TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 132, May 2021

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: May 2021

SCIENCE FICTION

Hypnopompic Circumstance
Gene Doucette

Carnivores
Rich Larson

There Are No Hot Topics on Whukai
Andrea Kriz

Saudade
Nelson Rolon

FANTASY

An Invitation to a Burning
Kat Howard

The Palace in the Moonlight
Howard Andrew Jones

Dead Men in Central City
Carrie Vaughn

Bones in It
Kristina Ten

EXCERPTS

The Blacktongue Thief
Christopher Buehlman

NONFICTION

Book Review: We Are Satellites, by Sarah Pinsker
LaShawn M. Wanak

Book Review: Hold Fast Through the Fire, by K.B. Wagers
Chris Kluwe

Book Review: Black Sci-Fi Short Stories, with editorial support from Tia Ross
Arley Sorg

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Gene Doucette

Howard Andrew Jones

Andrea Kriz

Kristina Ten

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2021 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by James Thew / Adobe Stock

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: May 2021

John Joseph Adams | 193 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 132nd issue!

This month we kick off the SF shorts with an alien visitor who’s not like the other ETs. In fact, Gene Doucette’s new story “Hypnopompic Circumstance” will have you rethinking the stories you’ve heard about UFOs, alien abduction—and maybe your life. In our other original SF short, “There Are No Hot Topics on Whukai,” Andrea Kriz brings us a story about pop culture, social media, and the pain of colonialism in the far future. We also have some great reprints from Rich Larson (“Carnivores”) and Nelson Rolon (“Saudade”).

Our original fantasy includes the story of Chicago’s most dangerous day spa—“Bones in It,” by Kristina Ten—and a tale of sand and magic in Howard Andrew Jones’ “The Palace in the Moonlight.” Our fantasy reprints are by Kat Howard (“An Invitation to a Burning”) and Carrie Vaughn (“Dead Men in Central City”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with book reviews from our terrific review team. Our ebook readers will also enjoy an excerpt from The Blacktongue Thief, by Christopher Buehlman.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Joseph Adams is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and is the bestselling editor of more than thirty anthologies, including Wastelands and The Living Dead. Recent books include A People’s Future of the United States, Wastelands: The New Apocalypse, and the three volumes of The Dystopia Triptych. 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 twelve times) and an eight-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed and is the publisher of its sister-magazines, Fantasy and Nightmare. For five years, he ran the John Joseph Adams Books novel imprint for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Find him online at johnjosephadams.com and @johnjosephadams.

Hypnopompic Circumstance

Gene Doucette | 9108 words

Thomas’s first encounter with the alien was terrifying.

It happened in his bedroom. Thom was attempting to get to sleep at the time, after a long Friday night that had extended into early Saturday morning. Alcohol was involved, and a little pot, but nothing natively hallucinogenic, not unless someone slipped him something. Nothing that could explain the appearance of someone who wasn’t supposed to be there.

Thom was still in his clothes—undressing being too much work—with the bass beat of the last song he heard running a tight circuit around his skull. It refused to leave because Thomas didn’t know the rest of the song. He decided it would either go away with sleep, or it would be in his head forever. There were no other options. Likewise, for the taste of vodka and tonic with a splash of bile that convinced him it was time to stop drinking and time to start finding a way home. It would either be gone in the morning, or it would be with him for the rest of his life.

The connective tissue between his thoughts began to fray. He was going over one particular conversation with Carl about patently dishonest distressed property reselling tactics which Carl swore by, and then another conversation intervened in which Ned declared Tina a bitch, and then Tina was there screaming about an open house and the bass beat on what the hell is the name of that song kicked in again and it all made sense to Thomas that the song lied about the bathtub, Tina, and Carl doesn’t care about the siding so let’s all here comes the chorus and SOMEONE WAS IN THE ROOM.

Thomas was lying on his back. Not two minutes earlier, his body was fully capable of moving about the apartment, but now it wasn’t at all up to the task. He could open his eyes—which he did, as soon as he sensed he wasn’t alone—but that was all. He was completely paralyzed.

The alien was super tall. Six foot five, at least. It was thin and all angles, like a piece of ambulatory scaffolding, with a long cloak and a hood. It had a head shaped like an upside-down teardrop, and eyes that took up half of its face.

Thomas couldn’t make out anything else about the alien, or turn his head to see the rest of the room. (Was this the only alien there? It could be a whole team.) It was too dark, and Thom couldn’t move to reach the light, the floor, or the baseball bat in the corner. The pillow under his head might do as a weapon, perhaps, but again he couldn’t move. He couldn’t even scream out loud.

The alien reached out with a gray-skinned hand that had only three fingers and a thumb—the fingers were unaccountably long and had an extra knuckle—to touch the side of Thomas’s face.

Thomas gave screaming another try. It still didn’t work, but his heart, which was now beating four times faster than the bass beat still stuck in his head, might have been audible by then.

And then, thankfully, Thom passed out.

• • • •

Thomas woke up still in his own bed Saturday morning, still in his clothes. His room looked just like it had when he passed out the night before. Everything seemed normal, so normal that he didn’t even remember the alien until he got out of bed, and then only after a lengthy internal conversation:

Oh good, I can move.

Wait, why was I worried about this?

Was there a chance I wouldn’t be able to move?

Yes, I remember not being able to move.

When was that?

. . .

When the ALIEN WAS IN THE BEDROOM.

In the frantic moments that followed, Thomas removed all of his clothes and checked every body part he could get in front of the bathroom mirror for evidence of obvious physical trauma or general malfeasance. He came away from this review deciding that he needed to get back into the gym, but otherwise satisfied that the alien hadn’t obviously poked or probed him.

The next thing he did was verify that it was indeed Saturday, and also that it was the correct Saturday. He wasn’t missing any time, not counting the time he slept. If he’d been abducted (of course he hadn’t been abducted) it was a very brief abduction.

Satisfied and already naked, he decided to bathe.

By the time Thomas was showered and shaved, dressed and holding a cup of coffee, he’d convinced himself that the thing which seemed utterly and totally true—that there was an alien in his bedroom—had actually been conjured by his imagination. Yes, it was correct that he’d ingested no hallucinogens (knowingly) and yes, nothing like this had ever happened to him before. Also yes, in the past his senses had always proven to be dependable in arraigning the external world and his mind had always been good about evaluating what the senses reported in a way that conformed with basic reality. Even when he was drunk and/or stoned. There was no reason to think that had changed.

Ergo, it never happened.

That was the only reasonable conclusion. It never happened, so he could go on with his day, and his life, without worrying that a six-foot-five gray-skinned bulbous-headed alien with three fingers and extra knuckles had a key to his apartment and was maybe, possibly, doing things to him while he slept.

It was ridiculous to think otherwise.

• • • •

Then it happened again. Sort of.

Thomas was in the business of selling real estate, which was why he had to work on a Saturday. It was also why he’d spent all of Friday night drinking with Carl, Ned, Indira, Louis, Ciera, and Doug: because he didn’t like selling real estate.

He also wasn’t great at it. An argument could be made that Thomas might enjoy it if he was better at it, but he was pretty sure it only worked the other way around, i.e., he would only be good at it if he liked it.

There was a third argument, which was that it was possible to be good at selling real estate while also hating real estate, provided one sufficiently liked making money. This was Carl’s approach, and it was great insofar as it justified all sorts of dishonest strategies because they accomplished the goal of making money.

The property he was trying to sell on Saturday was a vacation home belonging to a neurologist named Alek. It was a gorgeous place overlooking a lake, practically designed to make anyone who couldn’t afford it hate their own lives. It was so nice that when/if it sold, Thomas’s commission would be sufficient to live off of without selling another property for about eight months.

This only made him hate it more.

(That he even had the listing was something of a miracle. Alek, for whatever reason, seemed to like Thomas and think him competent at his job, which he really wasn’t.)

It was a lousy way to spend a Saturday. About twenty-five people showed up for the open house, and the two or three who could afford it—if their default public persona is rude and dismissive, they can afford it—didn’t look truly interested. Thom had to hold a fake smile and an engaging tone for about two hours longer than any man should have been expected to, while despising the fact that he was there at all, and when it was done he had nothing to show for it other than a sore face from all the smiling.

He skipped the bar in favor of a quick sandwich, and an early bed, choosing end the bad day as soon as possible over try drinking until the day improves.

No alien showed up as he drifted off. This would have been cause for celebration—it had indeed been a hallucination, perhaps triggered by too much of something—but he was asleep and couldn’t celebrate. Nor could he do so the following morning because that was when the alien did appear.

Thomas had been in that half-awake state where the dream he was having—he didn’t solidly recall what it had been about, but he did remember being somewhere public and missing his pants—when he got that same weird sensation that there was someone else in the room.

When he opened his eyes, he saw he was facing the left side of his bed. Generally, the view of that part of the room consisted of a nightstand with a book he’d been meaning to get back to, a lamp, an alarm clock, a chair being used to hold clothing, and a window. On this morning, all the other stuff was there, but now an alien was sitting in the chair.

Thomas tried screaming, but as before he couldn’t seem to move.

“Do you like your life?” the alien asked. It had a tiny mouth at the bottom of that bulbous face that seemed too small to produce real sound. “I’m just curious. You don’t seem happy.”

Thom slammed his eyes shut.

Not real, not real, it’s not real, he thought. Then he felt something touch his cheek.

He screamed again—this time out loud—and sat up in bed, recoiling from the contact.

There was nobody in the room. The clothes on the chair were right where they were supposed to be, and the alien was exactly as nonexistent as it was supposed to be.

Once Thomas got his heart to stop pounding, he lay back down on the pillow, closed his eyes most of the way, and looked at that side of the room again. The chair was holding his dark blue suit. It was possible that the suit plus the shadows from the curtain over the window conspired to look like an alien, especially since Thomas was already predisposed to look for one in his bedroom.

Yes, he decided, that’s all it is. Then he stopped putting his clothes on the chair.

• • • •

Only, it kept happening. A couple of times a week, either just before he fell asleep or just before he woke up, the alien would appear, talk to him for a few seconds or not, and then disappear back into the dark recesses of Thomas’s evidently overtaxed imagination.

Thom tried not sleeping, but that didn’t end up being a viable option. He borrowed some sleeping pills from Ciera—he claimed not being able to move Alek’s property was keeping him up nights—to see if sleeping too much worked better than not sleeping enough, but it didn’t.

Weirdly, he was starting to get used to it. Sure, he was always paralyzed and the alien was innately disturbing, but it hadn’t done anything to him. It mostly just sat there. It was still terrifying, but no longer I am falling to my death terrifying. More like, I was nearly hit by a car: a sudden shock, and then relief at still being alive.

And the alien asked the strangest questions.

“How was your day?”

“Do you enjoy this weather?”

“What do you want to do with your life? Is it this? Or something else?”

“Do you have a favorite color? Does everyone? Mine is ultraviolet.”

“Why do you care so much about what other people think of you?”

“You seem anxious. Do you like what you do for work?”

One morning, he didn’t ask any questions at all. He just said, “I’m being rude. My name is Gerald.” Then he left.

What was a little interesting was that as the questions continued (“Does everyone work all their lives like this?” “Are you dating someone?”) Thomas began asking himself the same questions. Because some of what Gerald wanted to know was sort of dumb—Thomas couldn’t speak for everyone, but he didn’t personally have a favorite color—but for most questions, even if Thomas had the power to respond he didn’t know what he’d say.

Despite being used to Gerald, then, Thomas still wasn’t getting a lot of sleep. Not because Gerald was a manifested figment of Thom’s imagination, given form in order to torture him. It was that the nature of the torture was in forcing Thomas into questioning everything he was doing with his life.

One day—finally—Thomas confided in someone about the alien. This was less a decision on Thomas’s part and more of a thing being blurted out of his mouth without him being a party to it. Certainly, his choice of confidantes was poor: his client, Alek. Probably, the last thing the man wanted to know was that his realtor was actively hallucinating.

He and Thom were in the middle of a strategy meeting at Alek’s primary residence in the city, a condo in a style that everyone at the office called upscale drug lord. Alek had just finished saying something requiring a response from Thomas, but Thomas hadn’t registered this in any way. He’d drifted back to the prior evening, when the alien asked why Thomas drank so much.

“Thom?” Alek said. “You there?”

“Yes, sorry. Sorry. What were you saying?”

Alek shook his head and headed to the coffee maker. They were in his kitchen for this meeting.

“You seem distracted, if you don’t mind my saying,” Alek said. He handed Thom a cup of black coffee. “Everything all right at home?”

“Yes, everything’s . . . neurologist, right?”

“That’s what my degree says, sure,” Alek said. “Are you looking for one?”

“And that’s, nerves. Neural pathways. The brain.”

Alek smiled. “Thom, I was joking. If you have a medical problem, you should really talk to your own doctor.”

“Yeah, I don’t know what I have.”

“All right.” Alek checked his watch, and then pulled up a stool. “What are the symptoms?”

“Aliens,” Thom said.

It just fell out of his mouth. Later, he’d come to understand how desperately he needed to talk to someone about this but in the moment, he was mostly just horrified.

“I mean, an alien,” he clarified. “It keeps showing up in my bedroom. I know it isn’t real, but knowing that doesn’t stop it from showing up. I don’t know what to do, but . . . I thought maybe there might be something wrong with my head.”

To his immense credit, Alek neither laughed nor fired Thomas on the spot.

“Have you tried asking the alien what it wants?” he asked.

“I can’t. When he shows up I can’t move at all, except my eyes.”

“I see,” Alek said. “Well, I’m the wrong kind of head doctor for that.”

“I know, I know. But I thought maybe you’d encountered something like this before.”

“Not personally.”

Alek pondered over his coffee cup for a few seconds, while Thomas enumerated the many reasons talking about this to a client was a bad idea.

“Alien, huh,” Alek said. “Specifically, an alien.”

“I don’t know what else to call it.”

“All right look, here’s some free advice. Go online and check out hypnopompic hallucinations. Or hypnogogic. One’s when you’re falling asleep and one’s when you’re waking up; I forget which is which.”

“Hallucinations.”

“Yeah, man, it’s either that or a real space alien is visiting you. If that’s what you think, you’re definitely talking to the wrong person. It’s just your body waking up in the wrong order and your brain not knowing it’s awake at all. With sleep paralysis thrown in, your head can end up in all kinds of unusual places.”

Thom decided not to ask what sleep paralysis was. Alek assumed he knew, and he was already feeling self-conscious about having brought this up.

“The point is,” Alek said, “not only is it not real, it’s not all that unusual. You woke up halfway, freaked out because you couldn’t move, and your imagination filled in an alien. If you were more of a religious type you would’ve seen an angel or a devil instead. A few hundred years back it probably would have been a succubus. So, relax.”

“Wow,” Thomas said, “that’s a huge relief, thanks.”

“You’re welcome. But do me a favor and talk to a psychiatrist anyway.”

“I’ll find one.” Thomas laughed. “Probably just ask me the same questions the alien’s been asking.”

Alek was supposed to laugh at that. He didn’t, and Thomas felt awkward all over again.

“Yeah, hypnopompic hallucinations don’t usually talk. Is it . . . telling you to do stuff?”

“It usually just asks about my day.”

Alek stared at him for an uncomfortably long beat.

Now I’ve said too much, Thomas thought.

“Anyway,” Thom said. “You’re right, I’m sure it’s nothing.”

“Yeah of course,” Alek said. “But definitely speak to someone, man. I can get you some names. Until then, keep in mind it’s all in your head.”

• • • •

Tina reassigned Alek’s listing a week later—to Carl, of course. Thom considered asking Alek for an explanation, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to like any of the possible answers. It was true that Thomas hadn’t been able to sell the vacation house within the anticipated timeframe, but it was also true that Thom had confessed to visual and auditory hallucinations. The second thing was probably a bigger problem.

I’d have fired me too, he thought.

Over the course of that same week, Thom had looked up the definitions of hypnopompic hallucination, sleep paralysis, and auditory hallucination. The word schizophrenia came up a lot. He didn’t think he was schizophrenic, but that was probably not an easy thing to self-diagnose.

Meanwhile, Thom’s work was suffering. He began to worry that Alek hadn’t just asked for a new realtor; he’d told Tina about the alien. Other listings started to get pulled from under him, and drinks after work stopped being quite so common. In fact, they were rare enough that he began to wonder if they were just meeting at a different bar without him.

He would have straight-up asked one of them about it but since paranoia was one of the symptoms the internet said he should be on the lookout for, he actively overcompensated in the opposite direction.

He also didn’t speak to a psychiatrist. He did pick one, and even went so far as to plug the number into his phone, but he couldn’t bring himself to connect the call.

Meanwhile, Gerald the alien stubbornly refused to stop showing up, despite not existing. He continued to drop in two or three times a week, always with a new question or a variation of an old one. It was like a recurring nightmare, where Thomas was trapped in the middle of a personality survey with no way to respond. Only, since he wasn’t asleep, it couldn’t be a nightmare.

• • • •

One morning, Gerald asked if Thom was having trouble at work.

“I ask because you’re not sleeping well,” the alien noted.

Gerald lacked the basic awareness necessary to work out that he was the problem, and not the rest of Thomas’s life. Thom didn’t have a great life before the alien visitations began, but it wasn’t terrible. And yes, at the time the question was posed he was having trouble at work. Tina had just suggested he take some time off, which wasn’t really a thing in a commission-based industry and she knew it. He told her he was fine, maybe a little too loudly, because Doug and Louis were in her office barely a second later, to calmly suggest he call it a day.

So he did. He left. He did not slam the door on his way out; he just closed it more forcefully than he meant to. It didn’t break or anything. Then he went to the bar, alone, and drank until the sun went down, and he went to bed, and woke up to Gerald the chatty alien wanting to know how Thom’s job was going and if he was getting enough rest.

YOU AREN’T REAL, Thom screamed. GO AWAY BECAUSE YOU AREN’T REAL AND I CAN’T TAKE THIS ANYMORE.

He couldn’t actually scream it; he thought it loudly.

Amazingly, Gerald acted like it had been spoken aloud. He . . . recoiled. He had a nearly expressionless face, and yet he managed to look wounded.

And then he was gone, and Thomas could move.

Thom spent the entire day—a day in which he hosted an open house for a distressed property where the most valuable thing in the place was the donuts he brought—wondering if this had done the trick, and he’d finally banished the alien from his unconscious mind.

He had not. Gerald returned that night.

Thom greatly preferred the morning visitations to the evening ones. Nighttime appearances were more frightening for some reason, even if Gerald didn’t really look much different regardless of the time. The alien seemed to be aware of this, as he mostly showed up in the morning. He also didn’t usually drop in back-to-back.

On this night, Gerald did something new. Rather than ask probing questions, he picked up the long-neglected book from Thom’s nightstand, flipped past the page Thomas had left off, and began reading.

Thomas fell asleep after about five sentences.

The following morning, as soon as he was awake Thomas flipped open the book to the bookmarked page. It was not where Thomas had left off; the bookmark was now three-quarters of the way through. Nothing on the page looked like anything Thomas had previously read. But he did find what Gerald had read out loud. All five sentences. And he’d read it word-for-word.

He’s real, Thom realized. And I know how to talk to him now.

But he still couldn’t, because Gerald didn’t reappear that night, or the next night, or the night after that.

And then a week passed, and Thomas decided he must have finally done it.

He’d gotten rid of his alien.

This didn’t positively impact his overall mood; if anything, it made his general demeanor worse.

Instead of worrying that Gerald might show, he spent his nights awake and going over the alien’s questions, again and again.

Thomas was not happy. He did not like his job. He didn’t like his friends, he hadn’t been in a serious relationship for three years, and he was doing nothing with his life.

What he was instead, was angry all the time.

Thomas didn’t have anyone he could talk to about any of it. But he used to. He could talk to Gerald, if only Gerald would come back again.

After another week passed, Thomas took to leaving apologetic notes for Gerald on the bedside table, and talking to his ceiling.

“I’m sorry if I offended you,” he said. “Please come back.”

But every night, Thom fell asleep alone and every morning, woke up alone.

• • • •

The month that followed was a bad one for Thomas.

It began okay. His work friends seemed to have concluded that Thom was back to normal, so he was getting invited to go out again, which was . . . okay. It didn’t bring him much joy, and the longer he spent with them the more he realized they weren’t friends at all; they were just coworkers. The only thing they all had in common was selling property for people they loudly despised to people they loudly despised.

He begrudged them for the word normal, too. He didn’t know what they thought his personal normal was, but didn’t think he’d behaved any different outwardly, before, during, or after Gerald came into his life. He had maybe been a little short with a couple of them, but he wasn’t getting a lot of sleep at the time; real friends would understand that.

Inwardly? If normal was to be interpreted as before an extraterrestrial proved its existence to him, Thomas didn’t think he’d ever get back to that.

Still, he tried going through the motions of his prior existence. But his ability to sell property to or for anybody had, if anything, gotten worse. Whereas when Gerald was around, Thomas zombie-talked his way through his appointments—which was bad enough—now that the alien was gone Thomas had begun self-sabotaging.

He couldn’t help himself. When showing a property, instead of skipping past the flaws—and he always knew where the flaws were in his listings—he kept bringing prospective buyers right to them.

Whatever hope Thomas had that he’d be getting over this eventually and going back to living his life—and again, to normal—fell apart the night after Alek’s vacation home finally sold.

It took Carl nearly as long to sell it as it took Thomas to not sell it, because the neurosurgeon was asking for too much and seemed content to wait until someone willing to pay too much came along. To that end, Carl was actually a better match, because what he did—and what Thomas was unwilling to do—was lie, outrageously, about the neighbors. This was his favorite trick. Taking Carl at his word, nearly every property in town was just around the corner from the family of a famous actor, sports figure, or pop singer.

The occasion of the sale called for a trip to the bar. Everyone got loud drunk. And Carl got to be Carl.

“To Thomas,” he said, some untold number of drinks into the evening, “for sucking so bad.”

Carl laughed. Nobody else did, not until Thom smiled, albeit thinly, to let them know it was okay.

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding,” Carl said. “Look, I feel bad. Tell you what, I’ll split the commission. You can have . . .” He acted like he was doing the math. “Five percent. What do you say?”

Thomas was pretty sure Tina had told Carl to split the commission already, and this was a performance. That just made it more grating.

“It’s okay,” Thomas said. “I don’t want your five percent.”

“Aw come on,” Carl said.

“I think that’s really nice,” Ciera said.

Doug, who only six weeks earlier was partly responsible for escorting Thomas from Tina’s office, clapped him on the shoulders and said, “Yeah, that’s really generous.”

Thom looked into the faces of the people around him and saw nothing he liked.

“No thanks,” he said, standing, “I’m not interested in your pity.”

He turned to walk away from the table when he heard Carl say, “Why don’t you ask the alien?”

Thomas lost his temper then.

Really lost it.

He couldn’t say how he ended up on the other side of the table, only that he did, and once he was there he had Carl’s collar in one hand while he was punching Carl in the face with the other hand.

He was told later—by the police officer in charge of escorting him from the bar to a jail cell—that it took four people to pull him off of Carl.

He had no memory of this.

Thomas was released on his own recognizance the next morning, once he proved sober and lucid. Carl—who got a nice ride from the bar to the hospital—didn’t press charges, but that was the only positive to come out of it.

Two days later, Tina notified Thomas that he would no longer be affiliated with her real estate firm, and that was that. He was effectively out of a job.

Another five days passed, in which Thomas did nothing but sit in his apartment, ice his swollen fist, and sleep. He talked to Gerald quite a lot during that time, but got no response.

On day six, he agreed to go into the office the following morning to fill out paperwork and clear his desk. This would no doubt be conducted in front of armed security or something. Which was stupid: Thomas wasn’t a threat. Carl was just an asshole. He thought everyone could agree to that. Even Carl.

Lying in bed that night, staring at the ceiling and waiting for sleep and/or Gerald to arrive, Thom wondered what he was going to do with his life now that he’d burned down what little he had so far.

What do you want to do with your life? Is this it?

Then he wondered if he wanted to live at all.

• • • •

When he opened his eyes the next morning he couldn’t move, which was fantastic news.

Gerald was there again, standing beside the bed, all six feet and five inches of him looming over Thomas.

Thomas tried to think-scream an apology, but he didn’t have a chance.

“Don’t go to the office today,” Gerald said.

Then he was gone, and Thomas could move again.

“Why not?” he asked the ceiling. “Why not, Gerald? Come back here and tell me why not!”

He stumbled out of bed and for some reason decided to search the house, as if after all this time the alien hadn’t been appearing out of nothing at all; he was just hiding in the linen closet.

Of course Gerald wasn’t in the linen closet or any of the other closets, or the shower, under the bed, or behind the couch. Thom looked anyway, not yet prepared to admit that his alien friend reappeared specifically and only to say something cryptic before vanishing.

Defeated, Thomas cycled through a shower and a shave, Gerald’s words echoing in his head like that bass beat from the first night.

Don’t go to the office today.

He’d already decided what clothes to wear while being formally escorted from the premises. Something casual but not too casual. An I am cool with not being here anymore look that said he was a guy on his way up, rather than who he was, which was someone who’d just as soon set his real estate license on fire.

He knew they were talking about him and wanted them to understand that he didn’t care.

Why do you care so much about what other people think of you?

Thomas decided he cared that they were left with the impression that he didn’t care. He had no reason to; he’d never be working with any of them again, never see any of them again if he had his way. And the odds were pretty good that most of them wouldn’t even be in the office, not unless they decided, collectively, to attend the formal drumming-out.

He could wear the khakis, loafers, and button-down shirt, act like he was heading to his yacht after this unsavory business was resolved, and it would make no difference. He could show up in a bathrobe, blue jeans, and sandals and it would also make no difference.

In that context, the idea of simply not showing up at all didn’t come off as unreasonable.

I’m sorry, something came up, he could say. Something in my important and busy life that took precedence over returning to the office for such trifles. Maybe we can do this next week?

Do you like what you do?

It was strange, but Gerald’s suggestion that he not go into the office on this day had somehow given Thomas a sense of agency over his life—however temporary—that he didn’t have before. He was always where other people told him to be, when they told him to be there, whether it was Tina at the office, his clients, or the team heading to the bar. Stupidly, this one potential rebellious act—of not going in when he said he would—felt like an act of liberation.

Liberation was a low hurdle. Especially when the only reason he was thinking about it at all was because someone else told him to stay home. Sure, that someone else was a space alien who may actually be evidence of a psychotic break, but he was still doing something someone else told him to do.

Unfortunately, going into the office was a binary problem. Tina told him to go, and Gerald told him not to, and there was no third option. He couldn’t defy both of them so his only real agency was deciding which one to ignore.

His act of performative defiance would have to take place at some other time.

The trip down this deterministic rabbit hole took up half of Thomas’s morning somehow, and soon it was well past time for him to have left in order to make it to the office as scheduled, especially if he intended to exit the apartment in clothing. In this way, he managed to make a decision by failing to make any decisions.

Close enough, he thought. He put on his bathrobe, turned on the living room television, and went about finding something to eat.

An hour later, he decided it would be best if he let Tina know that due to a difficult-to-describe decision-point paralysis he would not be leaving the apartment today. (He would find a better way to phrase that.) So, he called the office.

It went straight to voicemail, directing him to press zero to hear the directory listing the other available realtors, given Tina’s current unavailability. He pressed zero and listened to all the names, noting as he did so that his name was no longer an option.

He tried Ciera next and got the same message about pressing zero. Same with Indira, and Doug, Louis and Ned. Not even Carl was picking up.

Thomas’s paranoia spoke up to suggest that they were all perhaps avoiding him, but that was ridiculous; he was expected there a half an hour ago. If anything, they should have been eager to hear from him.

That was when he noticed the chyron on the bottom of the television screen. He’d been watching an episode of a serialized fantasy series about which he knew nothing (it had magic and vampires and looked sort of cool) but now there was a bulletin at the bottom, which read, DOWNTOWN EXPLOSION ROCKS CITY. A few seconds later, a local news anchor was apologizing for interrupting the regular programming, but the “possible gas main eruption” that destroyed two blocks of businesses downtown was too important to wait for the News at Noon.

The anchor read off the location, while at the same time a camera shot from a drone over the city confirmed the same thing visually: the real estate office was right in the middle of the blast.

• • • •

The police were at Thomas’s door a week later.

He’d spent most of that week in his bathrobe, with the clothes he would have died in still draped on the chair in his bedroom. Both of the times Thom left the house was for food, and he only did so after giving Gerald plenty of opportunity to notify him not to, if he were so inclined.

He was not. Once again, the alien didn’t show, which was terrible. Thomas would have been in the office when the gas main exploded were it not for Gerald, and now Thom was afraid to do anything at all. His new way of taking charge of his own life was to say no when the world said you should really leave the apartment.

The local news’s ongoing forensics of the downtown explosion was utterly engrossing. The death count was up to forty-nine, with over two hundred injuries. Tina was one of the forty-nine and so was Doug, and Louis, and Ciera. Indira wasn’t, nor Ned or Carl. So far. They were still adding to the list.

Thomas wasn’t being counted among the dead either. Nobody had called or come by for a wellness check and it wasn’t a secret that he was supposed to be there at around the time the explosion happened, and he hadn’t told anyone that he was still alive, but they hadn’t declared him dead anyway.

This led to Thomas being unduly preoccupied with the mechanism involved in developing an accurate headcount. The real estate office was at the epicenter of the explosion so there were no bodies to recover, which probably meant the only way to get included among the dead was to have someone report you missing. Self-evidently, there was nobody in Thomas’s life who could do that. (Aside from Gerald, who they probably wouldn’t believe.) This meant, perversely, that if Thomas was in the office at that time, he still wouldn’t be counted among the dead.

For about an hour, Thomas took seriously the notion that he had gone down there and was currently dead.

He resolved this by ordering a pizza.

Because of his new asceticism, when the police arrived at the door they didn’t get to meet the young, successful, definitely-going-places version of Thomas he had intended to convey by wearing the clothes draped on the chair. They got to meet someone who hadn’t shaved in seven days or showered in three, and hadn’t held a proper conversation with another human being in about two weeks.

It was not a good first impression.

The lead detective introduced himself, asked if Thomas was indeed Thomas, and then asked if he and the two uniformed officers waiting in the hall could all please come inside to have a conversation.

“I wasn’t expecting anyone,” Thomas said, as if this wasn’t obvious. Aside from the facial hair and—presumably, although he couldn’t smell it himself—three days of funk, he was in a bathrobe and boxers, with no shirt.

“We’re not looking for a dinner party,” the detective said. “We just need to ask you a few questions.”

His name was Naughton. He had a disarming smile.

“Sure, come on in,” Thom said.

Naughton took a look at the couch, and the pizza boxes on the floor next to the couch, and opted for the folding chair in the corner instead. (The couch was the only thing Thom had in the living room to sit upon. The folding chair was there if he ever had more than two people over, which had not yet happened.)

“Is this about the explosion?” Thom asked, sitting in his usual spot on the couch. He realized the television was still on, so he clicked it off with the remote, to be polite.

“It is, yes,” Naughton said. “I understand you were supposed to be downtown that day. Is that right?”

“I was, but I decided not to go. Lucky me, right?”

“Very lucky. Very lucky. You were meeting with Mrs. Wainscot?”

“Tina, yeah. I was clearing out. But, you know, I figured I could do that another day.”

“You changed your mind.”

“Yes.”

“Right. Okay.” He flipped to another page in his notes. Naughton was working off a small pad of paper. It seemed inefficient, but Thomas didn’t think it was his place to say so.

“You were also involved in an incident about a week earlier, is that right? A Mr. Fellowes was hospitalized? Carl Fellowes?”

“That was . . . yes. Yes, that’s true, but what does that have to do with the explosion? Did Carl say something?”

Naughton didn’t answer that.

“According to the report, you assaulted Mr. Fellowes, which is what led to Mrs. Wainscot’s decision to sever, is that essentially correct?”

“He wasn’t in the hospital,” Thomas said. “Carl. He wasn’t in the hospital. They checked him out and he went home. Didn’t stay overnight.”

“Must’ve really pissed you off,” the detective said, smiling.

“Sure, I guess.”

He closed his notepad.

“Look, Thom—can I call you Thom?”

“Sure.”

“Thom, this is just a loose end, do you understand?”

“Not really, no.”

“A loose end. You punch your friend Carl in the face—”

“Carl isn’t my friend.”

“All right. You punch your business associate Carl in the face because he made you angry. You lose your job. Boss asks you to come in and clear out your desk. You don’t go in, and boom. The whole block goes up. You see where I’m going?”

“Not at all.”

He grumbled and looked at his notes again.

“Why don’t you tell me why you weren’t there that day?” he asked.

“I told you, I decided not to go.”

“But why did you decide not to go? I mean, that’s pretty lucky, right? A little more luck than makes sense from where I’m sitting.”

It’d been a long time since Thom had interacted with another human being. It wasn’t as fun as he remembered.

“It was an accident,” Thom said.

“You weren’t there by accident?”

“The gas main. What does it matter why I wasn’t there if it was an accident?”

Naughton looked at one of the uniformed cops with a comically exaggerated what is he talking about? expression. The cop shrugged.

Thom didn’t know where the other cop went.

Is my apartment being searched right now? he wondered.

“Who told you it was an accident?” Naughton asked.

Thom pointed at the television. “Everyone,” he said. “That’s what they’re saying on the news.”

“Sure, they’re saying that now. The thing about a blast this big, it’s really hard to pinpoint whether something happened just because, or if someone meant for it to happen.”

“Like terrorists?”

“Sure, like terrorists. Except they like to brag about this kinda thing and we haven’t heard anybody doing that. Look, Thom, just tell me what made you decide not to go in that day, I’ll write it down in my notebook here, and we’ll be on our way. You can go back to . . . whatever you’ve got going on here.”

“It was a friend, that’s all. A friend talked me out of it.”

“A friend like Carl?”

“Carl’s not a friend of mine,” Thomas said, maybe too loudly. “I thought I told you that.”

“Whoa, whoa, take it down. Okay, a real friend, then. Not the kind of friend you send to the hospital. A different kind. What’s this friend’s name?”

“Gerald.”

“Excellent. Last name?”

“I don’t think he has one.”

“No last name?”

“If he has a last name, I don’t know it.”

“Sure. But we’re gonna have to talk to Gerald,” Naughton said. “So, help us out. You got an address? A phone number?”

“I, ah, I don’t think that will be possible. I don’t know when he’ll be back, and he only talks to me.”

“Right. Right. Here’s the thing, Thom . . .” He rubbed his face and looked at the ceiling, like a guy in a play who’d forgotten his lines. “Let’s say it wasn’t a gas main explosion. No, that’s not right. Let’s say something else happened first, and this thing that happened first triggered the gas main explosion. Let’s call this thing that happened first a bomb.”

“There was a bomb?”

“I’m not saying there was. I’m saying, what if? What if there was a bomb, and that bomb happened to be directly under the real estate office where you were supposed to be that morning. Now it’s possible that whoever put the bomb there didn’t even know they were putting it next to the gas pipeline cutoff, and that detonating something right there would ignite two city blocks. I mean, oops, right?”

“But that’s not what happened,” Thom said. “On the news, they were talking about a utilities maintenance breakdown.”

“Sure. Sure. Just use your imagination for a sec. So now we have a problem, don’t we?”

“I’m not following.”

“The problem is your friend Gerald knew about the bomb before it went off, and since nobody else did—cos it hadn’t gone off yet—that means your friend Gerald just might have had something to do with the bomb being there in the first place.”

“But, he didn’t,” Thom said. “He wouldn’t have. And . . . and there wasn’t a bomb.”

“Then how did he know?”

“I’m not sure, but he could . . . anything could be possible with him, because he’s . . .”

He’s an alien, Thom thought. He can see the future.

“He’s what, Thom?”

Thomas didn’t know how to finish his sentence with anything other than the truth, so he didn’t.

“Is he an alien, Thomas?” Naughton asked.

The police can read my mind too, he thought. Oh no.

“What did you say?” Thom asked.

“It’s just something we heard from a couple of people. Go ahead, you can tell me. Is your friend Gerald an alien?”

“It’s . . . it’s not like that. You probably think I’m . . . I probably sound crazy, but he proved it to me.”

“By telling you not to go into the office?”

“No. Yes, but . . . he read from the book. He read from the book on my nightstand. Do you understand?”

“Sure, Thomas. I understand.”

• • • •

Detective Naughton took him into custody then, but he didn’t go to jail. He’d already been in the jail once, overnight, after he punched Carl, and didn’t like it very much. He was sort of relieved when they brought him to a psychiatric hospital instead.

“For observation,” was what he was told. This sounded like something optional, but it wasn’t; he wouldn’t be allowed to leave.

They did give him his own room, which was okay. It came with a cot, a toilet, plush walls, and paper clothing for him to wear around. When he asked what the difference was between being under arrest and being held for observation—like, could he get a lawyer, and would they let him out once they realized there was no bomb—he couldn’t get a clear answer. Lots of shrugs and don’t worry about it and we’ll talk more about that soon.

Pinning his release on the absence of a bomb was a little treacherous, only because there might well have been one. He didn’t put it there, but he couldn’t speak for Gerald. Not that this made any sense at all. Why would a space alien commit an act of terrorism?

Shortly after his arrival, Thom had the first of many long conversations with a Dr. Blatt. Blatt seemed a lot more interested in Gerald than in the lack of a bomb.

“I didn’t think he was real either at first,” Thom explained. He thought at least acknowledging that this sounded improbable—that Dr. Blatt and Detective Naughton were likely coming from a place of total disbelief, and that this was reasonable—was a good way to start. “I was even going to speak to a psychiatrist about it. But then Gerald proved he was real, so I didn’t think I needed to.”

He went on to list the ways the alien had proven himself. Blatt wrote down everything, but didn’t look all that impressed.

“I’m particularly interested in the day he told you not to go into work,” Blatt said. “Was this the first time he’d given you a set of instructions?”

“It was, yes. Before that, we just talked. Well, he talked. I listened to what he said and thought about what the questions meant until I knew why he asked them.”

“I see. He didn’t tell you to do . . . anything else?”

“No, he didn’t.”

Blatt nodded, and wrote that down.

“Now, these questions your friend Gerald asked,” he said “How did they make you feel?”

“Confused, I guess.”

“Confused and angry?”

“Yeah, a little,” Thom said. “But not at him.”

“Did you act on that anger?”

Thomas sighed. “Not in the way you’re thinking of.”

“What way is that?”

By setting off a bomb, he thought. “I didn’t hurt anyone.”

“But you did. You sent someone to the hospital.”

“That was for something Carl said about Gerald, not about something Gerald said.”

Thomas must have raised his voice when he said this because one of the burly orderlies in the room stepped forward. Blatt waved him off.

“And yet Gerald’s words made you angry,” Blatt said. “You’ve already said so.”

Thomas realized that Blatt had yet to refer to Gerald as an alien, and wondered why that was. Surely this was an important detail.

“Yes,” Thom said.

“Why is that? Do his words still make you angry?”

“Yes, but at myself. And maybe the world.”

“Ah,” Blatt said. He wrote that down like it was important.

“What I mean is . . . I can’t remember the last time I was happy. I got the job I was supposed to get to earn the income I was told I needed to have. It paid for the apartment I should have wanted and the car I ought to have enjoyed and I didn’t really want any of it. I hate my life and I want to stop living it but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.”

“You have suicidal thoughts?”

“No . . . no, you’re not listening. I didn’t want to live this life. Look, it’s like . . . like I’ve been sold something I don’t want. Like a bad timeshare deal, right? But I’ve sunk so much into it now, I don’t know how to get out. So yeah, I’ve been angry. Gerald’s questions got me there, sure. But I should have asked those questions myself and if not, someone else in my life should have. Like my supposed friends. Like Carl. Somebody should have said something. But to be honest with you, Dr. Blatt, I think they’re just as unhappy as I am. Or were, I guess.”

Blatt made a ton of notes, which delayed his response.

“You wanted a way out of your life,” Blatt said. “Is that fair? Start over again?”

“Yes. But I didn’t know what I wanted to replace it with. I still don’t. Everything I had was supposed to be enough, so I never looked into my other options.”

“What do you think Gerald’s role in all of this was?”

“I think . . . I think he wanted to understand. But the more he asked the less I understood.”

“Of course. So, at what point did you decide you wanted to blow it all up?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your life, I mean. Was it after the incident in the bar or before?”

“I didn’t say blow it all up. You said that.”

“Blow up the . . . bad timeshare deal of your life. Is that better?”

“No, it’s not. Don’t put down that I said blow up, I never said that.”

“No, of course not,” Blatt said. “Tell you what, let’s end here. We can pick this up again tomorrow.”

• • • •

Thom didn’t mind being locked up in the hospital all that much. The food was okay, and while the word antipsychotics was floated—by Blatt and by a couple of the nurses—unless it was in the food, nobody was drugging him. He was regularly followed around by large orderlies in case it looked like he wanted to hurt someone, but that was only likely if Carl showed up. Otherwise, he was fine.

The sessions with Blatt didn’t improve any. The doctor kept pushing Thom to admit to doing something he didn’t do, rather than discuss what he actually wanted to talk about, i.e., what he was going to do with the rest of his life.

Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be something conducted on the inside of a hospital, or in a prison. He told Blatt this, but the doctor didn’t want to hear about it.

After a couple of weeks (probably; it was hard to keep track) Thom started asking why he was still there. Naughton hadn’t returned to file charges of any kind, which probably meant they hadn’t found any evidence of an explosive. That being the case, they had no reason to continue to hold him.

“We only want what’s best for you,” was what Blatt said.

Another time, Thom asked Blatt what part of his story sounded crazy to the doctor: the alien, or everything he said about hating his life.

“We don’t use the word crazy around here,” Blatt said. Then he didn’t answer the question.

Thomas did figure out what he wanted, eventually. The problem was, he would need Gerald’s help, and his alien friend had stopped visiting. He still talked to Gerald every night before falling asleep. There were probably listening devices in the room, recording everything, but he didn’t care. Gerald was listening too. He was sure of it.

“I know what I want now,” he said, on the first night in which it was a true statement. “Please come back.”

He said it again the next night, and the next. In session with Blatt, the doctor tried to steer him into explaining what it was that he knew he wanted—they were definitely listening—but Thomas refused to say.

The fourth night, Gerald returned.

Thomas was paralyzed, as always. His gray-skinned alien friend loomed over him, taller somehow in the big, square, featureless hospital room, with nothing available to provide scale. He was in his black cloak and hood. His enormous eyes set in his bulbous head stared at Thomas, somehow kindly.

“How are you feeling?” Gerald asked.

I’m sorry I doubted you before, Thom thought. I didn’t understand.

“You know what you want now,” Gerald said. It wasn’t a question. Thomas wondered if the alien knew what he was going to say.

Yes. I want you to take me with you.

The alien nodded slowly.

“You’re sure?”

Is it possible?

“Yes.”

Thomas’s eyes teared up. He was so happy.

Gerald smiled with his tiny mouth, unrolled his too-long fingers, and held out his hand.

“All you have to do is take my hand and we’ll leave this place tonight.”

But I can’t, Thomas thought. I can’t move.

“You can if you try hard enough,” Gerald said.

Thomas tried very, very hard. His fingers twitched.

Is this a dream? he asked.

“Keep trying,” Gerald said.

It had to be a dream because he’d never once been able to move anything but his eyes as long as Gerald was in the room. As soon as he did move, the alien would disappear. Every time.

He raised his arm, and Gerald was still there.

“How am I doing this?” Thomas asked.

“The paralysis was never my doing, Thomas.”

Thomas interlocked his fingers with that of his friend’s. The skin was cool and smooth.

“Very good,” Gerald said. “Now, come with me.”

Thomas stood.

There was a dark void where the wall used to be. Gerald walked him to the edge of it.

“What’s on the other side?” Thom asked. “I can’t see anything.”

“You have to step through first,” Gerald said. “Are you ready?”

“I’m ready,” Thomas said.

Gerald squeezed his hand, Thomas closed his eyes, and the two walked toward the unknown together.

©2021 by Gene Doucette.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gene Doucette is the author of over twenty sci-fi/fantasy titles, including The Spaceship Next Door and The Frequency of Aliens, the Immortal series, the Tandemstar books, and The Apocalypse Seven (2021). Gene lives in Cambridge MA.

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

Carnivores

Rich Larson | 6387 words

Finch pried himself out of the autocab midway down Jasper Avenue, where Carnivor gastro-bistro, the city’s most exclusive new eatery, skulked between concrete high-rises. He’d read up on the restaurant’s architecture when he and Blake first started planning the heist, so he knew it was a collaboration between a Bolivian artist and a decaying engineering AI, and that the swooping ridges of the façade, together with its calcium-spike stalactites, were meant to evoke the maw of an animal. For everyone with neural implants synched up to fine dining augreality, the restaurant’s name was slashed into the air in bright red.

Finch thought it was a bit kitschy. Blake, his partner in crime, thought it was bleeding edge haute couture and required Finch order a new suit that was not bleeding ugly. The Armani jacket already felt unpleasantly tight around his bookcase shoulders and thick-ribbed chest—a problem Finch was well used to. Not many stores catered to Neanderthal hybrid proportions.

The autocab squawked for payment. Finch licked his massive thumb and stuck it against the reader, then held the taxi in place by its door frame while he checked his appearance in the window. He ran a hand over his slicked red hair and adjusted the Full Windsor noose around his neck, wondering if the tattoos clawing out from under his cuffs looked professional enough in cobalt blue or if he should have masked them completely.

Finch let the autocab skitter back into traffic. It didn’t matter how he looked. The darknet CV Blake had done up for him was a bullshit masterpiece, and Carnivor’s proprietor, if her hacked pornstream was any indication, had a Neanderthal fantasy not uncommon among professional women. Finch inhaled. The cold air smelled like exhaust and something almost as pungent that his nose, tuned to Blake-imposed veganism, took a moment to recognize as cooking meat.

He made his way through the dilating doors into a mirrored entryway, where he was stopped by a bouncer who seemed to be mostly composed of HGH-pumped muscle and hair gel.

“Slow up, Red.” He tapped the neural plug set into the shaved side of his head, making his starched Mohawk wobble slightly. “I don’t see you on the facebook. In this modern day and age, you need to make a reservation, you know? And at Carnivor, we backlog up to three months.”

“I’m not a guest,” Finch said, sizing him up on old instinct. Scarred knuckles, crooked nose, probably fancied himself a boxer. The nametag scrolling down his breast pocket read Vick. “I’m here to see Ms. Carrow.” He tapped his own plug, down behind his ear, and shuttled over the Carnivor-red interview request.

A briefly hurt look flashed across Vick’s face before he regained his pre-set smirk. “Have to frisk you down, then,” he said, cracking his fingers. “You’re awful pale. Must be Irish, right?”

Finch stood scarecrow as the bouncer frisked. “Not that I know of. You?”

“You in the gravity gym a lot? What do you squat on standard?” Vick slapped one of Finch’s tree-trunk quads. “Big old haunches on you. Big veins, too, I got tiny veins, shitty circulation—”

Finch snagged the man’s hand tight enough to feel tendons rasp up on each other, then slowly moved it away.

Vick turned his grimace into a grin as he yanked his fingers back. “Your kind aren’t much for conversation, are they? More used to grunting.”

“You done?”

“Yeah, I’m done. Left your club at home, obviously.” Vick nodded toward the interior. “Right this way.”

Finch ran through a few ways to snap Vick’s neck as he followed him across a gleaming obsidian floor, past copses of smartglass tables and spiny organic sculptures. He watched a gaggle of Ghanaian businessmen wearing fashionably gashed suits put in their order while what appeared to be 2010s slaughterhouse footage played across their table. Finch shook his head. Kitschy as fuck.

While Vick was distracted by the swaying hips of a neon-lipped server, Finch scanned for fire exits, motion sensors, and small black cameras nestled in the ceiling corners. What he took to be the private dining alcoves were hidden behind a noise-cancelling black shroud.

Caught up in sending Blake the footage, Finch brushed against one of the shuddering sculptures and received a blast of hot peppery breath full in the face. He swore loud enough for Vick to turn around and give a hyena giggle. His eyes stung all the way through the silver-white labyrinth of Carnivor’s kitchens, where cooks doing prep-work shouted to each other in a thick blend of Tagalog, Somali and English. The smell of meat hung heavy, almost dripping.

Finch was still blinking away tears when they arrived at the door to Ms. Carrow’s office. Vick pointed him in without speaking, suddenly sour-faced, then stalked away.

“Thanks, Vick,” Finch called after him, flipping the bird to his turned back.

• • • •

Ms. Holly Carrow was in virtual conference when Finch stepped inside and closed the synthetic oak door behind him. Her dim-lit office was partially overgrown, with a faux-skylight shafting artificial sunshine onto the artful twists of branch and vine sprouting through the glass floor. Very envirochic, very expensive. It matched up with the utterly obscene amounts of anonymized money Blake had found flowing into Carnivor’s accounts, which in turn seemed linked to a mysterious bi-monthly delivery from a Brazilian medi/pharma company.

Very envirochic, very expensive, very warm. Finch did not do well with warm. Wasn’t built for it. He could already feel sweat prickling along his hairline as he approached Carrow’s desk. She was reclined in an orthochair, her dark head tipped back in its cradle. Neural plugs pulsed at her chemically smoothed temples. Her lips looked like a line of dried blood and her jawline was wide and perfectly angled.

Finch touched his own with some measure of jealousy, rasping his thumb along the coarse beard that helped obscure his Neanderthal lack of chin. As he stepped through the dappled light, a spindly-looking chair unfolded itself opposite the desk and blinked an inviting green. Finch sat gingerly; he’d done in their apartment’s cheap folding chair that morning halfway through Blake styling his hair.

Finch put his hands on his knees to wait, and realized the roll of his trousers looked like a miniature chub. Right as he was smoothing out his crotch, the restaurateur’s eyes flicked open. People always came out of a deep slice at the most inopportune moments. Finch tried to move his hand in a natural path to his knee.

“Sorry for the wait.” Carrow’s sea-green eyes tracked the movement like a laser. She gave a faint smile. “I hope it wasn’t making you . . . squirmy.”

“Not at all.”

“Good.” Carrow’s chair reconfigured, sliding her upright, and she extended a hand to make it all one sinuous motion. “Mr. Finch, I presume.”

Finch took it, finding it drier than he’d expected and strong. “Pleasure.”

“You have a very impressive CV, Mr. Finch.” She looked at the girth of his knuckles with more than faint interest—Finch remembered a few favourites from her pornstream and tried not to let it show on his face. “Private security coordinator for EpiGen. Paramilitary service in Pakistan and India. Very impressive.”

Finch blinked. “I do what I’m good at, I suppose.”

“Yes.” Carrow’s eyes roved down his chest, lingered a millisecond too long at his hips. Her cheeks tinted with a near-imperceptible flush Finch knew to look for. “We all play the cards we’re dealt. Genetically or otherwise. But I do wonder why a former CEO bodyguard wants to work security at Carnivor.”

Finch squeezed his kneecap. Blake had made the CV too perfect. He had that tendency. “I’m at the point where I need a position that’s longer term and lower risk.” Finch paused, then played the trump card. “We don’t live so long as you. Thirty-three is middle aged, for a neo. Cell decay will set in soon.”

The restaurateur leaned forward. “You’re a survivor from the original batch, then? From the Bangkok biolabs?”

Finch didn’t have to lie on this point. “Yes. Number 23.”

“I knew it,” Carrow breathed. “Well, ah, suspected. I’ve always wanted to meet . . .” She trailed off, trying to re-establish herself. “What they did in those labs was an atrocity. The experimentation. You should know I was a fervent supporter of the Diaspora Act. Referendum 88, as well. Neo rights are a bit of a passion of mine.”

“I don’t follow the politics.” Another thing he didn’t have to lie about.

“You don’t feel a certain responsibility to—”

“I’m me, first,” Finch cut her off. “Anything else, second. Including neo.”

Carrow’s dark red frown reshaped to a sheepish smile. “I’m sorry. I must sound like a paleochaser who’s side-windowing the wiki.”

“Not at all,” Finch said, sliding the polite veneer back over his voice. “I can tell when someone’s reading the wiki. You know, ‘you must have been so happy on August 16, 2055 when clone-grown Neanderthal-human hybrids gained full citizen rights.’ Shit like that.”

“Terrible.” The restaurateur rose; her orthochair reluctantly put its massage pads away. “I’ve been in virtual all day, Mr. Finch. Walk with me.” Finch creaked off his own chair and shadowed her over to the twisted trees. She wrapped her fingers around a moss-slick branch. “These aren’t real,” she admitted, sliding her hand up and down the length. “Real would have been too cheap.”

Finch shrugged, ignoring the phallic tableau. “They’re nice.”

“Sometimes people have trouble with real and not real,” Carrow said delicately, releasing the branch. “Sometimes mere illusion is offensive enough to make people take real action. An all-meat eatery, whether it’s vat grown or not, attracts its share of critics. That’s part of the charm, of course. Being contentious. The restaurant business is all about novelty.”

“I tend to eat vegan, myself.”

“So do I.” Carrow smiled as she wiped her hands together, then turned serious. “For the past month, Carnivor has been receiving anonymous vitriol from an individual, or perhaps a small group, who take issue with our mode and aesthetic. They think it trivializes the horrors of the defunct livestock industry. Or something. I wasn’t much concerned with them until they started making threats against our clientele’s safety.”

Finch remembered the late nights with Blake, composing anti-meat rants and credible bomb threats over a bottle of Luna vodka and hash. They’d gotten quite good at it.

“We attract an influential clientele,” Carrow said, leaning back against the tree, managing to exaggerate the camber of her back with relative grace. “Movie stars, moguls, athletes. Bookings for our more exclusive offerings are often made months in advance.” She paused. “We take the privacy of our guests very seriously. While most come here to be seen, others come here for the opposite. That’s why I’m looking to improve Carnivor’s security. I’d like to ensure no dining experience is interrupted by anti-meat radicals or celebrity chasers. The only man we have now, Vicky, is a bit . . . unreliable.”

“I feel qualified to do that, Ms. Carrow,” Finch said, lowering his voice to a controlled rumble as he stepped closer. “Though I would, of course, like to negotiate upward on the salary.”

Carrow smiled again, the flush coming back stronger. “Well, we haven’t discussed a benefits package yet, have we?”

• • • •

Finch couldn’t resist unzipping his trousers once he was out the door, then doing them up again, noisily, on his way past Vick, whose face turned taut and ashy in a way that almost made Finch feel bad for the prick.

“She doesn’t fuck in her office,” the bouncer snarled.

“Doesn’t fuck you, you mean. Maybe it’s the haircut.”

Vick’s response was guillotined by the arrival of a designer-swathed couple smelling like cheap pheromone spray and expensive liquor. He checked them against the facebook with his jaw clenched tight, and gave a smile that was more grimace as a server led them off.

“Once she does fuck you, she’ll fire you,” he said. “She just wants some neo cock. Then you’re back out on your ass. She loves her little ironies.” He preened his Mohawk in the mirror wall, deadly serious. “And don’t even think about hurting her. I’ve always wanted a go at a caveman.”

That word still sliced into Finch’s stomach, even after all these years. He felt the tips of his ears redden.

“You’d have to buy me a drink,” Finch said. He looked Vick up and down. “Several drinks. And that’s saying something, since my gut’s got no enzymes to process alcohol. Pre-agrarian and all that.”

“What the fuck are you grunting about?” Vick smiled like a shark; he had a nose for blood in the water. “Caveman.”

Finch was squared to him without realizing he’d moved. “Say it again.”

They stood toe to toe until the air was all but stinking with testosterone, or maybe just the sliver of vat beef caught in Vick’s teeth. For a moment Finch was ready to throw the whole job, the weeks and weeks of prep, just for a chance to bash Vick’s face in. Then a notification flag popped up in his peripherals. He opened it.

Unit, you get the job or fucking what? I’m dying metaphorically over here. Save me.

Finch scrolled Blake’s message up and down, allowing a smile to ghost onto his face. He turned on his heel and headed for the LRT station.

• • • •

The dark apartment was mercifully cold when Finch let himself inside. Blake said his hardware ran faster near zero, and affinity for low temperatures was one of the reasons they’d got together in the first place. That, and a mutual talent for petty crime.

At the moment, Blake was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the carpet, surrounded by a maelstrom of biodegradable moving boxes, congealing cartons of Mai Pet Pad Thai, Finch’s magnetic dumbbells, and the remains of the snapped folding chair from earlier that morning. Finch switched on the solar lamp, throwing stark shadows onto the white stucco walls.

Blake didn’t so much as twitch his close-cropped head, heavy lids half shut, lips half parted. His neural implants gleamed white against black skin, carving channels up his spine and all the way to his temples. Blake looked almost holy when he was sliced in deep. Like a monk, apart from the drool wending down his numb chin and dripping onto his Adidas trackies.

Finch peeled off his suit, deciding to burn off the last of his fight-or-flight adrenaline on the pull-up bar. Blake had nixed the squat rack due to space concerns. Most of the floor was taken up by their two foam mattresses, currently slung into opposite corners despite their tendency to migrate together in the evening. Blake’s was strewn with the colourful viscera of his half-unpacked wardrobe; Finch’s was bare.

After fifteen wide-grip pull-ups, Finch dropped to the carpet with the veins across his shoulders blue and bulging. Blake was still sliced in, seeing only code, so Finch used one of the hacker’s many shirts to sop the sweat from his springy red hair, then went to wipe the saliva from his companion’s chin.

Blake’s teeth snapped together.

Finch jerked his fingers back, dropping the shirt. “Fucker.”

Blake’s eyes winched fully open, beetle black. “Unit, you should have messaged me you were home.” He looked down, blinking. “Why’s my shirt wet?”

“You were drooling again.”

Blake sniffed at it suspiciously as he stood up, making the implants in his back click and clack. Then he broke into a grin and offered his fist for a congratulatory knock. “Carnivor’s new security consultant,” he said. “I’m so proud of you, Unit. Overcoming your checkered-as-fuck past. Wearing a slick-as-fuck suit. Which you have since discarded.”

Finch’s hand was a spade compared to Blake’s. “I could have shown up like this and still got the job,” he said, bumping fists and then enveloping Blake’s slender wrist.

The hacker grinned. “She was a paleochaser, huh?”

“Big time.” Finch tried to keep his voice light. “You homo sapiens. Trying to breed us out of existence all over again.”

Blake ran a playful hand down Finch’s arm. “Who can blame her, though, right? Your biceps look cancerous right now.” He plucked at the muscle. “You work out too much, Unit. Self-improvement is a short hop to, you know, self-obsession.”

“Try a chin-up. Maybe you’ll like it.”

“I hate sweating,” Blake said, moving to wipe the drool off his pant leg. “Shit’s undignified.” He gave Finch a sly look, then stepped out of the trackies entirely, leaving them pooled on the carpet. He rubbed one slim calf against the other. “You know, neither one of us has a uterus, so breeding you out of existence is pretty improbable. Chance you’re willing to . . . ?”

Finch cut him off with a bruising kiss before they maneuvered to the floor, managing to miss both mattresses entirely.

• • • •

After five days at Carnivor spent standing straight-backed and stern-faced in the entryway, or else circulating the restaurant to search for the early signs of aggressive drinkers, lovers’ spats, and general shitfuckery, Finch would have been ready to quit under normal circumstances. He’d cased out the place as best he could within the first few shifts, meaning most of his mental energy was spent tolerating Carrow’s increasingly unsubtle come-ons and Vick’s increasingly unsubtle jealousy.

But on the sixth day, when the delivery chime shivered through their implants, Vick’s face turned cagey. “I’ve got this one,” he said. “Remember, you don’t talk to guests unless they talk to you. And don’t call anything . . . kitschy.”

Finch messaged Blake, a tingle of anticipation finally worming up his spine. Special delivery. Think tonight’s the night.

The suspicion was all but confirmed when Vick returned in high spirits a half-hour later. “High-end stock fresh out the vat,” he announced. “But now what happens to the older cuts still taking up valuable freezer space?”

“You sell them on MeatSpin,” Finch guessed.

“I take them home, get out the griller, and feast like a fucking king all week long,” Vick corrected, grinning widely. “Me and the Somalis in the kitchen have a deal all worked out.” His smile shrank a few molars. “But I did let Cuaron cook one up for your supper. To celebrate your first week or some shit. So if you want to go eat, you go now. We’re going to be limelight tonight. Busy-busy.”

Finch unfurled Blake’s reply in the corner of his eye: Make sure, Unit.

“Alright,” he said. “Back in twenty.”

Vick was already back to his customary scowl. Finch split for the kitchens, winding his way through the smartglass tables, slaloming the quivering sculptures, swapping nods or knocks with harried servers. When he pushed his way through the doors with a practiced elbow, he realized he’d got used to the smell. In fact, his stomach was squelching hungrily.

Finch maneuvered through spurts of steam and bilingual conversation, stopping at a bubbling pot where Cuaron whisked meat stock into briny liquid. She gave a start when she looked up, eyes wide and nervous. Some people never got comfortable around Finch.

“You just got a delivery, right?” he asked.

“Yeah. Yes. Just did.” She chewed at her lip. “Why?”

“Vick says to double-check the freezer door sealed. Says it’s been finicky.” Finch shrugged. “Last door on the right, isn’t it? I’ll go.”

“I’ll go,” Cuaron said. “I’ll go. You should eat. Plated you something.” She pointed a pinky finger back toward the battered white counter where a covered dish leaked steam in a long ribbon.

“Thanks.”

Cuaron called a sous-chef over to the pot, then darted away toward the freezer alley. Finch followed at a distance, leaning into the chilled corridor long enough to see her go to the one windowless door at the end that none of the staff seemed to ever look at. Then he doubled back to retrieve his supper.

The cutlet was beautiful, perfectly-seared, and the urge to eat meat had been creeping back to him over the past week. Blake still held that the ideal diet derived protein from almonds and kidney beans, but Finch didn’t have the same digestive equipment, did he?

Juice seeped from the meat as he cut into it, and Finch felt a responding spray of hot saliva under his tongue. Feeling only slightly guilty, he wolfed it down and headed back to his post.

• • • •

It was near midnight when the restaurant expelled its last diners into a chilled evening, and well after by the time the kitchen staff followed. Finch and Vick finished their final sweeps and activated the alarm system. Vick sealed the doors behind them with his thumbprint, then swaggered off to his waiting autocab.

Once the red tail-lights swished away, Finch buried his hands in his pockets and rounded the corner. Blake was waiting in the alley, geared up, trailing wires from his spinal implants and through his sleeves. He was already wearing a woolly balaclava, with a hole cut at the temple for his one neural plug, but Finch could tell he was grinning underneath.

“Time to find out what these fuckers are hiding, Unit,” he said, tossing the other mask over.

Finch rolled the wool beneath his fingertips. “Special sauce recipe, probably.”

“Ha.” Blake slotted a stray cord into his smartglove, wriggling his fingers experimentally. “My bet’s still on tetrameth. Imagine how much you could fit in a cow carcass.”

“It’s vat meat. They don’t grow the whole cow.” Finch pulled the mask over his head. “Ready?”

Blake solemnly offered his gloved fist, then remembered the delicate circuitry and swapped it for the other. Finch knocked, and they slunk back out of the alley with the static of a hacked police scanner fizzing in their ears.

Entry was easy. Finch stood watch for less than a minute while Blake, squatting in front of the door, performed a quick viral strike on the alarm system and snuffed the CCTV while he was at it.

“Some of the footage is encrypted,” he said, touching a finger to his neural plug. “Downloading it now. How much you want to bet they scramble the backdoor cams on delivery day?”

Then he pushed his smart-glove’s thumb up against the door to trigger the lock reset, and they were in.

It wasn’t their first break-and-enter, but Finch’s nerves prickled, and his breath came hot and fast inside his hood as he led the way. Through the main dining area, into the metal maze of kitchens, down the row of freezers to the windowless door. It had a physical lock, for which they had a prybar, and it came unsealed with a dull echoing crack. Cold air slithered out from underneath, billowing around their ankles. Finch shoved the door open and the lights flickered on.

Nothing out of the ordinary met them. The walls were furred with frost, and dark stains had seeped into the concrete floor. Six porpoise-sized slabs of pure vat meat, covered in filmy membrane, dangled from ceiling hooks. Finch sealed the door behind them, relishing the rush of cold.

“This must be the right freezer,” Blake said. “It’s the only one with a Faraday mesh.” He shook his head like a wet dog. “Fucking feels like someone stuffed steel wool in my implants. Can’t touch my cloud. Whatever’s in here, they don’t want anyone transmitting camfeed of it.” He folded his arms across his chest and shivered, breath coming out in a puff of steam.

“Guess we start opening them up until the candy falls out.” Finch stepped in close to the first slab, spun the prybar in his hand, and swung. Instead of cracking against frozen meat, the prybar sank several inches deeper into the gluey membrane than seemed possible. Finch yanked the tool free with a sucking noise and let it clatter to the floor. Then, digging into the top of the membrane with both hands, he peeled it away in sticky ammonia-smelling ropes.

“Bust it, Unit,” Blake said through chattering teeth. “Dig that shit.”

Finch grunted in reply, working himself into a rhythm, breathing clean cold air. A shape was emerging beneath, something vaguely familiar, and then—

The lights flicked out.

Blake turned his yelp into a nervous laugh. “Oh, fuck, Unit, that scared me,” he said. Finch heard his hand scrape against the wall, and a second later the fluorescents sputtered back on. “Someone put the timer to five minutes. I’ll dial it back . . .”

Finch blinked. Hanging from the hook in front of him, with the last shreds of membrane dangling off it like tentacles, was a plastic-wrapped human body.

Blake fell silent for a second, then put both hands on his head. “Fuck me,” he muttered. “So she’s doing mob work. Shit, Unit, this is bad shit. Maybe we should gut check. Maybe we don’t want to blackmail someone who does disposal for a family.”

Finch barely heard him. There was something unnervingly familiar about the slope of the shoulders, the shape of the skull. He only had to peel a corner, letting a tuft of red hair escape, to know. But he kept peeling until the face came clear. A wider nose, a thinner brow, maybe. More or less, it was what he’d seen in a mirror at fourteen, back in the biolabs where he’d played host to all the viral and pharmaceutical trials that would have been illegal to perform on a full human. The clones who died and were sent for dissection looked an awful lot like this on the gurney.

Finch thought back to the black-shrouded alcove. The restaurant business was all about novelty, Carrow had said. She loved her little ironies, Vick had said.

“The cameras.” Finch swallowed. “Is there any footage from the private dining?”

Blake blinked stupidly, still staring at the hanging Neanderthal. “Uh. Yeah. Yeah, it’s that encrypted shit. I’m just putting it . . . together.” He squeezed his eyes shut, working his neural plug. His mouth wrenched downward. “Unit, I don’t think you want to see this.”

“Show me.” Finch’s voice came in a rasp he barely recognized as his own.

Blake wordlessly spread the fingers of his smart-glove and set a flickering projection against the blood-stained floor. Finch found himself looking down at a half-dozen diners wearing designer fashions and party masks, most of them drinking too quickly from their flutes, laughing nervously. The smartglass table, unwatched, was playing out a snowy scene with small black figures.

All the masked heads turned as two white-clad servers wheeled in the naked upright corpse of a neo, limbs spread like the Vitruvian Man, muscles waxed and airbrushed. They’d used a nerve clamp on his face, giving him wide eyes and a feral grin. The recording was soundless, but Finch could imagine what the server was saying as she highlighted a pectoral, a thick thigh, a denuded cock. All excellent cuts. Finch realized he already knew what it would taste like when cooked.

He managed to yank the balaclava off before bile spilled up his throat and sinuses and out, searing hot. Blake hopped backward to avoid the splatter. When it was over, Finch breathed in. Deep. Blew a clotted chunk out of his stinging nostril.

“Unit, you alright?” Blake’s voice was wavery as he switched off the projection. “That’s so fucked. So pure fucked. You eat something with cheese today? That’s probably why you hurled so hard. Fuck.”

Finch clutched at his abdomen like he might be able to claw it out entirely. He spat again and again, but supper’s aftertaste kept coming back.

“I mean, all the old labs got shut down, right, but that genome’s still floating around, right? That company in Sao Paulo, must be a front for some scuzzy black market operation, some warehouse thing.” Blake had pulled off his own mask, was running an anxious finger around his plugs. “Sticks them into the system as medical cadavers, ships them up here. Neo a la carte, right? Brazil hasn’t done up Referendum 88 yet. It might even be legal there.”

Finch gathered himself, looking from the steaming puddle to the hanging body to Blake, who was shifting foot to foot, clutching himself against the cold. For a moment, the air seemed to shiver and warp.

“I’ve got the snaps.” Blake tapped his temple. “Recorded you being sick, too, just because, you know, it makes it seem more real. This is so fucked, Unit. So, so fucked.”

Finch slowly nodded. His head was coming clear, the heat in his stomach replaced by a ball of black ice. He was going to murder Vick. He was going to murder Carrow, too.

Blake’s next words jarred him out of the revenge fantasy. “Unit, think how much Carrow will pay to keep this quiet.”

“What do you mean, keep this quiet?” Finch croaked. “This isn’t some money laundering thing. She’s butchering them. Us. For meat.”

Blake put his ungloved hand on Finch’s midsection, knowing better than to try for the out-of-reach shoulder. “Finch. Unit. I didn’t see this coming. I swear.” His voice turned wheedling. “But we have to remember the plan, Unit. This is ideal blackmail material. This could be a kingmaker.”

Finch jerked him toward the open freezer, harder than he’d meant to. “Look at him, would you?”

“It looks like you,” Blake conceded, wresting his gooseflesh arm away. “But it’s not you. Hundreds of people look like you, Finch. They’re not you. For all we know, this one had its brains blunted as soon as it came out of the exo-womb. It could be a frozen fucking vegetable.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Finch said. “Doesn’t matter. Carrow’s getting fucked for this.”

Blake moaned. Stamped his foot against the concrete. “Unit, you don’t care about politics. You care about your gravity gym, and your beard, and getting laid, and getting paid. Right? That’s what we’re getting out of this. Paid. She’ll cough up a fortune to make this go away. A fortune.”

Before Finch could form his slip-sliding thoughts into a reply, a voice came from the door.

“Bullets are actually pretty fucking cheap.” Vick had managed to stuff his Mohawk into the camosuit, but it flopped limply across his scalp as he pulled off the hood. His head floated over a vaguely man-sized shimmer in the air. A handgun hung suspended in front of it. “Supper didn’t agree with you, Finch? Can’t believe you actually ate it.”

Finch was halfway to his throat before Blake wrapped around his arm from behind, clinging like a bird.

Vick grinned. His lips were tinged purple. “This your little fucktoy? No wonder Ms. Carrow couldn’t get a rise out of you. Maybe that’s the real reason Neanderthals went extinct, huh?” He drifted the gun from Finch to Blake and back. “Personally, I think we just hunted you all down like animals.”

Finch swallowed. “Your boss loves neos so much she could just eat one up, is that it?”

“She’s a fucked-up woman,” Vick admitted. “And too trusting when it comes to knuckle-draggers. I knew you were shifty from day one. Hands on the wall, both of you.”

Finch’s swirling head was finally beginning to crystallize. Things seemed clear and bitingly sharp as he crossed to the wall and pushed his palms up against it. The cold stung his hands red. Beside him, Blake followed suit. He was shaking.

“I’d put that gun down if I was you,” Blake barked. “Everything in here is uploaded to my cloud. Soon as you pull that trigger, it’s everywhere.”

Finch didn’t have time to warn him before Vick smashed his face into the wall. When Blake brought his head back upright, his eyes were cloudy and blood bloomed from his nose.

“Faraday mesh,” Vick said. “You can’t send shit from in here. Now, in Ms. Carrow’s absence, I’m going to make an executive decision and pulp the two of you.”

“You really just camped out here in camo on the off-chance I was planning a robbery?” Finch asked. He saw Vick’s handgun wobble slightly in his peripherals.

“I told her you were shifty.” The handgun steadied, but Vick’s teeth were half-chattering when he spoke. “Told her you were from some radical fucking Neo Rights paramilitary. Told her someone must have tipped you off about Carnivor.”

Blake’s forehead was pushed hard against the cold concrete and he was licking blood and snot from under his nose, tears tracking slowly down his cheeks, but Finch forced himself to laugh. “That’s what you think? Paramilitary? I’m a criminal, shithead. We thought your boss was muling meth, and we were going to blackmail her.”

The handgun trembled again when Vick shivered. “Then you’re a fucking idiot for not figuring it out sooner. Caveman to the core.”

“How about you and me go bare knuckle?” Finch suggested. “You always wanted a try, remember? Anyone can put a slug in a skull. Not anyone can say they fist-fought a neo. Come on, Vicky.”

Finch was ready for it when a forearm slammed the back of his neck. “I’m going to eat you, caveman,” Vick hissed in his ear, burrowing the gun under Finch’s shoulder blade. “I’m going to eat your corpse. Think about that. Maybe a bit stringy. I’ll still eat it.”

“Vicky,” Finch repeated. “She call you that when she throws you around in bed? Does she make you dye your hair red and get your skin bleached?”

The gun slid up to knock against the back of Finch’s skull. He tried not to shudder. Blake’s beetle black eyes were wide and he was mouthing what looked like shut up, Unit, shut the fuck up.

“You’ll never be a real caveman, though,” Finch said. “Poor circulation. Good luck in the Ice Age.”

He slammed his hand backward into Vick’s wobbling wrist, flinging himself away from the wall. The gun went off; he felt the sonic clap like a bludgeon to the skull and for a wild moment he thought he’d been shot. The lights flicked out—Finch remembered they were on a timer, remembered Blake had dialled it back—then his hands found Vick’s neck and he forgot about everything but crushing his trachea.

A leg hooked him down and they fell to the floor; his sole slipped off the frozen vomit, and his kneecap cracked against the concrete. Metal bounced against his elbow and skittered away—the gun was gone. Vick scrabbled at his hands, clawing with manicured nails, but Finch held tight and tighter until the kicks became sluggish and Vick made a ragged vibration deep in his chest and the cartilage finally gave way. The puff of dead man’s air caught Finch in the face. He retched.

“Unit, you going to throw up again?” came Blake’s brittle voice, swimming through the fading keen in Finch’s ears. “He dead? I been sitting on his legs. Unless that’s you. You dead?”

“No. You?”

Blake’s fingers found Finch’s face in the dark; Finch found Blake’s numb lips and kissed them softly.

“Unit,” he mumbled. “Vomit breath.”

• • • •

They left Vick crumpled on the freezer floor and stumbled their way to the fire exit, Finch limping, Blake stubbornly trying to support some of his weight. The street outside became a silent movie as Finch’s hearing slipped away again. He could mostly hear his breathing, and blood swirling in his inner ear as they staggered down the block. Blake’s voice was tinny and indistinct. It took him a while to realize what he was saying.

“It’s uploaded, Unit. The clone in Carnivor’s freezer. Those cams from private dining. Everything Vicky said. All in my cloud now.” Blake raised his gloved hand and pressed a fingertip to Finch’s plug. “Look.”

Finch shut his eyes and saw the events of the past half hour race past in digital. Peeling back the membrane. Watching the smart-glove projection. Vick’s disembodied head. The gun. He found his good leg trembling.

“All you have to do is disperse it,” Blake said. “If that’s what you want. I figure blackmailing someone as psychotic as Carrow is a shit plan anyway.”

Finch hesitated for only a second before he selected dispersal and watched the web traffic begin to swell. The snaps and captions and visual/audio recordings began to expand outward, link by link, blooming like argon across forums and news recyclers. By morning, it would be everywhere.

“Of course, we need to get the fuck out of Dodge, now,” Blake admitted. “Unless you think you can stand up to, you know, legal scrutiny and shit. We can swing down to the coast. San Diego again. You go back to bouncing, I leave off net scamming and try to find something legit. No more B&E, no more blackmail, no more getting mixed up with units who kill units.” He paused. “You know. Boring shit.”

“West Coast might not be far enough,” Finch said, opening his eyes. “We’ll be famous after this.”

“Unit, I know.” He blinked. “Autocab’s on its way. It’ll meet us up on the corner.”

They staggered on in silence. It had rained while they were inside; the sidewalk was slick. The lampposts flickered on in sequence as they passed underneath.

“Brazil is pretty far,” Finch said slowly, watching their shadow hobble along on long dark stilts. “Sao Paulo.”

Blake stared at him, incredulous. “You mean go find that illegal clone factory, right? You trying to be a hero or something? Going paramilitary on me?”

Finch exhaled a long plume of breath into the cold air as the autocab pulled up to the curb. “That list you made. The things I care about. You should have been on it.”

Blake fixed him with a piercing look. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Up near the top. Beard-level, maybe.” Blake laughed; Finch tried to grin. “And under that, I think it’s time to make room for some other shit.”

“Hero shit, you mean,” Blake said, leaning back on the autocab.

“I’d view it more as self-improvement.”

“I’ll think about it, Unit. No promises.”

Finch opened the door, Blake bypassed the payment screen, and the cab slid off into the night, flashing nearby attractions and restaurant suggestions on the upholstery. They watched in real time, without speaking, as Carnivor dropped off the list.

©2021 by Rich Larson. Originally published in Strangers Among Us: Tales of the Underdogs and Outcasts, edited by Susan Forest and Lucas K. Law. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

There Are No Hot Topics on Whukai

Andrea Kriz | 5522 words

The day the dMods shut down Skeleton Caves, Esko put on her VR goggles and slipped into the Whukai space colony’s main chatroom to figure out what was going on. All the Whukains who made their living off the popular Terran MMORPG, d’Artagnan, had the same idea. Beside her, on top of her, avatars logged in—an absolute pandemonium of photorealistic, 8-bit, anime animals and humanoids and everything in between. The two main gold-farming clans had already started fighting among themselves.

“How many times did I tell you PKers,” the head of Esko’s clan screeched. “To leave the Terran players alone!”

“It don’t matter how many Terran players we killed,” leader of the rival HunterFam roared, “when you idiots kept giving us away by speaking Kainese! We. Must. Speak. Terran languages! That’s why all the Terran players reported us to the dMods!”

Esko tore off her VR goggles, tossing them onto her bunk. The interior of her sleeping pod, one toy block in a cluster of thousands, flooded back into view. A storm had kicked up outside, clogging her porthole with Whukai’s trademark scarlet soil. She didn’t have time to waste arguing over whose fault it was that d’Art’s most lucrative moneymaking method had been nerfed. She needed to come up with four hundred dollars for her parents’ chemo drugs. And this month’s rent.

• • • •

Out in the communal podway, the unemployed squatted over virtual dice, hung laundry. Or tried to as the soilstorm battered the rusted corridors, sent debris showering down from the ceiling. Esko followed the pod cluster’s quantum tangles—discernable from the pipes and electrical cables by their flickering—to her favorite InterplaNet café. No need to pay for time on her personal net connection when she wasn’t making money, after all. Her former high school teacher ran the place. He had a soft spot for her, ever since she’d dropped out to gold-farm full-time when her parents had been transitioned to living in the med pod. Like most Whukains he had multiple gigs, teaching virtually behind the café desk between running errands for those that spent their days, here, in VR. Usually gaming themselves into oblivion.

“Nice to see you, Esko. I don’t suppose you’re here to ask about reenrolling?”

“Don’t joke,” Esko grunted. “The dMods nerfed Skeleton Caves from five million gold to five hundred thousand per hour. I need a job.”

She collapsed into an empty VR station in the first row of cubicles.

“You gotta pay for that, you know.”

“Later.”

She slid on the VR goggles. The café’s virtual interface flooded in around her, grand and gaudy but somehow just as grimy. Her ex-teacher had the head of a rat. And a neon cigarette. He shrugged and went back to reading his manga.

“Any new MMOs?”

“Sure. Lots of new releases. None that we can log in to.”

Esko scowled. More and more game moderators auto-banned Whukain virtual footprints each day, it seemed. Figured. Earth cared more about maintaining the fake economies of their MMORPGs than providing a means of survival for millions of colonists on the planet of Whukai. Who did it hurt if Esko wanted to play, not for fun, but to farm virtual gold that some lazy Terran would pay real money for?

“There’s a Terran girl in the chatroom, though. She’s got an—offer.”

“A Terran?”

Her ex-teacher shrugged.

Esko figured it was a troll, but the avatar in the café lounge could only belong to a Terran. She had waist-length purple hair for one. And eyes to match. Seeing that, Esko opted not to spring onto one of the floating couches or the rusted mecha suit, that titan of a war machine, draped with neon lights. She thudded into a chair. On second thought, maybe she should’ve switched off her d’Art avatar. At least toned down the detail, the Skeleton dust caked on her adamant brawler claws. She could shapeshift into a bear with her totem. But she wasn’t sure that would help.

“Heard you have a job.”

“Yeah. I’m interviewing people.”

She waited, as if expecting Esko to be the one to start asking questions.

“I’m an author.”

“Oh,” Esko said. “That’s nice.”

“I’ll take you,” the Author said. “You’re the first girl who applied, you know. Who can speak Universal Terran. And I can tell you like shopping at Hot Topic too.”

Esko blinked. Hot Topic? Like from the ancient Terran net memes? The franchise had made a comeback recently—she’d seen virtual storefronts advertised in d’Art. But quantum export was expensive. No one around her could pay for throwback goth-slash-emo fashion.

“There are no Hot Topics on Whukai,” Esko said.

“Um. That might be a problem.”

“What are you an author of?”

“Elegy of Mortals? It’s like, one of the most popular net novels on LitFanFic. Millions of readers. It’s a Mecha Saint 2.0 high school AU fic? Maybe you’ve heard of it?”

Esko hadn’t.

“I need to know what the job is.”

“You’re going to be my friend.”

“But you’ll be paying me.”

“Yeah! I mean, it’s like an acting job. You’ll only be pretending to be my friend. Who’s also from Whukai,” the Author added quickly. “I just haven’t been able to get in touch with her lately. Here. I’ll send you a bunch of messages between us so you can get an idea of her personality and stuff. I’ll need you to have all of this read and be ready by tomorrow.”

It became immediately obvious to Esko upon seeing the “friend’s” messages that they had been written by the Author herself. At first, she just felt sorry for her. The Author must not have anybody who wanted to be friends with her in real life. Because, if this Whukain friend was real, why not just ask Esko to find her? Then again—why make this “friend” Whukain in the first place? Still. A job was a job.

“Tomorrow?” Esko asked. “Be ready for what?”

“Oh. Nothing much. Just a chat with some of my other friends.”

• • • •

The next Terran night—which Esko still wasn’t entirely sure, even after constant explanations about planetary rotations, that the Author understood was different from Whukain night—Esko met her in a popular Terran virtual chatroom. Esko tottered, uncomfortable in her newly gifted avatar, as the Author wove her arm through hers and they clicked into an elevator. In its mirrored walls, they could pass for twins. Purple and pink-haired girls with big boobs, decked out in hover heels and black dresses with way too many belts and buckles.

“If the questions get too hard, don’t say anything,” the Author said.

Too hard, Esko wondered? Wasn’t this supposed to be a party—soiree, the Author called it—between friends? The doors slid open to a penthouse. Floor-to-ceiling panes alternated between the socials and views of the rest of the virtual city. Over a cushion pit, neon words floated—Literary Night. Ask Me Anything! xXButterflyDragonEmpressQueenXx, author of Elegy of Mortals. Everywhere, avatars stood, sat, lounged. Unlike Whukai, where people used whatever style they could afford or pirate, all these figures were human. Like the Author’s they had hyper-realistic expression tracking. Which made them uncanny. Their eyes—dead.

“You didn’t say there was going to be this many people here,” Esko hissed.

The Author ignored her, plowing through the crowd. They stopped a few paces from the cushion pit. The prettiest avatars of the entire room sprawled there. The Author had informed Esko these were other Authors, in fact the most popular ones on LitFanFic.

“Here she is! My friend from Whukai.”

“She exists?”

“Yeah,” Esko said. “I exist.”

A beep from the bot sniffing at her heel verified her virtual footprint was indeed Whukain. The other Authors stared at her, their lips politely stretching into shark smiles. She felt more like an embattled Terran commander at a war crime tribunal. Not a guest at a “soiree”.

“What’s your name?”

“What pod cluster in Whukai are you from?”

“How did you write chapter six of Elegy of Mortals and upload to the Terran net when there was a planet-wide outage on Whukai?”

“My friend,” the Author cut in, “won’t be answering any of those questions. You know how difficult it is for a Whukain to out herself on the Terran net.”

“What’s the name of the implied double agent in season 13 of Mecha Saint 2.0?”

“I just said she’s not going to be answering those questions!” the Author bellowed. “My friend could be prosecuted by her home planet authorities.”

“Persecuted,” Esko said.

“Is it that bad?”

All heads turned to Esko for once.

“I could be shot by the Whukain authorities,” she said. “Just for being here.”

It wasn’t even that much of an exaggeration, Esko realized, as her words sent a shock wave of oohing and tittering through the room. Technically Whukains were only allowed on a Terran-approved list of sites. Though InterplaNet Compliance rarely slapped more than a fine on anyone that didn’t, for example, storm gaming livestreams en-masse, screaming about Terran tyranny. And shot was a bit archaic. More likely, you’d be thrown out of your pod cluster, to brave the deserts that covered 90% of Whukai and get eaten by a nequ. The socials screens lit up with posts. The Author settled into the cushion pit while the crowd converged, putting their hands on Esko’s shoulders, saying things like: Thank you for risking your life to come here. You’re so brave. Shaking their heads gently: I’m sorry we didn’t believe you. This is the problem with Terran society. We need to be better. Esko’s head whirled. She’d said, like one sentence. What the hell was wrong with these people?

“That went great, Esko!” the Author squealed the second they stepped back in the elevator. “Great! I want more.”

“More?”

“Are you free the same time next week?”

• • • •

“This Terran girl, xXButterflyDragonEmpressQueenXx, pays me to roleplay.”

Esko’s clanmates, assembled in the corner of a crowded marketplace in d’Art, shifted uncomfortably. From their scorched armor, feathers, and weird potion ingredients sticking out of their inventories, they’d resorted to truly desperate measures for making gold in her absence.

“Roleplay? Is it a sex thing?”

In her sleeping pod, Esko paused season 2, episode 12 of Mecha Saint 2.0. The Author had told her she needed to watch all three hundred plus episodes by their next meeting so she had no choice but to go at 4x speed, keeping one eye on it and her VR goggles over the other. Luckily, the brief action scenes where anything happened were interspersed with long episodes of monologues that she could mostly consult the Author’s character sheets to get the gist of. Everyone had a sentence or two of personality and backstory. Then paragraph upon paragraph summarizing their most popular romantic ships. Black text was canon material while neon pink was what the Author had ‘fixed’ in Elegy of Mortals. There was a lot of pink.

“I don’t think so.”

“You’ve gotta think outside of the box, Esko. You know how these Terrans are.”

“Does it matter if it’s a sex thing if she pays forty Terran dollars a session?” Esko snapped. “And you get a cut?”

The semi-legal d’Art gold-trading market, turned out, was the best way to anonymously transfer money from the Author to her. Esko walked the Author through the steps—basically what her gold-farming clan did, in reverse. The Author would buy billions in gold, transferring it to a ‘mule’ d’Art account. Esko would pick it up on the edge of the game world, an icy wasteland far from the dMods’ watchful gaze. She’d distribute it to her clan, who’d sell it back for Terran dollars in exchange for ten percent. Their rival clan, HunterFam, wanted to get in on the action too. But Esko brushed off their grandiose threats of bringing her whole “operation tumbling down”.

Was it a sex thing? To answer that, Esko would need to know who the Author really was. But that turned out to be one of the biggest mysteries on the Terran net. The LitFanFic elite—who’d all friended the Author by now and even liked her socials posts occasionally—had revealed themselves long ago, turning their net fame into appearances at virtual cons, writing workshop classes you could take for the low, low price of hundreds of Terran dollars, and sponsors. But the Author had done none of these things. The only clues Esko had came from Elegy of Mortals itself. From the set-up—a violet-eyed girl being recruited to Mecha Saint 2.0’s military academy after showing off her innate, supernatural mecha suit piloting abilities and romancing everyone in sight—the Author had to be Esko’s age. Esko herself had grown out of such self-inserts years ago. But generally, people grew up faster on Whukai.

True, Esko did feel icky at the now-weekly literary “soirees” the Author dragged her to. The Author let her customize her avatar after the first so she could be more comfortable, so smaller boobs, and a skin and hair color that was actually hers—in fact, make her hair even redder, her skin even darker, the Author had insisted. And the Author got to lounge in the cushion pit with all the other Authors while Esko got dragged around the room and asked really stupid questions. Like did the extra gravity on Whukai and having to live in pods really make people shorter and stupid. But that wasn’t really a sex thing. More of a prodding-at-an-exotic-animal, like a chained-up nequ, thing. So Esko read Elegy of Mortals’ Author Notes—jackpot. The Author couldn’t resist sprinkling them before, in the middle of, and after each chapter. Usually “real” comments “Esko” had made while “reading”—universal, gushing praise. But occasionally there was some back and forth and drama. Like once Esko had allegedly stolen a virtual pet and she and the Author didn’t talk for two months. And—

“I’m the co-author of Elegy of Mortals?”

“Only chapters five through six, thirty, forty-two, and eighty to ninety,” the Author said.

“What’s so special about those?”

“Well. They take place on Whukai.”

“Why do they take place on Whukai?”

The Author took a deep breath. Around them wavered the VR patio of a trendy Terran vaporwave bakery they’d taken to meeting at. The Author had even insisted on ordering virtual strawberry shortcakes they could pretend to eat. Esko couldn’t think of anything more Terran.

“Well,” the Author said, fake-chewing. “I got really interested in space colonist rights when we had all those protests on Earth. Like five years ago. I was just starting high school and saw a vid of that Terran peacekeeping tank run over all those Whukain students—it spoke to me. As the author of a Mecha Saint 2.0 fanfic with millions of readers on LitFanFic, I had to do something. Bring awareness. And—did you hear about the Space Colonist New Voices award? Now that it’s opening up to fanfiction, we can.”

Esko knew all about it. The Terrans had been spamming submission calls for the New Voices awards all over the Whukain net lately. Like the concept hadn’t been hastily cobbled together after yet more footage of Terrans mowing down yet more Whukains in the University pod cluster surfaced last month, triggering yet another round of protests on Earth.

“There’s no way Elegy of Mortals will win that kind of award,” Esko said.

“What?”

Esko tried to explain. The Author didn’t even know that cars could not drive across the surface of Whukai due to the fineness of the sheran, the planet’s dusky soil. Ordinary goods had to be transported on sleds pulled by neqqi—a kind of lizard-like creature, bioengineered from the planet’s draconic native lifeform, nequ. When Earth had invaded, they’d been forced to haul everything on the backs of their mecha suits. That’s why the Whukain Independence War had lasted so long. Not because the Whukain rebels had mutated into scaly subhumans that could live underground, as the propaganda—which even Terran authorities admitted was super-space-colonist-ist now—claimed.

“Did you even get a Whukain to read this? All of it—it’s wrong.”

“Then fix it!”

“How can I fix it when it’s already published?”

“I do it all the time,” the Author said. “Patch up plotholes. The only copy of Elegy of Mortals is on LitFanFic, you know. I hired security bots to wipe all others—even the originals on my VR set. It gets updated in real time. Across all reader devices. You can change whatever you want, no one will be able to prove it was edited.”

But this wasn’t exactly fixing plotholes, Esko thought. The award consideration deadline was in three days, so she only had time to fix the net novel’s problems on the most surface level. Descriptions of the home pod cluster that the self-insert’s Whukain friend had invited the entire mecha cadet class to. The Author seemed to be under the impression that they had indoor pools and malls and palm trees, like some kind of freaking resort. She axed the entire beach volleyball tournament arc. The Author put her foot down on the kidnapped-by-Whukain-rebels arc, though. The best Esko could do was redeem the rebel captain by making him realize that the mecha cadets were just children, after all, and what he was doing was no better than his own tragic childhood, really, and then shooting himself in the head. The Author refused to let him survive, but Esko succeeded in not making him a romantic interest, at least.

“Don’t hold your breath,” Esko told the Author as she sent the submission, seconds before the cut-off. “We’re not going to win.”

They won, of course.

• • • •

“Art inspires change. That’s why I write.”

At the VR awards ceremony, Esko wound up at the foot of the stage while, at the podium, the Author gave the acceptance speech. It’d be easier this way, the Author had explained. The Terrans would have trouble understanding her accent—the Author never had a problem understanding Esko, even if she did have an accent—and there was always the risk that Esko could forget something and screw it up. She could come up and hold the trophy at the end.

“Fanfiction, especially, draws inspiration from its source material,” the Author continued. “Mecha Saint 2.0 has always upheld the dignity of its space colonist characters. Remember the last episode of season 17, right before the hiatus. When Scarlet Crow promised Mecha Saint Maria that he would stay with the Terran holdouts until the end, that he wouldn’t defect to the Whukain rebels. When Maria found his mecha suit, scorched and abandoned, you all assumed that he’d lied. Because he was a space colonist. Because that’s what space colonists do. But when season 18 finally aired, we found out Scarlet Crow did fight until the end, even stepping out of his mecha suit to keep shooting the rebels when it broke down, and he did get incinerated for Maria. Hashtag, I believe in Scarlet Crow. Hashtag, I believe in space colonists. Hashtag, I believe in Whukai!”

That triggered thunderous applause, to Esko’s disbelief. During the ensuing cocktail hour, the Author held court, arm around Esko, champagne glass in her other hand. They wore matching shimmering gowns and Esko set her avatar to perma-smile for all the net journalists. The Author got most of the questions, of course.

“I’ve been meaning to ask, xXButterflyDragonEmpressQueenXx. How did you meet your Whukain friend? It’s not like communication between the Terran and Whukain nets was ever easy. Especially five years ago, when you started writing Elegy of Mortals.”

The Author took a deep breath.

“There’s something I’ve never told you guys. But I’ve wanted to, all these years.”

Even Esko perked up at that. Had the Author somehow gotten virtually drunk?

“Thank you for being such a welcoming community. I finally feel comfortable enough to say it. I. I. I—was born on Whukai. To my mom and a Terran mecha captain.”

Esko couldn’t breathe.

“My pod cluster was caught in the fighting and destroyed by rebels in the Whukain Independence War. I was eight years old. My mom gave me to my dad, the Terran mecha captain, and he flew me out just in time. I literally watched my family’s pod blow up below me. Of course, when my dad got back to Earth, he couldn’t admit who I was. So, he gave me to my current family. Who always wanted a child, but could never have one. I’m so lucky,” the Author sniffled. “To have been so loved.”

Esko didn’t waste any time dragging the Author back into the elevator. She couldn’t even wait until they’d reached the ground floor.

“Why the hell did you say you were Whukain?”

“Well. Half-Whukain.” The Author giggled. “I practically am, I hang out so much with you. At this point.”

“But why?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

The Author sighed at Esko’s look.

“Because it’s cool to be Whukain.”

Cool? Esko gritted her teeth as the Author went on and on, about how everyone was talking about space colonists’ rights, and how no one was listening to all her ideas about how to make Terran-Whukain relations better, but now they would, and read Elegy of Mortals too . . . Whukai wasn’t a store, like Hot Topic, that you could go into and browse, hack out bits and pieces of history and culture and guts to wear like a fashion statement. It was—everything.

“Why’d you make up all that about the Terran mecha captain and the rebels?”

“Well. It had to be realistic. How else would I have gotten to Earth?”

“It’s not realistic at all!”

“I’m sorry, Esko. I should’ve consulted you. We can retcon it.”

“It’s not about that.”

Esko struggled.

“I lived through the Terran-Whukain war. You don’t understand what Earth did to us.”

“I do! We had to learn about it in school and stuff.”

“When I was actually eight,” Esko continued. “We had to run because we heard the Terrans were coming. All the adults, my parents, even though my mom and dad were just mechanics, stayed to fight the mecha suits. The kids and old people put on as many layers of thermal on as we could and took as much food as we could. We ran across the deserts, to the mountains. The Terrans kept bombing us. A lot of us died that way. We couldn’t even get the bodies because the nequ picked them off. After a week, we ran out of food. We had to go back.”

Esko wouldn’t talk about those next days. The stench of burning plastic. The mecha suits that stood sentry all around the pod cluster, massive titans of starsteel. Their arms outstretched. Dozens of rebels hanged from their fingers.

“My mom and dad were still alive. But they’ll be sick from radiation for the rest of their lives. And the Terrans—they took my older brother. I never saw him again.”

“I’m sorry, Esko. I had no idea.”

Esko was crying now. She hadn’t thought of her brother in years. She thought she was over it. The stories she only learned when she was older, how the Terrans had used conscripted Whukains as meat shields—just to preserve their multi-billion dollar mecha suits from dents or scratches. Stories they could cry fake tears over now that Whukai was safely subjugated again. The Author was holding her now, virtually, saying she understood. Why did Esko have to relive all this shit just for some Terran idiot to understand?

“I wish you’d told me.”

“I wish I’d never taken this fucking job.”

• • • •

That must be it, Esko thought. The Author had gotten what she wanted, after all. Influence, a fanbase forever loyal to her in the name of showing that they were good Terrans, that they supported space colonists—and a Terran publishing megaconglomerate had even offered her a memoir book deal. All wrapped up in a perfectly crafted excuse for not revealing her identity. Even as Esko tried to bury herself in d’Art again, disintegrating Skeleton Dragon after Skeleton Dragon, she saw the advertisements for the Author’s upcoming book. Same Space, Same Sky: How I rediscovered my identity and home planet through writing fanfiction . . . Like a bad dream, she thought, that would be the last remnant of the Author in her life. But a couple of Terran weeks later, the Author’s voice floated into her sleeping pod, a ghost in Whukai’s second moonrise.

“Esko. Esko, I need you.”

Because of course she did. Esko groggily stumbled over to her VR station. She didn’t have to go far. It was trending all over the InterplaNet: #ElegyOfMortalsEXPOSED. The usual menagerie of Whukain avatars side-by-side with Terran ones in suits and prim dresses, in the same livestream clip played over and over again:

“We are HunterFam, a d’Artagnan gold-farming clan from Whukai.”

“And we are a community of concerned LitFanFic readers. Together we have irrefutable evidence that xXButterflyDragonEmpressQueenXx is lying about her connection to the colony of Whukai. We don’t have the real name of her Whukain ‘friend’, or a face ID. But we do have the last four numbers of her VR footprint, and that’s enough.”

A visual: two numbers morphed into shooting stars, soaring over a list of virtual locations. Glowing when they came close, remaining dark when they did not.

“As you can see, the ‘Whukain friend’s’ profile did not interact with that of xXButterflyDragonEmpressQueenXx until a certain day three Terran months ago. A day we can confirm—through d’Art real money transaction records that HunterFam collected in-game—that corresponds to when xXButterflyDragonEmpressQueenXx started paying this ‘friend’. For the service of corroborating her made-up life story, presumably.”

“We’re only asking for one thing, xXButterflyDragonEmpressQueenXx: do a face reveal. Come clean. Do the right thing. Or we’ll make you.”

After the initial shock faded, relief flooded Esko.

It was over.

“How are we going to get out of this one?” the Author whimpered.

“We’re not,” Esko said. “Just like HunterFam said. You have to come clean.”

“Okay.”

But she should’ve known the Author had agreed too easily. When she started livestreaming on the socials, it wasn’t with a face reveal. Not even in an avatar designed to evoke pity. No hoodie, no running make-up, no bloodshot eyes to make it look like she’d been awake, pondering her response, ever since the news broke. The Author stood in a pair of neon butterfly wings and her favorite black, covered-with-belts dress. She smiled, as if a bit afraid.

“There’s something I haven’t been telling you. But I promise, it’s all for good reason. I want to start off by saying—everything those LitFanFic readers and HunterFam said is true. The person I’ve been bringing to the VR chatrooms isn’t the person I said she was. She isn’t my Whukain friend. I have been paying her to pretend. Because—my Whukain best friend is dead.”

The Author started crying. Trying to. She huffed and puffed and virtual tears came out.

“She’s been dead ever since the rebel attack on my pod cluster when I was eight. I learned later that Terran troops had taken her. Not good people, like my dad and his mecha crew. They used her and other kidnapped Whukains as human shields. I struggled with that for a long time. Knowing that most Terrans were good. But others, a small minority, could be truly evil. That’s why I haven’t been honest with you . . .”

Esko wasn’t listening. She leaned back and pushed up her VR goggles. That would freeze her avatar, T-posed and gape-mouthed. But she didn’t care. She could barely stand to hear the Author’s voice when she returned to her. Let alone look at her.

“Why did you say I was dead?”

“Esko, don’t you see? This was the only way to save it. Look.”

On the socials, Elegy of Mortals was trending again: #IBelieveInButterfly. It all makes sense with her past. The VR footprints. A split personality. Scripting some actor to play the forbidden half of her history. But HunterFam says they’ve met the fake friend. You really believe a bunch of gold-farmers? xXButterflyDragonEmpressQueenXx only lied in the first place because of Terran pressure. Because we wouldn’t believe her. It makes sense. That she wouldn’t want to talk about it . . .

“And—well, I’ll get more people reading Elegy of Mortals if they feel sorry for me because my best friend is dead.”

“And there’s no more use for me now that you’re Whukain, is that it?”

“Esko. Don’t be like that. I’ll still need your help with making things realistic.”

“It’s over.”

“No, wait! I’ll pay you more.”

The Author whispered. An amount that gave Esko pause, even now. Could she really afford to say no? There was no way she’d find another job as well paying as this. She’d been saving. Hoping to move her parents to a better medical pod. She hadn’t spoken to them much. Since all this started.

“I’ll think about it,” Esko said, hating herself.

But the Author didn’t give her time to think. Her shrill voice invaded Esko’s sleeping pod only a few Terran hours later:

“Esko! Esko! They’re on my LitFanFic account! I can’t—I can’t log in.”

“What am I supposed to do about it?”

“The attackers. They’re from Whukai. They blocked all Terran virtual footprints.”

Payback, Esko thought. Serves the Terrans right. She slipped on her VR goggles. No one was in the login lobby of LitFanFic at this hour. She entered the password the Author had given her. To her surprise, the account swung open. So the attackers really hadn’t thought to block her. Underestimated yet again. Or they didn’t think she would actually go in, like a neqqi at the Author’s command. Paragraphs of pink text, cover art, streamed past her. She’d never been on this side of the net novel before. She could hear the guffaws of the others logged in—HunterFam trawling for info about the Author to sell to their Terran cronies, no doubt. She opened a virtual chat window.

“I’m in.”

“Oh my gosh,” the Author sighed in relief. “See the security panel? Yeah, that’s it. Kick everyone off the account. Return the access to me. That’s it.”

Esko’s hand hovered over the interface. As if it’d taken on a life of its own.

“Why should I?”

“Are you kidding me?” the Author exploded. “It’s my account! My net novel!”

“But people are only interested in Elegy of Mortals because of the Whukai chapters, right? And I practically wrote those.”

“Are you joking? You only got to write them because of me! You didn’t even want to. I had to force you to. You’re only famous because of me!”

“No. You’re only famous because you pretended to be Whukain. Because you pretended about all that stuff with the war. Because you pretended to be me.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. It could’ve been anyone else.”

Esko was stunned at how quickly the Author’s voice warped.

“It could’ve been anyone. I had the pick of everyone on your shitty planet. You’re nothing. You should be grateful. Don’t be so uppity, you Whukain worm—”

Esko shut the chat window and blocked her. With a flick, everybody else. All virtual footprints save her own. That gave her plenty of time to ransack the profile. That’s when Esko realized. The Author didn’t even exist in relation to this LitFanFic account anymore. She hadn’t put any of her real information in. And she’d never told it to Esko either. Only all those fake stories—so who knew whether Esko actually knew anything about her after all.

Do the right thing, HunterFam had said.

Anyone could be the owner of this account now. Anyone. Esko took a deep breath and turned off her avatar. In its place appeared a real vid of herself. Disheveled, yet glowing from the light of her VR set. She opened a socials window and just started livestreaming, knowing somewhere, out there, some fans would watch and someone would record it and it would never be lost. She waited for them to come.

Do the right thing.

She could log off. Leave the account dormant, inaccessible.

Or—she could reach out and take it. A platform was a platform, after all. If Esko struck out on her own, a solitary Whukain, she’d never, never get as many readers as this. Why not take advantage of that audience? She could fix Elegy of Mortals, be a better Whukain advocate than the Author ever could. Turn the net novel into a force for good. But what good could ever come out of a steaming pile of shit like Elegy of Mortals?

Do the right thing.

She leaned in and spoke to the invisible masses:

“My name is Esko. You might know me as xXButterflyDragonEmpressQueenXx. That’s right. I’m the author of Elegy of Mortals. And now I am going to delete it.”

©2021 by Andrea Kriz.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andrea Kriz writes from Cambridge, MA. Her stories are upcoming in Clarkesworld and have appeared in Cossmass Infinities, Nature, and Interstellar Flight Magazine, among others. Find her at https://andreakriz.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter @theworldshesaw.

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

Saudade

Nelson Rolon | 13338 words

The cardboard sign read, “HOPELESS, ME AND MY SISTER NEED MONEY FOR SHUTTLE BACK TO VENUS.” The word “hopeless” should have been “homeless” but because Vida couldn’t write in Hangul, she dictated the words to Menino instead. She blamed the mix-up on her outdated translator, which began acting up ever since she arrived in Seoul.

“People will get it,” Menino argued as the escalator descended to the first level of Chungmuro Metro Station. “You’re desperate and embarrassed, and you’d rather be dead than ask anyone for help.” He walked over to a nondescript corner, took his seat on the immaculate tiles, and held up their sign. “The bigger problem is that no one will believe a Korean boy and black girl are related.”

“‘Black’ isn’t a country,” Vida said.

“It is for us,” Menino answered. “Look around you. You’re alone.”

She didn’t have to. Blacks mostly appeared in Hollywood films dramatizing why many of the brown people had left Earth. Their histories were scripted as tales of intrepid, star-crossed minorities pioneering the empyrean sea. There was no mention of the ballooning economic disparity, and strongmen’s desires for an Aryan state of nature, that caused World War Three. Characters failed to remember how the United Nations, interested in conserving Earth’s resources, offered mega-corporations and billionaires subsidies for taking asylees off-world to be used as cheap labor. No one discussed the revolution of Brazil’s negro class, and how attempts to replace them through automation would free up real estate for developers seeking to house wealthier, whiter asylees. The fact Vida was in Seoul at all granted her instant and irrevocable fame, which was great for attracting audiences, but terrible for hiding.

“Please hurry up,” Menino said. He leaned in closer to their sign until his face was hidden. “You know I live up the hill. My parents could walk by anytime.”

“Don’t start,” Vida warned. She pointed at the cinema across the station, which audiences began to leave as they headed for the subway platforms below. “The last matinée just ended, and I need that crowd. Shut up and sit there if you don’t want to be dead weight.”

Vida walked away and went for a clearing. She began playing music from her wrist terminal. Her hips swayed rhythmically as she mimicked the dance of Romani descendants on Venus. Crowds formed around her with little effort; as Vida predicted, the sight of a Venutian following the premiere of another diaspora film was a good move. Despite the June heat, she veiled her face in a silk scarf, which added to her allure.

With a sizeable crowd in place, Vida sought the wealthiest-looking person to engage. Standing out almost as much as she did was a pink-faced, khaki-wearing, profusely sweating, balding white tourist beside his wife. He wore a gold mechanical wristwatch with diamonds in the bezel—a relic so rare one only saw them in museums or junk bazaars. Vida approached and removed his sunglasses. His beady eyes were drawn to her exposed midriff and long legs like radiation to a blackbody.

She sealed the deal by leaning forward until their noses touched, which left him slack-jawed; his spouse was less than pleased. Vida quickly took a step back—for dramatic flair, of course—and then raised her arms and snapped her fingers. The jewel around her neck lit up, and the man’s outfit transformed before his eyes. His pedestrian clothes were swapped for a flourishing pink dress. Its low neckline exposed his shoulders and revealed unsightly blonde chest hair. A corset dug into his rotund abdomen, while a crinoline cage rounded him out in the rear.

Clearly displeased with his new Victorian fashions, the man blushed in silence. His wife was the first to laugh, and the audience followed in suit while recording every moment on their terminals.

“Tip, please?” Vida said innocently.

The tourist grumbled something her translator couldn’t process. His wife slapped him upside the head and forced him to transfer credits over to her terminal. The chime of a successful payment made Vida’s heart flutter. She restored the man’s clothes with the snap of her fingers.

The show now over, the crowd fled downstairs at the announcement of an incoming train. Vida waved them off, removed her scarf, and wiped the sweat from her neck. She walked to Menino, whom she had earlier spotted chuckling along with everyone else. Compared to his usual stewing in unwarranted jealousy, mirth was a good look on him. She’d told him that foreplay with audiences was just part of the business, but the point never seemed to stick.

“I think we’ve made enough to finish the repairs,” Vida said. She exposed her sharp-toothed grin, which used to make Menino flinch. What could she say except that dental mods were cheap back on Utopia Planitia?

“Can we get some burgers?” Menino asked.

“Are you hungry again? If you want a free lunch, go back to school.”

“I made the sign!” Menino said as he stood up in protest.

“And you fucked that up,” Vida said. “You can dance next time if you want burgers.”

As Menino went on about his insatiable hunger, Vida’s attention wandered. There was chatter across the station. Moviegoers and commuters backed away from the escalator she and Menino had just come from, making way for a shadowy figure descending. For an instant, Vida mistook it for a dog. But its long whiskers came into view followed by its coiling tail and spindly fingers.

It was a rat. A giant fucking rat.

“Menino,” Vida said to the droning boy. “Shut up.”

He turned to see the creature.

“Oh,” he said, “I forgot you’re scared of dogs.”

The rat’s nostrils flared and sucked in the stench of summertime humans, sifting for a unique chemical signature. It turned to Vida. With a blink, its vapid black eyes changed to bright blood red, and it let loose an ear-shattering snarl.

“That’s not a dog!” Vida yelled. She yanked the boy by the collar and sprinted for the subway tunnels below. She felt the biomorphic beast racing after them in vicious pursuit. Its scraggy body would grow into a sleek obsidian monstrosity, limbs rippling and exploding and reforming in sinewy masses.

It didn’t take long for Menino to outpace Vida. As they came upon the turnstiles she watched Menino pay the toll, and then he politely moved tourists and elderly Koreans out the way while running through the underground convenience marts. Vida, less concerned with being a good citizen, barely hopped over the turnstiles and shoved as many people as possible to the ground.

Looking back, Vida saw the rat—now three meters tall—uproot the turnstiles and toss them aside. While Menino zipped downstairs to the platform, Vida grit her teeth and cursed her rapid fatigue. Without thinking—or perhaps thinking she was still in outer space—she tried leaping downstairs in a single bound. She twisted her ankle as she landed and dropped to the floor.

Menino turned back.

“You okay?” he asked. “Be careful, you’re still not acclimatized.”

Vida brushed him off and hobbled away as fast as possible. Never far behind, the rat possessed even less grace as it tumbled down the stairs, knocking clueless commuters away until it crashed through a concrete wall.

It was around 4:30 in the afternoon. The subway platform was saturated with people waiting for the 3-Train. The sight of that rodent sent everyone into frenzy, and Vida and Menino braced themselves for the rush of bony elbows and bulky backpacks. For passengers on the arriving train, the chaos at Chungmuro gave them no reason to exit.

This was really fucking bad.

“Get on the train!” Vida shouted to Menino as she fought against the tide.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Saving your ass!” Vida watched the rat recover from its impact. It kicked up dust and debris as it plowed through bystanders and ran straight for her. Vida knew she’d never make it on her throbbing ankle, so she squared-up as best she could. She planted her feet, bent her knees; this summoning would require all her focus. She endured the tide of rushing humans until finally seeing an opening.

Vida began, circling and swaying her arms like her father had every time he used the necklace. It was a power barely understood, and hardly under her control. Time trapped her within a bubble as the rest of the station froze. The temperature dropped. The air grew charged and heavy. The surrounding space began to warp, and photons twisted like paint in water, tearing apart with a thunderous noise. From this tear emerged a rusted two-meter steel cube. It hovered centimeters from the ground on one of its vertices. It was delicate and phantasmagoric.

Vida frowned at the sight of this.

“Really?” she sighed. “Tony Smith? Right now?”

The die tipped over a bit as if to frown back.

“Whatever,” Vida said, “just make it work. I’m tired and my foot’s killing me.”

The sculpture straightened up. It slowly rotated on its vertex and picked up speed with every spin. Vida could never predict what the esoteric sculptures would do. The safest bet was to get out the damn way.

“What the heck is that?” Menino asked.

Vida spun around and noticed him cowering behind her. He stared ahead at the neon nebulae within the closing tear.

“I told you to get on the fucking train!” she yelled.

But it was too late to scold him. Their time in warp space was up, and the shouting and rampage on the platform returned. The revolving cube launched ahead with impossible speed and smashed the rodent pursuer into the wall. Its body was shredded and strewn about by spinning steel edges. Vida grabbed Menino, shoved through the crowds, and squeezed into the departing train.

They were welcomed with groans from sympathetic but already squished passengers. Vida took a seat on the floor and leaned on the exit doors. Her breathing grew labored. The pain in her ankle was subsumed by numbness in her hands and face. Menino stood above her and tried striking up a conversation, but she couldn’t hear him because her translator flooded with a hundred conversations taking place at once. Its quantum computing couldn’t express their fright or convey all the nuances of their relieved sighs and reassurances to one another. She envied these people and their familiarity.

Menino crouched down to Vida.

“I told you not to exert yourself,” he said.

As she was too tired to speak, Vida offered him her middle finger. No need for translation.

• • • •

After disembarking for Menino’s burgers and then visiting Vida’s favorite patbingsu shop, they walked to the Black Light District of Itaewon. The BLD felt like a foreigner’s impression of Seoul, a blend of hyperkinetic Myeongdong and bohemian Gangnam. Gaming cafes ran beside idol-themed strip clubs in a fantasy fit for incels. Menino sometimes would hit up the arcades for Street Fighter, and Vida would cheer him on after a couple beers to distract the other players. But overall, she hated the place because she wasn’t a nerd.

The BLD was also the only place that would service her ship.

Menino spotted Ji-Hoon inside his open garage at the other end of a street too narrow for car traffic. The man was watching his favorite interactive program, Days of Your Lives, on an obsolete LCD television. He should have been fixing Vida’s starfighter, the Abelha Rainha. Only half the scorch marks on the left wing had been welded over and painted, which left no doubt in Vida’s mind that he hadn’t begun the engine repairs.

Ji-Hoon looked behind him as the pair came within earshot. He raised his hand, which held a silver Sapporo beer can, as if to say “hello.”

“I got one more if you want,” he said. He reached into his mini fridge and tossed Vida a can before she could answer.

“This better be free,” Vida said. She cracked it open and took a swig. It tasted like shit, so she gave the can to Menino. He took a sip and pinched his nose so he wouldn’t gag.

“You ever gonna upgrade to a wallscreen?” Vida continued. “I thought the idea was to have actors talking to you.”

“Maybe when you finish paying me,” Ji-Hoon said, “I could afford one. But for now, I have to enjoy my program without the 4D sensorium. Instead of the actors talking to me, I watch them talk into empty rooms with green screens.”

“I’m so sorry,” Vida said flatly.

“Your starfighter’s almost done,” Ji-Hoon said. He stood up from his lawn chair, placed a hand on his stomach, and let loose a belch. “I know you don’t give a shit about the excellently produced, well-scripted modern masterpiece that is Days of Your Lives.”

“Wow, you’re perceptive.” Vida swiped through several windows on her terminal. “We’ve got your cash. Went through hell to get it.”

“Yeah,” Menino chimed. “We fought a giant rat.”

Ji-Hoon looked to Vida. He was clearly puzzled.

“She doesn’t want to talk about it,” Menino answered for her.

A smirk cracked Ji-Hoon’s face. “Badass-space-pirate Vida is scared of rats?”

“And dogs,” Menino added.

Vida finished transferring her funds. She crossed her arms and glared at Ji-Hoon. “Is that enough money for you?” she asked. “I’d like to get off-world by tomorrow.”

Ji-Hoon checked his account. He whistled in astonishment.

“That’s it?” he said. He finished his beer and tossed the can to the trash can across the room. It missed and landed on the ground. “You can forget about me finishing that paint job, or even the hull repairs. This won’t even buy that wallscreen I’ve been after. You know, the one with ambient soundproofing?”

“I swear to Virgin Mary,” Vida said as she rolled her eyes. “You said you were almost done. What about the engine? Can I at least fly?”

“I need more money for the power couplings,” he said. “Get me that by tomorrow and I’ll order them, I promise. If you’re that desperate to go off-world, I know guys that’ll smuggle you out.”

“You’ll get your money,” she answered in her most polite voice. Slavers were the only “guys” that transported penniless women, a fact Vida was sure this hack-job mechanic was ignorant of.

“Just chill out,” Ji-Hoon told her. “It’s not like I can find parts for a Stinger down the street. That rat’s not gonna get you—”

“Can you ship those parts overnight?” she interrupted.

“Yes,” Menino said, “Ji-Hoon can do one-day shipping. He would love to do that. He does it all the time.” Menino could see the veins Vida’s neck throbbing. Her fists were balled up. He, too, had once told Vida to “chill” and quickly came to regret it.

Ji-Hoon took the hint. “I mean, I’ll see what I can do. But I can’t promise anything.”

Even though harming this man would bring her great pleasure, Vida did not punch him in the face. She thanked him for his work and motioned to leave. Shopkeepers were emerging from their daytime slumber while gamers patiently waited in line for first dibs at the machines. Vida needed to leave before Menino suggested they stay.

“You never told me how you got this ship,” Ji-Hoon called out to her. “Did you fly for the Emperor?”

“Not me,” she said. “My father did.”

Vida walked out into the alley. Menino lagged behind.

“Are you coming?” he asked Ji-Hoon. “If you promise to stop being rude, Vida won’t mind.”

“No way,” Ji-Hoon said.

“Are you ever going to leave this room?”

“No way.”

“Are you a recluse now?”

“Probably.” Ji-Hoon had gone back to watching his show. Menino threw his empty beer can at Ji-Hoon’s head but received no response.

Menino caught up to Vida as she descended the cement stairs just outside the garage. The stairs led to a winding path that separated Itaewon from the Han River. The pair walked in silence for a bit. Vida watched the river-people rafting in and out of their mostly submerged buildings and over the scintillating sunset waters. Like most of the diaspora children, she’d always wanted to visit Earth even though the brown people put all that effort into escaping. A little air pollution and global warming wasn’t going to stop anyone.

“Ji-Hoon can be rude sometimes,” Menino said. “But you two antagonize each other, you know.”

Vida sighed. “Stop talking, Menino.”

“Sorry,” he said. “So, this woman is looking for you? Cachorro Louco? And we just killed her pet rat? Is it really a rat?”

Vida sat down. She removed her red Converse and placed them at her side as she dipped her feet into the water. It had been a long day. She didn’t care that the road was too narrow to sit on, which forced the horny BLD clientele to squeeze by single-file.

“She should have found me much sooner,” Vida said. “She probably went through official channels for clearance.”

Menino sat beside her. “Are we going to fight her?” he asked. “You killed that rat pretty easily.”

“It’s not dead,” she corrected. “And fighting Cachorro Louco is stupid. We just need to get out of here. I need more money.”

“Yeah. I forgot that cardboard sign back at Chungmuro.”

Menino was still dead weight. One solution had come to Vida a while ago, but she’d settled into this hustling routine with him and didn’t have the time to explore it. She’d refused to consider the idea unless things became desperate; a near-death experience by a large rodent seemed an appropriate occasion.

“Maybe we can try something,” she said. For the first time in years she removed her necklace.

“Is that really oridium?” Menino asked with wide eyes. He marveled at the necklace, its hypnotic core swirling with all the colors in the universe. “Isn’t possession . . . a capital crime?”

“Yeah, if they ever catch you.” Vida slipped the necklace over his head. She wondered if she were cosigning Menino to a fate he wasn’t ready for. “You might need to use this if some serious shit goes down.”

Menino offered a puzzled look.

“I don’t know if my translator wants me to interpret your words literally, or metaphorically,” he said.

“Emotionally,” Vida said with a smile. “This necklace emits Hawking radiation. When I summon matter, I’m not creating it. It’s being pulled from someplace else. And I don’t entirely have control over what it summons.” Which objects emerged from the necklace seemed subconsciously chosen, although Vida’s father always pulled out practical things. Maybe the stone had favored him.

“Yeah, I remember,” Menino said. “Why is it so warm?”

“That’s the radiation cooking you alive.”

“Okay . . .” Menino stared at her. “How do I use it?”

Vida held her breath and then crossed her arms. She hadn’t planned this out at all. “It’s situational? ‘Reactive’ is a better word.”

“So I need to be in danger?”

“No, no, no,” Vida said. “Um. Close your eyes. Imagine I’m kicking your ass at Galaga.”

Menino cringed. “How old are you?”

Vida punched him in the arm.

“Fine, Street Fighter,” she corrected. “Whatever.” She grabbed Menino by the shoulders. “I’ve beat your ass ten times tonight. I won’t stop auto-blocking, and I love to spam.”

“You can’t auto-block anymore,” Menino said. “They took that out last game.”

Seeing the shift of colors in the gem, Vida kept at it.

“Cool,” Vida said. “There’s no auto-blocking. I’m just really good at blocking. You hit me with a light punch, medium punch, heavy kick. Then you tilt the joystick and shoot a kamehameha!”

Menino opened his eyes.

“You mean a hadouken?”

Vida stared at him.

“Dude, that’s not important. How does it make you feel?”

“I feel like you had a boring childhood,” he said. “Especially if you were playing Galaga.” Menino clutched his stomach as it groaned loud enough for even Vida to hear. “Can we go eat?”

“My childhood was just fine,” she said. “More fun than anything you did here.”

Just her luck. Of course Menino couldn’t use the necklace and even if he could, it would take too long to teach him. Vida considered stealing a ship, but Incheon Spaceport had too much security. She was out of time.

Vida grabbed her shoes and walked down the road barefoot.

“Where are we going?” Menino asked.

“I gotta get a drink,” Vida said, “or five, or ten. Hopefully, I’ll drink myself to death.”

“Great, let’s get some wings.”

Moments later, they heard thunder in the distance. The slight breeze that was relieving the scorching heat stopped. The waves lapping against the road froze in place. Clouds ceased their slow crawl in the sky.

“Is it supposed to rain?” Vida asked.

“No?” Menino said. They spun around to see a time rift twenty meters or so behind the boy. A hideous buzzing sound preceded the appearance of a giant wasp bursting forth. It soared on oversized, blue wings and fired lasers from its mouth. And it flew straight for them.

“Jesus Christ!” Vida tackled Menino into the river. The water nearly boiled them alive as lasers broke the surface. They remained submerged while the wasp circled overhead. Vida squeezed Menino tightly to avoid sinking, until the wasp went off into the distance.

Menino shot back up with a broad smile on his face and climbed back ashore.

“Did I do that?” he asked.

Vida couldn’t answer. She was too busy keeping afloat and gasping for air. The boy extended a hand and helped her back to land. They sat there for a minute while she recovered.

Menino couldn’t take his eyes off the gem. He cupped it in his hands like a closely guarded secret. “That was a Galaga ship,” he said aloud.

Vida nodded but couldn’t hear him. There was still water in her ears.

• • • •

Cachorro Louco made her way down the platform stairs. The steps were partially collapsed, and a handful of civilians sat upon them while being treated for minor injuries. At the landing she could see what was left of Algernon, though it took her a minute to comprehend what had happened. Chunks of its black flesh were thrown about the subway and splattered against the walls, while the rest of the oridium creature was pinned by a large steel cube.

Vida, it seemed, had become quite the summoner.

A couple of paramedics struggled to free a woman pinned under rubble. They noticed the bounty hunter and asked for assistance. Cachorro Louco possessed broad shoulders restructured to accommodate even more imposing cybernetic arms. Lifting concrete debris would be no trouble at all. She stooped down to the woman in distress.

“Did a foreigner do this?” the bounty hunter asked. “A thin woman with curly hair and black skin?”

The woman nodded in affirmation.

“Thank you very much,” Cachorro Louco said. Her terminal identified which debris was safe to lift and she tossed slabs of concrete aside like pebbles. It was a rare interlude; unless the natives got in her way, or were of use to her, noninterference was always preferred. There were too many countries, colonies, and customs to hold kindness in any regard.

She noticed pieces of Algernon rolling across the floor in dark blobs. They crawled over people and debris and gathered by the cube, which the blobs had dislodged to unpin the rest of the carcass. The masses congealed and morphed until it resembled the formerly dog-sized rodent. It wagged its tail as if nothing was wrong at all.

“It’s not like you to get killed,” Cachorro Louco said to the rat. “Now you know not to rush in by yourself.” She went to her terminal and began memory synchronization: the Hawking trail to Chungmuro, displayed as a loose cloud of floating lights, burned bright upon seeing Vida. She had a teenager in tow who was likely ensnared by false promises of adventure.

Cachorro Louco hadn’t seen the girl, now a nineteen-year-old woman, in at least two years. In that time, rumor spread of Vida’s viciousness; she was inspiring upstart teens all over the system—kids from the bottom of the scrap heap who were forced to grow up in an age of accelerated expansion. Spotting Vida’s obnoxiously yellow vessel while docked at Noctis Base had been fortuitous.

And now she had a weak spot.

“Ma’am,” someone behind her said. “This is an active crime scene and you’re tampering with evidence.”

Cachorro Louco ended the playback and turned around to see several officers had arrived onsite. The one who addressed her was a small man with a small voice and a small presence. His rank was sergeant.

“Were you and this . . . rat involved in this attack?” he asked. His knees shook ever so slightly. One hand rested on his TASER, which wouldn’t be effective against her no matter how much voltage it contained.

“I’m here on behalf of the Venutian Empire,” Cachorro Louco said. “I have full immunity.”

“That may be,” the sergeant said, “but you don’t have jurisdiction here. Do you have identification?”

“The girl is mine,” she said. With a tap of her wrist console, she transmitted the footage to the officer. “I can’t promise to bring the boy in alive.”

Cachorro Louco watched the tiny man size her up. She was tall enough to cast him completely in shadow. Her neck and chest were covered in white Special Forces tattoos that contrasted her obsidian flesh. Titanium arms bulged with fiber optics and copper muscles. Venus wasn’t the only world to engineer military cyborgs, but few nations could match the ferocity of their warriors.

“I’m really not worth arresting,” Cachorro Louco said as she sensed everyone’s apprehension. She pointed to her shoulder-length dreadlocks. “My hair releases poison if I’m in danger.”

The sergeant stared at her.

“Really?” he asked.

“No, you fool!” she said. Haughty laughter echoed throughout the tunnel as she made her way back up the stairs. “Should you find the Venutian before I do, give me a call.” The warrant for Vida’s body was good dead or alive; after having to chase her down to this planet, killing her wasn’t out of the question.

The sergeant offered no resistance. When the bounty hunter was gone, he watched the video she had transferred to him.

“Should we follow, Sergeant?” one officer asked.

The sergeant raised his hand. His officers fell silent.

“113 to dispatch,” he spoke into his radio.

“Go ahead,” the dispatcher said.

“Put out a call to the embassy. We need the Commission.”

• • • •

For such a meek kid, Menino had an eye for choosing bars. He went straight for the seediest hole-in-the-wall establishments where his parents would never think to find him. He’d probably seen them on the way to school or heard about them from his peers. A boy like him, however, never had the courage to enter bars until Vida came around. That night she was having a hell of a time taking bets on the aerial dogfight championships. The broadcast was on all wallscreens and the Korean squadron, typically the underdogs against the U.S. team, was kicking ass.

“We’re down to two pilots, boys,” Vida said to a group of American soldiers at the barstools. At the rate they were drinking, it wouldn’t be hard to fleece them before the end of the night. “It’s Cheong and Simmons, Korea versus the U.S. I can put you in for 50,000 credits each.

“They’ve already made their bets,” Vida continued as she pointed to a group of local gangsters across the room, the Sons of Sejong. “Cheong beats Simmons in under five minutes with seeker missiles. You gonna let them talk shit about Team U.S.A.? Didn’t you guys invent airplanes?”

That riled up the drunkards, although her terminal had trouble translating their slurred words and backwater accents.

“We match gamble because Korea team is feces,” their commanding officer said. “And after victory, you can show us pleasure time at base, Hot-and-Taut Venus.”

“Sure, sure,” Vida dismissed. “Whatever you want. Sex ‘til your dicks fall off.” As flattering as the offer was—and Vida wasn’t sure it was an offer—the plan was to sneak out with all the bets and finally pay Ji-Hoon.

At the other end of the bar, Menino stared down a half-liter glass of beer. Vida told him not to get it, but he did anyway. Now he couldn’t drink any more of the bile. She slid into the chair beside him and wrapped an arm around his shoulders while starting her sixth pint of Cass. Her hands were greasy with oils from garlic-fried chicken.

“You having fun yet?” Vida asked.

“You said you’d finish this for me,” Menino whined.

“No,” she said. “No, no, no. You have to finish it now, or you lose all those cool points you got earlier.” Vida pushed the glass with her own until it sat in his hand. “That Galaga shit was badass.”

Menino sighed heavily. “You better have some mean hangover cures on Venus.” He closed his eyes, raised his glass, and gulped, and gulped, and gulped. Beer ran down his chin and throat until the mug was empty.

“Way to chug, Menino!” Vida slapped him on the back, as proud of him as she’d ever been. “I promise not to make fun of you for the rest of tonight.”

He cupped his mouth, holding back a rush of vomit.

“Never again,” Menino said.

“That’s what I used to tell my father,” Vida said. “Look at me now! Another alcoholic dirtbag.” She raised her pint to the ceiling. “Rest in peace, you piece of shit.” She drank half of it before coming up for air, then tried refocusing on the broadcast. Her father did love competitive dogfighting.

This year the championships took place over Acidalia Planitia. With all the other pilots tagged out, Don Simmons faced off against Heong Cheong in a ferocious stalemate. Cheong fired two missiles, but Simmons deployed flares and successfully lead them astray. Still in Cheong’s sights, Simmons attempted to break left; the Cockpit Cam revealed Simmons crushed in his suit as a result of massive G-forces—the best part of flying, as far as Vida was concerned.

The screen returned to a wide shot of the aerial arena where off in the distance, one could spot the domed colonies of Mars. Everyone in the bar sat up as Cheong countered the break with a barrel roll and corrected his angle of attack. After that, Simmons was easily clipped by machine gun fire.

“Ha, fuck you, Simmons!” Vida yelled, showering the bar in saliva. “America sucks!”

Menino shut his ears to the noise. Amidst the excitement Vida grabbed her young, slightly intoxicated friend and tried helping him to the exit. The two hadn’t left the barstools when the Americans approached them, red-faced and frowning.

“Fucking Korean team wins!” the commanding officer said. “Never not cheaters, are they? We win next year. Please transfer our credits for more beer.”

“Excuse me?” Vida asked, feigning offense. “You guys lost. You don’t get this money back.”

“You are wrong, loose woman,” the man said. He grabbed ahold of her forearm. “We bet against Korea winning with missiles. Korea use gun, not missiles. We are winners.”

Vida cast his hand off her.

“We’re not doing this tonight, colonizer.” She looked to the bartender and hoped he would shoo the Americans away or something. He was too busy cheering along with others in the bar to notice.

“Make no trouble, female dog,” the officer said while petting her curly hair. “You come back with us to base for relations.”

Before Vida could punch him in the face, Menino shoved him.

“She’s not interested, white man,” the boy said.

In response, another American grabbed Menino from behind and locked him into a chokehold.

“Jesus, Menino,” Vida mumbled. “Why would you do that?” She told the boy to close his eyes while she raised her half-empty pint—and smashed it into the assailant’s face.

For the burly gangsters on the other side of the room, who had alcohol in their veins and earnings to collect, the sound of shattered glass was reason enough to start a fight. Their nano-ink dragon tattoos spread flames across their skin in reaction to adrenaline. They rushed at the Americans and tried tearing them away from Vida and Menino.

Now free, Menino lunged for the American officer and tackled him to the ground. Vida had neither the stamina nor the coherence to fight, so she wasted little time kicking men in the nuts. Maniacal laughter escaped her lips.

But she got the sinking feeling that Menino needed her help. She dropped to the floor, dodging haymakers and elbows until spotting the boy biting the officer on the arm. Vida removed her scarf, wrapped it around the man’s neck from behind, and then hooked her legs around his waist. He thrashed around and slammed her onto the floorboards. She hung on even as the scarf began to tear.

“Menino!” Vida yelled. “Get him!”

The bloody-nosed kid sat up and kicked the American in the face; the heavy man grew limp in Vida’s embrace. She shoved him off.

“How do we get out of here?” Menino asked as he helped her up.

Without a good answer, Vida thought to use her magic.

A half-second later the room rushed past as she flew in the air. At first, she thought it a dream in the midst of her passing out. Her body catapulted through a window and slammed onto the street outside. She was greeted by a starless sky. Debris fell like rain.

And then tremendous nausea came. Her throat filled with stomach acid, so she turned over to dry heave. No one vomits in their dreams.

“Are you alright?” someone asked her.

Vida looked up to see the gang leader. She swatted the woman’s hand away, grabbed the closest wall, and helped herself up. There was a crowd of onlookers staring from down the block. The Americans were splayed on the road in all manner of disarray. Menino sat up against the wall and held his head in his hands, but otherwise he seemed okay.

Where the bar had been, there was now a massive Moai head bursting from the walls and ceiling. It shot through the floor of the second story ramen shop; noodle-eating patrons slid down the Easter Island sculpture, as its surface was sleek with water from burst pipes.

“Where the hell did that come from?” the gangster asked.

Vida walked over to Menino as another gangster helped him up. The kid turned to her and smiled through bloody teeth.

“Can we go home?” he asked.

Vida wanted nothing more than to leave. Several Sons of Sejong stood in her way, however, bruised and banged-up but ready to kick her ass. In spite of her tipsiness she normally would have fought them off, and her failure to acclimate simply meant she’d have to be creative. But with Menino in tow . . .

“Sorry for the trouble,” Vida said to their leader while transferring back their gambling share. For a moment she considered giving the Americans’ share to the barkeep, but it would never cover the costs of rebuilding, so she kept it.

The gang cleared the path to the back alleys. Vida grabbed Menino’s hand. They stumbled down graffiti dreams, walls splashed in strobing neon and darkened by bitter shadows, carcinogen and college kin vibing in hookah dens to “The Girl from Ipanema” as it echoed through the Deadalean streets of Hongdae.

• • • •

The air that summer night seemed to boil just like it did on like Venus. Or maybe Vida’s lungs were burning due to their shriveled and weakened state. To be honest, it had been so long since she was on Venus that her knowledge of the place was reduced to trivia. Was Venus hot? Yes. Was Venus a slum-kingdom and blemish upon the Chocolate Diaspora? Certainly. Did everyone there regret leaving Earth and Mars? Without a doubt. Her recollections felt like stories read in a book or flashbacks from a movie. That old life and that old Vida were but dim reflections in a mirror.

Vida and Menino sat at Mojeon Bridge. She waited as he projectile-vomited into the shallow stream. Although she would never admit it, Vida was equally tired, and breathless, and intoxicated. It was a level of misery she’d come back from before and would look forward to again.

A couple of college girls some meters away dipped their toes into the current only to quickly withdraw when chunks of hot wings touched their feet. Vida laughed and yelled obscenities at them until they left. They’d be fine by morning: soon there would be resumés to submit, careers and families to juggle, and retirement to look forward to. It was a life wholly alien.

“You feel like a man yet?” Vida asked Menino as she slapped him on the back.

“I think I’m dying,” he said. He snorted and spit his lingering vomit into the water.

“Being a man means choosing how you die,” she said.

“Oh, right. I almost forgot about Vida the Drunk Philosopher.” Menino wiped snot from his upper lip.

“I’m serious. Things don’t get easier once we leave the planet. Mars is alright if you like dictators. But the rest of the system is full of trash—people like those imperialist Americans and those Hongdae assholes. Giant fucking rats and bounty hunters. People like me.”

“I know,” Menino said. He took a tissue from his pocket and blew his nose. “I know, but I can’t do this every night. I’ll come along to make sure you survive. That’s all I’m good for.”

The longer Vida watched Menino gag the more exhausted with him she became.

“If that’s going to be your attitude, then stay here. Like I said, I don’t need dead weight.”

But she did need him, or whatever was inside him that activated her necklace. She didn’t know what that was, and he didn’t know it was there. They didn’t know anything about anything.

“When’s the last time you called your parents?” Vida asked.

He tossed his tissue into the stream.

“What?”

“Home,” she said. “When’s the last time you called home?”

“Not since I met you,” Menino said. “You’d threatened to kill me if I did.”

“I’m clearly not gonna kill you, dumbass.”

Something nagged at her hazy, drunken subconscious. Perhaps it was that other Vida whose childhood was just beyond the reach of memory.

“You don’t want me around anymore?” Menino spat again into the water. “I was joking earlier. I can be useful.”

There were some things that stuck with Vida. She knew home had been the volcano favelas where greenhouse gases baked people alive. Home was where she browsed the library archives and dreamed of attending the university. She was going to be the first artist on Venus.

“I can call my parents,” Menino offered. “Is that what you want?”

After her father’s treason, the Abelha Rainha became her home. The radar ping was her morning alarm and her evening lullaby.

“I’ll call them if that will make you happy,” Menino said. He putzed around with his terminal.

No one chose to live in a starfighter.

“Go home, Menino,” Vida said as she grabbed his wrist to stop him. She squeezed until he squirmed away in discomfort. “Hug your fucking schoolteacher parents. Live your middle-class life. And don’t fall for the first girl that gets your dick wet.”

Menino frowned.

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

Vida rose from her seat. She stretched. She yawned. Despite her exhaustion, it was too hot to sleep at the usual spot under the bridge. She thought about visiting the bars a few blocks from City Hall, as she desperately needed some soju. This scene had grown too sentimental for her.

Menino began to follow. He seemed feverish and wobbly.

“You’re an asshole, Vida.”

Vida cocked her head back.

“Really? Tell me more.”

“I didn’t have to help you,” Menino said. “You didn’t know a damn thing about Earth, and I showed you everything you wanted to see. You said we could leave this bullshit city together. I believed you.”

Vida stopped walking. She turned to face Menino. He approached and stopped just shy of kissing her.

“There’s nothing out there for you,” Vida said. She pointed to the blank sky. “That’s my world. My blackness. You can’t go there.”

“Your father,” Menino said. “Did this bounty hunter—”

Vida shoved him away. Already off balance, he quickly fell backward and landed on his ass. She continued walking to the pubs and clubs where she fought off her ennui with pulsating music and debauchery.

• • • •

Ji-Hoon, always having been a light sleeper, stepped out from his garage and into the humidity of 4 A.M. Seoul. He watched shuttles depart Incheon Spaceport across the river. Their ion engines traced blue-white streaks against the dark stratosphere and into tar space.

Going to space wasn’t all that rare, and international flights were entirely conducted through hypersonic shuttles dipping in and out of the atmosphere. When Ji-Hoon was training for the Jovian colonial expansion, he had been stationed at Noctis Base on the moon, which many people saw as the true point where citizens became cosmonauts. He and a group of young, stupid, intrepid adults prepared to leave their families behind for the sake of mankind’s future.

Ultimately, Ji-Hoon didn’t qualify. He’d never see those crewmates again.

He didn’t care.

The pitter-patter of oridium claws against the street broke Ji-Hoon from his trance. A rather large black rat emerged from the shadows in the alley. Startled, Ji-Hoon jumped out the way as it walked through the open garage. It sniffed at the Sapporo can Menino left behind earlier.

“Are you with Vida?” Ji-Hoon asked while cautiously approaching the beast.

It failed to acknowledge him, but a low growl vibrated through its chassis.

“You know Vida?” said someone out of view. A different set of footsteps sauntered in from the unlit alley—a human this time, or someone who had once been human. Her steps were heavy, and her aura was odious. She hardly glanced at the mechanic before noticing his ship hidden beneath a beige tarp.

“Vida doesn’t live here,” Ji-Hoon said. “And I don’t know where the hell she is. Leave your number or something. I’ll call if she stops by.” He reached for the long wrench in his rear jeans pocket.

“She’s got something I need,” the woman said. “It’s a necklace housing a star gate. You’ll help me find her, and in exchange, you can pawn off that Venutian starfighter.”

It was an empty gesture: Ji-Hoon knew there was a bounty out for the ship. No one would buy it for parts when they could rat him out instead, but without leverage to keep the empire from reneging, no one would ever rat him out. He was stuck with hot merchandise.

“I don’t know where that girl is,’ he said. “The only thing I want is her money.” Ji-Hoon removed the wrench from his pocket. “Now get the hell out my shop.”

The woman snapped her fingers. The rat lunged at Ji-Hoon. He swung his wrench and whacked the animal; it flew into his workbench, knocking the unit over and spilling screws and washers over the floor.

“Why pick a fight with me?” the woman said. “You don’t seem the type to fall for Vida’s tricks.” After some silence passed, her eyes lit up as if the answer was staring her in the face. “Oh. You’re protecting the boy.”

The mechanic cocked his arm back for another swing. The woman shielded herself with a metal forearm, and Ji-Hoon dropped his wrench as his wrist dislocated. He was then blindsided by the rat as it slammed into his ribs and knocked the wind from his lungs. He crumpled over the television set; both fell to the ground with a crash.

Ji-Hoon knew his lung was punctured, but he’d be fine. He’d scrapped with the worst assholes in Korea and always came out on top. Last month he lost a couple teeth to the Incheon Road Sharks. The month before that the Sons of Sejong took his pinky toes as repayment for defaulted loans. And years ago the Busan Bitches—he’d never fuck with them again—tossed him onto oncoming traffic, which left him in a coma so long he had no recollection of why they hated him.

In any case, a giant rat and cyborg woman was a welcome change of pace.

“I don’t know where those kids are,” Ji-Hoon said while coughing up blood. He spat at the bounty hunter. “Fuck you and that rat you came with.”

Ji-Hoon tried standing up. He was still ready to break necks with his wrench. The bounty hunter kicked him back down and fractured his sternum. She followed up with a stomp from her boot that pummeled the muscles and bones in his forearm. The rat’s tail wrapped around his mouth to mute the screams.

“I don’t normally hurt civilians,” the woman said, “but you’re quite the troglodyte. If you happen upon Vida, tell her that this was her fault.” She lifted her foot and scraped her sole against the ground to clear the blood. The rat followed her back into the darkness.

Ji-Hoon lay still as his body numbed in shock. The spaceport launches seemed so muffled, so far away now. He suddenly regretted not finishing aeronautics school.

He turned his head to the television beside him. Images of a missing child filtered through broken glass and spilled ink.

“Tae?” His brother’s face was a bit chubbier in the picture, but the tired brown eyes and spiky hair were unmistakable. He’d never said anything about running away from home. It had been two weeks since he was reported missing—about the time he walked into the shop with that femme fatale on a humid evening like this one.

• • • •

Miles of suspended electrical wire cast a net over the city and powered LED street lamps so bright that night and day were at times indistinguishable. Circadian rhythms were a relic from before the second space race. Menino drowsily sneaked through the serpentine backstreets where light was scant. He passed the occasional caravan of corporate drunks shouting about the Korean aerial victory. They’d point to him and utter incoherent cheers. He looked away for fear of being recognized.

He opened the camera app on his terminal and poked at a face unknown to him. He’d probably lost a good ten pounds, and dark circles had formed around his eyes from little sleep. Vida spent nights regaling him with tales of her dad pushing oridium-q32 on the Martian streets under King Orion’s nose. She told of times her father won Mexican standoffs against pirates mining the asteroid belt. Her father would have hated him. Menino was sure of it.

Red and blue lights caught the boy’s attention. A block away some officers pulled over one of the rowdy groups and told them to keep the noise down.

Menino picked up the pace.

Home was just around the corner. From the bottom of the hill, he could already see Dongguk University where his parents worked. In an age where job transience was the norm, they’d toughed out administration changes and pay cuts long enough to earn “pity pensions.” Firing them was now illegal because the government refused to pay medical expenses related to mental distress.

Sending Menino back was the right move. There was nothing for him out there in Vida’s black skies.

His residence was one of the only freestanding two-story homes in the city, sandwiched between high-rise apartments. Menino went through his contacts list and found his mother’s number. He’d missed seventy-two calls from her in the time he was off the network.

He dialed. Her terminal rang, and rang, and rang. It was almost five in the morning, and she would be at work shortly.

“Tae?” she answered.

“Hey, mom,” Menino said. The name was now foreign and odd.

“Tae!” Mom shouted. “Oh, my . . .” A long silence followed. He could hear her sobbing, and that was enough to make Menino cry, too. Shortly she would wake Dad. Once he came to his senses, his voice grew louder and bickering ensued. He eventually synced onto the call.

“Were you kidnapped by those Busan girls?” his father asked.

“No,” Menino said. “I’m still in Seoul.”

“So where the hell have you been?” Dad pressed.

Menino hesitated. From across the street, he saw the light switch on in his parent’s room. Silhouettes scrambled behind white curtains. He could hear them shuffling and prepping to cruise the urban jungle in search of him.

“Did you run away?” Mother chimed in.

“No,” Menino said. “I’ve been out with a friend.”

“We spoke to your friends,” Mom said. “None of them knew where you were unless they were lying to us and the police.” His father tried to speak, and another argument broke out until Mom shouted for Dad to shut up. “Just come home, okay? Everything is fine here. We’re not fighting anymore, things are different.”

“You didn’t do anything,” Menino said. “I just didn’t want to be home.”

“What?” Dad shouted. His intensity distorted the audio and left Menino’s ears ringing. “Were you with Ji-Hoon?”

“What’s wrong?” Mom asked. “Where are you? Tell me what’s going on.”

The boy looked up at the wire mesh sky, where the first hints of navy and indigo dawn shone through. Even though it seemed a siren song, something beyond Earth continued to lure humanity away. It planted nausea and anxiety in Menino and had probably done the same to his brother years ago with the promise of curing a restlessness at the bottom of their mundane souls.

And that song had saved Vida’s people.

Menino remembered the warmth of her hands as she placed the jewel around his neck, which allowed him to summon the world with his willpower. She taught him to live for himself because that’s what the harsh vacuum taught her.

He placed a hand on his chest.

He still had Vida’s necklace.

And Cachorro Louco was coming for her.

“Shit,” Menino said.

“Tae?” his mother asked.

“Vida’s in trouble,” he said. “I’ll be back later. I promise.” She needed him one last time, or maybe for the first time—yes, definitely the first time.

His parents stopped shuffling in the window.

“Vida?” his mother said. “Who is that?”

“Tae!” Dad shouted. “Get your ass back home!”

Menino stepped away from the street lamps and hid in the awning of a grocery store. In the same moment, his parents pulled the curtain to look outside. His mother’s face had changed, too: they now shared the same hollowed features and sunken eyes, but Mom never asked for them.

Menino hung up before his resolve could crack. He slipped away into the streets once more. He opened his terminal’s net browser and searched for works of art he thought Vida would like. Lacking words to express his anger and elation, he would show her through one masterpiece at a time.

Because he wasn’t looking ahead, Menino crashed into a moped parked outside the 24/7 deli. He and the bike fell to the ground. A side mirror snapped off and cracked against the pavement while the kid skid across the concrete, bloodying his hands and knees.

Someone stepped out of the store holding coffee and a bag of Honey Tong Tongs.

“What the hell are you doing?” the man asked.

Menino saw the radio on his waist and the baton beside it. A badge was pinned to his shirt.

“You alright?” The officer placed his goods on the ground, approached Menino, and extended a helping hand. “What’s the rush? You training for a track meet or something?”

“Yeah,” Menino blurted out. “I can pay for the mirror—”

“No,” the officer said. “The precinct can take care of that. Just help me pick this up. And pay attention next time.”

“Yeah,” Menino said. “Yeah, I know. Thanks.” He assisted and then rushed off again, eyes still fixed on his terminal. He was halfway down the block before he heard the officer’s radio mention a missing teen in the area.

• • • •

With each thump of the subwoofer, her woes shed like dead cells. Every pass of the strobing lights wiped her spirit clean. She sank deeper into the worn leather couch and was absorbed by the room and everyone in it. She watched dancers touch skin-to-skin, hand-to-ass, thigh-to-crotch, teeth-to-flesh, and saliva-to-blood. She smelled their oxytocin and tasted twisted pain and passion in their sweat.

“Jesus,” Vida said while twirling the inhaler in her hands. “What the fuck is in this shit?”

The man who offered the drugs wouldn’t say. He wasn’t listening. They’d met at the bar not long ago and since then, he’d bestowed her neck and collarbone with more kisses than she’d ever care for in a lifetime.

“Okay,” Vida said, “Get off before you give me herpes.” She punched him in the face. The man was beyond coherent and unwilling to back down.

“So,” he slurred, “is it true that cosmic radiation gives you two pussies?”

Vida thrust a knee into his stomach. A woman on the couch shoved a foot into his pelvis. He whimpered and fell back. The intoxicated masses trampled and tripped over him.

“I’m sorry you came to Earth to see that,” the other woman said. “Unless you came here precisely to meet trashy men. I’m not going to judge you. We all have our kinks.”

“Oh yeah?” Vida said. “What’s yours?”

“Oh, I’m perfectly boring, trust me. Sometimes I cosplay, but everyone’s doing that now. You don’t seem the type, though.”

“I’ve been in the BLD so long that I’d seriously consider it.”

The woman stared at Vida for a bit with dreamy eyes and a sensuous smile. “Let me buy you a drink. I can tell it’s been a rough night for you.”

Vida laughed and shook her head, ashamed of being so transparent. “I’m flattered, but you found the right person at the wrong time. I’m here to siphon credits from everyone drunk enough to offer them.”

“Did you get some?” the woman asked. “From that guy, I mean.”

“I left him enough for the cab ride home.” Vida clumsily went for her terminal and displayed the credits in her account. She had more than enough for the power couplings, and maybe some for a stay at a hotel. There would be too many cameras and security guards, and too many people put at risk. But these could easily be her last hours on Earth. A cold shower and clean sheets were well-deserved, right?

As a side effect of the drugs, Vida nodded off into microsleeps. She dreamed of being shot out the sky by Cachorro Louco’s shuttle. Smoke filled her brittle lungs and burned her eyes. She was subsumed by roaring blue ocean and crushed by its pressure. She screamed for help until her vocal cords tore apart one fibrous strand at a time.

The inhaler dropped from Vida’s hands, and the sudden loss of its weight startled her awake. It fell onto the miserable man on the ground. He had fallen into a deep sleep some time ago.

The club was now too loud and busy and bright. It wasn’t dark enough for Vida. It wasn’t dark enough at all. She quickly stood up and thanked the woman beside her.

“Take care of yourself, Queen,” the woman said to her. “Because no one else will.”

Vida fled to the boulevard. She was alone once again stumbling about in the machinery of night while passing outdoor lounges, which lead to savory barbeque drifts and bass that vibrated the concrete, until she returned to Mojeon Bridge. The Abelha Rainha would be dark enough, and quiet enough for her to rest in. She could curl up in her cosmic cradle and inhale the dust and cologne of her ghostly father.

But she would have to wait until nine o’clock for Ji-Hoon to open the shop. She took a seat on the ledge to watch the first bands of sunlight split the inky sky. She and Menino had done so every morning before napping ‘til noon.

“That fucking kid,” Vida mumbled to herself as the exhaustion of another twenty-four-hour romp hit hard. “Such a nerd.”

She nodded off again. Her head dipped forward. The thought of dropping into the shallow stream below no longer fazed her.

Someone grabbed Vida by the shoulder before she could fall. Their hand has heavy, cool, and metal.

“Where’s the boy?” her savior asked.

Vida looked over her shoulder despite knowing who it was. She should have felt Cachorro Louco approaching; stealth wasn’t the priority of a 300-kilogram Amazon. Algernon leaped onto the ledge soon after and stared at Vida. Surely he was begrudging their last encounter.

“Did he leave?” Cahorro Louco said. “I thought you two were an item, or that you’d at least made him into a pet. Were you too much for him to handle?”

“Leave him alone,” Vida said.

“No, no, no.” The bounty hunter placed both hands on Vida’s shoulders and leaned into her. “You singled him out because he’s useful.” She glanced at Algernon still snarling away. “We’ve already been playing tag for years. Don’t drag this out by making me find him—or even worse, letting Algernon find him. You don’t want that.”

“It’s not that deep.” Vida rubbed the sleep from her eyes. “When I crashed in the river he jumped out to save me because you know there ain’t no fucking water on Venus. And then, after years without activity, the necklace summons the Burghers of Calais. They pulled my ship to land.”

“Ah. You think this boy has an affinity for oridium.”

Vida nodded. “How else do I explain it?”

Cachorro Louco shook her head. She offered a brief sigh as if responsible for Vida’s ignorance. “In order to manipulate matter, activated oridium needs a host with immeasurable will-to-power.”

“So?” Vida asked. “He’s got willpower?”

“No, you fool. You do.”

Vida’s heart throbbed in her ears. Her body shook with fight-or-flight. The sun mocked her with its warmth while her body broke into cold sweat.

“Your raison d’etre,” Cachorro Louco continued. “Maybe you had forgotten your self-worth. Maybe you were lonely out there among the stars, where everyone claws for survival in the sea of dark matter.”

Like most of Vida’s memories, the last days spent with Father came in waves; it was hard to remember anything at all when rest only came between naps. But she couldn’t forget Cachorro Louco tracking them to Ceres. The bounty hunter needed one punch to end the fight, puncturing Father’s chest in a burst of blood and bone. It was only much later that Vida realized he’d gifted her, his petulant child, with a necklace she couldn’t use because she didn’t see the use.

Cachorro Louco acknowledged her sin with a simple grunt and nod.

“You should stay with the boy,” she said. “Assimilate with these people. They’ve already welcomed you, a celestial daughter of Ham, into their fold. You’re a goddess among insects.”

“The food makes me sick.”

The bounty hunter shrugged.

“Or flee to the motherland. Your ancestors are Brazilian, right? I’ll join you once I collect my bounty. It’s a fitting end for people like us. We never rest long enough to remember where we’ve been, or where we’re from.”

She sighed before spinning Vida around, reaching for her throat, and tearing off her scarf.

Vida looked down. The necklace was gone.

“Where is it?” Cachorro Louco asked.

Menino. That fucking kid still had it.

Vida punched the woman in the stomach as hard as she could. Cachorro Louco released her and Vida fell backward off the bridge. Out of habit she motioned to open a ripple in space-time, but nothing happened. She managed to land upright, and then pain shot through her already sprained ankle. There weren’t enough expletives in the world to express her agony.

Algernon quickly dropped from the bridge and splashed into the stream to face her.

“Leave her!” Cachorro Louco said.

The rat, snorting in disagreement, stayed put.

Vida climbed out of the water and ran up the slope to reach street level. With her ankle swelling by the second, she knew she’d eventually collapse. Her best bet was to go underground and ride to Ji-Hoon. Or she could abandon the Abelha Rainha and catch a train to Busan where no one would recognize her. Or there was always the chance the embassy would accept an asylum claim—no, not a chance. She’d caused enough problems in Korea.

There was also Brazil, the bosom of the diaspora children. Getting there would be difficult, but Vida was sure she could do it. She could get a job selling shaved-ice or fruit by the beach and use the money to rent a room from a grandmother whose kids never stopped by. For breakfast, Vida could make her coffee in the morning—black, strong, almost undrinkable, like every old person liked it. And before dinner, they would pray in front of a poster of Jesus the old woman found at a bazaar sale, but Vida would notice it was actually Liam Neeson from that turn-of-the-millennium space opera, and she’d keep the secret to herself because deep down Vida was a good person.

The closest subway station was past Gwanghwamun Square where the statue of King Sejong overlooked the presidential palace. Even at that early hour, the streets were filled with commuters whose eyes and ears swallowed newscasts and net dramas. Their terminals warned them to avoid Vida as she sped by. Everyone moved out the way in unison without ever stopping to see who she was. She was fine with that. She didn’t want her arrest to be a system-wide spectacle.

The pain in Vida’s ankle soon overwhelmed her. She lay down, hoping to rest only a short while. The crowds, jolted from their distractions, paused to look. Many likely recognized Vida from her subway shows; she undoubtedly had stolen from some of them. For a few weeks they were her neighbors, her baristas, her fellow commuters, her patrons, her dance partners, her drinking buddies, her haters, her admirers, her fetishists. Vida never cared to know a thing about them.

With police headquarters only down the street, it wasn’t long before sirens blared across the plaza. Officers established a perimeter and tried helping Vida up until they noticed Cachorro Louco and Algernon approaching at a leisurely pace.

“Aren’t you tired?” the bounty hunter asked. “Rather than learn from your father’s mistakes you follow in his stead. I won’t let you further embarrass yourself or our people.”

“Fuck you,” Vida said.

“Where’s the boy?”

Vida didn’t know. Menino was back in the fold now and would be comfortable with that solidarity. She would continue running away: she was the descendant of a slave race still seeking solace in the sea of stars and dark matter.

“I truly am sorry,” Cachorro Louco said. “We’ll find him together.”

She whistled to Algernon. At first, the rat paced around to ward off the police. It needed room to transform into the diatom-shaped shuttle that haunted Vida’s dreams. But before it could transform, Algernon froze in place. Its hairs were raised as if catching something that flew in with the breeze.

Vida could feel it, too.

Cachorro Louco regarded her terminal as it blared with high-pitched urgency.

“That fool,” she said. “He came right to us.”

People grunted and grumbled as someone forced their way through the crowd. Vida turned around to see what it was. The sight of her naïve sidekick clearing a path brought a smile to her face.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” she asked.

Menino smiled back at Vida. “She’s not leaving with you,” he told Cachorro Louco. He held the necklace in his hand for all to see.

The bounty hunter threw her head back and laughed.

“I like you already,” she said. “I really do. But your libido’s not enough to stop me.” As she approached the boy, some chatter rose among the crowd about who he was. More officers arrived to tighten the perimeter. Some called out to Menino by name.

“Libido?” Menino asked Cachorro Louco. “You think I like Vida?”

“Don’t you?” she said.

Menino blushed. He turned to Vida.

“I hate you,” Vida said to him.

He nodded and offered his biggest grin.

“I hate you, too.”

A star gate crackled behind him. Because Vida sat outside of the rift-space, she barely caught a glimpse of the oncoming stampede before hobbling out of the way. In that second an army of terracotta soldiers poured onto the scene with swinging swords and javelins.

At this point the human crowds scattered. Algernon gathered its wits and whipped around the plaza to combat the warriors, chomping their limbs off and tackling through their chests. The officers unbuckled their batons and defended themselves instead of striking back. Inevitably, the soldiers’ sheer numbers would compensate for their lack of durability.

One of the cavalrymen mowed through the crowds at breakneck speed. After whacking a few officers out of the way, he scooped up Menino and hoisted him onto the saddle. The warrior man changed course and charged to Vida, who hadn’t gotten very far.

“Come on!” Menino reached out to grab her.

Cachorro Louco, unperturbed by all the commotion, was two steps ahead. It took little more than a swat from her cybernetic arms to crush the brittle terracotta resistance. As the horse approached Vida, Cachorro Louco cocked her arm back and swung for the horse’s head. The mare and mounted rider crumbled under her immense force and Menino flew forward. He smacked right into the bounty hunter’s chest.

She peeled the boy off her lifting him into the air. “All this potential is—”

An arrow struck her on the temple only to break into dust. The bulk of the army congregated to her. One figure repeatedly stabbed her in the ribs, so she flicked him in the forehead, causing his face to explode.

“All this potential,” Cachorro Louco resumed, “is wasted on a boy and his unrequited love.”

Menino shook his head.

“No,” he replied. “Vida just owes me a trip to Mars.”

He found Vida in the crowd and tossed the necklace. She hopped on her good leg and snatched it from the sky. Cachorro Louco threw Menino to the ground and then turned to face her.

Vida felt the oridium’s energy surge through her once again. Despite not knowing what the necklace would summon, whatever emerged would have to suffice.

A new rift opened and unleashed a heat wave that smacked Vida in the face. Whipping sands burst forth to blot out the sun. Vida was knocked off her feet and crouched into a ball to shield her body. Through squinted eyes, she made out a human figure stepping forth from the rift to tower above the plaza. Gradually she saw its ibis crown, braided hair, and limestone body. She was beautiful.

“Wow,” Vida said while spitting sand from her mouth and rustling it from her curls. “Queen Nefertari, it’s nice to meet you. Would you help me kick some ass?”

The queen rolled her stone eyes. She took one look at Cachorro Louco.

“Yeah,” Vida said, “her ass. Kick it.”

Algernon, who stood some meters behind Vida, shook free from a mound of sand it was buried under. The terracotta soldiers proceeded to strike but with a shriek, Algernon’s body grew another four meters to match this new foe. The little clay men were inconsequential; the rat swallowed them in a single bite.

Vida crawled out of the way before Algernon charged at Nefertari. The queen took a step forward, thrust her knee at the rat, and nailed it in the jaw so hard that Vida felt the impact in her chest. Algernon dropped to the floor but quickly latched onto Nefertari’s shin and bit down until it began to crumble.

“Poke ‘em in the eyes!” Vida shouted.

The statue took Vida’s advice and shoved her thumbs into its eyes. Algernon yelped as it released her leg. In that split second Nefertari jumped over Algernon and grabbed ahold of its tail. Pivoting on her good leg, and nearly stomping on the people below, she spun the rat in circles, throwing it clear across the plaza where it crashed into the façade of the performing arts center. The rat broke through one of the massive support columns and was buried underneath the falling stones.

Queen Nefertari turned to Cachorro Louco. The bounty hunter seemed so small and pathetic.

“Go ahead,” Cachorro Louco said. “‘What a cage is to wild beast, law is to a selfish man.’ All you’ve done is continue your march to misery.” Her eyes were focused on something off and far away.

Menino dusted himself and ran over to Vida. Seeing that she couldn’t stand, he sat beside her.

“Did I do alright?” he said.

Vida shrugged dissatisfaction. “Clay fighters aren’t too tough. I’m telling you, Galaga is your thing. Stick to that.”

Noticing that Menino was also distracted, Vida looked up to see what the commotion was about. Three small shuttles were descending upon Gwanghamun Square instead of heading for the spaceport miles away. Their chrome-painted exteriors reflected the rising sun. To Vida, they looked like angels coming for the rapture.

“Who are they?” Menino asked.

“The law,” Vida said.

The police officers, who couldn’t do much about the chaos to begin with, no longer had jurisdiction and backed away for the landing party. The remaining clay fighters kneeled on the floor and awaited their next orders. Queen Nefertari sat on King Sejong’s lap. Cachorro Louco went to Algernon to soothe the bruised beast. Menino spoke to Vida and explained his theory that the electrical street poles and their dense wire weave were metaphors for his feeling trapped in Seoul. For once, she humored him. She said that after her release from prison, they really would go to Mars for the aerial combat championships.

Truths and lies didn’t matter anymore. Vida didn’t plan on seeing him again.

• • • •

Three months passed.

Coverage of the event spread throughout the solar system, though no one could explain the wizardry that pulled both Emperor Qin’s clay army from China and Queen Nefertari from the facade of Ramses II’s tomb. The recent theft of international art objects, in fact, seemed to congregate in the city of Seoul. Rumor spread that Korea had insurgents planted in museums around the globe, or that one of the country’s gangs had finally made it to Japanese Yakuza or Italian Mafia levels of success. The Sons of Sejong, who were present for the Moai sculpture disaster at Hongdae, happily took the credit.

Web images of the Korean and Venutian teenagers made the news cycle for a week and then vanished. Although there were dozens of independently recorded videos of the couple that fateful morning, most regarded the incident as a film PR stunt. The last time oridium was a serious problem was during the Sigma Rebellion where Martian King Orion waged war against Earth for control of the colonies. That was forty years ago: oridium mining had long since been outlawed, although drug runners always had cheap derivatives on them. But there wasn’t enough to create giant monsters or superhumans anymore.

The implausibility of that summer worked to the benefit of the United Nations Extraplanetary Commission. No suppression or smear campaign needed to be issued. The Korean government agreed to ignore the thousands of reports flooding police precincts until eventually, people stopped talking about it. The Commission could spend its time figuring out what to do about a rogue bounty hunter, a nightmarish rat, a dejected mechanic, a wayward teen, a misguided pirate, and a necklace made to fulfill some unknown but highly illegal purpose.

By the time Menino was released from custody, summer vacation had come and gone. His life would return to an absurd normalcy. Seeing a regular therapist and attending cram school were small prices to pay for the trouble he’d caused. On his first day back to the academy, his peers marveled at the fact he was still alive, and not at all dead or abducted by black smugglers. Menino wasn’t at liberty to discuss what he went through, so he told people the truth: he had been kidnapped and was rescued by the police. His abductor would go to jail for a long, long time.

Menino sat in the back of his math class that morning. His buttoned-up shirt and black tie literally and figuratively choked him. There was discussion of imaginary numbers, but like most students his attention span was so dreadfully small that he tuned out minutes later. His focus fell upon shuttles zooming over the city. The few aircraft still powered by carbon fuels left contrails that dissipated into the ether.

He never did get to fly in the Abelha Rainha.

The Abelha Rainha . . .

Something about the name stuck with him.

“Tae Kyoo Cho?” the instructor at the front of the classroom called. “Would you simplify the equation?”

Menino looked at the projection on the wallscreen.

“I’d prefer not to,” he said.

The classroom turned to Menino. He smiled at his audience. He suddenly remembered what that “something” was. He rose from his seat and walked out of the classroom, and then out of the school.

• • • •

The blaze of summer sun lingered into late September. A rare breeze made its way through the Black Light District. The day drunkards and NEETs spread their arms and lifted their shirts to cool their sweaty stomachs. The usual stench of vomit and urine were carried in the wind and filled Ji-Hoon’s garage. He took a break from changing tires on his yellow moped, reached for his mini fridge, and pulled out a Sapporo. It would certainly dull the pain in his hand, which made it impossible to work for too long.

The surgeon told him the pain was psychosomatic, and that he would eventually forget his forearm wasn’t the real thing. The faint clicks and whirrs of aluminum bone and artificial tendon would become background noise. The sensitivity in his hand would pass after callouses formed. The important thing was to keep doing regular activities: return to the garage, fix vehicles as they came to him, and ignore the blood stain on the floor. On the positive side, he could call himself a cyborg, a real trans-human, more so than the people with microchips and terminals in their skulls. Those were old hat.

Without a television—he was still saving up for a wallscreen—the sounds emanating from his arm seemed even louder. He missed the incessant chatter of his soap opera stars. Now, the only other presence in the room was the elephant hiding beneath its beige tarp.

“You still have it?”

Ji-Hoon turned around and was surprised to see his brother. Menino leaned on the doorway with his black tie undone and his white uniform damp. He dropped his backpack on the floor.

“Yeah, they must have overlooked it,” Ji-Hoon answered. “Or Cachorro Louco never told them it was here.” He checked the time on his terminal. “Why aren’t you in school?”

“Can I have a beer?” Menino asked.

Ji-Hoon tossed a can across the room. The boy caught it, cracked it open, and took a swig. He still pinched his nose when he drank.

“Sorry about your hand,” Menino said.

Ji-Hoon got another drink for himself. “Don’t worry about it. I just need a few more months of rehab. Why aren’t you in school?”

“Because I remembered the Abelha Rainha.”

“Do Mom and Dad know you’re here?” Ji-Hoon asked.

“You called the police, right?” Menino noticed the bloodstained floor. “On me and Vida?”

“I think your downtown brawl was why they showed up.” Ji-Hoon walked to the suspended ship and yanked the tarp down. It kicked up dust and aggravated his allergies. He had replaced the burned hull plating. The entire vessel was retouched in yellow and black metallic, and he even repainted the name on the fuselage. It had been good practice for his new hand. “Vida was never going to stay. Not for you.”

“That’s why I liked her,” Menino said. “She didn’t need me. I had to make myself useful.” He climbed up the ladder leading to the open cockpit and sat in the pilot’s chair. “You can fly this, right?”

“I doubt it. Maybe.” Ji-Hoon resumed repairing the moped.

Menino saw that a map of the solar system was projected onto the cockpit HUD. A blip close to Jupiter blinked on and off.

“You almost went to Jupiter,” Menino said. “Is there a prison there?”

“Yeah,” Ji-Hoon said. “Trojan Station. Biggest supermax in the system.”

“Is this ship is tied to her biometrics? I think that’s where they’re taking her. Do you know?”

“Do I know where Vida is? Why would I know that?”

“I thought you might have overheard during the trial,” Menino said. “They sent me home early.” He looked around the shop. Aside from the one moped being repaired, business was slow. “Are you busy?”

Ji-Hoon stopped to stare at the boy. “I’m not flying that ship, Tae. I don’t even have my license anymore. You’ll have to manage a long-distance relationship.” He finished his beer and went for another.

Menino leaned out of the cockpit and glared at the mechanic. “You used to be cool.”

“I’m still cool,” Ji-Hoon said with a hint of annoyance. “I just have responsibilities now. Why didn’t you tell me you ran away?”

“Because I know you don’t care.” Menino stretched his arms, outlining the bounds of the garage kingdom. “This keeps you busy all day? Hiding in your cave and fixing shitty mopeds?”

Ji-Hoon grew red in the face. “Vida wasn’t here to play house with you. She thought you were a conduit for her necklace. I’m not going to fly half a billion kilometers so she can tell you that to your face.”

“Then I’ll fly there myself.”

“You want to do Vida a favor?” Ji-Hoon said. “Leave her alone. Finish school and go to college and live the life she never had. That’s how you’ll make her happy.”

“You know,” Menino said, “she said the same thing. But you’re both hypocrites. You came back from training and all you’ve done is rot in this garage and act like a jackass.”

“And I have every right to do that!” Ji-Hoon shouted. In a fit he threw his drink at his brother. The can struck the ship, punctured, and sprayed beer mist into the air. “No one asked for your opinions or your help, Tae. Go home and get the fuck out of my face.”

Menino climbed out of the cockpit and made his way to the exit. “Vida doesn’t need to ask for help,” he said. “She’s my friend, and I’m helping her because she’s a person. But you don’t have any friends. I don’t need you telling me how to be one.” He walked over to the trash bin and spilled its contents over the ground. There were rags soaked in black grease, and cans that rolled throughout the room and into the alley outside.

Menino picked up his backpack and left.

Ji-Hoon lifted his motorbike and continued working. The afternoon was unusually quiet, and although he could no longer hear the mechanical sounds of his hand, the low ping of the Abelha Rainha’s console rang in his ears for the rest of the day.

©2018 by Nelson Rolon. Originally published in FIYAH. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nelson Rolon is a nonprofit project manager in Albany, NY. He earned his MFA in Television Production from Brooklyn College. Nelson has been published in FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, and received mention in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. His writing explores transhumanism, interstellar migration, faith, and the desire for catharsis. Current projects include an anthology about a couple operating a games shop; a Tenchi Muyo fanfic; and a sequel to his debut novelette, Saudade. Nelson lives in a cozy apartment with wife Sara and their two cats, Vanta and Muta. Follow him on Twitter @oldmannelson, where he shares content from his extended writing family.

An Invitation to a Burning

Kat Howard | 2241 words

Merrinvale was a town that needed witches. Most places do—witches, after all, are the ones who make sure the small and large magics work. Things like the rising of bread and the turning of the seasons and safe passage through birth and death, all the work of witches. Some places accept this, and so they welcome their witches the same as they welcome any others and life moves in harmony.

Merrinvale was not one such place.

Merrinvale burned its witches, when it found them.

Most people, if asked, would swear that a witch burning hadn’t happened in years, if it ever had at all; that it was only a story told to frighten people into proper behavior. But when the fog came in, evening thick, it smelled of burning wood and worse things besides. The Merrinvale hills echoed with screams. And they called the fog the Witches’ Breath.

The fact that Merrinvale did not want its witches, much less accept them, did nothing to change the need of the place for them. And there were, as there always are, those who made sure the necessary things were done. But magic, when ignored, when forbidden, twists upon itself and becomes strange. Witches, when forbidden, seek this strangeness, and wrap themselves in its transformations.

• • • •

“They burn witches, you know.” Ronald spat at the ground near where Sage sat.

“So I’ve heard,” she said, not looking up from the rabbit she was untangling from a poorly cast trap of knotted twine. Her hands did not shake as she did so, and her face didn’t tense in fear, and Sage was proud of both things. Ronald was large, and Ronald was always angry, and Sage was not the first woman he had taken against. At least one of the others, Lilah, quiet and lovely, had disappeared, never to be seen again. “It’s a good thing I’m not one, then.”

“You could be,” Ronald said. “And if you did burn, that’s what everyone would think. Just another witch, gone and good riddance.”

Sage lifted her hands from the ground, and watched as the rabbit, now free, hopped away and out of sight. She curved her fingers into claws. “And if I were a witch, and here you were alone with me, with no matches in sight, what do you think would happen then?”

Ronald spat again, his eyes pinched and mean. But he said nothing else and he stepped back, away from the path where Sage walked.

She kept her back straight and her head up, but the taste of fear, bile and slime, coated her mouth.

• • • •

Sage found the note on her front porch. Black letters on a thick white card—one she nearly didn’t see, as a pile of maple leaves, rust-edged red, had heaped itself against her door overnight. But the corner of the paper showed through, and she set the information written on it to memory.

It was an invitation to a burning.

• • • •

Sage arrived at the indicated address at precisely the correct time. She couldn’t remember ever seeing the house before, which would not have been strange had she not lived in Merrinvale her entire life. Even now, the place looked abandoned, the windows all dark. Her hand went to her pocket, to remind herself that she had brought what was required.

The door whispered open. Sage stepped inside.

The cool violet air of the evening followed her into the house. Inside, the house no longer looked decrepit and empty. Soft candles lit floors of elegantly worn wood. The air smelled of the warm sweetness of beeswax and the sharp green of herbs. And something else, underneath. Something that flared her nostrils and raced her heart.

Smoke.

Nothing stopped her, and so Sage walked farther in.

At the first branch of the hall, a woman draped in veils sat on a stormcloud-grey velvet chair. She held her hands out, gloved palms up, and Sage set hers on top of them. The acrid scent of eucalyptus sliced through the warmth of the air, and Sage gasped, yanking her hands up and away.

The woman in the chair did not speak or move. Sage squared her shoulders, and set her hands upon the woman’s again. The hands beneath hers were cold, the deep cold of iron in winter, and her joints ached from the contact. The ache passed into burning. The woman tightened her hands around Sage’s and pulled her down, so close her veils whispered against Sage’s skin.

“Remember what it is the fire burns. Remember why you’ve come. Remember what it is to have power.”

Her voice was familiar. Not so much that Sage could put a name to it, but enough to know they had said their hellos in passing on the sidewalk, or while picking groceries. It could have been a shock, but it was instead a comfort: here was another, like her, quiet and unseen and powerful all the same.

The other woman let go of Sage’s hands, and raised a gloved finger to her lips, silencing any questions. Sage waited a moment, but the woman was so still it was as if she stood next to a statue. Sage continued on.

The house twisted and turned on itself, a labyrinth lined with bookshelves. Sage walked through narrow hallways, warm golden wood sighing under her feet. Through rooms with furniture shrouded in dust cloths, past the sob of an unseen violin. The veiled woman’s words beat along with her pulse: Remember, remember, remember.

As she walked, she saw no one. She heard nothing. It was as if she were the only soul in the house.

Then Sage turned a corner, and the hall opened up before her. Kept opening, really—it looked like a ballroom, where the back wall had been removed to let the night and the forest in.

And she was no longer alone.

In the ballroom were women Sage had seen her whole life, those she had waved to and passed by and traded bowls of soup and baskets of cookies with. Women who taught children and ran businesses and made art. They looked different than they did in their everyday lives. Both wilder and more natural, somehow. Flowers bloomed in their hair, and vines twined their arms. A belt of bones chained a waist. As strange as they would have appeared on the streets of Merrinvale, here they looked like they belonged.

Shadows thickened like piled velvet in the room’s corners. A spiraling pattern had been drawn in salt on the floor, incomplete sections open like the entrance to a labyrinth. Slowly, the other women in the room made their way toward the center. In singles and in groups, they barricaded themselves inside the boundary of the salt. They sat delicately, skirts pooling about them like puddles. They slumped to the ground as if they were wilting flowers. They tucked their legs to the side, leaned shoulder to shoulder, held hands. Connected.

Sage felt something inside herself pull as they did, a thread that wound her into their pattern, and so she sat, too.

Flames danced, salamander red, on the edges of her peripheral vision, and the smell of the fire grew stronger. But here, in this room, there was no terror in the scent, in the heat and crackle of the flames.

The air snapped, electric, then settled again. The salt patterns complete, creating a barrier between the women gathered and the world without.

The firelight flickered, shuddered, blinked, and when it settled, a woman with antlers spiking from her head stood in the center of the room. The antlers did not look like a hat—they looked like they had grown, curling up from her skull.

She was shrouded all in tattered tea-colored lace, from her antlers to her feet. Even her face was obscured. A shiver fluttered at the base of Sage’s spine, and traveled along the branches of her nerves. The hair on her arms stood up.

“You have come here,” the antlered woman said, “to burn your past. To scorch from yourself that which you would leave in the ashes. To cast off your old skins and make yourself new. To claim your power, if you are able.

“Bring what you would burn.”

The same words that had been written on the card inviting her here. Sage reached into her pocket. She had hesitated while making it, this small doll that was a copy of herself. She had thought that it might be easier to burn a doll that looked like Ronald, and watch all his hate rise up in smoke. Or an image of Merrinvale, to burn it before it could burn her. And so she took those impulses, the things she disliked in her own self, her fear and panic, and she sewed them into the doll, that the fire would not destroy her, but would clarify her instead.

Salt in the air surrounded the women in the circle like weeping, sticky on skin. The deer woman strode among them, regal. She stopped and brushed a hand over a head, bent to offer a word, a nod. To examine the offerings of those who had come to be witches. She paused before Sage, and the air smelled of the forest, secret and wild. In the woman’s eyes behind her veils, Sage saw only reflected flames. The woman bent her head, an acknowledgement of Sage’s offering, a blessing upon it.

With each interaction, color crept up the hem of her dress, shadows soaking into the fabric, darkening it. Magic shimmered like heat in the air around her. Sage felt that magic, too. Felt it shake the air and quicken her blood. She felt part of herself reach toward it.

The fire was brighter, the air sticky hot. The deer woman stood in their center, her dress red now, red darker than black, and wet, as if it bled.

“And now, the fire.”

Not every woman there was a new witch. Some had already claimed their power, and were there simply in support and community. The new among them brought their offerings to the fire, a private magic between the witch and her gift. Sage felt the flames like a warmth in her core as she tossed in her doll, felt them spark through her body. She felt an unraveling in herself, a calmness, as that which she had given up burned away. Margaretha, who ran the bakery in the center of downtown, held her hands out to Sage: “Welcome.”

When they had finished, when the fire had chosen the new witches and they had accepted its gift, the antlered woman brought a bowl into the center of the circle, carrying it like a blessing. Thick and heavy-looking, a pattern carved into tarnished bronze, full of wine, darker than the night. “Now,” she said, “we drink.”

What they drank didn’t taste like wine. Cold and deep, like iced plums, but also the bright sweetness of summer’s first strawberries. The warm burn of whiskey in the lone hours of the night, the taste of flame. Sage’s head spun.

The room shifted. Sage could feel her heart beat in time with the other women’s, see the breath that moved in and out of their lungs. She could live their memories. Here, now, the fire that the fearful would use to take their lives bringing them their power.

The flames stretched into the night, casting their shadows onto the walls, bending and twisting them until the women looked snake-haired, until they were horned and winged. And then it faded, dying down, making their shadows recognizable again. Until they looked like themselves. Until they looked like witches.

The dawn light replaced the fire’s light, and the women, witches old and new, looked no different from other women that lived in Merrinvale. The house shed its glamour to appear abandoned and forgotten, and ritual returned to ordinary.

Remember, remember, remember Sage’s heart beat, and she did as she walked slowly home. The feeling of connection, of power, of belonging.

And then the feeling of twine, tightening around her feet and ankles, tangling her, as if she were a rabbit.

“Witch.” Ronald’s voice ugly with certainty.

Light flared from a torch held in his hand and the heat of flame crackled, and Sage stood in perfect stillness. “And if I am?”

“Witches are for burning.” The fire thrust closer.

Sage reached inside herself. She remembered the feeling of her fear burning away, the connection with the other women, the witches, their welcome. She remembered her power.

“Are we?”

Fog rose from the ground. Witches’ breath. The twine untied itself from where it had bound her, and slithered away, snaking into the quiet darkness of the forest.

“Witch! Stop that!” Ronald shoved his torch at her, the flames licking at her hems, at her hands, at her hair.

None caught.

But fog, choking thick, surrounded the edges of Ronald’s clothing, his hands, his hair. The more he forced the fire on her, the thicker the fog grew, until the fire was gone and the fog seemed nearly a solid thing.

Sage sighed out a breath. The fog rolled away, and Sage stood alone.

• • • •

Merrinvale was a place that needed witches. Most places are, even if the people who live in them don’t realize it. And even when hidden in secret, witches still hold power.

©2021 by Kat Howard. Originally published in Hex Life, edited by Christopher Golden and Rachael Autumn Deering. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kat Howard is the author of the novels Roses and Rot and the Alex Award-winning An Unkindness of Magicians. Her most recent book is her short fiction collection, A Cathedral of Myth and Bone. Her novella, The End of the Sentence, co-written with Maria Dahvana Headley, was an NPR Best Book of the Year in 2014, and she was the writer for 18 issues of The Books of Magic for DC Comics. She teaches in the genre writing MFA program at Western Colorado University, and currently lives in New Hampshire, where she is working on her next projects.

The Palace in the Moonlight

Howard Andrew Jones | 8083 words

Dabir and I shrouded the Syrian in his saddle blanket and spent a few hours digging a hole for him in that lonely land. He had been the last of our companions. Bandits and desertion and, finally, illness, had whittled our numbers down from the score of warriors and porters with whom we had begun our journey so that only we two were left.

We finished the burial and our prayers and stood to contemplate the high scrubby brown hills that stretched before and behind us. Dabir’s gaze was fixated upon the route forward, and I glumly remembered the Syrian’s last words. Even through his fever he’d remained obsessed with the palace, repeating that it lay but three nights further. The most stupid of parrots prattled about more varied matters than that man, may peace be his.

“You mean to go on,” I said to Dabir.

His expression shifted back and forth between bemused and apologetic, and he lifted an empty hand, struggled to say something, then sighed. His hand dropped.

At that time he was in his early middle-age, and gray had crept into his spade-shaped beard. Usually, it was in better trim. In this time of hardship, you might think his eyes would be dulled, but their blue burned bright.

“Nothing lies before us but more empty hills,” I said. “In six days’ time, barring further misfortune, we’ll be back here with nothing to show but the passage of a further week away from our wives and children.”

“That’s likely,” he agreed. “But won’t you always wonder if we don’t go see?”

I snorted. “Next you’ll tell me we have a duty to the caliph.”

“You would have said as much, in younger days.”

I nodded, for he was right.

He spoke on, like the voice of my conscience. “The caliph and Jaffar will ask us if we looked upon the place by the light of the full moon. And you value the truth as much as I.”

He had the right of this, though I wasn’t pleased to admit it. I had no heart to travel on. But then I’d held little love for this venture from the start.

I’d seen more amusement than interest on the caliph’s handsome face when the Syrian had spoken at the banquet long weeks before. It was the vizier, Jaffar, who’d insisted the proposed expedition be funded, and he’d suggested we accompany the Syrian, ostensibly to ensure the venture’s success. Dabir and I were favored by the caliph, you see, precisely because we had delivered the impossible time and again. Though the vizier behaved as though he too valued us, for reasons too complex to relate here, he continually sent us forth in hope that we would one day fail to return.

That no kingdom could prosper in this place was readily apparent. A palace so grand as the Syrian had described required fields and villages to sustain it. There were none of these things nearby, nor did I expect to see them in the coming days. It might be that the Queen of Sheba had once spoken with Solomon, may peace be upon him, but his temple was long since dust and likely nothing was left of her palace but a few cracked columns where scorpions laired.

Yet I held off grumbling further and packed our gear. Dabir finished watering the animals, and then we climbed into our saddles and rode south.

I cannot emphasize enough how much I expected nothing but more disappointment. So imagine my surprise when after the third evening passed we beheld a citadel of towering spires glittering frostily under the stars. Just as the Syrian had claimed, for he had stressed again and again that we must reach the place during the full moon.

He had been wrong in one particular, for he’d promised the citadel stood upon a mountain height, and it rested instead in a valley, amid foothills of a distant range. Behind white cyclopean walls rose a vast dome and a half dozen needle topped spires.

Dabir arched an eyebrow at me and gave me one of his half smiles.

I answered his wordless question. “A wondrous sight,” I admitted.

A gleaming road, long and straight and silver as moonlight stretched out in front of the palace, and as we sat watching on the slope, we beheld a band of horsemen in shining raiment guiding a motley band of men afoot, some of whom drove goats and cows before them. Even if I had never before seen prisoners of war, I might easily have identified those in the saddle as captors and those they accompanied as their charges, so different was their manner.

“A nation at war,” I said to my friend.

“All nations have their enemies,” he said. “But I mark your words. We must be wary.”

I glanced at our three pack animals, laden yet with gifts. Once, there had been five beasts, but two of our soldiers had sneaked off with one, and the arrows of bandits had sent one plunging into a gorge too deep to attempt a recovery. Still, what remained was fine enough.

We waited for the armed host to enter the walls, then adjusted our appearance as best we might. Dabir’s finest robe had been lost, but I still had mine, and by the light of that full moon we brushed out our garments and wound clean turban cloths. Also I looked to my sword, a curved blade gifted to me by the caliph. Then we mounted up and advanced.

If there were sentinels looking down from those great white walls, rising higher than ship’s masts, we did not see them, nor did I hear horn calls raised in alarm. Faintly the wind brought us sounds of strange music—muted horns and some wind instrument, backed by cymbals and a drum. I could not place the tune, but its speed was swift and its winding sound faintly festive. It grew louder as we drew nearer to the citadel’s immense and open doors.

You may be sure that I watched the heights of the place, alert for the heads of archers. I saw only the curved merlons, each embedded with a sparkling, precious stone. Patterns in the white brick grew more clear as we neared, so that to the right and left of the gate we saw mosaics of crowned, bearded men bearing chests abrim with jewelry and treasures, and mighty horses and oxen and stranger creatures from myth. Each towered above the plain, yet each bowed their head in the direction of the open gate.

I looked to Dabir, riding at my side, to gauge his thoughts.

“We have been seen,” Dabir remarked.

That went without saying, for otherwise they would have sealed the entrance. “I mislike this place. Who watches from above? Djinn? Demons? Surely they are not so foolish to leave themselves unguarded.”

“Likely they watch from hidden places,” Dabir said.

“Likely it’s magic,” I said. “The Syrian promised the place was rich with sorcery.”

“Just because we found it by night doesn’t mean his talk of magics was true.”

I frowned, thinking it likely my friend was wrong, but saying nothing.

We passed through that gate, wide enough to welcome four elephants riding side to side with room to spare. Eight lantern bearing servants waited beyond, wearing golden robes. They looked something like Franks, for they were blue-eyed and fair-skinned with yellow hair. They spoke to us but we could not understand them, nor they us. Eventually, by signs they made clear that they would care for our horses and wished us to follow them. While one led off our mounts, one guided us across a luxuriant greensward for the domed, towered palace within the wall. The others trailed, laden with our surviving gifts.

“This will be a greater challenge if we share no language,” I said.

“We can hope there are scholars and translators within.” Dabir’s answer was distracted, for there was much to see.

The palace seemed carved from a single opal, for it was of brilliant white, as though someone had called down the moon’s light, frozen it, then worked it into shape. The building itself rose to only three stories, although its many towers soared to varied heights. One stood in every corner, and two rose in the back, and here and there an extra one thrust up off center. None looked to be the tower of the muezzin, so if the Queen of Sheba had converted, as is told, then she had not been demonstrative about it.

Though the portal into the palace was half the size of the gate to the fortress, it remained impressive enough, I assure you, especially with its arched entryway sparkled with diamond dust, redly reflecting the flickering torchlight from nearby sconces in a thousand different ways.

The music we had heard from without grew gradually louder, and more sprightly, and from its sound we knew we closed upon its source.

The lead servant guided us into a lofty hall. Its domed ceiling was painted with a great green dragon ribboned about a crimson sun. Slim pillars of stark white marble stretched down from on high, like the fingertips of a huge djinn who dared but briefly touch the surface of the earth.

Beneath that dome and between the pillars stretched a long banquet table heavy with food. The scent of so much well-cooked meat after weeks of road fare set my stomach growling on the moment. Duck I saw, and antelope, and fish, laid on beds of rice and vegetables. Breads there were, some still smoking, so freshly had they been pulled from the oven. There were fruits as well, many of them sliced beforehand and lying in clever rows. Also, there were cheeses and dozens of flasks of what was surely wine, to judge from the manner of most of those seated there.

That long table must have stretched forty feet, and there were men from at least twenty lands upon its benches. Many raised bejeweled goblets and laughed with the loud gaiety of the inebriated. Others lolled, and two were passed out beside their plates.

I saw pale men and dark men, black men and yellow, and they were arrayed in robes, or peculiar armored shirts, or little but feathers. Some were mustachioed or bearded, and two had heads utterly bare but for spiraling blue tattoos. No matter their many differences, they were alike in that all except the most drunken fell silent and watched sourly as we made our way under the hanging lanterns.

Had they wished it, the diners might have looked out upon a circular courtyard hung with bright paper lanterns. Fountains and statues that place had in abundance, but the eye was naturally drawn to a central feature, a wide-limbed apple tree from which depended yellow fruit mirroring light so ably that they looked lacquered. The bark possessed a peculiar luster, as though painted with sparkling motes.

I finally spied the six musicians, men in brown bent over their instruments and half hidden upon a curved balcony looking over the banquet.

It was beneath that balcony where we were met by a quartet of sturdy men in gold accented armor. Each bore a spear and a shield and a suspicious expression. At their head was a handsome woman with exceptionally clear light brown eyes. Her clothing was simple but well made, and she was ornamented only with a necklace on which a lovely blue circlet of lapis lazuli hung. Though in late middle-age, her beauty had not yet left her and it was easy to see she had been a rare flower in her time.

She addressed us in formal Arabic, her manner cool and direct. “Who are you, what is the purpose of your visit, and from whence do you come?”

Dabir bowed his head to her. “May peace be upon you. I am Dabir ibn Khalil, and this is Asim el Abbas. We travel at the behest of the Caliph of Baghdad, who sent us forth with gifts to present to her majesty, the Queen of Sheba.”

The woman’s interest was lit. “You have come far, then. Is there something your master seeks?”

“He wishes to forge bonds of friendship with the queen and her peoples,” Dabir said.

She regarded us in silence for a moment before answering. “My queen is always curious of novelty. But if you would speak with her, you must leave your weapons behind.”

I frowned at this news, though I had well expected it. One does not meet his own ruler with a blade at his side, much less the leader of a foreign land. Reluctantly, then, I undid the belt that held both my sword and knife. Dabir unfastened his own. The servant who had until now been leading us turned to accept them, bowed formally, and retreated.

I felt the eyes of the largest guard upon me. Though graying of hair he was no aged man, and he looked to give as good as he got should any blows be traded. I saw that he thought the same of me and knew that he would watch me close.

“I shall take you to the queen,” the woman said. She took over as our guide, and the soldiers fell in beside us.

We walked only a little further. The queen sat upon a little dais overlooking the banquet, eating from a platter upon a side table. Her chair’s narrow back barely encompassed both shoulders but towered half again above her, and was carved from the same exquisite ivory that supported the roof.

Brown of skin, she had that same aloof quality of beauty as her building. Garbed in pearly white dress with gold accents, her slender limbs were heavy with ruby-studded gold bracelets. Curling black hair piled artfully above her head, falling in well-brushed strands to either side of her ears, which were hung with delicate bangles. Her nose was slim, one wide nostril pierced with a small ruby.

As she turned her face to take us in, I found myself under the regard of black eyes empty as those in the time-washed statues standing in Greek ruins. She took a dainty bite from a shining yellow apple, watching us the while.

Our guide addressed the queen in a language that sounded harsh and rolling, then gestured to us.

The queen raised one hand and the musicians ceased their play. At a signal from the head guard, we took a knee and bowed our heads.

The queen addressed us in a cool, clear voice and we looked up in time to see her set the fruit aside. Two well-manicured hands motioned us to rise even as our guide instructed us to do so.

Our translator brushed her necklace. “I have introduced you as ambassadors, although it occurs to me now that neither of you quite have the look, and you have no retinue.”

“Fairly observed,” Dabir said. “What is your name, and your duty here?”

She smiled sadly. “I am Abla. And I am a sworn servant to the Queen of Sheba.”

“Lady Abla, I am a scholar, and my friend is a warrior. We departed Baghdad with a great retinue and many gifts, and we are all that has survived, with a diminished supply of the treasures the caliph had intended for her.”

The queen’s impatience at not understanding this exchange was easily marked. Abla turned to speak to her at length, gesturing to us from time to time. The queen asked other questions and I felt her keen eyes upon me.

“She would like to see the gifts you have brought her.”

Dabir stepped forward and with another bow directed the waiting servants forward.

Under the watchful eyes of the guards, he one by one withdrew the objects left us. From a small and sturdy chest he produced jewelry in abundance, enough fine necklaces and earrings and bracelets to have sent a thief gibbering in disbelief. There was a robe of gold, and a finely wrought silver circlet, as well as a Qur’an with most splendid calligraphy, carefully preserved in waterproof wraps.

None of these seemed to hold the queen’s interest, and I thought we had utterly failed to amuse her until Dabir lifted the small metal birdcage. Its top had become dented during our journey, and I knew that this embarrassed him, but when he turned the crank and the little mechanical avian behind the bars fluttered its wings and twittered out a song, the queen’s face brightened in child-like pleasure.

At her command Dabir brought the cage forward, working the crank so that the bird continued to mimic a living animal. She clapped like a little girl, saying something to Abla.

“The queen asks why you did not identify yourself as a magician.”

Dabir shook his head wryly. “I am no mage, Lady Abla, and this is not magic, but mechanics.”

“What year is it, Dabir?” Abla asked suddenly. I did not think this question had come from the queen. Surely it was a strange one.

Dabir answered swiftly enough “801.”¹

Abla’s eyes widened.

“Is something wrong?” Dabir asked.

She shook her head, then turned to the queen to speak with her, pointing at the bird as she did so.

“The queen wishes to know of the caliph who sent you, and his city. Does he have many marvels like this?”

Dabir looked to me. Aye, he was a fine speaker, but he’d remarked long before that I was the better teller of tales. And so I spoke, and conjured forth the marvels of Baghdad: wide boulevards and dazzling goods that hung from stalls arrived from every corner of the world, spices and cloths, fine carvings of jade, and exquisitely wrought jewelry shining with gemstones of every color. I spoke of the great mosques and the schools of learning. I told of the splendor of the caliph’s palaces and the wisdom of his rule, and it may be that Baghdad shined all the more because we had been so long absent from her, and in my longing that I omitted some few of its shortcomings. In any wise, the queen looked well pleased with my delivery, as translated by Abla. She adjusted herself upon her seat and, through Abla, asked another question.

“Tell me more of yourselves.”

This I did. I sensed the ruler had grown more and more curious about us, and thinking that we were yet on uncertain ground, I practiced no false modesty. I told her how clever and skilled my friend was, and how together we had bested dozens of threats and dangers, describing a handful of them in brief, and one at length. After, she considered me through her long lashes in a way that any seasoned man recognizes. It did not hurt that in those days I was a fine, powerful figure of a man, though my appearance had not stirred her until I spoke with eloquence, something to which younger men should pay heed.

“So,” the queen said through her translator, “you are a great warrior and storyteller, and your friend is a scholar and a wizard.”

Dabir bowed to her. “I am no wizard; I am a breaker of evil magics.”

I noticed that Abla seemed to wince at that before she translated.

The queen’s gaze shifted from me to my friend’s. “And what magics would you declare as evil?”

“Magic,” Dabir said, “is contrary to the laws of God, the creator—”

The queen, through Abla, interrupted him.

“Magic is but another tool, and if God did not wish us to use tools he should not give us the minds to fashion them, and the hands to wield them.”

Dabir politely offered open palms. “God does not wish us to slay other men, and yet we fashion swords, and spears. But I did not come to debate you, Majesty, but to bring you the regards of the Caliph, who would be your friend.”

The queen shook her head. “I have no need of his friendship, for he shall be dead in a matter of weeks.”

So matter-of-fact was this pronouncement that the hairs upon my arms stirred and stood upright. It was as though the angel of death had brushed the back of my neck.

Even if you did not understand his language, there was no missing the demand in Dabir’s response. “What do you mean?”

The queen looked almost bored by her own answer. “All will become clear in time. Worry not for him, for there is nothing you can do. Stay, and be my guests. I would hear tell of your adventures, and it would please me to speak with men of intelligence. So few of them come to me.”

I exchanged a worried look with Dabir, who quickly bowed. “Majesty, we would bring warning to our caliph.”

The queen gave a negligent flip of her hand. “We will speak of this later. For now, you may leave my presence. You have traveled far, and have earned this rest.”

She directed the guard captain to take the cage which contained the bird. He glared at Dabir as he did so, then set it upon the table before her. She turned the cage this way and that, looking in at the bird from different angles.

Abla faced us. “Come. I will convey you to your quarters. You do not, perhaps, understand the honor you have been accorded. Only a rare few are treated so well.” She bowed to the queen, retreated, and then headed away and to the left. We performed our own bows to the now indifferent monarch and followed our guide.

Again I took in the men at the table, most of whom had returned to their sullen drinking. “Is there some special occasion tonight?” I asked.

“It is a night in celebration of the planting of . . . a special tree. It’s a long tale,” she said, with the air of one who has no interest in explaining further.

“Who are these who sup with the queen?” Dabir asked.

“Travelers.” Abla took up a lantern hung upon a pillar at the banquet’s edge, then headed into a side corridor over floors of polished black granite.

We caught up to her. “An answer that says little,” Dabir said. “Tell me, Abla, from whence have you come?”

“I have been to many places, Dabir.” Then to me she said: “Tell me, is Baghdad truly as fair as you describe it?”

We passed through a fretted arch and onto a set of stone stairs that spiraled upward.

“It is a city of wonders,” I answered. “But it is Mosul that holds my heart. Do you know it? There dwells my love, and our children. It sits upon the banks of the Tigris, and so fair is it in autumn some call it the land of two springs.”

She asked then after the ages of my daughters, and I spoke of them, and my wife, on one hand a dignified woman of high status and upon the other a bright-eyed mischief-maker who liked still to ride the countryside upon the swiftest of horses. So it was that though we climbed a dark, winding staircase, I half looked upon the eyes of my beloved, and heard the laugher of my children, and the splash of water in our courtyard fountain.

She asked about Dabir’s family.

“I too love my wife and children. And I love my caliph. How does your queen know his fate? And what is to happen to him?”

Abla sighed. “He will die at his appointed time, as will we all.” She looked him in the eyes. “There is nothing that you can do.”

If our guide and her ruler spoke the truth, and Harun al-Rashid had but weeks, there was no way that we might warn him of any impending threat, for we were separated from our homeland by months. Still, I did not care for these words, and neither did my friend.

“How does the queen know this?”

Abla shook her head. “All will soon be clear.”

“I should rather it were clear now,” Dabir insisted.

We reached a fifth level, and though the stairs wound further yet, Abla glided into a little entryway and opened a door for us. Before us stretched a spacious room furnished with plush cushions and carpets. All of white stone, it was hung with thick tapestries of gardens and colorful birds and running horses. As she showed us a water pump and through the contents of three small bedrooms, servants arrived bearing lanterns, platters of food, towels, and piles of garments, as well as additional pillows, though there was little need for them, so abundant were they in those chambers already.

Dabir’s expression had remained troubled through much of this. As for me, it had been not just a long day, but a very long trip, and I thought that whatever we would do next it would be better accomplished upon a full stomach after a comfortable night of sleep. Also, it struck me as a rare pleasure to be fully clean once more, even if the waters would be cold.

“We are grateful to you for all these comforts,” Dabir said to Abla as she retreated toward the door. “As well as your company, although you have said much while explaining little.”

“That was not my intent,” she said, thumbing her necklace once more. “I would be your friend, Dabir.”

Bidding us good night, she then retreated and shut the door behind her. Dabir walked to the door. It might be that I would not have heard the soft thud outside if I had not been watching him.

Sooner than I, he deduced what this meant, and immediately tried the latch. It did not open, for it had been secured from without.

Dabir took his fist to the door. “Abla!”

I stepped to his side.

“What do you mean by this?” Dabir demanded of the woman beyond the door.

Her voice came to us dully through the wood. “I am sorry. You should not have come. Or you should have made yourselves less interesting.”

“What does your queen intend with us?”

“She intends for you to be her honored guests. But she will keep you here in this chamber for several weeks, until you are resolved as to your fate. Do not fear—” she added quickly. “You will be well fed.”

“What fate do you mean?” Dabir asked.

“Time, as you are accustomed, does not pass in the palace. By sunrise we will journey into other realms. When next we appear in this spot, half a year will be gone. In a year’s time within the palace, all whom you love will be dead or ancient.”

Seldom did I see fear upon Dabir’s face, but I saw it that night, and likely he saw it upon mine.

“You mean to separate us from our families, then,” Dabir said tensely. “You might as well slay us.”

“I am sorry,” Abla said sincerely. “I swore myself in service to the queen. And my oath means that I must obey her commandments.”

Dabir’s answer was swift. “Are there not higher commandments?”

“I am sorry. I hope that . . . in coming days . . . we may move past this. For we will have long years together. There are benefits to living here. Those who consume the fruit of the queen’s sacred tree have their years reversed.”

“Is that what happened to you? Did you come here with Antar?”

At this, I started. Antar? The famed warrior poet? True, the love of his life was the beautiful Abla, but he and she had lived more than a century ago. Could this talk of a sacred tree and magic years be true? I looked to Dabir, saw the determined set to his features, and ceased doubting.

There came a sad sigh from the other side of the door. “Antar had passed by the time I traveled here,” our captor said softly. “I was very old, and perhaps I was foolish, for I believed the stories I heard of the queen’s powers over life and death.” Her voice fell and I struggled to hear. “I came to beg her to return Antar to me. This she could not do. But she promised that if I served her, my own youth would be restored. Slowly I regain it, and with it strength, and beauty.”

“And what of wisdom?” Dabir asked. “The Abla of the stories is wise, and just.”

A long silence followed this question. Dabir pressed himself against the door. In the end, her voice came clearly to us both. “You seek to shame me. But I am sworn to the queen’s service, and you ask me to betray her.”

Dabir spoke quickly. “Are all the people at the banquet like you? Travelers sworn to serve?”

“They’ve found their way here. Some seek for favor yet with the queen, who has lost interest in them.”

“Why don’t they leave?”

I heard wry amusement in her answer. “Then they would no longer have access to the golden apples.”

“And what of the prisoners of war? What happens to them?”

“The palace needs slaves and servants.”

“As well as goods. Yet the palace brings no more benefit to its lands than would a band of raiders, for it appears but a few times a year.”

Abla’s reply sounded agitated. “The queen takes a tithe from her lands, as would any ruler.”

“But other rulers protect their lands and solve disputes of their subjects, and mete out justice. Does she do those things?”

Abla did not answer this.

“Your queen asks you to betray the rules of hospitality. How can you, who grieve for your Antar, separate us from our own loves, and our children?”

Her answer was slow in coming. “I am sorry,” she said, her voice heavy with regret. “We will bring more food in the morning.” Her feet scuffed the stairs as she retreated.

Dabir pounded the door once, called out to Abla, then stepped back. “We should not have come,” he said darkly.

“Weren’t you the one who said he would always wonder if we didn’t go further south?”

Dabir threw up his hands in disgust. “You might have tried harder to talk me out of it!”

“I can count on one hand the times I’ve talked you out of anything.”

Dabir muttered something I shall not repeat and then turned from the door to take in the room. I knew that his agile mind was already working out some sort of escape plan.

I longingly considered the platters of food, then Dabir and I set to work. We saw the only egress was through a narrow window looking upon the courtyard with the apple tree. There might have been sufficient handholds in the brick to climb down, if one were a monkey.

Dabir contemplated the bed sheets and declared that they could be of use in climbing, though he doubted they could get us all the way down.

I had been leaning out the window and observed that while there were no windows beneath us, there was one above, just below the battlement. “We could go up.”

His eyes shifted to me. “Suppose that window, too, leads to a locked room.”

“Then it is only a little higher up to the tower height.”

“Your bravery has ever impressed me,” Dabir said. “But we are seventy or eighty feet up. With a fall such as that there is no room for mistakes.”

I nodded. “It’s true. If I fall, I die. But then, if we fail in this, we’re separated forever from our families, which is near enough to death.”

He nodded shortly. “Truly said. Very well. We’ll find a way to make this plan less likely to kill us.”

Dabir marched straight away for a low table seated along a wall, and put his foot through it. At first, I was stunned my friend engaged in such an uncharacteristic bout of temper, but he explained we needed to fashion a kind of hook by which it would be possible to throw something through the window above and have it catch safely there.

First, there was the tedious matter of cutting and tying ever so many strands of cloth from the curtains and garments. They had taken my fighting weapons, but not Dabir’s small knife, which we put to swift use. I began to look over my shoulder at the window, wondering how much time was left before the dawn. By my estimation, it was past three bells of the night.

We tied two sturdy planks of wood in a cross to fashion a sort of hook, then crafted two long ropes. One Dabir knotted about my waist, securing it to a pillar, to better protect me when I leaned far out the window as I worked at heaving that hook through the aperture above.

I will spare you the tedium of my multiple tosses, or the gut-dropping fear when I twice lost my balance, only to be kept safe by the waist rope. Eventually, God be praised, the hook sailed through the aperture above, and when I tugged it did not come loose.

Dabir saw my mouth set with satisfaction. “It’s safe, Asim?” He asked.

I laughed. “Only a fool would declare that. But hopefully it will hold.”

He had lengthened the rope at my waist and now tugged it to check the security of a final knot. “Should the climbing rope fail, this one will keep you from falling all the way.”

If the anchor rope failed, likely the one about my waist would set me swinging into the side of the tower to smash my head on stone, but a small chance at survival was better than certain death.

Dabir clasped my hand and clapped my shoulders and bade me go with God, but not to go to him, yet, which was a little jest he sometimes made, and then I clambered through that narrow window and climbed hand over hand up our rope.

A few feet shy of the window coping a faint cracking, as of wood breaking, reached my ears. I had thought myself tense before that moment; my heart then set to gallop as if in reminder I was alive and it preferred me to stay that way. I climbed with greater speed, and heard a second crack. Our hook was failing. I pushed off the stone with my foot, leaping at the ledge with my left hand extended, and it was a good thing, for the climbing rope went slack and even as my fingers closed on the ledge our splintered hook tumbled past and struck my shoulder. I let go that rope.

Hanging above an eighty-foot drop supported by three fingers brought me little joy, and I scrambled to snare the ledge with my other hand. Grunting, I pulled myself up and over and dropped to the floor, panting in the darkness and pleased to once more have solid wood beneath me. Earlier I had spoken blithely of climbing higher if there was no exit from this room. This was now impossible, for I had no rope but that about my waist, and no hook to cast even should I wish to chance fate again.

Dabir called softly to me, and I leaned out to tell him I was safe for the nonce, then untied the waist rope and set out to explore the darkened chamber.

From feel, it was much like the one we occupied below, and the moonlight revealed couches and cushions. I could not see the door owing to the angle of moonlight, but I determined where it must be, and found it in its housing, closed shut.

I quietly breathed a soft prayer, put hand to the latch, and tugged.

And praise be to God, the door opened. Likely there was no reason to keep these tower rooms barred lest prisoners were within.

I slipped out onto the stairs, listened intently as I eyed the darkness above, and saw a light upon the landing below. Quietly I crept down, and espied Abla sitting dejectedly on the stair, head bowed in her hands.

Though I approached stealthily she must have felt my focus upon her, for she looked up when I was only a few feet away. She then goggled in amazement. “Did you climb the outside of the tower?”

“Aye.” I drew to a stop before her.

“You are braver than I realized.”

I didn’t point out that it was a bravery entirely unnecessary if she had merely opened the door to us. “I would dare anything to return to my wife and children. And to see that my friend can return to his. Why are you sitting here?”

“I wrestle with my conscience,” she said gravely. “I gave my word of honor. And yet—”

I shook my head. “Your honor is being twisted against you. It is the way of tyrants. In your heart, you know what is right, or you would have departed.”

She licked her lips and did not rise as I moved past to slide the bar from the door. It vanished into the wall, all but its very tip lost within the decorative frame.

I opened the door and Dabir stepped out to join us, halting at the sight of Abla.

The woman rubbed her pendant and sighed. “Now I have no home.”

“In point of fact,” Dabir said, “you’ve been no aid to us, and you can say as much to your queen.”

She looked down in shame, then spoke quietly. “But I should have been, and I will help you from here on.”

Dabir considered her. “Why?”

“Because all that you’ve both said is right. Once I strove to be just, and I hope that I was wise as well. I didn’t mind as much, growing old, when I did so with Antar. But once he was gone . . . it might be that I lost sight of myself. Or discovered I was more vain and foolish than I knew.” Her eyes were wide as they met mine. “It is not an easy thing to be praised all your life for beauty, and then to lose it, and I think I dwelled on rekindling that and looked past the loss of other things.”

“You must not truly have lost them,” I said, “Or you wouldn’t sit here upon these stairs.”

“Come with us, then,” Dabir said. “In Baghdad Abla will be given great honors.”

“We shall see. First we must get you out. And then I shall see to that tree.”

“What do you mean to do to the tree?” Dabir asked.

“I think this place is a snare, and so long as it remains it will continue to lure the unwary.”

Dabir nodded. “True enough. What will happen if the tree dies?”

“The magic of her palace will fail. No longer will it skip through the future and the world of dreams. It will stay here, where it was first intended. And no longer will there be fruit that sustains one beyond their allotted time.”

“I know what you’re thinking,” I said to Dabir. “But perhaps we should leave this to others. There’s not long before sunrise.”

“What others?” Dabir asked. “For uncounted years this place has flickered in and out of our world like a brilliant flame, enticing those who glimpse it and burning those who near it. No one before has stopped it. Or do you mean to suggest we traipse back to the caliphate and return with an armed host when the moon is in the proper place?”

Quietly I sighed.

He clapped my shoulder. “Come, we’ve been in more dire predicaments. All we need do is chop a tree and ride away.”

It proved less simple than he proposed. As is probably obvious after the briefest moment of reflection, it would surely prove challenging to chop down a trunk without attracting attention, for the tree was no sapling. A long period of time would likely be required, during which discovery was inevitable. Also, we lacked an ax. We therefore devised another method and quickly descended the stairs.

By this time of night, the banquet hall was mostly empty. All but one guest had departed, and the whole of the table had been cleared. A single, ruddy dark-haired man snored as he rested his head in his arms.

The paper lanterns still hung about the courtyard, and by their light we advanced down the little garden trail past a bubbling brook and little painted statues of frogs and birds and rabbits. Abla had left us to go secure our horses and weapons so that it was only Dabir and myself who stopped at the base of the apple tree, too wide around to encompass with an embrace. Intermittently dots upon the bark glowed, as if the tree were graced by tiny fireflies.

Dabir and I both carried lantern oil and he hesitated before advancing. I thought I knew why. “It is beautiful,” I remarked.

“And is it evil in itself?”

“Was the tree of knowledge evil in and of itself? The problem is that I see no way to separate it from the hands of those who’d misuse it. If we somehow managed to slay all of those who occupy this fortress, others would take possession of the tree, and use it for their own ends.”

He frowned sadly. “You are ever wise,” he said, which may surprise you, for it is usually Dabir who is rightly credited with any wisdom between us. But he valued my viewpoint, as you see.

And so we dumped our oil all about the base of the tree and along its limbs and then, not without regret, we put a torch to it. We lingered only a moment to ensure that the fire caught. We need not have worried, for its scarlet tongues licked up along the oil and quickly ate through to enwrap the tree, lighting the place as the leaves curled. Already the glow within the bark dimmed.

We raced from that courtyard and had barely set but two feet into the banquet hall when a horn of alarm was raised. I think the queen herself shouted, from some nearby place, for it was the voice of a woman which rang out. We might not have known the language, but the sound of rage and urgency proved universal.

We dashed past a group of half-dressed servants pushing in through a side door and ran out the central gate. There we found Abla with three saddled horses.

More horn calls sounded even as we led the animals through a postern gate and out into the countryside. We mounted in the shadow of the walls.

Abla had done well by us in all ways but one. Along with our weapons, she had returned to us the horses we had ridden in upon, and the animals were weary as ourselves. We got them moving and even into a gallop down that silvery road but clearly, they had very little energy left. I wondered why she had not simply found us fresh mounts, though later I was to understand.

As another trumpet rent the night, I glanced over my shoulder to discover the gate swinging wide to permit the exit of a dozen cavalrymen. That was not a great number, but it might as well have been a hundred against us few. Soon they were trotting into a gallop and gaining upon us.

A rose glow lit the eastern horizon, outlining a hill less than a quarter mile to our right. “Seek high ground!” I cried, and spurred my tired animal toward the slope. Abla, on the fresher animal, outsped us both.

Two of the warriors were a hundred feet or more ahead of the rest of their pack, and had pushed their horses to close upon us. I thought I recognized their captain as the second man. The first was a large fellow with a great beard, and he leaned back to hurl a spear. I shifted to the left so that the cast went wide. A moment later the captain himself rode up through my dust and swung at me with a long, straight blade. This I caught upon my shield, and leaned out to slash at him over its edge. He danced his mount away.

He had learned some Arabic, which I shall not bother relating, for his shouted words described insulting and improbable actions in which I had never partaken.

His companion warrior galloped up to my right side and then I was sorely beset, countering blows on my shield and catching strikes with my blade. That might have been all for me, but Dabir was ever a splendid horseman, and interposed himself, holding his own against the warrior.

I then traded blows with the fellow riding beside me. I knew that the greater force of guards could not be far behind. We drew close to the hill but there was no point in taking it. The coming dawn showed me a gully that lay to our left and I would have steered my opponent toward it, save that he was struck by a palsy. He spasmed in his seat and his horse stumbled and suddenly both were down with a groan and a clatter of arms and armor.

I glanced to my left to find that the same thing had happened to Dabir’s opponent. The two of us slowed and swung around, and then beheld a sight I never shall forget. The bodies of horse and men shriveled in upon themselves as if they were suddenly struck by the weight of centuries. Flesh withered, eyes sunk into skulls, and their arms and armor rusted. In but six heartbeats the living men and beasts looked as though they had been sun-bleached corpses for a thousand years. In looking back, we saw that the same fate had overtaken the rest of our pursuers.

“Look!” Dabir pointed to the walls and the palace, revealed now in the dying light to have crumbled to ruin, for only portions of the walls remained upright. As we watched, one by one the towers tumbled away.

“What’s happened?” I asked.

“Without the tree’s magics, time has caught up to the palace and its people.” Dabir’s head suddenly snapped around and he urged his mount into a canter up the slope. I was but a moment after him, having suddenly realized the same thing.

Alas, this fate had befallen Abla and her horse as well. It was hard to look down upon her, thus. Only the beauty of her necklace remained.

“She knew this would happen,” Dabir said as we looked down upon her body. “I wondered at the way she answered when I said she would be accorded honors in Baghdad.”

“Why did she ride out with us, then?”

“Perhaps it was easier than explaining. Or perhaps she might still have hoped.”

After prayers, we buried her there, in sight of the ruins. While we worked, a few living men and women wandered out from the dead palace, and by signing and a little broken Arabic spoken by one, we learned they were those captured over the last two nights of raiding.

They looted the riches of the palace, for there were many, and once they learned that it was us who had destroyed the queen’s power, they would have showered us with gifts. We demurred, though, for we were both ashamed that we’d not spared any thought for them. We accepted only a handful of treasures we had delivered to the queen, and a single golden bracelet she herself had worn.

These we presented to the caliph many months later, upon our return to Baghdad. When I told him our tale he rewarded us with many fine presents, though none compared with the company of our loved ones. Later, when the caliph’s second son came to power, he returned the bracelet to us, saying that he well remembered how his father had told the tale of our adventure. It remained upon our curio shelf for many years. I cannot say now where it has gone.

¹. Modern western dating used for reader convenience.

©2021 by Howard Andrew Jones.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Howard Andrew Jones lives in a lonely tower by the Sea of Monsters with a wicked and beautiful enchantress. He’s the author of the Ring-Sworn heroic fantasy trilogy from St. Martin’s, starting with For the Killing of Kings, the critically acclaimed Arabian historical fantasy series starring Dabir and Asim (beginning with The Desert of Souls) and four Pathfinder novels. When he’s not editing Tales From the Magician’s Skull or hunched over his laptop mumbling about flashing swords and doom-haunted towers, you might find him lurking at www.howardandrewjones.com, where he blogs about writing craft, gaming, fantasy and adventure fiction, and assorted nerdery. Now and then he’s on FB at howard.andrew.jones.1, and he occasionally tweets @howardandrewjon.

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

Dead Men in Central City

Carrie Vaughn | 6217 words

Horses were the most unreliable, most unfortunate creatures ever to walk the Earth. And yet, Ricardo was immensely sad that his was gone. He and his pretty tamed Mustang mare, Bandita, had been back and forth across the west for six years, and now she’d taken a bad step—a hole, a sharp rock, he hadn’t been able to figure out which—fallen down a hillside, and broken not one but two legs.

Traveling on horseback through the Rockies at night, accidents happened. His own neck had snapped in the fall, twisting wrong when Bandita came down on top of him. He’d heard the crack. Half an hour of lying still and staring at treetops healed him well enough. But she was mortal. The whole time, he’d listened to Bandita groan in pain, working herself into a sweat as she struggled to stand and fell back again, her broken legs unable to support her. Once he was upright, he’d done the only kind thing he could and ended it for her with his .45. He lay next to her for a time, taking in her last warmth and working to remember her, because she deserved to be remembered. Coiled up a couple strands of hair from her tail because he wasn’t sure why. Just that he had a braided band made up of tail hairs from all the horses he’d cared about over the centuries.

He gathered what gear he could carry, saddlebags and blankets, left her to the scavengers and moved on. The sky was turning gray, dawn was close, and he desperately needed a place to bed down for the day. He was in the middle of forest, miles from the next town with no sign of shelter anywhere.

He did not panic. He’d lasted this long and been caught in more unlikely situations than this. He could always find someplace out of the sun if he just took a moment and looked. Around here, plenty of mine shafts were dug into the rock, out of the light, if he could find one. The fall had turned him around a bit, but if he remembered right there were plenty of small towns between here and Denver. Maybe not much more than miners’ cabins and a general store, but they’d do.

Finding high ground, he paused and took a deep breath, tasting every scent that came to him. Felt eddies in the air, sensed creatures that had passed this way, and knew what might be waiting for him over the next hill. He found prey, a concentration of warm human blood rising. More than blood, he smelled the smoke of wood and coal fires, masonry and painted wood. The collected smell of horses and livestock kept in corrals. There was a whole town nearby.

Central City. Had to be. If he could get there in time, he might even be able to spend the day in a bed instead of a dank mineshaft. He tasted another breath, checked the direction, murmured a quiet prayer to the gray sky—he still prayed, taking it on faith that He was listening—and ran.

Trees blurred; the air turned to wind around him. He drew on some other force, a demonish power that flowed into him from some unknown source. From the first he’d been suspicious of it—but he would use it when he had to. It meant he could run. A shadow in the night. If only it were night.

His last bit of borrowed blood turned sluggish in the growing light. He didn’t have long. He kept to shaded gulches and gullies—away from the hilltops that would get the first rays of morning sun.

He could smell the town, sense people waking up with the dawn. He might or might not make it. At this moment the only creature more unfortunate than his horse was very likely him.

Then, coming around the next gulch, down the next slope, he found a road. Not much of one—dirt packed down by wagon wheels and dozens of horses. Not a main route, this probably went up to mining claims in the hills. But the way opened up. Just a few more minutes, a few more yards of speed—

And there it was. The mining boomtown of Central City, tucked in the mountains above Denver and looking to Ricardo’s eyes like a beacon of civilization. Two main streets intersected each other; another dozen side streets ran off from them. Solid rows of buildings three and four stories tall lined up. Maybe not pretty, not sturdy—the town had grown from nothing in just a few years after all—but it made a good showing.

One storefront had light shining through the windows, faint with the dawn but still visible. The sign said “saloon” and “rooms to let.” There, he’d go there.

The edges of the peaks sheltering the town lit with golden sun. Ricardo didn’t look, he just moved, drawing the very last bit of life in him, very nearly flying down the main street to the saloon door, stumbling inside and slamming it behind him, as the light outside grew.

Inside seemed darker than it should, the lanterns weak and the furniture brown and stained. The mirror behind the bar was dusty. But there were people here, a few who’d stayed up all night drinking and playing cards. They might continue through the day.

Three men at a faro table, another at the bar. One behind the bar who might have been the proprietor, and at the back door a matronly looking woman who seemed to be just getting started for the day. For the most part, despite their tired eyes and roughshod appearances, they smelled good. Full of warm blood, and he was hungry.

Except—the man behind the faro table smelled ill.

They all glanced up at him and stared. Ricardo imagined he looked a mess. At the best of times he presented a handsome, aristocratic figure, with dark hair, a firm jaw and fine nose. But now he was dusty, grimy, and probably had a panicked gleam in his eyes. He noticed a spatter of blood on his beige shirt from shooting Bandita, and his dark pants were torn. He looked like a man in trouble.

He reminded himself to breathe, so as to appear normal. Straightening, he settled his saddlebags firmly over his shoulder and convinced himself—and the rest of the room, he hoped—that he knew what he was doing.

Stepping up to the bar, he told the man, “I’d like a room. One without windows if you have it. Or a corner of the cellar if you don’t.” He set coins on the polished surface of the bar.

The barman stared at him. Swallowed visibly and stammered. “We . . . I mean . . . what do you mean . . . no windows?”

“I mean I’m sensitive to the light. No windows.”

“I—I’m sorry. We’re all full up.”

“You are not all full up, Frank. Sell the man a room, why don’t you.” The faro dealer spoke with an accent—light, lilting, southern.

The barman really couldn’t seem to decide what to do. He glanced back and forth between Ricardo and the dealer like one of them was holding a gun to his head, but he didn’t know which. Ricardo didn’t have time for this—he couldn’t look that terrible, could he? Surely a town like this had seen worse.

Fine. They couldn’t do this politely, Ricardo would manage in his own way. He leaned in; Frank gripped the edge of the wood, almost as if he knew what was coming. He watched Ricardo, which made it very easy for Ricardo to catch his gaze. Catch his gaze and fall into it, grabbing hold of a corner of the man’s will and twisting.

“You’d like to give me a room with no windows. You have something for me, don’t you? My money’s good here. You’re happy to help out.” He spoke low, persuasively, and his words filled the man, whose gaze softened. He nodded with understanding.

“We’ve got . . . something. Not much of a room. More like a closet. But it ain’t got windows.”

“That’d be fine. I’ll take it, and I want to be left alone.”

“Right. Sure. Upstairs. Second door on the left.”

“And no one will bother me.”

“Of course not, sir. Of course.” He reached under the counter for a key and slid it across the bar. Ricardo took it gratefully. Only a few more moments and he could collapse. Worry about blood tomorrow.

He turned to the stairs, and out of the corner of his eye saw the faro dealer nod to his players, stand, and nonchalantly make his way over, as if he just happened to want a stroll across the room at that moment, and they just happened to meet at the base of the stairs. The man glanced into the tumbler of whiskey he held, swirling the amber liquid. He also held a handkerchief, which he’d coughed into a couple of times already. Lungs rotting from the inside out—Ricardo could smell it.

Ricardo waited. The man obviously wanted to say something.

“Remind me never to sit down to cards with you, sir,” he said finally. His grin seemed amused.

So, the faro dealer noticed that, did he? Ricardo hadn’t planned on playing cards; most games of chance weren’t, and he wasn’t interested. But did this man really understand what he had seen? The hair on the back of Ricardo’s neck stood up. “I’m not much for cards myself.”

“Your wisdom impresses me.”

The gambler stood out with his precise way of speaking, his polite bearing, and his fine clothes. Shirt starched, jacket pressed, tie neatly knotted. He drew the eye, a calm pool in the grungy saloon. A man like him didn’t have to go out and dirty himself in the mines and the town, when people would come to him and hand over their money.

“Thank you, Mr.—”

“Doctor, if you please, sir. Doctor John Holliday.” The handkerchief disappeared in a pocket, and he held out a hand for shaking.

Ricardo knew that name. Everyone knew that name. “A pleasure.”

“The pleasure is mine. Gratifying, meeting a fellow man of manners way out here.”

“Indeed. My name is Ricardo Avila.”

“You are from Mexico?”

“Spain.” Really, though, he’d only spent the first eighteen years of his life in Spain, and the next two centuries in Mexico. He sometimes said the latter, when the situation warranted. In this place, he judged it would be better to be from Spain. “Though I have not been back there in some time.”

“Won’t you have a drink with me, sir? I suspect you have some fine tales to tell of your recent travels.” He gestured at his whiskey, nodded to a chair, and Ricardo lamented that it was sunrise. He was dead on his feet, nearly.

“My deep apologies, sir. I need to rest after the night I’ve had. Can I take up your invitation tonight?”

“Just after sunset, maybe?” Holliday suggested.

And wasn’t this ominous? Ricardo had to remember to draw breath in order to answer, “That’ll do nicely.”

“Tonight then, sir.”

Holliday watched him rush up the stairs.

• • • •

As he was informed, the closet had a bed, a chair, barely enough room to navigate around both—and no windows. Ricardo locked the door, propped the chair in front of it for good measure, and collapsed just as the coming day pulled him out of consciousness. Somehow, he’d made it through another night.

Hours later, the sun set, and he awoke in darkness uncertain where he was until he retraced his steps. He’d had to kill Bandita. He’d managed to find shelter. And Doc Holliday was dealing faro in the saloon downstairs.

Well then.

His veins burned, his mind throbbed. He didn’t get hungry, but his heart gaped, empty. He’d gone several days without new blood. The situation would not stand—he could feel every heart in the place. The saloon had filled with patrons. He didn’t just hear their voices echoing against the floorboards. He could hear their hot, beating hearts, and he wanted them all.

He had not lasted this long by not being very careful at times like these.

Even without windows or a lantern, he could see a little. He straightened his clothing, rubbed a hand on his stubbled face. He needed to get cleaned up. He took the chair away and carefully opened the door to look out in the hallway. Fortunately, he only had to wait a moment before the matronly woman from last night appeared, climbing up the stairs.

“Oh sir! You’re awake! Been waiting to hear from you—you were quiet as the dead in there.”

“No doubt,” he said. “If I could trouble you for a few things? A lantern maybe, some water?”

“Sure thing, give me just a minute.”

He learned that her name was Hannah O’Shea, she was the barman’s wife, and they made a decent living running this place. When she came to set a basin and lantern on the chair, which was also a washstand apparently, Ricardo carefully closed the door behind her. She turned at the sound, and he caught her gaze. Murmured words of comfort until she drifted into a stupor, settling on the bed as if she slept. He took her wrist and drank from it.

Not much. Not enough to do serious harm. A few swallows of rich blood, which filled him with fire and life. The burning in his veins settled, the thirst quenched. Hannah might be a little dizzy for the evening, but he held her gaze and reassured her that all was well, she just needed to drink some water and eat a little something, it was probably the heat made her feel a little off. She agreed, apologizing for nodding off like that, and he gently sent her off to the rest of her business.

It was not a perfect system, but it worked well enough in emergencies. He could now safely move among the saloon’s patrons without fear of losing himself. Time was, he had friends who knew what he was and were willing to offer up some of their blood for him. He’d been so grateful—not just for the blood, but for the companionship. Now—he’d been alone in the wilderness too long.

Denver. Denver would be different.

He washed, shaved, put on his spare shirt—smelled a little of horse, but he aired it out the best he could. Put on his coat. He trusted he made a presentable enough picture.

At last, he emerged. He probably didn’t look too awful.

The saloon was exactly what he expected, full of miners and cowboys, workmen and itinerants finishing their day by drinking and gambling the money they’d earned. The place was popular, the bar and tables full. Several card games were in progress—and yes, Holliday was still at the table against the far wall. A crowd two deep gathered to watch. Man had a reputation, after all.

Ricardo sidled up to lean against the bar, to take stock of the place, to think for a minute about what he needed to do next. Get a horse, get to Denver, settle in. Place like this ought to be just a stop on the road. But he was intrigued. He’d met legends before and knew he was seeing something special.

“Get you a drink?” asked the barman—Frank, Ricardo remembered.

“Whiskey,” Ricardo said. “Just a bit.” He didn’t drink—not in the usual sense, anyway—but it was good to have something in hand to blend in. Frank poured him a shot, and Ricardo had a thought. He asked, “How long has Holliday been in town?”

“Just a few days. On his way to Leadville, I hear, but there’s plenty of action in town, he decided to stay for a few.”

“And you get the usual cut?”

He grinned happily, and Ricardo thought about all those miners and prospectors working to get rich at entirely the wrong end of things.

Ricardo leaned in. “You have any work needs doing around here? I’m looking to earn some cash before I head out. And I wouldn’t mind sticking around to see the action.”

The barman nodded in perfect understanding. He could charge admission to watch Holliday deal faro. “Been a little short handed. What all can you do?”

“Anything,” Ricardo said.

“Tend bar? Clean the place? Deal with riff raff?”

“Oh yes,” Ricardo said, a curl on his lip. He didn’t even have to catch the man’s gaze and twist his will to make him believe. Holliday brought in business, but he brought in trouble, too, and they were trying to balance the both. A strong young man behind the bar might help with keeping folk in line.

Four nights in, Ricardo had become familiar, part of the furniture. He’d demonstrated his value to Frank—after that first shot of whiskey, he didn’t take another drink. Nothing better than a sober barman. He’d stopped two fights already without fuss or trouble. Just grabbed the miscreants by their collars, looked them in the eyes, and walked them out the door. Had a knack for it, Frank observed happily, and gave Ricardo a bonus both times it happened. If regular folk felt safe in his place, they’d come spend their money.

Ricardo could bend this whole town to his will. Gather to himself a whole collection of servants who worshipped him. This was what his kind normally did, what they were made to do.

He’d heard the arguments, and he did not like them. He didn’t want servants; he wanted friends, just a few. But they died so quickly, and the older he got the quicker they died. More than three centuries, and the paradox of his existence was still revealing itself to him.

Holliday was always at his table when Ricardo emerged for the night, and rarely retired before he did. Coughing kept him awake, he said, and if he was awake he might as well be making money. Every couple of hours he’d come to the bar to refill his drink, and he’d talk. Each night, a little more.

“I have heard of some folk having a sensitivity to sunlight,” Holliday said, drinking off the last from his tumbler and holding it out for more. Ricardo obliged. “Your condition appears to be most severe.”

They had done this dance for four days. Somehow, Holliday knew what he was and seemed to be watching for bodies stashed under the bar and studying Ricardo’s mouth for a glimpse of telltale fangs. But Ricardo was very careful.

“I manage,” he said. He could always find a man or two in back sleeping it off. A couple of girls he could pay for an hour of company. None of them remembered what he did to them. He never drank from anyone twice. He was able to gather some strength before the next leg of his journey. “As a medical man, you must see that kind of thing a lot.”

“Oh, not so much. You have to know what to look for.”

“And of course, you do.”

The man’s moustache shifted as he grinned. “Of course.”

“It’s a topic you’re interested in, I gather.”

“Certainly. I’ve heard such good stories. Like yours. Traveling ‘cross the Rockies on horseback at night? Why ever would you do such a thing?”

“The train was all booked up.” In fact, the train had been watched, and he couldn’t risk getting cornered. After what had happened on this trip, he might risk it next time.

Holliday chuckled. “I can tell you are a man who always finds a way. A survivor.”

“Yes,” he murmured. “I am that.”

“Any advice? For someone who might like to survive?” He waved a hand in a casual gesture, and Ricardo had a strange thought. Holliday was dying, that was clear. Cough by cough, his life ebbed. Ricardo could smell it, a miasma that hung about him—unlike everyone else in the room, he didn’t smell like food.

He had no advice. Not really. “I keep to myself. Try not to bother anyone.”

“And if they bother you?”

Ricardo glanced at Holliday sidelong. Holliday had never once met his gaze. He looked in his glass, he studied the crowd, traced the grain in the wood of the bar. But he knew better than to look in Ricardo’s eyes. Ricardo just about came straight out to ask, how? How did he know?

“Well then,” Ricardo said. “I send them on their way as politely as I can.”

“Amen, sir.”

Ricardo had been in Central City for ten days when he figured it was time he moved on. Holliday had made noise about doing likewise. As fascinating as this stop had been, as much as he was sure there were more stories to learn, Ricardo was starting to get a reputation, and people were starting to know him. This was too small a place for that to be healthy. He’d been through about as much of his food supply as he could without doubling up and raising questions. Best to get a horse and head on out.

One more night, he decided. One more night of watching Holliday, of watching people watch Holliday, and then maybe he’d have his own story to tell about the man. Holliday had been dealing for an hour or so already. His regulars and more than a few folk passing through surrounded his table and took part in the action. The night was perfectly normal. Which made it all the more jarring when a chair clattered back as a man stood up from the faro table and shouted, “You cheat! You’re a lying cheat!”

A young cowboy type stood pointing at Doc Holliday. He was not a regular.

Ricardo set down the cloth he’d been using to wipe down glasses and moved around the bar. The room had gone still, conversation falling quiet, everyone looking over.

A space had formed around the table—a number of players took up their cash and rushed away, and they couldn’t be faulted for it. That left the cowboy type, a beardless kid in boots, trousers, a plain shirt and bandana around his neck, sandy-colored hair brushing his ears, and a fiery look in his eyes. He wore two six-shooters in holsters on his belt.

Ricardo had a feeling this wasn’t about faro.

Holliday hadn’t moved. He sat straight as always in his chair, one hand holding his ubiquitous handkerchief, the other tapping on the box from which he’d apparently dealt a double, if Ricardo read the board right. Banker won half the stakes on a double, and Ricardo wondered how many pairs Holliday had dealt out of that box. Didn’t really matter, faro was an easy game to cheat at, and in any case you didn’t just stand up and call Holliday a cheater. At least, most folks didn’t.

“Might you repeat yourself, sir? I don’t think everyone heard you clear enough,” Holliday said, leaning back.

“You cheat! You fixed the deck!”

The corner of Holliday’s lip curled up. “You’ve been betting so little, how do you even notice you’ve lost?”

The cowboy looked like he wanted to lunge across the table at him, but he restrained himself. Ricardo watched, fascinated.

“Doesn’t it bother you? Me calling you a cheater?”

“Boy, I’ve been called so much worse. You seem quaint to me.”

The young man snarled. But still, he didn’t start the fight Ricardo was sure was coming. He was ready to grab whichever fist shot out first.

“Doesn’t this blowhard bother any of y’all?” the cowboy called out to the rest of the room, to his fellow players who’d pressed even farther away. “You sit here every night and let him take your money! Why!”

“Kid, you know who that is?” a voice hissed from the crowd, and the cowboy’s hard gaze turned straight back to Holliday. Of course he knew exactly who Holliday was. It was why he’d come here, and his expression twisted, trying to come up with something to say that would get the gunfighter out of his chair.

Holliday read him right. He’d probably seen a dozen of these young hotheads in his time. Ricardo hoped Holliday would stay seated, tell the kid to simmer down. Maybe buy him a drink. Not egg him on, because something about this didn’t feel right. But alas.

“Your ploy is weak, sir,” Holliday said carefully, directing the words like gunfire. “If your intention is to get me out on that street to challenge me on some point of honor—well, my honor’s not worth so much. You want to try against me you just need to ask.”

“Doctor,” Ricardo warned, moving close. The young cowboy had a kind of madness that told him that challenging Doc Holliday was a good idea. He wanted to be famous.

There were easier ways. Write a novel. Invade a country.

Holliday stilled his warning with a hand and a smile. He had his own madness—the fearlessness of a man who was already dying. “I want to see what he’s going to do with his fine guns there, and his heap of pride.”

“All right then. I challenge you.” The cowboy spoke calmly, but a sheen of sweat glowed on his brow.

While the two men faced each other down, Ricardo glanced at the crowd. Everyone wanted to watch—this was a story they’d tell their grandchildren, for certain. But most of them didn’t want to get too close. Most held back—except for two other men, nondescript white men wearing respectable coats and laundered shirts with neat ties, boots that had seen miles, and holsters tucked away under coats. When the excitable gentleman challenged Holliday, these two each took half a step forward.

This was a trap, Ricardo was sure of it. The cowboy wouldn’t be so confident if he had come here alone.

Holliday pushed back from the table. “Not even a glove to throw down. These are fallen times, aren’t they?” When he flipped back the edge of his coat, a casual move meant to look like he was only straightening the garment after standing, he flashed a glimpse of his revolver. Everyone murmured. There was going to be a show.

The other two men had already left the room, ducking out by some other door in the commotion.

Holliday and his challenger marched together toward the front door like gladiators entering the arena. Not so far off, really. Ricardo took Holliday’s arm and pulled him aside. “He has two friends waiting outside for you. This won’t be a fair fight.”

Holliday clicked his tongue, as if disappointed but not surprised. “They never are.”

“But you’re still going.”

“I have a reputation to maintain.”

Ricardo blinked at him. “A reputation for what?”

“Surviving.” He tipped his hat and winked at Ricardo, who decided he liked the man immensely.

• • • •

Time was, a duelist would need a second, and Ricardo almost asked Holliday for that honor. But the lanky man marched to the middle of the street before he had a chance. Life in a young country was not so formal.

Didn’t mean Ricardo couldn’t do his part. He walked a little way down the street, steps crunching on dirt, and studied the surroundings. The tops of buildings, the hidden alleyways. For all his time in the west, in some of the roughest places one could ever tell tales about, Ricardo had never seen an actual gunfight. Not like this, with two faced off, hands at their sides, waiting for the draw. His pulse, if he’d had one, would have been racing.

Few souls came out to watch. Most stayed indoors, crowded at windows. No one wanted to get in the way of a stray bullet. Almost no one, anyway.

He used his nose, his eyes, his other senses, listening for every heartbeat, every spot of heat moving through the world around him. And there they were, easy to spot for someone like him: one of the men had climbed to the roof of the saloon and lay flat, invisible in the darkness. He aimed down the barrel of a rifle, right at Holliday.

The other was in an alley across the street, pressed into the shadows like his compatriot. His pistol was still holstered—he was backup, then. Holliday had three men gunning for him, not one, and it stood to reason that the one on the roof wouldn’t wait for a polite count of three to fire.

The gunfighters’ breaths fogged in the chill night air. Ricardo’s did not.

He focused everything he could feel, everything he’d learned, all that power he’d struggled to understand and fed with blood. Blood was the price for what he was, and there were rewards he’d resisted in the early days. But he’d learned to use them well.

The man on the roof breathed slow and steady, his muscles tense, and Ricardo could just about feel the tension in his trigger finger, a muscle contracting, pulling on a tendon. The man in the alley was calmer, just there to clean up whatever mess the others made. Ricardo would have to deal with him, but not first thing. With his eyes, he watched the tableau before him, Holliday and the cowboy who hadn’t even had the decency to introduce himself—he likely expected to live, to be able to tell everybody the name of the man who shot Doc Holliday. They were a good fifty paces apart, hands at their sides, each waiting for the other to flinch. The young one looked like he stood at the edge of a volcano; Doc Holliday smiled, his skin pale with illness until it almost glowed.

Once this started, it would go quickly, but Ricardo could move faster than any of them, and he wasn’t afraid. Another reward for the price he paid.

That trigger finger on the roof squeezed, and Ricardo stepped into the street. To observers he would look like a blur, a shadow that had detached itself from the night and somehow appeared to suddenly stand in front of Holliday. When they thought back on the moment, they would say that he had always been there—he must have come out to the street with Holliday, or maybe he had run to warn him. Something. However it happened, he was there, and the bullet from the rifle struck him.

The shot pounded into his chest and he stumbled. Three more shots fired, cracks of thunder in his ears, pounding waves of force that struck the air and brushed against his skin. Three shots, and he looked to where they came from, where he must stand so that the bullets would strike him instead of Holliday.

But all three shots came from behind him, from Holliday.

First, the cowboy standing in front of them fell. He’d drawn, he’d gotten that far as soon as the shot rang out, but for all his bluster he was too late.

The man on the roof was next. He’d been aiming down the rifle for a second shot, probably wondering how the first had gone so far awry—obviously it had, since Holliday was still standing. But Holliday was at just the right angle to get him first. He slumped over his weapon and lay splayed on the roof as if he had dropped there from the sky.

Holliday shot the cowboy, the man on the roof, and the one from the alley had just stepped out and raised his revolver when the last shot fired, and the man fell. He lay groaning for a short time, a strangled attempt to cry for help through blood bubbling up his throat. The sound a dying horse might make. Then he died, and that was that.

Holliday hadn’t moved, merely pivoted his arm, and killed them all in less time than it took to inhale.

Ricardo touched the place on his shirt that now had a hole in it, where a little bit of blood had stained the fabric. Then he adjusted his coat to hide the spot. Holliday, replacing his gun in its holster, saw him do this but made no mention of it.

“Hey! Hey, are you all right?”

A stout man with a bushy gray moustache came running up the street. He was the sheriff, a temperance man who never set foot in the saloon, but someone must have gone to get him when trouble broke out. He grabbed Ricardo’s shoulder, as if he expected him to fall over any minute now.

“I’m fine,” Ricardo said. “Thank you.”

“I could have sworn you got hit!”

“Just a bad angle,” Ricardo said. “He missed.”

“Thank goodness for that,” Holliday said.

The sheriff seemed both nervous and thrilled. “I’ve got a dozen witnesses say that man threatened you, Holliday. Not a person here would blame you for this. If I could just get a statement—from both of you—we’ll call this all finished.”

Holliday had clearly done this dance before. “I’m obliged to you, sir.”

They followed the sheriff back to his office.

• • • •

A couple of hours later, Ricardo offered to buy Holliday a drink. They sat at a table in the corner, and after a round of excited congratulations and well wishes from the onlookers who’d witnessed the fight—and more than a few who wished they had—they were left alone.

Holliday looked exhausted. Usually, he could spend all night dealing cards and nothing more. But that little bit of effort on the street had taken a great deal out of him, and his handkerchief was spotted with blood.

“I thank you again,” Holliday said. “I underestimated those jokers, and you did not.”

“They thought killing you would make them famous.”

“I never did get the boy’s name,” he said, chuckling. The sound turned to coughing, and the handkerchief covered his mouth again.

Ricardo took a deep breath and said, “I could cure you. You would live ageless, forever. There is a price. A difficult one. But you would live.”

Ricardo considered that keeping alive such a man—prone to violence, expert at killing, with an attitude to suit—was perhaps not wise. Giving him the powers that came with his so-called cure was absolutely not wise, not wise at all. But more than either of those things he thought what a shame it would be to lose him. In three hundred fifty odd years, Ricardo had never made this offer to anyone. Not even those he loved best. He wouldn’t curse anyone he loved.

But this man? This man could survive very well with such a curse.

Holliday also seemed to consider, leaning back, stroking his moustache once. Ricardo couldn’t guess what he was thinking. Holliday’s reddened eyes gazed flatly, his expression didn’t flinch—that famous poker face revealed nothing. He brought his handkerchief to his mouth and coughed, as if to emphasize his own stake in the matter.

When he drew his hand from his face, he was smiling. “I do thank you for the courtesy, sir. But to live forever in this sad world? I do not see that as a blessing.”

Ricardo could be forgiven for feeling relieved.

“No, I expect to die on my feet, boots on. I’m almost looking forward to it. Better, don’t you think?”

“I hadn’t given it much thought,” Ricardo admitted.

“What, boots?”

“Death,” he said. Holliday coughed.

“You’ll be off to Denver soon, then.”

“Yes.” He knew of a couple of bolt holes he could use along the way. He wasn’t worried. “Tomorrow night. It’s time.”

“I have heard—there are others like you in the city. Most of your kind stay in cities, as I understand.”

“And how have you heard of such things?”

“You know of a man named Wyatt Earp?”

Ricardo smiled. “Yes. Of course I do. Just like I’ve heard of Doc Holliday.”

Holliday tipped his hat in thanks. “Let’s just say if you ever run into Mr. Earp, you watch yourself. He’ll know what you are just by looking. And he doesn’t much like your kind.”

“Perhaps when you see him again you’ll put in a good word for me.”

“I don’t much expect to see him again.” He sounded sad. Immensely sad. “I’m sorry. I’ll watch out.”

“Good.”

They both looked out the window then. The reflections in the glass had faded, and the sky outside was gray.

Holliday held out his hand. “I may not see you come evening, so I’ll say farewell now. You take care, sir.”

Ricardo suspected that Holliday didn’t much like goodbyes. Ricardo was used to them. “You as well. I’ll remember you.”

“That, sir, will be a kindness I do not deserve.”

• • • •

Holliday was dead two years later. Ricardo read about it in the papers, and that the gambler had died in bed, boots off. Ricardo mourned him and kept the story of their meeting to himself, because who would believe it? But he remembered.

©2021 by Carrie Vaughn. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carrie Vaughn’s work includes the Philip K. Dick Award winning novel Bannerless, the New York Times Bestselling Kitty Norville urban fantasy series, and over twenty novels and upwards of 100 short stories, two of which have been finalists for the Hugo Award. Her most recent work includes a Kitty spin-off collection, The Immortal Conquistador, and a pair of novellas about Robin Hood’s children, The Ghosts of Sherwood and The Heirs of Locksley. She’s a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero books edited by George R. R. Martin and a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado. Visit her at www.carrievaughn.com.

Bones in It

Kristina Ten | 4337 words

Besides the vedma who lived behind the stove in steam room three, the banya in Grand Lake Plaza was the same as any other budget day spa on Chicago’s West Side. It had deep-tissue massages and signature facials, plus day passes for the communal baths and steam rooms. There was a cucumber water dispenser in the lobby, and a little sign on the front desk that invited guests to “nama-stay a while.” The robes and slippers were cheap, scratchy polyester, but enough people tried to steal them that the owners figured they couldn’t be that bad. Mother’s Day specials, wind-chime music through the speakers, punch cards to get your tenth foot rub free. Yes, the banya in Grand Lake Plaza was the same as any other day spa—except for the vedma who lived there, of course.

The vedma had long black hair and two wide mouths: one for talking, cackling, snoring, singing, and casting spells, and the other exclusively for eating. The first mouth had a wet, gray tongue that flopped wildly like a caught fish. The other had countless teeth, tall and pointed, which stretched in every direction like a dense forest. She crouched behind the stove, her many breasts sagging to the floor, pinked by the warmth of the burning coals, until it was time for dinner.

The former owners, Pavel Korneliev and Masha Kornelieva, had opened the banya in Oak Park on the last snowless day before the longest, coldest winter on record. The vedma moved in that very night.

Pavel and Masha knew what to do about vedmas. It wasn’t uncommon for banyas to have them. They were attracted to the tangy stench of perspiration, the small curled hairs that gathered on the tile, the masses of plump, vulnerable flesh bobbing in bubbling water. All that filth and ugliness made clean, then unclean, then clean again as guests worked their way through the traditional banya circuit: bathing, sweating, then dousing themselves in ice. It was paradise for a vedma, and could be paradise for them all, so long as the owners were wise enough to strike a deal.

Which Pavel and Masha did, that very first night. They promised the vedma they would prepare meals for her twice a day, before open and again after close: the most scrumptious meats from their spa cafe menu. They would leave a plush cot for her to sleep on, keep fresh coals in her stove, make sure the cloying smell of bergamot that wafted through the rest of the banya never reached her. In fact, steam room three would be all hers. They’d put an “out of order” sign on the door so no one would bother her. All this in exchange for one thing—their guests’ safety—and another thing, if she would see fit to grant it: good fortune and prosperity for their new business.

To this the vedma agreed, and they all lived peacefully for nearly thirty years. In that time, the banya saw a number of pests: mice and ants, spiders and drywood termites, all looking for refuge from the lake-effect cold. All a far greater nuisance, Pavel and Masha concurred, than the reasonably amicable vedma.

Then the Kornelievs died unexpectedly when their small walk-up south of O’Hare caught fire. Their three children, grown by then and living out of state, bickered for months over what to do with the banya. None of them had wanted to go into the family business; they didn’t know the first thing about massage oil suppliers or how to clean a jetted tub. Eventually, they sold the place to the highest bidders: a middle-aged American couple with Silicon Valley startup money who thought the concept sounded “simply charming” and vowed to keep it as it was—save for one minor change.

Which was how Russian Baths of Oak Park—a practical name chosen by the practical Kornelievs—became B*Well Banya: a full-service day spa under new management with, to the vedma’s dismay, an entirely refreshed, entirely vegan menu.

The new owners didn’t know about the vedma or the agreement the former owners had made with her. They read an internet article about Russian banya customs, swapped the bergamot candles for white sage incense sticks, and put a “grand reopening” banner on rush order at the local print shop. As for steam room three, they couldn’t figure out why it would be out of order. Everything—the smooth red cedar benches, the birch brooms hanging on wooden pegs—looked just fine. It was only a matter of removing the strange, musty cot rolled up in the corner and they were ready to open their doors to the public, fully operational. More rooms meant more capacity meant more profit. Everything was going according to their plan.

The vedma, on the other hand, despaired. After clearing out the kitchen, she had put herself into a hibernation to wait out the Kornelievs’ absence. Now that she had risen, she was frail and full of questions: Where was Masha to turn the coals before bedtime? Where was Pavel with the platters full of fat sausage and pickled herring rollmops? Who were these loud strangers crowding into her steam room? And what on the seven continents and seven seas was a kale-chickpea energy bite?

The vedma cowered behind the stove during business hours, chewing her once long, gnarled nails to the quick. At night, after the new owners had locked up and gone, she crawled out warily and searched the supply room for food and rasped and wailed.

She screeched, “Kosti! Gde moi kosti?”

She shrieked, “Give me something with bones in it!”

• • • •

The tenured professor’s name was Jeremy, but he preferred everyone to call him tenured professor.

“Jer, you’re working too hard,” his mother told him one day on the phone. “You don’t make time to talk to your mother. How am I to know what’s going on in your life? Since you passed your tenure review, I thought you might relax a little. Get yourself a girlfriend, visit your parents once in a while . . .”

“Mom, I’m fine,” he said. “I’m relaxed, I’m relaxed. And please, call me ‘tenured professor.’”

Even though tenured professor insisted he was fine, and promised to call more often and even visit sometimes, his mother still got him a spa certificate for his birthday, thinking he could put it toward a nice hot soak or a massage.

“To loosen up some of that tension,” she explained.

Tenured professor had never heard of the place—B*Well Banya all the way out in Oak Park—but his mother said her nail lady’s friend’s sister swore by it. And besides, it was totally vegan, so she thought it would be perfect for him.

“You remembered?” He was surprised. It was a new thing he was trying, one of those New Year’s resolutions, and he couldn’t have brought it up more than once.

“Of course I remembered. My sweet Jer—I mean, tenured professor. Won’t eat animals. Won’t even eat the eggs of animals. So kind. Wouldn’t hurt a fly.” He could hear his mother beaming on the other end of the line.

Tenured professor worked in the creative writing program at the big university north of the city. He was especially proud to work there because when he had applied for undergraduate all that time ago, they had denied him admission. They had denied him admission! It felt impossible then and was truly unthinkable now—now that he’d gritted his teeth through four years at the community college, fled to Berlin to write his novel, and come home to bestseller lists, a six-figure book deal, and whisperings about a sequel. “Hotly anticipated.” That’s what they said in all the important literary circles. Once, it had been “we’re sorry to inform you.” Now, it was “hotly anticipated.”

The two-book deal had grown to three, then four, and now tenured professor was writing his fifth novel while sculpting the malleable young minds of tomorrow’s writers. Tomorrow’s writers, ha, he thought. Writers of product descriptions for clothing catalogs, maybe. Or ergonomic chair advertisements, or little notes in their children’s lunchboxes. His students didn’t have much promise, if he was being honest, but he couldn’t tell them that. And, oh, how him not telling them that was enough for them to latch onto. How moon-eyed and long-eyelashed they got. How fidgety-fingered. It was really quite endearing.

Still, he was a busy man. Overworked? Certainly. Stressed? Often. His mother was right after all, he decided. A trip to Oak Park couldn’t hurt.

• • • •

No one fed the vedma, so she grew even thinner. No one turned the coals in her stove, so she shivered through the night as the lips on her two mouths went blue. With her cot gone, she slept directly on the cedar floor—or on a threadbare towel if a guest had left one behind—her spine rattling against the wooden boards. All the while, she cried, “Kosti, kosti! I beg you, give me something with bones in it!”

When the banya still belonged to Pavel and Masha, the vedma feasted nightly on grilled lamb shashlik, chicken rolls, and her favorite, kholodets: pork legs and beef tails in a rectangle of brown jelly. In the mornings, there was fried smelt with onion and lemon and all manner of fish, brined, smoked, and cured. Ukha with whole pike heads. Salmon kulebyaka. Beef and cabbage pirozhki. Stroganina with Arctic muksun or raw reindeer meat on ice. There was always rye bread and horseradish sauce on the side, kvass and sbiten to wash it down with. But the meat was the centerpiece. And the meat was what, under the new owners, the vedma missed most.

The vegan cafe was a depressing affair. The new owners had brought in a retired restaurateur to consult: a tan, bright-toothed man who had made a killing with his nationwide chain of counter-service restaurants specializing in gourmet grain bowls. The banya’s new menu featured carrot-pistachio gazpacho and blackberry soygurt parfaits alongside tofu wraps, lentil salads, cashew milk smoothies, and four different kinds of hummus plates. The fridge was piled high with broccolini and vegan cheese.

One night, not long after the grand reopening, the vedma crept weakly into the kitchen and pulled out of the dishwasher a bowl that held the sparse remnants of green pea and mint soup. Starving and desperate, she licked it frantically with her eating mouth, her sharp teeth champing against the curved porcelain. Afterwards, she retched onto the floor of steam room three, her stomach insistent on ridding itself of this waste. Since then, she had been fooled by jackfruit skewers, with their stringy likeness to meat, and blood orange salads, with their promise of gore. But each was more horrid than the last, bloodless and boneless, and she spat them all out in disgust.

All the while, the vedma howled, the vedma moaned: “I long for something with bones in it . . .”

• • • •

Just as the tenure review board had suspected, tenured professor proved to be brilliant, ambitious, and productive. He put the university in his author bio, and many students applied and paid good money to study under him. But tenured professor was not a kind man, was not a sweet or would-not-hurt-a-fly man, no matter what his mother thought.

He encouraged students to come to office hours, and when they did, he shut the door behind them. The offices were drafty as it was, he explained as he drew the blinds. Then he told the young writers, each of them, one by one, that they showed exceptional raw talent. As they sat on the edge of his armchair and blinked nervously and fingered the hems of their skirts, he told them they had that “it” factor. He said it the same way every time, in a hushed voice like it’s our little secret.

Only making a success of oneself took more than talent, he said, took more than that “it” factor. It took discipline. And discipline was exactly what they lacked. No matter, a lack of discipline was a privilege of the young. But should they like to not lack discipline, he could be the one to teach them. Would they like that? he asked. Would they like to learn?

And the students, flushed with embarrassment and feeling special, said yes. Yes, of course. They went to parties where he showed them off to his friends and poured them dark, bitter drinks and teased them lightly about misunderstanding the Deleuzian theory of becoming. They nodded when he called their favorite films derivative. They met him behind the humanities building after dark. They sent him the photos he asked for, taut skin against spotless bathroom tile. They stayed up nights writing and rewriting to impress him, then pretended not to mind when in class he forgot their names.

Then, suddenly, his office-hour slots would be full before they could sign up, and when they passed by, another girl—chewing her lip, clutching a notebook—would be waiting outside the frosted door. And should any of his students actually go on to write a book, and think to reach out and ask him for a jacket blurb, good luck to them. They so valued his mentorship, they reminded him. If he would be so kind, they implored.

But he would not be so kind. He did not once reply.

• • • •

A month into the new owners’ tenancy, the vedma was wasting away. She had been making do with what she could. When the banya’s lights went out, she came out from her hiding spot, her legs sore from squatting all day and her hair heavy with ash. Then she went hunting for something to eat.

She chugged the golden massage oils and fruit-scented lotions from the supply room, and scooped sugar scrubs out of their jars with her fingers. She gnawed the business cards on the front desk, pulled the chewy felt layers from the banya hats. The banny veniki were not so bad—at least they had a pleasant salty taste from being thwacked against guests’ backs all day. The hot stones were a special treat: When she held them in her mouth, they had a solid, reassuring weight that felt almost, but not quite, like a craving sated. If the new owners noticed anything missing, they made no mention of it. They were too busy designing an appointment-booking app to bother taking inventory.

The vedma sucked the ink from pens, extracted the filament from light bulbs—anything she could find, however unsatisfactory a replacement. But it was never enough. Paper, plastic, dye, glycerin, stone: These were insubstantial things. They did little to nourish her.

Inside steam room three, her temptations were becoming harder to control. She sat hunched behind the stove as guests came and went, sweat rolling off their chests into the folds of their bellies, pooling at the bends in their elbows and the backs of their knees. Both the vedma’s mouths watered, even the one not meant for eating. But she remembered her promise to Pavel and Masha, and she hoped still that they would soon return. Masha with her arms full of pillows for the vedma to sleep on. Pavel with his cubes of eel and glass bowls of black and orange ikra. Their glances always respectfully downturned. Reverent, but unafraid.

One day, just before the banya was scheduled to open, the vedma heard a small voice coming from the direction of the lobby. It said, “She told me I need to add bones to it.”

Quickly, the vedma skulked into the hallway.

Peering from behind an artificial plant, she saw the new owners standing behind the front desk, and a teenage girl who looked like a cross between the two of them sitting in one of the lobby chairs. She had a stack of books on her lap.

“Did your teacher say what she meant by that?” the mother asked her daughter.

The girl kicked the base of the chair with her heels. An inch of skin flashed where her pants didn’t quite meet the tops of her shoes.

“Yeah,” the girl sighed. “She said I was missing an argumentative structure. She said that’s like the skeleton of the essay, and without it, the points I’m trying to make aren’t adequately supported. They just flop around.” She demonstrated by dropping her arms and flailing them loosely at her sides.

“Hm,” her father said, checking the clock over the door. “Well, it’s nice that she’s helping you rewrite it. College admissions essays are no joke. You can hang out here today and work on it. It’s going to be cacophonous at the house with the remodel.”

“I can’t believe the contractors are this behind schedule,” her mother added.

Her father nodded. “Tell me about it. What a welcome, huh? Next time, we’re calling Mark’s guys. Everyone around here runs on midwestern time.”

The new owners disappeared into the office, leaving the vedma alone in the lobby with the girl, who opened her notebook to a clean page and began filling it with neat, slanted lines. The vedma watched the notebook carefully, licking the lips on one mouth and then the other. Guests filed past her, carrying robes and slippers, making for the locker rooms or the cafe down the hall. But she never took her eyes off the notebook. This was it, she thought. At long last, something hearty. Something that had bones in it.

Hours passed before the girl finally stood up, stretched, and made her way toward the bathroom, setting the notebook down on the chair as she went. The vedma almost yelped in excitement. Instead, she waited until she was sure the lobby was empty, then scuttled on all fours to the notebook, yanked out the pages, and devoured them in a single bite.

When the bewildered girl returned, she found only a strand of long black hair caught in the spiral binding.

Later, safely behind the stove in steam room three, the vedma’s stomach grumbled and churned as the pages formed a disappointing gluey paste in her gut. This was the last time, she vowed angrily, baring her forest of teeth. She would not be deceived again.

• • • •

It was tenured professor’s job to provide constructive feedback. This essay lacked structure, or that story lacked emotional resonance, or this poem lacked bite. Or the research was iffy, or the grammar was bad. It was what they paid him for, his ability to turn a critical eye. It was a service he provided.

So when a freshman creative writing major named Lauren, who wrote mostly about her parents and deciduous trees, came over, he had to be honest. It was his scholastic duty. When she came over to his house in Wilmette on the weekend, and ran a bath for him like he’d asked, and poured him wine, and sprinkled in flower petals, he had to be direct with her. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be doing justice to the institution of higher learning, would he? When she undressed, and stood in front of the bathroom mirror as she undressed him, so he could watch her do it, when she helped him gingerly into the tub, he had to tell her the water was too hot.

He had to tell her the water was too hot, and leap out of the tub with exaggerated yowls so she would grasp the magnitude of the situation, and he had to splash her with the too-hot water, and he had to push her down onto the cotton bath mat. He had to grab her cheeks hard with his whole hand until she looked like a fish. He had to shake her. He had to hold her face so close to the water that if she breathed she would ripple the surface. Only she wouldn’t breathe, wouldn’t dare to.

“So hot, I felt like I was soup!” he had to growl at her. “Is that what you want? You want me to be soup? You want to cook me?”

He had to let her cry, let her choke on her spit as she blubbered apologies, spill the glass of wine into the tub as she tried to get away. The water swirled vermillion and the bottom of the shower curtain was stained before he finally gripped her shoulders and said, “Hey.”

“Hey, hey, hey.”

It was a hard job, this. A hard, hard job. No wonder he was always wound so tight.

“Everybody makes mistakes, right?”

No wonder he was so tense. Could really use a day to kick back and just relax.

“I said, everybody makes mistakes, right?”

She met his gaze timidly, her eyes ringed in black.

“That’s it,” he said. “That’s better. So, you made a mistake. It’s about embracing the learning process, that’s all. Being open to improvement.”

Later, he would make her a vegan dinner and read passages from Nabokov aloud, pointing out where the plotting and wordplay were just right. First, though, she would have to drain and clean the tub.

• • • •

B*Well Banya in Grand Lake Plaza, formerly known as Russian Baths of Oak Park, had a fairly standard layout. The lobby led to a pair of locker rooms, which opened onto the communal baths and cold plunge pool, which broke off into a long hallway lined with doors to the steam rooms and massage rooms. At the end of the hall were the break room and vegan cafe, where guests could replenish themselves between circuits. The circuit—the repeated transitions between hot and cold—was what guests came for. It was said the extremes were good for one’s health.

Which was why, of all the budget day spas in Greater Chicagoland, tenured professor arrived at B*Well Banya one morning, his mother’s gift certificate folded in his wallet. And of all the steam rooms in B*Well Banya, he stepped into steam room three.

By then, the vedma’s long black hair had grown hay-brittle. Her knees were bruised from knocking together as she crouched, and the teeth in her eating mouth had begun to fall out.

Tenured professor, on the other hand, was the picture of vigor. The hair on his chest rose up toward his throat, and his cheeks had a rosy glow behind his thick-rimmed glasses. He wore a robe but carried his tweed jacket draped over one arm, having refused to leave it hanging in the locker room with the other guests’ clothes.

He sank down onto the cedar bench. Immediately, his glasses started to fog. He smelled of sweat, yes, but also something else: a particular kind of ugliness, one that wouldn’t wash off in the bath. It was enough to raise the vedma from her famished stupor.

She had been scouring for inedible scraps. She had been pleading through the night: Kosti, pozhaluysta, kosti, kosti. No one had heard her or answered her calls. Now she was days from the end, she was certain, and it was time to face the truth. The Kornelievs were not coming back, no matter how fervently she wished it or how well she kept up her side of the bargain. The vows of the banya were broken. Theirs by absence and hers by hunger.

In the sealed steam room, tenured professor was little more than a smudge of pink in the mist. Still, from behind the stove, the vedma could see him. Oh, she could see him. Her powers were weakened, but she could tell, could always tell when something was a dead, dumb animal. When something was all meat and bones, no brains or heart or guts to speak of.

There was an emptiness to him. People usually didn’t like other people like that, she had observed over the years. But to a vedma, he sounded delicious. Just meat and bones, this one. Her favorite parts.

No guts like Pavel, or heart like Masha, or brains like the girl rewriting her essay from scratch that day in the lobby. The girl who was a senior at the local high school, working hard on her college admissions essays. Her first choice was the big university just north of the city, with its old stone buildings and vast green quad and top-ranking creative writing program, helmed by her favorite author.

It was something the vedma couldn’t possibly have known, except vedmas have a way of knowing those things exactly.

Suddenly, tenured professor became acutely aware of his nakedness. He took his glasses off and rubbed the fog away with a towel.

When he put them back on, he could see everything clearly: Her wild eyes. Her many breasts. Her two mouths upturned in matching smiles—close, then closer. Each of the dozens of pointed teeth in terrifying detail.

He could see his right hand, its faded ink stains, the callus on the first joint of the middle finger from so many hours spent grading in pen. One minute, it was at the end of his arm. The next, it was on the floor.

The vedma marveled at how easily he came apart, fat from sinew. Just meat and bones. Nothing else to hold him together.

Later, the new owners would stumble in screaming.

Later, there would be sirens and yellow crime-scene tape, and an escape from the plaza, across the highway and into the woods.

Later, a letter would come to tenured professor’s inbox asking for his honest feedback about his recent experience at B*Well Banya. One of those automatic emails. It would receive, as was customary with him, no reply.

Later, an obituary would publish the nice things, while others would publish the truth.

But for now, there was only the vedma—sitting on the floor of the steam room, sucking out the last of the marrow—and the pile of bones grown tall beside her. She wiped her eating mouth with what was left of his tweed jacket, finally satisfied.

©2021 by Kristina Ten.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kristina Ten is a Russian-American writer of short fiction and poetry with work in Lightspeed, Black Static, Weird Horror, AE Science Fiction, and elsewhere. She is a 2019 graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop and a current MFA candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder. You can find her at kristinaten.com and on Twitter as @kristina_ten.

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

EXCERPT: The Blacktongue Thief (Tor Books)

Christopher Buehlman | 7154 words

Set in a world of goblin wars, stag-sized battle ravens, and assassins who kill with deadly tattoos, Christopher Buehlman’s The Blacktongue Thief begins a “dazzling” (Robin Hobb) fantasy adventure unlike any other.

Kinch Na Shannack owes the Takers Guild a small fortune for his education as a thief, which includes (but is not limited to) lock-picking, knife-fighting, wall-scaling, fall-breaking, lie-weaving, trap-making, plus a few small magics. His debt has driven him to lie in wait by the old forest road, planning to rob the next traveler that crosses his path.

But today, Kinch Na Shannack has picked the wrong mark.

Galva is a knight, a survivor of the brutal goblin wars, and handmaiden of the goddess of death. She is searching for her queen, missing since a distant northern city fell to giants.

Unsuccessful in his robbery and lucky to escape with his life, Kinch now finds his fate entangled with Galva’s. Common enemies and uncommon dangers force thief and knight on an epic journey where goblins hunger for human flesh, krakens hunt in dark waters, and honor is a luxury few can afford.

“The Blacktongue Thief is fast and fun and filled with crazy magic. I can’t wait to see what Christopher Buehlman does next.” —Brent Weeks, New York Times bestselling author of the Lightbringer series

Coming May 25, 2021 from Tor Books.

1

The Forest of Orphans

I was about to die.

Worse, I was about to die with bastards.

Not that I was afraid to die, but maybe who you die with is important. It’s important who’s with you when you’re born, after all. If everybody’s wearing clean linen and silk and looking down at you squirming in your bassinet, you’ll have a very different life than if the first thing you see when you open your eyes is a billy goat. I looked over at Pagran and decided he looked uncomfortably like a billy goat, what with his long head, long beard, and unlovely habit of chewing even when he had no food. Pagran used to be a farmer. Frella, just next to him in rusty ring mail, used to be his wife.

Now they were thieves, but not subtle thieves like me. I was trained in lock-picking, wall-scaling, fall-breaking, lie-weaving, voice-throwing, trap-making, trap-finding, and not a half-bad archer, fiddler, and knife-fighter besides. I also knew several dozen cantrips—small but useful magic. Alas, I owed the Takers Guild so much money for my training that I found myself squatting in the Forest of Orphans with these thick bastards, hoping to rob somebody the old-fashioned way. You know, threaten them with death.

It pays surprisingly well, being a highwayman. I was only a month in with this group, and we had robbed wagons with too few guards, kidnapped stragglers off groups with too many, and even sold a merchant’s boy to a group of crooked soldiers who were supposed to be chasing us. Killing never came easily to me, but I was willing to throw a few arrows to keep myself out of the shyte. It’s the way the world was made. I had more than half what I needed for my Lammas payment to the Guild to keep them from making my tattoo worse. The tattoo was bad enough already, thank you very much.

So there I was, crouched in ambush, watching a figure walking alone down the White Road toward us. I had a bad feeling about our potential victim, and not just because she walked like nobody was going to hurt her, and not just because ravens were shouting in the trees. I had studied magic, you see, just a little, and this traveler had some. I wasn’t sure what kind, but I felt it like a chill or that charge in the air before a storm that raises gooseflesh. Besides, what could one woman have on her that would be worth much split seven ways? And let’s not forget our leader’s double share, which would end up looking more like half.

I looked at Pagran and gave him a little shake of my head. He looked back at me, the whites of his eyes standing out because he’d mudded himself, all but his hands, which he left white to make handcanting easier. Pagran used a soldier’s handcant he’d learned in the Goblin Wars, only half like the thieves’ cant I learned at the Low School. His two missing fingers didn’t help matters. When I shook my head at him, he canted at me. I thought he said to repair my purse, so I checked to see if money was falling out, but then I realized he was saying I should check to see if my balls were still attached. Right, he was impugning my courage.

I pointed at the stranger and made the sign for magicker, not confident they would know that one, and I’m not sure if Pagran did; he told me there was a magicker behind me, or at least that’s what I thought at first, but he was actually telling me to put a magicker in my arse. I looked away from the chief bastard I was about to die with and back at the woman about to kill us.

Just a feeling I had.

To walk alone down the White Road through the Forest of Orphans, even on a pleasantly warm late-summer day in the month of Ashers, you would have to be a magicker. If you weren’t, you’d have to be a drunk, a foreigner, a suicide, or some sloppy marriage of the three. This one had the look of a foreigner. She had the olive tones and shaggy black hair-mop of a Spanth. With good cheekbones, like they have there, a gift from the old empire, and there was no telling her age. Youngish. Thirty? Built small but hard. Those sleepy eyes could well be a killer’s, and she was dressed for fighting. She had a round shield on her back, a gorget to save her throat a cutting, and if I didn’t miss my guess, she wore light chain mail under her shirt.

The blade on her belt was a bit shorter than most. Probably a spadín, or bullnutter, which would definitely make her Ispanthian. Their knights used to be the best horsemen in the world, back when the world had horses. Now they relied on the sword- and-shield art of Old Kesh, known as Calar Bajat, taught from the age of eight. Spanths don’t take threats well—I was all but sure if we moved, it would be to kill, not intimidate. Would Pagran think it was worth bothering? Money pouches hung on the stranger’s belt, but would Pagran order the attack just for that?

No.

He would be looking at the shield.

Now that the maybe-Spanth was closer, I could see the rosy blush on the wood rim peeking over the stranger’s shoulder marking the shield as one of springwood. A tree we cut so fast during the Goblin Wars it was damned-near extinct—the last groves grew in Ispanthia, under the king’s watchful eye, where trespassing would get you a noose, and trespassing with a saw would get you boiled. Thing about springwood is, if it’s properly cured and cared for, it’s known to stay living after it’s been cut and heal itself. And as long as it’s alive, it’s hard to burn.

Pagran wanted that shield. As much as I hoped he’d move his cupped palm down like he was snuffing a candle, I knew he would jab his thumb forward and the attack would start. Three scarred brawlers stood beside Pagran, and I heard the other two archers shifting near me—one superstitious young squirt of piss named Naerfas, though we called him Nervous, kissing the grubby fox pendant carved from deer bone he wore on a cord around his neck; his pale, wall-eyed sister shifted in the leaves behind him. I never liked it that we worshipped the same god, they and I, but they were Galts like me, born with the black tongues that mark us all, and Galtish thieves fall in with the lord of foxes. We can’t help ourselves.

I pulled an arrow with a bodkin point, good for slipping between links of chain mail, and nocked it on the string.

We watched our captain. He watched the woman. The ravens screamed.

Pagran jabbed the thumb.

What happened next happened fast.

I pulled and loosed first, feeling the good release of pressure in my fingers and the bite of the bowstring on my inner arm. I also had that warm-heart feeling when you know you’ve shot true—if you haven’t handled a bow, I can’t explain it. I heard the hiss of my fellows’ arrows chasing mine. But the target was already moving—she crouched and turned so fast she seemed to disappear behind the shield. Never mind that it wasn’t a large shield—she made herself small behind it.

Two arrows hit the springwood and bounced, and where my own arrow went I couldn’t see. Then there went Pagran and his three brawlers, Pagran’s big glaive up in the air like an oversized kitchen knife on a stick, Frella’s broadsword behind her neck ready to chop, two others we’ll just call Spear and Axe running behind. The Spanth would have to stand to meet their charge, and when she did, I would stick her through the knee.

Now things got confusing.

I saw motion in the trees across the road. I thought three things at once:

A raven is breaking from the tree line. The ravens have stopped shouting.

That raven is too big.

A raven the size of a stag rushed onto the road.

I made a little sound in my throat without meaning to. It’s an unforgettable thing, seeing your first war corvid. Especially if it’s not on your side.

It plucked Spear’s foot out from under her, spilling her on her face, then began shredding her back with its hardened beak. I woke myself out of just watching it and thought I should probably nock another arrow, but the corvid was already moving at Axe, whose name was actually Jarril. I tell you this not because you’ll know him long but because what happened to him was so awful I feel bad just calling him Axe.

Jarril sensed the bird coming up on his flank and stopped his run, wheeling to face it. He didn’t have time to do more than raise his axe before the thing speared him with its beak where no man wants beak nor spear. His heavy chain mail hauberk measured to his knees, but those birds punch holes in skulls, so what was left of Jarril’s parts under the chain mail didn’t bear thinking about. He dropped, too badly hurt even to yell. Frella yelled, though. I glanced left and saw Pagran bent over, covered in blood, but I think it was Frella’s—she was bleeding enough for both of them, spattering the ground from a vicious underarm cut that looked to run elbow to tit.

As the Spanth switched directions, I caught a glimpse of her naked sword, which was definitely a spadín. Sharp enough to stab, heavy enough to chop. A good sword, maybe the best short sword ever made. And she could use it. She moved like a blur now, stepping past Frella and booting her broadsword out of reach.

Spear, her back in tatters, was just getting up on all fours like a baby about to try walking. Beside me, Nervous cried out, “Awain Baith,” Galtish for “death-bird,” and dropped his bow and ran, his older sister turning tail with him, leaving me the only archer in the trees. I had no shot at the Spanth, who kept her shield raised toward me even as she lopped Spear’s hand off below the wrist. Funny what the mind keeps close—I glimpsed the shield closer now and saw its central steel boss was wrought in the shape of a blowing storm cloud’s face, like the kind on the edge of a map.

Pagran had taken up his dropped glaive and was trying to ward the corvid circling him. It bit at the glaive’s head twice, easily avoiding Pagran’s jab and not seeming to notice my missed arrow—these things don’t move predictably, and at twenty paces, an arrow doesn’t hit the instant it flies. Now the war bird grabbed the glaive-head and wrenched sideways so Pagran had to turn with it or lose the weapon. Pagran turned at just the instant the Spanth leapt fast and graceful as a panther and cut him deep just above the heel. Our leader dropped and curled up into a moaning ball. The fight on the road was over.

Shyte.

I nocked another arrow as Spanth and bird looked at me.

The bow wasn’t going to be enough. I had a fine fighting knife on the front of my belt; in a tavern fight, it would turn a geezer inside out, but it was useless against chain. At my back, I had a nasty spike of a rondel dagger, good to punch through mail, but against that sword in that woman’s hand, not to mention the fucking bird, it might as well have been a twig.

They moved closer.

I could outrun the Spanth, but not the bird.

I pissed myself a little, I’m not ashamed to tell you.

“Archer,” she said in that r-tapping Ispanthian accent. “Come out and help your friends.”

That they weren’t really my friends wasn’t a good enough reason to leave them maimed and wrecked on the White Road, nor was the fact that they deserved it. The Spanth had fished an arrow from the bloody tangle of shirt under her arm, matched its fletching to the arrows still in my side-quiver, and said, “Good shot.”

She gave me the arrow back. She also gave me a mouthful of wine from her wineskin, good thick, black wine, probably from Ispanthia like she was. Pagran, grimacing and dragging himself to lean against a tree, got nothing. Frella, who seemed within two drops of bleeding herself unconscious, got nothing, even though she looked hopefully at the Spanth while I tied her arm off with one stocking and a stick. The wine was just for me, and only because I had shot true. That’s a Spanth for you. The surest way to make one love you is to hurt them.

To speak of the injured, Jarril was still unconscious, which was good—let him sleep; no stander wants to wake up a squatter, especially one barely old enough to know the use of what he’d lost. Spear had picked up her lost hand and run into the forest like she knew a sewer-on of hands whose shop closed soon. I don’t know where the bird went, or didn’t at the time. It was like it disappeared. As for the Spanth, she was off down the road like nothing happened past a scratch and a bloody shirt, but something had happened.

Meeting that Ispanthian birder had just changed my fate.

2

The Bee and Coin

Getting Frella and Pagran back to our camp was no easy matter. I gave Pagran back his glaive to crutch himself along on and had to let Frella lean her weight on me over a mile of uneven ground. Luckily, she was skinny—fit for palisades, as soldiers say, so she was less of a burden than she might have been. My masters at the Low School would have chided me for helping those two. They would have seen that getting trounced on the White Road was the end of our none-too-jolly band and that the archers who ran away, being brother and sister, were loyal only to each other and likely to help themselves to whatever we’d left behind before scampering off to the next adventure.

What I’d left behind was my fiddle, a fine helmet I’d hoped to sell, and a jug of Galtish whiskey. I didn’t really care about the helmet, and there was barely enough burnwater left to wet my lips, but that fiddle meant something to me. I’d like to tell you it had belonged to my da or something, but my da was a sad bastard miner and couldn’t play the arse-horn after a quart of beans and cabbage. I stole that fiddle. Walked off with it while a mate argued with a music student about whether his singing at a tavern had been in key. For the record, it wasn’t, but it was a damned fine fiddle. So much so that, after our con, I paid my mate his half of its worth rather than sell it. And now it was likely off to be sold for next to nothing and the two shytes who will have taken it so far ahead of me I had little chance to catch them.

• • • •

Cadoth was the first town west of the Forest of Orphans and the last town in Holt proper before you get to the yet gloomier forests and broad highlands of Norholt. You can tell how big a town is by how many gods have temples there and how big those temples are. For example, a village with one mud road, one tavern that’s really just the back of a fat man’s house, and a dying ox everyone shares at plowing time will have an Allgod church. No roof, logs to sit on, an altar with tallow candles and a niche where different gods’ statues will go depending on the holiday. Those statues will be carved from ash or hickory, with generous breasts on the goddesses and unthreatening pillicocks on the gods, except Haros, who will be hung like the stag he is, because everyone knows he screws the moon so hard she has to sink beneath the hills and rest from it.

A slightly bigger town, one with a full-time whore who doesn’t also brew beer or mend shirts, will have an Allgod church with a thatched roof and a bronze disc in a square of lead or iron, plus a proper temple to whichever local deity they feel will defecate least upon their hopeful, upturned faces.

Cadoth was as big as a town gets before someone decides it’s a city. A proper trade town at a proper crossroads, it had an Allgod church crowned with a bronze sun, a huge tower to Haros topped with wooden stag horns, plus temples to a dozen other divinities scattered here and there. Notably absent were Mithrenor, god of the sea—nobody much bothers inland—and the Forbidden God, for obvious reasons.

One thing a town this size will have is a proper Hanger’s House, as the Takers Guild Hall is called, and I would need to head there to discuss my debt to them. My adventures with Pagran and his cutty, stabby, punchy crew had gone well enough that summer, until we got our arses pulped and handed to us by the Spanth and her murder-bird. Now Nervous and Snowcheeks, the sibling archers who’d scampered when the bird joined the fray, had all but cleaned me out. I needed money—fast—and playing a few hands of Towers would be a good way to start.

I knew I’d find a game at the Bee and Coin because a Bee and a Coin were two of the cards in the Towers deck, besides the Towers, the Kings and Queens, Soldiers, Shovels, Archers, Death, the Traitor, and, of course, Thieves, signified in common decks by an illustration of a grasping hand.

Not everyone in the tavern would be a cards player. A few sheep- herders and root farmers faithful to the gods of sour frowns held down edgeward tables, talking low about rain and weevils, their never-washed woolens insulated with decades of hand-wiped meat grease. Two younger bravos near the bar had short copper cups at their belts, used in Towers to collect coin. Despite their swords, these fellows seemed leery of a trio of hard-looking older women clink-clinking away at Towers around a worm-bitten table.

I was leery, too, but I wanted a game.

“Do you care for a fourth?” I said, mostly to the bald killer shuffling the deck. She looked at my tattoo. She had every right to slap me for it but didn’t seem keen on it. Neither of the other two playing cards wanted a beer more than they wanted a cordial start to the game, so neither of them claimed the prize either.

Baldy nodded at the empty chair, so I put my arse in it. “Lamnur deck or Mouray?” I said.

“What’chye fuckin’ think?”

“Right. Lamnur.”

Nobles and such used the Mouray deck. Better art on that one. But folks with permanent dirt on their collars played the Lamnur deck, simpler images, two queens instead of three, no Doctor card to save you if you draw Death. For my part, I prefer the Mouray deck, but I’m partial to second chances.

“Now pay the price,” she said.

I dug sufficient coins out of my purse to ante.

Clink-clink!

She dealt me in.

I won two of the three Tourney rounds and folded the third so not to seem to be cheating, but the War round’s chest was too fat to pass up. The pale blondy woman with the scar like a fishhook bet heavy, thinking herself invincible with the last King in the deck, but I dropped the Traitor on her, archered off the Queen that would have caught the Traitor, took that King, and won. Again. A lot.

“The fuck’r ye doin’ that, ye slipper?” the bald one said, leaving out the how like a good Holtish street thug. Slipper wasn’t such a nice thing to be called, either, but then I had just bankrouted her.

“Just lucky,” I said, not lying. More about luck later.

She hovered between stabbing me and slapping me, settling finally on exile.

“The fuck out th’table,” she said, as in I should get, so I pouched my winnings up in my shirt, slid them into my belt-purse, and walked away smiling, followed after by several comments about my father, none of which I hoped were true. They all wanted to slap me, but were too enthralled by the game; they would stay nailed to the table until two of them were destitute, and then they’d likely fight. Little wonder preachers of so many gods rail against the game—it had killed more folk than the Murder Alphabet. I almost said it killed more than goblins had, but that would be too gross an exaggeration even for me.

I made my way toward the bar, and what should I see leaning on its rough wood, past a large fellow built for eclipse, but the Spanth from the road. We shared an awkward nod. The space at the bar next to her, the one I had been just moving to occupy, was suddenly taken by some rentboy with too much black makeup around the eyes. Those eyes inventoried the birder and found much to approve. She was a very handsome woman in her way, what with her black hair and seawater-blue eyes, but I hadn’t worked out if she would look better if she didn’t seem sleepy or if the heavy-lidded look gave her a certain charm. Men love a woman who doesn’t seem to give a damn, so long as she’s handsome. We also love a happy woman, so long as she’s fair, or a sad pretty one, or an angry girleen with a good face. You see how this works. So, yes, the Spanth was fair. But if she had to summon a smile to put out a fire, half the town would burn. She didn’t seem to notice the keen young pennycock next to her, rather occupying herself with her wine and staring into the middle distance. Troubled girl with good bones. The lads love that.

I found another place to stand.

A Galtish harper of some talent was singing “The Tattered Sea,” a song that had become popular after enough men had died to make calling humanity mankind sound a bit off. The word in vogue these last twenty years was kynd.

Her voice wasn’t half-bad, so nobody threw a bottle at her.

One day upon the Tattered Sea I waded out upon the waves
A comely young man for to see
Who looked to me more knight than knave
Now swam he toward a maiden brave Who treaded water in the brine
I should have left, my shame to save But I swam after, close behind
For I was young and poorly bred With much to learn of lechery Beneath the waves I dunked my head And what there should I hap to see?
I found a tail fin fairly twinned
Where I had sought four legs entwined Said I, “O, brother, are you kynd?” Said he, “No kynd, but surely kind
I’m kind enough to send you home Though kynd above I seem to be
You’ll find no pleasure ’neath the foam Nor husband in the Tattered Sea”
Then kindly did the mermaid speak To teach a daughter of the kynd
“Go back to land and loam and seek A legsome lad more fond than finned”
So turned I from the ocean cool Much wiser than a maid might wish For I swam out and found a school Where lustily I sought a fish

She got a few coins in her hat and too few claps, even counting mine, so she gathered her harp and went on to the next tavern and hopefully a more grateful audience.

I saw that, in one corner, a spellseller of the Magickers Guild— her face powdered white, her thumb and first two fingers of her left hand pinched together to cant her Guild allegiance—had lit a beeswax candle with a braid of hair tied around it to advertise she was open for custom. It wasn’t a moment before a young woman in rough-spun wools slipped her a coin and started whispering her wants in the witch’s ear.

Just after I ordered and got my first taste of the decent red ale they served at the Bee and Coin, a nasty-looking little fellow in waxy, stained leathers came up to my other side at the bar, staring right at my tattoo. It was a tattoo of an open hand with certain runes on it, and it sat on my right cheek. You could only see it by firelight, and then it showed up as a light reddish-brown, not too prominent, a bit like old henna. You could miss it altogether. Unfortunately, this fellow didn’t.

“That’s the Debtor’s Hand, yae?”

Yae, he said, a northern Holtish affectation. It seemed they were all Norholters here, which figured—we weren’t so far from the provincial border.

I was required to acknowledge the tattoo, but I didn’t have to be sweet about it.

“Yae,” I said, stretching it out just a little so he couldn’t tell if I was mocking him or if I was a fellow rube.

“Ye see that, barkeep?”

“I do,” she said without looking back. She was up on a stool now, fetching the Spanth’s wine from a high shelf.

“Anybody claim the Guild-gift yet?” the rube said.

“Nae,” said the barkeep, yet another Norholter. “Not tonight.” Now Leathers took my measure. I leaned back to give him a look at the blade on my belt, a fine stabber and slasher. A serious knife. A knife-fighter’s knife. I called her Palthra, Galtish for “petal”— the rondel at the back of my belt was Angna, or “nail”—and I had two wee leather roses inlaid on Palthra’s sheath. Not that Leathers would likely see more than the sheath and handle. I’d be unthumbed if I pulled a blade on any who slapped me in the Takers’ name, and should I bleed them, I’d be poked by the Guild wherever I poked them for the slap.

But did this kark know that?

“Then I claim the Guild-gift. Debtor, in the name of the Takers, ye’ll have this.”

Yah, he knew it.

He looked back at the prettier of the two girleens he had been nose-rubbing with, then, never taking his eyes off her, he flashed out his hand and popped my cheek. It stung, of course, especially the ring that cut my lip against my tooth a little, but the slaps never hurt as much as the knowledge that a moron got to paddle my cheeks and I could make no answer. I wasn’t even allowed to speak to him again unless he spoke first.

The barkeep poured the fellow his half pint of beer, on the Guild, putting enough head on it to let him know what she thought of him making Norholters look like cowards for striking those not allowed to return the favor. The rube drank from it, painting his near hairless upper lip with foam, which he then wiped with his sleeve.

“Man ought to pay what he owes,” he said with the conviction of the freshly twenty, as much to himself as to the room generally, but that was all I needed. He wasn’t supposed to speak to me after. Now I could talk.

“Man also ought to have a bit of callus on his hands,” I said. “Yours look borrowed from a high-nut boy.”

He seemed surprised I answered, but covered as well as he could, raising his half pint at me like he got what he wanted and didn’t care what I said, but he cared, all right. Someone had sniggered at what I said, and the laugh cut him, especially in front of his henlets. Oh, I knew his sort. Family had a bit of coin, but he was such an arsehole he’d up and left the inn or the chandlery or whatever business his bunioned mother ran because he couldn’t stand to be told what to do. Might have found his way to a Guild straw farm to get filled up with useless tricks and style himself a thief, but he couldn’t hack even that and got bounced before his debt could sink him. Gone long enough now that his clothes reeked, but he still hadn’t pawned his last good ring. Was one hard week away from turning cunnyboy or sell-sword, but wasn’t sweet or clever enough for the first or strong enough for the second.

I was a half heartbeat away from pitying him, but my face still stung from his bastard hand, so I said, “You can have another slap at me, as far as the Guild’s concerned. Seems a shame you wasted your first one doing so little harm, you fatherless kark.”

A kark is a wet fart, by the way, if you’ve never been to Galtia or Norholt. The kind you think will be one thing but turns out to be the other, to your shame and sorrow. It’s why a Galt says, “Close the whiskey jug,” not cork it. We say cork and kark almost the same, and most of us don’t hate whiskey so much we’d go putting a kark in it.

Several at the tavern hooed at that, shepherds and farm women mostly, not the sort to forgive weakness. He couldn’t let that be the last word, or he’d likely have one or two of them to reckon with as the taps kept flowing. A smart lad would’ve hustled the girls off to whatever hayrick awaited their exchange of crotch fleas. But he wasn’t smart.

“I wasn’t trying to hurt ye, I just wanted the beer. But I’ll hurt ye if y’like, y’shyte-tongue Galtie knap.”

The Spanth opened the wine with her teeth and poured herself a gurgle, one eyebrow raised in amused curiosity. She likely won’t have known that a knap was a tit, nor will she have known that the word I was about to use meant a particularly cute tuft of pubic hair.

“I doubt that, sprumlet,” I said. “I’ve had a hard piss hurt me worse than you look like to. But if you’d care to try, I’m all face for your knuckles. So why don’t you come and have another throw before your little sisters get the idea they’re at the wrong table.”

I touched my black tongue to the tip of my nose and winked at him.

That did the trick.

He rushed across the tavern and punched at my jaw. I shrugged up and leaned so my shoulder caught most of it. I won’t bore you with a blow by blow, except to tell you that he flailed his little cat paws at me, and soon, we ended up tussling on the floor, me grabbing his head close, now an arm, grabbing his head again. He smelled like week-old sweat and like his leathers had had the mold at some time or another, and they never really come back from that, do they? The barkeep was all “Here, here!” and “Now, now!” until she flubbed us apart with the end of the flail she’d had mounted over the brassheet mirror, probably the very one she’d parted goblin hair with in the Daughters’ War.

I got up holding a hand to my bloodied lip, evidently worse off than Stinkleathers, and he flipped his longish hair back in a move that a cockerel would have been proud of. Since he’d been the first to throw a punch and he was obviously a twat, the bartender gave him a shove toward the door. He collected the girleens on his way out, saying, “Regards to the Guild,” in such a nasty way I was now sure he’d been chewed by the Takers and spat out.

“Sorry you didn’t get to finish your beer,” I said to his retreating back.

I looked up where the Spanth had been standing, but she had slipped out during the fray. A woman who’s got someplace to be. A woman who doesn’t want to be recognized. Intriguing. I saw the fancy man with the made-up eyes looking at me with the same casual disinterest he might have shown a dog who wandered in. I winked at him. He sneered and looked away, which was what I wanted him to do, because I had to palm something from my mouth to my pouch.

It was Stinkleathers’s ring. Goblin silver.

Probably the most valuable thing he still owned.

Worth letting him hit me a few glancing blows at bad angles I entirely controlled. I had given his finger a good pinch as I stripped the ring so he would still feel it there, he wouldn’t notice its absence until he hit the bedstraw if I were lucky.

And I was.

Very, very lucky.

In many ways, I’m perfectly ordinary. A bit shorter than most, but Galts run small. Thin as a stray dog. No arse to speak of, so I need a belt to keep my breeches north of Crackmere. I’m a decent fiddler, as I’ve said, and you wouldn’t punch me in the throat for singing near you, but you wouldn’t be like to hire me for your wedding either. Some things I’m shyte at. Not laughing when I find something funny, for example. Adding figures in my head. Farmwork. Lifting heavy weights. But thieving? That I’ve a talent for. And part of that talent is a pure gift for and awareness of luck. Luck is the first of my two great birth-gifts—more about the second later.

Luck is very real, and anyone who tells you differently wants all the credit for their own success. Luck is a river. I can actually feel when I’m in it and when I’m out of it, too. Think about that for a moment. Most people try something difficult or unlikely with very little notion of whether it’ll work or not. Not me. When I feel the inner sunshine of good luck under my breastbone, I know that, yes, I can snatch that woman’s pouch and that it’s got a diamond or three gold lions in it. I know I can make the far jump to the next roof and that my foot will miss the loose tiles. And I know when I sit down to shuffle a Towers deck, the other fellow’s going to drown in Bees and Shovels and probably get a visit or two from our old friend Death.

Playing games of chance wakes luck up in me, and soon, it’s running out of control. You can only win so many hands or dice- throws before the others are ready to cut your throat. Worse, running through my luck at the gaming table means I’ll be well out of it when I need it. When I feel the empty chill of luck running thin, I know a walk on an icy path is like to split my tailbone. I keep my head down, because I’ve good odds to meet a man I ran a confidence game on the year before or some girleen I left things sour with.

It was luck that got me moved from a straw farm to a True School when I joined the Takers Guild. Normally, see, they recruit all the lads and lasses they can get to sign for the Low School, but only three of the nine schools are true. The straw farms teach basic lock-picking, basic climbing, some knife-fighting, but nothing advanced. No spells. No trap-finding or animal-talking, no cozening, no misdirection. Just loads of conditioning. You graduate from a straw farm strong, fast, tough, lightly skilled, and heavily in debt. If you can pay your debt somehow, good on you. When you can’t, you’re indentured. This means the Guild has at its beckon many thousands of leg-breakers, prostitutes, and hard laborers. They can summon a mob to terrorize a town, then disperse and hide them before the baron’s spearmen show up.

Myself, I went to a True School. Or at least I think I did.

But I am nonetheless very much in debt, as they want us all to be.

Here, read for yourself.

Our Most Esteemed Kinch Na Shannack, Third Year Physical, First Year Magus, Debtor

It is with great reluctance and no small disappointment that we, the bursars of the Pigdenay Academy of Rare Arts, in fealty to the Takers Guild, inform you that the meat of your debt has outgrown the shell of your willingness to work and is at risk to crack your body.

As your last four seasonal payments to us averaged less than two trounces each, at this laggardly march, you will not clear your debt of eighty-five trounces gold, one gold queening, one silver knight, and three silver knaves (plus interest), for a period of some sixteen years. Our actuaries need not be bothered to tell us this is beyond your likely life span and at the outer limit of your plausibly useful years in the profession. It is only at the argument of one of your former masters that we have measured your remunerative value alive and unmaimed beyond your cautionary value harmed for all to see or dead for all to know.

You are therefore commanded, on pain of unthumbing, to deliver yourself to the closest chartered Guildhouse for a look- over and a tongue-wag, the most likely outcome being a deed indenture of the greater sort. Our intelligence places you on the White Road and suggests that Cadoth may be the advertised Guildhouse most near your person. Of course, prompt payment, upon your arrival, in the amount of Two lions gold and five owlets silver or One trounce gold, two queenings gold, one shilling silver will render the conversation far more cordial and do much to reassure us as to your good intentions toward your promise. We need not remind you that the skills gifted to you within our walls render most students capable of discovering monies enough to clear their names within seven years leisurely or three years hard and lucky, and that our lenience in only burdening you with the mark of the open hand will not long persist without some laudable action on your part.

Tenderly (for now), The Humble Bursars of Your Masters in Arts Rare and Coveted By our hand

This First Lūnday of Ashers, 1233 Years Marked

It was now the eighteenth, exactly halfway through Ashers. Lammas month was coming fast, and with it, a new payment due the Guild.

Stinkleathers’s ring had been a good start, but I was going to have to do some stealing in Cadoth.

And I was going to need a buyer.

Copyright © 2021 by Christopher Buehlman. Excerpted from The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman. Published by permission of the author and Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christopher Buehlman is an author, comedian, and screenwriter from St. Petersburg, Florida. His novels include Those Across the River and The Suicide Motor Club, and his plays include The Last Neanderthals: A Paleolithic Comedy and Hot Nights for the War Wives of Ithaka. He tours the country most years, writing and performing at renaissance festivals. He and his wife travel with their rescue dog, Duck, and a black cat named Jane Mansfield who is proficient in ninjutsu.

Book Review: We Are Satellites, by Sarah Pinsker

LaShawn M. Wanak | 664 words

We Are Satellites
Sarah Pinsker
Paperback / Ebook / Audio
ISBN: 9781984802606
Berkley Books, May 2021, 368 pages

I am multitasking as I write this review. I am typing these words while listening to my husband talk on the phone while I’m also listening to lo-fi on YouTube. If I really wanted to, I would be knitting as well as playing a game of Candy Crush (which I switch over to far more than I should). I can blame this on the nature of this world where attention spans are shorter, how easily we can be distracted by the ping of phone notifications of email and social media. Ah, if there was only a way to focus our attention easier, or better yet, find a way to use multi-tasking to its full potential.

Sarah Pinsker comes up with a way in her latest book We are Satellites, but with it she also asks the question, “Is using multi-tasking software a good thing?”

A new technology is sweeping the country called Pilot, an implant that allows you to multitask more efficiently. High schooler David tries to convince his mothers, Val and Julie, to allow him to get one so he could concentrate better at school. Tech-savvy Julie is fine with it, but Val is leery. She worries that the push for this implant would mean that those who are unable to get it, such as Sophie, their youngest daughter with epilepsy, would be left behind. Ultimately though, they agree to let David get the implant—and further in time, Julie also gets one.

The story is a quiet, detailed look at how technology changes a family over a span of decades. David struggles with his implant—unlike most of the kids in his class who are able to tune out distractions, he is one of the few where everything around him is put in hyperfocus. However, when he tries to explain to people: his parents, his friends, his doctor, they dismiss the problem, or they don’t know what to do. Afraid that admitting the problem would mean the Pilot being taken away from him, David struggles with failure and hides his condition. Sophie, on the other side, deals with being bullied and called names by those who have the implant, and as she grows older, she fights back by joining an activist group protesting the Pilots. As parents, Val and Julie find themselves trying to hold their family together, but also falling on opposite sides of the issue. Which means in order not to hurt the other, they hold back little things from each other. Concerns, worries, observations—little things that by themselves aren’t bad, but over time can pile up into overall lack of trust.

And trust is the true heart of We are Satellites. For all its faults, the implant does what it’s supposed to. It’s just a tool. But as with all technology, it changes how people relate to each other. Pinsker does an excellent job of presenting the turmoil of the implant impacts relationships between spouse and children, spouses with each other, siblings, the world, the haves and have nots, the disabled, the privileged. I found myself shaking my head at the choices the characters made, but on further reflection found myself wondering if I would react the same way. Like technology, trust is a tool that needs to be exercised just as much, and lack of trust, or worse, abuse, can wreak havoc, whether it be corporations that push technology on the public without acknowledging problems, or whether it be between two people who are so afraid of hurting each other that they withhold it, and in doing so, hurt the very people they love.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LaShawn M. Wanak has been writing speculative fiction stories professionally since 2006. Her works have appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018, Fireside Magazine, FIYAH, and many others. She is the editor of GigaNotoSaurus and reviews books for Lightspeed Magazine. Writing stories keeps her sane. Also, pie. Visit her blog at tbonecafe.wordpress.com.

Book Review: Hold Fast Through the Fire, by K.B. Wagers

Chris Kluwe | 821 words

Hold Fast Through the Fire
K.B. Wagers
Hardcover / eBook
ISBN: 9780062887818
Harper Voyager, July 2021, 416 pages

Greetings, readers! This month I’d like to tell you about an excellent military SF book, Hold Fast Through the Fire, the follow-up to 2020’s A Pale Light in the Black, by K.B. Wagers. I’d recommend reading A Pale Light in the Black first, because there are some references to events that occurred in it in Hold Fast Through the Fire (plus it’s also a fun read), but it’s not absolutely necessary as Wagers does a good job of providing contextual information to help the reader fill in any missing pieces.

Hold Fast Through the Fire continues the journey of the crew of Zuma’s Ghost, an Interceptor class patrol craft in the NeoG, which in Wagers’ world is the equivalent of the space Coast Guard (I think the Zuma’s Ghost is the equivalent of a cutter, but I’m not an expert; all I know is it doesn’t get stuck in any canals so I assume it’s a good ship). After surviving the adventures of the first book, the crew, led by their captain Lieutenant Max Carmichael, have bonded into one of the most cohesive and capable units in the NeoG, but nothing stays the same forever no matter how much we wish it so. Hold Fast Through the Fire starts with two crewmembers of the Zuma’s Ghost leaving, which means it’s time for one new and one familiar face to step in to replace them, but fresh beginnings are always accompanied by challenges.

While reading Hold Fast Through the Fire, I was quite happy to see that Wagers continues their excellent combination of light-on-the-jargon military SF with nuanced character development involving a broadly diverse cast of characters. Wagers’ mil SF action is still as exciting and thoroughly plotted as in the first book, and the expansion of the Yuma’s Ghost family comes complete with all the growing pains that every family faces when interpersonal dynamics are upended. While this book focuses a bit more on the newer additions to the crew, every character in the book still feels fully realized and present as their own person, and their attempts to overcome new obstacles takes everyone working in concert.

Speaking of new obstacles, the stakes for Max and her crew in Hold Fast Through the Fire are even higher than before, as an insidious group is bent on causing a war between the Earth-based military space fleet and a Martian separatist movement in order to hide their own nefarious goals. This brings a bit of a whodunnit flavor to the book that, while not an out and out mystery novel, is definitely satisfying to watch resolve. The revelations the crew works to uncover all feel fairly earned, and more importantly, highlight the importance of them trusting and relying on each other instead of trying to be a lone-wolf hero figure.

The other thing I really enjoyed about Hold Fast Through the Fire is that Wagers isn’t afraid to address the ongoing dynamics of romantic relationships from various perspectives, whether those relationships are well established or barely in the process of forming, as well as how a lack of trust can affect their development. The people in this book are nowhere close to perfect, which is what makes it fun and compelling, because none of us are, we just have to muddle through as best we can. It also does an excellent job of highlighting Wagers’ core message of trust and acceptance being the way in which we survive—both interpersonally as well as when the space ass-kicking needs to happen (and in the case of Jenks, one of the characters in the book, that’s quite literal indeed).

Overall, much like A Pale Light in the Black, Hold Fast Through the Fire is an ambitious, outstanding breath of fresh air in the military SF genre, and I would recommend it even to those who may not think of themselves as military SF fans. In the NeoG, it’s not the size of your ship that matters, it’s how you and your crew come together to use it, and I’m thrilled we get another chance to visit Wagers’ universe. Hopefully there will be many more to come in the years ahead.

Read if: You like space adventures; you’re not afraid to start a bar fight to protect your crew; your family is your family no matter what.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Kluwe grew up in Southern California among a colony of wild chinchillas and didn’t learn how to communicate outside of barking and howling until he was fourteen years old. He has played football in the NFL, once wrestled a bear for a pot of gold, and lies occasionally. He is also the eternal disappointment of his mother, who just can’t understand why he hasn’t cured cancer yet. Do you know why these bio things are in third person? I have no idea. Please tell me if you figure it out.

Book Review: Black Sci-Fi Short Stories, with editorial support from Tia Ross

Arley Sorg | 2004 words

Black Sci-Fi Short Stories
Tia Ross, Associate Editor
Hardback
ISBN: 9781839644801
Flame Tree Publishing, April 2021, 432 pages

This anthology and I had a huge misunderstanding at first. Let me tell you, folks: I am not a fan of the cover, nor the title.

Not that the cover is “bad” or that the title is “wrong.” But when I initially glanced at the cover image, along with the word “gothic” thrown into the series title (not to mention that many in genre feel “sci-fi” is a term used mainly by people outside of “science fiction” literature), I had the impression of one of those anthologies which reprints old-timey stories. Penguin has a lot of these, such as The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories or The Penguin Book of the Undead. Cool books, and I used to love poring through them, but they just aren’t what I’m looking to cover in my Lightspeed reviews.

Turns out, not only did we have a misunderstanding, but this book is both wonderful and important. I’ll start with the “wonderful” and get to the “important” later.

Black Sci-Fi Short Stories opens with a brief but thoughtful foreward from Do You Dream of Terra-Two? author Temi Oh, who discusses the role of science fiction, the ways individuals and stories can inspire us, and the impact of seeing or not seeing the Black experience represented in science fiction, all beginning with an anecdote about Stephen Sondheim and Oscar Hammerstein. Sandra M. Grayson follows this with an erudite introduction which defines terms and places a number of the book’s older pieces—such as “The Comet” by W.E.B. Du Bois (published in 1920) and “Blake, or The Huts of America” by Martin R. Delany (published in two parts, in 1859 and 1861-62)—within the lineage of science fiction literature; Grayson explains what they are about, why they are important, and where they fit in the overall pantheon of science fiction.

From there, the book primarily offers original fiction and reprints of newer fiction, but cleverly ties these stories to that lineage of Black science fiction by placing them alongside those classic, historically important works. This allows the reader to understand the newer narratives in complex contexts, lending even more weight to an already solid set of pieces.

Favorites start with the first story in the book, James Beamon’s “An Empty, Hollow Interview.” In a future where people use gene therapy to remake themselves in the image of famous folks, especially long-dead famous folks, a particularly successful such a person has become a megastar by way of the genes and appearance of actress Hope Lange. The gene therapy comes at a high cost, and this cost is a signifier of the lengths individuals will go to just to become someone else. It’s star culture meets self-destructive, internalized hate. Through this lens, the narrative examines the pressures of society to be what you aren’t, and by inverse logic, becomes a treatise on the ways that existing as what you are is resistance.

K. Tempest Bradford’s “Élan Vital,” on one level is an exploration of love and sacrifice, in particular the powerful love for one’s mother. On another level, it’s a critique of the medical system, and our culture of disparity, wherein things which are perfectly possible are only available to the wealthy; the not-so-wealthy must sacrifice everything to keep up. Finally, it takes the idea just a bit further, to demonstrate the ways in which this kind of system exploits the bodies of the disenfranchised, to the benefit of the rich.

I’m going to say something about Tara Campbell’s “The Orb” that I very rarely say: I didn’t entirely get it, but I loved it. It was weird in all the right ways, and maybe the weirdness is the point, or maybe it’s just one of those stories which I need to read a few times to fully understand. In a secluded compound an enigmatic man has gathered a handful of people (read: cult) to raise “the Orb”: a firm, fleshy thing which grows as they feed and care for it. As said Orb grows, it raises new challenges, and eventually people start to disappear. The point-of-view character becomes more connected to the Orb as the story progresses, even undergoing strange physiological changes. If I were put on the spot, I’d say this is a superb piece about the control exerted by society and culture, told with strong feminist subtext. It feels allegorical, and the clearer themes are on giving up the self for unclear purposes and uncertain futures. Then again, were I put on the spot, a wiser answer might be “I’m not quite ready to talk about it yet.”

In Patty Nicole Johnson’s “The Line of Demarcation,” Doelle works in a warehouse reminiscent of an Amazon warehouse. At the urging of her company, she traded her arms for “Neolimbs” and was rewarded with higher income. But all is not as promised. The limbs don’t quite match her skin tone and, worse, they hurt like hell. As her aunt Deidra’s health declines, and as Deidra’s medical needs become more expensive, the company pressures Doelle to replace her legs as well. The story becomes a sharp reprimand of corporate culture, and of a medical industry which preys upon those in need, ultimately resulting in indentured servitude. It’s about class, but it’s also about products and systems which are designed with only certain segments of our culture in mind. It’s about false promises, but it takes the idea a step further: predatory companies (and people who benefit from them) are adaptable in the most insidious ways, using false promises as a lure. Try as you might to get out from under, they will eventually consume you, limb by limb.

Russell Nichols slays twice, first with “e-race,” in which Waldo Ellison is an old man and the future is coming quickly. In fact, it’s crashing through the door. Ellison finds himself forced to queue up for a mandatory eye operation which will erase everyone’s ability to “see color.” He tries to raise hell, first attempting to evoke solidarity in resistance to the procedure, and then to try to get thrown out. Both tactics fail. Through his struggles and the literalizing of metaphor Nichols presents a discussion around the complexity of racism, and the importance of maintaining a connection to our histories of resistance.

My notes for Nichols’s second story, “Giant Steps,” have three words etched above the rest, written large, in full caps: SO DAMN GOOD. [Editors’ Note: You can read “Giant Steps” in the March 2020 issue of Lightspeed.] The framing device is simple: Dr. Jenkins is on a trip to Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. Jenkins is making history and flying toward the culmination of a life of dreaming and planning. Striating this narrative are memories of key events which brought Jenkins to this moment, memories which throb in time to the moments of the trip. Through these memories we explore the pain of disillusionment, the need for belonging and a contradictory drive for independence, the impact of Othering, and the force and pressures—both external and internal—arising from notions of gender and race. The prose reads loosely like poetry, at times rhythmic, the power of words and their sounds delivering emotional resonance to the subconscious while lines, dialogue, and ideas engage the intellect. Take note, y’all. This is how it’s done.

Temi Oh rounds out my list of favorites with “Almost Too Good.” This is a slowly gripping story about a woman who becomes obsessed with having a child (though it’s told in second person, and expertly so), who discovers an odd but lovely tree. When she stands under the tree, she thinks she can see into the future. “Almost Too Good” is a beautiful meditation on faith, hope, perhaps even meaning, and is just the right amount of startling and strange.

It’s a wonderful set of stories, the strength of which moves me to believe that the stories which weren’t among my favorites will probably be favorites of other readers. You can buy this book for the quality of fiction and be happy. But I promised I’d talk about the “important” thing, remember?

In the course of sourcing a title for this month’s review, I also considered five other anthologies, three of which incorporate language about diversity or inclusivity in their marketing materials. Through examining their tables of contents and looking up authors I discovered that all five books featured very few or no Black authors—including one with an Octavia E. Butler quote emblazoned on an opening page. But there’s more. I have this new column over at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, in which I tackle assumptions about the publishing industry. I haven’t addressed race in publishing (yet), but nonetheless, in going through buckets of data on topics, I’ve accidentally noticed a lot of other data about publishing, such as the paucity of Black attendees at respected writers workshops, and the infrequency of Black authors getting published at major markets. To throw some numbers in here, for example, one very respected, award-winning market which many pro authors consider to be “inclusive” or “diverse” published a total of three Black authors in nearly eighty original stories published in 2020. What I am seeing too often is overwhelmingly white ToCs, or, in cases where “diversity” is attempted, what I call exclusionary inclusion: an appearance of diversity while still excluding certain group(s), which often happens to be Black folks.

Despite the various social movements and outcries and even Twitter campaigns to raise awareness or effect change, my stumbling upon this book in email couldn’t have been more meaningful. It had become too obvious to me that Black voices are still largely ignored, underrepresented in major outlets, and that people in publishing are more interested in explaining why they aren’t publishing Black people than they are in actually publishing Black voices. I rediscovered this book in email after initially discarding it (see above), feeling disillusioned by the statistics and ToCs I’d seen. Thankfully I thought, let me look at this thing again.

This book stands on the shoulders of work such as Sheree Renée Thomas’s Dark Matter anthologies, and in companionship with resources such as Nisi Shawl’s A Crash Course in the History of Black Science Fiction web post (bit.ly/3wmdkmC). But it’s not just another great collection of “diverse voices.” By establishing a history of Black science fiction, one which goes undiscussed and unseen in many circles, first the book proves that Black voices have always been here, even if some readers have never heard of them, never seen them, never looked for them. Then, by presenting so many incredible stories by a host of contemporary authors—importantly, not just the “big names” which many people may find familiar—the book demonstrates that powerful Black voices are still trying to be heard, and that there is no rational reason for Black stories to be as absent from ToCs as they are. In this way this book importantly reveals a pattern of exclusion, one which continues still, and stands proudly against it. This book is nothing less than a powerful argument for Black science fiction to be recognized, to be seen, and to be appreciated on its own terms.

Wake up, folks. Get a copy, read some stories, and see what you’ve been missing.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief of Fantasy Magazine, senior editor at Locus Magazine, and associate editor at both Lightspeed and Nightmare. He reviews books for Locus, Lightspeed, and Cascadia Subduction Zone and is an interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine. Arley grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado, and studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, and, in non-pandemic times, usually writes in local coffee shops. He is a 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate.

Author Spotlight: Gene Doucette

Xander Odell | 906 words

Almost anyone who has had one drink too many has experienced the sensations you describe in the opening of “Hypnopompic Circumstance” (without the alien, I suspect). You make a point of going into detail without becoming too graphic. How important is it to you to create a strong opening in a story? Are there any pitfalls you have to consciously work to avoid?

This question had me going back through my books to review how they opened, which led to a couple of observations: I have to have the first sentence down in my head before I can start writing a story (even if that’s all I know about the story); and that sentence is the only one guaranteed to last as-is through all the subsequent drafts.

I like starting in the middle and then backing up. In “Hypnopompic Circumstance” that middle was “Thomas’s first encounter with the alien was terrifying.” It works for the reader because now there are a lot of questions in need of answers (who is the alien, why is Thomas the only one encountering it, how many encounters have there been, etc.) which keeps them interested. Possibly as important, by starting with this kind of sentence, I’m interested in writing more. I usually don’t know the answers to the questions I pose in precisely this manner until I start writing, so it’s a great way to jumpstart finding my way to the ending.

The premise and voice were both engaging and carried me to the end. Tell us something of what inspired Thom’s unexpected romp.

I think the first time I read about hypnopompic and hypnagogic hallucinations was about thirty years ago, in an issue of Skeptical Inquirer, and I’ve wanted to use them ever since. In the same way that, for instance, the history of tuberculosis can explain the mythology of vampirism, these hallucinations can explain a whole host of extraterrestrial or supernatural events, and I think that’s really cool.

The story has almost a Philip K. Dick-esque sense of reality and what could be mental illness. Is Thom struggling with a psychiatric condition or is Gerald real? How does Thom’s time and treatment in the hospital intersect with his view of reality? What do you think happened at the end of the story? Was Thom slipping further into his illness or was Gerald a real alien taking him into the unknown?

I deliberately left this question unanswered in the text, and the reason (one reason) is that I actually don’t know. This is the other side of the “hallucination” coin: Yes, hallucination is a perfectly valid explanation that satisfies Occam’s razor, but it’s not Thomas’s reality, and that’s what matters in the story. For Thomas, Gerald is real; for the other characters in the story, Thomas is unwell. Thomas leaves with Gerald at the end, but I couldn’t tell you what the hospital orderlies find in his room in the morning.

You explore both fantasy and science fiction and have an intricate sense of worldbuilding. What would you say is the hardest part of crafting a new world for readers to explore?

The only purely new world I’ve created is in the Tandemstar books, where I’m building an entire planet. And that has been hard. I’ve decided I want to care about the political landscape of different countries, and what their religions are like, and their economies and everything, so what I’ve been trying to do was build out a story that crosses continents (so I can worldbuild on each continent) and that spans multiple books. I think the first series will end up being five books in total, only two of which are completed right now.

The worldbuilding in my fantasy books has been much easier by comparison. The Immortal books are arguably alternative history books, because the “fantasy” characters all exist in this world . . . we just don’t know about them. (I essentially took a bunch of creatures that would exist in a story with magic and took out the magic.) My biggest challenge there has been figuring out how to fit in my immortal narrator—Adam—with our actual historical record, plausibly. That’s been a lot of fun, because Adam is a cool guy to hang out with, despite his obvious drinking problem.

What’s next for Gene Doucette? What can eager readers look forward to in 2021?

The Apocalypse Seven will be available at the end of May! It’s my second book with the publisher (which is John Joseph Adams Books, and also Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and also Mariner Books) and I’m very excited about it.

I’m also planning to have the third Tandemstar book—The Ocean in the Sky—out by the end of 2021, possibly as soon as late July. I’m working on it now, so “by the end of 2021” should be a slam-dunk, except that a film project has jumped the line recently that’s been taking up a lot of my bandwidth. I can’t talk about that particular project right now, but I’m excited about that too.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Xander Odell is a 47-year old, happily married mother of two, an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. Their work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE, Daily Science Fiction, Crosssed Genres, Pseudopod, and The Drabblecast. They are hard at work plotting their second novel or world domination. Whichever comes first.

Author Spotlight: Howard Andrew Jones

Jude Griffin | 1426 words

Where does this fit in the universe of novels and short stories about Dabir and Asim? What do you use to keep track of their timelines and adventures?

I should lie and say that I’ve got a complex chronology written out, but the truth is that I know these characters and the arc of their lives so well that it’s easy to track. There’s a point in time, directly after the fourth intended novel, where the Caliph’s vizier is actively trying to thwart them, having moved on from finding them moderately embarrassing to actively disliking them because he thinks they’re deliberately trying to make him look bad, particularly Dabir. Because the caliph esteems them, the vizier can’t have Dabir and Asim removed in an obvious way. So, when the caliphate is endangered, he sends out Dabir and Asim, hoping that they’ll get killed in the process. On the plus side, their lengthy absences gets them away from the court. On the downside, they keep managing to make it back, usually covering themselves in glory. This eventually results in a calamity . . .

The changed physical setting of the citadel, the diners keeping their backs to the tree, the use of formal Arabic: I only appreciated these hints upon a second reading. Which story elements do you think might go undetected by readers?

Oh, I’d hate to spoil anything, but I do appreciate you telling me that. I try to tie most of their adventures to existing myths but not bog down the pace by expounding upon the details in depth. That way, if readers don’t really care, they can just dig in and enjoy the adventure. For instance, the primary guest star is part of a cycle of myths, and readers can read about her in more detail if they like.

I try to craft all of my work with care and that will hopefully mean return visits reward readers. I’m still waiting for readers to see some of the foreshadowing and subtext in my most recent series (The Ring-Sworn Trilogy), things that they may not notice the first time through. I was delighted last year when one reader observed something about the titles and their relation to something in the text, a matter that no one, not even my beta readers, had picked up on. There are another few things in those books I’m waiting for someone to notice and appreciate, and I hope they’ll tell me when they do.

Can you talk about why you chose the ending you did? Will the bracelet reappear in a future story?

I’d known how the tale would resolve since I’d conceived it, but if you mean the closing sentences and all that, it just came out that way when I typed the first draft and I was pretty pleased with the result. I don’t know how many readers out there grew up watching re-runs of the original Star Trek the way I did (over and over, because it was the only good speculative fiction available on-screen in my part of the country when I was a kid) but the best episodes, especially so many of the strong ones in the first season, are really quite melancholy. When the Enterprise slowly soars away at the end and the somber music follows her, you have a sense that only brotherhood/sisterhood and compassion can avert disaster, and that experiences have consequences—we (the crew/humanity) got out this time, but it was close, and life is fragile and bittersweet and to be savored, and we might have ended up like those people who made the wrong choices, or who were doomed because of their previous actions—or we realize how close they were to failing and losing their lives and all else they held dear.

What I didn’t realize until I was much older was that this feel is an essential component of hardboiled fiction. The writers of the original Star Trek grew up steeped in that kind of writing because it was all around them, and many of them were veterans of World War II or were young enough to have experienced it even if they weren’t on the line. As a result, that sense of duty, responsibility, teamwork, life’s fragility, and the necessity of hard choices permeates the best episodes. I love that sensibility, whether owing to natural inclination or because Trek storytelling got hardwired after so much watching, and so it ends up in all my fiction.

For some reason, it is often more marked in the Dabir and Asim tales, maybe because each of the short stories is rather like an episode from a TV series. I can dream that someone would make that one.

As for that bracelet, I don’t have any definite plans, although it will probably turn up on their memento shelf some time as a background detail.

What’s the best fan feedback you’ve ever gotten on your writing?

One of my favorite reviews is a five-star write up on Amazon that reads something like “Arrived in excellent time in good shape.” That cracks me up every time I think about it. Another is a one-star review because For the Killing of Kings was too gay, owing mostly to the mention of one of the characters having a husband. Given that my books tend to be PG-13, with sexuality a component of characters rather than a central theme of the narrative, the review said far more about the reviewer than the work—although the outrage over the reviewer’s prejudice drove some who might never have heard of it to go read the book, and that amuses me.

My most rewarding fan feedback about Dabir and Asim in particular is when people write that they love the characters and their warmth. One reader said that she loved Asim’s heart, and that made my day. He’s not flawless, but he’s a good man, and I’m glad that comes through for a lot of people.

Probably my most surprising fan feedback came one day when I was sitting at a convention table with some friends. I’d just shown them the copy of the cover of the second Dabir and Asim novel (The Bones of the Old Ones), which hadn’t been released yet. Some friendly fellow I’d never met wandered up out of the blue and told me how much he’d loved the first one and that he was looking forward to the second. I thanked him, and exchanged a few more words, but it was only after he left that one of my friends informed me that the stranger was none other than writer Scott Lynch. Color me stunned and honored. He later blurbed The Bones of the Old Ones.

Any news or projects you want to tell us about?

I recently returned the third and final book of my new fantasy trilogy to the copyeditor at St. Martin’s, which means the whole series should be available by August of this year. I’m pretty pleased about that—the whole thing starts with For the Killing of Kings. Some of my fans are excited to hear that I’ve pulled the outline for the third Dabir and Asim novel out of mothballs and am refining that, although I’ll have to draft that as a side project. I have nearly enough Dabir and Asim stories to publish a new collection, but a number of those stories haven’t appeared yet so I’ll have to delay that collection’s appearance for a while. You can find a (fairly) up-to-date list of the other Dabir and Asim stories on their dedicated page at my website, including their upcoming appearances in publications.

I’m currently working on several other book/series proposals and a cycle of adventures featuring another character, a series with episodes even more closely interlinked than those of Dabir and Asim. I’m excited about all of it. I’m also delighted to be working on issues six and seven of Tales From the Magician’s Skull. The magazine is getting better with every issue and I think readers are going to be thrilled with the contents.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

Author Spotlight: Andrea Kriz

Audrey T. Williams | 797 words

There was a time when I may or may not have been addicted to Guild Wars. What MMORPGs are you currently playing or did you play in the past?

I used to play a lot of RuneScape and Maple Story. Those were also my introduction to MMORPGs. I don’t play any now, but I still enjoy watching streamers and YouTubers who do. It’s fascinating how socially advanced these kinds of games have gotten, to the point where some people have created jobs providing services in these game worlds—which supplements or even provides their main income. The germ of this story probably came from learning about the recent plight of Venezuelan gold-farmers in Old School RuneScape. I can’t do it justice, but I think this video, in which some of those gold-farmers are interviewed, is a good place to start to learn more: bit.ly/398BHuh

The pretending to be someone else aspect of this story made me think of that Rachel Dolezal fiasco a few years ago. Was there a specific current event or events that led you to write this story and would you say a bit about what inspired you?

Well I want to be clear that this story is not based on any specific person and definitely isn’t meant as a callout to anyone or any community in particular. It came from thinking about how people, especially kids and teenagers, are spending more and more time online, especially during the pandemic. I wondered how this trend would evolve as virtual reality improves and as humans colonize space, separating online friends not just by countries, but by entire planets.

Throughout the history of the internet, there’s been this theme of anonymity, which is extremely empowering and absolutely needed in some cases. However, it has a dark side when people claim identities that aren’t their own and then do a lot of harm. I’m not saying all anons should be automatically distrusted. But I think often people tend to accept anonymous accounts that emotionally appeal to them, or fit into their worldview, while ignoring others. Another problem is that people may be aware of these complex situations, but don’t believe they could exist in their own online community.

For example, on Science Twitter over the summer, a prominent community member chronicled the suffering and eventual death of their friend and colleague from Covid. It turned out that person had completely made up that colleague including, unfortunately, giving this imaginary friend several marginalized identities. However, at the time this person was widely believed. I think the science community is still working through the ramifications of that.

I’m always interested to hear how authors come up with names for people and places in their stories. What people / places / cultures inspired “Whukai” and “Esko”?

The title, “There Are No Hot Topics On Whukai” was actually inspired by a YouTube video by Sarah Z. about the famous My Immortal Harry Potter fanfiction. A section of the video delves into the internet’s attempt to decipher clues about the author’s identity from notes peppered throughout the fanfic and one of the conclusions is, “There are no Hot Topics in Dubai.” I loved the sheer possibility of that quote out of context—especially when the location was moved away from Earth and Terran culture entirely. It was one of those cases where the shape of the title came first, and building blocks of the story came from thinking about what it could mean. You can watch Sarah Z.’s video here: bit.ly/3c8wWTo

For Esko, I’m not really sure where her name came from. I think I associate certain letters and syllables with certain personalities. I see “Esko” as a strong name.

The dynamic between the people of Whukai and the Terrans seems like it might be part of a larger world-building scenario. Any plans to expand this story and/or this setting in other stories or a longer work?

I’m always open to writing more stories set in the same world! There were some dropped plotlines, which I think could be interesting to revisit. For example, originally there was a third gold-farming clan whose leader had to go into hiding due to owing in-game protection mafias, as well as their own clan members money. I also thought about exploring the relationship between Earth and other space colonies. Of course, it also depends on the reception of this story and whether readers want more.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Audrey spent her childhood on North Carolina beaches playing in the breakers at Emerald Isle and fishing on Bogue Inlet pier. She now roams Northern California beaches, rivers, and woods seeking sea glass, foraging chanterelles, and hunting rocks and gems. Her work can be found in Space and Time Magazine. She works in San Francisco as a Copy Supervisor at a healthcare advertising agency. Find her on Twitter @Virgule2020.

Author Spotlight: Kristina Ten

Setsu Uzumé | 1080 words

Russian banyas, the worst of academia, tasty snacks, and the monsters who love them. How did this story first come to you?

The seed of this story was its setting. The banya holds a hugely important place in Russian culture, and it offers such a rich and interesting landscape, full of centuries-old rituals, special objects, and mythical spirits. It’s significant in its role as a community center, too, as the point where people from all walks of life will come together, however unlikely their meeting may otherwise be. Lately, I’m thinking more deeply about health, wellness, self-care, and community care—as many others probably are as well. I wondered what would happen if I started with this place rooted in traditions of well-being, relaxation, and vitality, and within its walls explored the opposing topics of danger, suffering, and deterioration. In this place of ease, who experiences hardship? In this place of community, who is left to fend for themselves alone?

Could you tell me a bit about the vedma? Which legends did you draw from, and how did you make her your own?

Vedma translates to “witch,” but for this vedma I drew from the myth of the bannik more than any specific witch folklore. The bannik is one of my favorite figures in Slavic mythology, and I think one of the lesser-known. He’s a guardian spirit of the bathhouse and has connections to the domovoy, a spirit or deity of the household. Like other “baddies” I find myself fascinated by (e.g., Baba Yaga), the bannik is morally ambiguous. On the one hand, he’s known to invite demons into his bath, spy on the banya’s human guests, and throw boiling water on those who annoy him—or worse. On the other hand, he has the ability to predict the future and will consult with humans on their personal fortunes, and ultimately his aim is to protect the banya’s customs and keep it clean and (generally) safe. In exchange for this protection, he is shown good manners and respect. The relationship between the vedma and the Kornelievs reflects this agreement. The rest—the vedma’s appearance, her distaste for the vegan lifestyle, and her subsequent resourcefulness—was a series of inventions, largely borne of the circumstances of an ancient spirit clashing with the modern day.

Last time we talked about setting stories in real or metaphorical homes. At the time, you hinted at this tale and what ultimately became Witness Magazine’s “Two Hundred Ways to Disappear”. Setting not-quite-human characters in shops seemed to move the dynamic from a private, interior space to a public one. How did that change the stakes of the story compared to your other pieces?

It becomes a question of privacy and safety, I think, or the impression of safety—and also of possession and intrusion, this sense of entitlement toward others’ space. In “Two Hundred Ways to Disappear”, the primary setting is the magic shop, which is owned by the magician but which, like you say, is open to the public. So when Mal steps inside, she’s entering his domain, but she’s also entering a public space in which the coming and going of others implies some measure of witness and safety. It’s the story’s other setting—Mal’s mind, her dreams—where things get more complicated. Because here is this realm that is meant to be the most private, the most safe, hers and hers alone, and yet the magician enters and claims ownership. Which is to say, monsters aren’t just in our heads; they’re living among us. But, yes, if we’re very unlucky, they’re also inside our heads.

“Bones in It”, too, deals with private places made public and safe places made dangerous. The banya itself transforms what is, for some, a private ritual into one that is communal. Then the vedma’s presence puts the apparent safety of the banya into question, but it’s worth noting that it hasn’t felt safe to her since the time of the Kornelievs. This place of supposed pleasure and leisure, for her, has been anything but. It’s been a struggle to survive. The other setting here, I’d say, is the sphere of academia, which can be an incredibly insulated, mystifying space, and certainly one that has protected this particular professor, at the expense of providing safety to others. So, there’s an inside and an outside again, the safe, reassuring face and the sinister interior. A covering up and an exposure.

There’s an interesting tension here between two monsters, and the way they embody hunger, richness, deprivation, and cleanliness. Is this a hopeful story, or a just one? Something else? What do you hope readers will come away with?

This is a revenge story. And also a cathartic story and a just story and a hopeful one (I hope). The bannik is canonically concerned with cleanliness, and the vedma has an eye for it as well. She too is a guardian, and she too gets rid of the filth.

Some monsters are covered in fur and bare mouthfuls of scary teeth, and it’s easy to recognize them as monsters. Other monsters wear nice jackets and airs of authority; they have impressive awards and loyal followings and teeth that look just like yours or mine. So they’re harder to recognize as monsters, but they’re every bit as real, and doubly monstrous in their deceit.

In terms of hopefulness, well. I hope we can believe people when they tell us they’ve met a monster. And I hope we can be vedmas for one another.

What can we look forward to next from you?

I’ll have a story in Diabolical Plots soon about erosion and ephemerality, and this question of: In a world so focused on “forever,” how do we learn to love the fleeting things too? It’s one of the hardest things I’ve had to write, and probably one of the most honest too. Besides that, I have a story upcoming in Split Lip about a man who speaks only in product names (and all the ways language fails us), and another in Weird Horror about misunderstood Russian monsters (because I just can’t seem to get enough of them!).

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Setsu writes and occasionally narrates dark fantasy. Their work has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Grimdark Magazine, and Magic: The Gathering. Find them on Twitter @scribblesassin.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 204 words

Coming up in June, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Timothy Mudie (“Different People”) and Endria Isa Richardson (“Do Nothing”), along with SF reprints by Nalo Hopkinson (“Inselberg”) and Sam J. Miller (“The Nation of the Sick”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Adam-Troy Castro (“A Tableau of Things That Are”) and Adam R. Shannon (“When You Die on the Radio”), and fantasy reprints by Sofia Samatar (“Wolf Tones”) and Theodora Goss (“How to Become a Witch-Queen”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with book reviews from our terrific review team. Our ebook readers will also enjoy a book excerpt.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

• • • •

Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got a veritable plethora of stories forthcoming. We’ve got work from the following authors coming up over the next couple of issues: Andrew Dana Hudson, Meg Elison, Rachel Swirsky, and Isabel Cañas.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

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Subscriptions and Ebooks

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 more than 100 stories (about 700,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain!

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe for more information, including about third-party subscription options.

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 (recently revived, other) 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!).

Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

The Editors

We already offer ebook subscriptions as a way of supporting the magazines, but we wanted to add an additional option to allow folks to support us, thus we’ve launched a Patreon (patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams).

TL;DR Version

If you enjoy Fantasy, Nightmare, and/or Lightspeed, our Patreon page is a way for you to help support those endeavors by chipping in a buck or more on a recurring basis. Your support will help us bring bigger and better (and more) projects into the world.

Why Patreon?

There are no big companies supporting or funding our magazines, so they really rely on reader support. Though we offer the magazines online for free, we’re able to fund them by selling ebook subscriptions or website advertising.

While we have a dedicated ebook subscriber base, the vast majority of our readers consume the magazine online for free. If just 10% of our website readers pledged just $1 a month, the magazines would be doing fantastically well. So we thought it might be useful to have an option like Patreon for readers who maybe haven’t considered supporting the magazine, or who maybe haven’t because they don’t have any desire to receive the ebook editions—or who would be glad to pay $1 a month, but not $3 (the cost of a monthly subscriber issue of Lightspeed).

Though Fantasy, Nightmare, and Lightspeed are separate entities, we decided to create a single “publisher” Patreon account because it seemed like it would be more efficient to manage just one account.

Basically, we wanted to create a crowdfunding page where, if you enjoy the work Adamant Press puts out, and you want to contribute a little something to help make it easier for us to produce more cool projects, then our Patreon is the place to do that.

What Do I Get Out of Being a Patron?

Well, you get the satisfaction of helping to usher the creation of cool new short fiction projects into the world! Plus, the more support we get, the better we can make the magazines and compensate our authors and staff. By becoming a supporter via Patreon, you help fund our growth and continued publication of three award-winning magazines. Of course, if you’re already one of our ebook subscribers (thank you!), you are already supporting us. This is for those who prefer to read the issues each month on our free websites, or wish to support our efforts more generally.

By becoming a supporter, you are also bestowed a title, such as Dragonrider, or Space Wizard, or Savior of the World and/or Universe, thus making you instantly the envy of all your friends.

Thank You!

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Thanks in advance for your time. We look forward to hopefully being able to make the magazines—and our other publishing endeavors—even better with the support of people like you.

About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

Managing/Senior Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Editor & Book Reviewer

Arley Sorg

Reprint Editor

Rich Horton

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

John Joseph Adams

Assistant Editor

Laurel Amberdine

Editorial Assistant

Alex Puncekar

Reviewers

Arley Sorg

LaShawn Wanak

Chris Kluwe

Copy Editor

Dana Watson

Proofreaders

Anthony R. Cardno

Devin Marcus

Webmaster

Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects

Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher

Robert Barton Bland

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

The Editors

If you enjoy reading our Adamant Press magazines, you might also enjoy these works edited by our publisher 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 and Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (with Karen Joy Fowler)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 (with Charles Yu)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 (with N.K. Jemisin)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (with Carmen Maria Machado)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 (with Diana Gabaldon)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 (with Veronica Roth) [forthcoming]

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live

Cosmic Powers

Dead Man’s Hand

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: Ignorance is Strength (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: Burn the Ashes (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: Or Else the Light (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

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)

A People’s Future of the United States (with Victor LaValle)

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

Wastelands: The New Apocalypse

The Way of the Wizard

What the #@&% is That? (with Douglas Cohen)

NOVELS and COLLECTIONS

Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey

Wool by Hugh Howey

Shift by Hugh Howey

Dust by Hugh Howey

The Silo Saga Omnibus 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

The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty

The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn

The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette

In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead

Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

Gather the Fortunes by Bryan L. Camp

Reentry by Peter Cawdron

Half Way Home by Hugh Howey

Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth

Creatures of Charm and Hunger by Molly Tanzer

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear

The Conductors by Nicole Glover

A Dark Queen Rises by Ashok K. Banker

The Apocalypse Seven by Gene Doucette

Questland by Carrie Vaughn [forthcoming]

The Undertakers by Nicole Glover [forthcoming]

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.