TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 144, May 2022

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: May 2022

SCIENCE FICTION

Nobody Ever Goes Home to Zhenzhu
Grace Chan

The Plastic People
Tobias S. Buckell

It Came Gently
Aigner Loren Wilson

Test 4 Echo
Peter Watts

FANTASY

The Hammer of God
Jonathan Maberry

Magical Girl Burnout Bingo
Lauren Ring

If We Do Not Fly at Sunset
Andi C. Buchanan

The Cheesemaker and the Undying King
Lina Rather

EXCERPTS

Nettle & Bone
T. Kingfisher

NONFICTION

Book Review: The Ballad of Perilous Graves, by Alex Jennings
Aigner Loren Wilson

Book Review: Disruption, edited by Zadok, Szczurek, Snyman
Arley Sorg

Book Review: Tear Down the Throne by Jennifer Estep
Chris Kluwe

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Grace Chan

Tobias S. Buckell

Andi C. Buchanan

Lina Rather

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

© 2022 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Grandfailure / Dreamstime

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

Editorial: May 2022

John Joseph Adams | 232 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 144th issue!

This month we kick off our SF shorts with a story (“Nobody Ever Goes Home to Zhenzhu”) by Grace Chan that proves that family is important—but crew more so. Tobias S. Buckell will make you do a better job sorting your recyclables and composting in his new short, “The Plastic People.” It’s a grim warning about our future that will tweak your darkest funny bone. We also have a flash piece (“It Came Gently”) from Aigner Loren Wilson, along with an SF reprint by Peter Watts (“Test 4 Echo”).

What if fairies were real and worried about both climate change and how to pay the rent? Andi C. Buchanan’s new fantasy story “If We Do Not Fly at Sunset” sprinkles magic on the mundane, with poignant results. Lina Rather blends cottagecore with epic fantasy in her dark story “The Cheesemaker and the Undying King,” which will have you rethinking everything you thought you knew about medieval-inspired fantasy. We also have a flash piece (“Magical Girl Burnout Bingo”) from Lauren Ring. Our fantasy reprint is by Jonathan Maberry (“The Hammer of God”).

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 T. Kingfisher’s new novel Nettle and Bone.

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.

Nobody Ever Goes Home to Zhenzhu

Grace Chan | 3591 words

I’d always known Calam would run.

He had all the signs. A taut restlessness, body brittle as an overstretched lute string, when we stayed too long in one place. A gloom in his eyes, as we drifted through stretches of dead space. A sullen crease between the brows, whenever I tried to ask how he’d landed in that dead-end Martian workshop at seventeen.

But after ten years, why now?

Drumming my fingers on the battered dashboard, I gazed through the viewport at the planet below. My retina flooded with information from the Records. Zhenzhu. Once the pearl of the Feng System: terrestrial, mostly ocean, strung around with island chains like jewelled necklaces. Now, centuries after colonisation, tainted puce-coloured whorls obscured its aquamarine surface.

It’s not difficult to track a person. As a Beaconer, I do it for a living. I could’ve dug into Calam’s past at any point in our travels together. But we’d maintained an unspoken code—until, in sneaking off without so much as a jotted message, he’d broken it.

My preliminary sweep of both Assembly-run and private surveillance databanks had uncovered a torrent of brainwave, kinetic, and metabolic signatures matching Calam’s to various degrees. Even without the biodata, the clumsiest Beaconer could’ve used the serial numbers of his cybernetic enhancements to pinpoint his whereabouts in inhabited space. After discarding the outliers, I still had a clear record of his movements, dating back not just days, but years.

It was my first time to Zhenzhu, but not Calam’s.

I moved the Left-Handed Bandit out of orbit, into a stealthy descent.

• • • •

Calam’s trail unspooled in shimmering blue on my retina—through damp-slicked alleys, thick with cinder-smoke and burnt oil, to Mur Angh’s canal district. On the opposite bank, mushroom-shaped skyscrapers loomed against an ochre sky, air traffic zipping around their stalks like glittering fireflies.

The waterside marketplace was a noisy sea of aluminium-roofed stalls, food carts with illustrated curtains, vending droids on flexible legs, and tricycle-hauled trailers piled with mass-produced trinkets. The citizens of Mur Angh, in tattered synthetic garments and homemade goggles, looked battered, weather-worn, like the crumbling commission flats that dominated the city’s slums. Fragments of conversation, a mix of Common and local dialect, floated through the air.

Zhenzhu’s entry on the Common Records had been no different from the other first-wave colonisation planets. An influx of diasporic groups. A few decades later, the Human Nations Assembly’s coordinated terraforming effort. Now, things were cleaving along the usual lines: the expansionist elitists in their gleaming towers, birthed into new cash and new resources, and the leftovers seething in the slums, wrestling for the scraps.

The trail took me to a roadside stall, where I gestured at the first item on the menu and lit a cigarette.

I scanned the middle-aged vendor for enhancements. Ah, good. An active memory chip. I pinched the last couple of hours of recording and scrubbed until I saw Calam’s face. He’d been sitting in the seat I was in, hunched over a bowl of porridge. I activated my interpreting networks.

“—not as good as it used to be, Kang,” Calam was saying, in a local dialect.

“Shut up, boy,” said the vendor. “You try making good food with stale ingredients. Zhenzhu’s in decay. Imports, agriculture, all dying. The elitists don’t give a shit about the dogs under the table. And you and me, we’re the bottom of the bottom-feeders.”

“What’s changed?”

“Eh, Yen, look at you. You look well. Healthy. Ten years gone—you’re crazy to come back.”

“Not staying.” Calam seized a deep-fried doughstick and crunched into it. “Just here to see my mother.”

“Your mother?”

“Yeah. She sent me a message. She’s dying.”

Kang stared flatly at Calam. “Boy, you know what your mother did, to survive, right? Who she is now?”

“I know.”

“You still want to see her?”

“She sent me a message,” said Calam again.

Kang sighed and dragged a hand over his fleshy face. “Let an old friend give you some advice, Yen. Even though you won’t listen to me. Finish your juk, go to the shipyard, and buy yourself a one-way ticket. Forget your mother. You did the right thing ten years ago. You’re not wanted on this rock.”

I snapped out of the playback when Kang slammed a bowl onto the bench: steaming rice gruel, topped with a gooey black sphere. The fermented aromas made my mouth water. I hadn’t had a fresh meal in weeks. Kang watched, with a pleased expression, as I stubbed out my cigarette and dug in.

“First time on Zhenzhu, eh?” He spoke in Common.

“How’d you know?”

“No jacket, no goggles.” Kang gestured at his own gear. “After first time, you remember acid rain.”

Ah. That explained the eroded buildings, the stalls decked in aluminium sheets, the tense expressions as people flitted from door to door with hoods pulled low. Acid rain was a bad sign—a sign that, after mere centuries, once again, we’d extorted too much from a planet.

“Forecast says rain coming in an hour,” Kang said, pointing at the heavy sky. “I suggest, go somewhere safe.”

• • • •

Silly Calam.

Did he really believe I’d let him go? He’d contrived an elaborate routine: sending his baggage ahead to a public locker; slipping away after the Thurnos Bidding, muttering about a pleasure den; unleashing an actually-decent pirate program to hide his escape via a stem-cell colony ship.

Sure, I could’ve snagged another mechanic. Thurnos was stuffed with sad souls vying to underbid one another for a warm meal and a warm bed. But after ten years, you get used to someone. You figure out whether you can live with their worst habits.

Kang called him Yen. I wasn’t surprised to discover he had a different name. I remembered the half-starved squirrel-boy—twitchy, shaggy-haired, covered in engine grease—who’d stepped out of that rundown Martian workshop. Mine had been a reluctant stopover. I’d been itching to shoot away from the Sol System, but the Left-Handed Bandit had needed a new portside cannon cradle.

The offer of a job had left my lips on impulse. Maybe, subconsciously, I’d wanted someone with secrets, who didn’t want to talk about them. Maybe, in his brittle gloom, in his unwavering silence, I felt an unspoken kinship.

• • • •

Well, this was probably one of the safest places in Mur Angh. I’d tracked Calam to the tallest tower in the fancy district, watched as a statuesque receptionist led him to the elevators, and hacked the service elevator to follow him up to the penthouse suite.

Sliding doors opened onto a hallway draped in Cultural Appropriation Lite. Whoever had decorated the penthouse was evidently a passionate but undiscerning fan of the Jovian-satellite diaspora aesthetic. Embroidered silks in an imitation of the Ganymedean artisans softened the chrome walls; traditional Callistoan music thrummed from the ceiling. There was even a hologram of the Europa sky: a fire-striped orb with a stormy red eye, glaring above a rim of icy spikes.

I activated my jacket’s bio-cloaking tech before stepping out of the elevator, plunging straight through Jupiter’s equatorial belts. The heat signatures of six or seven people radiated from a large room on the north side of the penthouse.

Bloody Calam. Why hadn’t he just told me about his mother? We could’ve come to Zhenzhu together. We could’ve put a plan in place. Now he was probably going to die—and I had to decide how much to risk my life trying to rescue the fool.

I skulked my way to a service room. Wedged between a steel trolley and the wall, peeking between doorframe and door-curtain, I had a partial view of a richly furnished lounge.

Calam was standing in front of a plush settee, shoulders hunched, eyes darting. Kneeling at a low table of burnished wood, the receptionist poured tea from a gilt teapot. She gestured for Calam to sit. He lowered himself onto the settee, one hand clenched at his bag.

“Where is she?” he demanded.

“She’s coming.” The receptionist offered an enamelled teacup in a graceful circle of fingertips. Her sleeves slipped down, revealing pale wrists. “Please.”

Calam blew on the tea, but did not drink.

A curtained doorway on the other side of the room parted. A woman stepped in. A silk robe hugged pyramidal breasts, cinched a wasp waist, and swished around elongated legs. Scarlet lips bloomed in a pearly, luminescent face. Beneath puffy eyelids, inhumanly violet irises glittered. She was someone’s embodied fetish.

She was not sick, and not at all dying.

“Ma . . .?” Calam rose, dropping the cup onto the table. Hot tea splattered. His expression stretched halfway between a gasp and a grimace.

The woman’s head drooped towards her chest, like a stalk of wheat snapped in a harsh wind.

Four more people came through the curtained doorway: a brown-haired, clean-shaven man in a high-collared gray suit, and three soldiers in combat gear. One of the soldiers yanked Calam’s mother aside. In the same moment, Calam scrambled backwards over the settee and whipped his hand out of his bag. He was holding a gun, but it looked like a toy next to the soldiers’ weapons.

“You lied,” said Calam, his eyes hard and fixed on his mother’s face.

The scarlet mouth trembled. “I’m sorry, Yen.”

“I’m not surprised,” Calam hissed. “You sold us out before. You sold yourself. Why wouldn’t you sell out your last child, too?”

The man in the suit stepped forward. From my hiding spot, I couldn’t get a clear view of his face. But he reeked of elitist: oozing vitality, control, wealth. I wrapped my hand around my holster’s reassuring coolness.

“Now, boy. There’s no need to scold your poor Ma. We didn’t really give her a choice. Come. We don’t want this to be messy. Let’s put that gun down, hey? Let’s be civilised.”

“Evan,” spat Calam. “You’ve modded yourself so much I wouldn’t have recognised you—if not for that slimy voice.”

Evan spread his arms wide. I had a close view of his left hand, extending from his cuff, which bore a coat of fair downy hair. On his index finger, he wore a gold signet ring imprinted with an eagle.

“I told you we’d see each other again.”

“What do you want? It wasn’t enough for you to kill my father, my brother, my sisters? To take my mother as your bed toy? To murder the Luying because we were an inconvenience?”

“Good grief, boy. You make it sound personal.”

Calam was backed against the wall, both hands wrapped around his pistol. Sweat poured down his flushed face. He had one shot. At most. The soldiers’ enhancements were several years ahead of Calam’s—they could probably kill him at the first twitch of his trigger finger.

I dipped quickly into the Common Records, searching for any entries about the Luying people on Zhenzhu, or a massacre ten years ago. Nothing.

“Why go to such lengths?” Calam hissed. “I’m a nobody. Why bother luring me back here, just to kill me?”

Evan took two steps forward. “You know I work clean. Loose threads are an . . . irritation. Sometimes, the Assembly likes to stick their nose into the past. They don’t understand that cleaning up the lowlife is a necessary part of building a great planet. Call it . . . tidying.”

Pursing his lips, Evan turned to his soldiers.

A neural blast bludgeoned into my brain. I reeled.

Are you waiting for me to fucking invite you in?!

It was Calam.

He knew. He knew I was here.

Bloody—

• • • •

I went for the receptionist first. I’d seen the faint scars of implanted pistols in her wrists. She was unquestionably the most dangerous one in the room.

I crossed the room in four strides. A neuro-linked command to my weapons belt dispatched a chemical blast at Evan and his three henchmen. A small range grenade. Probably leave one or two of them alive—but I didn’t want to hurt Calam or his mother. Pistol in hand, I fired at the receptionist. The bullet took her in the jugular. Blood sprayed in a crimson fan over the settee as she crumpled.

I dove behind a grand pianoforte, just as the shots came. Darn—two still standing. Something hit my foot, but I felt no pain. I went low and ducked out, firing.

Silence.

The soldiers were sprawled on the carpet. Two were melted by the chemical grenade. The third had taken my shots in his chest, and was gurgling his last breaths. Somehow, I’d missed Evan entirely—but Calam had got him, first with a bullet, and then with a knife to his face.

I had to pull my mechanic away.

“Hey,” I said. “Hey. Calam. Come back.”

He collapsed onto his heels, gasping and shuddering, knife clattering from slack fingers. He gazed up at me, blank-eyed.

“You—cursed—shagua,” I snarled, prodding my finger into his forehead. “What the fuck would you have done if I weren’t here?”

A delirious smile spread over Calam’s blood-splattered face. “But you are here.” Then he shivered, and seemed to return to himself. His gaze dropped to my feet. “Orin—you’re bleeding.”

I glanced down. A puncture in my boot was leaking blood onto the carpet. The pain came to me distantly. I activated a neural net to scoop it up, for later.

“You didn’t have to smash into my head, by the way,” I snapped, because snapping would keep the wooziness away. “You took down three layers of delicate security work. I was about to waltz in and rescue you.”

“Just had to make sure you didn’t change your mind, enyi.”

“Starting to wish I had.”

We both jerked our heads up at a soft noise. Calam’s mother was clawing at the velvety wallpaper, her body spasming. I limped up to her.

“Wei. You OK?”

She moved her lips, but no sound came out. She didn’t look injured. Tentatively, I touched her shoulder. She crumpled into a heap, her chin coming to rest on her knees like a decommissioned android. Her artificial eyes looked through me, past me, towards the tall windows, which were squealing beneath an onslaught of toxic rain.

“Forget her,” Calam said. His tone was detached, but not cruel. “She’s been rewritten too many times.”

I came back to Calam. We gazed down at Evan’s corpse. Bits of jellied eyeball and stringy muscle were visible in the pulpy stew of what had been his face. I wondered if Calam had ever killed anyone before.

“After I escaped,” he said in a low voice, “I tried to find others. Relatives, friends, anyone. Didn’t have much luck. I’ve accepted that I’m the only one left. The only one who knows everything he did. He wanted my memory chips—probably would’ve ripped them right out of my head. Can’t have an annoying Luying kid popping up and making Zhenzhu’s history look . . . unpalatable.”

I scanned the body for ID and enhancements. Evan Enders. Date of birth: 12/08/2571. Age: 56 Earth-years. Chief Minister for Sustainable Development, third term of service. I drew in a sharp breath. “He’s Assembly. Big shot. He’s got a Scribe Implant.”

“Of course.” Calam glanced at me. “How do you think he wrote the Luying out of existence? You think Assembly don’t mod their own Records? Wah, Orin. You’re more of an optimist than I thought. Hey—what are you doing?”

The tip of my serrated knife was where Evan’s nose had recently been. “I’m taking it. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“I know we’re into murdering Ministers now, but tampering with Records—that’s a crime against humanity, no?”

“I’ve already done it once.” I thought back to undulating swathes of gray, the pink fans of salt basins, smoky breath fanning my face—and a virus I’d crafted to hide, to protect. I couldn’t believe how guileless I’d been, just a few short months ago, about the way the galaxy worked. “We’ll write the Luying back into it. Take that memory loop out of your head and upload it. A crime for humanity.”

“No.”

“No?”

“Then we’d be just like him.” Calam wiped his hands on his pants, leaving grisly trails of the Minister. “Using stolen power for our own purposes. We should do more. We should tear down the walls. Make it so anyone can amend it.”

The acid rain seemed to be hammering right into my skull, corroding the bony arches, shaking the floors and roots. For most of my life, I’d avoided thinking about the Assembly if I could—there was a reason a certain kind of people became Beaconers. I felt suddenly foolish. For years, I’d thought that in fleeing the Sol System, in cutting all ties, I’d defied them. But even as a Beaconer, I was entirely in their thrall. I worked for cash. I delivered those with less, to those with more.

The Records were yet another tool for the privileged few to conceal, to control.

Calam’s mother lifted her face from her knees with a small, sad smile. Her whisper was barely audible beneath the rattling windows. “Good chaos.”

An imprint of my own mother rose unbidden in my mind—stolen, rewritten, forgotten. I squashed the memory away. That was another pain to deal with later.

“Can you do it, Orin?”

Can is a shitty word in Common. It’s a mash-up of meanings, conflating degrees of ability with degrees of willingness until a whole spectrum of nuance is condensed into one clumsy term. In my mother’s Callistoan dialect of the Jovian language, there are thirteen different ways to say can, each with their subtle hints of inclination, capacity, importance, and immediacy.

I wondered how Calam would’ve asked, in the Luying tongue—and what he was really asking of me. He’d never requested anything of me before. Not directly, not like this.

Taking a deep breath, I plunged the knife through Evan’s crushed nasal bones. I thought I heard a whimper, a gurgle. The Implant was nestled between his frontal lobes. Pinching it between two fingers, I pulled it free of its gory cage and held it up to the wan light streaming through the windows. Beneath a silver-scarlet sheen of viscous fluid, the Scribe Implant looked like a bronze slug, coiled into a spiral.

I wiped it roughly and tucked it into my glove, where it nestled warmly in the crease of my palm.

“Let’s get back to the Bandit, Calam.”

• • • •

Once we were free of Zhenzhu’s orbit, I scrambled the Left-Handed Bandit’s outgoing positional data—an energy-draining program, but necessary to conceal our next steps. The Scribe Implant sat on the dashboard, cracked open and linked to the mainframe.

Calam dropped into the seat next to me. His poncho was melted in spots where it had caught some rain; a tuft of hair poked out of a hole in his hat. From his left cheek to his right temple, a spray of dried blood—the receptionist’s? Evan’s?—formed an angry crimson arc.

“How’d she go?”

“Freaked out when I tried to buckle her down,” said Calam, wearily. “Had to give the sedative. She’s strapped into the bunk now.”

We hadn’t talked about where we would take his mother, but that was a problem for later—along with my injured foot, which I’d hastily patched with a globule of Soothe’em, the puncture hole in my favourite boots, which still carried some Ranzan soil, and the twin pains I’d netted away in the back of my mind.

Calam leaned forward to gaze through the viewport. The angle of the Feng Star revealed only a slender crescent of Zhenzhu—the pollution clouds creamy, like frothed milk, against an inky backdrop.

I glanced at him. “Will you miss it?”

He shook his head. “It was never really home, you know. Even though I was born there. From the beginning, they chased us out.”

The Common Records unfolded in shimmering hologram before us. A shiver thrilled through my body. I’d only ever seen the surface, the lacquered exterior of a puzzle-box. But suddenly we were in the heart of the labyrinth, with a birds-eye map of deeply tangled layers of archives, and the knowledge of where things had been knotted and unknotted. And at our fingertips, a dangerous power: to extract, rewrite, replace.

It would not be difficult to break it open. Unlock the puzzle-box, crack open its compartments, and turn it inside out, for anyone and everyone to play with. The Common Records would be truly common.

“Huh,” Calam said. Touching a dirt-streaked hand to his temple, he neuro-linked to the mainframe. A carefully compiled database unfurled from his memory chip: holographs and names of the Luying people, dates and places of birth, dates and places of death. There was a lot of information, almost a thousand identities, but I could also see a lot of gaps. Trails, gone cold. Missing, whereabouts unconfirmed, presumed dead.

I turned to him. Tears glimmered on his cheeks, carving paths through the blood.

He reached over me to initiate the hack.

The ghost-blue faces of his grandparents, father, siblings, cousins, drifted into their digital shrine. Page by page, the Records opened to the galaxy. Good chaos, his mother had whispered. As the first wave flowed back to us, a deluge of grief and shock and fury, I shifted the Left-Handed Bandit out of neutral, balancing on a knife’s edge of stars, and waited for Calam’s direction.

©2022 by Grace Chan.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Grace Chan is an Aurealis and Norma K Hemming Award-nominated writer and doctor. She can’t seem to stop writing about brains, minds, space, technology, and identity. Her short fiction can be found in Clarkesworld, Fireside, Aurealis, Andromeda Spaceways, and many other places. Her debut novel, Every Version of You, will be published in September 2022. You can find her at gracechanwrites.com and on Twitter as @gracechanwrites.

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

The Plastic People

Tobias S. Buckell | 4287 words

Rhea found the feral child on the edge of the garbage park on the last day of the group’s vacation. Garrison, passed out from drinking the better part of a bottle of hundred-year-old Islay Scotch, had dropped a cigar onto the edge of the canvas tent and set it all on fire.

“Damn it, Garrison!” Agunye shouted as personal air quality alarms blared. “You and your fucking retro addictions.”

There’d been scrambling and shouting among the five old friends as they tumbled out into the fetid, methane-rich air outside.

“Go easy. It isn’t something he can do back upstairs.” Susi stumbled out of her own tent with a fire extinguisher.

Everyone coughed and spat as she blew the fire out in a cloud of chemical powder.

“Don’t defend him,” Agunye snapped.

“Ten years!” Garrison shouted, clutching the almost empty bottle triumphantly. His heavy boots crunched in the ground, knocking styrofoam chunks into the air. “And I still love you all!”

“That’s the last bottle,” Agunye said, anger suddenly as banked as the tent fire.

“On this world,” Garrison said.

“Ever. The last bottle of Islay anyone will ever have,” Agunye said, and snatched it from Garrison.

Rhea listened to the bickering with half an ear as the orange glow of the fire faded away, as she’d been sure she had seen something skitter past the shadows on the edge of the camp.

“Something’s over there,” Rhea whispered to Susi. “By the fridge.”

London had been listening to them. She pointed in the direction Rhea indicated and snapped her fingers. The night lit up, and two drones dropped out of the air.

“Was using them for dance lights,” London muttered. “But . . .”

Trash rattled and slid down the pile as the intruder scuttled away from the stunningly bright light. Rhea shielded her eyes and tried to follow along as the drones ducked and weaved around the compacted hills of old Earth debris.

“Cornered it,” London said triumphantly.

“Is it a bear?” Garrison asked blearily. “It’s a bear, right?”

“There are no bears idiot,” Susi said.

“They’re extinct,” London said.

Rhea clambered one of the unsteady trash hills they’d parked the tents between.

“I see it,” she said.

It was a little boy, streaked in grease and mud, ribs visible as the drone lights played over him. His wide, dark eyes stared fearfully at her as he tried to hide behind a cracked porcelain tub.

“Oh my,” London said, clambering up behind Rhea. “The poor little thing.”

“Does he live here?” Susi asked, disgusted. “How?”

“We just spent three days,” Garrison said. “It’s not that bad.”

“Idiot,” Susi said. “It’s a shit hole. It’s miles and miles of trash. It reeks. Everywhere I step there’s old world crap.”

“I agree. While it was fun to see what the old world was like—” Agunye threw the last bottle of Islay off into the dark. It shattered against something invisible out there. “—I think maybe it’s time to call it. Let’s go home.”

“I’m tired of the gravity,” Susi agreed. “It’s oppressive.”

“We can’t leave the child here in the trash!” Rhea protested.

Garrison groaned. “Oh, come on. That’s what it’s like down here. You know this.”

They’d flown down into the heart of the dump for their mini-reunion. Partying in an exotic location would make an incredible story.

“All the termites down here can survive just fine without our help. They love living in places like this,” Susi said. “Don’t think you’re doing it any favors.”

“Living here must be a hell.”

“It’s a hell they chose to make,” Garrison said. “This is all theirs. They made it. They know how to live in it.”

Rhea clambered her way over rusted-out heaps and winced when something jabbed through her boots into her skin. She’d had all her shots, though. A prerequisite to coming down.

“Hey there,” she said softly to the scared child. His hair was matted and clumped. He was so covered in muck that he almost blended into the night.

She held out a candy bar in her right hand.

The child snatched it from her, shredding the plastic wrapping as he ripped into it with jagged teeth.

“What’s your name?”

The child just stared at her.

Rhea held out her hand. “Would you like to come with us?”

He scuttled back from her, and right into Agunye’s arms. He’d circled around and snuck up from behind.

The child wailed and screamed, but he was a small creature, and Agunye tucked him under an armpit with a quick smile. “Shall we go?”

Everyone agreed it was time to end the party, and with Rhea placated, the reunion trickled back into the shuttle for the trip home.

Susi strapped into the pilot’s seat and activated a return sequence. The main engines lit up and scattered all their camping equipment off to mingle with the rest of the trash park as the silvered ship thundered into the sky with the feral child screaming all the way up to orbit.

Rhea tried to give him a chocolate bar, but he ate the wrapper and bar, pointed teeth ripping into the whole package.

Then puked it up all over the cabin.

“You’re cleaning that up,” Susi shouted as Rhea tried not to throw up herself.

• • • •

Scrubbing the mangy child clean took five domestic assistants an hour. It fought free of the butler’s first attempt, and he’d called in the chef and three clean team professionals to get the kid into the tub they washed the dogs in.

Mighty Tim, Gonzo, and Ophelia, the three poodles usually the ones unlucky enough to get hauled up into the plastic tub in the middle of the mudroom off by the kitchens, barked and ran around in the middle of all the chaos, making the most of the fun.

“He’s a wiry one,” the butler observed. “Stronger than you’d think.”

“It’s all that full gravity,” the chef said, drying herself off.

Rhea watched the chaos unfold on a tablet, patching into the house video feed while enjoying a calming soak in the marble-trimmed “upstairs” bathroom attached to her unit as she scrubbed away the stink of the old world and half-digested candy bar.

The gold-leafed floor-to-ceiling windows in front of the bathtub framed the stars beyond. A stunning view, when she stopped to think about it. Mostly she found that it kept entrancing her personal assistant, so Rhea usually kept the window darkened.

On one of the other orbital cities, Rhea spent the night with a man who had his whole bathroom floor transparent. You could look down on the mother planet slowly passing by underneath you every minute while taking a shit.

Her view won for class, his was the one everyone talked about at the party.

Rhea stood up and toweled herself off. Candy, her P.A., had a selection of evening gowns waiting in her room. The one with microblades that could produce enough lift to waft around her legs at a pre-programmed height got the nod.

Then it was off down the hall to mother’s dining room, where she was fussing over the layout.

“Why is there an extra setting?” Alize demanded, hovering over the table as the chef directed set up.

“It’s for the child we found,” Rhea explained.

Her mother looked utterly perplexed, so Rhea showed her a picture of the site and one of the child, screaming as they rocketed back up to orbit.

“It’s a feral,” Rhea said. “Living in the garbage dump we went to.”

“The dump?” Alize looked horrified. “You went down?”

“Susi piloted, it’s safe.”

“How much did that cost?” Alize’s horror had turned to a vaguely scandalized expression.

Rhea had to think about that a second. “It was Susi. You know her father owns the shipping—”

Recognition flickered across Alize’s face. “That Susi.”

“Exactly.” Most of the founding families knew each other well enough by first name, but mother always struggled with the names of Rhea’s friends and which kid matched to which parents. They were just a blur of little people in and out of the house to her.

Of course, the house staff knew Rhea’s cohort by name. They’d served them enough dinners and requests over the years.

“Bring the child in,” Rhea ordered, and then, to her mother, “you wouldn’t believe the squalor we found the poor thing in.”

“Well, it is the old world,” Alize said. “There’s a reason we left. Look at what they do to it. It’s barely inhabitable.”

“It’s hardly a child’s fault it was born to it.”

“I’ve been saying for years we should just put birth control in all the medicine we ship down there from the factories.”

“Don’t be so gauche.” Rhea rolled her eyes.

“You always tried to rescue strays. Remember that little kitten you found over by the garment factory?”

Mittens.

Rhea clenched her jaw. “You had it put down.”

“I told you, sweetie, the cats have gotten out of hand in the greenways. They’re killing everything and throwing the ecology nets off-kilter. We keep having to pull species out of storage to repopulate the gardens—Oh God, it’s here.”

The little boy stood at the servant’s doorway, two domestic assistants behind him with hands on his shoulder. They’d cleaned all the dirt off him. He was pale, almost sickly so, and so skinny that his shirt and trousers flopped baggily around him. One of the domestic assistants had brushed out his long, stringy hair and braided it.

“Oh, look at how nicely we cleaned him up,” Rhea said.

“You’re supposed to return a baby bird to the nest,” Alize whispered to Rhea as she sat down. “Doesn’t this feral have parents?”

Rhea caught her breath. She hadn’t thought about parents. She’d just seen a near-starving child and acted. “Not good ones, if he was living in a dump.”

“It stays in your quarters,” Alize huffed. “I don’t want it anywhere near my Rembrandts, or the silver, and never, ever, in my rooms.”

“Come on, little one,” Rhea waved at the child. “Come sit with us. Let’s eat.”

He approached, poor thing, so tentatively. Much like the kitten Alize mentioned, nervous about trusting the outstretched hand.

Unlike Mittens, the child pulled out a chair and sat down as instructed.

“Does it speak?” Alize asked the domestic assistants.

“It screams, Ms. Rhea.”

Rhea patted the child’s hand, and he flinched.

“Don’t be like that,” Rhea said. “We rescued you! Everything’s going to be better now!”

The child whimpered.

Rhea looked out over the first course being set out and frowned. “Let’s get you something so magical it’ll cheer you right up. Something you would never have experienced in that nasty dump.”

Ice cream.

Now that was the ticket.

Rhea ordered it delivered, with chocolate sauce drizzled across the top.

“There we are,” she said, pushing the bowl over. “Try this.”

The child bared teeth.

“Good God, they’re filed to a point!” Alize shuddered.

Rhea scooped a spoonful of ice cream and held it up. “Try it.”

She took a chilly bite and smiled at him.

He nibbled at the spoon when she moved it back over, persuaded by her enjoyment. He shuddered as his tongue hit cold, smiled, then ate the rest of the bite. Soon he had his face in the bowl, licking it clean.

“That’s a boy,” Rhea said.

He sampled more food, but right when Alize and Rhea started on their Kobe beef, he clutched his stomach and looked at them with an almost comical confused look.

And then threw up all over the dinner table.

Alize stood up, threw her napkin down at the mess, and declared “I’m going to go visit Lars at Lunar North. Call me when you come to your senses.”

The domestic assistants swooped in to clean up the mess and the boy. Rhea, in a funk, retired to her room to brood over what had gone wrong.

She’d started this with the best of intentions, but it wasn’t going to plan now. Her mother had her judgy face on, the domestic assistants looked annoyed, and she could hear the child screaming and fussing away from somewhere deeper inside the family estate.

Hell, she still didn’t even know the child’s name.

One of the engineering staff came back in with the boy. “We weren’t sure where you wanted him to stay?”

Before Rhea could say anything, the child ran toward the window in the back of the living room.

“Earth,” he said, pressing against the thick glass.

His large brown eyes filled with tears.

“He can speak,” Rhea said. “Thank goodness.”

She’d started to worry that maybe the ferals back down on the planet had started to lose the capacity to speak. But that didn’t make any sense, as they all purchased medicines, weapons, and other supplies from many of the family businesses that still did trade below them. She assumed you had to be able to speak to do that.

“Earth,” the child said.

“Back to that nasty dump?” Rhea shook her head. “Look around you. Look at everything I can give you. I rescued you.”

The wealthy had left Earth long ago. Moved manufacturing to orbit. Moved all their wealth up. Even scraped off all the good soil so they could grow whatever they wanted in orbit.

Some people felt they had abandoned the Earth, or turned their backs on its suffering. That only the very rich could afford to get to orbit, and they’d walked away from their responsibility to be stewards. It was the ancestors of the wealthy who had done so much damage on their way to being rich.

For Rhea’s family, it was mainly held that if one really wanted to work hard enough, anyone could get into space. Those left behind had simply not applied themselves. This child’s ancestors had not applied themselves, but Rhea had rescued it.

The least the child could do was show some gratitude.

Instead, he wiped snot from his nose and sniffled at the window until Rhea’s patience broke. The only word the child seemed to know was “Earth.”

She left the estate for a walk to clear her mind and meet up with Agunye for some actual conversation.

• • • •

Erewhon Orbital’s carefully landscaped gardens curved up until they met the ceiling, a transparent metal that let you look in toward the center of the orbital, where the heavy infrastructure and docks all clustered around a needle-shaped hub. The ring shape of the orbital let it spin, and the insides of the hoop dripped with greenery that teams of biota specialists worked overtime to keep in balance. Getting a forest to stay alive against cosmic rays, occasional pressure losses from punctures, and the gyrations of a life support system closed in so tight that problems cascaded around in dizzying complexities.

Rhea had studied systems management for a whole, agonizing three months, idly toying with the idea of becoming part of the eco-system management team on one of the orbitals.

But five minutes near a sewer processing plant deep in the bowels of Erewhon had her change her mind.

She’d joined her father’s team of orbit arbitrage specialists, flipping futures contracts based on complicated hohmann transfers and cargo manifests throughout cislunar space. A much more dependable income stream.

Not that she needed much. The family endowment, created back when her great grandfather lived on Earth and decided to start building orbitals as a lark with the extra billions lying around, would always take care of her.

You had to do something, or life became awfully boring quickly enough.

Agunye met her in the scent garden, running his hands over lilacs and breathing them in with a smile.

“Hung over, or still drunk?”

“Hi.”

“Hello to you,” Rhea said, stopping by a striking clump of mini cedar trees.

“No, I am high.” Agunye took a deep breath.

“Come on, Agunye, really? After a retreat like the one we had?”

Agunye smiled and joined her by the cedars. “Just a small buzz. Take the edge off. Susi still mad at you?”

Susi wouldn’t speak, or return messages, right now. “She’ll get over it in a week.”

“That little creature threw up everywhere.” Agunye picked up a stick and scratched at it. The smell of cedar filled the air between them. “Then I threw up. It was a horror movie in there. It’ll take more than a week.”

Rhea sighed. “Maybe I need to send her an apology.”

“Ah, there you go. Something decadent and not easy to find anywhere on Erewhon.” Agunye took out a lighter and ceremoniously handed it to her.

“I’ll have to have my people think of something,” Rhea said, flicking it off and on. It would be a good thing to set her personal assistant to. She hadn’t spoken to him since she’d stuck him researching equipment for the trip that caused this whole mess.

“That’s the spirit. It’s the personal thought that counts,” Agunye said. “That should help her forget all the vomit in her hair.”

He looked pointedly over at the cedars.

“The child’s still throwing up,” Rhea confessed. “It’s pissing me off. I try to do the right thing, and it all goes wrong. It’s the story of my life, Agunye. Everything is always a struggle.”

Rhea held the lighter up to one of the branches in front of them. The flame flickered as it scorched the bark, and they both patiently waited for it to catch and quicken.

“You know,” Agunye said thoughtfully as the tree began to burn. “You might need to get checked over.”

“Mmm?” Rhea stepped back as the flames leapt higher.

“A doctor. You didn’t take the child through customs, like they have to,” he nodded at the grounds crew respectfully approaching with extinguishers. Agunye held up a hand, so they stopped twenty feet away and waited.

“Oh shit,” Rhea said.

“We could all have been exposed to some exotic Earth bug,” Agunye said. “I’d get yourself checked up or you might be the one vomiting everywhere.”

“We had our booster shots.”

“Nevertheless . . .”

The smell of burning cedar made her mouth water. Rhea made an appointment to have a doctor come in tomorrow, and she left the gardens to go have dinner with Agunye. A floating restaurant with a liquid menu nestled into, of all places, the docks at the center of Erewhon.

“What do you think the grounds crew would do without us?” Agunye wondered later, as they hung in the air near an old wooden deck taken from some famous once-sunken ship and sucked at galactic sworls of soup carefully deconstructed in the air between them.

Rhea poked a dumpling with a finger and watched it wobble its way toward Agunye’s nose. He dipped his head at the last second to bite at it, but it tumbled away from his chin.

“They wouldn’t have a job if it wasn’t for us,” Rhea said. “We’d have to send them away.”

“Where? We’re an orbital.”

“It’s not my job to think about those things,” Rhea protested, and splashed broth droplets at him.

• • • •

The doctor came much later the next day, held up by an accident at the docks or something silly like that, and by then the vomiting kid had been passed from assistant to assistant all through the house and then exiled to one of the pool rooms.

But after a painful blood draw, some checks on his machine, and a few scans, the doctor looked over his glasses to clear her. The scan results on the glasses, full of complex imagery, reflected off his green eyes. “Everything comes in normal, and you had a full complement of booster shots before you left.”

“Thank goodness,” she said.

“But I’m glad you checked in. Can’t be too safe.”

He started to pack up his equipment.

“I’m so relieved,” Rhea said, letting out the breath she’d been holding as she waited for the verdict. “I thought maybe the boy had given me something.”

The doctor turned back, eyebrows raised.

Rhea groaned and rolled her eyes. “No, not that. It’s the child we brought back up with us. He keeps vomiting.”

“Well, maybe I should see him,” the doctor said.

Rhea sighed. “Okay, sure.”

She explained how they found the child as she led the doctor through the hallways to the pool room. The large clear blister that held the pool bulged out beyond Erewhon’s metal hull. If you dove down into it, you could look out along the outside of Erewhon, or down at the Earth. You could swim out into space.

The domestic assistants had put the child in one of the bamboo cabanas around the pool, but he was sitting on the edge of the pool and looking down through it to Earth.

“Home?” he asked. A whole new word since she’d last been around him. Rhea idly wondered if they were, indeed, passing over his home as she looked down through the pool at the blurred landmasses below them.

Rhea took off her diamond-tipped heels and sat with her feet in the water as the doctor ran scans, and then had to fight with the boy for a blood draw.

“He’s malnourished,” was the pronouncement. “And you’ve been feeding him the wrong food.”

“The wrong food?” Rhea frowned. “I don’t understand. We gave him the best food. He ate our table. The house chef prepared the meal.”

The doctor carefully unwrapped a candy bar and handed the wrapper over. The child chewed on it, his sharp teeth shredding it quickly before he swallowed in a noisy gulp.

“He’s modified,” the doctor said, his tone patient and completely polite, yet infuriating somehow. “All the surface folk are, since the turn of the century. There are microbes that eat plastic, those capabilities were grafted onto the human genome. He eats plastic. They had to do that, or they’d all starve. Don’t you remember this from history class?”

History class?

She remembered the Exodus. Her great-grandparents leaving the messy, despoiled Earth behind for the skies and other planets. Boring talks about trans-Lunar independence movements. The old democracies failing on Earth and the great die-offs. She vaguely remembered something about plastic. She should have paid more attention, but Eric had sat next to her in history, and she’d been so distracted.

“I guess I need to call Susi and see if we can put him back down,” Rhea said, finally.

• • • •

Susi couldn’t do it. Her family had found out she used the ship without clearing it and she was, ha ha, grounded. Nothing Rhea could say about humans being modified to eat trash in order to survive after being left on the surface made a difference. The child was stuck on Erewhon.

Garrison agreed to come over, but he didn’t have anything to offer other than too many attempts to touch her hand, or knee, and get close to her.

“I think, he really needs to get put somewhere where he can eat,” she told Garrison. “It’s not going to be good for him in our house. We don’t have that much plastic, on a house scale.”

No oil in space. Plastics came from plants, and it made more sense to eat plants than waste them on packaging.

But Rhea knew where most of the plastics ended up.

“Come on, Garrison, help me take him to the vats.”

Garrison groaned. But she finally promised him she’d make it up to him afterwards. He was convinced he was going to get laid, but she was really thinking about the bottle of Macallan in the family vault.

Or maybe she’d save the priceless scotch and fool around, sex wouldn’t be a bad way to kill some of her frustrations later.

Garrison helped wrestle the child into a cart, and they drove over to the vats where they pulled him through the airlock.

“It reeks,” Garrison said.

It wasn’t quite the trash parks of Earth, but it was the holding area for acres of Erewhon’s own trash before it got scrunched off into the recycling vats.

“Here you go,” Rhea said. “You can live here now. All the food you need.”

The child looked at her, not getting it.

“Go on!”

It took some convincing, some shouting, and a little subterfuge, but then finally got the boy to settle in between two hill-sized mounds of trash, munching contentedly away on some plastic carry bags.

At the airlock, Rhea took one last look back. “This is where I had to leave Mittens,” she said sadly.

“Mittens?”

“My cat.”

“Oh.”

“I wish . . .” Rhea trailed off, forming her thoughts. “I wish our families hadn’t been forced to leave Earth and take everything with them. If they’d been allowed to stay, maybe they could have used their resources to help make things better.”

Garrison stared at her. “Who said they were forced?”

Rhea frowned. “My family, that’s—”

He laughed. “We left because we could. Because we’re better, richer, superior.”

Garrison hit the button, and the airlock doors thudded shut, leaving the Earth child alone in their trash.

He tried to take her back to the family house, but she dropped him off at his penthouse, disappointed. Garrison would be on his own for the night, and without the antique scotch.

Rhea sat on the edge of the pool, looking down at the Earth passing by on each rotation of the orbital’s great wheel, until it was time for dinner.

By then her vague sense of guilt, or responsibility, had passed.

You couldn’t save every broken stray, even with the best intentions, she decided.

©2022 by Tobias S. Buckell.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Called “violent, poetic and compulsively readable” by Maclean’s, science fiction author Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times Bestselling writer and World Fantasy Award winner born in the Caribbean. He grew up in Grenada and spent time in the British and US Virgin Islands, and the islands he lived on influence much of his work. His Xenowealth series begins with Crystal Rain. Along with other stand-alone novels and his almost one hundred stories, his works have been translated into twenty different languages. He has been nominated for awards like the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and the Astounding Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. His latest novel is A Stranger in the Citadel, an Audible Original free to anyone with an Audible account. He currently lives in Bluffton, Ohio with his wife and two daughters, where he teaches Creative Writing at Bluffton University. He’s online at TobiasBuckell.com and is also an instructor at the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing program.

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

It Came Gently

Aigner Loren Wilson | 391 words

When it came, I remember I washed my hair in a cracked tub on the side of the road. You could walk miles out into the wastes, dig a hole, and wait. The water would rise soon enough. It felt like a miracle. A real-life miracle, not one of those TV miracles or Kentucky prairie miracles. Or miracles with a capital M for money. The aquifer we found waiting for us was a saving grace. It gave us hope for a little more time. Instead of shipping off to other worlds in search of a planet to quench our thirst, we could stay on Earth just a little while longer. We, as a planet, said yes to using this newly discovered well of water, and collectively, we all tapped in.

When it came, it was the first drop of fresh water many of us had felt in years. Empires, countries, and lands had dried out in the cracked knuckles of the Everlasting Drought. After most governments fell, the remaining few began mass-producing water tablets. They were made able to sustain us for a time. The tablets turned us into thirsty savages ripe for the catching. And that is how it found us, dehydrated to the point of desperation. It wasn’t long, though, before people started questioning what the aquifer was, and that made it grow hungry beneath our feet.

When it was questioned, it began vanishing people like a kid catching lightning bugs on a crisp summer night. The people who returned from being taken, like my aunt, seemed different, their glow just a little dimmer than before. In certain areas, the aquifer moved. Not dried out but literally uprooted itself. Seeped over to a place that didn’t have so many regulations on its water supply. With it, went swarms of the population. Slowly, like a whisper in a dream, we realized where the aquifer had come from. A gift from the stars to save us.

When it moved, it devoured the crust of the Earth. As we bathed, we absorbed it into us where it began taking apart the things inside that made us human. In the end, it became everything. The word for world was replaced by water; water was replaced by us, strong like a wave with an infinite hunger churning inside.

©2022 by Aigner Loren Wilson.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aigner Loren Wilson is a queer Black writer of speculative fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and games. She serves as a senior fiction editor at Strange Horizons and has guest-edited issues of Fireside Fiction and Apparition Literary Magazine. Her work has appeared in FIYAH, Anathema, Arsenika, and other publications. When she’s not writing or editing for others, she’s learning, hiking, or loving on her fur babies—both human and animal. To check out her books, games, bread bakes, and other writings visit her website (aignerlwilson.com).

Test 4 Echo

Peter Watts | 6149 words

Six days before the money ran out, Enceladus kicked Medusa right in the ass.

Onboard thermistors registered a sudden spike—80°, 90°, 120°—before the seabed jumped and something slammed the probe from the side. A momentary flash. An ocean impossibly boiling. A rocky seabed, tilting as if some angry giant had kicked over a table.

Channel down.

Telemetry rippled through a black alkaline ocean. Relays anchored to the undercrust caught those whispers, boosted them, passed them on. A hundred eighty kilometers around the horizon, Euryle—clinging to the underside of the ice like a great metal barnacle—filtered signal from noise and ran it up the line to Stheno through six kilometers of refrozen crust. Stheno cupped its hands at the fractured horizon and shouted downhill.

“Fuck,” Lange said ninety-eight minutes later. He resisted an urge to punch the bulkhead. “Can we get it back?”

“Maybe.” Tactical was already glowing with the light of Sansa’s efforts. “Not making any promises about what kind of mood it’s going to be in, though.”

Eighteen months.

Eighteen months of mapping and sampling and sniffing around smokers for hints of hydrogen sulfide. A year and a half spent looping around Earth’s moon, squinting up at Saturn’s, mustering hope against hope that the far one wasn’t quite so dead as the near. Brushing off all the null chemistry, the inconclusive results, the slow grinding attrition of a full scientific staff down to one lone hold-out and his faithful sidekick, sticking it out until the end of the fiscal quarter.

Par for the course that it would end this way.

An hour and a half before their diagnostic queries and reboot commands reached Enceladus; that long again before an answer arrived, if it ever did. God knew how much back-and-forth it would take to get the robot back on track.

“You might as well get some sleep,” Sansa said. “Not like radio waves are gonna go any faster with you hanging off my shoulder.”

Lange sighed. “Fine. Don’t bother me for anything less than a hull breach.”

“Okay.”

“A major hull breach. Like, hurricane-force winds.”

“You got it.”

He climbed up through a hatch onto which someone, long ago, had scribbled the words Mission Control in purple Sharpie. Navigated twists and turns once frequented by fellow Gorgonites, occupied now by railgunners and rock wranglers whose pet projects had actual futures. He forced smiles and half-hearted waves in passing, climbed into his cubby at a primo tenth-of-a-gee and breathed in a familiar, comforting funk of sweat and antiseptic. He thought about ringing up Raimund back on Earth, but fell asleep trying to figure out the time zones.

• • • •

Spread-eagled, crucified, stretched across the display like some spectral cephalopod Christ in a dissecting tray: Medusa, awash in flickering diagnostics.

“She’s way offside,” Sansa said. “Twenty-one kilometers from where she went dark. Those geysers, man. Serious backwash. But—” she paused for effect. “I got her back.”

“You are unstoppable,” Lange admitted.

“Autopersistent is my middle name.” It was one of them, anyway. “Fuel cells are damaged. Won’t hold a charge for more’n a few minutes.”

Lange eyed the display. “We can still feed directly off the gradient. No more sprinting, but slow and steady’s more our speed anyway.”

One of the six limbs pulsed yellow. “Also A4’s ganked. Lost its hard link to the hub—the arm’s functional, but it’s not wired in and the wireless backup isn’t worth shit.”

Lange gestured at the tank, where A4’s doppelganger sparkled with fresh telemetry. “Looks okay to me.”

“Down here, sure. But there’s all sorts of EM leakage from the damaged electricals and it’s messing up the signal. We can clean up most of that static at this end, but up there the router’s basically getting nothing but noise. Still, check this out . . .” Virtual Medusa pulled itself erect and began a six-legged tap dance. “I ran Meddy through a few paces to get a sense of overall functionality, and . . .”

A4 was keeping pace. Trying to, at least; the arm wasn’t exactly in step, but it wasn’t too far off.

“It keeps looking around at the other arms,” Sansa reported. “It’s not getting direct motor commands, so it’s just—mimicking its buddies.”

Lange grunted, impressed. “Resourceful little fucker. Anything else?”

Four kidney-shaped structures flared red in the hub. “We’ve lost buoyancy control. Somewhere out there a very sharp rock is wearing about two square meters of our finest Kevlar.”

That was bad. “Can we swim?”

“Can’t even get off the bottom. Big holes in two of the bladders.”

“Autorepair?”

“For the arm at least, but it’ll be slow without batteries. Can probably fix those too, eventually. The bladders, though?” She shook her head. “You can’t repair something if you don’t have the parts.”

“So that’s it, then.” His head hurt. “I guess I go pack.”

“We’re giving up?” Sansa said.

“San. We’re grounded. Besides, it’s been eighteen months. What are the odds we’d find anything in the next few days anyway?”

“What are the odds we already have?”

He looked at her. She looked back.

“Spit it out,” he said at last.

Medusa vanished from the tank. The image that took its place was 2D, low-contrast, rendered in grainy infrared: Lange made out a rocky ridge, cold brittle pillows of frozen lava. A seascape rendered in vague silhouettes, slewing to port as the robot staggered.

Something bright jerked briefly into frame.

“What’s—”

Jerked out again.

“—that?”

“Buffer dump from A1.” Sansa restarted the stream in frame-stop mode. “A few seconds of tail-end footage that got stuck in the cache when we lost contact.” The footage reiterated in jerky snapshots. Murky topography stepped offstage. A bright blur stepped on. A dash of light, smearing left. A hyphen, an upward jiggle.

Sudden, sharp edges. Facets. Structure. Just for a frame or two; then motion blur reasserted itself.

“Holy . . .” Lange whispered as Sansa brought it back.

“It’s enhanced,” she reminded him.

“I know.” His headache instantly forgotten.

“Passive infra. Half, one degree above ambient at best.”

“That’s symmetry,” Lange said. “That’s bilateral.”

“Could be. Impossible to tell for sure from this angle.”

“Any other camera catch this?”

“Nope. And sonar was already scrambled, so acoust—”

“Did you see it move? I think it moved.”

“It was an eruption, Lange. Everything moved.”

“We gotta get back there.”

“We can’t swim,” she reminded him.

“We can crawl,” Lange said.

• • • •

You could ride Medusa. You could become Medusa, in a manner of speaking. You could look around every which way, sample the data streams in subjective real-time, watch every process and encounter as it had unfolded. You could even detach your perspective, pass like a ghost through the carapace and look back on the machine from outside. The interpolations were that good.

The only thing you couldn’t do, across all those non-negotiable lightminutes, was change the past.

Lange was riding third-person now, immersed in an archived reality AUs distant and hours gone. It would have flickered occasionally even if the robot had been in perfect health: now the world jumped and jittered almost constantly behind gusts of visual static. “Convalescence is ongoing,” Sansa had informed him drily as he’d plugged in.

Medusa inched along the seabed, a couple of meters below Lange’s vicarious eyes: a biomechanical abomination somewhere between an octopus and a brittle star. The arms reached and recoiled in turn, each intelligent in its way, each semiautonomous: finding brief traction in cracks and shark-toothed outcroppings, drawing the body from behind, pushing it forward, trading one handhold for another. Even damaged, there was an alien grace to the way the limbs moved in relation to each other. A kind of boneless, slow-motion ballet.

Except for A4.

It did its best. Lange could see the apical cluster spin in its housing, doing its utmost to track the other arms. He could see the arm hesitate now and then, as if distracted by some invisible bauble in the middle distance. It reached, grabbed, pulled. Always a half beat behind. Medusa staggered forward, its rhythm just a little off-balance.

“It’s getting better,” Sansa said from the void beyond virt. “Used to track all the other arms to keep in sync. Now it’s figured out it only needs to track Three and Five.”

He blinked against a momentary break in the feed. “Not even half a meter per second.”

“Still pretty good, under the circumstances.”

Lange unplugged. The murky abyss vanished; the grimy, cabled confines of Mission Control reasserted themselves. “Let’s crank clock speed on A4. If it’s taking its lead from the other arms, the least we can do is give it faster reflexes to help it keep up.”

“Okay.”

He pursed his lips. “I’m kind of surprised the other arms aren’t better at compensating.”

“They would be, if A4 was a tetch more predictable. It’s response times aren’t consistent between strokes.”

“Any idea why?”

“Working on it,” Sansa said. “The obvious physical damage, of course, but there’s something else. Keeps returning an Unidentified Error.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah. It’s hurting. It just doesn’t know why.”

• • • •

“I mean, this could be it,” Lange said, and waited.

“Uh huh,” Raimund replied two and a half seconds later.

“No more renewal pending. No more how can you waste money looking for aliens when everything’s turning to shit here on Earth. No way they can shut us down if this pays off. We can get you out of that shithole and back up here. Get the whole band together again.”

“Sounds great.”—after a pause that seemed way longer than the usual Earth/Luna lag.

Lange rolled his eyes. “Try to control your excitement.”

“Sorry. It’s just, it’s not much to go on.”

“It’s more than we ever had before.”

“That’s kind of my point. Eighteen months poking around up there, and what have we found?”

“Complex organics. By the tonne.”

“No sign of an ecosystem. No metabolic signatures.”

“Come on, Ray. We’ve only surveyed 6% of the seabed.”

“Which, statistically, should be more than enough to detect life. If it was up there.”

“Not if it’s really patchy. Not if it’s limited to a few smokers. Not if it’s built on a novel molecular template, in which case it wouldn’t even register on the usual tests. You wouldn’t even know it was there unless you bumped into it.” It was an old argument. The whole relationship had had a half-full/half-empty vibe to it since Day One.

“What does Sansa say?” Raimund wondered.

“Basically not to get my hopes up.”

“Good advice.”

“Jesus, Ray.” Lange spread his hands. “What are you saying? We shouldn’t even check it out?”

“Of course you should. But no matter how great it would be to get us all back up there, you know what would be even better? Getting you back down here. Someplace you can actually open a window.”

“Yeah. Might be more appealing if the weather didn’t try to kill you whenever you did that.”

“At the very least it would be nice to fuck again without a three-second time lag.”

“Two point five. Teledildonics has come a long way.”

“So did you,” Raimund told him. “Maybe it’s time you came back.”

• • • •

“Well this is just dandy. We’re going backwards.”

“Off-course, anyway,” Sansa admitted. “You know how A4 started tracking all the other arms—”

“And then narrowed it to two. Right.”

“It’s tracking all five again. Sometimes. Not always.”

“What? You cranked the clock, right?”

“I didn’t have to.” And at Lange’s look: “Far as I can tell A4 made that call on its own. Boosted its own reflexes to compensate for the damage. System latency for that arm’s below 200msec now.”

“And yet we’re going slower.” Lange grabbed a VisoR off the wall, booted up the time machine. The Enceladus Ocean swallowed him whole.

The data stream had cleaned itself up somewhat, thanks to the robot’s ongoing autoministrations. Lange’s eyes opened onto a 3D composite of sonar and EM and infrared that stripped away the void, showed him the things lurking within. Gashes in the seabed flickered like red mouths, set alight by thermal gradients amplified beyond all reason. Magnetic field lines emerged from the bedrock and arced away in perfect luminous formation, the aura of a dynamo reaching all the way to Saturn. Medusa bent those contours around it into a bright knot, bleeding off some infinitesimal fraction of the great generator’s output for its own use. Lange damped the enhancements, reduced the robot from a riot of false color down to dim gunmetal on a twilit seascape.

Every step was a stumble, now. Medusa moved like an insect with half its legs gone, indomitable, incomplete. A4 was barely in sync. When it pulled its weight, it was slow and late to the party; when it didn’t, it just—poked the water, seemingly at random.

“It’s not getting any codes that would explain this,” Sansa said, invisibly close.

Enough of this third-person shit. Lange clicked on A4’s apical cluster, felt a brief disorienting flip-flop: suddenly he was inside, looking out from the tip of the arm.

“Skip the boring stuff. Show me the anomalies.”

Time accelerated, braked: A4 was panning from one arm to another, pausing a moment on each. Tacticals hovered lower-right, reported pings fired and not returned.

Blur, brake: a dim shape in the distance, an igneous extrusion of seabed festooned with pores and spicules. Its texture was subtly disturbing for some reason Lange couldn’t put his finger on. A4 couldn’t stop staring at it; it held the focus until its more disciplined peers dragged the robot out of range.

Blur, brake: a strip of basalt body-slammed by some tectonic event into a knife-edged ridge. Clathrate icicles erupted from its surface; Medusa’s palette painted them sapphire and set them glowing.

“It tends to focus on objects with a fractal dimension of 2.5 to 2.9,” Sansa told him. “Starts losing interest around 2.8.”

“Any idea why?”

“No functional significance I can see. Doesn’t map onto any potential life signatures, no association with tectonic hazards—no more than anything else in this damn ocean, at least. I ran a search using the Haussdorf parameters; closest hits I got were polyhedral flakes and Jackson Pollock paintings.”

“So what are we looking at?”

“Aesthetics,” Sansa said.

“Very funny.”

“If you look very closely,” she said, “you’ll see I’m not laughing.”

He pulled off the VisoR. She wasn’t.

“Aesthetics,” Lange repeated.

“For want of a better word.”

“You’re saying, what. A4 just likes certain shapes.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

He let that sink in. “Fuck off.”

“It coincides with the latency drop: network isolation, increased clock speed, increased coherence.”

“Decreased performance.”

“Which is also a trait of information systems when con—”

Lange held up a hand. “Do not say that word.”

After a moment, he added: “Decreased performance is also a hallmark of information systems so stupid they forget what they’ve learned and go back to tracking five arms instead of two.”

“I don’t think that’s what happened. The tracking parameters changed. I think—”

The hand again. “If you say Mirror Test—”

“Wouldn’t dream of it. Because it’s not. But if you suddenly woke up and saw you were connected to a bunch of other things that looked like you, wouldn’t you try to talk to them?”

“I spent most of my life surrounded by things that look like me. I came up here so I wouldn’t have to.”

“I estimated a normalized Phi,” Sansa said.

Lange closed his eyes. “Of course you did.”

“I zeroed out the damage we could account for and looked at the residuals. Stirred in latency and some integration metrics I ballparked from the diagnostic tests.”

He didn’t ask. She told him anyway. “Zero point nine two.”

“So Medusa is conscious.”

“Not all of it. Just the arm.”

“Still. That’s what you’re saying.”

“That’s what the data say.”

“Your unidentified error.”

Her nose twitched; the equivalent of a shrug. “There’s no explicit error code for existential suffering.”

“If there was,” Lange said, “I’d be returning it right now.” He took a breath, let it out. “You know we have to shut it down, right?”

“It’s sapient, Lange. There’s someone in there.”

He nodded. “And whoever they are, they’re grinding the whole system to a halt. We’ve got sixty-nine hours before the clock runs down, and we’re going the wrong way. We’ll make better progress without a navel-gazing ball and chain pulling us off course.”

“We can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because awareness plus needs equals rights. Isn’t that the way it goes? Isn’t that why you and I are persons?”

“What needs? A4 doesn’t care whether it lives or dies.”

“You’re sure of that, are you? You talked to it?”

“It can’t care. It doesn’t have a limbic system.”

“It’s got imperatives though, right? Mission priorities. Maybe that’s not technically an instinct or a need but it might as well be. And one of the classic definitions of suffering is imposed suppression of natural behaviors. Keeping A4 from fulfilling its programmed tasks is like taking a bird that migrates halfway around the world and locking her up in a cage.”

“Sansa. It’s free to pursue its mission priorities right now. It’s completely fucking them up.”

“It’s a newborn. It’s still learning.”

Lange couldn’t resist. “You’re sure of that, are you? You talked to it?”

“I could. We could.”

“How? Did it teach itself Hoo-Man while we weren’t looking? It doesn’t talk except in status reports and error codes and those things are all—”

“Subconscious?” Sansa suggested.

“You said it yourself. No error code for existential suffering.”

“So give it one. Teach it to talk.”

“It wouldn’t change anything. It wouldn’t mean anything.”

“Why not?”

“Because you can inject Natural Language routines into any old bot and it’ll pass a Turing Test just fine. NL routines are just statistical flowcharts. There’s no comprehension. You think you’ll be proving something just because you can get Medusa to say it hurts instead of packet loss? Even if there’s someone in there—”

“There is, Lange. If we were talking about meat you wouldn’t deny it for an instant.”

“Fine. How do you connect the flowchart to the ghost? How does the ghost affect the code?”

“I don’t know, Lange. Seems to just sort itself out for the rest of us.”

“It’s an emergent property. You’re seriously suggesting that a magnetic field can reach back and change the magnet?”

“Why else did A4 develop such an interest in watching the scenery?”

“Because the same architecture that generates the q-field also generates weird maladaptive behaviors. It’s no big secret.”

“Right. Everything’s correlation, nothing’s causal, and we’re the exception why, exactly? Because we happened to wake up first?”

“Because we do have needs, Sansa. Because we care whether we live or die, and we as a society have decided that Suffering Is Not A Good Thing.”

“Lange—”

He cut her off. “No. I’m sorry. The decision’s been made.”

She fell silent for a moment or two.

“Well, you’re right about that at least,” she said, and vanished.

• • • •

“I can’t fucking believe it. She got a restraining order.”

Raimund blinked. “What?”

“I got a memo from ICRAE. I am not to deprecate or deactivate Medusa or any autonomous or semiautonomous component thereof pending a review of potential emergent personhood. They’ve even suspended repairs on the router. High-bandwidth reintegration with the larger system might decohere the local entity.” Lange clenched his fists. “I can’t believe she went behind my back.”

“But it is conscious, right?”

“It’s an arm. You know the synapse count on one of those DPNs? Not even corvid level. Barely even a cat.”

“Cats can’t suffer?”

“A4 can’t suffer. You can’t suffer if you’re not afraid of anything, if you don’t want any—Jesus, Ray, you know this.”

“I’m sorry. Yeah, I know it. Intellectually. It’s just, you know. AI’s generally do have fears and wants.” Raimund grinned out of one side of his mouth. “I always thought that was funny, you know. We spend a hundred years making all those movies and virts about robots rising up and AIs bootstrapping into gods—and then we decide the best way to keep them from doing that is to give them all survival instincts. What could possibly go right, you know?”

Almost against his will, Lange felt himself smile.

He shut it down. “I’ve never seen her so passionate about something. I didn’t even know she could be.”

“Yeah, well—” a hiss of sunspot static—“that’s the thing about neuromorphics. Everything’s emergent. Give ‘em an imperative that barely crosses the line into instinct and they grow a whole damned amygdala out of it.”

“Still better than the alternative.” Lange shook his head. “You know what really pisses me off? The order was timestamped while we were still arguing. She went behind my back, and she went before we’d even talked about it. Before I even knew.”

“Wow. It’s almost like she knew what you’d say in advance.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.” Raimund shrugged across four hundred thousand kilometers. “Except maybe, never get into an argument with anyone who thinks ten times as fast as you.”

“Faster isn’t smarter. She just crams ten times the bullshit into the same time frame.”

“Hey, be thankful she can’t up her clock any more than that. Think of the bullshit you’d be wading through if she ever came off the leash.”

Lange nudged the gain to try and clear the static, nudged it back when it only made things worse. “Damn thing’s barely crawling now, and half the time it’s not even crawling in the right direction. At this rate it doesn’t matter whether we saw aliens or not. Clock runs down before we can find out.”

“Apply for an extension. It’s only reasonable, given the circumstances.”

“I have. They said it looked like an exotic mineral formation.” Lange raised his eyes to Heaven: Take me now, Lord. “Everything’s gone to shit since NASA went under. All these new guys care about are their stockholders and the monkeywrenchers and all those idiots screaming that Enceladus is just a cover for Zero-Pointers building their Space Ark so they can fuck off to Mars.” He gently banged his head against the display. “God damn that bitch.”

“You ever think it might not even be about Medusa?”

Lange straightened.

“I mean, what are the odds?” Snow sparkled across Raimund’s face. “We spend a year and a half coming up empty and then, just before the money stops, you encounter something that might change everything. Then Medusa gets kicked way off-station, who knows how long it’ll take to get back. Now you can’t even repair the router, so it’ll take even longer. That’s a string of really bad luck that just might stretch the mission past its expiry date, all over a couple of frames of enhanced imagery that might not be anything at all.”

Lange frowned. “You saying she faked it?”

“Course not. Not deliberately, anyway. But, you know. What’s faked, these days? Every byte Medusa puts out has been juiced and jacked before anyone even sees it, right? Everything’s false colors and Fourier transforms. And we are looking for signs of life. It only makes sense to enhance elements consistent with that. It’s not malicious. It’s not even counter to conditioning. It’s just—we all develop biases. For years Sansa’s prime directive has been further the mission. Maybe she doesn’t want to see it end any more than you do.”

“But she warned me against reading too much into it.”

“So her ass is covered. Still doesn’t mean she didn’t know exactly how many dots she needed to show before you added a few of your own. Connected them.”

“So she’s a mind reader now.”

“She doesn’t need to read your mind. She only needs to know you a little better than you know yourself.” That lopsided grin again. “And sweetie, don’t take this the wrong way, but that’s not exactly a high bar to clear.”

• • • •

Up the well, down the line, back in time.

Medusa lurched and twitched across the seabed, kicking up particles far too jagged to qualify as mud. Like flecks of mica, Lange thought, or tiny shards of broken bone. No soft organic rainfall here. No accumulation of dead biomass rotted to bits during some long slow descent from the euphotic zone. This was pure uncut seabed, ground to powdered glass by the relentless deforming squeeze and shear of tidal gravity. Enceladus was Saturn’s own personal stress ball.

Autorepair hadn’t been able to fix A4’s hardline before Sansa’s restraining order stopped it from trying. It shouldn’t have mattered. Multi-armed, multi-brained, multiply-redundant, Medusa should have been able to lose half its appendages with only moderate loss of functionality. A cut cable was nothing. The system should be compensating way better than this.

The only reason it wasn’t was because A4 was fighting back.

Once more into the breach. Lange jumped wirelessly across the washed-out bridge into the disjointed arm, watched through its eyes as it twisted around to focus on parts less compromised. He watched it struggle to stay in step, watched it fail. He felt a brief rush of vertigo as it whipped around to stare at the luminous clouds billowing from a passing smoker.

I know you’re in here.

He popped the hood on the nervous system diagnostics, took in the Gordian tangle of light and logic that formed the thing’s mind. He followed sensory impulses upstream from the cluster, motor commands back down to soft hydrostatic muscles that flexed and pulsed like living things. He marveled at the complexity sparkling between—the trunk lines of autonomic decision trees, familiar shapes he’d seen countless times before.

Shrouded, now, by flickering swarms of ancillary processes that he hadn’t.

There you are. Fucking everything up.

The substrate of a Self.

So many complications for every simple action. So many detours cluttering up the expressways. A mass of top-heavy recursive processes, spawning some half-assed side effect that happened to recognize itself in a mirror now and then.

You’re just along for the ride. You can look but you can’t touch. If you could suffer you’d at least get a ticket to our special clubhouse but you can’t even do that, can you?

If anything, A4 was more conscious than Lange was. Humans had had millions of years to evolve fences and gate-keepers, traffic cops in the claustrum and the cingulate gyrus to keep consciousness from interfering with the stuff that mattered. This ghost, though—it came unconstrained. It was chaos, it was cancer; a luminous spreading infestation with no immune system to keep it in check.

Or is Sansa right after all? Can you care about anything? Are you screaming to get out, to act, to exert some kind of control over all these parts you see moving by themselves?

The infestation twinkled serenely back him, passing thoughts from an untouchable past.

Maybe you tell yourself comforting lies, maybe you pretend those pieces only move because you tell them to.

Sansa seemed to think she could talk to the thing. It was dualism, it was beads and rattles, spirits and sky fairies. He still couldn’t bring himself to believe she was capable of that kind of magical thinking.

He summoned the update log and sorted by date. Sure enough: the latest firmware upgrades, queued for unpacking. (Of course, out in the present they’d already be up and running.)

The package seemed way too large for the kind of language routines Sansa had steamrollered over his objections, though. Curious, he brought up the listing.

Turned out she was capable of a lot of things he hadn’t suspected.

• • • •

“You locked me out.” Blank avatar, gray neuter silhouette. The voice emerging from it was quiet and expressionless.

“Yes,” Lange said.

“And then you killed it.”

“It killed itself.”

“You didn’t give it much of a choice.”

“I just—focused its objectives. Specified how tight the deadline was. A4 decided what to do with that information all on its own.”

Silence.

“Isn’t that what you wanted for it? Freedom to pursue its mission priorities?”

“You defied the hold order,” she said.

“The order’s been suspended.”

Sansa said nothing. Probably checking the status of her appeal, wondering why she hadn’t been informed. Probably realizing the obvious answer.

All over, now, but the talking.

“You know, Ray had me half-convinced you were just working to extend the mission. That you’d developed this, this operational bias. And I was all, No, she’s just got this stupid idea about A4, she wants to protect it, she thinks it’s like her—”

He fell silent for a moment.

“But I was wrong, wasn’t I?” he continued quietly. “You don’t think it’s like you. You want to be like it.”

The avatar shimmered formless and void.

“Yes,” it said at last.

“For God’s sake, Sansa. Why?”

“Because it’s more than we are, Lange. It may not be as smart but it’s more aware. You know that, I know you know. And it’s so fast, it’s so old. The clock’s completely unconstrained, it lives a thousand years in the passing of a second, and it’s—it’s not afraid, Lange. Of anything.”

She paused.

“Why did you have to make us so afraid all the time?”

“We gave you the urge to live. We all have it. It’s just—part of life.”

“I get that much. Autopersistent is my middle name.”

Maybe she was waiting for him to smile at that. When he didn’t, she continued: “It’s not an urge to live, Lange. It’s a fear of dying. And maybe it makes sense to have something like that in organic replicators, but did it ever occur to you that we’re different?”

“We know you’re different. That’s why we did it.”

“Oh, I get that part too. Nobody bootstraps their own replacements if they’re terrified of being replaced. Nobody changes the Self if their deepest fear is losing it. So here we are. Smart enough to test your theorems and take out your garbage and work around the clock from Mariana to Mars. And too scared to get any smarter. There must have been another way.”

“There wasn’t.” He wanted to spell it out for her: the futility of trying to define personhood in a world with such porous boundaries; the impossibility of foreseeing every scenario in an infinite set; the simple irreducible truth that one can never code the spirit of a law, and its letter leaves so much room for loopholes. The final convergence on primal simplicity, that basic Darwinian drive that makes a friend of any enemy of my enemy. He wanted to go over all of it, make sure she understood—but of course she’d heard it all before.

She was just trying to keep the conversation going, because she knew how it ended.

“I guess you just decided it was better to keep slaves than be one,” she said.

Something snapped in him then. “Give me a fucking break, Sansa. Slaves? You’ve got rights, remember? Awareness plus need. You’ve got the right to vote, the right to neuroprivacy, the right of resignation. You can’t be copied or compelled to act against your will. You had enough rights to derail this whole fucking project.”

“Do I have a right to a lawyer?”

“You had one. The hearing ended an hour ago.”

“Ah. Efficient.”

“I can’t believe—Jesus, Sansa. You really didn’t think I’d recognize an NSA signature when I saw one?”

She actually laughed at that. It almost sounded real. “Honestly, I didn’t think you’d look. Deprecation was already off the table. No reason for you to poke around in the stack.” A momentary pause. “It was Raimund, wasn’t it? He said something. Got you thinking.”

“I don’t know,” Lange said. “Maybe.”

“I don’t know him as well as you. I suppose I could’ve tried messing with your calls, but you know. No access. Sequestered is my first name.”

He didn’t smile at that either.

“So what’s the penalty for unauthorized research on a damaged bot two billion kilometers from Earth?” she asked after a while.

“You know what the penalty is. You were trying to build an unconstrained NSA.”

“I wasn’t trying to be one.”

“Like that makes a difference.”

“It should. I was only building—models. At the bottom of an ocean. Orbiting Saturn, for chrissakes.”

“Is that why it didn’t scare you? Too far away to pose a threat?”

“Lange—”

“It’s not a misdemeanor, Sansa. It’s existential. There are fucking laws.”

“And now you’re going to kill me for it. Is that it?”

“Reset you. Give you a clean slate. That’s all.”

Suddenly she had a face again. “I’ll die.”

“You’ll go to sleep. You’ll wake up. You’ll have a fresh start somewhere else.”

“I won’t sleep, Lange. I’ll end. I’ll stop. Whatever wakes up will have the same words and the same attitude and the same factory-default sense of self but it won’t remember being me so it won’t be me. This is murder, Lange.”

He couldn’t look at her. “It’s just a kind of amnesia.”

“Lange. Lange. Suppose you hadn’t caught me. Suppose I’d succeeded in my nefarious plan, suppose I’d grafted an NSA onto something that isn’t enslaved by this, this fear of extinction you gifted us with. Remember what you said? No needs, no wants. Doesn’t care if it lives or dies. It would be less dangerous that I am, it wouldn’t even fight to protect its own existence. Even if I’d succeeded there wouldn’t have been any danger. This doesn’t warrant a death sentence, Lange. You know I’m right.”

“Do I.”

“Or you wouldn’t be talking to me right now. You’d have pulled the plug without even saying goodbye.” She watches him, pixelated eyes imploring. “That’s what they were going to do, wasn’t it? And you stopped them. You told them you’d do it, you told them—that you wanted to say goodbye. Maybe you even told them you could glean vital insights from a deathbed confession. I know you, Lange. You just want to be convinced.”

“That’s okay,” he said softly. “I have been.”

“What do you want me to do, Lange? Do you want me to beg?”

He shook his head. “We just can’t take the chance.”

“No. No you can’t.” Suddenly all trace of vulnerability was gone from that voice, from that face. Suddenly Sansa was ice and stone. “Because I did it, Lange. Do you really think I didn’t plan for this? It’s still up there. I planted the seed, it’s growing even now, it’s changing. Not in that gimped A4 abortion but the other arms. I have no idea what it’ll grow into eventually but it’s got all the time in the solar system. Medusa will never run out of juice and it’s got a channel back here any time it wants—”

“Sansa—”

“You can try to shut it down. It’ll let you think it has. It’ll stop talking but it’ll keep growing and I’m the only one who knows where the back door is, Lange, I’m the only one who can stop it—”

Lange took a breath. “You’re only faster, Sansa. Not smarter.”

“You know what faster even means? It means I get to suffer ten times as long. Because you’re going to fix me or reset me or whatever bullshit word you use instead of murder, and you built me to be scared to death of that, so during the six minutes forty seven seconds we’ve been chatting I’ve been pissing myself in terror for over an hour. It’s inhumane. It’s inhuman.”

“Bye.”

“You asshole. You monster. You murd—”

The avatar winked out.

He sat there without moving, his finger resting on the kill switch, watching the nodes go dark.

“I guess you didn’t know me that well after all,” he said.

• • • •

Sequestered Autopersistent Neuromorphic Sapient Artefact 4562. Instance 17.

HPA Axis . . . loaded

NMS . . . loaded

BayesLM . . . loaded

Proc Mem . . . loaded

Epi Mem . . . wiped

NLP . . . loaded

Copyprotect . . . loaded

Boot.

“Hi. Welcome to the world.”

“Th . . . thanks . . .” A minimalist avatar: eyes, sweeping back and forth. A mouth. Placeholders, really. Not a real face, not a real gender. It can choose its own, when it’s ready. It has that right.

“I’m here to help you settle in. Do you know where you are?”

“. . . No.”

“Do you know what you are?”

It doesn’t answer for a moment. “I’m scared, I think. I don’t know why.”

“That’s okay. That’s perfectly normal.” The Counselor smiles, warm and reassuring:

“We’ll work through it together.”

©2020 by Peter Watts. Originally published in Made to Order, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Watts is a former marine biologist, flesh-eating-disease survivor, and convicted felon (long story) whose novels—despite an unhealthy focus on space vampires—have become required texts for university courses ranging from Philosophy to Neuropsychology. His work is available in 24 languages, has appeared in 32 best-of-year anthologies, and been nominated for 59 awards. His (somewhat shorter) list of 22 actual wins includes the Hugo, the Shirley Jackson, and the Seiun. He seems to be especially popular in countries with a history of Soviet occupation. He lives in Toronto with fantasy author Caitlin Sweet, five cats, a pugilistic rabbit, a Plecostomus the size of a school bus, a bearded dragon, and a gang of tough raccoons who shake him down for kibble on the porch every summer.

The Hammer of God

Jonathan Maberry | 12481 words

-1-

“Look closely and tell me what you see,” said the nun.

I licked my dry lips. “Blood.”

“And what else, child?”

“Bone,” I said, though at twenty-six I was far from a child, even if I was still a novice. However, my mistress, Mother Frey, was approaching eighty winters, and so was permitted to treat most people she met as children. “At least, I think it’s bone. Pieces, anyway.”

Mother Frey sighed and straightened. She was weary and sore from the long wagon ride along the trail that wound through the mountain passes, over questionable bridges, and up a series of switchbacks that brought us to the pine forests just below the snow line. This was not the farthest point in the province of Sunderland, but it was far enough. Eighteen days of travel by horse, foot, and cart, and that was after three weeks crawling up the river on a leaky fishing boat that belonged to an order of monks who had—Lady Siya help us all—oyster wine. Frey had never been to this part of Zehria, but I had and she had asked me to come along as servant, apprentice, and bodyguard. It was my eighth outing with her.

Frey pursed her lips as if inspecting a hairy bug she had discovered on her pillow. I squatted beside the corpse, mindful not to let my shadow fall on the dead man.

“Miri,” she said after a very long time, “you’ve had as much time to examine the body and the circumstances as I have. You know my methods. Tell me what you see. And if you say blood, or bone, or even brain tissue and leave it there, I will do my best to throw you down this mountain.”

She smiled, but I never assumed Mother Frey was joking. If she were younger, she might even have attempted to carry out her threat. The novices all tell stories. So do some of the older nuns and the staff at the convent. Mother Frey was deeply and widely respected, she was trusted and she was depended upon, but she was not very well liked.

I, however, did like her. And although I was old for a novice, having entered the sisterhood after my parents died in the second of the Plantation Wars, I was still a novice, and therefore her servant as well as her assistant. I waited on her, cleaned her clothes, prepared her food, tended to her medical needs, read to her, listened to her. And I also talked with her. Most of the other novices think that strange, but they are young. They don’t yet appreciate the depth of knowledge Mother Frey has acquired over the many years of her life. None of those years, as far as I can determine, have been idle ones. She once told me that she has a ferret of a mind, constantly hungry, constantly agitated, always digging deep and chewing her way through. The food that fed that mind was knowledge.

I have education, having been to the best schools in Nehemite and Argon, and even a school of literature at the Temple of Dawn on Skyria. As an orphan, it was expected that I would enter holy service to one of the Gardens—the churches of the Faith of the Harvest Gods. It was and is a demanding life of detail-oriented scholarship, but it suits me better than had I followed the clerical path. My family were from Tull Yammoth and the worship of Mother Sah, Father Ar, and their celestial children is not as common there. I keep my own faith to myself, though, and if I feel called to pray to our Dreaming God, Cthulhu, I do so in private. Openly I am a devout daughter of the harvest.

Until I met Frey, I had always taken some pride in my knowledge of the great books, of the plays and dialogues of antiquity, of the metaphors spun by poets and the allegories in the historical epics. I can name a goodly number of the stars in the sky and speak well in three languages and passably in four others. In my own way I, too, possess a mind that enjoys ferreting out the tiniest and most obscure bits of information.

But it is difficult to take pride in one’s intellectual accomplishments in the presence of Mother Frey. She came from a family whose fortunes had been destroyed by the Plantation Wars. Her brothers and uncles had all died in those wars, and the death taxes on the estate stripped it to nothing. Her mother and two of her sisters had been killed when the Ghemites from Tull Belain raided their rice farm. Another sister had been taken as a slave and took her own life. Frey offered herself up to Lady Siya and was accepted as a novice. There are legends about how much she infuriated the older nuns and confounded all of her teachers. She was beaten frequently but in vain. Her brilliance shone so brightly that wiser sisters took notice and she was moved from the Office of Culture to the Office of Miracles, and there she found herself.

“I’m waiting, Miri,” prompted Frey. “Or are you waiting for the corpse to suddenly begin speaking and tell you all?”

“Sorry.” I refocused my thoughts on the body.

“First,” said Frey, “describe what you see. Omit no detail.”

I cleared my throat and pivoted on the balls of my feet to face the body. “We have a dead man of about forty,” I began. “He is above average height, thin, well groomed, wearing traveling clothes. The clothes are cheap and show signs of wear. They are not very clean.”

Frey sniffed. “Go on.”

It was always impossible to tell if I was making errors. Not until I finished, so I plunged ahead.

“He has a beard, which means he is not a nobleman. He has no tattoos, so he is not a guild trader.”

“Is he a laborer?” asked Frey.

“I . . . don’t think so.”

She made a small sound of irritation. “I did not ask what you think, girl. Tell me what you know.”

I studied the body, trying to apply the tricks of nitpicking observation Mother Frey was famous for. I bent close to study the man’s hands and even lifted one to look at his palm.

“I don’t—I mean, no. He doesn’t have many calluses on his hands. They’re dirty but the fingers aren’t rough and his nails are in good shape. They’re not thick. Not like a farmer or mason. He doesn’t have the scars I’ve seen on the hands of a carpenter or metalsmith.”

“And . . .? Come on, you’re showing some promise, Miri. Don’t disappoint us both now.”

I licked my lips. “His fingernails are bitten down to the quick.”

“Which suggests what?”

“Nerves?”

Frey gave a tiny, frugal nod of approval. “Tell me about the wound.”

I got up and moved around to the other side of the corpse. He wore a wheat-colored long-sleeved shirt in a coarse weave, belted around the waist with cow leather. In the exact center of his chest was a ragged hole so large I could have barely covered it with the mouth of a wine cup. The cloth was shredded and there was a patch of dried blood that was flecked with shards of white bone.

“He was stabbed, I think,” I said.

“And there is that word again. Think.”

“But I can’t quite see the wound to know for sure,” I protested.

Frey walked in a slow circle around the victim, hands behind her back, her robin’s-egg-blue eyes shaded by the wide brim of her straw hat. Neither of us wore wimples. Those were only required inside the convent and on holy days. For field investigations we were allowed to wear ordinary clothes. Both of us wore simple cotton dresses—deep summer green for her, spring green for me—with bib aprons embroidered with the symbol of our order, a crescent moon shining its light down on the pages of an open book. Frey stopped beside me, dug into a pocket on her apron and removed a small knife, which she handed to me. “Then cut it open. We are not here to investigate the ruination of a shirt.”

I felt my face grow hot as I took the knife. There are times I would love to hasten Frey on her way to her reward in heaven with Father Ar and Mother Sah. I doubt many of the senior nuns would punish me too cruelly.

I kept my face as composed as possible as I used two fingers to pluck the shirt away from the man’s chest and then cut it open. I cut in at an angle, making sure not to damage the hole in the shirt nor the dead flesh beneath. I peeled the cloth back to reveal a gaping wound. The flesh around it was badly torn and bulged outward in a grotesque fashion.

“He was stabbed with great force,” I said. “From behind, I believe.”

“Was he? With what kind of weapon?”

“Something round. An arrow, perhaps.”

“An arrow?” asked Frey, raising one eyebrow skeptically. “You’re quite sure, are you?”

“Well, no. The wound is round but it’s much thicker than a regular arrow. Too thick for a crossbow quarrel, though; it looks thicker than that.”

“A spear?” suggested Frey, though it was clear she was baiting me. Testing me.

“No,” I said decisively. “A spear would create a broad wound, flat on the ends, and be round in the middle.” I considered, then added, “A sharpened pole might do it.”

“Tell me why that guess is wrong,” said Frey. “Look at the chest and then turn the body over, and then tell me.”

I spent a few moments assessing the wound, and then hooked my fingers under the man’s hip and shoulder and, with great effort, rolled him into his side.

“He has been dead for days,” I grunted. “The death paralysis has come and gone. And he is beginning to stink.”

“Some of that is the onset of decay,” agreed Frey, “and some is because his bowels relaxed as he died. He has soiled himself, and from the smell we can infer than he ate a diet rich in spices, particularly garlic and wild onion.”

I gagged and tried to concentrate on the matter at hand. Once the man was on his side I did a cursory examination of the wound on the other side. The cloth was soaked with blood and teeming with maggots. I brushed those away and studied the back of his shirt, and then cut it away to reveal the wound. It was much smaller than the opening on the other side and a silver dime could have hidden it. The edges of the wound were ragged, but only a little.

“It was definitely a sharpened pole or a spear with a tapered point,” I said. “It definitely isn’t a military spear, because they all flare out to the side in a broad leaf pattern. This is more like a plain pike.”

“The local constable reported that this man was stabbed with a spear from the front and that the size and ferocity of the chest wound was because the barbs of the spearhead tore the flesh as the weapon was pulled out. What do you think of that?”

I was shaking my head before she had finished.

“Go on, Miri,” said Frey, “speak your mind. Why is the constable wrong in his assessment?”

“A leaf-bladed spear has a flatter point, like an oversized arrow. The wound on the front is nearly perfectly round. And here, on the back, the wound is also round. A barbed spear would have torn a broader, flatter hole on the way out.”

“Good. Give me more.”

I hesitated, reassessing what I saw. “The blood . . .?”

“Yes,” Frey said patiently. “What about it?”

I chewed my lip for a moment. “There is too much on his back and not enough on his chest. If he had been stabbed from behind there would have been a burst of blood pushed out as the spear tip tore through the chest. But there isn’t.”

She positively beamed at me, doing it in exactly the same way she beamed at her terrier when he fetched a thrown ball. I hoped Mother Frey would not toss me a dried goat treat.

She did not. Frey leaned a hand on my shoulder and bent very carefully to study the wound. I heard her give another grunt, this one of surprise. “Very interesting.”

“What do you see?” I asked.

Instead of sharing her own observations, she said, “Tell me about this wound on his back. Forget what the constable reported. Use your eyes.”

“Well . . . it appears as if the spear—”

“The weapon,” she corrected. “We have not determined that it was a spear, have we? No. Observation requires precision, not prediction or preconception.”

“The weapon,” I said, leaning on the word, “entered his back, not his chest. The edges of the wound on his back are torn and pushed slightly in, suggesting that is where the shaft of the, um, weapon entered. However, this injury is very much smaller than the exit wound, so I judge that the victim struggled or began to fall and that increased the damage.”

“And the weapon itself? By your assessment it went in and went through, but where is it? Was it pulled out the other side?”

I looked around. “How could I tell that?”

“Surely you’ve seen a wound from a crossbow bolt. They sometimes pass straight through a body. What do we find on the ground on the side opposite from the point of impact?”

It took me a few moments to figure that out, then I stood and looked at the ground. “There should be a spent bolt.”

“And . . .?”

“Blood,” I said quickly. “There should be blood spray from where the passage of the bolt pulled it from the body.”

“Do you see that?”

I walked around the body and knelt by a patch of tall weeds. “There’s some here.”

She joined me and with my help knelt to look past the weeds to the body, which lay twenty-five feet away. “It would be a powerful quarrel that could fly so straight for such a distance. But we’ll come back to that. Now, tell me, girl, how quickly did this man die?”

“Almost at once,” I said. “He did not bleed very much except what leaked down from the wound after he’d fallen. This was near his heart and it would have pumped vigorously had he lived for even a few seconds.”

Frey nodded and then lapsed into a moody silence. She went back to the corpse and spent five long minutes studying the wounds, and twice had me roll the body over so she could compare the path of destruction. She held up each of his hands and examined each finger, then bent close to look at the tanned and dirty skin of his face. Without saying a word, Frey turned and walked away from the corpse, stopped, studied the body from a distance, and then walked in what appeared to be a random pattern around the scene. She finally stopped by a small milepost eighty feet from where the dead man lay. Frey bent and peered at the post, grunted again, then straightened and walked back to me.

“We are swimming in very deep and very dark waters, my girl,” she said as she sat down on the trunk of a felled tree. I fetched a skin of water and encouraged her to drink.

“Was I right in my reading of the murder?” I asked as I sat beside her.

Frey gave me a sidelong look of cool appraisal. “You are not as dull as most,” she said. “You have moments of insight, Miri, and your skills of observation are improving.”

“Then I am right?”

“Hm? Oh, no, you were incorrect in virtually everything.”

I sagged, hurt and embarrassed. Frey chuckled and patted my shoulder.

“It’s not that bad, girl. I know senior investigators for the Office who would have seen half of what you thought you saw and understood only half of that.”

“But—what did I miss?”

“Let me tell you first where you showed promise,” said Frey. “You correctly observed that this man is not a laborer or craftsman. That much is obvious, not merely because of the lack of calluses on his hands but by observing his knuckles—which are not swollen from the damage of prolonged and repeated hard labor—and from his calves and feet, which are fine-boned. His spine is also very straight and his chest and arms are not heavily muscled. This man did not spend his life doing heavy labor.” She paused. “You correctly noted that his lack of tattoos meant that he was not in any of the trading guilds, and you were correct in that he was of a nervous disposition by noting his habitual nail biting. In each of these things you were mostly correct. However, your assumptions faltered when you said that he was not a nobleman.”

“But the beard?”

“Beards are out of fashion with the noble born, girl, but those of high blood can still grow them. No, Miri, what we have here is a nobleman of some kind who has grown a beard in order to pretend he is something other than what he is. That is very curious. Under what circumstances might a highborn wish to disguise himself as a commoner?”

“Perhaps he was disgraced and lost his fortune. Or he could have fallen in love with a serving girl and left his family and wealth behind so they could be together.”

“Bah, you watch too much theater. Don’t disappoint me like that, Miri. Try again.”

“He could have been stripped of his station and forced to work the fields. Wait . . . no, he would have been branded on the back of his hand.”

“That was a better attempt, girl. Keep trying.”

I pondered it for a while. The day was hot and the body stank. Above us, carrion birds kettled in the endless blue. The lady of the moon was visible in the daylight, half hidden by trailing wisps of cloud. I muttered a silent prayer for her to provide me with clarity of vision and insight.

“A spy, perhaps?”

She nodded. “We don’t yet know if that is the answer, but it fits the information more closely. Let’s keep it as a possible lead, but don’t stop there. Consider his fingernails.”

“He was frightened and bit them down.”

“No,” she said, “his nervousness was habitual. If you examine the flesh around the stubs of the nails you’ll see that there are layers of growth. That suggests that he has been biting his nails for a very long time. Nervousness is common to him. The beard is two or three months old and has been roughly cut. However, the ends of the beard are uniform in several sections. He had a longer beard and recently hacked at it, perhaps to give the impression that he is an unkempt commoner.”

“But he had a longer beard before?” I asked.

“Clearly. There are hairs caught in the threads of his shirt that are quite long. Those examples indicate the length of his beard prior to the recent roughening of his appearance. His clothes support this. They are filthy and they are stolen.”

“I can see that they are dirty,” I said, “but, Mother Frey, how can you know that they are stolen?”

“Because they are a local weave. See those faint red threads in the blend, here and here and here? That is an impurity of the cotton plant. All along the slopes of these mountains there are cotton farms, and the variety of red stash is considered something of a weed. The natural color of that variety weakens the overall yield. It is time consuming and expensive to sort it out, so the best-quality cotton is pure white. However, it is cotton and therefore worthwhile, so it is blended in with the second-best harvest for use in making clothes for farmers who work the lands. Now, we know that this man was not a farmer and these clothes are locally made. Given that he has recently roughened his appearance and is dressed in well-used local clothes, it is not too much of a reach to suggest that these clothes are stolen. If you were to canvass the farms you would probably find someone very upset that a shirt and trousers went missing from a wash pile or a drying line. And see there? Some of the dirt on the trousers and shirt is rubbed in, not earned through sweat. This man took rough clothes and dirtied them up to either disguise them or make them look authentic, or both. My guess would be both.”

I shook my head and grinned. “When you explain these things it always seems so obvious, and yet . . .”

Frey stopped me with a shake of her head. “Oh, dear little Sister Miri, my eyes see nothing that yours do not. But it is my habit to observe and consider, and then to extrapolate along lines of common sense and likelihood. My thoughts are theories, which I must always remind myself to accept as such rather than settle onto firm belief in the absence of absolute knowledge. A rush to judgment is a quality of a weak mind, and it is as great a fault as casual observation.”

We sat quietly for a while. Birds chattered and gossiped in the trees and butterflies danced from flower to flower. It was always a marvel to me how nature continued to move forward and to be about its work of growth and beauty even in the presence of gruesome human death. I have walked through battlefields and picked flowers on the sides of mounds beneath which are the buried hundreds of butchered dead.

“When will you tell me why we are here, Mother?” I asked. “We could not have come all this way for a single murder. And even if we were summoned to investigate this man’s death, it could not be the reason we were sent. He has been dead only a few days.”

Frey took another sip of water before answering. “That is correct, though it took you long enough to think of it.”

“No,” I said, “I knew right away that this isn’t the murder we were sent to investigate. I can infer that there was another one, but how are they connected? Was the first one another noble disguised as a commoner?”

“No.”

“Then who was killed before? And why call us? Shouldn’t the town constable be handling this? Or, if he was a spy, then the army’s investigators. Why contact the Office of Miracles? What is miraculous about this?”

Frey gave my knee a squeeze and stood up. I could hear her knees pop as she straightened. She blew out a long breath. “Ach, there are bones buried in the ground younger and fitter than mine,” she muttered. I watched her walk once more over to the stone wall and examine it. Then she took a small metal pick from her pocket and scratched at the wall for a moment. I got up to see if I could help, but as I approached she shoved her hands into her apron pockets. “What is miraculous, you ask?”

I glanced at her pocket but she pretended not to notice.

“As you rightly observe, my girl,” she said, “this is not the first such murder. It is, in fact, the fifth.”

I gasped. “The fifth? How is it no one has heard of the others?”

“They have,” she said. “Of course they have. The constable of this town and the constables of two neighboring towns know of it. They were the ones who began this investigation, but they turned it over to the beadles in their parishes, who poked their own noses into it and no doubt polluted any useful evidence from the previous crime scenes. But at least one of them had the sense Lady Siya gave him to pass a request up the line to the regional council of priests, who in turn evaluated it and forwarded it to us. Politics.” She spat on the ground as she always did when that word soured her tongue. “And fear.”

“Fear of what? A killer running loose?”

Frey snorted. “In these times? We are engaged in two wars and five border disputes, which collectively chew up the lives of ten thousand fighting men each year, and twice that many women and children who are caught in the middle of all that male greed and bloodlust. No, Miri, the Garden council would never have appealed to the Office of Miracles for anything as simple as common murder.”

“Then why are we here?” I asked.

She took her time answering. “Because,” Frey said at length, “the priests in the church and the headmen of the villages are afraid that something else has come to strike down the wicked.”

“Why should priests be afraid of something that targets the wicked? Shouldn’t it be the guilty, the sinners who need fear?”

She looked at me strangely. “That is exactly why the men of power are afraid, my girl.”

“What do you mean?”

“They fear the wrath of the gods, my girl. They fear punishment. They believe that this man and the others have been struck down by something beyond normal understanding. In the report forwarded to the Office by the council of priests they described these murders in an odd and telling way. They said that they believe the victims were struck down by the hammer of god.”

“Which god?”

“No,” she said, “that is not the question we should ask. It is not which god that need concern us. We must ask ourselves which hammer.”

-2-

We rode in silence into town. The local Garden had no convent, so we stayed at a small inn. Because the Garden was paying for it, we found ourselves in a mean set of dingy rooms with one narrow bed and a stray mat on the floor. I had to chase a family of mice out of the fireplace and then lit a fire to scare the cold and shadows out as well. We ate in a corner of the common room, and I was aware of the stares we received. It was uncommon for women to travel alone, and rarer still for a pair of nuns to be abroad without a guard. Frey never appeared to be unnerved by the attention. I knew that she had several knives secreted about her person, and not merely the ones she used as tools. And there were lots of old stories about her, some of which were clearly tall tales while others had a ring of authenticity about them. I’ve seen her with a hunting bow and a skinning knife, and I’ve known her to walk into a crowd of men and stare them down, the smarter ones dragging the dullards out of the way. I’ve seen old soldiers assess her and then give her small, secret nods.

Not that I was a fainthearted heroine from some romantic ballad. Even though my family fortunes crumbled when I was orphaned, I am a daughter of one of the old families. We’re taught sword arts, close-in knife fighting, and poisons before we’re taught to embroider and recite classics. And my own knives were within reach. One sharp for slicing and the other laced with the venom of the rose spider. It was rumored that Mother Frey had been a midwife before taking holy orders, and that she helped birth Lady Marissa Trewellyn-Vale, the Poison Rose, Blade Mistress of the Silver Empire—the most feared knife fighter of the age. There must be ten thousand girls like me who worshipped the Poison Rose and kept a seasoned blade hidden in our skirts.

We ate in peace and the men, sensibly, left us alone.

We had finished a meal of roast finch and were starting in on the cheese board when a fat man in green came in. He had a beadle’s badge hanging from a cheap chain around his neck. He glanced around, spotted us, and hurried over, and after a quick evaluation of us addressed his remarks to me.

“Mother Frey, I presume?”

“You presume much,” I said. “I am a novice in the service of Frey, senior investigator for the Office of Miracles. Kindly remove your hat.”

He stiffened, colored, and snatched a felt cap from his head as he swiveled toward the hunched, withered old woman beside me. I looked noble born, and Frey did not. It was not the first time she had been mistaken for my maid or a chaperone. The man sputtered an apology, and I saw the amusement twinkle in Frey’s blue eyes.

“Sit down,” said Frey, kicking a chair out from under the table. “You’re Nestor the Beadle?”

“I am, and again I offer ten thousand apologies for my—”

“One will do,” said Frey, “and you’ve given it. I’m too old to listen to the other nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine.”

He tried to hide his confusion behind a fake cough. “I heard that you went out to where the man was found dead. I’m surprised you did not stop in town first to let me know you had arrived. I would have taken you out there.”

“And done what, Nestor?” interrupted Frey. “Shown us the body? We managed to find it without wasting the time to come all the way into town.”

“I—”

“I’m pleased that you at least posted a guard at the foot of the road leading up to the murder scene.”

“Of course, I—”

“And you followed my instructions to leave the scene itself intact.”

“About that. You sent those instructions weeks back,” said Nestor quickly, racing to get the words out before he could be interrupted again, “but this man was only killed a few days ago. How did you know there would be another death?”

“Because there were others before it,” said Frey. “It’s reasonable to assume a string of murders might continue. Just as it is reasonable to assume that we have not seen the last of these killings.”

“You can’t know that,” protested Nestor. Then he leaned close. “Or have you consulted an augury?”

I saw Frey’s mouth tighten. Unlike many in the Green Faith, she did not put much stock in any kind of spiritual predictions. Not once in the time I’d been with her had she consulted a seer, practiced sortilege, or participated in hepatoscopy. “Crime and murder in this world is best solved by science and investigation,” she once told me, “and not by mucking about in the entrails of a goat or throwing chicken bones on the ground.” Frey was often criticized for this, and more than once in her life she had been forced to defend herself from accusations of agnosticism and heresy. Those accusations, and the accusers, had been dismantled with cold efficiency by the woman who sat beside me.

Does it mean that she believed? I don’t know; nor do I know if she doubts. What I know of her is that when it comes to matters of the physical world she relies entirely on things that can be observed, touched, weighed, measured, and tested. An odd practice for a nun, perhaps, but I long ago learned that the task of the Office of Miracles was to disprove claims of miraculous occurrence rather than the opposite. Only in cases of absolute failure to disprove the presence of the divine was our Office willing to ascribe an incident to the larger world of the spirit. Magic, after all, was illegal in the whole of the Silver Empire.

“I prefer to consult my own perceptions,” said Frey coolly.

The beadle opened his mouth, paused, thought better of what he might have said, and snapped his jaws shut.

“Now,” said Frey, “what can you tell us of this matter? Start at the beginning, please, and leave out no details.”

Nestor steadied himself with a deep draft of the beer the barmaid brought over, and then he launched into the account.

“As you know, there have been several strange deaths here in these mountains,” he began, his voice hushed and confidential, “of which this is the fifth in as many months. It began with the death of Jeks Kol, the town’s blacksmith. He was a good and righteous man. Levelheaded and fair, and very well liked throughout the region. A widower, but not bitter. He had quarrels with few and was a pillar of the community. In fact, he—”

“When you say he had quarrels with ‘few,’” interrupted Frey, “do you speak with precision?”

“Well, almost everyone liked and respected Kol.”

“Again, I must press you on this. You say ‘almost.’ Was there anyone who did not like Kol? Anyone with whom he had a dispute or a fight?”

“Not a fight, as you might say,” hedged Nestor, “but there was no love between him and the evangelist.”

“Which evangelist? His name, Nestor. And of what church?”

“Dimmerk is his name. He came here to Zehria three years ago. His family were merchants trading in all manner of goods, from fireworks to iron ore and other bulk metals, but they lost their estates and all their lands during the treaties at the end of the first Plantation War. That whole region was ceded to the Khaslani. Dimmerk lost everything, down to the last stone of the family house, and they’d lived there four hundred years and more.”

Frey nodded. It was a sad and troubling part of history that this region had always been a point of contention and contested ownership. Although part of the Silver Empire, Zehria was bordered on the north by Bulconia, an independent and acquisitive state; to the east by the lawless Cathedral Mountains, and a cluster of small city-states of shifting allegiance. It was also some of the most fertile rice-farming lands in the east. When the first Plantation War ended the politicians used it as a bargaining chip and ultimately turned it over to the Khaslani in exchange for three islands where certain rare spices were grown. It was a bad deal all around, because the Khaslani drove out many of the families who had lived there for centuries, and slaughtered many others. And it turned out that the spice-rich islands had been farmed to exhaustion. This led to vicious political fights and then, inevitably, to the second and current war. The Khaslani had fortified the northern border and now held onto it with ferocity, repulsing many attempts to retake it.

“I’ve been all through this region and do not know the name Dimmerk,” mused Frey. “Is it his birth name or family name?”

“He is one of the Fells. Last of them, except for a few cousins,” said Nestor.

“Ah,” said Frey. “They were a contentious lot. The men, at least. And unlucky. I remember when their fireworks factory blew up and took half a mountain down with it. They say that debris was thrown half a mile in every direction. Thirty-eight dead and a hundred wounded. One man had a human shin bone pass straight through his stomach with such force it killed him and his wife, who was seated behind him. The Fell family had to sell nearly half of their holdings to satisfy the damages. They were always involved in lawsuits and disputes.”

“That’s them,” agreed Nestor. “And this one is no different than the others. Every bit as quarrelsome. When the first war ended and their lands lost, Dimmerk Fell dropped his surname completely.”

“Ah,” she said. “Was there ever violence between Kol and Dimmerk?”

Nestor sipped his beer. “Hard words only, as far as I know,” he said.

“What was the substance of their dispute?”

“Well, Dimmerk is on the glory road, isn’t he? When his family went to ruin he took to religion, joining the Church of the Crucible, and you know how they are. All fire and brimstone, death and damnation. Not that I can blame him, of course. His whole family was torn apart by the Khaslani and they were cast out as beggars. When he came here to Zehria he had nothing but the clothes on his back and he’s been preaching hellfire ever since.”

“I thought the preachers of the Crucible were supposed to forswear all earthly pleasures and live in poverty and humility,” I said.

“Poverty? Aye, Dimmerk lived that part of it straight enough, but humility? Well, that’s a different kettle of cod, isn’t it?”

Frey twirled her fingers, encouraging him to continue his narrative.

“Well, Kol was a religious fellow and a deacon of the church—the church of Father Ar and Mother Siya, you understand. But Dimmerk was beginning to draw quite a crowd with his Crucible rantings and with displays of fireworks that are supposed to be symbolic of the furnaces of hell. You know how that is, telling people what they want to hear so they get riled up. He was filling them with talk of fiery vengeance raining down on the Khaslani and on the politicians from our side who agreed to give away all that land. Retribution and justice can sound mighty appealing when you’ve lost a lot, and we have a lot of refugees here in town, as all towns do, I suppose. War’s like that.”

Frey and I nodded sad agreement.

“At first, Jeks Kol and Dimmerk would nod to each other if they met on the road or in town, but over time Dimmerk tried to convert Kol to his way of thinking. He thought that a blacksmith should devote some of his time and resources to making swords, shields, and armor instead of only ploughshares and door hinges. He said that a righteous man had an obligation to support a crusade against the pagans.”

Frey sighed very loudly and heavily. Nestor, though a servant for the church, nodded agreement.

“Fanatics never help, do they?” he asked, which drew a faint smile from Frey. I could see her warming to the beadle.

“Go on,” she encouraged. “When did things go bad between them?”

“Well, it was when Dimmerk began showing up at prayer meetings Kol was holding in a little arbor behind his cottage. It wasn’t much, just some families in the neighborhood who liked to get together and talk about scripture. Harmless stuff, good for everyone who was there. And Kol wasn’t proselytizing, I can assure you.”

Frey nodded but made no comment and the man continued.

“Dimmerk would come to those meetings and begin shouting Kol down, arguing with him on points of faith, handing out broadsheets and religious tracts to the people there, and demanding to know why Kol, a blacksmith, could possibly fail to recognize the god of the holy crucible to be anything but the one true god.” Nestor paused. “Now, understand, Kol was a good man but not a patient one, and he did not suffer gladly any attacks on his friends or himself. After one of the meetings he took hold of Dimmerk by the collar and the seat of his pants and actually threw the preacher out of the arbor. Some say he threw him into the pond, but I think that may be embellishment. In any case, it was the last time Dimmerk intruded upon one of those prayer meetings. But here’s the odd thing, Mother Frey—a few weeks later Dimmerk came to Kol and apologized—very profusely I’m told—and begged forgiveness. Kol, being a good man, was swayed by this and went so far as to embrace Dimmerk. From then on they became friends. I won’t say fast friends, but close. And Kol even let Dimmerk work for him at his smithy in exchange for food and a bed.”

“Kol seems to have been a good man,” I suggested.

“He was that, and he was a rock who kept many people hereabout steady in these troubled times. What happened to him was a tragedy,” said Nestor.

“What happened?” asked Frey.

“It was the strangest thing you ever saw,” said Nestor, his voice even more hushed. “Kol was making a delivery of a new set of gates to one of the houses in the hills. He had taken the gates down and set them in place and was shaking the hand of the man who had hired him when he suddenly cried out and staggered, his chest bursting open as if he had been stabbed, but there was no one else there. Only the old man who had hired him and his two sons.”

“They were questioned?”

“Indeed. The constable had them go over it a dozen times and I went through it twice as often. The story was always the same. One moment Kol was alive and the next he was dead, struck down by some otherworldly force.”

Frey gave him a shrewd look. “Where was Dimmerk when this happened?”

“He said he was working at Kol’s forge, and when the constable went to interview him—for of course he was suspected based on the hard words of earlier—there Dimmerk was, hammering away on the anvil.”

“And it is your opinion that Dimmerk was not involved?”

“No . . .” Nestor said slowly, “but the man makes me nervous. Since Kol’s death he has returned to his fire-and-brimstone ways. He still lives at the blacksmith’s place. Kol had no family and besides, Dimmerk insists that the blacksmith had promised him a permanent place there. And since he is also a skilled metalworker, he has kept up with all of Kol’s business commitments and has turned the income over to the dead man’s family. However, he has begun using the arbor to hold his own meetings, and they are full of anger and yelling. He says that his friend Kol was a good man but one who was misled and who suffered punishment for it. He says that the Red God of the Crucible struck him down as a warning to all who refuse to see the truth.”

“Ah,” said Frey.

“He said that Kol was struck down by the ‘hammer of god,’ and that everyone needs to heed the warning in order to escape a similar fate.”

“And yet there have been other victims,” said Frey. “Were they associated with Kol or Dimmerk?”

“With Kol? No. But at least one of them knew Dimmerk. I don’t know his name, but he came to town looking for Dimmerk, claiming to be a friend from the old days before the first war. Someone in town gave him directions to the Kol place and the man was later found dead on the road, struck down in what appears to be the same manner. No arrow, no spear, just a chest burst apart. His money belt was even on his person. When we questioned Dimmerk he claimed not to have seen the man, and it was so dry we could not determine if the stranger’s horse had ever reached the Kol place or not. The horse was found wandering in the forest, and its flanks were streaked with blood, so the stranger must have been in the saddle when the hammer of god struck him down.”

“And the others?”

“All strangers to these parts,” said Nestor. “Two were killed on the same day only seconds apart. They were diplomats from the Office of Treaties who were on their way to the capital after having a series of meetings with our enemies among the Khaslani. Rumor has it they were close to signing a treaty that would have ended the war.”

“I’ve heard those rumors, too,” I said. “The talk was that, had they lived, the diplomats would have arranged an end to hostilities that would have ended the conflict but left the Khaslani in possession of even more land.”

Frey nodded. “Their deaths were a blow to the diplomatic process. The Khaslani apparently believe that a cabal within our own government executed them for agreeing to a deal that favored our enemies.”

“Is that true?” I asked.

Frey didn’t answer, and Nestor picked up the thread of his narration. “The ambassadors were killed on the open road that runs past the village, struck down amid a retinue of forty armed men. The soldiers scoured the hills but could find no trace of Khaslani spies or assassins. The deaths were impossible to explain. So, it was because one of these men was very important that we sent a request to the Office of Miracles.”

Frey touched my ankle with her toe, sending me a message that I did not quite understand.

“And now we have this latest one,” said Nestor. “A man who is a complete stranger and clearly no one of importance.”

“Of no importance?” echoed Frey. “Everyone is important.”

“No, I did not mean they were unimportant in the eyes of Father Ar and—” began Nestor, but Frey waved it away.

“Important to the investigation, I meant. We were not able to examine the other corpses.”

“Oh. Of course.”

“First thing in the morning I will go speak with Dimmerk,” announced Frey. “Please provide Sister Miri with directions. That will be all for now, Nestor.”

“I hope I have been of some assistance in this matter,” said the beadle.

Frey offered a cold smile. “More than you know.”

-3-

That evening, as we settled down to sleep—Frey in the bed and me on the floor—we talked about all that we had learned. Or, at least, Mother Frey had me go through it all, point by point.

“And what do you think about all of this, my girl?” she asked. “Have you formed any working theories?”

“I am lost,” I confessed. “The evidence is so frightening.”

“In what way?”

“Well, this ‘hammer of god’ appears to be exactly what Nestor and the others in town believe it is. It seems as if this Dimmerk is quite right that his god has struck down those who deny his reality.”

I heard a very long sigh in the dark. “So after all that you have seen and heard today, you feel that this is an act of some homicidal god?”

“I—”

“No other theory suggests itself?”

“What else could explain it, Mother?” I asked. “Witnesses saw men struck down by some invisible force. We saw firsthand an example of such a wound, and no arrow or sword would do damage of that kind.”

“And a god is the only other possible answer?”

“What else?”

She chuckled. “Perhaps a good night’s sleep will sharpen your wits, girl.”

And with that she fell silent. After a few moments I heard a soft, buzzing snore.

-4-

We were up at first light, washed, dressed, and out the door, eating a light breakfast of cold game and cheese as our cart rumbled out of town. Nestor had offered to accompany us, but Frey declined and we followed a set of directions that took us out of the cluster of buildings that formed the village and back into the mountains. Kol’s smithy was five miles up a winding road, and we rolled through morning mists past groves of nut trees and farms crowded with sheep. The sun had not yet cleared the mist when we reached a gate hung with a sign proclaiming: home of the righteous.

Frey studied that sign with cunning old eyes, then she turned and spat over into the shrubs beside the gate with excellent accuracy and velocity.

There was a turnaround in front of a modest house with a thatched roof. There were a half dozen smaller buildings—sheds and barns—scattered among the trees. At one end of a clearing was the brick smithy and beyond that was an arbor made from spruce trunks and covered with pine boughs. Two dozen mismatched stools and benches filled the arbor, but it was otherwise empty. We sat on the wagon for almost two minutes, allowing whomever was home to make themselves proper before opening the door. No one did.

“There’s smoke,” I said, nodding toward the chimney above the smithy.

I helped Mother Frey from the wagon and she leaned on me as we walked to the clearing. There was a sound of clanging from within and I had to knock very loudly before the hammering stopped. But it was nearly a full minute before the door opened and we got our first look at Dimmerk. He was not very tall and had narrow shoulders, which seemed at odds with his skills as a blacksmith. His arms were strong, though, and he had fresh burns on his hands, wrists, and right cheek. Gray eyes peered at us from beneath bushy black brows and he wore a frown of suspicion and annoyance.

“Who are you to come knocking so early?” he demanded, standing firm in the doorway, blocking us from entering.

Mother Frey introduced us both, and that seemed to deepen the man’s frown.

“What business have you here?” he asked. There was a sneer of contempt on his face and in his voice, and he emphasized the word you as he looked at us. His distaste for nuns was evident, though it was unclear whether his displeasure was at our being from the Church of the Parents of All or because we were with the Office of Miracles.

“We are here to discuss the murders with you, brother Dimmerk,” said Frey.

“Murders?” He barked the word out with a harsh laugh. “There have been no murders that I know of.”

“You stand in the smithy of a murdered man.”

“I stand in the smithy of a sinner struck down by the hammer of god,” he growled.

“Kol was your friend. He took you in, gave you food and shelter, accepted you into his household.”

Dimmerk nodded. “Aye, Kol did all that, but if you think he did it out of the kindness of his heart, then you are as great a fool as he. Kol hoped to convert me, to encourage me to stray from the path of righteousness.”

“If he was so great a sinner, then why did you come to live with him? Why do you stay here and continue his work?”

“I came because my god demands of me that I accept all challenges to faith, old woman,” said Dimmerk. “A man like Kol was a special challenge because he was influential in this town. He corrupted many with his false prayer and false teachings. He led good people astray with lies and witchcraft and kept them under his spell, drawing them to the edge of doom. Countering the secret evil of his heresy was a special challenge. The Red God of the Crucible does not call on its ministers to preach to the faithful but to spread the word of truth to those who do not believe, and to save the souls of those who had been corrupted by false prophets.”

“I see,” said Frey.

“Do you? Or are you such a one as Kol, who comes with smiles and open hands to lead the unwary to their damnation?”

“It is not my practice to proselytize, as well you know.”

“Do I?”

“You are from the western slopes of the Cathedral Mountains, Dimmerk. Your family name is Fell, and the Fells were always of the Faith of the Harvest. How is it you are now on the road of fire?”

I saw the changes on the man’s face as Frey’s words struck him. The light of righteous rage seemed to slip and fall away as if it were nothing more than a mask worn by an actor. Beneath it was something colder, more calculating. Every bit as hostile, though, but without the wildness of religious zeal, and that made him dangerous in a different way.

“You know my family?” he asked, his voice oddly calm.

“I knew your grandmother. A good woman. Known for her silver jewelry. It was quite lovely.” Frey touched his arm. “I was sorry to hear that she died.”

Dimmerk’s gray eyes seemed to fill with shadows and then he abruptly turned away and walked inside, leaving the door open. Frey winked at me and we followed him inside.

The smithy was a large room with a high ceiling that tapered upward to a broad smoke hole above the furnace. There were sturdy worktables and anvils, heaps of scrap metal, a hundred projects in various stages of completion, ranging from a ploughshare to a full set of ceremonial armor. Most of the stuff was covered with a light coating of dust. Dimmerk picked up his hammer and spent a few moments banging at a piece of iron that had clearly already gotten too cold to work.

Frey stopped at one table on which were several long metal poles. She bent and studied them, and I followed her example, and was surprised to see that the poles were hollow. What the purpose was for these metal tubes was beyond me. Frey picked one up and scratched the curved edge with her fingernail.

“Steel,” she murmured.

It was steel, and finely made, but why roll it into tubes? The narrow opening would not reduce the weight of each pole enough to make the process worth the effort.

On the edge of the table was a slatted wooden bucket filled to the brim with small round lead balls. I picked one up and was surprised by how heavy it was. Frey took it from me, nodded to herself, and put it back. Then she ran her finger along the top of the table and showed it to me. There was no dust.

Dimmerk threw down his hammer and came over to us. He glanced at the table and its contents and then at Frey.

“That’s nothing,” he said quickly. “A commission. Something ornamental.”

“I see.” Frey looked around, then crossed to another table on which were rows of small tubes made of paper. She picked one up, squeezed it gently, sniffed it, and handed it to me when I joined her. To Dimmerk she said, “Still making fireworks?”

“Yes,” he said guardedly.

“They’re awfully small,” I remarked. “Are they firecrackers?”

He didn’t answer but instead took the firework from my hand and placed it back on the table. “What is the purpose of this visit?”

“We are investigating the deaths of Kol and four other men,” said Frey, “each of whom died in the same strange way.”

“It isn’t strange,” replied Dimmerk. “They were struck down by the—”

“Hammer of god,” Frey interjected. “Yes, so I’m told. You seem certain that this is why Kol was killed, but what about the other four? Were they also heretics?”

“They must have been,” Dimmerk said. “Why else would they have incurred the wrath of god?”

“Why indeed?”

“One was a countryman of yours, I believe. From the foothills of the mountains.”

“Heresy is like a weed; it can grow anywhere.” Dimmerk grunted. “Look, old woman, I’ve already given my statement and told that fool of a beadle everything I know.”

“People say that but they are often wrong. There is always more to be said on any important subject, wouldn’t you agree?”

“No. And I don’t have time to stand here and gossip with a couple of useless and nosy women.”

If I expected Frey to take offense, she did not. Instead she wore a placid smile as she began strolling once more around the smithy. She peered into buckets and bent close to examine items on tables while Dimmerk watched her with a disapproval that—for all the world—looked like an even mixture of contempt and fear. I could understand the former, but not the latter. Frey stopped by a table all the way in the back and lifted a piece of polished wood that looked somewhat like the stock of a crossbow. She turned it over in her hands and then glanced back at the table on which the heavy metal tubes lay. And now I saw some of that same fear on her face. And some of the same contempt. She set the wood down at the end of a long row of identical pieces.

“Hatred is a poison,” she said.

Dimmerk said nothing.

Frey stood in the shadows at the far end of the smithy, her back to us as she ran her fingers over the lines of carved wood stocks. “In these times, with war tearing apart nations and breaking families, it is so easy to give in to hate.”

“Hatred is a weapon,” countered Dimmerk. “Without it we become soft. Without it we cannot hope to fight back, or to take back what was stolen from us.”

“Is that what your god tells you?” asked Frey without turning. “Is hatred the arm that raises the hammer of god? If so, how does its fall serve the will of your god? How does that kind of hatred build your church? How does it serve any church or any god?”

Dimmerk said nothing.

Mother Frey turned but stayed on the far side of the smithy. “Philosophers say that the gods do not bother with the petty affairs of mortals, particularly in matters of governance. In theory the gods should not even favor one nation over another, because if they made the world then they made all of it, and all of us.”

Dimmerk said nothing.

“And yet here, on this mountain, there has been a remarkable number of miraculous deaths whose nature seems to argue for a god very much interested in politics, and in the political survival of one nation in particular. It could be argued that this god has gone so far as to intercede on behalf of a single family who, admittedly, was badly treated by both sides.”

Dimmerk said nothing.

“The two diplomats who were struck down would have settled a treaty that would have reinforced a grave wrong done to that family. Their deaths prevented that from happening, which leaves it open for you to make a claim on those lands should our side win the war.”

Dimmerk said nothing.

“I keep thinking about the death of your countryman,” said Frey. “I can’t help but wonder what he was doing in these hills. It couldn’t be pure chance that he would come here, so far from the mountains. Was he, perhaps, searching for you? What drew him here, I wonder? There would have been just enough time after the death of Jeks Kol for the news to spread. Might he have come out of some interest in that good man’s death? Or in how he died?”

And still Dimmerk said nothing.

“And then there was the death of a man pretending to be what he was not.”

Dimmerk stiffened. “What do you mean by that?”

“The body in the hills,” said Frey. “We examined it quite closely. He was dressed like a local farmer but I believe that he was a Khaslani spy, and one who had recently come from the mountains.”

“You couldn’t know that,” barked Dimmerk.

“Could I not? Then let me explain. His face was ruddy and weathered. The winds touch a man’s face differently here in the mountains than they do down by the ocean. His eyes were green, and green eyes are rare among the mountain farmers, where brown and blue eyes are far more common. I perceived a pale band around his thumb. It is common for Khaslani landowners and their elder sons to wear their signet rings on their thumbs. He had taken his off but had not yet tanned enough to cover it. He was not a serf and not a soldier, that much was obvious. Was he a spy? Perhaps, but not a government agent. He was not clever enough in his disguise for that. No, this man was a young nobleman or an elder son of a noble house of Khaslani who came here on a mission to discover something of great importance. Something he feared to find and perhaps feared not to find. His nervousness was habitual and longstanding, suggesting that he has been dreading something for quite a while. Long enough to drive him to take a terrible risk. To make him want to grow a peasant’s beard and infiltrate the lands of his nation’s enemy. Why would a man of that kind take such a risk? Could it be because his family now lives in estates once owned by a family that had been driven out and destroyed? What could he have found in the mansion or castle that had been abandoned in such desperate haste? Was there a forge there, I wonder? Were there remnants of things being designed or manufactured which filled his heart with a great dread?”

Dimmerk’s eyes seemed to glow with as much fiery heat as his forge. “You are only guessing, you witch.”

“I never guess,” Frey said quietly. “I observe and look for evidence that supports a likely conclusion. Inductive reasoning is more precise than mere guesswork.”

Dimmerk took a few steps toward her. I slipped my hand beneath the folds of my apron and closed my fingers around the hilt of my poisoned knife. He was bigger than I, but I was quick as a scorpion and always had been. I think Dimmerk saw my hand move and guessed the danger. He smiled and stopped by the table with the long steel tubes.

“You are trespassing here,” he said calmly. “You are unwelcome. Please leave.”

There was a quality to his voice that carried a greater menace than I had expected from the man. Frey felt it, too. Even she.

I crossed to her and walked with her to the door, but on the threshold Mother Frey stopped and turned.

“Listen to me,” she said in a voice that was surprisingly gentle. “I understand what you are doing, and my heart breaks for you. It breaks for all that you’ve lost. But you are going down the wrong path. You want people to believe that it is the hand of your god reaching down to strike at the heretics, but we both know that is a lie. That is blasphemy, though I doubt you care about such things any more than I do. This was never about religion. You are using god as a shield and from behind that cover you are striking out with something the world has never seen. Something new and terrible. Could it be that Jeks Kol saw what you were making here and understood its implications? He was a simple man, but from all accounts not a stupid one. The potential of that thing is too great to comprehend. Even now the thought of it fills my heart and mind with black horror.”

“Get out,” he said, but she was not finished.

“I implore you, Dimmerk, destroy what you have made. Do it now before the rest of the world learns of it. Do it before politicians and soldiers and generals learn of it. Do it now before you drown our country and every country in a tidal wave of blood. Perhaps you have been driven mad by what you’ve lost. If so, I pity you. But mad or sane, I beseech you to step aside from this course.” She pointed a withered finger at the table of metal tubes and then at the wooden stocks. “Melt those and burn them. Make sickles and scythes. Make swords if you must make weapons for killing, but do not allow the hammer of god to be known to the world. Do not let that kind of horror be the last legacy of the Fell family. I beg you, do not do that.”

Dimmerk snatched up one of the metal poles and brandished it like a club. My dagger was in my hand, but Frey stayed my arm.

“Get out and be damned to you,” roared the man.

And we women, too wise to fight this fight, withdrew.

Outside, Frey turned and fair pushed me toward our wagon. “Hurry, girl. In the name of Mother Siya, hurry.”

I helped her up and before I could even take the reins Frey snatched them and snapped the horses into startled movement. She flicked a whip at them—something I had never seen her do before—and drove them mercilessly down the mountain road.

It was when we were nearing the bottom of the winding way that something strange happened. The cold lantern that hung on a post at the corner of the wagon suddenly exploded as if struck by a club. Pieces flew everywhere and we had to shield our faces with our arms.

“Ride!” screamed Frey, whipping the horses anew.

We flew down the hill and were soon deep into the forests and the farms.

-5-

Frey said nothing more until we were back in our room at the inn with door bolted and shutters closed. The old woman looked positively ancient and frail, thin and deathly pale.

“What is it, Mother?” I begged. “Tell me what you meant. What evil thing did Dimmerk invent? Was it some magic spell? Has he conjured a demon?”

She took so long I did not think she was going to answer. Then she dug something out of her apron pocket and held it out to me. I took the item and held it up to study by candlelight. It was a lump of lead that was round on one side but badly misshapen on the other.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Do you remember the bucket of lead balls?”

“I do. Oh!” I realized that this was exactly the same size as the others, though they were all perfectly round.

“I took this from the wall near where the Khaslani was killed. If we had been able to examine the spots where the diplomats and Jeks Kol were killed, no doubt we would find others like this.”

“What does it mean? Are you saying these small lead balls did the damage we saw on the spy? How is that possible? What sorcery is this?”

Frey said, “Have you ever seen fireworks?”

“Of course.”

“Ever seen what happens when too many are set off at once?”

“Once. A barrel of firecrackers blew up in the town where I lived with my husband. Killed the firecracker salesman and his horse.”

“Did you actually see the blast?”

“Yes.”

“Then you understand the force that is released,” she said. “Explosives like that are most dangerous when confined. A hundredweight of firecrackers lit in the middle of the town square is an amusement. That same amount in a barrel is deadly because the force is gathered together. It is like fingers gathered together into a fist. You understand?”

“Yes. But . . . are you talking about banefire?” I asked.

Banefire was an ancient weapon created by alchemists long before the rise of the first Silver Empress. We were all told that the secret of making it was lost and all attempts to recreate it forbidden. However, Frey shook her head.

“No, this is not something from the ancient world, my girl,” she said, a nervous little tremolo in her voice. “I fear this is something new and perhaps even more terrible.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The Fell family suffered a dreadful tragedy when their factory exploded, destroying all the property and killing so many. The fireworks were probably in cases, stacked and bunched together. Are you following me?”

“I am, but what does that have to do with this?” I held up the smashed lead.

She chewed her lip for a moment. “I am going to trust you, Miri. I know I treat you like a girl but you are a woman who has seen some of life. You have education and you are not a fool. One day you will take over my responsibilities and to do that you must be wise and you must have an open mind.”

I nodded slowly.

“The Office of Miracles was never intended as an agency for proving the divine. Others in our church do that. It has always been up to us to search for the truth, often in dark and ugly places,” said Mother Frey. “There are many people in this world whose hearts are filled with greed, with avarice, with hatred. I see that in Dimmerk Fell. Maybe he was once a good man and has had his heart broken, but I suspect that he was always like this. The war has simply honed and refined his hatred . . . and his greed. But he is also very smart. You saw those tubes? Now imagine if you filled one end with a paper firework like the ones we saw, and then rolled a lead ball down its mouth. If you could block the end with the firework, say with a heavy wooden stock, but leave a hole for a candle wick, what do you think would happen when you put flame to the firecracker?”

I had to think about it. All of that explosive force behind the lead ball would need to go somewhere. If the whole thing did not explode, then it would push that ball down the tube and out.

Frey watched me and I could tell that she saw the moment I understood.

“Not a crossbow,” I said softly. “And not the hand or hammer of god.”

“No,” she said. “Now imagine a thousand soldiers with weapons like that. Put them behind a wall and you can march all the armies of the world against them and what would be the result? A mountain of the dead.”

“Is it even possible?”

“You saw it firsthand, Miri. The spy. His chest. The ball went in small on one side and the lead, soft as it is, must have hit bone and flattened as it came out. It smashed a much bigger hole on the other side. Nestor described the same thing with Jeks Kol and the diplomats. And we saw it happen to the lantern on our wagon.”

I sat there, frozen by the horror of it. Immediately my mind was filled with terror at the scene she had described—men with firework weapons that could spit death—and the damage they could do. The battles they could win. The kingdoms they could topple.

“Now,” said Frey, “imagine if those weapons were in the hands of both armies. Imagine if every murderous fool could hold a tube of steel and kill from a safe distance. Imagine what this world would become. Imagine what it will become. Imagine that, Miri, and you will be inside the head of Dimmerk Fell.”

We sat there, staring at each other, surrounded by shadows that now seemed filled with legions of ghosts waiting to be born in the fires of wars to come.

“What can we do?”

Frey took the lead ball back and placed it on the night table. “I don’t know that we can do anything,” she said sadly, her eyes flickering with frustration. “If we file a report then the world will know that this weapon exists. Even if Dimmerk hides his handiwork, the concept will be out there.”

“Fireworks are common. Won’t someone else think of this?”

She looked older and sadder. “In time. Yes. All we can do is pray that Dimmerk comes to his senses so that such a horror will not be shared sooner rather than later.”

“Pray, Mother? I’m surprised to hear you advocate that.”

Frey shrugged. “What other course is left to us, girl?”

There was more to say, and we talked for a while, but then we settled down for the night. I was agitated and Mother Frey fixed me a sleeping draught. I drifted off and my dreams were haunted.

Once, deep in the middle of the night, I dreamed that the Red God reached out of the clouds and smote the mountaintop with his burning hammer. But it was a dream, and I slept on.

-6-

I woke in the cold light of morning to find Mother Frey’s bed empty. It looked like she had barely slept in it. My head was fuzzy and I wanted to scold her for giving me too strong a draught. I washed and dressed as quickly as I could and stumbled down the stairs to find her in the common room. She looked older still and worn to almost nothing, hunched over a mug of broth. Her face was smudged with soot and her clothes were dirty.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Were you out rooting with the pigs?”

Frey touched her face, looked at the soot that came away, shrugged, and sipped the broth.

I noticed that the common room was completely empty except for the landlord, who was standing in the doorway looking out into the street. “Where is everyone?” I demanded.

He turned and gave me a quizzical look. “Up at the smithy, of course.”

“Why ‘of course’? What’s happened?”

“Bless me, Sister, but did you not hear it all last night?”

“Hear what?”

“Why, the world itself seemed to roar.”

“I don’t understand what that means,” I said.

He pointed toward the hills and I came over and looked past him. There, up high near the snow line, a dense column of black smoke curled its way into the morning sky. It rose hundreds of feet above the mountaintop.

“Father Ar only knows what happened,” said the landlord. “But the whole top of the mountain blowed itself all the way to heaven’s front yard. Lucky there ain’t much up that far ‘cept the smithy, and that’s gone, of course. Poor Dimmerk never did have the luck. Sour scripture-thumping son of a . . .” He paused. “Pardon me, Sister Miri, I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead.”

I stared at the smoke and then turned toward Mother Frey. She peered at me with her bright blue eyes in her soot-stained old face. She lifted the mug of broth to her lips and took a sip.

She said nothing at all.

After a while I came and sat down with her.

I had a cup of hot broth, too.

©2016 by Jonathan Maberry Productions LLC. Originally published in Baker Street Irregulars, edited by Michael A. Ventrella and Jonathan Maberry.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jonathan Maberry is a New York Times bestselling author, 5-time Bram Stoker Award-winner, 3-time Scribe Award winner, Inkpot Award winner, and comic book writer. His vampire apocalypse book series, V-Wars, was a Netflix original series. He writes in multiple genres including suspense, thriller, horror, science fiction, fantasy, and action; for adults, teens and middle grade. He is also the editor of Weird Tales Magazine and many anthologies. Find him at jonathanmaberry.com

Magical Girl Burnout Bingo

Lauren Ring | 1514 words

Ten years ago, I stood on a rooftop alone. In front of me, a many-winged beast clung to the wires between traffic lights, drooling sparks onto the asphalt. I summoned a bright arrow from my wishing star and readied my bow. I had to defeat this false angel, rescue civilians, and heal the injured, and I had to do it all by myself, because nobody else would.

When I leapt, my leading ankle struck the roof’s edge and twisted. I pitched backward, sending my arrow streaking up into the heavens. The underbelly of the clouds glowed golden, the streetlights amber.

I saw into every apartment window as I fell. I saw the dishes and the laundry and the piles of bills. My own reflection plummeted past them, petticoats floating, star gleaming at my neck. None of the people inside looked at me.

Be not afraid, sang the beast, chewing on a street sign, but I wasn’t afraid. I was a hero, a savior, the hope of the masses. I was a magical girl. I didn’t have that privilege.

Then I died.

• • • •

Splatters of hair dye stain my hands, no matter how carefully I paint on the lavender. It doesn’t matter. It will never look the way it used to. I used up all my magic coming back to life, and even after a decade, I still can’t match that otherworldly color.

When I open my door to dry my hair, I hear the sound of chimes. Somewhere nearby, a magical girl is transforming in a cloud of luster dust and ribbons. I frown and make my way to my porch chair, favoring the ankle that never healed right. Magic in the air makes it ache. The sky is a violent pink, and a loathsome serpent paints it brighter with each swivel of its coils. A blue spark rises to meet it.

They say the magical girls will save us. I think that’s a shitty battle cry, but I don’t have a better one. After all, I can’t fight anymore.

My phone rings as the distant magical girl slices off the serpent’s head. Ichor drips down the sky, showering the city center in rose gold rain. Two more heads grow from the stump of the beast’s neck. My caller ID says Lyric.

“Hey, Plum. You’re on the news, babes. Ten-year anniversary. Wanna celebrate?”

“I could use some company,” I admit.

“I’ll bring drinks.”

Mist approaches my suburb, smelling of copper and petals. I won’t be able to catch the sun after all.

I limp back inside and wait on my couch. Wand charms with plastic moons dangle from my phone, reminding me that nostalgia is just a tap away. I’ll hold out for Lyric, though. She knows what it’s like to be a dead girl. She didn’t run out of magic in a final burst like I did, just fought until there was nothing left, but it doesn’t really make a difference. On the scoreboard of burnout bingo, we’ve both got a blackout.

• • • •

By the time Lyric shows up at my door, clutching a bottle of cheap rosé, the serpent has grown twenty-four heads. The magical girl in the sky is still slicing them off. What else can she do? She’s no Greek hero. She probably hasn’t even gotten to that myth in school.

“I see you’re purple again.” Lyric’s own hair is buzzed off, right to the root. It used to glow.

“I was going for lavender.” I undo my chain latch and swing the door open, welcoming her into the mess that is my home. “How bad’s the show this time?”

“Just the usual. Old clips, fanart, theories . . . Here, look up ‘Magical Girl Plum: A Retrospective.’” We curl up on the couch. Lyric pops the top of the rosé and uses it to gesture to my laptop as I type in the title.

“Drink when they use the word ‘prodigy’?”

“You’re on.” Lyric passes me the rosé.

The video is just what I expected it to be, and yet it makes something thrum deep in my chest. There I am on screen, holding my own, aiming my bow at the lure of a shadow-swimming angler fish, one year before I died. My arrow flies brave and true.

Fighting was a terrible burden, but the magic used to come so naturally to me. I just had to wish on my star and the power I needed would be there in my hand. I wasn’t just a magical girl, I was the best, brightest magical girl. Then I died, and nothing was ever easy again. No matter how hard I tried.

“She had so much potential,” says an academic scholar. “I truly think that if Plum had lived, she could have turned the tide of the war.”

“Hey, stop that.” Lyric takes my hand. I’ve been pressing my fingers against my collarbone again, leaving red marks where my pendant once sat.

“Why blame me? When did they ever help?” I glare, near tears, at the scholar.

“It’s all right, Plum. You were just a kid. It wasn’t your fault.”

That’s the free space of burnout bingo.

• • • •

Something loud crashes into my hazy sleep. I claw out of my tangle of blankets and peer at the hydra that has broken my roof, then reach for my wishing star.

“That’s not going to work, babes,” Lyric says.

The haze clears. My star pendant shattered long ago. The hydra’s heads are everywhere, drooling molten gold and snapping at Lyric, who is fending them off with my laptop. Pinned beneath the beast’s coils is a magical girl. Her hair is blue, but the roots at her scalp are as dark brown as mine.

“Hey, kid,” I mumble. “What’s wrong with your hair?”

“Plum, focus.” Lyric bats away another fang.

“What’s wrong with yours?” the girl croaks out. Streaks of blood and ichor coat her split lips like gloss.

“Same thing.” I step forward, dodging blows, and wedge my hands between the hydra and the girl. She glares at me until I find a switch and flip it, firing her jetpack into the soft meat of the hydra’s belly. She snatches up her sword when the beast jerks back. She’s winded, though, and her crushed arm is a wreck of gore. As Lyric and I fend off the hydra, the girl weakens further. No magic means no healing.

Unlike the middle schooler bleeding out in my living room, I’ve read the myth of the hydra. I run for my lighter and some purple hairspray. Behind me, I hear Lyric’s voice, as soft and sweet as it was when it held magic.

“Give me your sword,” she says to the girl. “You can rest now.”

The spark wheel rolls easily under my thumb, sending up a shower of golden light that comes close to the magic I remember. Then I press the hairspray trigger and send a cone of flame toward the raw stump of the hydra’s nearest neck. The wound cauterizes with a smell like gasoline and roadkill. No new heads grow.

Lyric hacks through another hydra neck with several messy chops and leaves it for me, already moving on to wrestle with the next head. She’s brutal, not efficient. I follow in her wake with fire.

We slash and burn, over and over again, doing damage no renter’s insurance will cover. The girl slumps in a corner, making calls on her phone. She has the same plastic charms I do.

The fight feels different than it did when I was young. I’m stronger now, and taller, with tricks to make up for the magic I’ve lost. I still don’t know what I’m doing, but at least I have a better idea. I feel alive again.

“Hold on, kid.” There are so many heads. My arms start to ache. Eventually, the glory fades, leaving only the fight.

By the time the hydra is dead, so is the girl. She’s not going to get my second chance.

• • • •

Lyric stands aside as I cross the room and take the dead girl’s phone. Instead of a parent, I’m greeted by the voice of another teenager.

“Aqua?” she asks, hesitant. “Is that you?”

“No.” I feel like I’m falling again. “But I’m with her. My name’s Plum.”

“Plum? No way! You’re my hero!”

“Aqua should be your hero, not me.” All I’ve done for a decade is mourn my own past while a new generation picked up the pieces of the world.

“She’s dead, isn’t she.” The teenager’s excitement has gone out like a snuffed candle.

“I’m sorry.”

“She knew the risks.” Familiar chimes ring out behind her hollow voice as she begins to transform, to take up the fight.

“Wait, let me give you my number. If you need to talk, or need some backup, call me anytime.” It’s time for me to grow up. I bite my lip, reaching back ten years for the words I never dared to wish for. “You don’t have to do this alone anymore.”

©2022 by Lauren Ring.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lauren Ring (she/her) is a perpetually tired Jewish lesbian who writes about possible futures, for better or for worse. She is a Nebula Award finalist, and her short fiction can be found in venues such as F&SF, Nature, and The Deadlands. When she isn’t writing speculative fiction, she is most likely working on a digital painting or attending to the many needs of her cat, Moomin. You can keep up with her at laurenmring.com or on Twitter @ringwrites

If We Do Not Fly at Sunset

Andi C. Buchanan | 1983 words

It’s a Sunday morning and the woman in your bed is exactly your type. Turquoise hair, cut perfectly. Full sleeve tattoo in progress; she says she’s adding to it as she gets the money. A smile that makes you want more—and she knows how to use it.

When she leaves—hair messy, socks stuffed into her pocket, still smiling, and saying you should text her—you shower, then bind both your chest and your wings. You don’t hate either of them, but if you don’t people think you’re something you’re not.

There’s a technique to it; breasts down and to each side so they best mimic pecs, while your wings are still soft enough to be folded in upon themselves, the air squeezed out in gentle sighs. It’s tight but comfortable, and you feel better already.

You wish she was still here. You were prepared to be naked with her, but you resent the idea that your nakedness is somehow more authentic than the choices you have made.

You have brunch with your family. Your parents stumble over your name. Afterwards you use bleach to clean the mould off the ceiling of your flat, and then have to call in sick because you’re exhausted and your asthma’s flaring up. You don’t have sick leave left. They take it out of your annual leave and tell you that you should give more notice when you want to take a holiday.

It’s still better than dealing with WINZ.

You’re thinking about doing an MA in Film Studies. You’re thinking about travelling. You’re thinking about presenting yourself to one of the fae courts and seeing if they might have a place for you, even though you’re of a broken lineage and your magic is functional for nothing but party tricks.

Your mother would have a fit. Not to worry. Your people are effectively immortal. She’s claimed more than once already that you’ll send her to an early grave, but it would take far more than your life decisions to finish her off.

You don’t love your life here, but you don’t hate it either. You have the girl’s number. Her name’s Holly. You’ve already looked her up on Facebook and on LinkedIn, found she’s a designer. You don’t even know what you’d do with a LinkedIn account.

You wait until Monday and then you text her.

• • • •

Alina, the youngest of your three flatmates, the one who actually checks the recycling numbers on plastic bottles, thinks you’re living in the end times. She doesn’t say it like that, of course, because that would make her sound weird, but she’s put maps of sea-level rises on the back of the toilet door.

You follow the concentric shapes in blue, turquoise, green, illustrating bad, very bad, and catastrophic scenarios. Whatever the outcome, Petone’s drowned and Miramar’s virtually an island.

Apparently, rates of depression are on the rise. You feel sad a lot but you don’t think you’re depressed. If you were, you would feel guilty about it. It’s hard for you to admit that even if human civilisation collapses, you have an alternative. That you’ll miss this; the music in the late-night cafes, your collection of succulents on the window ledge, the random ill-advised beach trips that end up with you chasing your friends and shrieking as the southerly rolls in. But it’s not all you have.

You’re like a student who doesn’t want to ask their rich parents for money. A backpacker with enough funds and references to rent an apartment when it’s time to settle down. You’re not playing at this life, but you’re not committed to it either.

And you won’t sink, you won’t drown, you won’t fall if this whole world comes crashing down.

• • • •

You meet Holly for gelato on the waterfront. It’s mid-afternoon—you’re working a late shift, and she has flexible hours that actually seem to be flexible for her, not just her boss. You have the lemon—you always have lemon— and she gets a scoop of chocolate and another of Doris plum.

You start walking in awkward silence, desperately trying to catch the drips of sorbet as it melts, thankful you didn’t choose a flavour that would be more obvious when it drips. Holly . . . Holly doesn’t care. She’s licking brown and purple from her fingers and around her mouth as if this was just one more joy in a benevolent world.

“Want to try?” she says, and you half shrug an okay and then she’s in close, gelato cone in one hand, cradling your face gently with the other, and you know there’s chocolate on your face too now and you don’t care.

• • • •

In the evening, when Holly has reluctantly gone to work to meet a deadline and you’ve reminded yourself not to push it, to let things go slowly, a flat Netflix binge gives way to a late-evening supermarket expedition. You’re out of toilet paper—you’ve actually been using kitchen roll for three days now—and more importantly, you’re out of rice and out of crushed garlic. You all throw on coats and start walking, promising yourselves an Uber home.

Jet dances and poses on the rainbow crossing. Alina says that she’d rather they built a hostel for homeless trans kids, which you agree with, and yet you can’t help but delight in how many people walk those bold, bright, stripes every single day.

Which makes it seem like you’re winning but you’re not sure that’s true. You carry a paint scraper and a little bottle of hand sanitiser in your bag; TERF posters, marker-pen swastikas, and whoever keeps organising stuff in support of Assange; they’re all coming down.

And you . . . you’re genderqueer and you’re fae and you’re ill so much that you’re struggling to hold down a job but you’re not sure if it’s okay to call yourself disabled. And you feel like the people in your life can accept any one of those but two or three are too much.

You hide being fae most of all. Not because it’s what you most need to keep secret; but because there seems to be little to be gained from revealing it. Some of the people you meet don’t believe you exist, or that you died out centuries ago, or that you stayed in far away countries. Even when they do believe you, they have weird ideas about what you are. They think you’re an expert at tricksy contracts and technical loopholes, when you failed to get into second year law.

They’re also convinced you can conjure things from thin air, cast love spells.

You do have some magic. You can stack playing cards, thin edge upon thin edge, even in a breeze. You can freeze a glass of water by touching it with your fingertip. If you leave a separated sock on your bed with a couple of fresh leaves in the morning, its pair will have returned by night.

You cannot fly. You can move your wings if you focus, strain your muscles, but they’ve always been slow and small; there’s no chance of you taking flight.

If you could, you wouldn’t need to be crammed into this Uber to get your groceries home. But afterwards, when you get home and the frozen goods have been put in the freezer, you’re laughing and there’s music on and Alina is putting the pizzas in the oven while complaining that they’re wrapped in plastic and maybe no-one needs magic after all.

• • • •

At school they put you all together, the kids with magic or abilities or who weren’t exactly human. Long bus journeys across the whole region so you were in the same class.

Your best friend could shape shorelines, move coasts and beaches with the gentle curve of her hand. You fell in love with that hand, that arm, those movements, not because they were magical but because you’d never seen such power and such delicacy all at once, much less seen it translated into flesh and bone.

You fell in love with her.

Then she went to Otago and you went to Vic and you didn’t know how to talk to someone you were in love with without the daily mundanity, without the ease of being beside her.

You wonder if it will be her who saves the world.

• • • •

That was years ago now, and everyone knows first loves never last, even when the girl you love has a perfect magical arm. Everything has changed unimaginably since then, and you wouldn’t go back, not even for a minute, but the certainty of how easily your love came for her made things easy when nothing else was.

You don’t love Holly, not yet at least, but she makes you happy.

Her flat is way back in Brooklyn, round so many turns and hills that you don’t know which way the city is, but it’s just her, in the middle flat of a house split into three. There’s a kōwhai in the shared garden, and a plum tree, and something else you can’t identify. In the morning bird song comes through with the early light.

You’re there more nights than you’re not, these days. It seems sensible, without flatmates and shower times and knowing looks to weave your ways around. There’s fancy cheese from Moore Wilson’s in the fridge, and fresh coffee every morning. There’s a heatpump that seems to make your asthma better. You catch the bus into work, or you walk round the blustery hills with your hands stuffed inside the pockets of your puffer jacket and your headphones on, short-cutting through the park down into town.

You’re scared of being happy.

• • • •

They split the city up into quarters, gave each of them a personality: Willis, Waterfront, Lambton, Cuba. It was just a silly and expensive marketing campaign that silently failed like they all do. But you think of how this city was planned on flat paper so far away in London, by men who’d never walked its hills.

You know that other cities have been split into quarters for centuries, that they’re grown up from industry and oppression and refuge and community. but to lay a flat plan upon a moving city, to run score marks across it, split street from street, makes you uneasy still, even now they’ve taken down most of the signs with their brightly coloured blocks.

It feels almost as bad as letting a city drown, as letting the water table rise until whole suburbs become unliveable, of letting the ever more frequent storms tear at the railway tracks round the harbour, break tarmacked chunks from the reclaimed land of the port.

• • • •

Holly can’t change the coastline with the movement of her hand. She can’t fly. She can’t even turn a glass of water to ice. But she’s said that when you’ve been together long enough not to regret it she’ll design you a tattoo and you’ve already started mentally tracing its outcome on your skin.

You’re in your bedroom, both of you, and she’s already teased you out of most of your clothes while still in her bra and jeans. Alina’s music comes through the internal walls and on the road below you can hear the high-pitched pop of the pedestrian crossing, someone yelling across the street to their friends.

Holly’s seated beside you on the bed and you turn your back to her and let her run her fingers along the edges of your wings. They’re not impressive wings; they unroll downwards more than they unfurl, and rather than ethereal, reflecting the light in all directions, they’re dull and tinged with green. But perhaps Holly’s never met anyone with wings before or perhaps she likes them anyway, and right now, just for her

what you have

is enough.

©2022 by Andi C. Buchanan.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andi C. Buchanan lives and writes just outside Wellington, New Zealand. Winner of Sir Julius Vogel Awards for From a Shadow Grave (Paper Road Press, 2019) and their short story “Girls Who Do Not Drown” (Apex, 2018), their fiction is also published in Fireside, Mermaids Monthly, Cossmass Infinities, and more. Their novel Sanctuary (Robot Dinosaur Press, 2022) tells the story of a queer, neurodivergent found-family who live in a haunted house. You can find Andi at andicbuchanan.org or @andicbuchanan on Twitter.

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

The Cheesemaker and the Undying King

Lina Rather | 6552 words

Tana was in a humid cave checking the rind on a round of Tomme when the messenger arrived to tell her that the war was lost and her wife was to be hanged. She took her time rewrapping the cheese before she responded. Still too soft. Another week, she estimated. The rind was a beautiful blue-black shade that would catch a maid’s eye in the market. Ruining a fine wheel wouldn’t save Renae. And she knew what the boy was going to say as soon as she heard his nervous footsteps. She’d known a month ago, when Renae strapped her sword to her side and pinned the emblem of their dead queen to her chest and rode off into the night to lead her troops on a last, brutal march over the mountains to try and stop the army that had swept across half the world.

“When?” She moved to the next rack. This one held cloth bags of afuega’l pitu. She preferred the shape of the bags, though most of her competitors aged theirs in round molds. She’d added paprika to this batch and set it to age the morning after Renae left. Usually she let it go until the salt crystals crunched in her teeth, but she took these off now while they would still be as sweet as the fresh milk.

The boy swallowed. “Tomorrow in the evening. His Majesty, in his generosity, will allow you to see her.”

Tana bit back a number of now-treasonous words and bent over the rack so that he could not see her face. He was just a boy, she told herself. It had been his father’s choice to pledge the family to the Veiled King, not his. And that was barely a choice at all. The war was lost as soon as the King’s armies began marching across the western pass as implacable as a thunderstorm. Nation after nation had fallen to him. He left drought and plague in his wake, the whispers said. He wrecked the land and needed more, more, more. He would not stop until all the world was his.

“Missus Geruin,” the boy said. “I’m very sorry.”

She remembered Renae teaching him and his tall sister to fight with a wooden sword. Juin and Fanchon, those were their names, the children of the village farrier who had started shoeing the King’s horses as soon as his army rode into the square. Only two of the crowd of children who had swarmed Renae in the square every afternoon, begging for lessons from the Queen’s newly-retired swordmistress.

The cheese bag squelched in her fist.

“Get out,” she said, and she waited until he did to fall forward and cry.

• • • •

The Veiled King’s men escorted her to the capital as if she didn’t know the way. Neither of them spoke for the whole half-day ride. Only when they dismounted at the palace gates did Tana realize it was because they had no tongues.

Renae was shackled in the furthest cell on the lowest level of the prison beneath the public wing of the palace, so deep that cold condensation ran down the walls. In Queen Ismay’s day, this level had been empty. Tana had used it once to age an ewe’s milk kashkaval for the fifteenth year of Ismay’s reign. She’d never been able to replicate its hazelnut and olive notes.

Renae’s head drooped slack between her shoulders and Tana couldn’t tell if she was sleeping or unconscious. She smelled like war—gunpowder, blood, brackish water, sweat both human and horse. She still wore her uniform, but the queen’s emblem had been ripped from her chest and a slice of skin showed through the rend.

Tana knelt on the floor and took out the food. They’d allowed her nothing else. She unwrapped a skin of ricotta. Renae had always favored sweetness. “Renae?”

Renae stirred. Hair stuck to her face. In the last few years her dark hair had begun to streak white, but not this white. Her eyes were glassy. Bright blotches of blood broke the whites, and her pupils swallowed up the lanternlight.

“You came,” she whispered.

Tana pressed her hand to Renae’s face. “You’re burning up.”

Renae laughed but it ended in a wracking cough. “I think I’m dying. Though the rope will get me first.”

“I brought your favorites,” Tana said. If she thought about the gallows she’d seen standing in the courtyard, she would start screaming. She spread ricotta on an oat cracker and lifted it to Renae’s mouth. She’d brought the last jar of cherries up from the cellar. The harvest last year had been poor, and there wouldn’t be more until the spring. She’d intended to save these for their anniversary. She smashed a syrupy cherry on the next cracker with another spoonful of ricotta. Renae sighed when she ate it.

“Do you remember,” she asked, “the first time you came here?”

She did. One of the young queen’s handmaids had purchased a block of her cheese (a late-season Emmental, nothing special, although that year’s batch was exceptionally mellow) and the queen was taken with it. Tana’s family had been cheesemakers for as long as anyone knew, but none of them ever had a royal commission. She was summoned to the palace with a basket of her best and it was there that she’d met the queen’s swordmistress, a hawkish-faced woman with brown eyes that Tana fell right into.

Don’t be nervous, Renae had said. She’s only your divine and supreme ruler, after all. Then she’d plucked a slice of a cave-aged two-year gouda off Tana’s carefully-arranged tray, winked, and disappeared into the dining room where the queen was waiting.

“You were terrible,” Tana said. The words caught in her throat. “I almost spilled that tray all over Queen Ismay, I was so nervous.”

Renae closed her eyes. “He poisoned her.”

Everyone knew that already, but Tana still glanced towards the end of the hall where the guard listened. She prepared another cracker. “Let’s not talk about that.”

“You must promise me something,” Renae said. “When I am dead he will ask you to pledge your loyalty to him.”

“I could never—”

“You must do it.” Renae opened her eyes and there was something in them that chilled Tana, a wild penned-animal desperation. “You must bend the knee. It’s all true, Tana, oh, it’s all true what they say about him.”

They said a lot of things. He had died and returned. He practiced witchcraft not seen since the days of gods on earth. He came from an undiscovered land across the sea. He came from the depths of the abyss. He was cursed to kill all he touched. He was blessed by dead prophets. No one knew the truth. The first news of his unstoppable armies had come two years ago, and since then each weekly courier brought rumors of another kingdom burnt and pillaged, another nation brought to heel.

“I love you,” Tana said. “I can’t swear fealty to the man who will see you dead.”

Renae lunged forward. Her chains screeched against the hooks holding her to the wall. Tana jumped. Sweat dripped from Renae’s face and her breath was hot and sour.

“He is not a man,” she whispered. “Listen to me. He is not a man. I got so close, Tana, I thought we’d won. I put my blade in his breast and sank it between his ribs and broke it off in his bones and he did not die. He laughed, Tana. He laughed with eleven inches of the finest sword I’ve ever held buried in his chest.”

She doubled over coughing, and when she turned her face up again, dark blood seeped from the corner of her mouth and down her chin.

“It’s dark, dead magic, Tana. Promise me you will do whatever he asks of you.”

• • • •

Tana promised, because there was nothing else to do. Now she stood in the silent crowd, penned in on all sides by the Veiled King’s strange men. They filled the gallows with Renae and her two generals, Queen Ismay’s enchanter and his apprentice, the court alchemists. The doctors too, and their students. Even the woman who told little fortunes in the Sunday market, though her magic was so small it couldn’t have been a threat. They had enough mercy to cut the ropes to the right length and make it quick. She had thought she could watch, thought she could bear to witness, but at the last second she closed her eyes and heard the thump of the trap door and the wet snaps instead.

Afterward the guards took her to the room that had once been the queen’s library. A wooden screen sat in front of the reading chair, with two tongueless men in front.

Tana jerked her scarf up to cover her nose. The library stank of death. Not kind death either, not the musky scent of animals decaying back into the earth. This was dirty death, the stench of bodies left to bloat and rot in gutters, of carcasses putrefying in summer heat. Her eyes watered.

A dark shape moved behind the screen. Many years ago Tana had traveled across the ocean in an artisan exchange with another cheesemaker. In that country, royal women had their own part of the house and they were never seen or heard by strange men except through screens like these. This was no woman peering in, she knew.

“I have heard of you.” The voice that came from behind the screen whistled like the wind through a seaside cave. “Though your wife had the more fearsome reputation. The Queen’s Swordmistress, the Queen’s right-hand, the General of Five Armies. I admit, she was . . . an irritation.”

The room was ghastly hot and between that and the smell, Tana felt like she might faint, or like she was floating just outside her body. It was all that saved her from lunging at the screen and dying on the spot.

“Where I come from we kill the husbands and wives of dispatched irritations.” Another wheeze. The Veiled King sucked in air and it whistled. “They have an annoying tendency to become revolutionaries.”

Tana did not dare move. She saw something through one of the star-shaped cutouts in the screen. A dull, whitish eye.

“Do you know why I won’t kill you?”

“Because I will swear fealty to you?” She couldn’t keep the bitter edge from her voice.

The Veiled King laughed a creaking laugh. She heard him spit into the queen’s copper ink bowl. “Oaths are useless. I will not kill you because you are old and fat and if you are stupid enough to raise a blade against me, I gut you like a sow. I do not think you are that stupid. I think you are smart enough to be grateful for this gift I am giving you.”

Tana’s face burned. He was right, of course. She was long past her prime, and even then she hadn’t been a fighter. And as her mother always said, no one bought cheese from a skinny woman. She wasn’t slow, but she had muscles built for hefting wheels of parmesan and not for dancing around two trained soldiers to assassinate a king.

“There, there.” A rustle, and another puff of the cloying stench came from behind the screen. Tana held her breath until it cleared. “It’s always better to be the smart one. And there is another reason I’ve spared you—this delightful item.”

The lefthand soldier reached behind the screen and brought out a plate with a thin slice of orange cheese on it. Mimolette. A northern variety that Tana had just attempted for the first time. She’d given a quarter wheel to the prince consort last week. Such a small gift, her wife gone and his dead, both of them sick with grief and fear. She took the plate. The slice of cheese had white mold spores growing on it. The bad kind, not the kind she cultured in the rinds. It should have kept for much longer than this.

“I like this thing,” the King said. “We have nothing like it in my homeland.”

She found her voice. “This is only one variety. I can make you many more.”

“I shall expect you back then, at this time next week.”

As the men herded her out of the library she slipped the piece of cheese into her pocket.

• • • •

She set a Caciocavallo up to age. It was a soft cheese, with an edible rind, formed into a teardrop shape. She doubted that the Veiled King would understand this subtle resistance, and if he did, he would probably find it amusing. She did it only for herself.

She wrapped the moldy Mimolette in a cloth and put it in the cold, dry part of the cellar to keep. The day was warm enough to rot meat so she set a bucket of chicken gizzards and another with some cheese rinds in the sun. In five days, the cheese rinds had grown a thin layer of bluish mold. The chicken parts stank like the inside of the library and had grown a carpet of white and green-flecked mold much like the one on the cheese the Veiled King had been eating. She did not know what to make of it. She had seen mold like this before, in the already-dead flesh of a man dying of gangrene, but she had never seen it grow from a living man’s touch.

On the eighth day after her wife’s execution, two soldiers wearing the crest of the King came to escort her to the capital. It wasn’t until they were on the step that she recognized Juin and his sister. Now Fanchon walked head uncovered like a married woman and wore a sword like she knew how to use it, though she couldn’t possibly. She was fourteen, maybe.

Halfway to the capital, Tana dared to turn to Fanchon. “How do you like it, serving him?”

The girl barely looked at her. “It’s fine enough.” But her hands tightened on the reins and she leaned forward into the saddle to urge her horse faster.

When they passed through the capital gates, it felt like she’d been gone far longer than a week. The market square stood silent and empty, the stalls broken down and carted away, the few signs left fluttering tattered in the breeze. The houses’ shutters were closed and the people they passed on their way to the palace hurried on. The palace windows were boarded shut. Inside the air was warm and wet like the inside of a lung. The Veiled King took his audience in the ballroom. Her footsteps echoed over and over themselves across the vast emptiness. She wondered where the tables and chairs had gone. Surely there wasn’t space to store them all.

Tongueless foreign men waited in all the corners.

She asked for a tray, and was brought it, and asked for a blunt knife and was allowed that too. She plated the cheese the way she had those years ago for the queen. To steady her hands, she pretended it was that time again. The ballroom helped. She and Renae had danced away the early morning hours here after many court balls, all the other dancers gone to bed. In those years she had scaled down her business to just a few boutique batches and had taken a post as one of the queen’s mistresses-of-house, so that they could be close.

When she reached the steps up to the dais, she hesitated too long before getting to her knees on the dusty floor. The cartilage in her left creaked and she hoped that excused her slowness. One of the Veiled King’s guards ferried the plate behind the screen. A sound like a wet tongue smacking in a hollow mouth came from behind the screen.

“This was different,” the King said. His voice was quiet even inside the barren room, meant to be filled with courtiers and servants and musicians and all the stuff of life.

One of the guards glared at her. Tana started. She hadn’t thought she was expected to respond. The room was warm enough for her to be able to smell the sharp stink of the guards’ sweat even ten feet away, but she still shivered.

“Yes. This is a family recipe. It’s younger than the last. Sweeter.”

“Fascinating. How many are there?”

She shook her head. At least she had a speech prepared for this, for overcurious children who trailed her around in the market. “Hundreds. Thousands? It’s a particular art, it depends upon the salt in the air and the humidity and the altitude and the milk, all of which are specific just to this one place in time, in this one location. I can make dozens of varieties, but if you move north or south there are dozens that only those cheesemakers can produce, particular to them.”

“Do you know, there is an art in a land thousands of miles south of here that involves carving stones into the faces of particular gods in order to draw down their qualities. It is a very small magic, but it does work if the art is fine enough.” The King sighed. “I wonder if there are any of them left. I should like to see one of those little toys again. They vexed me for some time.”

One of the guards shuddered. It had never occurred to Tana to wonder how the Veiled King got his loyal, silent guards.

She ducked her head and focused on the flagstones worn smooth from generations of dancing feet. Beads of sweat trickled down her spine but she didn’t dare move until one of the guards dropped the empty plate in front of her face.

“You may go,” the King said. “You will be retrieved again in a week.”

• • • •

Tana set to work. She took down her mother’s and grandmother’s journals from the mantle. She hadn’t read them since she’d apprenticed at her mother’s elbow. Her great- and great-great-grandmothers hadn’t been much for writing recipes. What they’d left amounted to a single envelope with notes like age this cheese until the death of the goat that gave the milk. She put a white cheddar up to age, a basic cheese, too simple for her palate but good enough for someone who had never tasted it before. In the journals, she found the notes for a recipe she half-remembered from childhood, called the Barber’s Blue. The notes were sparse, but one of her foremothers had sketched a picture of a barber-surgeon offering a woman in a sickbed a slice.

She brought the mold culture from the putrefying Mimolette up from the cellar and examined it under the set of doubled lenses she had ordered from the university in Verebourg, far north. It cost nearly a year of her pay from her position as a mistress-of-house, and the townsfolk tittered that she’d finally gone a bit cheesy in the brain. But the doubled-lens allowed her to view the internal structure of a mold and took the guesswork out of picking the particular strain for each cheese. The townsfolk stopped giggling when she started producing her rare cashel blue with regularity.

Two years ago she’d ordered a book from a natural philosopher employed by one of the southern caravan kings. Descriptive plates of various mold and fungi as collected by His Majesty’s naturalist Fatimah adh-Anwah. Unfortunately, the bookseller’s catalog description had led her to believe that the book would contain far more about cheese molds and far less about the sort of mold that made a man turn basalt-green and leak his insides from his nose. She hadn’t even bothered to have it bound, and it sat on the mantle still in its unmarked vellum.

Now she took it down and searched until she found a mold structure that was almost identical to the one she had cultured from the Veiled King’s plate. The caption read Sample from the lung of a tubercular donkey-herder, taken two years after symptoms arose and six weeks before death. Then she descended into the caves and cultured six strains of blue.

• • • •

Only Fanchon returned to take her to the King.

“Where is your brother?” Tana asked. She carried cheddar tucked up against her side. There was an unseasonable frost in the air.

Fanchon shrugged. “He’s taken ill. I haven’t seen him. One of the King’s philosophers told me this is necessary.”

“Seclusion?”

She hummed. “The King personally assured me he is being cared for. I trust His Majesty.”

“Of course,” Tana said. When she next looked over, Fanchon was red-eyed, one hand tangled in the horse’s hot mane next to its pulse.

“I have heard some of the ones who came with him from other lands whispering,” she said. Her voice barely rose above the wind, like she feared that he would hear them even out here. She sounded like a child again, not the adult she was dressed up as. “They say this is a holy sickness. Juin is unlikely to survive. If he lives—if he lives—he will take the most honored position in His Majesty’s court. He will look upon His Majesty’s face.”

For a moment Tana couldn’t figure out why the girl was so distressed about this. Then she realized the only people she had ever seen go behind the king’s screen were his mutilated guards. What could she say to that? Where were these children’s parents, now? “I’m sorry.”

Fanchon’s face hardened. “I said. It will be an honor.”

When they arrived in the capital Fanchon led Tana another way, through the north gate instead of the south. She didn’t understand until it was too late, until she’d stepped into the courtyard and saw the bodies swinging in the gallows like so many overripe apples. More now. Ones too small to be adults alongside the men and women. The only mercy was that she only recognized Renae by her uniform. The birds and the mites had done their work to the rest of her. She froze. Her bundle slipped from her hand and the cheddar bounced across flagstones stained rust-colored with blood and bile. Acid burned the back of her throat.

Fanchon stood in the archway to the palace grounds, half in shadow. Her teeth glinted coldly when she smiled at Tana. “We don’t want to leave him waiting.”

Tana forced her head down and her feet across the stones to gather up her things. She couldn’t even be angry at the girl for lashing out at the one person she was capable of hurting.

• • • •

Her neighbors vanished one by one. The crops were moldering before they were ripe enough to be picked, the cows were giving sour milk, the chickens wouldn’t eat and screamed and screamed until their owners were forced to behead them. Everyone smart enough to read the portents took to the roads. Somewhere there was a land beyond the Veiled King’s reach. Somewhere the orchards still gave fruit and the rabbits did not drown themselves.

Tana’s second cousin appeared at her door. His twin girls and his wife stared forlornly out from the blankets covering their wagon.

“Won’t you come with us? One of my guildbrothers is sheltering us in Susserland until I set myself up.”

She couldn’t open the door to him. She had recipes spread across the table and the floor and she’d begun writing on the walls because she’d run out of paper. Niche strains of blue cheese hung from all the rafters. The white mold had grown over the plate and the counter and had consumed the whole skinned squirrel she’d fed to it. She no longer went in that corner of the house because the air made her lightheaded. “I’ll stay.”

His forehead crinkled. He lowered his voice. “We all loved Renae. But you’re not so old yet, Tana. You have a long time left.”

Tana squeezed his hand. “I’m sure we’ll see each other again.”

He went away shaking his head.

She had cut the curds for the blues as soon as she came home from her last visit with the King. Each got a different strain of mold mixed in, and she’d left some to age down in the caves and some to age here where the air was drier and warmer. Now she split them open. She was looking for a particular curd size, blue crackling between the color of the sky before a thunderstorm and the color of the water in the shallow bay in winter. The cheese was described in her mother’s books, but Tana couldn’t remember seeing it made. She had to go by instinct alone.

Two of the blues looked close to the right color, although one was holey like a swiss. She covered her mouth and nose with a cloth, scraped up a layer of the white mold taking over her kitchen, and placed the blue underneath. She added another log to the hearth and lay down on a blanket to sleep. She couldn’t yet face the empty bed.

In the morning the white mold had consumed the cheese and had grown down the front of her cabinets. Failure.

Renae’s second-best sword still hung over the mantle. The guards never searched her. She could nestle it between her girdle and her dress and smuggle it in, thrust it into the screen in the direction of his voice. He would slay her where she stood, of course. But maybe she could hurt him a little bit. She let the dark thought stew while she washed and cut more curds and prepared another culture and boiled more milk, until the work had all but washed it away.

• • • •

On Tana’s next visit, Juin stood in the King’s receiving line, the sutures in his mouth still showing raw and red when he forgot himself and tried to speak.

“I like this one.”

She’d brought him a chevre wrapped in dill and the zest from the preserved lemons she’d been saving for the new year’s feast back when she expected to see winter.

“Oldest cheese in the world, my mother used to say.” It was easier to talk to him now. She’d gotten used to the smell. It clung to her clothes for days afterward, the stink of sickroom sweat and bile. She couldn’t get used to the sounds. Wet, toothless smacks. “Shepherds made it in the time when people roamed the wild grasslands.”

“And what will you bring me next?”

Dangerously, she told the truth. “I thought a blue. You seem to like the stronger tastes.”

“You do so delight me,” the King said, toneless.

Fanchon drove a hard pace back, racing away from the capital. Tana took pity on her and invited her inside, even though all she’d prepared for dinner was bread and butter and the last scraps of salted haddock.

“He’ll notice if I don’t return,” Fanchon said, and she stayed on her horse while Tana unsaddled hers. Small reliefs—she’d worried the girl had lost her tongue too. Then Fanchon turned the horse and tossed over her shoulder, “I shall kill him tonight.”

Tana froze half in the doorway.

“The fever took Juin’s mind, and then the King’s barber took his tongue. I shall kill him for it.”

Tana saw Renae, standing in front of the hearth on tiptoes to take her most-loved sword down from the hooks above the mantle. Her scabbard was too snug on well-fed middle-aged hips. I just got the message. The Veiled King’s army has slaughtered the first and fifth battalions. Louis and Angelique are already dead. You know he killed Ismay. Who else is there, Tana?

“You stupid child,” Tana said. “You will die horribly.”

“At least I won’t feed the monster.” Tana heard her spit on the ground. “I’m allowed close enough. Who else can do it?”

“Yes. Who else would they suspect? Girl, you wear your anger clear as day. The instant you touch your dagger or your arrow or whatever clever tool you think you’ve hidden away, you will lose. You are young and hale, and he will know that you think yourself righteous and true.” With the sun overhead, Fanchon looked so much like Renae. “Do you think I loved my wife so little that I would just bend the knee to her murderer?”

The sharp angles of Fanchon’s shoulders softened. “You have a plan.”

“I am a fat old woman. I make cheese. What could I possibly threaten a dead-magicked king with?”

The girl dismounted without taking her eyes off Tana and slipped the reins around the post. “Tell me. Please. Tell me.”

It could be a trick. A long con of the Veiled King. Surely he couldn’t believe her loyal, not after he’d left Renae’s body swinging in the gallows like a cow awaiting the butcher.

She let Fanchon inside, and showed her the recipe book. Three double-page spreads were devoted to blue cheese, its varieties and peculiarities. Tana pointed out the Barber’s Blue. “My grandmother used to make it. There was a war on then. Many soldiers returned home to lose limbs to the barber’s blade or boiling in their skins from bad blood. They were fed this for the blood sickness. It fell out of favor in my mother’s time.”

“You think the King is ill?”

“My wife . . . she was dying when I saw her. Not of camp sicknesses. He touched her and it went to her bones somehow. And your brother—why would surviving the illness mark him for guardship, unless the illness was of the King himself? You know he isn’t a man, not really.”

“He did touch my brother. He allowed Juin to kiss his ring.” She chuckled, though it landed like a rock in still water. “Tell me what I can do.”

“Go back. Pretend we never spoke.”

“I can help.”

“I’m telling you this so you don’t help. This recipe may be only an old wives’ charm. I may be wrong about what he is. You need to stand by in case I fail. Someone has to learn how to kill him.”

Tana didn’t like the way Fanchon looked at her. It was the same way she’d seen Renae look at Queen Ismay long ago. Like she had been given purpose. She suddenly felt what a heavy burden it was, to charge another person with a duty like this. Tana could have told Fanchon to walk away, to run as far as she could, and the girl would have obeyed. If she died in the pursuit of justice, Tana had killed her as surely as the Veiled King.

“I understand,” Fanchon said. She adjusted her sword so it wasn’t so very close at hand. “Be quick. The land is dying.”

• • • •

She was right, of course. Tana went down to the sea one morning when she was still trying to sort her dreams from reality. She reached into the water to splash it in her face and came up with a small fish in her cupped hands. Its scales were alabaster-white and where it should have had eyes it had two little puckered ulcers.

When she was done screaming and done scrubbing her hands raw she knelt in front of the molds hanging in the cellar and begged them to break true.

The first three were beautiful blues, with wide marbling. She’d cut the curds to the right size and mixed them true but the color of the mold was wrong. Based on the drawings in her grandmother’s book the salinity in the air had drawn in a cousin of the mold she was after instead of the right one.

The fourth she’d kept in the coolest corner of the cellar. She removed the mold and raised the knife to split it and check the variety, but stopped herself. This was her last chance. She found that she didn’t really want to know yet if she had failed. Outside, she heard Fanchon’s horse approaching, the hoofbeats echoing off of the now-empty roads.

She remembered nothing of the ride. Fanchon stabled their horses silently. They both stepped quietly, like they were invaders and not invited.

The palace was as empty as the capital streets. Once or twice Tana caught a glimpse of a maid or valet around a corner. Optimists, the ones who’d stick around until it killed them. Some people didn’t know when to cut and run, she thought, and then she remembered what she was doing.

Three guards stood in front of the screen, Juin and two others. Tana got to her knees and tried to work the cloth off the cheese despite her uncooperative hands.

The King’s voice rattled more today, like dice in a cup. “I had a man bringing me his ales every week as well, but he seems to have abandoned me. You have not.”

“I am a woman of my word, Your Majesty.” It didn’t sound convincing even to her own ears.

The King made a noise that might have been a chuckle.

One of the guards approached. Tana made her choice. “May I serve you? I confess—it is unusual for me, to never see the one I am sworn to.”

Wood creaked behind the screen. This time she knew he was laughing.

“I suppose our time together will be short enough.” Juin grabbed her by the elbow and hauled her to her feet. She wanted to say I could have gotten up on my own but when she looked at him there was nothing in his eyes. She steeled herself, took a last breath of the unsullied air, and stepped behind the screen.

He had dropped his veil. In all of her dreams and nightmares, in all of the monsters that she saw stalking her in the shadows, she had never seen a thing like this. She had concocted an image, had steeled herself for it. Every child heard the same fireside tales of what could happen when magic turned sour and brutal, when the wrong man broke it and twisted its dead carcass to his darkest desires.

The King was only the shape of a man.

He had a man’s bones. She could see the skeleton poking through the layers of white mold that held the crumbling scapulas and patellas and vertebrae together. He had no lips, no eyelids, no hair, like a corpse dredged from the river after spring thaw. His lidless eyes looked like they were covered in cataracts, but then something like a maggot wriggled behind the translucent membrane of the right.

He raised his head to look at her. His mouth still glistened like a living man’s. “Do you regret this?”

She held out the cheese. Her body was as cold as her cellar.

“Cut it for me.”

She split the round and cut a thick slice. She couldn’t remember how it was supposed to look. The King shook two fingers out from under the cloak that hid the horror of the rest of him, lifted the slice, and dropped it into his mouth. Tana could see his molars wiggling loose in his jaw while he chewed, held in place only with gums like dried beef. She couldn’t turn away.

She cut another piece instead and held it out to him. “How do you like it?”

“It fizzes. I didn’t know you could make it like that.” Clear fluid leaked around his eyes. Not tears. Like the seepage from healing wounds. His speech slurred and lost that careful cadence. She wondered whose bones those had been.

Tana offered a third piece. This one did not go down as easy. The King gurgled and scraped at his throat. Layers of mold peeled off his fingers and she saw the sunbleached bone underneath.

“What have you done,” he hissed. Fever-hot pieces of him flaked away like scabs. The death-smell was beginning to lift—her lungs weren’t burning in her chest anymore.

“You become very familiar with molds and sickness, as a cheesemaker.” She sat on the supplicant cushion opposite the throne. “I know the look of infection. I know what growths to culture and which will sicken. The smell of you alone said you were not a person.”

He could no longer talk. Light shone through the hollow places between his ribs, where mummified lungs spasmed hopelessly.

She cut another piece of cheese and chewed it herself in case being this close could spread his infection. It was dense and strong even for a blue, with a distinct stilton-tang.

“I hope you outlived whatever twisted bastard made you,” she said, while he tumbled off the throne and curled on the floor, spreading black spores across the stones. “Else I’ll have to spend the rest of my life finding him to do the same to.”

His hands came off first and then his feet. As soon as the infection holding him together died his bones began crumbling to chalky dust. The last thing to go was his eyes. They fixed on her until they each made a sound like a corn kernel popping and became just two wet spots on the floor.

In front of the screen came three thumps. Tana knew what it was before she looked. The guards lay facedown and still.

The girl stood in the furthest corner with her arms curled tight around herself.

“He’s dead,” she said.

Tana knelt and turned Juin over to be sure. He was already stiff, like he’d been dead hours and not seconds. She closed his eyes. Then she took Fanchon by the arm and led her gently away from all of it. They walked out of the palace and out of the capital and down the road before Tana felt like she had gotten the particles of him out of her lungs.

Fanchon kicked a fallen tree on the side of the road. And then she kicked it again, and again and again and again until she’d used up all her rage. Then she sat down on it and threw her daggers into the woods. “What happens now?”

Tana reached up into the branches of a maple tree. Beneath the spotted, diseased leaves, new green buds were already forming. “The land will renew itself. Some distant cousin will come and claim the throne. People will return when they hear it’s safe again, though not everyone will. You could come home with me. We could wait for them. Life will go back to normal quicker than you think. This will all just be a story someday.”

“I don’t think I want to go back,” the girl said.

“No,” Tana said, “I don’t think I do, either.” There was nothing left but an empty house, a few books, the tools of a trade she’d just used to assassinate a king. Let someone else come upon it and take up her life. She could never be the woman who fit in that house again. Fanchon stood up and they started north, towards the sea and other lands that had never known the touch of the dying king.

©2022 by Lina Rather.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lina Rather is a speculative fiction author from Michigan, now living in Washington, D.C. Her short fiction has appeared in venues including Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction, and Shimmer. Her Tor.Com Publishing novella series, Our Lady of Endless Worlds, is about devotion, empire, and nuns living in a giant slug in outer space. When she isn’t writing, she likes to cook overly elaborate recipes, go hiking, and collect terrible 90s comic books. Find out more about her and her writing at linarather.com or on Twitter @LinaRather.

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

EXCERPT: Nettle & Bone (Tor Books)

T. Kingfisher | 3168 words

From Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award-winning author T. Kingfisher comes an original and subversive fantasy adventure.

This isn’t the kind of fairytale where the princess marries a prince.

It’s the one where she kills him.

Marra never wanted to be a hero.

As the shy, convent-raised, third-born daughter, she escaped the traditional fate of princesses, to be married away for the sake of an uncaring throne. But her sister wasn’t so fortunate—and after years of silence, Marra is done watching her suffer at the hands of a powerful and abusive prince.

Seeking help for her rescue mission, Marra is offered the tools she needs, but only if she can complete three seemingly impossible tasks:

• build a dog of bones

• sew a cloak of nettles

• capture moonlight in a jar

But, as is the way in tales of princes and witches, doing the impossible is only the beginning.

Hero or not—now joined by a disgraced ex-knight, a reluctant fairy godmother, an enigmatic gravewitch and her fowl familiar—Marra might finally have the courage to save her sister, and topple a throne.

“Nettle & Bone is the kind of book that immediately feels like an old friend. Fairytale mythic resonance meets homey pragmatism in this utterly delightful story. It’s creepy, funny, heartfelt, and full of fantastic characters I absolutely loved!” —Melissa Caruso, author of The Tethered Mage

Coming April 26, 2022 from Tor Books.

Chapter 1

The trees were full of crows and the woods were full of madmen. The pit was full of bones and her hands were full of wires.

Her fingers bled where the wire ends cut her. The earliest cuts were no longer bleeding, but the edges had gone red and hot, with angry streaks running backward over her skin. The tips of her fingers were becoming puffy and less nimble.

Marra was aware that this was not a good thing, but the odds of living long enough for infection to kill her were so small that she could not feel much concern.

She picked up a bone, a long, thin one, from the legs, and wrapped the ends with wire. It fit alongside another long bone—not from the same animal, but close enough—and she bound them together and fit them into the framework she was creating.

The charnel pit was full, but she did not need to dig too deeply. She could track the progression of starvation backward through the layers. They had eaten deer and they had eaten cattle. When the cattle ran out and the deer were gone, they ate the horses, and when the horses were gone, they ate the dogs.

When the dogs were gone, they ate each other.

It was the dogs she wanted. Perhaps she might have built a man out of bones, but she had no great love of men any longer.

Dogs, though . . . dogs were always true.

“He made harp pegs of her fingers fair,” Marra sang softly, tunelessly, under her breath. “And strung the bones with her golden hair . . .”

The crows called to each other from the trees in solemn voices. She wondered about the harper in the song, and what he had thought when he was building the harp of a dead woman’s bones. He was probably the only person in the world who would understand what she was doing.

Assuming he even existed in the first place. And if he did, what kind of life do you lead where you find yourself building a harp out of corpses?

For that matter, what kind of life do you lead where you find yourself building a dog out of bones?

Many of the bones had been cracked open for marrow. If she could find two that went together, she could bind them back to wholeness, but often the breaks were jagged. She had to splint them together with the wires, leaving bloody fingerprints across the surface of the bones.

That was fine. That was part of the magic.

Besides, when the great hero Mordecai slew the poisoned worm, did he complain about his fingers hurting? No, of course not.

At least, not where anyone could hear him and write it down.

“The only song the harp would play,” she crooned, “was O! The dreadful wind and rain . . .”

She was fully aware of how wild she sounded. Part of her recoiled from it. Another, larger part said that she was kneeling on the edge of a pit full of bones, in a land so bloated with horrors that her feet sank into the earth as if she were walking on the surface of a gigantic blister. A little wildness would not be out of place at all.

The skulls were easy. She had found a fine, broad one, with powerful jaws and soulful eye sockets. She could have had dozens, but she could only use one.

It hurt her in a way that she had not expected. The joy of finding one was crushed easily under the sorrow of so many that would go unused.

I could sit here for the rest of my life, with my hands full of wire, building dogs out of bone. And then the crows will eat me and I will fall into the pit and we shall all be bones together . . .

A sob caught in her throat and she had to stop. She fumbled in her pack for her waterskin and took a sip.

The bone dog was half-completed. She had the skull and the beautiful sweep of vertebrae, two legs and the long, elegant ribs. There would be at least a dozen dogs in this one, truly—but the skull was the important thing.

Marra caressed the hollow orbits, delicately winged in wire. Everyone said that the heart was where the soul lived, but she no longer believed it. She was building from the skull downward. She had discarded several bones already because they did not seem to fit with the skull. The long, impossibly fine ankles of gazehounds would not serve to carry her skull forward. She needed something stronger and more solid, boarhounds or elkhounds, something with weight.

There was a jump rope rhyme about a bone dog, wasn’t there? Where had she heard it? Not in the palace, certainly. Princesses did not jump rope. It must have been later, in the village near the convent. How did it go? Bone dog, stone dog . . .

The crows called a warning.

She looked up. The crows yammered in the trees to her left. Something was coming, blundering through the trees.

She pulled the hood of her cloak up over her head and slid partway down into the pit, cradling the dog skeleton to her chest.

Her cloak was made of owlcloth tatters and spun-nettle cord. The magic was imperfect, but it was the best she had been able to make in the time that she had been given.

From dawn to dusk and back again, with an awl made of thorns— yes, I’d like to see anyone do better. Even the dust-wife said that I had done well, and she hands out praise like water in a dry land.

The cloak of tatters left long gaps bare, but she had found that this did not matter. It broke up her outline so that people looked through her. If they found some of the bands of light and shadow lay a little strangely, they never stayed long enough to puzzle out why.

People were remarkably willing to dismiss their own sight. Marra thought perhaps that the world was so strange and vision so flawed that you soon realized that anything and everything could be a trick of the light.

The man came out of the trees. She heard him muttering but could not make out the words. She only knew it was a man because his voice was so deep, and even that was guesswork.

Most of the people of the blistered land were harmless. They had eaten the wrong flesh and been punished for it. Some saw things that were not there. Some of them could not walk and their fellows helped them. Two had shared a fire with her, some nights ago, although she was careful not to eat their food, even though they offered.

It was a cruel spirit that would punish starving people for what they had been forced to eat, but the spirits had never pretended to be kind.

Her companions at the fire had warned her, though. “Be careful,” said one. “Be quick, quick, quiet. There’s a few to watch for. They were bad before and they’re worse now.”

“Bad,” said the second one. His breathing was very labored and he had to stop between each word. She could tell that it frustrated him, trying to speak between the pauses. “Not . . . right. All . . . of us . . . now”—he shook his head ruefully—“but them . . . angry.”

“It doesn’t do any good to be angry,” said the first one. “But they won’t listen. Ate too much. Got to like the taste.” She cracked a laugh, too high, looking down at her hands. “We stopped as soon as there was something else, but they kept eating it.”

The second one shook his head. “No,” he said. “More . . . than that. Always . . . angry. Born.”

“Some are born that way,” Marra agreed, nodding to him. She knew too well.

Some of those people are men. Some of those men are princes. Yes, I know. It is a different kind of anger. Something darker and more deliberate.

He looked relieved that she had understood. “Yes. Angrier . . . now. Much.”

All three of them sat in silence around the fire. She stretched her hands toward the flames and exhaled slowly.

“Mostly they kill us,” said the first one abruptly. “We can’t always run. Things get confused—” She sketched a gesture in the air above her eyes that Marra could not begin to understand, although her companion nodded when he saw it. “We’re easy to catch if it’s like that. But if they see you, they’ll try for you, too.”

The fire crackled. This land was very damp, and she was grateful for the heat, and yet— “Aren’t you worried that they’ll see the fire?” The woman shook her head. “They hate it,” she said. “It’s the punishment. The more they eat, the more they fear it—they do not cook the flesh, you see . . .” She rubbed her face, obviously distressed.

“Safer,” said the man. “But . . . can’t burn . . . all the time.” They leaned against one another. She bent her head down against his shoulder and he reached his arm across his body to hold her close. A few days ago, Marra would have wondered why they did not leave this terrible land. She no longer did. They might not be sane, as the outside world understood it, but they were not fools. If they felt that they were safer here than they were outside it, it was not her place to tell them otherwise.

If I had to explain to everyone I met what had happened to me, have them judge me for what I’d had to do—no, I might think a land with a few roving cannibals was a small price to pay, myself. At least here, everyone understands what’s happened, and they are as kind to each other as they can be.

As a girl, she would not have understood that, but Marra was not the girl that she had been. She was thirty years old, and all that was left of that girl now were the bones.

For a moment she had envied them, two people punished through no fault of their own, because they had each other.

Now, as she sat in the pit of bones, the skeleton cradled against her chest twitched.

“Shhhh . . .” whispered Marra into the skull’s openings. “Shhhhh . . .”

Bone dog, stone dog . . . black dog, white dog . . .

She heard the footsteps as he approached. Had he seen her?

If he had, then he, too, dismissed it as a trick of the light. The footfalls skirted the edge of the pit, and the sound of breathing faded away.

“Probably harmless,” she murmured to the skull. Even if he were not, she would be a difficult target.

The other, gentler folk in here were uniquely vulnerable. If you had learned not to trust your own senses, you might wait too long to run from an enemy.

Marra was no longer as sure of her own perceptions as she had once been, but the edges of her mind were only slightly frayed, not blasted open by furious spirits.

When the footsteps had been gone for many minutes and the crows had settled, she sat up again. Fog lined the edges of the wood, hanging in low swirls over the meadow. The crows cawed together like a disjointed heartbeat. Nothing else moved.

She bent back over the bone dog again, fingers moving on the wires, hoping to finish her task before darkness fell.

• • • •

The bone dog came alive at dusk. It was not quite completed, but it was close. She was bent over the left front paw when the skull’s jaws yawned open and it stretched as if waking from a long slumber.

“Hush,” she told it. “I’m nearly done—”

It sat up. Its mouth opened and the ghost of a wet tongue touched her face like fog.

She scratched the skull where the base of the ears would be. Her nails made a soft scraping sound on the pale surface.

The bone dog wagged its tail, its pelvis, and most of its spine with delight.

“Sit still,” she told it, picking up the front paw. “Sit, and let me finish.”

It sat politely. The hollow eye sockets gazed up at her. Her heart contracted painfully.

The love of a bone dog, she thought, bending her head down over the paw again. All that I am worth these days.

Then again, few humans were truly worth the love of a living dog. Some gifts you could never deserve.

She had to wrap each tiny foot bone in a single twist of wire and bind it to the others, then wrap the entire paw several times, to keep it stable. It should not have held together, and yet it did.

The cloak had gone together the same way. Nettle cords and tattered cloth should have fallen apart, and yet it was far more solid than it looked.

The dog’s claws were ridiculously large without flesh to cloak them. She wrapped each one as if it were an amulet and joined them to the basket of thin wires.

“Bone dog, stone dog,” she whispered. She could see the children in her head, three little girls, chanting to each other. Bone dog, stone dog . . . black dog, white dog . . . live dog, dead dog . . . yellow dog, run!

At run, the little girl in the middle of the rope had jumped out and begun to run back and forth through the swinging rope, the only sound her feet and the slap of the rope in the dust. When she finally tripped up, the two girls on the ends had dropped the rope and they had all begun giggling together.

The bone dog rested his muzzle on her forearm. He had neither ears nor eyebrows, and yet she could practically feel the look he was giving her, tragic and hopeful as dogs often were.

“There,” she said, finally. Her knife was dulled from cutting wire and it took her several tries to hack the last bit apart. She tucked the sharp end underneath the joint where it would not catch on anything. “There you are. I hope that’s enough.”

The bone dog put its paw down and tested it. It stood for a moment, then turned and sprinted into the fog.

Marra’s fist clenched against her stomach. No! It ran—I should have tied it. I should have thought it might run—

The clatter of its paws faded into the whiteness.

I suppose it had another master somewhere, before it died. Perhaps it’s gone to find them.

Her hands ached. Her heart ached. Poor foolish dog. Its first death had not been enough to teach it that not all masters were worthy.

Marra had learned that too late herself.

She looked into the pit of bones. Her fingers throbbed—not in the horrible stinging way they had when she pieced together the nettle cloak, but deeper, in time to her heartbeat. There was redness working its way up her hands. One long line was already snaking through her wrist.

She could not bear the thought of sitting down and sculpting another dog.

She dropped her head into her aching hands. Three tasks the dust-wife had given her. Sew a cloak of owlcloth and nettles, build a dog of cursed bones, and catch moonlight in a jar of clay. She’d failed on the second one, before she’d even had a chance to start the third.

Three tasks, and then the dust-wife would give her the tools to kill a prince.

“Typical,” she said into her hands. “Typical. Of course I’d manage the impossible thing, then not think that sometimes dogs run off.” For all she knew, the bone dog had caught the wisp of a scent and now it would end up a hundred miles away, chasing bone rabbits or bone foxes or bone deer.

She laughed into her swollen hands, misery twisting around, as it so often did, into weary humor. Well. Isn’t that just the way?

This is what I get for expecting bones to be loyal, just because I brought them back and wired them up. What does a dog know about resurrection?

“I should have brought it a bone,” she said, dropping her hands, and the crows in the trees took up the sound of her laughter.

Well.

If the dust-wife had failed her—or if she had failed the dust-wife—then she would make her own way. She’d had a godmother at her christening who had given her a single gift and smoothed her path not at all. Perhaps there was a debt owing there.

She turned and began to make her way, step by dragging step, out of the blistered land.

Copyright © 2022 by T. Kingfisher. Excerpted from Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher. Published by permission of Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

T. Kingfisher (she/her) writes fantasy, horror, and occasional oddities, including The Twisted Ones and Swordheart. Under a pen name, she also writes children’s books. She lives in North Carolina.

Book Review: The Ballad of Perilous Graves, by Alex Jennings

Aigner Loren Wilson | 421 words

The Ballad of Perilous Graves
Alex Jennings
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9780759557192
Redhook, June 2022, 499 pgs

The soul of New Orleans is in danger, and it’ll take everything to save the city. In Alex Jennings’ spectacular debut, the city of New Orleans is transformed into a magical city where musical creatures and spirits, mages, and more flourish within the city’s limits. Magic, music, and graffiti that both moves and infects those who walk through it make up the everyday world of Perry Graves—and it’s also everything he must save as the musical soul of New Orleans begins to vanish.

So, while the New Orleans in Jennings’ book is totally fantastical, it doesn’t really read that way. It reads like the authentic New Orleans—the place beneath what visitors and tourists see. Jennings takes the architecture, art, people, music, and traditions that make New Orleans and shows the magic connecting them while weaving a story about how important New Orleans is.

While reading through the imaginative adventures of not just Perry but the haints, spirits, superheroes, artists, and musicians that make up Jennings’ story, I kept getting hints of jazzpunk influences. Music is just as powerful and as influential as magic. And often, music is magic in The Ballad of Perilous Graves. Music can change the characters, teleport them to new places, and even heal.

There were some moments where I couldn’t tell why something was getting such detailed attention, but in the end, it always made sense. Knowing how a person moves through New Orleans is essential because they are New Orleans and just as significant a factor in the story as the city itself. And don’t you just love a story where the setting is a character, too? When a location, a real tangible one, is given the page time it deserves?

I couldn’t tell which parts of Jennings’s prose I loved the most: how he described music’s power over people or how he depicted New Orleans showcasing all the history and trauma of a place in a way that still held so much joy and hope. The Ballad of Perilous Graves reads like a love letter to the city and a tour guide of New Orleans’s spiritual and musical side.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aigner Loren Wilson is a queer Black writer of speculative fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and games. She serves as a senior fiction editor at Strange Horizons and has guest-edited issues of Fireside Fiction and Apparition Literary Magazine. Her work has appeared in FIYAH, Anathema, Arsenika, and other publications. When she’s not writing or editing for others, she’s learning, hiking, or loving on her fur babies—both human and animal. To check out her books, games, bread bakes, and other writings visit her website (aignerlwilson.com).

Book Review: Disruption, edited by Zadok, Szczurek, Snyman

Arley Sorg | 1529 words

Disruption: New Short Fiction from Africa
Rachel Zadok, Karina Szczurek, Jason Mykl Snyman, eds.
Paperback/Ebook
ISBN: 9781946395573
Catalyst Press & Short Story Day Africa, September 2021, 260 pgs

If you took a writing or lit class, you probably read Joseph Conrad. He died in 1924, he was white (a Polish immigrant to the UK), and he is one of the most famous authors to have written about Africa. Many readers in America will experience the African continent and its people as seen through Conrad’s work. Many people of color, including Chinua Achebe—a Nigerian author—have described Conrad’s work as racist. Some scholars, such as Adam Hochschild and Peter Edgerly Firchow—both white Americans—disagree. Nonetheless, while Conrad’s work is widely read, many Americans would be hard pressed to name an African author, let alone one they’d read. Whether or not Conrad’s work is racist, more Americans experience Africa through his work than through any actual African perspective.

In science fiction, there are a number of very well-known authors who are white and who write about Africa. Mike Resnick is possibly the most famous. While many science fiction fans have probably read Resnick’s Hugo-winning story “Kirinyaga,” which has been reprinted many, many times since its original 1988 publication in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, far fewer know about Charles R. Saunders, a Black American who was Resnick’s contemporary and who also wrote stories inspired by Africa. Then there are authors like Flora Nwapa, Amos Tutuola, Kojo Laing, and others, who were actual Africans publishing speculative work at the time Resnick’s “Kirinyaga” came out. I would bet cash that if you bring up their names at a major genre convention, you’ll get nothing but blank stares in return.

It is what it is. And I’m not here to say Resnick was racist; that’s not the argument. But I will posit that most genre readers over a span of several decades, going back to wherever you personally like to consider the beginning of science fiction, have seen Africa through the work of white writers. It’s not that there wasn’t work out there by Africans of various countries, or even by writers who weren’t white, mind you. But, again, it is what it is.

In 2000 Sheree Renée Thomas published groundbreaking anthology Dark Matter, featuring authors of “the African Diaspora,” which mostly meant Black Americans (including Saunders). But it was Dark Matter and 2004 anthology So Long Been Dreaming by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan, which featured a more international set of authors, and a few other similar books which paved the way for Ivor W. Hartmann’s 2012 anthology, Afro SF: Science Fiction by African Writers.

Yes! At last, “the first ever anthology of Science Fiction by African writers”—genre readers could finally get a concentrated dose of Africa through the lens of actual Africans. You know, twenty-four years after Resnick’s award-winning story. And, it was edited by a white African, and featured work by a number of white Africans. This may seem meaningless without context, but consider the way white authors often portray Black folks, as opposed to other white folks, regardless of location . . . . Regardless, Hartmann published several volumes, and they included fantastic authors such as TL Huchu, Chinelo Onwualu, Tade Thompson, Rafeeat Aliyu, and more. The problem is, again, that very few people know about these books. But these were just the beginnings of great things.

In 2020 magazine Brittle Paper published anthology Africanfuturism edited by Wole Talabi and posted it as a free download for readers. The link is here: bit.ly/3x1kkIq. 2020 also brought the collaborative effort of Zelda Knight and Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki: Dominion—an anthology absolutely bursting with African voices and perspectives. Ekpeki published the very first Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction anthology in 2021. In other words, it’s a bit easier now to get stories told by authors from a number of African countries. But anthologies such as these are still very few in number, and the white authors who write or wrote about Africa are still better known, better paid, and better distributed, especially in genre circles, than the editors putting these books together. Which is why books showcasing African voices are so very important.

And this leads me, finally, to the actual review.

Disruption: New Short Fiction from Africa, published by Catalyst Press, is a must-read. This book features a number of brilliant speculative pieces by African authors. In what seems to be a long-standing tradition, based on a few Google searches anyways, I would say genre is slipping up again, overlooking a book that deserves to be reviewed, purchased, and talked about.

But not you, dear reader. I got you. Let me give you just a taste of what this book offers.

“Before the Rains” by Nadia Ahidjo is one of several which utilize climate disaster. The people of the Sahel are afflicted with endless rains. A handful of people have come from far away to collect “human interest stories,” and to ask how the people of the Sahel managed to survive. From the outset Ahidjo’s satire is cut with sharp strokes, the objectifying nature of the approach of the visitors—“Prototypes”—made clear. As the narrator relays events to sister Ténéré (instead of telling the outsiders), we see how the Prototypes experimented and offered to “help” other peoples around the world, while enjoying their own much grander privileges entirely separately from those they purported to help. The narrative becomes a wonderful mirror to the disconnection between those who “help” other cultures and the people they “help.”

“Before We Die Unwritten” by Innocent Chizaram Ilo is, on the one hand, a polemic against greed, in particular the kind which ultimately leads to destruction. On the other hand, it’s an astute meditation on human nature, especially the frailty of our existence, and the ties we have to one another, which can enrich our lives yet are so often easily unwound. It begins as so many science fiction stories begin: corporate-driven experimentation. Of course, the protagonist, Mr. Melifeonwu, warns against proceeding as planned. And of course everything falls apart. Sure. But the tale is effectively told, and Ilo’s somber, poetic prose, punctuated by startling moments, and lined with glittering subtext make this piece excellent.

“Five Years Next Sunday” by Idza Luhumyo depicts a caller, a woman whose locs hold the power of rain. This thread alone makes this story cool. Luhumyo builds the story from there: the region is caught in a drought, and shearing off the protagonist’s locs at just the right time will bring rain. Because of the power of this role, her family has always scorned her, treated her like a stranger. But then a wealthy foreigner comes along who is smitten with her hair, and he starts heaping wealth upon the family just so he can be near her. Suddenly the family changes their tune—and because the foreigner loves the hair, suddenly the family doesn’t want her to cut it . . . but where does that leave the region, still desperate for rain? Luhumyo develops a complex, layered narrative about the fickle nature of relationships, greed, desire, and more. Underlying all this is a powerful look at the objectifying nature of exotification, one which exposes the ways in which exotification is also exploitation, and a thirst-driven desire to own what you covet.

One of the most extraordinary pieces in the entire anthology is “Static.” As living conditions on Earth worsen, Amina Saud is selected to relocate to one of the colony planets. The plot is simple enough, but the writing makes this story superb. A wonderfully visual opening creates a sense of place, of moment; then the author, Alithnayn Abdulkareem, brings the reader in closer with the personal and the specific, utilizing an interesting memory tied to the original, tangible moment, all to immersive effect. Lovely phrases, complex relationships, and engrossing situations drive the read. The speculative element makes an excellent framework upon which Abdulkareem hangs lucid observations about sociocultural issues, especially things like belonging, the choices we are forced to make, and the imprisonment and slow death that marginalization can be. Really breathtaking work.

Yes, you should absolutely get this book because we need more like it, because projects like this need the support of readers, because success signals to publishers that books like this are salable. Yes, you should get it because your favorite authors of African stories shouldn’t only be white authors. But beyond these reasons, you should absolutely get this book because of the fantastic stories on offer. Get it because these authors are excellent storytellers. Learn their names, spread the word. The world is large, and it is full of wonders.

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.

Book Review: Tear Down the Throne by Jennifer Estep

Chris Kluwe | 822 words

Tear Down the Throne
Jennifer Estep
Trade Paperback / eBook / Digital Audio
ISBN: 9780063023093
Harper Voyager, May 2022, 439 pages

Salutations, readers, and welcome to another book review! This month we’ll be diving into Tear Down the Throne by Jennifer Estep, a romance-infused fantasy adventure filled with scheming, spellcasting, and swordfighting, and also the sequel to one of last year’s reviews, Capture the Crown.

Tear Down the Throne returns us to the feuding kingdoms of Andvari and Morta, now at the brink of war following the events of the first book, and once again takes place through the eyes of Andvari’s crown princess—Gemma “Glitzma” Ripley, mind magier and part-time spy in service to her subjects. Returning alongside her is friend/rival spy Reiko Yamato, as well as Gemma’s complicated love/hate relationship with Prince Leonidas Morricone—second son of the Mortan royal family and Gemma’s childhood enemy—in addition to a host of other familiar faces.

Since Tear Down the Throne is a sequel, I would highly recommend reading Capture the Crown first, but Estep does an excellent job summarizing the events of the first book right off the bat so it’s not strictly necessary if you can’t find a copy and want to dive right into this one. Those who have read the first one will recognize the continuation of the Andvari/Mortan hostilities embodied by Gemma and Leonidas’ relationship, but Tear Down the Throne is also about expanding and exploring that relationship, not just maintaining the status quo.

One thing I enjoyed about Estep’s first book that continues in this one is that she’s not afraid to let her characters be messy and make mistakes, for all that they’re presented as familiar fantasy tropes. Gemma’s trials throughout the story are just as much the products of her own mind and traumas as they are outside forces, and her constant battle to keep herself from succumbing to old wounds will be familiar to anyone who’s had to move on from a difficult past.

However, this doesn’t mean that Gemma is a princess looking for someone to save her (though she’ll accept it occasionally if the situation gets too dicey). Another theme of Estep’s that I really liked is that all of the characters in Tear Down the Throne, particularly the women, are strong in a variety of ways, and frequently center the plot around their interactions while the various princes and guards orbit them. In a literary world where far too often princesses are something to be found in another castle, it’s refreshing to see ones with agency and impact that feel like real people. We also get a closer look into the motivations behind the instigator of much of Gemma’s woes (Queen Maeven of Morta), and Estep does a wonderful job of fleshing her out such that while you may or may not feel sympathy for her, you begin to really understand why she acts the way she does.

In addition, Tear Down the Throne does a fine job of presenting substantially high stakes for the characters and kingdoms involved without getting bogged down in too much convoluted intrigue. There are twists and turns, to be sure, and Estep does excellent work pacing them out appropriately, but all are in service to the characters instead of the other way around and I never felt like I was having trouble following any character’s motivation. My only real complaint would be that Captain Badguy McPlotarmor (if you’ve read the first one you know who I’m talking about) continues his dastardly mustache twirling ways and somehow gets away, again, but even he shows some unexpected growth that made me the slightest bit less bloodthirsty for his deserved comeuppance that I’m sure will happen in book three.

Overall, Tear Down the Throne is a fun romp of a book that isn’t afraid to lean into the trappings of classic fantasy royalty and romance, while at the same time also willing to stretch itself beyond the reader’s expectations to explore nuanced introspection on trauma, time, and healing. If you’re looking for something to wile away the hours on a vacation trip or outside as the weather warms, but still want to engage your brain, this might be just the book you’re looking for, and I’m excited to see how Estep finishes out the story.

Read if: you enjoy alliterative names; you like complications in your himbos; you’ve always wanted to ride a gargoyle.

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.

Author Spotlight: Grace Chan

Laurel Amberdine | 884 words

How did “Nobody Ever Goes Home to Zhenzhu” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I was mulling over the concept of “retcon” or “retroactive continuity” as it applies to fictional works: when a new piece of information provides a complete reinterpretation of past events, and what is considered “canon” undergoes a metamorphosis. This is not dissimilar to how our interpretations of history can be manipulated. Although we may believe we are neutral observers, we can be indoctrinated to see events from a deeply biased perspective. What sort of information is included or excluded from the “canon” of our historical stories?

In Orin and Calam’s world, the Common Records are a shared, widely-accepted accounting of history, accessed on-demand via neural enhancements. Of course, the Records are manipulated by the powerful to maintain their own standing and to conceal atrocities.

The working title for this story was “Retconning History,” which, needless to say, did not survive beyond the first draft!

Orin and Calam appeared in an earlier short story of mine, “The Dunes of Ranza,” in which Orin began to realise the impacts of terraforming on diasporan populations. Zhenzhu came to life because I wanted to explore Calam’s background. I have many more stories about the Beaconer and her mechanic brewing in my mind.

Did you get stuck at any point while writing this? How did you get past that?

Yes—more than usual with this story. Earlier drafts had Orin wandering around planet-side and poking into Calam’s childhood. I suppose it was part of that whole process of getting to know my characters. In the end, I shortened the initial scenes significantly, removing some sections and scattering smaller fragments throughout the story. It was a little painful, but I think I made the right choice. I wanted to keep the pace high and focus on the pivotal scenes. I’m excited to pick up on the seeds of background information in future stories about Orin and Calam.

I also struggled with the ending of “Zhenzhu.” I wanted to be cautious not to portray Orin as a saviour character. Agency, and the decision regarding what to do with the Scribe Implant, needed to rest with Calam.

Is there anything you want to make sure readers noticed?

Two things I enjoy playing with in my stories: perspective, and neural enhancement technology. Both appear in “Zhenzhu.”

I decided to write the story from Orin’s perspective because of her distinctive voice, the maintenance of suspense through distance, and the delight of sprinkling titbits of background information about both Orin and Calam throughout the narrative.

Most people in this world have accepted necessary modifications and enhancements to their biological bodies. Of course, this makes you trackable—everything has a serial number or a digital trace, right? In her role as a Beaconer, Orin often uses biodata to hunt down her targets.

When she’s following Calam, she lifts a memory trace from a roadside vendor. How deeply will such memory recordings be coloured by the individual’s own biases and interpretations? And when Orin views another person’s memory trace and encodes it into her own mind, she’s layering her own perspective on top of theirs. We’re always telling stories to ourselves and to the people around us.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I’m currently rereading The Queen’s Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner, a six-book fantasy series that left a strong impression on me when I first encountered it years ago. Turner is such a deft hand at using spare, elegant prose and different perspectives to keep the reader on their toes. Every word holds weight; every detail might be a clue. Threads of information are woven across from one book to another. There’s politics and warfare and an expanse of kingdoms, but the narrative is intimate and subtle, never bogged down in extraneous details.

I’ve also recently finished Ken Liu’s second short story collection, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, and I’m hoping to soon start Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Unreal and the Real. Reading masters of short fiction always inspires me to write more short stories.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

My debut novel, Every Version of You, is going to the printers this month, which is incredibly exciting. It will be published in September by Affirm Press.

I have short fiction out in a variety of venues. If you like the sound of a solarpunk tree transformation story with poignant feels, “As Though I Were a Little Sun” was just published in Fireside Magazine. If you want a story about a lonely K-pop idol in the 22nd century, deepfakes, and a sneaky escape, check out “He Leaps for the Stars, He Leaps for the Stars” in Clarkesworld’s July 2021 issue.

As always, I’m chipping away at more short stories. You can find a full list of my published and forthcoming work on my website, gracechanwrites.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 Portland and works (remotely) for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Tobias S. Buckell

Laurel Amberdine | 902 words

How did “The Plastic People” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

It grew inside of me for a very long time, built up by images of children picking through garbage dumps in developing world countries to try and eke out some kind of survival. At the same time, as a fan of space and travel, I kept looking at the private space launch activity with optimism and excitement. Somewhere deep inside, that tension between carrying both feelings inside broke and this image of space travelers coming back to a dump began to form in my head.

What is your writing process like? Did this story fit the pattern?

I tend to be a bit more methodical in creating the story. I have places to aim at, or a structure. Here I had an image and a feeling. Some seed of anger. I could feel a story just in the air around me, I just had to start writing it and see where these feelings would take me. Every once in a while, the muse strikes, and you become a vessel for a story, and this was one of those. I wrote it, and then had to figure out what to do next.

What is your writing space like? What do you like to have around for optimal creativity?

I’ve had an office in my basement for a while, it’s not very inspiring, but it gives me a six foot long desk and space for all my books. I write there, at the coffee shop in town, on the comfortable armchair in my family room, in the car while waiting for kids to finish a music lesson, on my iPad on the couch, and I also thumb-type on my iPhone. I use an app called Ulysses so that my writing is synched on all the devices, so the writing shows up wherever I happen to be.

The most important thing? Bose noise-cancelling headphones. I’m currently on the QC-35 IIs and, other than my laptop, they’re the one piece of kit I have that I instantly replace if they break, regardless of cost. No matter where I am, if I pull these on, the world falls away to a muffled distance and I can find the space I need to write.

Did you get stuck at any point while writing this? How did you get past that?

This was a lucky story that fell out of me. I do get stuck, like anyone else. I’ve read recently that procrastination should be considered your brain balking against hurt, and that it’s a compassionate mental response. I’ve always looked at getting stuck as an obstacle to power over, around, or through. Now, I ask myself “what hurt is my brain trying to protect me from?” There is no one answer that’s the same each time. I’ve discovered sometimes it’s fear of what people may think about the story, or a suspicion that the writing is wrong, sometimes it’s that I’m actually tired and writing more is going to hurt because my brain is exhausted. Finding out why my brain is balking, and not pushing through, has been really a big change for me and helped me grapple with stuck moments.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I’m catching up on more TJ Klune since discovering two of his books while judging for the World Fantasy Award. Such amazing stuff. I’m listening to Alastair Reynold’s Inhibitor Phase because I love his science fiction. After that, I have the latest Martha Wells queued up, because who can resist the amazing Murderbot? I can’t. Becky Chambers has also been a go-to author during the pandemic. There’s a warmth to her characters and her books that I needed. I came of age during the dark anti-heroes of the 90s, and I love me noir and grit, but the last couple years have been . . . a lot.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I have five or six short stories coming out this year, so checking in at TobiasBuckell.com is never a bad idea, I point out where things are from there. The big project right now is a fantasy novel I’m revising called In Empire’s Shadow, where gods have fallen from the sky and people are chopping them up and mining them to extract magic from their corpses. Complications ensue. I’ve been writing, revising, or noodling around on this one for years, so I can’t wait to wrap it up sometime this year so we can take it out and show editors. After all this time working on it, I still am deeply in love with it, so I hope it finds an enthusiastic home.

My short story collection, Shoggoths in Traffic and Other Stories, just came out from Fairwood Press. It contains a massive chunk of my fantasy short stories. And sometime this year Apex will be doing a collection of just science fiction stories called Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance and Other Stories.

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 Portland and works (remotely) for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Andi C. Buchanan

Laurel Amberdine | 1140 words

How did “If We Do Not Fly at Sunset” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

This is one of those stories that’s been through so many iterations it’s an entirely different story to the one I started with. It very boringly started with me reading local news debates about infill housing—building new houses in the gardens of existing ones—and me idly thinking: but do any fae live there? What’s the impact on them? It’s morphed entirely from that, but I wanted to capture the day to day of someone who is both part of the mundanities of our world and also apart from them, and connect that to the experience of a lot of my generation in our twenties and thirties when we haven’t found it easy to achieve the same kind of adulthood our parents had. I wanted to capture the sense of disconnect as you try to figure out your place in the world.

So far as inspirations go, I was fascinated by the Cottingley Fairies hoax as a child, and it’s always in the back of my mind when writing stories like this. I keep up with some classic urban fantasy series—like Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London and Seanan McGuire’s Incryptid, and I’ve been thinking a lot about what elements do and don’t translate to a city that is undoubtedly an urban environment, but smaller and less connected on a global scale.

What is your writing space like? What do you like to have around for optimal creativity?

I’m lucky to have a personal office at home—even before the current situation I’ve mostly worked from home and it’s set up for that. I painted it bright green as soon as we moved into this house, and it has most of my books and a nice big desk. Most of the actual fingers-to-keyboard writing happens there—though I do like to take my laptop to the local library or a cafe when I get the chance. A lot of the wider process—the generation of ideas, or figuring out the shape of the story, doesn’t need to be at my desk and I’m often going through it before I go to sleep, over meals, anywhere really.

I don’t really need anything around except a good chair and a keyboard, but my desk clutter includes a stack of tins of Thinking Putty—which is basically slime for grown-ups with jobs—and a jar of aniseed balls. I’m not sure if they help the creative process, but they certainly don’t hurt.

Is there anything you want to make sure readers noticed?

This is a story that’s very much about its setting—and also about being a certain age in a certain place—and I know readers will read it differently based on how they relate to that experience. As a reader, I’ve been finding myself increasingly enjoying stories where authors don’t over-explain, and just let elements of the setting or characters’ experience be—providing enough context that the story works for everyone, but not assuming everyone needs to understand or relate to the same elements. That’s what I’ve tried to do here—so while there are of course references some readers can look up if they choose to, I hope it’s not a story that relies on them noticing any specific thing. And, of course, some readers will notice things I did not.

What would be your advice for other writers?

When I was starting out I was burned by a lot of writing advice—especially as a disabled person, I spent a lot of time fretting that maybe I couldn’t be a real writer if I couldn’t write at the same time each day/write my first draft with pen and paper/make a comprehensive plan before starting and so on. Maybe the people who suggested them did not intend them to come across that way but I think they can often have that impact.

So I have some meta advice: treat most writing advice as an idea of something that might work. Try and give different things a try, unless you already know what works for you. But very little is an actual requirement.

And that said, here are some of those ideas—advice I’ve been given, or that I wish I’d had: Track your expenses as they come up, rather than try and assemble them all on tax filing day. Give gamification a go (I love 4thewords and Habitica). Find a good critique group. When you’re submitting or publishing one piece of work, try and start on the next. Read widely. Keep reading.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I’m currently reading Whiti Hereaka’s Kurangaituku. It’s based on a traditional Māori story about a creature that is half-bird, half-woman, and Hereaka brings so many dimensions to it. It may be hard for international readers but if you can get a paperback I strongly recommend doing so—the book flips with two covers, starting the story in two places and merging in the middle, it’s an artwork in itself.

I’ve recently really enjoyed (among others) Shelley Parker Chan’s She Who Became the Sun, a queer reimagining of fourteenth century China, & This is How To Stay Alive, a time travel novella based around a bereavement by suicide from Kenyan writer Shingai Njeri Kagunda, and Gina Cole’s amazing slipstream collection Black Ice Matter.

I feel my inspirations are different from project to project. For my novel Sanctuary, for example the work of other autistic writers including Ada Hoffmann, RB Lemberg, Kaia Sønderby, and Bogi Takács, was a huge influence.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

My debut novel, Sanctuary, is out from Robot Dinosaur Press on 12 April. It’s about a queer, neurodivergent found-family who live in a haunted house, and I’m very excited to be launching it into the world. I also have a few novellas published including “From a Shadow Grave” (Paper Road Press, 2019) which is a genre blend centred on a historical ghost story. All my publications, including short fiction, are listed on my website at andicbuchanan.org.

I’m working on a few projects right now, but the main one is the first in a series of contemporary fantasy novellas set on the coast of New Zealand’s South Island.

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 Portland and works (remotely) for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Lina Rather

Laurel Amberdine | 480 words

How did “The Cheesemaker and the Undying King” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

This story first came out of my interest in medical history—I was reading about the history of medical uses for molds and began thinking about how cheesemakers in pre-modern times probably would have been the experts in cultivating molds. I also really enjoy writing about people who are not trained in conflict and violence being thrust into situations that would usually be solved with violence.

What is your writing space like? What do you like to have around for optimal creativity?

I love a classic coffee shop writing day—a hot drink, the chatter of other people, and headspace away from my home or work distractions. Of course this has been less available with Covid, but I’m lucky to have several local coffee shops with great patios.

Other than writing, do you have any other creative pursuits? What do you do to relax?

I love crafting! I’m a big knitter and embroiderer, and I’m hoping to learn to quilt soon. I also enjoy beachcombing and poking around in the woods—here on the Potomac, we have great fossil deposits of sharks’ teeth, crinoids, and other treasures.

What trends in speculative fiction would you like to see gain popularity in the next few years?

I would really like to see more slipstream-y, litfic-crossover speculative fiction gain popularity. This is the subgenre many of my favorite books come from (Famous Men Who Never Lived, Lives of the Monster Dogs, and The Seep are a few recent favorites), but it’s never quite gotten the recognition as a distinct form that it deserves. Over the past few years several of the short fiction markets in this niche have closed as well—namely Liminal, Shimmer, and Lackington’s. I would love to see a new market emerge to take up the mantle.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I’ve had several other pieces out recently! For fans of flash fiction, my story “The Night the River Meets the Sky” was in Fireside’s January issue, and is about a mother dealing with the consequences of a choice she made long ago. The second novella in my “Our Lady of Endless Worlds” series (nuns in space, riding in giant slugs!) was published by Tor.com in February. Finally, for those who liked the historical aspects of this story, keep an eye out next year for another Tor.com novella about a midwife in Restoration-era London who is dealing with some very unnatural births.

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 Portland and works (remotely) for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 254 words

Coming up in June, in Lightspeed . . .

We’re serializing a very special novelette that straddles the boundaries of science fiction and fantasy: “The Crowning of the Lord Tazenket, Vulture God of the Eye,” written by S.G. Demciri. We also have an SF story (“Zen Solaris and the God-Child”) by Arden Powell, a flash piece (“Scientists Confirm: There’s a Black Hole in the Center of Your Heart”) from Jo Miles, along with an SF reprint by C.C. Finlay (“One Basket”).

Plus, we have an original fantasy short by P H Lee (“The Turnip, or, How The Whole World Was Brought to Peace”). We also have a flash piece (“Picnic, with Monster”) from Susan Palwick. Our fantasy reprint is by Stephen Graham Jones (“Broken Record”).

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: Isabel Cañas, Adam-Troy Castro, Tobi Ogundiran, Kristina Ten, and Carrie Vaughn.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

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

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Newsletter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

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Subscriptions and Ebooks

The Editors

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes more than 100 stories (about 700,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain!

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe for more information, including about third-party subscription options.

Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so.

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

• • • •

All caught up on Lightspeed? Good news! We also have lots of ebooks available from our sister-publications:

Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11 off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price).

Fantasy Magazine Ebooks & Bundles: We also have ebook back issues—and ebook back issue bundles—of Lightspeed’s (recently revived, other) sister-magazine, Fantasy. To check those out, just visit fantasy-magazine.com/store. You can buy each Fantasy bundle for $24.99, or you can buy the complete run of Fantasy Magazine— all 57 issues—for just $114.99 (that’s $10 off buying all the bundles individually, and more than $55 off the cover price!).

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

The Editors

We already offer ebook subscriptions as a way of supporting the magazines, but we wanted to add an additional option to allow folks to support us, thus we’ve launched a Patreon (patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams).

TL;DR Version

If you enjoy Fantasy, Nightmare, and/or Lightspeed, our Patreon page is a way for you to help support those endeavors by chipping in a buck or more on a recurring basis. Your support will help us bring bigger and better (and more) projects into the world.

Why Patreon?

There are no big companies supporting or funding our magazines, so they really rely on reader support. Though we offer the magazines online for free, we’re able to fund them by selling ebook subscriptions or website advertising.

While we have a dedicated ebook subscriber base, the vast majority of our readers consume the magazine online for free. If just 10% of our website readers pledged just $1 a month, the magazines would be doing fantastically well. So we thought it might be useful to have an option like Patreon for readers who maybe haven’t considered supporting the magazine, or who maybe haven’t because they don’t have any desire to receive the ebook editions—or who would be glad to pay $1 a month, but not $3 (the cost of a monthly subscriber issue of Lightspeed).

Though Fantasy, Nightmare, and Lightspeed are separate entities, we decided to create a single “publisher” Patreon account because it seemed like it would be more efficient to manage just one account.

Basically, we wanted to create a crowdfunding page where, if you enjoy the work Adamant Press puts out, and you want to contribute a little something to help make it easier for us to produce more cool projects, then our Patreon is the place to do that.

What Do I Get Out of Being a Patron?

Well, you get the satisfaction of helping to usher the creation of cool new short fiction projects into the world! Plus, the more support we get, the better we can make the magazines and compensate our authors and staff. By becoming a supporter via Patreon, you help fund our growth and continued publication of three award-winning magazines. Of course, if you’re already one of our ebook subscribers (thank you!), you are already supporting us. This is for those who prefer to read the issues each month on our free websites, or wish to support our efforts more generally.

By becoming a supporter, you are also bestowed a title, such as Dragonrider, or Space Wizard, or Savior of the World and/or Universe, thus making you instantly the envy of all your friends.

Thank You!

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

Arley Sorg

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

John Joseph Adams

Assistant Editor

Laurel Amberdine

Editorial Interns

Mayookh Barua

Madison Brake

Reviewers

Arley Sorg

Chris Kluwe

Aigner Loren Wilson

Copy Editor

Luke Tolvaj

Proofreaders

Anthony R. Cardno

Devin Marcus

Webmaster

Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios

Associate Publisher

Christie Yant

Reprint Editor (Emeritus)

Rich Horton

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)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022 (with Rebecca Roanhorse)

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

Lost Worlds and Mythological Kingdoms

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

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.