TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 135, August 2021

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial, August 2021

SCIENCE FICTION

Before the Haze Devours You
Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas

Now You Feel It
Andrea Chapela (translated by Emma Törzs)

City of Refuge
Maurice Broaddus

Anything Short of Death Is Survivable
David Anaxagoras

FANTASY

Now You See Me
Justin C. Key

Ancestries
Sheree Renée Thomas

The Tale of Jaja and Canti
Tobi Ogundiran

My Sister is a Scorpion
Isabel Cañas

EXCERPTS

The All-Consuming World
Cassandra Khaw

NONFICTION

Book Review: Seasons Between Us: Tales of Identities and Memories, edited by Susan Forest & Lucas K. Law
LaShawn M. Wanak

Book Review: King Bullet, by Richard Kadrey
Chris Kluwe

Book Review: We’re Here, edited by C.L. Clark and Charles Payseur
Arley Sorg

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Justin C. Key

Andrea Chapela

Tobi Ogundiran

David Anaxagoras

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 Grandfailure / Adobe Stock

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

Editorial, August 2021

John Joseph Adams | 249 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 135th issue!

This month’s science fiction originals include a cyberpunk-flavored tale of mind control from Andrea Chapela (translated by Emma Törzs): “Now You Feel It.” If you are a fan of Oliver Twist (or if you grew up in the 1980s, Oliver and Company), then our SF short story “Anything Short of Death Is Survivable” (by David Anaxagoras) will leave you saying “Please sir. I want some more . . . dangerous space salvage missions and mistreated orphans.” Nelly Geraldine García Rosas takes you on a trip to Titan in her flash piece “Before the Haze Devours You.” Our reprint this month is from Maurice Broaddus (“City of Refuge”).

Our first full-length fantasy short (and at 10,000 words, this one’s a novelette) is “Now You See Me” by Justin C. Key—the story of an art exhibit with powerful consequences. In “The Tale of Jaja and Canti,” Tobi Ogundirian brings us the story of a boy created by magic and the mother he’s always yearned to find. Our flash story this month is the very touching “My Sister Is a Scorpion” from Isabel Cañas. And our fantasy reprint is Sheree Renée Thomas’s “Ancestries.”

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 All-Consuming World by Cassandra Khaw from Erewhon Books.

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.

Before the Haze Devours You

Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas | 1478 words

If time can stop, this is how it feels.

01:32:03 PLSS WARNING: Abnormal temperature detected in EMU

Yunuen was born to be trapped in this moment. She has been looking at the same alert in her helmet’s heads-up display for a perpetual instant that has become her whole existence. One billion kilometers away from home, she lies in the purgatory that is the red glow of this warning message. In front of her eyes, these petrified uppercase letters have lost all their meaning. Time does not exist anymore.

Surrounded by Titan’s thick, orange haze, Yunuen feels a deadly chill slowly making its way through the insulating layers of her suit. But she feels something else, something warm. Blood soaks her inner garments. A clot starts to form somewhere in her lower back and tickles exactly where it aches the most. Everything is pain and cold.

01:34:05 HUT WARNING: Inconsistent pressure detected

Everything is sound too. The blare of her suit’s alarm blasts in her ears. Yunuen can barely hear her thoughts inside this fishbowl overflowing with ominous noises and waves of pain.

She tastes blood and bile. The ghostly smell of methane lurks in her nose, but that cannot be. That should not be. She should not be here alone either. Not now that it has started snowing, and fragile methane crystals gradually pile up on her body.

“What do you want to prove, Yunuen? Here, you don’t have to pretend you’re strong. In this gig, we’re all vulnerable. We’re teammates. We do the job, we go home. Together. It’s that easy. There’s no need for you to overcomplicate things,” the commander has said so many times. But Yunuen is stubborn and has already overcomplicated everything by being here alone, bleeding, with a tear in her suit, and unable to communicate with her ship.

>01:35:11

>Ramirez-Navarro extraction ship, I have a problem here. I made an unauthorized landing.

>(no response)

>Ramirez-Navarro, do you copy?

>01:36:13

undelivered

Yunuen crashed near the methane-extraction tank she was looking for before her accident. She can see the faint green glow of LEDs blinking through the haze like a sleepy source of Morse code signaling life. Yunuen thinks that her whole apartment could easily fit inside that huge metallic container, maybe even a three-bedroom townhouse. She could move there with Ixchel to start a new life away from everything, just the two of them watching dunes disappear like ghosts among the haze, catching a glimpse of Saturn on an impossible clear day. Although the tank is not supposed to remain on Titan, it is set to be Ramirez-Navarro’s most important cargo: one of the first delivering methane for Mars’ terraforming process.

She knows she ruined everything when she decided to abuse her security privileges in order to take the ship’s glider out by herself. But she had a reason. Who would have liked to wait for months so another viable gravity assist window would open? Who would have liked to stay orbiting this orange-haze sphere instead of going back to Ixchel’s soft arms? This job had to be done now, no matter Titan’s weather conditions. Fuck the weather. What could go wrong? Just get the job done and go back home as quickly as possible. Besides, installing an updated radio beacon into the methane container’s control panel should not have to be a more-than-one-person job. Yunuen could do it with her arms tied to her back.

01:36:47 CCA ERROR: Primary functions diverted to PLSS

The vast expanse of Ligeia Mare stretches out into the horizon. Yunuen should be glad she crashed on these jagged rocks instead of the liquid methane where she would have frozen before drowning. She instead curses because she cannot make sense of what happened. If only she could access the suit’s telemetry records to see why it failed mid-glide, or why the haze dragged her down, but there is no information she can read because all alerts override the suit’s functions unrelated to survival. That data would be useless, though, since she cannot share it with anyone. Yunuen has tried to reach her ship for minutes that seem endless, but the Ramirez-Navarro comm links appear to be offline. Her high-pitched voice breaks out of the pain and mixes with all those alerts, but it doesn’t go anywhere.

Yunuen needs to send a signal to her ship, a flare-like sign marking her location. She knows her crewmates should be looking for her by now because they are not as selfish as she is, because they don’t want to prove anything to anyone. Someone on board Ramirez-Navarro must have already noticed that she is not there, that the glider was taken out by force, that the airlock was offline for a moment. Yunuen needs to get to the tank to finish her original mission. She struggles to get up, but her legs don’t obey her. The pain in her back is like the haze: looming, expanding, eternal. Besides, it has been snowing steadily. This light snow is unstoppable, like her pain. How long will it take the Ramirez-Navarro crew to find her? How long does she have before her suit can no longer keep her alive?

She needs to do something. Now.

>01:37:20

>Ramirez-Navarro, this is Y. Do you copy? I made a hard landing, but I have eyes on Methane Extraction Module 001.

>(no response)

>Ramirez-Navarro, someone. Do you read?

>01:38:02

undelivered

“Neither you, nor I,” said Ixchel. Her eyes were swollen from crying. “It’s not fair that you get to leave and I have to stay. So meet me halfway, in Mars. But do it sooner rather than later, before the haze devours you, before I forget how warm your body feels beside mine.”

When Yunuen was selected for the Ramirez-Navarro extraction mission, she had to leave her other plans aside: the three-bedroom townhouse in the middle of nowhere, Earth, Ixchel. She didn’t even say goodbye before quarantining at Yucatan Space Center previous to launch. She didn’t want anyone—much less Ixchel—to know she was terrified of being alone so far from home. She is here, nevertheless, surrounded by haze, losing everything she thought she had and never cared about, her fears piling up on her like methane snow.

She tries to crawl while dragging the radio beacon in one hand. The golden circuit board leaves a short trail in the snow. Yunuen is barely moving, a couple of centimeters at best. The pain is overwhelming and the tear in her suit is getting bigger with the slightest shift in position.

She smells methane, perhaps formaldehyde. Her Primary Life Support System is starting to react to Titan’s snow that is slowly getting into it. Yunuen has an idea. She needs a spark.

01:39:23 PLSS WARNING: Foreign element detected in EMU

Yunuen knows that an explosion can generate enough radio waves to be detected by the Ramirez-Navarro’s continuous search system. That way, the ship could easily locate the methane extraction module. Get the job done. She needs a spark as well as her remaining oxygen which would be useless if she would let it escape. Outside of her suit, that oxygen would boil, but inside, it flows in a human-shape balloon, whose fate is to pop. And go back home . . .

The whole Solar System listens to her shriek when she conjures all her will to detach the battery of her PLSS from the inside, then put it near the oxygen supply. She’s sweating, but still manages to make a lump of snow to seal the tear on her suit. Froth comes out from her mouth. She gathers all the strength she has left to grab a piece of rock and smash the battery. Over and over again. Each blow feels like Ixchel’s pounding heart. Every strike resembles Ramirez-Navarro’s boosters igniting. By means of a rock, Yunuen commands the universe. Her hands are meteors.

A glimmer.

Yunuen doesn’t have time to stop feeling Titan’s cold, to entrust herself to the pain that won’t be much longer. Minutes ago, time ceased to exist.

She thinks about Mars and the Ramirez-Navarro crew, and about Ixchel crying back home, more than one billion kilometers away from her. She knows her own tears won’t even last as drops in Ligeia Mare. She thinks about the three-bedroom townhouse, and that she would have wanted to get the job done and go back home before being devoured by Titan’s haze.

She thinks that she doesn’t want to be alone, and she thinks about the pain, and the blood, and the noise of her suit’s alerts, and the blast that is even louder.

sys@ramirez-navarro[01:23:45]:~$ mem-ctl search –all

. . .

[01:41:03] Incoming transmission . . .

[01:41:04] Radio waves detected.

[01:41:06] Methane Extraction Module 001 located.

This is how it feels when time moves on.

©2021 by Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas is a Mexican immigrant and a graduate of the Clarion West class of 2019. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Clarkesworld, Nightmare, the World Fantasy Award-winning anthology She Walks in Shadows, and elsewhere. She can be found online at nellygeraldine.com and on Twitter as @kitsune_ng.

Now You Feel It

Andrea Chapela (translated by Emma Törzs) | 7325 words

Rivera had been weaving dreamscapes at Ibsen Spa for twelve hours when a new videolog came in, a back-of-the-neck buzz. Two blinks opened the message: Urgent work, it said, followed by a telephone number. Rivera had been about to go home, but this message changed everything. Finally, after a whole year gone: a new job. Here at Ibsen Spa, the work was easy, with no risk of being stuck in the vicious aftermath of mind-manipulation; but neither did the Spa offer any chance of exercising skill or talent. Such opportunities—and the feelings of mastery that came with them—were part and parcel of working for the agency. But after that last job, after that loss of control, the boss had sworn Rivera would never work for them again. Be grateful, he’d said. After all, the punishment could have been so much worse.

With the agency, Rivera had modified people’s minds; modified their past intentions. Permanent and untraceable changes. If the boss was swallowing his pride and calling now, it meant somebody with a lot of money must be desperate—and desperation made for the most interesting jobs.

Rivera went back to the small, spa-assigned studio, with its low lights, uncirculated air, and padded pink satin walls. It was all designed to help clients relax, though to Rivera it felt claustrophobic, like being inside a human body. But behind the studio’s closed doors, it was easy enough to use a ping to disconnect the room from the outside. Most people preferred wristlets, but Rivera still liked the physicality of the ping. It did everything a wristlet did, but it was easier to hide, easier to customize . . . and easier to destroy, if necessary. Depending on what was needed, the ping could act as a handheld remote or as a control for the images on a retinal screen.

Rivera crouched in front of a locker at the far end of the room and pressed down on the false bottom. Inside the hidden drawer lay a briefcase and a cellular phone so old Rivera’s grandparents might’ve used it in the early years of the twenty-first century. Given the kind of clientele the agency attracted, such technological discretion was paramount. Agency clients never had honorable intentions—they were always rich, powerful, and well-disposed to pay exorbitant sums for illicit services. Looking at the cellphone, Rivera hesitated, left fist opening and closing, wrist throbbing. It still ached like this on rainy days, and here in Mexico City that meant at least once a week. But the long-absent weight of memories tingling against fingertips was irresistible: Rivera had missed this work too much to think twice.

“I thought you said you’d never work with me again,” Rivera said when the call connected.

“Rivera,” said the boss. His velvety voice was chilling. “Don’t make me beg. This case is delicate and we need your skills. We’ll pay you quite a bit more than you’ve made this past year . . . And you and I both know how much you miss the job.”

Left fist open. Closed. Open. The ghost of pain still lingered, but the boss was right. He knew that Ibsen Spa’s soft pink room could hold neither challenge nor thrill.

“The last time we saw each other,” Rivera said, “you broke my arm and told me to forget about working for you ever again. So why me, why now? You have other people.”

“I told you not to make me beg.” The boss had the smooth, cultivated voice of a man who always got what he wanted, but Rivera knew him well enough to sense the humor in his tone. “Garro’s abroad and I need the best. I’ve decided to overlook your . . . slip.”

“How much are we talking?”

Another neck-buzz, another videolog. A long line of zeros appeared, and on the other end of the phone, the boss laughed as Rivera inhaled sharply. With this kind of money, it’d be possible to get out of debt, to buy the apartment outright, take fewer shifts at Ibsen, work only with those clients who actually seemed interesting.

Rivera thought of the woman from that final agency job, thought of the surge of rage that had made it impossible to go on, and took a deep breath. It had been an isolated case. It wouldn’t happen again.

“Where do I have to go?”

“In fifteen minutes,” said the boss, “you’ll find a car on the corner of Aldama and Cádiz, by the Oxxo.”

“And the procedure?”

“Cognitive rewiring. It has to stand up to legal scrutiny, so you mustn’t leave a single sign of your work.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Good. And one more thing, Rivera.” The brief pause and the sudden ice of his tone made it suddenly hard to breathe. “I trust you’ve learned your lesson and will behave yourself. No playing at justice. You’re an unbiased agent: I’m paying you to do the work and then leave without a trace.”

The boss had never believed Rivera’s claim that it’d been an accident. But there was no point in arguing.

“It won’t happen again.”

“I hope not,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to regret this call and be forced to pay you another visit.”

He hung up.

Rivera left the cellphone in the locker’s hidden drawer but removed the briefcase and took out a pair of sunglasses, testing the buttons on each arm to ensure the closed-circuit still worked. Some equipment was delicate enough to have been ruined by a year without use, but these were still active. Sunglasses atop head, briefcase in hand, Rivera headed for the private clients’ changing room and took out a packet of intrabugs, grimacing to find only three of them left. The needles were made of an iridium-platinum amalgam, illegal and very hard to get, and it’d take the better part of a month’s salary to find more when they were gone. But with just a quick puncture behind the ear, one little intrabug could sever a mental connection to the network—a connection Rivera severed now.

The abrupt silence and sudden, shooting headache made it hard to see, and Rivera leaned against the sink waiting for the nausea to pass, for the world’s colors to readjust. When a brain was used to the constant buzz of the network—to the ads, messages, explanations, dialogue bubbles—the clamor was only really noticeable when it was gone. Rivera breathed deeply a few times, blinked, and slid the sunglasses on in an effort to avoid the newly-intolerable brightness of the lights.

It was just another job. Nothing had changed.

• • • •

The client was a tall, heavyset man who stopped pacing when Rivera entered his office. Even at one o’clock in the morning he was wearing a grey suit, a blue tie, and freshly shined shoes, as perfectly groomed as if he’d gotten dressed only moments before. Rivera recognized him immediately; his face had been on the news countless times. This was Don Francisco Mejía-Botta, businessman and brother of a deputy whose name was being circulated as a candidate for the next gubernatorial election. Their family wasn’t just rich; it was pedigreed.

“You’re Rivera?” he asked, disbelieving.

Rivera took off her sunglasses, but despite her satisfaction at his incredulity, she didn’t smile. Her clients, perhaps due to the combination of illegality and technology implicit in the job, always expected a man. Which was why Rivera wore her hair long and dressed always in a blouse and skirt: so they could never forget she was a woman. Like this man, many clients grew uncomfortable upon first seeing her, but that was an advantage. Staying one step ahead of her clients’ reactions was one of the biggest challenges in this line of work.

“I am,” she said. “Good evening. I’m here because the agency says you need a quick, clean job, and you requested the best.”

Cautiously, the man examined her, his chin raised unnecessarily high as if he smelled something rotten; he was incapable of hiding his disgust at her presence. All the better. Transparent client; easy job.

“It’s a sensitive case,” he said. “You’ll have to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Nothing you see or learn here can ever leave this room.”

“I’m aware of the terms.” She wouldn’t give him the pleasure of her discomfort. This was a game she knew better than he did. “The agency should’ve pre-signed for me electronically, but if your lawyer’s advising you to keep a paper record, then I’ll sign again now; that way we can start as quickly as possible. It’s my understanding that we don’t have much time.”

The contents of Mejía-Botta’s contract were hardly noteworthy. Rivera had signed hundreds just like it. Nevertheless, she took her time, not only to make sure there were no hidden tricks, but to prolong the silence.

She’d been in many wealthy houses when she worked for the agency, yet this was one of the biggest and oldest, probably inherited. But its security was a disaster: there was barbed wire around the garden, a digital security barrier on the threshold, and little cameras hovering above the doors and windows like fireflies. Predictable and stupid. So many people believed that maintaining vigilance from outside would keep their house safe . . . but such measures did nothing if the danger was already within.

Rivera had barely needed to glance down the hallways to see all the changes the old structure had suffered in order to adapt to new technologies. There were little sensors everywhere, working against the thickness of the stone walls to maintain the network, and their blinking red lights made it clear that all connection was currently turned off. Having such low connectivity was risky; if the police went through the general logs, the lack of network activity would raise suspicion. Rivera would take care of that before she left.

“Is there a problem?” The client asked.

“No,” said Rivera. She signed the papers. “Everything seems to be in order. What’s the situation?”

The client took the contract and shut it away in the desk’s main drawer. Rivera heard the little click of the lock; a combination. Again, stupid. Those locks were so easy to crack. Mejía-Botta sat down behind the desk but made no move to offer Rivera a seat and she didn’t ask for one. She could do this standing.

“I assumed the agency would’ve briefed you,” he said. He was drumming his fingers on the table as if in exasperation, but Rivera could see he was stalling. He didn’t want to go into detail and didn’t know what to do with his hands. She stayed silent.

The office was a big room, dominated by a dark wooden desk and three bookshelves. Judging by the state of the books, many of them had probably never been read. A pure show of money and status. Yet the welcome-hologram that had guided her there had been an old image, the colors faded, probably at least ten years old. Ostentation with no real attention.

Mejía-Botta loosened his tie and made a quick gesture, and the door opened again. A young man appeared, around eighteen but probably still in high school. Despite his shower-wet hair, he smelled strongly of a sobering tonic. Rivera was more than acquainted with the sweet smell of ethanol derivatives as they broke down in the body; many of her clients at Ibsen smelled exactly like this boy did. Giving him the soberizer had been a good decision—Rivera might have to clean up the memories of intoxication, but at least she wouldn’t have to deal with any physical effects. The boy was uncomfortable, his red, unfocused eyes darting around the room without settling on her. Dilated pupils, continuous changes in posture, accelerated breathing: he’d had an anxiety attack recently, but even that couldn’t touch his arrogance. It oozed out of his every pore, from the desultory way he held himself, to his lack of shoes, to his gray sweatpants, marked with a private school crest, and topped with a sweatshirt so old it was coming apart at the sleeves.

“This is my son, Gabriel,” said Mejía-Botta. “He had a little . . . incident . . . a few hours ago, and it’s possible the police will be coming to interrogate him in the morning.”

“What happened?” Rivera asked Gabriel, but the boy avoided her gaze and it was his father who answered.

“Just a bit of nonsense with a girl at his school,” he said. “But she’s from a good family, which complicates matters. The two were dating, there was a mix-up with a few photos, and apparently now she’s run away from home.”

“They weren’t photos, they were videos,” Gabriel interrupted. He couldn’t sit still. He jiggled his foot, shifted in place, open and closed his fists as if he were trying to access the network. He had all the nervous twitches of someone who wasn’t used to being disconnected for so long. This inability to withstand periods of being offline was ever-more common in young people. Rivera would have to modify the evidence of Gabriel’s reduced connectivity, too—as with the house, it would leave a blank spot in the network log, and though it wasn’t illegal to be disconnected, it would certainly attract the authority’s attention.

“Videos, photos, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “What interests me is the intention. I need to know if you’re innocent.”

“I don’t care if Gabriel’s innocent or not,” her client interjected. He took off his tie and unbuttoned the neck of his shirt, clearly tense. “That’s what you’re here for. What I want is to be assured that if the police show up, it will be clear to them that Gabriel’s the real victim here.”

Clean-up for a rich little boy. They’d really called her in for something so trivial? From the state of Gabriel, it was easy to guess the story. Sexual disappointment followed by virtual humiliation. The latter had been a serious crime for a few decades, but since it was now possible to analyze someone’s memories, the crime was prosecuted based on intentionality. If this really had all been an accident, Gabriel would get off with a few months of community service. But if the prosecutor, in this case, could demonstrate that the defamation had been premeditated, and furthermore, that the girl had done herself injury because of it, Gabriel would get a harsher sentence. Up to four years in prison, if he was over eighteen, and a boy like Gabriel wouldn’t last four years in a Mexican prison.

Rivera put her hair back and took out her briefcase. Gabriel would feel more comfortable if she concentrated on something other than him.

“Tell me what happened today, Gabriel,” she said. “May I call you Gabriel?”

Gabriel nodded. He laced and unlaced his fingers before glancing at his father. Fear of authority, or of telling the truth? A bit of both, probably.

“Carmen called me at nine,” said Gabriel. “I was at a friend’s house, just chilling, and I told her I was busy—but she kept calling. She left me a videolog.”

“Do you still have it?” Rivera asked, though she was sure he’d already gotten rid of the evidence. Fear made people do stupid things. She opened the briefcase and began to unload the contents, as if looking for something in particular.

“No,” he said. “After I showed my dad, he told me to erase it. She was crying, cussing me out, telling me she’d seen the video and that I’d ruined her life.”

Rivera took out a pair of gloves, a manila envelope, and a bottle of neurogel that was almost empty. She’d have to buy another soon.

“And then what happened?”

Gabriel looked at the floor and didn’t answer. Fine—Rivera could change the subject, if that’s what he wanted.

“What happened with the photos?” she said.

“It was a video,” said Gabriel. “Someone got it from my files at school or something, and I guess, like, everyone saw it. I don’t know. It’s not that big a deal. Carmen’s just a drama queen.”

Silence again. This was a lie. He’d probably sent the video on purpose. The job wasn’t just a change of facts, then, but of intentionality. That made things much more interesting.

“It wasn’t an accident,” said Rivera. “If the cops go over your memories, they’ll see that you sent it purposefully, am I right?”

Gabriel looked away.

“He’s guilty of nothing,” the client interrupted. “If the girl sent him those photos, then the consequences are hers to deal with.”

“It was a video,” Gabriel said quietly.

“Same shit,” his father said, fist coming down hard on the desk. “It’s her fault, not his.”

“If he did it on purpose then he’s already guilty,” said Rivera. “And if she gets hurt in any way because of this, they’ll judge him to be at fault. How old is she, Gabriel? Over eighteen?”

“Yeah. She turned eighteen last month.”

Rivera nodded. Well, that pre-empted any charges of child pornography, at least. Changing the actual content of the video would’ve been more complicated. She only had to change Gabriel’s intentions, his emotions. An internal cleansing. Subtle, delicate work; just the kind she liked most. She watched Gabriel fidget and considered the situation.

On her last job with the agency she’d had to do something similar to this. She’d had to go into a woman’s mind to modify her emotions so that instead of loving her husband, she would hate him. That time Rivera had committed an error; this time she would not. While there were many different ways to modify Gabriel’s intentions, the easiest path would be to introduce guilt.

“All right,” she said. “This is what I’m going to do. I’m going to connect to your memories and make the event seem like an accident. But before I do that, you’re going to send Carmen a message, just your voice—and in it, you’re going to sound very regretful. I’ll tell you what to say, don’t worry. Can you do that?”

Gabriel nodded.

“I need you to listen to me carefully,” she continued. “You understand, don’t you, that your feelings themselves are going to change? Every change I make will be irreversible—no one will be able to undo it.” Rivera opened the manila envelope and took out a contract. “I have the paperwork here.”

“He’s not going to sign anything,” said his father.

“He’s of age and I need him to accept the conditions. After he signs, we can start. It’ll take about two hours. But if he doesn’t sign, I don’t work—and he can talk to the cops tomorrow.”

Mejía-Botta snatched the paperwork out of her hand. Ten minutes later, Gabriel was lying on the sofa with his eyes closed, in an induced sleep. This, plus the detox from the soberizer, would help hide any signs of the memory modification. Rivera had moved a coffee table in front of his sofa and spread out the contents of her briefcase. She dabbed a bit of neurogel on each one of the electrodes before attaching them to the back of his neck, to his forehead, and to both of his temples. Next, she took the wires, each one a different color, and connected them to a cap of fine graphene mesh, which she fit carefully over his head. When she turned the mesh cap on, a hum filled the office. Rivera checked each level, peering at the screen of her sunglasses, then took them off to deliver her final instructions to Mejía-Botta.

“I need you to leave the room and close the door behind you,” she said. “Come back in two hours. Turn the connections back on in the rest of the house, but leave this office dark. Make sure nobody interrupts me—it’s a delicate job.”

Mejía-Botta didn’t even object. The smell of the neurogel, sharp and acidic, combined with the sight of his son slumped on the sofa attached to a glowing mesh web had clearly disturbed him. When he’d gone, Rivera took out her ping and set it on the table alongside everything else, and then unfolded a touchpad beside it. She filled the gloves with neurogel and slipped them on, feeling as if she’d submerged her hands in a bowl of ice water. Then she lowered her sunglasses again, took a deep breath, and extended her arms to begin. Carefully she found Gabriel’s memories from the previous day and isolated them, then began to reorganize them by the hour, searching until she found him at his friend’s house.

She selected the memory, took one more deep breath, and went in.

• • • •

Froggy Polanco’s penthouse is a nice place to be, and Gabriel’s feeling good. He’s spent a lot of Fridays here, curled up in his favorite spot on the big couch facing the windows, but at this hour the afternoon sun would be right in his face, so for now he’s in the kitchen with his friends. They’re making rum and Coke. Ice from the freezer; Coke from the bar; rum from the jugs of Bacardi, one leftover from last week, the other new. It’s a familiar scene.

Froggy’s off talking to his parents in their room. While his friends make drinks, Gabriel messes around on his drop-down screen, looking to put on some music. He’s interrupted by Carmen’s first call.

What the hell does she want? It’s been days since she’s answered any of his messages, since Wednesday, when they had that fight outside the chemistry classroom and she dumped him. He wants to leave her hanging; she deserves it, just like she deserved what he’d done to her that morning. No. He does want to talk to her, but he doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t answer because he’s nervous and hurt. Hesitation. He closes the notification bubble. He leaves the kitchen.

Forward.

An hour later, he’s three drinks deep. No. He’s only had one and he hasn’t even managed to finish it. Carmen’s called him again twice. She’s upset—No. Spread doubt, tie it up around his thoughts: is she upset? Did she get the apology message he sent her? (Note: send a retroactive message.) Should he write her another?

Forward.

Fourth drink. No. Interweave the memories, yes, just like that, cross the threads so this drink is the same one he was drinking earlier, the rest of the Bacardi polished off by his friends. Gabriel laughs with them but he keeps checking his missed calls, and it’s not satisfaction he feels when he says, Carmen won’t quit calling me; it’s worry. His friends laugh and Gabriel smiles—careful now, pin the edges—although he feels even worse.

When his friends say he just needs another drink to get him out of his head, Gabriel pretends to consider it, but the truth is, his worry’s rising with each missed call. It’s easy to take the loose thread of a feeling and bring it to the surface, stitch it in where it’s missing. He’s sitting on his favorite couch with the glow from the nearby buildings coming in through the windows. From this height, Mexico City is a carpet of golden lights. A third log comes in, this one with a video attached. The log, the lights, the worry, the fear, it’s all mixed together. He gets up and goes into the bathroom to watch the video alone.

There’s Carmen’s face. Her hair’s a mess, her makeup’s running, she’s crying. She says Fucking answer your phone; she says the Principal just called her house; she says he’s a coward, a son of a bitch, how the fuck could he do this to her? She’s out in her car looking for him right now, she swears she’s going to find him. She’s driving erratically, all her attention on the video instead of the road, and it’s dark, too dark. Suddenly she curses; the recording loses focus; and Gabriel hears a shout before the video cuts off entirely.

Shit, is she hurt? He tries to call her. Why isn’t she answering? He leans on the bathroom sink, verging on a panic attack from pure worry. This, at least, is real. Carmen shouldn’t be driving around alone at night. He looks at the other logs she sent him earlier but they’re only voice messages. In each one she sounds more and more anxious: she screams at him, she says she can’t believe what he did, she calls him a piece of shit and says she hopes someone kills him or he kills himself. Finally, Gabriel calls his father. The panic attack is real, but wind the strands of it carefully, so the fear is for her, not for himself. A tug. Gabriel’s subconscious suddenly fights the change, and his intentions start to unravel—but with a few tucked stitches, he caves, and the feelings smooth into place.

Rewind.

That morning at school. Moments before the accident.

Gabriel’s sitting on the bleachers outside the gym watching a soccer game with his friends, Froggy smoking next to him and talking about Carmen, about how he saw her after algebra talking with Jorge Puga outside the classroom. Gabriel’s pissed about the fight from Wednesday, pissed that she broke up with him. Jealous? No, just rearrange the feeling, inject it with shame. Everything hurts. The break-up hurts because he misses Carmen, of course he does; if he didn’t miss her so much, he wouldn’t be thinking of her as he does now, wistful, remembering.

Such threads of memory need to be manipulated carefully to imitate real patterns of thought. Gabriel remembers how, on these very bleachers, he and Carmen had talked about college, about their parents’ expectations, and he remembers how deeply seen he’d felt by her, how understood. He remembers cramming for finals together at his house, how they’d gone from talking to kissing to abandoning all pretense of study, and this makes him think in turn about the Day of the Dead party, sneaking with Carmen up to one of the third-floor rooms. And thinking about the Day of the Dead, talking about Carmen and Jorge Puga, that’s what makes him tell Froggy, I want to show you something. Look. He projects the screen from his wristlet and shows Froggy the video, just a few seconds of movement, a few quick shots of Carmen naked, laughing, posing for him. She’d sent it to him a couple weeks earlier. He shows the video without malice—the action is born purely of confusion and pain. Those feelings are hard to find, but they are there, hidden under everything else.

Another tug. Careful now, the whole weaving could unravel. Focus on the pain: Why would Carmen send him this video if she didn’t want to be with him? Why would she tell him she loved him? Gabriel is furious—No, he’s confused. It’s an easy feeling to find in a nineteen-year-old boy. Easy to manipulate. Just take the strands of rage and tuck them away, make his anger something small, hidden beneath the pain and the confusion that permeate that simple move of handing the screen to Froggy and letting him watch the video. He doesn’t stop Froggy from downloading it. No—rewind. Where is Gabriel’s regret? Where to find it? Again, the moment Gabriel shows Froggy the video. Another tug. Gabriel wants Froggy to download it because he knows Froggy will share it, and he knows sharing it will hurt Carmen. She deserves to be hurt. No! Rewind. Stupid kid, doesn’t he care about her at all? Tease out the good memories, hold them firmly, redirect them. Froggy starts downloading the video and Gabriel reacts very slowly, his objection stuck in his throat. It’s an accident. He’s just not thinking—and anyone who sees these memories will know he doesn’t want to hurt Carmen, he doesn’t want to humiliate her. Where is his guilt? Another tug. No. Take the confusion, the pain, the betrayal, and bury all the satisfaction. He doesn’t want to hurt her, but she hurt him so badly and—yes, there, regret, just a little bit, way deep down, only a glimmer . . . but maybe enough to use. Seize it, aim it.

But it’s barely enough to cover a few seconds.

Well, it doesn’t matter if Gabriel doesn’t feel it; the emotion can come from elsewhere.

Release the anger, push Gabriel to the side, introduce regret. Make way for other feelings. Missing Carmen is at the heart of everything. So, it’s not anger that makes him laugh and say, She’s gonna regret dumping me now; he says it because he misses her, because it’s the kind of thing you say when you’re hurt, isn’t it? So many complicated feelings, it’s understandable that there’d be a moment of confusion. That’s why he makes this mistake, causes this terrible accident. Froggy sends the video to one of their buddies. But that doesn’t matter. Gabriel’s what matters. He feels satisfied? No. He can’t believe what Froggy just did. He tries to stop him. He panics, like he’ll panic hours later. He worries. (Note: modify message history so it’ll look like he tried to cancel it.)

The video of Carmen goes viral throughout the school.

Forward.

Gabriel’s in his room, getting ready to go to Froggy’s house. A call comes in. He’s alone and it’s easy to manipulate this part. Tie a knot around both sides of this memory, close the circle. Remorse on one side, panic on the other, and in the middle is shame, fear, regret. Yes, like this, so it permeates everything. Like this, he’ll feel guilt.

Forward.

And it’s later, when he’s freaking out in Froggy’s bathroom, when he doesn’t know where Carmen is, when he’s calling her and she’s not answering. Hours, he waits. He loved Carmen and he made a mistake and the more time that’d passed since letting Froggy send the video, the fewer words he had, only shame, so much shame that when she first called him in the penthouse he didn’t answer, not that first call and not the next. He ignored them because he didn’t know how to ask for forgiveness. It’s not that he doesn’t love her, it’s that he doesn’t know how, because people like him never learn to say how they feel.

Forward, quickly, to when he’s calling his father in a panic. He no longer believes things might work out, no longer feels like he’ll get away with this, despite a lifetime of feeling like he could get away with anything. This time he feels weak because he couldn’t help her, because it’s his fault Carmen’s hurt and might be in danger. These are new feelings, this guilt and fear and helplessness, and they merge into a single chaotic, deafening emotion that hides all others.

It’s in him now, and he’ll have to live with it.

• • • •

Rivera took off her gloves with the utmost caution; the gel inside had hardened during the time she’d spent working. She needed a moment to breathe, to reestablish her self in herself, but there was still so much left to do. She took a half-hour to clean all the equipment and go over all the notes she’d made, then to enter the house network and erase any sign of her visit. The story would go that Gabriel’s father gave him a sedative to calm him down. Carefully she put the electronics back into her suitcase, and the mesh cap, the gloves, the glasses, the neurogel. She closed the briefcase, closed her eyes, then opened them again. She needed to keep going with these little chores, to distract her mind and control her rage before the recoil hit. There was still so much to be done. She took Gabriel’s wristlet from his arm and connected it to her ping. As she’d suspected, she had no problem accessing the private network. From the office, she had the entire house at her fingertips.

Breaking into the wristlet was more difficult, but nothing she couldn’t manage in a few minutes. She modified the logs, diverted the missed calls, and finally added a sign of the voice message that had never made it to Carmen’s cellphone. A system error, uncommon but not improbable. She went over her work again and again so she wouldn’t think about how this family would get off scot-free for humiliating this poor girl, this Carmen; who, unlike Gabriel, would never be able to erase the video’s effects. Gabriel would learn once again that he was beyond consequences and he’d develop from a spoiled child into a man who believed he deserved everything.

Even so, when she looked at him, prone on the sofa, she felt a twinge of sympathy. This was a natural side effect. After all, she’d used her own remorse when Gabriel resisted the changes; natural that it should create a connection between them, a new addition to the standard backlash she’d soon begin to suffer from dealing in emotions that weren’t her own.

She’d understood what to do because it wasn’t the first time someone had resisted her so strongly.

The first time had been her last job with the agency, when she’d been contracted to modify a woman’s feelings and make her believe she hated a certain man, when in reality she loved him deeply. Rivera had been led to understand it was a post-breakup contract and that the woman had agreed to the modification, but when her subconscious had begun to fight back, Rivera had realized that the man in question was in fact still her beloved husband. Her beloved husband, who owed quite a lot of money to Rivera’s powerful drug lord client.

Until that moment, Rivera had finished hundreds of jobs without a problem: she’d erased memories, obtained classified information, uncovered bank passwords, visited terrifying nightmares on her clients’ enemies . . . but she’d never had to fight against a consciousness that actively resisted her. She couldn’t bring herself to complete the job, and so she’d left a snag; just one snag, to unravel everything. The woman had gone to the police and they’d arrested the agency’s client.

Rivera had hoped she’d gotten away with it—but then her boss had shown up. He thought she’d left that snag as evidence for the police. That was when he’d broken her wrist and told her she’d never work for them again, told her the agency couldn’t employ someone who had suddenly developed scruples. He hadn’t believed her when Rivera tried to explain that she simply hadn’t been able to summon her own will to work upon the woman.

Rivera closed her eyes. She didn’t want to think about that anymore. This time she had been stronger than Gabriel, so there was no need to keep revisiting the mistakes of her past. She had a connection with him now, yes, but she wouldn’t let herself feel compassion. He was just a shitty kid who would never get the punishment he deserved.

She stood and collected her briefcase. She couldn’t stay in this room for one second longer. The sound of an automatic latch followed her out as the door shut behind her, and outside, the chauffeur was waiting. Mejía-Botta wouldn’t deign to reappear, naturally.

“The client told me to take you wherever you wanted to go,” said the driver.

She could feel a headache coming on. Just a little longer and she’d be home, where she could connect to the network and distract herself, try to minimize the side effects.

“Where you picked me up is fine,” she said.

As soon as they reached the periphery of the city, she pulled off the intrabug she’d stuck on earlier, then opened the window and closed her eyes to stave off the nausea of reconnection. A vibration on the back of her neck let her know she’d received her payment for a job well done.

• • • •

In the following days, the Mejía-Botta case reverberated across the internet. The story: a good girl from a private school, the daughter of the García Colíns, had been in a terrible car accident after suffering bullying and virtual defamation at the hands of her ex-boyfriend, Gabriel Mejía-Botta, with whom she’d recently ended a relationship. At least that was how the accusations began. Rivera followed the news through the fever and nausea of recoil. Working for the agency had taught her that the best way to deal with the mental backlash was to watch kitten videos on a constant loop. She particularly liked the one of two spotted cats playing with a ball of yarn, unrolling it until their paws got tangled and they mewed for help. She projected the videos on the ceiling of her room and watched the images until they were the only thing she could think about.

Two weeks later, Gabriel was declared innocent. He was full of remorse and his memories showed a clear sense of guilt. His friend, the son of a beloved telenovela star, was sentenced to fifty hours of community service for sending the video. Ultimately it was deemed a case of a terrible misunderstanding followed by an unfortunate chain reaction.

Rivera’s headache took longer to fade than it took for public opinion to reverse itself; a reversal that forced the García Colíns family to publicly ask Gabriel’s forgiveness for the defamation. Carmen, standing between her parents, looked diminished, very different from the furious girl Rivera had seen on the log. She only glanced at the camera at the very end, but in that moment, Rivera thought she caught a glimpse of rage. This apology was another humiliation.

Two months after the Mejía-Botta incident, Rivera still hadn’t been called for another agency job, so to fight her insomnia she went back to Ibsen Spa. She didn’t need the work; she’d bought her apartment with that last payment, and there’d been enough left over to have savings, but she wanted a distraction while she waited for the agency to call. One Thursday night she was getting ready for her next spa client when the receptionist knocked on the door and told her someone was in the waiting room looking for her.

Rivera couldn’t hide her surprise when she emerged to find Mejía-Botta.

“I didn’t think I’d see you again,” Rivera said as the receptionist left them alone. She didn’t offer her hand. “How did you find me?”

Mejía-Botta had dark circles beneath his eyes and he seemed different, not the man she’d met two months before, the man who thought he ruled the world. His tailored suit was wrinkled, his appearance unkempt, and there was no sign of a tie.

“It took a lot of money to find you,” he said. “But everyone has their price—even your boss.”

Rivera didn’t react, although this hit her like a shock of cold water. The agency had given out her information? They’d sold her? She clenched her teeth. What were they playing at? Did they think she’d somehow made another mistake?

“Well,” she said. “Here I am. How may I help you?”

The client paced from one side of the room to the other. “It’s Gabriel,” he said. His speech was halting. “I want . . . I want him to be like he was. I don’t know what you did, but all the experts we’ve taken him to claim it’s impossible to find where you changed him. Gabriel truly believes he sent those pictures by accident.”

“Of course he does,” she said. “If he didn’t, the police would have suspected something.”

“That’s what the agency said, that it was the best work they’ve seen in years. But Gabriel . . . he’s not the same person anymore. He’s been in the hospital for weeks now. He tried—he tried to kill himself. Look, I’m ready to pay you. I’m ready to pay double!”

“There’s nothing I can do,” Rivera said, her tone neutral. She tried not to show how this news affected her. She hadn’t meant to drive Gabriel mad; she’d only done her job. She shoved her own regrets to the side and concentrated on Mejía-Botta. “I warned him,” she said. “If I undo my work, it’ll likely fry his brain completely.”

“But everything in his brain is a lie!”

“Not for Gabriel, it isn’t,” she said. “I repeat: there’s nothing I can do. He’ll have to live with the guilt. No mental readjustment is free of consequence.”

But she felt dirty. So, Gabriel had paid a price for his actions after all . . . But who was she to decide who paid, and how? If someone entered her mind and judged her own intentions, what would they find there? Gabriel was just a kid and she’d driven him crazy as a challenge to herself, to prove she could. Her will against Gabriel’s wasn’t a fair fight. Mejía-Botta would never understand what his son was feeling because he didn’t know what it felt like to repent for one’s actions, nor to pay for them. He would never accept the fact that no one could undo what she had done to Gabriel.

Yet he, too, would have to learn to live with this.

Rivera felt the buzz of a log on the back of her neck, but she didn’t read it yet. She put her hand in the pocket of her robe and gripped her ping. How dare her boss sell her out after all the dirty work she’d done? She’d destroyed a child’s mind for him.

“Your boss told me you’d refuse,” Mejía-Botta said. “I’m giving you the opportunity not only to fix your mistake, but to be paid for it. How could you be so ungrateful?”

“I didn’t make a mistake,” she said. “It was a job; I completed it; I was paid for it; thus ends our transaction. But . . .” Rivera paused deliberately, enough time to ping a message to security “. . . For a low price, I’d be willing to help you forget what your son did. So you can sleep at night.”

Mejía-Botta let out a furious shout and pounced on her. Rivera had anticipated this reaction and managed to dodge it, putting one of the sofas between the two of them. The Ibsen guards burst in before Mejía-Botta could take another step.

After he was gone, Rivera returned to her studio. She sat on that pink couch meant for clients, and it sagged under her weight, wrapping her in a suffocating embrace. She would have liked someone to change her own memories. What would it cost to forget? Blinking, she opened the log she’d just received. It was the agency. A new job, a new telephone number. She could cancel her next Ibsen client and call the boss.

But the boss had betrayed her.

She thought about that final job, from before. She didn’t know the name of the woman, nor what had become of her, but if her mind hadn’t fought so hard for itself, there was no doubt that Rivera would have done to her the same thing she’d done to Gabriel. She would have done it because she could; because it was her job. Yet she realized now that she would never be able to do such a thing again. What made her any different than her clients? Was it worth it to use her talents like this, not caring whom she destroyed? A bell rang through the doorway and then the receptionist’s voice: her next appointment had arrived.

Was there another path, another way of using her skills? Could she find a different option? Rivera looked at the log again and without letting herself think too hard, she squeezed her ping to erase the agency’s message.

This was the first step.

“Let them in,” she said.

©2021 by Andrea Chapela.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR

Emma Törzs is a writer and teacher based in Minneapolis. Her short fiction has been published in journals such as Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Uncanny, and honored with a 2020 NEA fellowship, a 2019 World Fantasy Award, and a 2015 O. Henry Prize. She’s an enthusiastic member of the Clarion West class of 2017.

Andrea Chapela is a Mexican writer. She is the author of a YA fantasy series, an essay collection, and two short story collections. She studied Chemistry at UNAM and has a Creative Writing in Spanish MFA from the University of Iowa. She’s a graduate of Clarion West 2017 and part of the Mexicanx Initiative. She has received the National Gilberto Owen Literature Prize for Stories in 2018, the National Juan José Arreola Literature Prize in 2019, and the National Joven José Luis Martínez Essay Prize in 2019. She was selected in Granta’s Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists 2. Her work has been published in English in Samovar, InTranslation, and TupeloQuarterly.

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

City of Refuge

Maurice Broaddus | 6299 words

Hope was a fickle bitch. Mercurial and quixotic, the kind of woman you spent the whole week getting ready for only to have her cancel the date at the last minute.

The world was ending, but Royal Parker still had to go through the motions of a job interview. He knew as soon as he sat down across from the manager—in his ridiculous red-and-white striped shirt and paper hat—that he wasn’t getting the job. Despite the assurances from the Liberation Investment Support Cooperative, the corporate entity controlling the state’s infrastructure, jobs were scarce. He hated that even part of him wanted this person’s approval, that this idiot pretending to have authority held the keys of opportunity. Still, Royal tried to do all the things his counselors recommended. He shook the manager’s hand, his large, meaty hand engulfing it like a shark devouring tuna. Royal attempted to shrink into his seat to hide his hulking build, a man used to many hours a day lifting weights. As the manager bridged his fingers in front of him, Royal could see him assuming what his story was without so much of a glance at his resume dancing before him as a series of holographic projections. He’d taken note of Royal’s cautious shamble, his one eye constantly on alert over his shoulder; his cornrows, nice and neat, revealing the barest hint of gray budding at his temples. He’d always wanted to wear a linen suit for as long as he could remember. When he was inside, such a suit had the feel of reaching for something he couldn’t attain. Not that things were much different now. Sitting up straight as to not cause a crease in it, Royal smiled his best, safe, toothy grin.

Though he tried to hide it, the manager was scared. He guarded his position, not wanting to risk his job in any way. He feared losing it and the system then treating him like a . . . Royal. The manager asked him to explain the gaps in his job history. Royal shifted his posture, his shirt rode up just an inch, enough to reveal the beginnings of a tattoo. Then came the familiar refrain.

“We’ll let you know if anything opens up,” the manager said.

This was the same story all over what folks now called Original Earth. Things were getting bad. End of the world, book of Revelations, apocalyptic-type shit, but the idea of that was too much for folks. So they doubled down on the things they knew, business as usual until the total collapse in order to maintain the status quo. Once Indianapolis had declared bankruptcy, a quarter of the population left town, only hastening the inevitable. It was unable to pay its debts. The slow decay of infrastructure spread like a metastasizing tumor. These days, even emergency services were no longer part of city services. Ambulances abandoned, broken down on the side of the road, stripped of parts; police cars a decade old if they ran at all. The Indianapolis City Council turned to privatization through LISC. The whole city was sold off, part and parcel. Everything was up for sale: land, services, jobs. The richest one percent around the world fled the ecological disaster that O.E. was becoming, building what they called a new Earth for themselves on Mars. Royal’s own people were in the midst of a “fifth wave migration” to the moon for the experiment they now call Muungano. Black folks were heading there at such a pace, needing so much housing, they now constructed orbiting cities like a crisscrossing belt crowning the moon. But O.E., these streets, were all he knew, and he couldn’t bring himself to leave. Or couldn’t bring himself to believe that his people would have him. He slipped on his oxygenator mask and went back into the street’s comforting embrace.

Royal began his daily stroll and took inventory of his surroundings: broken streetlights, cracked pavement overtaken by grass and weeds, sewer lines backing up into houses, piles of uncollected garbage—bags of trash long torn open by roaming dogs spilling their gutted contents to the streets and curb. Funny things happened when a person ran out of money. Slowly losing the sense of who they were. The way that hunger and lack gnawed away at their very being. He couldn’t escape the shadow of guilt—of being unable to provide for even himself—that followed him. Even on the verge of economic collapse, checks came too slow and bills too fast.

Royal’s block hid, tucked in the shadow of Indianapolis’ Golden Hill neighborhood. Not enough wealth to move to Mars, but the alcove could afford to dome itself. Its air filtered, its water purified by its own system, the transparent shield screened most of the worst UV. A conspicuous concentration of resources within eyeshot and yet out of reach of his neighborhood, since the poorest always lived in the most vulnerable infrastructures. The worst effects of climate change were felt by those least able to do anything about it, a climate apocalypse caste system.

A surveillance drone hovered low, wanting its presence noted before circling out of sight again. Paint flecked from the wood trim of the house. Columns of worn brick held up the porch. A punching bag dangled from a rusted chain in the corner. The bones of the house were still intact, the rest an echo of what had once been. LISC provided retrofitting loans to homeowners for basic air and water filtration systems. Not even close to doming, but good enough so masks weren’t necessary indoors. Since so many homes fell into default on the loans, LISC owned many of the houses in the neighborhood. Going on its third generation within the family, the house still belonged to his niece. For now. She let Royal stay in a guest room on the second floor. The room had been split into two rooms, just enough room for a single bed and chest o’ drawers. The size of a prison cell.

Ford waited for him on the porch.

Ford. One word. The LISC penal officer barked the word at Royal on their first meeting and that was all he got for a name. It could be his first or last. A light-skinned dude with low-cropped hair and cold eyes half-closed with boredom. He favored tight-fitting T-shirts which showed off his chest and arm muscles. He had an unlit cigarette tucked behind his ear though no one ever saw him smoke.

“What’s up, Ford? Wasn’t expecting you.”

They shook hands without warmth.

“That’s the whole point of a home visit, Old School.” There was always the intimation of threat to Ford, even in the low measure of his greeting. Like most LISC officials, his oxygenator didn’t reduce his voice to heavy asthmatic breaths. Ford called him Old School from the jump. He scanned him like a story he’d read a dozen times before. “Nice suit. What you been up to?”

“Just out looking for a new job. I done been to a half dozen fast food joints.”

“I can’t help you with your hustle,” Ford glanced about the porch, prowling along it like a disturbed cat. “You won’t get a job tatted up like that. Won’t even make it through the interview.”

“Who you kidding? Once they scan that I been locked up, my resume gets shitcanned.”

Ford idly punched the bag. The system tracked the movement of all of its citizens. A PO’s job was to sweep through every so often to verify a parolee’s address and make sure they were where they were supposed to be. Ford’s rep rang out on the streets because he took shit to another level. Like it was his mission in life, he rode each of his clients as if the man wanted them to fail rather than operate as a “re-entry coordinator,” which was his actual official job title. Ford’s brand of monitoring he summarized as to “tail ‘’em, nail ’em, and jail ’em.”

“Are you a man of your word, Old School?”

“I’m a man who doesn’t like to go through needless motions when we know what the result is going to be.” Waiting for the trap to spring—which was every conversational turn with his PO—Royal eyed Ford’s unlit cigarette. His mouth itched to light and inhale it. Wouldn’t be any worse than breathing what passed for air anyway. A reflexive cough sputtered within his mask. He took an assessing inhalation for any telltale scrapings within his lungs, signaling that he had The Rasp. The high levels of dust and such in the air settled like corrosion within a person’s chest. But he breathed smoothly. For now. “I can’t stand people selling me on fake dreams.”

“Word on the vine was that you were tough. One of the baddest cats who ran the streets before you went on pause.” Ford delivered a combination of blows to the bag, bobbing and weaving when it swayed back toward him. An excuse to demonstrate how fast his hands were.

“I don’t know about all that.”

“Me either. I’m just not seeing it. I’ve brought down taller motherfuckers than you in my sleep. All I see now is a broken-down old man itching to get sent back up.” Ford’s words were another lash of humiliation he had no choice but to accept. This was Ford’s act, trying to provoke Royal into saying or doing something reckless. Stir that anger in him. If Ford were just a man, that kind of slick comment would’ve earned him a quick beatdown. But Ford had the full weight and authority of LISC’s judicial system behind him. Royal could swing at the system, but when it swung back, he’d wake up in jail. Satisfied that his words set Royal in his place, Ford smiled. “You gonna invite me in?”

Shrugging, Royal lowered his head, to hide the flash of anger in his eyes. The gray sky of small particulate fog grew so thick it blotted out the sun. The house door hissed, creating a bubble while the mechanism scrubbed the air with them stopping in the doorway before it allowed them through. They walked through the living room, a minefield of strewn toys from the babies and dirty plates of teenage boys who didn’t pick up after themselves. Royal stayed downstairs when he was alone, retreating to his space only when family returned home. He didn’t want to intrude, remind them that he took up precious space. A low-hanging smell of mildew wafted along the baseboards from the basement hinting at a cracked seal he’d need to attend to. African masks hung on the walls. A portrait of his niece and her children. A blank space where her husband should have been. Royal wondered about all of the blank spaces in people’s lives where he should have been. A sour smell of sweat wafted from the couch where his niece often slept. She worked such long hours as a nurse that some nights she never made it past the couch from the door when she came home. She woke with the kids in time to shuffle them through their morning routines and left for work again.

Royal plopped down heavily into the chair. He heard that on Muungano, their nanobots were so attenuated to their people’s commands, they could fashion custom furniture with a wave of their hands. Or clean surfaces. Or clean air. That world was beyond him every bit as much as Mars. Or even Golden Hills. Unconsciously, he started to rub his leg, nursing a phantom ache from an injury suffered while inside.

Framed photos lined the mantel. Ford ran an inspecting finger along it before taking a long moment to examine his hand. Like a guard, full of his authority to toss his space like a vulture picking his bones, sifting his flesh for anything to amuse themselves. He picked up a framed candid photograph—a holovid system was well out of their finances—of Royal’s grandparents. Royal hated the way Ford combed through his life as if he had the right. That he could pick up his life and set it down any time he wanted. The intensity of Ford’s scrutiny reminiscent of the lingering gaze of a doctor during an exam.

“Nice home,” Ford said almost absently, continuing to nose about.

“Thanks. I’ve worked hard to get things back on track. Made a plan. Working my plan.” Royal recited the words, but to his ear he might as well have clutched his hat to his chest and end each sentence with “yessa, boss.”

“That sounds . . .”

Royal’s link alert chirped. He held up a “one minute” finger to Ford though no holovid displayed. His was the basic unit issued by LISC so that their citizens could remain tethered to the system network. Clinging to the possibility that it might be an actual call back from a possible employer, he turned his back to the PO. “Yes?”

Ford knocked a photo from the mantel.

“I got to go,” Royal whispered. “Yes, tomorrow then.”

Ford didn’t bother to meet his eyes. His hand rested on another photo, deciding whether it too should tumble. For a moment, Royal saw who he used to be. A brash young man, cocky and sure, his strength and vitality able to power through most situations. Then he remembered that young man ended up in prison. “You seem to barely got time for me, Old School.”

“I’m not trying to put you off. I’m hustling. You caught me at a time. You know how it is. Responsibilities around the house. Trying to stay afloat. I may have a line on a possible job doing deliveries, though. Whatever it takes, right?”

“Yeah, you sound like a busy man.” Ford centered the photo on the mantel. “I may have to see about slowing you down.”

Ford squared off against him, letting the silence land like shackles at Royal’s feet.

“Why you got to play me so hard?” Royal hated how the hint of pleading in his voice reduced him.

The front door chimed and the filtration system whirred. Duke, his niece’s oldest son, stopped within the doorway, allowing a rush of air sweetened by the cloying smell of weed on his clothes. A little dude with an addict’s thinness to him, his twists needed tightening as his hair tumbled out of his head in an untamed sprawl. A constellation of freckles splattered his cheeks and faded splotches lined his neck, like he’d been splashed with bleach. A homemade mask of toilet paper and duct tape dangled from his ear. He worked for the Paschal family. Kevin Paschal, Pass, was once a neighborhood entrepreneur and sometime drug dealer who built an entire family enterprise under the nose and off the radar of LISC. Duke spotted Ford from the threshold and ground his cigarette underfoot.

Royal winced. The last thing Ford needed was an audience.

“I like breaking eggs. If a few omelets get made, cool.” Ford thumbed toward Royal for Duke’s benefit. “This motherfucker right here thinks he’s somebody.”

Duke raised his hands like he wanted to back away without mess landing on him. “My name’s Bennett and I ain’t in it.”

“You clever, ain’t you?” Ford’s voice dripped with the sense of having been disrespected. “Royal, you must come from a clever family.”

“It’s not like that,” Royal said.

“Look at you. Domesticated dude. You playing at being a family man, now?”

Royal swallowed. Not just the dry hitch in his throat, but he wanted to tell this trifling, bureaucratic, overcompensating Napoleon what he could do with his home visits. With his intimated threats. With his assumptions and judgments. But he couldn’t. Ford was just one set of teeth of the disembodied beast people called the justice system. The beast would have its due, its bones to grind to fine powder.

“I’ll help you out, Old School. Why don’t you come down to my office tomorrow and we’ll see what we can do to make sure you aren’t so . . . overwhelmed.”

“But my job appointment tomorrow?” Royal knew an office visit meant Ford keeping him—and whoever else made his shit-list—sit and wait from eight a.m. until whenever he felt like dismissing them.

“Fuck. Your. Job.” A pause lingered at the end of Ford’s sentence like the PO wanted to add a word just to make his point plain. “You will be at my office first thing. We’ll go through all of your paperwork. And only if you find yourself not violated can you even think about taking a job. You got me?”

“Yes.” Royal let the sentence stop without adding the word “sir” in mild protest.

Ford glared at him up and down as if he were small, sneering before sucking his teeth. He cut his eyes to Duke, who stepped out of the way. The door hissed, the portal sealing shut behind him.

“Your boy’s trippin’ hard today,” Duke said.

“He ain’t my boy. I trust Ford as far as I can throw him and I ain’t been working out lately.” The bluster sounded hollow. “It’s the end of the world and I still have to deal with this petty foolishness.”

Royal angled away from Duke, unable to sit under his nephew’s gaze. He’d been stripped of something and the less someone was able to see witness, the better. His head slumped, determined to keep his eyes closed until the sting of his humiliation and helplessness ebbed.

• • • •

Hope was like a stripper. If you paid her well, the more she came around looking for something extra. But you wanted her around since her company and attention almost felt like the real thing. You came to depend on them like any addict in need of a fix. Then one day you see her fucking around with someone else and you could no longer convince yourself that her attention was anything except fake. She never truly existed. Not for you.

A shrill of alarm clawed at the back of Royal’s head from the first moment he stepped into Ford’s office. The receptionist barely glanced at him, no longer particularly noting the parade of felons when they came through. They were numbers on numbers: a filing code counting down the days until they were off papers or heading back to lockup. Wagging a finger, she directed him to take a seat. Chow lines, sitting in his cell, shower lines, linkage lines the system trained him how to wait on his life.

No one else had their life held up alongside him in the office.

In another life, he had his own construction company. Fixed up and painted many of the houses in the neighborhood as a part of LISC’s “Pre-enact the Future” program. He also had a temper that flashed hot when pushed. It led to the occasional “misunderstanding.” He got clipped for drunk driving (which quickly became drunk and disorderly), escalating once he began shouting at the officers, which led to them calling for a backup unit (which quickly became backup units), once he began yelling about what they could do with their unwarranted traffic stop. The misunderstanding occurred once he stumbled into one of the officers and they began swinging. That cost him a few years. When he went upstate to “college” he got hooked on that her-ron.

Two hours later, the receptionist motioned for him to enter.

No nameplate rested on Ford’s desk. No holovids of any family hovered about. No awards or certificates hung on the wall. No clue illuminating who the man was other than Ford. Perpetual coffee rings scarred his desk as if he left standing orders to never scrub them clean.

Without so much as turning to him, Ford handed Royal a specimen medi-cup. “Fill it up as best you can.”

Royal sized up the medi-cup. He wanted to make a joke to break the tension in the room, but there was less than no play in Ford’s eyes. A level of corruption and ineptitude infected the PO to the bone. Royal turned to head to the bathroom.

“Nuh uh. Where I can see you.” Ford turned to the holographic reports display hovering over his desk.

“Right here?” Royal gestured to his zipper.

“You get a drop on my floor, you’ll be licking it clean.”

With the nervousness of a deer sniffing about, knowing a trap was about to spring shut but not knowing where from, a roar of panic filled the back of his mind. Royal fished in his pants to pull out his dick, there in the open of the office like some animal. Wanting to piss all over the rings on Ford’s desk and leave the final dribbling trail on the PO’s shoes, Royal peered straight ahead. He blinked a few times to fight back the burning in each eye.

Ford’s studious observation veered dangerously close to a leer. Like the guards inside watching an absurd show, they vented the anger of their powerlessness on the prisoners. Their rough hands tugging at his jaw: poking him, sticking fingers in his mouth, ordering him about, controlling him. It was all the same game, wondering how much he’d be worth out in the field. Incarceration was a profitable LISC venture.

Careful not to overfill the container or splash, he slipped his dick back into his drawers lest he accidentally drip on the carpet. He secured the lid, set the specimen cup on Ford’s desk, and backed away. Royal strained to keep any challenge from his eyes. Ford nodded, stepping between Royal and the desk.

“Good and tight.” Ford turned around with the specimen cup. “Temperature says an even hundred degrees. You may be running a fever.”

Royal stifled a reflexive cough. An increasing sense of unease ran through him. Life had a way of going from sugar to shit with a quickness. Ford tapped the screen on the container with a knowing grin. A few seconds later, a single colored line appeared.

Positive.

“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” Ford said. “Someone’s been a bad boy.”

“That’s not possible,” Royal said. “I’ve been clean for . . .”

“Yes?” Ford waited for the unprompted confession.

“I’m clean is all I’m saying. I know I am. That has to be one of them false positives.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Jerk LISC around a bit with your claims of false positives. Life is one big conspiracy against you, isn’t it?” Ford eased back in his chair, arms folded across his chest. “You about to accuse me of something?”

The question hung in the air between them. A positive drop was “game over”. Once Ford reported he was positive, he would leave the office in cuffs headed for processing preparing to return upstate to finish out his prison sentence. There was no appeal. No re-test. Ford only blocked his view for a moment, not much time to do much to spike the sample. Maybe switch them out, but it would be pointless to accuse him anyway. A parolee’s word against a PO’s. That complaint wouldn’t exactly make it to the top of anyone’s priority list.

“No,” Royal said. “Sir.”

“Sir. I like that.” Ford sat up straight, scrutinizing Royal like a chef determining if his dish was ready. Existing on just as low a rung as him, but reveling in the power of his position, for what little that afforded him. A better seat in the master’s house. “Not so much big talk from you now. I have your full attention? You sure you’re not too busy for me now?”

“No.” Royal clenched his fist in impotent rage.

Ford glanced down at the balled fingers and smiled. “You want to take a swing at me?”

“No.” Royal unclenched to massage the top of his thigh. “Just frustrated.”

“I would be, too. Flushing your life away for a shot in the arm.”

“But I didn’t . . .” Royal hated the near whine his voice took in protest.

“I know you’re out here serving niggas up. And getting served. You’re a criminal. Ain’t no treatment for that. That’s a lifelong condition. No medicine. No counseling. No rehabilitation. This is who you are. Life’s about accepting responsibilities for your actions. Like you being too busy for me.”

“I’m sorry about that.” Royal’s gaze wavered.

“Fuck. Your. Sorry. You were ninety percent violated by the time you first stepped into my office. This was just the final ten percent. You all the same. You people only know one way. You don’t know how to live on the outside. There’s no part of you civilized. You make us all look bad. But I got you. All I had to do was let you be true to your nature and you could inevitably fuck shit up.”

The world on the brink of a complete, extinction-level environmental collapse. Politicians declaring war on some country or another every week. Civilizations establishing themselves in new parts of the solar system, and Royal was forgotten. Lost in all the events too big to wrap his mind around for anyone to notice his small problems of just trying to survive the day-to-day. His world orbited a low-level bureaucrat so caught up in his own mess, he’d rather step on Royal’s throat than help him have a chance to build a better life. “Is there . . . anything I can do?”

“Son, my job ain’t to help you. My job’s to make sure you take as few people down with you as possible.” The deliberate emphasis on the word “son” was another reminder that Royal wasn’t seen as a man. A malicious grin spread across Ford’s face. “Tell you what. You do me a favor and next week I’ll give you a re-test. You pop positive again, ain’t nothing I can do for you. Negative and I’ll chalk this up to an unfortunate . . . misunderstanding.”

“What sort of favor?” The roar returned to the back of his mind.

“You in a bargaining position, Old School?”

Royal shook his head. “Just need to know the scope of the job.”

“I need you to procure something for me.” Ford scribbled on a piece of paper. He clutched the folded paper between two fingers and extended it to Royal. “Here’s the address. Plus day and time. He has one of them fake books as a safe thing on a shelf in his study. Let me know when you have it and I’ll swing through to collect. You don’t want to screw this up.”

Royal reached for the paper.

Ford withdrew it, giving him a proprietary stare. The condescension mixed with shapeless threat returned to his tone. “Ain’t too many second chances for people like you. You don’t want to fuck this up.”

• • • •

Hope was a loose chain that jangled whenever you moved to remind you it was there. It allowed you to move just enough to give you the illusion of freedom, but still kept you in your place. Hope made things horrifying because hope led to the false belief that there was a chance that you could one day be free.

His life was an unfinished letter.

That her-ron addiction left a wound in him. The familiar pang, the hunger, the need to ride a blast. Anything to quell the anxiety. To almost forget. Almost. Because other than the very first blast, he never soared so high as to completely forget. Without it, he sank to the floor, dying by inches, every day. Pain arced through him, nesting in his deepest places and nursing on every bad memory, every insult, every beating. Addiction was adaptation to the cage his life became. When isolated or alone, drugs were the sole comfort to be found. The pain vanished and the rush allowed him to do anything because nothing hurt. People would do anything to keep the pain away. No matter the sunken eyes. No matter skin the color of bruises. No matter how much a mirror terrified him for fear of the monster reflected in it. There was no such thing as control.

When he stood in front of the house, Royal realized why the address on the piece of paper seemed so familiar. Pass’s drug fortunes built a veritable fortress. A wrought-iron fence surrounded the home. Statues of lions rearing atop concrete posts. A four-car garage usually had his current Lexus parked in plain view like a trophy on display. Pass could easily live in Golden Hill, but the houses of that neighborhood remained in the hands of people who stuck to their own kind.

Out front as a lookout, Duke took a few practice shots at the portable goalpost in front of the house. The surrounding bushes probably hid an EMF pulse generator to disrupt drones, maybe even a number of weapons. His makeshift mask in place, not even being afforded a real one as he stood out in the polluted air for his efforts. He knocked down the shot and the rock bounced, stopping at Royal’s feet. Royal picked it up, bounced it once, and took a shot. The net snapped, crisp as money.

“Still got some lift to you,” Duke said.

“All I need is someone to talk crazy and wake it up.”

Duke’s gaze shifted in knowing appraisal. “Are you up?”

There it was. The tone. Even if Royal hadn’t heard it, he’d have felt it the same way he did every time his soles slapped the sidewalk concrete underneath them. The tension on the streets, as real as a chilled wind blowing fast food paper bags down deserted alleyways. He recognized the glint in his eyes. The waiting. The expectation. Theirs was the inevitability of the bullet crashing through bone and spurting brain matter. “Just thinking.”

“You know Pass don’t like loiterers.” Duke eyed the low-lying haze for any encroaching drones. “So, you need to make up your mind.”

Royal stared at the house, wondering what the book safe Ford wanted so badly contained. Drugs. Money. Data sticks. Blackmail materials. Maybe the whole thing was a trap. An excuse for him to get caught breaking in. His body riddled with bullets would be just another day in “Napghanistan.” The chorus rose in his head, a room full of voices, each vying to be heard. He flushed with heat. It filled him so full he could barely breathe.

“Yeah, serve me up.”

“You sure?” Disappointment underscored Duke’s question.

“Yeah. How much?”

“Ten.” Duke whistled for someone and held up a lone finger. A boy, no older than twelve, wheeled his bike toward Royal. His hand-me-down rebreather unit—a first-generation oxygenator—nearly covered his entire face. He held out his hand. Royal clasped it, his hand swallowing the boy’s to his wrist with the exchange.

Duke pounded the ball against the pavement, turning his back on his uncle. “Who up next?”

• • • •

Hope was a victim, full of potential and dreams. Slowly strangled so that the light could be watched fading from her eyes.

Royal cupped his hand against the breeze of heavy traffic that roared by. The city had removed the lights at 25th and 22nd Streets so that commuters could drive through without having to stop. Stopping meant someone might pay attention to the state of the neighborhood. Paying attention meant someone might be moved to do something. A group of men wandered out of a family church. Might as well been praying to the god of technology, since that was the only thing listening who might be able to make the world a better place. But tonight was the neighborhood crime watch meeting. Royal considered it a meetup of the folks who reported a “suspicious man casing the neighborhood” every time he went out for a walk about. The group crossed the street when they approached him. Social distancing, since he was a plague in their community. He couldn’t escape who he was and, like Ford, they saw who they wanted to see. He threw his hands up in sad triumph, celebrating what exactly he wasn’t sure.

Royal wasn’t home ten minutes before someone pounded on his door.

“Is it done?” Ford barged past him when the door seal wheezed open.

“You watching me now?”

“Is it done?” Ford repeated.

“We need to talk about this.”

“If you seeing me now, we’re way past the ‘talk about it’ stage.”

“I went there. No one was home.”

“Did you go in or not?”

“I got it.”

“You did?” Ford arched a skeptical eyebrow.

“You sound surprised. Didn’t think I’d make it in? Or out?”

Royal suspected his base treachery. A betrayal, even of self, that ran marrow deep, not knowing where it ended and he began. It was wrapped up in him, a part of him. The system had narrowed Ford’s choices, too. He opted to become its instrument, both whip and chain, so that he could maintain the illusion of his freedom.

“You got something to say, spit it out.” Again, Ford let the accusation land between them in an uncomfortable silence. “Nothing? Hand over the package. Or don’t. But either way, I’m going home for dinner.”

“Not so fast. Like I said, we need to talk about it.”

Ford’s eyes lowered to grim slits. He leaned against the door frame. “You don’t have it, do you?”

“No.” Royal’s future flashed before him. A single dark night that stretched out for years. Of waiting. His life on pause again. Alone. He barely hung onto his family the last time. Blood pounded through his vessels. A roar of white noise crushed his thoughts with the slam of each heartbeat. It filled him. A vortex of anger. Pure. Unadulterated.

With rage-fueled speed, Royal swung. His large fist caught Ford on his temple. The PO’s head snapped back violently, his eyes rolled skyward as his body dropped. Royal crouched over the body. Glancing around the room, he whispered to Ford’s unconscious form, “Ain’t nothing more precious than time and freedom.”

• • • •

Hope never was.

Ford’s head lolled, straightening with a start as if suddenly woken from a deep sleep. The room reminiscent of Royal’s dank cell; only missing a filthy pallet with a loose cloth for bedding and little more than a bucket for relief. Royal drew a chair across from him. Ford started to lunge out of his seat but stopped short. He’d been zip-tied to the chair with his own restraints. On the table between them were Royal’s old-school works: a needle, a spoon, and a small baggie. Royal bridged his fingers in front of him.

“You got a cigarette?” Royal leaned over and plucked the cigarette from behind Ford’s ear. “See, the way I figure it, this here cigarette was your way of making fun of me. A lot of folks, really. Them omelets you so fond of making. I bet you were a smoker. What, two to three packs a day?”

“Two.” Ford spoke through pursed, swollen lips.

“Bet you didn’t go through a program or nothing neither. Just sheer force of will. This was your way of reminding yourself that not only can it be done, but, unlike us, you could even have temptation within reach and not give in. Am I close?”

“Don’t pretend you know me.” Ford flexed against the zip ties.

“Got a light or you going to leave me hanging?” Royal fished in the man’s pockets, withdrawing a lighter. Ford’s own feckless entrenchment stole hope and freedom burned them. He blew a cloud of smoke into Ford’s face. “You haven’t been baptized into family until you’ve gone through pain together and come out on the other side.”

“What’s that supposed to be? Some pussy-ass threat meant to scare me?”

“No. Just a reminder that one thing addicts have in common is pain and need. You know the hurt, the hollow pang you rarely if ever admitted to.” One thing he did learn was that rules were put in place to rig the game, so playing by them always led to the same result.

“Go ahead, do what you’re gonna do. I’m not scared and I’m not going to beg. Hurt is what you do.”

Royal ground the cigarette out under his heel.

“Our first confrontation was initiated because of violence . . .”

“You were a violent man,” Ford said.

“I don’t disagree. Violence is all that people like you and me understand. You see, you and me are . . . conjoined, is that the right word? Our fates are conjoined by violence’s continued threat. We live in a reckless state. You are the law enforcer, the face of the oppressors, whose job it is to reinforce their will. Create the illusion of law and order, justice, on our backs. When it’s all really about scrutiny. Control. You bring violence with you everywhere you go. It is your chief weapon and your chief product.” Royal recalled his days inside, how he’d adjusted to the casual brutality of it all. By then, violence became the air he breathed. The only thing he could do was dream. Of one day being free, his soul soaring high, flying home. “Changing the order of the world always requires a violent act. Now this here, this is about pain relief. About how people are able to carry on as if the world wasn’t coming apart at the seams all around them.”

With the methodical ease of muscle memory, Royal sorted his works and loaded a blast into the syringe. He held it between them until it was the sole focus of Ford’s attention. Royal’s threadbare voice waned as he pressed the needle to Ford’s jerking arm.

“It’s time for me to serve you up.”

©2020 by Maurice Broaddus. Originally published in Escape Pod. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A community organizer and teacher, his work has appeared in magazines like Lightspeed Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Uncanny Magazine, with some of his stories having been collected in The Voices of Martyrs. His books include the urban fantasy trilogy, The Knights of Breton Court; the steampunk works, Buffalo Soldier and Pimp My Airship; and the middle grade detective novels, The Usual Suspects and Unfadeable. His project, Sorcerers, is being adapted as a television show for AMC. As an editor, he’s worked on Dark Faith, Fireside Magazine, and Apex Magazine. Learn more at MauriceBroaddus.com.

Anything Short of Death Is Survivable

David Anaxagoras | 8373 words

Olive feared she might vomit which would be a really dumb and dangerous thing to do since her mouth was sealed off (along with the rest of her skin) against the vacuum of space. Basically, her insides had nowhere to go. She swallowed hard. Only little kids got space sick and she wasn’t a little kid, she was fourteen.

As soon as the hatch had opened and she went rushing out into the empty, Olive’s skin crystalized—just like it was supposed to. Tough yet flexible. DragonSkin was one of the most expensive augments Grubb could buy, as he was fond of reminding her. It made her feel special and she was certain it made the other rats jealous of her, but as Attie always said, you take every advantage and don’t apologize. Nice girls die fast.

But that first moment when the world goes silent and your stomach floats up and presses against your heart—it always terrified her. What if one day the augment didn’t work? It was second-hand/black-market after all. It wasn’t designed for her. And the not-breathing thing—that added to the general terror. She couldn’t carry oxygen with her. Even if she did there would be no way to take it in. The DragonSkin had other priorities, like not letting you die a cold death in space. One of her lungs, the original one, occasionally spasmed. The other lung wasn’t really a lung anymore, it was some kind of bioengineered bag of tricks, a wet machine that generated whatever oxygen she needed. Olive had no idea how it worked but was grateful it did.

As Olive oriented herself, she could see The Seeker was already far off. Grubb piloted her in a graceful arc toward the far side of the ice moon. The old junker might look like a scrap pile, but she could dart through space like a river eel when the moment called for it.

“Good luck on the hunt my dear,” Grubb announced through her tenna, his voice a buzzing insect in her brain that made her ears itch deep inside. “Find some pretty flowers for Old Grubb, eh? Many pretty flowers.”

Olive straightened her body and pointed her toes down. Her DragonSkin was a solid that flowed like a liquid. Its crystal matrix formed a faceted shell that shifted and reconstituted instantaneously to her needs. When she flexed her ankles just so, her DragonSkin shunted off excess radiation to propel her downward in relation to her head, and simultaneously stiffened around her joints to conserve and focus the energy.

She sank fast toward the wreck below.

Once she got past the initial trauma of being blown out into space, she didn’t mind it so much. Anything short of death is survivable, she could hear Attie say.

This wreck was unlike any she had scavenged before. It was laid out under her feet like a tableau—a hyperreal painting of desolation and beauty, starkly lit by the cold reflected light of the ice moon. Two warships were mashed together in a dance of destruction—the hammer-shaped Aumot ship had rammed through the flat disc of the Simahtan Empire ship. An immense debris field surrounded their final resting place, shards orbiting in perfect synchronicity with the wreckage. Olive could feel near-microscopic bits pinging off her DragonSkin as she descended. For a moment, it sounded almost like rain.

Most battlefields in the inner systems had been picked over at least once, but out here it seems they found one untouched every day. What was out here that was worth two ships annihilating themselves over? She had heard the ice moon was once a paradise, but the shatter had shifted its orbit into perpetual shadow under its mother planet. That was the story with almost every world now. What hadn’t been destroyed by war was doomed by the shatter—an ever-expanding web of fractures in spacetime. Like cracks in the center of a frozen lake, the shatter grew with no sign of stopping.

As Olive continued to drop, she twisted in a lazy spiral and took in all the sights around her. If she had been breathing her breath would have caught in her throat at the sight of the pearlescent gas giant Morgana, its wide flat rings seemingly reaching out to her. But she couldn’t look at something so beautiful for too long. She pulled in her arms and spun faster. She knew she wasn’t graceful or pretty, but in space she felt like a dancer. Of course, whenever she had thoughts like that she imagined Attie rolling her eyes and knocking a sharp elbow into her ribs. Keep your mind on the money, she would probably say. Focus on the job.

Olive hit a warm spot and angled her toes up to stop her descent. She could feel a thrum of low-level radiation and paused so her DragonSkin could soak it up. From this distance she could see getting into the wreck would be easy—wide swaths of both ships were exposed to space. Their insides glittered with the flash-frozen moisture of their former atmospheres.

“Better keep moving my dear, so many treasures await!” Grubb was not a patient person and of course, he knew everything Olive did or didn’t do and almost every thought she had. It was one advantage of paying for her tenna and having it installed himself—he was in her head constantly. He was in all the rats’ heads.

Olive lingered a bit longer in the radiation bath—what did Grubb know about her DragonSkin or what it needed? He paid for it; he didn’t use it.

Bullseye jetted out from behind her and placed itself directly in her line of sight. It was a squat bot, made for zero-g. One of those self-assemblers where you invest in the basic unit—just a processor in a shell, really—and the bot continues to build itself and evolve with whatever resources it can find. It had many arms but no real legs or other terrestrial locomotion, which would just be a hindrance in space.

Bullseye’s front appendages (made with parts Olive recognized from previous scavenges) snapped at her.

“Boss said move,” it said.

“Keep your head on,” Olive said, and shunted the transmission through a miasma of radiation blowing off the back end of her DragonSkin to make it as unpleasant to receive as possible. If it irritated Bullseye, though, it didn’t show it.

Olive pivoted head-down and placed her arms flat at her sides. She flitted toward the outer edge of the Samahtan ship, which was big enough to swallow her sprawling childhood slum and then some. She turned again and entered feet first. Just before her head slipped past the bulkhead, she saw several small reflective specks at the far end of the hull—other rats, each having been dropped off at regular intervals by Grubb around the ship.

Grubb wouldn’t ever bring the ship too close to their scavenge. For one, the shatter played hell with certain kinds of engines. She overheard Grubb once say that a competitor of his slammed into a fracture that overloaded his engines and destroyed the ship. It was hard to know if this was exactly the truth, though, as Grubb’s competitors had a universal habit of meeting sticky ends. She suspected the real reason Grubb stayed on the periphery was so he wouldn’t get entangled with local authorities, rival scavengers, roving gangs, warlords, or worse—missionaries.

There was rarely any hub chatter between the rats on a job. Grubb said he didn’t want anyone giving away their salvage with stray transmissions, even though he didn’t seem to have a problem broadcasting himself willy-nilly. Attie said Grubb kept a lid on conversation because he didn’t want them all building “camaraderie.”

Olive wasn’t sure what camaraderie was, but Attie was always right. No matter. Compete or cooperate, what mattered in the end was that you got your haul. If you didn’t bring in your haul or if you violated your contract in any other way, Grubb would sell off your augments to make up the difference. They didn’t always come out clean. If you survived, you didn’t last long.

Olive wriggled in through a bundle of thick cables and tubes. The hard, smooth shell of her body slipped through without too much resistance, but Bullseye got hung up and had to cut his way through with a plasma torch. That gave her some time to explore alone.

Olive remembered her first augment.

Desperate, she had snatched a nice fat slice of M-eat from a street merchant in Aught City, where she and every other lost child in the galaxy thought they had a chance at a life. Olive’s first three years were spent wastepicking on the garbage moon of En, swaddled and slung on her mother’s back until she was able to crawl through and grab a bit of food or useful widget on her own. Her family couldn’t keep up with a debt that stretched back three generations, though, and they were sent to Liberty House, the debtor’s prison on Aught, where they had to pay for room and board on top of their debt.

Neither of her parents survived.

The family debt then fell entirely on Olive. She had intended to honor it. She really did. She believed what she had been taught—good, honest, hard work would free her. Show some grit. Have some determination. Her mother and grandmother had worked toward their debt relief, and her mother, and so she must as well. To honor the debt was to honor your family, your ancestors. It was the one principle everyone was taught. Honor your debts. And everyone owed.

Olive would have been caught, M-eat in her grasp, if Attie hadn’t appeared from nowhere and grabbed her hand and raced her through the labyrinth of merchant carts, solicitor’s tents, and street performers.

“Let go!” Olive protested.

“You’re so stupid!” Attie laughed. “Keep up!”

Attie dove through beneath the bottom edge of a tent and pulled Olive under. Inside was hot, humid, smoky. Olive’s eyes burned. As she adjusted to the dark, she could make out a bundle of bodies writhing on the floor. Attie stifled a giggle and turned to Olive and placed her fingers on her lips. Attie watched the writhing thing on the ground but Olive studied Attie’s features. Her hair was a wild tangle and seemed to be permanently blown back from her head. Her skin was caramel and her face was wide and friendly. Olive held out the M-eat—an offering. They tore it into strips and shared it while they waited for the commotion outside to die down.

Later they walked through the spice market and Olive breathed in scents from a hundred worlds. She smelled something like a yellow sun warming the earth after a night rain. And the smoldering remains of a forest fire which made her throat itch. And apples slowly fermenting in a damp, misty orchard that made her heart inexplicably heavy. Olive’s head swam. Every scent was a peep into another world and the universe felt truly vast for the first time.

“Got lodgings?” Attie asked. “Because I know a guy.”

Attie was paid a bonus for every new rat she recruited. She didn’t hide this fact. It’s how you survive. It’s part of honoring your debt.

Grubb took Olive into the nest and stripped her of her debt—literally. Her identifiers were surgically removed with a filth-covered implement—but not before she was registered as a corpse. She died from razorworm, a common enough ailment that wouldn’t cause an inquiry. To be sure no one investigated, her family debt was also erased—a nearly impossible feat as far as Olive knew. It unnerved her more than a little.

Attie held a rag to the wound where Olive’s identifier had been wrenched out and Olive sobbed and found she couldn’t stop.

“I’m sorry,” Olive said, sucking in a wet breath, “I don’t know why I’m crying.”

Attie just nodded and applied more pressure.

Grubb traded Olive’s identifier chips for credit toward her first augment. The technician who fused the hair-fine superconducting fiber to her spinal column was pockmarked and had a perpetually runny nose. He flicked a finger toward a receiver and her tenna hummed to life. A cacophony of voices invaded Olive’s head, sharp and cutting like exploding glass. She screamed but couldn’t hear herself over the jabbering. Underneath it all, a hollow cry, distant and shrill.

“The breath of the universe,” Attie later explained.

It sounded like a dying animal.

“Well, yeah,” Attie said. “The shatter.”

The shatter. The whole wide universe full of starshine and sweetly rotting apples was cracking apart. Thanks mostly to ships like the ones she was scavenging.

Olive stretched her body and aimed herself toward a tight opening between decks. She darted toward an open area. Bullseye hadn’t taken long to cut his way through the bulkhead’s cables. He followed right behind her.

“Pretty, pretty flowers, where are they hiding?” Grubb cut in. “You are finding them, yes my dear?”

In all her time scavenging, Olive had seen just six flowers and only been able to harvest three. She secretly hoped she wouldn’t see any. It was one thing to face Grubb’s frustration at finding nothing, another thing entirely to be punished for a failed harvesting. Better to scavenge power cells, lengths of cable, processors, food rations, and other bits like the rest of the rats.

Of course, just as she thought this, she sensed a tugging in her ribcage, which wasn’t a ribcage anymore, but a kind of intricate tenna array just for the purpose of detecting the fracture lines of the shatter, and by extension, the flowers. The lines here were deep. The shatter was strong. She might even be close to a nexus.

She sensed fracture lines more often and in more places, it seemed. To her it felt like a faint tickle—the edge of a feather tracing a thin line inside her chest. It was such a constant itch now that was she becoming numb to it. Either her augment was malfunctioning—which she would never admit to for fear of being scrapped—or the rumors were true, and the shatter was spreading farther and faster and one day the universe would burst open along a billion seams.

It was sad to think about in a way, but also—and she tried to banish this thought as soon as she had it—a strange kind of relief. Like death releasing the pain of someone you loved. As it has released her parents. As it had released Attie.

She should have taken Attie to the river.

When it was clear Attie was too sick to survive, most of the other rats turned their back to her. They were supposed to. Attie had taught them that. Though there was no hope for recovery, Grubb didn’t turn her out. Olive had grown savvy enough to understand why. It wasn’t for Attie’s sake she was fed and brought water while she twisted in her cot, unable to earn her keep or pay her debt. The payoff was making it look to the other rats like their loyalty would be rewarded. Grubb would always have their back. But Attie wouldn’t last long and it cost Grubb almost nothing to use her this way.

Olive was the only one who really cared—but she didn’t care enough, because Attie had asked Olive to take her to the river, and Olive refused.

“Take me to the end of the pier and lay me down. Roll me into the water. It will be cold. Dark. Like going into a dream.”

Each day for three days Attie had asked, and even though Olive had no intention of doing so, each day she promised she would. Olive’s heart wished for release for her friend, but she couldn’t be the one to do it. She just couldn’t.

A small flame burned under Olive’s heart—her own anger eating at her. Attie spent each day in madness and pain and then died as all victims of razorworm do, vomiting up liquified organs and hundreds of razorworm eggs—stark white pearls in a soup of blood.

Olive tried to forget all these thoughts and focus on where she was now. The tickle in her chest had turned to a burning. She was surely close to a fracture line now and—and then she felt her body snap into it, like a runaway marble dropping into a gutter. She could break away if she wanted but she let it carry her for now.

“Did you find a fracture?” Bullseye asked.

“I’m following it now,” Olive replied.

“Good! Good!” Grubb cut in. “Double credits toward your debt if you find me flowers!”

A sudden burst of energy lit up her tenna and Olive knew right away one of the rats was in trouble.

Sareh?

Ruki?

Denos.

His voice, strained and panicked, overwhelmed the hub. He was caught in a fracture line that had twisted back on itself. It was simultaneously squeezing and pulling him apart in at least four dimensions. Bullseye turned and jetted off to Den’s location. Olive knew there was little chance of extracting him. Not whole. Even if the shatter spun him out like so much spaghetti, she knew Bullseye only wanted to recover his augments and any scavenge he had on him.

Olive decided to play it safe and pulled herself out of the fracture. If it took Den by surprise, it could take her. She tried her best to ignore the screams. She had a job to do and debt to pay and she couldn’t run off to rescue rats that should know better than to get themselves caught in the shatter.

And anyway, Olive was glad to have Bullseye off her back for the moment. It might give her a chance to collect a few things for herself. It wasn’t right, and she felt a pang of guilt just thinking about it—but it was all part of the game, she told herself. What did it matter as long as she was ultimately paying her debt? The scavenge didn’t belong to anyone yet, so technically it wasn’t stealing. Still, she banished those thoughts, afraid if nothing else they might leak into the hub.

She slipped between long strands of melted alloy fiber, stretched to spider-web thinness where the ship had been pulled apart and twisted in the collision. The shatter was unbelievably strong here. Fractures running in all directions. She followed the strongest line along the bulkhead, through what looked like a training room, and into a mess hall.

As soon as she turned the corner she saw them, shimmering along the dimensional fault lines—three perfect flowers.

They hung in space, vibrating and glimmering and shifting and phasing. They throbbed with an energy no one understood. Olive drew closer and tried to keep her head clear. She couldn’t shut off her tenna or disengage from the hub, so she had to distract herself as much as she could. She tried to think of a song. One from the camps, perhaps. A song about a hero who paid off his debts and went on to live a life of continued personal responsibility and reward.

She drew close to the flowers. They never failed to mesmerize her. Each as unique as a snowflake, each an intricate fractal dance of congealed interdimensional energy perpetually expanding and folding in on itself. Each an expression of the vast unknown and unknowable. They sprung like tiny beads of blood along a scrape—other universes literally bleeding into ours. The flower-like structures were the only way our universe could contain the energy leak, make sense of it. From chaos, beauty.

Men like Grubb were determined to use them for their own purposes.

Olive didn’t pretend to understand how, but she knew the flowers were used to power the engines of the ships of empires and to power the very weapons that broke the universe. The flowers were cultivated by destruction. Around in a circle it went—weapons and engines ripping open the universe, the universe bleeding more flowers into the world, which in their use widened the shatter until the whole universe split open. Even after the empires fought themselves to extinction, the shatter continued to grow and the flowers continued to sprout like mushrooms upon graves.

Olive gently cupped her hands around the first flower, felt it vibrate in her hands, through her hands. Many had attempted to use mechanical means to harvest flowers, but the flowers were delicate and temperamental. They responded to a living touch in a way that a drone could not hope to reproduce. Still, it took practice. And DragonSkin. Trying to fumble with a flower in a pressure suit was a sure way to collapse a flower. And when they collapsed the results were . . . unpredictable.

With barely the whisper of an impulse, Olive drifted backward, and the flower came with her, pulsing still as if it believed it were attached to the fracture even though it was now cupped in her hands. She transferred it into a shielded pod she kept in her backpack.

That’s one.

The second came even easier.

Without Bullseye breathing down her neck, she wondered if it was possible to secret away a flower for herself, perhaps to sell or—

Pain sliced up her arm.

She cried out, or rather, she tried but couldn’t, being sealed in her DragonSkin. Instead, she screamed into the hub.

A pulse coursed around the crystalline shell of her DragonSkin. It was designed to absorb and redirect energy. Her body tingled and jittered and then a flash of excess power vented in a glowing plasma around her.

Her arm still hurt, which meant it was still attached, so she tried to be grateful for the pain. She pulled her arm close. She had gotten sloppy and her arm had been pulled deep into the shatter. Simple fault lines were harmless, but in certain places—particularly close to a nexus—they could be twisted and folded over many times, as no doubt Den had found out earlier. She had heard of one rat whose whole body had been turned neatly inside out. No ripping or tearing of flesh. Everything inside has just been folded outside in a blink.

She didn’t want to imagine what was happening to Den. His bright white smile flashed in her mind and she deliberately shrank the image, squeezed it smaller and smaller until it was a tiny pinprick. Inconsequential. Den was probably dying in pain but what does a pinprick matter in the vast empty?

Olive inspected her arm. The pain faded. The DragonSkin had done its job. Her arm would be fine. But it was a reminder for her not to let her mind wander when she should be concentrating.

She turned back to find the third flower gone. Vanished. Its energy absorbed back into the shatter. Or exploded back into it—she didn’t really know what happened on the other side. Or sides.

Was Grubb expecting three flowers? Did he know?

Another strong fault led Olive down through a hole that had burned through three levels. She was sure to find another flower.

Olive came upon a chamber which was completely dark. Her DragonSkin throbbed. It was constantly absorbing and dispersing a low-level energy, which meant it probably wasn’t safe here for an extended time. She planned to make a quick inspection, mark the area as clear, and get out.

Olive drifted to the center of the room and released a handful of glimmer stones. They spread out and blazed like tiny stars.

She wasn’t prepared for what she saw.

Not a flower.

A full suit of battle armor.

It appeared to be caught in the shatter. Space was bending and distorting around it. It hurt her eyes to look at it. The suit was cycling energy and leaking a bit into the empty. It must have been what her DragonSkin was sensing—some sort of radiation leak.

The battle suit was a gargantuan exoskeleton. An armored warrior could step inside and pilot it—basically a tank that wrapped around the body. It was old tech but in pristine condition, preserved by the shatter in relativistic time. The gunmetal-green armor was slick, shiny, and faceted like a dark jewel. Olive guessed it was to better deflect energy weapons and to make it harder for sensors to get a reading. As far as she could tell, it had never seen battle. It must have been jarred loose from wherever it was stored and got hung up in the fracture during the battle.

For one crazy moment, Olive contemplated keeping the battle suit for herself. But it was far was too big and impractical to take with her. The thought of somehow sneaking it past Grubb or Bullseye was absurd. It was a shame because the shatter had perfectly masked the suit’s existence—no one had gotten a reading on it. She was the only one who knew.

Perhaps she could seal off the chamber and leave it to come back to at some future date. Some far future when she had her own salvage ship, maybe even the Seeker, having taken over from Grubb after years of loyal service. She could return here and claim her bounty.

But what use would it be then? And surely someone else would have discovered it in that time. Maybe it was best to shove it into a far-flung orbit around Morgana. Only Olive would know its exact trajectory.

Then it occurred to Olive she was thinking about this all wrong. She had a battle suit. She could well use it herself. She didn’t have to hide it or set it adrift, she could use the thing to escape. Wherever she wound up, she’d sell the suit, pay off her debts, start her new life. She saw herself, older, stronger, face weathered and toughened by time, pulling a cart with the battlesuit through a market in a bustling city. She would trade it for a stall next to the spice market. She would sell roast eel to travelers from hundreds of faraway worlds, and every day she would breathe in velvety spice-scented air.

There had to be a way to open the armor. Olive inspected the markings on the battlesuit. Upper pectoral. Recessed handle. It was probably imprinted with the biometrics of whatever soldier belonged to the suit, but her DragonSkin might be able to emulate them. Olive wasn’t weaponized—no junker would be foolish enough to arm a rat—but she had some rudimentary hacking mods built-in. They made it easier to get into places that were not meant to be gotten into. The rewards were enough to outweigh the risks for Grubb, anyway.

She reached for the handle. The shatter pushed back. She adjusted, pushed through, and grabbed on to the—

White light exploded in her head. The room spun. Something hard collided with the back of her neck. Olive blinked back the pain. She regained her senses and swallowed her urge to panic. What just happened? Where was she?

It came to her in an instant. She got blasted back by the battlesuit’s defenses. Olive shook off her disorientation, gave silent thanks again to her DragonSkin, and swam back as close as she dared get to the battlesuit. Why were the defenses active? Was someone in there?

The suit’s face was nearly solid alloy with one dark horizontal stripe of dark glass across the eyes. She flung a glimmer stone at the battlesuit’s head. Before it pinged off, it shone a bright light directly into the glass, but it was still too dark for Olive to see anything.

No matter. Whoever was in there, if anyone was in there at all, was probably dead after all this time. The suit didn’t know better. It knew it had a passenger but wasn’t smart enough to know it was a corpse. And if the soldier were somehow alive, too bad. The suit was hers. He’d had it long enough. She’d be doing him a favor anyway by ejecting him. Otherwise, he’d just be stuck forever.

Olive tuned her tenna toward the battlesuit and started searching for access. Some port, some function, some flaw she could exploit. At the same time, she began feeding it energy from her DragonSkin. She didn’t have a lot to spare but the suit would need enough power to deactivate the locks and eject its pilot, and who knew what it had left after that defensive blast.

Something clicked—maybe a way in. The suit had been cycling through a self-test when it got caught in the shatter. It left a port open. She knew what to do—convince the battlesuit it failed its self-test which would it to active the failsafe and eject the soldier. Then it would default to maintenance mode and she’d have free access, physically and digitally.

It would just take a moment to recall the right protocols for the old tech. She had an extensive database stored in a local memory facet. Another wonderful augment courtesy of Grubb.

“Look at that tech, it’s magnificent!” Grubb said.

His voice was loud and sudden and startled her. Though of course, he wasn’t actually in the room. Olive turned. Bullseye had found her. Grubb’s big fat head was being projected through Bullseye’s round, glassy face. It was monstrous.

“What a lovely, lovely find, my girl! You see, you see, you find and you pay your debts, you work hard and this is a reward,” Grubb said. He laughed, a wet, hacking chortle.

“Now bring my prize! And don’t set off any alarms—we don’t want to attract attention out here, do we?” Grubb’s face flicked off, leaving a ghostly afterimage slowly decaying in the dark.

No, Olive agreed, we don’t want to attract attention. The last thing she needed was to get caught in a battle between Grubb and the local Warlord. Or imperial remnant. Or rival junker. Or all the above. Grubb was mostly good at avoiding such trouble. Olive was certain he was not above abandoning her if it came down to it.

Bullseye hung in space, expressionless. It floated between Olive and the exit. She cast to Bullseye’s private channel.

“It’s not so easy as Grubb thinks, Bullseye. The suit is caught in the shatter. It’s going to take some work to extract it. I don’t even know if I can,” she said.

She didn’t know what she was expecting in response, but it was doubtful Bullseye would just go and leave her to it.

She was about to try a different tack when the low-level energy she was feeding the battlesuit abruptly cut off. Before she could turn, she felt a sudden burn and her DragonSkin shifted nearly all its hardness to one focused spot on her shoulder blade in a fraction of a second.

It was protecting her from weapons fire. Barely.

The soldier inside the battlesuit was alive.

Olive barely had time to register that the suit had ejected him when the soldier pivoted over her head and aimed his weapon right at her face.

Her DragonSkin constricted, twisting her body involuntarily out of harm’s way. It wrenched her back, but whatever pain she felt—and it was a lot—was better than taking another blast from the soldier’s weapon, this time in the face.

Bullseye unfolded its squat body, transforming to something spiderlike and terrifying. It wrapped itself around the soldier and bent his weapon arm toward a harmless corner of the chamber.

In this instant, time slowed for Olive. A glimmer stone drifted in front of the soldier and illuminated his faceplate. She could clearly see him for the first time.

He was a boy, not more than fourteen. Maybe younger. His eyes were wide and black as space. His skin a warm, earthy color that reminded her of Attie. The intense light of the glimmer stone revealed a spray of large freckles concentrated on his nose and spreading out over his cheeks. His rusty brown hair was close-cropped on the sides and a messy, curly tangle on top. He wasn’t like any boy she had ever seen.

He didn’t have DragonSkin, but his pressure suit was sleek and form-fitting. His helmet bore a designation—J4KK. She didn’t know exactly what it meant, but to her the boy was now Jakk.

And Bullseye had him in a death grip.

Jakk rotated his body up—a dozen small thrusters on his pressure suit working in unison. Olive lunged forward. She knew her DragonSkin was about to blow off the excess energy she absorbed from Jakk’s weapon. She grabbed on to Bullseye’s head and wrapped herself around it. Her timing couldn’t have been better.

Womp! The blast took Bullseye’s head clean off. The rest of its body spun away into the dark.

Jakk fled for a hole in the wall. A service tube or just some infrastructure exposed in the ship’s destruction, Olive didn’t know. She aimed herself in his direction and followed. Having a scanning eye was helpful for scavenging. It was also helpful for following child soldiers ejected from their battlesuit. He barely gave off a heat signature, though. If the ship hadn’t been exposed to the cold of space for so long she doubted she would have been able to pick out his trail.

Something sharp grabbed her ankle and climbed over her back. The force of it slammed her down into the floor of the tube. If she had been breathing instead of receiving O2 from her augmented lung, she would have had the breath knocked out of her.

She caught the barest glimpse of a headless Bullseye as it spidered down the tube after Jakk.

She pushed herself up just as a plasma beam sliced down the tunnel and neatly severed one of Bullseye’s appendages. Bullseye bounced angrily off the walls of the tube, righted itself, and kept going until it disappeared into darkness. Olive was grateful she hadn’t risen sooner or she would have caught the full blast of the beam. She knew her DragonSkin couldn’t take another hit. In fact, she was quickly reaching her limit. If she didn’t get back to atmosphere soon, the DragonSkin would start to degenerate. Weak spots would open and then the vacuum of space would skin her alive.

Grubb’s voice raged over the hub.

“Grab that soldier, Bullseye. He’s worth ten of you!”

Olive knew Grubb didn’t mean the boy himself. Second-hand augments were worth an obscene amount on the grey market. The rest of the boy, the real boy, was just meat.

She had one glimmer stone left. She flicked it down the passage. It illuminated the tunnel in a ring of light as it sailed away from her. The light grew dimmer and then suddenly bounced around erratically—it was a junction.

Olive pulled herself down the tunnel and quickly surveyed the open mouths of the three tunnels that lead away from the junction. She could still sense the faint dissipating trail of Jakk’s heat signature. Directly ahead. Hopefully, Bullseye chose a different path.

It was a tight squeeze and Olive realized how narrow Jakk’s shoulders must be. The tube widened and suddenly she was in a large chamber that had been ripped open, exposing one side to the cold empty. The ice moon loomed large, framed by tattered edges of the bulkhead. Its hard, pale light spilled into the chamber and edged in silver the silhouettes of a dozen dead and naked boys. They were scattered and suspended in space, curled like fetuses in a giant metal womb. The boys’ silhouettes were cut-outs against the stark light of the moon—holes where a boy once was, where a boy still should be. The barracks must have been destroyed before any of them could suit up. Grubb would wet himself at the potential bounty of augments to be harvested here. Olive felt a hot blush of shame prick her cheeks that such a thing would even occur to her.

Jakk floated in the center among the corpses. Olive couldn’t see his face, but his body language told her he was stunned. She realized he hadn’t known this was how his brothers had met their fate—he must have been locked in the battlesuit when they all died. His shock was such it must have overwhelmed his training—he didn’t sense her coming. Or if he did, he no longer cared.

Olive focused her tenna. She had cracked the battlesuit, surely she could find an open channel to Jakk. She didn’t know if or how he would react and had no time for lengthy explanations. There must be a code for friendlies so boys in battlesuits don’t blow each other up in a fight. She searched the database but didn’t turn anything up.

She found something that might be an opening and cast one word on a loop: friendly.

Jakk spun, aimed a weapon. It looked like a slicer. The barrel ended in a vertical slit, taller than the rest of the gun. It was a messy weapon you could practically cut a small ship in half with, or sweep a room and sear the flesh off your enemies. Jakk must have had multiple weapons on him because she was sure this wasn’t what hit her in the shoulder. The slicer would have cleaved her arm right off, DragonSkin or no.

After a moment, Olive noticed she wasn’t dead or burned or sliced in half. Jakk was holding his fire. Her tenna finally clicked through to an open channel. Jakk was letting her in. How much could she explain and how quickly?

“Did you do this?” Jakk asked.

“Your friends died a long time ago. I think you would have died too, but—”

“Where’s the commander? I have to report.”

Olive drifted closer by slow inches. She tried to be as calm and unthreatening as she knew how, but the thought that Bullseye would find them, perhaps in a matter of minutes, was a balloon of panic swelling inside her.

“You got caught in the shatter,” Olive explained. “Look, we can’t be here, it’s not safe.”

Jakk looked at her blankly. He was calculating something. Perhaps an order tree.

“I have to get to the skiff and get back to base.”

“War’s over. You don’t have to do anything. Everyone lost and the universe is broken.”

Olive was nearly in arm’s reach now. The slicer was still trained on her. On its highest setting, it would divide her cleanly from head to crotch.

“You were stuck,” she said. “For who knows how long. You don’t owe anyone anything now. Jakk, please don’t kill me.”

“Who’s Jakk?” Jakk asked.

“It says on your helmet.”

“They all say that. Are you—are you an angel? Your skin is like a diamond.” He reached out momentarily to touch it, but of course he couldn’t, not through his pressure suit.

Olive didn’t know what to say. She wanted his cooperation. And she wanted to not be sliced in half. And maybe it was the only way he could understand. He’d gotten suspended in time long before there was DragonSkin. She just never expected, even at her silliest, that one day a boy would mistake her for an angel. Even now she felt absurd pondering it.

“Are you here to take me to the golden fields?” Jakk asked.

“I can take you somewhere safe,” Olive said.

Jakk lowered the gun.

Something hard and angled slammed into the small of Olive’s back. Bits of crystalline DragonSkin sheered away. The spot on her back felt brittle now, less flexible. She imagined could even hear it grinding against itself, like the sound of sand in her teeth.

Olive pitched forward and crashed into Jakk. They spun together end over end. Instinctively they twined their legs together to keep from flying apart. Jakk felt solid, much more solid than she imagined. It was oddly comforting.

Jakk shifted and twisted under her. The slicer came up and over her shoulder. She felt the intense heat of its blast like the hot kiss of a rising sun on her neck. Olive and Jakk continued to tumble and as the room spun back around Olive could see the crab-like shadow of Bullseye, now two half-Bullseye’s, trying to orient itself. Themselves. The edge where the slicer had split was still white-hot. They probably weren’t expecting to be cut in half. Good.

“Did you say something about a skiff, Jakk?”

“Other end of the ship.”

“I know a shortcut,” Olive said, and turned them toward the open bulkhead. She willed her DragonSkin to impel them onward, and she felt Jakk’s thrusters puffing and venting to give them a boost. They clung together and spun headward and she imagined this was what people felt like when they danced together.

She dared to look in Jakk’s helmet shield. His eyes were trained toward the stars, and the moon’s bright reflection masked most of his face. He was intensely focused. Determined. Olive felt a peculiar admiration.

They brushed the ragged edge of the bulkhead and Olive felt a sudden, crushing tightness around her calf. She thought at first she was caught in debris, but then Bullseye’s metal arms wrapped around her arms and chest and she saw the other Bullseye climb up Jakk’s back and snake an appendage around his neck.

Grubb’s voice buzzed over her tenna. “Olive my sweet, what is it you are doing? My poor Bullseye is a wreck, I can’t make heads or tails of this damage report and where even is his head?”

She tried to block him, but of course, you can’t block Grubb. He owned her tenna after all.

Bullseye wrenched the slicer out of Jakk’s hand and tucked it inside of him somewhere. Well there’s one item Grubb managed to score off of Jakk. Olive was determined it would be the last.

Bullseye tightened its grip around Jakk’s neck, clamping down on his pressure suit. Another arm wrapped around his faceplate. She couldn’t hear the grinding crunch of Jakk’s helmet under Bullseye’s metal arm of course, but she imagined he could. She reached out to grab—something, anything, a wire, a hydraulic line—to stop Bullseye, but she immediately felt her own arm wrenched around her back.

“Such a shame, such a shame,” Grubb said, “you were a good fit for those augments and now I have to find someone else. I knew one day you would break my heart, little girl.” Grubb blew his nose.

Olive and Jakk’s eyes met. They were going to die together. That was something at least.

The increase in pressure stopped. Bullseye froze and a small red light flickered deep inside his mechanics. He was getting an emergency signal.

The arms retracted and Bullseye pulled his two halves together as best he could and he jetted away as fast as his thrusters would push him. For a fraction of a second, Olive felt indignant that a broken old bot would be called to safety and she would be left to die.

Olive and Jakk, arms free, grasped each other again.

“What happened?” Jakk asked.

Before she could answer, intense violet radiation sliced through the vacuum of space, following along a fracture a few hundred meters above their heads. It slammed into a spiky knot of spacetime, a nexus where fault lines converged. The shatter was being energized and that much energy pouring into it meant only one thing—the only thing that would make Grubb dump his rats and run.

The Bartok Warlord ship Skineater slammed into local space. Two smaller ships followed in quick succession. Olive didn’t recognize them but they looked like they belonged with the Skineater.

Grubb had no desire to tangle with warlords. His own skin was much too precious. She knew he hated to give up a haul, but you can’t enjoy your hoard if you’re dead.

Another hot blast of radiation and a ship from the Imperial remnant appeared directly opposite the Skineater. Olive and Jakk were literally caught in the middle.

Grubb chimed in. The audio was slightly garbled. She had no doubt that he was preparing to run.

“I leave you a gift, my dear,” Grubb said. “For you and your friend. Neither of you will suffer, it is a promise. Goodbye, little one.”

Panic exploded inside her. She felt helpless, angry. She had heard that Grubb and his kind implanted self-destruct devices in their rats. Partly from spite to keep their gear from falling into the hands of a rival, and partly to silence potential witnesses. Was it possible to deactivate it? Was it located somewhere she could rip out? An absurd thought—even if it was, her DragonSkin would keep it locked in. She had perhaps seconds left.

Something pulsed up and down her tenna. The destruct signal?

“Stay calm, I’m blocking his transmission,” Jakk said. “Looking for open access, just hang in there.” His dark eyes were fierce, determined.

Olive tried to calm herself. She tried to disable whatever blocks and defenses there might be so Jakk could hack his way in.

Something raced through her nervous system. A shadow creature with many tentacles crawled through her head. It felt weird—she wanted it gone.

“Don’t push me away,” Jakk said.

Vaguely Olive wondered if this ruined the idea for Jakk that she was some sort of angel, but she realized she didn’t care. No one besides Attie had ever really helped her before. It meant everything to have a friend again. She had saved Jakk and Jakk was saving her.

“Hold on—there!” Jakk said.

“That’s it?” Olive asked.

“That’s it. You’re disarmed,” he said.

“I don’t feel different.”

Jakk smirked. “Are you sure?”

Of course she felt different. She would never be the same.

“Nobody can hack like that,” Olive said. “Even I couldn’t have done that.”

“Disabling autodestruct is the first thing I did to myself before I stole the battle suit,” Jakk said. “If I knew, I would have done yours sooner. Sorry.”

“Anything short of death is survivable,” Olive said, and smiled because she thought of Attie.

Six marauders in heavy battlesuits emerged from the Skineater. They were coming right at them, fast.

“Jakk—”

“Got ‘em on sensors, six on my six. There’s more coming.”

Jakk spun them around and Olive could see the imperial ship, dark as volcanic glass, cutting a notch in the brilliant disc of the moon. A dozen small dots swirled away from the ship and towards them like angry hornets.

“Drones,” Jakk said. “We’re outgunned.”

She felt him try to pull away, but she held tight. “We’re safer together.”

“They don’t care about you, they’re after me.”

“Hey, I’m worth plenty.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Shut it and fly us toward that fracture.” Olive nodded her head toward the fading crackle of violet energy high above them.

Bullseye had taken his slicer, but Jakk still had his blaster. He grabbed it and starting firing at something behind her.

“They’re too heavily shielded,” Jakk shouted.

“What is? What’s too heavily—?”

Jakk’s thrusters spun them around again and Olive saw something silver and pointed and fast flashing through the black.

“Jakk turn around, let me take the hit!”

The impact was sharp and brutal. She heard Jakk’s breath escape in one explosive cough. They tumbled head over heel toward the imperial ship.

“Jakk? Jakk!” He wasn’t responding.

A dozen drones blasted past her and opened fire on the raiders. Olive knew they were only protecting their claim. She and Jakk were still in danger from whoever won the firefight.

“Thrusters on, Jakk!” Olive commanded. “I can’t stop our tumble by myself—I don’t have enough power. Thrusters now!”

Jakk murmured. His thrusters fired. Tiny little puffs. They stopped spinning. Olive reoriented them and they started toward the fracture again.

“Next. We’re next. Target.” Jakk’s words were slurry. He was hurt. Olive didn’t want to think how badly.

“We’re not sticking around. Give me your blaster.”

“Locked. Biosig.”

Olive reached behind her, into her pack, and pulled out the shielded sphere containing the flower.

“Then you’ll have to trust me.”

A few clicks away, the drones were carving up the battle suits. The smaller skiffs maneuvered into position to fire on them. The battle would last a minute longer, if that.

Olive flicked the sphere and the two halves spun away from each other, leaving the flower exposed, floating beside them.

“Pretty,” Jakk said.

“The ancients used it to travel far and fast. It’s got enough punch to rip a hole in spacetime.”

She grasped the flower and for a moment she was struck by the lovely intricate folds of reality. It was pretty, but it was the power it held within that made it beautiful.

She felt them fall into the undertow of the fracture—a wagon wheel sliding into an ancient rut in a stone road. They picked up speed.

“Where?” was all Jakk had breath to say.

“Away. Somewhere better,” Olive said.

“Golden fields,” Jakk said.

“Maybe so.”

Olive placed the flower between them and held it there with a hug.

“Energize it, Jakk. One shot. Full power. Make it count.”

Jakk gripped his blaster but his arm seemed to drift. Olive brought his arm in and pointed the blaster to the flower between them. In a flash, the world would be gone. She had paid her debt when Grubb had tried to blow her up. She had other debts to honor now—the friendship of Attie, the other rats like her who suffered and never had a chance to escape, the boy in her arms.

She felt the roiling heat of the shatter now. Any moment they would be crushed.

“I don’t really know what will happen,” Olive confessed.

“Anything short of death is survivable,” Jakk said, and Olive laughed, and he pulled the trigger.

The shatter embraced them.

©2021 by David Anaxagoras.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Anaxagoras is the creator and co-executive producer of Amazon Prime Video’s Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street. His episode “Gortimer vs. the Relentless Rainbow of Joy” earned him a WGA Award nomination. He also wrote for Netflix’s animated action-adventure series, Glitch Techs. He holds an MFA in screenwriting from UCLA. David grew up in southern California but recently relocated to Texas where he’s currently working on his novel. Find him on Twitter @davidanaxagoras or visit his website at davidanaxagoras.com

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

Now You See Me

Justin C. Key | 10424 words

Good art changes you. And that was the point, right? That’s what the social media ad that caught my attention wanted me to believe: Our Shoes: You couldn’t understand our struggle . . . Until now. I had read the line over and over again during a rare downtime in the on-call room and was still mesmerized by it when Danny messaged our Allies 4 Life group. I got three tix to that new BLM exhibit in Brooklyn. Who’s rolling?

As the timely one of our little group, I had the privilege of holding our place in a line that almost circled the block. I looked around; I was the only white person. A young obstetrician in East Harlem, I was no stranger to black spaces. My patients were black, my nurses were black, and I had gathered more than a few black friends through college, medical school, and mutual gatherings. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder what they thought of me, the quiet white woman in line for an exhibit about them.

Finally, I saw Pam and Danny at the edge of the parking lot. I rose up on my tiptoes and waved them over as if signaling a lifeboat searching a wreckage. I rocked back on my heels and tried not to cringe at the sight of Danny’s BLM shirt. She’d always been extra with her allyship, especially considering she had come late in the game. I sometimes remembered the things she’d said in high school, the jokes she had made, and wondered if they stayed in the back of her mind or if she had shut out that side of herself completely.

“Wow, this is quite a crowd,” Danny said. She made a point to flash a big grin to the group adjacent to us. “A beautiful day, beautiful people. I can’t wait. It’s going to be fucking awesome.”

“I hear it’s hard to stomach,” Pam said. She rubbed her pregnant belly as we rounded the last corner. The line seemed to move quicker now that I wasn’t alone. We’d likely be on the tail end of the next batch.

“That means it’s powerful,” Danny said. She leaned back into us and took a selfie with the art exhibit sign in the background. “We need something every once and a while to shake us up, you know? Speaking of . . .”

Danny pulled a dark blue newborn shirt from her fanny pack and leaned down to coo at Pam’s belly. “Godmommy got you something special. I can’t wait to meet you, little one.”

Pam unfolded the shirt, laughed, and held it up.

“‘I fuck with godmom?’” I read. “Really, Danny?”

“Damn right. We have to show her love. With Pam as a mom, me as godmother, and you delivering, that’s the dream team right there.”

“Don’t jinx it,” Pam said. “She could come at any time, on any shift.”

“I’ll be there,” I said. I had arranged my month’s schedule to be exclusively labor and delivery for the weeks surrounding Pam’s due date. Even if she did deliver overnight or on one of my mandated off days, as chief resident I could easily make sure I was there without anyone making a fuss about duty hour violations.

“Shit,” Danny said. “‘No food, no drinks’ type scene. I have to finish this. Want some?”

Danny pulled out a half-eaten chocolate bar with tattered wrapping and broke me off a piece. The chocolate had an earthy taste to it that I couldn’t quite place.

“Spread the love,” Pam said.

“Here, have mine.” Danny slapped my offering hand.

“No THC for my godchild. You should know better, doc.”

I spit out the chocolate. Danny was already laughing. “Weed? You gave me weed?”

“THC.”

“Are you fucking kidding me? What if they drug test me?”

“Why in the world would they test you? Little Miss Perfect, Chief Resident no less. Live a little.”

I wiped my tongue with my shirt. I hadn’t swallowed. A little would be absorbed under my tongue. A minuscule amount. Still. “What if I’m working tonight?”

“Are you?”

“That’s not the point. You have to tell someone before you give them weed—THC, whatever. What if Pam went into labor and I was stoned?”

“Good point,” Pam said.

“All right, all right,” Danny said. “More for me.”

After a brief check of our bags, we entered a dark, cramped space. In front of me, Danny’s excited light dimmed to a silhouette. My breath whistled as heat rose through my neck and settled around my eyes and ears. I slowed just enough to let Pam lean into me. I could almost feel her vibrate in pace with her racing heart; she sought the same comfort.

“It’s like the underground railroad,” Danny threw back in a whisper.

“Not funny,” Pam said.

“No, she’s right,” I said. Perhaps that was the artist’s intention. A lack of control in the darkness of America. Probably bullshit, but I needed to hang my hat on something to keep me from turning around and pushing through the too-quiet line until I found sunlight. In the hospital, I was in charge. Even when the patients crashed I knew my role and that of everyone else. Here, there was only darkness and a quiet chaos. An uncertainty without form.

The corridor ended. We suddenly had space and room to breathe. My heart eased itself back down my throat but still sat high and loud in my chest. Darkness continued to cling to the air even as pockets of art illuminated the distant walls around the room. I could hear the other visitors milling about but, besides the shadows passing in front of the exhibits, could see no more than an arm’s reach in front of me.

“Pam? Danny?” Where had they gone? I felt silly calling for them. I wandered toward the light of one of the pieces and soon found myself leaning into the art. A vibrant and colorful restaurant, its patrons in the middle of good conversation and good food. Hanging in someone’s home—Danny’s parent’s, perhaps—I wouldn’t have given it another look. Here? Yes; white. All of them. I searched the less-defined features of the waitstaff. Also white. Next, I searched for meaning. I was missing something.

I moved on, unsatisfied. The next were similar. A packed subway train. A board meeting. A garbage truck making its rounds on a residential street with overlapping trees shedding autumn leaves. All white, from the kids running in the grass to the men collecting trash.

Reading the reviews, I’d expected something like the African-American history museum in DC, which I’d been to twice. A walk through the perils of the slave trade, the civil war, and Jim Crow as a reminder of history’s dark side. Here, there was none of that. The paintings were all modern. How they would help me understand “the struggle” was beyond me.

A bit of light caught Pam’s pregnant figure. Her frozen expression blunted any relief I felt as I walked over. She was either on the verge of tears or a scream, paused so perfectly between the two that she could have been part of the exhibit. She cradled her swollen belly. I followed her gaze, felt my mouth part, and just barely stopped myself from collapsing into her.

What the fuck was this?

I’d seen worse in my training. I’d handed a healthy, crying baby to his mother’s arms for the first time a few hours before passing another pale and near lifeless one to the pediatric ICU team on stand-by. Though when documenting later that night I entered the same measurement for both—seven pounds—the perceived weight of life wasn’t lost on me. The dying newborn was simultaneously lighter and harder to bear than anything I’d ever held. I’d rolled a screaming mother from the emergency to the operating room to find that her uterus had slowly necrosed and died after an otherwise routine c-section just a few days before. I’d informed families who had come to celebrate new life that instead they’d now have to plan a funeral. My heart had grown hard enough to do the job.

Still . . . what the fuck was this? I didn’t know. Not at first. The scene was relatively routine. The laboring mother. The monitors. The hospital staff. All familiar. And yet . . . Was it the mother’s distress? Young and black, her mottled hospital gown tipped with sweat and the slightest hint of blood, her belly rose like a stone, indicating the painful contractions of active labor. No, I had seen that face as well, in all shades and colors. I frantically searched the scene for some blatant horror and the source of whatever fingers wrapped around my lungs. If I didn’t find it, it might undo me—

And then, I saw. It wasn’t the mother, or the surgical kit open and ready for an inevitable emergency C-section. It was the response of the medical team. The doctors looked on with something that wasn’t quite amusement, but it wasn’t concern, either. They could have been the waiter taking an order or the trash collector signaling the driver to move to the next block.

“They don’t care,” Pam said. And they didn’t. One watched the fetal heart monitor like one might watch the pump at a gas station. Another leaned against the doorway, drinking a coffee and checking his phone. I blinked; the doctor checking his watch must have been my imagination.

“Come on,” I said. “This is too much.”

“No,” she said. “I need to see this.”

The sisterly thing to do would have been to nod and stand by her. But it was too much. That wasn’t how things were. The hospital was a place of healing, heroics, and miracles. In that painting was a place of indifference and silent contempt. I moved away; Pam didn’t notice me go.

I found Danny with her arms crossed over her chest and shoulders hunched as if taken by a chill. She had a serious, somber look I hadn’t seen on her since her father’s funeral that first year out of college. The piece was of a young slave woman fleeing across a field, her masters in hot pursuit. My eyes drunkenly rolled over the canvas. I focused on the center for stability, where two German shepherds snarled and tugged on their chains. Wait—I’d had a German shepherd growing up; they were relatively modern breeds, only a century or so old. I stepped back. The woman wasn’t a slave at all. How could I have thought so, with her tight-fitting jeans, neatly braided hair, cell phone in hand, and brown hoodie ripped at the sleeves? She was running from two police officers, obvious in their blue uniforms.

“She’s been running for a while,” Danny said. “See?” And I did.

I moved away, and as soon as I did the memory of the painting was hazy and incomplete. Had she been a slave? Were the dogs dated hounds or modern breeds? Whispers from the other people in the display room rose from the quiet ashes. The shuffle of feet, the soft wheeze of someone who likely had untreated asthma, they all told me I wasn’t alone even if I felt as such. Only the art accompanied me.

I wouldn’t say that the painting caught my eye as much that it caught me. There was nothing particularly special or remarkable about it. An empty city street, the cars, and buildings exaggerated in their cartoon appearance. The grit of the city lay in contrast to the golden sunset sky that showed between the gaps in the skyline.

I don’t know how long I stood there, taking it in. My eyes went to every corner, every mark, as if some clue or insight into the creator’s mind lay about, ripe for the taking. It was there, I just couldn’t see it. It gnawed at me like an absent word on the tip of the tongue. Thoughts of being lost and undecided in medical school flitted by. The lack of purpose, the desire of fulfillment. That was before. I’d worked to establish myself now, to be rigid and proud in my profession. If I could . . . just . . .

A hand on my shoulder. I screamed, stifled it with my fist, and turned to find Pam.

“I’m leaving,” she said.

I began to ask “why” but I knew.

“All right, okay. Let’s find Danny and—”

My hand went to my mouth. I’d sent a glance back that was supposed to be a fleeting thing, but . . . there it was. The purpose. There was a woman in the picture. Not hidden. In fact, the picture was of the woman. She was smack in the middle, standing on the sidewalk beside an intricately painted car. Even as I wondered how the hell I had missed her I found it difficult to see her fully now that she was exposed. My gaze rolled around her like a piece of ice slipping through clumsy fingers. I focused; she came to clarity. Spandex pants, a loose-fitting tee. Skin the color of birch and with the shine of obsidian. Everything was defined. Everything was clear.

Except for her face. Of that, she had none.

• • • •

I found Pam pacing outside the gallery as she spoke into her phone. Her free hand steadily circled her midsection. A natural movement for any expecting mother that I’d come to recognize, in its excess, as a sign of mental distress. But she was okay. A ridiculous thought, but a real one. We’d survived something, even if we wouldn’t be able to say what it was.

“You sure I shouldn’t come in?” Pam said. “It’s been almost two hours and I’ve been moving the whole time.”

“What’s wrong?” I began, but Pam held up a finger and shook her head. I quelled the urge to push further. Despite the ethical and emotional complications, I had essentially become Pam’s ob/gyn. I had counseled and guided her through the initial in vitro fertilization process and had been with her ever since. Her and her baby, they were my responsibility.

“Right, okay. Lots of water. I will, doctor.”

“What’s going on?” I said again once the call was over.

“I haven’t felt her move since before the exhibit,” Pam said. “One of the doctors on call—a man, low voice—said I should drink cold water but I don’t have any water. She’s supposed to be moving, right?”

“She’s probably just a little sleepy,” I said. Behind my smile that I hoped was reassuring, my mind went through all the more serious explanations. “Why didn’t you ask me?”

“I would have. I just couldn’t find you. And you shouldn’t have to work on your day off.” She jumped a little, placed both hands on her belly, and then closed her eyes. “There you are, big girl. You scared momma.”

“I’m never off. Not when it comes to this.”

Pam nodded, though her mind was elsewhere. “Where’s Danny?”

Behind us, the entrance to the exhibit sat cold and bare. The line was gone. No one had emerged after me. Shit. I’d have to go back. Why would Danny do that? Why would she stay in that awful place and make me come after her?

And then my friend walked out of the art exhibit, her face lit in laughter.

“Whoa, what happened?” she said when she saw us. “Baby girl coming?”

“Not today,” Pam said, pocketing her phone. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

• • • •

On the drive back into Brooklyn after leaving Our Shoes, Danny’s need to evoke laughter ran up against our temporary inability to laugh. Her jokes did little to cut through the thick and stifling silence. She even pulled out an old racist one from high school. The irony of her allyship gave it a levity that would have forced guilty laughter any other day. Now, I just felt uneasy.

Thoughts of the faceless woman ate up the last of my reserves. So, when Danny spoke again after a particularly long silence, I took in a sharp breath to yell at her to shut up. But what she said was without humor. Her voice had the same cold quality I had heard back in the exhibit.

“The pictures changed for you guys, too, right?”

Danny’s words sucked all the unclaimed emotion from the car.

Laughter, safer than tears, sparked between the three of us. What we had just witnessed had stirred something we didn’t want to share with ourselves, much less each other. Allies have to laugh every now and then so as not to go crazy.

“That shit was insane,” Danny said. “Damn near thought I’d lost my mind.”

“How do you think they did it?” I said.

“A hologram. Some lighting tricks. Unsettling, huh? My painting, it kept changing. I swore it was a runaway slave at first. And that must be what it was. Then I saw the dogs, and when I looked at her again she wasn’t a slave at all, just a woman running from a mob.”

It wasn’t lost on me that Danny had referred to it as “my painting.”

“I saw one where the woman was invisible, but not invisible, you know?” I said.

“Yes, I know exactly what you mean by that cryptic-ass sentence.”

“It must have been the hologram.” But what about the face?

Danny slapped the steering wheel. “Fucking great. I love great art. My take is it’s supposed to be a metaphor of how things change today? What did you think, Pam?”

I locked eyes with Pam in the rearview. She had laughed, too. The hint of it still lay across her lips. “It was powerful. Just not my cup of tea.”

“What was yours?” When Pam raised her eyebrows, Danny went on. “Come on, I know something spoke to you.”

Whether Pam was going to describe the delivery room scene or tell Danny to “fuck off”, we never knew. Flashing red and blues lit our world and brought back our silence. Danny cursed through the rearview mirror, hit her steering wheel, and cursed again.

“Last thing I need,” she said.

“How fast were you going?” I said.

“The speed limit. They ran my plates at the light.”

“You got expired tags?”

“No! My shit’s up to date.”

The police wouldn’t just run a random person’s plates. There must have been a reason.

Danny put on her blinker and slowly changed lanes, so formally and carefully that it would have been fitting for her to put her arm out, too. Instead of speeding up to pass and apprehend someone more deserving of his energy, the cop fell in line behind us.

Danny continued to curse softly as she pulled the car onto the side of the highway. I touched her shoulder. She started so badly that she hit the horn.

“You got a dead body in the back or something?” I asked. “You look stressed.”

“I’m just . . . my ID, it’s in my purse.” She reached into the back, rummaged through it, and then gripped her license against the wheel. She thrust her cell phone into my hand. “Here, put this away.”

“Your phone?”

“I’m not taking any chances.”

A dead body in the trunk was a joke, to be sure, but other thoughts began to fill the space. Did she have something worse than weed? I knew she dabbled, maybe even sold. These thoughts led to others. Had I seen this car before? It did look new. Stolen? Wild and frightening notions, not only in their absurdity but also in how they manifested in my mind less as fantasy but more of a call to caution. I pushed them aside.

An unsteady glow approached the driver’s side. Danny rolled down her window. I squinted against the officer’s high-powered flashlight. The beacon fully blocked his features.

“Do you know why I stopped you?”

Danny stared straight ahead, hands gripped to the wheel, mouth set. Her undefined angst bled over and into me. Pam mouthed what the fuck? when I looked back at her. I shrugged in response. Danny had been one to find trouble all throughout high school and college. The number of run-ins she’d had with the police was second only to the times she avoided them. If there was anyone I’d want to talk to the police on my behalf, it would be her.

“What seems to be—” I raised my hand against the light as it shifted to me. “What seems to be the problem, Officer?”

The light continued. The officer said nothing. The flashlight’s circle grew in my vision, dream-like. The cop was leaning in.

“Was I speeding?” Danny finally said. The light immediately left me, bobbed, then clicked off. I could see his face now. Young, soft. There was even the hint of a smile.

He looked at Danny for a while, then behind him as if to check where he was, and finally spoke. “Sobriety checks. Just want to make sure everyone is all right.”

Danny’s grip loosened. Her shoulders fell. “We just came from the most sobering place ever. You need me to get out? Take a breathalizer? I could use the fresh air.”

“No need,” he said. “You all have a safe evening.”

• • • •

I slept a deep, dreamless sleep that carried me past my morning alarm and didn’t break until the sun through my window was strong across my face. I checked my phone and almost went back to sleep when my day brain took over.

Shit.

I jumped up, washed my face, and grabbed my phone to summon a rideshare while I got my work bag together. The phone’s facial recognition kept jamming and it had been so long since I used my code that I was almost locked out with my attempts. Finally, I got through, called a nearby car, poured Othelia fresh kitty litter, and double-checked I had everything before stepping out the door.

A red Prius slowed to a crawl halfway up the block. I checked the app; the tags matched. I waved. The driver looked right at me and then away. I groaned and walked forward, already committing to a three-star review. He rolled down the passenger window and leaned over.

I told him my name and gestured with my phone. “Heading to MacArthur Hospital, right?” That and my tone should have been enough to convey that I was in a rush.

The driver frowned and sped away. I stood there, half in the street outside my apartment, and for a moment I didn’t care that I was late. I looked around, suddenly ashamed. Had I done something wrong?

I swiped at my phone to see if there was a glitch on the app or to call another ride, almost threw it into the gutter when it stuttered in recognition error, pocketed it instead and headed down the block to the nearest station. I took the train and used the extra thirty minutes of commuting time to email the clinic and file a complaint to the rideshare company. I was never late.

I entered Building 200 and, as I took the stairs to the fourth floor, went through possible scenarios of what I would say to Dr. Ernst, the hospital’s director of labor and delivery and the attending supervising today’s clinic. In residency there were no excuses, only outcomes. And I was chief because I had some of the best. But my reputation was only as good as the outcome it promised. Being late shouldn’t matter as long as I got the work done.

Why, then, did I feel like an intern that just fucked up on the first day?

I entered MacArthur’s Family Healthcare Clinic through the back and slipped into the resident’s workroom. A second year presented a case to Dr. Ernst on the far side. Neither of them looked up. I hung up my work bag, put on my white coat, and set up at a sleeping computer.

“Pressures are good,” I heard the resident say. I recognized him as a second year. We’d been on labor and delivery a few times together. He emitted a nervous air around the team, like he had something to prove. I got a chance to see his bedside manner, however, and he was surprisingly warm and empathic with his patients. “I put in for a fasting glucose.”

“What’s the main thing you have to watch out for in her, given her age, number of pregnancies, and her last three pressures?” Dr. Ernst said. “This is a ‘read-my-mind’ question, but I want you to read my mind.”

I tapped my finger as the electronic medical health records system loaded. I was used to playing catch-up secondary to a late patient or two. Even if the first three were roomed and waiting already, I could skim their charts for the crucial pieces, order routine labs so the phlebotomist could get started, see them in rapid fashion, and be back on track by lunch.

“Huh,” I said when my schedule loaded. No arrivals yet. What’s more, the day looked thin. I counted; definitely more than a few cancellations. The most I’d ever had, to be sure.

“Lucky me,” I said to myself. I sat back in the soft, borrowed comfort of a salvaged day and stifled a laugh. What a shitshow. I sent a message to Allies 4 Life about it, refreshed the schedule again, and checked who’d be on the floors with me over the next week. The second year’s presentation drifted over. Something about it piqued my interest and tugged with familiarity.

I clicked through a few tabs in the electronic medical records, found the source of my intuition, and sat up fast enough to cause the front of my chair to lift a little.

“That’s my patient,” I said. And it was. I’d delivered her baby three months ago and this was her second postnatal follow-up. I skimmed the notes quickly to see if there was any reason she’d appeared on a schedule other than mine. I didn’t have any missed page alerts. They would have told me she was here, waiting, before shifting her to another resident.

“That’s my patient,” I said again, standing.

The resident slowly stopped; his eyes shifted past our supervisor and onto me.

“Oh,” he said. “Are you sure? I don’t think so.”

“Positive. I delivered her baby right before sign-out and I was there two hours later because I wanted to get everything in. Gestational diabetes, right? G-two, p-one, didn’t want the epidural. Had to observe the baby for hypoglycemia, almost sent him to the PICU.”

The resident frowned. “That’s a lot of our patients.”

I caught myself soon enough to make it look like I was just turning to engage better in the conversation. If the attending wasn’t in the room, I might have said something more. I knew what our patient population was like. Hell, I had taught his “Intro to Harlem” lecture on it more than a year before.

“She’s definitely my patient,” I said instead. I watched the attending out of the corner of my eye without actually shifting my gaze, a skill I’d picked up early in residency. That brief sliver of a second of direct eye contact put all your insecurities out there on the table. “I don’t know how she got off my schedule and onto yours.”

“I’ve already talked to her and put in the orders.”

I nodded and, on my own terms, turned to Dr. Ernst. “I can see her with him. None of my patients are here yet. I’m familiar with her and it can save you some time.”

She waved a hand. “I have to see the patients anyway.”

“If you want to just eyeball her, I can sign the note.”

Dr. Ernst leaned back in her chair to look up at me. Despite our respective roles, I hadn’t the pleasure of seeing firsthand how she gained her infamous reputation amongst the residents in and out of the operating room. I was spared this side of her for the same reason I became chief: I was too good to criticize. She regarded me now as if I was an ever elusive treasure, finally within her reach.

“Are you suggesting I jeopardize my license by committing fraud?”

I hadn’t expected that. Dr. Ernst’s eyes lit in enjoyment; her mouth remained rigid. “Because that’s what it would be, right? Signing something that said I met with and assessed the patient, when I didn’t at all?”

I really had nothing to say. The practice I suggested wasn’t only widespread, it was encouraged. Most of the attendings had private afternoon clinics, wanted to be done as soon as possible, and the autonomy was good for the residents. It was like I’d just gotten a citation for being wet outdoors during a thunderstorm.

“Also, it might be worth considering that the patient requested a different doctor.”

The resident turned his back to me and continued with his report. He recounted a patient history that I had already gathered, the type of history that sticks with you and doesn’t require notes.

I retreated back to my computer and, for the first time since contracting senioritis, hoped for a patient to pop up in my waiting room. I’d never had a patient fire me. I called the front scheduling desk. No one answered. I hung up, tried again, gave up sooner, and went out to the front. Gloria, our long-time patient coordinator, was dealing with a patient’s insurance issue. I stood off to the side, tried to make eye contact, and ended up scrambling in front of her before she could beckon over the next patient in line.

“Name?” she said without looking up.

“Jane Doe.” I quickly saw that someone had already soured Gloria’s day. That wasn’t an easy task. “Has anyone from my schedule showed or cancelled?”

“The app isn’t working?”

“No, or else I wouldn’t be out here.”

Gloria’s key-tapping stopped. She looked at me over her glasses. The other assistant, in the middle of checking in a patient, paused to turn our way as well.

“Sorry,” I said. “Just a bizarre morning. Can you check my schedule? It’s not working in the workroom.” Out of habit, I told her my last name.

“I don’t see any appointments.”

“Is it blocked off? Maybe I made a mistake and today is my vacation or something.”

Gloria frowned, typed. “It doesn’t show up as blocked. Let’s try scheduling a new one. Weird. See?” She turned the screen. “Appointment made, in the system, wait a second, hit refresh and . . . it’s gone.”

“Has that happened—”

The next in line came up beside me; I had to move out of the way. Gloria smiled at her and took down her information. I waited a moment for her to politely pause with the woman and finish with me, saw that she had no intention of this, and doled out a weak “thanks” before returning to the workroom.

Dr. Ernst and the resident were gone, likely out seeing my patient. I dropped behind my computer and woke it from sleep. As it booted, I checked my group messenger. There was a flurry of activity. I scrolled up, thinking it stemmed from my story. But that had gone unnoticed.

Pam: I’m having these strange stomach pains. They’re sharp.

Danny: Sounds like gas.

Pam: Funny. This might be it.

Danny: Isn’t labor supposed to be painful? You can handle it, you’re strong.

“How far along are they?” I typed.

Pam: Thought maybe I should call the hospital.

Danny: How far apart are they?

Pam: Every three minutes or so. But sometimes just a constant pain.

“Any bleeding?”

Danny: They’ll just send you home.

Pam: You think so?

Danny: Def. It’s probably just your nerves. Besides, I might need you to come pick me up. Can’t get in my apartment and my neighbor just called security on me. #kiddingnotkidding

I imagined Danny cursing out her landlord or trying to break into the window and began to type What’d you do to make them do that? I stopped myself and instead sent an emoji with its tongue sticking out. Then I typed, Pam, call me.

“There they are,” I said when I looked up at the screen. The day’s schedule, albeit thin, was as I had seen it before. I habitually reloaded the page.

“What the fuck?”

All the patients were gone. Only they hadn’t simply disappeared. They had loaded with the page and then dissolved just slow enough to leave the impression of a spreading disintegration.

I leaned in close enough to feel the screen’s static hum against my nose. Some of the names were still there, faint and likely illegible to anyone not familiar with them. I shifted the screen with the arrow keys. No, not an artifact burned into the LCD monitor. Each letter faded at its own pace, seeming to ripple as its edges blew away into nothing.

And then, only white.

• • • •

I took the bus home. I dropped my medical bag at the door and called for Othelia. She was usually somewhere close when I arrived. I checked her nook by the couch, the kitty litter, and finally found her dozing on the back windowsill. She opened a feline eye towards me, yawned, and went back to sleep.

“You too, huh?”

I changed out of my clinic clothes, checked to make sure my pager was signed out to the overnight team, and logged into my work email. The last timestamp was from the day before. I checked the internet connection and reloaded. Still nothing. I switched over to social media and began a mindless scroll.

I woke to the vibration of my phone. The day’s emails were finally coming through. This had happened before; some connection problem with the server or my phone. I expected upwards of fifty emails from hospital administrators, program events, and patient inquiries. Except, there was only one. A notification.

I opened it, sat up, and read it over again. Dr. Ernst had filed an incident report against me for poor professionalism and lapse in clinical duties. What’s more, the department requested a drug test. It was my first grievance in my nearly four years of training at MacArthur. And for a chief resident, it was unheard of.

• • • •

I woke a full thirty minutes before my alarm the next morning and immediately reached for my phone. The residency program director hadn’t yet responded to my acknowledgement of the incident report and request to meet. I refreshed my email a few times, checked the Allies 4 Life chat, and stopped myself from going down the social media hole. Today was a hospital day. Twenty-four hours of labor and delivery, no less. For the first time I’d be walking into the hospital with a scarlet I on my back. Being late—being anything other than perfect—wasn’t an option.

I entered the hospital earlier and more anxious than I had in years and considered it a mercy when the busy, serious nature of the work took over. Still, little things that usually left me unfazed stuck. The patient that forgot my name or thought I was the nurse. The junior resident who didn’t inform me of a significant clinical change in one of our patients. The other junior resident who didn’t come grab me when our patient went into active labor. The night-time attending tapping the other residents for a learning case, when I had been right there. The near constant pushback from my team, as if they had all somehow witnessed my previous day’s failure in clinic.

Thankfully, the work kept the speed.

Things quieted as night turned to dawn. After two deliveries and one emergency C-Section after midnight, the floor was finally calm. My hospital checklist was done. No patients were near fully dilated and I had thirty minutes to spare. I went to the resident lounge, poured some coffee, and set a mental reminder to later check the day’s notifications from Allies 4 Life. I’d gotten one email my whole shift informing me of an important package in my mail. Something that needed immediate attention. I saw the small, square package in my cubby, opened it, and almost laughed. I looked around, read the notice that came with the package, and laughed again. Unfuckingbelievable.

The small workroom where we signed out smelled of coffee and pastries. I thought I’d have to wait a few minutes, but the second year from the previous day’s clinic was already here, set up at the work table. I pulled my list from my back pocket.

“I got seven to sign out,” I said. “I suspect all but two should deliver during your shift.”

“Oh, I already looked them up. Straight forward. You don’t need to signout.”

“A good signout is important. I hope the senior residents are teaching you that.”

He sighed with impatience. I didn’t remind him that he was a second year and I was Chief. I could have. As a junior resident I had been reminded of such things for much less. Instead, I took extra time reviewing my patient list. For his benefit and the sake of patient care. Overconfidence—especially in junior residents—scared the shit out of me.

“Her pressures have been good overnight,” I said about the last. This was her third pregnancy. First two she had preeclampsia, one of which ended badly. “I really hope she delivers before change of shift. She’s been here a minute. A trooper, too.”

“Looks like she was a little hypertensive here,” he said. “I already put in for a diuretic.”

I frowned. “That was one occurrence and she was laying on the cuff. If you look at her other reads, they’re all normal. I had the nurse redo it—see, here. Did fine.”

The resident didn’t say anything, only continued to click through her chart.

“You’ll dry her out and put the baby in distress,” I said. I could have let it go. I’d signed out and it was the end of my shift. What the resident chose to do now was between him and the attending.

“Better than letting her get HELLP,” he said.

“She’s not near that. I just told you—”

But he continued to frown at the page with that vital sign. He picked up the nearest phone and called the patient’s nurse. “Hey, can you check vitals on twenty-three B again?”

I waited for the retort. The nurses had yet to change shifts. She had already rechecked the pressures and waking a sleeping woman during labor was not fun.

But the nurse actually sounded relieved. Her voice drifted over the phone. “I’ll get that right now. Overnight doc wouldn’t let me. You never know with these GD cases, though.”

“You done?” The resident turned to me. I noticed for the first time that he had a lazy eye with an unsettling, off-balance gaze.

“Sure.” I wasn’t. “Here’s my overnight notes. Page me if you need anything.”

The week went on like this, and by the end of it I was looking back at that no-hitter in clinic and thinking of it as the best day in the world. Even if the universe balanced it, a busy clinic day was still better than the floors and I looked forward to my next one on Thursday. However, a resident called in sick and the automated jeopardy system selected me to cover their inpatient shift. This was obviously an error, as the Chief wasn’t usually available for staffing needs, but I was too tired to raise the alarm.

Finally came a two-day break mandatory for the stretch I’d just had. I fingered the package in my locker after signout. I’d considered not doing it at all out of principle.

I went to the restroom, filled the cup, placed it in the sample bag, and put it in one of the collection baskets for clinical labs before leaving.

• • • •

My legs are swollen. Is that normal?

One foot was still in a dream as I checked my phone. The last two days had gone by in a blur of restless sleep. Even as a senior resident I worked upwards of seventy hours a week with usually just enough rest to give the obligatory morning coffee something to work with. Being on this sudden, forced vacation, I’d crashed. My body rejoiced in the rare opportunity to slow down.

The message was the latest in a days-long string between Danny and Pam in our Allies group. Until now, I had completely forgotten about them.

Another from Danny popped up. They sent you home, you’re good. You know you’re dramatic.

I read through the whole conversation and by the end of it I didn’t need coffee. Me missing Pam’s trip to the emergency room shouldn’t have mattered. Based on what I’d just read she should have still been in the hospital. Headaches, blurry vision, long bouts of little to no movement from her baby. Just one of those warranted an overnight stay to rule out preeclampsia.

I called Pam and almost broke my neck tripping over my scrubs as I pulled them on. No answer. I paced my small apartment for my workbag as I dialed the resident workroom on the Labor & Delivery floor. No answer. Shit. I found my bag under a sleeping Othelia, who was not trying to move. She hissed as I pushed her aside. I’d reflect later how her hairs stood all over her body, how her back arched, and how her teeth bared in a defense usually reserved for the unknown.

• • • •

Pam lived alone in West Village in a nice two-bedroom that her parents owned. The crosstown bus stopped right in front of her building but the back doors were jammed. I pushed and kicked them to no avail. The bus began to leave and I screamed.

“Back door!” a man yelled from his seat behind me. The bus stopped; the doors opened. The man gave me a half nod as I stepped off. Then he and the bus were gone.

Pam dropped her phone when she saw me. This initial surprise gave me pause. Instead of sisterly recognition there was bemusement and fear. Some of it I’d seen in that rideshare driver before he drove off. I might have left to wander the streets in a lost daze if not for her eyes. Beyond the red streaks of tears and insomnia, her sclera was tinted yellow.

“It’s me,” I said. “Pam, it’s me.”

Her expression softened. She smiled, then gripped my arm hard enough to leave a bruise as a contraction went through her. My experience held a healthy inventory of women in the beginning parts of labor too early to start the epidural but far enough along to solidify my decision to never have children. And those who chose to do the whole thing natural—God bless them. I knew normal labor pains of all intensities. The sharpness of Pam’s grit, the rigidity of her body, and the pungent odor that grazed the air would make me nervous even at a hospital. Outside of one, I was terrified.

And her eyes. Damn it all to hell, her eyes.

I picked up her phone from the floor when her painful episode had passed.

“We’re getting you to the hospital. What’s your password?”

I checked her blood pressure with my cuff on the rideshare ride over. Fuck. I checked it again.

“That bad?” she said. Pam was in-between contractions that thus far proved as irregular as they were concerning.

“It just means they’ll get you roomed quick,” I said. “We should call Danny. She’d want to be here.”

“She’s probably busy. Up to no good. She’s going to get herself killed.”

I nodded. This made sense, even if I couldn’t place why.

“They won’t see you,” Pam said. She laid her head back. Sweat matted her head. Her eyes shone with the sharpness that labor pains brought to the mind. In between the contractions, I’d heard some patients say, was an eerie comfort and clarity. “We shouldn’t have gone to that exhibit.”

The contraction came. I offered my hand to her grinding grip and rode it out. I watched the buildings pass by in a blur as the abnormally long contraction came to an end. We pulled up to the back of the hospital near the emergency bay. I helped Pam out, got her into a wheelchair, and scanned my ID at the physician entrance. The sooner I could get her upstairs to the unit—and probably the operating room—the better.

My card didn’t work. By this point I wasn’t surprised. I rolled Pam to the check-in desk.

“Patient’s name?” the receptionist said.

“Pam Hunter. She’s thirty-five weeks pregnant, is having irregular contractions about three minutes apart, and hypertensive with systolic in the low two hundreds. Jaundiced, fatigued. Classic preeclampsia. She needs an OR.”

The receptionist typed at the same speed she had before. After what felt like another hour she looked up and at Pam. “Hunter, is it? What’s going on?”

“What the fuck?” I said. “I just told you. She needs to go to the OR.”

“You’re scaring me,” Pam said.

“No need to be scared,” the receptionist said. “We’ll get you set up and you can talk to a doctor. How’s that sound?”

A nurse came to roll Pam back past triage and into a single room.

“I’m an ob/gyn resident here,” I said to the nurse. Slow, careful, as if a misstep might cause her to ring the alarm and bar me from coming back with them. “I think she might be in fulminant liver failure. We need to get gyn surgery and liver here as soon as possible.”

“We’re putting you in bed eight,” the nurse said to Pam. “Your doctor will be with you shortly.”

She helped Pam into a hospital gown, set up the baby monitor, and then left us. Alone and waiting. I paced the small room and tried not to go insane with each of Pam’s contractions, which I could do nothing about. Intensity aside, I noticed they grew more frequent, more concrete. I rang the bed alarm for the fourth time and was about to walk out to the nurse’s station when the door opened.

Finally, my favorite second year resident came in.

“Is the OR ready?” I said. “Where’s the attending? Is Ernst on?”

“Hi Pam,” the resident said and walked past me. He sat on the edge of the bed, put on a fresh set of gloves, positioned Pam’s legs, and quickly checked inside her. Pam sucked her teeth from the pain. The resident was slow and deliberate. Still, he had made an awful misstep. I know either myself or someone else senior in the residency had shared the importance of asking the patient every time before doing a vaginal check. Finished, he took off the gloves. “Close. About six millimeters, moderately effaced.”

“She’s got late decels all throughout her read.” I pointed to the baby monitor. “Where’s the attending?”

My co-resident stared at the monitor. He saw the decelerations. Recognizing that pattern was a key part of his training, as unavoidable as learning how to walk. Yet his features did not reflect the horror of it, the urgency. He almost looked . . . uninterested. Nausea poured over me. I’d seen this before. At the exhibit. A doctor looking on as a deadly medical event happened.

This wasn’t going to turn out well. Both Pam and her baby were in serious danger. I knew that. I had been trained for that. From the very first week of medical school where our first patient had been a cadaver, I expected death to be an integral part of my career. But no one had trained me on losing a friend.

One of the emergency technicians came in with the ultrasound. He rubbed gel on Pam’s belly and started projecting to the screen.

“There’s a lot of fluid,” the resident said. “Some outside of the gestational sac.” He touched the screen. “And where is this collection coming from?”

I watched with growing angst. The junior resident was still too green around the ears to recognize what I could. Pam’s liver had burst. I logged into my paging software and paged Dr. Ernst. She came within minutes.

“Thank god,” I said. I began to rattle off the details of her condition. “G1P1, mid-thirties—”

“You can’t be here,” Dr. Ernst said.

“What? Okay, any other time, but now—”

“Your drug test came back positive for cannabis. You are barred from clinical duties, until further notice.” She looked up from me. I felt erased. “Let’s take her to the OR.”

Everything moved fast after that. They gathered Pam’s lines and monitors and began to roll her out of the room. She was just coming down off of a contraction and began to call out for me.

“Pam, I’m here!” I grabbed her hand. Someone else pulled it away. Pam continued to call for me and looked around, frantic and frightened, everywhere I wasn’t. “Pam, I’m right here. I’m not leaving you. You’re going to be okay.”

The medical team piled around the bed, pushing me back. I slipped and fell. My knee cracked against the floor. I scrambled up and followed them out into the hall. Other hospital personnel, technicians, rushing doctors, and even patients walked the halls without notice or regard for my existence. I fell twice more and tasted blood in my mouth.

I ran to the elevator holding Pam and wedged my foot between the closing doors. They didn’t acquiesce like they usually did. I yelled out in pain as the heavy steel pinched my foot. I yanked back; it came out with a pop. I banged on the metal, but it was too late. I could hear the machinery rising.

I took the stairs three flights up. The door was locked. I searched my many pockets for my ID, found it, and used it. The indicator flashed red. Again. The same. I banged on the door. Residents, surgeons, nurses and technicians in blue surgical scrubs passed just inches away from the door’s glass window. None of them turned. None of them saw. None of them heard.

I began to scream.

• • • •

Hours. I had been in that damn stairwell for hours.

I heard the steady cry of a newborn as I rounded the corner and entered another long hallway of operating rooms. The sound should have brought me joy, but I was too good, too experienced. The sound was singular, cutting, and without any of the comfort that came with the immediate bonding with mom after birth.

Two pediatricians rolled Pam’s newborn down the hall in a hospital bassinet. They chatted with each other as if discussing the weather. The newborn’s initial wail had withered to a pout. I didn’t look at her as they passed. I couldn’t. God, I couldn’t.

I opened one of the double doors to the operating room. Pam’s limp, blood-spotted arm extended from under the sheet and hung off the side of the table. That’s all it took.

I pushed down the public stairs, out of the hospital, shielded my eyes from the golden sunset peeking through a break in the skyline, doubled over, and vomited into the gutter. Passing legs knocked into my side and I stepped forward into the mess of puke, leaves, and the trash of New York. My offender wasn’t blind or oblivious or preoccupied. Only indifferent, as if he had casually kicked a can lying in the middle of the sidewalk.

The roll of tires. I moved just in time to avoid the approaching car claiming the empty parking space. No horn blare. No screech of the brakes. Only the squish of the front tire moving casually into my vomit. I stared at the driver as he got out. He didn’t pause at the woman still doubled over by his car, drool dripping from my mouth. If he even saw me, that is.

I screamed. Hot bile burned my throat. The man briefly looked up from his phone, as if he’d overheard the beckon of someone else with his same name. Distant and faint, more of a cursory glance than a real curiosity.

I straightened myself, leaned against his car for a second as a mild dizziness passed like a warm wind, and went to stand in front of the meter maid. Even in New York, the city where I could stroll the streets naked and not get a second look, I should have been more than remarkable. Spittle dripping down my chin, hair disheveled, a mottled pair of scrubs that looked stolen. What’s more, I was fully blocking the meter, so he’d have to acknowledge me.

He stopped just short of me without looking up. What was he waiting for? Did he even know?

“Excuse me,” I said, soft at first. “Say ‘excuse me’.”

The man’s eyes flickered, but not my way. Whatever crossed his mind had nothing to do with me.

“I’m right here,” I said. “I’m right fucking here! See me!”

My voice climbed to a yell that rattled my throat. The world shook and blurred until I saw not a man but rather the gray representation of everyone shutting me out. The residency, the demotion, that fucking drug test. All the blood and sweat and sinew had done nothing to stop my own friend from dying in front of me.

I’d heard before of the world going red, of the hot blood pulsing behind the eyes in the fit of rage. I thought it was all colorful nonsense. Not anymore. The gray sky turned to blood.

“See. Me!”

I punched him. I punched everything. My knuckles cracked across the bridge of his nose, which began to spurt blood almost immediately. He yelled out and cradled his assaulted face, looked down at his bloodied hand, and then at me.

“Now you see me. Ha!”

Any triumph fell into a hollow dread. He looked at me, but not in the way I wanted. If he had yelled, or cursed, or hit me back, or fled as if I had meant to kill him, any of those would have been better than this dead stare. I stepped away; my back hit something soft. Another stranger, this one tall and lanky, just standing there, staring at me. I took in more of my surroundings. The hospital’s revolving door had stopped mid-turn; its occupant stared at me from inside the glass. A car stopped in the middle of the street. Its driver leaned across the passenger seat to let me know that he, too, saw. A group of young interns, scurrying back after grabbing a quick lunch to go, paused to stare.

I pushed past the man. His fingernails dug lines into my arm, drawing blood. I swatted him away; someone’s shoulder collided with mine and knocked me to one knee. They were all still staring, closing in but not moving at all. I saw all their grief, their sorrow, their disappointment in life aimed towards me, blaming me.

The worst of it was the silence. All of New York admonished me without words or reason.

I pushed myself up and ran. I lived in the Tribeca neighborhood, well past the south end of Central Park, miles on foot. I ran just the same and didn’t stop. Every conversation paused, every stride slowed, every eye I passed turned toward me. Never at me, not directly. I ran even as my legs wailed and I felt the overworked thrum of my heart in my skull. If I stopped to rest, that dead gaze would be there, and it would eat me alive.

I almost collapsed when I reached my building. I took three big breaths and pulled out my key. It didn’t work. I tried to buzz myself up but the call wouldn’t go through to my phone. One of my neighbors—an older woman with three dogs—appeared on the other side of the door. I quickly rehearsed an explanation for my lost key. The door opened; my neighbor came out and didn’t acknowledge a hint of my soul. I slipped inside.

I yelped. A warm, strong grip on my arm. My neighbor, her body only halfway through the door, held me tight, decisively. She continued to look toward the street; sweat coated her brow.

“You don’t belong here,” she said.

I yanked away, ran upstairs, and kicked up the mat outside my apartment door. I almost laughed as the spare key slipped into the hole and turned. I’d gotten one up on it. Whatever it was.

I slammed open the door hard enough to bounce loudly off the coil. My roommate—usually staying over with her boyfriend—lifted her eyes from her phone for no longer than a second. I screamed frustration and kicked over the trash can. The sound of metal against wood and the tumble of domestic trash was sucked into the walls. My roommate didn’t even flinch. She would find the mess later and imagine she must have bumped into it in the middle of the night or blame Othelia even though she had never done such a thing before. That’s how this worked, I was realizing, the world corrected for my absence.

The inside of the bathroom was darker than usual. My fingers paused on the light switch. What if I saw nothing in the reflection? Would I cease to exist? My hand fell away. I moved close to the mirror, trying to see myself in the darkness. Small bits of light leaking in from the hall played silhouettes in the reflection. I swayed from side to side but couldn’t quite sync up the movement with mine. I lit my phone.

Any angle I tried the glare went right into my retina, blinding me. Where was I? I could just make out what seemed like the outline of my body. Finally, I swept the light in rapid ovals. What I saw in the mirror sent my heart to thrum inside my throat.

Matted hair beat down by a surgical cap. Below that: blushed, featureless skin without shape or nuance. A face blank, like a canvas.

I slammed my phone into the mirror. It shattered into spiderwebs. The slivers caught better what little light there was; a thousand faceless monstrosities stared back at me. I picked up a fallen shard and ran it across my face, sparking fire. I ran another line, then another, and another.

As I left, I briefly saw my roommate, still scrolling through her phone.

• • • •

I called a car using Pam’s phone. I dialed Danny as we crossed over into Brooklyn. No answer. I called her again, left her a voicemail that I deleted before it could save, and gave up. Tears began to fall.

“Damn you, Danny,” I said. “Pick up.”

The driver turned up the radio. I tried Danny, again and again and again.

“An unarmed woman was shot and killed this morning during a domestic dispute in Chinatown,” the radio said. I scrolled through my texts with Danny and the group to make sure I wasn’t missing any clues to where she could be. “Witness reports say the woman approached the police officers, pulled out what they feared to be a gun, and she was shot eight times in the torso. It was later confirmed that the woman did not have a gun but was holding a cell phone. She was pronounced dead at the scene.”

Pam’s phone dinged to inform me that I was at my destination. I looked out the window. The parking lot was empty. The signs were gone. There was no line, no buzz of anticipation. The entrance was bare and uninviting. I entered, slow. The air was so still and quiet that I wondered if my transformation had been complete. That’s what this was, right? A transformation? Had I passed on to where no one could see me and I could see no one else? I stopped to listen for any joy or laughter coming from some parallel existence, where the exhibit was still running and still attracting a crowd.

Nothing. I went inside because I had nowhere else to go. The same claustrophobia met me as before, only now I had no shoulder to lean into. I stopped at the creeping sound of sobbing, and realized from the sting of tears on my torn face that it was my own. Tears for Danny. Tears for Pam. Tears for myself.

The door to the exhibit yawned open. No one checked for tickets. I paused at the entrance. The dark, narrow corridor was no more. Paintings hung in neat order around the exhibition room. A few people mingled about, passing from one piece of art to the next with stoic expressions. None of the few white people seemed uncomfortable in their whiteness.

I entered. If this was the place that had stolen myself from me, what would I be inside? Invisible? An intolerable monster? A failure for everyone to see?

But no one noticed me. One man frowned at the picture he’d been admiring as I passed behind him, as if the art had suddenly revealed itself as offensive in some visceral way.

I almost passed it: Danny’s picture. There were no dogs. No chains. No fear of imprisonment, mauling, or the whip. Just a black woman talking casually to the police. Beside it was the delivery room, only now it was postpartum. The mother smiled as she cradled her newborn daughter. In the background a nurse rested one hand on the mother’s shoulder while she waited for the blood pressure read to show.

And then, the one of me.

Me? Why did I think that? The one like me. Either way, I’d come prepared to focus, like before. But that wasn’t needed. I could see her immediately. She stood smack in the middle of the street, fully facing the viewer with her hands on her hips and chin high in a stance of confident pride. Her face was clear, detailed, and pleasant.

She smiled, because the world could see her.

©2021 by Justin C. Key.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Justin C. Key is a speculative fiction writer, psychiatrist, and a graduate of Clarion West 2015. His short stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Escape Pod, and Interstellar Flight Magazine. He is currently working on a near-future novel inspired by his medical training. His horror novella, Spider King, is available now from Realm wherever you listen to podcasts. When Justin isn’t writing, seeing patients, or exploring Los Angeles with his wife, he’s chasing after his two young (and energetic!) sons and marveling over his newborn daughter.

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

Ancestries

Sheree Renée Thomas | 4288 words

In the beginning were the ancestors, gods of earth who breathed the air and walked in flesh. Their backs were straight and their temples tall. We carved the ancestors from the scented wood, before the fire and the poison water took them, too. We rubbed ebony-stained oil on their braided hair and placed them on the altars with the first harvest, the nuts and the fresh fruit. None would eat before the ancestors were fed, for it was through their blood and toil we emerged from the dark sea to be.

But that was then, and this is now, and we are another tale.

It begins as all stories must, with an ending. My story begins when my world ended, the day my sister shoved me into the ancestors’ altar. That morning, one sun before Oma Day, my bare heels slipped in bright gold and orange paste. Sorcadia blossoms lay flattened, their juicy red centers already drying on the ground. The air in my lungs disappeared. Struggling to breathe, I pressed my palm over the spoiled flowers, as if I could hide the damage. Before Yera could cover her smile, the younger children came.

“Fele, Fele,” they cried and backed away, “the ancient ones will claim you!” Their voices were filled with derision but their eyes held something else, something close to fear.

“Claim her?” Yera threw her head back, the fishtail braid snaking down the hollow of her back, a dark slick eel. “She is not worthy,” she said to the children, and turned her eyes on them. They scattered like chickens. Shrill laughter made the sorcadia plants dance. A dark witness, the fat purple vines and shoots twisted and undulated above me. I bowed my head. Even the plants took part in my shame.

“And I don’t need you, shadow,” Yera said, turning to me, her face a brighter, crooked reflection of my own. “You are just a spare.” A spare.

Only a few breaths older than me, Yera, my twin, has hated me since before birth.

Our oma says even in the womb, my sister fought me, that our mother’s labors were so long because Yera held me fast, her tiny fingers clasped around my throat, as if to stop the breath I had yet to take. The origin of her disdain is a mystery, a blessing unrevealed. All I know is that when I was born, Yera gave me a kick before she was pushed out of our mother’s womb, a kick so strong it left an impression, a mark, like a bright shining star in the middle of my chest.

This star, the symbol of my mother’s love and my sister’s hate, is another way my story ended.

I am told that I refused to follow, that I lay inside my mother, after her waters spilled, after my sister abandoned me, gasping like a small fish, gasping for breath. That in her delirium my mother sang to me, calling, begging me to make the journey on, that she made promises to the old gods, to the ancestors who once walked our land, to those of the deep, promises that a mother should never make.

“You were the bebe one, head so shiny, slick like a ripe green seed,” our oma would say.

“Ripe,” Yera echoed, her voice sweet for Oma, sweet as the sorcadia tree’s fruit, but her mouth was crooked, slanting at me. Yera had as many faces as the ancestors that once walked our land, but none she hated more than mine.

While I slept, Yera took the spines our oma collected from the popper fish and sharpened them, pushed the spines deep into the star in my chest. I’d wake to scream, but the paralysis would take hold, and I would lie in my pallet, seeing, knowing, feeling but unable to fight or defend.

When we were lardah, and I had done something to displease her—rise awake, breathe, talk, stand—Yera would dig her nails into my right shoulder and hiss in my ear. “Shadow, spare. Thief of life. You are the reason we have no mother.” It was my sister’s favorite way to steal my joy.

And then, when she saw my face cloud, as the sky before rain, she would take me into her arms and stroke me. “There, my sister, my second, my own broken one,” she would coo. “When I descend, you can have mother’s comb, and put it in your own hair. Remember me,” she would whisper in my ear, her breath soft and warm as any lover. “Remember me,” and then she would stick her tongue inside my ear and pinch me until I screamed.

Our oma tried to protect me, but her loyalty was like the suwa wind, inconstant, mercurial. Oma only saw what she wanted. Older age and even older love made her forget the rest.

“Come!” I could hear the drumbeat echo of her clapping hands. “Yera, Fele,” she sang, her tongue adding more syllables to our names, Yera, Fele, the words for one and two. The high pitch meant it was time to braid Oma’s hair. The multiversal loops meant she wanted the complex spiral pattern. Three hours of labor, if my hands did not cramp first, maybe less if Yera was feeling industrious.

With our oma calling us back home, I wiped my palms on the inside of my thighs, and ignored the stares. My sister did not reach back to help me. A crowd had gathered, pointing but silent. No words were needed here. The lines in their faces said it all. I trudged behind Yera’s tall, straight back, my eyes focused on the fishtail’s tip.

“They should have buried you with the afterbirth.”

• • • •

When we reached the courtyard, my basket empty, Yera’s full as she intended, we found our oma resting in her battered rocker in the yard. She had untied the wrap from her head. Her edges spiked around her full moon forehead, black tendrils reaching for the sun. She smiled as Yera revealed the spices and herbs she collected. I pressed fresh moons into my palms and bit my lip. No words were needed here. As usual, our oma had eyes that did not see. She waved away my half empty basket, cast her eyes sadly away from the fresh bloody marks on my shoulder, and pointed to her scalp instead.

“Fele, I am feeling festive today, bold.” She stared at a group of baji yellow-tailed birds pecking at the crushed roots and dried leaves scattered on the ground. They too would be burned and offered tomorrow night, at Yera’s descension. And we would feast on the fruits of the land, as my sister descended into the sea.

“I need a style fitting for one who is an oma of a goddess. My beauty.”

“A queen!” Yera cried, returning from our bafa. She flicked the fishtail and raised her palms to the sky. “An ancestress, joining the deep.”

Yera had been joining the deep since we were small girls. She never let me forget it.

“Come, Fele,” she said, “You take the left,” as if I did not know. Yera held the carved wooden comb of our mother like a machete, her gaze as sharp and deadly. Her eyes dared me to argue. She knew that I would not.

Together we stood like sentinels, each flanking oma’s side. The creamy gel from the fragrant sorcadian butter glistened on the backs of our hands. I placed a small bowl of the blue-shelled sea snails, an ointment said to grow hair thick and wild as the deepest weed of the sea. Yera gently parted our oma’s scalp, careful not to dig the wooden teeth in. Before I learned to braid my own hair, Yera had tortured me as a child, digging the teeth into the tender flesh of my scalp. Now her fingers moved in a blur, making the part in one deft move. A dollop of gel dripped onto her wrists. She looked as if she wore blue-stained bracelets—or chains.

I gathered our oma’s thick roots, streaked with white and the ashen gray she refused to dye, saying she had earned every strand of it.

“This is a special time, an auspicious occasion. It is not every year that Oma Day falls on the Night of Descension. The moon will fill the sky and light our world as bright as in the day of the gods.”

I massaged scented oils into the fine roots of her scalp, brushed my fingertips along the nape of her neck. I loved to comb our oma’s hair. The strands felt like silk from the spider tree, cotton from the prickly bushes. Oma said in the time before, our ancestors used to have enough fire to light the sky, that it burned all morning, evening, and the night, from a power they once called electricity. I love how that name feels inside my head—e-lec-tri-city. It sounds like one of our oma’s healing spells, the prayers she sends up with incense and flame.

Once when Yera and I were very small, we ran too far inside the ancestors’ old walled temples. Before we were forbidden, we used to scavenge there. We climbed atop the dusty, rusted carcasses of metal beasts. We ducked under rebar, concrete giants jutting from the earth, skipped over faded signage. We scuttled through the scraps of the metal yard at the edge of green, where the land took back what the old gods had claimed. I claimed something, too, my reflection in the temple called Family Dollar, a toy that looked like me. Her hair was braided in my same simple box pattern, the eyes were black and glossy. She wore a faded skirt, the pattern long gone. When I flipped her over, to my surprise, I discovered another body where the hips and legs should be. The skirt concealed one body when the other was upright. Two bodies, two heads, but only one could be played with at a time. I tried to hide my find from Yera, but she could see contentment on my face. So I ran. I ran to the broken, tumble down buildings with blown-out windows that looked like great gaping mouths. I ran into the mouth of darkness, clutching my doll but when I closed my eyes, searching for the light, Yera was waiting on the other side.

That is when I knew I could never escape her. My sister is always with me.

• • • •

Before the Descension, our people once lived in a land of great sweeping black and green fields, land filled with thick-limbed, tall trees and flowing rivers of cool waters, some sweet and clear, others dark as the rich, black soil. Our oma says when our ancestors could no longer live on the land, when the poisons had reached the bottom of every man, woman, and child’s cup, they journeyed on foot and walked back into the sea, back to the place of the old gods, the deep ones.

But before they left, they lifted their hands and made a promise. That if the land could someday heal from its long scars, the wounds that people inflicted, that they would return again. In the meanwhile, one among us, one strong and true, must willingly descend into the depths to join the ancestors. This one, our people’s first true harvest, will know from the signs and symbols, the transformations that only come from the blessing of the ancestors, when the stars in the sky above align themselves just so. Yera is that first harvest. She has wanted this honor her whole life. And from her birth, the signs were clear. Her lungs have grown strong, her limbs straight and tall, she does not bend and curve like the rest of us. My sister has the old gods’ favor and when Oma Day ends and the Descension is complete, she will join the waters, and rule them as she once ruled the waters of our mother’s womb, she will enter them and be reborn as an ancestress.

• • • •

The ceremony has not yet begun and I am already tired. I am tired, because I spend much of my time and energy devoted to breathing. For me, to live each day is a conscious act, an exercise of will, mind over my broken body’s matter. I must imagine a future with every breath, consciously exhaling, expelling the poison because my brain thinks I need more air, and signals my body to produce light, even though my lungs are weak and filled with the ash of the old gods. Unable to filter the poison quickly, my body panics and it thinks I am dying. My knees lock, and I pull them up to my chest and hold myself, gasping for breath like our oma said I did, waiting in my mother’s womb.

Oma gives me herbs. She grinds them up, mortar and pestle in her conch shell, and mixes them in my food. When I was smaller, she made me recite the ingredients daily, a song she hummed to lull me asleep. But as I grew, the herbs worked less and less, and my sister did things to them, things that made me finally give them up. I have given so much to her these years.

And I have created many different ways to breathe.

I breathe through my tongue, letting the pink buds taste the songs in the air. I breathe through the fine hairs on the ridge of my curved back and my arms, the misshapen ones she calls claws. I breathe through the dark pores of my skin. And when I am alone, and out of my oma’s earshot, out of my wretched sister’s reach, I breathe through my mouth, unfiltered and free. My fingers searching the most hidden, soft parts of myself and I am light air star shine, light air star shine, light—

• • • •

In the suns before Oma Day, I spent a lot of time sleeping. My breathing tends to be easier if I sleep well, and so I slept. My lungs are filled with poison which means there’s no space for the light, the good clean air. I have many different ways to expel the poison, and meanwhile my body goes into panic because my mind thinks I’m dying, so between controlling the exhalation, telling my mind that I am not dying, inhaling our oma’s herbs through her conch shell, I am exhausted since I do this many times a day. And then there is Yera. Always my sister, Yera. I must watch for her. I know my sister’s movements more than I know myself.

• • • •

This night, on the eve of Oma Day, which is to say, the eve of my sister’s descension, I can feel Yera smile, even in the dark. It is that way with sisters. As a child I did not fear the night. How could I? My sister’s voice filled it. Outside, the baji birds gathered in the high tops of our oma’s trees. Their wings sounded like the great wind whistling through what was left of the ancestors’ stone wall towers. They chattered and squawked in waves as hypnotic as the ocean itself, their excitement mirroring our own. And I too was excited, my mind filled with questions and a few hopes I dared not even share with myself. Would I still exist without my sister? Can there be one without two?

As more stars add their light to the darkness, I turn in my bed, over and over again like the gold beetles burrowing in our oma’s soil. I turned, my mind restless while Yera slept the sleep of the ages. For me, sleep never comes. So I sit in the dark, braiding and unbraiding my hair and wait for the day to come, when my world would end again or perhaps when it might begin.

The past few days I’ve been aware that braiding makes me short of breath, and I realized that I am very, very tired. Last night I was going through my patterns, braiding and unbraiding them in my head, overhand and underhand, when I remembered what the elder had once said to our oma. That she had done a lot in her life, that she, already an honored mother, had raised felanga on her own, and it was all right if she rested now. And I thought that maybe that was true for me, the resting part, which is perhaps why today I feel changed.

• • • •

“Hurry, child. Hunger is on me.”

Our oma calls but even she is too nervous to eat. Her hair is a wonder, a sculpture that rises from her head like two great entwined serpents holding our world together. My scalp is sore. My hands still ache in the center of my palms and I am concentrating harder now to breathe. I rub the palm flesh of my left hand, massaging the pain in a slow ring of circles.

Yera has not joined us yet. She refused my offer to help braid her hair. “You think I want your broken hand in my head? You know your hands don’t work,” she said. I remember only once receiving praise from her for my handiwork. I had struggled long, my fingers cramped, my temple pulsing. I braided her hair into a series of intricate loops, twisting off her shining scalp like lush sorcadia blooms. Yera did not speak her praise. Vocal with anger, she was silent with approval. Impressed, Yera tapped her upper teeth with her thumb. Oma, big-spirited as she was big-legged, ran to me. She lifted my aching hands high into the air as if the old gods could see them. Now dressed in nothing more than a wrap, Yera’s full breasts exposed, nipples like dark moons, her mouth is all teeth and venom. “You have always been jealous of me.”

“Jealous?” I say and turn the word over in my mouth. It is sour and I don’t like its taste. I spit it out like a rotten sorcadian seed.

She turns, her thick brows high on her smooth, shining forehead. “Oh, so you speak now. Your tongue has found its roots on the day of my descension?”

Inside, my spirit folds on itself. It turns over and over again and gasps for air, but outside, I hold firm. “Why should I feel jealous? You are my sister and I am yours. Your glory is my glory.”

I wait. Her eyes study me coolly, narrow into bright slits. The scabs on my shoulder feel tight and itchy. After a moment, she turns again, her hands a fine blur atop her head. She signals assent with a flick of her wrist. Braiding and braiding, overhand, underhand, the pattern is intricate.

I have never seen Yera so shiny.

I take a strip of brightly stained cloth and hand it to her. She weaves it expertly into the starfish pattern. Concentric circles dot the crown of her head. Each branch of her dark, thick hair is adorned with a sorcadian blossom. We have not even reached the water and she already looks like an ancestor.

“Supreme,” I whisper. But no words are needed here. I pick up the bowl of sea snail ointment and dip my fingertips into the glistening blue gel. My stained fingers trail the air lightly.

“Mother’s comb,” Yera says and bows her head. “You may have mother’s comb. I won’t be needing it anymore.”

I smile, something close to pleasure, something close to pain. My fingertips feel soft and warm on her neck. They tingle and then they go numb.

Yera’s mouth gapes open and closed, like a bebe, a flat shiny fish. Her pink tongue blossoms, juicy as a sorcadian center. Red lines spiral out from her pupils, crimson starfish.

“Sister, spare me,” I say. “Love is not a word that fits in your mouth.”

• • • •

The sorcadia tree is said to save souls. Its branches helped provide shelter and firewood. Its fruit, healing sustenance. Its juicy blossoms with their juicy centers help feed and please the old gods. To have a belly full and an eye full of sweet color is not the worst life. As I leave our Oma’s house, the wind rustles and the sorcadia in Oma’s yard groans as if it is a witness. I gaze at the sorcadia whose branches reach for me as if to pull me back into the house. Even the trees know my crimes.

• • • •

Silver stretches over the surface of the sand. Water mingles with moonlight, and from a distance it looks like an incomplete rainbow. Our oma says this is a special moon, the color of blood, a sign from the ancestors. The moon is the ultimate symbol of transformation. She pulls on the waters and she pulls on wombs. When we look at it we are seeing all of the sunrises and sunsets across our world, every beginning and every ending all at once. This idea comforts me as I spot our oma in the distance. I follow the silver light, my feet sinking in the sand as I join the solemn crowd waiting at the beach.

There are no words here, only sound. The rhythmic exhalations, inhalations of our people’s singing fills the air, their overtones a great buzzing hum deep enough to rend the sky. Before I can stop myself, I am humming with them. The sound rises from a pit in my belly and vibrates from the back of my throat. It tumbles out of my dry mouth to join the others around me. Beneath my soles the earth rumbles. That night my people sang as if the whole earth would open up beneath us. We sang as if the future rested in our throats. The songs pull me out of myself. I am inside and out all at once. As my sister walks to stand at the edge of the waters, I feel as if I might fly away, as if every breath I had ever taken is lifting me up now.

A strong descension assures that straight-backed, strong limbed children will be born from our mothers’ wombs, that green, grasping roots will rise from the dead husks of trees to seed a future. The others dance around this vision. When one descends, all are born. When one returns, all return. Each bloodline lives and with it, their memory, and we are received by our kin.

Music rises from the waves, echoes out across the sand, a keening. The elders raise their voices, the sound of their prayers join. I walk past them, my hair a tight interlocked monument to skill, to pain. The same children who laughed in my face and taunted me are silent now. Only the wind, the elders’ voices, and the sound of the waters rise up ahead to greet me. The entire village watches.

Oma waits with her back to me, in the carved wooden chair they have carried out to face the waters. When I stand beside her, her fingertips brush the marks on my shoulder. Her touch stings. The wounds have not all scabbed over yet. She turns and clasps my hands, her eyes searching for answers hidden in my face.

“Fele, why, why do you do such things?”

Our oma’s unseeing eyes search but I can find no answer that would please her.

“Yera,” I begin but her tsk, the sharp air sucking between her teeth, cuts me off.

“No,” she says, shaking her head, “not Yera. You, Fele, it is you.”

• • • •

They think I don’t hear them, here under the water, that I don’t know what they are doing, from here in the sea. But I do.

I wanted Yera to fight back, to curse me, to make me forget even the sound of my own name. I am unaccustomed to this Yera. This silent, still one.

“Fele!” they call. “She has always been touched.” “I told her oma, but she refused to listen.” “One head here with the living, the other with the dead.” “Should have never named her. To tell a child she killed her sister, her mother. What a terrible curse.”

They whisper harsh words sharp enough to cut through bone. But no words are needed here. I have withstood assault all these years, since before birth. This last attack is borne away by the ocean’s tears. They say my Yera does not exist. That she died when our mother bore us, that I should have died, too. But that was then and this is now and we are another tale.

• • • •

It does not matter if she is on land or that I am in the sea.

We are sisters. We share the same sky.

Though some spells, when the moon is high and the tide is low, and my body flinches, panics because it thinks it is dying, I journey inland, to where the ancestors once walked in flesh, the ones we carved into wood. I journey inward and I can smell the scent of sorcadians in bloom, the pungent scent of overripe fruit, and feel my sister’s fingers pressed around my throat, daring me to breathe.

Tiny bebe dart and nibble around my brow. They swim around the circles in my hair and sing me songs of new suns here in the blueblack waters. Now I am the straight and the curved, our past and our future. Here in the water, I dwell with the ancient ones, in the space where all our lives begin, and my story ends as all stories must, a new beginning.

©2020 by Sheree Renée Thomas. Originally published in Nine Bar Blues. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sheree Renée Thomas is the author of Sleeping Under the Tree of Life (Aqueduct Press), named on the 2016 James Tiptree, Jr. Award Longlist and honored with a Publishers Weekly Starred Review, as well as Shotgun Lullabies. Thomas is also the editor of the World Fantasy Award-winning Dark Matter anthologies (Hachette), Associate Editor of OBSIDIAN: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora (Illinois State), co-edited Trouble the Waters: Tales from the Deep Blue (Rosarium) with Pan Morigan and Troy Wiggins, and recently took on the mantle of editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Her short stories and poems can be found in Sycorax’s Daughters, Apex, Harvard’s Transition, Afrofuturismo, Stories for Chip, Revise the Psalm, The Moment of Change, Mojo: Conjure Stories, Strange Horizons, Mythic Delirium, Jalada, So Long Been Dreaming, Memphis Noir, and Mojo Rising: Contemporary Writers. Find her @blackpotmojo or in Memphis, Home of the Blues.

The Tale of Jaja and Canti

Tobi Ogundiran | 2318 words

I: The end, almost.

Seated on the balcony of the house across the street is a man. He is slumped in his chair and has remained unmoving for several hours. The tattered frays of his agbada spreads about his person like an old sailcloth, snapping in the wind. His equally tattered hat is positioned on his head such that you cannot see his face. He has maintained this position for nigh on a day (which is much, much longer than you think).

If you think him dead, then you’ll be wrong; if you think him alive, well . . .

Look closely.

You may find that the skin of his hand is the texture of old wood, the shriveled grains of a tree long exposed to the elements. You may find that the wrinkles on his face are unmoving, the tight curls of his beard a little too solid, the globes of his eyes a little too elliptical. Don’t be alarmed, it is exactly as you think: he is made of wood.

After some five hundred-odd years of roaming the treacherous terrain of the Midworld, his journey has led him here. Now. Sprawled on that balcony as unmoving as a tree.

Waiting.

II: The years before, before.

Jaja’s first memory is of a weeping, wizened face.

“Papa?” He stretches to touch his Papa, and a thin wooden hand appears in his line of vision.

“Oh,” Papa gasps, tears streaming down his cheeks even as he smiles. “Oh, bless the stars!” As Papa sweeps him off the table into a hug, Jaja sees the hem of a dress vanish as the shop door clatters shut. He glimpses the impression of a woman through the dusty shop windows.

This is the first he sees of the woman who gave him life. His mother.

The act of procreation was a deceptively simple thing: Papa carved him from the finest wood, and the woman he calls mother filled him with life.

“Who is she?” Jaja asks Papa several times in the intervening years. It is from Papa he learns her first name: Moremi.

“Moremi?”

“Yes, my boy,” says Papa, filing the wood that will become the hand of a new toy. Jaja wonders vaguely if that is how he was assembled. He knows that that is how he was assembled.

“I met her at the edge of town, on my way to the forest to . . .” He gazes shiftily at Jaja. “Life had not been very good to me, you see. Once, I had been wealthy, the most renowned toymaker in all the land, but soon people forgot about me, and the shop became as silent as a tomb, quieter still when my wife died. So, I decided to walk into the forest, walk until I could walk no more.

“It was hard to notice her at first, yes, because her skin was the dark of midnight, but her hair, oh . . . it was like light trapped in locks!” His eyes glaze with the sheen of reminiscence. “There was something about her that made me forget my troubles. She said, ‘That is a fine boy you have there, sir.’ And that is when I realized I had been cradling you in the pit of my arm. My wife and I, we never could have children, see. So, I made you for her, the child she could never have. When she died, you were the only thing to remind me of her.

“This woman, she knew why I was going into the forest. She knew what I intended to do. So, she took my hand, and led me back here to the shop where she commanded me to fix you up. I gave you new hinges and oiled the rot of your hand. And she watched me night and day as I worked. And when I screwed on your last finger she wept.”

“She wept?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“She must have seen what a beautiful boy you are,” says Papa, “Weeping, she took you and cradled you to her breast like a newborn babe, singing a song as old as time. When she placed you on the table, you were . . . you.” Papa wipes his eyes. “Moremi, she gave me purpose. She made me want to live again. She gave me you. And she did not even wait for me to thank her.”

The years pass and Jaja doesn’t age. But he doesn’t worry much about it; he knows he’s not an ordinary boy.

Still, boys will be boys and in his free time he makes mischief. With friends from down the street he terrorizes the neighbourhood with the sweet abandon of childhood.

And he watches his friends go gangly, sprouting like beanstalks from childhood and into youth. And they in turn look at him with fresh eyes, the scales of innocence lifted, as they realize that he is different.

They turn on him. With sticks and stones and hurtful words, he is reminded that he is other.

He weeps.

The shop is his refuge: his endless youth is given to toil; to filing wood and oiling hinges, to air-drying wood just right, to wiping it down with vinegar and scrubbing the uneven surfaces with glasspaper, to oiling with beeswax and lacquering for durability.

Papa does not have much, but he cares for him. Jaja knows what it is to love and be loved. And he loves that old man right until the very end.

Jaja stands long at the fresh mound of Papa’s grave, wondering who will love him now that Papa is gone.

That is the moment he decides to find his mother.

That is also the moment he starts to age.

III: The search.

Jaja travels the world in search of his mother.

All he has is a description of her and the vague memory of a song. When he tries to sing it to people, all that comes out is a tortured clack, like the rattling of wooden shutters. He walks farther than he’s ever walked in his life, and then some. He passes through sentient forests and wades through thrashing waters. And when he can wade no more, he boards a passenger ship whose captain is missing a nose.

It is from him he learns of her second name.

“The Midnight Queen,” says the captain when he gives him her description.

“The Midnight Queen?”

“Oh, yah. Das what I call her. She got skin as black as a starless night, hair white as da morning sun.” He chews on his pipe, squinting at the frothing waters. “Very beautiful. Me an’ my old boys, we got attacked by a kraken. Damn beast tore right through da ship till we were all of us screaming for our mothers. It ate my boys, bless em, an’ took a rightful chunk off my face.” He taps at the hole in his face. “I was convinced I was dead. Everything went black. Next thing I know I hear singing an’ da kraken is dropping me all sweet and nicely on da shore. I saw her then, very briefly. Coulda sworn I was hallucinating. But I no forget her since.” Jaja looks in his eyes and thinks he can see something there: kinship. “This be one hundred years ago and I haven’t aged a day since.”

Jaja feels his age in the creak of his wood and the rust of his hinges. He is startled to learn how much time has passed since he set out on his quest.

The world changes around him as the years pass and he remains the only constant. He feels like the axis around which the wheel of time spins. Still he ages, slowly, painfully.

He has long left the realm of men when he hears the sounds: rhythmic pounding sounds coming from deep in the forest. He enters into a clearing with a modest hut, where he finds a young girl laboring over dinner while her mother snoozes in the corner. The sound Jaja heard is the pounding of her pestle into the mortar as she cooks a steaming meal of pounded yam.

“I am looking for a woman,” he says, “you may have seen her.”

“Does she have dark skin, with hair of light?”

“Yes!”

“Why, she was here only yesterday,” she says, then pauses. “I think. I am never sure about time in these parts.”

A flicker of hope warms Jaja’s heart. “This woman, what did she do for you?”

“We had eaten our last meal weeks ago, me and my mama, and were waiting for Death to claim us when I heard a voice singing. So, I followed the voice to the glade in the forest where I found the woman. She told me I would always find fresh tubers as long as I lived.”

“Do you know where she went?”

She thinks for a moment. “Yes. She took the road. It leads only to one place: Orisun.”

Jaja thanks her profusely and heads down the road.

IV: Orisun.

The city, Orisun, is filled with ethereal threads of light shimmering in the air: iridescent, like sunlight on the skin of a bubble. The single paved street is flanked by strange houses, stretching as far as he can see. As Jaja makes his way down the street, creatures stare at him through the windows. He understands that these creatures are as old as time itself. He sees people too, many of them children, doing unchildlike things. They look at him with old eyes.

He knows that she is close.

Someone seizes him from behind and Jaja turns to see a young boy with cowries for eyes.

“You’re lost.” It is a simple declaration.

“No,” Jaja says, “I am . . . looking for someone. A woman with dark skin and hair of sunlight.”

This is when he learns her third and final name: “Canti.”

“Canti?”

“The singer. The one who gave you life. That is what we call her. Don’t you know never to look for Canti?”

“Why not?”

He looks at Jaja like he is stupid, then really looks at him and nods solemnly. “You are already far down this path. What difference does it make? Go to the house at the end of the street. You will see a chair on the balcony. Sit there. Wait.”

Jaja wants to thank him but he is already scuttling down the street.

V: Jaja and Canti.

Here is Canti, the singer. She was, before the dawn of time and will be long after. She sang the world into existence and will sing it into oblivion.

She knew the moment he decided to search for her. She followed him through whispering forests and thrashing waters to dissuade him. She has watched him sit there for a day (which you now know is much longer than you think), hoping he will go, go far away and never seek her again. Hoping he doesn’t set eyes on her a second time.

She opens the door and crosses the street toward him. Jaja sits up at her approach, taking off his hat.

“Mother,” he whispers.

Her heart shatters. She has been called many things; Canti, the Midnight Queen, Moremi, Oluwa. But never “mother”. It is a word that carries the weight of his pain and yearning. It is a word that drips of undying, unparalleled love. It is a word she’s longed to hear ever since she learned to sing.

“You shouldn’t have come.” Her tears betray the swell in her heart. “Twice you can look upon me.”

Jaja rises, the old wood of his body groaning in protest. He reaches out a hand and touches her.

“I am Life, and Death,” she says.

Hasn’t he known this? Hasn’t he suspected from the stiffening of his wood, from the rings that marked his years, and from the rust of his hinges, that he drew closer and closer to Death? But none of that matters because all he wants, all he’s ever wanted, is to feel love if only for one last time.

She presses his head to her breast in a gesture to mirror when she sang him to life.

“Tell me you love me, mother.”

She would tell of all the ways she loves him, explain the endless facets of that word and what they mean. She would tell of the dying notes of her life-song thrumming in his wood, of how in a moment of weakness she sang her desire into him. She would tell of how quickly she fled so he wouldn’t see her, so he would never die. But words are not enough, have never been enough for one like her. So, she gathers him in a hug instead.

“I will sing you a lullaby. My son.” The tears that flow down her cheeks are hot.

“Yes,” Jaja says. Skin dark as night, hair locks of light, this is the last he sees of the woman who gave him life. “I would like that . . . very much.”

The world explodes with her song.

VI: The end.

Standing on the balcony of the house across the street is a tree. It is a magnificent tree with each limb spreading out regally in the directions of the seven worlds. The leaves are tendrils of light hanging from the limbs like curtains of Dawn itself. The powerful roots are firmly entrenched in the earth of the Midworld. The tree has stood for a long time (which is longer than you think) and will stand for even longer.

Look closely.

Upon closer inspection, you may find carved into the trunk the lines of an ancient face, the delightful crinkles of old eyes, the suggestion of lips upturned in a contented smile.

Don’t be alarmed, it is exactly as you think.

©2021 by Tobi Ogundiran.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tobi Ogundiran is a writer of Yoruba extraction, whose work has been nominated for the British Science Fiction award. His dark and fantastical tales have appeared in The Dark, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, FIYAH, Tor.com and elsewhere. Find him at tobiogundiran.com and @tobi_thedreamer on Twitter.

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

My Sister is a Scorpion

Isabel Cañas | 1503 words

My baby sister didn’t used to be a scorpion, but she is one now. I don’t know if that sounds weird to you, but it doesn’t to me, because right after my sister was born, Abuelita turned into a white crane and flew away. She was so sad after we buried Abuelito, you know. One winter day, she stepped outside of the faded stucco church into bright sunshine, her Bible tucked under one arm. Maybe the touch of the sun was not enough to warm her after the shadows of the church, and she wanted to be closer to it. Maybe the air felt stronger that day, strong enough to bear her to heaven. She dropped her Bible, looked up at the sky, and sprouted wings—wings like an angel, white as her hair, white as teeth. Her neck grew long and elegant, and just like that, she leaped into the sky. With a few beats of her enormous wings, her shadow passed over the pages of her Bible fallen open on the church steps, fluttering sorrowfully in her wake. And she was gone.

Mamá watches the skies out the kitchen window. Even when she’s in the middle of washing dishes, her face looks like she’s somewhere else. She’s waiting for Abuelita. I miss Abuelita and wish she hadn’t left me alone, but I don’t think she’s coming back. Maybe she flew to where Abuelo is and stayed. I would.

But I was telling you about my sister. Her name is Noemí, but we call her Mimi. She’s almost a year old and her teeth are small and perfect and bright, like the inside of seashells or Abuelita’s wings. Her hair is soft as a kitten’s and black, black as her eyes, which gleam like a scorpion’s waxy scales in moonlight. I always knew there was something different about her. Maybe it was because Mamá and Papi treated her like she was made of glass, like the small bowls Mamá put beneath each of the legs of the crib to stop the scorpions from climbing into Mimi’s blankets.

“Lucia,” Mamá says, “if you ever see a scorpion in here, do not touch it. You must run to get me right away, understand?”

I understand. Scorpions are dangerous. If they sting you, you swell up to the size of a balloon and float away—but in me and Mimi’s bedroom, I don’t know if you’d be able to float out into the sky, because the window doesn’t open very wide. I think about this at night, in our empty room, when the sun has set and the desert is dyed purple and the breeze through the cracked window is cool. I always leave the window open, because if I get stung, I need to run to the window before I blow up too big to fit through it. I’ll climb up on my bed and onto the sill and slip through. Then I’ll float away, like Abuelita, high above the town. Above the stucco church, above the graveyard. I’d wave goodbye to Abuelo and my uncles whose graves we visit there in the back, and then I’d turn toward the big, yellow moon.

• • • •

Mimi was always ready for anything.

Mamá and Papi don’t understand that. See, Mamá has been lying to me. Over weeks, she and Papi took taxis to and from the hospital, back and forth, like when Mimi was born and I was left with Abuelita. But this time, when they came back the last time, they didn’t have Mimi in their arms. And they never went back to the hospital again.

Since then, Mamá and Papi been floating around the house like ghosts. Once, I heard Papi sobbing in the bathroom, but whenever Mamá starts to cry he yells at her to stop.

When I asked why Papi hides in the bathroom, Mamá told me it is because Mimi is dead. In between words like cancer and there’s nothing we could do, all I heard Mamá say was you’re alone now, Lucia. You’re alone forever.

I curled my hands into fists. “You’re wrong,” I said. I poured every ounce of my heart into the words, hot like asphalt, hot like oil. “You’re wrong.”

I knew it would make her cry, that Papi would shout, but I said it anyway. Because she was. She was and I knew it, and so I looked for Mimi even harder.

Because Mamá and Papi don’t know what I know.

My sister Mimi is a scorpion.

• • • •

It must have happened when I was at school, because when I came home, Mimi was already gone. Papi took her to the hospital, Mamá said that day, but I knew better. I know with the same certainty that Abuelita is a crane that a scorpion got past the glass dishes Mamá placed at the bottom of the crib. I’ve seen spiders walk on the ceiling. Maybe the scorpion crawled up the wall of our bedroom and onto the ceiling, and from there, dropped into Mimi’s crib.

And when the scorpion dropped into the crib, in the middle of Mimi’s nap, she didn’t cry. She’s ready for anything. When the scorpion lifted its pincers and its tail, brandished high, she probably sat there, eye to beady eye with it. And the scorpion saw the spark in her, how her black eyes were like the snap of candles. And the scorpion knew she was different.

So when, with the slow, inevitable ripple of its many legs, the scorpion crept close, when its arched tail lashed with the speed of a whip, it knew what would happen: my sister would not die. She would become a scorpion. She would shrink like ice melting, and her skin wouldn’t turn yellow, like some ugly scorpions, but black like her hair. Black like her snapping shining eyes. Black like a stove, gleaming and hot. With eight legs and slender, sharp pincers with the same elegance as Abuelita’s crane neck.

Then Mimi and the scorpion would have jumped away, out of the crib to the tile floor. They would dart into the dark corners of the room, so Mamá wouldn’t find them at the end of nap time.

Scorpions are small and easy to lose, you know. They fit into all the small cracks and shadows of houses. But I will find her.

“You must be careful when you open closets,” Mamá says. So I am. I keep my eyes open for Mimi. Every time I go into the bathroom, I check the tub, calling her name very softly—if I say Mimi’s name any louder, Papi will be angry with me. I check the kitchen cabinets every morning, starting with beneath the sink and moving from left to right, just to be sure. When Papi asks what I’m doing, I say nothing.

Because when I find Mimi, she’ll be my secret. I’ll hide her in my front dress pocket and we’ll go on adventures. At night, I’ll carry her to the dusty lot where the neighborhood boys play soccer, and together, we’ll look up at the sky and count the stars with glittering black eyes. I’ll feed her with the crumbs of the pan dulce Mamá brings home from the panadería where she works and slip bits of concha frosting to her. Vanilla is my favorite, so Mimi will know how much I love her when I give her vanilla.

With Mimi in my pocket, I’ll never be alone again.

• • • •

In the middle of the night, I hear the drag of tiny legs on glass.

It’s dark, but I can see Mimi’s crib in the moonlight from the window, placed safely away from the wall in the far corner of the room. Just where it always has been. The crib’s legs in glass bowls, just as they always have been. No one has moved them. Even though Papi says every Saturday it’s time to move the crib, neither he nor Mamá have touched it. I’m glad it hasn’t moved.

Because the moment I wake, I know I’m not alone anymore. My heart trips in anticipation as I lift my head slowly from the pillow.

A smudge darkens the bowl at the foot of the crib closest to my bed.

Mimi is here.

I pull back my blanket and put my bare feet on the cold tile floor. Three quick, tip-toe steps and I’m at the bowl. I kneel down before it.

Mimi is here.

She freezes. Looks up at me.

Her scales are so black they look like soot. So black they reflect almost no moonlight. Unlike her eyes: these glint, liquid and bright, as they look up at me. The intelligence in them snaps like candles, snaps like her pincers as she raises them and her arched tail up to me.

Mimi came back.

“I missed you so much,” I say. And with one hand, I reach down into the bowl.

©2021 by Isabel Cañas.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Isabel Cañas is a Mexican-American speculative fiction writer and graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. Her debut novel The Hacienda, a tale of witchcraft and suspense set in 1820s Mexico, is forthcoming from Berkley in May 2022. To find out more, visit isabelcanas.com.

The All-Consuming World

Cassandra Khaw | 3870 words

Maya has died and been resurrected into countless cyborg bodies through the years of a long, dangerous career with the infamous Dirty Dozen, the most storied crew of criminals in the galaxy, at least before their untimely and gruesome demise. Decades later, she and her diverse team of broken, diminished outlaws must get back together to solve the mystery of their last, disastrous mission and to rescue a missing and much-changed comrade . . . but they’re not the only ones in pursuit of the secret at the heart of the planet Dimmuborgir.

The highly evolved AI of the galaxy have their own agenda and will do whatever it takes to keep humanity from ever regaining control. As Maya and her comrades spiral closer to uncovering the AIs’ vast conspiracy, this band of violent women—half-clone and half-machine—must battle their own traumas and a universe of sapient ageships who want them dead, in order to settle their affairs once and for all.

Welcome to The All-Consuming World, the debut novel of acclaimed writer Cassandra Khaw. With this explosive and introspective exploration of humans and machines, life and death, Khaw takes their rightful place next to such science fiction luminaries as Ann Leckie, Ursula Le Guin, and Kameron Hurley.

Coming September 7, 2021 from Erewhon Books.

Previously, in Chapter 1: Maya seeks out Ayane, an old member of the Dirty Dozen, hoping to recruit her for one last heist. When she refuses the offer, Maya makes it clear that Ayane has no choice in the matter.

Chapter 3: RITA

Initializing . . .

“You stinking, cockshitting motherfucking piece of slime—” Ayane is on her before Maya, lungs still dripping perfluorocarbon, can heave herself out of the clone vat. The clean air burns like a motherfucker, and she’s drowning in nothing as Ayane rains down punches, both of them screaming. “You killed me. You fucking killed me. I’m so lucky my repositories are current, you useless fucking piece of rust.”

Pressure digs into Maya’s left orbital socket; one hard jab and pop. Aqueous humor dribbles from the ruptured cornea as Maya’s scream becomes a shriek. Ayane naked of her modifications is still an elemental force. The light winks out from Maya’s eye as Ayane gouges deeper.

“Kiddy-diddling whore cunt—” Rita’s voice in the back of her mind, clicking in disapproval: we don’t use language like that. Maya cannot be fucked right now, though, not with her head bleeding black, good eye still hazy. Everything is too low-rez: block shapes and broad colors, no definition. Data, not information.

But she can work with that.

Maya coils like an adder, muscles balling, bunching, building momentum. Counts halfway to one before she lunges because fuck you, that’s why. Fair’s got no home in the country of brawls. Elbow meets nose. Osseocartilaginous structure blooms into shrapnel, calcium spalling, knifing into new tissue.

Blood spurts. Sticky, metallic, boiling-hot from the vein, a burgundy too close to purple to be womb-born. Ayane howls and Maya howls louder, triumph in the pitch of her jackal-like ululation. She torques, scrabbles and kicks against the flooring, finds purchase with a toe; fishes for a fistful of long black hair. A hard yank and follicles come loose in bloody clumps. Ayane goes down, cussing, spitting hate and pain like a mouthful of teeth. Give Maya a few minutes and there will be actual teeth, molars and incisors in a rain of fresh calcium.

That’s the problem with her, Maya thinks, clambering atop Ayane, grinding a forearm into the slim bar of the other woman’s pretty throat, crushing the larynx flat. Ayane can make any firefight into a Hail Mary come true, but take away her guns and what do you get? Just another dime-doll with more sass than sense.

“Stand down.”

Rita.

Maya recoils from her prey, still down on all fours, skull bent low, ear cocked to the ground. Blood spools across the cold alloyed floor, viscous, clonetech fluids always quick to coagulate. She listens as Rita paces closer: long strides, controlled, boot heels keeping time.

Clack.
Clack.
Clack.

One point five seconds between impacts. Rita is putting on a show.

Nearby, Ayane sits and chokes.

Slender fingers graze the curve of Maya’s skull, and she turns her face into the flat of a waiting palm. How she has missed this. Does it matter that it began as an oxytocin miracle, injected during parturition, loyalty in a nutritional paste? Maya likes to think of it as serendipity, a boost, a roll of the dice they’d loaded and spun to their own soundtrack. She likes to believe she would have always chosen Rita, over and again, through every permu‐ tation of destiny.

“Couldn’t you just have fucking sent a letter?” Ayane, voice all jagged, the demands wheezed.

Rita doesn’t miss a beat. “You would have ignored it.”

“That’s what she said,” Ayane grates, and it takes Maya a minute to puzzle out what’s happening: the other woman is laughing. Wracking coughs with no rhythm, profanities sawing between every slurp of air. It ends strangled, suffering. Maya doesn’t hide her grin. Cunt, she thinks, licking her tongue over the burst of consonants.

“Fuck you.” Ayane, always quick with the comeback and apparently quicker than Maya, who’d called her a cunt out loud without realizing, drunk on homecoming.

“Both of you. Shut up,” Rita snarls as she straddles Maya’s hips, crouches down. Her fingers are membraned in latex. They smell of clean things, astringent and antibacterial. She takes hold of Maya’s face, tips it one way and then another, the light searing Rita’s face into blank shapes, and it is all Maya can do not to weep, so happy to have her world pared down to the simple sweetness of Rita’s command.

“You’ll be fine. We’ll pop a new implant and call it a day.” A platonic kiss, applied like a benediction, like a prayer, a second chance. Funny how Rita will precipitate contact but chastise reciprocation.

Maya nods, trembling, not quite trusting herself to speak, because she’d rather die than let Ayane see her underbelly, spongy and pale, crisscrossed with reminders that faith is another word for shooting yourself in the head.

“So why did you drag me here?” says Ayane, voice morassed in snot.

“Didn’t Maya tell you?” Rita’s answer, incurious. Her fingers skate over Maya’s cranium, cartographing the planes of brand-new bone: a ritual devised when it first became clear to them that clonetech was a business of diminishing returns. Each resurrection mothered new health complications, fewer symmetries, like the body is a story that will persist until permitted to write its own end.

“I told her,” says Maya. “I said the Minds were killing off ex-cons. But she wouldn’t fucking listen.”

“Maybe, if you didn’t start your pitch by offing my customers.”

“Most of them are alive, bitch. Don’t know what your problem is.”

“Language,” snaps Rita.

Maya flinches. “Sorry.”

“My problem is that I don’t give a shit about either of you,” comes the reply, glacial in its delivery. “I told you two that I never wanted to see either of you again. Not after that last job.”

“No loyalty at all for your old friends?” says Rita.

“That died with Johanna.”

“Interesting choice of words from someone who was complicit in her death,” says Rita, an anglerfish lure in the teasing pinch of her tongue between white teeth, her small smile.

“What did you say?” says Ayane softly.

“You,” says Rita, imbuing the word with ponderous lethality. But it doesn’t last. As Rita continues to speak, her voice cracks, branchiates into emotion, actual fucking emotion. Has Maya ever heard her speak with such passion before? She doesn’t know, can’t think through the throb of pain in her eye. “You were responsible for the physical systems, weren’t you? Those things you’ve always boasted to be your forte. If they hadn’t been so flawed, if you hadn’t fucked up—”

Rita shakes her head, staccato and sudden.

“Forget it,” she says.

“Fuck you. Fuck off, Rita. Fuck you and fuck you, you fucking jackass. As if you’d ever given a flying fuck about what Johanna had to say. If you’d fucking listened to her, we wouldn’t even be in this mess. We’d all still be in one fucking piece. Johanna wouldn’t be dead, and . . .” All those old hurts like an embolism encysted in Ayane’s lungs. Now, it breaks, bleeds in a trembling soliloquy, and Maya can tell Ayane would stop herself, would swallow this murmuration of words, but it is too late. Grief has an inviolate momentum.

“Something else would have done it,” says Rita gravely. “If it wasn’t that fucking job, it’d have been another. This was all going to end in tears. We didn’t have the equipment. We never did.”

How she says the word equipment, how the syllables string into a noose with which Ayane can hang. Maya is not the recipient of that pragmatic cruelty but still she flinches. What Rita lacks in martial expertise, she more than compensates for with the artistry of her malice.

Rita pulls air into her lungs, a rattlesnake-hiss, before she straightens, one hand around Maya’s wrist. One tug and Maya is on her feet, suspended by a strength that belies the scientist’s blackbird frame. The world gyres, nauseating. Maya bites down the urge to retch, visual cortices still adjusting to the limited input, everything still so horribly wrong. No depth perception yet and no way to compensate, not until the right modules regrow, mapping her brain with tiny tapeworm wires.

“The Minds want all of us criminals dead. Every last one of us. They want to pick us off, one by one. And as you know,” says Rita, “it is safer in a pack.”

“You keep saying that like it’s a bad thing. Maybe it’s time for a culling. Universe might be a lot better if there were less crooks around,” says Ayane.

“Would you say that about their children too? Their families? Their friends?” continues Rita, perfectly mesmeric. “You, of all people, know the Eaters have no sense of nuance.”

“The Bethel—”

“—have given their blessing. The Minds are all in agreement.” Rita’s voice softens, timbre contoured for seduction: an octave huskier, textured with need so palpable it makes Maya tense, her fight and fuck-them-up reflexes primed to go. “I need you, Ayane. You’re the only one who made the Butcher of Eight weep oil.”

“No. No, no. Absolutely not. Fuck you. I don’t trust you.” Ayane, backing away, jams herself into a corner of the room. “Fuck. You. I am not buying any of this. Fuck all of you. Let the Minds do what they want.”

“Fuck you. Watch how you talk to her,” Maya snaps and sways from the thump of her own voice, the word fuck like a gunshot punching through sinew. The tension in the room is practically Damoclean. If the cacology of Ayane’s responses persist, Maya might just have to shoot her in the fucking head.

Rita doesn’t acknowledge either of them, purrs on instead, like she owns the airwaves, the very right to speak, her rich contralto whetting every word, sharp‐ ening every syllable. Some people wield knives; Rita could win wars with a whisper. “You know as well as I do that Johanna’s original had a family. She’s dead now, of course. But all her children had children and they’re all good people, and they’ll be dead when the Minds are done. They won’t care how sweet Johanna’s grandkids are. They’d wipe them out as readily as they will anyone associated with any criminal.”

“How did you know about that? That was a secret.” “Johanna told me.”

“No, no. She wouldn’t have. No, Johanna wouldn’t have said anything to you. She hated you.”

“Does it matter, Ayane? They’re still going to die.” “You’re a piece of shit.”

“Maybe,” Rita says, and Maya knows without looking that Rita is grinning that megawatt smile of hers, surgi‐ cally perfected; right eye slimmed to a wink, just the right amount of shark to counterbalance all that airy sweetness. “But I’m also right.”

And here, right here, exactly like Rita said she would, Ayane cracks.

The woman slicks wet hair from her face, twists it into a ponytail over her shoulder. Her fingers carve through the strands of artificial—like fuck au naturel hair could even dream of such lustrousness—keratin, pleating them together, a Sisyphean little tic. The braid doesn’t hold, oiling loose each time Ayane lets go. But Ayane takes zero notice. She leans back and takes a shuddering breath while Maya glares, impotent, desperate to act.

“One last job,” says Rita, kind as a mercy killing. “Not even a job. Don’t think of it as a job. One last favor. Then we’re done and you’ll never have to hear from us again. You can go home, run your club, do what you want.”

“No. I’m not fighting for you anymore. I told you once. I’m going to tell you again until you understand it. I’m not doing this again. The last time I did, you—” Breath is heaved into lungs that are nascently functional, gasped between clenched teeth. Ayane’s words come in starts and stops, until their meaning becomes tessellated, syllables mixing like oil and blood in the rain. “—you let her die, Rita. You let Johanna die. I told you. I—I—I told you we shouldn’t have done that job. She told you we shouldn’t have done that job. We ran the numbers. We told you. But you insisted and she died.”

“And you went out of that door with your profit and hers.” Rita is tougher than she looks, tougher than any of them, and she doesn’t flinch at all as she cuts under Ayane’s meat and drags out all those old hurts into the clone-farm’s cold lights. “You made yourself a good existence, didn’t you?”

“Stop. Talking.”

For a moment, Maya thinks that she might rush them, whatever good that’d do. But it is the principle of the fucking matter. As Ayane staggers onto her feet, Maya slots herself between her and Rita, a trembling arm raised as a barricade. Entirely symbolic, the whole charade: Maya is a borderline invalid herself. Even if she weren’t hemorrhaging from an orbital socket, she’s still too fresh from parturition to be of any gaugeable use, that first tussle having leached away whatever reservoirs were pre-installed in this new frame.

It’s the thought that counts, though, Maya thinks to herself. Her vision steadies. The chamber is low-ceiling, small. The walls are abscessed with machinery of varying quality, a bootstrapped hodgepodge of recovered tech that is only tenuously operational. Rita estimated another five, six cycles before the menagerie would fail.

After that?

All ruminations are sidelined by an unexpected noise. Crying.

“You bitch.” Ayane clatters into a fetal position again,

an arm thrown over her face. She moans, over and over, twitching like an embryo cored from the womb. Just a clot of meat, desiccated by exposure to environments hostile to its own ambitions of long-term survival. “You bitch. You—”

“I can’t change what happened.” Rita’s voice: soothing, luminous with triumph. She’s got her. Anyone with ears knows that. Gracefully, she steps out from around the pillar of Maya, grazes fingertips along the svelte line of the latter’s shoulder, tracing out a promise that she will be back. Maya’s heart twists, pulse accelerating. “And for what it’s worth, I’m so sorry it went down the way it did.”

“Liar.”

“But the past is the past. Besides, we owe it to Johanna.” A face amalgamates from Maya’s faded recollections: curling purple hair, one hemisphere of the scalp shaved; a bloom of scar tissue; a smile like happily ever after. Johanna had been the compassionate one, the kind one, the voice of restraint. And look at where that got her, Maya thinks, bitter, recalling again the funeral—a few quick words spoken over a smoking carcass, all that prettiness blown away, Ayane screaming while Maya hauled her ass through the door.

“Her sacrifice deserves to be honored.”

Sacrifice? Maya comes back to the present, dazed by the sequencing of those words, the very specific interpreta‐ tion of events. There are other words for what happened. Better words, words dripping pus, words burnt black as fat forgotten on the grill, words falling like curds of cauter‐ ized muscle. All kinds of words to describe what had happened to poor Johanna O’Riley, forever twenty-four, eternally dead, the only star to have shone in one woman’s sky.

But Rita comes first, is first, will always be first in Maya’s admittedly short list of priorities so she says nothing about that. Besides, fuck Ayane. What did she ever do for them except walk out?

“Stop. Talking. About. Her.”

“The dead aren’t silent, and we can’t be either,” says Rita, very softly. “We owe something to their ghosts.”

Ayane, pleading: “Stop it.”

“You know I’m right. I can tell. I know you agree with what I’m saying. You just don’t want to admit as such. And that’s all right. Ultimately, it’s not about us. It’s about what the dead need.”

There is a trick to handling Rita, Maya thinks, one that only she seems to know. You have to pretend you don’t care. Even if you do, you need to pretend otherwise. Especially when she deploys that lilt, that timbre, that soothing prevaricated compassion. Don’t show weakness, or Rita will go for the throat. “If you ever loved Johanna, if she ever meant anything to you, you’ll do this.”

More crying still, Ayane finally succumbing to the trauma Rita has uncharneled. No more defenses, no more pretenses at resilience. Only the broken-backed, open-bellied exhaustion of a wounded animal that has, at last, consented to dying. To Maya’s surprise, the nakedness of Ayane’s grief embarrasses her. She averts her gaze.

“Ayane?” whispers Rita.

No answer.

“Ayane,” Rita says again, and there is the clack of heels upon the corrugated floor. “I need you to talk to me.” Nothing still.

“Ayane?”

Then: “Fuck. You.”

Maya tenses, half-turns so she has actual visual on the tableau, waits for Rita’s cue to pummel some respect into Ayane’s skull. But the doctor only chuckles, the sound syrupy. “Do you remember Dimmuborgir?”

Stab of memory, like an icepick to the cerebral fissure, boring down, down until images gush out. Dimmuborgir. A promised land decadent with opportunity. Dimmuborgir. Full of everything you could ever want, a literal fucking wonderland. If you had Dimmuborgir, you had the universe. Even the Minds hid it from each other.

Ayane’s expression flickers at the invocation of its name, wafting between reverence and what the fuck. In the stammering marine light, she is unlovely as the rest of them. Her arm drops slackly to her side.

They’ve all heard the rumors. The Minds, unaccount‐ ably, gossip with abandon; yeah, even in the presence of vermin like the Dirty Dozen. Maybe it’s hubris. Maybe, a machine machismo. Privately, Maya is convinced it’s because she and her cohorts are scarcely a data point within the Conversation, inconvenient but meritless, an error that will resolve itself once the dregs of their technology, well, die. Immortality allows the privilege of indifference.

Still, Dimmuborgir. That hallowed quarry, its mythos leviathanic. Maya watches Ayane the way a fox might surveil a sickly honey badger. Indisposed for now, but both of them are still predators of roughly equal stature and therefore, competitors. The word—competitors—as it enters the forefront of Maya’s cognition registers as a wasp sting, a sharp pricking of revelation that astounds her with what it corporealizes: a hatred for Ayane, a rabid need for her to leave, to omit herself from Rita’s perception.

She fists her hands around the air: clench, unclench, muscle memory crying for enameled grips, the comforting clatter of bullets in their chambers. It would be nice, frankly, if Maya could pontificate on her current feelings. But she understands, as the rest of them do, that no other will can be dominant with Rita in the equation.

“Yeah.” Ayane, hoarse. “What about it?”

“We go there and we get what we need: a superweapon to take down the Minds.” Smile full of teeth, sharp with pleasure. People make that mistake with Rita all the time, thinking those bird-bones brittle, breakable. She sets herself down on one knee, slopes forward, one gracile arm outstretched like an olive branch. “And I know someone who can get us there safely.”

“Who?”

Maya knows the answer already, but she knows too her role, knows both of these things like the jackhammer thumping of her pulse, going ra-ta-ta-ta. Too fast and too loud and fuck, does part of her long to be anywhere but here. If she could mutiny, she would. She knows that this would be wiser than complicity.

Although she can’t see Rita, can only perceive the back of her head and the lacquered hair, Maya knows from that chuckle of hers, basal and irresistible, the exact way Rita is grinning right now. The cock of her smile, that let’s-set-the-world-on-fire stare. Maya would gut herself to be its recipient.

Adrenaline seizes Maya in its teeth and shakes her, a cat worrying at its lunch. Her factory model settings disallow any attempt at mitigating the sudden hormonal spikes. So, Maya grinds nails into her palms, gashes crescents into the meat. It is untenable, her flesh without its suite of adaptations. Fuck, could they rewire her synaptic matrices? Give her a self independent of Rita? Because she can’t bear this much emotion. Her world attenuates. No. Better this than its opposite. Better to have Rita than not. Maya cannot abide by the thought of being emptied of Rita.

Her inner soliloquy becomes cacophonous, so loud that she does not register the triumphant denouement of Rita’s whole spiel.

“Elise. She’s alive.”

Copyright © 2021 by Cassandra Khaw. Excerpted from The All-Consuming World by Cassandra Khaw. Published by permission of Cassandra Khaw and Erewhon Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cassandra Khaw is an award-winning game writer whose fiction has been nominated for the Locus and British Fantasy Awards. Their short stories can be found in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Uncanny Magazine, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Book Review: Seasons Between Us: Tales of Identities and Memories, edited by Susan Forest & Lucas K. Law

LaShawn M. Wanak | 679 words

Seasons Between Us: Tales of Identities and Memories
Susan Forest & Lucas K. Law (Editors)
Hardcover / Paper / Ebook
ISBN: 978-1988140179
Laksa Media Groups Inc., August 2021, 360 pages

Back in April this year, I turned fifty years old. It was very similar to my birthday last year which also took place during Covid quarantine. No fanfare, very quiet. It was a sober milestone; it’s not like I feel old, per se—I had a much harder time turning thirty. But the lack of hoopla and festivities made me feel more keenly the weight of years I’ve been through thus far. Perhaps this is why I was drawn to the anthology Seasons Between Us: Tales of Identities and Memories. It contains twenty-three stories ranging from fantasy to dystopia to science fiction and poetry, all exploring the decisions and the moments that makes up a life, whether it is long-lived or cut short, mediocre or action-packed, or somewhere in between.

The roster for this anthology runs the gamut of well-known authors to relative newcomers to the field. “Dress of Ash” by Y.M. Pang took the Cinderella-sister trope and spun it into a tale of a master sword-wielder wishing to protect her younger step-sister. Maurice Broaddus’s “The Sabhu My Destination” shows how a Black man changes himself through growth, creativity, and technology (and is loosely framed around the seven stages mentioned William E. Cross’s The Negro-to-Black Conversion Experience. I see you, Maurice.) “The Veil Between” by Karin Lowachee slips in and out of time as its protagonist tries to cling onto the moments of his three lives with three lovers. And Jane Yolen’s “The Astronaut’s Four Seasons” is a brief but gorgeous poetic summation of, well, an astronaut’s life in four different parts of her life.

Some of the stories focus on quieter elements of life. The ghosts showing up in Joyce Chng’s “Blue Kueh” only wish to be remembered, even if their appearances startle their former social workers. I fell in love with S.B. Divya’s “Messages Left in Transit, Devices Out of Sync”, a simple story about a woman who, while she is denied becoming an astronaut, still finds childbirth (the cause of her grounding) an amazing miracle. “Clear Waters” by C.J. Cheung has a father struggling to accept his daughter’s choice in an android partner, while Rich Larson’s “Robocare” has a grumpy old man taking out his grief on the loss of his best friend on teenage hooligans—and realizing he has more in common with them than he thought.

“The Hidden Knowledge Society” by Bogi Takács focuses on a younger protagonist, a girl who is convinced she is an alien hybrid (and maybe she is), or might be going through growing pains in general. Meanwhile “Hope to See the Ghost Tonight” by Patrick Swenson melds the fear of being ten years out of high school with a freaky hide-and-seek game which may hold dangers in the dark. And Karina Sumner-Smith’s “A Grave Between Them” tells of a teenage girl granted a power that makes her far more world-weary than she ought to be.

I don’t have space to go into all of the stories, but at the end of each story, each author gives advice to their younger selves. The advice is brief but poignant, personal, and fitting. It made me consider what advice I would give my younger self. I doubt I would be as insightful, especially since I’m emerging on the other side of 2020. It’ll be more like, “Stop trying to please other people. It’s okay to say no. Play music loud, keep reading, and keep loving. That’s how you’ll stay true to yourself. Oh, and swear more. Trust me. It’s not all that bad.”

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: King Bullet, by Richard Kadrey

Chris Kluwe | 835 words

King Bullet
Richard Kadrey
Hardcover / Ebook / Audiobook
ISBN: 978-0062951571
Harper Voyager, August 2021, 320 pages

Greetings, readers, hopefully your summer is staying safe and sane, especially for those of you in Los Angeles. The reason I mention that specific city is because for this month’s review, we’re finishing off the Sandman Slim series in style with the glorious finale that is King Bullet, and the Los Angeles Richard Kadrey takes us to is one on the verge of erupting.

King Bullet takes place three months after the events of Ballistic Kiss, the previous Sandman Slim novel, and once again features James “Sandman Slim” Stark as the beaten up, broken down, world-weary occult noir protagonist who never met a problem he couldn’t violence his way out of. In King Bullet, Stark is desperately trying to make sense of a world gone insane—a deadly pandemic is choking out the life of the city (definitely inspired by Covid); his non-binary partner is having issues reconciling their life with his own; and an agent of pure mayhem leading a terrifying cult is trying to burn the entire place down in an orgy of destruction, eyes set squarely on Slim.

Luckily for Stark, he has plenty of old friends to count on (even if he doesn’t always trust himself enough to ask for their help), and each of the characters built up over the previous nine novels gets a chance to shine in this final entry (though for the dead ones it’s a bit more literal and fairly brief). The interpersonal relationships between all these obviously damaged people is, like the previous books, equal parts delightful and despairing to read, and everything is delivered in Kadrey’s terse yet evocative noir style.

As in the other Sandman Slim novels, one of the fun things about Kadrey’s writing is how the city of LA is just as much a character as Stark and his friends, with various local landmarks making their appearances throughout the story, as well as some homages to the city’s turbulent past. While real-life Los Angeles might not be quite as bleak as painted in King Bullet (we’re not ablaze yet as of this writing, but it’s still early in fire season), Kadrey does a bang-up job of weaving in some pressing current social issues, including the city’s homelessness problem, the relationship between its citizens and its police, and what happens when local municipal services all go to hell.

The other interesting thing I appreciated while reading the novel is how Kadrey doesn’t hold back from examining the mental toll Stark’s journey has taken on him. Sure, his body heals unnaturally quickly, but even the mind of a half-angel who came back from Hell can be a fragile thing, and Slim has seen more than his share of troubles. There’s also a remarkable amount of character growth in this last entry, with Stark making some choices—including his approach to the final set-piece showdown—with a maturity that feels hard-won and fairly earned. The denouement itself is suitably explosive, and felt like an appropriate way to finish off a series that has been about living with the consequences of making hard choices.

I do have to warn you as a reader, though—King Bullet is an absolutely deranged novel from start to finish (in a good way, I promise), and is probably the closest you’ll get to experiencing an acid trip while being completely sober. I actually did laugh out loud when Kadrey included a small bit about Stark enjoying the anime Dorohedoro, because of course Sandman Slim would resonate with that particular visual blend of “what the hell is even happening” and “now for some extreme ultra-violence.” It really felt like Kadrey decided to leave absolutely nothing off the table when it came to the conclusion of Stark’s story, and I, for one, am glad he decided to go for it, because it gives the book an almost manic intensity that makes it hard to stop turning the pages.

Overall, King Bullet is a satisfying conclusion to an epic noir saga, and is the perfect reading choice for both a day on the sand at Venice Beach, or an evening sipping bourbon amidst West Hollywood’s wild nightlife. While it’s always bittersweet to see a story come to an end, I’ll still keep an eye on the shadows, because someone like Sandman Slim doesn’t stay gone forever.

Read if: You like long fights against impossible odds; you know what it’s like to live on nothing but pizza; you’re wary of pigs.

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: We’re Here, edited by C.L. Clark and Charles Payseur

Arley Sorg | 1631 words

We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2020
C.L. Clark and Charles Payseur, editors
Paperback
ISBN: 978-1952086274
Neon Hemlock, August 2021, 264 pages

Keep an eye on Neon Hemlock, y’all.

One of the first things I learned in working at Locus Magazine was that there are far more small and independent presses are out there than you think.¹ A chunk of them are authors self-publishing with a catchy “publisher” name, or perhaps publishing their friends. A fair number are somewhat indistinguishable from each other: if you set books from these indie presses together on a shelf, you might not be able to tell that they are from different companies (but you could tell that they aren’t from major publishers). Some independent presses publish titles which are, in fact, easily distinguishable from other publishers, but the books from within that press, if placed together on a shelf, might all seem indistinguishable from each other.

Then again, there are many distinctive independent publishers who produce notable books. Quite often, after you’ve read or seen a handful of their titles, you start to get a sense of their literary taste and visual aesthetic. When a title comes in from one of these houses, you can often tell whose book it is at a glance. They might not have the budgets that big houses have, but many of their books are outstanding. Importantly, the presence of their products dramatically improves the quality of the overall body of available literature. In other words, our lives are made richer by the work of independent publishers.²

Newcomer Neon Hemlock, launched by dave ring in 2019, promises to fall into the latter category. They feature gorgeous covers and offer books by intriguing, talented authors, such as Eboni Dunbar, Anya Ow, Premee Mohamed, Shingai Njeri Kagunda, and our own Nightmare Magazine editor Wendy N. Wagner. In the December 2020 issue of Lightspeed I reviewed Neon Hemlock’s anthology Glitter + Ashes—quite favorably; and I would hold that book up as an example of a title which feels distinctive and which improves the offerings of genre.

Which brings me to their latest anthology: We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2020, by series editor Charles Payseur and guest editor C.L. Clark. By virtue of being a “Year’s Best” (in other words, a reprint anthology), rather than a gathering of original pieces, this book may not be as distinctive or fundamentally transformational in its impact on genre as Glitter + Ashes was, or as upcoming Unfettered Hexes will likely be. All the same, it’s a welcome addition, and does stand as important and unique in the scope of “Year’s Bests,” which are often the takes of various editors on more or less the same subjects. That is to say, there are many kinds of “Year’s Best” science fiction and fantasy books, framed in different ways, with titles adjusted to reflect variation in editorship; but none of them are quite like this one, and many of their editors do not consider queer representation a priority.

Clark and Payseur have selected a solid set of stories, sometimes touching, many of them memorable. Favorites include “Escaping Dr. Markoff” by Gabriela Santiago, which evokes an old-timey silver screen vibe. Characters are named by their type, such as “The Beautiful Daughter” and “The Fiancé.” The main character—“You”—is clearly caught in some sort of strange, fairly dire predicament, and this includes being manipulated by the toxic Dr. Markoff. Part of the predicament involves memory loss. On paper, it’s an idea which would not interest me, and utilizes tactics, such as withholding information from the reader, which I would usually consider weak devices. And yet, in the actual read, this story is immediately gripping. The setting is interesting, and the style is engaging. By the time the conclusion unfolds, the whole piece strikes me as masterful.

In “The Currant Dumas” by L.D. Lewis, Sam is a food journalist in a post-environmental disaster world where food journalism doesn’t really exist anymore. There’s a lovely playfulness in her portrayal, including the way she chases a passion which she is still discovering, and the ways she navigates a range of responses, from curiosity to proprietor Yvette, who says, “ . . . we don’t have room here for anyone who doesn’t work. You’ll do all that writing business on your time, not mine.” Aboard a train which shuttles goods to select surviving colonies, Sam catches the eye of Cirque performer and Magician Layla, who is, of course, full of surprises. As their relationship develops, Sam also pushes forward in creating her own space in the world. There’s a dash of adventure, and the world is pretty cool. But the strength of the story is in the genuine characters, and their interactions, which are grounded in humanness and seasoned with the right amount of awkwardness.

Innocent Chizaram Ilo’s “Rat and Finch Are Friends” is a story about a boy named Izu who is a shapeshifter and who falls for another boy. Izu is punished for his feelings, and the two boys are forced to be separate. Themes of otherness and denial are sharpened by clever utilization of the speculative element, wherein Izu is told to keep his shapeshifting ability a secret, and some members of the family want to erase his ability entirely. It’s a poignant tale with a touching ending.

Naomi Kanakia’s “Everquest” is a painful exploration of dysphoria wherein Gopal discovers freedom and a truer sense of self in playing wood elf character Gayatri. Gopal’s parents are not so understanding, and before long, Gopal has to shut down this joy to perform the role of “responsible adult.” Eventually the game calls, as Gopal’s truer self may be buried, but never really disappeared. It’s a heartfelt story which uses narrative not only to describe external prejudices and pressures, but to also delve into difficult subjects and emotions, including shame and self-loathing. This one deserves a place in more “Year’s Bests.”

“Body, Remember” by Nicasio Andres Reed is lovely, strange, and complex. Jun is on a dig in Ossia, a town “built on the grave of ancient Ossuaria, seven kilometers from the mouth of Vesuvius.” When the volcano buried Pompeii in ash, the people of Ossuaria had time to flee, leaving the ancient city empty. Jun, however, is on site when they open a boathouse which is packed with human bodies preserved by volcanic mud. Worse, Jun hears something in the depths of the boathouse, whispering, the sound rising from the darkness and loneliness. The story itself is about a kind of gentle struggle against the aggressive elements of life. Brilliant but understated lines deliver strong emotions. And, even as events provoke Jun’s reflections, there is a subtle underlying discussion being carried out around the way experiences color judgments and perceptions. Really, this story is a depiction of the constant fight to be yourself, to be who you actually are, and the ways that this fight shifts over time but still exists; the arenas change, and combatants change, but the fight is ongoing. The images of the dead and the internalizations which arise are gorgeous and effective. This one deserves to be read slowly, and to be absorbed as thoughtfully as it is written.

Last month I reviewed Paula Guran’s Far Out, which is not a “Year’s Best” but nearly could be. I commented that the table of contents “reads like the glitterati of queer fiction,” that there were no surprises in terms of what names were listed; but I praised the sources that had been tapped, as Guran had gathered stories which many people likely would not have read. By contrast, the table of contents of We’re Here is more about the up-and-coming authors. These are the folks who have a strong foothold in publishing, a sense of career, but who, for the most part, haven’t achieved the awards and statuses of the folks in Far Out. A notable exception being multiple award-winning Charlie Jane Anders, who appears in both books. On the author end, this book introduces readers to quality fiction by skilled writers whose names may be new(er) to readers; or at least, readers may not have realized just how notable these authors are. On the resource end, there are fewer surprises here than Far Out provided, almost all the stories being available and free to read in a narrower set of online publications.

To my thinking, they are both good books, but they are doing very different things in very different ways. This makes them worthy companions, and great additions to the reading lists of anyone who loves short fiction. Remember what I said at the top? It definitely holds true here: our lives are made richer by the presence of these books.

¹. The Locus Book Summary in the February 2021 issue says, “We saw genre material from 294 publishers, down from 318 last year.”

². Tachyon, founded in 1995; Small Beer, founded in 2000; Rosarium, founded in 2013, to name just a few of the more than a dozen or so that easily come to mind.

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: Justin C. Key

Laurel Amberdine | 911 words

Well, thanks a lot, now I’m scared to go to another art exhibit! Just kidding . . . maybe. Anyway, I loved the story. How did this premise occur to you?

I took an online horror writing class with Garrett Cook last fall and one of the exercise prompts was to “take a moment where a work of art has caused an uproar of some kind and set your piece in that moment . . . Let’s examine transgression in the arts, the good, the bad, and the ugly of it.” That really resonated with me. After that, things just started to come together.

I liked how Danny and Pam faced obvious tangible threats, like death, while your protagonist went through the prolonged horror of disappearing, after a career of being increasingly important. Since you’re in medicine, I’m suspecting this might come from some observation of personality types there? Can you share some ways in which your experiences informed this story?

I didn’t originally have my protagonist in the medical field. Going into the second draft, I knew I wanted her story to show the horror of being both invisible and hypervisible in society. I had already established that one of her friends would get inadequate medical care and it occurred to me that I could have the added dynamic of being in a position to help but then feeling hopeless because society has decided to ignore you.

My experience in medicine has definitely informed much of the dynamic. It’s a high-stress, high-stakes, highly hierarchical environment. There’s four years of medical school and then three to ten years of residency (depending on the specialty) and the whole process is working your way up the totem pole. My protagonist is in her last year of residency and a big part of her identity has become being a leader in the hospital, being highly reliable, and being able to help people.

I’ve also definitely seen my POC colleagues be reprimanded heavily for the same things our non-POC colleagues would do regularly. I’ve gone through the last eight years feeling I have to be relatively squeaky clean to survive.

Is there anything about “Now You See Me” that you wanted to make sure readers noticed?

Perhaps this is apparent, but I definitely want people to recognize and reflect on the fact that I used real fears/experiences of Black and Brown people in this country. Our protagonist becomes in a sort of way invisible to society, except when she does wrong and then receives heavy consequences. Her friend begins to run into legal trouble and the response is “well, what did she do to bring this on herself?” Her other friend experiences the real fear of receiving medical care in a system that is historically tilted against us. I thought of a Black pediatric resident who recently died in childbirth (Chaniece Wallace, MD) while writing that. I just want people to know the result is fiction, but like most speculative writing, it’s rooted in reality.

Given all you have going on—work, family, and writing, I feel like you might have some thoughts on time management! How do you manage to fit writing in with everything else? Any advice for the rest of us?

I’ve adopted (read: am at peace with) the method of writing in spurts. Though writing now is definitely becoming a more consistent, daily thing, throughout medical school and residency and family-expanding I had to be comfortable with going periods of time without writing. I was able to set things up for myself so that even during those “off-seasons” I could feel productive in some way. For example, I did Clarion West the summer between my second and third year of medical school (which just so happened to be the last summer break of my life), wrote my ass off, and then during the last two years of medical school I mostly revised and managed submissions. Now I mostly write at night once the children are asleep and do smaller things like light edits or managing stories in the in-between time (I am writing this at eight a.m. before my first patient at 8:30, for example). To-Do Lists help. Using different media helps shake writer’s block. Sometimes writing a scene long-hand or even on my phone can help get out of a funk. Don’t get discouraged by periods of not writing. I stopped working on my novel for two years and now I have an agent for it!

What are you working on lately? Where else can readers find more of your work?

I recently landed an agent, Adam Eaglin of The Cheney Agency, and we are working on preparing both a novel and a short story collection for submission to publication houses, hopefully sometime this year. I am wrapping on a yet-announced project with Realm, have turned in final drafts for upcoming stories in the anthologies Vital, Don’t Touch That, and the new and exciting collaborative Many-Worlds project spearheaded by Cadwell Turnbull. My serialized novella, Spider King, is available now wherever you get your podcasts. You can find me on Twitter and Instagram @JustinKey_MD and links to all my published works on my website, justinckey.com.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in San Francisco where she works for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Andrea Chapela

Gordon B. White | 1374 words

Much like Rivera faces the challenge of sifting through memories of thoughts and impulses, sometimes it can be difficult to parse out how exactly a story was conceived. To the extent you can recall, what was the inspiration behind “Now You Feel It”?

For this story in particular, the inspiration is quite clear to me. In 2015 four young men of wealthy families in Veracruz sexually abused a girl (who was still a minor at the time). Two of them fled to Spain so that they wouldn’t be persecuted. The whole thing and the trial were discussed on the news a ton. In 2017, when the trial was underway, I remember reading about it. I was living in Iowa at the time and feeling quite estranged from anything to do with Mexico. As I remember it, the defense lawyer argued that the guys were just bothering her and didn’t feel any pleasure during the abuse, so they couldn’t be accused of having had sexual intent; therefore, they couldn’t be charged with sexual assault. This made me so mad at the time and I couldn’t stop thinking about how it would work if crimes were sentenced based on intent, and what a future might look like if intention could be seen and judged. Moreover, I realized that even with a technological advancement that could prove intention, in a country like Mexico it was inevitable that people with money would try to get away with it. That’s how this story started.

I agonized a lot about what kind of crime Gabriel would commit. Even if the inspiration was a real case, I wanted to do something different. At the time, sharing intimate pictures of people wasn’t a crime in Mexico and I thought it would be interesting to choose something that would seem “mild” by our standards and that would be a big deal in this world. I mention this because in the time since I wrote this story, the “Olympia Law” was passed in Mexico and now people who share intimate photos or video of others without their consent can be charged.

Although set in the future, “Now You Feel It” feels contemporary because it deals with issues that are not created by technology but which have been exacerbated by it. In a way, because Gabriel and Froggy can share Carmen’s pictures so easily, they do damage in the heat of the moment, whereas if they had to move slowly, they might have reconsidered. Similarly, it seems that because Rivera manufactures Gabriel’s feeling of guilt all at once, rather than letting it develop naturally—which it might have done, since the threads were there beneath the surface all along—Gabriel is destroyed by it. What can we take away from the effect this technological acceleration has on our characters?

This is a very interesting reading that I had never considered. When writing future scenarios I do keep in mind how fast technology is changing, but how slow human feelings and behavior change in comparison. Technology is going faster and faster, and I don’t think our interactions and feelings can keep up; by the time we’ve figured out one way of using a certain advancement, it seems as if a new one is already here. We sometimes speak as if technology is going to resolve the issues we have as a society and in most cases, I think technology just makes it clearer where the system is the weakest. In the case of Mexico, impunity, injustice, and corruption are issues that plague the day-to-day of its citizens and how they interact with others. I guess it is like that in many parts of the world, but it feels especially in-your-face in Mexico.

While readers will rightly be disgusted with Gabriel’s actions and root for him to face consequences, much like the story’s criminal justice system, that impulse is based on the perceived intentionality of his actions. In the end, the Gabriel who faces punishment is arguably no longer the same person who committed the crime; however, the damage to his victim, Carmen, is even worse than before. As readers weigh their own reactions to Gabriel’s fate, what should they take into consideration?

The world of “How You Feel It” is one of the bleakest I’ve written, but still, I couldn’t bring myself to keep the characters from facing the consequences of their actions. Even Gabriel’s father must face some consequences. I think the bleakness lies in the fact that it is inherently unfair how the consequences are dealt for each character; they don’t necessarily fit the actions. Carmen hasn’t actually done anything wrong and is the one that gets the worse punishment. I really feel for her and the humiliation that she is put through twice. In her case it doesn’t even matter that she, too, is from a wealthy family: she is vulnerable because a man believed she had wronged him. That man is Gabriel, who’s really still a boy, and who in the end also pays a price for what he did. I think nothing in the story is fair because the system the characters inhabit is unfair at its core. The person I really wanted to be punished is Gabriel’s dad and although in some ways he feels guilty for what he did, I think he feels it for all the wrong reasons. It is easy to see how Gabriel would have turned out like his dad very easily, feeling like he could get away with everything.

One of the rhetorical flourishes I enjoyed was how Rivera’s gender is at first concealed from the reader, so that when Don Meíja-Botta meets Rivera and is surprised to find out she is a woman, at least some of your readers likely share that surprise. I certainly did, and it made me reconsider how my experiences as a man create implicit biases and assumptions that shape how I view the stories I’m told—a thought which I carried through the rest of “Now You Feel It”. How did you come up with this tactic?

I don’t remember when I first thought it would be cool to conceal Rivera’s gender. I think one of the beta readers told me they were surprised by her gender even when it was clear from the start, because of the expectations we have of the genre. From the start the story has a clear cyberpunk noir tone. I recognized from the comment how it could easily be assumed that Rivera was a guy unless I stated otherwise, and so I thought it would be neat to not be obvious about it. Some people are tricked by it, others aren’t. I also think that the effect is different in English. Both languages telegraph gender in very different ways. In Spanish, possessive pronouns aren’t gendered and you can just drop the subject pronouns in most sentences. I think the effect might be less pronounced in Spanish because of that—you could almost miss it. But Emma Törzs, the translator, did an awesome job when I brought up the feature, and she was ready to take the challenge of making it work in English. I was quite pleased that she figured out a way to make it work.

Finally, what’s coming up next for you? In addition to any scheduled releases, are there any new projects or ideas that you’re just beginning to explore?

Recently I was selected as part of Granta’s “Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists” series, and there is an SF story in the showcase issue that I’m very proud of. Then in the fall I have a story coming out in Future Tense, a partnership between Slate, New America, and Arizona University. I’m also currently editing a novel about love and the end of the world. Idea-wise I keep trying to understand how to write about Mexico City now that I’m living here again.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Gordon B. White is the author of the collection As Summer’s Mask Slips and Other Disruptions (Trepidatio Publishing 2020). A graduate of the Clarion West Writing Workshop, Gordon’s stories have appeared in dozens of venues, including The Best Horror of the Year Vol. 12 and the Bram Stoker Award® winning anthology Borderlands 6. He also contributes reviews and interviews to outlets including Nightmare, Lightspeed, Hellnotes, and The Outer Dark podcast. You can find him online at gordonbwhite.com.

Author Spotlight: Tobi Ogundiran

Laurel Amberdine | 534 words

I love this story so much! I see a lot of fairy tale retellings, but this take on Pinocchio might be my favorite. Such a great twist with the wooden boy looking for his mother, not to be “real.” Can you explain how this story came about?

Thank you, I’m glad you love it! I’m a visual writer, and writing for me is typically recording what I see in my mind’s eye. With this story, the opening scene is actually what came first; I found the image of an old man made of wood sitting on a balcony quite striking. I knew right away that he was waiting for something, for someone. But the reason he had traveled so far, his backstory, everything that had brought him up to that moment eluded me.

I didn’t set out to write a Pinocchio retelling, but as I drafted I realized I was writing one. But where Pinocchio wanted to be a real boy, all this protagonist wants is to be loved. We know that the love of a sane parent is unconditional, a mother’s love doubly so, and it just made perfect sense that after the death of his father, the wooden boy would seek out his mother if only to feel love one more time. But of course, things aren’t what they seem.

How did you get into writing genre fiction?

Growing up in Nigeria, I constantly heard tales which would ordinarily seem too far-fetched to be true. But they were true. And this helped shape my understanding of the world, in that the lens through which you view life affects how you experience it. This, coupled with the fact that as a teen I read so much Stephen King and Harry Potter, I guess it was inevitable that when I finally decided to put pen to paper, to craft my own stories, the stories that came were fantastic in nature. The realization that what I wrote was genre only came later.

The ending with the magnificent tree was perfect, but also . . . I just love trees. Do you have a favorite tree, or any that have been important to you?

I love trees too! I’m not sure that I have a favourite tree. I’m just obsessed with all of them. Few things inspire the level of awe in me that really old trees do. I’ve been in the deep forest a couple of times, where the trees are so old you can’t help but feel that they’re sentient. Indeed trees play a huge part in Yoruba cosmology, and it’s something I always try to infuse in my work.

What have you been working on lately? Where can readers look for more of your work?

I’ve been juggling a couple of tantalising projects, chief among them being a retelling which I can’t speak about just yet, but keep your ears peeled. Readers can find links to my other published work on my site: tobiogundiran.com.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in San Francisco where she works for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: David Anaxagoras

Laurel Amberdine | 903 words

I liked how timely this story felt, despite such an exotic setting. The economic/energy cycle, where spaceship flight causes damage . . . which leads to more energy sources . . . which leads to more damage, seems awfully familiar. Rather like what we’re doing to this planet, now. And of course the endless debt that rules a person’s life is also far too familiar. Were any of these current issues on your mind when you were planning this story? How did it all come about?

This story rose out of the remains of an idea which I had simmering on the backburner for years. I wanted to write something about a salvage operator, an affable guy who puttered around the galaxy in his junker ship, scavenging crap leftover from extinct civilizations. I just thought it was a good arena for stories, but I never did get the details sorted out. The idea just remained a low hum in the background for a long while.

Then I happened on a reality-style PBS show where they send people to live in some past time period. This one was set in Victorian slums. As I watched, it became clear that we haven’t evolved at all in how we treat those in poverty, not to mention the way we trap generations of people in debt. It was depressing and rage-inducing.

So debt became an organizing idea that sparked a new take on my junker story. My salvager guy transformed into someone with much more at stake. And while the story isn’t a direct retelling of Oliver Twist, there were elements and echoes that worked their way in. Finally, the shattered universe became another riff on that cycle of endless exploitation. While I didn’t start out with poverty, debt, and environmental destruction in mind, those issues brought meaning and relevance to the story which motivated me to explore the world and follow Olive into that ship. It was the key to finally unlocking the story for me.

Your setting here is so rich and full of possibilities. Do you have any other stories in this world, or would you consider writing more?

I wasn’t thinking beyond this one story when I started because I had such a big world to wrap my mind around. Plus, I had remnants of a whole other version of the story I had to fight to keep clear out of my head. I was just hoping to make it to the end of the story with my sanity intact.

Not only did I keep my sanity, but it was a blast to write. I loved spending time with Olive and Jakk. It was hard to say goodbye at the end. I can’t wait to go on more adventures with them. My dream is to write seven or eight Olive and Jakk novelettes—there’s something about the condensed, fast-paced nature of that length that appeals to me. It works well with this world and these characters. I’m sketching out some ideas for both the next story and the broader arc of the characters and the series.

I didn’t even realize you wrote short science fiction, and now here’s this excellent story! How long have you been at this, and what else have you been creating lately?

My first love is science fiction. I started out wanting to make movies. When I was a kid I couldn’t afford a camera and film, so I wrote scripts for the movies I wanted to make. My first science fiction epic was called It Came from The Black Hole and I typed it in the fifth grade on a toy typewriter that only printed IN ALL CAPS.

Over the years I switched back and forth between prose and screenwriting and eventually landed in UCLA’s MFA screenwriting program. I sold a TV show to Amazon Studios and thought I would be a TV guy for the rest of my life. I’m very proud of my show but I learned quickly that I needed to have more creative control over my work. You basically give that up when you make a TV deal.

I have retired from TV writing and I’m very happy writing fiction now. I’m thrilled that my first story found a home in Lightspeed. I have also completed a middle-grade novel (a science fiction thriller), and I’m on the hunt for a literary agent. In the meantime, I’ve started writing my second novel, another middle-grade thriller I can only describe as “Lord of the Flies set in an escape room at the top of a sentient Trump Tower.”

Where else can readers look for your work?

My TV show, Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street, is available in the US on Amazon Prime. The first episode is free even if you don’t have a Prime membership. I believe the pilot episode is also free on YouTube. Outside of the United States, availability varies, but check Amazon first. I also wrote for the animated science fiction action-adventure show Glitch Techs on Netflix. Readers who want to keep tabs on me and my work can find me on Twitter as @davidanaxagoras, where I’m very active.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in San Francisco where she works for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 219 words

Coming up in September, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Thomas Ha (“Where You Left Me”) and Meg Elison (“Uprising”), along with a flash story by Andrew Dana Hudson (“Stowaways”). Our reprint story is by Violet Allen (“Mister Dawn, How Can You Be So Cruel?”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Anya Ow (“Fanspell: Flowers in Spring (RobYung, NSFW)”) and Lizz Huerta (“Sía”). Our fantasy flash is by Adam R. Shannon (“It Begins to Snow”). Plus, we have a reprint story from Alexander Weinstein (“Invasive Species and Their Habitats”).

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: Gene Doucette, Donyae Coles, P H Lee, Aimee Ogden, and Stephen Graham Jones.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that speculative goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Lightspeed:

Website

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Destroy Projects

www.destroysf.com

Newsletter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2

Podcast Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/itunes-rss

Twitter

www.twitter.com/LightspeedMag

Facebook

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Subscribe

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe

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!

If you’ve read this far, thanks so much. We hope you’ll consider becoming a backer on Patreon. That URL again is patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams.

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

The Undertakers by Nicole Glover [forthcoming]

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.