unsheathes his longsword from across his back. It once belonged to Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf, a fallen starborn, and Kitshan took it when he defeated them. Kitshan slams the darkened blade against stone. The metal doesn’t scratch, doesn’t break, and neither does the mountain. He hammers at the walls, his frustration useless.

I will serve, the starborn pleads. I will do all you wish. Please, let me out.

“I don’t want your service,” Kitshan snarls. “I just want—”

Escape. Peace. Mere.

He stops again before the sarcophagus. The starborn presses a many-fingered hand against the inside of the sheathing. Its eyes are large, and even through the opaque prison, he feels the desperation in that gaze.

“How long have you been here?” he asks.

The starborn shrinks back. Alone. Long, long, with no one here. I am scared.

Kitshan slides his weapon back into its scabbard. Abyss take him.

Scared. So’s he. So was Mere, before the wraith was taken from him.

He can’t leave the starborn here alone.

“How do I open your cage?”

• • • •

(“No,” the Violet Sun said, when he asked her blessing to travel to the world of Rebirth. “Forget of this, my wolflord. It will bring only grief.”

He’s disobeyed the gods before.)

• • • •

The crystals aligned around the sarcophagus dim as Kitshan follows the numerical code the starborn gives him and dismantles the cage. Air shivers and snaps as the gray pillar dissolves.

The starborn is half his mass: a wisp of light sketched into humanoid form. Tiny horns speckle its head, and vestigial wings hang limp across its spine. Two eyes over no mouth. It shudders, flecks of gray dust crackling from its surface.

“Where’s the door?”

The starborn hesitantly stretches out a hand for his. He jerks back. It flinches away.

Skin, it says. No One has blessing and can open the door.

He hesitates. His armor is the only defense against the dead-burned cold. But he can’t stay here forever. He’ll be found or killed if he does. The Arbiter’s dreadnought can crumble this mountain with ease.

At the place the cavern entrance once sat, he irises back the palm in his glove. Pain flares, numbing his hand in seconds. He grits his teeth against the agony and lays his skin against stone.

It melts away with a soft whisper. WELCOME, BELOVED.

He fumbles to close the glove, his left arm scarcely movable now.

I can help.

The starborn presses its body against his, twining around his side and shoulder, seeping into the scratched armor and exposed skin. Memories not his bloom against his thoughts:

—Sol-Weft-Saiph caresses the tiny starborn’s face with great wings, unpeeling the last shadows from its eyes so it can see, breathe, grow. “You fell from the darkened void, small one, but here you will be safe until you are strong enough to fly.”

—The peoples of this world are bright like constellations, made of songs and sorrows, fierce and kind. They are friends. They let the starborn light the city from the power grids. Valuable thing, they tell it, smiling, and the starborn beams.

—Sol-Weft-Saiph imprints a map of the universe’s skin against the new starborn’s eyes: So you may always find us.

—The people say: The gods bring war like tides, washing away everything. We must appease them. And the starborn asks: Can I help, friends? And the people say: Yes!

—But the gods do not want anything as bright as themselves and tell the people and these servants of the gods, the Cold Ones, to make the starborn go away. The starborn does not want to be dark again, but the people are friends and say: You must do this for us. So the starborn follows the friends deep into a mountain and climbs into the cage and waits for Sol-Weft-Saiph to come back.

—No one comes.

Heat returns to Kitshan’s flesh and the pain ebbs. He can flex his fingers. Startled, he doesn’t throw the starborn off him. He’s shaking and doesn’t trust his voice.

Better? the starborn asks. I help you not be cold.

“Better,” he says. “Stay close.” Invitation, not command.

Where do we go?

“I need to heal my ship.” That’s all it needs to know. “Get off this planet.”

Can help!

He watches as the light from the snails gradually brightens the closer he gets to the mountain’s outer skin. “How?”

The starborn’s tiny wings flutter against his nape. Can fly, No One.

• • • •

This is what will happen if the Arbiter of the Suns catches him: He will die, and not well.

The consorts, if they do not strip his bones and devour him alive, will bind him and carry him to the Arbiter of the Suns. He will be dragged in chains to the Courts of Tranquility.

Mere, his wraith, the one he fell in love with long ago, will have no choice but to execute him.

His soul will be forever trapped in the still waters of the execution pool, forgotten until it deteriorates into nothingness. He will have no hope of another life when this universe ends and another grows from its ashes.

He cannot endure to hurt his wraith like that. Since the Red Sun marked him on the battlefield of Nishu Atar, he cannot die at his own hand, no matter how great his want. So he must live. Escape this planet and finish his mission.

(His final promise to Mere: I will come back for you.)

• • • •

When the Violet Sun first created Mere, Kitshan offered it his friendship and promised himself he would protect this one. Mere learned to paint, learned to read poetry, learned to dance. They spun together in zero-G waltzes and lay in the observation deck of the Serantau Station to watch the rotation of the lush planet Sera III.

(“Are you happy, love?” Kitshan asked. He wanted nothing more than for Mere to dream, to create, to live. And Mere said, “I am.”)

When their time was up, Kitshan’s heart broke.

“When?” Mere asked him, as the guards bound its hands. Though separated by a long-distance holofeed, Mere’s gaze never wavered from Kitshan’s. “When will you come back for me?”

• • • •

Kitshan jogs in the cold, bitter dark spilled across the landscape. The starborn huddles against his side, threaded like a holoimage into his armor. His lungs burn, muscles strain. The armor’s power is almost depleted. He doesn’t ask the starborn for more. He’ll need all its help for his ship.

Ahead, he spots the ruins. Without a moon or radiation from cityskin, he sees the vast expanse of void lit with stars laid out in this system. A shared breath of the universe.

No sign of the Arbiter or its consorts yet.

I remember this, the starborn says. It was the home of friends.

Wind keens among the broken buildings and deadened stone.

The dirge of the elements reminds him of the thrum of Forever Brightness’ engines when the dreadnought glided through subspace. How long would it have taken his partner to sail to Rebirth? On that world, he hopes to find the seeds of Life, ones he can use to restore the dead. His ship, who died because he helped bring the war to an end.

“How’ve you not been found before now?” Kitshan asks the starborn. It helps to have another voice beside him, one to remind him he isn’t alone in the dark. He’s never stopped missing Forever Brightness.

The Cold Ones can’t see.

“Can’t see?”

The starborn curls about his shoulders. I am small, new. Sol says: “You are not bright enough yet to be seen. This will make you safe if the Cold Ones come before I do.”

Kitshan turns his head, his throat tight. “But Sol hasn’t come back.”

The starborn’s voice quavers, uncertain. Friends had to make me alone, but friends did not let the Cold Ones destroy me.

Kitshan reaches a hand up, and the starborn curls its fingers around his. “You won’t be caged again.”

Can we leave this world, No One? The starborn sounds smaller than before. There is no home left here.

“If you can lift the ship into orbit.” He takes a steadying breath. “I’ll see you get home.”

Yes! The starborn brightens against his armor. Can fly! The Cold Ones will never see us.

Kitshan half-smiles, fierce hope baring his teeth against the dark.

• • • •

Forever Brightness, Burning Dark took its name from chiaroscuro clouds in the Echelon Rampant Nebula. It was there, among the ruins of station cities and the bones of eel ships, that Kitshan and Forever Brightness defeated the Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf, and where Kitshan realized the vast destruction he and his ship had wrought: hundreds of worlds dead, galaxies unmade, the ghosts of a trillion non-combatants echoing in the void.

Where he realized, with the Violet Sun’s dearest enemy bound before him, he hated himself more than any of the other gods or those he was sent to fight and kill.

He dropped the sword and walked until he reached the airlocks on Forever Brightness’ fighter bays.

What’s wrong? Forever Brightness asked, their communication sequestered from official logs and the eyes of the Violet Sun.

“I can’t do this anymore,” Kitshan said. He pressed his forehead against the ship’s interior wall. “Before I became a pilot, a general, do you know what I wanted to do? Back on Osirin V, before . . .” He flicks his wrist, infinite gesture to describe all he cannot say, all he can remember of the war. “This.”

You wanted to map unknown space, make the subspace waves safer for ships to travel.

Kitshan’s shoulders hitched as he tried to breathe against the weight of guilt and grief crushing down on him. “I thought I could bring some good to those who come after.”

There is always choice, Forever Brightness said.

“Is there?”

We can still make our own destiny even with what we have become.

• • • •

On the battlefield of Nishu Atar, he walked, unarmed and unarmored, toward the Red Sun’s wraiths and conscripted Tadier spider-queens. There were hotspots of attack and retaliation scattered over the once-trade-hub world. Peace did not mean death would stop.

“I am General Kitshan Zu,” he said, “servant of the Destroyer of Worlds. I decimated your homeworld of Xian Azure. I have shown you no mercy.”

The lead wraith, a tall bipedal machineflesh soldier, stalked towards him. Its skin burned deep red, like the Sun Lord it had been made to serve. Its long knife-like fingers splayed in rage.

Kitshan did not flinch as it stabbed him through the chest, its eyes inches from his face as he choked on blood. It lifted his body, triumphant, and then dragged him across the field to the mountain caverns.

Dead, and yet, his soul was not carried to the Beyond Space, or whatever purgatory the Violet Sun deemed fit for him endure. He felt the God of Death caress him instead, burning yet another mark into his spirit, and then he was revived, sucking breath from patched lungs as his heart beat once again.

He stared up at the red wraith, its claws still bloody. It tilted its head; in its other hand was a nanite medical kit. It had revived him. They were alone in the semi-dark, the cavern crusted in old halogen-bulbed lanterns and rusted wiring for long-dead consoles.

“Why?” Kitshan demanded, wondering if it meant to slaughter him again. The taste of his own blood clung to his teeth. “I don’t deserve mercy.”

“None of us do, General,” the wraith said. “But this one will not be seen only and forever as a machine for Death. This one . . .”

It hissed in pain, fighting programming or habit, Kitshan didn’t know.

“I,” the wraith said, “will be more. Our final actions in life must mean something.”

It picked him up and carried him to a field hospital. He did not see it again, but he knew—he knew—it had been destroyed when it returned to its post.

• • • •

The unminded ship lies in ice-slicked dust. Kitshan sprints the final distance to the battered vessel. It’s untouched. He climbs back into the small, ruined shell. If the starborn can lend him energy to repair the maintenance drones and reignite the engines—

The starborn shivers against him. The Cold Ones are here.

Kitshan’s belly tightens. He peers up. Entry trails burn against the sky, and then the Arbiter’s consorts’ ships land in a great explosion of dust and rubble, less than ten kilometers from his position.

The starborn quivers, its head tilted back to stare at the sky. Home.

The cloud whips debris against his helmet and armor. Kitshan hisses in pain as the starborn peels free and unwinds from his shadow.

We must go, No One! They will make us cold.

“Engines,” Kitshan snaps. “Power them on.”

Still in orbit, the Arbiter of the Suns’ dreadnought waits. Kitshan’s implants ache with memory. That ship is alive, bound, and even planetside, he senses its hurt. The Arbiter was forged in the Courts of Tranquility, and like all that is created in the Principality’s heart, the Arbiter is made from pain.

The starborn stretches itself and threads its body through the dead ship.

In the distance, the twelve consorts keen, their hunting cries melodic and synchronized. Their multifaceted armor gleams with fractal light: a hungry, multi-bodied living prism cast against the dark. They swarm towards him and the starborn.

Metal shakes, glowing faint in the night. The starborn’s energy is remaking the thrusters and healing the impact-burned hull. It shimmers through circuitry and nav system. The viewscreen, cracked, flickers clear again and the ship’s sensors show him how close the Arbiter’s dreadnought is.

Fly, the starborn says, gleeful, we will fly!

Kitshan feels the cockpit reshape, secure against vacuum and heat. “Be careful,” he says. “Even if the Arbiter can’t see us—see you—that dreadnought can sense when there’s atmospheric disturbance for launch.”

Will be careful, the starborn says. It has spread itself over the ship’s entire surface. Will give you the stars, No One. When home, I will be stronger! I can take you wherever you wish.

Kitshan presses his fist against his helmeted forehead in gratitude. Rebirth does not seem so distant, now.

The unminded ship creaks as the starborn lifts it with dogged velocity into the sky. They climb through the night. Kitshan stares at the sensor readouts on screen. He keeps expecting the dreadnought to lash out with cannons or war-tendrils.

Yet nothing happens. The dreadnought hangs heavy and silent in orbit, and the consort ships drift back into their launch bays. The Arbiter of the Suns cannot see him.

Below, the consorts slow, circling near the crash site, wreathed in hunting algorithms. They cannot see him. They cannot catch him.

Kitshan dares breathe as the starborn bears him towards escape. The pace slows, and he feels the strain echoing along the lines of his vessel, traced along his armor.

“What’s happening?”

Never . . . flown . . . before . . . The starborn shivers with effort. We are close!

The ship crackles, shaking inside and out, the ascent gnawing at metal. Kitshan braces himself against the cockpit. “Wait—”

The starborn screams as it pushes itself to its limit—it will tear itself apart lifting the ship out of atmosphere. Home! I see it, No One!

Even if its essence will hide him in space, he has no propulsion yet—the engines are not yet charged. He might drift until his oxygen depletes or the pull of this world drags him down in flame once more. A cleaner death, at least.

But the starborn will die, too.

“Let go,” he tells it. “You can’t carry us both.”

The starborn’s face materializes inside the viewscreen. But I must get you to the stars, No One.

He swallows, aware of his choices and what they will bring. “My name is Kitshan Zu.”

I am Vale-Sol-Bright. I owe you all for how you aided me. You made me not alone again. You are friend.

Kitshan lifts his hand, just shy of the starborn’s face. A farewell. “And as your friend, I want you to be free.”

He will not let Vale-Sol-Bright self-destruct. Not like Forever Brightness. Not cold and alone. He wants the starborn to live.

Its head tilts, eyes bright as the universe intent upon him. This is your desire, Kitshan Zu?

Kitshan rests hand to the hilt of his sword. “Yes, Vale-Sol-Bright.” Like he wanted for Mere. He hopes Mere can forgive him. “Release me. Go home. You’ll find Sol and your family in the stars.”

Thank you.

The starborn unwinds from the ship and Kitshan shuts his eyes as he falls.

• • • •

Once, Forever Brightness asked him: What will we do, if the war ends?

Once, he answered: “We can sail among the stars together, never commanded to destroy.”

Once, he believed he would see his ship again.

• • • •

He doesn’t crash.

Great, sinuous braids of shipflesh unpeel from the dreadnought like tentacles and catch Kitshan’s vessel as it falls. The arms pull him towards the hold.

The dreadnought will pry apart his dead ship and the consorts will return and swarm him.

Kitshan readies his sword. He will fight, and he will lose.

He has only his memories of Forever Brightness, yet he can hope, for a moment, that if he cannot find his ship, that his ship can find him in another life.

If his last action is to see the starborn is free, it will be enough. He tips his head back, staring up through the viewscreen. His last glimpse of the sky. He sees the starborn flying higher, faster, a bright spec sharp against the turning dawn.

“Be well, my friend.”

Vale-Sol-Bright’s voice is clear, carried back to him through the stratosphere. I will remember, Kitshan.

The starborn burns bright, climbing toward home.

©2017 by A. Merc Rustad. | © 2017 by Reiko Murakami.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A. Merc Rustad is a queer, transmasculine, non-binary writer and filmmaker who likes dinosaurs, robots, monsters, and cookies. Their fiction has appeared in nifty places like Lightspeed, Cicada, Uncanny, Escape Pod, Fireside, IGMS, Flash Fiction Online, Apex, Shimmer, and others. Their stories have been reprinted in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy twice: “How to Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps” in 2015 (guest editor: Joe Hill) and the Nebula Award finalist “This is Not a Wardrobe Door” in 2017 (guest editor: Charles Yu). Their website is: amercrustad.com. Merc is mostly found on Twitter @Merc_Rustad and sometimes playing in cardboard boxes.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

The Walk Up Nameless Ridge

Hugh Howey | 5700 words

1

It was difficult to sleep at night, wishing good men dead. This was but one of the hurtful things I felt in my bones and wished I could ignore. It was an ugly truth waving its arms that I turned my gaze from, that I didn’t like to admit even to myself. But while my bag warmed me with the last of its power and my breath spilled out in white plumes toward the roof of our tent, while the flicker of a whisperstove melted snow for midnight tea, I lay in that dead zone above sixty thousand feet and hoped not just for the failure of those above me, but that no man summit and live to tell the tale. Not before I had my chance.

It was a shameful admission, one I nearly raised with Hanson, my tentmate, to see in the wrinkles of his snow-beat face whether this was a guilt shared. I suspected it was. In the mess tents and around the yellow craters we dubbed latrines, the look among us was that only one would be remembered. The rest would die alone in the snow or live a long life forgotten—and not one of us would’ve been able to explain to a child the difference. Frozen to death by altitude or by time was all the same. The truth was this: History remembers the first, and only the first. These are the creeping and eternal glaciers, the names etched across all time like scars in granite cliffs. Those who came after were the inch or two of snowdrift that would melt in due time. They would trickle, forgotten, into the pores of the earth, be swallowed and melt snow at the feet of other forgotten men.

It was a quarter past Eno’s midnight and time to get up. If Shubert and Humphries were to make it to the top, they likely would’ve by now. If any of their gear still worked, they would be radioing in their victory, taking the first pictures of starlit peaks wrinkling far past the limits of sight. By now, they would know how many fingers and toes it cost them, how much oxygen was left in their tanks, whether or not they would live to speak of the mountain’s conquest.

The faint odor of tea penetrated my dark thoughts. It must’ve been a potent brew to smell it at all. We had already scaled beyond the heights where taste and scent fade to oblivion. One had to remind himself to eat and drink, for the stomach is one of those organs that knows when to quit. It is the first, in fact, to go. The mind of the climber is the last.

Hanson brought me tea. I wormed a single arm out into the cold, though my heating bag had become a feeble thing. I did not want to lose what little it held. I coughed into my fist, that persistent cough of the dead zone, and accepted the steaming mug.

There were no words spoken as we forced ourselves to drink. Every twitch was an effort at those altitudes. We were sleeping higher than all the fabled peaks of Cirrus VII. Our fourth camp along the Slopeson Ridge, at 42,880 feet, was higher than any speck of dirt on Hanson’s home planet. And when we arrived on this wasteland of a frozen ball, out here in a corner of the galaxy where men go either to not be found or to be remembered for all times, we set up a basecamp very near to the highest peak of the place I grew up: Earth. Where men were first born and first began to scale to deadly heights.

I sipped my tea, burning my numb lips, and told myself it would be an Earth-born who scaled Mt. Mallory first. This was a distasteful idea that I and many others were willing to share. The secret I kept to myself was that others could die if they dared climb her before me.

2

Two other private teams were making a go of it that season. Government expeditions and collectives of alpine clubs had given up decades ago. They now watched as men such as I took leave of our day jobs and, with borrowed funds and the best of gear and medicine at hand, set out to prove what was possible.

The window of opportunity for a summit was but a bare sliver of a crack. Half a day at most when the fearful winds of that dizzy world slowed to a manageable gale and before the monsoons buried the rock under drifts a hundred meters deep. The problem, of course, was in not knowing when that half day would fall. Every climber across thirteen worlds studied the weather charts like daytraders. As the season neared, predictions were logged on the net, men in their warm homes with their appetites intact and the feeling still in their fingers and toes would make guesses, watch reports from the satellites left behind by those government expeditions, and make bold claims.

I had been one of those prognosticators until recently. But now, after spending a night at camp 7 beneath the Khimer Ridge, I felt as though I had graduated to one who could sneer at the antics of those at lesser heights. By dint of my travel between the stars and my arduous climb thus far, I was now an expert. It lent Hanson and I the illusion that our guess was far more refined than the others.

Or perhaps it was the lack of oxygen that made us crazy this way. In the middle of that terrible night, rather than spend my last morning thinking of my wife and kids or dwell further on the debts incurred to travel to frontier stars and hike up a murderous peak, I thought of all my fellow climbers who were safely ensconced in their homes as they followed our every move.

Right now, they likely followed Shubert and Humphries, two strong climbers who had knocked out all else the galaxy had to offer. They would also be keeping an eye on Hanson and I. And then there was the pairing of Ziba and Cardhil, who were also making a bid that year.

Ziba was an enigma of a climber, a small woman who looked far too frail in her heatsuit and mask. When first I saw her navigating the Lower Collum Ice Falls above basecamp, I mistook her oxygen tanks for double-oughts in size, such as they dwarfed her frame. The consensus was that there was little to fear in her attempt that year. I had done some digging before my uplink succumbed to the cold, and read that Ziba had knocked out the peaks of her home planet, none of which top thirty thousand feet, but she had at least done them in style. No oxygen and swiftly, one of those modern climbers. It had been a private joy to watch her give in to the true mountaineering methods necessary on Mallory’s great face. The methodical lift of crampons, the bulging tanks of air, the fogging and frosted masks. These were the ways of the true climber. Mallory is an instructor to all, and Ziba did not seem too full of herself to submit, learn, and adapt.

Cardhil, I figured, was the great unknown. Ziba had chosen an odd tentmate in the android. And if it were a manchine that was the first to summit great Mallory, the consensus across the alpine forums was that nothing would have occurred at all. There would not even be an accomplishment to asterix. And anyway, I had sent notes a week ago to an old climbing buddy, telling him not to worry. The cold was worse on the manchine’s joints than our own. Hanson and I had left camp 6 while Ziba was chipping away at Cardhil’s frozen ankles. And please don’t tell me that a man’s memories counted for the man himself, that the android lived because he remembered living. I have had many a conversation with Cardhil around basecamp and watched him with the sherpas. He is no different than the droid who cleans my pool or walks my dog. A clever approximation, but with movements too precise, too clean, to pass for human. The other day, Hanson nudged me in time to turn and catch Cardhil taking a great spill on the East Face. The way he did even this was unnatural. Supremely calm and without a whimper, the manchine had slid several hundred feet on his ass, working his climbing axe into the deep snow, with all the false grace of an automaton.

Nobody feared this duo as long as they were behind and below us. There, off our ropes and out of our way, they had only themselves to kill.

3

Hanson and I left our flapping tent in utter darkness. The driven snow blocked out all but a few of the twinkling stars. Near the tent, a pile of spent oxygen bottles gathered a drift. They glowed bright in Hanson’s headlamp. Debris such as this would be left for all time. They were an addition to the landscape. The local Ha-Jing, whose lands included half of great Mallory, made good money selling permits to aspiring climbers, and this litter came with the riches. The south face of Mallory, which some climbers posited would make for an easier ascent, was governed by the irascible Hiti. Great climbers by all accounts, but miserable at governing. The only assaults on that face have been clandestine affairs. There had been some arrests over the years, but like many who come to Eno hoping to etch their name in the history books, most simply disappeared.

Hanson broke snow for the first hour, his head down in a stiff breeze. We had radios in our parkas but rarely used them. Good tentmates had little need for words. Roped in to one another, the union becomes symbiotic. You match paces, one staring at a flash-lit patch of bright snow, the other staring at a man’s back, illuminating a spot in a sea of darkness. Boots fell into the rapidly filling holes of the climber ahead, each lifting of a crampon some new torture, even with the springs of the powered climbing pants taking most of the strain.

I’d lost count of the number of peaks we’d climbed together. It was in the dozens across a handful of planets, most of those climbs coming over the past five years. Climbers tend to orbit one another long before they share tents. The first time I met Hanson was back on Earth on a new route of Nanga Parbat, a small mountain, but notorious for gobbling souls. Climbers called her “Man Eater,” usually with knowing and nervous smiles. Tourists from other planets came to exercise on its west slope or to make an attempt on its south face while preparing for harsher climbs. Some took the tram to Everest to hike up to the top and join the legions who made that yearly pilgrimage only to walk away wondering what the fuss was about.

I tended to bite my tongue during such diminishing talks of my planet’s highest peak. My twenty-year partnership with Saul, my previous tentmate, had ended on a harmless run up Everest. There was a saying among the Hiti sherpas: Ropes slip through relaxed grips. The nearest I ever came to death was while climbing indoors, of all things. It wasn’t something I told anyone. Those few who had been there and the doctors who tended to me knew. When anyone noticed my limp, I told them it happened during my spill on Kurshunga. I couldn’t say that I’d failed to double back my harness and took a forty-foot spill on a climb whose holds had been color-coded for kids.

Saul had also fallen prey to a relaxed grip. He had died while taking a leak on Everest’s South Col. It was hard to stomach, losing a good man and great friend like that. Hanson, who trudged ahead of me, had lost his former tentmate in more glorious fashion the same year Saul died. And so mountains brought couples together like retirement homes. You look around, and what you have left is what you bed down with. Ours, then, was a marriage of attrition, but it worked. Our bond was our individual losses and our mutual anger at the peaks that had taken so much from us.

As Hanson paused, exhausted, and I rounded him to break snow, I patted the old man on the back, the gesture silent with thick gloves and howling wind, but he bobbed his head in acknowledgement to let me know he was okay. I coughed a raspy rattle into my mask. We were all okay. And above us, the white plumes and airborne glitter of driven ice and snow hid the way to glory. But it was easy to find. Up. Always up. One more foot toward land that no man had ever seen and lived to tell about.

4

At sixty thousand feet—the height of two Everests stacked one on top of the other—man and machine alike tended to break down. We were at the limit of my regimen of steroids. The gears in my hiking pants could be heard grinding against one another, even over all that wind. And the grease smeared over the parts of my face not sheltered by the oxygen mask had hardened until it felt like plaster, like blistered and unfeeling skin, but to touch it and investigate it was to invite exposure and far worse.

Batteries meant to last days would perish in hours up there. The cold was death for them. And so our suits gave up as we moved from the death zone to a land that begged for a name far more sinister. The power left in struggling batteries went to the pistons and gears, routed away from the heaters. Fingers and toes went first. They would grow numb; the blood would stop flowing through them; the flesh would necropsy and die right there on the bone.

The Sherpa of Changli had a saying: A man can count on two hands all the climbs he conquers, and that man conquers nothing. I always took this to mean the more we summit the more we lose. Climbers were notorious for staring down bars in basecamp at lifted mugs, silently counting digits gone missing, making a measure of a man’s worth by how far they’d pushed themselves. Saul had a different take on the Changli saying. To the people who lived in the shadows of mountains, these were not things to conquer. To climb them was foolish, and who would think to do so? As much as I had loved Saul, he was always too politically correct for my tastes.

Breaking snow up that unnamed ridge, my mind turning to mush as supplemental oxygen and doped blood could only do so much, I felt the first pangs of doubt. My cough rattled inside my mask; my limbs felt like solid lead. Two days prior, at camp 5, I had pushed myself beyond my abilities. Eating and drinking moved from inconvenient chores to something I dreaded. My weight was down. I hadn’t been out of my clothes to see what I’d wasted away, just comforted myself instead on how much less I now had to lug to the top.

The radio in my parka clicked on with the sound of Hanson breathing. I waited a moment between arduous steps and listened for what he had to say. When the radio clicked off, I turned to check on him, my headlamp pointed at his chest so as not to blind him. Hanson was a strong climber, one of the strongest I’d ever seen. He had fallen back to the end of the rope that joined us, his breath clouding his mask. Lifting a hand a few inches from his thigh was all the wave he could muster.

“Take your time,” I told him, clicking the large switch on my belt. What I wanted to say was what the hell we thought we were doing. There, five thousand feet below us and eight light years away, was the tallest peak ever climbed. We were moving into the thin air above the highest of heads. We would have been in outer space on some small planets, in orbit around others. And still, we wanted to conquer more.

The rope between us drooped as Hanson took a few laborious steps. I turned and broke snow, resigning myself to an extra hour at the head, an extra shift to give him more rest. It was hard to know what drove you once you passed the thresholds of all pain. Maybe it was the thought of Shubert and Humphries somewhere above us, either in glory or buried in snow. Maybe it was the fear that Ziba had gotten Cardhil’s ankle sorted and that they would begin their push later that morning. Or maybe it was the promise I’d made to myself after telling my wife and kids that I would be safe. I had told them that I wouldn’t take chances. But I had already promised myself something different: I would come home with that final ridge named after me, or I wouldn’t come home at all.

5

My altimeter died at 62,000 feet, even though the manufacturer sold these with a guarantee of 100,000. Such guarantees were bullshit gestures with no real-world testing. As I climbed, I composed the post I would make on the forums complaining of its failure. And had my remaining fingers been any kind of functional, I would’ve removed the strap from my arm to save the weight. Instead, I carried one more dead thing up with me. From then on, I had to guess how high I was by the hour. It was still dark and we were probably at 63,100 feet when I stumbled across Humphries.

He wore an orange suit, the kind men with low confidence and a care for their mortal coil wore. It made them more easily found and more likely to be found, two very different things. I pointed out the snow-dusted form so Hanson wouldn’t trip on him, but I didn’t slow. Humphries had died facing the summit, which meant he hadn’t made it. I felt a mix of relief and guilt for the awful thoughts I’d held in my sleeping bag all night. Shubert, of course, was still out there. We could meet him stomping down in the dark, his eyes as bright as the handful of twinkling stars above, and whatever was driving Hanson and I upward would likely leak out our pores. Whatever glory I had hoped to win would be spent in future days recounting my time on the same slopes as this other man. I would detail my ordeal up Shubert Ridge, a horrible name if ever there was one. I would write of his glory and bask in whatever shadows fell my way. These were my mad ruminations as I left his dead tentmate behind and crunched through that terrible snow a thousand feet beneath the peak.

A tug at my harness gave me pause. Hanson was flagging again, at the end of his rope and ours. I questioned what I was running on for Hanson to give out before me. I wondered if the doctors hadn’t worked some kind of special magic between the doping and the careful regimen of drugs. Perhaps the coils in my pants were holding up better than his. Hanson had skimped on his gears and had invested in more heat. I may be freezing to death, but I was still climbing. I saw the look on his face, beyond the glare of my flashlight and the frost of his desperate breathing, and that look told me that this was as high as he would go. It was a look I’d only seen from him once before, but enough times from others to not need the radio.

After a coughing fit, I jerked my thumb toward the summit. Hanson lifted his hand from his thigh and waved. As I pulled the quick release that held our rope to my harness, I wondered if I would be stepping over both him and Humphries on my way back down. God, I hoped not. I watched him turn and trudge into the dark maw of night and white fang of snow before looking again to my goal. The summit was several more hours away. I would be the first or the second to stand there. Those were adjacent numbers and yet light years apart in my esteem. They were neighboring peaks with a precipitous valley between. Being second was death to me, so I lifted a boot, gears squealing, toes numb, and remembered with sadness the lies I had spoken to my family. There was nothing about this safe. If I loved them as much as I loved myself, I would’ve turned around long before Hanson had.

6

The highlanders of Eno have a saying about climbing alone: The winds seek out the solitary. And sure enough, with Hanson dropping back to camp—hopefully dropping back to camp—the winds came for me and shoved my chest for being so bold. With my oxygen running low, the mask became an impediment to breathing, something to catch my coughs. Adjusting the top of the mask against my goggles, fingers frozen stiff, I let the wind howl through a crack, invigorating me with the cold. The gap sang like the sound a puff makes across the mouth of a bottle. This whirring howl was a sort of musical accompaniment. It made me feel less alone. The dwindling oxygen made me feel crazy.

When I came across Shubert, I thought he was already dead. The snow was covering him, and the ridge here was perilously narrow. Solid rock stayed dusted with snow and ice, otherwise it felt the ridge itself should be blowing away.

Shubert stirred as I made my slow and agonizing way around him. He was faintly swimming toward the summit, clawing through the ice, throwing his axe forward. I stopped and knelt by the young and powerful climber. His suit made no noise. It must’ve given out on him, leaving him alone and under his own power. My thoughts were as wild as the wind, disturbed by my air-starved mind. I thought of Cardhil, and how something so reliant on its mechanical bits held any hope for rising above camp 7. I rested a hand on Shubert’s back to let him know he wasn’t alone. I don’t know that he ever knew I was there. He was still crawling, inch by inch toward the summit, as I trudged along, head down, mask singing a sad lament. If I made the top and got home, I decided I would name that ridge after him. I was already dreaming not just of being a legend, but the awesome humility I would display even so. It was delusion beyond delusion. I was dying, but like Shubert, I cared only about the next inch.

The oxygen ran dry as the sun broke. My headlamp had grown feeble anyway, frosted with ice and with its battery crippled by the freezing temperatures. This was my last sunrise, I was fairly sure. Cutting through the shark’s teeth of peaks that ran the breadth of this alien continent, the dull red glow was empowering with its illusion of warmth. Once that large foreign star lifted its chin above the most distant of snow-capped crowns, it seemed to rise with a vengeance. It made a mockery of my own agonizing ascent.

It occurred to me in the wan light of dawn that I was the highest man in the universe. Coughing into my mask, I couldn’t feel my legs, but I could at least balance on them. The handful—not quite—of fingers and toes I had left would be gone. But that was optimistic. I could see the summit up the ridgeline. There was no more technical climbing, no ice to work up, no faces or craggy steps, just a long walk on unfeeling stumps. A walk to a grave that stood far over all mortal heads.

I found myself on my knees without remembering falling. The snow was thin here. It blew off sideways and was just as soon replaced. There would be no flags ahead, no weather stations, no books to scribble in, no webcams showing a high sunrise to millions of net surfers. It was just a lonely and quiet peak. Not a footstep. Not ever. Untrammeled earth, a thing that had grown exceedingly rare.

The people of Eno had their own name for Mallory. Locals always did. It translated to Unconquerable, but of course nothing was. It was always a matter of time, of the right gear, the right support teams, all the ladders and lines and camps and bottles put in by hardworking sherpas.

I was on my hands and knees, mask howling, lightheaded and half-sane, crawling toward my destiny. And I missed Hanson. I wanted him there. I missed him more than my wife and kids, who I would never see again. There was my grave up ahead, a bare patch of rock where snow danced across like smoke, like running water, like angels in lace dresses.

I wondered if my body would lie there forever or if the wind would eventually shove me off. I wondered this as I reached the summit, dragging myself along, my suit giving up the last of its juice. Collapsing there, lying on my belly, I watched the sun rise through my mask. And when it frosted over, and my coughing grew so severe I worried those were flecks of purple lung spotting my vision, I accepted my death by pulling the mask free to watch this last sunrise, this highest and most magnificent sunrise, with my very own eyes.

7

The tallest climbs, often, are the easiest. All the great alpinists know this. Tell someone you’ve summitted Mokush on Delphi, and the mountaineer will widen his eyes in appreciation while the layman squints in geographical confusion. The steep rock approaches of Mokush more than make up for the lack of elevation. And of the several hundred who have reached the top—Hanson and I among them—thousands have perished. Few peaks have so bold a body count and so brief a list of conquerors.

On the other hand, list the highest peaks of the eight old worlds, and most will whistle in appreciation. Everyone knows the great climber Darjel Burq, the first to top the tallest mountain on each of the civilized worlds. But other climbers know that Darjel was hoisted up many of those by sherpas, and that he never once assaulted the great Man Killers who stand along the shoulder of those more famous giants and claim the more daring of men.

This was a peak for climbers like Darjel, I thought, lying on the top of the universe and dying. Here was a peak for the tourists. One day—as I coughed up more of my lung, pink spittle melting the frosting of snow on my mitts—the wealthy would pay for a jaunt to the top of Mallory. The drugs and heatsuits and blood doping would improve. In another five years, I would have made this climb and lived to tell the tale. But not today. And anyway: In five years, it would not have mattered. I wouldn’t have been the first.

The sun traveled through its reds and pinks until the frozen skin of Eno was everywhere golden. It was a good place to die. And when my body was found, they would know I’d made it. Unless it was many years hence and the wind and blizzards had carried me off to a secret grave, they would know. Such had been Mallory’s fate, the great and ancient climber whose name graced this peak. I was of those who never believed Mallory had made it to the top of Earth’s highest summit. But no longer. The madness of my oxygen-deprived brain, the sad glory of my one-way victory, and suddenly I knew in that very moment that Mallory had climbed to the top of my homeworld. He had simply never planned for the climb back down.

Sleep came amid the noisy and blustery cold. It was a peaceful sleep. My breathing was shallow and raspy, but at least the cough had gone away. I woke occasionally and looked an alien sun in the face, whispered a few words to that orange ball of fire, and allowed the ice to hold fast my lids once more.

I dreamed of my wife. My kids. I went back to the party my office had thrown, all the confetti and balloons, the little gifts that were well meant but that I would leave behind as useless. Coffee and dried meals, boot warmers that were suited for lesser hikes, the kind of gifts that show how little these revelers and kin know of where they are wishing me off to with their gay ribbons and joyous cards.

The mementos, likewise, had been left behind. The picture of my nephew that my sister dearly wanted me to carry to the roof of all the worlds. A dozen of these that seemed so small and light to each giver but added up to difficult choices and considerable weight, and so none of them even made it to basecamp.

I longed for all of them in that moment. Not that I could have dug them out with my dead fingers, but just to have them on my body. In case my preserved form was ever discovered and picked through by future explorers. Just so they would see that these things were there. That I wasn’t so alone.

I woke once more and spoke to the sun, and he called me a fool. His climb was rapid and impressive. And who was I? I was a mortal pretending to do godly things. I had wax for wings. I was already dead, my body frozen, but all the effort of my being, my slowing and cooling blood, the best drugs doctors could pump into me, kept my thoughts whirring. Slowly whirring like gears with their dying batteries. Just one more turn. Another thought.

I woke and spoke to an angel. So small. The world was outsized for her. An angel in a mask, breath fogging it with ice, no tanks on for that final and swift climb of hers.

I passed out again, but I felt the world shudder beneath me. The mountain was rising. They did this, you know. Confounding last year’s climbers by lifting up a fraction more for the next season. Always this: our accomplishments subsiding to time and acclimation. That fear that our former feats were yesterday’s glory. Every year, the mountains moved just a hair higher. And I was likewise now rising and falling, numb everywhere except in my mind. Only in my head, by the jounce of my neck, could I feel the world move.

Ziba was there, a face behind a mask, an angel with no oxygen, laboring down that nameless ridge having summited after me.

And Cardhil, whose ankle had seized, whose gears whirred, whose mind was said to be that of the great climber of the same name, but it was not something I ever believed. Until that moment. And I would never doubt again. It was Cardhil who carried me. And the perfect grace that had seemed inhuman at basecamp felt like a real man to me on that summit. Cardhil staggered and limped along. He cradled me in his mighty and trembling arms.

At camp 7, Hanson tended to me, though he was in no shape to do so. He said my hands were gone. My feet as well. I believed him.

At 6, we notified basecamp. We informed Humphries’ and Shubert’s team that they had perished nobly. The controversy was not in my mind at camp 6. I was weeping frozen tears. I was still dead on that peak, blabbering to alien stars. I had not yet been carried anywhere.

There was no memory of camp 5. I’m not even certain we stopped there. At camp 4, a doctor removed my lips and my nose. It required no instruments. My sherpas were there to congratulate me. The horror of what I’d done was far worse than the horror of what I’d become. I could look at myself in the mirror with no revulsion. To think on myself, though, was to invite black thoughts.

Ziba and Cardhil made it down the mountain ahead of me. I asked Hanson to work the radio, and I tried to form the words with my new face. But it wasn’t my lips that caused problems. It wasn’t my tongue.

At basecamp, at this approximation of civilization, I was provided a glimpse of what awaited me across the worlds. And it did not matter who I told or how often. I wrote in every forum, had letters crafted by those who could form them, who could understand my muted, lipless words, but Ziba, I was told, was already off to explore new worlds. And my exhortations that she be remembered fell on deaf ears. Ridgelines had already been named. And when my wife kissed my new face weeks later, the tears I wept were not for seeing her again but for the misery, the pain, of not having been left there where I deserved to lay, where I could be forgotten, frozen in the vastness of time, spinning lazily with broken wings beneath that great orange and alien star. Beneath that star who alone would ever know the awful truth of my most hollow glory.

©2015 by Hugh Howey. Originally published in The Walk Up Nameless Ridge/Beacon 23 (Kindle Singles). Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hugh Howey is the author of the acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel Wool, which became a sudden success in 2011. Originally self-published as a series of novelettes, the Wool omnibus is frequently the #1 bestselling book on Amazon.com and is a New York Times and USA TODAY bestseller. The book was also optioned for film by Ridley Scott, and is now available in print from major publishers all over the world. The story of Wool's meteoric success has been reported in major media outlets such as Entertainment Weekly, Variety, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Deadline Hollywood, and elsewhere. Howey lives in Jupiter, Florida with his wife Amber and his dog Bella.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

Crossing the Midday Gate

Aliette de Bodard | 7530 words

Dan Linh had walked out of the Purple Forbidden City not expecting to return to it—thankful that the Empress had seen fit to spare her life; that she wasn’t walking to her execution for threefold treason. Twenty years later—after the nightmares had faded, after she was finally used to the diminished, eventless life on the Sixty-First Planet—she did come back, to find it unchanged: the Midday Gate towering over the moat; the sleek ballet of spaceships between the pagodas and the orbitals; the ambient sound of zithers and declaimed poetry slowly replacing the bustle of the city at their backs.

It was as if no time had passed. She paused under the wide arch of the gate, catching her breath, and remembered the smell of apricot flowers, and the familiar presence of Ai Nhi by her side as they discussed anything from the teachings of Master Kong to the proper way to culture samples.

Ai Nhi. Linh breathed in; managed to steady the trembling of her hands. For a moment, a bare moment, a seizure came on—and she was much older—white-haired and bent, standing in a wide courtyard, watching a ship descend towards the planet, the wind of its approach ruffling burning fingers into her hair—and then it was gone, and she was back in the Forbidden City, her eyes stained with tears. It meant nothing; meaningless scraps of possible futures, the side effects of her vaccine—and none of it would make the past, or the future, what it should be.

Things have changed, the imperial messenger had told her when he’d come to pick her up from her Heaven-forsaken planet. Your presence is required at court.

Things had changed. It didn’t seem that way; it didn’t seem as though anything would ever change here. The line of emperors and empresses was unbroken, all the way to the founding of the Dai Viet Empire; and the changes that spread like wildfire on the outer edges of the numbered planets only nibbled at the unceasing, incurious fabric of court life.

And yet . . . and yet, in the pavilion by the lotus pond, there was someone who’d called her back. She’d expected a man; but the person waiting for her wasn’t even human: a small, cat-sized avatar of a mindship, surrounded by a scattering of bots like an honor guard; purely honorific, since the mindship herself, The Serpent’s Pearl in the Sea, was in orbit around the planet, and impervious to any attempts made on her life, or indeed any physical contact.

It had been years, and the ship appeared unchanged, save that the list of her titles and achievements were overlaid over her prow, and on her hull was the pelican and dragon insignia of the Grand Preceptor, the position the ship had always hungered for—the one denied to her when the vaccine scandal had broken out. Things have changed, the messenger had said, and now Dan Linh knew what. The court had given in; finally, against all its misgivings, had appointed its first mindship Grand Preceptor. There was no one else, not a single human or a single servant—only the two of them, and the growing, uneasy silence in the pavilion.

Gently, softly, Dan Linh abased herself on the painted tiles, ignoring the scuttle of bots moving out of her way, and the familiar twinge of pain in her knees. “Your Excellency. This is . . . unexpected.”

“Rise, Luong Thi Dan Linh,” The Serpent’s Pearl in the Sea said. “There is no need to be so formal.” But she had used Dan Linh’s full name, without any of the titles she had been accorded. “We missed you, at court.”

Of course she hadn’t. “You were better off without me,” Dan Linh said. Court intrigues had never been her forte: She was a scientist, first and foremost, afforded entry into the highest circles only because of the ship and her protection, only because she’d discovered the vaccine that had saved so many lives. “I didn’t know of your elevation,” Dan Linh said.

The Serpent’s Pearl in the Sea rocked from side to side, in mild amusement. She had changed: no longer the earnest mindship who had argued with her about the necessity of getting the vaccine to as many planets as necessary, no matter the cost to the treasury. “You wouldn’t,” she said. “News doesn’t travel that fast, I’m afraid, and I’d already set your recall into motion as soon as it was confirmed.”

“I—I don’t understand.”

“There isn’t much to understand. I don’t have much time, Linh, so I will be brief—I apologize for setting aside the proper protocols. Your place is at court, with us, rather than wasting your talent on teaching children about basic biology. Your old laboratory could use a firmer hand.”

She . . . All she’d always wanted, the dream that had woken her up every morning of her exile—her old laboratory, her old teams back; the familiar hum of ovens; the familiar chatter of lab hands as they prepared samples for examination—everything casually handed back to her, with barely a flourish. “You jest.”

“I never jest,” the ship said.

Of course she didn’t.

Dan Linh had to ask. Now, before she lost her nerve; before the accumulation of favours bestowed on her shamed her into silence. “What of Ai Nhi?”

The ship’s voice was cold. “Ai Nhi is still at court. Her husband is the General of the Southern Flank.”

“And she heads the Cedar and Crane laboratory?” The same one whose direction the ship had just offered her.

The ship descended from the dais, and came to hover by her side—as she’d done, in the days where their relationship had been less formal. “Ai Nhi will be fine. There are other posts she can take up. You care too much about her. I told you, back then.”

Back then, Dan Linh could have denounced Ai Nhi—after all, it had been Dan Linh’s word against Ai Nhi’s, and wasn’t Dan Linh the head of the Cedar and Crane Laboratory? The inventor of the vaccine against Blue Lily, the savior of lives uncounted? What was a mere student, weighed against all of that?

“It was the right thing to do,” she said quietly, still not looking at the ship. Ai Nhi had been kinless, and without status or protector: They had exiled Dan Linh, but they would have executed Ai Nhi for the same offence.

“Was it?” The Serpent’s Pearl in the Sea’s voice was soft. “Did you like the Sixty-First Planet, Dan Linh? I remember a more ambitious woman—one who wanted to leave her mark on history; who wouldn’t listen to her superiors’ orders when she knew what was best. What happened to her?”

She had shrivelled and died—that was what had happened, because out there on the Sixty-First Planet, where resources were so stretched they didn’t even have personal bots, there was no place for ambition—she’d got crushed into the rhythm of her life, into teaching children and teenagers with no motivation or talent, and, even when she did find a child whose grandiose dreams hadn’t already been reduced to nothingness, there was no way she could help them, no way she could get them out of the same exile they were all trapped into.

“You saved lives,” The Serpent’s Pearl in the Sea went on. “The entire Empire would have been devastated by Blue Lily, if you hadn’t been there.”

“Ai Nhi—”

“Ai Nhi has done capable work.” The ship’s voice was still terribly soft. “Kept things running. But she’s not you.”

No. She didn’t have the flashes of brilliant insight that made a good researcher, and, more damaging, not the capacity to surround herself with people who did—the vaccine, Dan Linh’s discovery, had been as much An Hang’s and Vu’s and Yen Oanh’s as it had been hers, meticulous teamwork in service of a common goal. Ai Nhi was Dan Linh’s mistake; the one student who had cracked and run under pressure—and the other, darker mistake, Dan Linh’s choice to remain silent instead of accusing her student, to endure twenty years of exile on a Heaven-forsaken planet for her sake.

“You can’t protect Ai Nhi forever, Dan Linh.”

She’d dreamt of this, staring at the stars as her daughter Lan nursed at her breast—wondering how things would have gone, had she not spoken up—had she remained at court. She’d wondered what she could have accomplished—at all the research on Blue Lily and other illnesses, all the other chances she’d have to affect things, to help people be more equal against the shadow of death—and she’d known it was nothing but bitter regrets, costly things she couldn’t afford, so far out on the edge of the Empire.

And now she had come back—and she had another chance. Another lifeline; a chance to walk again the corridors of the court with the support of a mindship turned Grand Preceptor—the highest rank of official within the court, the Empress’s personal advisor, the educator of her children and the policymaker of the Imperial Court.

“Well? What do you say?” The Serpent’s Pearl in the Sea, silent, hovering by her side, waiting for her answer, as she had waited, twenty years ago.

Another chance—and how many of these would she get, what little time she had left? She wasn’t like the ship—traversing centuries ageless and unchanged—she was merely mortal, and already standing in the shadow of death and rebirth. “I’m glad to be back, and will be glad to be of service.”

“Good,” The Serpent’s Pearl in the Sea said. “There will be a reception in two days to honor you. I’ll send attendants with . . . more appropriate clothes.” The ship’s voice was light, conveying quite effectively her amusement at the quaint, provincial things on her back—the clothes of the poor and exiled.

“To honor me?”

“Of course. It’s high time for justice, for the court to recognize what you did—the billions of lives you saved across the empire, Dan Linh.”

A reception. With her at its center. She felt . . . brutally exposed, with no protection. “I can’t—”

“You used to be prouder.”

And she’d been castigated for it, cast out without support and exiled for twenty years. “I—” she took in a deep breath. How was she going to find her place back, if she couldn’t bear even this? “I’ll be there.”

“Good,” the ship said. “You need to be. As I told you—things have changed. The court has ossified.” For the first time, there was emotion in her voice, the passion Dan Linh remembered from their evenings together. “We need to change, and the first step is to bring you back.”

A Grand Preceptor mindship; a youthful, dynamic one, nothing like the previous staid holder, who had been content to plot and backstab merely to keep his place—things were changing, indeed, and she was at the heart of it, and she wasn’t sure, anymore, if she had the guts for it in the wake of her return.

• • • •

The Serpent’s Pearl in the Sea had assigned Dan Linh her old quarters—here, too, nothing had changed: the same three rooms spread around a courtyard with a cedar tree, and a slew of bots and attendants that seemed to slip into cracks when Dan Linh was not watching—bringing dumplings and tea, cushions, and a profusion of court clothes ranging from the traditional to the more modern confections changing colors depending on the mood and thoughts of the wearer. And, in the ambient mood system, her old starscapes and mountain watercolors hung, and the same quiet zither music played—as if she’d just stepped back in time, and all she had to do was walk back to her old laboratory to find Ai Nhi and Vu hard at work on samples, discussing the side-effects of the vaccine, or arguing about the best guidelines for production.

But there was . . . something else in the palace now—some shadow of unease she could feel; whispers in the corridors that ceased when she appeared—once, she caught the tail end of a conversation about the Grand Preceptor. The Empress might have appointed The Serpent’s Pearl in the Sea, but the ship didn’t appear to have much support in the Forbidden City.

A younger scholar had smiled shyly at Dan Linh as she walked by, calling her “Honored Teacher” and telling her the vaccine had saved her sister—and Dan Linh had stopped; stood, tongue-tied and unsure of what to say. “You—” the scholar had said, and then shaken her head. “Forgive me, but you shouldn’t be here.” And had fled, reddening, before Dan Linh could ask her what she’d meant.

Someone—she assumed it was the ship, again—had left her documents, in the communal network: the year-end reports of the Cedar and Crane laboratories submitted to the court, and court memorials sent by the scientists. The temptation to open it—to find what Ai Nhi had done, in the past twenty years—was almost overwhelming.

Almost.

Dan Linh closed her eyes, for a moment, trying to step away from it all, to remember that she was no longer young, or powerful, or well-regarded. Then she asked the communal network to relay a message to her daughter Lan on the Sixty-First Planet—reassuring Lan that she was fine and the court hadn’t recalled her for some arcane punishment, telling her about The Serpent’s Pearl in the Sea’s elevation and her own.

The Sixty-First Planet was barely within range of mindships; even if by some miracle she ranked that kind of courier, she wouldn’t get an answer from Lan for several days or weeks.

If only Chi Hieu had still been alive—if only he had been able to come with her—but he was gone now, the only trace of him contained within the mem-implants their daughter had inherited, the ones Dan Linh couldn’t bring herself to talk to—mere simulations of him, with nothing of the vibrancy and care he’d had when he was alive.

Chi Hieu was—had been—the greater spouse in their marriage, though most people wouldn’t have been able to tell. Though he had sat for the examinations and attained the highest rank, he had chosen to step away from it all, dedicating himself to his poems and his family, smiling negligently at court intrigues and never taking anything seriously. He would have laughed, would have written a short, biting poem on the situation, would have taken her into his arms and whispered sweet nothings into her ears until she could once more see clearly. But he wasn’t there, not anymore, and tonight the wound of his absence felt recent again, too imperfectly papered over not to ooze heart’s blood.

Their daughter Lan was an adult now, with responsibilities of her own—managing the orchards of a large estate on the Sixty-First Planet, planning with her usual cool head for planting and pruning and the ceaseless work throughout the seasons—and she couldn’t have come with her mother, even if she had wished to. Raised with disapproval of the court, she’d had no desire to come to the First Planet.

Dan Linh sat down, pulling a cup of fragrant, flowery tea to her, and started reading reports.

It was all there—the familiar, formal language of court memorials, the lines of equations cramped close together, science far beyond what her students were capable of—bringing back memories of what she’d done, back in the days of the vaccine—analyses of efficacy and ease of setup, of growth rates and sample sizes, a wash of information so raw and undiluted that it threatened to drown her.

The science was beyond her now, but the rest wasn’t—the stories of internecine fights, of the desperate hunt for funds from the treasury in fallow years, and all the hundred things that went into keeping a laboratory together. Past the first few years—past the miracle of the vaccine and the necessity of refining the production process for the entire Empire, the Cedar and Crane laboratory had slowly, inexorably dwindled away as Blue Lily was contained—its original purpose pared away, leaving nothing but trivial research, its talented researchers leeched away into better, more challenging postings. Ai Nhi had done her best, but even with court support she hadn’t been able to keep things together.

But Dan Linh was back now, and things would change.

Dan Linh took a deep, trembling breath, reached out for the tea again, and was surprised to find darkness spread over the courtyard, and the distant music and laughter of private poetry parties. Had it been so long?

The chimes of the door resonated across the room. She set aside the documents and moved—a scattering of bots on the floor as she moved, racing towards the door; an image of who was outside started to form, but Dan Linh had already flung open the door.

And then wished she hadn’t.

The man standing on the threshold hadn’t changed either: the same dark hair, the same thin, almost ascetic face; the scarred hands, a childhood accident on a remote planet where they didn’t have proper graft techniques. “Hello, Dan Linh.” No formality either, no recognition of her titles, but of course he wouldn’t.

Khiem.

Ancestors, no. Not him.

Dan Linh struggled to keep herself steady, to silence her frantic heartbeat—and the only thing that slid out of her mouth was the thought circling, again and again, in the emptiness of her mind. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“No doubt.” Nguyen Van Duy Khiem’s voice was dark, amused. “But let us observe the courtesies, shall we? Will you not share tea with me, Dan Linh?”

She remembered him—his eyes burning in the painted oval of his face, as he called her behavior inappropriate—as he advocated for her death as an example, a reminder that one did not deceive the Imperial Court. She remembered the Empress turning to look at him, the desperate prayer on her own lips, to her ancestors and whatever deities might be watching, that the Empress not listen, that she not be swayed by Khiem’s dark, angry eloquence.

She hadn’t been, but it had been close, and Khiem had never stopped. Even on the day she’d left, he’d petitioned the head of the Embroidered Guard to have her arrested.

Khiem walked in, not waiting for her answer. The bots clustered around him, like eager pups; a swarm of them dragged tea and hot water from the kitchen corner; another swarm pulled the low table in the centre of the room, set up plates and chopsticks. He sat cross-legged, still smiling, and waited for her to do the same. The communal network, obedient to his cues, changed the surroundings: The room faded, became the sharp slopes of a mountain with the outbuildings of a temple complex clinging to its slopes—the angles of the rock broken, here and there, by the curve of a roof, the circle of a longevity symbol on a door. In the distance, a flock of cranes wheeled, making mournful calls like reed flutes, and the air was moist with a hint of approaching cold.

“Why are you here?” Dan Linh asked. She sat down, feeling the smoothness of cut marble underneath. The table was polished mahogany, but only the food and tea on it was real; the rest was only ambient.

Khiem smiled. “I thought I would welcome you back.”

She would never be welcome, not so long as Khiem was at court. But he was Third Rank—and The Serpent’s Pearl in the Sea Grand Preceptor—vastly outranking him. She was safe. She had to be.

“What do you want?”

“Oh, Dan Linh. Still as bad as ever. I thought twenty years would have taught you diplomacy.”

“You know I’m a scientist. Not an official or a courtier.”

Khiem shrugged. He swirled the tea in the cup, staring at it for a while. “No. You were never that. The games we play . . . they genuinely don’t interest you, do you?”

“Games? You wished me dead. You hounded me to the Midday Gate calling for a death sentence.”

“Forgive me,” Khiem said, and it didn’t sound like an apology at all, more like a raised eyebrow, wondering how she could be uncouth enough to raise such fuss, twenty years after the facts. “‘Games’ is the wrong word. Perhaps some think of it as games. I’m in earnest—but there are rules, and I follow them. You . . . you never did.” He smiled. “Not eight hours back into the Purple Forbidden City, and you already flout them as though they didn’t exist.”

“I have no idea what you mean.”

“As I said.” Khiem set his cup on the table. A crane alighted on one of the rocks: watched them for a while, before shaking its wings open and flying away. “I admire you in many ways, Dan Linh, I genuinely do. You move through life untethered by anything but the purity of your craft. Tussles of power never interested you, did they—or who supported who and for what reason? I wonder how well you’d have done, if you’d stayed at court.”

Better than Ai Nhi, she thought, sharply—remembering the litany of losses in the report; and Khiem must have seen her face, read it as easily as an open book.

He said, “Ai Nhi . . . did well, all things considered. She found herself a protector—”

“You?” She was married, The Serpent’s Pearl in the Sea had said, to the General of the South Flank. On the communal network, the General was in disgrace, deployed to a faraway place on the edge of the numbered planets, and Dan Linh didn’t need to play the intrigues of the court to read significance into that.

Khiem shrugged. “Perhaps. Does it matter?”

“It should.”

“And perhaps it shouldn’t,” Khiem said. “As I said . . . Ai Nhi was more . . . accommodating than you were, though perhaps she didn’t have your fire for science.”

No, she’d never had—which was why Dan Linh had been surprised, when Ai Nhi had come up with the improved manufacturing process—surprised, and pleased, and was this the reason why she hadn’t checked Ai Nhi’s results thoroughly enough? She’d asked herself that question often enough, and had no answer. “She was head of a laboratory,” Dan Linh said. The laboratory that she’d founded, with her discovery of the vaccine, that she’d been forced to leave in disgrace. “That’s all that should matter. Keeping the laboratory safe. Making discoveries that matter. That help people.”

Khiem’s burning, mocking eyes held her. “You think more discoveries would have saved the Cedar and Crane? The plague is gone—your vaccine has saved us all. There’s no money for esoteric research.”

“Esoteric research which gave you the vaccine.” Her voice was sharper than she’d thought it would be. “What were you going to do, come the next plague?”

Khiem smiled, a bare tightening of his lips. “Oh, Dan Linh. This is exactly why you wouldn’t have done better than Ai Nhi. Exactly what got you into trouble, twenty years ago. You think of what is right—of, say, the necessity to get your vaccine to as many people as possible, regardless of what else it might imply or whom it might vex, regardless of the deaths it might cause.”

“It didn’t happen like this,” Dan Linh said, more forcefully than she’d expected. Was the wound still so raw, her foolishness still boring a hole in her self-possession? “You know it didn’t.” And how pathetic, wasn’t it, to still feel she needed to justify herself to a man who’d never listened to her or valued her?

“Didn’t it?” Khiem smiled, an expression as thin and as cutting as a razor blade. “I had a stroll back into the archives, when I learnt you’d be coming back. I . . . remembered.” He closed his eyes, his tone slow enough to suggest he was quoting from memory, rather than using a note in the communal network. “‘In the light of the available evidence (see graphs 3a and 16), we believe in the necessity of modifying the manufacturing process to attain greater efficacy. The slight loss in concentration of the active organism would be compensated by the ease and speed of delivery of the vaccine throughout the numbered planets (see graph 19d).’ Your words? Ai Nhi’s? Do you even remember?”

The words of her nightmares, of sleepless nights wondering if that was where she’d gone wrong, where she’d let her arrogance let the better of her—and sometimes she’d have a burst of anger, and remember that it was Ai Nhi’s process, Ai Nhi who had checked the experimental results with her, over and over again, seeing nothing wrong—only what they’d gain, checking the devastating spread of Blue Lily so much faster, so much more easily. And that Ai Nhi was still at court, was still rising through the ranks of civil service, while all Dan Linh had for herself was exile and bitterness.

“I didn’t mean the deaths,” Dan Linh said, slowly, carefully. “We honestly thought—” But it was about the deaths, about those who’d lined up, eager to get vaccinated—trusting her and Ai Nhi, only to catch a side infection—a less deadly one than Blue Lily, but was it truly much comfort, if they were still dead at the end?

She’d made her amends for that, said her prayers, over and over, and burnt incense at shrines, day after day, year after year, praying for swift passage, and swift rebirth. She would be torn apart in Hell if the King of the Underworld thought her still guilty, and she accepted that—but that was for the gods to judge, and not for people like Khiem.

“Oh, Dan Linh.” Khiem smiled again, that expression she wished she could wipe from his face. “Have you understood nothing, in your exile?”

Anger flashed, red-hot, searing. “The Sixty-First Planet is a place of dust storms and small settlements, and children who grow up and become settlers themselves, never leaving the planet, let alone the solar system. Where do you think I would have kept up in court graces?”

Khiem picked up a dumpling, held it to the light until the filling of pork and chives glistened, pink and green flecks through the translucent skin. “A lesson, then, Dan Linh—in honor of your return. We’re not fools. We know that vaccines have risk. Your process was . . . contaminated and flawed, and for that, yes, you’d have been blamed, possibly dismissed from your post. But I wouldn’t have called for your death, or . . . hounded you, as you said, on the basis of that.”

“Then why—”

Khiem shrugged. “It wasn’t you, Dan Linh. It was never about you.”

Then who . . . She clamped her mouth on the question before it escaped her. If not her, if not Ai Nhi—there was only one other person Khiem could mean.

Her protector of the time—and her current one, too. “You wanted The Serpent’s Pearl in the Sea in disgrace.”

Khiem smiled, a teacher pleased at a student’s answer. “Of course.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s a mindship,” Khiem said, slowly, carefully, as if Dan Linh should have known, all along.

“And thus not worthy of her post?” Just as scientists like her hadn’t been worthy of joining the court?

“Because, despite subtle hints from the court, Grand Preceptors have clung on to their posts until the breath left their bodies. What will you do, if The Serpent Pearl’s in the Sea refuses to step down?”

She . . . she had never stopped to consider it—as Khiem had said, oblivious to anything that wasn’t the work of the laboratory. Mindships were immortal, or close enough—much longer-lived than humans, unchanged for generations. “Why would I care?” she asked, bluntly. “She’s shown me more constant favor than any high-rank official.”

“Because—” Khiem exhaled, as if talking to a small child. “Because emperors and empresses need to live and die, and so do courts and officials. Because the base unit of our lives is still human, still mortal and aging. Because anything that holds onto power that long ossifies. Do you remember the tales of the Auspicious Destiny Emperor?”

Every child did. He’d ruled for over eighty years, by the end of which the court was bloodless and drained of energy, the functionaries too settled in their ways to even envision new ideas. “That’s not the same,” Dan Linh said, more sharply than she’d intended. “And The Serpent’s Pearl in the Sea isn’t like that. She’s dutiful and filial, and she would obey the edicts of the Empress.”

“Perhaps she is. Perhaps she’s not.” Khiem rose, slowly gathering his robes around him. “That’s not the point. There . . . is fear among the civil servants, Dan Linh, and it’s not unjustified. It never was.” He pursed his lips, looked as though he might stop speaking, might stop spearing her with words, but then he went on, regardless, “You say you could have done better than Ai Nhi. Well, here is your chance to prove it, but I don’t think you’re starting out well.”

“What do you mean?”

Khiem waited until he was all the way to the door before he turned to face Dan Linh. “Ask yourself this—why are you back here?”

Dan Linh had had enough of him, and of his supercilious guessing games. “Do tell me. Since you’re being so helpful.”

Khiem laughed, with no joy or amusement whatsoever. “You’re the woman who banished the plague. The one who ended the era of Blue Lily and ushered in our new age of prosperity. What better way to reassure the court than to have you by the side of The Serpent’s Pearl in the Sea?”

And then he was gone, but his words remained in the room, casting a pall like the miasma of fog over everything.

• • • •

The laboratory was deserted: It had changed in thirty years—filled with more and more complicated machines, every available surface covered by bots. Dan Linh stood, for a while, watching the lights blink on the panel of the ovens, remembering the nights she’d spent there, the sleepless manufacturing of batches—the graphs that told her, again and again, that she couldn’t outrace the plague, that the vaccination rate was always going to be lower than Blue Lily’s mortality rate. Her initial vaccine—the one she’d rashly, foolishly tested on herself—took too long to produce, too many resources. She—and Ai Nhi—had believed there had to be another, faster way.

But she didn’t want to go there, couldn’t afford to.

“Professor,” a voice said, behind her.

She turned, and saw Ai Nhi.

She’d changed so much, and so little. The face was the same, a perfect oval with the hair pulled back in a classic topknot, the mouth thin, elegantly delineated with vermillion—but the eyes were deeper, darker than they had been, and she stood ramrod straight, the awkward and gangly girl hammered into shape by years and years of propriety and dancing around court intrigues.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” Dan Linh said. But really, she ought to have known that coming back to court would be like summoning, one by one, the ghosts of her past, of her failures and her regrets.

“Where else?” Ai Nhi’s voice was sharp, cutting. There was a younger woman with her—maybe twenty, twenty-five years old? Not much younger than Ai Nhi herself had been, back then. “This is Cuc,” Ai Nhi said.

If Ai Nhi was impeccable, Cuc . . . was not. Her fingers were stained with ink, her five-panel dress frayed, and she didn’t appear to be capable of sitting still. “You work here?” Dan Linh said, guessing.

Cuc nodded. She looked at Dan Linh, awe-struck. “You—” She swallowed, started again. “You’re Professor Thuong Thi Dan Linh. They said you were back, but—”

“Cuc.” Ai Nhi’s voice was distantly amused. “Forgive me,” she said to Dan Linh. “She thinks of you as a living legend.”

The woman who ended the plague, Censor Khiem had said. The one who ushered in a new age of prosperity. Dan Linh felt it, trembling on the edge of unfolding—a seizure, a vague, blurred image of the court, of kneeling before the throne of the Empress with someone at her side—another meaningless, illusory image from a future that might never come to pass.

“I’m no goddess,” Dan Linh said, when the seizure was gone. “And no different from you or Ai Nhi.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not,” Ai Nhi said. She shook her head. “The one who walked away.” She made it sound—like a failure, her voice a sharp reproach, but beneath it was something else. Anger? Remorse? “I thought you would come here, to haunt familiar places—” She shook her head. “Do you find it much changed?”

“Yes,” Dan Linh said. “But of course it would change.”

“New masters, new ways.” Ai Nhi’s voice was ironic—such bitterness, such anger within her. Dan Linh had always thought she’d be happy—that, if someone was going to be bitter, it might as well be her, lying awake listening to the slow, steady sound of her husband’s breathing, wondering what was happening at court, and having no way to find out in her distant exile.

She hadn’t expected Ai Nhi to—to turn into this tall, commanding woman, hadn’t expected the barely contained bitterness—but then again, how else would Ai Nhi have looked, with the remnants of her dreams turned to ashes, the inexorable decline of the laboratory, and finally Dan Linh’s return, like a slap in the face?

“I didn’t expect this,” Dan Linh said, finally. It hadn’t turned out like either of them wanted, or hoped.

Ai Nhi shrugged. “I did. The moment your protector—” she spat the word, “—ascended.”

“Are we going to have an argument on the suitability of a mindship Grand Preceptor again?” Dan Linh said, wearily. She’d had that with Khiem, had had her draught of doubt and upended worldviews for a lifetime.

“No.” Ai Nhi shook her head. “I don’t take part in such fights.” But Cuc, by her side, looked ill at ease. There is . . . fear among the civil servants, Khiem had said—and everyone knew that Dan Linh didn’t take part in court intrigue; and almost everyone was like Cuc, remembering her as the scientist who had ended the plague and chosen to go into exile—a symbol, both an omen for a prosperous future with countless blessings, and a reminder of her integrity in the face of pressure. “This isn’t about The Serpent’s Pearl in the Sea.”

“About us, then?” Dan Linh asked, gently. About the laboratory, about what Ai Nhi had made of it.

Ai Nhi’s hands moved, encompassed the entirety of the laboratory, the machines softly beeping, the temperature-controlled incubation chambers. “I imagine that you’ve read the reports by now.”

“I’ve read them,” Dan Linh said. Over and over again, trying to see where it had gone wrong, where all the small decisions Ai Nhi had made had turned into disasters. Khiem had said Ai Nhi had done well, considering; that it was none of her fault. That there was nothing Dan Linh could have done better than her.

Khiem was wrong.

Or was he?

“You would, no doubt, have done things differently.” Ai Nhi smiled—again, an expression that never reached her eyes.

“No doubt,” Dan Linh said. Except it was so easy, wasn’t it, to analyze things afterwards? To dissect errors, as people had taken apart their new manufacturing process—tracing the contamination back to a faulty concentration in the second step of attenuating Blue Lily—and then passed judgment on them. And then, because it was late, because she was tired and adrift, and unsure of what she could cling to, “Do you ever regret?”

Ai Nhi’s face didn’t move. “Cuc,” she said, gently. “Can you go direct that bot cluster, please? It’s a precise maneuver, and it requires a knowledgeable hand.”

Cuc, startled, looked at Ai Nhi; and then at Dan Linh. “I . . . guess so,” she said. They heard her footsteps, dwindling away on the tiles of the laboratory—and then only silence, and darkness spread from within the communal network, muffling all sounds.

Ai Nhi walked closer to Dan Linh; stood, for a while, looking at her. “Regret that I’m here?” she asked.

“I didn’t mean that,” Dan Linh said.

“No,” Ai Nhi said. “I didn’t think you did.” The floor and the laboratory had vanished, and she stood in utter darkness, as though she hung within the starless void of space. “I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t know, back then.”

“Neither did I.” Dan Linh stared at Ai Nhi—because there was nothing left, only the void, only themselves. “But they still died.”

“And some of them still lived.” Ai Nhi’s voice was sharp—as cutting as jagged glass. “Does it balance out?”

“I don’t know,” Dan Linh said. She would never know. Khiem would say it didn’t—or perhaps he wouldn’t, not really caring about what it all meant—and The Serpent’s Pearl in the Sea would say that it did, that she was the saviour of untold billions, the woman who had mastered Blue Lily—and Dan Linh wouldn’t believe either of them. She knew her faults, all too well.

Ai Nhi looked as though she was adjusting her hairpins, but her topknot came loose, and a spread of black hair, sprinkled with grey, spread behind her back. She was . . . old—no longer the student Dan Linh remembered, and perhaps no longer with the faults she remembered, or imagined. “I’m not a fool,” Ai Nhi said. “I know what I owe you.”

“Nothing,” Dan Linh said.

Ai Nhi smiled, sharp, cutting. “Twenty years? Don’t lie to me, Professor. It ill suits you.” In the darkness, her eyes seemed to shine, illuminated as if from within. “I won’t make a fuss. Not that I was ever in a position to make one.” She shrugged again, but Dan Linh read the quiver in her shoulders, the suppressed grief and fear. “It’s only fair. Things change. People rise and fall from grace, and the balance of power shifts like the wheel of rebirth.”

And Dan Linh, her fate tied to The Serpent’s Pearl in the Sea, rose with the mindship’s fortunes.

It’s only fair.

Was it?

“You love this laboratory,” Dan Linh said, slowly.

A flash of something, in Ai Nhi’s eyes. “What does it matter?”

Dan Linh wanted to ask about the General, about whether it had been a marriage of love like her and Chi Hieu, about whether they had shared sweet nothings on the pillows, and walked side by side, laughing at the way the world worked—but she found the words frozen in her throat: too casual, too familiar for this woman whom she was going to displace.

“You’re right,” Dan Linh said, slowly. “It doesn’t matter. Thank you.”

And walked away, unsure of what to think anymore.

• • • •

Two hours before the reception, The Serpent’s Pearl in the Sea found Dan Linh in the antechambers of her quarters, kneeling on the floor with the ill-fitting grace of someone unused to court protocol. “You should be getting dressed,” the mindship said—her voice puzzled, with just a hint of anger.

Dan Linh took a deep, trembling breath; thought of Khiem and Ai Nhi and darkness spreading across the laboratory. “I can’t.”

Things change, Ai Nhi had said. Some things did, some things didn’t, and the laboratory was all that Ai Nhi had left: her own work, her own stand against the encroaching darkness of old age and death. “Can’t?” The Serpent’s Pearl in the Sea’s voice was smooth, quiet—the calm before the storm struck.

“I can’t displace Ai Nhi just because you have a need for me.”

“I’ve told you before.” The ship was angry now, and the effects of that rippled in the communal network, casting the sheen of oily water upon the marble floor. “You care too much for Ai Nhi.”

“I won’t do better than Ai Nhi,” Dan Linh said, wearily.

“This isn’t about doing better. This is about doing what is right.”

“What is right for you?” The words welled out of her mouth before she could take them back. “To have my support?” In Dan Linh’s mind, Khiem smiled, revealing the fangs of tigers. This is exactly why you wouldn’t have done better than Ai Nhi.

The Serpent’s Pearl in the Sea was silent, for a while. The sheen on the floor spread, seemed to cover the entire room, until even the scuttling bots seemed alien lifeforms. “Perhaps,” she said. “And perhaps I was genuinely trying to help you. Twenty years ago, I couldn’t keep you safe. I couldn’t keep you here.”

And Dan Linh hadn’t even been able to keep Ai Nhi safe. The weight of failures, of the deaths that she would always carry with her, of her arrogance and belief she knew better than anyone else—twenty years of exile were not enough to make amends for any of it.

“But you’re right,” The Serpent’s Pearl in the Sea said at last, when Dan Linh didn’t speak up again. “It’s a risky thing, to tie yourself to me—to face the hostility of the court—and I shouldn’t have expected you to do that, merely on the basis of old friendships. I was . . . dishonest with you. For that, I apologize.”

Dan Linh stared at the floor, at the bots. The ship had asked her whether she regretted her decision, twenty years ago. Ai Nhi hadn’t, but then, Ai Nhi had known the value of it, and the cost. She’d done the right thing then, and she couldn’t do anything less now.

And she’d always known, hadn’t she, what the right thing was?

“What’s past is past,” Dan Linh said. And, more slowly, “You can still have my support. But I can’t be here. I can’t be at Court, not even for you. You said there were other posts for Ai Nhi. Surely there are others for me, too. Surely . . . A lab on a small planet,” she said, finally. “Somewhere I can continue my research.”

“You would return to your exile?” the ship’s voice was . . . amused? Angry? She couldn’t tell, not anymore. “Running away from court and all our intrigues?”

“I’ll take the nomination from you,” Dan Linh said, slowly, carefully. “That will be a political act.” A clear message sent to the Court, of whom Dan Linh supported, of whose integrity she approved of—a paradoxical acceptance that marked her, now and always, as a part of the ebb and flow of court intrigue.

Silence, in the wake of her words. At length, The Serpent’s Pearl in the Sea spoke. “There are some laboratories that might need a new head, yes. I would need to think . . .” And then, with a hint of anger, “You don’t know what you’re asking for.”

Dan Linh rose, wincing at the ache in her knees; stood silently, watching the mindship—the first Grand Preceptor who wasn’t human, the first who would outlive the Empress herself—the one she had chosen to trust, because she couldn’t share Cuc’s fears, or Khiem’s unthinking prejudice. Because she had to believe in something better, because she’d always done so.

“I don’t know all of it,” she said. “But I know more than I did, twenty years ago.”

“I see,” the ship said. “Thank you.”

Outside the antechamber, the maw of the court waited to swallow Dan Linh again—to honor her for the lives she’d saved, to excoriate her for the ones she’d lost—all her choices leading her to stand here, trying to make things better. Khiem would laugh, tell her she was a fool, and Ai Nhi would tell her to stay out of the politics that would only break her, but she was beyond either of them now.

In the end, faced with the uncertainty of deciding, all she could do was choose to do right—without knowing what it would bring—whether it would be a bright, shining future, or one scattered with the jagged shards of bitterness.

Some things changed, others didn’t—and she wouldn’t burden herself with regrets.

©2014 by Aliette de Bodard. Originally published in To Shape the Dark, edited by Athena Andreadis. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a System Engineer. She studied Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, but moonlights as a writer of speculative fiction. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, as well as numerous short stories, which garnered her two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award, and two British Science Fiction Association Awards. Her space opera books include The Citadel of Weeping Pearls, a book set in the same universe as her Vietnamese science fiction novella, On a Red Station Drifting. Recent works include the Dominion of the Fallen series, set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, which comprises The House of Shattered Wings (Roc/Gollancz, 2015 British Science Fiction Association Award, Locus Award finalist), and its standalone sequel The House of Binding Thorns (Ace/Gollancz). She lives in Paris with her family, in a flat with more computers than warm bodies, and a set of Lovecraftian tentacled plants intent on taking over the place.

What I Told My Little Girl About the Aliens Preparing to Grind Us Into Hamburgers

Adam-Troy Castro | 2490 words

Pretty much everybody made peace with it very early on in the process. It wasn’t the most pleasant prospect in this world, or any other. But it had been explained to us in the most rational and persuasive terms imaginable, in sentences so simple that even the dumbest among us were capable of getting it; and once we swallowed that pill and incorporated it into our daily lives, it really didn’t make much of a difference in the scheme of things. We were adults about it.

But that doesn’t make much of a difference when your four-year-old daughter looks up at you with her big brown eyes and asks you, “Daddy? Why are the space men going to grind us into hamburgers?”

Tanisha is the light of my life. I guess that doesn’t come as much of a surprise, really. Fathers are supposed to dote on their daughters. But I’ve been around long enough to know that this isn’t always so. I have a friend, Ferd, short for Ferdinand, not a bad guy really, but one of those men who really doesn’t know what to do with the strange miniature people he’d created when he got together with that pretty wife of his; not his son, and certainly not with his daughter, who he regards like she’s as much of an alien as the ones who came down from space and declared our future as meat. Ferd doesn’t have one damned idea what to make of the pretty little girl he fathered, who looks up at him with her sky-blue eyes and expects him to show her something, anything. “I guess I don’t have the fatherhood gene,” he told me once. But since Tanisha’s birth, I’ve found out that I do, and that it wraps me as tightly as any set of chains ever forged for any imprisoned man, and I would not have it any other way. Whenever she asks me a difficult question, whether it’s naïve or childish or just one of those eternal mysteries that anyone not a four-year-old girl understands cannot be solved even by authorities far more educated than I, I know that to her I am the primary source of wisdom and that I don’t dare blow her off with some half-truth meant only to placate her into giving her a moment’s peace.

So I just said, “They think we’ll taste good, I guess.”

This was on our back steps, after sunset, looking out onto our little green yard surrounded by a high wooden fence with the one knothole that sometimes flickers with pink whenever the big friendly pit bull from next door sticks his tongue through and licks our side for reasons mysterious to any mind less arcane than that particular canine’s. The sky was a dark purple not yet fully faded to black and a few of the brighter stars, none belonging to the aliens who were going to grind us up and make us into hamburgers, had already appeared to announce that yet another day had passed. We’d just had dinner, franks and beans, and as per our nightly habit had stepped outside so I could have one of my four daily cigarettes and Tanisha could have her last energetic run in circles before her bath and bedtime story. It was a time when a daughter could ask her father questions, like how birds could fly, or what life was like in olden times, or why the aliens were going to grind us up and make us into hamburgers.

She was beautiful, my little girl: not just beautiful in the way that all little girls are, even when they’re not, but beautiful in the way her mother was, beautiful in the way that made strangers say that one day she was going to break hearts. And she would have, too, at least if there were a future beyond the one only weeks away, where she and everybody else was going to end up being ground into hamburgers. Someday, if not for those aliens, I would have stood there with wet eyes as she married some guy, or, I more than halfway suspect, some girl I pretended to like but hated a little, for taking her from me, and if there was a plus side to what was going to happen, it was that I would never really have to live a day when she was no longer my little girl. The negative, of course, was that I would live a day when she and her mother and I all got ground into hamburgers. But she was beautiful, a little person with probing eyes and an infectious laugh and hair that got tangled in her braids, and never more beautiful than when she was trying to stump her old man with questions.

She tilted her head, in the manner of any little girl who needed to stay in some kind of motion even when doing something as sedentary as asking a question, and said, “How are they going to grind us into hamburgers?”

“Do you remember that big silver building we saw the other day? The one that just popped up in front of the Winn-Dixie?”

“. . . yes . . .”

“Well, that’s one of the machines that’s going to grind us into hamburgers. There are millions of them, now, in every city and every town, and in places far from any city or town, anywhere you can go to find people.”

“Even on the ocean?” said Tanisha.

Maybe she would have been a lawyer. She’d always been quick, even before she started talking. That’s one of the great pleasures of parenthood, you know; at least, it is if you’re one of those folks who take to the job, who understand that when you take hold of a baby, you’re in for an exercise in watching that child forge connections, figure out the way the world’s put together and how she’s going to find a place in it. Each basic building block is triumph. I, for one, deeply remember the day when I carried her outside, brought her to the scrawny little sapling that sits beside my front curb, and taught her the word “tree.” I remember how she repeated the word doubtfully, saying “twee?” and how she seemed to be filing it away for future reference, a useful bit of information that she’d likely need to reference later on. I treasure beyond all reasonable proportion the knowledge that I never had to tell her the word a second time. Before long, she was acquiring data at a rate that seemed dizzying, figuring out things before I got around to explaining them to her, deducing Z from her prior experience with X and Y. Now I was proud to say that she was smarter at her four than I’d been at my ten, and that she seemed poised to accelerate still further, to build the kind of mind that dwarfed her old man’s. Even on the ocean? That was her brain at work: a direct line for the first obvious loophole.

A lawyer, then. It would have been nice to see her graduate from law school. She would have been the first in our line, of which we only know the last century and a half, to make something like that of herself.

“Even on the ocean, sweetie. They have smaller vessels tracking our ships at sea. They’ve let us know that when the day comes, those vessels will match speeds with those ships, lower a walkway and let folks know when it’s time to climb aboard to be ground into hamburgers.”

“Oh,” she said, and asked the next question after the shortest possible interval for processing: “Will it hurt?”

“No, honey. They promised us it won’t hurt.”

“Do you believe them, Daddy?”

“Yes,” I said, without hesitation. “They were kind enough to show us everything. It’ll be over before we know it. There’s even a bit, just before the end, that’s going to be fun.”

“How can it be fun?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. But they showed us. They’re smart.”

By now her eyes were very round. “How will they make us into hamburgers?”

And how much of the truth does a wise father tell? What details do you include, when replying to life’s unanswerables? Do you say that Grampy died because he was an old man who lived too hard, drank like a fish, suffered hypertension, and had a simmering temper that he mostly hid from his loved ones, but that ate away at him every single day he endured on this planet? Or do you say that God was getting lonely without a Grampy and that he took yours to live with him for a while, but that Grampy’s still in our lives, looking down on you from a heaven of fluffy white clouds? Which is better, the truth or the fantasy? The truth did have the advantage of being indivisible. It might be upsetting, but she would never be able to pick at it, never be able to find the contradictions that had already led her to question the accounts, if not the veracity, of Santa Claus. I would only have to leave out some of the worst to advise her that when the day came, the aliens would release a signal, more powerful still than the one that currently kept us reconciled with the inevitable; one that would call to every human being with two brain cells to put together, and have us drop everything we might be doing to head toward the machines and up the ramps and past the burst of something that would relieve us of any senses at all, so we wouldn’t have to dread feeling what happened next. I wouldn’t have to tell her that the blades they intended on using, which they were kind enough to demonstrate for us on the same day we found out that we were all going to be ground into hamburgers, were only a few molecules thick, and sharp enough to part steel; those would end us, and subsequent more advanced filters would separate the edible from the nonedible, removing anything that didn’t belong to the animal, from eyeglasses and clothing to the fillings in our teeth to artificial heart valves and hips and other prosthetics, discarding all of those, before what was left was sent further to machines that separated every organic part of us from every other part of us, separating the prime from the gamey, the fat from the lean, the tender from the tough, grading it all before mixing us all together and collating us into individually wrapped patties of about a quarter-pound apiece, before cooking. I could tell Tanisha that since we were all going to be mixed together, in the end, that some of the patties I’ll become will also contain bits of her, and bits of Mommy, and bits of other people we care about, and that as I lay awake at night, I sometimes prayed that this would be so, because in my head it possessed some value of still being a father: that being what I was left with. But really, I could have said that it would be all be over with that one burst of bright something that was going to take away God and the alphabet and rules of poker and the awareness of each other and the capacity for feeling pain and fear; and anything that happened after that was going to be beyond our capacity to feel, except for, as the aliens who were going to grind us all up into hamburgers promised, one moment of artificially-induced but nevertheless powerful joy.

Their kind explanation had included a brief, diluted sense of that happiness, broadcast to all of us in the same instant. The fundamentalists got their rapture and the addiction-prone got a high that they could chase, with longing, for all the time we had left. Some even called what we were going to get fair recompense for what we were going to lose, and I was not one to argue, not when in all the weeks that followed I’d been unable to keep thinking of that one taste I’d had, the taste that still called to me and that I found myself still longing for, in the dead of night. Nothing else I’d ever known, in my life, had ever compared to that taste . . . but for one thing, the arrival of the little girl who was still staring up at me, blinking, waiting for me to provide an answer that would get past a filter far more demanding than any the aliens were going to use to take the good parts from the bad.

Big brown eyes like dinner plates, asking the question:

How will they make us into hamburgers?

I said what all daddies have always said, to such unanswerable demands, since the beginning of time.

“Magic.”

Blessedly, that was still an answer that satisfied. She nodded and said, “Okay.”

She crawled into my lap and gave me a hug, not so much because she needed the comfort as because it was one of the good things she had learned that a life could have, and I hugged her back and kissed her on the top of her head and told her with mock sternness that it was time she got her little butt back inside and got ready for bed. I assured her that I would be back inside in a little bit, to tuck her in and tell her a story, one that would send to her the land of sleep with sweet and comfortable dreams. She knew from experience that this was a critical part of the negotiation that, once completed, could not be argued with, and so she went, bopping with the energy that she had somehow still not used up, not with that conversation, and not with anything that had come before it.

I was left with one of my favorite parts of the day, the sudden delicious quiet that came after she was gone, but before I had time to worry about what she’d gotten up to. It was the first few days of fall, just before a winter that was coming but that none of us would live long enough to feel, and the breeze was cool in a way that lightened what part of the summer had still not resigned us into departing. It felt good, and with that breeze came a charcoal-scented whiff from some neighbor a few houses away, using his backyard grill for what was surely one of the last times.

I’d eaten a full dinner, but the aroma did what such mouth-watering smells do, and fooled me into thinking I was still hungry.

©2017 by Adam-Troy Castro.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam-Troy Castro made his first non-fiction sale to SPY magazine in 1987. His 26 books to date include four Spider-Man novels, 3 novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and 6 middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of young Gustav Gloom. The penultimate installment in the series, Gustav Gloom and the Inn of Shadows (Grosset and Dunlap) came out in August 2015. The finale appeared in August 2016. Adam’s darker short fiction for grownups is highlighted by his most recent collection, Her Husband’s Hands And Other Stories (Prime Books). Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun (Japan), and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, and, internationally, the Ignotus (Spain), the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and the Kurd-Laßwitz Preis (Germany). He lives in Florida with his wife Judi and either three or four cats, depending on what day you’re counting and whether Gilbert’s escaped this week.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

The Tale of Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle

Sofia Samatar | 3490 words

This story is at least a thousand years old. Its complete title is “The Tale of Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle: It Contains Strange and Marvelous Things.” A single copy, probably produced in Egypt or Syria, survives in Istanbul; the first English translation appeared in 2015.

This is not the right way to start a fairy tale, but it’s better than sitting here in silence waiting for Mahliya, who takes forever to get ready. She’s upstairs staining her cheeks with antimony, her lips with a lipstick called Black Sauce. Vainest crone in Cairo.

She leaves her window open for the birds to fly in and out. If you listen closely, you’ll hear the bigger ones thump their wings against the sash. The most famous, of course, is the flying featherless ostrich. A monstrous creature, like something boiled. Mahliya adores it. She lets it eat out of her mouth.

• • • •

While we’re waiting, why don’t I tell you the Tale of the White-Footed Gazelle? I’m only a retainer, but I do know all the stories, for that’s the definition of a servant, especially one in my position, the head servant, and indeed, in these lean times, the only one. Once I presided over a staff of hundreds; now instead of directing many people, I direct many things: I purchase shoes and bedding, I keep up with all the fashions, with advances in medicine, tax laws, satellite TV. If your purpose, as you say, is to produce a monograph on the newly translated Tales of the Marvelous and News of the Strange, including versions of the stories as told by people who experienced them, why not begin with me? I am perfectly familiar with the Tale of the White-Footed Gazelle, which lies enclosed in the Tale of Mahliya and Mauhub. You will be familiar with this narrative structure from A Thousand and One Nights, a collection of tales whose fate has been very different from that of Mahliya’s story. One might ask: Why? Why should A Thousand and One Nights rise to such prominence, performed on stages in Japan and animated by Disney, while the very similar collection containing the Tale of Mahliya and Mauhub has moldered in a library for centuries? Well! No doubt all that is about to change. Just close the window for me, if you would; my bald head feels every draft. When I was a younger man—but that’s not the story you came to hear! Listen, then, and I shall spin you a marvelous tale.

The Tale Of The White-Footed Gazelle

I have condensed it for you because you are a researcher. In this story you will find:

Haifa’, daughter of a Persian king, also a gazelle

The White-Footed Gazelle, also a prince of the jinn

Ostrich King

Snake King

Crow Queen

Lion

A love story. Haifa’ and the White-Footed Gazelle fall in love, then separate, then move toward each other again, then apart, as if in a cosmic dance. We learn that the Ostrich King unites hearts while the Crow Queen divides lovers. These movements of attraction and repulsion also characterize the Tale of Mahliya and Mauhub.

An animal story. A prince of the jinn takes the form of a white-footed gazelle to follow Haifa’ into her secluded garden. When he abandons her due to a misunderstanding (he thinks she’s divulged his true nature), she tracks him through a country of marvelous beasts. In a wild green valley, ostriches graze in the shadow of the Obsidian Mountain, which marks the border of the land of the jinn. The Ostrich King herds his flock with a palm branch, flicking their tails with the spikes. That night, as Haifa’ takes shelter with him, the Snake King passes with his retinue. A noisy party, jostling and laughing, quaffing great goblets of smoke. They ride upon snakes and wear snakes coiled round their heads like turbans. “Have you seen the White-Footed Gazelle?” Haifa’ asks. “No,” says the Snake King, flames flashing up in his mouth. “Ask the Queen of the Crows.”

To reach the Crow Queen, Haifa’ flies on a smooth-skinned, featherless ostrich, which covers a two-year journey in a single night. The Crow Queen is a scowling old woman with ten jeweled bracelets on each arm, ten anklets on each leg, and ten rings on each finger. She wears a golden crown studded with gems, carries an emerald scepter, spits on the floor, and has never shown pity to anyone. Fortunately, Haifa’ bears a letter from the Ostrich King, and the Crow Queen owes him a debt. She reunites Haifa’ with her beloved.

The story doesn’t end there. Haifa’ pines for her own country, and her new husband agrees to a visit as long as they both go as gazelles. Unfortunately, they are captured: Haifa’ the Gazelle by Mauhub, and the White-Footed Gazelle by Mahliya. When we meet Haifa’, she’s just been turned back into a woman by a priest of Baal. Weeping, she tells Mauhub her story. Mauhub is astounded, but not as much as you might think. He’s an animal intimate himself: As a child, he was suckled by a lion.

• • • •

A few more interesting points about this story:

1. Feet

The White-Footed Gazelle is named for his feet and also seems to have a foot fetish. When he first transforms himself into a man in front of Haifa’, he declares his love and immediately kisses her feet. In between kisses, he speaks to her in a pure and elegant language, more delicious than honey and softer than clarified butter. “He said I was like a shoot of sweet basil. He kissed my feet and sucked them and by God I felt my heart fly into my throat.”

2. Shivering

The gazelle shivers and turns into a woman. She tells the story of the White-Footed Gazelle, which shivered and turned into a man. A weird sort of shudder seems to precede transformation. The strangest thing, though, is the seizure suffered by our heroine’s father. This happens early in the story, when Haifa’ is living with her lover in an exquisite idyll: He’s her pet gazelle by day, her lover in a locked room at night. Then one night Haifa’ wakes to a cry of alarm: “The king! The king!” Terrified for her father, she rushes out half-dressed, leaving the door open. The White-Footed Gazelle doesn’t wake up—perhaps he’s a heavy sleeper, or perhaps, being a jinni, he’s deaf to human sorrow. Whatever the reason, he only wakes at dawn. Finding himself alone, the door open, he thinks Haifa’ has betrayed him and exposed their secret.

Out the window he goes on mist-white feet. Haifa’ will come back soon, having left her father sleeping peacefully. She’ll cry out over the empty bed. She’ll dash out into the garden, slapping her face in her grief. She will begin her quest.

How strange that the source of the error that parts these lovers should be a seizure. An excess of trembling.

To shiver is to move rapidly from one place to another and back. From prince of the jinn to white-footed gazelle, from beloved to enemy. I think of this whole story as a long shudder.

3. Lion

I did say there was a lion, didn’t I! Haifa’ the Gazelle meets him shortly before she’s captured by Mauhub. The lion has scraped out a hole in the ground, and he’s squatting in it and crying. “Dark-eyed gazelle, fair as the moon, I, the red lion, have suffered a great sorrow . . .” The story sort of drops him there. Later, of course, he’ll turn out to be the long-lost mate of the lioness who suckled Mauhub. This fact won’t redeem the lion, who remains throughout the story the same dirty, sniveling creature we meet in this scene. Forget about him. He’s an asshole.

I think I hear Mahliya’s feet on the stairs. It’s either that or the shuffling and crowding of the birds on the perches in her bedroom. Mahliya’s feet are so light they sound like wings. You’ll notice, in a few moments, how graceful and regal she is, an incredible thing at her age. Even I, who have attended her for more years than I care to remember, and have therefore had many occasions to be annoyed with her tricks, admit this. Her queenly poise never shatters. During the revolution, while others cowered indoors, she watched the crowds from her balcony, smoking a water pipe.

Really, it’s too bad that a foreign researcher like yourself, the first to visit her, should be kept waiting so long! If you like, I can tell you a version of her story myself. Just keep in mind that Mahliya will tell it differently.

The Tale of Mahliya and Mauhub
or
The Portrait

My story begins with a portrait. The Egyptian princess Mahliya fell in love with a portrait of Mauhub that was painted on the wall of a church in Jerusalem, as was customary for princes of Mauhub’s line. The painting was fresh, the oil still gleaming; it was adorned with red gold, and its eyes were a pair of topazes. Beside it glimmered a picture of a lioness suckling the infant Mauhub. A crystal candle filled with jasmine oil illuminated both paintings. Mahliya was enchanted. She embarked at once on a love affair conducted entirely under the sign of the portrait.

Portrait One: Mahliya as a Young Man

When Mahliya first met Mauhub, she was disguised as a young man. She introduced herself as Mukhadi’, Mahliya’s vizier. We must suppose she did this in order to increase Mauhub’s interest in the real Mahliya, who was sending him gifts and letters at the same time. A frantic existence: by day, hunting trips and conversation with her beloved, seizing each chance to give him a brotherly punch in the arm; by night, tender yet formal letters, the preparation of splendid packages, sighs, poetry, fainting spells, and tears. You will have noticed the shudder in this story, the same trembling motion that shapes the Tale of the White-Footed Gazelle. Back and forth, back and forth. Incidentally, it’s a wonder Mauhub didn’t suspect Mahliya’s pretty young vizier. Mukhadi’ means Impostor.

Portrait Two: Mahliya as Mirror

On their last hunting trip together, Mauhub caught Haifa’ in her gazelle form and Mahliya caught the White-Footed Gazelle. It was Haifa’, restored to human shape, who informed Mauhub that his hunting companion was also the mysterious princess who kept sending him gifts and letters. Mauhub rushed to Mahliya’s tent. They spent one glorious night together before their fathers recalled them to their respective kingdoms. The lovers continued to communicate through gifts, the most magnificent of which was certainly Mahliya’s mirror.

This mirror was enchanted so that when Mauhub looked into it, he saw Mahliya sitting beside him. “Nothing was missing,” the story tells us, “except the lady herself.” Such an odd phrase; if she was missing, surely nothing else mattered.

I see Mauhub contorting himself, one eye on the mirror, embracing a lady who only appears to be there.

When Mahliya heard of the beauty of Haifa’, who was staying with Mauhub, she got so furiously jealous she sent an eagle to snatch the mirror away.

Portrait Three: Mahliya as Anchorite

For the crime of arousing Mahliya’s suspicions, Mauhub had to be punished. Mahliya tortured his messengers, crushed his armies, beguiled him across the sea with a magic bird. At last, worn thin from travel and near starvation, ugly with suffering, he stumbled to a hermitage on swollen feet. An anchorite peered down from the window, radiant in black wool. She made Mauhub swear to serve her, forced him to write the promise on his arm. All this so that when he reached the city, Queen Mahliya, in her true form at last, could yank up his sleeve and expose his inconstancy.

A love story. She forgave him.

An animal story, teeming with life. Mahliya’s army of buffaloes tramples Mauhub’s army of lions. Her army of wildcats destroys his army of elephants. She builds him a fortress in the land of the jinn, a place swarming with snakes and lizards. Above each door of this fortress, a brass falcon whistles in the wind. When the lovers have passed many years in delight, a sorceress transforms Mauhub into a crocodile. Mahliya recognizes him by his pearl earrings. She knows him, although he never recognized her: neither as Mukhadi’ the vizier nor as the beautiful anchorite. He didn’t know. He didn’t know me. Of course it was me, what’s the matter with you? Why are people so stupid? You’re like Mauhub: Rather than the real person in an unexpected shape, you prefer the magic mirror, which gives you the image you wish to see, although it leaves you grasping nothing but air.

The Wonder Curse

Now that we’re being honest, let me ask you something. (A photograph? All right. Here, I’ll blow some smoke. That’s an old movie star trick. It’ll make my mouth a delectable little beak, smooth my wrinkles, and impart an air of nostalgia.) My question is this: Why are you people so hungry for marvels? I mean here you are, braving a twelve-hour journey from JFK, one of the world’s worst airports, plus a taxi ride through the afternoon traffic, only to sit in an elderly woman’s apartment and listen to a story. Really, I felt I had to trick you to make it worth your while! (Hand me my wig, will you? It’s under your chair. You’ll want another photograph now, I suppose!) Of course there’s a venerable tradition of marvel tales here, a tradition that harbors my own story. But lately it seems to me that there is such a thing as a wonder curse, like the literary version of a resource curse. As if, having once tasted the magic of the East, visitors become determined to extract it at any cost.

The link between marvels and money is quite clear. Fabulous tales, astronomical wealth: both are forms of fortune. Perhaps the story is a kind of treasure map. But there is more than one map of the world, my friend. Consider what this tale contains and what it does not.

This Tale Contains:

Yellow silk, red leather, white marble, red onyx, gilded copper, ambergris, topaz, emerald, amber, musk, ebony, gold, carnelian, camphor, Indian aloes, Bactrian camels, pearls, rubies, Chinese steel, silver, sandalwood, slaves.

This Tale Does Not Contain:

Airports, cigarettes, Internet cafés, Chipsy potato chips in tiny packets, pineapple-flavored Fayrouz soft drinks, soap operas based on the works of Naguib Mahfouz, traffic jams, copy shops, subway trains shrieking down long black tunnels, subway trains so crowded you can’t get in, schoolgirls fanning themselves with exercise books, schools, radios, the knife grinder’s cry, wedding parties on barges, street murals of Umm Kulthum with her iconic glasses and handkerchief, the light through the windows of Mari Mina Church at precisely five forty-five p.m., broken china, makeshift tents, outdoor barbers, street musicians, street protests, cell phones, pictures of bruises taken with cell phones, barricades, security police, rooms where the lights are never turned on, tear gas, pamphlets, bullets, peaceful activists shot down on the street, a poet shot down on the street, the poet who wrote of the streets, who trembled, bleeding, her body transformed into something else, but what? There is no gazelle.

The Lion’s Tale

There is, however, a lion. There’s always a lion. This is his story: The lion weeping in the dust was reunited with his mate, Mauhub’s wet nurse. He promised to be faithful to her, as Mauhub had promised Mahliya. But just as Mauhub betrayed Mahliya by swearing to serve the lovely anchorite, even going so far as to write her name on his arm, the lion betrayed the lioness. Tempted by some delicious roasted game, he agreed that if the old woman cooking it would give him a taste, he would marry her daughter. For the sin of inconstancy he was turned over to devils in human shape, who docked his tail and cauterized the stump with fire. His nose and ears were cut off, his whiskers shaved, his body smeared with dung, his neck encircled by an iron ring. Fairy tales are inexorable, their ferocity divine. When the lion returned to his mate, he was so hideously deformed she wouldn’t have him. His howls of anguish curl about the story, creating a beautiful border, a frame for Mauhub and Mahliya’s wedding portrait.

Yes, it was Mahliya—that is, it was I—who sent the old woman to tempt the lion. You may suppose I did so in order to spare my beloved, to transfer his crime onto another body through which I could then enjoy, without suffering myself, all the pleasures of vengeance. Think what you like. Somebody has to pay. There’s always an animal, a wonderfully absorbent material, capable of sopping up an ocean of cruelty. Go visit the Alexandria Zoo sometime—you’ll see lions panting in a concrete hole, surrounded by mounds of trash.

The Crow Queen’s Tale

Things don’t always work out in life. Somebody has to pay. This is my song.

Oh, come. You must have known I was also the Crow Queen. Didn’t you read the story? Look how Mahliya holds back from Mauhub, hides from him, tricks him, fights him. She is the Queen of the Crows, who separates lovers.

In the end, it’s true, I stayed with him. He died quietly in my arms. He had grown so small by the end, so shriveled, I could carry him like a child. The day before he died, I flew with him over the tombs of Giza. He was half-blinded by cataracts, but he loved the air.

Sometimes I still can’t believe I cast my lot with human beings. It’s humiliating. Of Mahliya the story says: “Iblis captured her heart.” It’s true, I was captured and I was defeated. I can save a man who has been turned into a crocodile, but not a man who is growing old.

“Are you near or far, living or dead?” sings Mahliya in the story. “Oh that I were a cross hung around his neck, that I might taste his scent.” She sings that she wants to cover his mouth with hers, trace the gaps between his teeth with her tongue. “Oh that I were a sacrifice, mingled with his spit.” A love story, an animal story. All these animals in love. I understand the White-Footed Gazelle’s desire for his beloved’s feet. There is a place where we are all animal, even you. We flicker in and out of it. We can be terribly hurt there, but also comforted.

The Queen of the Crows falls from her window at dusk. She catches the air. An old woman, languid. She glides down Ramses Street toward Masarra. She doubles back toward the river. Masr al-’Adima. Everything’s pink. In the gardens of Maadi they are hosing down the paths.

I am the spirit of ruined utopias and unrequited love. It’s not my fault. You didn’t recognize me—do you think I recognize myself? No! That face in the mirror: that’s not me. I see myself only in motion, smoking, gripping my windowsill in the instant before flight. I only recognize the wings that flap. God, I loved Mauhub so much. He was a descendant of Nebuchadnezzar, you know—the king who lost his mind and ate grass like an ox, whose hair grew long like an eagle’s feathers and his nails like an eagle’s claws.

It’s growing late. The Crow Queen always feels restless at this hour. She longs for flight. Tonight, however, she has a guest, a foreign researcher. The Crow Queen squawks like an impresario, preens before the camera. The photographs will show a bald old lady with snapping kohl-rimmed eyes.

I have cast my lot with human beings, even knowing what I know: that things don’t always work out, that somebody has to pay.

I’ll rise or fall with them. Dear beasts! Instead of scribbling down notes, why don’t you let me fly you over the square tonight? You can ride the featherless ostrich if you prefer, though I warn you he’s very slow these days, his belly scarred by rubber bullets. We’ll weave through the ghostly lights around the Mugamma al-Tahrir and watch the city flicker like a broken bulb. In that stuttering glow the square is like a dirty yellow mirror, a magic mirror reflecting even the ones who are missing. Yes, even the lions. I call it my palace, for these beasts are my true subjects. Look at me: I can’t stop shaking.

©2016 by Sofia Samatar. Originally published in The Starlit Wood, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria (2013), The Winged Histories (2016), and the short story collection, Tender (2017). Her next book is Monster Portraits. Her work has received the John W. Campbell Award, the William L. Crawford Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award.

The Dragon of Dread Peak (Part 1)

Jeremiah Tolbert | 13320 words

Editor’s Note: Instead of two original fantasy short stories this month, we have for you a single fantasy novella (presented in two parts) by Jeremiah Tolbert, which is about twice the length of a regular Lightspeed story. So, although you are getting three original stories instead of four this month, you’re still getting about the same amount of fiction. We hope you enjoy this minor deviation from our usual offerings, and rest assured we will return to our regularly scheduled programming next month. It’s also a sequel to Jeremiah’s story “The Cavern of the Screaming Eye,” which you can read in our October 2016 issue, or on our website at lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/cavern-screaming-eye. —eds.

When I made the decision to take up an after-school job closing trans-dimensional portals into pocket-worlds full of dangerous monsters and traps, I thought it would be easier—or at least more fun—than working the counter at a fried cockatrice joint or selling newssheets on a street corner at the crack of dawn.

My team’s first outing into dungeonspace—when we defeated The Cavern of the Screaming Eye on our first try—had gone pretty good. Since then, we’d been running low threat level, poorly synced dungeons as practice, the kind that don’t actually kill you if you take damage inside them, that instead mostly just send you hurting back to Braxis City, our little isolated fragment of the real world. A good thing, too, that we’d started slowly. The subsequent weeks of practice had taught me and my teammates that, if anything, our early success had been almost entirely luck. It was still to be determined if I had the same kind of natural skill at overcoming the dangers of d-space that my brother Rash had possessed.

And now, our latest run had ended like the previous six; in total disaster.

Stinging from our failure, we made the trek back to our training gym in silence. Once we slogged inside One-Arm’s Gym, Domino dropped his smoldering dungeoneering pack and slumped onto a pile of exercise mats. His namesake black-and-white mask flapped on the tether at his hip like a broken bird wing.

“Well, that run didn’t go very well, did it?” he said, patting out an ember that threatened to burst into open flames again.

I was too busy going over the run in my head to answer him. It’d gone badly, but something strange had happened. Again. I’d spoken with the weird, disembodied voice that I thought of as The Thing Between. I’d first encountered it in The Cavern of the Screaming Eye, and the experience had left me confused and disoriented. It revealed itself only to me and told me things about my missing-and-presumed-dead brother. Though I’d encountered it a few times since, I never got over how unsettled it made me feel. Maybe that was why we’d bit the dust? My head just wasn’t in the game.

“Flip? You okay?” Dom poked me on the shoulder.

I nodded. “Fine. I’m fine.” I slipped off my own pack. I’d managed to avoid the fire jets that charred him only to be crushed out of dungeonspace in a collapsing wall trap, and that was after spending an hour at the bottom of a pit having deeply strange conversations with a mysterious entity.

“So yeah, that didn’t go well, huh?” Dom repeated.

“About as ‘well’ as you did on that trig test last week. A total party wipe is kind of the opposite of ‘well.’”

I unbuckled my belt and scabbard and let them fall to the floor in a heap as I moved to light the gas lamps along the wall of the gym. Every joint in my body ached; a de-sync side effect of being ejected from the Repeating Phantasm dungeon. It’d only last a couple of hours. We’d gotten to know the aches pretty well over the past four weeks since we’d teamed up to take on Dungeonspace.

Our dungeon tactics mentor, Doom Maiden, was sitting on a weight bench pulling at the velcro straps to remove her Kevlar, and she had a “you kids effed-up and Imma gonna lecture now” smirk on her face.

She’d been really riding our asses lately, but I thought we’d had this one under control. Even when things had gone fubar in d-space, she didn’t intervene—but that was by design: I’d insisted on no training wheels for the run.

I could be real dumb sometimes.

Since Doom Maiden had left the dungeon voluntarily—unlike us—she wasn’t suffering from the same butt-kicking boneache as the rest of us.

“Want my opinion?” asked Doom Maiden.

“Do we really have a choice?” I tried a grin. “Ow. How the hell does my face have so many joints?”

Behind Doom Maiden, Basher stripped out of her plate mail in a jerking, pointed sort of way to let us know she was scorching hot and not just from the fire trap that’d wiped them out. “No, Dom, getting burned to a crisp is not my definition of a good run,” she growled.

“Don’t blame him,” I said. “I made a bad call.”

“He’s the ass who triggered the trap. Aren’t you supposed to be an escapist? Spotting traps is your job!”

“I only stepped on it to stop you from blundering into it as usual!”

Doom Maiden held her hands up and pressed against the tension in the room. “Restore your chill. Flip, what was your first thought when Dom triggered the pressure plate?”

“Run like hell, but Dom was snared. We would have lost him if Basher and I bolted.”

“Instead, you had a total party kill trying to free him. Taking the lead means you make some hard calls.”

Scolding received.

I nodded, lips pursed to keep my anger from showing. Dom wouldn’t make eye contact with any of us. This kind of dressing down always got to him the worst, and even though Doom Maiden was trying to help, we were all reaching our maximum frustration levels.

Her tone softened. “Dungeonspace is dangerous. It’ll get worse when you work your way up the threat ratings where the real booty’s found. Understand?”

We nodded. I doubted any of us really needed to be reminded of that. If the Phantom dungeon had been rated lethal threat, we wouldn’t have been standing there to be dressed down.

“Go home. We’ll try another run tomorrow after school. You guys did better this time.”

I was pretty sure that last part was a lie, but it made me feel a little better anyway. I mulled it over as I helped Basher with some of the stubborn ties on her greaves. I didn’t wear much armor myself—just a padded explorer’s outfit—preferring my natural dexterity to keep me out of danger. Basher, though—the troller transformation had continued to rework her body ever since we’d first met, making her stronger, tougher, and ever more massive, but she had slowed as a downside. Her skin was also now gnarled and green, thick as leather, but not so thick that it could turn away a gobbin’s poison arrow or a wraithblade. So we’d pooled the lootbucks we earned from defeating and closing The Cavern of the Screaming Eye dungeon to buy her the suit. I would have barely been able to move wearing it, but to her it weighed nil. I was all kinds of regretting it now; we’d sunk so much cash into the armor. We’d been so sure we would earn it back in no time.

I swallowed my pride and did my best not to choke on it. “Hey. Sorry I got us roasted.”

Basher sighed; the tension she’d been holding in her back drained away, letting her looming frame slouch more comfortably. When a troller stood tense, everybody in the room felt it. “Forget it, Ivan. I don’t know what I would’ve done differently in your place.” I felt a little thrill every time she used my real name and not my d-space moniker. It was silly, and always made me a little uncomfortable in my own skin immediately after.

“Why don’t you take the lead tomorrow?” I said. I wasn’t sure if really wanted that or if I was just afraid of making another bad call and losing even more of my team’s faith.

“Nah.” She laughed—a soft, melodious sound that reminded me she wasn’t just a hulking monster but a teenager just like the rest of us. Sometimes I wished I was the kind of guy who could tell good enough jokes to hear her laugh more often.

“I thought I’d have to yell more about it, but you’re doing a really good job of beating yourself up.”

I felt my cheeks flush. “Uh, well. Thanks for that.”

“Are you okay? You’ve seemed distracted since we pulled you out of that pit early in the run.”

I wasn’t ready to talk about it. I shrugged. “Just focused on the homework I have to do tonight. Oh, hey, how are things with Sam?” Sam was her on-again/off-again boyfriend and the absent member of our team. I felt bad using him to change the subject. “I’m guessing not great since he didn’t show tonight.”

Her expression turned somber. “I should have told you earlier. He’s joining up with another party.”

“What!” Dom exclaimed. “That traitor!”

“Who’s he going with?” I asked.

“The Brave Trio want him. He told me to tell you guys sorry, but he says he knows we’ll do fine without him.”

“Oh.” Sam leaving was a stinging reminder of how badly we’d been doing lately. “Well, if he joins them, can they still call themselves a trio?” Lame attempt at a joke, I know, but it was my defense mechanism. I wished he would have told us himself instead of making Basher do it. But I wasn’t sure how much I would miss him after he pulled crap like this.

Dom wasn’t letting it go. “He’s only got the cred to join up with those thrilljunkie poseurs because of us!”

Dom had already stripped out of his leathers and changed back into his street clothes; baggy jeans, a knitted cap that was trying valiantly to tame his dreadlocks, and another vintage crawler team tee—this one for Dynamo’s Dozen. They hadn’t been a thing since my parents were kids. He had what seemed like an unlimited supply of vintage fanboy shirts.

Jimmy—a/k/a “Domino”—had only just moved into the city proper when we met two months ago. He grew up on the outskirts of our pocket, near the Fade where fewer anomalies formed. That distance from it all had given him an unrealistically upbeat view on the d-space scene. Not even our string of failures had dented his perkiness. I worried his positivity put us at risk; we’d even talked about how he needed to take some things more seriously. But then, I worried about a lot of stuff, at least some of which there was no point doing so. If only I knew which things were which, my life would work so much better.

“Screw it; we don’t need him,” Dom said. For once, he wound himself down without one of us talking him through it. “Two trollers in one party was overkill anyway! We’ve got Ivan’s brains, my stealth, and Cindy’s muscle. We’re a well-balanced party of ass-kicking awesome.”

“There’s no such thing as too much muscle in d-space,” I grumbled.

“Sponsored teams can offer a lot of perks to trollers,” Doom Maiden pointed out. “You guys should count yourself lucky that Cindy’s sticking with us.”

Cindy—Basher—looked anywhere but at me, her posture suddenly stiff again. I felt the bottom fall out of my stomach, like how it feels when you plummet down a ten-meter-deep pit trap.

Our team has only been on fire in the literal sense—we had seen early success, but we’d been slow to pull things together since. The lootbucks weren’t dropping in wheelbarrows like we’d been expecting them to. Hells, I wasn’t even sure we could scrape together enough cash to keep paying Doom Maiden’s cousin One-Arm to use his gym for our training.

So, yeah, sure; it made sense that Basher would be considering ditching the party too. Her treatments put her in steep debt to Body Mods, Inc. She needed to be part of a successful team—needed the bucks way more than Dom or I. That meant either we were going to have to stop screwing up or she was going to have to move on. Sam we could lose—but not Basher.

Dom got quiet, probably thinking similarly doomy thoughts. “I’ll walk to the bus station with you, Ivan,” he said to me, then added to Basher, “See you tomorrow?”

Basher nodded. “Good luck on your trig test,” she said to me, then lugged her armor into the gear storage room. Dom and I headed into our locker room.

“She’s got one foot out the door, huh?” Dom whispered.

“Can you blame her?”

“How can she abandon Team Scream after all this work we’ve been putting in?”

“The work needs to pay—wait, team what?”

“I’m trying out team names for when we officially register with Municipal Anomaly Control. What do you think?”

“Uh . . . not that one.”

“Okay.”

I stored my kit and pulled on a blue and black “work” uniform. It reeked of fry-grease. I never washed it to lend more weight to my half-baked deception, and it was a good thing I didn’t actually have to wear it to a job because the fabric made my skin break out in hives. Really, I only ever wore it coming and going from my apartment, all for the benefit of one person: Mom.

“Dude, you still haven’t told her?”

After my brother Rash died in d-space, she’d either kill me or ground me until I aged out of interfacing with the anomalies. I said as much to Dom, and he tsked.

I put on the stupid horned hat that Balrog’s Burgers made their employees wear and checked the mirror. Taller than I was a year ago, and still a little chubby, but starting to build muscle from all the training. Pale skin from spending too much time in dungeonspace. I looked as dumb as I felt. But at least my acne had started to clear up. Though even that wasn’t all good, because it didn’t help my cover story.

Who cares? It’s still the face of a loser, a voice said. It sounded an awful lot like Rash. I didn’t want to agree, but the ghost of my brother had a point. I wasn’t a winner. Heck, I still owed Amit from my dungeonomics class a hundred lootbucks for the uniform. His boss had docked his pay for “losing” it and he’d been expecting me to pay up yesterday.

I really needed a win. We all did.

“Lying to her isn’t a great plan, man,” Dom said. “It’s just going to cause more problems for you.”

“Jimmy—you don’t know my mom. Trust me; it’s the only way.”

“I’ve met your mom twice and she seems like a nice lady.” Dom said, then sighed. “But okay.”

We sat not saying anything for a moment until Dom furrowed his brow, then broke the silence. “Bloodaxe is about to walk in.”

“Dude, it’s way spooky when you do that.”

His instincts had been growing sharper lately; Dom was developing real d-space talents as an escapist just like he’d hoped.

He’d been lucky. I was still plain old Ivan, known to d-space runners as “Flip.” I’d earned the name because of a coin I used to carry—a d-space artifact—that always landed on heads. Used to because I’d traded it to One-Arm to cover another month of our rent at the gym. The way things were going, I figured before long everyone would start calling me “Flounder” or “Flop.”

On cue, the locker room door swung open and in strode Bloodaxe, full of chill and swagger as always. Basher was big, but Bloodaxe towered over even her, his bare, blue-green arms criss-crossed with fading scars from a hundred d-space battles. He was older than the rest of us—coming up on nineteen now, meaning he was about to age out of the scene. Pretty soon, his mind wouldn’t be able to sync up with the d-space anomalies through whatever quirk of neurobiology allowed us teenagers to crawl. He’d been planning to transition into coaching our team in battlefield tactics; we had a handshake deal for him to collect part of our earnings, but that had been flat zilch so far, so I half-expected him to announce he was moving on to Sam’s new team.

What he said was far worse.

“Somebody escaped the Black Hole.”

• • • •

To understand why those words turned my world upside down, you need to understand my family’s screwed up history with the Black Hole anomaly. My older brother Jonah, a/k/a “Rash,” was part of the top team in Braxis City. Almost a year ago, they went into the Hole and didn’t return.

Rash was the lead of a d-space team called Alpha Response, and they were chartered by Braxis City’s Municipal Anomaly Control to tackle the most dangerous threats. D-space anomalies caused all kinds of strangeness and havoc, and if enough of them were allowed to form unchecked, reality became Swiss cheese. Even small anomalies caused electrical tech to stop working around them, which was why our city looked like something out of a Charles Dickens novel.

Luckily, brave, stupid, and stupidly brave kids like us could venture inside the anomalies and destroy them.

Every anomaly had an artifact at its heart, like a splinter under the skin of our world. If you captured it, the anomaly would vanish but leave behind artifacts in its place. Artifacts had all kinds of crazy powers in d-space. Some even worked their powers in originspace, and those were worth a fortune. Every crawler dreamed of bringing home one of those.

When the Black Hole manifested in the East Barrio Riverside Apartments, it created chaos. Gravity rotated 180 degrees in a five-hundred-meter radius. It launched three people through a skylight and into the upper atmosphere, all the way out of the Fringe and into the Nothing. The anomaly appeared as a half-meter-wide sphere of midnight glass. Even looking at it for a moment, rumors said, could claim your sanity. Everything about it screamed maximum-threat level.

Municipal Anomaly Control sent in Alpha Response. They never came out. Four more A-level teams took a run at it, and when none of them came out, MAC put the anomaly on full guarded lockdown. Nobody was allowed in and it was monitored for any kind of unusual activity around the clock. Incursions from d-space were rare, but still possible and never a good thing. Our world was mostly a safe haven, but sometimes, for reasons nobody understood, the horrors of dungeonspace found their way into originspace. My father was killed in an incursion when I was little, but I didn’t know much about him or how that all went down. My mom never talked about those days, even before Rash disappeared.

After months of nil activity at the anomaly, MAC declared dead everyone who’d gone inside the Black Hole. Mom got a small bereavement payment that got us through the rest of the year, but that was drying up now.

Meanwhile, I tried to move on. I thought I had moved on, but then I met Jimmy and his enthusiasm dragged me into the d-space world. I had always hoped I would belong there most of my life, but Rash had always been telling me I didn’t have what it took. But he was wrong; together with Dom, Basher, and Sam, we four defeated the Cavern of the Screaming Eye on our first outing.

When we beat the dungeon, we captured its artifact: a key made of the same material as the Black Hole anomaly, obviously related somehow to that mysterious dungeon. Even more mysterious, while in the Cavern, I spoke with that unknown entity that claimed to know my brother and a lot about the workings of dungeonspace.

Most d-space denizens didn’t know anything about the nature of their reality pockets. But the voice continued to speak from the darkness in other dungeons I visited. Always coy—never explaining who or what it was. I didn’t know what to make of The Thing Between. I still hadn’t told my friends about it. If they knew I was being stalked by a creepy and mysterious voice in the shadows that claimed to have known my brother, would they want to keep crawling with me? I had to learn more about it first.

After the Cavern, with the same friends I was reluctantly keeping secrets from, I formed a crawler team. I hoped that together we could use the key and my secret conversations to find out what happened to my brother. It would take years of training and d-space experience to reach a point where we could attempt something like the Black Hole, but it was the goal we were working toward.

The Black Hole had been quiet, so I thought we had time.

Turns out, the Black Hole had other ideas.

• • • •

We gathered on the gym’s sparring floor to discuss Bloodaxe’s bombshell. Basher swayed with exhaustion and periodically glanced toward the door.

“Thanks for staying,” I whispered to her.

“Of course,” she said and shot me a look of confusion.

“You didn’t have to. This is my deal.”

Doom Maiden gave Bloodaxe a punch on the arm. “I’ll rip you a new one for missing practice later. What’d you hear?”

“All anyone was talking about at the Speakeasy,” Bloodaxe said in his growl of a voice. He was a pretty chill guy most days, but the troller reworking made him sound angry even when he wasn’t.

“Who?” I asked a little too fast. “Who made it out?” I wasn’t sure if I was hoping it was my brother, or desperate that it wouldn’t be. What would he say if he saw me with my own beginnings of a crawler team? He’d been one of the city’s best, and I was still rank zero.

“Don’t know who or what. There was a hell of a fight, but MAC guards took whoever it was alive. Now they got . . . the escapee? Yeah, they’re locked up in MAC HQ tighter than new TrunchCo leather undies.”

“Gross,” Basher and Doom Maiden said.

“I need to talk to them,” I said. “They might know what happened to my brother.” For now, I didn’t want to acknowledge the possibility that the escapee was Rash.

“That’s what I figured you’d say,” Bloodaxe said with a tusky grin. “Did some asking around. There is someone with the pull to get you inside. He’s a huge pain in the ass, but he’ll meet with us. He owes me a big-ass favor.”

Doom Maiden rolled her eyes. “Oh Gods, not that asshole.”

“Yeah. If Ivan wants to talk to the escapee, he’s going to have to do a job for Briggsby.”

• • • •

As much as I wanted to find out who Briggsby was and what we were going to do to earn his help, we had to call it a night or some of us were going to get grounded. We made plans to meet up at One-Arm’s after school.

Dom and I left the gym together and jogged for the bus stop, just barely making it onto the last bus of the night. As we took seats, it pulled away from the curb and chugged down the broad streets, steam engine rolling us forward with a pleasant rhythm that had rocked me to sleep many nights. The regular driver was an ex-crawler and had a lot of sympathy for our deal, and he’d wake me up for my stop with his bell.

Dom and I rode in silence, which was not typical for either of us, but especially not for him. It was all over his face how he wanted to assure me that things would be okay. I imagined him saying that we would come up with a plan and that our party would start to work like a real team—that optimism of his that never tarnished no matter how badly things were going. He was smart enough to know I didn’t want to hear any of it right now. I was too tired to think about tomorrow, especially with the failure of today still lingering.

Dom stepped off with a forlorn wave to catch the Blue Line on 9th Street. I returned it, and slouched in my seat. I rode for twenty minutes with only my fears and thoughts to keep me company. I did my best to keep them at bay by focusing on the sound of the wheels creaking over the paving stones, the hiss of steam, and the hum of the motor. I didn’t do a great job. I couldn’t even relax enough to nap. Finally, Antonio dinged his bell and gave me a nod from his mirror. I stepped off the bus and out into the cool spring air. The quality was good today, clean. I wished I could go anywhere but home right now. I hated bringing troubles to a home that already contained more than enough.

Our apartment was in a decent enough part of the city. Pollution didn’t get as bad here, not like in the north. Our building was ten stories, built during the Reconstruction, simple and unremarkable concrete construction like a lot of the buildings in the outer West Barrio. Lately, it was falling into disrepair; the elevators hadn’t worked in months and our pneumatic mail delivery was getting backed up every other day. The heating and gas lights worked, at least. The super was never around no matter how many angry notes we left her.

I slogged up seven flights of steps and down the hall to our door. I’d gotten good at opening it without making a sound—opening doors silently is a very useful knack to develop for d-space crawlers, and this was one of those cases where the skillset was just as applicable to originspace.

I expected to find Mom passed out on the couch again, but it—and the living room—was empty. Gaslight flickered from the hall, and I heard a rustling of someone moving things around in one of the bedrooms. I groaned. She’d searched my room in a fit of vodka-fueled paranoia twice in the past six months—luckily, I kept all my gear at the gym. I figured she was at it again, but as I crept forward, I could see that the light came from my brother’s room.

Neither of us had been in Rash’s room since the Hole had swallowed him up. Mom had forbidden me, certain that Rash would make it back someday, and he would be pissed if anybody messed with his stuff. Rash had been “lost” to d-space before, but never for longer than a week. As days added up to weeks, and the weeks spooled out into months, she never got around to doing anything with his belongings. His room became a hollow, aching space in our lives that we never talked about.

I peered around the doorframe. Mom was teary-eyed, but I didn’t smell any booze. She had a determined air as she packed away Rash’s crawler ’zine collection in a milk crate. She paused to tuck strands of gray hair behind her ear. I tried to slip past without her noticing me, but I wasn’t half as sneaky as Dom.

“If there’s anything you want to keep for yourself, you better get in here and pick it out tomorrow,” she said.

“Hey, Mom.”

“How was work?”

“Busy, I guess.” Gods, I wished I could tell her how hard things were right now; the real truth. If I could, then she could assure me that things would get better. The Mom I could tell everything had disappeared with Rash.

I took a tentative step inside, worried that somehow I would upset this new balance. One wrong move, one wrong word and I might send her spiraling again.

“It’s time to admit that your brother isn’t coming back,” she said, voice calm. “Bet you thought I should have done that a long time ago.”

I shrugged.

“Have you gotten your first paycheck yet?”

The sudden change in topic threw me off balance. “Wh—oh, no. The first one they garnished for my training and uniform and stuff. I should get it pretty soon.”

“Good. I need some help with the rent. With your brother gone and those bastards at the plant cutting everybody’s hours, things are tight.”

I blinked. “Sure.” Add another worry to my pile. More pressure would turn me into a diamond faster, right?

“Get some sleep, honey. I’ll finish up this box.”

I leaned in and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. I hadn’t done that in longer than I could remember; I’d forgotten the particular taste of the machine oils that got into her pores—like coppery limes.

I thought it would make me feel better, but instead I felt curdled to see her happy. I knew something that could renew all her painful hopes again at the worst possible time, and I couldn’t tell her. Not until I was sure who it was. What it would mean for us.

She smiled. “What was that for?”

“No reason,” I said. “Love you. Good night.”

Sleep didn’t come easily, and when it did, it brought the nightmares. Ever since the Cavern, I’d been having bad dreams after traveling into d-space. They were foreboding, vague, full of flames and shadows and smoke. In them, I stood and witnessed some behemoth rising up through a cloud of ash. I was certain that whatever this thing was, if it fully revealed itself to me, I would die. Each time, I shifted my weight atop a precipice of rock, desperate to see the thing even though I knew it was a harbinger of my doom. Inevitably, I would lose my balance, tumble into the fiery turmoil below. After the first few times, I learned to wake up without screaming. Those had been awkward conversations with Mom, but she’d chalked it up to more Rash trauma.

Nobody knew the full impact of traveling to d-space had on our heads; I figured nightmares like mine were common. A lot of crawlers ended up—if they survived into adulthood—with post-traumatic stress or worse. The counseling business in Braxis City thrived, and if I could scrape together some money, I might talk to a therapist myself . . . at least about the dreams. They seemed to be getting worse. More real.

I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it, but it seemed like the shape in the smoke was growing closer.

• • • •

Dawn broke sooner than I was prepared for. I steeled myself to the school day grind. Sometimes thinking of it as just another day of battle and training helped alleviate the boredom.

Dom and I met for lunch in the back corner of the cafeteria near where the other, better established crawler teams sat (and mostly sneered at us). We talked through the latest issue of Frobisher’s Guide—our favorite crawler ’zine. Frobisher described a new anomaly threat popping up—Gobbin Ambush. The little purple-skinned humanoids were becoming increasingly organized and aggressive against caravan teams that were crucial to the trade of Braxis with the other originspace cities. Frobisher had the usual outlandish theories to explain all of it—another coming Cataclysm being the most ridiculous.

It’d be hard to break the world when it was already in tatters.

The issue also included a pretty good overview of battle strategies against superior numbers made up of individually weaker forces. We debated the finer points of that strategy for a while before turning to personal matters.

“So what’s the story with this Briggsby guy?” I asked.

“You don’t know him? He’s one of the most prominent traders of artifacts on the scene.”

“Well,” I said defensively, “Rash worked directly for MAC. They have their own systems for earning that don’t involve fences or fixers. What makes this one so special?”

“He lives in d-space. Guess how old he is?”

“He’s ten. Some kind of child prodigy, been doing this since he was five,” I said with a straight face.

“He’s practically forty! Briggsby solved the aging-out problem by moving into a dungeon he tamed and never left. He’s, like, the most powerful formulist. I guess he didn’t want to lose all his magic just because he turned twenty.”

The description did shake loose a dim memory of my brother mentioning a “crazy hermit sorcerer.” Braxis was full of movers and shakers like that—people who facilitated trade between crawlers and the engines of commerce that could make use of the ’facts, or collectors who wanted to buy the looted art (artifacts with no real power, but still curiosities of value, like my old coin). Rich people could never get enough of dungeon loot to decorate their condos and mansions, or, apparently, their private dungeonspace pockets.

“Briggsby knows more about d-space loot than anybody, and ’cause of that, he’s built a network of connections in the city, even within MAC and the government. I bought my mask from him. Not directly, but through one of his fronts. I’m way surprised Francisco got us a meeting. He’s super-reclusive.”

“If anyone has the connections to a guy like that, it would be Francisco.” A year before, Francisco—Bloodaxe—had been a prominent crawler on the scene, but according to rumors there’d been a totally botched run and he was the sole survivor. He never talked about it; one time over drinks at the Speakeasy, he almost opened up about it but then Doom Maiden had made a joke at his expense, and the walls went back up. Those two had a weird relationship, kind of what I imagined a normal brother/sister thing would be like. (I never had a sister, and my one brother had been kind of a dick.) Their relationship was totally platonic, though, on account of Bloodaxe preferring guys.

The bell signaling the end of the lunch period sounded, so we got up and bussed our trays, Dom grinning the whole time. “Dude, I can’t wait to meet the great Wizard Briggsby!”

“I wish I was as excited as you.”

“Eh, I’ve got enough excitement for both of us.”

• • • •

When I finally walked into the gym after school—twenty minutes late—I got some glares. Dom was practically vibrating onto another plane of existence, bouncing around from foot to foot, shadowboxing. Basher was quiet, but her shoulders still carried nervous tension. Doom Maiden was the source of the most annoyed scowl. Bloodaxe looked troubled and deep in thought, and barely acknowledged my arrival.

The reason I was late was because I’d taken the long way to the gym from Braxis West High. After Rash’s disappearance, I’d taken up long walks around the city to get away from my mother’s grief. A nice side effect was that it burned off enough of my weight that I could actually consider becoming a serious crawler, and I’d learned to appreciate the meditative effect of repeatedly putting one foot in front of another.

This walk, I didn’t have any profound thoughts; I’d spent the time worriedly brainstorming ways we could pull our team together better. Dom and Basher bickered constantly now. I’d been questioning my calls, and that wasn’t good for anyone; you needed confidence to run a team. Mine had dried up, and I wasn’t sure how or where to find it.

“Everybody here?” Bloodaxe said, with a sheepish grin. “All right. No practice run tonight, kids. We’re meeting with Briggsby in a Tower of the Magus. He’s got a job offer, and if you pull it off, he’ll pull some strings to get Flip on the inside.”

Doom Maiden crossed her arms. “Dealing with him is a bad idea. Briggsby’s a dick. He doesn’t care about anybody but himself.”

“You got a better idea?” Bloodaxe asked, tone sharp.

“Forget the whole thing,” she said to me. “If it’s your brother, Municipal Anomaly Control will notify your family. Till then, I say we keep training and earn us all some bucks in d-space.”

Before I could respond, Dom spoke up. “Dude, no way. The main reason we formed this team was to help Flip find out what happened to Rash. If we need to do a work-for-hire job to get new info, then I’m in.”

“Me too,” Basher said, after a significant pause. “This time. But guys, I have to start bringing home some lootbucks—and soon.”

“Maybe we can negotiate for a small payment on top with Briggsby?” I suggested. “He’s probably a reasonable guy . . . right?”

• • • •

“You will find that I am not very reasonable,” Briggsby said with a greasy smile. “I don’t have to be. I hold all the cards in this situation.”

The wizard sat at one end of a long hall on a throne floating a couple of meters in the air. His black hair was thinning, combed carefully over an enormous bald spot, and he carried a paunch of the kind you get when you spend your days sitting instead of moving around. He wore a purple robe—not a wizard’s robe, embroidered with arcane symbols or anything like that. A bathrobe. My mom owned one just like it, only green.

What Briggsby lacked in physical presentation, however, he made up for in projection; his voice boomed through the great hall, and though we stood a dozen meters away, we could all hear him clearly. He spoke with a real confidence, and I was more than a little envious of it. I felt like I should be taking notes.

Briggsby was flanked by a pair of marble statues. They looked like jacked-up gym rats, bursting with well-defined muscles, only they had hammers instead of hands. One could have almost mistaken them for regular statues if they didn’t shift their weight occasionally. Their presence was obviously intended to awe and intimidate; the formulas necessary to create them took incredible concentration, but Briggsby showed no signs of strain. That meant he actually was as powerful as Dom had said.

“Frankly, your group’s reputation, such as it is, does not encourage me to believe that you’re capable of accomplishing the tasks I wish to set before you.”

“Give the kids a chance and they might surprise you,” Bloodaxe growled. “Surprised me.”

“Indeed. It’s only on the strength of your recommendation that I have agreed to take this meeting. What I see before me are inexperienced children that are as likely to have a T.P.K. as they are to acquire the object of my desire. Perhaps with yours and the Doom Maiden’s tutelage, they will, as you say, surprise me.”

“We got past the screaming eyes,” Basher muttered.

Briggsby stroked a patch of black hair on his uppermost chin. “Oh, yes, I’m well aware of your exploits thus far. There is quite a difference in threat level between cyclopian froglings and an ancient dragon like Karnifex.”

The room went silent. Even the golems turned their heads to stare at Briggsby.

“Did he just say ‘dragon’?” I asked.

“Ancient dragon,” Basher said.

“‘Karnifex’?” Doom Maiden wondered aloud.

“I feel like I should add something here,” Dom said, “but I got nothing. We can’t kill a dragon. Even I know that.”

Briggsby chuckled. “The task I require of you is not, as you fear, to slay the elder wyrm, but much simpler and perhaps even within the realm of possibility, given the resources at your disposal. Karnifex has in his possession an especially interesting artifact. I require it for my continued work.”

“There’s no fucking way I am sending these kids up against Karnifex,” Bloodaxe said, his voice crackling in a way that meant he was raging hardcore. I took a step back.

Briggsby chuckled. “Oh yes, that’s right! You have a history with the beast. Nevertheless, if you wish to earn my favor, you will acquire the Phylactery of Youth from the dragon’s hoard.”

“There’s nothing else we can do?” I asked. “Maybe mop some floors around the ol’ wizard’s tower? Some light dusting?”

Briggsby shook his head. “No.”

“So what exactly is the job?” Dom whispered.

“This crazy godsdamned wizard wants us to steal from the most powerful dragon in d-space,” I whispered back.

“Oh.” Dom paused. “Well . . . that sounds pretty fun, actually.”

I shook my head and spoke up. “Briggsby, sir, if we do this, we’re going to need some backing. We’ll need more financial resources to pull it off, and we’re a bit short at the moment.”

“What do you have in mind?”

I went for it. “How about ten thousand lootbucks for expenses?”

“Why in the world would I agree to that?” he sputtered. “Did I not, moments ago, explain that I don’t need to be reasonable?”

“Well,” I said with a smile, “that would be true if you hadn’t just told us what it is that you want, and that means you’ve shown me your cards, even if you do hold all of them. I bet there are other parties who would love to get their hands on a ’fact that can reverse aging. Who knows how many adults would love to be able to go back into dungeonspace and relive their glory days, huh? Just think of what MAC could do with that power?”

The possibilities were actually horrifying—adults would ruin everything about d-space. Briggsby alone controlling that power would be preferable, but I wasn’t telling him that.

“I see. You think you can threaten me and my interests?” Briggsby’s eyes began to glow, and a blue-white energy began to swirl around his hands. “It would be far easier for me to eliminate you than to negotiate further.”

“You could do that,” I admitted, “but you won’t. You’re trapped in this rat’s hole of a dungeon. Dude, you don’t even have working plumbing in here, and we didn’t see fields of crops on our way in. Your survival depends on not pissing off everybody in Braxis City. If word gets out you murdered some ‘inexperienced kids,’ you’ll be finished. Take your pick; starve to death or go become an accountant.”

Briggsby’s eyes dimmed and their energy evaporated. “I may have underestimated your cleverness. Do not think that your empty threats are what have convinced me, young man. In truth, it is your demonstration of some small glimmer of cleverness gives me some hope of your capabilities. Fine; I will ensure the funds are made at your disposal.”

“Thank you, sir. You won’t regret giving us this opportunity.”

“He might not,” Doom Maiden said, “but I have a feeling we’re going to regret the hell out of it.”

She might be right. We were in over our heads on this one, and looming somewhere a few stories over our heads was a ten thousand year old dragon.

• • • •

We rode the Green Line from Briggsby’s d-space anomaly back to the Gym. Nobody looked happier than they did before we met with the fixer. I’d never seen Bloodaxe turn so pale—he was practically chartreuse.

Basher broke the silence. “How exactly are we going to take on the Dragon of Dread Peak?” Her enormous hands nervously fidgeted in her lap. “More experienced crawlers than us have tried and failed.”

“Tried and been devoured, more like,” Bloodaxe muttered.

“I’m working on a plan,” I said. The idea had hit me just then, at least the start of one. “I think this is going to be easier than it sounds.”

Domino clapped his hands once, then tucked them away, embarrassed at his over-excitement. “I knew Flip would figure this out. There’s a reason he’s our leader. So what’s the plan?”

“Francisco, what did Briggsby mean about you having history with the dragon?” I asked. “We’re going to need lair intel and—”

“Karnifex took my former team,” he said in a voice barely louder than a whisper. We all leaned in closer.

“You mean, like, he took them out?” Dom asked.

“His breath weapon is a paralyzing gas. Turns you into a kinda living statue. That bastard plays with his prey a while, and then, when he’s bored or hungry, he eats them.”

“Oh my Gods,” Basher said. “I’m so sorry, Francisco.”

“If they’re not dead already, they will be some day. I can’t help on this one. I . . . I just can’t lose another group to Karnifex.”

The bus stopped, and Bloodaxe abruptly stood and charged out onto the street. We’d never seen him show fear of anything. As the bus pulled away, I watched him dwindle into the distance, shaking on a street corner.

“We need to go back for him!” Basher said.

“The old grump needs some space right now,” Doom Maiden said, “and you kids need to pay attention. You stay in this game long enough, you’ll lose friends too. It’s been fun and games up till now, but things are fucking real this time. Flip, what’s your idea for taking on Karnifex? Not a frontal assault, I assume?”

“No, of course not. I figure we Bilbo the crap out of this one,” I said. “We have all the pieces we need, don’t we?”

Doom Maiden frowned, looked as if she was going to object, but then nodded slowly. “Maybe.”

“What’s a ‘Bilbo’?” Basher asked.

“Haven’t you read the classics?” Dom asked with a grin. “It’s pre-Cataclysm. Bilbo was a short, hungry thief who stole from a dragon named Fog, or Bog, something like that. It’s been a long time since I read that one.”

“Yeah, Bilbo does steal from the dragon, but that sends it on a rampage,” Doom Maiden said. “Let’s avoid that part, okay?”

I nodded. “We have to be careful. Bilbo had a magic ring that let him turn invisible. Sound familiar?”

“Pretty much the same magic as my mask.” Dom was the only one of us who owned a d-space artifact of any significant power or use. When he wore it inside dungeonspace, he turned mostly invisible, so long as he moved slowly.

“Right. The rest of us work to distract Karnifex somehow, and you slip in, steal the Phylactery, and out we go before he knows what’s happened. Simple Bilbo.”

Basher’s scowl meant that she wasn’t sold on the plan. If nothing else, Cindy was practical and she was good at poking holes in my ideas. “You heard what Bloodaxe said. How do we distract Karnifex long enough to let Domino do his thing? He could paralyze and eat us in seconds.”

I paused, thinking. She had me there. “There’s plenty of ink spilled about Karnifex—the Dragon of Dread Peak has been around for decades. We’ll do some research, figure out what’s most likely to get his attention. Bribe him, smooth talk him, play hide and seek. Something like that.”

“It isn’t the dumbest plan I’ve ever heard,” Doom Maiden said, “but it’s close. We’re leaving a lot of room for things to go wrong once you’re inside. But . . .”

“You can practically see the pneumatic tubes working in her brain,” Dom faux-whispered.

“It’s why she’s so bad at cards,” Basher said with a smirk.

“Yeah, yeah,” Doom Maiden grumbled. “I know somebody who knows just about everything about dragons. She’s a competent formulist, too. Her magic could come in handy here. We could bring her in as a freelancer.”

I frowned. “She’s not one of those godsdamned dragon-botherers, is she?”

“She’s not nearly as zealous as a lot of them, I promise.”

There were a hundred small, oddball religions in Braxis City that less generous people would call cults, and a handful of them involved worshipping dragons. The biggest sect of worshippers believed that dragons were the cause of the Cataclysm; they called themselves Servants of the Drake, but everybody else called them dragon-botherers. The Servants believed dragons had created the anomalies and that some could even control them. To the Servants, dragons were the Creators of All, gods of our multiverse, and they documented all the stories about them they could find, even bringing some of the monsters offerings of food and loot, although that was uber-illegal. Not that it stopped them.

My family had no formal religion. (Except for Rash, who claimed he was a First Reformation Nihilist, but I always thought he was just kidding.) Most in Braxis City believed in higher powers—dungeonspace made it hard not to and sometimes people met entities out there that were pretty god-like—but Mom didn’t ascribe to any particular pantheon, and the idea of formal religion had always seemed exotic to me.

But besides the weird religious zealot thing, I was also nervous about bringing a new element into our team. Then again, a formulist’s spells could prove useful, and knowledge of Karnifex was something we absolutely needed to pull off my half-baked plan.

“If you vouch for her, let’s offer her a share to join the party this time,” I suggested. “We might need all the help we can get on this one. Any objections?”

“You vouch for her? We can trust this wizard?” Basher asked.

Doom Maiden nodded. “She’s good.”

Dom shrugged. “I guess some spellcraft could come in handy.”

“I’ll send her a tube-message from the gym,” Doom Maiden said.

“I hate to bring this up,” Basher said, “but we should move quickly. Once they’ve gotten their act together, MAC will probably move whoever escaped the Black Hole to a higher security facility outside the city. That’s their protocol for incursion threats. If they relocate the escapee, not even Briggsby will be able to get us in.” Basher had an older sister who worked in Municipal Anomaly Control, and so she knew more about their bureaucratic ways than any of us.

“How much time do you think we have?”

“Two to three days, max. Once the paperwork goes through, they’re gone.”

I swore. “Okay. We can do this.”

“Of course we can,” Dom said brightly. “We’re Flip’s Fierce Fighters.”

“Oh come on, nooooo,” Basher said.

“That one’s awful,” I added.

“Fine, fine, I’ll keep trying.”

• • • •

“I’m Sparks,” the dragon-botherer said. “I hear you need an expert.”

Sparks stood a meter and a half if I was being generous, and probably weighed about as much as my left leg. She reminded me of an anxious bird, the way she shifted around, never standing still. Her bleached blonde hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail except for a blood-red streak that ran from over her right eye and tucked behind an ear to hang down to mid-neck. She wore a stylized dragon pendant on a silver chain, just visible inside the folds of her half-zipped black hoodie. Something just beneath her cuffs sparkled in the gym’s gas lights: microweave chainmail. She’d come prepared to see action. And she clearly had some skill if she could afford that stuff. Light as cloth, a hundred times stronger. I tried not to drool.

“You won’t do better than me,” she added, “especially if this involves Uncle Karny. He loves me like his own hatchling.”

I could tell by Basher’s shift in posture that she had taken an immediate dislike to the formulist. She’d folded her thick arms across her chest and broadened her stance like she was prepared to bounce Sparks straight out of One-Arm’s Gym.

“Are we really about to let someone onto our team who calls the most dangerous dragon in d-space ‘Uncle Karny’?”

“Come on, don’t be rude,” Dom said. “Nice to meet you, Sparks. I’m Domino, this is Flip, and the grumpy one is Basher.” He offered his hand, but Sparks ignored it.

“No offense, but I don’t want to get too friendly. If this ends in a party wipe, I don’t want to feel guilty.”

“You’re just a basket of sunshine, huh?” I asked.

“Yep!” Sparks said brightly. “I’m practical, too. Doomerella said you’ve got a plan, so why don’t you run me through it and I’ll make it better so we can avoid that T.P.K., mm-kay?”

I laid out the basics. Sparks began to suggest some modifications.

“So, the only thing a dragon hates more than humans poking around its hoard is another dragon. That hatred for one another is what led them to cause the Cataclysm—so they would be eternally separated from each other.”

“Oh, I’ve heard this theory,” Dom said excitedly. “Our world was caught in their crossfire.”

“Uh huh. Point is, we’re going to have to look totally legits when we get Karny’s attention. If he suspects we’re playing him,” she snapped her fingers, “we’re stiffs.”

“What do you suggest?” I asked.

“Honest deception is the best kind with dragons this old. They have a harder time smelling the lie beneath the truth. We bring him an offering as Servants of the Drake while Domino works the Bilbo angle. I can stretch the offering ritual out to maybe fifteen minutes. We have to offer something with real oomph though. Got a good piece of art or a ’fact? Dragons love d-space loot as much as we do.”

“We’ve got some backing on this,” I said. “We’ll pick something up on the market.”

“So long as it doesn’t take too much from my share,” Sparks warned. “I’m already giving you a cut-rate deal here.”

“Question,” Basher said. “If it comes down to choosing between us and the dragon, whose side are you going to take?”

I stifled a gasp; the question hadn’t even occurred to me, and I could tell from Dom’s look that he hadn’t thought of it either. Even if her tone was rude, Basher had a point. We could be real suckers sometimes.

Sparks only laughed. “Fair enough. In my faith, we revere dragons, but they’re not ‘gods’ in the traditional sense. They’re smaller aspects of a greater divinity; we’re not stupid. A dragon will devour a Servant just as quickly as any rando crawler. I wanna make it out alive, thank you very much.”

“But would you kill a dragon?”

Sparks frowned. “I’m hoping it never comes to that. If it means surviving to play another day, I guess I would. The Flame cannot be diminished by the death of a single wyrm. I’d come down pretty hard against plans of dragon genocide, though.”

“What else are you bringing to the table besides the cover story?” Basher’s direct questioning was getting harder to excuse. I wondered if I should step in. I never knew how to resolve team disputes.

Sparks shot a glance at Doom Maiden. “Look, I didn’t know I’d have to audition—”

Doom Maiden shrugged. “Don’t look at me. I’m just the adviser.”

Sparks rolled her eyes. “I can prepare formulas that will buy us time to escape if things go bad.”

Basher nodded. “Fine. Good.” She uncrossed her arms, and I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding until just then.

“Can you draw me a map of his lair?” Dom asked. “And any ideas where I would find the ’fact? The faster I can find it, the easier it’ll be on you guys.”

Sparks nodded. “I know the first few chambers, at least. That should help.”

“Does anyone actually know what this ’fact looks like?” Basher asked. “What even is a ‘phylactery’?”

“I think it’s a vial, right? Full of blood?” I said, uncertain.

“Historically, it was a small box made of leather worn around the neck,” Dom said. “How many phylactery ’facts could there be in Karnifex’s hoard? I’ll find it.”

• • • •

We spent the rest of the evening drilling the details. Sparks taught us the basics of the offering ceremony, which involved a lot of prostrating on the ground and reading from a dusty tome she carried. I took a peek at it while she was taking a pee break; the pages were heavily annotated in girly handwriting. Some passages were underlined or circled. I tried to read some, but it was really dry stuff, written in language that seemed to deliberately obscure meaning. It reminded me a little of the way Briggsby had talked.

A messenger arrived just before our dinner break and delivered a bulging envelope of lootbucks. Doom Maiden headed out to the Ninth Street Bazaar to find a ’fact that would please an ancient dragon. Sparks had given her some ideas of what might hold Karnifex’s attention long enough for Dom to make it in and out of the lair.

Just as we were breaking to find some dinner, Bloodaxe slipped inside the gym door and motioned to me from the threshold. He wobbled a bit and his eyes looked unfocused. I hustled over.

“Are you drunk?” I tried to level brotherly concern in my voice instead of scorn.

He rolled his eyes. “Yer not my mum. Come on, we need to talk.” He led me outside and into the alley between the gym and a corner bodega.

“I think we have a solid plan—” I began.

“Won’t matter. Karnifex is thousands of years old. He’ll outsmart you. Only reason MAC hasn’t locked him down is ’cause they trade ’facts with ’im. You can’t pull this off without losing someone.”

“We’ve surprised you before. You said so.”

“Ivan.” He seemed to regain his balance. He rarely sounded so serious. “Listen. You’re leading yer friends to their deaths, and for what? ’Cause yer still hung up on yer jerk of a brother? You gotta stop living in his shadow and be yer own chill dude.”

I shook my head, but couldn’t find the right words. He didn’t know about Mom and her grief. Rash’s disappearance was bigger than just me. A death was like a pebble dropped in a pond. The aftermath rippled outward, impacting so many others in ways you couldn’t predict or expect. If I could do something to ease that, I was going to. Jerk or not, my brother mattered. I didn’t say any of that—I was too embarrassed, too tongue-tied.

“I think we can pull this off,” I mumbled. Gods, I really needed a ’fact that could give me a silvered tongue.

“Better crawlers than you have tried and died. My lost friends’re at the top of that list.” Bloodaxe stared at me, and I could feel a drunken anger building up in him. He was going to blow if I didn’t do something. “You think yer so damned smart just because ya beat the Cavern of the Screaming Eye. Ya. Got. Lucky. That’s all. Ya haven’t done squat yet. I’m not going to watch this blow up in yer face.”

“Fine,” I said. “Go. We don’t need your help. If you’re out, you won’t be getting a cut on this one, either. That’s all you cared about anyway, right?”

His eyes widened like I had slapped him in the face. “That whatchya think?”

I nodded. Defiant. “Prove me wrong.”

Bloodaxe pursed his lips, sighed. Without another word, he turned away and staggered into the night.

Had I won or lost that fight? If I had won, why did it feel so much like I’d lost?

My stomach tumbled, and I felt like going for a long, quiet walk.

“Whoa,” Dom whispered somewhere behind me. He slipped out of the shadows. “That was intense. I’ve never seen him like that.”

“He’s probably right, you know.”

“Hey, high risk, high reward. We’ve got a plan. Sparks knows her stuff.”

“We’re all risking our lives, dude, but you’re risking the most. Are you sure it’s worth it?”

Dom thought quietly for a moment; I could practically see him calculating the right thing to say to me. Sometimes I was afraid that Jimmy cared about what I thought a little too much. I wasn’t sure I could live up to his idea of me. “Dude, you’re my best friend. If there’s anything I can do to help you, I’m going to do it. I know you’d do the same for me. Right?”

“Of course I would.”

“What are you two whispering about out here?” Doom Maiden asked. Apparently, it was a night for people to sneak up on me. She was carrying an armful of packages. Dom leapt to take a few from her, ever the well-mannered thief.

“Thanks—all this was way heavier than it looked. Was Francisco here just now?”

“Yeah. He said this is a suicide mission and tried to talk us out of doing it.”

“What’s the story with him and Karnifex?” Dom asked.

“That’s too long of a tale to tell on the street,” Doom Maiden said. “Let’s head inside.”

• • • •

Doom Maiden took a seat on a stack of mats. “Francisco was a good crawler. Not great; he’d be the first to tell you. But he was competent and a solid earner. He supported two little sisters and his parents on his take. Back then, he was second-in-command of the Inevitables.”

“I read about them in an old issue of D-Space Heroes & D-bags,” Dom said. “They were a good party. They had some epic dungeon take-downs a few years back!”

She nodded. “They moved up the ranks fast. The Inevitables had really solid teamwork, and Francisco was instrumental in that. You guys don’t know how lucky you are to have him running your drills. He was a great tactician, even if he wasn’t the best fighter in d-space. But Blight, their party leader, had dreams of making it superstar big.”

“I met her once,” Sparks said. “Kind of a status-hungry bitch.”

Doom Maiden shot her an annoyed look, but continued. “Blight wanted what we all want, and she figured she had the team to make a run at Karnifex. But the way I heard it was, she ignored Bloodaxe’s finer strategic advice and she pulled a ‘Leeroy Jenkins’ with a spells-blasting full assault. It was a massacre.”

“No wonder he’s so worked up,” Basher said. “That’s awful.”

“Karnifex let him go free to warn crawlers against making any other attempts.” Doom Maiden shrugged. “I can’t blame him for wanting nothing to do with this.”

We’d all heard stories like it, growing up. D-space was dangerous. Everybody knew that, but it was somehow different to know that this kind of tragedy had touched our friend. Even after what happened to Rash, it was easy to get caught up in the excitement of everything, to forget the risks we were taking. Guilt at what I had said to Bloodaxe was gnawing in my innards.

“Am I making the same mistake that Blight did?” I asked quietly.

Doom Maiden grimaced and looked away. “That’s for you to decide. Francisco feels pretty strongly you’re not ready.”

“The difference for us is: You have me,” Sparks said cheerfully. “We’re not making an assault on an elder wyrm. That was idiocy and hubris. This is a totally different scheme. I’m sorry your friend’s old party got rekt, but the situations don’t compare.”

“Hmm,” Basher said. “I kind of agree with that.”

Dom and I shared a glance of shock at the two of them agreeing about anything. He said, “We’re coming at this run with the same level of planning that Bloodaxe and Doom Maiden here trained us for. He’s not thinking clearly right now. It sucks, and I love the big guy, but I say we go for it.”

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll run the Bilbo tomorrow.”

• • • •

I couldn’t even pretend to pay attention in class the next day. I ran over the plan again and again in my head, checking it for flaws. It had plenty; only someone with no imagination could fail to see how it could all go catastrophically wrong.

Even still, we had to move forward. As much as I wanted to know who the escapee from the Black Hole was and what had happened to Rash, we also needed a win for morale and for the epic loots. This was a make-or-break moment for our yet-to-be-named team.

Just before sunset, we met up at the entrance to the Dread Peak. It was in Cauliflower Park in the North Barrio, a small tree-filled lot nestled amongst the streets of pre-Cataclysm brownstones that were home mostly to poorer families who worked factories across the river or the fields further north. We had lived not far away from there before Rash’s successes had allowed us to move closer to the city center and the cleaner, more up-scale West Barrio. I felt sad and nostalgic for the place; it seemed, if anything, to have grown dingier since I last visited. Factory smog often wafted southward and contributed to the sense of decay and grime.

The anomaly itself appeared as a crystal serpent coiled around a raging bonfire, a meter-and-a-half across, that shifted slowly in color across the full spectrum. Even a dozen meters away, behind the MAC security cordon, I could feel the heat of it. The grass and plants in a ten-meter radius had withered and died. This anomaly looked a hell of a lot more dangerous than anything we’d gone through before.

“Interfacing with this is going to hurt, isn’t it?” Dom asked.

“Not as much as you think,” Sparks said. “But it does sting a little.”

A bored looking twenty-something in a Municipal uniform sat in a booth beside a small gate. She was reading a copy of Thrilling Tales From D-space. Now that I was into the real thing, fictional stories didn’t entertain me much, but I used to read that ’zine. She looked up from the page only when Doom Maiden cleared her throat.

“Huh?”

“Could you open the gate?”

The woman frowned, then looked through a stack of paperwork. “I don’t have any authorizations for travel. Did you file a request with MAC?”

Doom Maiden dropped a tiny cloth sack on the counter with a clink. “Here’s our authorization. I think you’ll find our paperwork is in order.”

Dom nudged me and whispered, “We’re bribing people now?”

“All for a good cause,” I whispered back. “MAC would have taken weeks to approve the request to run this, if ever.”

The woman smiled, and the pouch vanished. “Right, of course. Sorry, I see it right here.” She stood and unlocked the gate, and we filed through. “Have a good one. Hope you don’t get eaten.”

I reached into my pack for my d-space timer, but Doom Maiden waved me off. “No timers. This is a maximum-threat dungeon, and there’s no known de-sync time. You either make it back to the entrance or you capture the dungeon’s heart. Those are your only ways out.” She passed out thumb-sized pebbles, smooth and cool to the touch. They were made of some white stone I didn’t recognize. Maybe marble? There was something else there, though; something inside. A hum I could barely feel in my fingertips.

“These are thoughtstones; I picked them up last night. They’ll let you communicate with one another sub-vocally. Put it in your mouth, inside your cheek.” I followed her instructions. To my surprise, the pebble dissolved, leaving a sweet, tangy aftertaste. “The effect will wear off in a couple of hours, so don’t take too long in there. Good luck.”

“Equipment check,” I said.

While the team was going over their gear, Doom Maiden handed me a hand-sized porcelain bowl that you could fill with water and then use to scry remotely. We’d purchased it at All-Night Bazaar as our offering to the dragon.

The bowl only worked within d-space, like most ’facts. The ones that worked even in our world—“prime ’facts”—were priceless, and every d-space adventurer dreamed of capturing one. Early crawlers, working just after the Cataclysm, captured a bellows that constantly pours out flammable unnatural gas. Without it, we in Braxis City might have been living in pre-industrial conditions. The other pockets of originspace that we had contact with were defined by what prime artifacts they had captured, too. To discover a prime artifact was to become a legend. I could go for becoming a legend one day. For now, I wanted my story to be about how I outwitted the great and terrible Karnifex.

“Okay, let’s head in,” I said.

One after another, we touched the anomaly and vanished. I was last. I reached for the bonfire, felt the heat scorching my fingertips. I hesitated, and looked over my shoulder. Doom Maiden gave me a curt nod. I touched the flames and disintegrated.

It hurt like hell.

• • • •

You can learn a lot about dragons in ’zines and books, but none of it truly sinks in until you experience it for yourself. Worst of all is how awful they smell.

Their lairs reek with a combination of feces and rotting meat and something event more pungent and indescribable. For the first moments after my body reconstituted in d-space, I had to focus on keeping down my lunch.

“What is that?” Basher asked, dry-heaving.

“Dragons scent-mark their territory,” Sparks said. “I like the smell, but it takes some getting used to.”

Through bleary eyes, I could just make out Basher, bent over and vomiting. “Okay, okay, I feel better now . . . nope, never mind—” she said, then vomited again.

Sparks muttered a few words while drawing shapes in the air with her fingers—performing the calculations of a reality-bending formula. My eyes cleared and Basher stood upright, a look of relief and a healthy green color returning to her cheeks.

[[Dom, you okay?]] I transmitted on the thoughtstone network. Somehow I just knew how it worked.

[[I’ll live]] his mental voice was faint. [[Probably]]

[[Move into position and get ready]]

[[Already ahead of you]]

“Everybody pull themselves together okay?” I asked.

Basher gave me a thumbs-up and Sparks chuckled.

“Great. Let’s go rob a dragon.”

• • • •

On this side, the anomaly blazed like a fiery ruby atop a cliff overlooking a desolate valley full of charred tree stumps and ash, and for as far as the eye could see, not a living thing stirred.

Dread Peak was an active volcano, but the anomaly was in a stable area with no recent lava flow. The air was dry and it was difficult to breathe, hot and laden with ash. I stifled a cough and wondered if we should have brought breathing masks—who knew what kind of nasty stuff was in the air in this place? How many of the failed attempts to take on Karnifex were attributable to the dragon and how many had been due to the terrible air quality?

Sparks walked calmly following a path into the crater. The trail was surprisingly well-worn and wound around the rim in a slow spiral. With each step down, the temperature climbed. I listened for Dom’s invisible footsteps, but couldn’t make them out. He was getting better at sneaking every time we entered d-space. Which was good, given that our plan relied on him going unseen.

The path terminated halfway down into the crater at a shadowy opening in the porous, black rock face. The tunnel walls were rippled and irregular in a way that caught my eye. I reached out and ran my hand down them. The walls contained deep grooves, each cut nearly as wide as my hand. I tried to imagine a dragon with talons that large, but I couldn’t conjure an image of something that enormous, let alone something with the raw strength to burrow into the porous volcanic rock, tearing out boulder-sized chunks to create its lair.

As we descended, the temperature cooled some, and the passage seemed to wind away from the caldera full of lava. I pulled at the back of my padded vest, trying to get some air between it and my damp skin. Sweat poured down Basher’s temples, and I worried that we hadn’t brought enough water to stay hydrated. I offered her my waterskin, and she emptied it with a grateful smile.

We definitely hadn’t brought enough water. We’d have to hydrate with celebratory drinks later.

Sparks began to sing an odd tune in a language I didn’t recognize; it was full of half-notes and strange pitch shifts that didn’t fit my definition of music, much less good music. I knew from Sparks that The Servants of the Drake used the song of greeting to let the dragons know that we weren’t hostile. Most of the time, it kept the dragon from lashing out. Luckily, it seemed to be working now. The only other sounds were the hot winds above us and the low rumble of the mountain’s molten heart below. Nothing moved in the dim passage ahead.

Basher and I did our best to join in on the song, but we hadn’t had enough time to properly memorize it. I prayed to any gods listening that our singing was close enough not to draw Karnifex’s ire. We exchanged anxious looks as the passageway grew darker. Sparks worked another formula and a pale orb of light snapped into existence and floated above her right shoulder.

The rumbling I’d heard before shifted in speed, sped up, and I realized that what I had thought was the mountain was actually the great bellows of a dragon’s lungs.

“EH? WHO COMES?” I felt the voice in every bone in my body, including some I hadn’t known I had.

Sparks sang our introduction. We were mere supplicants to the Holy Drake, come with a gift to curry his blessing.

There was a long pause.

“GET ON WITH IT THEN.” Karnifex’s words were not quite right, tilted a bit sideways, but we could understand them. I had never heard an accent before quite like it. Who knew dragons had accents?

We followed the passage into an enormous space—an emptied out caldera large enough to fit Braxis West High twice over. The floor was littered with bones of indeterminate origin. Most were of a size appropriate to humans, but some far larger. I was surprised at the lack of treasure. The stories of dragons told of great heaping piles of gold and valuables. I guess Karnifex was smart enough not to leave his valuables lying out in the open.

What I had taken for the far wall suddenly shifted, and I almost cried out “cave-in!” But the “wall” was actually the flank of the beast. Karnifex was so large that I couldn’t take in all of him at once; it was like sitting too close to the screen at a cinema, neck craned back. Scales, yes, blood red and white in places, and horns, protuberances, and shiny black teeth and talons. A wing like nightfall, unfolding briefly and causing a gust of wind so strong it staggered us all, even Basher. Great, green eyes, three times as tall as me, and twice as wide, lids slitted with caution.

When I was nine, Rash found a snake in the park and he decided to keep it as a pet. It was a docile milk snake, but it terrified me. Around it, I felt the urge to run screaming for the highest point in our house I could find, to climb, and maybe screech and throw my poop at it for good measure. It felt like all sense in my head fled every time I saw the thing, and of course Rash had tormented me with it, hiding it my bed or closet where I would find it unexpectedly.

Karnifex was that snake magnified a million times. There was no primate roost high enough to escape the great wyrm. That primitive-brain fear, yes, combined with a sense of utter unimportance, of worthlessness and diminishment. If the infinite universes could give birth to something like Karnifex, what purpose did humans serve? I had never felt more insignificant.

Some unknown amount of time passed before I felt Sparks nudging me in the ribs. Eyes diverted to the ground, I regained some control of myself. I moved to help her unroll the sacred cloths and build the makeshift altar.

[[Dom, status check]]

[[Holy shit holy shit holy SHIT]]

[[I know, but you gotta pull it together, dude, we need you here]]

[[I had no idea]]

[[Get moving]] I tried to shout mentally. [[But yeah, no shit, right?]]

[[Okay okay oh gods it’s so BIG]]

I looked to see how Basher was handling it. She was busy unfolding the other half of the embroidered cloth. If she was frightened, she didn’t show it. She seemed focused on the work.

“Great Karnifex, Mightiest Aspect of the Holy Drake. I bring these initiates to receive your blessing. We have brought you this scrying artifact as a gift of honor so that you might observe your domain from the comfort of your den.”

I placed the bowl on the cloth and took a step back.

Karnifex’s head swiveled until it was a fraction of a meter away, inspecting the artifact closely with that great green, hypnotic eye. This close, it was, inexplicably, somehow more tolerable. The eye became all I could see—how that was less horrible, I couldn’t explain.

“OH,” Karnifex sounded disappointed. “SO SMALL?”

Sparks fell prostrate on the cloth. Basher and I hastened to mimic her.

“Our deepest apologies, Great Karnifex. We are pitifully small creatures, beneath your attention.”

“EH. NO MATTER. RISE.” The dragon hissed out sounds with angular shapes that took shape in a ring around the bowl. Draconic runes—I never thought I would ever see such things in person. The bowl grew to the size of a bathtub.

“BETTER.” Karnifex sounded pleased.

[[Found it, guys, found it]]

I nearly jumped to my feet. Sparks shot me an alarmed look, but Karnifex was focused on his new prize.

[[This was too easy, I am awesome]]

[[Move to exit now]]

A pause. [[I want to check something first]]

[[Dom, no, do not deviate from the plan]]

[[There’s a whole room of them statue things, I want to see if I can get closer, maybe we can save them]]

[[Dom, no no]] Sparks cut in. I glanced at her, but she showed no outward sign of her panic.

[[We have to help Bloodaxe’s friends if we can we can fix everything, I just want to get a look]]

“EH?” Karnifex shifted to glance over one mountain of a shoulder. There was an odd flash of light, and a high-pitched keening.

[[Fuck, how did I miss that tripwire—]]

“A THIEF? IN MY VAULTS?” Karnifex’s roar knocked the air out of my lungs, and I worried for a moment that my bones would liquify under the decibels. It was impossible that something so large could move so quickly—it defied all physics and laws, but my mind was trapped by the mundane rules of our own reality, and here in d-space such things weren’t even improbable.

Karnifex departed the antechamber, scales screeching against the rough rocks as he barreled deeper into his lair in search of Dom.

“We’ve got to help Dom!” I shouted. Already, Sparks and Basher were headed back the way we came at top speed. Only I had hesitated. They turned at my command, and that was the first time I saw the fear in Basher’s face. It was the pressure plate trap all over again.

“Don’t be an idiot! We need to run!” Sparks screamed.

“YOU CAN’T ESCAPE ME, LITTLE THIEF,” Karnifex bellowed. I turned in time to see Dom appear, his mask in one hand and the Phylactery in the other, running in the open space of the caldera. Karnifex was snaking up behind him. Dom was not nearly fast enough to make it.

The dragon opened its maw and a bile-green gas billowed forth, enveloping Dom. He let out a scream that strangled in his paralyzed throat. Karnifex snatched Dom’s frozen body up in his talons and retreated back deeper into his lair.

“THIS ONE’S BETTER THAN A BOWL,” the dragon muttered.

[[Go]] Dom sent weakly. [[This is my fault, I’m sorry, Ivan]]

Basher looked at me, question obvious on her face. I nodded, tears streaming down my face. What could we do?

We ran.

[End of Part 1]

©2017 by Jeremiah Tolbert.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeremiah Tolbert has published fiction in Lightspeed, Fantasy Magazine, Interzone, Asimov’s, and Shimmer, as well as in the anthologies The Way of the Wizard, Seeds of Change, Federations, and Polyphony 4. He’s also been featured several times on the Escape Pod and PodCastle podcasts. In addition to being a writer, he is a web designer, photographer, and graphic artist. He lives in Kansas, with his wife and son.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

The Dragon of Dread Peak (Part 2)

Jeremiah Tolbert | 10680 words

Back in originspace, Basher sobbed in Doom Maiden’s arms. Sparks stared at the ground. I didn’t know what to do with my hands. I wanted to punch something. Mostly I wanted to punch myself. Or maybe Domino. If only he had listened to me! Why did I ever think I could be a leader? Not even my best friend listened to me when it counted. How could I have been so stupid? How could he?

“We’ll get him back,” Basher said. She was frantic. “He’s still alive. Right, Sparks? He’s still alive.”

Sparks nodded. “For now. For days, weeks, months. Who knows. Karnifex will toy with him. Until he gets bored. Then he’ll . . .” He’d do what dragons did. We all knew it. She didn’t have to say it.

“He didn’t stick to the plan,” Sparks said, tone a little sad. “It would have worked if he hadn’t gotten greedy. Karnifex’s most prized possessions are his prisoners.”

Basher shook harder, and Doom Maiden glared at Sparks. She seemed to shrivel up. I felt guilty for the pleasure it gave me to see her lose some of her confidence. To see someone else feel a little like I did.

“Sparks,” Doom Maiden warned. “Now is not the time.”

“Bloodaxe tried to tell me that we were in over our heads,” I said. “I wouldn’t listen. I let our success go to my head like a complete fucking idiot.” I punched a nearby tree. My knuckles blossomed in pain, and I felt blood drip between my fingers. It felt like punishment well deserved, or at least the start of one.

“You hear the stories, but nothing prepares you for what dragons really are,” Basher said. “All that power . . .”

She was right; I understood now how Sparks’s people could come to revere them like gods. Karnifex, if he had wanted, could have killed us all as easy as breathing. That he didn’t—despite our deception—was somehow even more painful than if he had; now I had to live with the loss of my best friend.

“Nobody could ever defeat him; there aren’t weapons powerful enough,” I mumbled. “Not even the best crawlers of all time could kill him.”

“You need to pull it together, Ivan—” Doom Maiden warned. I wouldn’t listen. I needed to get as far away from my shame as I could. I walked, not really paying attention to where I was going. I ignored their calls and protests as they faded behind me.

By the time I began to feel calm, I had walked all the way home. The sun was rising; Josef, our block’s lamplighter, tipped his cap as I passed. It wasn’t a prestigious job, but I was starting to think that maybe I should find work doing something like that. It was clear that I didn’t have what it took to make it in Dungeonspace. I never did; Rash had always been right about that.

Before I even reached I front door, I could smell the tangy aroma of Mom’s famous breakfast scramble. My stomach did flip-flops of excitement. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten something.

“Ivan?” she called from the kitchenette.

It was then that I realized I hadn’t changed into my fake uniform. I was still wearing my crawler gear, which still reeked of the dragon’s lair. And I could hear mom’s footsteps coming toward the living room. I froze.

She rounded the corner. She stared silently. I could see tear stains on her cheeks. It hadn’t even occurred to me that she would worry about me not coming home. “Oh, Ivan.” she said, then turned and walked back into the kitchen. “Well. At least you’re not dead.”

“Mom!”

“I don’t even want to hear it.”

“Mom.” I stepped into the kitchen. She turned off the burner and stared at her frying pan. For a minute, the sizzle of vegetables and roc-eggs was the only sound.

“How long?” she asked quietly.

“Mom, it’s not—”

She grabbed a spatula and flung it into the sink with a loud clang. “How. Long.”

“A couple of months,” I admitted. “Not very long.”

“Oh good,” she said, tone sarcastic. “My only living son has been lying to me for two months. That’s all. It’s not like it’s been years. That’d really be godsdamned awful.”

“I’m sorry—”

“You promised. When Jonah died, you swore that you would never get involved in d-space. You can’t ‘sorry’ your way out of this.” She spun and looked me in the eye again. Her nostrils flared. I’d never seen her so angry. An image of enraged Karnifex flashed in my mind, and I took a step back.

“You don’t have to worry. I’m done.” The tears came then, and I couldn’t do hold back any longer. I broke down and began to sob. “I screwed up big time and I don’t think I can fix it!”

Her expression softened, and she placed a calloused hand on my arm. She guided me to the tiny table in the corner where we had once eaten meals together as a whole family, now just two of us remaining.

“Tell me what happened, Ivan.”

I started with the recent, horrifying, soul-crushing events and worked my way backwards, all the way to the Cavern and the beginning—meeting Jimmy, my only real friend in the entire damned city, lost now because I couldn’t hold our team together. It rushed out in a torrent of words, and she listened quietly, interrupting only to ask a clarifying question now and then.

As I spoke, I felt a weight from my chest begin to lift a little. I hadn’t realized how much it had been hurting me to lie to her for so long. I knew, deep down, that my mother only wanted me to be happy and safe, even when sometimes her decisions or rules seemed to run contrary to that. The guilt of how I had hurt her . . . I knew it’d last a long time. But at least the shame of the lie I could let go of now.

Even so—I still couldn’t tell her the whole truth. I left out the connections to the Black Hole, and the escapee. Not really lying, I told myself.

“Dungeonspace is nothing but death and sorrow,” Mom said once I was finished. “It’s such an adventure when you’re fifteen, but by the time you’re twenty and the anomalies stop working? You’re relieved. You’re happy that the doors are closing to you and that you can never go back. Some philosopher once said, ‘for there to be adventure, there must also be risk.’ Over time, all that risk leads to tragedy and heartbreak.”

“You sound like you’re talking from experience . . .”

She laughed. “Every generation thinks they’re the first delvers, or crawlers, whatever you call yourselves now. We called ourselves explorers in my day. It was all so new, and there was so much to be found. Dungeonspace is where I met your father . . . seems like a few centuries ago and also just like yesterday at the same time.” She scowled, and stared at nothing. “I know dungeonspace. It took your father from me, even after I thought we were safe. It took your brother. I don’t think I could go on with any of this if it takes you from me too.” She wiped her nose with a dishtowel.

I stood there dumbfounded for several moments. I had to say something, but I couldn’t believe she’d been a crawler and never told us. Finally, I worked up the nerve to speak: “Mom, I know I’m risking a lot. Not just for myself, but for you too. I’ve tried to be careful. I never should have let them put me in charge. They all think I know what I’m doing because Jonah was my brother. Like somehow I have a natural talent for this. But I don’t. I’ll never be as good as he was.”

Mom scowled. “Ivan Kuzmich, you’re smarter than your brother and twice as kind,” she said. “Smarts and kindness can go a long way in dungeonspace. But it’s mostly the smarts you need.”

“I’m done,” I said. I swore it, like an oath. “I’m never going back. I’ve lost my best friend. I can’t risk anything else.”

She sighed. “I really wish I believed that.”

“I do—”

She took me by the shoulders and looked me in the eyes. “You don’t,” she said flatly. “Let’s stop lying right now.”

I didn’t want her to be right, but damn—she knew me better than anyone. “If there’s any chance I can save Jimmy, I have to do it. But it’s Karnifex. What could we possibly do against the most powerful dragon in the known world fragments?”

“Attacking that monster would be suicide even if you had an army. They tried that once, you know, in your grandfather’s day . . . What was it you said earlier, about dragons and what they hate even more than people?” she mused.

I tried to remember. “Sparks said that the only thing a dragon hates more than people—” It struck me like a bolt of lightning. “—are other dragons. Oh wow. I know what we have to do.”

“What?”

I ran to Jonah’s room. Mom hadn’t finished boxing up his old ’zines. I tore through them, looking for one in particular I had remembered him reading. The special dragon issue of Frobisher’s Guide.

I rolled it up and shoved it in my back pocket, gave Mom a kiss on the cheek, and ran for the door. “Can you send a tube-message into school excusing me today?”

“What are you going to do?” Mom called out.

“We’re going to fight dragon with dragon.”

• • • •

I’d never been to Basher’s house, but I knew she attended Braxis East High—my school’s supposed cross-town rival—and that was easy to reach by bus and streetcar. I hopped off a few minutes before the first bell and lingered outside the campus, hoping that I would see her somewhere in the crowd of arriving students. Their school building looked like our own—a long, narrow building made of brick and glass, three stories tall. If you’d walked by in a hurry, you might not have noticed the graffiti or the broken windows here and there that had been boarded over.

Some of the students gave me hard stares, and one troller in fashionably tattered d-space wear slammed against my shoulder as he passed.

“Hey, do you know Cindy—I mean, Basher?”

He ignored me and continued walking.

Eventually, the crowds parted and a pale, weary-looking Basher stopped a few feet away from me. She looked me over, as if assessing me for injuries, or perhaps calculating the best place to inflict one.

“What are you even doing here, Ivan?”

“I’ve got a plan.” I put all the confidence I could muster into those four words. I even convinced myself. They sounded almost good.

“To save Dom?”

“To defeat Karnifex, save Dom, and save everybody.”

Her shoulders slumped and seemed to shrink half a meter. “I’m so tired of plans.”

Not the reaction I’d been hoping for, but . . . “You’re not walking away.”

“I didn’t want to go to class right now anyway.”

“Walk with me to get something to eat and I’ll explain?”

“I’ll listen, but no promises.”

I nodded. “Fair enough.”

• • • •

She led me to a diner a few blocks away. I was surprised at how many people our age were seated in booths or clustered around tables. They had to be cutting class, or maybe they’d dropped out entirely for the dungeonspace life—something I had heard was more common in this neighborhood, but heavily frowned upon in the West Barrio. Most wore d-space gear out in the open. There were a lot more crawlers in the East Barrio, clearly. A tall, smiling woman with a prosthetic leg just visible beneath her apron asked me if I wanted the special.

“What’s that?”

“Cockatrice and waffles.”

I blinked. “Are those good together?”

Cindy put her large hand on my shoulders and guided me to a corner table. “That sounds great, Donna. Two specials.”

“Sure thing, hon.”

At the table, I dug through my bag for the dragon special issue of Frobisher’s Guide from a few years back. I had dog-eared several profiles on the bus ride.

“We’re going to need Sparks again; the plan hinges on convincing a dragon to side with us against Karnifex. With an equally aggressive dragon on our team fighting Karnifex, we would have the cover we need to get everyone out alive.”

“I should have asked before we walked all the way over here and ordered.” She began to stand.

“Come on, Basher. It could work. Like Sparks said, the only thing dragons hate more than people are other dragons. We play them against each other.”

Basher eased slowly back into her seat. “You’ve gone insane. First—how are we going to convince a dragon to join up with us? Our last attempt at parlaying with a dragon didn’t go so well.”

“We were doing fine until Dom got greedy. Sparks can do the talking again.” As I spoke, I realized I wasn’t just trying to convince her of my idea—I was also still trying to convince myself. But I didn’t want her to see that, so I kept myself sounding puffed up and sure.

“Fine. Much bigger problem, though: How do we get a dragon out of one dungeon and into another? There’s no way to move things that aren’t artifacts. What you’re talking about is . . . what, an incursion? Nobody knows how they happen, let alone how to make one happen.”

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat.

“Yeah, okay. About that . . .”

• • • •

I told her about the voice in the dark, The Thing Between.

It had first spoken to me in the Cavern of the Screaming Eye when I had been alone exploring its twisting passages. It had known things about my brother, claimed to have spoken to him many times. Our first encounter had been brief, and I had hoped a one-time thing, just a fluke that would never come up. That was, until we spoke again.

On our most recent failed run at defeating the Tower of the Repeating Phantasm, I’d fallen into a pitfall trap and was stuck there for almost an hour while the others had tried to figure out how to open the trap door and get a rope down to me. There in the pitch-black, the voice found me again.

“Quite a predicament you have made for yourself today, young Flip,” the voice said. It seemed to come from the darkness itself. It was both a whisper and a shout within the same sounds, almost like many voices speaking fractions of a second apart. “It is good to speak to you once more.”

“How can you be here?” I asked. “We defeated the Cavern.” Creatures and objects sometimes echoed and repeated between anomalies, but they didn’t have continuity. Yet the voice remembered our last conversation and picked up where we had left off. It wasn’t an echo—it was the original, somehow persisting beyond the closing of the Cavern.

“You assume that I made my home within that paltry space?” It chuckled, and I felt a chill to match its cold tone. “I dwell in the spaces between and beyond.”

“You live in originspace? In Braxis City, or another pocket?”

“Between.”

“In the Nothing?”

“If you wish.”

I lost my temper then, fed up with its ambiguity and riddles. “If you won’t talk straight, then go bother some other crawler smart enough to not fall in a pit.”

“I will endeavor to speak more plainly. How have you fared in your ventures since we last spoke?”

“Not great, as you can see for yourself.”

“Hmm. Yes, you do not yet understand your potential. So much you have to learn. Perhaps you have the time. Perhaps you don’t—now, I do not aim to speak with obfuscation, but my assessment is unsure. It will be up to you.”

“It’s up to me if I can be a great crawler?” I rolled my eyes. “Thanks for that stunning bit of wisdom.”

“Like your brother, you could be so much more than that, Ivan.” There was a scraping sound above. A sudden shaft of light nearly blinded me.

“There you are!” Dom had said. “I was worried you’d gotten spiked to death.” A knotted silk rope descended. I no longer felt The Thing Between’s presence. It had fled, as it always did whenever others were near.

• • • •

“Whatever it is, I think I can ask it to help us make a bridge for a dragon from one dungeon to another,” I said.

“First archmages, then dragons, and now literal, godsdamned demons? Maybe we could find a lich to bring in on this plan too?” Basher asked sarcastically. “I can’t believe you haven’t told any of us about this before now!” She shook her head. “Nobody on this team wants to tell anybody anything. It’s no wonder we can’t bring it together.”

“We don’t know it’s a demon. I don’t know what it is, but I—I didn’t want to worry you guys. The voice is harmless. It’s kinda mean-spirited and mischievous, but it seems to want me to become somebody.” I paused. “I liked the idea I could do that,” I said, more softly.

Basher reached across the table and took my hand. “Ivan, you are somebody. You don’t have to live up to the creepy stalker-voice’s expectations or anybody else’s. Just your own.”

“I was afraid you would think I was dangerous if I told you, and you wouldn’t want to crawl with me anymore,” I said. “I need this group to work. I’m not a troller like you; nobody is going to invite me to their party if this one doesn’t work out. And I know you need to start earning to pay for your treatments.”

She looked down, seeming to only just realize we were still holding hands. She didn’t take her hand back at first—she squeezed gently, then let go. “I’m not going anywhere. I need to land a payday, but I want to do it with you two dorks, not a bunch of cut-throat mercenaries that only see me as a meat-shield.”

I laughed. “You’re more than that to me.” I added hastily, “I mean, to all of us. Domino and Doom Maiden, too.” I felt guilty. I wanted to take back the last part, but I couldn’t. It was already in the air.

Our plates arrived, and we dug in. The combination of the fluffy, sweet waffles with the salty, battered cockatrice was amazing. I kept up with my troller friend bite for bite, which was no small accomplishment.

“Okay,” she said between bites. “Let’s say it might work, and it’s worth a try. What do we do next?”

“You go find Sparks and get her in on this. Doom Maiden too, if she’s not too pissed at me.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to find The Thing Between and convince it to help us transport a dragon across dungeonspace. You’re right; it might not even be possible, but I have to try.”

“I was gonna complain that you gave me the hard parts, but—never mind.”

“This leader stuff is totally bogus. You sure you don’t want to take over?”

“You’re always questioning yourself,” Basher said. “What’s it going to take for you to stop doing that? This team needs a leader who believes in himself as much as his team does.”

“It’s just . . . I don’t want to make a bad call. It’s a lot of responsibility, this leadership shit. I’ll try to be better. But do me a favor, and if you think I’m making a bad call: Tell me. Please?”

She nodded. “Of course. We trust you, but it’s not a blind faith kind of thing.”

“Are you sure you don’t want this job?”

“Nah, I’ll wait until a dragon eats you and then I’ll lead us to certain victory. My legacy will look so good after yours.”

“Okay, okay . . .”

“You won’t believe how good my legacy’s gonna be. Statues of me on every street corner . . . I’ll make sure they mention you in my epic song, at least for a stanza or two.”

She was still going on like that as I headed for the door.

“See you later, Ego-in-Waiting.”

“Don’t get eaten by demons, Reluctant-but-Determined-Leader.”

• • • •

The nearest anomaly, just a couple of blocks down the street from the diner, turned out to be the Forest of Endless Night, which was perfect for my needs. Nobody runs the Forest to actually close it—on orders from MAC. The Forest is connected to another originspace pocket containing a city named Shijie. MAC ran regular draftee-guarded caravans for trade with them through the Forest, and Shijie did the same. That was one downside of being a crawler—once you were an officially recognized operator on the scene, the city could draft you into doing work for the city’s survival. My brother had managed to avoid it by working for a MAC-sponsored team, but a lot of other crawlers spent weeks guarding wagons across dangerous d-space terrain. The make-up homework after a long haul was pretty killer.

I popped through the anomaly and appeared at the foot of an oak tree as tall and wide as an office building. The canopy above was thick enough to block out the sky, although the light filtered through the leaves enough that it wasn’t total darkness. I wondered if it was dark enough here to bring out the Thing. Before, it had always been pitch black.

“Hello?” I called out. “Mister Voice?” I waited a minute, but nobody answered. What had I been thinking about when the voice had spoken to me before? Was there some trick to summoning it? I closed my eyes and calmed my thoughts. I felt something stretch in the back of my mind, reach outside my body, this space, and into somewhere infinite and vast. My pulse raced.

“Young Ivan . . . most impressive,” The Thing Between said. “You have advanced in your talents.”

“I have no idea what I just did,” I admitted.

“You took your first step toward becoming greater. I am so pleased. You have need of my companionship?”

“Er, something like that. I don’t have a lot of time. You’re able to travel between the dungeonspace anomalies, right?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.”

“My friend Domino’s being held captive by a dragon. The only thing that I think can take on that dragon is another dragon. I have to figure out how to get one there. There’s got to be some way.” I paused. “Can you help?”

“Aid you to build a bridge from the domain of one dragon to another? Wyrms that have battled one another for eons? Creatures of immense power that destroy anything that threatens their domains?”

“. . . yes?”

“No.” The voice was firm. “I will not help you with this.”

I let out a long and frustrated howl, and for a moment, it felt good. “Why the hell not? You always want to talk, but you never actually say anything. You keep finding me. I bet you don’t have anyone else to talk to. Must get lonely out in the Nothing. If you don’t help me with this, I’ll never speak to you again! Because you know what? I’m done with dungeonspace. I’ll never come back, I’ll never run again, if we can’t save Dom. He was the whole reason I even got involved in this.”

There was a long pause, and I wondered if the Thing had departed.

“I cannot help you directly. I cannot draw attention to myself—such a bending of the rules would attract . . . entities . . . that neither myself nor you would wish to encounter. You, however, could . . . perhaps not a direct point-to-point connection, but I believe . . . yes. You could use your world as the bridge—the coordinates are known. You need merely to alter the paths to your world to allow the bi-causal transference.”

I felt like I’d only understood a handful of those words, but there was hope in them. “I can do that?”

“This is the smallest fraction of the potential we have spoken of. The talent resides in your bloodline. Your brother. A lineage stretching back to the beginning, yes . . .” Like before, the voice’s attention seemed to be wandering away.

“Can you show me how?” I asked, tone sharp. “Stay with me here for a little longer, please!”

“You can only learn through trying to exert your will in such matters. It cannot be taught, but great need has always been a catalyst for great leaps in ability. There’s . . . some . . . probability you will succeed. To say more would endanger your chances. Good luck.”

The Thing Between’s presence left me, and I was alone in a giant forest again, burdened now with ideas that frightened me.

I had an ability to alter the anomalies? Some kind of unknown d-space talent? And my brother did too?

Rash had definitely never talked about being able to do anything like that, and I’d certainly never heard of such a thing. Given that, it seemed extremely unlikely that there would be any information available to help me, no mentor to walk me through this. As the Thing had said, I would have to learn on my own, and quickly.

The whole conversation felt like three steps forward, and two giant leaps backward. But the voice had said there was a chance. That would have to be enough for now.

If there was any chance at all of saving Dom, I had to take it.

• • • •

When I walked into One-Arm’s Gym, Basher and Sparks were huddled together giggling. Was I even in the right place? Had I somehow ended up in a mirror universe where all personal relationships were upside-down?

“Flip! Glad you could join us,” Sparks said merrily. “Basher’s got me up to speed on your wyvernshit crazy plan. I’m all in, buddy.”

“Really? I kind of thought making dragons fight would be against your beliefs.”

“What’s the worst that could happen? We go have a talk with Auntie Maelstrom and maybe she eats you two, but leaves me alive. Best-case scenario, you can actually do what you say you can do, and we get to see something I’ve been dreaming about seeing my entire life. Two dragons enter; one dragon leaves! A battle royale. It will be so. Freaking. Epic.”

“Maelstrom?” It wasn’t one of the dragons I had flagged in the issue of Frobisher’s. But I recalled the name; she dwelled within the Fortress of the Frozen Wastes. Maelstrom was smaller than Karnifex and less hostile to humans; rumor had it she’d even helped some out-of-their-league crawlers safely to the exit on abandoned attempts to solve the Fortress. That generosity had led to a scene-wide ban on running that anomaly—because completing the Fortress would have made Maelstrom cease to exist. A bad way of returning the favor.

“It’s actually pretty genius,” Basher said. “We free Maelstrom to deal with Karnifex. She’ll take over his hoard and we can mop up the Fortress before anybody knows she’s gone. It’ll be easy mode for the full Monte Haul!”

“And best of all, it’s well known amongst dragon-worshipping circles that Maelstrom hates Karnifex. The have some kind of history, pre-Catacylsm. Ex-lovers, I bet. She really hates his scaly hide.”

“There’s one non-negotiable element, though, to my participation. I’m taking a double-cut on whatever we score in Maelstrom’s lair,” Sparks said brightly. “A girl has needs. Swimming-pool-full-of-gold-coins needs.”

“I said it was okay,” Basher said. “If we bring in a whole hoard of treasure, she’ll have earned it.”

“Why are you two suddenly so cozy?” I asked. I felt a little outnumbered without Dom.

Basher smiled. “We had a good chat.”

“About what?”

“Things,” Sparks said cagily.

“Sparks likes Dom!” Basher blurted.

“Basher!” Sparks was blushing. “Kinda. Maybe! Look, I was gonna ask him out after all this was over, and then he had to go and get himself frozen. I figure I get another chance if we do this. He’s an idiot, but a cute idiot.”

“That’s why you’re going to help us?”

Basher shrugged. “Just go with it. She’s in. I’m in. Doom Maiden said no way, but it’s probably good that she isn’t here to poop all over your plan. How did things go with the spooky voice?”

“Oh, you know. Told me I have superpowers. Apparently, people in my family kind of, uh, have the ability to create incursions.”

Basher’s face turned pale. “You what?”

“The voice said it couldn’t help me create a bridge, but that I could move a dragon from its dungeonspace into originspace, and then through a second anomaly. I could do that on my own.”

“Whoa!” Sparks jumped up and began to pace. “You can do that? For real?”

“No idea, but I’m going to try. The voice hasn’t lied or been wrong before. And . . . I was able to summon the voice, somehow. I pulled it to me. Have either of you ever heard of a d-space talent like that?” I asked. Sparks and Basher shook their heads.

“I guess you’re not just plain Ivan anymore,” Basher said. She smiled softly, and nudged me in the ribs. If I could do this, I was anything but plain.

“Guess we’ll find out,” Sparks said. “Now let’s go convince a dragon to punch the shit out of another dragon!”

The time for agonizing over plans was over, and soon MAC would transfer the escapee into a hole so deep we’d never reach them.

“Let’s grab our gear and go.” I paused. “Hey. If I give either of you an order . . . will you listen to it? Please? I can’t have a repeat of last time. If I’m going to be a leader, I need you to follow. Um, in d-space.”

“You’re the boss,” Sparks said.

Basher was grinning, like I’d finally gotten the balls to say something that should have been said weeks ago. She gave me a quick nod.

“Okay, let’s go sweet talk a dragon.”

• • • •

The Fortress anomaly was in a meat locker warehouse in the South Barrio. The building had once stored dry goods, but the anomaly put off sub-zero temperatures and the owner had made lemonade from sub-zero lemons. She was going to be royally pissed after we closed the place, probably. Nobody wants to lose free air conditioning.

Approaching the anomaly made my teeth chatter. Even Basher’s teeth were chattering. I realized a fatal flaw in my new “skip planning” spontaneity, which was we hadn’t outfitted ourselves for the cold weather.

I never really wanted to know what it would feel like to spend eternity as an ice cube, but thanks to transport through the anomaly, now I do. It was somehow a little warmer on other side, and we came through straight into a raging blizzard.

Sparks fumbled against the raging wind with her tome of formulas and shouted words I couldn’t make out. A pocket of warm, calm air formed around us, cutting the chill dramatically. As the numbness ebbed from my fingers and toes, I wondered if Sparks would consider becoming a permanent member of the team; her magic was ridiculously useful. She could make a good teammate, even if she did have some weird ideas about dragons.

“So how do we find Maelstrom?” Basher asked. We peered out into the flurry of snow. I had no idea which direction was which, and I was afraid to get out of sight of the anomaly exit.

“Maelstrom has already found you, little ape,” said an icy, feminine voice in the white. Where Karnfiex’s voice registered in your guts, Maelstrom’s voice echoed inside your head, tone even and soft-spoken. Drifts around us shuddered, and the enormous wings of a wyrm stretched up into the sky, casting even more snow and ice upon us—which melted quickly thanks to Sparks’s spell. In the shadow of the dragon, I could finally see more than a few meters away.

Maelstrom was large, but not even half the size of Karnifex. I worried we had chosen poorly—could this one stand up against him? The impact of seeing her was no less terrifying, however. After a certain point, “big enough to eat you in one single bite” can’t get much scarier.

Sparks squealed. “Ahem—oh, great Maelstrom—” She started winding up to deliver some grand speech.

“Cut the crap.” The dragon sat, tail coiled around her feet. Her wings bent and continued to shelter us from the wind, but I couldn’t help notice she also blocked our escape route. “What do you want? You clearly haven’t come to battle.”

Sparks grinned. “Aren’t you bored of living in this icy wasteland? Wouldn’t you rather go some place warm? Some place full of great treasures gathered over centuries?”

The dragon’s left eyebrow escalated a foot. “Perhaps . . . go on.”

“We’re here to offer you a deal. We have the means at our disposal to transport you to the lair of another dragon, one with an enormous hoard you can make your own. The other holds our friends captive. All we ask in return is that we free them, and take a single item from its hoard.”

The dragon chuckled. “You suggest that I take the risk of battling another of my kind for the possibility of a larger hoard in warmer climes? No. I am comfortable enough here.”

I sighed. “Well, it was worth a shot. Let’s head home.”

Sparks rolled her eyes at me.

“What if I told you the dragon was Karnifex?”

Maelstrom huffed frigid air that Sparks spell couldn’t quite warm. I shivered. “That blowhard still lives? Impossible.”

“He lives, and we have a route to him. You can extract your revenge or whatever. He won’t be expecting you, right?”

“No . . . the Sundering has made sure—”

“Exactly. A perfect surprise attack. You can take him—not that I think you’d need a surprise attack to take him anyway. He is so ancient, after all, and you still have the shine of youth upon your beautiful scales! What do you say?”

The dragon stared at us, unblinking, seeming to weigh our offer. “I do grow weary of all this snow . . . if you can do this, truly, then I will agree to your terms . . . for the moment.”

Sparks turned to me with a broad grin.

“I’m sorry I ever doubted you,” I said with a grin of my own.

• • • •

Now all I had to do was figure out how to get the dragon from here to there.

Something that, as far as I knew, had never been done before. But that was dungeonspace life sometimes. You had to do the impossible three times in an evening and still make it home before curfew.

On this side, the anomaly appeared as a small archway made of turquoise ice. It was certainly not large enough for Maelstrom to pass through.

I walked around it in a wide circle. “Okay,” I muttered to myself. “I gotta change this. Make it larger, and . . . open the door fully somehow.”

As I stared at the arch, I felt a twinge again in the rear of my mind. I closed my eyes to focus on the sensation. It felt almost like how an arm feels after it’s fallen asleep and has begun to wake up. Numb, tingling. The sensation unfolded, and I reached out with it.

“Holy Drake,” Sparks hissed. A yellow light shone brightly enough that I could see it through my eyelids. I tugged with my ethereal limb, stretching the fabric of the anomaly, but somehow aware that if I moved too quickly, something might tear. I worked slowly, carefully, easing it wider.

When I opened my eyes, the light had faded, and the arch was now tall enough for the dragon to step through.

Basher and Sparks stared at me, jaws agape. Startled, but also a little scared? I felt that too. What had I just done? What did it mean for my future? My mind raced to worry about what all this meant, but I pushed it aside; that could come later.

“Did you . . . work some kind of formula?” Sparks asked. “You kind of looked like you were working magic.”

“Maybe. I have no idea.”

“Enough prattle; let’s play,” Maelstrom said, and stepped through the arch.

“I really hope we didn’t just make a really big mistake,” I said, and hurried to follow the dragon.

• • • •

When we came through, Maelstrom was busy devouring chimera shanks hanging from meat hooks inside the warehouse. “Delicious! What do you call this?”

“I’ll bring you some next time we come to visit, Auntie,” Sparks said. “Right now, we have to travel to Karnifex’s lair.”

“And quickly, before anyone sees us,” Basher said.

“Too late,” I said, pointing to the two warehouse workers running at full speed for the doors. “A MAC High Threat Response Team will be on its way any second now.”

“How are we going to get there without scaring half the city? The entrance is kilometers away,” Basher said. “We can’t just walk there.”

Sparks grinned. “Auntie Maelstrom, I’ll bring you even tastier meats next time if you do us this one really big favor . . .”

• • • •

“Oh gods, oh gods, oh gods,” I babbled, adding a fear of heights to my list of phobias that I’d developed in the past two months. I clung to Basher’s waist, and ahead of her, Sparks yipped and hollered with joy, hands gripped tightly on Malestrom’s scales. We sat between the dragon’s shoulders, which were taut with the effort of keeping us aloft. The city was a net of sparkling lights below, rushing past in a blur.

“Look on the winning side,” Basher said in my ear over the howl of the wind. “At least we didn’t have to fit a dragon on a municipal bus.”

“Yeah, but—oh gods, don’t let me fall,” I grasped Basher tighter as the dragon’s muscles rippled. Basher may have laughed; I couldn’t be sure. I was too busy hoping I wouldn’t pee my pants.

Maelstrom made a thankfully gentle landing in the spring grass a few feet away from the Dread Peak anomaly guard booth. The MAC agent inside fled into the night screaming like she’d witnessed a murder, or, well, murder incarnate.

“So, child,” the dragon said, eyeing me. “You’re the ape who opens gates?”

I glanced at Sparks nervously. She immediately understood my concern and promptly distracted the dragon with more platitudes and descriptions of Karnifex’s great hoard that would soon be hers. Maelstrom had an obvious weakness for flattery. Anything to keep the dragon from realizing that I might be more valuable than any of Karnifex’s loot. If I could create incursions, I could allow all sorts of d-space denizens into our reality. That would be bad. But if I could open new pathways to other pieces of originspace, it could change everything. The voice had hinted that this was only the beginning of my abilities. Who knew what else might I accomplish in time?

I went to work again widening the anomaly to allow the dragon’s passage. A wave of exhaustion hit me halfway through, and my knees buckled. Luckily, Basher was there to keep me upright. I felt calmer, somehow, when she touched me, and stronger.

“It’s done,” I said, breathing heavily. “I don’t think I’ll be able to do that again any time soon. I feel like I could nap for days.”

I waited for everyone else to pass through the anomaly. The girls went through arm in arm, still riding the high of convincing Maelstrom to help us. My excitement, however, was already fading to worry. I was afraid that I hadn’t enlarged the anomaly enough, but the dragon seemed to dwindle in size like it was vanishing into the far distance. I felt a vindictive hope that it stung for her as much as it did for me. Then I followed her through.

As I burned into cinder and traveled the space between, I had a flash of a vision. Something rising in the smoke and ashes from below—my nightmare again. I felt for the first time as if the presence below was aware of me, eyeing me. Oh gods, I had drawn the attention of it—

Then I was standing on the side of Mount Dread beside my friends. I gagged at the scent, as I had the first time, but like Sparks had said, you did get a little used to it. Maelstrom had taken flight and was circling in the air above, screeching a challenge. Karnifex perched on the lip of the volcano, slowly flapping his enormous wings. He already bore several savage wounds on his flank, and seemed weakened by the successful ambush that we’d orchestrated.

“HOW HAVE YOU TRAVERSED THE SUNDERING, YOU LEATHERY OLD BAT?” he roared. “HOW IS IT POSSIBLE?”

“The child-apes are clever creatures. Capable of so much more than pitiful offerings of meat and trinkets,” Maelstrom answered. “They’ve brought me to your doorstep, after all. Now I shall finally end you.”

“YOU’VE TRIED BEFORE AND FAILED,” Karnifex replied with a snicker. “YOU WON’T SUCCEED THIS TIME, EITHER, WHELP.”

“Yes, I am still young, but you are ever more decrepit,” Maelstrom said, and plunged from the sky in a blur. The two dragons collided with a thunderclap and a great gust of fetid air, and they tumbled into the smoke of the crater.

“Now’s our chance,” I shouted over the din. “Find Dom!”

Sparks remained stuck in place, staring up into the smoke. She trembled, and her eyes were moist. “That was every bit as badass as I always dreamed.” Basher had to physically drag her away from the vantage point. “Okay, okay! But come on, you have to admit, that was amazing!”

We rushed down through the cavern that fed into Karnifex’s sprawling lair. The space inside the greeting room seemed even more vast without the dragon’s bulk to partially fill it. We moved together, carefully keeping an eye open for more traps, but uncertain how much time we had. How long would a dragon battle last? Who knew? Nobody had ever seen dragons battle before. Today was turning out to be full of firsts.

Past the antechamber, we followed branching passages leading to the great wyrm’s treasure vaults, all neatly organized by types, shapes, and qualities. Karnifex was a fastidious sort of dragon, but I guess with eternity alone inside a volcano, he had plenty of time to think through his loot organizational system. We passed rooms full of polished furniture, stereotypical piles of gold jewelry and coin, and even one odd room full of shimmering metallic disks piled halfway to the ceiling. There was writing on some of them, old words that I only half-recognized. One said: “AOL” and “1000 hours free,” but I had no idea what any of that meant.

In the rear-most treasure chamber, we found the captives. A dozen figures, frozen like statues in various poses of terror or failed escape. There, Domino stood paralyzed in the middle, the Phylactery in one hand and his mask in the other. I couldn’t bear to look at the fear on his face. What if we couldn’t unfreeze him? I hadn’t given that problem much thought, but surely Braxis City’s finest could find a cure with some time.

“Hang on, dude. We’re going to get you home,” I whispered. A tear rolled down his cheek in answer. It was enough for me to know he was still alive, somehow, in this frozen state. I felt relief to know that much.

The cavern shuddered, and a few bits of rubble fell from the ceiling high above. Small, mostly harmless pieces—for now—but not a good omen.

“We have to move,” Basher said. “What now?”

“Sparks, do you have an antidote-formula to reverse the effects of Karnifex’s breath?”

“Um . . . I can take a shot at it. It’s not something I have prepared, so I’ll be working on the fly with raw calculations.”

“Do it!” A large chunk of stone fell from the ceiling and smashed into shards only a few feet away from one of the frozen crawlers. “That epic dragon brawl is going to bring the whole mountain down!”

Sparks flipped through a pocket-sized tome and began tracing her equations in the air and muttering to herself. Another loud boom echoed above. Everything around us shook.

After a moment, Sparks shook her head. “I’ve got nothing. With some time, I could figure it out, but we’re short on that, obvs.”

“Guess we’re doing this the hard way,” I said. I sized up Dom to figure out the best way to carry him.

“I can carry two at a time, maybe three if I can find a smaller kid,” Basher said. She brushed me aside and moved to heft Dom and another.

“Can you conjure up Elwood’s Floating Platform?” I asked Sparks. It was a pretty common formula, useful for moving around large heavy objects, but it required a lot of concentration to maintain.

“We’ll never get them all this way,” Sparks said, eying the trembling cavern ceiling.

“We have to try!”

“Yeah, okay, okay.” She went to work weaving the glowing green disc out of the ether. As it started to form and slowly grew, she seemed to shrink in energy and stature.

Basher carried Dom like he weighed nothing and balanced him on her right shoulder. She tucked a third of the frozen under her spare arm and began to jog toward the exit. I stared and marveled at the sight for a moment too long, and Sparks nudged me with a leer before returning her attention to the disc.

“Okay, let’s get another couple.”

Sparks and I worked to load a statuesque kid dual-wielding swords onto it. It wavered a bit, and Sparks looked paler still. “Let’s head for the exit,” I said. “Maybe we’ll have time for a return trip.” I wasn’t very hopeful, but I figured I should put on a show of it to keep up team morale.

The disk moved a little slower than Basher; she slowed to keep our pace. More bits of cavern were coming down around us, but miraculously, nobody was struck on the climb out. We unloaded beside the anomaly and turned back to descend into the mountain a second time. A hot blast of nauseating air knocked us off our feet as the two dragons, bodies entwined, rocketed into the sky from the crater.

Basher pointed. “Uh, Sparks?”

“Yeah?”

“That doesn’t look like fighting to me.”

“Huh?” Sparks turned, sheltered her eyes against the blood-red sun. “Oh. Oh, gross.”

The fight had morphed into something like acrobatic dance. The dragons spun, twisted, dove together, as a single mind. Their scales were tattered, wings ripped, but no longer were Maelstrom and Karnifex fighting to the death. Quite the opposite, in fact. A moment later, they broke apart and pinwheeled to landed side by side only a few dozen meters away. Karnifex nuzzled against the smaller Maelstrom’s cheeks. They hadn’t yet noticed us or Karnifex’s victims.

“We need to go back for the others,” I whispered.

Basher shook her head, and leaned in close. “Remember when you told me to tell you when you’re making a bad call? This is the time. We can’t save everybody. We. Have. To. Go.”

Before I could even argue, Maelstrom spotted us and cackled with draconic laughter. If you can live your life without ever hearing a dragon laugh like that, I recommend you do so. Some nights, I still wake up in a cold sweat remembering that sound, like broken mirrors grinding together with bone and flesh. “There they are. That’s the one I was telling you about. That weak little thing has the Gift, if you can believe it.”

“THAT ONE?” Karnifex scoffed. “PREPOSTEROUS.” He blinked. “THEY’RE STEALING MY FAVORED TRINKETS!” Karnifex roared. Post-coital bliss gone, he took to the air once more. The only thing in our favor was that he moved slower than before, tired by the exertion of battle and copulation.

“You ignoramus! The one ape is more valuable than all your other treasures piled together,” Maelstrom screeched, but she soon followed into the air.

As we took cover, the anomaly hummed. Bloodaxe and Doom Maiden assembled piece by piece into existence, both fully kitted for battle. Bloodaxe had his namesake dripping weapon in one hand and a polished steel shield in the other, while Doom Maiden had a recurved bow at hand.

“Oh, thank the gods!” I said. “We are so in over our heads.”

“We’ll distract the dragons,” Bloodaxe said. “You three save as many as you can.”

Doom Maiden drew and unleashed her bow; the arrow burst into a missile of light, flaring bright and hot as the sun. Bloodaxe roared, and charged in the direction of the circling dragons. As he ran, he grew taller, matching his height to Maelstrom’s through some ’fact he had that he’d never mentioned before. The now-giant troller and the dragon clashed and tumbled to the ground, sending dust and rubble into the air, distracting Karnifex. Doom Maiden continued to pepper Karnifex with light bolts. The dragon hovered, confused.

“Go! Save the others,” Doom Maiden shouted.

Basher, Sparks, and I scrambled down into the cavern. We collected three more stiffs, and, huffing, began the long climb back up. With a crack and a shudder, the passageway behind us collapsed.

“Holy shit!” I yelled. “That was close.”

“Even if we had all day, we couldn’t dig this out,” Basher said, panting. “This is the last we can save.” We would have to mourn the others later.

When we reached the battlefield on the peak, Bloodaxe was normal size again. He had taken cover with Doom Maiden to harry the dragons with missile attacks—her with her bow and him with a crossbow which shot orbs that expanded into meter-wide fireballs. They sheltered behind a pile of crushed rock a few meters from the anomaly. The dragons were making sweeping passes through the sky, laying down breath weapon attacks. Maelstrom spat ice shards as wide as my arm, but the wind dispersed Karnifex’s poison breath before it could have an effect. It seemed he was a better fighter at close distances. Our plan to make dragon fight dragon, while not exactly successful, had helped draw the wyrm from the safety of its lair.

“Everybody through the anomaly!” I ordered. Sparks guided the disk up to the edge. Basher followed with a stiff under each arm. Doom Maiden and Bloodaxe let loose one final explosive volley of attacks, then ran through.

I stood watch. I couldn’t leave—not yet. I had to know.

“What is the Gift?” I called out, holding my hand close to the exit’s flickering surface. “Tell me or I’ll break the connection entirely and we’ll be stranded here forever. No more dragon-botherers bringing you gifts ever again. Just the two of you together, forever. And, uh, me . . . for however long it takes you to eat me.”

That stopped them. They hovered in mid-air, exchanging enormous-eyed glances.

“It is as I said. It does possess the Gift,” Maelstrom said.

“NOT YET A MASTER. WE CAN DEFEAT IT!” Karnifex hissed. “YOU WILL BE MY MOST PRIZED POSSESSION.” The dragon lunged toward me again.

“Screw it.” I touched the anomaly, and burned out of existence—

—and was suddenly back in the park in Braxis City.

At first I thought I was still atop Dread Peak because the ground still trembled, and the night sky was bright with swirling lights. The anomaly throbbed like a heart.

“Something’s wrong,” Sparks shouted. “I think they’re trying to follow through!”

Frantic, I reached into the anomaly with my “gift.” Rather than bunching up like I had planned, I stretched, stretched harder than I had before.

Tiny holes began to open in the air around me, little windows to other places. Dungeonspaces, originspace pockets, and there, in the distance, smoke and flames . . . terror crept up my spine like a spider. Wind roared all around us, rushing into some of the tiny anomalies that had formed. I knew I only had seconds to pull things back together or something catastrophic would happen. In my hurry, I knew I had endangered all of us in Braxis City.

I did my best to force the gaps closed one at a time with one part of my mind while the other pushed back against the dragons. But they were too much, too strong. I was losing.

“I can’t do this,” I whispered. Just then, a hand on my shoulder. Green and firm and kind.

“You can do it, Ivan.”

I pulled with all my focus one last time at the anomaly’s fabric. I felt something snap.

A concussive blast sent me tumbling, and the world spun end over end. I collided with something unyielding and the world went dark.

• • • •

When I opened my eyes, I half-expected to see myself back in Karnifex’s lair, trapped in a cage for his amusement. Instead, I was in my own bed. A figure sat at the foot of the bed in the shadows. Somewhere in the distance, I heard laughing voices.

“Hey dude,” Bloodaxe said softly. “Welcome back.”

“Is everybody okay? Basher . . . was with me when the anomaly blew up.”

“Yeah, she’s fine. That girl is tough as wyvernhide, and your body sheltered her from the worst of it. You took a nasty bump on the head, but the sympaths say you’re going to be okay. They got everybody thawed out, too. There’s gonna be some really happy families in Braxis City tonight.”

“Well . . . that’s good. How long have I been out?”

“Couple of hours. Doom and I called in some favors to get you patched up quickly.”

“How’s Dom?”

“That runt? He won’t be okay until he knows you’re up and about. He’s in your living room pacing a hole in the carpet.”

I put my hand to my head and felt the bandage wrapped around my temples. There was a dull throb pretty much everywhere. I felt drained of every drop of energy I had.

Bloodaxe cleared his throat. “Just wanted to say . . . well, damn it! You shoulda listened to me.”

“I know.”

A long pause. “I’m glad you didn’t. I’m glad you are who you are, Ivan. Thanks, bro.”

“Thank you for having our backs,” I rasped. “We saved more of them because of you.”

He shrugged. I thought maybe I saw tears, but that couldn’t have been. A genuine d-space hero like Bloodaxe, crying?

He bellowed, “Hey, everybody! He’s awake!” Excited voices answered from the living room, and our entire team, including Sparks, and even a few new faces from Karnifex’s collection shuffled into my tiny room. Mom stood in the back, dabbing with one of her Mom tissues at the corner of her eyes.

“How are you feeling?” Basher asked.

“We should ask him to solve a complex math problem to make sure he doesn’t have brain damage,” Sparks said.

“Quick, what’s thirty seven times five hundred and thirteen?” Dom asked.

“I have no idea,” I said.

“He’s okay,” Dom said assuredly. “He wasn’t that good at math before he took a blow to the head.”

I ignored the wisecrack. “Did somebody deliver the Phylactery to Briggsby?”

Basher nodded. “I dropped it off an hour ago.” She passed me an envelope. “These papers will get you in to see whoever came out of the Black Hole.” As I reached for them, she pulled them back.

“The only reason I’m giving these to you now is because time’s running out. You still need to rest, but after.” She hesitated. “Briggsby did tell me one thing. I’m sorry, but the person who escaped isn’t your brother.”

It took me a minute to absorb that information. I wasn’t sure if that was the blow I’d taken or just shock or relief or something else I didn’t have the words for. “That’s okay,” I said. “Whoever it is, maybe they’ll know something. How much time do I have before the transfer?”

“Two hours,” Basher said. “I was going to go if you didn’t wake up in time.”

“I called a wind-up cab for you,” Mom said.

Mom! I felt like an ass—we’d been talking about Rash right there in front of her. From her tears, I could see she knew everything now. No more secrets between us. It scared me, a little. At least I could give back that stupid Balrog’s Burgers uniform, though.

“We’ll talk after,” I said, to her especially, but to everyone else, too. In response, nods all around, and gestures to hurry.

Dom helped me down the stairs to the front entrance of the building. My knees didn’t want to cooperate on their own.

“You know,” he said, “I had a lot of time to think while I was frozen. I was scared about a lot of things, but there was one thing that never really worried me.”

“What’s that?”

“I always knew you would come back. Somehow, some way, you would figure out a way to rescue me.”

“I wish I’d had your confidence,” I said.

Dom rolled his eyes. “It’s time you have some confidence in yourself, buddy. You might not be the biggest hero who ever was, but you’re my hero and my friend. I’m sorry I caused so much trouble. I promise I’ll listen better in the future. You’re the best leader this team could have.”

I was afraid to say anything, afraid that I might cry, and I didn’t have the energy for it. I hadn’t expected how much Dom’s words would mean to me. I’d been so focused on everything that had happened over the past few days that I hadn’t really let myself feel anything beyond anxiety and fear.

The taxi blew its horn outside.

“One more thing before you go,” Dom said. “What do you think of Dragon Matchmakers, Inc.?”

“For what?”

“Our team name?”

“Absolutely not!”

“Okay. Go have your clandestine meeting. I’ll keep brainstorming.”

• • • •

The envelope from Briggsby contained very official-looking paperwork drawn up by some very high-up MAC officials. I thought I’d have to sneak in some kind of back entrance, but the instructions sent me right through the main door.

A guard was assigned as my guide, and he, along with my papers, got me through six different layers of armed security, locked gates, and what looked like heavily trapped passageways.

Finally, we reached a metal door at the end of a long corridor, flanked on either side by two more guards. They did not look pleased to see us.

“Ten minutes,” my guard said. She unlocked the door and shoved me inside.

The light was dim. I could only just make out the disheveled figure huddled in the corner opposite me.

“I’ve already told you everything I know,” a woman’s voice whispered from within a tangle of long black hair.

I recognized it—but just barely. She had been one of my brother’s teammates. Poison! She was one of the best escapists ever. It made sense that she had been the one to break out of the Black Hole. She and my brother had even dated for about six weeks before he moved on to some d-space fan girl.

“Poison? Is that you?”

“Huh?” She looked up at me. Her eyes looked wrong. “You’re just a kid.”

“What happened to you?”

She began to tremble, and then to wail. I didn’t know what to do. I reached out to put my hand on her arm, but she scrambled away. “Don’t!” Her wailing turned into sobs, then sniffles. I was getting impatient. The guard said I only had ten minutes, and I’d already used up at least five of them waiting for her to pull herself together.

“My name is Ivan. Rash was my brother. Remember? Please, what happened to him?”

Without warning, she lunged at me. I took a step back, but she grabbed my collar and drew me close. Her fingers were cracked and bloody.

“Oh.” She let go, and slumped exhausted against the cell wall. “I do remember you! You were that fat little bastard that he always treated like shit. I felt so sorry for you back then. We might have even broken up because of how he treated you. I can’t remember anymore. Your brother was such a jerk, but I had no godsdamned idea what kind of monster he was.”

The guards muttered out in the hall, probably trying to decide if they should intervene to help me. “I’m okay!” I said over my shoulder. “Poison, what happened to Alpha Response?”

“Captured. Tortured. Somehow, they knew one of us had the power, but not which one. We had no idea what they were talking about, not that it mattered. Not that it stopped them. They broke him eventually. He told them everything. About his experiments. His abilities.”

Who was they? But more importantly: “What do you mean, experiments?”

“About dungeonspace. Your brother had a secret talent that he never shared with any of us. Not even me! They wanted that. Faced with them tearing him open for it, and . . .” she laughed bitterly.

“And what?”

She let me go and scrambled back into her corner. “He flipped. Just like that, your brother changed sides. Now he rides at the head of their armies. They’ve conquered a hundred shards thanks to him. Maybe it was coercion at first, but now? I’ve seen it on his face when they ride back in, all full of conquest and victory. He loves it. He’s one of them now.”

She began to scream again, words interspersed with raw animal sounds. I struggled to get away, but her hands grasped me even tighter. “They’re coming! Oh gods, they’re coming for you all! You’ve never seen an army like theirs. This city will burn. We all will burn!”

The guards burst through the cell door then—one grabbed me by the collar and dragged me into the hall, while two others held down Poison and administered some kind of drug. She went limp and slumped to the floor.

“Ivan . . .” she muttered. “He’s found the way back. Black Hole was unstable, but I had to get out. Had to warn—”

“I don’t understand—”

“Ivan! Warn everyone! Your brother is coming home and he’s bringing the Legions of Orocutus with him!”

• • • •

When I made the decision to take up an after-school job closing trans-dimensional portals to pocket-worlds full of dangerous monsters and traps, I thought that the worst that would happen would be that I’d get some cool scars and put some lootbucks in my pocket. In my wildest fantasies, I dreamed I would find Rash and rescue him from whatever hellish dungeonspace trap that had him in its clutches. That I’d make our family whole again.

I never imagined that I would have to save the world from him.

©2017 by Jeremiah Tolbert.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeremiah Tolbert has published fiction in Lightspeed, Fantasy Magazine, Interzone, Asimov’s, and Shimmer, as well as in the anthologies The Way of the Wizard, Seeds of Change, Federations, and Polyphony 4. He’s also been featured several times on the Escape Pod and PodCastle podcasts. In addition to being a writer, he is a web designer, photographer, and graphic artist. He lives in Kansas, with his wife and son.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

Becoming

Rachel Swirsky | 1960 words

The stranger emerged from the shadows by the backstage door, proffered lighter held in long pale fingers. Winged eyeliner emphasized the charcoal of his heavy-lidded eyes. He wore the absence of a smile like expensive jewelry.

Morgan leaned in for the light. “Hello,” she said huskily. She liked the look of him. She was stuck working this show as a stagehand, staring at the actresses who could get real work, and she wasn’t even supposed to smoke during her well-earned breaks. She could use a distraction. Gesturing toward the theater with her cigarette, she asked, “Enjoying the show?”

“Oh, I don’t attend the theater,” the man said, slipping the lighter back into the pocket of his leather jacket.

Morgan pursed her lips and blew out a narrow stream of gray. “What, were you waiting for me?”

“For . . . someone.” He looked at her sidelong through a screen of dark lashes.

His voice was so flirtatious that she took it as banter, discarding the line without thinking too much about what it meant that he’d just admitted she could have been anyone. If she had, she might not have ground the half-smoked cigarette beneath her heel and followed him behind the hedges that lined the parking lot where they could kiss in the shadows because screw this job anyway. She might not have slid her hands along the shoulders of his leather jacket, closing her eyes and tilting her head upward to receive his kiss, exposing her neck as she did so.

• • • •

“So that’s why I’m a vampire,” Morgan said, sitting at the bar, nursing her drink, looking up at the genial-though-weathered face of the bartender. “Stupid luck. Could have been anyone. He said so.”

She tipped her head back to take the rest of whiskey at once, but the glass was empty except for a sliver of ice-melt stuck to the bottom. She smacked the glass down again.

“Even then,” she continued, “even then, it could have been okay. They don’t turn most people. But he was bored, and he wanted someone younger than him to play with, so there you go. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. Stick your teeth into her neck and leave a girl a wreck. He doesn’t even pay attention to me anymore, you know? Says he wanted a natural blonde.”

“That’s a shame,” the bartender said, head shaking slowly back and forth as he fixed her with amber eyes brimming with sympathy.

Morgan took a second look at him. Ashy blond hair fell in a bed-headed rumple across his forehead. A slightly feral, woody cologne rose from him, strong even across the bar. Stubble shadowed the square line of his jaw, intriguing and masculine.

“Ever slept with a vampire before?” she asked, leaning over the bar to show the cleavage beneath her leather corset.

The bartender’s lip slid upward in a teasing smile. “Not with a vampire, no.”

Drunk on self-pity and single malt, Morgan shrugged off his odd emphasis.

She draped herself over him as he gave last call and closed up. She groped him while he grabbed his bomber jacket, and nibbled his ear as they made their way to his truck.

Soon he was behind her, eager to taste and claw her skin, fingernails gouging delicious scratches into her back. Above, the night was swaddled, clouds blacking the moon and stars. His deep, guttural noises were thrilling and wild.

Wind took the sky and banished the clouds, exposing the plump whiteness of the full moon. Behind her, Morgan heard the furor of breaking bones and sprouting fur as the shape pressed against her back transformed and began to howl.

• • • •

“Yes,” Morgan said with irritation. “You can be both a vampire and a werewolf.”

The bespectacled professor leaned forward, stylus tapping his tablet. His office was small and cramped, books looming down at her in bulky red leather covers with gold-lettered spines.

“This is just fascinating,” he said. “Fascinating! Do you understand how many theories this overturns? Do you realize the implications for theology? How can a creature be both soullessly dead and wildly animal at the same time?”

Morgan shrugged. “When I’m a wolf, I drink deer blood. When I’m human-shaped, I avoid silver jewelry.” She held up her hand and spun the gold bangle on her wrist. “It’s not that complicated.”

“What about sunlight?” he asked.

“I might be able to deal with the sun as a wolf, but I’ve never wanted to take the risk. Honestly, it doesn’t seem worth it. The important things about being a werewolf all happen at night anyway.”

“Fascinating,” the professor repeated, “Just fascinating. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more fascinating specimen before.”

Morgan shifted in the small, bare wooden chair that sat in the shadow of the professor’s desk. She was more uncomfortable with his tone than the seat; when he complimented her, he seemed possessive, voracious.

“I’m not a specimen,” she said.

The professor leaned back in his winged armchair, waving his hands defensively in the air. “Of course not! Of course not. Badly chosen word on my part. But you are—fascinating.”

He leaned forward again, and she saw behind his glasses that the whites of his eyes were veined with red. As he ran his worm-like tongue avariciously across his teeth, they moved loosely in his jaw, releasing a scent of decay.

“Fascinating,” he said again. “When I think of what’s locked inside that head . . .”

His tongue flapped out of his mouth to lick his lips. It was a purple slab of meat, riddled with maggots. She’d thought he was merely skinny, but she noticed now the way his skin was tight and shrunken.

“When I think of that . . .” His breath trembled with excitement. “. . . that braaaaiiiin . . .”

Morgan sagged in her chair. “Crap.”

• • • •

She managed to avoid the merman who was posing as a surfer while he searched for an underwater bride. She fell for the demon’s infomercial sales pitch for “cosmetics,” but went out on a blind date with an angel later which ended up canceling it out.

When the elder care industry started transplanting brains into robots, she jumped at the chance to join aging millionaires upgrading to cyborgs. She was tired of being subject to the cacophony of supernatural demands. At least her strain of zombification left her mental faculties intact. Vampirism canceled out zombie decay, too, but still. At this point she was reduced to sucking blood out of brains.

Unfortunately, it turned out that her supernatural limitations weren’t tied to her body after all. Having a cyborg’s perfect facility with calculations did help her catch prey in her wolf-shape, though, which was good since any squirrels or rabbits that escaped her zombified jaws became monstrously afflicted themselves, which was probably going to collapse the whole ecosystem at some point.

When a passing comet weakened the veil between worlds, releasing floods of spirits, Morgan was one of dozens who passed into the afterlife without leaving the Earth. It was the best thing to happen to her in decades.

Being a specter in the shape of a robot had its virtues. Translucence restored her immunity to the sun, and she no longer needed to consume blood, squirrels, brains, or electricity. Ghosts were scarce, so it was easy to float to an isolated farmhouse and settle in to spooking the chickens. She was tired of interacting with other creatures, alive or undead.

Eventually, the residents got scared and moved out, taking the chickens with them. The house’s reputation prevented anyone else from moving in. Morgan enjoyed her solitude beneath the slumped roof, wandering the weather-battered floorboards between decaying walls.

She was displeased when a man arrived with cameras and monitors.

He was a bland-looking young gentleman carrying books and jury-rigged machinery labeled university property. He was probably a grad student, she realized. She wouldn’t have thought a man that age was young back on the night when she was turned into a vampire. It had been a long time.

He spent hours setting up screens and speakers and microphones, all wound together with odd wires. At certain nodes, he placed strange things: semi-precious stones, beakers of bubbling fluid, carved ivory charms, carefully drawn geometric patterns. She watched his plump brown hands working under the scrutiny of his narrowed eyes, the brow above furrowed with concentration.

She was so intent on watching him, in fact, that it wasn’t until he set up a recording device that she realized what he was up to.

Shit, she thought. Ghost hunter.

She zoomed for the door, but before she could get far, the air around her became a furious wind, pushing her back to the floor.

The grad student looked up at the disturbance. “Uh, hello,” he said, scanning the room as he spoke, clearly unsure where Morgan was. “Sorry about this. I’ll let you go in a minute. I know you’re a recluse, but we thought we should tell you before we left. Uh.” He scratched his neck, looking embarrassed. “Could you make a sound? So I know where you are? This is awkward.”

Morgan sneered invisibly.

“Fine, uh, you don’t have to,” he said. “So, um, we’re all leaving the Earth. Everyone, all the people. We’re building a ship and we’re going to go out into space.”

Morgan gave an acerbic snort. “Why?”

The grad student blinked rapidly. “You talked!” he said, turning his head in the direction of her voice. His gaze missed, falling over her shoulder.

“I do that,” Morgan said. “Why are you leaving?”

The grad student’s fingers rose to fret with his collar. “Uh. Things are sort of . . . not good.”

“Global warming?”

“Yeah, that,” he said, clearing his throat to buy a few seconds. “And, uh, the garbage continent. And the, uh, asphalt virus. And the zombie rabbits . . .”

“So you’re leaving. Goodbye. Let me go, please.”

“I will. I will! In just a second. See, well, since everyone is going, it’s going to be pretty lonely here, and what with the asphalt virus, there won’t even be much to, uh, look at. So, we’ve got this list of verified hauntings. And we’re offering, if you want to come on the ship, you can.”

“You’re planning to fly a haunted ship,” Morgan said.

“Well, sort of, I mean . . .” He trailed off, then cocked his head, considering. “You’re just a straight-up old-fashioned meat transfer, right? Human brain in a robot body? Well, a ghost body now, I mean, but, uh . . .”

“Yes, fine, that’s right,” Morgan replied impatiently. “And?”

“I say a ship, but it’s actually more like a space-born computer.” He gave an awkward smile. “Have you heard of this thing called uploading?”

• • • •

Millions of years later, an urgent summons surged through the welter. Morgan rose through layers of collective virtual consciousness to participate in the steering council. Their vessel was rapidly disintegrating, and their only source of succor was the alien hive ship nearby.

The hive queen’s order flashed into all their consciousnesses simultaneously. She extended her antennae in friendship and sympathy as she explained that the humans would be welcome to join them. They prided themselves, she said, on peaceful integration and assimilation.

Morgan laughed and laughed.

“I knew it,” she gasped unintelligibly between breaths. “I knew it!”

Avatars, fragments, and instantiations regarded her with confusion. After millions of years evolving in the welter, many of them probably didn’t even know what humor was anymore.

Morgan laughed even harder. She wondered how the universe would look through bug eyes.

©2017 by Rachel Swirsky. Originally published in Patreon.com/rachelswirsky. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rachel Swirsky holds a masters degree in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and graduated from Clarion West in 2005. She’s published over 50 short stories in venues including the New Haven Review, Clarkesworld Magazine, and Tor.com. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, and the Sturgeon Award, and in 2010, her novella The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window won the Nebula. If it were an option, she might choose to replace her hair with feathers, preferably bright macaw feathers.

The Breaker Queen

C.S.E. Cooney | 18110 words

PART ONE: ELLIOT

Elliot Howell considered the glittering company about to assemble for dinner below and sighed.

Even in his best jacket, a blue velvet smoking jacket that was the pride of his wardrobe, he would be shabby by comparison. His fair hair needed cutting and combing, and his trousers were shiny at the knees and showed his clumsy darning besides.

Charles “Chaz” Mallister had already jostled him on his way downstairs, lightly teasing, “Nice threads, Professor. So very last century! You merely lack the antique lace at your throat and cuffs. By the by, old boy, you’ve a bit of pigment on your nose.”

With one of his odd winks that never failed to make Elliot feel both complicit and oblivious to the source of his complicity, Chaz pushed ahead and clattered on down the stairs. His glossy white shoes rapped against the rosy marble like pistol shots. One end of his ascot, yellow polka dots on bright apricot silk, fluttered over his shoulder. It looked as though it wanted to fly off and float gently to the floor of the main hall far below—to be swept up by some knight errant, perhaps, for use as a favor—but an emerald pin the size of a crocodile’s eye kept it firmly attached to Chaz’s person.

“Braying jackass,” someone muttered.

Elliot, thinking he had done so, was shocked at his lack of charity.

“I rather like him,” he answered mildly. Then, “Sometimes,” before he could stop himself. That last word, the unkind word, echoed down the staircase.

Elliot winced. An oft-repeated complaint he had from his pupils was that he was too soft-spoken. Speak up, Professor Howell! they’d write in their student evaluations. But the walls of Breaker House—a house that had more rooms on one floor, it seemed, than his old dorm building—always caught on whispers and hyperbolized them.

“You’re too good for this world, Howell,” the original voice responded. “Careful—show a little claw, or the Gentry will carry you off and devour you like candy.”

Elliot’s mouth twitched as he turned to look up at his friend. At least he would not be the only shabby one at dinner; Gideon Alderwood’s narrow, ascetic face was irritable as he shrugged himself into a frayed tuxedo jacket. There was a ripping sound as the rotted silk lining inside tore. Elliot leaned against the banister, watching.

“I hate this devil monkey suit,” Gideon said. “Proposing we inaugurate a tradition of dining in our bathing drawers is the only sensible suggestion Chaz Mallister has ever made. Of course, he was nine at the time, and not yet grown out of his good sense.”

Elliot shrugged. “Before my time then. I never met any of you lot till Uni.”

Gideon pushed a dark tangle of curls off his brow. “Pity, that. Chaz was just about bearable back then. I wonder, was that before or after I . . .”

He trailed off, brow pinched, lips pressed to fishing-line thinness. “How can you be sure of anything I say, Howell? I could be lying. Or mistaking dream for remembrance. The Desdemonster has a better memory about childhood matters. Best ask her.”

Elliot studied Gideon’s tailcoat with an artist’s appreciative eye. He did not know which he preferred: the stark simplicity of Gideon’s black-on-black attire or Chaz’s extravagant green pinstripes, apricot scarf, and pomaded red hair. He wished to sketch a study of both men, side by side. An image of Gideon in black armor, wearing the apricot ascot as a favor, galloped across his vision. He sucked back a smile.

On closer inspection, Elliot noticed a streak as white as pigeon soil marring Gideon’s lapel. He leaned closer, scraping at it with his finger. Gideon glanced down, long-suffering.

“Grooming me, are you? How positively primatical. Will you eat what you find?”

“Horned Lords take you,” Elliot said affably. “I wouldn’t have to groom you if you’d remember to wash.”

“Says the man with a streak of vermillion up his nostril.” Gideon rubbed one long forefinger, still coated in clay, against his thumb. He held out his arms and stared down the length of his sleeves, smudged in several places with white prints. For whatever reason, this tickled his unpredictable sense of humor. One half of his thin mouth dragged itself up.

“Well, Howell,” Gideon said, pleased, “if people insist on interrupting my work with their little dinner parties, the least I can do is bring a bit of it with me.”

A half-smile from Gideon was about as resistible as a riptide. Returning it, Elliot asked, “Why accept Miss Mannering’s invitation to Breaker House if you’d prefer to be back in your garret sculpting?”

Gideon grimaced slightly. “As to that.”

“Yes?”

“Miss Mannering’s mama, Mrs. Mannering—or should I say, ‘Dear Aunt Tracy’?—told Cousin Desdemona that if she did not lure me down to Breaker House for this week-long natal fête, she would furnish my address to the daughters of her five closest friends, inform them they had an open invitation to watch me work, and that I’m always looking for models.”

His dark eyes, which left anyone who fell under their scrutiny fried and dazzled, as though lightning-struck, narrowed.

Elliot laughed outright. “So you’re determined to misbehave?”

Gideon flapped a slender, clay-crusted hand. “I don’t care enough for that. As long as the Desdemonster doesn’t make me play tennis, and leaves me afternoons for working, I will make an effort at mealtimes. At least,” he amended, “dinners. But I’ll be damned, Howell, damned and tithed to the King of Goblins on his ever-darkening throne, if I have to choke down port and cigars afterward, forced to endure H.H.’s politics and Chaz Mallister’s ascot.”

“No,” Elliot agreed, “let’s sneak out to the pub instead. We’ll drink summer ales. Take Ana with us. Poor girl. She’ll be about ready to escape Miss Mannering by dessert, I’d wager.”

The remnants of Gideon’s half-smile vanished. A stony storm front slammed over his face, and he growled, “Analise Field should not be here.”

“She’s your next door neighbor,” Elliot pointed out patiently, not for the first time that week. “You practically live in each other’s pockets. She brings you soup when you’re sick. You got her first novel published.”

“She doesn’t belong at Breaker House.”

Elliot shook his head. “You know, Alderwood, sometimes . . . you’re a worse snob than your cousin Desdemona.”

Grumbling unintelligibly, Gideon preceded Elliot at a stomp down the steps.

• • • •

Breaker House had so many branching corridors, so many doors opening into halls with still more doors, that Elliot, whose reluctance to attend another of Desdemona Mannering’s formal dinners made him more slow-footed even than usual, lost sight of Gideon. Then he lost his way altogether.

He found the billiard room, with its green-felted table the size of his entire efficiency apartment, and a monstrous clock on the mantel shaped to look like the Sacrifice of the Hunter God. He found the morning room, all done up in ivory brocade, ivory velvet, and ivory knickknacks enough to evince the doom of a thousand elephants. He found the music room, stuffed to the rafters with gilded harmonium, the grandest of all grand pianos, concert harp, and delicate couches. Eventually, he found the library. And a maid.

“I am glad to see you!” Elliot exclaimed.

He blushed in confusion when the maid looked up sharply, the wine she was about to decant splashing onto the glass-topped table. His first, too-quick impression of her face left him bewildered—as when, succumbing to an afternoon’s nap, he woke confused to the fullness of night, mistaking the moonlight for dawn.

She glanced down again, smiling slightly. Possibly at his expression. Immediately, Elliot’s feet doubled in size, his tongue swelled up like a pustule, sweat sprang from his pores, and he very much worried that, any second now, he would burst into a rash of pimples like a teenager.

“Seven Hells,” Elliot swore. Then, a renewed blush scorching him, “Sorry. Miss.”

He began to cross the room, tripped on the edge of a carpet, righted himself. The maid looked over her shoulder again, met his eyes, and raised her hand in a gesture that was like a mother soothing a fretting child.

The anxiety in Elliot’s chest eased. He straightened his shoulders and managed to say with creditable fluency, “Sorry for the spill, I mean. For startling you. And for swearing.”

Approaching the table, he leaned over and sopped up the spilled wine with the blue velvet sleeve of his evening jacket. “There!” he pronounced. “All better.”

The maid laid her hand on his wet arm. “Boy. You should not have done so.”

Unlike Gideon, Chaz, and almost everyone else in this house with the exception of Analise, Elliot did not have any experience with household servants. But his general impression was that they did not go around calling their employers’ houseguests “boy” in voices like, like . . .

Her voice was deep. It was the color of his sleeve, the color of the spilled wine. It was blue velvet wine and wine-dark brine and a horn blowing far out at sea. Despite her words, she seemed pleased at his impulsive action.

“No matter.” Elliot willed her to look up at him again. “I bought this jacket for a dollar at the flea market by the University. It must be ancient, don’t you think? Smelled awful, too. Mothballs. Mildew. You name it. But I’d fallen in love with the color, you see. I generally only encounter this color in my favorite paintings. So I wrote my mother and she advised me to hang it out my window for as many sunny days as Seafall was willing to provide. And it worked!”

“Yes,” said the maid, with a firm nod. “That is it exactly. I had wondered, but now I know. You smell like sunlight.”

Her nostrils flared as she drew in a great inhalation. Elliot sketched her in his mind, extrapolating from the curve of her cheekbone, the tip of her nose, the line of her chin. But the sketch twisted and shifted and changed even as he imagined it—from a woman to a fawn to a lioness to a hare to a mare to a wolf. Something wild. Something wary. Something with a wide-bridged nose he wished to stroke two fingers down.

But the maid did not seem wary when she cocked her head to one side, lifted her chin, and peered up at him through the tangle of her eyelashes.

She was tiny, he realized, but also bristlingly full somehow, like wool sparking with static. Her hair was hidden beneath her mobcap, but her eyebrows and eyelashes were dark.

Black. Like her eyes. No, blue, like her eyes. Dark blue.

Blue-black, then. Except, eyebrows couldn’t be dark blue, Elliot reminded himself. She wasn’t a raven or a crow.

No—his thoughts spun off again into a kaleidoscopic tumble of black-winged birds—she was a grackle. A grackle in a woman’s shape. A girl’s.

No, Elliot told himself. Definitely a woman’s shape.

The maid’s hand still grasped his sodden cuff. She was rubbing the wet nap between her fingers, studying the stain. Elliot suddenly knew what a kitten felt when his mother cat had him by the nape of the neck. Or perhaps, more aptly, what the warriors of Damahrash felt when their women took hold of their pricks in gauntleted hands and demanded an end to the endless war. He would have given her anything she asked.

“What is your name, boy?” the maid inquired.

“Elliot Howell.” Elliot heard his voice as though someone else had shouted the words down his throat. “My friends call me Howell. Mostly. I mean, Ana calls me Elliot. But Gideon calls me Howell. Chaz Mallister calls me Professor, but he’s not exactly my friend. He did audit one of my painting classes for a while though. I don’t know why. He knows more about art than I do.”

The maid’s blue-black, black-blue, shiny-dark, no-white eyes stared up at him.

“What do you profess?” she asked.

The weight of those all-deep eyes pinned him, as if he once more stood before his Masters committee defending his thesis Against Illusion: The New Voluptuist Vanguard—a defense which, since Illusionism still had strongholds in every academy, conservatory, and college in Southern Leressa, and the Voluptuists were considered no better than an upstart group of raggle-taggle street artists, was hotly contested. He had barely escaped with his degree.

Elliot began to stammer. “M-me? Oh, painting. I’m just . . . I’m a painter. I teach some classes, take commissions. Sometimes,” he hesitated, “I sometimes sit on out on sidewalks and paint passing tourists for pocket change. No reason you should have heard of me.”

“A painter?” The maid’s face lit with a smile. For the first time, Elliot understood what “beaming” really meant.

She has a mouth made of moonlight, he thought. I shall paint her, and call the painting Woman with the Moon in her Mouth.

“Yes!” the maid cried, seizing both his hands, answering his thought. “You shall paint me! By your work, and for your devotion, you shall be remembered forever. You, Elliot Howell.”

Her small brown hands, each finger tipped with tiny, sharp, blue-black nails, reached up to cup his face.

“Midnight is the breaking hour,” she told him solemnly, in her voice that was like the moving sea floor. “Any door will do, if you would follow me.”

Elliot, avidly studying her face, memorizing it, now noticed the livid marks—tattoos, he realized—scattered across her cheeks like freckles. The sight of them—like calligraphy, like hieroglyphics, like bird beaks and bird bones and fangs and claws and crescent moons and stars, like nothing else he’d ever seen—shocked him to his belly. Did more than shock him. Moved him. Reassigned his priorities. Drained his head of blood and sent it pounding elsewhere.

“Mistress,” he gasped, reeling and dizzy, “I think I am lost.”

The maid stepped back. She turned her back on him and continued to refill the cut crystal decanter from her dark bottle. He could no longer see her face, her strange eyes, her blue-winging eyebrows, her markings. He just saw a white cap, a white apron over a black dress, a slender brown neck.

“The dining room is just through there, Mr. Howell,” said the maid, in a voice so meek and squeaky he could hardly believe the same woman spoke. “Miss Mannering and the Countess will be down shortly. The rest await you inside.”

“Thank you . . . Thank you—I . . .” Elliot found himself at the door, without remembering he had moved. He paused but did not turn back to look at her. “And . . . what’s your name, miss?”

“Nixie, sir.” He could practically hear the bob of curtsy in her intonation. “That’s what they call me here at Breaker House. Nixie. At your service, sir.”

• • • •

The dining room was dark polished wood, red velvet draperies, fine china and crystal, and gilded cherubs wherever a gilded cherub could conceivably be stuck, suspended, or fastened. Each of the four walls sported a different portrait of a Mannering ancestor. Elliot, despite the bizarre buzzing in his head, stopped to scan them with a critical eye.

Seven Hells rising—the one on the western wall was a Quraishi original from the middle of last century. Each brush stroke was like a fingernail dragged lightly down his scalp, a razor opening his belly, thorns and roses summertiming just under his skin. Elliot’s body swayed toward the portrait. He stopped himself. Clenched his fists. Willed himself to be calm.

But still he shivered, agitated and elated from his encounter with the maid, as he gazed up at the dark-skinned lady in her lace-pale dress, leaning against a balcony and looking out across storm-foamed waters.

Eloise at the Edge of the World read the brass plaque affixed to the bottom of the ornate frame. He’d studied that painting in University. Now he taught it to students. He’d written a paper about Ilar Quraishi’s uncanny use of chiaroscuro. And here it was, like a living thing, right before him.

Elliot wanted to fling himself out of the room, flee upstairs, and scrape his current canvas clean. Perhaps set fire to it. He was unworthy to paint the portrait of another Mannering woman, as she looked out over that same balcony. He was unworthy to hold a brush. He should go back home and paint houses and repair roofs, like his father before him.

“Get a grip, Howell,” he muttered, tearing his gaze away to study the more elaborate, if less intimidating, dining room table instead.

The enormous silver epergne at the center would make an excellent goblin minion, he decided. Just glue on a pair of googly eyes, a dime a dozen at the downtown market . . .

“Where I come from,” Analise Field’s whisper tickled his ear, “we have one fork, one spoon, one knife. Well—maybe two knives if we’re eating steak. Otherwise, it’s your basic butter knife. You?”

Elliot snorted. “According to my mother, we dive in like hogs. No utensils needed. Unless we’re acting civilized for company. Then we eat with our hands. But we don’t bother to wash them first.”

“Are you sure we aren’t related?” she asked. “Because you sound an awful lot like my brothers. We never could break them to cutlery.”

“It’s cruel work, Ana,” Elliot agreed. “Best let the feral be.”

Analise smiled wryly at him. In the three years they had known each other, the alchemy of friendship had transformed her plain features, rounded shoulders, and worried forehead into one of the kindest, most comforting sights his eyes beheld.

She’d sat for her portrait once, on his request. Elliot had called it Writer at Work. In it, she was barefoot, dressed in flannel pajamas and the bright red scarf her mother had knitted, which unfurled all the way to the floor and went on for a few feet more. He’d asked her to assume whatever position she found most conducive to page count, so Analise had curled up in a wide windowsill seat with her feet propped against the wall, set her notebook on her knees, and clamped her pen in her mouth. The sun shone through the window glass, touching her curly red hair to wild spirals of flame. Elliot had taken painstaking care to render a ghostly reflection of that fiery hair in the glass.

Writer at Work was currently on display in the Seafall Museum of New Century Art—by far his most celebrated accomplishment. It had sold to an anonymous purchaser, who donated a matching grant to the museum on the condition the painting be exhibited year round. The minor fame the painting brought him was how he’d met Desdemona Mannering, who’d sought him out one afternoon as he sketched tourists in Faircloth Park. She’d claimed to be Elliot’s “most ardent and devoted follower,” and begged him to paint her, too.

He’d accepted—for a sum so obscene he’d lived off it for six months—and now Desdemona Mannering had commissioned a second portrait, done in the Quraishi style, as her twenty-fifth birthday present to herself.

“For, my dear boy genius,” Desdemona had written to Elliot, “we must celebrate our quarter centuries, or else perish in alarm of them. Come stay at my summer cottage, attend my birthday party, and paint me beautiful ere I grow bent and cracked.”

“Why are we here again?” Analise’s plaintive query interrupted his thoughts.

Elliot took her hand and stroked one of the ink stains there. “You’re here because your bestselling novel launched you into the arms of the New Century Glitterati, thus making you Miss Mannering’s new best friend. I’m here because I’m not teaching next semester, and I’d very much like to survive the winter with the estival proceeds of my so-called art. And Gideon is here . . .”

“To make sure I don’t break anything expensive,” Analise finished for him, scowling.

Elliot shook his head. “Oh, Ana, no.”

“Well, he acts like it. He looked like he wanted to pick me up and put me out the door when he saw I was here.”

“I think . . .” Elliot hesitated. “I think he’s here to protect us. In his way. It’s hard to tell. He insists it’s because he’s afraid of his Dear Aunt Tracy.”

Analise scoffed. “Gideon? He isn’t afraid of anything. Except his own sculptures.”

They looked over at their dour friend, where he leaned against the cherub-festooned mantelpiece, wiry arms folded across his chest. Gideon frowned fiercely at the floor, listening to but not partaking in a conversation between Chaz Mallister and Mr. Harlan Hunt Mannering. H.H., as he was known throughout Seafall, controlled Candletown Coal Company, owned stock in rails and shipping, had partnered with multiple businesses abroad, and divided his time between five estates: least of these, Breaker House, his “summer cottage.” He was Desdemona’s father, Gideon’s uncle, and as far as Elliot could tell, a raging jackass.

The gentlemen sipped aperitifs and talked politics. Rather, H.H. talked and Chaz made polite noises. Phrases such as “labor legislation” and “bleeding hearts” and “goddamned liberal conspiracy to hike wages” rose and fell until Gideon’s head shot up like a mishandled marionette’s. He stared from his uncle to Chaz with such angry incredulity that Elliot was surprised Chaz, at least, did not combust on the spot. This he failed to do, but he did fall silent, downing his drink so quickly he choked. Mr. Mannering did not notice.

Elliot shook his head in disbelief. “The look on Gideon’s face would blacklist me from respectable employment for the next decade if I tried it in this company. But I suppose an Alderwood can get away with such fulminations and impertinences.”

Analise’s laughter was as near to mirthless as he’d ever heard it. “It’s not because Gideon’s an Alderwood. It’s because Gideon’s Gideon. He could’ve been raised by wolves and the result would have been the same.”

“Have you met his mother?” He’d meant it at a joke, but Analise only sighed, turning away from the object of their conversation and hunching her shoulders against him, as if against a raw salt-wind.

Elliot had never understood the fraught relationship between his two best friends. Sometimes he thought they both would have been far happier had they never met.

“Look at him, covered in clay again,” Analise muttered. “He works harder than anyone I know, and for what? Have you ever seen one of his statues?”

When Elliot shook his head slowly—Gideon was very private about his work—she continued, “That’s because he destroys them as soon as they dry. He takes a hammer to them. Pounds them to powder. I can hear it through our shared wall. Keeps me up at night.”

“That makes no sense,” Elliot replied, half-laughing. “Every time I talk to him, he can hardly wait to get back to work.”

“That’s because every time he tries to stop, he starts sleepwalking. Stops eating. Dreams awake. If he neglects it too long, the work comes upon him like a fit; he drops everything and just . . . builds.” She shook her head. “He doesn’t wish anyone to see him taken over like that. It’s why he left his mother’s house and slums in a cheap city garret pretending to be a pauper. Once, I found him in a fever next door. He told me things . . . It was an accident, but he hates me for it.”

The arrival of Miss Desdemona Mannering and Countess Lupe Valesca interrupted any further revelation. Elliot put a hand on Analise’s elbow and squeezed. Obediently, they both turned to appreciate the double vision, dripping gems and trailing furs in the doorway. The Countess immediately silked over to H.H. Mannering and tucked her arm in his elbow, whispering something into his ear.

Desdemona cried, “Darlings!” and flung herself into Analise’s and Elliot’s arms, trusting them to catch her. She kissed Analise full on the mouth, but lingered longer in Elliot’s embrace, pressing her cheek to his. She left a sweet scent of jasmine-perfumed powder on his skin that renewed the fever he’d felt with the maid Nixie. Her cheek was as soft against him as her satin evening gown, a rich, golden brown that matched her skin perfectly. Desdemona’s private seamstress, imported to Seafall all the way from Damahrash, had seen to it that the embroidery accenting the gown’s skirt and bodice complemented her employer’s sable pompadour and slashing black eyebrows.

“Are my artists happy?” Desdemona asked, glancing from Elliot to Analise with a prodigal smile. “Do they have something yummy to drink? Are refills in order? Gracious, how ferocious my cousin looks! Is Daddy bitching about unions again? What a bloodbath. Dear me, what is that on Cousin Gideon’s jacket? Oh, clay. Of course. Poor boy.”

She rolled her eyes. They were full as black as Gideon’s, but glittered, Elliot thought, where her cousin’s flashed. But did that glitter conceal shallowness or depth?

He found it hard to despise anyone who loved his paintings. But her presence—despite the perfume, the kisses, the solicitude—never failed to make him want to go on a long, lonely walk on the mainland moors that had begat him.

Desdemona linked her arm through Analise’s and strolled her over to where the others stood.

“So, dearest Leez,” she burbled, “how many chapters did you write today?”

Analise smiled guiltily. “I didn’t write at all, I’m afraid. First I walked the grounds. Then I took the Cliff Walk below the house all the way till Silver Bridge. It was very refreshing—I’ve been getting appallingly sedentary.”

Desdemona tickled her with fingers more topaz and ruby than flesh. “Naughty girl! Though it is a breathtaking promenade, isn’t it? Daddy just had it paved last spring. But you must promise to write tomorrow! I want your next novel dedicated to me. Due entirely to your stay here at Breaker House!”

Gideon, turning to face the mantelpiece, stuck a fingernail into a golden cherub’s carved eyelid and dug in. Elliot flinched in surreptitious sympathy, rubbing his own eye.

“Miss Field,” said Gideon, not looking up from his concentrated vandalism, “may very well never write again. Why should she? Her first novel sold more copies than Memoirs of a Courtesan. She could rest on her laurels until she dies, and then, embalmed and entombed amongst the greatest literary minds of the New Century, her monument would still read, without any gross exaggeration, Analise Field, Authoress.”

Desdemona giggled. Chaz and the Countess tittered, their tones harmonizing so precisely that Elliot suspected Chaz of mocking Lupe Valesca as much as he mocked Analise. H.H. Mannering merely grunted and refilled his glass.

Only when Analise tugged her arm free of Desdemona’s did Gideon let his fingers fall from the cherub’s desecrated eyeball. Elliot took a step toward them. Stopped. Intervening in their fights was like stepping bodily between two opposing cannons. The cannons couldn’t care less; it was you who ended up with a hole in your chest.

“Better that,” Analise spat, “than to die bitter and alone, leaving no good works behind you, no friends to mourn you, and no mark on the three worlds except the scratch in the dirt where they bury you.”

“Is that the premise of your next book?” His eyes were half-lidded, intent. Disdain dripped from his words, but his expression was stone. “How very modern, Miss Field. Mother will love it. Mind you, she won’t read it, but she’ll pass it along to her publisher friends who’ll give you another half million advance and all the right press. Just like last time.”

“I didn’t ask you to give my first book to your mother!” Analise’s freckled face flushed a bright, hectic red. “I didn’t know that’s what you intended when you asked if you might read it. It wasn’t even a finished draft. It wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready!”

Gideon spread his hands. “Ready or not, here you are.”

Analise snatched the aperitif from H.H.’s fingers and dashed the remaining contents into Gideon’s face.

“Ana!” Elliot said involuntarily.

“I was invited.” Tears streamed down Analise’s face. “Damn you, Gideon, I was invited.”

“Uninvite yourself,” Gideon suggested, gentle as sleet falling. “Breaker House is not for you.”

Analise turned and fled the room. Into the startled silence that ensued, Chaz drawled out, “I’d say it was about time for dinner, wouldn’t you?”

The Countess tittered again. “Oh, my! Yes, please.”

“Don’t know where you find ’em, Desi,” H.H. rumbled to his daughter. “Well—I know where he came from,” he indicated Gideon with a jut of his chin. “The Alderwoods always ran to the eccentric. Did you know,” H.H. asked the Countess, offering his arm to escort her to the table, “my wife Tracy once fancied herself a pianist? But her sense of rhythm was rotten, just foul. Ask Desi.”

This last, he threw over his shoulder to Desdemona. For a moment, Elliot saw what the glitter in Desdemona’s dark eyes kept hidden. The sharks swimming there.

“One day,” H.H. went on, “I sat Tracy down and laid it all out for her. Said if she didn’t stop her infernal playing, I’d sell the piano. Either that or chop it up for firewood. Never touched ivory again, did she?” He laughed. “Tell you the truth, I almost regret it now. Tracy’s been meddling in politics ever since.”

“Yes, Daddy,” Desdemona murmured. “One might even say the Women’s Enfranchisement Act is all your fault.”

“What was that?” her father asked sharply. But she just opened her eyes wide, smiled lazily, and shrugged her bare shoulders.

“And will Tracy be joining us for any of your birthday celebrations?” The Countess’s round, dolorous, basset hound eyes were, Elliot thought, without real curiosity or concern, the smile not quite suppressed enough on her red mouth. If he had been a betting man, he would have wagered H.H.’s hand was squeezing her thigh.

“Mother arrives tomorrow,” Desdemona replied airily. “Bringing Aunt Audrey with her, along with most of their Suffragist Sisterhood. My birthday present this year, Mother says,” Desdemona caught Elliot’s eye and winked, “is an opportunity to help lobby for improved Child Labor Laws. Lucky me.”

She smiled, glittering, glittering—That, Elliot thought, that’s the smile I want to paint—until even the Countess turned her eyes away, saying vaguely, “Perhaps I shall take the opportunity to go shopping tomorrow afternoon.”

“I love shopping,” Desdemona agreed with a gush of, Elliot thought, manufactured enthusiasm. “Chaz and I are due for another spree, aren’t we, Chazzie darling? Come sit next to me, do, and nibble my ear, would you?”

“I’d rather nibble the shrimp, dear one,” Chaz replied. “But if you insist—“

“I do.”

“I am your most humble servant . . .”

Elliot hesitated before taking his own seat, wanting to join Gideon by the mantelpiece. Perhaps grab him by the shoulders. Shake him. Knock him to the floor. He flicked his fingers when they wanted to curl into fists. Useless—useless, to add to the mayhem with physical violence.

Gideon’s hands came up briefly to cover his eyes, then dropped, trembling. Watching him, Elliot observed how gray and weary Gideon suddenly looked, as if he had aged ten years in the last ten minutes. He peered blearily around, as if surprised to discover the room was there still. Elliot looked on, at once transfixed and repelled by the distant, dying look on his friend’s face.

“Howell,” said Gideon, in a voice so soft it lured Elliot closer despite himself. When he was an arm’s length away, Gideon reached out and touched the side of Elliot’s face. Elliot inhaled sharply, leaned in. Gideon rarely touched anyone; now Elliot knew why. He thought his skin would sizzle and slough off if Gideon did not release him soon.

“If Ana tries to go . . .” Gideon set his forehead against Elliot’s. Pressed. “Don’t stop her. Please. I’ll make it up to her. I promise. But this place . . . It’s bad for people like her. For you too, Howell,” he added, with a tinge of regret. “But you have a sensible streak beneath all your dreams and visions. It anchors you to this world. Ana, though—Ana pretends to be the sturdy farm girl. Pierce that rural façade, and her internal landscape is . . . wind and fire.”

Gideon shuddered. His hand fell away from Elliot. He stepped back, black eyes burning in his pallid face. “Breaker House will open its walls to her if she stays. And she will walk through them. And be swallowed.”

Elliot’s vision washed blue-black. Eyes. Wings. Claws. Midnight is the breaking hour. Any door will do.

“Gideon,” he said tightly. “I don’t understand you when you talk like this. Say what you mean.” He paused, frowning at the look of strain on Gideon’s brow. “If you can.”

His friend pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’ve crossed over, you know. And returned. But you don’t ever really come back, do you?” He held up his hands. Beneath the crust of clay, his skin bubbled with blisters, calluses cracked and bleeding. “They don’t let you come back. Remember that.”

Ducking his head so that his dark hair fell into his face, he shoved his hands into his trouser pockets. When he next spoke, his voice was clipped and nonchalant.

“I’m for bed, Howell. Make my excuses, will you? I find I am not hungry.”

“You’re never hungry,” Elliot whispered. “Ana’s the only one I ever saw who can make you eat.”

Gideon met his gaze. “I would eat from her hand like a dog.”

Elliot opened his mouth, having no real idea what to say in reply—but Gideon made a face as though he had bitten into a bad fruit, and left the room without another word.

• • • •

Dinner was long, delicious, and a little like what Elliot imagined the Second Hell to be, where you ate your fill but felt hollow forever.

He would paint his impressions of the night, he decided, in a triptych: Banquet of the Breaker House Condemned. The finished work sprang before his mind’s eye, mercifully obliterating reality with its exhaustive—if not yet actualized—detail.

The first panel would show Countess Lupe Valesca, Chaz Mallister, and Father and Daughter Mannering all gorging themselves until the weight of their own excesses moors them to the floor.

The second panel: a self-portrait of sorts, depicting the demons arriving to cart our dear, departed, approximately whale-sized artist away to become the next meal for the other doomed gourmands. The expression on the artist’s face, Elliot decided, critically eyeballing his own severed head, would be one of relief. This stage of hell indicates absolution; for once the artist is consumed by the damned, shat out, flushed into the sewers of hell (that is, the Third Hell), and broken down by fiend beetles, he at least would stand a chance of being reborn.

The third and final panel would begin in Bana the Bone Kingdom, where goblins dwell. Bana separates the Seven Hells from Athe, the world of mortals. Between Bana and Athe shimmers the thinnest, most delicate Veil, another world itself: the Valwode, where the Gentry live—or dream they live, life being for the Gentry but an unspooling chaos of pyretic reverie, senseless and without surcease.

Our army of fiend beetles, now bearing the artist’s soul piecemeal upon their chitinous backs (How do I sketch a soul excreted? Elliot pondered), would crawl up a bone ladder out of the goblin realm, pass through the rainbow-spangled Valwode and thence through a portal into Athe. Above, in the mortal world, a pregnant woman (who looks very much like Elliot’s own mother), fitfully asleep on her mattress, would await reception of her baby’s harrowed soul.

Elliot blinked himself free of the vision to find dinner had ended, and Chaz’s limpid blue gaze fixed on him. He had the uncomfortable notion that Chaz could see right through his skull, as if it were canvas instead of flesh and bone, with the triptych showing through like a pentimento.

“Port and cigars, Professor?” was all he asked.

When Elliot sighed, Chaz grinned. He did, however, endeavor to keep H.H. engaged in conversation to such a degree—toad-eating him, laughing at his jokes, inserting leading questions into every splintery suggestion of a pause—that Elliot found himself at leisure to sketch out the triptych on a notepad he kept tucked in his pocket.

Throughout the (insufferable, monotonous, fury-spurring) conversation, Elliot glanced up every so often to witness Chaz adjust the angle of his body to keep H.H.’s back turned on the shabby young man in the blue velvet coat, or release a cloud of noxious cigar smoke to strategically obscure Elliot from view. It was an unexpected kindness—though Elliot for the life of him could not guess why Chaz had extended it to him.

When the two women rejoined the party, Desdemona made a beeline for the settee where Elliot had secluded himself, her dark eyes dangerously inquisitive.

“Oh, are you doodling, dear thing? Do show!”

Elliot hastily stuffed notebook and charcoal stick away. He offered Desdemona one of his shy smiles, which his mother claimed were “Hell on the heart, kid,” and which had inspired not a few students to leave unsigned love letters under his office door. He promised: “When it’s ready, Miss Mannering, you shall be the first to see it. Likely I won’t be able to do anything with the idea for a good while. After all, I’m here to paint your picture, not to indulge my idle fantasies.”

“Oh, that’s just commissioned work!” Desdemona’s straight razor smile softened for him. “I want you to be inspired here, too. I solemnly swear to buy whatever you paint at Breaker House . . . But not before I host a great unveiling for it and drive all my friends wild with jealousy that the work is already spoken for.”

“You are very generous, Miss Mannering.” Elliot smiled again, privately vowing never to show the triptych in public. Let the world discover it post his particular mortem, please, when it couldn’t hurt him.

In the music room, Desdemona left Elliot to join the Countess at the baby grand, lending her opinion as to which piece for piano and harp they might play together. When Phantasie Sabbat in C# Minor, Op. 12 began, Elliot slipped out onto the terrace and descended into the gardens. He skirted the fragrant flowerbeds, inhaling deeply as though he could breathe the maid Nixie back into existence. How she must smell just like this: night-blooming flowers and a night-fallen sea.

Lost in thought, he let his feet carry him whither they wished to go. This, apparently, was the long gravel drive in front of the house. He peered into the darkness. At the end of the gravel drive, the massive gates of Breaker House stood open. A taxi idled in the tree-lined street.

A wash of golden light over the gravel as the front door to Breaker House opened. Darkness again when it closed. A crunch of footsteps.

Elliot called out, “You shouldn’t let him get to you, Ana. Stay, if you want.”

Her answering silence was grim.

“All right.” He sighed. “Maybe it’s for the best anyway.”

Coming to stand beside him, suitcase in hand, Analise asked him, her voice as flat as a penny on a train rail, “What did you mean, when you said Gideon was protecting us?”

Elliot shrugged. “Oh, Ana, I don’t know. I—I sometimes say things, and they seem to make sense until you think about them, and then they don’t.”

“And then they do again,” Analise retorted, “about a week later, when you look back at how some bizarre chain of events unfolded in the wake of one of your pronouncements. Don’t think I don’t notice these things, Elliot Howell. You’ve a deep eye. You see three worlds down.”

He strolled over to wrap his arm around her shoulders. “We all do, don’t we? The three of us. Isn’t that why we’re here?”

“There you go again!” She trembled with what Elliot supposed were stifled sobs, but all he heard was a single wet sniff before Analise broke away from him. She wiped an impatient hand across her face and straightened her spine. “Well. I’m not here anymore. So Gideon gets what he wants. Again. For whatever mystifying reason he wants it.”

“He swore to make it up to you,” Elliot offered. The words sounded thin of substance to his ears. Even in the near-total dark, he saw the dubious crook of her eyebrow.

“I know how Gideon Alderwood pays his debts,” she said. “Bring him soup once when he’s sick, and he thinks he has to get your first terrible novel published.”

“I like your novel,” Elliot said softly.

A miserable pause before Analise whispered, “I liked it too.” She nodded goodbye, and trod away down the gravel path, bowed by misery and the weight of her suitcase.

She always packs more books than clothes, Elliot thought.

Not until she had passed the gate and closed it behind her did Analise turn back. She grasped the wrought iron bars and shouted through them, “Elliot! Be safe! I’ll see you when you return!”

“Count on it, my friend!” Elliot yelled back.

The taxi rolled away.

• • • •

By the time he went inside, the music room was empty. When he inquired of a passing maid (not his maid, not Nixie, but a woman with wan eyes like the star of a tragic opera) where everyone was, she answered, “Mr. Mannering and the Countess have retired, sir. Mr. Mallister and Miss Mannering are down in the indoor swimming pool. Will you be joining them, sir? I could fetch you a fresh towel.”

“Horned Lords, no!” This emphatic denial startled a smile from the pale maid, which she quickly sucked behind her lips. “That is,” Elliot continued more circumspectly, “I didn’t bring my swim trunks. And if I’m to paint all day tomorrow, I’d better, uh, retire myself.”

Elliot didn’t think he’d be retiring in quite the same manner as H.H. and Lupe Valesca. Though if Nixie showed up at his door and offered to peel him out of his blue smoking jacket using nothing but her knife-like nails . . .

The new maid asked, “Do you know your way back, sir?”

Laughing, Elliot replied, “Any door will do?”

Her body jerked with the sharpness of her gasp. “Don’t!” Her dove-colored eyes filled and spilled over with tears. “Don’t go, Mr. Howell. Shut your door tonight. Ignore the bells. Please, sir.”

He stared until she ducked her head and gave a short, shuddery sigh.

It’s one of those times, Elliot thought, when asking someone what they mean yields nothing but an invisible brick wall. This we know from Gideon. There are, he reflected, many invisible walls in Breaker House.

“Are you all right?” he asked instead, gently. To no avail. The maid gestured to the spiral staircase behind him.

“Your room is the next floor up, sir. Follow the balcony railing around to the right. It’s the bedroom beside the Countess’s, sir. There is a portrait of a little boy holding a monkey right next to it.”

“Ah, the Redding,” Elliot replied, nodding. “It’s a classic. Lad and his Lady, it’s called. Not a print, I take it? Not,” he added quickly, “that I was thinking about taking it.”

His attempt at wit won no answering smile from her. She did look up at him again however, her eyes wet and red-rimmed, as if she had been crying a very long time, or sleeping very little, or both.

“Once,” she said, “I was a rising star at Seafall City Ballet. Once I was a guest at Breaker House, invited to dance through her midnight halls by a horse the color of the dawn tide, with eyes like abalone shells. Look at me now.” She raked a hand over her face, and Elliot suddenly beheld the years on her, the cobwebs her hair had become, the weariness that had worn her nearly transparent.

“I’m hardly here,” she whispered. “A marvel you see me at all, Mr. Howell.”

She slipped away, and whether she rounded a corner or faded into the wainscoting, Elliot could not say—even to himself. But it was almost midnight, and he had an appointment to keep.

In his room, he packed his paints into their box and collected his palette. He left his easel, along with the just barely begun canvas of Desdemona and the Deep—or, what he privately thought of as Eloise All Over Again: This Time, by Hack. He took off his jacket, laid it tenderly upon his bed, and changed into one of his work shirts.

When left loose, his butter-colored wisps tended to fall into his eyes, plastered by sweat and paint, impeding his work, so he tied a worn scarf over it, and regarded himself in the mirror that hung over an ebony escritoire.

He could wish the effect of scarf and smock more piratical. But though Elliot was both tall and broad, his face was even more cherubic than those of the oaken angel babies decorating all four posters of the guest bed. He had round blue eyes, tender lashes, a broad, snubbed nose, ruddy cheeks that triple-dimpled on each side, and a rueful red mouth that smiled even at rest. He would look like his dad before he was much older: fat, benevolent, trustworthy, the favorite perch of children, a famous shoulder to cry on.

Elliot crossed his eyes at his reflection.

“You’re not old yet,” he told himself. Then, uncrossing them, added in his mother’s voice: “And if you’re not damned careful tonight, kid, you may never be.”

With a brief nod to the mirror, acknowledging both the sagacity of the advice and his intention to completely disregard it, Elliot tucked his box of paints under his arm and eased open his bedroom door.

At the far end of the hall, a maid was about to descend the main staircase. She held a hurricane lamp aloft. The fiery glass globe bled its glow upon her face, throwing the strange markings upon it into stark relief.

Nixie.

Nixie, and her cap was off, and her hair was down. It did not fall in waves, he observed, but braids. A hundred, hundred, hundred blue-black braids snaking all the way down her back.

Forgetting to breathe, forgetting to step quietly, forgetting everything, Elliot slipped out of his room after her.

And then, the bells.

PART TWO: NYX

Nyx the Nightwalker, Queen of the Valwode, led her quarry through the shifting borders of Dark Breakers.

To think—mortal hunters pursued their prey, harried and exhausted it, pierced it through with arrows or bullets, then dragged the carcass back to home and hearth long after it had fallen.

Ever had it been otherwise with her folk. Not to pursue but to lure. To entice. To seduce a living thing deeper into the dream with the bait of the beautiful unlikely: a song from the waves, a flash in the fog, the golden hind or silver mare or jet-black maid—hooves and mane and hair of moonlit jade.

Impossible to witness such wonders and not to follow. This was the glamour of the Gentry. This was how they caught their prey.

Yet perhaps, Nyx reasoned, it is unfair to think of the boy as prey, exactly.

She meant him no harm, but to honor him. He had done her an extraordinary service—stained his sleeve for her sake! then stammered for her pardon!—and this while she wore her mortal guise besides. Most human inhabitants of Breaker House could not perceive her however she appeared, and if and when they did, they often treated her with callous contempt. Probably because she always took care to appear powerless. An old woman. A servant. A household pet. A child.

No, she meant him no harm—but the boy’s presence in Dark Breakers would serve as a lesson to others of her court. That upstart, Susurra, for example. Nyx’s presumed heir.

Presumed heir indeed.

Well, Susurra was presuming too much these days. Nyx was still the Breaker Queen. It was still she who wore the Antler Crown. She, who maintained the vision of the Veil Between Worlds. Was Nyx not the wellspring of her world’s magic? The winter heart around which revolved an everlasting summer evening idyll?

Yes, all this, and more besides!

That a goblin girl of Bana would dare incite the court of Dark Breakers against Nyx before the appointed time! No matter that Susurra was Nyx’s niece, the youngest of her brother’s twelve daughters . . .

Did Susurra think herself cleverer than wisdom, to lay her plans so boldly, amass support, stir up such dissent—and hardly care, in the midst of all her machinations, to conceal her effort from Nyx’s scrutiny?

It shows spirit, Nyx admitted to herself. And that kind of spirit—that energy, even that mischief—is exactly what the Valwode needs from its future Queen.

But though Nyx was grown ancient, her attention attenuated, finding the perpetuating of the Valwode’s dream of itself to be an increasingly stultifying chore, she was not yet spent.

Not so far gone as to allow a palace coup under her very nose. Not yet.

Susurra was too young, too impetuous, too untried to rule in her place. She needed to be taught a long lesson. One that would see her through countless centuries of the grueling concentration it took to sustain the Valwode.

Hence, this boy. This painter. Elliot Howell.

Susurra knew Nyx had been grooming her for heir, the Breaker Queen having no children of her own. But this childlessness was ever by choice, and a mortal boy—young, vigorous, tender—could change all that in a single night.

Nyx would not allow her womb to quicken. But Susurra—and all her conspirators in the Gentry court—could no more predict Nyx’s next action than they could a volcano erupting out of the Bone Kingdom below to cover the Valwode in a molten nightmare of magma and ash. It was paramount to remain unpredictable. Uncertainty drove the Gentry wild, and they must remain wild to live. The Valwode needed its little earthquakes. What could be more murderous to the immortal Gentry than complacency?

Nyx would take her pleasure of Elliot Howell (no hardship, she surmised) and a twentyfold pleasure besides in the speculation her liaison would engender. Half the court at Dark Breakers only supported Susurra’s proposed coup because she was already the appointed successor. Take that appointment away and see how the pieces fell.

Nyx’s smile deepened. She would give the draconic gossips of Dark Breakers meat enough to gnaw on for the next decade, at least. Long had it been since last Nyx beckoned a mortal from Breaker House to Dark Breakers, from Athe to the Valwode.

Her courtiers were less careful than she—or perhaps less choosy. How recklessly they tore through the walls and let them scar shut again, forgetting to return what they had taken. Many a time had Nyx discovered some forlorn mortal wandering the quicksilver corridors of Dark Breakers, their flesh pecked to cheesecloth translucence, their bones hollowed like birds by the dreaming winds of the Veil. To these ragged souls, Nyx offered a choice: a return to their own world—out of time, placeless, friends and family all dead and gone, speaking in riddles, riddled with fading dreams—or a merciful death.

Most chose the latter.

So she snapped their necks. Turned their bones to bells. Set these bells to ring open the walls at midnight, warning mortals away, reminding her own people to have a care.

“Have a care,” Nyx murmured to herself, as a swell of recklessness seemed to seize her, unroot her. How could she be careful, when Elliot Howell was even now behind her, moving like a beam of sunlight at her back, following where she led?

Down the winding stairs. Through the dark halls. Through the walls.

Into the Valwode.

Into, what had been, in the Breaker House on Athe, the Breakfast Room. But here in the Veil Between Worlds, it might be anything she wanted. Anything the Breaker Queen envisioned and bespoke.

“A banquet hall!”

Nyx hoisted her hurricane lamp high. But it was no longer a vessel of glass and oil and cotton wick, but a fallen star balanced on her fingertips, the once white light now burning cold and blue.

A table emerged from the swift-moving mercury of the floor. It spilled over with fruits and cheeses, savory breads, briny olives, bowls of wine, foaming fountains of sherbet, platters of roasted viands—of both beast and vegetal variety—as well as cakes, chocolates, creams, and pastries as airy as clouds.

Setting the star onto the table as a centerpiece, Nyx hushed its glow to a spark, looked around, and commanded, “A bower!”

Next there arose from the floor a dais of ivory and of pearl, and upon it, a bed of swan wings and furs: silver, tawny, fawn-colored. The bed was vast enough to cradle a dozen Breaker Queens and their attendant mortal painters, as well as all the Gentry courtiers and goblin roués invited to join in their frolicking. The bed moved lightly, like a boat rocked by waves.

Was all as it should be? Would the boy be pleased? He was here now. She knew this by his breathing.

Mortals of Athe labored to breathe the dreaming winds of the Valwode: at least, in the beginning. Here the air was but the idea of air. It might easily be mistaken for fire, or fog, or a mouthful of snow.

He was sweating, too. Nyx could smell it. Salt and ozone. Hope. Panic. Turpentine. Charcoal. Soap. Sunlight.

“Elliot Howell,” she said, turning so swiftly he did not have time to be startled. She clasped her arms about his waist and pulled him hard against her. He went so still she thought perhaps she had stopped his heart by accident—something she had not done since she was quite young, and she would be vexed with herself if in her excitement she murdered this boy ere she made him welcome and taught Susurra a lesson—but then his arms encircled her, and he sighed.

His body curved around hers, as though she were a pillar of flame on a freezing night. Mortals found the Valwode a cold realm, at first.

“Welcome,” Nyx the Nightwalker proclaimed, “to Dark Breakers.”

• • • •

Minutes they stood like that, breathing together.

The longer she leaned against him, the less her age weighed on her. Years sloughed away. She—as old as poetry—was practically napping on his chest like an infant. He exuded refuge.

“Elliot Howell,” Nyx mumbled into the damp patch on his shirt where she had drooled on him slightly. His arms tightened.

“Nixie.”

What a deep voice he had, but shy and soft, a baleen whale of a voice. He laughed a little when she nuzzled deeper, surprised and reverential, as if he had never been happier.

How came he to be so dear so soon, and why did he smell so good, and what was she doing falling into his heartbeat like that? A Gentry could undream her own immortality if she listened too closely. She might set her own end by that awful clock. That time bomb humans carried around with them in their chests.

Nyx pushed back from his arms, glaring, and snapped, “One night. That is all.”

The boy looked at her, his round blue eyes brimming with the daylight of his sunny world. With his oversized smock, and that ridiculous kerchief in his hair, he looked like the largest, hairiest dairymaid ever to be stolen for a wet nurse on a Gentry whim.

“Why only one night?” he asked.

“I have my reasons. You have only to lie back and enjoy yourself.” Nyx eyed him up and down, and then grinned suddenly, provoking an answering—if bewildered—grin from him.

“You will need to keep up your strength.” She gestured to the banquet table. “I did not know what you liked, so I brought forth all I could imagine. You are a child of enormous height, and broad of bearing, and young withal. Your appetite must therefore be considerable, and I do not wish you to fade to nothing before the night is done.”

The boy’s hand moved gently to his stomach, rubbing it once in a clockwise crescent, as if to ask it a question. Some inward answer given, he glanced back at her, his expression grateful, if wary.

“Mistress,” said he, “I ate my fill—more than my fill—at dinner, before. I do not wish to refuse your hospitality, but . . .” He laughed again, that profoundly joyous, not at all boyish, sound. “Neither do I wish to embarrass myself before you.”

Nyx dug both fists into her hips and stomped her foot. “Are you refusing my gifts? How dare . . .” She trailed off, staring down at herself in amazement, her braids clattering into her face.

Stomped her foot?

She had forgotten the effect mortals had upon the Gentry. Forgotten? Or merely imagined it no longer applied to her, as powerful and as ancient as she was? Oh, she had kept them at a distance for so long, refusing to take a human lover—too distracting, she claimed, too heady. Humans were to the Gentry what cocaine was to humans . . .

She must remain in control. She had brought him here for a reason. Susurra—that Usurper Apparent—would come to understand that Nyx was no Scarecrow Queen, blank-eyed and lethargic, staked to her haystack throne to keep carrion eaters away. She was still vast.

Nyx’s delight in the boy’s company was completely incidental. She needed a mortal lover to teach Susurra a lesson; she had chosen Elliot Howell because he did not repulse her.

Well, and because he had charmed her. Because it was altogether bewitching to see her effect on him, how rosily he blushed, how sweetly he stammered . . .

Nyx grew dizzy, euphoric. She stepped close to him again, and smiled as he swayed toward her.

“Do you fear,” she asked coyly, “that once you have supped at my table, you will stay here forever, forsaking your world for the dream?”

In answer, Elliot Howell set down the wooden box he carried, plucked a strawberry from the crest of cream it surmounted, and popped it into his mouth. His lips reddened as the strawberry tasted him back. The walls exploded in strawberry creepers, festooning greenery and bright aromatic fruits.

“I am not afraid,” the boy said, smiling at her.

“I cannot tell you,” Nyx murmured against his breastbone, “how this thrills me.”

His breastbone? Once again, she found herself pressed bodily against him. Had she moved, or had he? Oh, she had not been this young for a very long time. It was as humbling as it was intoxicating; she could bounce off the walls of Dark Breakers after just a whiff of him.

Her hand slid up his chest. His heartbeat knocked against her palm. Nyx loved a mortal heartbeat. Did she? Why? Ah, yes. The quickening pound of it: the galloping of horses, the vigor of a thunderstorm, the surf against a rocky shore. If she concentrated, closing her eyes and counting forward, she could foresee the exact number of heartbeats remaining to him. The precise day his heart would stop, when the fevered rivers of his blood would cool and darken, his warm flesh turn to cold clay. And he, worm meat and bone dust. And he . . .

Nyx hated a mortal heartbeat. That awful clock. Now she remembered.

The boy’s enormous hands were cupping her face, wiping her tears away.

“They’re . . . s-sticky,” he stammered, in his voice that was like a meadow of heartsease and sweet violets. “Your tears.”

“Taste them,” Nyx whispered, forgetting everything to watch his mouth.

He did. His eyes rolled back into his head. His knees buckled and his body bucked, and she caught him by the front of his smock and the small of his back, holding him easily and steadily until the avalanche of his ecstasy had passed.

When Elliot opened his eyes again, the blue of them had, impossibly, brightened. Late September-dizzy-dying-summer bright.

“They’re sweet,” he gasped. “Like clover honey. But spicy too . . . ch-chili pepper . . . and sea salt. And . . .”

Nyx told him, “You will not forget us, nor remember us merely as a dream. Not now that you have tasted my tears.” She looked down, ashamed at herself. “I . . . For this, I . . . I should beg your pardon, Elliot Howell. It was rash, perhaps vicious, of me to . . .”

He bent his head and kissed the tears from her face. “I. Don’t. Want. To. Forget. Any of this. Not ever.”

“You say that now.”

Nevertheless, Nyx took his hand and guided it to the knot at the back of her white apron. She had not bothered to shuck off her Breaker House garb, thinking that if she, at least, remained unchanged for him whilst he moved through worlds, he might not find the transition so disorienting. But these mortal-made clothes chafed her now: the factory-sewn uniform dress, the machine-stamped metal buttons, the wool stockings.

Elliot Howell was deft with the knot, and the buttons, and now his bare hands bumped along her spine. She stretched to her tiptoes and pulled that dairymaid’s scarf from his hair, so fair and feather-like and flyaway, so sweet.

Horned Lords, he was sweet. Nectar to her senses. Sweet, and earnest too—may all the Spirits of Air and Darkness help her! What was she thinking? Parading the boy before the caprice and malice and mischief of the Gentry court was like exposing a newborn to a nest of lamias. All his rosy-lipped smiles and soft looks would avail him no protection here; she must be his shield, his breastplate, his helm and greaves . . .

Oh, but why think of them now—when Elliot Howell was tasting her again? And gasping at each lick, his fists first clenched upon her shoulders then flexing loose as each shock wave brought on by her tears bolted through him.

She must return his kisses or burst into flame. She must . . .

“What new toy is this, Queen Nyx?” a voice asked from behind her.

• • • •

“Niece.” Nyx slammed to the flats of her feet, but did not turn to face her.

“Auntie.”

That voice. Syrup over sandpaper. An indolent Gentry drawl overlaying the innate goblin gutturals. Susurra’s voice, more than any other creature’s in Nyx’s not inconsiderable acquaintance, scraped the ears like a manticore sharpening its claws on a mulberry tree. It was almost impossible to ignore—which was, indeed, one of the reasons Nyx had chosen the girl for her heir.

“I did not call thee to my bower. Avaunt.”

Susurra laughed. “Oh, don’t avaunt me, Auntie! I might very well avaunt all the way back down to Bana and tell Da you banished me for good. His own daughter! And then where would we be?” She turned to Elliot and smiled with all her pointed teeth. “Susurra of the Night Hags. And you are?”

To enter her bower, uninvited! To speak to her guest before introduction!

Nyx whipped about on her heel, peeling herself free of all disguise. Gone, the half-undone costume of domestic service. In its place, a robe of scarlet petals, each velvety leaf overlapping like fish scales. It swept from shoulder to floor, pooling around her feet in a blood-deep shadow that smelled of roses. Silver vines with silver thorns twined up her bare wrists and arms, encircled her throat, bound back her braids, draped her face in a veil of barbed chains. A silver scepter appeared in her hand, spiked on one end like a morning star. The Antler Crown burst from her skull, a raging tangle of tiers that reached higher than the unruliest cowlick of Elliot Howell’s hair.

She heard him catch his breath, but her niece required the better part of her attention.

Susurra widened her nightshade-purple eyes, batted her mothwing lashes, and exclaimed, “Forgive my intrusion, Auntie Majesty. But you were here all alone, without your servants, without your loyal court of magicians and knights to protect you. And I could not help but notice that this mortal is . . . so very large.”

Susurra cocked her head and grinned. The grin of a goblin girl, like a cobra lily, was greenish-purple and carnivorously attractive. She had more teeth than a barracuda, and she kept them very clean and white.

“So large,” she repeated. “And shaggy. And, hell’s maw, Auntie—strapping. I could not bear to think of you here, unprotected, vulnerable to his brutish impulses. He might overpower you.”

Nyx narrowed her eyes, but only said, politely, “That would be my object in this endeavor, yes.”

Susurra laughed like a wasp alighting in a pool of water. “I cannot allow it.”

The words settled around her shoulders like a cloying mist. Nyx stilled. All the way down, she stilled. Down to the quicksilver currents that were the foundation of Dark Breakers.

This goblin whelp, Nyx thought, will come to know the power of stillness. A meet chastisement, when she learns what moves beneath it.

“We must take your age, your frailty, into account.”

Susurra watched Nyx, waiting for her to protest, to act, to flame out in rage, which Susurra would meet with mockery.

When she did nothing, Susurra relaxed. Nyx could almost see a tail of peacock feathers unfanning behind her, the weight and brilliance of it gloating its way into her lordly swagger.

Susurra’s hand unfurled from the ragged cobwebs of her sleeve.

Even now, knowing the potential in that hand, Nyx did not move. To disturb the deep-moving undertow connecting her to Dark Breakers would obstruct the rearward flow of power back to her. The dream reversing itself, rushing from the far reaches of the Valwode and returning to its nexus in Nyx.

“We must consider if you are still competent to make such a decision for yourself. To engage with such burning vitality, with this urgency of blood and desire . . .”

Each of Susurra’s five-jointed, willow-wand-long fingers was lovely and learned and individually maneuverable. The scimitars of her nails were lacquered purple and filigreed in a copper lace as delicate as slug trails.

Nyx could see what was coming next. But it was for queens to sacrifice their pawns. Later, later she would reward him beyond all measure. For now . . .

“We all know the legendary effect of humans upon the Gentry.” Susurra shook her head sadly. “I fear it might prove too much for you.”

Reaching past Nyx, she stroked her fingers lightly down Elliot’s forearm, and whispered, “She’s extremely old,” with a droll wink. “There is nothing our great Queen has not seen or done. You’ve the look of a lad who wants to be gnawed on. She’s nothing but gums and drool, wasting away on her diet of watered-down dreams. I fear she’ll dodder off, bored and muttering, before she’s even gotten down to . . . bone.”

Nyx almost smiled. This was flagrant business indeed. Jejune, but effective. Susurra was doing everything short of attacking Nyx to provoke a response. Spark the inciting incident. What had she planned? What reinforcements waited behind these strawberry-heavy walls, that had her so struttingly confident?

Oh, it was all very stimulating; it worked almost too well, for Nyx did want to act in haste, to throttle the girl for her effrontery—favored fosterling or no. Her blood roiled. The floor beneath her feet roiled.

And yet.

The Breaker Queen’s core was ice. Her heart was the midnight moon in the dead of winter.

Susurra was right about one thing; Nyx was old. Too old to allow this cheeky child to goad her into folly. She had a more fitting discipline in mind—both for her fickle courtiers, and for this girl who intended to rule them without the blessing of the Breaker Queen.

“I, on the other hand,” Susurra’s seeking fingernails tightened on Elliot’s arm, “am young. What is finer than fresh meat? I would worry you right down to the marrow.”

The deep red scratches she left on him welled at once and began to bleed. Elliot’s face was pale, his lips pinched. He made no sound. He stared at Nyx, awaiting her cue. He did not want to disgrace her, she perceived, or hasten catastrophe by acting inappropriately in this strange realm. This fine boy, pierced through for her sake, probably poisoned, while she, Nyx the Nightwalker, bided.

No more.

The Breaker Queen, cold quite through now, unleashed the diverted currents of Dark Breakers in all their countless torrents back into her being, the whirlpool whence they originally sprang. The splash-back rushed her, flooded her, with the powers she had poured into her realm for centuries.

Her fingers closed around Susurra’s throat. (A thousand dying mortals haunted these hands: their snapping necks, those hollow bells . . .) She lifted the goblin princess up, up, bore her away from Elliot Howell, back toward the dais of ivory and pearl. This was no great work. The girl was too young to have imagined herself substantial; she was mere fume and suggestion, a tissue-paper confection, glued into form with twigs and cobwebs.

Nyx was old, and ice. Moonlight. A destroying wave.

When they were clear of the bleeding mortal—my bleeding mortal, Nyx thought grimly—she dashed Susurra to the floor.

She landed lightly, on fingertip and toe-tip, a spider kiting on a gossamer thread, blown wayward by an arbitrary wind. The Breaker Queen stared down at her, as still and deep as the Veil she dreamed.

“Every insult thou spoke,” she breathed, “every mark thou made upon him, is one bar more on thy cage.”

At her hushed words, pikes began to spear up from the floor to surround Susurra: each as tall as the ceiling, with the gleam of mercury, clustered close together like pine saplings growing in a circle. Susurra stood quickly from her crouch, her silver skin flushed to a burning jade. A choker of emerald bruises ringed her throat.

“Nyx!” Her voice was a monstrous rasp, a true beast of the Bone Kingdom. She rattled her bars. “Unfair!”

Fury lent the girl gravity. The bars even bent a little. Nyx nodded her head approvingly. This Night Hag was powerful—for all her wispy looks and sly, slithering ways.

“I chose well for my heir,” Nyx complimented her. “Or—I will have chosen well, Susurra. Eventually. As the oaken barrel ages the wine, so shall thine own cage mature thee . . .”

Susurra’s teeth flashed in panic, but a coat of syrup had calmed her rasp when next she spoke: “Queen Nyx. Auntie Majesty. You know—and I know—that I have immunity in the Valwode. If you would punish me, you must extradite me back to Breakers Beyond, where Da will mete out his own justice, according to the laws of Bana. He would take my imprisonment in Dark Breakers as a great affront. Do not so lightly cast aside your ancient alliance with the Bone Kingdom, nor offend the beloved brother whom you raised from an egg. But release me at once and I will never speak of it again.”

“Iron,” said Nyx, succinctly.

Even speaking the word was like regurgitating a broadsword. Susurra cowered back from the sound of it, palms clapped over her sensitive, serrated ears.

“You wouldn’t,” she said, rasping once more. “Nyx! You couldn’t!”

“Does my own niece, heir to the Antler Crown and darling of my dark court, have no true notion of what I can and cannot do?” Nyx inquired wonderingly. “Oh, I have neglected thee, sweet pupil—but I shall make amends. Iron,” she said again.

Susurra whimpered. The soft tissues of Nyx’s throat felt grated and pulped. The thick taste of rust rushed over her tongue, and she spat a stream of blood between the bars. It splattered at Susurra’s knees. Susurra huddled away from it, trembling, but nonetheless maintained presence of mind enough to crawl around the spray and skitter forward, thrusting her forehead through the widest gap between two quicksilver pikes. Her long fingers triple-wrapped the shafts, all her knuckles standing out like studs on a flail.

“You cannot call that here!”

The Breaker Queen gave the slightest twitch of a shrug. “Indeed, dear niece, it just might murder me to try. But then—to merely speak the word would surely murder thee. Iron,” said Nyx, for the third time, and the liquid gleam of the cage turned dull and gray.

Susurra snatched back her hands from the iron bars. Not soon enough. Not before they began to blacken and bubble and burn. She fell to the floor with a sound like sandstone splitting.

“Susurra of the Night Hags,” pronounced the Breaker Queen, “for contempt of queen and benefactress, for maltreating a guest at her table, for thoughtless trespass and willful act of treason—but above all else, for the heinous crime of ignorance—thou shalt endure imprisonment. No audience shall be granted thee, no remission, no parole. Thou’rt young, niece. Well, and so. Ripen forgotten in a lost pocket of Dark Breakers, till a creature more desperate than thee discovers thy hidden cage in her hour of greatest need. Go with my blessing, if not my crown. May thy time apart grant thee wisdom to know,” Nyx leaned in, “never to harm that which is mine.”

“No,” Susurra whispered.

“Oubliette,” said Nyx, with a sharp flick of her fingers.

“No!” Susurra howled. “No! Please! Nyx! No!”

The floor parted like two opposing waves, and swallowed her, iron cage and all.

• • • •

Nyx waited for the iron rage to leave her. She shook her head hard and saw from the corner of her eye the boy, slumped against the table.

The poison in a goblin’s scratch was not as fast-acting as that in a goblin’s bite, but it was quick enough. Elliot’s arm bled profusely, if sluggishly; the scratches already turned a puffy and green-black like the noxious ichor flowing through Susurra’s veins. Elliot listed as he stood, his face beaded with perspiration, gone murky as dishwater.

“Elliot Howell,” Nyx called, clapping her hands together. “Do you look at me now!”

Over his eyes, a sick and purplish oil slick.

“Mistress,” said the boy, the boundaries of his words blurred, “I fear I am . . .”

Nyx darted in to catch him as he fainted.

“Boy,” she grunted as he fell upon her, “you are heavier than a Gentry giant. You stink of sweat and Susurra’s sabotage. But only promise me you shall not perish this night, and I swear you shall have whatever boon you beg me for, up to half my realm and my firstborn child.”

Miraculously, Elliot began to laugh, though the sound smeared out of him, deflating into a gasping sigh. “Yes,” he agreed, “I’ll live, I swear it . . . Always wanted . . . to be a dad.”

“You?” Nyx heaved him bodily over her shoulder. “You are barely out of diapers.” Carrying him to the bed, she dumped him onto the furs and then leaped after him, taking his arm onto her lap and tracing his angry wounds.

The walls of Dark Breakers whispered to her. Traitors and conspirators surrounded her, they said. Her vassals had turned against her. Gentry knights, bearing enchanted weapons made at her forges, stamped with runes of her magic, stood ready to run her through. Court magicians, invested with ritual, carapaced in incantation, awaited Susurra’s signal to attack.

We have little time, the walls warned her.

Strawberries tumbled from their festive creepers to the floor. Green leaves fell, baring barbed vines that twined about the room, like the silver thorns wrapping Nyx’s arms and throat.

The poison had been the plan all along. Nyx knew that if she healed the boy, as Susurra had predicted an elderly and infatuated dotard of course must, it would surely weaken her. Especially after calling forth the iron.

But that, at least, Susurra in her supreme arrogance had not augured. Nor her own incarceration in the oubliette. Her niece had acted quickly to interrupt Nyx at her love-play before any undesirable conception occurred, ousting Susurra as heir. To further insure nothing like that would ever happen again, Susurra had moved up her traitorous timetable to depose the Breaker Queen.

Had she seen herself as some great goblin general, riding at the head of a Gentry army to rip the Antler Crown from Nyx’s brow and set it upon her own? Did she know nothing of how these mysteries moved? Fool. Her father should have taught her better.

Ah, well. Susurra would learn. Or she would fade, forgotten. That was none of Nyx’s concern anymore.

Elliot moaned and burned on her bed. “Nixie.”

“Hush, beloved.”

The Antler Crown receded into her skull, absorbed by bone. The silver thorns and chains vanished from her arms and hair, leaving only her robes. She slid Elliot’s upper body across her thighs, settling his head against her chest.

The walls with their thorn fortifications bulged inward, absorbing some silent impact from without. The accompanying blast of attack boomed on the inside of her head, a concussion that shook her long dream of the Valwode to its genesis. Nyx glared at the walls. They quivered to a standstill.

“Let Dark Breakers fall to my foes,” she commanded them, “but that this room remain sacrosanct for a night and a day. Let them rail against thee, my walls, and bring all their might and magic to bear upon thee; they shall find thee adamantine and indomitable. Thy doors are locked. We shall look to the rest when my work here is done. Let nothing disturb me till then.”

The room heard and sealed itself.

Satisfied, Nyx bent her head over Elliot’s arm and began to lick his wounds. He cried out once, like a frightened child, then fell silent. She thought perhaps he had fainted again, but when she glanced at his face to check on him, he was watching her from the glittering slits of his eyes.

“Your tongue is rough,” he said. “Like a cat’s.”

“Not always.” Her lips felt numb and swollen. They tasted of softly rotting grapes. “But it must be so now, to abrade the poisoned flesh and draw the venom from your wounds.”

“I like it.”

Nyx blinked. And then she blushed as she had not blushed in how many uncounted years?

Ducking her head again, she dragged her tongue along a particularly deep and seeping wound. She gagged, spat, lapped again, laving up the thing that would kill this boy. She had allowed this. She owed this.

The walls shook again, silently. The bed trembled.

Elliot sighed, and said, in a dreamy, feverish tone: “They call me the Monk, you know, at Uni. Not because I don’t like women. I do. It’s just . . . Ana says I’m fastidious. I wrote that in a letter home to mama, and she wrote back that she doesn’t know how any son of hers developed niceties, we’re all such savages back home, but she supposed I always did like to make things difficult for myself. Chose a career in the arts, after all. Desdemona—Miss Mannering—has several times implied that painters are notorious lovers of women, and that everyone will expect me to seduce my models and smoke opium, and that I’ll disappoint my public if I live too quietly. But I tried going to parties, back in Uni. Not to live loudly. Because I was lonely. A painter should live in the world, I thought. So I tried, and who did I meet but Analise and Gideon? My best friends. The Hick and the Stick, that’s what they were called. But they’re like me. Two more anchorites in the monastery. Ana’d rather write than drink—although a real writer’s supposed to do both, they say. And Gideon would rather . . . I don’t know. Not do what he does. But he must. I think he knows about this place. Have you met him, Nixie?”

By this time, Nyx was as febrile as he was. His words, the surf, pounding away at her coherence.

As she weakened, the intensity of the attacks outside mounted. Just—one—more—lick—and . . .

“Done,” she whispered, ragged and stunned. She sat back from him. “Elliot. Rest. I must, too.”

She fell back into the furs and feathers, hardly aware when he rolled off her lap, squirmed up next to her, and scooped her into his arms to cradle her close. She burrowed into him, breathing deeply. He smelled of himself again.

She licked her dry lips. His face above hers was a purple smear. She had to warn him.

“Do not wake me. Do not attempt to leave this room. I will return you to Day Breakers—your Breaker House—when I am recovered. My word on it.”

“Recovered?”

Alarmed, Elliot began to sit up. Nyx was pleased to hear the strength returning to his voice. His breath on her face, sweet as strawberries. She wished she could see him, but her vision had gone utterly dark.

“I will take you through,” she whispered. “Your own time. Your own world. My word. Do not . . .”

“I won’t,” Elliot promised, stroking her hair. “Rest now, Nixie. Rest.”

• • • •

The ache in her head split her skull along its sutures. Nyx wondered grumpily if she had slept in her Antler Crown again, as she was used to do in her younger days, waking sore and entangled with her pillows.

No.

The effort it took to unglue her eyelids almost undid her. Only the low, steady rumbling from the walls worked to coax her from her slumber. The first thing she saw upon opening her eyes was the banquet table, tumbled onto its side. Dishes broken. Crystal shattered into shining shards. Food everywhere. The floor had frozen in waves of brittle silver.

“They are almost through,” she whispered.

A soft crackle near the foot of the bed teased her up onto her elbows. Nyx rubbed her tingling face and squinted. Elliot Howell sat cross-legged, notebook on knee, busily at work, his little wooden box tucked up against his thigh like a pet. He was sketching so quickly his hand was a blur.

She could not help it. She burst out laughing.

“Are you happy in your work, boy? How fortunate I am in my present guest! Dark Breakers falls to the foe, and here I have brought a painter to capture it!”

“Who is your foe?” Elliot’s fingers were black with charcoal, his blue gaze moving from her to his notebook.

Nyx shrugged. “Everyone. The Gentry as a construct. Old dreams, passed on to me from the last Breaker Queen, who forget that they must be remembered to live. Almost, I wish them success in their coup.” Nyx laughed again. “Let their harebrained valor destroy the Veil Between Worlds and themselves with it. Let the Antler Crown and all its memories die with me.”

The boy’s hand—at last—stilled. “Mistress . . .”

Nyx snorted. “You may as well call me by my name.”

His breath caught on the syllables. “Q-Queen Nyx . . . Please.”

“Please what?”

“Spare them?”

The look he gave her was so pained and pleading. Oh, such hope in that look. Such belief in her gentleness. Ha—did the boy think to dream her into a Breaker Queen that never was and never could be? Nyx the Merciful? Nyx the Tenderhearted? What a bemused darling.

She shook her head slowly. Mortals. She had awoken bruised, battered, raw, half-dead of poison—and within five minutes she had already started to feel fickle and ticklish, glowing like a gas lamp, vibrating like a tuning fork. Did she have time for this?

Yes.

“Well, I do not know what I shall do.” She cast a sheltering swan’s wing to one side and kicked a sphinx’s pelt to a rumple at her feet. “I have not decided. In the meantime, before I whisk you back to your world, you did promise to paint me.”

Elliot flipped through his notebook, frowning. “I’ve enough material to paint you for the rest of my life! But to do you honor, I need time.”

Poor, sweet creature. That frown did not suit him. He had a gleeful forehead. Astonishment should crown his brow, not anxiety. Nyx crawled across the furs to him and knocked his notebook aside. His round eyes opened even wider, like a startled baby’s.

Better, she thought, and taking his face in her hands, climbed into his lap and kissed him on the bridge of his nose.

“No,” Nyx whispered. “You must paint me.”

She dreamed her red robes away, and they melted to nothing. Wrapping her bare legs around his waist, she pressed herself against him. His smock was rough against her inner thighs. His heart, his heart, his heart went wild when her breasts grazed his skin. Nyx reached for his wooden box, flipped the latch and then the lid. A tumble of paint tubes and oil pastels spilled out, gem-bright as the treasure cache in a mermaid’s sunken grotto.

She smiled against his startled mouth. “Array me for war. The Gentry are a people impervious to pain but not to beauty—and beauty made by a mortal hand renders them impotent. If they hear a human song, they must dance. If they see a human sculpture, it freezes them in imitation. What will they do when they behold your work upon me, vivid and new as the dawn?”

Trembling, Elliot reached out to select a carmine pastel from the box. He dragged it in a thin, jagged line from her forehead to her chin, down her throat, her sternum, her belly. Then with a delicate arching of his thumbs, he smeared the oils into red wings across her breasts. Her neck became the neck of a firebird, her belly a flaming tail.

Nyx yelped, “Your art . . . it burns!” as his peculiar brand of genius, built to bonfire radiance by years of study and practice and craft, swept over her.

Elliot’s smile flickered like the gold and yellow flames he was swirling over her shoulders. This was a . . . different smile than any she had seen on him. Confident. Engrossed. Not a little coy. Almost a Gentry smile, that.

Exhilaration and desire throomed through her. The tattoo of timpani. The crack of cannons. He knew what he was doing to her, this boy. His finger-work, delicate and deft, was scalding in its purpose. Tongues of blue and green scalloped her eyes and cheeks. He incorporated the markings already decorating her skin, careful not to cover them—clever boy.

She did not know when she had stopped breathing, only that she gasped when Elliot stopped, stooped, and peered into her eyes. His stained hands threaded through her braids.

“Mistress,” he murmured, with that curling imp of a smile. “My work is done.”

Nyx retorted, “I think not,” and knocked him sideways onto the mattress, still atop him.

They had so little time.

PART THREE: UNVEILING

“Elliot, do you want this one over here? It’s a rather isolated area, but the painting’s so large, I think it needs the space. This way, we can light it as it deserves. They’ll round the bend, expecting a snack table—and find a shrine instead.”

Elliot followed Analise’s voice around the corner into a small alcove. She stood on a stepladder, hammer in one hand, pencil in the other, the front pouch of her canvas apron full of hooks, pins, nails, and hangers.

A life-size portrait of Woman with the Moon in Her Mouth leaned against the wall at her feet. It was not as blatantly sexual as The Firebird, which showed a woman rising ecstatic from an inferno on wings of red and gold fire, nor as fiercely melancholy as The Breaker Queen, depicting a beggarly crone, dragging a leash of bone-colored bells behind her, bent beneath the weight of the rack of antlers she wore, trudging across a snowy field at midnight. Woman with the Moon in Her Mouth was, simply, a girl in a black dress and a white apron, decanting wine from a dark bottle into a crystal container. But the wine she poured out was the color of quicksilver, and instead of a mobcap, the glowing horns of a crescent moon were set upon her brow.

Analise said in a soft voice, “I love this one,” watching his face from above. “If I look away for a moment, then look back, it’s like seeing her for the first time. I keep thinking I should turn her to face the wall until I’m ready to hang her, or the next time she might startle me off my ladder. After all this work—to break my neck and miss your opening! It wouldn’t do.”

Elliot cleared his throat, looked away. He did not want to think about girls with broken necks. One morning, a year ago, he had woken on the floor of the Breakfast Room of Breaker House, naked and sprawled, smeared with oil pastels, to find a dead girl beside him.

Her neck was snapped. She looked young, but also worn clear through, her hair the color of frost on a grimy attic window. No one knew her name or recognized her face—except for Elliot, who had spoken to her just once, the night before, in the hallway outside the music room. The dead girl was—at least he thought she’d been—a Breaker House maid. Or a ghost, forgotten almost as soon as encountered.

As it turned out, she was neither—only, like him, a casualty of contact with the Gentry, caught like a butterfly in the viscid, dream-hung Veil Between Worlds. Elliot searched the city archives until he found her face in a newspaper article from early last century. Sari Shah, prima ballerina of Seafall City Ballet, whose performance in The Milkmaid’s Bargain had nearly caused a riot on opening night. Her hair had been black then, riotously curly, her eyes a snapping, roguish, haughty gray. But it was she.

At least, he thought it was she. How could he be certain? Some days he was not certain of his own mind. What was memory. Conjuring. Dream. Wishful thinking.

The girl who might (or might not) have been Sari Shah was buried in Paupers’ Vault, nameless and unmourned. But Elliot’s painting The Milkmaid’s Bargain was prominently displayed in his new exhibit: a smoky outline of a spirit staring curiously into a mirror, where the image of her living self laughed out at her, vibrant, made-up, fully costumed, posing for her dead self defiantly en pointe. Of all his new body of work, it was the only painting Gideon ever peered at more than glancingly. The first time he saw it, he stared at it for the better part of an hour, then tore his gaze away with a deep shudder, looked gray-faced at Elliot, and said, “I met her, when I was a child. Often.”

Elliot did not want to think of girls with broken necks.

“Where were you thinking for that one?” he asked Analise. He did not bother to apologize for his long lapse of attention. It was almost a joke now, after a year. The absent-minded artist grown nearly wholly vacant. After the first few months, Analise, practically weeping with frustration, had shouted, “Stare into space all you want, Elliot! Just please stop begging my pardon for it!” And so he had.

“About here?” Analise dragged her finger an inch lower. “Or here, maybe. If you approve.”

Elliot squinted up. “I don’t know . . . A bit to the left maybe?” She slid her finger to the place. “No, no—too far. A little higher. Please. Maybe three inches? Perfect. Thank you.”

Analise made the mark with her pencil, then jammed the pencil behind her ear and dug in her pockets for a nail.

“Gideon will be stopping by in a few minutes,” Elliot said casually. “He most generously volunteered to provide ‘spirituous liquors for this momentous occasion’ out of his own poor pocket.”

Analise dropped her hammer. As Elliot scrambled for it, she clunked down the ladder’s steps and reached for her jacket, slipping it on over her apron.

“That’s my cue for a coffee break,” she said with false cheeriness. “I’ll just be down the street. Um . . . Fetch me when he’s gone, would you?”

Elliot slipped the hammer into the empty loop on his tool belt. “How can you live next door to him and never speak?”

“Many next door neighbors never speak to each other.” Analise pushed a bright green toque over her pandemonic hair. The pencil slipped from behind her ear and fell to the floor. “This is Seafall, remember? Even accidental eye contact is impolite—practically akin to ripping a stranger’s clothes off. The only reason I can look at you full in the face is because we’re both barbarians born. Me from farm country, you from the moors.”

“Hail to thee, blithe sprites,” drawled Gideon’s voice from the propped-open storefront door. “I’ve boxes of booze outside in the trunk of a taxi. Come give me a hand before the teetotalers attack.”

Analise shoved a pair of dark sunshades over her eyes, but not before Elliot saw the hurt there. He swept her into a hug and rocked her off her feet. “Go caffeinate, Ana,” he said. “Horned Lords know you deserve it after all your work. I’ll join you soon.”

Nodding brusquely, Analise sidled past Gideon without touching or looking at him, who in turn did not touch or look at her. When she was gone, he stood frozen in the doorway, like one of his own statues. Elliot was not even sure he was still breathing.

Strolling over, he asked, “What libations have you brought me?”

Gideon snapped upright, stepping through the door. “Oh, the lot. A full bar and then some. Courtesy of my mother’s cellaret—though,” he added, “I somehow neglected to tell her I was raiding it.” He shrugged. “She’d approve, I’m sure; she’s a self-proclaimed patroness of the arts, after all. And as we all know, the more your patrons drink, the freer they’ll be with their wallets, the richer you’ll be by night’s end. At least, that is how it’s supposed to work. Did you remember to buy ice?”

“I’m afraid not.”

Elliot did not want to think about selling any of his paintings, but the money Desdemona had paid him for her birthday portrait had almost run its course. He had not taught any classes for a year, nor taken on any private pupils, nor traded in caricatures on the city sidewalks. Instead of letting him go, Seafall University chose to regard his extended leave as an informal sabbatical, even allowing him to retain use of his apartment and studio space. He was, after all, the talk of the town. Keeping him on reflected well upon Besant College.

Elliot, so long labeled “The Monk” for his frugality, had spent freely and lavishly this last year, purchasing the finest materials and supplies, gracing his finished work with the most ornate frames, and destroying with apparent impunity any canvas that displeased him (rather like Gideon with his sculptures) instead of scraping it clean and reusing it. He ordered food delivered to him, and even—occasionally—indulged in narcotics that enabled him to stay up all night working . . . though, on Analise’s insistence, and with her determined intervention, he had mostly weaned himself off the latter.

“I’ll get the ice then,” Gideon offered, “before the opening tonight. I’ve done my own work for the day.” He glanced around quickly, his restless eyes taking in everything, lingering on nothing too long. “So this is your year, is it? It’s rather like seeing someone’s eviscerated entrails garlanding the walls.”

“Yes,” Elliot agreed simply.

“If it were me,” Gideon said, his look as black as the inverse of lightning, “I’d’ve set the whole pile ablaze. How do you bear it?”

“The cure’s in the work,” Elliot replied. “Why would I destroy my own cure? To keep my wounds fresh? I am not so fond of bleeding out as some, Alderwood.”

Gideon flinched. Barely. A flicker of eyelid. “Where did Ana go?” he asked abruptly.

“Down the street for coffee.”

“I could use a coffee.”

“You hate coffee.”

“Nevertheless, I will drink it today.” He nodded. “Would a demitasse of espresso suffice, or will only a percolator’s worth of boiling pitch adequately express my remorse to our mutual friend?”

Elliot bent to pick up Analise’s fallen pencil. “You could leave her alone.”

Gideon laughed, a sound like a dying crow. “Yes. And so I have done. For a year. But tonight is your gallery opening. Do you not think,” he asked with a touch of unwonted winsomeness in his grin, “that we should all be friends again for the occasion? I can bring her around. I am terribly charming, you know.”

Elliot raised both eyebrows in not wholly exaggerated shock. “You’re not, really.”

Gideon zapped him with his crooked half smile, and Elliot knew that if he smiled so at Analise, smiled just like that, plunking himself beside her in her booth, raising his shot of espresso like a doomed hero his flask of poison the morning of his execution, downing it in a single gulp and strangling out his much-belated apology as he pretended to die upon her table, Analise would crack, would laugh, would smack his arm and love him again. And tonight the three of them would lord it over the gallery like Gentry nobility, mingling with the patrons but connected to each other by the invisible golden cord of camaraderie.

Elliot remained in his squat on the floor, worrying the pencil between his fingers. “She’s at Café Impedimenta.” He sighed. “Just . . . be careful, old man.”

The carrion caw, or “ha!” Gideon made was his only answer before he left.

The floor was hard and cold, but there Elliot remained, staring at the pencil in his hands. When he was not working, if he was not constantly up and about, if he stayed still, he could sit for hours, doing nothing, staring at nothing. A crack in the wall. A fleck of paint on the rim of the tin can where he kept his brushes. The lead tip of a pencil. His thoughts took on a garbled, palimpsest quality. It was worst in the mornings; it took colossal effort to wake up, leave his bed, remember to eat and drink, to accomplish anything except the one thing he was still certain of in his rewritten, impossible world. Art.

Footsteps approaching the propped-open doorway. His head was too heavy to lift. He was so tired. Rallying himself to glance up, he asked, “Did you forget something, Alderwood?”

But the person standing above him was not Gideon.

“Hello, boy.”

• • • •

At the gallery opening, every painting sold for its asking price, which Elliot had set astronomically high out of his deep reluctance to sell them. Woman with the Moon in Her Mouth went to Mr. Charles “Chaz” Mallister, who outspent Miss Desdemona Mannering in an increasingly spiteful bidding war. Then, at the end of the night, when she was spitting mad and ready to break her champagne flute over his head, turned the receipt for the painting over to her with an odiously innocent smile and a “Happy birthday, Desi, you dear old thing!”

The celebrated master painter was courteous to all admirers, gracious to the fawning, modest to the humble, patient to the inebriated, and never once did he let go of the hand of the woman who stood at his side. His model, obviously—and more besides, as any perspicacious passers-by might discern in the invisible current sparking between them.

She was a strange little thing. Small (the top of her head barely reached the painter’s breastbone), her braided hair dyed the weird blue-black of grackle feathers, her brown face tattooed like a carnie. She never smiled that night but once, when Elliot Howell introduced her to his friend, the famous authoress, Analise Field.

By that time, most of the guests had left, leaving their cake-crumby plates and sticky glassware on every shelf, table, and tuck of the gallery.

“Ana!” The tiny model let go of Elliot only long enough to take Analise’s hands in hers. “You are the writer, yes? Elliot Howell spoke of you. I read your book when I first came here. It helped me to understand the city. You write about Seafall as an outlander. Like me. It is useful to see the city through your eyes. There is much I would ask you. Much I need to understand.”

Analise laughed. “You’d be better off with a travel guide than my dopey novel! But I’m happy to answer any questions. Seafall’s a bit sadistic to newcomers, I’m afraid. Sorry, I didn’t catch your name?”

“Nyx,” said Elliot.

“Nixie to my friends,” Nyx enlarged, sharing a warm glance between them.

“Well, Nixie, I’m so glad to . . . I mean, Elliot never indicated . . .” Analise laughed again and opened her arms. “Oh, may I just hug you? Since we’re both outlanders, and I’m already so fond of you, for making my friend smile again. I can tell we’ll be friends. Really, I’ve liked you since I met your paintings!”

“The friends of Elliot Howell are my friends,” Nyx said solemnly. “As were my foes his own in my hour of darkness.” Her dark blue, very-dark, black-blue eyes met Elliot’s. “But now I shall live in the daylight.” Nyx touched her right palm to her left breast. “I have set my clock to his.”

Analise glanced from Nyx to Elliot, her smile wry and wistful. “Now you are speaking the secret language of lovers—which only sounds like sense until one tries to parse it. Perhaps Gideon can interpret?” she added tartly as he joined them.

He silently slipped her a glass of champagne, a gesture so unexpectedly gallant that Analise’s entire neck, face, and ears flushed a bewildered, mottled red, and she had to walk apart awhile to spend a few minutes in quiet contemplation of one of the paintings—Poisoned Sleep. Gideon studied Nyx from beneath his spiky black lashes.

“Lady.” Gideon was not quite drunk enough to slur his words, only drunk enough that his speech came out a bit too crisp and careful. “How did you manage to leave your country? I did not think emigration possible. Not in this direction, at least.”

“My country is in chaos.” Nyx’s small smile strayed from wilderness to wickedness. “Some of that chaos, if may I boast, was manufactured to my specifications. While the various factions seeking governance squabble like dogs, I laid my own plans, made my own preparations, and departed. They won’t come looking for me. Indeed, they cannot.” This last, she directed at Elliot, whose concerned gaze softened with relief.

“And what’s to become of your House?” Gideon inquired, enunciating every last syllable. Analise, champagne unsipped, turned her back on Poisoned Sleep to monitor the volley of dialogue. Her expression grew more and more neutral as the conversation slipped beyond her understanding.

“My House is older than I am,” Nyx answered. “If it chooses, it will fall. But I think it will choose to fight first, and select for itself a champion to defend its ancient halls, and all the far horizons beyond it. I, meanwhile, will play my part when it is made known to me.” She sipped her champagne. “There are those who remember you fondly in my country. Do you ever intend to visit there again?”

The glass stem of his champagne flute snapped in Gideon’s hands.

“No?” Nyx inflected the word as if repeating an answer he had not spoken aloud. “I hope you will be permitted,” she continued smoothly, “to remain on your side of the border. For your sake. But these . . . invitations . . . can prove irresistible after a time.” She shrugged slightly. “It is their, if I may be permitted to use the word, nature.”

Analise, handing off her own drink to Elliot, hurriedly snatched a handkerchief from her pocket.

“Gideon, Seven Hells rising, you’re bleeding!”

Gideon barked a laugh when he looked down and saw the blood on his hand. Analise grabbed his wrist and began to bind the wound, while the others watched. He leaned into her a little—though not, Elliot thought, for support. He lifted his uninjured hand, almost touched her hair. Let it fall again.

Gideon straightened his shoulders, his face cold and closed, and when Analise finished tying off the knot, tugged his hand from hers, nodded once at Nyx, and left the gallery without another word.

Analise watched him until there was nothing left to watch. Then, to Elliot, said, “That’s it, then.”

What could he say? That work was the cure? That cocaine helped for a while, and then hurt forever after? That Elliot would be there for her, to offer her a bite of food and anxiously watch her eat it, to let her sob on his floor for hours and helplessly stroke her hair through it, and forgive her her long, abstracted silences and inability to answer any questions that had just been put to her? She knew all of that.

“I will have to think,” Analise said slowly, “if half a day’s grace was worth a year’s wait.”

Nyx caught her gaze and kept it. In her voice that was deep and somehow resounding, that reached into Analise’s skeleton like a bass drum, she said, “We must be merciful to the wretched, Ana.”

Analise’s eyes narrowed to probing slits, her lips parting as if about to ask what terrible thing Nyx meant by mercy.

Elliot held his breath, but his friend only sighed, short and sharp, and said, “It won’t come to that,” with an uneasy glance at The Milkmaid’s Bargain.

Wisely saying nothing, Elliot left to fetch her coat and help her shrug into it. When she had buttoned all her buttons and wound her scarf, Analise turned to embrace him, and then Nyx, in farewell.

“Let’s all have breakfast together soon! On me.” Jabbing her toque once more over her red curls, she added, “Congratulations, Elliot. It was a great night. Truly. Goodbye, friends.”

“Goodbye, Ana,” Elliot and Nyx said together.

Her wry smile winked across her face. “Oh, no! From code to unison! Thus it begins!”

Shaking her head and laughing, she stumped out of the gallery. Elliot followed to lock the glass doors behind her. He and Nyx would exit out the back door, which locked itself. He flicked off the light switches on the wall, and the blazing rooms were flooded with the emptiness of midnight. Even the silence seemed to change, as it always did in the breaking hour.

“Mistress,” Elliot stretched out his hand to her. “Shall we for home?”

Nyx the Nightwalker crossed the gallery on feet as quiet as bats on the wing. Rising to her tiptoes, she wrapped her arms around his neck and spoke directly into his ear.

“This—” she pressed her twinned heartbeat to his, “this awful clock,” she whispered, “this astonishing clock—is home.”

© 2014 by C.S.E. Cooney. Originally published in The Breaker Queen (chapbook). Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

C.S.E. Cooney (csecooney.com) is the author of Bone Swans: Stories (Mythic Delirium 2015). The title story is a Nebula Award nominee, and appears in Paula Guran’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Novellas 2016. She is the author of the Dark Breakers series, Jack o’ the Hills, The Witch in the Almond Tree, and a poetry collection called How to Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes, which features her Rhysling Award-winning poem “The Sea King’s Second Bride.” A graduate of Columbia College Chicago’s Fiction and Theatre departments, Cooney works as an audiobook narrator for Tantor Media. Her alterego Brimstone Rhine has put out two EPs: Alecto! Alecto! and The Headless Bride. Her short fiction and poetry can be found at Uncanny Magazine, Lakeside Circus, Black Gate, Papaveria Press, Strange Horizons, Apex, GigaNotoSaurus, Goblin Fruit, Clockwork Phoenix 3 & 5, The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, Rich Horton’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy anthologies, and elsewhere.

EXCERPT: Retrograde (John Joseph Adams Books)

Peter Cawdron | 4381 words

Mankind has long dreamed of reaching out to live on other planets, and with the establishment of the Mars Endeavour colony, that dream has become reality. The fledgling colony consists of 120 scientists, astronauts, medical staff, and engineers. Buried deep underground, they’re protected from the harsh radiation that sterilizes the surface of the planet. The colony is prepared for every eventuality except one—what happens when disaster strikes Earth?

“Science fiction as it should be. Retrograde combines realistic characters with depictions of Mars as our explorers will one day find it in a powerful story. A must read!” —Ben Bova, six-time Hugo Award-winner and author of The Grand Tour series

Available Now from John Joseph Adams Books (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

1: Devils

I’m giddy with rice wine.

“Okay, deal the cards again,” James says, circling his hand around the table. “I get this. I can fool the landlord.”

“It is dou di zhu,” Su-shun replies. “‘Fight the landlord,’ not ‘fool.’”

I laugh as Jianyu pours me another tiny glass. “Are you trying to get me drunk?” I ask.

Jianyu replies, but I can’t hear him over the noise of the card game and James calling out, “To fool is to fight without being seen, my friend. To fool is as good as a fight. Sometimes, it’s better.”

“Sometimes it is,” Su-shun admits, dealing cards around the table.

Jianyu smiles at me and then turns to James, saying, “You sound like Sun Tzu in The Art of War.”

“Did he say that?” James asks with innocence in his voice.

“No,” Su-shun replies, and everyone bursts out laughing.

“You’ve had too much to drink,” I say to James, but I’m the one swaying under the influence of alcohol in the light Martian gravity. I hold on to the edge of the table with one hand, feeling as though I could float away. The rest of the Chinese crew gather around, yelling and placing bets—speaking so fast I find it hard to believe anyone can follow the conversation. All I can tell is that there’s a lot of excitement around James and his grossly misplaced bravado, with the Chinese betting both for and against him, but I suspect it’s mostly against.

Like smoke in some seedy Shanghai restaurant, water vapor drifts around us, rising up from humidifiers wafting homemade incense throughout the Chinese module. I love the ambience. For a Midwestern girl like me, immersing myself in another culture is as intoxicating as alcohol, and I find myself torn between staying and leaving. I’ve got thirty kilos of rock samples to sift through tomorrow—that’s easily eight to ten hours of work.

“We should be going,” I say, tapping James on the shoulder and pointing at the digital clock on the wall. It’s showing 12:00 a.m., but the seconds counter has gone well beyond 60—it’s at 2,344 and climbing. I forget exactly how many seconds there are in the Martian time-slip, but a day on Mars is roughly forty minutes longer than it is on Earth, so our clocks are set to pause for the best part of an hour from 12:00 to 12:01. In theory, it means we can sleep in an extra half hour or so each day, but in practice, that gets channeled into our work. Our biological clocks are like those of drifters constantly traveling across time zones. The physiological effect is like driving around the world once a month—which is more crazy than it seems: around halfway through the month, noon starts to feel like midnight. I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to it.

“Come on, Liz! I’m about to clean them out.”

“Yeah, that’s not happening,” I say, gesturing toward the hatch leading out of the module. “Let’s go.”

Su-shun gives me a look like he’s a cat with a mouse, giving James just enough freedom before swatting at him again with long, sharp claws. He smiles behind narrow, thin eyes. He’s loving this.

I look to Jianyu, trying to get his attention as he moves behind James, but he’s caught up in the fun.

Yelling echoes through the module. It’s astonishingly loud inside the narrow, tubular mod. It’s sometimes difficult to remember we’re on another planet, millions of miles from home. We could be in a simulator on Earth, although things never got this wild back there. With no instructors critiquing our actions, life is a lot more free on Mars—or as free as it can be living inside a tin can.

Jianyu puts some money down on James, which surprises me—although “money” is too strong a term. Poker chips act as pseudocurrency in the informal economy that exists within the colony. Most people barter for anything they want beyond the basics, but chips are sometimes exchanged as well.

The sweet smell of spiced rice floats through the air. Thin strips of faux meat sizzle in a wok as the chef constantly turns over a succulent Asian dish, adding a small ladle of water every few seconds, causing steam to billow into the overly humid air. The chef is talking as rapidly as everyone else, though to whom I don’t know—I’m not sure anyone’s listening. Although the meal smells delicious, I can’t imagine the crew wanting to eat at what equates to almost 1:00 a.m., but for the Chinese, the party is just getting started.

I love the Chinese mod. Technically, it’s a mirror image of our own module, yet the Chinese have made it into a home. Somehow, they’ve transformed their mod into a back alley in Guangzhou—vibrant and full of life. Clothes hang from a line running across the back of the communal room, which is something Connor would never allow in the U.S. module. To my mind, the pieces of clothing act as pendants, colorful flags, festive decorations. I doubt anyone here gives them a second thought. They’re a touch of life on Earth being transplanted on Mars.

“You be the landlord,” Su-shun yells, pointing at James as though he were fingering a murderer in a lineup.

“Oh, no, no, no, my friend,” James says, wagging his finger. “I see what you’re trying to do. You be the landlord!” Laughter erupts from around the crowded table.

Jianyu says, “Come on, Liz. Throw some chips into the pot.” His hand runs down the back of my arm. Jianyu steps around me, but his hand lingers just long enough to express tenderness. He’s normally guarded about our relationship. I don’t think he’s embarrassed about dating a foreigner, or intentionally secretive, he’s just private about his feelings, and that’s fine with me. Rural Chinese modesty is quaint to someone who lived in downtown Chicago for six years. Tonight, though, the rice wine is going to his head, and he sneaks a kiss on my cheek, adding, “You know you want to.”

“No way,” I say, laughing more at his impetuous public kiss than anything he said, yet I’m swept up in the euphoria. It’s no longer a question of staying or leaving, but of betting or continuing to fiddle with the chips in my pocket. I’m tired. I performed an eight-hour surface op earlier today. My body yearns for bed, but my heart loves the explosion of life around me.

“Ah, ha ha,” Su-shun says, this time pointing at me. “She’s afraid he will lose!”

“She’s too smart,” Jianyu replies, winking at me, and more poker chips find themselves cast onto the pile in the middle of the table. How anyone keeps track of what’s been bet and by whom, I have no idea, but the system seems to work. Deep down, I suspect no one really cares. The chips are like gold on a games night like this, even though they’re little more than a novelty.

There are five players seated at the round dining table, with two dozen others cramped around them, all trying to get a good vantage point. That’s pretty much everyone in the Chinese mod, but the commotion within the module gives the impression there are hundreds of people bustling through a crowded market.

Su-shun finishes dealing to the players, but before anyone can pick up their cards, Wen storms over, pulling people away so she can get to the table.

“Out. Out. Out!” she yells over the ruckus, reaching in and scooping up two piles of cards. “Americans must leave.”

“What?” Su-shun has a look of disbelief on his face.

“You leave now!” Wen yells, looking me in the eye. This is a shift in persona. There’s no banter, no friendly rivalry. I see anger in her eyes.

“James,” I say, pulling on his shoulder. “We need to go.”

“What? No way. I’ve got chips in that pot!”

Wen doesn’t bother collecting the other cards. It’s enough to simply toss them from the table. The other players are incensed.

“Leave!” she yells.

Wen doesn’t stop with the cards. With a bat of her hand, the chips are scattered across the table. In the low Martian gravity, they skim through the air and bounce over the floor of the module. We’ve been on Mars for nine months building the main base, but the sight of objects being propelled under Martian gravity never gets old. It’s jarring to see physical things obeying a rate other than the 1 g in which we were raised. It’s as though the universe has betrayed us, and life on Mars never feels quite right.

“Wen!” Jianyu protests, but the old matriarch will not be pacified, and she screams again for us to leave.

Wen has her long hair pulled back into a ponytail. At sixty-four, she’s the oldest person on Mars, but you’d never guess her age from her work rate or her physique. She’s imposing, intimidating even the men.

James gets slowly to his feet. He sways a little under the influence of alcohol and strange gravity. At the best of times, it’s easy to lose your footing on Mars. For James, this isn’t the best of times. I take his arm. Wen grabs both of us, marching us toward the central hub at the end of the mod.

As we’re in roughly one-third of Earth’s gravity, even the most forceful march is stunted, but I can feel Wen pushing us on. Our feet bounce slightly between steps.

Most colonists struggle to retain 1 g fitness. It’s easy to slack off and settle for less, but not Wen. She used to run marathons on Earth. I doubt she’d have any problem running several back-to-back up here. One of the Chinese men opens the hatch as we’re marched out.

“We’re just having a little fun!” James protests as we’re thrust into the vast central hub connecting the various modules like spokes of a giant wheel. The Eurasians are in the process of closing their outer hatch. The outer hatch to the Russian module is already shut. It’s normal to keep the inner hatches secure to control humidity and airflow, but the heavy outer hatches are only ever closed during containment tests or depressurization drills. It’s the middle of the night. This isn’t about our game. Something else has happened, and not knowing why we’re being treated like this is a little scary. My mind is dull with alcohol, and that thought passes like a bird on the breeze.

Wen yells, “Zhànzhēng fànzi!” as she shuts the hatch. I catch a glimpse of Jianyu behind her. He looks confused, bewildered. He tries to say something, mouthing a few words in English, but I don’t understand.

Zhànzhēng fànzi. Jianyu has been teaching me Chinese. Although I struggle with the sheer complexity of the language, he’s taught me some of the more common expressions, and I remember this one because to my ear it seems to rhyme. In Chinese, I’m pretty sure it means “warmonger.”

I feel like a leper being shunned.

“What the hell?” James says, leaning against the railing of the walkway within the hub.

Starlight drifts down from above.

The four modules that make up the Martian colony are set deep underground within volcanic lava tubes to protect us from cosmic radiation. There’s roughly thirty feet of basalt and regolith between us and the harsh, radiation-scorched surface of the planet.

The four mods have been built in two lava tunnels that converge in the shape of an X. At the center of the X, the roof of the tunnel has collapsed, probably millions of years ago, long before Homo sapiens existed as a species. That’s the crazy thing about Mars: nothing’s new. There’s plenty of fine-dust erosion and the odd meteor strike, but the geological vistas we explore are hundreds of millions—if not billions—of years old. It’s as though the planet has been frozen in time, waiting for explorers from Earth.

The collapsed section above the hub forms a natural skylight some forty feet across and easily visible from orbit. It took almost four months for our automated extrusion builder to create a glass dome over the skylight, forcing us to suit up when moving between mods for what felt like an eternity, but it was worth the wait. Once the dome was in place and the walls were sealed with thick plastic manufactured here on Mars, the hub tripled the usable space within the colony. The glass in the skylight is three feet thick and laced with lead, along with numerous layers of laminate to protect us from radiation. Near the edge, the glass distorts the light from outside, but on a clear night like tonight, you get a stunning view of the stars directly overhead.

Harrison comes bounding out of the U.S. module.

“Where the hell have you two been?” he yells across the hub with its crops of wheat and corn growing in layered fields beneath soft blue grow lights. The hub is huge, and not just because it’s wider than the modules. It’s naturally almost four stories deep. James and I are on a raised metal walkway above the top field, still feeling somewhat bewildered by Wen, somewhat jovial from being slightly drunk, and somewhat enchanted with Mars itself.

Harrison comes running along the walkway. He’s not known for his subtlety. Harrison’s a robotics engineer from landlocked Arizona, yet he swears like a sailor hitting his thumb with a hammer. One of the common misconceptions about life on Mars is that everyone’s a scientist, but it takes mechanics, doctors, and engineers to make the colony work.

“Connor’s been looking for you fuckers everywhere. You need to come with me. Now!”

“Whoa there, cowboy,” James says in a thick drawl. “Just what the Sam Hill is going on?” James is from Canada, but he loves winding Harrison up with a fake Texas accent, even though Harrison’s from Arizona. To James, the mysterious American Southwest is just one big muddle. Perhaps it’s his blasé attitude that makes him so effective at annoying Harrison. I can’t help but laugh.

I slur my words. “Yeah, cowboy. Slow down.”

“Connor wants you back in the mod” is all Harrison will say, refusing to be baited. He grabs James by the wrist and pulls him on. James snatches at my hand, and I fall in step behind the two men, laughing at the madness of such a rush on Mars. The rice wine has left me light-headed and as clumsy as a kid stepping off a spinning fairground ride. Running in Martian gravity is entirely counterintuitive. I lean into the run at an angle that would have me falling flat on my face on Earth, but on Mars it results in a gentle lope.

I can see Michelle standing by the hatch leading into the U.S. module, ready to close the heavy metal door behind us. We’re the same age, but her dark skin is flawless and she usually looks much younger than me. Now, though, she looks exhausted. She’s dressed in her pj’s, barefoot, no bra beneath her top, hair disheveled. Why is she even awake?

“What’s wrong with everyone?” I ask.

Michelle says, “They just nuked Chicago.”

© 2017 by Peter Cawdron. Excerpted from Retrograde by Peter Cawdron. Published by permission of the author and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

Q&A with Retrograde Author Peter Cawdron

Retrograde is a mission-to-Mars story, focusing on the establishment of the first colony on the Red Planet. The colony is a truly international one, with astronauts from the United States, Russia, China, and several other countries around the world all coming together to achieve the monumental undertaking of not only visiting but living on another planet. Most stories focus on one nationality, sometimes only on one person, what inspired you to tackle an international story?

Ever since Sputnik launched, spaceflight has had a tortured relationship with politics and military muscle. The first crewed launches were atop modified intercontinental ballistic missiles. When you think about it, we fired people into space instead of lobbing nuclear weapons at each other—which is a rather nice compromise, but initially, the space race was a substitute for war between the superpowers.

Politics rather than science still holds some sway over space exploration. Even today, countries like China aren’t able to participate on the International Space Station because of human rights abuses—abuses that occur all too often elsewhere but without any political implications. In the midst of this highly charged environment, scientists from around the world have embraced the final frontier and sought to distance themselves from the petty in-fighting that divides our planet. Whereas war brings out the worst in us, space exploration brings out the best.

When it comes to colonizing Mars, the sheer scale of the challenge demands international cooperation. In writing Retrograde I wanted to extend this notion further, and explore the dichotomy that exists between patriotism and science.

In Retrograde, international spirit of cooperation in the name of science is juxtaposed with the dark turn events take when the Mars colony learns that nuclear war has broken out on Earth, with multiple detonations all around the globe. Why does the novel focus on this particular type of crisis?

Space exploration demands astonishing precision, which in turn demands a level of planning, preparation and contingency thinking that’s unprecedented—no gas for the next fifty million miles. The training provided by the various space agencies has to account for every possible eventuality, but there’s one scenario no one could foresee—what happens on Mars when war breaks out on Earth? Retrograde explores the way relationships fracture under unexpected pressure.

Retrograde is grounded in the latest scientific knowledge about Mars, its origins, and the physics of life on another planet. What kinds of research did you do in order to ensure all of the details were accurate?

Lots. Accuracy is always difficult to quantify. Hitting a bull’s eye with a bow and arrow at twenty yards is impressive. At a hundred yards, just hitting the target is an accurate shot (for me, at least). In the same way, it’s impossible to write a book about living on Mars that is entirely accurate as no one has actually ever lived there, so that made researching the book difficult.

I spoke with various scientists at NASA and SpaceX, as well as reviewing NASA websites on Mars, and associated topics like space habitability, but there are some subjects that aren’t settled. For example, each summer, the slopes of Mars experience landslides leaving dark streaks in the soil. What causes these? There are research papers looking at the possibility of subsurface salt brines melting and running out on the surface as water, while there are other papers considering the possibility of dry ice sublimating and causing super-slippery but incredibly dry conditions. Which is correct? We don’t know. More research is required. One of the challenges I faced in writing this novel is once we have boots on the ground, debates like this will be settled as a scientist will be able to examine the slopes firsthand. So for the characters in Retrograde there’s no debate. For us, though, it’s still debatable. In the novel, I went with salt brines but that may be proven wrong in the long term. For me, this highlights how science is dynamic, and our accuracy improves over time.

Elon Musk and others have talked a lot about missions to Mars in recent years. How likely do you think it is that a private company like SpaceX will end up leading the way to humanity stepping foot on Mars, rather than the international consortium of government agencies as depicted in the book? And what are the challenges he’ll face in getting to Mars?

I love the way Elon Musk is pushing forward with space exploration. He’s heralding the start of a new endeavor, where space is no longer the exclusive domain of nation states. I’d like to think he can pull this off, but I don’t underestimate the difficulty involved. The most likely initial scenario for SpaceX is a Mars fly-by, as landing is an order of magnitude harder yet again, but even a fly-by isn’t without its challenges.

Imagine driving from New York to Los Angeles on a single tank of gas, only you’ll use half your gas just getting across the Brooklyn Bridge—that’s a trip to Mars. Roughly half the fuel required to get there will be spent just getting into orbit around Earth. From there, it’s one big rocket burn, and 180 days of coasting, drifting through the darkness toward a distant red dot.

Imagine having to set your course precisely in Newark, and then coasting downhill with little to no adjustments until you roll up to the gates of Disneyland in LA, and you get an idea of the kind of precision that’s involved in getting to Mars. Over the course of the journey, your body will be blasted with radiation equivalent to 50 CAT scans, or roughly 30 times the annual dose of someone working in a nuclear power plant. When you get back, your risk of cancer will have increased by 3-5%, so it’s not a death sentence, but it’s not a walk in the park either.

Mars is a harsh, alien world, where just surviving would be pretty brutal. But just how difficult is it to survive there?

The harshest environments on Earth are found on Mt. Everest, Death Valley, and places like Antarctica, but they really don’t compare with Mars. On Earth, we have to contend with weather, something that’s fleeting on Mars. A global dust storm on Mars would feel like a light breeze to us, but the variations in temperature are extreme. A summer’s day on Mars can reach 70F but by midnight, the temperature can fall to -80F so even a minor fault in heating a habitat or a spacesuit could be fatal in a very short period of time.

Atmospheric pressure is so low any exposed skin will bruise instantly. Depending on how much skin is exposed, nearby organs would rupture, while blood would boil (without heat) as various molecules like oxygen expand, undergoing phase change from a liquid to a gas. Not a pleasant way to die.

This does, however, highlight a difference in how Martian surface suits and spacesuits would operate. In space, temperatures can range from Mars-like to 250F (similar to the inside of an oven), but over much shorter periods of time. On Mars, the range is less and the transition is slower, so Martian surface suits could be simpler and more lightweight. NASA has been experimenting with mechanical counter-pressure to simulate the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere. Imagine being shrink-wrapped into an extremely tight wet suit and you’ll get the idea, combine this with a filament heating system, and Mars surface suits could offer considerably more flexibility than a spacesuit. I’ve had a lot of fun exploring ideas like this in Retrograde, working within the limits of emerging science.

What’s the coolest thing you came across while writing Retrograde?

Some of the more interesting points come across almost as side notes in Retrograde, like farming in subterranean lava caves. Then there’s the difficulty of maintaining a close ecosystem, where microbes can cause significant problems, upsetting the balance of the internal atmosphere, either by forming too much CO2 or too much oxygen. There’s also simple things like Martian dust that can cause significant health problems for astronauts, as Martian dust is highly reactive and can be as fine (and as damaging) as cigarette smoke.

NASA has been experimenting with lettuce on the International Space Station, which might sound more comical than scientific, but we live in an ecosystem on Earth. To survive long term on Mars, we’ll need to establish not just Homo sapiens there, but a bunch of other species as well, including insects for the pollination of plants, etc. I thoroughly enjoyed working some of these “big picture” concepts into Retrograde to make the story as plausible and realistic as possible.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Cawdron is the author of Anomaly, Little Green Men, and Feedback, as well as more than twenty other novels, novellas, and short stories. He lives in Brisbane, Australia.

EXCERPT: Ka (Saga Press)

John Crowley | 3162 words

From award-winning author John Crowley comes an exquisite fantasy novel about a man who tells the story of a crow named Dar Oakley and his impossible lives and deaths in the land of Ka.

A Crow alone is no Crow.

Dar Oakley—the first Crow in all of history with a name of his own—was born two thousand years ago. When a man learns his language, Dar finally gets the chance to tell his story. He begins his tale as a young man, and how he went down to the human underworld and got hold of the immortality meant for humans, long before Julius Caesar came into the Celtic lands; how he sailed West to America with the Irish monks searching for the Paradise of the Saints; and how he continuously went down into the land of the dead and returned. Through his adventures in Ka, the realm of Crows, and around the world, he found secrets that could change the humans’ entire way of life—and now may be the time to finally reveal them.

“Unquestionably one of the finest works of fiction I’ve ever read. A monumental achievement of modern mythmaking, Ka shows us the heights that fantasy is capable of.” —John Joseph Adams, editor of Lightspeed and series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy

Forthcoming October 24 from Saga Press.

Ponies in winter out on a cold heath, a darkening day once upon a time, far East from here across the sea.

A sharp wind blew their tails against their flanks and hid their faces and their lashy eyes, closed against the cold. It was colder in winter now than it had been, Dar Oakley thought. A number of Crows held to the scragged and wind-bent branches of a tree; they too tended to sit with their backs against the wind, which kept their eyes from freezing, but allowed the wind to lift the feathers of their backs and necks and reach down to the flesh.

The plan was Dar Oakley’s, though he had hardly got out the gist of it before the others took it up and yelled it from perch to perch along the treeline, each passing it on as his own, her own. It meant acting in concert, and it meant having an end in view; and while these Crows could do the one and do the other, whether they could do both at once was less certain.

The four Horses now and then nuzzled the frozen grass, but mostly they stood still close together to share warmth (who doesn’t? Even Crows). The smallest among them was either a youngling or somehow stunted, a bag of bones.

The Crows had gathered in silence, and been ignored by the Horses. They muttered low among themselves as more joined them.

“Who’ll call a start?”

“We’ll know when.”

“I say now.”

“Hush! Hush and wait.”

“Look there,” one called.

Far off over the fields a Brother could be seen walking their way, with one of the farmers that the Brothers employed, perhaps coming to gather in these Horses before night. The Crows could see them, but the two of them were too far off to see the Crows, or the Horses either, who stood in the lee of a low hillock.

“Now,” said another.

“All together!” Dar Oakley cried, and the word passed through the branches and up and down until they were all yelling it. The Horses raised their heads—Crows making a ruckus will cause most animals to look up to see the cause—but before they could take it into their heads to move off, Dar Oakley gave another cry, and all the Crows rose up—not as one but in a long wave, one’s rising causing those nearby to rise. Then in a shrieking black crowd they descended onto the Horses. Dodging at their heads and flanks, crying at their ears, they got the four beasts moving in fright—that was the easy part. It was harder to separate the smallest from the other three, and chase him in a different direction: the Horses naturally wanted to stick together. Some of the Crows had to harry the little one daywise while the rest ran the other Horses darkwise, and it was hard for those Crows not to turn and join in chasing after the little Horse when it got separated, but to keep driving the other three away. Dar Oakley had explained it—keep after the bigger ones until they were too far from the little one to find it, or lost the impulse to try. It was how the Wolves did it: cut out the weakest.

The three bigger Horses ran as the Crows pressed them. Faces! they cried to one another. Eyes!

Wolf! Wolf! the others cried at the stumbling little one. Run! Run!

The Horse was running in mad circles. The Crows were growing as weary as the little Horse they chased. There’d been little to eat these last short days. Then they had some luck: the Horse turned from the open ground and into a rubbled slew that led down toward the river. The Crows, all at once grasping what must happen, forced the Horse with their screaming and their black wings in its face further down that way, and almost immediately it lost its footing and plunged sprawling down. It struggled to rise but couldn’t.

The Crows were crazy with triumph. Who are the Wolves? they cried. We are the Wolves!

Dar Oakley ceased his yelling and settled on the rocks above where the Horse lay. Somehow a foreleg had got thrust into a fissure of rock; perhaps it was broken. The Horse’s head twisted this way and that, lips drawn back, a sobbing breath from its throat, blood on a cheek where a Crow had dagged it. The beast wouldn’t live through the coming night.

It was pleasant to sit and watch their prize, but night was coming fast and they had flown far from the roost. One by one they ceased crying We are the Wolves! We are the Hunters! Two by two they ascended away. In the night the real Wolves would appear, the carcass-openers, and come day the Crows would eat. Eat and eat.

Far behind in the fields, the Brother and the farmer stood arm in arm, afraid and praying: for surely they had seen devils in the form of birds set upon their Horses, drive them far away out of sight and (for all they could tell) ride them down to Hell.

• • • •

It was for sure a hellish crew, those Crows in that day, as Dar Oakley now tells it. The flock he flew with was tightly ranked and more battlesome than others, and the winners of their contests were fearless and fierce—though the winners weren’t always the biggest or the quickest, any more than the top Dogs in any Dog-pack are always the largest. Winters, when these Biggers gathered in their favored groves, they socialized with one another; they foraged together, they fought with and cursed rivals and upstarts, and admitted the bravest to their ranks. They mourned those of the gang lost to Owls and accidents, remembered and spoke of them, but that never stopped them from getting out in front when another Owl was to be mobbed, or a Hawk chased off, or a dangerous game played, Come on, come on! The rest of the flock profited by their schemes and their daring, and got a share of the feasts they contrived, laughed at their jokes, avoided their thick bills.

There was Va Thornhill and Kon Eaglestail, they went unchallenged and left alone, even by each other. There was Ta Blue-eye and his daughter-wife Fin, both with eyes as black as any Crow’s. There was (Dar Oakley can still name them, like a retired officer remembering his old regiment) Big Stonybrook and Little Stonybrook, the tougher of the two; and Rowanberry, loutish and cruel, and sneaky Other Rowanberry. And there was Dar Oakley, who sat midway in this corps, not the strongest or the most heedless of them but the smartest and most inventive. The plan about the Horse was his—he had in his mind an image not of Wolves but of People fighters on a raid, and how they’d cut out the weaker animals or the slower females to surround and seize.

Through that cold night he tried to remember when it had been that he had seen such a thing, if he really had. He pressed his memory back and back until, as always, it came at last to a night-darkness, a nothing, into which his thought could not go. Like the night’s nothing, which yields up a world when day returns, he knew this nothing within him wasn’t empty: but that’s all he knew.

At dawn when the gang went back out to the rubbled pass, three Wolves were going away, their whiskers black with Horse blood, their white eyes sated and sleepy. They would not have dared come close enough to the Brothers’ buildings and fences to have got this meal themselves.

Now it was Crows’ time to eat. There was plenty: not even Ravens, who disdained People, had found this place as yet.

Va Thornhill called, and one after another they all joined him, and as the cold sun grew higher the others came in and settled noisily to eat at the Wolf-torn body while Va and Dar Oakley and Kon Eaglestail looked on from the branches of the lone tree that bent wearily there, hungry of course but keeping watch. When they did join in, room would be made for them.

“Look there, Dar Oakley,” Va Thornhill said. “Your friends.”

Dar Oakley looked. Across the frost-sparkling field, a Brother, surely the same one as the day before, was striding steadily toward them, white skirts curling around his bare red shins, and with him a farm-boy carrying a halter.

“In search of their Horse,” Dar Oakley said.

“Ha,” said the bigger Crow. “Our Horse.” He let himself fall from the branch toward the cadaver, which was so tugged and pulled this way and that by so many Crows that it gave an odd impression of fighting back against them.

They weren’t Dar Oakley’s friends, the Brothers and their other People; Va Thornhill spoke that way because, yes, Dar Oakley took an interest in them, and liked to frequent their stone buildings and watch them come and go on their inexplicable errands. Now and then he’d forget himself so far as to come down into their kitchen-midden, and find a bite or two there to swallow as he pondered them. They clearly despised him, but despite that he thought that in some way he belonged to them—as though his parents (whom he couldn’t remember) had long ago nested among them.

They were like a flock themselves, some ways. Their dress was all the same, like the pelts of a species of beast, where the clothes of the other People who came now and then to visit them were more varied. He’d thought they were all alike too in being almost bald, like Vultures, but then on a warm day he’d seen them one by one sit down on a stone in the sun while one with a tool clipped away at the hair of their heads and made them all look the same. They scraped the hair off their faces too, most of them, so it was impossible to tell if any were females (a bare face was a sign of a People female, he knew, and seemed always to have known): but there were never any young among them.

All this Dar Oakley found it good to think about; and because his knowledge gained the Crows advantages, they didn’t much mock him for his interest. Long ago, the story among them went, there had been a Crow in a far demesne who studied People and found a way to feed his flock on rich People flesh, with no trouble in the getting of it either.

But those days were past, if they had ever been, and the trick was long forgotten.

The Brother, one of the scraped-face kind, was close enough now that he must see, yes, the Crows eating the flesh of the Brothers’ Horse, and he began to run toward them, crying out and lifting the harmless stick he carried. Unafraid but cautious, the Crows arose and went away, though not far—they gathered on the rocks or in the dead tree and yelled from there. The Brother warned away the boy, and came stumbling down the rocks on his near-bare feet, and when he reached the remains of the Horse he went down on his knees before it. He clasped his hands together as though he held something in them, though there was nothing, and made a rapid series of noises, varied and soft, like brook water running over stones; now and then he lifted his face to the white sky.

“It’s all right,” Dar Oakley said to those around him. “They do this.” He had seen them at it, though he hadn’t understood it. This was as close as he had ever come to one, close enough to hear. He’d never seen one do it beside a dead beast. It was hard to tell if he was old or young—neither very old nor very young was all Dar Oakley could tell—but his back was bent and the gizzard of his long neck stuck out like a Vulture’s.

He got up from his knees, plucking at his skirts, and looked around himself at the Crows. No beast with enemies likes to be stared at steadily, but as long as Dar Oakley stayed, calmly observing, the Biggers would all stay, and as long as they stayed most of the others would too. The Brother made no threatening gestures or cries; he only went on, mouth moving, as he had when he had knelt beside the dead Horse, but now—there was no mistaking it—looking to them, to the Crows.

He raised a long bony forefinger and shook it at them.

He put his closed hands on his hips, and thrust out his chin.

He spread his arms wide, his palms turned up, like branches they might sit on.

And all the time he went on making his stream of noises.

“Let’s mob the being, drive it off,” Va Thornhill said, still flush with the victory of the Horse. He assayed a sharp attack cry. No one took it up.

“What does it mean by this, Dar Oakley?” Kon Eaglestail asked. “What is it doing?”

Dar Oakley had no answer. But he felt the presence of an answer within him—so he’d put it later, remembering this moment. He left Kon’s side and went closer to the Brother, who took notice of his approach, and spoke as though to Dar Oakley alone. For yes it was speech, Dar Oakley was certain of it. Not speech he knew, but like speech he had once known.

“Have no fear,” the Brother said to him. “No fear.”

A trembling took hold of Dar Oakley’s throat and cheeks, as though he were about to bring up his food. Instead he brought forth a word, a word the Brother had said.

“Fear,” he said.

The Brother stopped speaking.

“Mine,” Dar Oakley said. “Not yours.”

He had never been able to say many words in their language—he could hear and understand but couldn’t speak it. He could tell from the way the Brother looked at him that he’d understood the Crow. When he spoke again Dar Oakley knew the words.

“Crow,” was what he said. “Did you speak to me?”

Dar Oakley becked rapidly head up, head down—which he just then remembered or conceived was a sign to People for Yes.

The Brother fell to his knees. He clapped his hands together and with his eyes on Dar Oakley spoke too fast for Dar Oakley to catch any meaning. Later on, when the Brother retold to him the tale of that morning— as often he did—he’d say that he said Sin no more, bird of death! Steal no more from those who have so little. Don’t be Wolves but, black though you are, be Doves. We are Doves among Wolves and we can’t harm you. But God will love you and feed you for our sakes if you don’t steal from us.

Whatever it was, Dar Oakley becked. He said words he knew: Yes, he said. Wolf, he said. Steal. Each word arising from his gut or his crop and making its way out, wringing his throat and twisting his tongue. From a safe distance the other Crows were laughing in derision, this absurd exchange, were they speaking? The Brother on his knees smiled upon them—which seemed threatening enough, his long yellow teeth showing—and he held out a hand to Dar Oakley as though that Crow would be fool enough to just walk up onto his palm. But that’s just what he did. Yelps and cries of warning from his gang.

The Brother rose, Dar Oakley clinging to his hand. “Deo gratias,” he said. He raised his other hand and drew it down; then he crossed the line he’d made in the air with another going billwise-otherwise. He lifted the Crow up, and stared into his eyes as though to see within; and the Crow looked back.

A century or more later, when hagiographers wrote down in their lovely uncial script the full story of how the lowliest and least of the Brothers of that Abbey had preached to the Crows, they would write how at the name of God and the sign of the cross of His Son, the shaggy little pony that lay dead before him had stirred, stood, and gathered in his mutilated parts; and when he was whole he had bent his knee to the Brother. And all the guilty Crows had bowed their heads, and in the Saint’s own tongue had begged forgiveness.

The Crows had a different tale, in which the Horse’s well-cleaned gray bones are still there come spring.

© 2017 by John Crowley. Excerpted from Ka by John Crowley. Published by permission of the author and Saga Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Crowley’s first published novels were science fiction: The Deep (1975) and Beasts (1976). Engine Summer (1977) was nominated for The American Book Award; it appears in David Pringle’s authoritative 100 Best Science Fiction Novels.  Little, Big (1980) won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel; Ursula Le Guin described as a book which “all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy.” In 1980 Crowley embarked on a multi-volume novel called Ægypt—The Solitudes, Love & Sleep, Dæmonomania, and Endless Things. This series and Little, Big were cited when Crowley received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature.  His recent novels are The Translator, recipient of the Premio Flaianno (Italy), Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, which contains an entire imaginary novel by the poet; and Four Freedoms. He has also worked in film and television and written scripts for historical documentaries, many for Public Television; his work has received numerous awards and has been shown at the New York Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, and many others. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Boston Review, The Yale Review, Conjunctions, Tin House, Lapham’s Quarterly, and other venues.

Book Reviews: October 2017

Christie Yant | 1049 words

This month we consider An Unkindness of Magicians by Kat Howard and Spoonbenders by Daryl Gregory.

An Unkindness of Magicians
Kat Howard
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 978-1481451192
Saga Press, September 26 2017, 368 pages

“Fortune’s Wheel has begun its Turning. When it ceases rotation, all will be made new.”

Magic always has a price. For generations, that price has been hidden from the powerful families who use it. Now the Turning has come, a time when the Great Houses of the Unseen World challenge each other for dominance; a time of change, when anything can happen—and those outcast have returned to claim their due.

Author Kat Howard brings together some of the best-known names in magic in a darkly glittering novel where the inhabitants of the Unseen World live and work alongside modern-day New York City. The descendants of Merlin, Shakespeare’s Prospero, and the alchemist John Dee are among the core elite of the Great Houses who will battle to maintain the status quo.

Sydney—an outsider with no last name—has earned some small freedom from her indenture to the House of Shadows, and has been contracted by Laurent Beauchamps as his champion in a bid to elevate his family’s fortune and be recognized as one of the great Houses. Laurent’s best friend, Gray Prospero, the disinherited son of Shakespeare’s Miranda, has his own designs on the outcome, and his own way of tapping the power he needs to get his way. The stakes for the Houses are largely political; for the individuals involved, they are personal; and for those on the fringes of the Unseen World, they just might be life and death. Sydney must defeat the House challengers while navigating the waters of family feuds, ancient compacts, missing cousins, and the terms of her own freedom.

Howard has a knack for finding the magical in the everyday (the Angel of the Waters statue in Central Park houses a potent spell), and conversely, the everyday in the magical (“Even magicians need lawyers,” we learn, and it turns out that they can be lawyers, too). Her previous novel, Roses and Rot, explored a complicated relationship between sisters, set against the backdrop of an artists’ retreat and steeped in the context of fairy tales; in An Unkindness of Magicians she looks at a different type of family fractured by social striving, evoking a sense of long history by bringing names of legend into the present.

An Unkindness of Magicians is set in a richly-imagined world in which magical duels are fought beneath crystal chandeliers while the spectators sip champagne, as those who make their lives possible are kept neatly out of view. Howard explores themes of corruption, greed, and disparities of power and privilege in an absorbing read that is part murder mystery, part political thriller, and part fantasy underdog tale: When the Wheel ceases its Turning, which House will come out on top—and who will pay the price? All lovers of contemporary fantasy should have this on their TBR list.

Spoonbenders
Daryl Gregory
Hardcover / Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 978-1524731823
Knopf, June 27, 2017, 416 pages

The Telemachus family has a secret, or rather, two: One, they were briefly famous as the Amazing Telemachus Family for their stage act of mentalist tricks—famous enough to appear on television’s most popular daytime talk show, where they were very publicly debunked and humiliated by the Astounding Archibald. And two, it wasn’t entirely an act. Hardly at all, in fact.

Now each pursuing their own lives and livelihoods in ways not always entirely legal or wise, the family must come together as their collective past catches up with them. Their paranormal abilities make their already complicated lives even more so, as along with Irene Telemachus’s foray into the brand-new world of online dating, her son Matty’s discovery that he can actually leave his body (though only under very specific and embarrassing circumstances), and whatever it is that Uncle Buddy is building in the basement, add Grandpa Teddy’s grifting, Frankie’s mafia entanglements, a government agent, and the reappearance of the man who ruined the family in the first place—and letters arriving from the long-dead Grandma Maureen.

Spoonbenders is an ambitious book. There is a lot going on here, so much so that I found myself waiting for an authorial misstep, some thread left dangling—to my delight, I found none. Few authors can make each point of view compelling, but Daryl Gregory has done so, managing to weave the story of each family member deftly into a fabric that feels utterly genuine and satisfying. The arc that binds them all together is that of the enigmatic, unspeaking, and temporally unmoored Uncle Buddy, whose peculiar efforts at home improvement the family abides with sympathy and humor.

Half the fun of reading Spoonbenders is the tingle of recognition that signals nostalgia done right. Set in the mid-1990s, with the incessant arrival of new America Online CDs and the whine-and-hiss of a 14.4 modem, there are also looks back at the ’70s with nods to Uri Geller, The Mike Douglas Show, and the Amazing Randi that feel like time travel back to a childhood of staring hard at pennies trying to make them move. (Anyone else?—I thought so.) Gregory’s attention to detail makes the nostalgia feel entirely authentic.

Spoonbenders is a convincing and entertaining look at a complicated extended family, with a Stranger Things vibe that captures the feel of the time and place exceptionally well. There is something for everyone here, a story that crosses generations of experience, pop cultures, and genres—a riveting tale with a ton of heart, masterfully told.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christie Yant is a science fiction and fantasy writer, Associate Publisher for Lightspeed and Nightmare, and guest editor of Lightspeed’s Women Destroy Science Fiction special issue. Her fiction has appeared in anthologies and magazines including Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011 (Horton),  Armored, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, io9, Wired.com, and China’s Science Fiction World. Her work has received honorable mentions in Year’s Best Science Fiction (Dozois) and Best Horror of the Year (Datlow), and has been long-listed for StorySouth’s Million Writers Award. She lives on the central coast of California with two writers, an editor, and assorted four-legged nuisances. Follow her on Twitter @christieyant.

Media Reviews: October 2017

Christopher East | 1730 words

This month we take a look at new television set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The Defenders (Season 1)
Created by Douglas Petrie and Marco Ramirez
ABC Studios, Goddard Textiles, Marvel Television, and Netflix
August 2017

Legion (Season 1)
Created by Noah Hawley
20th Century Fox Television, 26 Keys Productions, Bad Hat Harry Productions
February 2017

The vast increase of scripted TV shows in recent years has created plenty of room for the superhero genre, a category still prospering in the wake of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s blockbuster dominance. While the trend continues to thrive, it’s left some critics wondering whether it’s a sustainable phenomenon. Are the superheroes of today like the westerns of yesteryear, destined to ride off into the sunset once their time has passed? As the genre grows increasingly formulaic, it’s difficult not to harbor that suspicion. But two Marvel superhero shows—The Defenders and Legion—are attempting to inject some new life into the genre and perhaps extend its longevity.

Marvel knows a good thing when it sees it—perhaps to a fault. The Defenders is an obvious attempt to do for TV what The Avengers did for film: build a complex universe from its inexhaustible roster of characters, weaving several solo projects together into a team. More Marvel formulism, right? But the weight of expectation, combined with the execution of a logistical feat unprecedented in the medium, initially made The Defenders build-up even more exciting than The Avengers. After opening promisingly with the gritty first season of Daredevil and the outstanding, unusual Jessica Jones, Marvel looked to be doing something rather different with its Netflix MTU. By the time the stylish Luke Cage had arrived, Marvel seemed well on its way to building a groundbreaking new corner of Marvel’s onscreen megaverse, perhaps even a superhero version of The Wire. Unfortunately, the sequence eventually lost its momentum—churning out diverting but forgettable fare. Luke Cage lost its way in a clumsy second half, while Iron Fist floundered through a truly terrible first season. Suddenly it appeared the critics were right. Maybe superheroes had peaked. Maybe we’d gotten too much of a good thing.

Well, The Defenders has finally launched. No, this isn’t The Wire for superheroes . . . not even close. But it’s a pretty good show, an interesting collision of the four series’ worlds, and ultimately I think it will satisfy the fans who’ve been following along with the project—even those who rightfully despised Iron Fist.

The series dawns in New York with its principal players wrestling with various inner demons. Matthew Murdock (Charlie Cox) has retired from vigilante crime-fighting as Daredevil to devote himself to more lawyerly attempts to save the city. Super-powered private investigator Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter) is drinking her way through the aftermath of her traumatic showdown with Kilgrave. The indestructible Luke Cage (Mike Colter) finishes a stretch of prison time and hits the streets determined to make a positive mark on the city. And Danny Rand (Finn Jones), aka the Immortal Iron Fist, returns from Asia, still tracking The Hand in the wake of his failure to protect the magical land of K’un-lun from destruction.

It requires a few strategic episodes of simmering plot to bubble these four heroes’ lives together, but it’s time well spent, a mystery-solving slow-cook that reintroduces the characters and their extended worlds before thrusting them together against The Hand’s sinister leader Alexandra (Sigourney Weaver). In the name of furthering The Hand’s nefarious agenda, Alexandra is hatching an evil plot that could very well leave New York City in ruins, but not if Daredevil, Jones, Cage, and Iron Fist have anything to say about it.

The Defenders isn’t a seamless four-series integration, but it’s a decent show that benefits from a reduced running time (eight episodes to the usual, plodding thirteen) and from the merging of several impressive ensembles. Indeed, “getting the band together” solves a problem each show possesses: one-note protagonists. In the individual series, Daredevil’s Catholic guilt, Jones’ affected indifference, Cage’s nobility, and Iron Fist’s entitled arrogance often left me craving more participation from their many relatable sidekicks. Here, everyone on the team—especially Iron Fist—is improved by a group dynamic which distributes the emotional workload. Meanwhile, the supporting characters—Daredevil’s Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) and Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson), Iron Fist’s Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick), Luke Cage’s Misty Knight (Simone Missick), Jessica Jones’ Trish (Rachael Taylor) and Malcolm (Eka Darville), series-hopping Stick (Scott Glenn), and the ubiquitous Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson)—all turn up to orient us into each major hero’s life, before ultimately mingling in fun ways. The show can be forgiven if it’s not always sure what to do with all these side characters in light of the short episode run, but their very presence contributes to the atmosphere of momentous, event television. Of the group, Dawson and Henwick are best served by the scripts, so much so that they could easily be considered full-fledged members of the team—something I’m guessing subsequent seasons will explore.

So The Defenders works in many ways. Alas, in others it’s a letdown. Despite the shorter length, the pacing wavers, and as the story bounces between characters, the scene quality is similarly uneven, leading to a Frankenstein’s monster effect that delivers everything from Jessica Jones at its finest to Iron Fist at its worst. Once the early intrigue starts adding up to something, that something is the usual apocalyptic nonsense, leading to familiar violent spectacle: true-to-form, expected, and rife with difficult-to-track, emotionally empty fight scenes. Overall, the direction is quite interesting, but occasionally gets distractingly artsy and convoluted. In the end, I think The Defenders successfully executes a difficult mission, but it’s a qualified success. This show isn’t about to transform the genre, but it does plenty to sustain it in its current form.

By contrast, FX’s Legion, a more obscure Marvel property, definitely does spin the superhero genre in new directions. An offshoot of The X-Men franchise, Legion follows the life of troubled David Haller (Dan Stevens), a schizophrenic who has spent much of his life in a mental institution. David leads a bleak existence designed to medically keep his noisy inner voices in check, but an encounter with a fellow patient, Syd Barrett (Rachel Keller), unlocks what he soon comes to learn are mutant powers—and while they’ve been driving him mad all these years, they also make him extremely powerful. David is liberated from his confinement by Dr. Melanie Bird (Jean Smart) and her associates, and spirited away to a secret research facility called Summerland. She wants to help David learn to control his powers, and keep him out of the hands of an unscrupulous government agency called Division 3. But what does David himself want? With the help of Ptonomy (Jeremie Harris), a mutant who can project David into his own memories, David confronts his past in the hopes of finding out—but the process is complicated severely by David’s rather unusual friend, Lenny (Aubrey Plaza).

Legion possesses many of the earmarks of classic comic book fare: a troubled super-protagonist, a colorful team of sidekicks, a simplistic good-evil rivalry between two opposing forces with incompatible worldviews. Summerland is basically Charles Xavier’s Psychotherapy Lab for Gifted Youngsters, a super-team of mutants and outsiders aligned against a more powerful, more organized evil: Division 3, the humorless, reactionary source of difference-squashing villainy. In all these respects, Legion is rife with the comfortable, familiar elements of the genre.

But it also dramatically veers away from formula. For one thing, it lacks the familiar structural bones of most superhero fare, its plot ricocheting through time, through unreliable viewpoints, and in and out of different planes of reality. Legion, while certainly not without violence, resists the temptation to build toward a traditional, bludgeoning showdown; it’s more random and unpredictable than that, some of its biggest confrontations of a more psychological variety. Legion lacks a traditional, nefarious Big Bad. While it does have a primary villain, it’s a creepy and distinctly different one, glimpsed largely in the reality-warping hallucinations or the scary back corridors of the psyche. If most superhero tales are built like identical skyscrapers, with hero and villain racing toward the top in parallel elevators, Legion possesses far more interesting architecture: a complicated building with lots of weird twisty corridors and tangential side rooms, erratic juts and awkward angles.

Even more striking, however, is the show’s inventive visual style. Spectacle is practically a prerequisite of the genre, but Legion doesn’t settle for the obvious. The show’s vision, while perhaps derivative, is also unique and invigorating. Numerous filmmakers seem to have made an influencing mark—among others, one sees nods to the mindbending weirdness of David Lynch and the artfully cockeyed flourishes of Terry Gilliam. (Indeed, the show’s mix of retro styles with contemporary ones reminded me of Gilliam’s Brazil, which exists in a similarly indecisive temporal landscape.)

Also lending considerable verve to Legion’s style are the performances, particularly those of Dan Stevens and Aubrey Plaza. Stevens leans into David’s instability with impressive intensity. Plaza, meanwhile, is a fearless, scene-stealing marvel. She commits whole-heartedly to her weird, multifaceted role, delivering a riveting performance that balances playful quirk with unnerving menace. No other actor’s presence contributes quite so strongly to Legion’s unusual flavor profile.

In a genre that too often relies on formula, Legion is breath of deliciously weird fresh air. Hopefully it’s not too unorthodox to attract a viewer base, but in my opinion it’s exactly what the genre needs right now: something that takes some artistic chances, shakes things up, and broadens the range of potential superhero stories.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christopher East is a writer, editor, reviewer, and avid consumer of science fiction, fantasy, and spy fiction. His stories have been published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Cosmos, Interzone, Talebones, The Third Alternative, and a number of other speculative fiction publications. He’s attended the Clarion and Taos Toolbox writing workshops, and served for several years as the fiction editor for the futurism, science, and technology blog Futurismic. He blogs extensively about writing, fiction, film, television, music, comics, and more at www.christopher-east.com. Currently he lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works for an occupational and environmental health and safety consultancy.

Interview: Tade Thompson

Christian A. Coleman | 2947 words

Tade Thompson is the author of the science fiction novel Rosewater, a 2017 John W. Campbell Award finalist and on the Locus 2016 Recommended Reading List, and The Kitschies Golden Tentacle Award-winning novel Making Wolf. His novella The Murders of Molly Southbourne has been optioned for screen adaptation. He also writes short stories, notably “The Apologists,” which was nominated for a British Science Fiction Association award. Born in London to Yoruba parents, he lives and works on the south coast of England, where he battles addictions to books, jazz, and art.

I was floored and so impressed to see the daring places you’ve taken the body horror genre in The Murders of Molly Southbourne. Tell us about what sparked the idea for the novella.

Thanks for your kind words. The Murders of Molly Southbourne came from the confluence of several ideas on which I had been ruminating for quite some time.

Just after the Cold War, there were one or two veterans of the African proxy-war wandering about West Africa. These were not combatants, or at least they did not portray themselves as such, but if you bought them liquor, they would tell you hair-raising stories of insurgency and counter-insurgency from both sides of the Iron Curtain. They had fragments and rumours of experiments that were interesting, impossible, but believed by the tellers. These had been in my head for years.

I found your protagonist, Molly, endearing and tragic. She grows up socially isolated because of her peculiar condition—creating identical copies of herself whenever she bleeds. And the copies, called mollys, always try to kill her. What about her character compelled you to write her story?

Molly herself blazed into my consciousness fully-formed while I was writing something else. Usually, I can jot such conceits down and continue the work at hand, but the character was insistent. The story poured out of me and the first draft was done with no breaks at all, by which I mean I would sit down to write and force myself to stop for sleep or to be on time for work. It was close to Csikszentmihalyi’s flow state. All I can tell you is the character forced her way onto the page with little regard for me.

Molly has a particular list of literary touchstones that includes Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors and Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Recessional.” What personal significance do they have for her?

It would be difficult to discuss why Kipling and why Shakespeare without spoilers. Those familiar with “Recessional” will see similarities in the themes and a foreshadowing of Molly’s fate, but I am a big believer in the reader’s interpretation. I say, “Kill the author dead and let the readers take what they will from the work while they dance on the Barthesian grave.”

The frame-story structure of The Murders of Molly Southbourne is very similar to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In fact, I’d go as far to say that your novella is a close cousin (several generations removed) to her novel. Frankenstein is also referenced as the favorite book of Molly’s main love interest, her physiology and anatomy professor James Down.

I’ll have to restrain myself here. Frankenstein is quite possibly my favourite book. The similarities and overt mentioning of the book are deliberate. My close friends know I’m a Frankenstein and Mary Shelley nerd, and that I can be mined for trivia (like how the Monster was a vegetarian, for example). I have a Frankenstein-related work coming out in 2018, which I can’t talk about yet. I have four different copies of the book, including one illustrated by the great American artist and writer, Lynd Ward, as well as two different annotated versions. I’m an 1818 edition snob, a Polidori Truther . . . just don’t get me started, because it will take all week.

You begin the novella with an epigraph by Theophilus Roshodan that lays out the premise. His name doesn’t come up in any Internet searches or in any philosophy encyclopedias. Did you make him up? If so, who is he based on?

Theophilus Roshodan does not exist, and has never existed in consensus reality. He is a recurring minor character in some of my unpublished work. He’s often an irritating know-it-all author stand-in, and as such, he never survives the first draft.

In the Bible (Luke 1:3), the book of Luke is written by a doctor who never met Jesus. This particular gospel is a letter to someone called “most excellent Theophilus.” I am not a Bible scholar, but I imagined a student of philosophy, maybe a monk, writing about life. Roshodan leans towards Seneca for inspiration, but also Sartre.

The epigraph was the last thing I wrote. It was to act as a coda to the entire novella, so I reverse-engineered it to cover one of the intended major themes. Sorry if I sent you on a wild Google-chase!

You have a background in medicine and psychiatry. How much of it came into use when you were doing research and drafting the story?

All of it. I bring everything I know to whatever I write, and I believe the same of other writers. A person’s complete life experience forms the basis of authorial voice, in my opinion. To hold back any part makes a narrative feel contrived.

Molly’s psychological reaction to her condition, and her ambition to be an anatomy demonstrator—all mined from my experience.

You’ve explored the theme of the body as a site of conflict before in your novel Rosewater with an alien race that invades humans at the cellular level. What made you want to explore the violent aspects of body horror in this novella?

When it comes to bodies, there is violence done every day. I did not think of body horror as a sub-genre when writing it, but I think the body is a source of great anxiety to each of us. So you shave (legs, armpits, or chin), taking a blade to yourself; perhaps you exercise, causing yourself pain; perhaps you fast or diet, denying yourself; perhaps your job means you have to stay awake. If you think about it, life itself consists of low-levels of body horror all the time. To write fiction, we just exaggerate some of what happens naturally. While Rosewater is about what I called a gentle cellular apocalypse, The Murders of Molly Southbourne is about what we do to ourselves for survival. I did not necessarily explore the violence we do to other bodies, physical, like the death inflicted on black bodies on the US streets, or psychological, with something like catcalling a passing woman’s body or feeling entitled to the body as a trophy in a lot of fantastical fiction. Ultimately, Molly’s violence is a metaphor that I must leave readers to work out. Or not. I hope the book can survive scrutiny on many levels.

A creeping sense of inevitability takes hold of all aspects of Molly’s life. In order to survive, she has to kill the mollys before they kill her. This taints her existence, her relationships, and her outlook. What are your thoughts on horror as a genre to explore existential dread?

It’s possible that some readers of horror (among whom I count myself) enjoy it because it makes real life not so bad. That’s not my original thought. It’s a bad paraphrase of an essay in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre. For me, existence means sacrifice. What had to die today for me to live? A cow, some vegetables, a chicken. Am I comfortable with this? So far, yes. Maybe a day will come when I’m not, and I’ll become a vegetarian. There is no Being without cost, and reconciling this can be a source of primal dread. Annihilation or nothingness/non-being can be a consequence. The best horror taps into this. A simple horror conceit: a monster running after a young person, the monster representing all our predators and the young person representing our potential. There are finite outcomes: monster kills young person, young person kills monster, young person evades monster, monster starves to death, et cetera. Horror can examine the physical and emotional survival of the self and the (sometimes) terrible cost of maintaining that integrity of body and soul. Horror is not the only genre to do this, but I think it has the best potential for it.

At one point, Molly says to herself, “Why have I survived? This cycle will repeat itself.” Classic horror stories, such as Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” are based on the idea of the repeating cycle of terror. Molly sure goes through it every time she has to kill a molly. Is this an idea that terrifies you, and if so, why?

First, I love Jackson’s work generally and “The Lottery” specifically.

Now, there is a certain futility to our survival mechanism as a species. Each of us is going to die, no matter how many crystals we put in our bowl, or how many reps we can do in the gym, or how much money we give to crying orphans on TV. Personally, not a lot terrifies me anymore, because I have had to confront my own mortality a few times in my short life. I recognize that a lot of people have not. So here’s the thing: If you throw a body to the predator, it will take time eating and digesting that, while you go away free. Until next time, of course, because there is no end to predators or prey, or their eternal dance. Horror helps the reader throw a metaphorical body, that of the actors in film or characters in prose. “They are dead, therefore, I am alive and safe for now.”

Have I answered the question? I feel like I rambled.

Let’s talk genre for a bit. You’ve mentioned in a previous interview (bit.ly/2x1cKzo) that you’ve had challenges getting your stories published because they don’t always fit in the conventional parameters of genre. The Murders of Molly Southbourne toggles several: horror, coming-of-age, science fiction. Were you worried at all about genre-bending in this one?

No, because I’ve stopped worrying about such things. Genre subdivisions were invented so books could be found and catalogued, not to shackle the writer. If what I write works as a narrative, good. If it doesn’t, then perhaps it won’t find a market, and nobody will hear. Darwinian fiction survival works just fine for me, and I understand that it’s not personal. I don’t set out to create genre mash-ups. I read a lot of different books in different fields, and this tends to affect my writing. By convention, Rosewater is science fiction, but there are some segments that are unmistakably horror (like the temple made of meat). But the same applies to The Thing, Alien, or even Predator. They are not one thing, and they endure.

The Murders of Molly Southbourne was a lot more science fictional in the first few drafts. My editor at Tor.com, Carl Engle-Laird, helped me see where the soul of the story lay, so I stripped off a lot of the science and explanations. I started to think of the book as a dark fairy tale, but with science and no fairies.

We discover that the world Molly lives in is beset by widespread infertility. It would appear that drawing parallels with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and P. D. James’s Children of Men is in order, but I noticed that your novella is being released during a year of decreases in male fertility. Were you drawing from previous reports of infertility while writing this?

The fertility decline in some Western countries has been known in clinical circles for quite a while before it came into public consciousness. I was drawing from my knowledge of this, but not the recent reports. I have not read the P.D. James book, and I didn’t really like the movie for various reasons. I adore The Handmaid’s Tale book, but I haven’t seen the most recent adaptation, although I’ve heard good things.

The recent reports on the male fertility crisis—I’m thinking of the ones that made the news in The Guardian and BBC News—focused only on Western countries and neglected to look into Africa, Asia, and South American countries. An obvious bias is at play here in the research. What’s your take on the issue?

As a black man, I find the whole thing problematic. On the one hand, “Oh, Malthusian Nightmare! Overpopulation is killing the Earth (not inequality or corporate greed)! Minorities are breeding us out!” Then, “Oh, noes! Fertility crisis! Humanity is doomed!” It is difficult not to interpret the situation as, “We’re not having enough babies of the right colour.” There are, of course, other perspectives, like irresponsible journalism or bad science.

The Murders of Molly Southbourne has already been optioned by Cathy Schulman’s Welle Entertainment. That’s amazing! Is this the first work of yours to be optioned?

Yes, I’m pleased and excited, as is the entire Tor.com team. It is the first of my works to be optioned, although not the first to stimulate interest. It’s also the first of the Tor.com novellas to be optioned. Brendan Deneen brokered the deal, and we like to joke that the process nearly gave each of us a coronary.

What can you tell us about it?

I can’t say much, except that I’ve spoken to Cathy Schulman a few times and I’m really impressed by her and her team, including Adam Stone from Phenomenon. I’m not just saying that. I’ve already learned a lot about visual storytelling from the conference calls. I feel the book is in good hands with Welle Entertainment.

There’s also news that your novella is the first in a series. Can you tell us anything about what’s coming up next?

I interrupted writing the second novella The Survival of Molly Southbourne to do this interview. I can tell you there are four novellas in my outline folder, so we’ll have to see if I can impress editors enough to get them published. I don’t think I can say any more at this stage, but watch this space.

This probably won’t be a trilogy, will it? I read in Nick Wood’s interview of you (shortstorydayafrica.org/news/idont-like-linearity-i-find-it-boring-an-interview-with-tade-thompson) that you don’t like trilogies. What about them don’t you like?

Ahh, trilogies.

’Tis true, I don’t like them as a staple of Speculative Fiction publishing. A part of me resents reading a book bound between covers that does not complete the story. The origins of that resentment are no longer relevant: Books are plentiful and generally cheap now.

It was not always thus, and I had to manage my book addiction with meager resources. I often had to buy the third book only. Nobody else read science fiction/fantasy in my house, and choices had to be made. My sister Maria had these pulpy romance novels that she preferred, each self-contained. If my dad took us to a bookshop to buy one book each, I would try to make a case that three SFF books were equal to one in terms of completeness. It did not fly. Ten-year-old me is like, Why the hell can SFF writers not finish their stories in one book? Animal Money by Michael Cisco or Imajica by Clive Barker would be a trilogy or quadrology in other hands.

On the other hand, this trained me to keep multiple, incomplete story threads in my head for years sometimes, which is useful to me as a writer.

I’m happy to concede that my trilogy-hate is not objective, is based on childhood experiences, and is unfair, but I still ask, Why not a big-ass book with different parts? I love my omnibus edition of The Southern Reach by Jeff VanderMeer. The Grass King’s Concubine by Kari Sperring isn’t a trilogy and it’s excellent. I also enjoy anti-trilogies like Miéville’s Bas-Lag books.

And, of course, one day I’ll have to eat my words and write Hoist: Book One in the My Own Petard Trilogy.

Are there other projects you’re working on that you can tell us about?

Apart from the Molly novellas, I’m in the process of writing Rosewater: City State, a novel set in the Rosewater universe, and Shorty, a stand-alone novel about demons, necromancers, and obscure Christian cults.

There’s always something!

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Christian A. Coleman is a 2013 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. He lives and writes in the Boston area. He tweets at @coleman_II.

Author Spotlight: A. Merc Rustad

Alex Puncekar | 751 words

This story just oozes atmosphere, reminding me a little bit of some recent Ann Leckie and Kameron Hurley novels. What was your process for writing this story?

Lots of layers! I kind of think of it as a Photoshop project: layers and layers that you fiddle with individually (sometimes forever) until it looks right, then you can compile it into a seamless whole. Much like “Tomorrow When We See the Sun,” this one took a long time to piece together in a way that clicked. I wrote a proto-draft to this story that was pretty unrecognizable (it had a whole other plotline that made no sense, honestly), but it provided the bones: I knew this story’s core was about Kitshan’s journey and dealing with his loss.

If you’ve read “Tomorrow . . .,” then you probably already know how this one ends, in time. It was tricky to then construct a tale whose ending is shown in the opening of a different story, and make it work without seeming entirely . . . pointless? Maybe that’s not the best word. It was hard to find the balance between inevitability and hope, because even though Kitshan’s fate is shown later, I didn’t want this piece to be entirely bleak.

And I’ve always loved stories that allow agency to characters who seem to be bound to a specific destination. Yes, Kitshan dies. It’s what he does before, how he chooses to help Vale-So-Bright and come to terms with his past and his decisions, where agency lies and the emotional core of the story rests.

Kitshan and Vale-So-Bright make a great team, and I think it’s their dependency on one another that makes them so. How did you approach writing these characters and how did their eventual team-up change or affect the narrative?

I have a total soft spot for innocent, still-growing characters who are slightly alien but also very relatable and humane. And Vale-So-Bright provides a very clear contrast to Kitshan, which made their interactions so much fun to write. I knew early on in writing this story that their relationship would be crucial; however, given that Mere and Forever Brightness were also integral to Kitshan’s story, it was definitely a surgical balance of spotlighting Vale-So-Bright and keeping the others key in the narrative. Balancing act: nightmare mode.

I finished this story satisfied with its conclusion, but I had so many questions regarding its vast universe, because you weave in so many different concepts, characters, and ideas. What do you think the advantages of writing in this sci-fi/fantasy hybrid are? How the heck does the Courts of Tranquility sound so scary yet so cool at the same time?

One thing I love about this story world is I can just add everything shiny. I love over-the-top shiny in my fiction. Why hold back? Like a cat, if it fits, into the story it goes . . . and cats are a liquid, so they can fit anywhere.

True fact: when I first read Orwell’s 1984 (back when I was a tiny!Merc and didn’t quite get a lot of the political commentary), I was miffed that things like the Ministry of Truth and the Ministry of Love were not literal. Tiny!Merc was outraged that these names were, in fact, hiding something quite different. When I grew older and eventually got the irony, it really became all that much scarier. Naming something that has connotations of positive concepts when the thing is really fucking terrifying is a mind game all its own. The Courts of Tranquility definitely got named because that place is nightmare fuel and yet no one in this universe would actually name it something literal like “Court of Murderous Sun Gods Who Murderize Everything.” It just doesn’t have the same ring to it, y’know?

Do you have any projects coming up that you would like to talk about?

There’s a few things I’m not sure I’m allowed to share yet, but if all goes according to plan, I will have short stories in a couple of very cool anthologies next year!

Oh, and if you like my Principality Suns storyverse, I have a short story in the Humans Wanted anthology (ed. Vivian Caethe), which I hope you’ll check out.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Alex Puncekar lives in Ohio and is finishing up his MFA at Youngstown State University. You can find his published work in Aphelion: The Webzine of Science Fiction and Fantasy and Jenny Magazine, or you can find him on Twitter @AlexPuncekar.

Author Spotlight: Hugh Howey

Laurel Amberdine | 1974 words

This story highlights one of the most dramatic aspects of what we often call “toxic masculinity”—achievement at any cost. I was a bit horrified to see in reviews that some readers really liked the nameless protagonist, who doesn’t even like himself! But I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Assertiveness and accomplishment are attractive qualities. What kind of reaction were you expecting readers to have?

One of the strange effects of fiction is that the main point-of-view character tends to elicit sympathy almost in spite of themselves. From A Confederacy of Dunces to even the most extreme cases like American Psycho, it’s difficult to be dropped into someone’s world and care nothing for them. Perhaps it comes from our habit of rationalizing our own worst traits, something we practice a lot. If this story were told from anyone else’s POV, the current main character would be a villain. But since we hear his thoughts, doubts, self-loathing, confessions, and regrets, we feel for him.

And I think it’s okay. I don’t think it’s terrible to sympathize with this character. He’s a changed person at the end, and his journey comes with very high physical and emotional costs. I wept for this guy every pass I made through the story while writing and editing it. I guess I saw a lot of myself and my own failings in him.

This is where the “strange effect” of fiction is really quite powerful. Being able to sympathize with people completely unlike ourselves helps open our minds to what others in the real world are going through. I try to remember this when I find myself judging people whose ambitions have lead them astray. We have a political and corporate climate right now that makes it easy to lose sympathy for people. There are some folks out there who are reviled by many, and I think it would break our hearts to learn how much some of them loathe themselves.

While the dangers of climbing a very tall mountain seem well known, you address a much more interesting danger: the risk of getting what you always wanted, and being publicly rewarded, for a goal that was selfish and pointless. Was your initial conception of the story based on the physical risk, the internal conflict, or something else entirely?

The internal conflict for sure. I’ve written in several places how this story was deeply personal to me, how it attempted to capture what I was feeling about my own success with my novel Wool. This wasn’t the first time I’d felt the effects of Imposter Syndrome, that sense that you don’t deserve your current place and will be found out and have it all taken away. One of my earlier careers was as a yacht captain; it was a career that I progressed through very quickly. I went from living on a tiny sailboat in the Bahamas (a boat with no bathroom, shower, refrigerator, etc.) to being in charge of 120-foot yachts in the span of just a year. I was only twenty-four years old, and I was making more money than I deserved. It felt like I’d taken a shortcut somewhere. My psyche rejected this reality.

I think this is why my roofing career brought me so much joy. Not only was the work more rewarding, and the clientele more enjoyable to be around, but the conflict with my ego vanished. I went home every day to my girlfriend and my dog and our house, and I felt like I’d done something worthwhile with my day. I never felt this while captaining yachts.

When I started writing fiction, it was just to cross something off my bucket list. My first few novels were this fun space opera, and they got a small readership, and I really enjoyed creating worlds for a handful of friends and family to enjoy. It all felt very much “right.” I was working in a bookstore for almost no money, and I couldn’t wait to sit down and push my latest novel forward another chapter to see what happens next.

Then I wrote Wool, which was a short story to help cope with the loss of my beloved dog. It wasn’t a story I promoted. I put it out there and moved on to my next novel. Everything that happened after felt like a dream. I wrote the rest of the full novel during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) while the first story was still taking off. Within a month, I felt like that twenty-year-old at the helm of some big yacht that he wasn’t sure he could helm. And I was again earning much more than I knew I was worth.

“The Walk Up Nameless Ridge” is about every bit of this. Fate is fickle and capricious. There are more deserving writers out there who will never sell as many books as I have. That’s not a pleasant feeling. It’s akin to this other gnawing sense I get when I’m in a restaurant, and I’m watching the staff hustle around, and I remember waiting tables and being in the weeds, and it strikes me that these people are going to work a lot harder than me today and earn a fraction of the money. I know that sounds naive and weird, but I’ve talked to others who have the same feelings. I think these thoughts just don’t get voiced a lot.

What I found that helps is to direct a lot of my spare time into advocating for writers. And not just writers, but all the support people who make these works possible. I’ve been carried to the top and back by the efforts of many others. I think this story is about giving them their due, or reducing my own credit, or a bit of both.

I loved the irony of the small woman and her android being the ones who save him, after he was so dismissive of their chances. I suspect that if he’d found them at the top, helpless, he’d have claimed victory regardless and made sure no one knew the truth. So he got everything he was after, but she really won. Did you know the ending when you began, or did it take a while to figure out?

I knew the moral I wanted to convey: I wanted this guy to get credit for something he only achieves with the help of others. My career would never have amounted to much without the advocacy of a handful of early fans. Or without the cover art from folks like Jason Gurley and M.S. Corley. Or the editorial help from my mom, or from Lisa Kelly-Wilson, Nadene Carter, and David Gatewood. It’s a team effort, but only the quarterback gets any credit. I wish Amazon product pages listed the cover artist and editor for every book, so you knew who made these works really shine. To me, these are the people conquering mountains, and moving off to conquer another, without ever leaving more than a bare trace of their egos behind.

The details felt vivid and accurate. Are you familiar with extreme climbing, or did you do research for this story? I’m going to assume you didn’t visit any alien planets . . .

Ha! I wish. I’d love to go to Olympus Mons before I die.

Most of what went into this story comes from the dozens of alpining books and articles I’ve read over the years. I was an avid rock climber in my teens and twenties, and I always dreamed of going up Everest or K2, but I always knew it would only be in my imagination. For this story, I needed an accomplishment like that—something I aspired to that I knew I wasn’t capable of. It really tapped into everything I dreamed about when it comes to writing novels, and all the bizarre ways that my writing career has exceeded those dreams.

I guess the real confession in this short story is this: I don’t feel like a writer. I know people think of me as a writer, and see me as a writer. I know that I’ve written a lot of stories and that I have a lot more to tell. But it doesn’t feel like who I am. I think of myself as a reader. A sailor. A roofer. A boyfriend. A son. Maybe this is my way out of Imposter Syndrome: outright denial. The only way I get so much writing done these days is to tell myself and everyone else that I’m retired and to assume that none of it will ever be published.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know about this story?

There is something that I’m only thinking about now, because of my current situation. As I write these responses, I’m sitting in a sailboat in the middle of the South Pacific. My girlfriend and I just left an island called Palmerston, one of the most bizarre islands I’ve ever visited. It was settled by a man named William Marsters and his three wives over a century ago. The three families who live on the island are all direct descendants of those three women. They welcome passing sailors into their homes, and we leave behind whatever we can that might assist them. Visiting Palmerston in a sailboat is probably as close as an Earthling can get to taking a spaceship to another planet.

Now we’re sailing along in twenty knots of wind toward a submerged speck of land called Beverage Reef. This reef is basically just a mountain buried under thousands of feet of water. We’ll drop anchor here with no land in sight, no land for a hundred miles in any direction. And yet there’s a place out in the middle of nowhere to sit seven feet over pristine white sand and spend a few days snorkeling pristine tropical reef. It’s another of the very unique and bizarre spots on our wild and alien planet.

I guess when I sit here, bobbing along on some pretty tall seas and some stiff winds, responding to questions about this short story that I wrote years ago—it occurs to me that while some things like climbing mountains feel impossible, other things like sailing clear around the world feel simple. And maybe that’s the beauty of our individual gifts, the source of our admiration and envy, and the heart of the different characters in “The Walk Up Nameless Ridge.” What feels impossible is a matter of perspective. Tonight, we will anchor on top of a mountain and swim with sharks there. And hardly know we’ve accomplished a thing.

What can readers look for from you next?

My short story collection Machine Learning is due out in October. If readers enjoyed this story, there’s a lot more where it came from. I’m currently working on the sequel to Sand, which was recently re-released into bookstores. And there was a big announcement at Comic Con this year about the Sand TV show that’s in the works. So some exciting things afoot there. And of course, I’m always working on more short stories. No idea when or if I’ll publish all of them. Maybe if Machine Learning does well, John Joseph Adams will wring another collection out of me one day.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in San Francisco where she writes science fiction and fantasy and works for Locus Magazine. Her YA fantasy novel Luminator is forthcoming from Reuts Publishing in 2017. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Jeremiah Tolbert

Sandra Odell | 1195 words

It’s wonderful to return to the world of Dungeonspace Adventures, and “The Dragon of Dread Peak” does not disappoint. What is it about exploring this world of tech and magic that appeals to you?

It’s been a weird trend in my fiction the past few years that I feel like merging the fantastic with the grounded creates something fresher, at least to my eye. Also, I have always been a fan of novels and stories where a grounded reality close to ours comes into contact with fantasy. “Dragons in modern city streets? How would that work?” I think my interest in all of this goes all the way back to the Guardians of the Flame series by Joel Rosenberg. In that, regular people are transported into their role-playing game characters. Here, I was interested in the idea of—what if regular people and their RPG characters were one and the same? What if there was no difference?

Taking ordinary people and introducing them to the fantastic is kind of what we do as writers of fantasy, isn’t it? It makes sense that stories about that literal thing would hold some interest for me.

Tell us something of what inspired this particular story.

This trilogy of Dungeonspace stories (and yes, there will be a part three!) are about how we find ourselves as we grow up, how we rise to challenges, and how we struggle with the expectations of others that we didn’t ask for or really want. Flip, the poor guy, isn’t entirely sure what he wants out of life, which is something we have in common. But he’s determined, no matter what, to do the right thing and not let anybody down—which I think comes pretty much from my own character also. I hate letting people down more than anything.

Like with most stories, this one is a mix of ideas, personal life events, and genuine fiction, thrown into the mental blender, and turned into a story-paste. It’s hard to pick out one particular element as something inspirational for it, other than “role-playing games!” As always, I’m playing with tropes that have been bouncing around in my head since I first picked up some dice and began to play at age five.

Each character in “The Dragon of Dread Peak” is well realized and fleshed out. Flip must balance the real world stresses of family, failure, and his interest in Basher. Basher continues to grow and learn through her own metamorphosis. Dom faces trials in d-space and how people perceive his so-called failures. What would you say was the most difficult part of juggling continued character development and the events in “The Cavern of the Screaming Eye”?

This is the first sequel to anything that I’ve ever written, and just trying to keep my vision of the characters consistent (at first) with who they were in the first story was a real challenge for me. I’m not experienced in writing long-form work, or series of any sort. I re-read “Cavern” about ten times, taking detailed notes about the characterizations, so that I could create a sense of continuity from one story to the other, while expanding things. Hopefully each of our characters evolves in “Dragon” quite a bit further. They’re going to need that evolution to survive what’s coming next.

The team is warned that Briggsby is a supreme jerk and he doesn’t disappoint. People familiar with role-playing games will recognize his sort instantly, the smarmy wizard and information broker, the man sitting in the shadowy back corner of the bar, the wizard given over to debauchery who keeps to his own thoughts in a cold, ruined tower. Why did you decide to play with this particular trope rather than other old favorites such as the surly barbarian or the charming rogue? Did you have a favorite class/race combination when you first started playing RPGs?

My first RPG character was for basic D&D, and he was an elf. Basic didn’t have classes and races as distinct things, so elves were a kind of fighter/wizard combination. I loved that character, and the adventures we had have stuck with me for nearly thirty years. So I’m partial to elves and spellcasters from that experience. The odd spells of D&D have always fascinated me, as well as the names. It’s probably no surprise to any RPG veteran that Briggsby’s name is meant to be a reference to an old-school wizard.

The great thing about Dungeonspace is that it’s vast and I have a lot of stories I want to tell. Briggsby isn’t the last archetype I’ll be exploring by any means. Actually, Briggsby will get his own story. I’m interested in seeing what happens to him when he uses the Phylactery of Youth. It’s not going to work in exactly the way he expects.

And like any great dungeon module series, this story ends on a cliffhanger potentially fueled by another familiar fantasy trope, brother against brother. Can you share hints of what readers can expect in (what I can only hope will be titled) “The Legions of Orocutus”?

The next time we meet up with our band of d-space adventurers, they’re going to be preparing for imminent invasion. You’ll see a bit more of how Braxis City defends itself from incursions. Flip’s strange new powers will continue to grow, which is good. He’s going to need them in the fight against Rash and the Legions of Orocutus. But as usual, the possibility of invasion isn’t the only problem the kids will have to deal with. There will be relationship woes and homework and curfews.

And yes, that’s a very good title idea indeed! We’ll see if the story matches it as I write it. Most of the time, the title is the last thing I come up with, but with Dungeonspace, it’s usually the first!

By the end of the sequence, Dungeonspace will be in a different place. You can expect some interesting changes in the aftermath. And that sets me up nicely for the first novel . . .

You wear so many hats that it must be difficult to carve out time for yourself. What does Jeremiah Tolbert do to recharge his batteries?

I like to go to the movies. That’s about as close as I get these days to uninterrupted space and time to think and experience things, and as a parent of a toddler, I don’t really get to do that often anymore. It’s definitely hard to find time that isn’t devoted to trying to make a living, to supporting my family. I probably don’t get a chance to recharge often enough. I have taken the summer off from writing since finishing “Dragon,” but I should be starting the next story any day now. Aaaaaany day now . . .

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Sandra Odell is a 47-year old, happily married mother of two, an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. Her work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE, Daily Science Fiction, Crosssed Genres, Pseudopod, and The Drabblecast. She is hard at work plotting her second novel or world domination. Whichever comes first.

Author Spotlight: Adam-Troy Castro

Arley Sorg | 662 words

This is a short, tasty piece . . . kinda like a burger. It’s also a great handshake between idea and character. Do you see a lot of yourself in the father? Are your characters often strongly autobiographical, or do you prefer to create characters that are very different from you?

I would like to think that if I were a father, I’d be as friendly a presence in my child’s life as this protagonist, but alas, life has not provided the hard evidence. I like to create characters different from myself, but at longer lengths have often given myself a little Hitchcockian cameo at the edge of the action. Closest thing to me in any recent work is the title character in “The Old Horror Writer” at Nightmare Magazine.

It would be easy to draw metaphor(s) from this piece. For a moment, I wanted to give you a vegetarian high five! Don’t worry—I shook it off. Is this story meant as metaphor, does it stand as something specific for you, or is it just a damn good story about a father and his daughter? (Not to mention the end of all of us.)

I am not a vegetarian. Never have been. I know I should be, but I honestly don’t want to receive emails stating the case. The horrors of slaughterhouses are not the subject matter here. It’s just a story about having to explain the unexplainable to an innocent.

On one hand, there is a sense of resignation throughout. This is kind of mirrored in the final line, which lands as both surprising and incredibly poignant. On the other hand, this piece could be seen as presenting a “live in the moment” attitude and carrying a certain tranquility. Any thoughts on this?

I think it’s acknowledgment that we are carnivores, most of us, even if in this story not at the top of the food chain.

Looking at your wiki and website, I see that you’ve written a few stories at this point (knee slap!). You said in a prior interview that you like to challenge yourself and that you get bored, and that consequently you like to experiment and try different things. What have you found to be the most challenging or interesting, and why?

Most challenging were my Gustav Gloom novels, where I had to exercise my macabre imagination without compromise, while retaining a sense of fun for middle-grade readers. It was an exercise in reconnecting with my inner child.

For people who haven’t read your work, where is the best place to start? What is the work you are happiest with/most proud of?

For folks who want hard science fiction, I would say my novel Emissaries From The Dead (or any of the other Andrea Cort stories appearing regularly in Analog). For folks who want a fun romp, I would say the Gustav Gloom novels, which are accessible to adults. But for folks who want to see what I consider the state of my writing art now, I would suggest the collection Her Husband’s Hands And Other Stories, with the caveat that these are all dark stories and that they are not to be read in one sitting. I am proudest of that book, in that, I think, it comes closest to justifying on its own the time I have spent in quiet rooms looking at blank pages.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know about this story or about your work in general?

About this story, no; I think it stands for itself. About my work in general, only that more is coming, and that I hope what you get to see next is the mainstream thriller now passing the 80K mark.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Arley Sorg grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado. He studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, and usually writes in local coffee shops. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he is an assistant editor at Locus Magazine. He’s soldering together a novel, has thrown a few short stories into orbit, and hopes to launch more.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 162 words

Coming up in November, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Ashok K. Banker (“A Vortal in Midtown”) and Charlie Jane Anders (“Cake Baby”), along with SF reprints by Leslie What (“The Mutable Borders of Love”) and Philip Raines and Harvey Welles (“Alice and Bob”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Kathleen Kayembe (“The Faerie Tree,” with an original cover illustration by Galen Dara) and Max Wynne (“A Wound Like an Unplowed Field”), and fantasy reprints by Rachel Swirsky (“The Day the Wizards Came”) and Jonathan L. Howard (“The Commission of the Philosophical Alembic”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, a feature interview, and our book and media review columns.

For our ebook readers, we also have our ebook-exclusive novella reprint—“Tracking Song” by Gene Wolfe—and an excerpt of Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

Stay Connected

The Editors

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The Editors

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes 96 stories (about 480,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain! For more information, visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe.

Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so. Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

• • • •

All caught up on Lightspeed? Good news! We also have lots of ebooks available from our sister-publications:

Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11 off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price).

Fantasy Magazine Ebooks & Bundles: We also have ebook back issues—and ebook back issue bundles—of Lightspeed’s (now dormant) sister-magazine, Fantasy. To check those out, just visit fantasy-magazine.com/store. You can buy each Fantasy bundle for $24.99, or you can buy the complete run of Fantasy Magazine— all 57 issues—for just $114.99 (that’s $10 off buying all the bundles individually, and more than $55 off the cover price!).

About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

Managing/Associate Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects

Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher

Robert Barton Bland

Reprint Editor

Rich Horton

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

John Joseph Adams

Assistant Editor

Laurel Amberdine

Editorial Assistant

Jude Griffin

Book Reviewers

Amal El-Mohtar

LaShawn Wanak

Christie Yant

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Dana Watson

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Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

The Editors

If you enjoy reading Lightspeed (and/or Nightmare), you might also enjoy these works edited by John Joseph Adams:

ANTHOLOGIES

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: The End is Nigh (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: The End is Now (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: The End Has Come (with Hugh Howey)

Armored

Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill)

Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 (with Karen Joy Fowler)

Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2017 (with Charles Yu) [forthcoming Oct. 2017]

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live

Cosmic Powers

Dead Man’s Hand

Epic: Legends Of Fantasy

Federations

The Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes

HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects

Lightspeed: Year One

The Living Dead

The Living Dead 2

Loosed Upon the World

The Mad Scientist’s Guide To World Domination

Operation Arcana

Other Worlds Than These

Oz Reimagined (with Douglas Cohen)

Press Start to Play (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Robot Uprisings (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Seeds of Change

Under the Moons of Mars

Wastelands

Wastelands 2

The Way Of The Wizard

What the #@&% Is That? (with Douglas Cohen)

NOVELS and COLLECTIONS

Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey

Shift by Hugh Howey

Dust by Hugh Howey

Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn

Sand by Hugh Howey

Retrograde by Peter Cawdron

Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer

The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp

Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.