TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 145, June 2022

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: June 2022

SCIENCE FICTION

The Crowning of the Lord Tazenket, Vulture God of the Eye, Part I
S.G. Demciri

One Basket
C.C. Finlay

Zen Solaris and the God-Child
Arden Powell

Scientists Confirm: There’s a Black Hole in the Center of Your Heart
Jo Miles

FANTASY

Picnic, with Monster
Susan Palwick

The Crowning of the Lord Tazenket, Vulture God of the Eye, Part II
S.G. Demciri

Broken Record
Stephen Graham Jones

The Turnip, or, How the Whole World Was Brought to Peace
P H Lee

EXCERPTS

In the Shadow of Lightning
Brian McClellan

NONFICTION

Book Review: Light From Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki
Aigner Loren Wilson

Book Review: Monsters Born and Made, by Tanvi Berwah
Chris Kluwe

Book Review: Dreams for a Broken World, Day & Meeropol, editors
Arley Sorg

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

S.G. Demciri

Arden Powell

P H Lee

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: June 2022

John Joseph Adams | 252 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 145th issue!

Ask any two writers or critics to nail down the difference between fantasy and science fiction, and you’ll come up with two different definitions. They’re sibling genres who exist on continuum of the unlikely, and sometimes they even meet up. This month, we’re serializing a novelette with one foot in the domain of SF and one foot proudly in the realm of fantasy: “The Crowning of the Lord Tazenket, Vulture God of the Eye,” written by S.G. Demciri.

Our other stories are a little easier to define. We’ve got a new post-apocalyptic SF short (“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, and a reprint by C.C. Finlay (“One Basket”).

P H Lee returns with the latest Tale of the Great Sweet Sea: “The Turnip, or, How The Whole World Was Brought to Peace,” which is just as savory as it sounds. Susan Palwick creates a kaiju tale in her new flash piece “Picnic, with Monster.” And our fantasy reprint is “Broken Record,” by Stephen Graham Jones.

Our nonfiction team has put together the usual terrific assortment of author spotlights and book reviews. Our ebook readers will also enjoy an excerpt from In the Shadow of Lightning, the latest novel from Brian McClellan.

It’s another great month of speculative content, so thanks for checking it out!

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.

The Crowning of the Lord Tazenket, Vulture God of the Eye, Part I

S.G. Demciri | 5493 words

She dreams of blood.

She always has done. Her gold gown drenched in it, the gold paint on her fingertips muddied by it. Her arms glow in the dream, a hundred paths of light trailing over her collarbones. In this dream, this vision, she is free.

Her kind don’t really dream. They—she, she doesn’t think there are others—pull on the strings of fate. They look forward into the future and imagine possibility.

She tells herself every time she dreams of blood and freedom: this is a dream. This is not fate. Do not get your fragile heart broken.

• • • •

Ihuet is the daughter of a god.

The Father God Amzu, He Who Rules from the Eye. He who brought salvation to a hundred broken worlds and built the three cities within the protective shield of the free-floating station Dagan. Whose seed sprang up in the form of two children: Ihuet, Oracle of the Eye and her elder brother, Ashdanar, the Bull God.

Here is the great station Dagan: a great gleaming orb of silver and crystal with four levels, like resin spread thin within a marble. There is the uppermost city, Per-Wadjet, forbidden to all but the Father God and his children, with a circumference of two miles near the top of the sphere. There is a single obelisk made of metal, engraved with glyphs, and the ghosts who maintain the station. Many miles below it is the city Nekheb, a glittering array of white, pale gold, and rose made nearly entirely of stone. Its buildings are flat-roofed, their sides sloped, their great palisades lined with round columns etched with glyphs. In Nekheb is the royal palace and the temple of the oracle side by side and cutting through its center is the great river Baal. Palm trees sway in the city’s breeze and tall reeds grow along the river shore. The river slips over its western edge down to Lake Nekhen and its city, a great green spread, its buildings clustered on the lake shores.

In these cities the living and the dead worship Amzu and give thanks and tribute to Ihuet and Ashdanar. Their gratitude is never-ending, for in Dagan there is no war or strife. Beyond the crystalline walls of their station the galaxy is riven by conflict and the march of war—pushed by Amzu and dreams of dominion—is unending. In Dagan the crops do not fail, calves are always born, the people never hunger.

Ihuet knows what these people will do as the tides change. The threads of fate, in this regard, are easily divined. Fear, first, and then relief when the choice of successor is taken from them. Eyes cast down at injustice that does not touch them. Mortals, Ihuet thinks as a serving girl fastens her into a gown, are always predictable.

Ihuet remains still, brown arms outstretched as a handmaiden wraps her in an iridescent diaphanous layer over the bronze metallic gown.

The palace is much like the rest of the city. High ceilings, pale gold and rose quartz walls, their surfaces etched in glyphs detailing Amzu’s ascension to godhood, the birth of his children, his daughter’s prophecies which ensured his victories. There is Ashdanar against eight Knives of Sardis. Amzu against a Hadasti consular. Ihuet with the snake of prophecy wound about her wrists. She passes all of this in silence, the only sound the gold in her hair chiming, her gown trailing on the stone floor behind her, the re-adjustment of the palace guards as they lower their heads when she passes.

Amzu is returned into the bosom of the royal city and has spent many hours above contemplating the wisdom of the Eye. He brings with him victory over the second and fourth fleets of the Qart Hadast Empire, and the heads of two of their highest consulars besides. Now he reclines in the palace feast chamber at the head of a long table alone. His long legs are sprawled out from his high-backed silver chair, one elbow propped on an arm rest, his knuckles beneath his chin. The heavy gold torque of his station hangs askew from his neck and his kohl-rimmed eyes glitter with amusement at her entrance.

The scribe stops midway through a sentence at her arrival, lowers his eyes and bows, then retreats without rising from the room. Ihuet comes forward and sinks to her knees in a chorus of chimes, then kisses the ground at her father’s feet.

“Hail to the Father God of the Eye,” she murmurs and does not raise her head.

“Daughter,” he greets warmly and lifts her back onto her feet, then encircles her in a hug. Ihuet presses her face against his shoulder, the tension leaching out of her. He smells of frankincense and engine oil and he is warm. Being in Amzu’s presence reminds her of being newly born, wandering Per-Wadjet on wobbling feet, trying to make sense of a thousand worlds at once. It reminds her of fearlessness—a galaxy’s worth of futures at her fingertips and the knowledge that her father would be there to catch her no matter her fall.

“Congratulations on your latest victory,” she says when he pulls away. “There isn’t much of Qart Hadast left.”

He grins, his dark face luminous with joy. “Indeed,” he says. “Though they have managed to hide away their world relic. I won’t be satisfied until I find it.”

“Shall I help you look?” she asks.

“There’s no fun in that, Ihuet,” he chides and turns his eyes back to the spread of papers on the table. “With the world relic we’d be able to perfect our agricultural processes across all stations. And we’d finally be able to return to the world-making project.”

Ihuet frowns. “But the stations are perfect—they are mobile, defensible, and our people are happy.”

“Nothing is perfect,” he murmurs. “All things can be improved.”

She raises her eyebrows, and he sees—his face splits into a grin.

“Except for my daughter, she who sprung perfect in all things from the well of my thoughts,” he says, and kisses her forehead.

This pleases her and a small smile tugs at the corners of her mouth.

That is when she sees—the papers are designs for a new obelisk to commemorate Ashdanar’s victory against the Ephesian Syndicate. A chill runs down her spine.

“You flatter my brother too much, Father,” she says softly.

A shadow falls over his eyes—they have had this conversation many times before.

“He is my son and deserving of praise,” he says, falling back into his chair.

“You have made a god in your image,” she says, and the words have too much weight. She wishes to take them back and cannot. “A god without the prudence of your age and wisdom. Cage him.”

“Ihuet,” he warns.

It is always like this, she thinks. A hundred threads of fate, suddenly snapped by a single choice. Her palms sting with the truth of it. She comes forward and passes a hand over his face, incapable of doing anything else.

“When the Bull God casts you down the Well of Worlds, I will not weep for you.”

I will be too busy weeping for myself.

• • • •

The afternoon after her sister’s execution, Tazenket sits with her legs hanging over the edge of the cliff on the isle of Neveh, her gold eyes fixed on the ocean’s horizon.

She and Tureght are—were—two of a hundred in the creche of the Tower of Neveh. They’d been plucked from the same planet—Lixus, in the Barca star fields. A hundred girls all training to be one of five basileis and then the only Anax of the androleteirai of the Anat Atar Ascendancy. Tazenket had counted Tureght among her closest sisters. Now, in their forty-third year, the creche was winnowed to forty-eight of the original hundred, and of those forty-eight each knew where they would go. Some were slated for basileus, some for consular or generals. A rash of them were better suited to diplomacy, and there were those like her sisters Tinitzir and Tinitran who could have risen higher but preferred to serve as polemarch to one of five basileis.

The ocean breeze tears at her open jacket and she waits for it to take her grief. At forty-three she thinks they should have left their years of sororicide behind. A lesson—a needed one. Nothing is ever put to rest. No structure is ever stable.

A week ago, Tazenket dreamed a vision. She can still see it now—in the great forum in the center of the city of her birth, empty but for her and one other soul. Beneath a white linen awning stitched in gold sits an oracle. Her skin is honey brown, her hair black and hanging down to her shoulders. Her chest is bare but for the gold paint on her shoulders and breasts, and the unblinking eye of prophecy between them. She is standing and trailing from her waist to the ground is a white linen shroud. Her eyelids are painted in gold as are her fingertips, and splitting her bottom lip is a bar of turquoise paint.

Tazenket knows she is an oracle from the moment she lays eyes on her. The oracle holds open her hands to her and on the palm of each is another eye, drawn in kohl.

“I have a gift for you,” the oracle says.

Even now, a week later, Tazenket shivers when she recalls her voice. The gift was Tureght and proof of her treachery. She’d refused, at first, to accept it. Had spent a week investigating. Had hoped it was a dream born of paranoia, not truth. In the end, Tureght is sentenced for collaborating with the Bull God Ashdanar. In the end the dream is true.

She sighs and scrubs a hand over her face, then climbs to her feet. Many paces away are Tinitzir and Tinitran, twins taken from Oea. Loyal to her. More loyal than Tureght, to be sure. Tazenket buttons up her jacket, combs her fingers through her short hair, and joins them.

Here is the planet Thermadon: one of the last living planets in the Anat Atar Ascendancy. A place of blue waters and white isles and endless vegetation. More guarded than any other place within their stellar borders, home to the Tower of Neveh, the palace of the Androleteirai’s Anax. There are two continents on Thermadon and the isle of Neveh sits between them in the southern sea like a delta at the apex of a river. In the center of the isle is the tower and built around it is its metropole. There are zoos and temples, forums and promenades, shops where every delicacy galaxy wide can be had.

She can’t remember Lixus most of the time. The Lixus she does remember isn’t real—holos and paintings she looked up out of curiosity at sixteen. She has only ever truly known Thermadon—Neveh, its glittering turrets in the shadow of its great tower. Its flat roofs and ridged walls, and the white river that cuts through it. The cold embrace of the Ascendancy’s fleet and the icy wink of starlight.

Tinitzir and Tinitran flank her as they walk back to the city, collars buttoned up, two-headed axes strapped against their backs. They are tall and broad-shouldered, their black hair bound into a single neat braid. If not for Tinitran’s scar over her left eye, a shock of white in her brown face, they would have been identical. She can feel them exchange glances as they get closer to the city.

Tazenket didn’t flee, except that she had, weaponless, without her guards, to the cliff. Eyes open she sees the oracle; eyes closed she sees Tureght in her last moments, her face contorted with hatred. They were four before today. Tazenket, the basileus, always flanked by her three polemarchs. Raised in the same creche, trained by the same hand, turned toward the same purpose.

And now—

She dreams again that night.

She stands in the center of the forum once more. Across from her is the gold linen awning and beneath it is a platform covered in velvet. The oracle sits, dressed in a lapis gown gathered at her shoulders. It spills down her front in a diaphanous wave, sheer enough Tazenket can see the painted cobra between her breasts, its hood spread wide. Every now and then its tongue flicks out. Her hair is loose and heavy, threaded with countless gold chains. Before her is a table—on the left side is a wooden board, on the right a heap of many-colored stones.

The oracle smiles. “Would you like your fortune told?”

Tazenket swallows around a rock in her throat. The oracle raises an eyebrow, and her smile turns sly.

“Do you fear the future, basileus?”

“I fear witchcraft,” she replies stupidly. Is astonished those words have emerged from her mouth in that order.

The oracle laughs. It is a beautiful sound. Then she raises a hand and beckons her forth with a crooked, gold-tipped finger. Tazenket walks forward dazed. The oracle’s eyes are rimmed in kohl, she notices. They are brown. Luminous.

“You don’t believe in oracles, my lord.” It isn’t a question. She tries not to watch her hands as she begins to arrange the stones on the wooden board. A star map, Tazenket realizes. “Not every oracle is true,” she continues.

“But you are?” Tazenket asks.

She pauses, one hand over a blue stone, and lifts her eyes. “Oh yes, my lord. The only true one.”

The oracle is in her dream, isn’t she? The oracle was right about Tureght. Her finger taps and taps against the blue stone.

“Another gift,” she announces.

When Tazenket wakes, the blue stone is clutched in her palm.

• • • •

Nefermedes, the Anax of the Anat Atar Ascendancy, stands haloed by the light of the morning sun in her feast hall. The room takes up an entire floor in the tower, its walls all glass looking out at the isle below and the ocean beyond. She is a tall woman, whip thin, with a brown face cut from stone. Her black and silver hair hangs as a mane down her back. She has one long, thin scar running from her temple to her chin, and a single gold hoop earring in her right ear. Both her arms are made of allodite, meteor strong, strong enough to heft her axe. She is approaching her second century. The first time Tazenket sees Nefermedes she is eight years old and the Anax appears as a giant to her. Now they are the same height.

She glances over her shoulder when the doors close behind Tazenket.

“It was well done,” the Anax says. “Rooting Tureght out.”

“Yes, my lord,” Tazenket agrees and comes to stand beside her. Makes no show of her grief, though Tureght’s last words linger in her mind. All morning she has gone back and forth—she hates the humiliation of confessing. Hates more that she will be found out and her secrecy used against her. She has only been basileus for three years—the position is not easily lost. Perceived treachery, however, is cause enough.

Nefermedes’ mouth crooks into a smile. “You are a poor dissembler,” she says. “It is why I picked you.”

“So that I couldn’t keep my own counsel?” Tazenket asks, amused.

“Because I knew you were honest,” Nefermedes replies.

Tazenket is honest. She is forthright, brave, willing to take risk in battle, and exercises prudence when necessary. She has three major victories under her belt—two against the Ephesian Syndicate, one against the Qart Hadast Empire. All impressive. But The Thousand Wings of the Eye and its god king Amzu creeps ever closer to their borders. And this dream—vision—

“An oracle came to me in sleep,” she says, carefully looking out at the horizon.

Nefermedes, she knows, has enough superstition that she goes to the temple of Atar before every departure. Her axe is blessed by its priestesses. Her ships anointed with their oil.

“Twice,” Tazenket continues.

“Tureght?”

Tazenket nods.

“What has she given you this time?”

“The Bull God Ashdanar will cross into our stars, seeking out our golden worlds for conquest. She told me where he would be, down to the hour.”

Oracles are rarely so specific, or so the stories say. They speak in riddles in lieu of the gods. If not for the stone burning a hole in her pocket, she wouldn’t repeat the dream at all.

Nefermedes frowns into the horizon, contemplative. “Take a fleet,” she says at last. “Worst outcome: you chased a dream. Best outcome: you return to Thermadon with the Bull God’s head.”

Tazenket bows low. “Yes, my lord.”

• • • •

The Ascendant Basileus fails.

Ihuet is rarely surprised and this should not shock her, nor should it cause her grief. And yet. There are times when the lines of fate may be manipulated. A wavering will or a will built like the bulwark of a dreadnought. Unfortunately, the Basileus’s desire meets and falls away against Ashdanar’s will to survive. Her brother returns to Dagan thirty-two days after she speaks to Tazenket.

In Nekheb, between the royal palace and the temple, there is a plaza. It is here that the admirals, generals, minor gods, and future postulants of her temple are greeted on their return. Ihuet stands beside her father, robed in green and black as Ashdanar winds his way through the city flanked by his surviving generals.

She has no care for politics. A little over a century of life and her days have revolved around this: future telling, the possibilities of her father’s reign, the crops and well-being of the Daganites; of late, her brother and his machinations. She cares for victory because it ensures her safety. She has never, before now, betrayed her father.

Ashdanar has lost eighteen of twenty-four ships in his armada, including two dreadnoughts. A sacrifice for his escape. A highlight of his failure to reach and conquer an Ascendant golden world. He walks through the city barefoot, his only clothing a white cotton skirt gathered at his waist. Obeisance in the face of his failure.

The plaza is a rectangular affair of rough limestone, its corners marked by four obelisks. Behind Ihuet and Amzu are an array of minor priestesses, attendants, and scribes. Ashdanar approaches them then prostrates himself before his father and sister, arms spread wide, palms and forehead pressed against the ground.

“Forgive me, God, for the loss of your wealth and the failure of your first born,” he says. His voice rings out over the crowd—they are hushed, tense, listening. A priestess comes forward with a bowl of blood—a calf recently slaughtered for his sanctification.

Ihuet takes the bowl and pours it slowly from the crown of his head, over his back, his thighs, then waits. Ashdanar rises to his knees and lifts his head to their false sun and Ihuet pours the last of the blood over his face. Her brother’s arms rise up, his face tilted just so, beatific and in ecstasy. Benediction.

She withdraws as Amzu comes forward and passes a ringed hand over his son’s face, then kisses his forehead.

“My first born is returned to me, whole and unharmed,” he says. “All is forgiven.”

All is always forgiven.

The ceremony ends. The Bull God and the Father God retreat to the palace. Ihuet retreats to the temple. She is not given to anxiety or fear. Or rather—she wasn’t before the portents of her brother’s rise. Her stomach is in knots and the palms of her hands sting. She is a goddess. She is the only daughter of Amzu. She is terrified of Ashdanar’s eventual visit.

He arrives four hours later, pristine, in a gold skirt and a torque of iron and blue stone around his neck. His shorn head is dusted in gold and his eyes lined with kohl. She is, foolishly, in a prophetic chamber. The temple is littered with them—large ones for the ordinary Daganites, small ones for dignitaries, rotundas for prophecy ahead of a campaign. Amzu has decided to engage the Ascendancy in truth, when their enemies have always been Qart Hadast and the Knives of Sardis.

Ihuet is preparing the royal rotunda when her brother enters the room.

The handmaidens go preternaturally still. She turns to face him and the handmaidens file out as soon as he passes them, terrified of being caught in his web. She doesn’t cower or shrink. She is the Oracle of the Father God, who yet lives. He cannot harm her.

“Brother,” she greets and folds her hands in front of her.

He climbs the steps to her dais.

“Sister,” he says congenially. “How have you been in my absence?”

“Fine,” she replies.

She has never loved her brother. No one has ever expected her to and Ashdanar has never sought to endear himself to her. But now—now, she hates him.

“I am glad to hear it,” he says, reaching her. “I toil to maintain your safe and idyllic existence.”

She casts her eyes down. “And we are grateful for the sacrifices of the Bull God.”

“Ihuet.” There’s a sharpness to his voice. She remains still as he lifts her chin. “You know why I am here.”

Ihuet can’t control the flinch of fear and the way she shrinks back, against all logic. He won’t harm her in the temple, and yet his hand snakes out and grips her arm.

“If you are grateful for my sacrifice,” he says, “you will prophecy at the brazier.”

She hates how small she feels. Hates that the circumstances of her birth bind her to this spot. She shrinks back again.

“Please, Ashdanar,” she begs.

And that satisfies him. It is the answer he needs—she would not fear it if she were confident in the outcome. He grins, vicious and hungry and she trembles. Fate has locked into place. His greed, her father’s ignorance, her own impotence. Some wills, she thinks, are insurmountable.

And then he finds her face, a rictus of fear, and his expression softens.

“Fear not, sister,” he says softly and trails a finger down her cheek. “You are foremost in my heart. And ours is a glorious future.”

His lips are soft on her forehead. She sees nothing as he bounds back down the steps and exits the chamber. The doors groan shut and Ihuet drops to her knees, shaking, her hand around her throat. The snakes beneath her gown writhe in fear.

• • • •

Tazenket sits on the edge of her bed in her chambers onboard the Tanit Ascendant. Her head is bowed, her hands pressed against her temples.

The Basileus doesn’t like to lose. No one onboard the Tanit would consider their engagement with the Bull God a loss. Eighteen ships foundered, including two dreadnoughts. A triumph by any measure but hers. She wanted the Bull God’s head on a platter. Anyone willing to ignite a reactor on not one, but two dreadnoughts didn’t deserve command.

That the oracle was right figures only a little in her mind at present. The Bull God and therefore the Father God crossing into Ascendancy territory is a declaration of war. Inevitable, she thinks. Helped by Tureght’s leak of information to them. They have crushed the Qart Hadast Empire in the years after its cataclysmic collapse, and then the Knives of Sardis and the Ephesian Syndicate. Amzu is working his way through the galaxy, piece by piece.

She hears the chime of the oracle’s jewelry before her gold painted fingers comb through the short hair at the nape of her neck. Tazenket squeezes her eyes shut. She is dreaming. The oracle cannot be onboard her ship.

“You look quite dejected for someone celebrating a military victory,” the oracle says. Her voice is sweet, musical. Tazenket lifts her head.

The Oracle of the Eye stands over her, robed in a dark chartreuse—she wears a black cotton sleeve of a gown underneath with chartreuse tulle, pleated, falling in a tide to her feet. A gold belt is wound around her waist and over her right shoulder is a scarf of black velvet, its ends fringed in gold tassel. The serpent that sat between her breasts in Tazenket’s dream is now wound around her throat, its head disappearing behind her left ear and into her hair.

“I am not asleep,” Tazenket says wearily and comes to her feet.

“Indeed not,” the oracle replies and looks up at her. “And yet—.”

“Here you are,” she finishes. “Should I be worried?”

“I am the only one with the capability,” she says and wanders away to Tazenket’s bar cart. “And only because you are close enough to one of our relays.”

Tazenket makes a note to search for Amzu’s relays within their borders.

“You have surprised me, Basileus,” the oracle says. She has one finger on the cap of a bottle of spirits. “I am not easily surprised.”

That elicits a short laugh from Tazenket. “No, I imagine not. How have I surprised you?”

“I did think you would kill the Bull God at the first available opportunity,” she says.

Tazenket considers her then and closes the space between them. The oracle watches her unafraid; indeed, she has nothing to fear. It is only her consciousness that has been projected into Tazenket’s quarters. She cannot be hurt—can leave anytime she wishes. And yet she watches Tazenket closely.

Ihuet, goddess, daughter of Amzu, Oracle of the Eye, barely comes to Tazenket’s shoulder. She is slender where Tazenket is thick, her hair long where Tazenket’s hair is buzzed short. Tazenket trails a thumb over her cheek—her projection is warm and doesn’t ripple at contact. Strong relays.

“Why do you want me to kill your brother?” she asks.

She thinks she won’t answer as she pulls away and walks to the center of the room. The gown ripples behind her—Tazenket knows Dagan is too far, even with relays, for the projection to be so flawless. She believes only a little in gods, and certainly she doesn’t think Amzu is divine in the way the Daganites do. But there is something—

As if sensing her thoughts Ihuet asks: “Does the Ascendancy have a creation myth?”

Tazenket snorts. “We have many—our reach is vast. Our cultures vary. Some believe one thing, others another.”

“No state religion?”

“The forging of the Ascendancy is mythic enough.”

The oracle’s mouth quirks into a smile. “How quaint. Do you know ours?”

Tazenket shakes her head.

“First,” Ihuet begins, “there was nothing. And then a pale blue dot—the planet Uskish, wreathed in dead water. And then a miracle occurred: the planet birthed a single mound of land and the land birthed Amzu. Glorious and brilliant was he and so filled with joy that he danced and where his feet struck the ground, vegetation grew. Where he swam, fish sprung up in his wake. But he was alone—even as some fish came to land and others launched into the sky, there were no others like him. And so, he spilled his seed on the ground, and Ashdanar sprang forth. And he spilled his seed into the sea and Ihuet walked out of the waves.

“Do you know the next part, Basileus?”

Tazenket’s breath is lodged in her throat. She shakes her head.

“Godhood is a lonely existence—Amzu is content to be the only father, but the way of gods is proliferation. The first pair procreate so that their children may adjudicate in their stead, for their dominion is far reaching and eternal.”

Her walk back to Tazenket is graceful, lithe. It makes her think of mosaics in the temple of Atar, of oracles and priestesses dancing before their gods.

“Have I shocked you, Basileus?”

“Surely you are protected,” she says, rather than answer. “Your father—.”

“My father will not heed reason,” Ihuet replies. “And in place of reason, he will not heed his oracle.”

Tazenket feels bewitched. The oracle’s eyes are luminous and her mouth is round and full. The snake coiled around her throat ripples.

Her chamber doors hissing open break the spell. Tinitzir stares uncomprehending at the two of them, black eyes wide, before lifting her sidearm.

“Wait!” Tazenket bellows.

The gun is aimed at the oracle. “Why is the Oracle of the Eye onboard our ship?” Tinitzir asks. On the heels of Tureght’s execution, it’s a fair question.

“Why indeed?” the oracle says and her form ripples, then reappears beside Tinitzir.

The general swears and swings around. The oracle smiles, dimple cheeked and lovely. Mocking.

“In three weeks’ time you will receive an invitation to Dagan from my brother,” the oracle says, ignoring the gun.

“Outsiders aren’t allowed on Dagan,” Tinitzir bites out.

“Hostilities always cease at the death of an old monarch and the ascension of a new one.”

Her general draws in a startled breath. Tazenket folds her arms over her chest.

“This is what you wanted to avoid,” she says.

“Accept his invitation, Tazenket,” says the oracle. “You will not like the galaxy beneath the rule of my children.”

• • • •

Two weeks after Ihuet sees the broad-shouldered Lord of Neveh, Amzu, Father God of the Eye, plummets out of the sky of Uskish.

Here is the fourth level of Dagan, in its bowels, the mirror image of Nekheb: the city of the dead. It is not a graveyard—the bodies of the Daganites are turned to compost for the farms in Nekhen. The bodies of their soldiers and warriors are cremated and sent to float among the stars. The floor is black metal and there is a single three-sided pyramid in the center carved out of meteorite. Its sides gather the dew of Lake Nekhen, so high does it rise. Built around it is a gate with a single, locked, entrance. Those mourning their dead come down and scrawl their loved one’s name against its unforgiving stone knowing that in a day or two it will disappear. Beyond the pyramid’s gate are buildings half its height, the walls facing the pyramid ramrod straight, those facing the walls of Dagan built at a slope. They, too, are made of meteorite.

Before Dagan was filled with mortals the city of the dead was alive with ghosts. It was not the city of the dead, but the first city, shaped by Ihuet’s own hand. She is the only one who remembers.

Ihuet stands farthest from the pyramid, at the edge of the city. Below Dagan hangs the pale blue dot that is Uskish, unpopulated but for the first mound, and Amzu’s first temple. And there just above its atmosphere is Amzu’s ship. Before Uskish and Dagan, her father loved nothing more than the stars. And here now, he flies his old ship, reveling in the beauty of the void. And there, she sees, the fire of destruction on his ship’s gossamer wings, the shudder of the vessel, its steep and unstoppable plummet as it’s caught by gravity. It does not wink out; it is engulfed in flames. She feels the moment her father dies as an unmaking of herself. Her body folds in half, her hands braced against the glass keeping her from reaching him. She remembers first knowing—understanding—that Amzu was her father, her eyes blinking blearily up into a light as bright as the sun, his hand on her forehead. She draws in a broken breath, can feel her handmaidens avert their eyes.

It is a long time before she can straighten.

Her handmaiden holds out the tray bearing her father’s first crown. She takes the platter and makes her way steadily through the city of the dead until she reaches the temple of Wadjet. The road to the temple is a wide boulevard paved in gray stone, lined on either side by eight blank pillars. Each pair lights up as she passes it, heralding her arrival. The temple itself is a single long room—the ceiling is clear glass and the black pyramid cast its shadow over it from the east. Here are great braziers, cold for nearly a century, lining the path to the temple’s end. And there, erect, tall as three men, is the effigy of Wadjet.

Here Ihuet can still hear the sound of her voice, wrathful and heart broken. Here, still, she can hear her father making promises that he can no longer keep. And there, at the feet of the effigy of Wadjet is her old helm, rusted by almost a century of disuse. Ihuet sets her father’s crown in the place next to it and waits.

In an hour, she hears the first wailing of mortals as news of her father’s demise reaches the station.

[end Part I]

©2022 by S.G. Demciri.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

S.G. Demciri is a Black Amazighi writer of science fiction and fantasy. She received her PhD in English literature with a focus on Victorian literature and translation in 2020. After graduating she lectured on the history of western fantasy, drawing connections from Beowulf, through depictions of the crusades in medieval literature, the chivalric romance, William Morris all the way to Tolkien. A former Victorianist and lapsed Medievalist, she now writes for video games. She can be found on Twitter at @sgdemciri and online at sgdemciri.com.

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

One Basket

C.C. Finlay | 7676 words

::if ur thirsty go get a drink::

Alaya glanced up from her chatscreen and across the small apartment to the blinking red light on the family water tap; they’d already used up their daily ration. She licked dry lips. Simone didn’t understand—she lived down in Grand Tunnel, where everyone got an extra liter of drinking water per day just because they were old families sitting on the biggest ice vein left in the asteroid.

::maybe ill just go swimming:: Alaya answered.

Simone responded with video clips of surfing—an old Earth sport they’d just learned about in history class at school—and they were both laughing when Alaya heard the lock buzz open on the front door. Her mom wasn’t supposed to be home from work for hours yet, but if she came back from work anytime and Alaya’s homework wasn’t done—

::gotta go:: Alaya typed, then quit chat.

Her grandmother Dionne pushed through the door with the urgency of a Leak Team. She wore her own well-patched walking suit, everything but the gloves and hood, and carried a second set of outside gear folded under her arm.

There was no hello, no how-are-you, from the little old woman, just a hasty, “Alaya, come over here and stand against the wall.”

Alaya froze like mist in a vacuum: she recognized the second set of gear tucked under her grandmother’s arm.

“What are you waiting for? Go on,” her grandmother said, with a casual swat at the back of her head.

It didn’t come close to hitting her, but it was enough to send Alaya scooting from the table to the kitchen wall. There were twin pairs of ascending lines and corresponding dates written on the buffed sealcrete. One set of lines had been added every year on her birthday. Rhymed with earthday. If you counted only her own trips around the sun, she was little more than one year old, but out here in the frontier archipelago of the colonies their clocks were still tied like a lifeline to Earth’s spin and orbit.

“Don’t slouch! Stand up straight.”

Alaya stretched to her full height, towering over her diminutive, Earth-born grandmother. She tried to glare at the old woman without meeting her eyes.

“That’s what I thought. Only fourteen years old, and you’re already as tall as Brandon was when he—” She paused. “You’re the same height as your brother was. Guess he took after me.”

Alaya folded her arms across her chest. So she was already as tall as her brother Brandon was when he died. So what? There would never be another mark, another year scratched on the wall for him. Sometimes his absence still seemed as unreal as the way they measured years.

“Hello, Alaya.” It was the pleasant-but-firm voice of her geometry homework, calling to her from the tablet at the table. “Do you need additional help solving this problem?”

“No, I’m fine,” she said sharply.

“Haven’t you got your homework done yet?” her grandmother asked.

Alaya hesitated. “Everything except math,” she mumbled. “I had a hard time concentrating.”

“Babygirl, you have got to keep up with your homework. Especially math.”

Alaya’s grandmother was a bioengineer and her mother was a farmacist, and they both expected her to follow in their sciencey footsteps, even though she dreamed of working at the docks just for a chance of seeing the sky outside their asteroid. At school she competed in every sport they offered because the best athletes with the best reflexes had the best chance of being assigned to the docks.

“Alaya, are you listening to me? Promise me you’ll do your math when we get back.”

Back? “Where are we going?” Alaya asked.

“Promise.”

“I promise,” she said, eyeing her brother’s suit. “Where’re we going?”

“I thought you liked surprises.” She handed the suit to Alaya. “Carry this—you’ll need it.”

Alaya didn’t like surprises so much as she hated to be bored, but this looked like the opposite of boredom. A walking suit was good for only one thing. Most of her friends had gone walking on the asteroid’s surface at least once already, if only at the main dock entrance, and Simone had been outside half a dozen times to help her father do solar panel maintenance. But ever since Brandon died, Alaya’s mother had kept her tethered to schoolwork and far away from anything with a whiff of risk.

Grandma Dionne stood in the doorway. “Are you coming or not?”

Her grandmother was prickly, quick to change her mind when she got frustrated, and Alaya didn’t want to ruin this opportunity—her next chance to even stand in one of the big open locks at the docks could be years off. Tucking the suit under her arm, she followed her grandmother out of their quarters and closed the door.

“Grandma, where are we—?”

“Save your breath, girl. If I wanted to talk, I could have invited you to dinner.”

Her grandmother must be twisted up in nerves if she didn’t want to talk. Alaya’s heart started to race—that had to mean they were going outside.

But then they turned the wrong direction, away from the main corridor. Instead, her grandmother led her to a maintenance tunnel and one set of locks, then through another and finally into a series of freezing and abandoned ice-mining tunnels. Together, they hurried six kilometers up-spin, their way illuminated only by a hovering dronelight that scattered the stray beetle-mice. The air grew thinner as they went, which made Alaya’s mouth grow even drier.

At last they dropped into an old, dusty barrel lock. Built by the asteroid’s original wildcat miners, it was barely big enough for two people, with the hatch they came through connected to the tunnels and another situated in the middle of the floor leading to the surface where it could connect directly with a ship. Maybe her grandmother was going to take her flying somewhere?

The space had been designed for earthers, so it was a cramped for someone as tall as Alaya. Her grandmother docked the drone in a charger, and it lit up the space. The wall niche contained fresh supplies: two airbags, some coiled cable, baskets, rolls of patchtape.

“Put it on,” her grandmother said, nodding at the suit in Alaya’s hands. When Alaya’s heel slid all the way through the stiff pants into the boot, her grandmother exhaled relief, breath condensing into crystal fog.

“I could have tried it on at home,” Alaya said, shivering.

“Your mother might have caught us.”

Alaya’s eyes widened. “You didn’t tell mom?”

“We don’t have a lot of time before your mother gets home from work so I’m not hooking up the plumbing for you,” her grandmother answered, changing the topic. “So if you have to go, just hold it.”

“I’ll be fine!” A half-hearted protest, but still enough to make her lips crack. Alaya wasn’t peeing more than a couple times a day. The asteroid’s orbit was at aphelion, as far as it could be from the regular belt routes. Supply ships hadn’t visited in months, and everyone’s food and water rations had been cut. For those in the outer rim of tunnels, like Alaya’s family, rations had been cut a little more. Plus Alaya was giving part of her shorted portion to her aunt, who’d just had a baby. The next ship was scheduled to arrive in about a week, but it could just as easily be another month or two before it showed.

“Seal everything up tight,” her grandmother said. “This suit hasn’t been worn in a couple years, so we’ll need to run a leak test first.”

This suit hasn’t been worn since your brother’s accident, is what she could have said.

Either the coriolis effect or nerves were making Alaya’s stomach twirl. “I can’t get this glove on.”

Her grandmother reached over and snapped it shut. “Did you see how I did that?”

“Yes.”

Her grandmother unsnapped the glove. “Now you do it.”

The second attempt went smoother. When the glove was snug, she said, “I don’t know how to connect the hood either.”

“Just fit it into the collar, it’ll seal itself. Let me hook the airbag up to your breathing system first. Did you see how I did that?”

“Yes.”

“Good. You’ll do it next time. Now put on your hood.”

With thick-fingered hands, Alaya tugged the hood over her head and fitted it into the collar socket. When it clicked into place and sealed, lines of colored text lit up the clear faceplate.

Thigpen, B.
Location: Effie
Air remaining: 177 minutes
Depth: +2 m
Nearest airlock at: O m
Voice channel: open
In range: Thigpen, D.

Thigpen, B. The B was for her brother Brandon—she’d have to change that later if this was going to be her suit now. Thigpen, D., her grandmother. Effie, short for Ephigenia, named after the Ethiopian saint, not the figure from Greek myth. Effie was a dark, dense C-type asteroid, potato-shaped, one of the independents located on the edge of Jupiter’s trailing Trojans, and not to be confused with Iphigenia, a corporate asteroid in the main belt. The channel was local but no one else was close enough to overhear them through the rock. The airlock indicator would always point to her nearest way inside; the target-shaped graphic blinked green at the moment because she was standing in an airlock. Other graphics signaled her vital signs. Everything was green, except her pulse, which was beating fast enough to blink yellow.

“Turn around.” Her grandmother’s voice in her ear. She was wearing her own hood.

Alaya turned and bumped against the wall.

She felt a tug on the floppy airbag draped over her shoulder. “Your suit’s going to fill with red smoke,” her grandmother said. “It won’t hurt you, but hold your breath.”

“If it won’t hurt me, why do I need to hold my—”

But then red smoke was swirling in Alaya’s face, so she clamped her lips tight and squeezed her eyes shut. Panic bile rose in her throat, but she swallowed it—she had no desire to scrub her brother’s suit clean with sand and rags.

Her grandmother mumbled a string of curse words as she ripped wide strips of tape off a roll and slapped them onto spots behind Alaya’s knee, under her armpit, and in the middle of her back where the airbag connected to her suit. Alaya realized that’s where Brandon’s suit had been torn in the tunnel accident, where his air and life had leaked out while he was trapped under the borer. A hand on her shoulder spun her around—her grandmother checking her from every angle.

“I’m going to flush your suit now.”

The air whooshed out, sending a cloud of red smoke swirling up the lock and into the tunnel. Alaya’s ears popped. She opened her eyes just in time to see her grandmother tuck the tape roll into a pouch at her waist. Then she stood on her tiptoes to touch their faceplates together. Alaya saw herself reflected in the old woman’s big brown eyes.

“I’m so proud of you, babygirl,” her grandmother said. She stepped back, breaking contact. “Now when we’re out there, you do everything I say.”

It was the same tone of voice she used with the assistants in her lab, and Alaya responded the same way they did. “Yes, ma’am.”

Her grandmother picked up a large spool of microcable, unreeled a length, and tugged on it skeptically. She hooked a carabiner to the harness on Alaya’s suit and connected the two of them. “We’re going to follow the line of anchors. You always have your carabiner hooked to an anchor until I tell you to move. You got that?”

If they were using a line, it meant they were going outside and not into another vessel. “Yes, ma’am.”

Her grandmother tapped a round metal anchor on the airlock wall. “I want to see you hook it, unhook it, and do it again.”

Alaya attached and removed the carabiner several times. “How’s that?”

“Good enough. We are never both unhooked at the same, do you understand?”

“Why?” Her pulse started to race again, making a yellow heart beat its warning on her faceplate. “What’s going to happen?”

“Nothing’s going to happen, we’ll be fine,” she said firmly. “But just because we’ll be fine doesn’t mean we won’t be careful. It’s the other way around—careful is what keeps us fine. Got it?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Alaya said, but she called up a map of the asteroid to try to figure out where they were. The answer was approximately nowhere, close to nothing. “Grandma, what are we doing out here?”

Her grandmother squeezed her shoulder. “We’re going to look for wild chickens.”

“Chickens?” Alaya laughed. The Lumpkins, who were the richest family on Effie, kept dozens of chickens, goats, and other animals on their algae farm over in Iron Hole. Alaya had visited them with one of her school groups. “You’re making fun of me. There aren’t any chickens in space.”

“Then they’ll just be our secret, won’t they? Now seal the hatch.”

Sealing the hatch was Alaya’s job because she could reach it more easily. With their suits on, the only thing distinguishing the two of them was size, and anyone who saw them would take her for the adult and her grandmother for a child. As she reached up and spun the door shut, she remembered something her mother said once: Being trapped on Earth made people small—we had to move into space in order to grow.

“Sealed,” she said.

Her grandmother wiped dust off the control pad, entered a code, and cursed when the panel flashed amber. She tapped in a different code, and the old light blinked mint. A fan whirred and pulled the air out through a vent in the wall. There was a mechanical click, and the door at their feet popped up a half inch.

“Ha,” her grandmother laughed. “Your uncle DeAndre told me this airlock still worked, but I wasn’t sure I believed him. I didn’t test it when I brought the supplies down here because I was worried it might only work once.” She bent down, turned a lever, spun the wheel, and pulled the round door open.

Alaya knew that Effie had been spun up to give the rockers inside an illusion of greater gravity. She knew that the floors they walked on were the inside of an eggshell, and their heads were pointed toward the yolk.

Knowing that was one thing. It was another thing entirely to see her grandmother open the hatch, drop through the floor, and flip upside down so that her feet were on the outer surface.

Alaya froze.

The hole gaped at her feet. She saw nothing but empty space and the diamond pinlights of distant stars.

A sharp yank on the cable at her waist pulled her down to her knees.

“Come on,” her grandmother said. Her shadow leaned across the hole, eclipsing the stars. “Don’t waste air. We’ve got work to do.”

“I can’t—”

“Yes, you can. Grab the hold bars and swing through like you’re going around a corner.”

“But—”

“Move!”

Alaya swallowed hard and grabbed the bar.

“And don’t forget the baskets.”

She reached over to the wall niche and clipped both microfiber baskets to her wrist. Baskets were different than sacks because they had rigid bottoms, which made them easier to prop open in low gravity, and lids that sealed magnetically when you flipped them shut. She fixed her eyes on her grandmother’s feet, and swung through the hatch. The round circle of an anchor glared at her like a blind eye, and she slapped her safety line onto it. After she pulled the hatch shut, she stayed there on her knees, staring at the ground.

Layers upon layers of bootprints were pressed into the regolith. That meant lots of people had walked here before. Which was less reassuring to Alaya than she expected. She gripped the access bar and tried not to barf. What was it Simone said about going outside the first time? You feel like you’re going to fall up, so just stare at the ground in front of you until the feeling goes away. It was a lot easier to stare at the ground if she stayed on her knees.

A hearty laugh burst in her ears. “All right, that’s long enough. Get on your feet, babygirl.”

“But—”

“Don’t but me. Sounds like your mama talking. She never did like taking walks with me—too much of an agoraphobe.” She grabbed Alaya by the shoulder and jerked her to her feet—Alaya stiffened and kept her eyes fixed on her own feet, just to make sure they didn’t leave the surface. “What? Are you worried you’ll go flying off the surface? We’ll be walking against the spin, toward Pancake Crater. Nothing leaves the surface going against the spin. When we’re done, we’ll keep going around the crater to the Sunnytown Lock on the other side. Against spin the whole time. No risk at all.”

Alaya hesitated before speaking. “I don’t think that’s right, grandma. Escape velocity doesn’t have any direction.”

Her grandmother made a little hmmm sound that didn’t sound entirely displeased. “How about when we get back to your room, you do the math and show me?”

“Yes, ma’am.” She spoke quietly. Math was the farthest thing from her thoughts at the moment, and she wasn’t eager to lead her grandmother down a path toward more homework.

“If you’re worried about getting lost, you can think of the anchors as a corridor. As long as you stay connected to them, you’re on a known path, where someone else can find you if they come looking.”

“Uh-huh.” Alaya bit her tongue to keep from saying that if nobody knew they were out here, nobody would come looking for them. She kept her head down, looking out for the trail as they walked. The display in her faceplate showed elevated pulse and respirations. She tried to slow her breathing. “You’re going to a lot of trouble just to play some joke on me about chickens.”

“That’s what you think, huh?” Her grandmother took a leap toward the horizon and landed near the nickel-plated knob of another anchor. “Guess you better keep up if you want to find out.”

Alaya followed, keeping one eye on the beacon of her grandmother’s suitlight and the other on her own datastream. The airlock indicator changed every ten meters or so, and now an arrow pointed back the way they’d come. The little red heart graphic pulsed fast, hard, and the respiration icon puffed little yellow warning clouds at her.

Meanwhile, they hopscotched from anchor to anchor, pitted old bolts sunk deep into the dark, carbonaceous surface of the asteroid. They had been left behind by the wildcat miners who later became the early squatters who became the first families who settled there. Everybody knew the history of the first four families: Dudley, Lumpkin, Sapp, and Singh. Alaya’s family were Thigpens and Patels and Broadnaxes, mostly second- and third-wavers, although her uncle DeAndre had an ex whose other partner was related to the Sapps. Alaya was so scared she watched the ground the whole time just to make sure it didn’t slip away.

They came to a stop.

“Look up, babygirl,” said the voice in her ear. “Go on, look up. No prettier show in the universe. And to think some folks go their whole lives and never see it.”

Simone’s advice had helped, although she didn’t think she’d ever admit that to Simone. But her stomach had settled a bit, so Alaya glanced up—

—stars wheeled slowly overhead, like welding sparks drifting down an unlit tunnel with no visible bottom—

—and gasped.

Her grandmother chuckled softly. “Yeah, you got eyes big enough to drink it in. Thought you might. Nothing like your mama.”

Alaya loved her mother, but she stood a little straighter thinking that she might be better at something that her mother was. As they loped along again, she kept her neck bent back, soaking in the sky, glancing down just long enough to clip her anchor or check her step. A relatively smooth path stretched along the row of bolts from the airlock to an old landing site, but once they passed the site the trail disappeared in rubble and spall. Alaya barely noticed. Out there somewhere in the spinning dark was Mars, with its underground cities and its first shallow, surface lakes, and the Moon, with all its military bases and atomic scarring, and the orbiting platforms around Jupiter and Saturn, and somewhere else in the asteroid belt were the cities in Ceres and Vesta and Juno, the mining stations that supplied Effie and all the other parched rocks with—

She stubbed her toe on a boulder, stumbled, and fell hard into a jagged cluster of rocks. Her facescreeen flashed red as a warning pinged. “I’ve got a leak!”

“Hold on, I’m coming,” her grandmother said, pulling out her roll of tape as she hopped to Alaya’s side.

“I found it, it’s on my knee,” Alaya said, clamped a hand over the tiny tear, twisting the fabric shut. The red light switched to yellow, but the alarm kept buzzing. Her minutes of remaining air ticked down quickly.

“Okay, I need you to spread the fabric flat, on three,” her grandmother said, with a strip of tape poised to go. “One, two, three.”

Alaya smoothed the fabric flat—her faceplate burned crimson, the alarm squealed—and her grandmother slapped the tape down, silencing everything.

“You okay?” her grandmother asked.

“I’m fine,” Alaya said. “I’m sorry—”

“Nothing to be sorry about. These cheap old suits were meant for temporary, emergency use—not to be passed down from generation to generation. And anybody who doesn’t have their head up in the stars the first time they go for a walk has their head up their ass. I know that’s not you. But now you know the danger, so be more careful, okay?”

“Okay,” Alaya said. She checked her vitals. “I’m down to about 130 minutes of air.”

“That’s plenty,” her grandmother said. “We’re close to the crater.”

Alaya studied the surface. Before them stretched a single set of old footprints, going out and coming back, frozen in the dust like a child’s trail through wet concrete in a new tunnel.

The old prints matched the new ones left by her grandmother. The exact same boots, only the first set looked fresh with deep treads and the new set were worn smooth at the heels. She wondered exactly how long her grandmother had been using this same suit. Probably ever since she arrived on Effie.

They continued, slowly picking through the crater’s ejecta, and Alaya had to keep her head down, her eyes focused on her next step. Her grandmother paused to find another anchor, and then paused longer for the one after that. They reached the end of the footprints at the rim of the crater. Her grandmother stood there, staring down the long, low slope.

“What are you looking for?” Alaya asked.

“This is where I scattered them,” her grandmother said, scanning the surface intently. “I had a theory at the time that there would be more water contained in the regolith around a crater because of ice ejected by the impact. And I figured no one else would come looking for it. Too low gain for quick extraction.”

Alaya studied the crater, but it had such a low albedo it was almost as dark as the sky above them. “Your chickens?”

“I designed and released them about thirty years ago, when your mother was the age you are now.” She let out some of the line, easing her way down the slope. “I knew we’d need them some day. I just didn’t know it would be this long.”

If she didn’t sound so serious, and if she wasn’t one of Effie’s top genetic engineers, Alaya would have taken it for a joke. She licked her cracked lips. Even her tongue felt thick and dry in the recycled air of the suit. “Grandma?”

“Yeah?”

“If it’s so hard living here, why did you leave Earth?”

“Just because it’s hard here doesn’t mean it’s better back there. When I left Earth, it felt like we were escaping a house on fire. At least out here, in the archipelago, the problems are a more a manageable size. One tiny rock full of desperate people instead of a whole planet full. Nobody’s got nuclear weapons. Hell, nobody has guns. We’re all just struggling to get by together.” She paused. “Your eyes are better than mine—do you see anything?”

“Like what, a chicken?”

“If the sun was up, there’d be enough light that we’d see them moving. No, I’m looking for signs of movement.”

“That twisty little line there,” Alaya said, pointing at a thin trail curving like a sine wave through the dust. And then added, only half seriously: “It looks like it was made by a chicken.”

But her grandmother said, “Yeah, I see it.”

She skipped down the slope to a dark, dusty rock sitting at the end of the sine wave. She reached down and lifted it up with two hands, holding it up for Alaya to see.

Six tiny legs twitched slowly.

Alaya squawked and hopped backwards.

“Get back here,” her grandmother snapped, and Alaya caught herself. She eased forward in a crouch.

“What is it?” she said.

“I called them chickens because I designed them to lay eggs. I started with cockroach genes, because they’re vacuum and radiation resistant, but if I had to do it all over again now I might try some of the new macroexpression tardigrade genomes instead. These creatures get just enough light from the sun to let them crawl through the dust. They chew up the regolith, sorting out the tiny bits of water, which collects in a pouch back here . . .”

She squeezed the rear end of the creature and its legs twitched, a little more vigorously than before. Her grandmother muttered some curse words which Alaya knew she better never repeat, and put the “chicken” down again, making sure to brush the dust off its back. The creature lurched forward an inch or two into shadow and then stopped.

Her grandmother traced the animal’s trail backward, bent over, studying the dust as she went. With a sudden, delighted “Aha!” her hand darted into the regolith and came up holding a speckled gray ovoid as big as the palm of her glove.

“It’s an egg!” Alaya said.

Her grandmother laughed. “It’s over a hundred em-ells of pure frozen ice, is what it is.”

Alaya swallowed a dry lump in her throat. 100 milliliters. Just five of those would be enough to bring her daily water ration almost to normal again. And they could recycle most of that, day after day, at least until the supply ships came. “How many are there?”

“Let’s find out,” her grandmother said. She traced the sine wave back through the dust and pulled up another one. “Hurry up and bring those baskets down here.”

Alaya slid cautiously down the slope to her grandmother’s side. She unhooked one of the baskets from her wrist and set it on the surface. The weighted bottom gave the microcloth shape and kept it open. The first two eggs tumbled out of her grandmother’s hand and into the basket’s dark mouth.

“I’ll take this basket and this direction,” her grandmother said, unclipping the safety line that connected her to Alaya. “You take that direction over that way and start filling up yours. Tie on extra line if you need to, but stay anchored.”

Too excited to speak, Alaya turned and scanned the dust for the telltale tracks. When the full-spectrum light of her hood lamp fell on a dark rock, the rock seemed to wake up and twitch slowly through the dust. This time, Alaya didn’t jump.

Up close she could see the resemblance to the Lumpkin chickens. The creature was about the same size and color as the astrolorp breed, which had been specially bred for low gravity on the asteroids. The large round body had a carapace instead of feathers, and wings that spread out slowly like solar panels to catch and absorb the light from her hood lamp. The large body was topped by a tiny head with hard, beak-like mandibles that slowly pecked and crunched through the regolith.

She turned her head to look at the creature’s track. Deprived of photons, it stopped moving. “How many eggs has each one laid?” she asked as she followed the trail backward and found her first.

“It takes years to lay an egg, but there should be four or five in each trail,” her grandmother said. “Keep an eye on the clock and hurry up now. We’ll need about forty minutes to get to Sunnytown Lock.”

Alaya checked her datastream. Less than ninety minutes of air left, which meant fifty minutes to work. She gave a verbal command for an alarm at forty-eight minutes and then she started hunting for eggs like a toddler at an Easter party. She found four eggs along the first trail, but spent too much time looking for a fifth, then too long again finding her next chicken and adding line to her safety rope to reach it. Her basket was less than half full when the alarm went off.

“Grandma?”

“Start heading back up slope,” her grandmother’s voice said in her ear. “I’m going to get just one more . . .”

Alaya turned in time to see the distant figure of her grandmother, about half a kilometer away and free of her safety line, take a long leap downslope toward a cluster of dark, chicken-sized rocks. It was graceful and precise and Alaya found herself admiring the skill of it as her grandmother’s foot touched down in the dust—

Her leg twisted, slamming her into the ground.

Her grandmother screamed simultaneously with the safety alarms. Her basket spilled and eggs rolled down the slope through the black dust.

Alaya froze for a second while her grandmother reached for her leg and shrieked again.

With more reflex than conscious decision, Alaya jumped toward her grandmother. The basket of eggs dangling from her wrist bounced against her leg. When her safety line jerked her up short, she unhooked it and kept going.

She landed in the dust at her grandmother’s side and immediately saw what had happened: the toe of her foot had lodged in a crack between two rocks buried in the regolith, and her momentum torqued her as she fell, snapping her leg. Her dusty gray suit was torn. White bone, bright as a knife blade, split the old woman’s black skin. Blood was everywhere, and air hissed out of the tear even as her grandmother tried to squeeze it shut with one hand and grab her tape with the other.

“Alarms off,” Alaya said. Her own suit was warning her about her elevated heart rate and breathing. Decompression training from school kicked in, and she clamped one hand over the leak while grabbing the tape from her grandmother with the other.

“You’re going . . . to have to . . . push the bone back . . .” her grandmother said through gritted teeth.

“I know,” Alaya said. There was so much blood but it was freezing as it hit the vacuum. At least the icy scab, the only bright red thing in the black and gray world, formed an emergency seal of sorts. She untangled her grandmother’s foot first and then she leaned on the leg with all her weight and pushed it back into line.

She thought she knew all of her grandmother’s curse words by now but she learned a new one. Then she took the tape and wrapped it around and around and around the leg until there wasn’t any left. “How much air do you have, grandma?”

“Enough.”

“How much?” she said, using her mama’s voice.

“Twenty-five minutes.”

“Oh my gosh!”

“There’s always more than that . . . reserves . . .”

“Shut up a second.”

Her grandmother shocked her by shutting up, but she was breathing fast the way Alaya’s aunt had been when she gave birth. Alaya’s mind raced. The airlock indicator still pointed back the way they came, only half the distance of the one to Sunnytown.

“Are you ready?” she asked her grandmother.

The old woman’s face was pale through her mask. She bit her lip and nodded.

“This is going to hurt,” Alaya said, slipping an arm under her shoulder. Then she changed her mind. “Wait a second.”

She scrambled down the slope, stuffing as many of the spilled eggs as she could into her own basket until it bulged full. Returning to her grandmother, she said, “Okay, now we can go.”

“Good thinking,” her grandmother said. It was barely a whisper.

Alaya grunted as she lifted her grandmother with one arm and the basket with the other and started slogging back up the slope. All the extra weight felt like it was pressing in on her lungs, stifling her breath. And dehydration was making her light-headed and sluggish.

But there was nothing she could do about that. With her head bent down to illuminate the path at their feet, the climb was slow as it was arduous. By the time they finally crested the ridge, Alaya’s head throbbed and she staggered dizzily. Her grandmother was panting.

“If I can’t go on, you take the eggs and you . . .”

“That was the hard part,” Alaya interrupted. “The rest will go faster.”

Her grandmother didn’t reply, just hopped along on one leg, mostly carried by Alaya’s arm around her waist. The bone had been sticking straight out of her leg. It cut right through her suit. There was so much blood. Alaya knew her grandmother was strong, but she had no idea how the woman was still going right now.

They were nearly to the landing pad when her grandmother passed out, just slipped out of Alaya’s loose grip, falling like starlight into Effie’s somber dust, where she stayed.

“Grandma,” Alaya said, her voice cracking, her lips cracking. “Grandma?”

She rolled her grandmother over, leaving a body-shaped void in the regolith. Her grandmother’s respirations were up, her blood pressure was down, and her skin was pale. Alaya bent down, grabbed her grandmother by the armpits, and started dragging her toward the airlock. The egg basket was still secured to her wrist, and by the time they passed beyond the old landing site, she was tripping over it every second or third step. If she wasn’t too dry for tears, she would have been sobbing.

Leaving her grandmother was not an option. Leaving the eggs was not an option. Carrying them both wasn’t working.

She opened the colony’s emergency radio channel and called for help. No reply. That was no surprise; there were no direct lines to any receivers from this location, and the surface was too dense to penetrate. Every warning indicator on her facescreen blinked yellow or red, but she made herself pause to think.

This was just like running deliveries for her mother’s farmacy. When the loads were too big to carry at once, she’d carry them in stages.

She unhooked the basket from her arm and then spun around, like they did in the hammer throw for strength building down in the gym and let go. It flew farther than she hoped.

Her grandmother’s eyes blinked open when she lifted her under her arms and started dragging her again. The old woman glanced side to side, panicked. “Where are the eggs?”

“We’re going to get them.”

“Don’t let anyone else know,” she said between gasps. “We don’t have enough eggs to share.”

“Stop kicking the ground,” Alaya said.

“I’m trying to help walk.”

“It’s not helping.” Her heart raced and her tongue was so swollen it threatened to choke her. At least it felt like they were climbing downhill. Part of that was the curve of the asteroid, going downward from the rim of the crater to the airlock. She was shuffling toward sunrise, but it felt like floating. “Here are the eggs. Hold on a second.”

She spun, and, with all her strength, threw them again. They sailed even farther this time before they dropped into the dust. She was panting when she grabbed her grandmother again.

“We’re going spinward,” her grandmother side, her eyes as wide and bright in the dark as a pair of moons. A red light flashed on her faceplate. Her oxygen levels were close to zero.

“It was the closest airlock,” Alaya gasped. “We couldn’t go farther.”

“Safety line?”

“No time.”

Her grandmother’s grip tightened on Alaya’s wrist. “Be careful. The real danger is the cliff just beyond the airlock—”

“No time!”

When she reached the eggs, she looked down slope and spotted the old airlock on the lip of the horizon. Still too far away. She didn’t think she could make it. Her limbs felt as loose as a bad orbit. Spots swam in her eyes. She leaned over, hands on her knees, gulping oxygen.

“Why’d we stop?” her grandmother asked through gritted teeth.

“I just . . . need to . . . catch m’breath . . .”

“Your brother . . .” her grandmother started, and then paused.

Her dead brother. Crushed in a mining accident—he had volunteered for the extra shift to bring home extra rations to help his mom and little sister. “What about him?”

“He used to keep a little chemical helper. You know what I’m saying?”

She didn’t. “No . . .”

“A stimulant. In his suit. For emergencies.”

Neither her mother nor her grandmother approved of drugs, as such, but everybody knew that you did what you had to do, especially in an emergency. Alaya figured this probably counted as an emergency. “Where?”

“Verbal command . . . tell the suit you need to wake the hell up.”

“Suit, I need to wake up.” Nothing happened.

“Wake the hell up.”

“Suit, I need to wake the hell up.”

The sharp pinch of a hypospray injection shot into the meat of her bicep. A second later, before she was done saying ouch, euphoria cometed through her blood. Confidence exploded like the volcanoes on Io. She had this. She could see the airlock. She was going to get the eggs and her grandmother to the airlock and she was going to celebrate by drinking a glass of water.

Her suit blinked a whole new set of red alarms. Her heart rate jumped into tachycardia and her respirations came twice as fast. Sharp pains stabbed through her head and chest. Her mouth felt even dryer, if that was possible. But it didn’t matter. It all was far away, like it belonged to someone else. The part of her that was present in her body right here, right now, could do anything.

“Okay, okay, okay, I got this,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier, I got this, we’re going to do this now, okay. Okay?”

“You got this.” Her grandmother grimaced, but gave her a thumbs up.

First the eggs. She picked up the basket. It was nothing. There was a long flat slope in front of her. She started spinning the basket above her head as she ran. Her reflexes had never felt so perfect. When she reached her top speed, at the apex of her leap, at just the right tangent to her spin, she let go. At exactly that moment the golden eye of the sun rose over the asteroid’s horizon, spilling cold light across the surface. The basket of eggs went sailing. Alaya landed on her knees in the dust, squinting at the extra light and grinning so wide it hurt her cheeks.

“That was good, grandma, that was really good,” she said. “I got so much power into my throw . . . wait, that’s not good, no, wait.”

The basket did not appear to be coming down. She had thrown the eggs so hard that if they hadn’t achieved escape velocity they had at least accomplished a very low orbit. They were going to sail right past the airlock and disappear over the cliff and the curve of Effie’s surface.

“Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit.”

She clapped a hand over her own mouth, ashamed at her swearing.

Her grandmother’s calls to her ablated like water in a vacuum. Alaya was already running, taking huge, dangerous bounds across the surface, chasing the shrinking basket of eggs. She was first in her class in most sports, but she had never run like she did now. The chemicals shooting through her veins charged her with electricity. The dust hid dangerous rocks, just like the ones that had broken her grandmother’s leg, but Alaya scanned the surface as she ran and missed them all. Her brain spun out dryboard calculations as she went. vesc = (2 * G * M / r)1/2 —the escape velocity was the square root of 2 times the gravitational constant, or 6.67 times 10-11 Newton-meter²/kilogram², times the mass of Effie divided by the radius at the pole, and . . .

Oh screw it. Math sucked anyway. She was going to have only one chance at this and she was running out of time.

She was fast approaching the rocky edge of an escarpment, the highest point in her route. Just beyond that, the surface of the asteroid curved sharply away, like the edge of a cliff.

Her grandmother’s voice crackled over the radio.

Alaya ignored it. Her foot hit a solid edge of stone and she launched herself at the basket. It felt like her first perfect grade card, like the first time she’d done a gene splice in her mom’s lab, like the time she’d won the school handball tournament. Flawless. Right.

The sun coming over the horizon flared on her faceplate like she was falling into a deep tunnel of white light. She hung there for a long moment. No matter how hard she stretched, the edge of the bag floated just beyond the reach of her fingertips, like she was a rogue planet with her own tiny moon. Fear shot through her, that they were both going to keep on sailing, zooming right off the edge of the asteroid and into the vast empty space toward the inner planets.

Her middle finger touched the trailing cord.

She wrapped her hand around it.

Yanked down hard.

The change in angular momentum was just enough. They fell, spinning and twisting, tangled together, into the dust just over the edge of a steep slope.

She immediately checked her suit to make sure nothing was leaking, and by some miraculous turn of fate, it wasn’t. She snapped the basket to her wrist and stood up, suddenly drained, like a bottle with a crack in the bottom. When she plodded back over the ridgeline, her grandmother’s voice burst in her ears.

“Alaya! Babygirl! Answer me! Alaya!”

“I’m coming,” she said.

“Did you—?”

“Yeah.”

“Girl.”

That was all she said. Girl. But Alaya could hear a change in her voice, something new that hadn’t been there before.

The long trudge back, dragging her grandmother to safety, the nausea and disorientation when she flipped through the airlock and stood on the inside of Effie again, stashing the eggs where no one could find them, calling for help, and dragging her grandmother downspin through the tunnels until help came to reach them—all that passed in a blur, like the lies that she spun about why they were outside and what they had been doing. Astronomy project. Dark side of the asteroid for a clearer view.

She wished the conversation with her mother had gone as easily, but she survived that too, although threats of retribution and righteous judgment to come lingered afterward in the air like the smell of burnt toast, and then Alaya escaped and went back to retrieve the eggs, and soon after that she and her grandmother were alone in their tiny apartment. Her grandmother lay in her hammock, with her leg strung up in a cast. Glowing green icons on the cast indicated that the healing stims were working.

“You know, there’s an old Earth saying,” her grandmother said with a laugh. She’d been laughing softly to herself a lot ever since the doctor started her pain meds. “Something about the danger of putting all your eggs in one basket.”

Alaya thought about that. She thought about how Effie was like a big egg floating through the solar system, with a few thousand people protected inside its shell, scraping by as well as they could. Someday a meteor might crash into them, cracking the egg and spilling them all into space. Or someday they might hatch out of there, and Alaya would head out into the wider universe to do something interesting.

The timer buzzed. Alaya rose and pulled a cup from the microwave. It contained about one hundred em-ells of dusty water rescued from the regolith. She handed it to her grandmother, who took it with a grin. Her eyes were sharp and clear. She tipped the cup to her lips, then passed it back.

Alaya accepted it back. “Sometimes, there’s no choice.”

“Huh?” her grandmother asked.

“Earth, Effie, it’s all the same. You don’t have a choice. Sometimes all your eggs are in one basket,” Alaya said. She took a sip of water. The taste was sharp and acidic on her tongue, so cool sliding down her throat. “But then you better take good care of that basket.”

©2020 by C.C. Finlay. Originally published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

C.C. Finlay edited The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction from 2014 to 2021. He is also the author of five books and dozens of stories, with work translated into sixteen languages. In 2021, he won the World Fantasy Award and he’s also been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon Awards. He and his wife, novelist Rae Carson, live in a hundred-and-forty-year-old house in Ohio alongside an ever-changing cast of cats.

Zen Solaris and the God-Child

Arden Powell | 4869 words

Zen shared his shoebox apartment with a girl named Ratter, who ate vision-pills for breakfast and tattooed her dreams on her skin. She had grown up in the Wastes and was missing her dominant arm from the elbow down. Versatile as flesh and blood, her tattoo gun was a whirring prosthetic she had built herself, configured to strap on at the shoulder. The needlepoint twitched like a fingertip, and she drew her designs with bold, exact marks.

“What do they say?” Zen asked, as she etched lines of prophecy from unknown alphabets over her ribs.

“That the world isn’t really ending.”

It was the plant tattoos Zen liked best, all roots and tendrils.

“I see them in my dreams.” The gun buzzed as she dug the needle into unmarked skin. “Everything’s getting green again.”

“When?”

“Prophecy’s not a science. Some god or angel—They’ll bring the green back when they’re ready.” She wiped away the excess ink and the shape of a child emerged, blotted with blood like something being born.

The Citadel didn’t know about her. She’d never even seen it, never been recorded in their files. “They wouldn’t want me anyway,” she always said. “Waste-living fucked up my insides; I can’t grow a thing in here. You can put whatever you want into me, but nothing’s ever coming out.”

She was invisible to the Citadel’s roving eye, but Zen wasn’t, and when the military stomp of boots sounded outside their door, they both knew it was him the mercs were after.

“You could jump,” Ratter offered.

They were thirty storeys up, nothing waiting below but the wet splatter of insides coming out to paint the dirty concrete red. Zen’s smile was a slash as he opened the door.

The merc was a tall, shapeless figure hidden under a heavy jumpsuit, head obscured by a gas mask with thick black goggles and a protruding proboscis like some misshapen insect. A blaster was strapped on at the hip, the muzzle flashed and smoky from constant use.

“You are registered as a female body,” said a toneless voice through the mask. “All healthy bodies belong to the Citadel and are required to perpetuate the species. Please sign here to verify identification.” The merc held out a solar pad with a name that wasn’t Zen’s anymore and a picture that didn’t look like him.

“No thanks.”

The merc’s goggles never betrayed a hint of thought. “Your body is property of the Citadel. Cooperation is non-negotiable.”

“You want to shove some test-tube spunk up into me so those crusty old bastards who run the joint have one more shot at prolonging the human race. We should’ve died out years ago, and no amount of half-dead radioactive embryos are going to save us now. So, with all due respect, you can take your repopulation efforts and shove them up your ass. Sir.”

The sharp crackle-punch of a blaster pulse hit Zen in the chest, and everything went black.

• • • •

The kind of green he could only remember in the backs of his teeth and the corners of his dreams, lush and creeping in around the edges of his consciousness, tendrils pushing through the cracks, looking for somewhere to take root.

• • • •

Zen was thirteen when his body changed into something unexpected. He spent the next five years on the run, too chickenshit to escape to the Fringe Zones or the Wastes for good. At eighteen, the Citadel caught him, as he’d known they would. Kids could run and hide, but the Citadel had uses for adults.

“You can’t be trusted to sustain the population,” the doctor told him. “Your generation isn’t interested in procreation, so the government has to step in to ensure the species’ survival.”

“Who wants kids right now?” Zen asked blankly.

“The children are the future.” The doctor held out a gown so thin Zen could put his fist through it if he tried. “Let’s begin.”

“What, I don’t even get to meet the guy you’re going to use to knock me up?”

“We’ll find a match based on genetic compatibility. A new generation specifically designed for the world as we know it.”

Zen snorted and snatched the gown from his hand. Citadel doctors loved to talk like they had any reliable way of testing for genetics or immunology anymore. All they could do was pair up the people whose symptoms weren’t too similar, and hope the differences would result in a sum greater than its parts. Every few years the Citadel announced some new success: a decrease in infant mortality, an increase in babies born without any obvious defects. The right ratio of boys to girls.

Zen knew better than to trust any of that shit. He knew how they kept the numbers even, cutting into soft little baby parts until they matched the cold, exact images in the surviving medical texts. Male or female, with nothing in between.

Let the doctor see what happened when they fucked around with babies’ bodies, then. He had barely dropped his pants when he heard the doctor’s sharp inhale, his audible frown. Zen bit back a vindictive smile and pulled the gown on.

“You should have a female body,” the doctor said, like Zen had done it on purpose. “When did this happen?”

Zen shrugged, tugging his gown down to cover his junk.

“Very well,” the doctor said, finally. “It doesn’t matter what the external organs look like, as long as the womb is still viable.”

Zen tasted bile, same as he always did when he heard that word. He’d have cut the thing out years ago, if he thought he’d survive the process. It didn’t matter whether it was viable—and it probably wasn’t. He’d only bled once, a few months before his body decided it was a lot less female than the doctors said.

“I need to piss,” Zen said. “Can I do that, first?”

The doctor scowled but pointed Zen to the bathroom, and Zen skipped inside and shut the door before the doctor could tell him not to. Standing on the sink, he could reach the ceiling vent, and after a good shove it came loose. He dragged himself into the opening, knees and elbows banging against the corners. All he had to do was follow the air flow and he’d find the outer edges of the building, and then it was just a matter of evading the mercs until he could escape to the Fringe. There he would meet other people like him and introduce himself as Zen and no one would know whether he was registered as a female body or not, because—

• • • •

Zen woke to starry vision and the crude metallic stink of battery-truck. Almost everything ran on solar now, but some of the older models were still squeezing juice out of archaic energy sources. When he was out on his bike he could smell them a mile off, circling like hulking metal scavengers hunting down the carrion-husks of rebel Wastoids. He blinked the headache away and pushed himself up to find that his wrists were bound, metal cuffs digging into the skin. Thin sheet metal and the bars between him and the merc at the wheel separated him from the outside world.

The merc had removed the gas mask, revealing a rough-hewn jaw and hard, flat eyes. The blaster was visible in a way meant to intimidate. Zen didn’t have a blaster but he did have a switchblade, and could handle that even with his hands tied. It was a messier way of doing business than he preferred, but blood was blood and dead was dead, squirming guts and gushing arteries and all, and he wasn’t about to let a mess stand between him and freedom. What was one merc’s life worth? Nothing, same as his. Absolutely nothing.

He would have lashed out right away if it had just been his life on the line, but he wasn’t the only one rattling around in the back of the truck. The merc hadn’t taken Ratter’s prosthetic; that was a point in their favour. Zen had seen firsthand the damage that needle could do when Ratter set her mind to violence instead of art.

“They don’t know who I am,” she said. “Just grabbed me on the off chance I was a healthy body, I guess.”

“Why’d you cooperate?”

Her eyes were sharp, same as they always were when he asked her about things bigger than either of them. “Because I’ve got a feeling that something’s coming.”

“Yeah? Well, can it hurry up and get here before we hit the Citadel?” He sat up, cracking his back. “Who’s the kid?”

The truck’s third prisoner sat huddled behind the merc’s seat, staring at Zen with wide, dark eyes. The kid was brown and androgynous, with a huge mass of tangled curls, and wearing more layers than most people bothered with. Nothing but their face and fingers were bare. Prepubescent, which didn’t rule them out as part of the repopulation effort, and they hadn’t tried to sink their teeth into him yet, so probably not a Wastoid.

Before he got an answer, something sent the truck lurching to the side. They hit a wall hard, metal buckling on impact, and from outside, the snarl of engines and the shouts of half-feral Fringe gangs erupted. Zen struggled to his feet, coursing with bright-eyed adrenaline. Across from him, Ratter found her feet, too, but the kid stayed curled tight, watching them unblinkingly.

“Move,” Zen snapped, reaching over to pull the kid up by force. He stopped short when they scrambled away like he was pointing a blaster at them.

Something hit the truck a second time, tearing the side open like it was meat, and everything exploded in a riot of colour. The Fringe gang surged up in a wave, reaching in to pull the merc to the ground. Zen kicked at the rear door until it gave way with a scream of metal, and slid out without looking back. The gang was more interested in shredding the truck for parts than taking prisoners, even as Zen shouldered his way through to grab one of their sturdier looking bikes. The merc lay motionless underfoot as the gang stripped the truck bare.

“Can you drive one of these things?” Zen asked the kid as Ratter hauled her own bike upright and swung a leg over. The kid was smaller than they’d looked now that they were out of the truck, and the bikes needed a long reach to steer them.

Before the kid could answer, one of the gangbangers broke off from the frenzy to clap a hand on their shoulder. The kid whirled to face him, wide-eyed but silent. Zen had his knife out, but he’d hit the kid if he threw it. He and Ratter would be better off gunning it and leaving the kid behind.

“Stealing?” the gangbanger demanded.

The kid wrapped their fingers around the gangbanger’s bare wrist, and he froze like he didn’t understand what was happening. Zen sure as hell didn’t. Something squirmed under the skin like an infection, pressing right up against the surface until it split open and a tiny shoot burst out. It was green like Zen had never seen before, delicate leaves unfurling like one of Ratter’s tattoos. The gangbanger stared as his arm opened from wrist to elbow and the plants that had taken root in his veins grew, crawling over him. By the time he started screaming, it was too late.

“What the fuck,” Zen said.

Ratter’s eyes were all pupil, like when she had the best kind of vision trip. “Come here, kid. Ride with me.”

They only hesitated a second before climbing up behind her, wrapping their skinny arms around her waist, taking care to avoid bare skin. There was no power on Earth that could have made Zen offer to share his bike, not after what he’d just seen, but he wasn’t going to tell anyone else how to live their life. Dislocating one thumb, he slipped his cuffs and kicked the bike into gear. Behind him, the gangbanger was a mere shape on the ground, already shrouded by thick, fast-growing moss whose tendrils waved in the air like fuzzy antennae as it made its way towards the truck, swallowing the metal until it too disappeared. The rest of the gang was yelling, scrambling away from the fast-moving green. Some of them escaped.

“You ever been beyond the Fringe?” Ratter asked the kid. “If the Wastoids catch us, you better run fast and not look back.”

Zen tugged his scarf over his nose and followed Ratter out of the Fringe with a shriek of tires, tearing past body-mod shops and tattoo mechanics and burnt-out vehicles, their skeletons charred wrecks, some still on fire. No one had the materials to build anything new, hadn’t in decades, so people crushed into smaller and tighter spaces and fought over scraps, drinking dirty water and breathing in each other’s pollution as they waited for the end.

Fuck that. At least in the Wastes he could die on his own terms.

The Fringe Zones didn’t give way to the Wastes so much as come to a sudden stop. The last line of buildings fell back before a poison sky that stretched like an open wound, and then there was nothing but sand. If you survived the radiation fields then there were the Wastoids, and if you survived the Wastoids—But nobody survived them. Not for long, anyway. They were barely even human anymore.

• • • •

They stopped when the sun fell low enough that their bikes were struggling. As Zen rooted through the storage compartments to see what the Fringe gang had left, Ratter sat down to examine her prosthetic. She unscrewed bits and pieces to clean the grit, swearing under her breath as she worked, a mantra so familiar to Zen it sounded like white noise. It was only when the cursing stopped that he stalked over to see what the trouble was.

A tiny green shoot winked up at them, stem so thin it could hardly support its weight. Zen reached over to yank it out, but Ratter stopped him, shaking her head.

“The roots go deeper than you think.”

Zen looked closer. Sure enough, the roots were tangled in the heart of the prosthetic, wrapping around the metal pieces and digging their feet in like little claws. It rankled, the thought of her going green like that gangbanger had. Zen had seen plenty of deaths, but there was something eerie about watching a body turn unrecognizable like that. Eerier than the gnarled bodies of a car wreck or even the slow burn of radiation poisoning. Maybe because he’d never seen a green death before.

Ratter shifted closer, elbowing his ribs with her flesh arm. “I never thought I’d be able to grow anything, inside or out. This makes me feel like I’m bigger than my body. I like it.”

“You’re fucked up.”

She laughed, sharp and barking. “I know you don’t understand. You’ve never believed in anything other than yourself. But I want this. It’s the start of something good.”

The kid sat across from them, watching the shoot worm its way out of the metal, looking for the last dying light of the day.

“You got a name?” Zen asked.

The kid shook their head, arms looped over bony knees.

“Boy?”

Another negative.

“Girl?”

Head shake.

Zen blew out his breath and turned to watch the sunset, mirroring the tiny plant. “Yeah, me neither.”

• • • •

The Wastoids found them that night. Zen pulled his switchblade the second he heard voices, but there was nowhere to run, and without the sun to power them, their bikes were dead. He angled himself in front of the kid, Ratter on the other side with her prosthetic humming a warning. He kept his stance low and wide as the gang circled them, communicating in soft growls and bursts of staccato laughter. The leader finally stepped forward, dressed in layers of colourful scraps, his hair long, mane-like, and matted. He held a makeshift blaster in one hand, one of the old types that still ran on battery. Good in the dark.

“Bikes,” he said, in a voice like broken glass.

“Take them.”

The gang swarmed in like flies on a carcass, hauling the bikes out of sight. Zen flexed his fingers around the blade, trying to count the figures in the dark. Too many for him and Ratter. Maybe if the kid set the green on them—But he didn’t like his chances of surviving that.

“Food?” the leader asked.

“Nothing.”

“Meat?” he pressed, edging closer. His teeth were filed to points and his eyes glowed like they had their own light.

“No,” Zen snarled. “Back off.”

Raising his blaster, the Wastoid laughed, mouth parted like he could already taste them, and Zen bristled. Behind him, Ratter spat a curse and shifted closer.

But the Wastoid paused, looking past them. For a second, no one moved. Zen watched the gang watch the kid, who stared back with a burning calm Zen couldn’t match. The leader shifted again, like he was being drawn forward, and though Zen growled and shoved him back, the kid stepped out to meet the Wastoid head on, stony and unafraid. Zen itched to drive his knife into somebody and bring things back to actions he understood.

“You know this guy?”

The kid slowly shook their head, never breaking eye contact.

“But I know you,” the leader sing-songed. “I’ve been waiting. Recognize you from the dreams.” He tapped his temple and smiled knowingly, like dreams meant anything real.

“You a prophet?” Ratter asked.

If he was a prophet, then so was every half-mad junkie in the Fringe. But Ratter said it like it meant something, so Zen kept his mouth shut.

The man cackled, and in a move faster than Zen could anticipate, grabbed Ratter. She swung her prosthetic up, the needle poised to scratch his eyes out, but he caught her arm before it could connect. His mouth stretched in a wide smile, baring his teeth as the little green shoot blinked at him from in between the lines of metal.

“There it is,” he crooned, and Ratter stilled, no longer trying to wrench out of his grasp. “You don’t know what you have,” the Wastoid whispered, his breath fetid and urgent. He never stopped smiling, glowing eyes boring into Ratter’s. “You have the end and the beginning of the world and you never even realized.”

Ratter stared back at him, enrapt, until Zen shoved the man against her needle. As it broke skin, Zen slashed at the gang to drive them back. Ratter pulled away, reeling her prosthetic in to minimize the damage done—Zen hoped she was more concerned about the machinery, but she was still staring at the Wastoid—and the man howled with laughter like a wild thing.

“We go to the Oracle,” he finally said, choking down the last of his wails, “and then we see how the world ends.”

• • • •

Besides the radiation, the Oracle was the only thing keeping the Citadel out of the Wastes. Ratter talked about her every so often, filling their apartment with stories as she etched away at some new design. The Oracle knew how the world was going to end.

“Did you ever meet her?” Zen asked.

“Once.”

“And did she tell you?”

Ratter smiled, the expression incongruously soft on the otherwise hard crook of her mouth. “The green will come back.”

“Wouldn’t that be good?”

“Yes. Just not for us.”

Zen had been dreaming about the green for years. It spread like oil over water, rippling on top of the surface and smothering everything beneath, taking root in Zen’s skull and growing out from behind his ribs. He always woke up from those dreams feeling restless, like he was running out of time.

• • • •

In the heart of the Wastes where civilization had gone feral and the Earth’s bones lay flayed and exposed like the gnawed-bare carcass of some ancient creature, Zen slouched along a pace behind the others. There was something magnetic about the kid: the quiet ferocity in their eyes and how they still hadn’t said a word this whole time. Zen had met people whose vocal cords had been fried from radiation. Maybe the kid had lost their tongue. You run your bike into a wall, bite down too hard at the wrong second—it didn’t take more than that.

The Wastoid leader guided them through the hazy mirage of the Oasis to a tent on the edge of camp where the city of mismatched patterned fabric butted up against an orange cliff face. As they passed, the Oasis inhabitants emerged from their shelters to bear witness, all of them sun-dark, lean, and hungry like the last flare of a solar cell before it dies at dusk. Inside the tent stood a guard wearing a merc’s stolen body armour under his wrap, and beyond him waited the yawning mouth of a cave.

“Come.” The Wastoid was still smiling that sharp-toothed grin. “We see the Oracle.”

The kid walked through first, passing under the sweep of fabric where the material gave way to stone. Ratter stayed by the kid’s side. The sprout in her prosthetic had grown in the hours since it had taken root. Tiny buds poked their heads out from the metal architecture, and tendrils crawled up towards her elbow, where the prosthetic met flesh. Once the shoots found skin it would be over in seconds, but Ratter didn’t seem concerned.

As they walked deeper, the walls grew wider and more decorated: figures etched in charcoal and ash, and lines of poetry or prophecy scribbled up and down in alphabets Zen recognized from Ratter’s skin. The air hummed with urgency, like they were waiting to be spoken aloud. A few yards deeper the walls retreated to offer up a huge, dome-shaped room, the sun burning white through a hole at the very top. In the center of the room sat the revered Oracle, surrounded by her acolytes. A towering headdress covered her eyes, shrouded in a hundred layers of shawls and scarves, only her hands and her mouth visible. Paper-thin and brown, her skin absorbed the orange light reflected from the walls. She lifted her head as they approached and broke into a smile like a fissure in stone, raising her hands to welcome them.

“I’ve been waiting.” Her voice creaked like a sigh. “Come forward, child.”

The kid approached, allowing the Oracle to grasp their covered forearms and draw them out of Zen’s protective reach.

“Yes,” said the Oracle, seemingly satisfied with whatever she sensed in the kid. “You are the one. You bring blessings.” Turning her unseeing face to Ratter, she continued, “And you’ve already begun to share them.” Her headdress swayed precariously when she moved, a mountain of stitched scrap metal and cloth. The weight must have been enormous, but she didn’t bend. She turned next to Zen, who prickled under her blind scrutiny. “And you. They call you . . .” She tilted her head fractionally to one side. “A healthy female body. They keep you in their files.”

Zen curled his lip and the Oracle smiled. “They’re wrong, of course. About many things.”

The Oracle was only an old woman, nothing holy or prophetic about her, but something in Zen’s chest eased when she said that.

“What could I have been? If they hadn’t cut me like that.”

“You are exactly as you are, and you were always going to end up exactly here, now, with the God-Child. Your purpose was to bring them to us.”

He bristled, hot and irritable and uninspired again. “I’ve had enough of people telling me what my purpose is, if it’s all the same to you. I’m not here to donate genetics or save the human race or this—the God-Child?” He turned to the kid. “Is that supposed to be you?”

The kid blinked at him impassively.

“Okay, great. What does that even mean? Are you here to save us? Because honestly, I don’t think we deserve salvation from anybody, god or not. We fucked the planet into oblivion, we wiped out every living species—including ourselves—and now we’re too dumb to roll over and die already. Everyone’s always talking about these goddamn prophecies like their dreams aren’t the same scattershot neural bullshit as anyone else’s, but we’re finished. The last thing I want is some god stepping in to rescue us and prolonging the whole fucking mess for another generation. No offense.”

The kid shrugged. Ratter wore the same smile she always did when he talked like that—not patronizing, but like she had a secret she couldn’t tell him yet.

“But the planet’s still here.” The Oracle’s smile mirrored Ratter’s, and it stopped him in his tracks.

“What?”

“You said we destroyed the planet, but it’s still here, and it will keep turning long after we’re gone. And we’ll be gone soon,” she confided, her smile stretching wider, “now that the God-Child is here.”

“Oh yeah? You some kind of weapon?” He prodded the kid’s skinny shoulder. “Somebody tattoo instructions for the next atomic bomb onto you?”

“Even better.” The Oracle’s lips peeled back to reveal more gum than tooth. “They contain multitudes, as you do. Alpha and omega, the beginning and the end. Show him, child. Show us all what you have.”

Ratter held her breath, pressing up against Zen’s side and taking his hand, her fingers digging into his. Against his will, adrenaline boiled up inside Zen too, like he was balancing on the top edge of a skyscraper, staring straight down. Slowly, the kid raised both hands to their mouth and pushed something past their lips into their palms. Zen couldn’t see it, but the acolytes all gasped at the same moment: a hushing intake of breath like a prayer.

He elbowed them out of the way to look over the kid’s shoulder as they cupped the thing between both hands. It was smooth and round, a dark, rich brown that reminded him of things from a thousand years ago. That restless feeling under his skin shivered up, anticipatory and breathless. The end of the world. The start of a new one. There, at the very top of the dome, a tiny crack ran through the outer shell, and poking out from inside was the smallest, brightest hint of green.

“Bless us, child,” the Oracle murmured, reaching out.

Zen took a hurried step back, breaking the ring of watchers, but Ratter didn’t move.

“It doesn’t hurt,” Ratter told him. The sprout in her prosthetic had reached her shoulder and dug into the joint around her clavicle like an insect. “You can run, if you want. You can watch it take the Citadel. And then, after, you can stand on a fresh planet, the last body left, and tell me what it looks like. It’ll be so beautiful. All that green.”

• • • •

It was quiet, at the beginning of the world. Thick moss carpeted everything, absorbing sound. What used to be skyscrapers now stood as towers of silent green, and streets became valleys. Zen walked through all of it, the kid at his side. The kid was as quiet as the landscape, skin brown as soil, their curls turned yellow and gold with pollen. Ratter was right: it was beautiful. He didn’t know whether her consciousness had survived the green, so he talked to her like she was everywhere. He told her about the trees.

They were his favourite. Straight, red trunks that towered almost as tall as the buildings, crowned with dark green leaves casting shadows like clouds. The smaller ones were slender, silver-trunked with light yellow-green tops that shimmered and shivered in the breeze like metal chimes. He understood how Ratter felt, looking at trees like that. He understood what the Citadel had always wanted from him. Bringing that kind of beauty into the world: that might be worth giving up his body for.

“Was human extinction a side effect of bringing back the green, or was that the whole point?” he asked the kid.

They sat side by side on top of a little hill that used to be a battery truck, overlooking what used to be the Wastes. Now it was a sea of blue-green grass, each blade as wide as Zen’s hand and as high as his waist, rippling in the breeze like an ocean. The kid rested their chin on their arms, folded over their knees. They were careful not to touch him, but Zen had started sitting closer, lately. The pollen didn’t scare him so much anymore.

“When I’m done, turn me into a tree, okay? Something that’ll live for a long time. I want to see whatever happens next.”

The kid turned to face him. Slowly, they extended one hand, letting it hang in the space between them, fingers outstretched. A silent, patient offer.

Zen inhaled, pulling all that green into his lungs, and reached out to take it.

©2022 by Arden Powell.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arden Powell is a speculative-fiction author and illustrator from the Canadian East Coast. They graduated from St. Francis Xavier University in 2013 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, Honouring in English Literature. As a hybrid author, they self-publish as well as publish with indie presses, and have had work accepted in places including Baffling Magazine and Nyx Publishing. A nebulous entity, they live with a small terrier and an exorbitant number of houseplants, and have conversations with both. They write across fantasy sub-genres and everything they write is queer.

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

Scientists Confirm: There’s a Black Hole in the Center of Your Heart

Jo Miles | 1161 words

The black hole in the center of your heart devours everything around you. It always has, but when you were small, your event horizon was, too: you might pull in a teddy bear, your corgi puppy’s love, your grandma’s snickerdoodles. Small fuel for a small hunger.

But you didn’t stay small. In school, you pulled other children into your orbit, cool kids and nerds and loners, along with shelves of books, the faded basketballs from the gym, the classroom iguana. You drew them to you and consumed them, and your hunger only grew.

Bigger and bigger. Desks, filing cabinets, coworkers, they fall into you and vanish. Your first car. Two girlfriends, who barely got close enough to earn that label. Your grandmother. The paintings in your home, then the sofa, the bed, and finally, in a sign of what’s to come, the house itself.

How did this insatiable hole take shape within you? Pundits love to speculate on it while drifting closer and closer to the reach of your maw. You’re searching for your father’s love, the most popular theory goes. Or maybe you’re looking for a perfection that does not exist. Maybe it’s a reflex to protect yourself from the unkind world, and you never meant to destroy anything at all. One by one, all those theory-spinners have studied you too closely and fallen to your appetite, but their demise hasn’t stopped new fans from circling you, insatiably curious. Just as you can’t stop consuming the world, they can’t help being fascinated by you, even though they know where it will lead.

They never do the sensible thing and run.

I learned long ago to keep my distance. I’ve watched you carefully, carefully, from the edges of your life: from the far side of the schoolyard, from the office across the street. Always just out of reach. I know you better than anyone ever did, but I still don’t really know you, any more than you know me.

But I do know all the pundits are wrong. I wish this were the story they imagine, a story about loneliness and unresolved childhood trauma. It’s not that at all.

Here’s the real story. You were told your whole life that you deserved everything: your choice of college, job, woman. Success in all things. You were told that you deserved the world, and you believed it. It’s no surprise that a black hole formed in your heart. If you tell enough little boys that they should get everything they desire, eventually one of them will have desires so fierce they collapse in on themselves and become a super-dense gravity well, drawing everything to you.

You’re unstoppable, now. You’ve crossed a tipping point, consuming office buildings, roads, parks, schools. Taking a person is nothing; you gobble up whole crowds of glassy-eyed adoring spectators and leave only emptiness behind.

You never pause long enough to realize: the more you consume, the less is left. You’ve got a world inside you now, unreachable to you. Have you never considered how your story has to end?

Apparently not. You carve vast furrows in the ground and swallow oceans in a single gulp. Magma spurts from the world’s wounds, and you lap that up, too. I flee on a rocket ship, barely in time, and watch from a too-small window as the Earth crumbles and falls to your greed.

My escape is temporary. You are growing exponentially, sucking in the solar system: our beloved moon, our planetary neighbors. Saturn goes in a stream of orange gas. The sun glows as it stretches and stretches, a bright, horrible ribbon slurped down like a milkshake through a straw. I race past poor Pluto and Charon as they fall together to their end in you.

Do you understand yet? All the things you’ve taken haven’t filled the hole within you, and now you’re alone. You’ve stolen an entire solar system, and there’s no one left who’s capable of loving you.

No one except, theoretically, me.

Why is it that you never devoured me? I used to believe it was because I’ve been careful enough, kept enough distance, but caution didn’t save anyone else, and honestly, I’ve made plenty of mistakes. It took me too long to suspect that you’ve let me keep escaping because you need me free. I’m the girl next door, the one who was supposed to want you but never did. I’m the one you can keep chasing, forever and ever, and you believe my capture will be so sweet, never realizing it’s really the chase you love.

I assumed you didn’t know what it meant to have someone—you’ve always confused destruction with possession with love—but you must know you’re missing something, because you’ve singled me out. Saved me for last. It’s not flattering, you idiot. You’ve taken away everyone and everything, leaving nothing for me to love but you, but it’s like they used to say: Not even if you were the last man on Earth.

(You aren’t even on Earth anymore. You destroyed that, too.)

Maybe I’m the one who’s been too slow to realize: the struggle to escape you has become my life, and in that way, I’ve let you define me. All that’s left for me is running away from you. I might escape you, or I might fail, but my relationship with you is inescapable.

Unless.

I’ve had a theory for a while now: I think the people you consume don’t die. The more you take, the more I have to believe there could be a world full of people carrying on within you, and if they’re not quite the same as they were on the outside, they’re still people, full of hopes and joys and life and love. And most importantly, they’re beyond your reach. If I’m right, then everything you’ve devoured doesn’t become yours—it’s lost to you, forever. They dwell within you, but you can never touch them again, and that’s an existence I could live with.

I could be wrong. Maybe that’s wishful thinking born of desperation. Maybe there’s nothing but oblivion waiting beyond your jaws. I don’t want to be the girl who sacrifices herself to escape you, but I have to say, the gamble seems worth it. If I’m right, I’ll be free of you forever, and in the worst case scenario, being stretched away to nothingness in a black hole sounds better than a life alone with you.

So no more fighting to escape. I’m reversing thrusters, turning this ship around, and diving in. The change in direction will be so sudden that you won’t have time to examine your apparent good fortune. You’ll think you’re winning until I’m past your event horizon and you understand, too late, that you’ve lost.

And then you’ll be alone in the empty universe you’ve made, with no one to blame but yourself.

©2022 by Jo Miles.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jo Miles is a Maryland-based writer of science fiction and fantasy. Their stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Analog, Fireside, and more. You can find Jo online at www.jomiles.com and on Twitter as @josmiles.

Picnic, with Monster

Susan Palwick | 1506 words

Journal Prompt: What does freedom mean to you? How do you know when you’re free?

Freedom means walking through the park on a cloudy Tuesday afternoon, instead of being locked up in the hospital or a group home. Caleb was released from the hospital this morning, not because he’s well—he knows he’ll never be what the doctors call well—but because they had nothing left to offer him. He dutifully took their pills when he was locked up, because otherwise, they just get a court order to force you. No freedom in hospitals. But he’s not going to take the meds here, on the outside. Meds make him so slow and heavy he doesn’t recognize himself. Freedom means not having to take meds.

That’s why, when the hospital sent him to the group home, he picked a fight to get kicked out. Group homes made you take meds, too. He feels a little guilty about that, because he knows the social workers worked their asses off to get him that spot. Very few group homes will take people diagnosed with psychosis, and the fight he picked probably means that there’s now one fewer.

But now he’s free, walking through the park. Clouds build overhead, promising rain that will be a relief from the overwhelming humidity. Caleb’s drenched just from walking, but that’s okay; it’s so much better than the dry, sterile air in the hospital. He smells grass, trees, things growing.

He has a little money and plans to buy a hot dog as soon as he finds someone selling them. The hospital served hot dogs sometimes, but they never tasted right. He also has the pencil and pocket journal the hospital gave him for afternoon group, where the social workers used writing prompts to help the patients explore their feelings. Caleb likes writing. Writing in the journal during group reminded him that, no matter what the doctors and social workers said about recovery and staying on your meds, freedom means staying off meds and out of places that make you take them. The journal was the only good thing about the hospital.

Journal Prompt: How do you know when you’re starting to spiral down or go into a relapse? What can you do to take care of yourself when this happens?

Caleb has always known he’s going to a bad place when the monsters came back. The monsters themselves, vague whispering forms looming around corners and above trees, are less frightening than the problems they cause. Other people can’t see them and think Caleb’s weird when he dodges to get out of their way, although he’d rather duck monsters than be zoned-out on meds.

Walking through monsters smells awful, like sulfur and shit, which Caleb supposes are what his own insides smell like, too. But he’d be mad if someone walked through him, and he doesn’t want to piss off the monsters. He only walked through one once, and it didn’t seem angry, but that one was little, a baby. Why take the chance?

Any recurrence of monsters means that, sooner or later, Caleb will be heading back to the hospital. He always winds up doing something people around him consider dangerous, like yelling or running into traffic. When he sees monsters, other people think he’s the monster.

He’s been off the meds for barely a day, although he already feels more like himself. The monsters have never come back that fast, and he doesn’t see any now.

But he sees other things.

There, above the tree line of the park: a giant green head, swiveling, turning to take bites out of buildings which it then spits out. Caleb hears screams, not his own. Distant trees start toppling.

Caleb scans his surroundings. Nobody else is here, not even the usual babies in strollers being pushed by their moms, not even the inescapable dog-walkers, some of them professionals walking ten dogs at once while their people toil away in offices or clinics or construction sites or wherever they work.

There’s no one here, except Caleb and—coming closer every second, if the toppling trees are any clue—a monster. It’s a lizard, or one of those really scary movie dinosaurs that chases and eats people. T Rex. That’s what they’re called.

Squinting at the approaching form, Caleb realizes that he’s seen this monster before, on TV. It was in Japan when he saw it. He can’t remember its name; that was too long ago. He wonders why his brain has ditched his usual monsters and come up with this thing instead.

Standing in the park, kissed now by raindrops and cooled by a restless wind, Caleb begins to hear sirens and screaming. Then he hears the buzz of aircraft, and watches as airplanes arrive to drop bombs on the monster. It swats them away like balloons; their detonations shake the ground under Caleb’s feet. None of this has ever happened before.

His eyebrows rise.

He starts to grin.

He breaks into a trot, running towards the monster, and very soon he meets people running away, sobbing. Some of them are yelling a name: “Godzilla!” Caleb, still moving against the current, begins to laugh, his heart soaring.

Journal Prompt: Sometimes when we’re really worried about something, the problem will resolve in a way we never could have predicted. Write about a time when this happened to you. What did it teach you about worrying?

Other people can see the monster! It’s not just him! He’s not alone anymore!

The crowd of people fleeing Godzilla has thinned. Some of them try to warn Caleb. “What are you doing? Don’t you know there’s a monster that way? It’s Godzilla!”

“I know!” Caleb says happily. “It’s wonderful!” They stare at him the way people have always stared at him when he talks about his monsters, but this time he can’t get locked up, not unless the hospital plans to lock up a lot of other people, too. He doesn’t think they have that much room. He could turn and run with the people who are fleeing—he’d be one of them, if he did that—but he wants to meet Godzilla.

Running towards the creature as a few panting stragglers race past him, Caleb sees an abandoned hot-dog cart. He stops and grabs as many hot dogs as he can, burned ones and perfectly cooked ones and barely cooked ones and raw ones. He doesn’t have time to fix them nicely, although he stuffs some buns in one sweatshirt pocket and a bunch of condiment packets in the other.

It’s raining much harder now. Godzilla’s stopped to munch on a tree, and for the moment isn’t coming any closer, but Caleb jogs towards the monster, splashing through puddles and clutching his feast. When he reaches Godzilla, he stops, short of breath. He wants to wave, but can’t, because his arms are full of hot dogs. Instead, he sits cross-legged on the ground and begins putting the hot dogs in buns—stopping to eat one first, because he’s hungry—and then decorates them with mustard and relish and ketchup in varying proportions. They’re going to be soaked, but he thinks they’ll still taste good.

After a few minutes, the giant chomping sound of Godzilla chewing on the tree stops, and Caleb realizes that the monster is looking at him, cocking its huge head—stories above Caleb’s own—to fix him in its sight. Its eye is round and yellow, like a cat’s eye. Water drips from its chin onto Caleb, who smiles and waves, hands free now. “Hey! Hi, Godzilla! I brought you hot dogs! Do you eat them? I saw you spitting out those buildings, so I guess you can’t digest them. And you’re chewing trees, but who wants to live on salad? We can share! I don’t know how you like them, and I don’t think you could tear the packets very well with those hands of yours”—the monster’s arms are small and spindly, the four-clawed hands ridiculously small, although Caleb wouldn’t dream of insulting it by saying this—“so I did them up a bunch of ways. You can take any you want.”

Godzilla roars, but it’s not the ear-shattering noise the monster let out earlier: more of an inquiring, dubious sound. Caleb smiles and says, “I know. I’m acting weird, for a human, because most of them run away from you. I know how it feels when people run away. It’s lonely. I thought you might like some company. If you don’t, I’ll go away. But I hope you like hot dogs as much as I do!” He picks up two, one in each hand, and scrambles to his feet to hold them over his head, where maybe the monster will be able to reach them.

The great eye blinks. The head cocks in another direction. And then, very slowly, Godzilla bends, and reaches down with its tiny hand to meet Caleb’s outstretched right arm, and accepts a hot dog.

©2022 by Susan Palwick.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Susan Palwick has published four novels with Tor Books: Flying in Place (1992), The Necessary Beggar (2005), Shelter (2007), and Mending the Moon (2013). Her story collection The Fate of Mice appeared In 2007 from Tachyon Publications. Her second collection, All Worlds are Real, was published in 2019 by Fairwood Press. Susan’s fiction has been honored with a Crawford Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, an Alex Award from the American Library Association, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame, and has also been shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award, the Mythopoeic Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award. After twenty years as an English professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, Susan now works as a healthcare chaplain. She lives in Reno with her husband and their three cats.

The Crowning of the Lord Tazenket, Vulture God of the Eye, Part II

S.G. Demciri | 6473 words

It is three days before she dreams a strange prophecy.

The Daganites believe prophecy is shrouded in mystery. In truth, it is logical—bound by choice and statistics and a million small things they don’t pay attention to, but that gods do. Mortals love secret and ritual and when they come to her temple with their hundred small choices they don’t look at her. Eyes cast down, watering from the smoke, foreheads pressed to the ground. It is pretty and leaves them feeling assured.

Sometimes a series of choices are made at once or in rapid succession—her father’s refusal to cage Ashdanar, Ashdanar’s greed, Ihuet’s self-preservation—and it’s as if an equation appears in her mind. This, and this, and this, she thinks, means this will happen.

Rarely does she prophecy in dreams. Never has she shared such a foretelling.

It is a fresco and then it’s real—a bull cresting a grassy rise, his forelegs raised up in anger or fear. A serpent winds its way about his neck. A few feet above, just shy of the bull’s horns a vulture hovers, her wings spread wide, her end feathers curled up. Her claws gleam in the sun, deadly sharp, seconds away from tearing open his back.

The prophecy—the possibility—hits Ihuet so hard she slams back into her body, spine arcing off the bed, screaming. For long, awful minutes it grips her in a way nothing but prophesying before the brazier has. Her muscles clench, her fingers seize up. She cannot close her eyes.

Ihuet understands the vision—a question she must answer. A possibility she must rise to.

Her body collapses, sore and angry. She pants, staring up at the ceiling, her eyes adjusting to the lamp light born by one of her handmaidens. They have clustered around her bed, faces worried. One sits on the edge of her bed and takes her hand. It grounds her.

“My lady—” she begins.

“A loom,” Ihuet interrupts, voice hoarse. “And thread. Now.”

• • • •

Ihuet prophecies before the brazier ahead of a new military campaign. Ashdanar is ascendant, and he will mark the start of his reign with true war against the Anat Atar Ascendancy. They have beaten him once and he must reclaim his honor if he is to be respected as the Bull God.

Amzu didn’t like to put her to it. The brazier causes her pain—it is the forceful lowering of all her mental shields, the deliberate welcoming of a galaxy’s worth of information to divine the future. It is the only way to ensure the prophecies she tells are true, unfiltered by her desire or machinations. It’s the only prophecy from her that Ashdanar will trust.

She stands still in her bath chamber, perched on a dais, as her handmaidens flick gold dust against her wet skin. They robe her in white, sheer enough one can see the dust. Sheer enough the generals and her brother will see the first cobra wound around her right breast, the second, its head raised along her spine. A cuff on each upper arm, tasseled with gold chain to chime when her body moves against her will. Her hair is bare, her eyelids painted in gold and rimmed in kohl, her bottom lip split with a single bar of turquoise paint.

A handmaiden sets a plate of gold paint at her feet. Ihuet steps into it. Mortals love ritual. She thinks her brother loves it more.

The walk from her chambers in the temple—she will not sleep in the palace as long as her brother rules—is a long one. She is flanked by her handmaidens, all in white, escorted with a linen awning overhead. The doors to the rotunda groan open and there is a rush of silk and cotton as the generals sink to their knees before her. Ashdanar does not.

She makes her way to the flat-topped pyramid in the center of the room. Her brother waits for her at the foot of its steps. She sinks to her knees before him and kisses the ground.

“Hail to the Bull God of the Eye,” she says, forehead pressed to the ground.

If Amzu stood over her—she recalls the last time he had stood over her. Ashdanar takes her by the shoulders and pulls her to her feet. He does not hug her, for which she is grateful. Instead, he swallows her with his eyes, wide and hungry. His hand rests against her throat. She can feel the cobra wound around her breast writhe in angry agitation.

“Lead us to victory, sister,” he says.

She climbs the steps and settles herself on a cushion, legs tucked underneath her. The braziers are lit.

Her first inhale of smoke feels like a wave lapping at her, pulling out with a quiet rush. The second is fire pouring down her throat as the galaxy invades her empty spaces. Her body stiffens, her spine bends. Her throat expels a terrible moan—half pleasure half pain. The serpent on her spine winds its way over her hips to settle, coiled on her belly.

Ihuet’s mind spirals out of her control as it processes—numbers, troop movements, personalities. Her mouth announces coordinates, stars, generals’ names. She screams, waits to hear questions, pronounces their answers. She cannot control her mind or her spirit as it swallows the galaxy entire, looking and searching and answering. As it finds—as she finds—what she wants.

The Lord of Neveh, still onboard her ship.

Tazenket is out of her martial leathers, dressed in a sleeveless shirt, black trousers, and boots made for ground war. The back of her head is still shorn short, while the front grows long, and it falls across her eyes. She is bent over her desk, stylus in hand. Ihuet shudders and her hand goes to her throat as another revelation passes out of it. The image of Tazenket fades and then returns. This time she is looking at her, eyes wide and bewildered, half out of her seat.

She hears the quiet roar of a relit brazier. Her next inhalation of smoke unseats her. She is on her back, her eyes riveted by the ceiling—the turquoise and gold of her father’s ascension to godhood. Tazenket is beside her, her hands on her shoulders. She lifts the sliver of consciousness in her quarters and Ihuet’s vision splits—the basileus’s shoulder, the temple’s ceiling.

Ihuet continues her prophetic recitation.

She feels Tazenket stiffen against her as she recognizes the numbers, feels the threads of fate shift, clings to her as her recitation trickles to a halt. The priestess asks and asks—oracle, oracle—where?

Ihuet looks up at the basileus with one set of eyes and the mosaic of her father’s early years with another.

“Beware,” she says, voice hoarse. There is silence—the styluses have stopped moving. Fingers no longer tap information into tablets. “Beware the Vulture.”

• • • •

Tazenket returns from her admiralty meeting to find a figure sitting at the end of her bed.

The oracle is instantly recognizable even without her jewelry, without her paint, without her diaphanous gowns and trailing scarves. She is bent over her knees, her hands knuckled over the edge of the bed, her hair falling down in a curtain over her left shoulder. She is wearing a simple cotton sheet wrapped around her waist. When she looks up her eyes are unfocused, the skin beneath them bruised. A serpent is wound around the curve of her right breast, its tail on her shoulder, its head settled against her sternum.

Her eyes at last fix on Tazenket and her gaze gains clarity. Her spine straightens. There is a second snake coiled against her right rib cage.

“No one has ever breached my fail safes before,” the oracle says quietly. “Not even in this state.”

She doesn’t need the line of black kohl, Tazenket realizes. Her lashes are thick and cast shadows on her cheeks.

“No one has breached anything,” she replies, still standing in the entrance to her room. “You are in my bed chamber.”

A furrow appears between Ihuet’s eyebrows and she lifts her hand to stare at its palm, then looks wonderingly around the room.

“Oh,” she breathes and it’s the least certain Tazenket has ever heard her. Tazenket knows the oracle shouldn’t be here, that she didn’t plan this. How strange that fate might swing out of the control of one who so easily plucks its strings. She wonders if her last appearance, her second betrayal of her brother, was deliberate.

Yes, Tazenket decides as she pulls a chair from the wall to sit across from her. It likely was.

She expects that sitting across from her will make Amzu’s daughter seem less small, but she is without her charm and her smirk and her paint. She is fatigued and in grief. And yet still—Tazenket doesn’t believe in gods walking among mortals. But the woman who looks out from the oracle’s eyes is as close to divinity as she’s ever been. She can feel her pull, feel herself on the end of some thread of fate being drawn inexorably closer.

“Why did you choose me?” Tazenket says, is once again astonished that these words have left her mouth.

“My father met you ten years ago,” she replies. “Do you remember?”

Tazenket did. “I thought him dangerous and wildly intelligent. In some people they are the same thing—in him they were two separate creatures.”

“When he came back to Dagan he said, ‘if only I’d known her at the beginning’,” Ihuet says. She smiles, small and secretive, and traces a finger over Tazenket’s chin. “It takes much to make the Father God wish he could rewind time.”

Fate’s thread grows taut, and the smile slips off the oracle’s face.

The oracle should not be here and nor should Tazenket be sitting across from her, waiting for her to shed her confusion and her grief. She shouldn’t want answers—the recitation of the Anat Atar’s Ascendency’s many fleet locations, and the pain with which she recited them leave her with many questions. Worse still is the memory of her body—slender, slight, breakable. They have both committed a betrayal and Tazenket knows that if she does not rise and leave the room now her feet will be on a path not of her own making.

She remains seated.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” she says softly.

Ihuet’s head bows with remembered grief and her hands come to her face.

“My father was as the sun to me,” she says, and her voice is low. “I began with him. I did not—I could not anticipate this, even when Ashdanar came among us.”

Tazenket frowns but Ihuet has come to her feet, her eyes fixed on the window on the far side of the room. Outside is the cold emptiness of space and suspended in it is the blue jewel, Thermadon, wreathed in white cloud cover, streaked with green farmland. The oracle’s right-hand presses flat against the window as if she might pass through it and toward the planet itself.

Tazenket comes to stand behind her; she does not trail her index finger down the oracle’s spine. One serpent has moved and watches her suspiciously nestled against the oracle’s right shoulder blade.

“I thought Ashdanar was first born,” Tazenket says, and folds her hands behind her back.

“No,” is all the oracle says.

“But—”

“It is a myth, Basileus,” she interrupts with her signature charm. One eyebrow raised, watching her reflection in the glass. Her hand hasn’t moved. “Built on half-truths like all myths are. Amzu’s first born needed to be a warrior, and though I had a sword and helm in the beginning, I was the only oracle. So, he took my place.”

Tazenket sees something, some memory, some remembered rage or grief, wash over the oracle’s face in the window’s reflection. She turns away from Thermadon, her eyes clear. There is grief, still, but purpose too. She has remembered herself and the ghosts of prophecy have gone. Tazenket’s grip tightens behind her back.

“Will you come to my brother’s coronation, Basileus?” she asks. She does not look coy or small. There is a smile and a promise and the touch of fate pricks Tazenket’s palm.

“Yes,” she says. “I will come.”

• • • •

Beware the Vulture.

The oracle’s voice echoes in Tazenket’s mind as her sister Tinitran fastens the triangular fibula to her right shoulder. It is studded with polished blue and green stones, and from its top emerges a gleaming, two-headed axe. The uniform of the upper echelons of the Ascendancy is a re-imagining of the days they were planet-bound to Thermadon. Gone are the leather skirts and riders’ boots and cured leather. Instead, a body suit of woven praedium, dyed black. The left shoulder and arm is bare, an acknowledgment of the old myth that the Ascendants of Thermadon surgically removed their left breast. A gold worked leather cuirass over the chest, a skirt of the same material, open in the front, falling to the back of the knees, knee-high black boots with greaves rising to the hips, a labris painted on its surface in gold. A pale gold fur stole sits on Tazenket’s left shoulder, and a mantle in black trails down her back and to the floor. On each forearm is a polished black vambrace.

She combs her hair out of her eyes and behind her right ear.

You are basileus, she thinks to herself. The first of her creche to be awarded the title. The most likely to succeed Nefermedes. To be Anax. Her mind should not wander as it does. Her world shouldn’t be so easily turned upside down.

Her body burns as if branded where the oracle writhed against her.

The invitation had come. Amzu, the Father God of the Eye, is dead. His son, Ashdanar the Bull God, will take his place. Not every ascending leader held a coronation open to their adversaries, but when one did, the law was clear: no killing, no war, no hostilities. A fragile peace took hold of the galaxy for seven days while the leader cemented their hold and pleased their gods. And Ashdanar, with none of the accomplishments of his father and his cataclysmic loss against the Ascendancy bright in recent memory, needed the galaxy’s confirmation of his ascension.

“Ket,” Tinitran says just as she’s about to step down from the dais. Tazenket’s eyebrows raise—her sister always calls her “basileus” unless it is serious.

“What is it?” she asks.

“You’ve never led us astray,” Tinitran says, blunt. “But you are wrapped up in this oracle.”

“I cannot do what she wants,” Tazenket says. “I will not, in fact. I won’t breach the guest rite.”

That relieves her sister. “Good. Figure out what she wants this time, make sure it is beneficial for us.”

She gives her sister a lopsided grin. “When have I done otherwise?”

Tinitran grunts. “And Ket?”

“Hm?”

“Get what you want out of her,” she says, folding her arms over her chest. “It pains me to see you daydream.”

Tazenket laughs.

For five days the Tanit Ascendant has flown with a small fleet led by the Anax’s flagship, the Anatu Ascendant. In the distance, less than an hour away, is one of a thousand eyes in Amzu’s empire. The space station orbits the dead planet Uskish, its crystalline hull gleaming in the pale light of this system’s dying star. No one has managed to secure Amzu’s technology—even from this distance Tazenket can see its verdant green fields, its flowing water. It’s beautiful, self-sustaining—an empire with no need of planets, mobile in its defense.

The ship docks—close up she realizes how enormous it is. Enormous enough to host small fleets from each of the principalities in the galaxy. It could swallow them all whole. Tazenket debarks with Tinitzir and Tinitran on either side of her and feels the hairs on her arms stand on end. She is waiting, she realizes, to see if she will catch a glimpse of the oracle in the flesh. She clasps arms with the other basileis, all creche mates, scattered throughout the Ascendancy, then bows before the Anax.

They are escorted by automatons from their launch bay to a great balcony circling the station. An attendant approaches them. She has met citizens of the Thousand Eyes before, there is always a difference between those who serve and those who do not. Those who live onboard the ships and engage in combat are taller, broader shouldered, their eyes more awake. The Daganites—the worshippers of Amzu—do not leave Dagan.

The attendant approaches them, then bows low before Nefermedes.

“Welcome to our humble station, Esteemed and Enlightened Anax of the Ascendancy. We are pleased to host you.”

“We are pleased to be hosted,” she says.

The attendant gestures a young girl forward—a real Daganite. She stares up at them, eyes wide, and the tray in her grasp trembles.

“Eat of our bounty and be welcome,” she says, voice wavering. Red fruit is artfully arranged on the silver trays surface. They each take a slice.

Their party is born in a chariot from the balcony and through the air, over the main city.

“What is below you is called Nekheb,” the attendant says. It is a gold and rose city with wide lanes and flat roofs, spread out like a girl’s glittering skirt. Winding through it is a river, silver in the twilight. They are borne toward the city center. On the right banks of the river are the royal palace and the temple, and between them is a great pavilion. The chariot lands outside of the royal palace. The river runs and the reeds on its bank sway and Tazenket can smell the lower city’s loamy soil. And yet— The air is too still, its temperature too moderate. The light is clear and bright, but there are no clouds and no sun. It doesn’t rain on Dagan, Tazenket thinks.

The halls of Nekheb’s royal palace are high ceilinged, their floors made of pale rose stone. Here the air flows and Ashdanar’s banners, emblazoned with a bull’s head, ripple in the false breeze.

The usher leads them up towards the roof terrace, its stone floor covered in carpets with seating arrangements under linen awnings. They are one of the last representatives to arrive.

Tinitzir and Tinitran remain close and Tazenket cannot keep her mind from turning to her dead polemarch. She knows the grief makes her remember a young Tureght—impulsive, curious, quick to laughter. The Tureght of their most recent years, the Tureght who betrayed her to Ashdanar, was solemn and grave and quiet. She kept her council and smiled little and resented the accolades Tazenket received.

And yet the basileus imagines her now, twenty or twenty-two, grinning as she sits beneath a red linen awning, comparing the river Baal to the river cutting through the Isle of Neveh.

Tinitran touches her arm, eyebrow raised, and she shakes her head. It is not a time to dream or grieve.

Instead, Tazenket joins her fellow lords and Anax at the roof’s edge, looking first toward the river. A small ship sails from the mouth of the river toward the palace. It is guided to the dock and four attendants emerge, bearing on their shoulders a palanquin. Tazenket feels electricity zip up her spine—she knows who is aboard the palanquin, can see her silhouette through the white linen curtains. The palanquin is born up the path from the dock to the pavilion, then set down.

Ihuet emerges, clad in black. A cap of delicate gold lace sits on her head and trails down her back. She walks flanked by priestesses, each bearing a lit silver torch. When she turns around to face the river the firelight catches on the gold paint on her shoulders and throat, her fingertips and palms. Ashdanar joins her, barefoot, clad in a black cloth wrapped around his waist, his chest painted with a stylized bull’s head. He kneels before his sister, his dark eyes cast down, and waits.

Tazenket sees anger and grief in the oracle’s face, or perhaps she sees nothing so far away and only imagines it. A priestess comes forward bearing a silver bowl, sinks to one knee, and bears it over her head to Ihuet. Amzu is their first god king. Tazenket wonders who designed this coronation. How much did Ashdanar insist on to consecrate his divinity?

The oracle dips a hand into the bowl of oil and passes her thumb over his forehead, then over his bottom lip. She brings forth a goblet with a red liquid and bids him drink. And then at last a third priestess brings forth his crown, an iron cap with curving bulls’ horns, a small sun suspended between them. He rises, triumphant, and sets himself in his father’s throne. Below, the Daganites bellow with joy. They love their new king, can do aught but love him.

Tazenket’s eyes return to his oracle, her eyes cast down, flanked by her priestesses. She feels something like fate prick against her palms.

• • • •

Ihuet stands out on the balcony. Spread out before her is Nekheb after dark, its streets pricked by gold light, the river winding its slow way through it. Her mind works its way through the forked paths of her future, its various iterations and possibilities. The self-destructive impulse in her entertains a future where she does nothing and allows Ashdanar’s rise to power.

Her stomach turns.

“My lady?”

Ihuet turns—her handmaiden stands between the curtains leading into her chamber. Beyond her is a tall and broad shape—Tazenket, Basileus, Lord of Neveh. Her calculations shriek to a halt. Twice now she’s been surprised. A not unpleasant feeling. A strange feeling.

“My lady?” the handmaiden prompts a second time. Ihuet’s eyes flick back to her—she has been staring at the outline Tazenket makes through the fabric.

“Go,” she says. The handmaiden bows, and slips off the balcony, back through the chamber. Ihuet passes under the curtains a moment later.

She’d caught a glimpse of the basileus during the coronation—a tall woman among tall women, face severe, arms folded over her chest. Neither dreams nor projection prepares Ihuet for her up close—she is a giant, her arms as thick as Ihuet’s head. Her brown skin gleams—Ihuet doesn’t think she’s allowed anyone to dust her in gold, but in the lamplight of her bed chamber, it appears so. Her eyes really are gold—tawny, like a lion’s pelt. Her mouth ticks up into a smile.

“You’re staring, oracle,” Tazenket says.

Ihuet blinks. “You have surprised me, my lord,” she replies. “Again. A rarity.”

The lord shrugs her hood back from her hair. “Does no one surprise you anymore?”

“No,” Ihuet says simply. “Not since I was a child and able to run across the Mound on Uskish.”

It’s only when she comes closer that she realizes the Lord of Neveh isn’t wearing her armor—she’s dressed like a Daganite. The woven cloth won’t disguise her—there is too much of her for that. But it tugs at a wayward thread of fate.

“What are you doing here, my lord?” she asks, looking up.

Tazenket—and her name leaps into Ihuet’s mind unbidden—leans down, and the tip of her nose brushes Ihuet’s cheek. In her mind a half dozen doors to new paths tear themselves open. Her breath stalls in her throat and her eyes widen. When she looks at Tazenket she sees her—she sees both of them. Entwined, Taznket’s bare shoulders and back gleaming, Ihuet’s slick thighs. She jerks back on an inhale.

“Are you frightened?” Tazenket asks. She has straightened, and her eyes are dark.

Ihuet shakes her head, mute.

The lord’s mouth tastes like ambrosia, and who would know that better than a goddess. It is hot, her lips soft. Her fingertips are calloused, something no one else on Dagan can say. Ihuet’s mind races, trying to sort through pleasure and prophecy, to chart a path through an encounter she did not plan. Tazenket grasps the back of her thighs and lifts and the threads of prophecy fall away from her mind.

The bed is near the balcony; closer is the altar, cushioned and pillowed, arranged beneath the eye of a statuette of Amzu, his great sun born aloft over his head. Again, the paths of prophecy fork—Tazenket pulls at the delicate pins on her shoulders and around her waist, tugs the delicate fabric down, leaving her in nothing. A calloused thumb catches on Ihuet’s nipple and again her body jerks; the cobras twined around her spine unwind.

Ihuet has enough sense that she tugs on Tazenket’s clothes, pulling at her blouse and the sash around her waist and the lacing on her trousers. She freezes, painted hands pressed against Tazenket’s ribs. Inked into her skin is a vulture—it’s in the Tinnou style, all stark black lines. Evocative rather than realistic. Its head and beak rise defiantly between flat breasts, its wings spread up over her ribs.

When she meets Tazenket’s gaze, she is smiling, something hard and fierce and hungry, and she leans down, her hands on Ihuet’s wrists, and kisses her again. Again, as if by force of habit, Ihuet tries to track the threads of prophecy. But Tazenket is an impulsive lover and does not cleave to the rules of fate. The spool unravels and all that is left is the hot pleasure winding its way through her, Tazenket’s teeth over her throat, Ihuet’s gold paint on Tazenket’s skin.

It is the brazier and its opposite, a scouring of herself through fire and ecstasy. When Tazenket presses a finger into her and then a second, Ihuet’s whole body strains and she knows this is not the brazier at all. Where it sought to fill her against her will, Tazenket will draw something out. She hears her own voice even as her spine bends and her thighs part further. My lord, my lord. . .

And then Tazenket withdraws her fingers and hooks her hands behind Ihuet’s knees, drawing her onto her back. Her eyes fly open—there is more gold paint on Tazenket now, smeared over the vulture’s beak and her breast.

“Ket—,” she begins, voice hoarse, and then her thigh is over Tazenket’s hip, Tazenket’s knee against her spine, and her hips roll. Ihuet’s voice climbs, her eyes fixed on the flat golden sun overhead, her fingers achingly tight in the cushions. Tazenket grips her thighs tight enough to bruise. The cobras sway through their own dance—one coils its body ever tighter where Ihuet’s body meets Tazenket’s; the second sways—she can feel its body curving against her sternum, its head rising in time with her.

“My lord—!” Her voice breaks, her spine bends, and the cobra’s hood flares just as the second uncoils suddenly, passing from her body to Tazenket’s.

• • • •

Tazenket rises from a light doze on her stomach, cushioned by the softest bed she’s ever lain in. They had not remained at the oracle’s altar but fallen into bed. Their legs are still tangled together, and Tazenket’s arm is over Ihuet’s stomach. The oracle lies on her back, propped up by pillows, her hand held aloft. Every now and then Tazenket sees a near imperceptible flash of light, small enough to fit in the grooves of the oracle’s fingerprint.

“What are you doing?”

Ihuet folds her fingers into her palm. “Prophesying,” she says.

Tazenket lifts her head and props it up on her first. “Aren’t you meant to do that at an altar?”

“We have defiled my altar,” she replies tartly. Tazenket stills when Ihuet reaches a hand and traces a thumb over her cheek. “You surprised me. Again.”

“Bad?”

“Valueless,” Ihuet says, then course corrects. “Interesting. It is rare—not even my father could surprise me.”

She sounds meditative and considering. Tazenket wants her to think less, to hear her say my lord again. Instead, the oracle says something absurd. Terrifying.

“Do you want to be Anax, Tazenket?” asks the oracle. “Or do you want to be a god?”

She pulls away. She is conscious of Ihuet’s eyes on her, tracking her as she sits up. How serious and dark they are, how much they seem as if they are lit from within.

“I will not kill your brother,” she says gruffly. “I will not break the guest rite.”

“You are all honor and warcraft,” the oracle replies. “I would not ask you to. You didn’t answer the question.”

“It is a stupid question,” she snaps and swings her feet out of the bed. She hears Ihuet rise, hears the rustle of cloth, her bare feet padding over stone. Ihuet appears in front of her arrayed in a sheer silver mantle, pointless. She can see the paint she smeared across the oracle’s ribs and breasts. And the single cobra, sleeping on her right shoulder. Her twin rests twined around Tazenket’s right bicep.

Ihuet steps between her thighs and lifts Tazenket’s chin. She feels lost and caught and stupid. She wishes Ihuet had never come into her dreams and doesn’t want to leave this room.

“An oracle,” Ihuet begins, “only asks pointed questions. And you know the answer to it, though you wish you didn’t.”

Tazenket swallows around the rock in her throat.

“Should you like it all?” Ihuet asks. “Or only some? Or only me? Would your sisters in the Ascendancy follow you?”

She sees how the oracle lays down paths and possibilities. This here, that there—which to choose?

“Do you love Nefermedes so much?”

“I love my sisters,” she says, the words drawn out of her suddenly and violently. Her chest heaves. “I would not abandon them.”

“Tazenket—what do you want?”

• • • •

It is a sword.

Her sisters, waiting outside the oracle’s chambers, bring her armor and watch as she dresses. Tinitran eyes the cobra now wound around her wrist and says nothing. Ihuet emerges from the bath chamber robed in gold silk, gathered in pleats over her right ribs. The cobra is wound around her throat, its hood spread wide over her clavicle.

“It is in Amzu’s temple on the Mound,” Ihuet says. “The serpent will unlock the temple. Retrieve the sword. Bring it to me. I will do the rest.”

“Why is the sword important?” Tinitzir asks.

Ihuet’s smile is hard and small. “Ritual.”

• • • •

Her handmaiden pilots the chariot that bears them from Nekheb to Nekhen to the city of the dead. Tazenket stands beside Ihuet, a pillar, her axe strapped to her back. Ihuet looks up just as Tazenket’s fingers brush hers, then slot themselves with her hand. The lord’s sisters ride with them, their dark eyes suspicious. They do not trust her.

She is gripped, suddenly, by guilt and her grip on Tazenket’s hand tightens.

“There are still open paths,” she says, almost against her will. “You need not ascend to godhood. You can leave after you deliver the sword.”

The Lord of Neveh brushes her knuckles against her cheek. “You have mistaken my hunger for fear. You picked me. Now you are stuck with me.”

Ihuet nods.

The chariot is set down at the spot where Ihuet felt her father’s death. They disembark and Ihuet leads their small company towards a building. Its floor lifts up and leads to a small launch bay below.

“I will wait here,” she says, and the lord’s sisters grunt, unsurprised.

“If I could retrieve the sword myself, I would,” she says to them, rather than Tazenket. “I cannot leave Dagan. My body is shackled here.”

The twins exchange a glance.

“There is nothing below that can harm you,” she says. “The planet has been dead for a long while.”

They nod. She exhales, relieved.

Ihuet watches the ship, small, bullet-shaped, pierce Uskish’s atmosphere. How long since she saw its strange shores, its high steeples, its clear water? When did she last see the sun through atmosphere? Had she missed it, or had she forgotten until now?

A handmaiden produces a chair, and a second sets her loom in front of her. The mantle is nearly finished.

She waits.

• • • •

It is night on the Mound on Uskish. They all three bear torches as they make their way through the center of the main complex. The place is ancient. Tazenket can divine that there was once a small city here, built up around the temple of Amzu, now overtaken by vines and moss. It is not in collapse, it is frozen. Not so ancient as Amzu would have the galaxy believe, built in the post-stellar industrial age with materials that last.

Where their feet strike the ground there is an absurd echo—not stone or dirt. Sometimes, the ground gleams like copper, winking up at them in mockery.

The temple has a single steeple with a great gold disc at its top. Its doors are sealed, overgrown with vines. Tazenket raises a hand and presses her palm, cobra hood flared against it, against the door. Light zips along its surface. The sound of an engine waking up fills the air.

“Welcome, Primary User, Codename Wadjet.”

The doors hiss open.

Inside, they put away their torches. The high ceilings are lit. It is a narrow corridor, its walls painted over in the Amzu style, its floor paved in pale sandstone. Lining the walls, their heads bowed in sleep, are automatons covered in dust.

The hair on Tazenket’s arms stand. The cobra writhes against her palm.

“Let’s go,” she mutters. “I do not wish to linger.”

The hall leads to a tomb. It takes up the entire first level of the temple, or a great deal of it at least. The walls here, too, are painted. In the center is a stone table and on its surface is an effigy of Amzu.

Clutched between his hands is his sword, its ruby hilt gleaming in the halflight.

“Tazenket,” Tinitzir says softly. “Come here.”

She is standing in front of a series of paintings. Tazenket recognizes the oracle, though she is arrayed in a way she’s never seen before: sword in one hand, held aloft, a helm over her head.

“Do you see anything wrong?” her sister asks.

Tazenket shakes her head.

“The sword isn’t Amzu’s,” Tinitzir says, tapping the image. “It is hers.”

Tazenket stares at the woman in the painting, her dark eyes fierce. There is gold on her eyelids.

“It doesn’t matter now. We have the sword, regardless of who it belongs to. Let’s go.”

Tinitran grips her arm. “Do you know what you’re doing?”

“I know enough,” she replies.

• • • •

Ihuet dares not touch the sword. She stares at it in Tazenket’s hands for what feels like an eternity, and then she looks up at her. The Lord of Neveh surprises her and causes her to surprise herself. She wishes to kiss her, rather than do what must be done. She swallows.

“Come with me,” she says.

They board the chariot once again, though they keep it low to the ground and remain in the city of the dead. Ihuet stares at the hilt of the sword, remembers its fashioning, remembers how she screamed in fury at first. How her father had calmed and promised her protection. Promised she would never be without him. She feels young again, small and naive.

The black pyramid in the center of the city grows, its shadow long, swallowing them up in due time.

Ashdanar waits until they have debarked from the chariot and are footsteps away from the pyramid’s gate. His men fall on them like ticks on an animal. Her handmaidens fall and Tazenket’s sisters draw their weapons.

Ihuet screams. She is bound and shackled, but the city of the dead remembers her in the days it was alive and the floor shudders, then ripples. Her brother falls one way, Tazenket another. His men teeter and fall and roll as the ground tries to swallow them up.

The sword skitters away from Tazenket. Ihuet’s heart beats a drum in her chest. If Ashdanar gains the sword—

She scrambles towards it—his eyes are fixed on the Basileus. She scoops it up—it is warm, pulsing, in her hand.

“Ashdanar,” she calls.

He turns and she drives the sword forward. It slides in—his body resists the intrusion but the sword wins. She looks up, grim, at the shock on his face. He makes a wet sound, a wheeze of surprise.

“I am the child of Amzu’s forge, Ashdanar. Not you,” she says.

He does not understand. Her brother drops to his knees when she withdraws the sword. Ihuet finds the strength to bring the blade up again. It severs his head from his shoulders. Her gown is heavy with blood. The paint on her fingers muddied and bronze. Her chest heaves.

Tazenket, on her back, stares at her uncomprehending. His men watch her. But their god is dead. They can’t stop her now.

Sword in hand, Ihuet takes the final steps to the stone gate. Her hand, covered in her brother’s blood, presses against its facade. A panel hisses open. Inside is a key slot shaped for her sword. When the sword locks into place and the hilt is turned there is a sound, a revving and whirring as the gate groans open, as glyphs on the pyramid glow, and the city of the dead comes back to life.

• • • •

Tazenket watches Ihuet lift her head up like a flower turning towards the sun. The ground beneath her trembles and whirs and warms. The pyramid glows.

“Genetic shackle, released,” a woman’s voice says. It is coming from the tree. “Welcome, Primary User, Intelligence 8427. Codename Wadjet. Renamed Ihuet. Fourth Iteration.”

Paths of light trail along Ihuet’s skin and her face breaks into a smile, her eyes still closed.

“Who has control of the station?” she asks.

“The Primary User,” the voice responds.

“You’re an intelligence,” Tazenket breathes.

Ihuet’s eyes turn to hers. She is the same—isn’t she?

“I am the only intelligence,” she replies. “Shackled to maintain the secret of my father’s ascension.”

The oracle holds out a blood covered hand. Tazenket takes it, allows herself to be drawn forward.

“Kneel, my lord,” Ihuet says.

Tazenket kneels.

The mantle Ihuet drapes over Tazenket’s shoulders is red and blue, a vulture’s wings, edged in gold. On her head is set a crown—two feathers curving around the sun’s disc. Ihuet lifts her face so that their eyes meet.

“All hail Tazenket, Vulture God of the Eye.”

©2022 by S.G. Demciri.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

S.G. Demciri is a Black Amazighi writer of science fiction and fantasy. She received her PhD in English literature with a focus on Victorian literature and translation in 2020. After graduating she lectured on the history of western fantasy, drawing connections from Beowulf, through depictions of the crusades in medieval literature, the chivalric romance, William Morris all the way to Tolkien. A former Victorianist and lapsed Medievalist, she now writes for video games. She can be found on Twitter at @sgdemciri and online at sgdemciri.com.

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

Broken Record

Stephen Graham Jones | 7822 words

DAY 1

What Jaden remembered of the wreck was screaming and water drops hanging in the air and the thin white mast at a diagonal and then breathing cold water deep into his chest, shrieky regret about too much stuff at once, and now he was here.

A desert island.

It was the kind people in single-panel cartoons are always living on. The only difference for Jaden was that there was no tall coconut tree drooping over him, casting a puddle of shadow for him to move with all day. The rest was the same, though: his vision failing before the flatness over the water did. In every direction.

Jaden sat back into the sand and chuckled. It wasn’t that he was amused to be alive. It was that he amused to be alive like this, with no cell, no watch, wearing the shorty-short jean shorts he’d packed as a joke, to swim in.

He rubbed his jaw, imagining the epic beard he was going to grow. Except he’d never been able to even get a goatee to come in full. His dad had always told him to wait until he was thirty-five, then he’d miss these babyface days, but, unless some tuna started beaching themselves for him every day or two, he was going to come in nine years short of that mountain man look, he guessed.

Not that this was going to go that long.

Maybe a century ago you could get marooned for months or year or ever, but not in the modern world, right? Not with satellites watching, not with ships crossing back and forth every hour. Not with there not being any more undiscovered islands. Not with Margo looking for him.

Surely she would be.

Jaden had felt guilty for going on the trip without her. Now having left her there to call in the Coast Guard was going to be what saved him.

“Hello?” Jaden called up into the sky.

It would have been cool if a gull had wheeled around overhead, screeched a response.

There were no birds at all, though.

It was just Jaden.

DAY 2

Jaden woke the same as he had the day before: all at once, gasping on the beach. There was gritty white sand clinging to the right side of his face, and all over his chest.

He was hungry.

He stood, wobbled to what he was calling the down-water side of the little island, and peed into the ocean.

This wasn’t so bad, he told himself. He had about the same floorspace as he’d had in his efficiency apartment, the year he’d crapped out of grad school. Nearly four hundred square feet? He walked it off. It was eighteen heel-to-toe steps across one way, seventeen and a half the other. And the plumbing worked about the same as it had in his efficiency. The air conditioner was maybe even better.

He could do this. Maybe some sunburn, sure. But he was going to look rugged when he got rescued, wasn’t he? All tan and windblown and scraggly.

Well, tan and windblown and scraggly if a ship pulled up in the next two or three days, he figured.

That was about how long he figured he could go without water. Probably he should have dug a pit or something to pee in. Maybe the sand would filter it into water. Jaden didn’t really know how nature worked—he’d never watched the survival shows—but he remembered that from somewhere.

So, in serious lieu of anything else at all to do, he sat at the exact center of the island. It was maybe six inches higher than the rest of the island. He scraped a trench around him, just doing nothing, and then decided this circle he’d trace was the outline of a target. So he dug the bullseye out—the exact center of the island. This was where the coconut tree was supposed to have been.

About half of every scoop of sand sifted back in, but it wasn’t like he didn’t have time.

What he pictured uncovering was either a coconut or a skull. The skull would be the island’s former resident, and would fill him with despair and all that, but the coconut would just mean he’d washed up too early. If in fact a coconut was actually a seed. Jaden wasn’t really sure about that.

It didn’t matter. He didn’t find a skull, and he didn’t find a coconut.

He found water.

It was such a surprise that he pushed back, fell away. Looked around.

Still three-hundred sixty degrees of unending ocean.

And, at the bottom of the little hole that was a little deeper than his forearm, a few handfuls of cold, mostly-clean water.

Jaden licked the side of his finger.

Fresh water.

So he wasn’t going to have to drink his own urine.

Things were looking up.

DAY 3

Jaden was writing H-E-L-P not in the sand—there were no branches, no rocks—but on the sunburned skin of his thigh. Over and over. Each time he got to L, the H was fading away.

Passing the hours was turning out to be the hardest part.

His feet were in the water, hanging off into the sharp drop-off all round the edge of the island. His toes were wiggly bait for anything down there.

“Teach a man to fish,” he said, and then couldn’t find the end of it. It had been going to be funny, though. Killer funny. Something about a mermaid. But, had a mermaid beached herself right then, Jaden would have bitten into her tail, he knew, even eaten the fin.

All the hunger he’d felt before in his life, it had just been mild discomfort. An inconvenience.

What he was feeling now, it was real, and it hurt. He’d already pulled all the frayed strings off his shorts, chewed them to paste, swallowed them. Could you eat your own hair? It was some sort of protein, wasn’t it?

Then, like he’d been hoping for, something brushed his shin.

He stabbed his hand down what he considered to be ninja-fast, and what he pulled up was . . . what? It was cold, and solid, and kind of square.

He crawled back from the water, in case he dropped it.

He’d been expecting debris from the wreck to wash up. That always happens in the movies. You get a rope, a trunk of goodies, and, if it was a plane you’d gone down in, maybe some flotation seats or mini-bottles of vodka.

What Jaden got was a double-stick popsicle.

He ceremoniously peeled the waxy wrapper and buried it under the sand near his water hole.

The popsicle was chocolate.

And . . . was it familiar? Had there been any of these on-board?

Probably there had been. Popsicles are great. Especially fudge ones.

Jaden applied his tongue to a top corner delicately, like he was worried the ice cream might have gone past its expiration date.

It was delicious. His first food in three days.

He made himself go slow, to savor it.

Who knew when the next one might come floating in.

DAY 4

Jaden’s tongue was sore. He was still licking the popsicle.

It wouldn’t go away. It was more rounded on the corners, but he was pretty sure the rounding was only because he’d moved some of the cold fudge over to the side, with all his licking.

Still? He was full.

He’d gone to sleep with the magic popsicle still in his hand, then woke frantic and panicked. It had been right there in the sand, though. No crabs stealing away with it, no sand bugs crawling all over it. The sun didn’t even seem to touch it.

The popsicle couldn’t be cold, either, but it was.

Jaden started to dip it into the ocean, but saw himself dropping it, or a shark surging up to steal it. So, even though it clouded up his drinking water, he swirled it around in there, holding each stick with a different hand, and pulled it back up, clean again.

He closed his eyes, applied tongue to chocolate.

Just as delicious as before. Just as good as the ones his aunt—

That was it! The summer he’d spent with Aunt Jolie, when his mom and dad were doing their figuring out their relationship thing, a Schwann’s truck or something had lumbered down her street every two weeks, and—“special for her favorite nephew”—she would buy a case of double-barreled Fudgsicles.

It didn’t make up for his parents acting like children, but they had been good popsicles.

When Jaden couldn’t possibly lick one lick more of this one, he dug up the paper, wishing pretty hard he’d unwrapped it more carefully, and rewrapped the popsicle, buried it under more sand than was strictly necessary. If you have a magic popsicle, though, you take good care of it, don’t you?

Jaden drank his cloudy chocolate water until his stomach hurt.

For the rest of the afternoon he tried to keep to what he called his fake-n-bake schedule, even though there was nothing fake about it: fifteen minutes lying on his left side, giving his right side up to the hot-hot sun, then fifteen minutes on his back, his front, his other side.

It made the hours go by.

Just before dark he renamed it, too. Not fake-n-bake, but rotisserie. He was the Rotisserie Man.

It was the best reality show ever. It had magic popsicles and everything.

DAY 5

Rotisserie Man was official dead. Well, “cooked,” Jaden corrected.

He woke with not just his frontside burned, like it had already been, but his whole body.

Nocturnal Man lumbered into being.

Jaden scooped out a sand-angel near shore and snuggled down into it as deep as he could, buried himself as best he could manage. It didn’t cover him completely—he’d imagined himself as a head propped up on the sand, which was going to freak somebody out when he smiled—but it was a lot better than nothing.

He’d wanted to dig up in the middle of the island, lie back into that cool fresh water, but he didn’t want to mess that situation up.

Near shore, it was white sand for as far down as he dug.

And, of course, as soon as he was dozing off, prepping for his long night of watching for passing ships’ lights or beacons or whatever, he had to pee again.

He could go right here in the sand, he figured, in his jean shorts, but just because there’s no civilization doesn’t mean you can’t be civilized. That was something Margo had said once, camping.

She would think this was funny.

Jaden smiled, and then he was crying, and then he was clambering up from the sand, throwing handfuls of it out into the water, kicking it even.

At which point he realized the sand was a limited resource too.

He was living at sea-level, wasn’t he? If he threw enough of his island out into the ocean, then the water would seep up over everything he had.

Not that he even halfway understood why or how there was sand in the first place.

Did the rinse-wash-repeat action of a thousand years of waves pulverize cooled lava into sand like this? But wouldn’t it be black, then?

But maybe this wasn’t volcanic, Jaden figured.

It was igneous. That was a word he remembered from junior high. And another: “Sedimentary!” he screamed out over the water, and then ran to what he considered the other three sides of the island, screamed it out from them as well.

Then, peeing off the down-water side of the island, there was a magazine bobbing on the surface.

It was a Playboy.

DAY 6

Jaden was taking stock. Serious, serious stock: one cistern or aquifer or hand-well or something, one magic popsicle—Fudgsicle—one pair of jean shorts, and one gentleman’s magazine.

It made him shiver in the hundred-plus heat.

How does a magazine survive the open waters of the ocean long enough to end up way out here in the middle? And, had this one been lost eighteen years ago? Either that or the same storm that had wrecked Jaden had dumped somebody’s vintage collection overboard.

Porn. Exactly what he needed, yes.

The centerfold’s name was Peggy.

Jaden read the issue from cover to cover, twice. There was an interview with Tom Cruise about a Vietnam movie Jaden had never seen, there was an excerpt of a Vietnam novel he couldn’t imagine the rest of, there was a Vietnam short story about a river that was in Canada, there was another pictorial of an actress Jaden had never heard of. And there were all the columns. All the stupid, stupid columns.

“Thank you!” Jaden called out to the world anyway.

If you’re not grateful, you don’t get anymore.

This was from Jaden’s mom, before she left and got sick and died three states away, not telling Jaden or his father.

But don’t think about her.

Start thinking about sad things on a desert island, and there’s no one to pull you out of that spiral.

Jaden licked his popsicle until he was full and drank from his hole in the ground and peed in the ocean and buried himself in the sand again.

Soon his hair would grow long enough to shade his face. Until then, he would keep arranging his jean shorts over his head.

Survival was pretty stupid, really.

DAY 7

Well, night. And maybe it was kind of still day six, Jaden wasn’t super sure anymore.

If he was going to turn into a creature of the night in order to preserve his skin, though, then he had to start doing it like this: pinching himself awake all night, burrowing down into the sand during the day.

The sky was a big blue bowl turned over him, it felt like. And he’d been living here for ten thousand years, and had an endless supply of BBs for his rifle, had been pumping it up and taking aim up at that bowl forever, making stars.

“This one’s for you, Margo,” he said, and aimed his imaginary rifle up, poked another hole in the sky.

He was spelling her name, connecting the dots. He was drawing pictures. Squares and triangles at first, but then he’d leveled up, was on to Dr. Seuss versions of tall, spindly buildings. He couldn’t do animals yet, couldn’t imagine how the Greeks or Egyptians or Inca or whoever had done all that. Buildings, though, those he could do.

His plan was to get enough going to have a real city up there. Except the stars kept moving. All together, but on their own, too, some of them.

It was only because he’d poked so many holes in the night sky—because he’d let this much light into his upside-down bowl—that he saw the shimmer out in the water. It was different from the white that surged at the top of the waves.

“Don’t do it, don’t do it,” Jaden told himself, but he already was: running out to that shimmer, falling into the water, dog-paddling out to it.

It was flat and hard—another magazine?—but he couldn’t look, had to get back to the island.

Out in the ocean, he had the sudden certainty he wasn’t going to find shore again in the dark. That some current was going to grab him, swish him around the side of the island, push him out farther than he could swim back. That a whale was going to nibble at his feet, take his whole leg into his mouth to see if he was a big plankton. Even a vine of seaweed brushing him would probably stop his heart.

The island was still there.

Jaden clambered back up, panicking and scrambling when it was more like swinging up onto a roof than walking up a slope—what kind of beach was this?—then tried to angle whatever he’d found up to see it.

He had to wait until morning to be sure. Until sunup.

No trumpets played in glory when he could finally make out the picture: a man in a tasteful suit, leaning to his right.

An album, a record.

Vinyl.

MC Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em.

DAY 9

Jaden was buried in the sand with his popsicle in his mouth.

Just staring. At nothing. He wasn’t super sure it was the ninth day, but he was pretty sure he’d skipped the eighth day. Hadn’t eaten, hadn’t drank. Had just laid there. With Peggy.

Her turn-ons were white roses and children and animals, and her turnoffs were cigarettes and traffic. To be honest, Jaden was confusing her with Margo, some.

His plan was, when he was rescued, to leave the Playboy buried in the sand, for the next tenant.

Without meaning to, his tongue worrying over that cold chocolate, he bit into the meat of the popsicle. Into the fudge. The cold hurt his teeth and the popsicle tumbled down into the sand on his chest, but he still had a big chunk of it in his mouth.

He chewed it, swallowed it.

He kind of wanted to look down, see what might or might not be happening with the popsicle, but he also kind of didn’t want to watch the goose do its golden egg thing.

But then he remembered: there’d been words on the popsicle sticks that summer with his aunt, hadn’t there?

He sat up, sand caking off him, covering the popsicle even more. He dug it up, shook the sand off, rolled over to wash it clean and then bit in again, deeper, faster, more and more, all on one side, enough to free up the stick on what he was calling the right.

He licked it clean, squinted to read the scrolly red font.

TRY AGAIN.

And now he just had half a popsicle.

DAY 10

Night again.

Jaden didn’t quite have a city in the night sky yet, but he had picked out three kind-of columns of stars he could build three different-height buildings from, and those stars all stayed together, mostly.

Now he was making up a story for why this light on the seventeenth floor was off, why that one was migrating sideways, or to a lower floor. The stories mostly had to do with candles and a blackout. He called the wandering stars elevators.

Jaden wondered what if he bit off a piece of his calf and ate it.

The popsicle stick he’d denuded had never got its fudge iciness back. Jaden wore the naked popsicle stick behind his ear now. His first impulse had been to chew it, but that was the kind of indulgence you allowed yourself when there was more than two popsicle sticks in the whole entire world. Or, the world Jaden had access too.

The MC Hammer record was useless. The sleeve was just a sleeve, the record just a record, the tiny print on the label just what Jaden would have expected, had he ever got that record.

And, related: why that record? More to the point, why that Playboy? He’d never even owned a single issue, had only ever sneak-looked at his uncle’s, that one summer.

He threaded the popsicle stick from behind his ear and set it under his nose like a mustache and pooched his lips up to keep it there.

It was the current contest: how long until his lips cramped, and the coach—it was either a coach or a drill sergeant, Jaden wasn’t completely committed yet—how long until that coach or drill sergeant would pull him from the game or the battle, and Jaden would say no, no, he could do it, just give him time.

One of the lights of his buildings in the sky winked out and Jaden blew it a kiss, letting the popsicle stick tumble down his chest.

Game over.

DAY 11

Bright, bright sun. The only kind anymore.

But there were a lot of kinds of island, evidently.

Until the other night, getting the MC Hammer record, when he’d had to lunge up onto the island instead of just walk, he’d assumed all islands were the crowns of vast majestic never-seen underwater mountains. But mountains have slopes, don’t they? Even unmajestic ones? They don’t have walls or cliffs leading straight up to the tip-top.

Jaden was no geology major or island-ologist, but this island wasn’t quite tracking.

He’d been pondering it all morning, like figuring out the nature of the island might give him the clue he needed to escape. Finally he planted the popsicle stick straight up and down by the water hole, made sure the Playboy and the record were buried together, checked the wrapper on the half a popsicle he had left, and, like a flag he was leaving behind to tell somebody he’d been here, he stripped out of his shorts, laid them out by the upright popsicle stick.

They wouldn’t blow away. No clouds, no wind.

And then he walked to the non-urinal side of the island, sat on the edge, and slipped into the . . . not exactly the cold, more like the great empty lukewarm.

Still touching—holding on—he treaded water with his legs, he heavybreathed, getting his lungs to capacity, and then he ducked under, keeping his hand in constant contact, but going down, and down.

As deep down as he went, and all the way around, the rocky underwater part of the island was the same width as the overwater part of the island, as near as he could tell. Like it was a column thrusting up from the ocean floor, thousands of feet below. Not some conglomeration or stack of rocks, but . . . a lava tube? Craggy but not cracked.

It was stupid. This wasn’t a mountain. It was a post. It was a column.

And there was a hand-sized, irregular piece of thin plastic bobbing against the underwater cliff.

Jaden started to put it down the front of his pants, but he wasn’t wearing any, so he clamped it in his teeth, let himself float up.

DAY 12

The plastic he’d found on his brave and useless dive was a blister pack. The cardboard still attached showed what had been in the blister pack: a werewolf action figure.

Jaden had all his items laid out by the water hole: popsicle, popsicle stick, album, magazine, action figure. Well, action figure case.

Counting the popsicle and the popsicle stick as one, that was four things. Four things from what Jaden knew was a list of ten. What Ten Things Would You Have on Your Desert Island?

It had been a contest in a magazine, that summer he spent with Aunt Jolie.

Up in the treehouse his older cousins had built years ago, before they grew up and moved out, Jaden had carefully written down what ten things he would have on his desert island.

He would need food, so why not have the best food ever?

He would definitely want his uncle’s magazine.

MC Hammer was amazing.

And he’d always wanted to see a werewolf.

Only, he must have been sleeping when the werewolf bobbed up against shore. So the glue keeping the blister pack to the cardboard had given way, and the action figure had tumbled down to the ocean floor.

Jaden stood, walked over to the edge.

“What about the record player!” he screamed out over the water.

It had been the next item on his list. Followed, he was pretty sure, by a power outlet, with power. He’d underlined “with power” three or four times, to be sure.

All so he could sit on his island and listen to MC Hammer. Maybe practice some dance moves.

DAY 13

Slurping water up from the hole like a sunburned caveman, it hit Jaden that the record player had probably been there, but, like the werewolf’s blister pack, it had sunk. The popsicle and magazine had floated, because they were wood and paper. The record had floated because it was still in its cellophane, or because it was grooved plastic and cardboard.

But the record player had just gulp-gulped straight down.

Along with the power outlet.

That made seven, then. Seven down.

And, he was pretty sure, in the same order he’d filled them in on the magazine’s form, to mail in.

Whoever’s list was chosen was supposed to win a year’s subscription, plus publication. Not this, having to subsist on the actual list you’d written down.

Had that been in the fine print?

Jaden couldn’t even remember what the magazine had been. It was just one he’d stole from the convenience store.

What was next on the list, though? That was the real question.

Hopefully not any more records. The one he had was already melted and warped. And, he hadn’t asked for a werewolf action figure, he was pretty sure. He’d said what he’d want would be a werewolf, the actual monster. Because werewolves are cool.

“Oh yeah,” he said then, when he saw the scum of notebook pages floating in on the surface of the water, the blurry words made of large looping letters in purple ink.

That was next.

Sandra Peterman from homeroom’s secret journal.

Number eight.

DAY 15

No sleep the night before, or the night before that, or the day between. Just remembering. Trying to remember.

That trip to the convenience store had to be where this all started, didn’t it? When he’d got that stupid magazine? Though “trip” wasn’t really the word. More like the power was out for the whole block, and his aunt had hustled him out into the sunshine she said would be good for him.

Walking past the convenience store, Jaden had seen its lights were off as well. He’d wandered in, the door not dinging like usual. No clerk behind the counter. The store was murky gray, like a ghost of itself, and it was cool inside, like the cooler door had been left open to fog the place up.

Jaden hadn’t taken the magazine because he wanted it. He’d taken it because he was mad at his aunt, and his mom, and his dad, and the world. He’d taken it because no one was watching. He’d taken it because it was the closest one to the door. Only, somebody’d spilled a coke behind the magazine: when he pulled it, it stuck to the shelf with coke syrup, just, more the color of mucous or saliva. Like the world had heard that he hated it, so was trying to keep him there long enough for the power to come back on, or for the clerk to be walking back from her cigarette. He pulled harder, got away with the torn-out insides, not the cover, then kept the rolled-up magazine pages in the treehouse so he wouldn’t have to explain where they’d come from.

Doing the magazine’s desert island contest had just been a way to kill another afternoon.

Sneaking that torn-out form into the mail, Jaden had pretended he was rolling up a secret message in a bottle, throwing it out into the water.

Only, it had come back, hadn’t it?

Jaden, sitting in the sand of his island with his action-figure blister pack and his Playboy and his popsicle that wouldn’t melt and his record that would, cringed.

It had come back, hadn’t it? Years later, when someone moved their desk, when they cleaned up the mailroom, when that messy postal jeep was retired—when whatever happened that got Jaden’s contest entry back into the mail, years too late.

Shit.

Jaden stood, paced the perimeter of the island, looking for a coffin bobbing in the water.

DAY 16

Jaden was still walking around and around the island. No coffin yet. The sand of his path was compacted. He couldn’t see it in the dark, but he could feel it under the soles of his bare feet.

He was thinking what if a wave came, pushed too hard on the stalk of rock he was sitting on, crumbled it down into the depths.

He was thinking what about scurvy. He was thinking about chocolate poisoning. He was thinking there was a code hidden in Peggy’s turn-ons and turnoffs in the Playboy, that maybe each turn-on was a 1, each turnoff a 0, for some binary message.

He’d broken the record into shards to use as a weapon. He’d tried wearing the record sleeve as a folded-open paper hat but it kept popping off, so he’d used the bare-wood popsicle stick to carve out two eyes.

The ocean looked the same through his mask.

Jaden screamed, whipped the album sleeve out into the darkness then immediately ran to the edge of the island after it.

Maybe it would come back, he told himself.

Please let it come back.

Like the desert island list he’d mailed off.

Running on automatic all those years ago, he’d put his return address down not as his aunt’s, where he was mailing from, but his actual home, his usual address.

Three years later, the letter had come back.

It was waiting in the mailbox when Jaden and his dad came back from . . . not his mom’s funeral, they hadn’t been in time for that. But her grave, anyway. Their own service of standing there with their heads down.

Jaden had loosened his tie and opened the letter, left it on the kitchen table like a joke he wasn’t in the mood for.

A week later, he was in the mood.

Waiting for his cereal to get less crunchy before school, he’d scratched out what had been the tenth item, wrote in instead, Mom.

Which was why he couldn’t sleep.

DAY 17

The ninth item from his list was a six-pack of toilet paper.

It bobbed up in its plastic, knocked on the side of the island.

Jaden waited half the day before he finally fished it up. What he was waiting to see was if the water would deliver it around the side, let it go on past.

It wouldn’t.

“You’re for guests,” Jaden said to the toilet paper, and nestled it upright into the sand, but it was a lie. He didn’t need the toilet paper for what he’d figured he’d need it for—there was the down-water side of the island just a dunk away, and, as it turned out, subsisting on popsicles and water was pretty light on the bowels—but he did need a pillow, as it turned out.

He slept better than he had in two weeks.

DAY 19

Jaden woke this time to the sand being gently cleared from the side of his face. He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep exactly, but he’d peeked out twice in daylight and peed once in the night, he thought.

He opened his eyes to a figure above him.

“Mom,” he said.

She smiled.

He closed his eyes and the delicate scraping of her palm on his cheek continued. He was crying now. His throat was full.

She’d woke on the beach, she told him after all the hugging and the rest of the crying.

“Beach?” Jaden said, looking all around.

They smiled.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he told her.

“This was poking me in the hip,” she said. It was a silver straw, sharp on one end. Still in a plastic sleeve.

“Number ten,” Jaden said, in wonder, because he thought he’d crossed that one out, to write Mom in.

“A straw?” she asked.

“It’s for the coconuts,” he told her.

His mom looked around for the coconut tree.

“I should have wished better,” Jaden explained.

“This is my wish,” she said. “Being here with you.”

“I only have popsicles,” Jaden said.

“I like popsicles,” his mom said.

It would have been nice to have a fire to sit by, but there were no matches, and only one popsicle stick for firewood, and one record sleeve, and one straw that was more of telescope, now. Jaden talked his mom through the city he was building in the sky, and, like moms do, she looked where he was pointing, and nodded that she saw it, yes. Right there, and there.

Jaden gave her the pillow, then waited until she was asleep, crept over to where the Playboy was buried.

Still crawling—he didn’t want to be a menacing silhouette with a handful of porn should she wake—he dropped the magazine over the down-water side of the island.

The glue at the spine, which had already been crackly-dry, gave up altogether, and the pages spread out over the water, bobbed cheerfully right by the island.

Frantic, Jaden scooped precious handfuls of sand onto each of them, until they sunk.

DAY 20

The next day they spent digging.

Jaden’s reasoning was two-fold: in one place he’d dug, there’d been water, right? Other holes might have even better treasure. It was videogame thinking, but that didn’t mean it was wrong.

And then there was the issue of the coconut straw that his mom had washed up on. It had been there all along, hadn’t it? Or, in the right order, anyway. Other items might be buried as well.

The outlet for the record player turned up after an hour or two. The cord snaking down from it plunged down into the island’s rock stalk, which he now guessed had to be hollow—even more fragile than he’d thought. More impossible.

It had power, too, just like he’d said with his underlining. Jaden scooped a handful of salty water over to it, dribbled enough in that the twin slits spit sparks back up.

The record player showed up in pieces. An arm under the sand here, a piece of wood laminate there, from the cabinet. The needle, who knew.

It didn’t matter.

The record was in shards anyway.

Jaden explained about the down-water side of the island—their selfcleaning latrine—and the water hole, and about burying yourself for the sunlight hours.

His mom didn’t care about any of that.

She wanted to know what he’d been doing all those years she’d been gone.

They passed the popsicle back and forth—one rule: no bites—and, with all the buildings in the sky leaning over them, Jaden told her about the girlfriends and the jobs he’d had, about Dad and his hilarious dating life, and when he didn’t say anything about Margo, it felt like he was doing that because he would explain her by saying she liked white roses and children, and wasn’t into cigarettes. And she deserved better than that.

DAY 21

The coconut straw turned out to be perfect for the water hole.

“Technology,” Jaden said to his mom. He was out of breath from drinking.

She was still cupping her water in her hands to drink.

“And look,” he said, blowing into the straw different depths: it would whistle, too.

“How are we going to cut our hair, do you think?” Jaden’s mom asked, threading some out of her face.

“Why did you leave?” Jaden said back, watching her from under his bangs.

The ocean murmured its watery murmur.

“You know,” she said, averting her eyes. “I got sick.”

“Of Dad?”

“I didn’t want to get you sick too.”

“And then you died from it.”

“I couldn’t call at the end. I wanted to. I’m sorry. But it’s best you didn’t see me. I didn’t want you to have to remember me like that.”

Jaden stared out at the unbroken blue.

“I stole a magazine,” he said. “I think it was a genie magazine, a magic magazine.”

She was just watching him.

“I wrote your name on a list,” he said. “It was . . . I had to cross the straw out to do it. It was a stupid contest. But I shouldn’t have stolen it, I know.” Jaden looked out to the open water, called out, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry!”

“You crossed the straw out?” his mom asked, looking at it stuck in the sand by the water hole.

“I didn’t cross it out enough, I guess,” Jaden said. “But you came anyway. I got eleven, not ten.”

“Thank you,” his mom said. “This has—it’s been a gift.”

“You’re well now, right?” Jaden said.

“I think am, yes.”

“And you’re here.”

They didn’t push it any farther.

“Why that album?” his mom asked, after the appropriate length of time.

“Because I was a stupid kid,” Jaden said.

DAY 22

Jaden was playing his game of one of his fingers burying itself and the others going into a minor panic from it when there was a flurry of motion and a hard, fast cough from the other side of the island.

He let his ring finger stay buried and looked over slow and indirectly. In the tight confines of the island, it was polite to give each other privacy on the down-water side, where privacy would be most appreciated.

But this wasn’t that.

His mom was lying sideways on the sand. Her back was arched like from being electrocuted, and her fingers were stretched back the wrong way. The tendons in her neck were steel cables, and chocolate foam was coming from her mouth, since she’d had the popsicle last.

“Run,” she said, her voice deeper. Dangerous.

Jaden ran to her.

“What can I do?” he said, feeling in the sand under her, in case she was somehow on the outlet and getting electrocuted. “What do you need?”

The popsicle stick, he thought. He could depress her tongue, keep her from choking. Or—or he could do a field tracheotomy with the coconut straw. He’d seen that on television at least twice, and knew roughly where to stab.

But then his mom’s mouth elongated into a canine muzzle, the muscle under the skin bubbling and tearing and creaking.

A werewolf.

He’d asked for a werewolf.

DAY 23

Or maybe it was still day twenty-two. Was it midnight yet? Jaden couldn’t tell.

All his buildings had toppled over.

He was treading water five yards out from the island. It was far enough that his mom couldn’t slash out, reach him with her claws, and close enough he didn’t panic that he wasn’t going to get back.

Evidently werewolves are afraid of the ocean.

His mom’s transformation had been brutal. He’d watched her turn inside out, and, inside her had been a snarly wolf-thing.

No, she hadn’t been able to call him at the end of her sickness fifteen years ago.

She couldn’t physically hold a phone.

She’d barked and screamed and growled at him all night—she could smell him—but she’d stayed on the island.

In frustration, she turned on the toilet paper, shredded it into confetti. For a minute or two the island had been a unicorn daydream, all fluff and whiteness.

She didn’t eat the popsicle, though. Dogs aren’t supposed to have chocolate, Jaden knew. Maybe that went for wolves too?

Jaden wasn’t crying anymore. He didn’t have the energy.

“Mom,” he said for the ten-thousandth time.

His mom’s large ears rotated to catch his words. Her whole body stilled, stiffened.

“Mom,” he said again, and let himself go under again, told himself this was the last time, that he wasn’t coming back up.

DAY 24

Jaden was hanging onto the island with one hand and throwing up into the water.

It was dawn.

He had stayed in the water for two nights, and the day between. Every part of him was shaking and spent. For a few hours he’d been certain he was being punished for sneaking eleven items from a ten-item list, but then, if his mom was a werewolf—and she was—he figured he’d really only gotten his original ten.

His whole time out in the ocean, no sharks had come. No gulls had drifted down for a closer look. No werewolves had come running across the surface of the ocean, from all his mom’s plaintive howling.

She was starving. She was crying with her mouth, with her voice.

She’d finally found the fresh water, slurped and slurped at it, then splashed her pee down onto the sand. An hour or two or three after that, she padded around in a circle, made enough of a bed to curl up in, her tail curling up over her nose. Behind that tail, she shifted back to the mom Jaden knew.

Jaden had waited what felt like an hour after that, being sure, then pulled himself onto the island. He crawled gingerly to the water hole, drank until he threw up again. He threw up as quietly as he could manage.

He sat down in the sand then, staring at his mom. She was lightly snoring.

He flicked grains of sand at her face. Her lips, her eyelids. Nothing.

“Mom,” he said, not really that loud. She didn’t twitch.

He extended a foot, pushed on her thigh. She rolled with it, stayed there.

He turned away from her and licked the popsicle in what he considered a mournful way.

It tasted the same.

DAY 25

Jaden hadn’t meant to sleep, but he guessed he had.

His mom hadn’t eaten him in the night.

Did all werewolves sleep this long when they came back to human?

She’d said it was best he didn’t see her at the end, and she’d been right. He couldn’t that image out of his head, now. That pacing, that growling. That hunger.

“I can’t do it again, Mom,” he said.

No way could he spend another thirty-six hours treading water.

He considered his options. He didn’t have any.

The only thing he could do was scratch her name off the list. Either hers, or his own.

And, if she was a good mom, if she really loved him, if she was really her, she wouldn’t want it to be him, would she? He wasn’t the monster. He wasn’t the one who had left. He wasn’t the one who was, technically, already dead.

What he’d considered the worst hell before—living with a broken record and a never-ending popsicle—it was his dream, now. It was what he had to fight his way back to.

No more werewolves. No more mothers. Nobody eating anybody.

Jaden should have asked for a boat in that contest. A raft. A raft and a compass. No, a shark cage up here on dry land, to keep his mom in.

But there was no shark cage. There was no going back. There was just him, and what he had to do.

He sat down behind his sleeping mom, told her he was sorry, and, pushing hard with both legs, launched her out into the water.

She woke instantly, and fought to get back, but Jaden repelled her, apologizing the whole time, and then he repelled her some more.

She didn’t fight so hard, once she understood.

“I’m sorry,” she said, treading barely enough water to keep her mouth above the surface.

“I wrote your name,” Jaden said.

They were both crying.

“You grew up perfect,” she said, butterflying backward into the open sea, and Jaden closed his eyes.

DAY 26

Night. No city in the sky. Not quite midnight yet, Jaden guessed.

It was quieter now than it had been.

Jaden had been holding his tongue to the popsicle for long enough that it had kind of dried to the chocolate.

The splash to his left turned him around, the popsicle hanging from his mouth.

It was his mom.

She was half her, half not.

Jaden screamed, ran for her, butted her back into the water before she could get steady on the island.

She fought back to the ledge, the shore, and she was panicked—she knew what was water, what wasn’t water, and she wasn’t going to stay in the water anymore.

Jaden kicked her back, kicked her back again, but he wasn’t winning.

She was wolfing out more and more. Because she wanted to say alive.

Jaden shook his head no, yelled to her to stop, and, when she didn’t, he drove the sharp end of the straw down into the hand she’d clawed into the sand.

The straw went through. They both looked down to it. The skin of her hand and the light werewolf fuzz coming in sent tendrils of smoke up.

Silver.

That’s what he’d written on the list, right? Silver straw, for coconuts. He’d asked for silver because it was antimicrobial, a thing he knew from his aunt explaining her earrings to him when she hadn’t been able to answer any questions about where his parents were.

His mom jerked her hand back from the island, from the straw. Her hand—her paw—split down the middle, left the straw standing there in the sand, the werewolf blood on it sizzling away.

“Stop, stop!” Jaden said to her.

She couldn’t, though. She couldn’t help it.

And, the silver, it was making her go back from wolf.

It was his mom again.

“Jaden, please, just let me come up for a—”

Jaden drove the straw into her right eye, and, when the blunt, hollow end was sticking out, was just blinding her not killing her, when it was just pumping blood and eye juice, he thumped it once, hard, with the heel of his hand, pushing it deep enough that a slow plug of grayish pink came out the straw, drooped down into the water.

His mom stopped fighting.

Jaden leaned forward, held her forearm in his hand, then her hand in his, then her fingers. Then nothing.

DAY 32

Jaden should have kept the record sleeve. The one with the eyeholes.

And the action figure blisterpack.

He could have fashioned the blisterpack’s plastic into lenses for the eyeholes of the record sleeve, improvised . . . not sunglasses exactly—there was no tint—but something to wear when he was buried in the sand, anyway.

It would feel like wearing a mask. Like he was somebody else.

But he was just him.

As of last night and this morning, he’d taken to talking out loud to Peggy.

He was telling her how tonight he was going to have to rebuild a city, window by window. Maybe if he did it right, those stacks of windows would resolve into the portholes of a monster of a cruise ship, right?

It didn’t hurt to dream.

Well, it sort of did, but he couldn’t help it.

His beard wasn’t full yet, he knew. He could tell by rubbing his jawline. His beard was wispy, thin, a joke. But give it a few years. Give it a few years, and he’d be living in his own personal comic strip.

It was going to be hilarious.

©2018 by Stephen Graham Jones. Originally published in The Devil and the Deep, edited by Ellen Datlow. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Graham Jones is the NYT bestselling author of nearly thirty novels and collections, and there’s some novellas and comic books in there as well. Most recent is My Heart is a Chainsaw. Next are Earthdivers and Don’t Fear the Reaper. Stephen lives and teaches in Boulder, Colorado.

The Turnip, or, How the Whole World Was Brought to Peace

P H Lee | 6845 words

I have heard it on the rumors that when the tale-spinner’s guild gathers in their secret places, a full half of them are sworn to never tell the truth, and the other half to never tell a lie, even if it mean their life. Being one of that trade myself, I can tell you that that’s more or less the shape of it, and I tell you so you know that this tale is true, just as it was told to me, for I am one of the ones sworn to the truth.

The name I’m called is Dusty Boots, I come from the valley of Erwhile, and I am in love with a girl that I can never have. The story I tell you now comes from the lips of a clergyman, and by his honest word it is a good and righteous tale. Far be it from any among us to impugn the rectitude of the Church; a Church man told me the tale, so it must be wholly and entirely true, no matter how extra-ordinary it may seem to us.

Once upon a time, although what time I shall not say, in the wide, rich lands of the Vale Traverse, there lived two brothers, one tall and cunning, the other short and kind. Having served together many years in the king’s army, they at last retired and received their granted lands side-by-side. But, as it happened, the lands granted to the cunning brother were deep and fruitful, and the lands of the kind brother were rocky and poor, and so in the course of time the cunning brother grew very wealthy, living in a fine house with hands and servants, while just beside him his kind brother lived with only his wife in a poor little shack, too poor even to keep a single child, saved from beggary only by his brother’s bitterly given charity.

One day in early summer, the poor brother was out working his poor fields, digging up a crop of turnips, what little had grown of them at all, when he found a turnip too large to pull out by its greens. Curious, he reached to dig it out, but found it was much larger even than he could dig by hand. In the end, he spent all that day digging and digging, unearthing that entire turnip, but even by the evening he had not yet finished.

He was so overawed by that great root that he did not return to his house for dinner, and worked into the dark of the night, straight through until the dawn. At last, in the light of the day’s new sun, he had finished unearthing it. And what a turnip it was! Laid out on the field, it was nearly twice the height of a man, and it was even longer from tip to stem. In fact, although he did not know it, it was the largest turnip that had ever grown in the history of the world, even in the primordial ages that no man knows.

When he returned to his house, he found his wife waiting for him, up all night with worry.

“And where’ve you been out all night,” she snapped at him, “and not even come back for your supper?”

“Wife,” he replied, “you will not believe me but to see it with your own eye, but our field has produced the most wondrous turnip that ever I have seen. I think, although I do not know for certain, that it is the largest turnip that has ever grown in the history of the world, even in the primordial ages that no man knows.”

“Well, don’t that just take it,” said his wife, incredulous, “bad enough that you’re out all night, and not even come back for your supper, but now you’re telling some story tall as I won’t believe! And I suppose the Witch-Queen came and whisked it away before I’ll ever set my eyes on it!”

“No, no,” said the poor man, “my wife, this is no make-believe or story-told. The turnip is right here in the field, plain to see. Come here! I’ll show it to you.” And, although she did not believe him, his wife followed him out into the fields, until she saw the great turnip as well, and nearly fainted from the shock. She threw her arms around her husband and smothered him with kisses.

“Husband,” she said, “blessings and good news come at last. From this one turnip we’ll be able to eat for a year at the least. We’ll be able to repay your brother’s loans. We’ll even be able to have the children we’ve always wanted.”

Her husband stood there as she embraced him, staring at the turnip, deep in thought. “But it would be a shame,” he said, “to have such a magnificent turnip as this and simply eat it.”

His wife stopped, stood back, and shot him a horrid glare.

“What I mean to say is,” he held up his hands, “what I mean to say is that, surely, this must be the greatest turnip that has ever been grown in the whole history of the world, even in the primordial ages that no man knows. If we eat it, it will just be gone in a year or two, forgotten to history. And what a shame that would be. My greatest accomplishment as a farmer, just gone like that. No, there must be some other thing we can do with it.”

His wife did not say anything in response. She just put her fists on her hips, huffed, and marched her way back to the farmhouse.

But his mind was made up. They could not eat the turnip, for then it would feed their bellies and be gone to the world forever. But neither could they keep it—for they were poor farmers, and could not protect it against those who would want a thing of such magnificence. All they could do was to haul the turnip to the capital and gift it to their king, who kept in his possession all manner of marvels.

• • • •

The very next morning, the farmer loaded the turnip up into his wagon, hitched up his two bony mules to the front of it, and made his way to the capital, the wagon creaking and groaning the whole way from the strain. Once there, he made his way to the king’s castle and before long was in the sovereign presence.

When the king saw this ill-kempt farmer, his hands rough with the dirt of the fields, he was shocked. “Who are you,” he demanded, “and why have you entered our sovereign presence in such haste, with dress filthy and so unbecoming to our court?”

“Your majesty,” said the farmer to the king, “know that I was once a soldier in your service, now turned farmer by your generous grant of land on my retirement. I have worked hard to till those fields for many years on many years now, but they have yielded little but dust and driven me to poverty. I tell my history now not to complain at your majesty’s generosity, to which I am eternally indebted. Nor to beg for any charity from your majesty. It is only to explain my lowly and unkempt appearance.”

“So why then have you come to our presence?” asked the king. He was suspicious of the farmer, for there were many fine and foul that came to beg his wealth from him.

“Just the other day, as I walked among my field digging turnips,” said the man, “I came across the largest turnip I had ever seen, twice as high as a man on the short side, and perfectly formed as you ever did see. When I looked at it, I knew at once that it was the greatest turnip that has ever grown in the history of the world, even in the primordial ages that no man knows. My wife wanted to eat it—for truly we do not have enough to eat between the two of us, and do not speak of the children we would have. I had half a mind to agree with her. But what a waste that would have been! Such a magnificent turnip, gone in a year or two at the most, forgotten to history. After I thought on the matter all night—all night, I tell you true—I realized that there was nothing for it but to take the turnip to the capital and make a gift of it to your majesty, who has places and capability for keeping such magnificent things in safety.”

“It is very kind of you to think so,” said the king. “But in truth I doubt that there is any turnip in the world that is grand enough for our royal treasury.”

“Ah, your majesty,” said the man, “come with me and see, for the turnip is just outside your hall.”

And the king came with him, and the moment he set eyes upon the turnip he cried out with delight at its size and perfection. He ordered it taken to the royal treasury at once, and he rewarded the farmer with gold and silks and jewels and all manner of other finery, calling him brother and embracing him and inviting him to sit and sup at his right hand. But the man deferred, eager to return in triumph to his wife.

Well, you can imagine her surprise when her husband returned in a great carriage, pulled by two gray horses with the whitest coats she had ever seen! She rushed out to see what great lord was riding through their hamlet, only to see her husband descend from the carriage all bedecked in fineries to take her in his arms.

Yes, after that, it was very good for them.

• • • •

Time passed and the news of the poor brother’s fortune spread as such news spreads, and it was not long before it reached the ear of his brother’s nearby farm. Now, this farmer, unlike his brother, had fortune’s favor upon him, and had in due course become quite wealthy. He was unaccountably proud of his wealth, which he imagined he’d gotten through wit and skill, rather than simply the whims of fate, and perhaps, in the end, there was some truth to that. When he heard about his brother’s newfound favor with the king, he was at first overjoyed at the fortune of his blood. But as the nights passed, and word after word of his brother’s opulence reached his ear, envy began to eat at his heart.

“What a silly sot my brother is,” he said to himself late at night, “to have gifted our king some dirty turnip from his field. And, yet, how generous our majesty’s reciprocity? Surely, there must be some way I can turn this to my advantage, so that I can once again have the better of my brother.”

So, because he was quite cunning, he schemed night after night after night, until at last he set his mind on a path he thought sure to bring him wealth. “If my brother,” he reasoned, “a poor man and nothing at all to his name, with only some overgrown turnip to give to our king, is so rewarded with silks and gold and jewels, then what of I, a rich man? I may gift our king with silks and gold and jewels, treasures beyond the reach of ordinary men—speak not of poor men like my brother! Imagine how much greater my reward would be. It is decided! I shall give the king all my gold, all my silks, and all my jewels, every bit of wealth to my name. Then we shall see what rewards await me.”

So, that morning, he ordered his servants to load his carts with all his gold, all his silks, all his jewels, all the other fineries of his household. He took everything, even the silverware from the kitchens, even the candlesticks from the mantle. Then he loaded himself into the firstmost cart and made his way to the capital, his wagons moving slow, creaking and groaning under the load. Once there, he made his way to the king’s castle and before long was in the sovereign presence.

The king was not surprised to see another rich man come to pay him court, but on this day he had no patience for such trivialities. “Who are you,” he demanded, “and why have you come into our sovereign presence? Out with it, man!”

“Your majesty,” said the rich man to the king, “know that I was once a soldier in your service, now turned farmer by your generous grant of land on my retirement. I have worked hard to till those fields for many years now, and they have grown good crop year and year again. With such blessings I have in due course become quite wealthy. I tell my history now not to cock and crow at my own cleverness, but rather to thank your majesty’s grant that has allowed me all of this prosperity.”

“So why have you come to our court?” asked the king suspiciously, for there were many fine and foul that came to beg his wealth from him.

“The other day,” said the farmer cleverly, “as I looked at upon all my eastern silks, my austral spices, my good gold from the mountains northward and realized that, for all my fortune, I had not repaid the one who had made it possible. Wealth is hollow without virtue, and gratitude being the heart of every virtue, I have come today not merely to give my gratitude in words—words which pass as they are spoken and thus are of no value nor meaning—but also with the possessions of my wealth. Who better deserves to share in my fortune than my own king, by whose grace they have been granted and by whose might they are preserved?”

“It is very kind of you to think of us,” said the king. “But in truth I doubt that there is a farmer in the world—even as wealthy and fortunate a farmer as yourself—that has wealth grand enough to suit our royal treasury.”

“Ah, your majesty,” said the man, “come with me and see, for my gifts to you are just outside your hall.”

And the king came with him, and when he saw fine carriages drawn by horses black and gray, this carriage stuffed with gold and jewels, this one with spices and powders, and this with silks and slicks, he cried out with delight at the wealth and splendor. He ordered the fineries taken to the royal treasury forthwith. He called the farmer brother, and embraced him, and invited him to sit and sup at his right hand. The farmer stayed a night to feast with his king, and another night, and another, all the while imagining the great reciprocities that the king would heap upon him, and how he would best his brother once again.

As joyed as he was at the farmer’s gifts, the king nonetheless spent a sleepless night in worry. How could he reward the gifts of this gentle farmer? The man had given him such a great treasure of gold and jewels, spices and powders, silks and slicks. Great generosity surely deserved a great reward. But every treasure in the king’s possession was only the same kind. “Surely,” thought the king, “it would be ungenerous to return a gift the same in kind. What use are gold and fineries to such a wealthy man?” He tossed and turned all night, but only as dawn neared did he find a solution.

The next morning he summoned the wealthy brother to his company. “Friend,” he called him, “truly you have rendered me a great tribute, one not easily forgotten. For the whole of the night, I could not sleep, for all my wealth and power I could not find an appropriate gift to return to you in kind. But, as dawn neared, I at last recalled that I was recently given a strange and unique treasure, with no other like it in all the world. Although I am loathe to part with it, it is the only possible reward for your pious generosity. Although it is too large to fit into my throne room, if you will step outside with me a moment I will show it to you.”

With great eagerness, eagerly imagining what reward this could possibly be, the rich farmer followed the king out to his courtyard, only to see a cart loaded with the largest turnip that he had ever seen. “Behold,” said the king, “this great turnip! Truly, it is magnificent, is it not? It is the largest turnip that the world has ever seen, even in the primordial ages that no man knows. I have never seen its equal, not in size nor in shape nor in perfection, and now I make a gift of it to you.”

The man was shocked. He had given up the whole of his wealth, every scrap of value within his household, only to receive his poor brother’s turnip in return? It vexed him! But he could not refuse the royal gift. He bowed before the king, and thanked him humbly, and set off back to his granted land, his wealth wholly spent, with only the giant turnip to show for all his efforts.

• • • •

Oh, how the clever brother was vexed! He schemed and schemed, ignoring his wife and children, ignoring his servants and his friends, ignoring even the hungry grumblings of his own belly. Finally, he concocted a wicked plan. He gathered some of his remaining friends and servants, greedy men and wicked too, and told them of his plan, and then they set off together to the farm of his kind brother.

Suspecting nothing, the kind brother was overjoyed by the unexpected visit. When he saw his clever brother approach, he left off his work and rushed out to embrace him.

“Brother,” he cried, “truly it has been too long! As you can see, fortune has finally smiled upon me. Now I can repay you for all your loans and generosity that carried us through our lean years.”

If the shrewd brother had been a kinder man, or a better one, perhaps he would have been content to take his brother’s repayments, and build from them a fortune once again. But, alas, he was a clever man, and no small part wicked, and at that moment all he heard was his own jealousy. “How cruel is my brother’s mockery,” he thought to himself, “that he flaunts his new-found wealth, all to further my of-late embarrassment. I had thought that my brother was a kind man, if not as clever as me. But I see now that his kindness was nothing more than a thin facade that he used to exploit my wealth with loans and promises. Now that he has no need of me, he is no better than any other man. Well, brother, if that’s how it shall be, then we will see at the end of things who of us is cleverer.”

Taking on an honest countenance, he spoke to his brother. “No, brother,” he said. “I come not to recall your loans and promises, for what is money between blood? Rather, in the many years since we were soldiers on campaign together, we have had no time between we two as brothers. And so I have come to invite you with me on my hunting expedition, which leaves this very day.”

The kinder brother, suspecting nothing, was overjoyed, and immediately agreed. He called on his wife to pack things for him to hunt with his clever brother. But his wife was immediately suspicious, and called him aside.

“Husband,” she said, “I don’t like the looks of this. Your brother has never been close, since you were poor and he was rich, and he comes sniffing around now that our fortune’s struck. I know that there’s some wickedness afoot. I beg you, husband, for my sake if not yours, do not leave on this ill-met expedition.”

When he heard his wife’s words, the farmer knew there was rightness to them. But he thought about the other men, and their scornful laughter if he admitted that his wife had kept him. He could not face the shame of it. He took that anger from the weakness of his heart and turned it at once against his wife.

“Quiet, woman!” he commanded, “You are simply jealous of my time alone with men. I will not listen to your petty jealousies! You are my wife, to hear me and obey. Send me off happily or I will divorce you straight-away!”

His wife looked him square in the face, her eyes wide, so upset that she could not say a word. She ran from the room, trailing sobs and tears, leaving him to pack his things alone.

• • • •

After their hunting party reached the forest, his brother rode ahead, and the man soon found himself riding alone with strange men, each of them the greedy compatriots of his sly and prideful brother. As soon as they were certainly alone, the wicked men fell upon him and beat him with their clubs. Although he had been a soldier and was no stranger to battle, there were so many of them, and only one of him, and so in the end of course he succumbed to their assault.

Once they had him on the ground, the other men spat on him and kicked him, laughing all the while. “We would kill you now,” they said, “but for your brother’s sake. He wanted to be the one to do the killing, so we’re off to fetch him now.” They stripped off all of the man’s clothes, tied a sack around his head, left him hanging upside down from an old ash tree.

For a time, the man hung there, despairing of his fate and his wife’s unheeded warning. But neglectful fortune was soon to favor him once again. Along through the woods there came a scholar on horseback, the sort of man who valued knowledge about all else, a man learned of writing and writ of learning, such a man as has not held sword nor plow his whole life through.

When this scholar saw our hanging man, he stopped his horse and stared at him in astonishment. An ordinary sort of person might have thought that he had been set upon by robbers, or might have mistaken him for a fairy, or thought this a pagan practice, forbidden by right and custom, but the scholar did not know what to make of the naked man at all. Not being the sort to leave his curiosity even a moment unsated, the scholar spoke his bewilderment aloud.

“Dear sir,” the scholar asked, “if I may disturb your silence for a moment—and I am very accustomed to silence of the forest, which is why I often in my cogitations come so deep into the woods, where ignorant and peasantish folk fear for bears and fairies—I would merely mean to ask of your mind how it is that your person has been secured so, inverted and naked in a tree, covered by some impediments to your vision but none to your decency.”

Now, dear listeners, you may perhaps find the next part of this story quite peculiar. To listen to it, you even find it paganish, or even heretical. But, I must remind you, this is a tale as it was told to me from the lips of a churchman. Thus, it is in every aspect righteous. Far be it from you or I, simple laymen in honest fear of God, to judge it otherwise.

Regardless, when the hanging man heard the scholar’s question, he knew at once that this was a scholar and then, only a moment later, he struck upon a plan to free himself. “Sir,” he said, “in truth I would not tell you, for this is the greatest secret of all mankind, greater than the works of the eastern philosophers, greater than the works of the austral scientists, greater than the secrets lost in the occidental lands forgotten to the ages of man. But I can tell that you are a scholar, the sort of man who values knowledge about all else, learned of writing and writ of learning, such a man as has not held sword nor plow his whole life through, so perhaps you might have some sliver of capacity to understand the nature of this exercise.”

Hearing this, the scholar leapt from his horse and fell to his knees before the hanging man. “Oh, sir,” he said in desperation, “or sire or any other respect you might claim, please tell me your secret, I beg of you. My whole life, I see now clearly, has been preparation for this moment. I promise you I shall be worthy of it.”

“There is no need for sirring or siring,” said the hanging man, his ruse already sprung, “for amongst men of reason such as ourselves there should be only a natural equality. So I tell you now that this cloth enclosing my head, though it appears to be an ordinary sack, is in truth an ancient receptacle of all the knowledge and wisdom that has been lost to the ages. By hanging myself naked in this tree and plunging my head into its depths, I am partaking of the pure and free knowledge of the universe, the knowledge beyond the firelight, the knowledge that one particular philosopher, in times antiquous, was made to drink his poison merely for speaking of it. The forgotten knowledge of every world is contained within this sack, and I gaze upon it in utmost clarity.”

The scholar fell to the ground, shaking with rapturous anticipation. It was all he could manage to croak out a few words. “Please, sir, please, my brother-in-knowledge, I beg you for a single glimpse into that sack upon your head. I would not be so bold to ask to plunge my head into its depths, but merely a glimpse would be enough to satisfy my lifetime of study.”

“Enough!” said the hanging man, “you may have more a glimpse of it, but the way is difficult, and I fear that you would shirk from it. No, no, I think it would be best if you returned to your books. You could certainly not bear it.”

“No!” screamed the scholar. Hearing the refusal pained him more than knives. “No, please, I will do anything, suffer anything, bear any depredation, for my life is given in pursuit of knowledge, and so it follows, like A from A, that I will even give my life for it. Please, I beg you, tell me that way and I will follow it, though it take years, though it take my body and my life, if my mind will finally know the whole of it, that should be enough for me. I beg you, show me the truth. Do not forsake me to this world of shadows and firelight!”

“Very well,” said the hanging man after a pause, “First you must strip yourself of all your clothing, giving no thought to your decency nor dignity, for in the light of truth we are all known fully, with no illusions to hide us from the world. Then, I will beat you to within a very moment of your life, for to understand this knowledge you must abandon the flesh and its pleasures and illusions. Lastly, I will hang you reversed from this tree, for in this manner you will see the world entirely new, without any of the pre-judices that your learning has wrought in you. That done, you shall be able to see the world entire, to each of its four round corners, everything as it truly is, every secret laid bare at last.”

“Enough!” said the scholar, and immediately he stripped off all his clothes and let the hanging man down from the tree. “You must beat me within an inch of my life! Tie my hands with that rope, if it please you, so that I do not succumb to my baser impulses and resist your blows. Hang me reversed from yonder tree, and plunge my head into this sack, so that I shall know the world and finally be free.” And the other man did so, beating the scholar most brutally, then suspending him from the self-same tree and wrapping his head in the self-same sack. When that was done, he donned the scholar’s clothes as his own, mounted his horse and, thus evading fratricide, made his way back home.

As to what that scholar saw within that sack, however, I shan’t speak a word of it. A righteous tale from the lips of a churchman is well enough and good, but there are still some tales that, if you heard them even once, would surely twist your heart to heresy.

• • • •

Shortly thereafter, the kinder man went to pay a call upon his murderous brother. He cried out from the edge of his brother’s field, saying “Do not be afraid. I have not come in vengeance. Come out, and embrace me as your brother once again, and all shall be forgiven, for I have determined a method for both our fortunes.”

What could the wicked brother do? He could not cower in his house forever. At last, he came out into the field, making a great show of tearing his shirt and crying for forgiveness, but the kind brother would not hear it.

“I know well enough that it was desperation that turned your heart to murder,” he said.

“Oh brother,” replied the other, weeping, “you don’t know the half of it. Even our seed has gone to fill our bellies. Surely we shall starve come winter, for there is nothing left to save us. Better that you should forget your treacherous brother, and make your own way, that at least one of our family should carry our forefather’s line into future generations.”

“Oh nonsense,” said the first brother. “For I have in my method salvation for us both. Now, that turnip from my field—the largest turnip that the world has ever seen, even in the primordial ages that no man knows, that I gave to our king who gave it in turn to you, is it still in your possession? Surely, you cannot have eaten all of it already.”

“In truth,” said the second brother, “I was so vexed to receive a worthless gift that I have left it to rot in the remains of my carriages.”

“Worthless gift! My brother, that turnip is worth more than any gold or jewels, spices or powders, any silks or slicks. It is greater wealth than this entire kingdom! Greater wealth than all empires of all the world!”

When the cruel, sly brother heard this, he curled his fists in anger. “Brother, I have always thought you to be kind, but I see I was mistaken. To leave my family to starve, very well. I deserve no less. But to add to this your mockery? It is cruel, brother, all too cruel!”

“It is not a joke! Simply cut the turnip into parts, no smaller than your fist. Reserve what you need to eat this winter, and sew the rest into your rich and fertile fields, just as you would with any seed, and in the springtime we shall see what comes of it.”

The wicked brother did not understand, but what could he do? In desperation, he followed his brothers words. Imagine his surprise when he found in the springtime his fields full of giant turnips, each as large as the first or larger still. He immediately ran to his brother’s house, embracing him and kissing him and promising him all manner of repayments. “No, no,” said the first brother, “all I wish for repayment is one of your many turnips, so that I may sew my fields in the selfsame manner.” His brother gladly granted him a turnip, and he sewed his fields in the selfsame manner, and by midsummer both households had more turnip than they might eat in twelve lifetimes and one more.

Word of their prosperity spread and spread, until it came to the ears of their sovereign the king, who summoned both of the brothers his sovereign presence. When they arrived, he recognized both of them from years before.

“Tell me,” asked the king, “how you are both now so wealthy, when one of you came before me a pauper, and the other one paupered himself in gifts?”

“We have determined a method,” said the kinder brother, “by which we may harvest enough food to feed ourselves forever, with plenty left over for sale and charity. Thus, we appear now before you built so plump and dressed so gay.”

“Tell me this method at once,” said the king, “and for it I shall create you both as dukes. But if you withhold it from me, you’ll both get a long rot in the dungeons before your heads hang lifeless from my wall, for my gratitude is outmatched only by my wrath, and I shall not wait a moment more.”

“Your majesty,” said the shrewder brother, “there is no need for threats or promises. Our duty to you compels us to speak the truth regardless.” They told the king their method for growing the turnips, and gave him a gift of several from their fields. True to his word, the king created both the brothers his dukes with proper lands and titles and invited them to sit and sup at his either side. Having done so, he distributed both the turnips and the knowledge to grow them to all the men of his realm. And so it came to pass that the people of that kingdom grew rich and plentiful and never again knew any kind of want.

But the nearby kingdoms grew jealous at their neighbors’ sudden wealth. Whispers of their weaknesses travelled fast amongst all the princes and kings of the Vale Traverse. Soon, in hard spring after a hard winter, ragged armies marched jealous against that little prosperous kingdom, intent on seizing their stores of food or at least some part of their great treasure. What’s worse, all the men of that realm were by now both rich and content, with wives and families, so rich and so content that they could not be persuaded to take up arms, or serve otherways in the king’s armies. For what had the fortune has the soldiering life to offer men who already have enough?

Faced with the armies of a dozen realms or more, and with no soldiers willing to stand against them, the king called his two most trusted dukes to court. “I have created you both dukes, and you have supped at my either side. Now I call you to account on all your oaths and promises. You are clever men; use your cleverness to defend our kingdom. For these armies are demanding of our turnip-lore, and our people are too content to take up arms as soldiers. If the world should learn our secret, then there shall be no differences between us. Our kingdom shall once more be poor and ordinary, with all my newfound wealth and power gone. No,” he cried, “I will not have it! You must find a way to turn these armies back or both your heads shall hang lifeless from my walls!”

For days and nights the two dukes planned and plotted, but in the end they could divine no method that would save their nation, their families, or their heads.

Finally, with enemy armies already gathered at the borders of their little kingdom, the cunning brother came bursting into the other’s room at midnight. “At last,” he said, “I have hit upon it!” He explained his plan to his brother.

“But,” said the kind duke, “though it could work, surely it is treason. Our king’s generosity is only exceeded by his wrath, so though our kingdom would be saved, our heads would surely hang lifeless from his wall.”

“Yes,” said the cunning duke, “but what is there to be done about it? What are our two heads against this entire kingdom? There is nothing for it. We must gather up our households this very night and, having enacted our plan, we shall flee to the cities of the south, where I have heard there is some refuge for unfortunate men.”

“Then we must make haste,” said the kind brother, “for enemy armies already gather at the borders of our little kingdom.” They gathered up all that they could, and all their households, including amongst their things some cuttings of the great turnip, and under a flag of parley came to speak with the enemy commanders.

• • • •

When the enemy commanders saw that only two families had come to meet them the field of battle, they laughed at the ease of conquest. But still, they came to speak with the two dukes, for such is the custom of the Vale Traverse, that a flag of parley is never once ignored.

“How is it,” said the leader of them all, a haggard man in red armor who was called the Prince of Rust and Blood, “that so wealthy a kingdom can only manage two old men upon the field, accompanied by a number of women and servants, whereas we poorer nations field an army so large to stretch from one horizon to another? Have you become so weak in your prosperity that you have forgotten war entirely?”

But the kinder of the dukes stepped forward, and showed him a great turnip. “Oh Prince of Rust and Blood,” he said, “mighty at war, it is true that we have no armies that might oppose you. So we offer you instead the secret of this nation’s prosperity. With these turnips from our fields, we know not hunger nor want nor need, and are thus wealthy beyond wealth, content beyond contending.”

“So why,” said the Prince of Rust and Blood, “should we not simply burn your villages, slaughtering your men and your children, taking your women and these marvelous turnips as well?”

“If your armies turn back now,” said the cunning duke, loud enough for the whole gathered host to hear him, “we will tell each of your soldiers the secret that grows these turnips, and give each of them a part that he may grow for his own, on his own land, and from this he shall never again know for want, never know for hunger, never know for need, never again need for war.”

The Prince of Rust and Blood loved nothing more than battle, so he laughed at the duke’s offer, not even bothering to refuse. But his soldiers were not cruel men like him, or if they were cruel they were only cruel out of necessity. Every soldier of that army had heard the clever duke speak his promise aloud. And, even as the Duke spoke his offer, the wives and servants of the two Dukes’ households walked amongst that assembled host, giving each man a piece of the great turnip, and whispering to each the secret of its cultivation. So when the Prince of Rust and Blood ordered them to battle the soldiers of that army would not raise a spear or sword or bow, instead demanding only a little piece of the great turnip, and a little land to grow it on, that they might know for themselves that wealth or, at least, sufficiency. And when the Prince turned back to the Dukes, betrayed by his own armies, they were already gone, fled along with their households to the cities of the south, where there is some refuge for unfortunate men. What happened to them after, I cannot say. The story leaves them there.

I can tell you, though, that all those soldiers took their turnips home, and grew from them their own crops, and gave the secret to their neighbors in sale or charity, who passed it on to their neighbors in turn, until the turnips had spread over the entire world. Once they had the turnips, no one ever again knew hunger, no one ever again knew want, no one ever again knew war. And so, in this gradual manner, the whole world was brought to eternal peace.

That is the story, the whole and the heart of it, just as it was told to me from the lips of a pious churchman. However impossible it seems to you, however absurd you find its ending or how heathenish its middle, if any man call me a liar, he’d best take that matter up with God.

©2022 by P H Lee.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

P H Lee lives on top of an old walnut tree, past a thicket of roses, down a dead end street at the edge of town. Their work has appeared in many venues including Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Uncanny Magazine. From time to time, they microwave and eat a frozen burrito at two in the morning, for no reason other than that they want to.

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

EXCERPT: In the Shadow of Lightning (Tor Books)

Brian McClellan | 7231 words

From Brian McClellan, author of The Powder Mage, comes In the Shadow of Lightning, a brand-new epic fantasy where magic is a finite resource—and it’s running out.

Demir Grappo is an outcast—he fled a life of wealth and power, abandoning his responsibilities as a general, a governor, and a son. Now he will live out his days as a grifter, rootless, and alone. But when his mother is brutally murdered, Demir must return from exile to claim his seat at the head of the family and uncover the truth that got her killed: the very power that keeps civilization turning, godglass, is running out.

Now, Demir must find allies, old friends and rivals alike, confront the powerful guild-families who are only interested in making the most of the scraps left at the table and uncover the invisible hand that threatens the Empire. A war is coming, a war unlike any other. And Demir and his ragtag group of outcasts are the only thing that stands in the way of the end of life as the world knows it.

“Powerful rival families, murderous conspiracies, epic battles, larger-than-life characters, and magic.”—Fonda Lee, author of The Green Bone Saga

“Engaging, fast-paced and epic.”—James Islington, author of In the Shadow of What Was Lost

“Clever, fun, and by turns beautifully bloody, In the Shadow of Lightning hits like a bolt through a stained glass window.”—Megan E. O’Keefe, author of Chaos Vector

Coming June 21, 2022 from Tor Books.

Prologue

Demir Grappo picked his way through the aftermath of a battle as the sun began to set over the mountains. The sky was a brilliant hue of red, wispy clouds looking like the flames of an eternal forge, a scene worthy of a painting if not for the carnage spread out across the plain in every direction. Demir let his eyes linger on that sunset, trying to block out the screams and moans of the dying. He wondered if his army had an official artist. Most armies did, didn’t they? If not, he should get one.

He held up his fingers to make a rectangle like that of a landscape painting. It was an incredible view. Slowly, he lowered his fingers so that they took in the rapidly darkening battlefield. This . . . less so.

Demir had grown up on stories of wartime glory—of heroism and last stands and outnumbered cavalry charges; of unstoppable breachers in their brightly colored sorcerous armor cutting a swath through infantry while glassdancers rained shards of glittering silica across the battlefield.

Those painted words had always been so much cleaner than reality. They hadn’t talked about the clouds of powder smoke, or the putrid slurry of mud and blood underfoot. None of his tutors had ever mentioned the screams of grown men and women—weeping for fear, for wounds, or for their dead friends. They certainly hadn’t mentioned the smell.

And the blood. Oh, so much blood. There always was when glass-dancers were involved.

Demir had managed three victories in seven days, and he could not deny that watching a battle unfold to his specifications had made his heart pound in a way he’d never before experienced. Seeing the enemy routed; listening to his soldiers cheer—those things certainly felt glorious. But this? There was no glory for the medics, surgeons, and priests wandering the aftermath.

Demir contemplated the swampy morass of blood left in the wake of a company of soldiers who’d fallen beneath a glassdancer’s attack. The bodies were eviscerated, sliced apart by millions of shards of glass. Those that survived looked like horror-house dummies, screaming in agony until a medic could reach them with various types of godglass to distract the mind, lessen the pain, and speed recovery.

Was that his handiwork, he wondered? They were rebel soldiers, after all, and it was easy to lose track of these sorts of things during the chaos of a battle. His eyes fell on one of the wounded, a young woman sitting up with precious pain-deadening milkglass clenched between her teeth. She was staring at Demir with a mixture of horror and fear so intense that Demir found himself covering the overlapping triangle tattoo on his left hand that marked his sorcery.

His glassdancer tutor had once told him that it was good and right for their kind to stand above others. It was a gift, she had claimed, and beyond the sorcerous power to manipulate common glass it would also give him a psychological edge over others. They would always fear him, because they knew he could kill with a thought.

The evidence was before him. Hundreds of men and women, cut to ribbons. They were right to fear him. He had never witnessed his own destructive power with such acuity as he had on the battlefield these last seven days, and deep down, it terrified him. Would he get used to this over time? He was only twenty years old, after all, and this was his first campaign. Would he harden? Or would it always leave him sickened?

Demir looked around for something—anything—with which to ground himself. His staff of officers hadn’t yet noticed his disappearance, and he was alone but for the dead, the wounded, and the healers and priests who tended to both. The living gave him a wide berth the moment they connected his decorated black uniform with the silic sigil marking him as a glassdancer. They might not actually recognize him, but they could do the math. General Grappo, the glassdancer commander.

He hated that so much. Why couldn’t they see the victories he’d given them, instead of the deadly sorcery he never wanted?

His eyes finally fell on a familiar figure and he turned his aimless wandering in that direction. He passed a medic handing a piece of white god-glass the size and shape of a horseshoe nail to a wounded soldier. “Clutch it between your teeth until the pain passes,” the medic instructed, glancing at Demir as if it were his doing. Half the soldier’s guts were hanging out. She would be dead in a few hours, but the sorcery of the milkglass would ease her passing. On a whim, Demir tried to feel the little piece of milkglass with his sorcery, but the spot it occupied was cold and dead to his senses. Godglass was the only glass a glassdancer could not manipulate.

Putting the medic and his dying patient from his mind, Demir approached the man he’d seen kneeling in a small clearing in the field of dead. Demir knew him just well enough to guess that he was not praying. Clearing his head, he called it, before and after every battle. Demir wished more soldiers attended to their own minds as carefully.

Idrian Sepulki was big, over six feet tall, with skin as dark as coal, broad shoulders, and legs strong as tree trunks. He wore the armor of a breacher: halfplate of interlocking steel worked with a myriad of high-resonance god-glass; accents of milkglass to suppress pain; bands of yellow forgeglass to increase his strength and speed; pinpricks of purple witglass to invigorate the mind. Most predominant of all was the dark blue hammerglass that was harder than steel, making the armor itself almost indestructible. Idrian’s kite shield and immense bastard sword, both also inlaid with godglass, lay on the ground beside him, crusted in blood from the battle. His helmet had two hammerglass ram’s horns curled tightly against the steel. Among the soldiers, Idrian was known simply as the Ram.

The sorcery of so much godglass in one place would sicken a normal person in a few minutes and kill them in mere hours, but Idrian was a glazalier—one of those rare individuals resistant to glassrot. All breachers were, by necessity. Demir glanced down at the back of his own hand where a purple, scaly shimmer had appeared on his skin. It was the first sign of glassrot, caused by using witglass to plan and command the battle. Without care, the patch would harden into something akin to fish scales and become permanently fixed to his skin. He would need to be judicious with his exposure to sorcery for a few days.

“Breacher Sepulki,” Demir greeted Idrian. The soldier cracked open one eye, saw that it was Demir, and made to get to his feet. Demir stopped him with a wave. “Don’t let me interrupt.”

“There is nothing to interrupt, sir,” Idrian replied, his voice a deep, vibrant bass. “I am simply emptying my mind of violence.” He opened both his eyes, revealing that the right had been replaced long ago with a false eye made of purple witglass. Demir had asked around a couple of weeks ago, but no one seemed to know when he’d gotten that glass eye, or why it hadn’t killed him yet. Taking godglass into one’s own body wasn’t unheard of, but it was very dangerous, even to a glazalier.

“Sounds healthy,” Demir responded. “I was enjoying the sunset, myself.”

Idrian fixed Demir with that unsettling, one-purple-eyed gaze. There was no fear in that gaze, and for that Demir was grateful. At least someone in this army viewed him as more than a monster. But then again, breachers were little more than state-sponsored killing machines. Power understood power. “It is quite striking, sir. Congratulations on the victory.”

Demir gave Idrian a cool nod and wondered if it irked the breacher to call someone less than half his age “sir.” “It does seem to be a victory, doesn’t it?”

“The enemy has been crushed. Whatever strength they have left has fled to the mountains. Holikan lies defenseless before us.” Idrian nodded to himself. “At least, that is the intelligence I have received. You may have more current information.”

“No, that’s about the sum of it.”

Idrian snorted. “Thank you, sir. Do you happen to know where my battalion is?”

Demir considered this for a moment, going through a catalog of the thousands of commands he’d sent out over the last twenty-four hours. He wouldn’t usually keep tabs on a single battalion, but Idrian belonged to the Ironhorn Rams—they were commanded by Demir’s uncle Tadeas and they were the best combat engineers in the Ossan Empire. Idrian would normally be with them, but Demir’s plans for this battle had required an extra breacher.

“Haven’t caught up to us yet,” he answered. “I imagine they’re still blowing up bridges along the Tien.” He frowned. “That reminds me, let’s send a fast horse to let them know the war has been won. No need to destroy infrastructure that doesn’t need to be destroyed.”

“Of course, sir. Should I carry the message myself?”

“Eager to join back up with them?”

“They’re my friends, sir. I don’t like them being without their breacher.”

“Ah. No, stay with me a while yet, at least until I’m completely certain of the enemy’s surrender. We’ll send a horse, and I’ll make sure you rejoin them soon.”

“Thank you, sir.” Idrian paused. “If I may?”

“Yes?”

“The soldiers are calling you the Lightning Prince. I thought you might want to know.”

“I hadn’t heard that.” Demir took the name on his tongue and rolled it around. “Is it meant to be a diminutive for my age, or a celebration for the speed of my campaign?”

Idrian hesitated just a moment too long. “Come now, be honest.”

“Both, I think.”

Demir chuckled. “I like it.” The Lightning Prince. Most great men were middle-aged before they’d earned an honorific like that. He hummed to himself, enjoying the way the nickname sounded in his head. It almost made him forget the blood soaking his boots. Maybe he would get used to this. Maybe he would harden to killing, and to ordering others to kill.

He shuddered. No. More importantly than being a glassdancer or a general, he was a politician. He was in charge of this campaign by circumstance only, and within a few days he planned on heading right back to his province, where he could put the bloodshed behind him and focus on helping his people.

Idrian climbed to his feet, towering over Demir by eight inches. “Sir, I believe that your staff is looking for you.”

Demir glanced the way Idrian nodded to see a small group approaching on horseback. They were an odd mix of Ossan political liaisons—here to oversee negotiations with the enemy—and grizzled officers sent along to make sure this young upstart governor didn’t make a complete disaster of his first campaign. The lot of them grinned at him like asylum fools. He could see in their eyes that they expected to gain prestige, land, and merits on the coattails of his victory. Demir didn’t mind. Sharing credit meant they would be beholden to him in the future; a card to keep in reserve for if he ever needed it.

He let his eyes wander across the group for several moments, making mental notes of who he could use in the future, who might be trouble, and who he could forget. Tavrish Magna was a great potbellied jokester with few ambitions. Helenna Dorlani whispered behind Demir’s back constantly, undermining him with the subtlety of a company of cuirassiers. Her cousin Jevri gladly took Demir’s bribes to report on her. Three members of the small Forlio guild-family had managed to finagle their way onto his staff, and they stood to gain the most from this campaign, while Jakeb Stavri had made deals in the Assembly that bet strongly against Demir’s success. He would lose hundreds of thousands, and based on the look on his face, he knew it.

It was a complex group, both personally and politically—untrustworthy adders slithering about his feet, any one of which might bite at any time. Even in victory he needed to be cautious, lest one of them turn on him for their own gain.

The man out front was named Capric Vorcien, and he was a personal friend that Demir had brought on campaign to cover his back against all the rest. Capric was a tall, thin man in his early twenties with the black hair and olive skin of an Ossan native. Tattooed on his right hand was an inverted triangle crossed with the wavy lines of a sun setting over the desert—the silic symbol of the Vorcien guild-family. He saluted Demir grandly and swung down from his horse.

“Hail, Victorious Grappo!” Capric called. The others echoed the words with various levels of enthusiasm. Demir gazed back at the group, still evaluating each person, noting the secrets hidden in the eyes of each. Behind their pleasure at a battle won, there was fear there, just like the soldiers’. How many glassdancers were there in the officer corps, after all? Not many. Capric was the only one who didn’t seem to walk on eggshells. “That was an incredible battle,” he complimented Demir.

“Satisfactory,” Demir demurred. “That countercharge from their dragoons surprised me.”

“But you shattered it anyway. Glassdamn you, man, take some credit!” Capric clasped his hand, pulling him into a congratulatory hug during which he whispered, “Look over my left shoulder. If you want to go ahead with your next plan, now is the time.”

Demir’s eyes found an unfamiliar trio among his staff: a middle-aged woman with the blond hair of an eastern provincial, accompanied by two bodyguards, all three of them looking haggard and defeated. He pulled back from Capric and gestured at the group. “What is this?” he asked loudly, though he knew exactly who they were.

“The mayor of Holikan has come to surrender.” At Capric’s gesture, the woman approached Demir, hands held out in supplication. She fell on her knees, pressing her face to the ground.

“I surrender the city of Holikan,” she intoned. “I do not ask for terms— but I offer my life in exchange for the lives of my subjects. They do not deserve the wrath of the Empire.”

Demir blinked down at her. He had discussed this moment with Capric at length. It was the crux of the next step in his political career, and yet it still managed to surprise him. Beside the prostrating mayor, Helenna Dorlani produced a short silver lance and now held it, pommel-first, toward Demir. Tradition dictated that he accept the surrender and then pierce the mayor’s neck with the ceremonial weapon, executing her on the spot. She was a rebel, after all; an insurrectionist and traitor to the Ossan Empire. Demir glanced toward Idrian, his confidence wavering at the idea of such immediate, formalized bloodshed, but the breacher had taken two long steps back as if to say that a soldier had no business in this kind of thing.

Demir took the lance from the liaison and turned toward Capric. Capric himself just shrugged. He knew Demir’s mind. He knew Demir had no intention of following outdated traditions just to please the Assembly. Demir gave the lance a little twirl, then slapped the haft thoughtfully against his left palm. “Stand up,” he said.

The mayor glanced up at Demir, then at the gathered officers. She seemed confused by the fact that she wasn’t being speared at this moment. Demir thrust the lance into the ground, point-first, then leaned on it while he took the mayor under one arm and pulled her to her feet. He offered her his hand.

“Good evening. I’m Demir Grappo.”

The mayor stared at his other hand for several moments—or rather at the glassdancer sigil on it. Finally she answered the handshake. “I am Myria Forl, mayor of Holikan.” She hesitated for another few moments, then added, “I’ve heard of you, Demir Grappo.”

“Good things, I hope.”

She nodded. “What are you doing here? You’re a governor two provinces over; a politician, not a warrior.”

“Warrior?” Demir laughed and jerked his thumb at Idrian. “He’s a warrior. I’m just a bit clever. Tell me, Myria, what do you want?”

“I . . . Excuse me?”

“Seven months ago, you declared your independence from the Ossan Empire. You’ve defeated two armies, gathered support from your province, and from what I can tell were doing a damned good job of this whole rebellion before I showed up. And yet . . . you’re still calling yourself a mayor.”

“Because that’s what I am,” she said incredulously.

“So this wasn’t a personal power grab? You haven’t made yourself Monarch of Holikan?”

“No,” she said emphatically. “I declared independence because Ossa has only ever treated us as provincials. We are not, and will never be, equals. We want fair taxes and local magistrates, and—”

Demir cut her off gently. “I know. I read your declarations, all eighty-seven of them. I just wanted to ask you in person.”

A throat cleared, and Demir turned to find that Helenna Dorlani had retrieved the silver lance, wiped the blade, and now held it toward him once again. “General Grappo, it is tradition that you spill the blood of the rebel leader, then decimate the city.” She seemed confused, her eyes darting toward the sigil on Demir’s left hand as if wondering why a glassdancer wasn’t ready to kill at a moment’s notice.

Demir ignored her and took a long look toward the city, where lanterns were being lit in the windows as night fell. He could imagine the fear of all those people, having just witnessed their army scattered, knowing the traditions of the Ossan Empire. “Decimate,” Demir muttered. “To force the entire city to draw lots, and then make them murder one out of every ten of their own number. No quarter for children or the infirm. That sounds unpleasant.”

“It’s meant to be,” Helenna insisted. “It’s a punishment.”

“For what? The crime of wanting to be treated as citizens in their own country?” Demir snorted. “I don’t believe the punishment fits the crime, and I will not allow it.”

“But . . .” Helenna stuttered, “you must!” She turned to Capric. “Tell him that he must follow tradition.”

Demir didn’t let his friend answer for him. “What law requires it?” he asked lightly. “None. I may be young, but I was the governor of my own province when I was fourteen. There is a difference between law and tradition—and I know the laws like my own silic symbol.” He held up his right hand to show the tattoo of an upside-down triangle with cracked lightning spreading from the center. It was the sigil of the Grappo guild-family, a complement to the glassdancer sigil on his left—the two tattoos of true power within the Empire. He took a deep breath. “Madame Mayor, do you surrender Holikan into the care of Demir Grappo of the Ossan Empire?”

Myria Forl stared at him warily. “I do.”

“Wonderful.”

As the words were said, Capric was already removing something from his saddlebags. He produced and unfurled a black and crimson cloak with solemnity. Demir felt the twinge of a smile on his lips, his heart skipping a beat. The victor’s cloak was another tradition, one of pomp and foolery, meant for nothing but flattery.

But he’d damn well earned it, and he savored the moments that it took Capric to lay the heavy fabric across his shoulders and then clasp the golden chain. Capric finished the ceremony by placing a single kiss on Demir’s left cheek and giving him a small bow. “Well done, Lightning Prince.”

The hairs on the back of Demir’s neck stood on end at the formal statement of his new honorific. He kept his face expressionless, nodding to Capric and then declaring, “The city of Holikan is now under my protection. They are not rebels, they are our cousins, and we will treat them accordingly!” The officers stared back at him in vague surprise. None of them would argue, of course, not with their general and certainly not with a glassdancer—but he knew they were all furiously penning letters to the capital in the backs of their heads.

“What the piss are you doing?” Myria whispered.

He replied in a low voice, “I may be an Ossan citizen, but I’m also the governor of a province. My people have the same complaints as yours, and I will take them to the Assembly.”

“They won’t be happy.”

“The Assembly is made up of a bunch of rich, self-fellating fools. I know, because I am one. We’re never happy.”

“You’re mad to defy them.”

“Madness and greatness are separated only by the degree of success. Besides . . .” Demir glanced at the battlefield around them. His stomach turned at the sight, and he found himself struck with a longing to return to his province. This last week had proved he was good at war, but he much preferred peaceful administration, where he could spend all day greasing the cogs of government and then climb into bed with his mistress. He thought briefly about how most citizens his age were busy going to university, getting laid, and looking for the next drink. He wondered what it would be like to be idle for once. The option had never been given to him. “I find that I prefer the living to the dead; and having friends to making enemies.”

Demir glanced over his shoulder to find Idrian still there, the big breacher wearing a thoughtful expression, gazing past Demir’s head and into the distance. He rubbed at his godglass eye. Demir wondered if he disapproved. Perhaps he would ask him on another day.

“Breacher Sepulki,” Demir said, “I’m placing the mayor under your protection. Keep her safe until we can sort out the rest of this mess, hmm?”

Idrian nodded silently.

“Good.” Demir slipped one hand into a special cork-lined pocket in his uniform. He produced an inch-long, spoon-shaped piece of witglass. The handle end of the spoon was worked into a flared hook that he pushed through one of the piercings on his right earlobe. Witglass was fairly common—it augmented natural mental faculties, making it a favorite among shopkeepers, officers, politicians, and more. But high-resonance witglass, the very best quality, had a habit of driving its wearers mad. Demir was the only person he knew of with a strong enough mind to make use of it.

The sorcery took effect immediately, the barely perceptible hum and vibration creeping into his brain to speed his mind, allowing him to visualize the branching possibilities of the near future. He made calculations at an inhuman speed, processing decisions weeks ahead of time, preparing himself for his next hundred moves as if he were playing a complicated game.

But this wasn’t a game. It was his career, and the lives of all these people, and perhaps even the future of the Empire. He would use his victory to bolster his guild-family name the same as any good Ossan, but he would also use it to better the lives of millions. Ambitions, he had decided when he was barely twelve, did not have to be just for oneself. He had ambitions for everyone.

One day the world would see that he was more than his innate sorcery.

The masses would smile at him without fear.

Satisfied with his plans and remembering his own encroaching glassrot, he slid the witglass off his ear and back into his pocket, where the velvet and cork lining protected him from the godglass sorcery when he didn’t need it. He let his fingers remain there for a moment, running them over the various godglass baubles. Each was shaped differently so as to be picked out by feel; a comforting assortment of sorcerous crutches for his weak, mortal body.

He was deep in thought from his brief meditation when one of the staff, still on horseback, called out. “Sir, there’s something going on back in camp.”

Demir felt the tug of his own thoughts, and it took a force of will to pull himself out of them. He let go of Myria’s arm, giving it one last reassuring pat as if they were old friends, before lifting his eyes in the direction of the camp. The plain here had only a slight incline, and it wasn’t until he had found his horse and gotten into the saddle that he was able to tell what the staffer had been talking about.

There was, indeed, something going on in camp. Hundreds—no, thousands—of torches had been lit, and a large procession was breaking away from the encampment and heading across the plain directly toward Holikan. The torches glittered as the last vestiges of sunlight disappeared over the horizon. Despite all of his mental faculties, Demir found himself completely flummoxed. After the battle, select regiments had been sent out to treat the wounded, hunt the fleeing enemy, and secure outposts, but the bulk of the soldiers had been ordered to return to their tents, where casualties could be counted and control could be asserted over an army with their blood up.

So what the piss were they doing marching toward the city?

“Capric,” he called, “find out what’s going on over there.”

Capric scowled in the direction of the city for a few moments before throwing himself into the saddle. Demir watched him ride away, transfixed, something in his brain refusing to click over, knowing that something was wrong but unable to find an explanation. This was not in his calculations. Unwilling to show himself in a panic, but unable to remain completely idle, Demir began to ride slowly toward the south, a fear of the unknown growing in his belly. He took the fabric of his victor’s cloak between two fingers of his left hand, rubbing it anxiously.

It wasn’t until Capric returned, breathless, that the fear really took hold. “Demir,” Capric barked, “there’s been some kind of communication error. The Eighth seems to think they have orders to sack the city.”

“Sack the . . .” Demir whispered. “What glassdamned century is this? We don’t sack cities! Get back there and tell them to return to camp! Spread the order to all the colonels. Go!” Capric galloped off, and Demir glanced over his shoulder at his staff. He eyeballed Helenna Dorlani first, then Jakeb Stavri and the oldest of the Forlio brothers. Everyone wore the same expression of vague confusion and surprise that he imagined on his own face. “Who gave orders to sack the city?” he demanded.

They all looked at each other and shook their heads. “No one would give an order like that,” Jakeb said. “Decimation, yes. But nobody has sacked a city in a hundred years!”

Demir swore and turned back, watching until the realization finally settled in that the soldiers would reach the outskirts of the city before Capric even made it back. Once they’d actually started their pillaging, it would be impossible to get them to stop. He dug in his own heels, forcing his horse into a gallop, barely hearing the startled swearing of his staff. The darkness quickly forced him to rein in lest his mount break a leg crossing the uneven plain, and it was almost ten minutes before he reached the column.

He was greeted by a harried Capric. “The colonels say they all have orders to sack the city!” Capric reported.

“Who gave the order?”

Capric winced. “You did!”

“What?”

“They all have orders with your personal seal telling them to conduct the sacking.”

“No, no, no,” Demir breathed, watching the stream of soldiers flow past him, torches and bayoneted muskets in hand. Some were somber. Some cheered the dark promise of a night spent slaking a bloody thirst. All of them were heading out to follow orders. His orders, apparently. He fumbled for his witglass, fixing it to his ear long enough to churn through his memories, looking for some kind of mistake.

Had he sent out a poorly worded missive? Had he said something off-hand to one of his secretaries? Nothing immediately came to mind, and that terrified him. Mistakes could be made along the best lines of communication, but this was beyond anything he’d encountered in his studies.

He needed to find out what had happened, but first he had to curtail this impending ruin. He pointed at an officer among the group. “You there, Captain, hold your men!” The captain either didn’t hear him, or ignored him. The soldiers themselves were so engrossed in the prospects of their new mission that they didn’t even notice his presence. Demir urged his horse closer, wishing he had a pistol to fire in the air. “Stop!” he shouted. “Hold! Get yourselves in order, damn it!”

Anger warred with the growing panic in himself. He reached out, grasping for scattered bits of glass left over from the battle and plucking them up with his mind. Hundreds of shards rose into the air, hovering in place like frozen raindrops as they awaited his mental command. His eye twitched, his thoughts stayed by indecision. Could he kill his own men to avert this disaster? How many would he need to massacre to get their attention? After several moments he let go. The pieces fell, sprinkling to the ground, unnoticed by the marching soldiers.

He heard a gunshot, then another. Screams came from the direction of the city, followed by the sounds of whooping. Demir could feel control slipping from his fingers, eliciting a panic deep in his chest like one he’d never felt in his life. He turned and galloped toward the outskirts of the city, where the gunshots, screams, and shouting grew louder and more chaotic. He soon passed a woman’s body lying by the wayside, bayoneted several times. The sight of it made him want to vomit. He saw another corpse, then another—obvious civilians, all of them.

A stronger man—a more experienced glassdancer—would have ended this with a quick, brutal show of discipline. Demir knew he could still do it, but he couldn’t bring himself to take the action. His mind was spinning now, frayed at the edges and threatening to snap. What madness was this? How could any of his officers have thought he would give such an order? He had marched them across the mountains with uncanny speed and won them three great victories but he’d never been cruel in triumph.

He reached the outskirts of the city and found that thousands of his soldiers had already plunged into the interior. They rushed from building to building, snatching anything of value, throwing children into the street, killing men and women where they stood, all in the flickering of torchlight while the smoke of burning buildings began to thicken.

Demir continued to ride, searching for officers, trying to find someone to help him get this under control. He was half blinded by smoke, confused and disoriented, when his horse stumbled over a tipped cart. He barely threw himself free of the animal, landing on his left hand, pain lancing up his arm. His horse rolled over, making a murderous racket, then got upright and galloped off into the night.

Clutching his wrist, unable to think through the pain and the cacophony, Demir rushed from building to building, ordering his soldiers to stop. He berated them, lambasted them, and finally begged them. A few of them frowned at his mud-covered uniform. No one recognized him. Why would they? Few had ever seen his face up close, and he couldn’t get the glove off his broken left hand to show them his glassdancer sigil.

“Who is this?” one would ask.

“Some madman,” another would say.

“He has an officer’s uniform and an expensive cloak.”

“The officers are all getting drunk in Grappo’s tent. We have orders to follow. If we don’t do it quick, someone else will get the good loot. Three cheers for the Lightning Prince!”

They would laugh, and ignore him. Someone finally grabbed him by his victory cloak and threw him into a ditch, where he barely caught himself before going facedown in the filth.

He lay partially submerged in the muddy, shit-filled water, staring into the street. His whole body shook with fury and terror. Not a half hour ago he had pledged that Holikan was under his protection, and now there were orders under his seal to sack the city. With trembling fingers he reached into his pocket, searching for skyglass to help him calm his nerves. He pulled out a handful of baubles that immediately slipped from his fingers, falling into the mud. He plunged in after them desperately, but came up with nothing.

Across the street, the cry of a child caught his attention. He looked up to see a little girl—probably no more than four or five, screaming into the air. Demir pushed himself to his feet and struggled out of the ditch. If he could not save the many, he would save the one.

The sound of galloping hooves filled his ears, and his path was suddenly blocked by several dozen of his dragoons. He’d never been so close to them before, and the thunder of their passing would have made him piss his pants if he hadn’t already done it in the ditch. He searched his pocket for godglass, remembered that he’d dropped it all, and then gathered his courage. The dragoons were soon gone, and he took several more steps before his eyes fell on the spot where the child had been.

The child had been trampled. Her little body was silent and still, broken and bloody. He staggered toward her, tearing off his victor’s cloak and using it to scoop her up before sprinting to the other side of the road just ahead of another group of dragoons. He clutched the body to his chest, every fiber of him shaking, and dropped onto the front step of an abandoned shop.

The nightmare had only just begun.

• • • •

By the time his staff found him, Demir had not moved. He had not slept, or eaten, or had a coherent thought in more than twelve hours. He sat on the step, cradling the corpse of the child in his victor’s cloak, having spent a night watching every atrocity that a victorious army could inflict upon a city. His head lay against the cool stone of the shop’s threshold, his eyes burning from the acrid smoke of a hundred fires, his tongue parched and his wrist swollen.

It was Idrian who discovered him and called for the others. The breacher had discarded his armor, wearing an officer’s uniform stitched with the ram’s horns that gave him his moniker. He came and knelt before Demir, examining his face. Demir flinched away from that purple godglass eye.

“Sir, are you all right?”

Demir could not find the words to reply. He felt hollow, stripped. He knew that his legs still worked, but the very idea of standing felt impossible. He licked his cracked lips, tried to summon words, and failed. He felt tears in his eyes and tried to look away; to hide them from the breacher.

“It wasn’t supposed to happen this way,” he finally managed. “I didn’t give those orders.”

“I know, sir,” Idrian replied gently. “Communication went awry. We’ll find out what happened, I promise.”

Slowly, the rest of Demir’s staff gathered behind Idrian, staring down at Demir. In the place of those victorious grins of yesterday were looks of horror and disgust. Capric came close enough to pry into what Demir had wrapped in his cloak, only to stumble away and retch in the ditch. Idrian’s one eye darted toward the dead child, but he did not flinch from it. Demir could feel the stares of his staff—he could see the calculation in their eyes, each one wondering how this development would affect their career or their guild-family. He could see that each of them was trying to figure out how to detach their name from this disaster.

It was one thing to punish a rebelling city with defeat and decimation.

It was another entirely to put it to the torch.

Demir tried to think. He attempted to gather all his faculties, to calculate the possibilities of the future. He had given his word, before more than a dozen people, that Holikan was under his protection—and then his army had sacked it. They’d murdered and burned and plundered on his apparent orders. He needed to start an investigation; to pin this disaster on someone else, either real or invented.

“Witglass,” he croaked.

Capric returned to his side, pressing a piece into his hand. Demir fixed it to a piercing, trying to think. His mind was blank, and the witglass caused a sharp pain behind his eyes until he removed it and gave it back. He could no longer calculate. The future was dark and silent.

His mind had broken.

“Myria Forl?” he asked, raising his head to look for the mayor.

“She is safe,” Idrian assured him. “Your uncle arrived in the middle of the night and I left her with our battalion. No one will harm her.”

Demir’s gaze went to the black column of smoke that rose above them. “I wish she were not safe. I wish she could not see what I have done.”

“You didn’t do this,” Idrian said firmly. “It was an accident. A crossing of orders.”

Demir looked across the faces of his staff. They all avoided his gaze. Not from fear this time, but from shame. He had not done this, certainly, but it was his responsibility.

Slowly, every muscle hurting, Demir managed to climb to his feet without dropping the body of the child. He found the door to the shop open, and the inside ransacked, though he had no memory of soldiers forcing themselves past him. He deposited the body, still wrapped in his victory cloak, on the shop counter.

He touched the child’s hair briefly, searching for a prayer from his childhood, wishing he believed in a god to pray to. He tried to gather his thoughts. How could he face another person after this? How could he return to his guild-family, or his lovers, or the people of his province? How could he ever look another soul in the eye? He returned to the front step. For the first time in years he felt his youth; helpless, inexperienced, and wondering when a real adult would come along and fix all of this.

Idrian produced a milkglass bauble and pressed it into Demir’s hand. The godglass was not as high quality as his own, but the sorcerous effect was immediate—the ache began to bleed from his bones. “We should see to that wrist,” Idrian said. “It looks like it might be broken.”

Even with Idrian’s milkglass, Demir’s wrist hurt so badly that he no longer felt it. Like his soul, it was numb. “Who is my second-in-command?” No one answered. He peered at the faces of his staff. “I don’t even know.” A mad-sounding laugh slipped through his lips. “In my arrogance, I never thought I’d need them. Well. Whoever they are, congratulate them on their promotion.”

“Sir?” Idrian asked.

“I resign.”

“You can’t resign!” someone said. “This is your moment of triumph!”

Demir looked for Capric, hoping for an ounce of reassurance. His friend was staring slack-jawed at the dozens of dead in the street, all civilians. A triumph. He still might be able to salvage this. His mother, political genius that she was, would certainly try. But if he marched back into Ossa at the front of a triumphal parade after this, he would never be able to live with himself.

He avoided Idrian’s gaze. “Apologize to Myria Forl for me. Tell my uncle that I’m sorry for not finishing the campaign. Capric, write up my resignation. Forge my signature.” His mother would be disappointed. So promising, she would say. Such a fool. We could have fixed this. Demir stumbled off the step, regained his balance, and began to walk. “Tell them not to come looking for me,” he said over his shoulder. “The Lightning Prince is dead.”

Copyright © 2022 by Brian McClellan. Excerpted from In the Shadow of Lightning by Brian McClellan. 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

Brian McClellan is an American epic fantasy author from Cleveland, Ohio. He is known for his acclaimed Powder Mage Universe and essays on the life and business of being a writer. Brian now lives on the side of a mountain in Utah with his wife, Michele, where he writes books and nurses a crippling video game addiction.

Book Review: Light From Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki

Aigner Loren Wilson | 494 words

Light From Uncommon Stars
Ryka Aoki
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 978-1250789068
Tor Books, September 2021, 384 pgs

Ryka Aoki’s latest novel, Light From Uncommon Stars from Tor Books, is a beautiful adventure and tale of queer community, love, and talent. Shizuka Satomi made a deal with the devil to get seven violin prodigies to sell their souls for fame and success. For her last soul, Shizuka goes looking for talent in the San Gabriel Valley and finds it and more among the storefronts and people who call it home.

Shizuka’s seventh soul and one of the biggest heartbeats of the book is Katrina Nguyen, a young transgender runaway who can hear violins sing and plays music so unique that Shizuka knows she must claim Katrina’s soul for hell. The other heartbeat of Light From Uncommon Stars comes in the form of queer romance over donuts, no less.

And the donuts! Before reading Aoki’s novel, I did some digging to figure out what (beyond great queer content) Light From Uncommon Stars was about. The first aspect of the story that caught my attention was the spaceship and aliens masquerading as a donut shop and its employees. What a wild combination! Donuts are amazing, and spaceships are amazing; I don’t know why it’s taken so long for the two to meet. I loved and agonized over how detailed and tantalizing Aoki’s descriptions of the donuts were, too.

I couldn’t sit down to read without craving one of the giant, frosted donuts. The focus and detail placed on the donuts spread across every aspect of the book, creating a sense of connected community. Halfway through the book, I knew the neighborhood, felt comfortable and afraid in Shizuka’s presence, and always wanted to hear Katrina play. Aoki wonderfully describes these moments and elements in a way that pushes the story forward at a sometimes break-neck speed.

Another part of the novel and Aoki’s writing that I enjoyed was the blend of genres. Shizuka and Katrina’s story feels fantastical, almost like a modern fairytale. Then there’s the story of Shizuka’s love interest, Lan Tran, a retired starship captain and interstellar refugee who owns the starship/donut shop. Their story feels like a literal star-crossed lovers’ story—a blending of science fiction with the fantastical.

Both storylines or genres meet and blend in a way that’s as delicious as Starrgate Donut’s treats. Though the story isn’t cozy science fiction, the story, characters, and setting are something I found highly engaging and enthralling. I wanted to go back to the pages to see how the characters’ relationships developed and what would happen next.

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: Monsters Born and Made, by Tanvi Berwah

Chris Kluwe | 858 words

Monsters Born and Made
Tanvi Berwah
Hardback / eBook
ISBN: 9781728247625
Sourcebooks, September 2022, 352 pages

Greetings, readers, it’s time for another book review! This time we’ll be looking at the debut novel from Tanvi Berwah, a gripping tale of struggle and sacrifice in a scorched and hostile world, a story of Monsters Born and Made.

Monsters Born and Made follows the life of sixteen-year-old Koral, a Hunter of the ferocious sea-beast called a “maristag” (kind of like a kelpie—mythical half-horse half-fish—but with a much nastier disposition, poisonous blowdarts, and chompy fangs) that frequent the coastal waters around the island of Sollonia on which she and her family lives. Koral and her family’s livelihood depends on capturing and training maristags for the elite Landers class that runs the island, but as Hunters, they’re looked down upon by both Landers and lower-caste Renters alike; the Landers for not being one of them, and the Renters for daring to work with their oppressors. When Koral and her brother Emrik fail to catch a maristag needed to secure the family’s future, Koral finds herself forced into increasingly dangerous choices to try and keep those she loves alive.

One of the first things I noticed about Monsters Born and Made was the complexity that Berwah infuses her characters with right from the start. Koral’s relationship with her family is deeply complicated, but sadly familiar in its combination of love and trauma that all too frequently affects those pushed to the margins of society. It’s an ambitious undertaking for a debut novel, but one that works throughout the course of the book, mainly because Berwah isn’t afraid to delve into the highs and lows of Koral’s family dynamics. Koral and her family are a jagged, broken thing, but despite all the pain there’s still an undercurrent of hope that they can find a way to patch the pieces back together into something that’s a little better than it was before.

Another thing I liked about Monsters Born and Made is that it’s suffused with a very strong sub-theme of class/economic disparity, but it conveys its message without seeming forced or condescending. The antagonists (of all sides) are motivated by believable desires, and Koral’s attempt to navigate competing spheres of power while looking out for her loved ones leads to natural conflict between factions that all want a piece of Koral and what they think she can represent for them. Nor is Koral a perfect navigator of these treacherous tides—she makes plenty of mistakes on both the micro and macro level, but keeps fighting forward with an indomitable will.

One way Berwah really helps sell the conflicts in Monsters Born and Made is the environmental stresses of the world Koral lives in. While it’s similar to Earth (in that there’s oxygen and water), Koral’s planet has a hotter, harsher sun, is covered almost entirely in oceans, and is filled with aquatic life that’s relentlessly hostile towards humanity and each other. For all the fighting between the various human factions, there’s an underlying current of understanding that surviving on the planet comes first, but it’s a delicate balance that’s reaching its breaking point. In many ways, it feels similar to climate-dystopia books like Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, or Blackfish City by Sam Miller, but Berwah definitely puts her own twist on how an inimical world both contributes to social stratification as well as ultimately forcing it to crack.

The only fault I had with Monsters Born and Made is that some of the action scenes are a little loose, in that it was hard for me to picture exactly what was going on, in contrast to the gritty realness of the city in which Koral lives, and the evocatively harsh feel of the island and its environs. It wasn’t enough to take me out of the story, but it was slightly jarring compared to the level of inspired descriptiveness that permeates so much else of the book. Overall, though, it’s a minor complaint, and only stands out compared to the wonderful writing in all the other facets of the story.

Ultimately, I was very impressed with Monsters Born and Made, both with the boldness of the personal dynamics between all the characters as well as the evocative style of Berwah’s writing. If you’re looking for a book that has something to say and isn’t afraid to say it to your face, you should definitely check out Monsters Born and Made.

Read if: you’ve ever wanted to ride a seamurderhorse; you dream of seeing what’s over the horizon; you know what it’s like when family is complicated.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Kluwe grew up in Southern California among a colony of wild chinchillas and didn’t learn how to communicate outside of barking and howling until he was fourteen years old. He has played football in the NFL, once wrestled a bear for a pot of gold, and lies occasionally. He is also the eternal disappointment of his mother, who just can’t understand why he hasn’t cured cancer yet. Do you know why these bio things are in third person? I have no idea. Please tell me if you figure it out.

Book Review: Dreams for a Broken World, Day & Meeropol, editors

Arley Sorg | 1494 words

Dreams for a Broken World
Ellen Meeropol, guest editor; Julie C. Day, series editor
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9781955360050
Reckoning Press, November 2022, 304 pgs

Michael J. DeLuca launched Reckoning Press in 2016, and released Issue #1 of Reckoning Magazine, “creative writing on environmental justice,” in December of that year. DeLuca envisioned a deliberately inclusive journal, and goes into this in the editorial for that first issue: “In these pages you’ll find the people on the front lines: activists, ecopunks, scientists, historians, workers of the land, teachers, students, immigrants, the marginalized, and yes, the privileged. Environmental justice isn’t just for the exploited. Neither is reckoning. For what it’s worth, we’re 66% white, 60% American, 50% male-identifying, 12% Asian, 11% Indigenous, 7% Black. Yes, I counted.” In 2020 Julie C. Day began a new anthology series, starting with her project Weird Dream Society, published by Reckoning Press. While the table of contents does not quite reflect the level of intentional inclusivity of DeLuca’s first editorial, it does list some fantastic writers; and, according to the Reckoning site, all proceeds for that project go to RAICES, a nonprofit that “promotes justice by providing free and low-cost legal services to underserved immigrant children, families, and refugees.”

Dreams for a Broken World is the second anthology in the Dreams series, and the proceeds this time go to Rosenberg Fund for Children, a nonprofit “established to provide for the educational and emotional needs of children whose parents have suffered because of their progressive activities and who, therefore, are no longer able to provide fully for their children.” The foundation is named for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, whose lives were “thrown into turmoil by the harsh reprisals aimed at those resisting repression.” Guest editor Ellen Meeropol is married to the son of the aforementioned Rosenbergs, and is a founding board member of the Rosenberg Fund for Children.

Where Weird Dream Society set out to “present a more expansive definition of the term ‘Weird fiction,’” Dreams for a Broken World “is about being broken and dreaming change.” The introduction clarifies the mission: “We created this anthology to break down barriers and call for change. As you read this book, we hope you notice the ways in which these stories connect, sometimes directly, sometimes more obliquely, to form an ensemble of voices that are stronger together and reach towards activism, community, and social justice.” I suspect that the editors achieved what they set out to do. Two things I can tell you with confidence: first, this book delivers a more inclusive set of (also fantastic!) writers than the first anthology; and second, there are some truly stunning pieces on offer. I’ll talk briefly about a few of them. But really, you can just stop reading here and make sure to get a copy.

I really loved original short story “Finding Ways” by Zig Zag Claybourne. Benjamin August’s mother has died, been cremated, and been handed over to Benjamin. “His mother fit in a box. A sturdy plastic box. Black. Meant to be dignified. When they gave it to him, he had no idea what to do with it.” This opening demonstrates some of the fine qualities of this piece: a distinctive, light but respectful voice paired with thoughtful cleverness which, all together, delivers a deep, engaging narrative. Claybourne adds a few fresh story ideas, plus interesting characters and situations, and gives us a meditation on being human, and human relationships. It’s a soulful journey through grief, a topic which is heavy by nature, and which is often rendered in extremes. Here it’s carried off with a gentleness which is almost spiritual in itself. Claybourne’s story is unique and wonderful.

Reader, I strongly recommend that any anthology with a Nisi Shawl story be at least considered for purchase, and not overlooked. They recently had original short “I Being Young and Foolish” in one of my favorite anthologies of 2021, Sword Stone Table: Old Legends, New Voices (bit.ly/3wiRq4P). Here Shawl gives us “Fourth and Most Important,” a reprint from 2020 anthology Us in Flux. In the span of a few pages Shawl provides a jaunt into the near future to explore relative advantage and privilege. Willis is more interested in flying his drones than just about anything else. But he starts to get very curious about what Mx. Pickell and their type of rich folk are trading via Pickell’s secret weather balloon network. It’s a fun, brief piece, with delicious layers for those who read a bit more carefully.

“Why Mama Mae Believed in Magic” by Cynthia Robinson Young—originally published in The Halcyone Literary Review in 2020—is immediately raw and powerful. Brutal is probably a better word. The story describes the journey of a young African child who is kidnapped for slavery and brought to a plantation in the U.S. Her identity is somewhat subsumed, as she grows into adulthood, until she meets a more recently enslaved individual named Kossula. The subtext here is about the ways we are bent, until we don’t remember what we were before (with a dash of looking at the ways we are taught to turn on each other). Ultimately, it’s about the importance of uplifting each other, of persistence, of survival; and of doing whatever we can to make sure that we do, in fact, survive.

Breena Clarke’s “The Drill” was first published in 2004 anthology Mending the World: Stories of Family by Contemporary Black Writers. The idea is simple: a mother is waiting for her fourteen-year-old son to return, and it’s his first time coming home at night without his mom. The narrative is effective, smooth, and tense, with glittering truths about the dangers of just being a person—as well as, to some degree, dangers specific to certain people in specific situations. This piece is gripping, relatable, and just really well written.

Sabrina Vourvoulias’ “La Gorda and the City of Silver” (originally published in 2011 anthology Fat Girl in a Strange Land) is so good and enjoyable you’ll be eager to find other stories by the author. A young girl grows up in a family of luchadores, but she is told that girls can’t be luchadors. Still, she designs her own costume and mask in secret. When one of the luchadors proves to be a terrible person, and no one holds him accountable, she dons her outfit and becomes La Gorda—but this is just the beginning! The story sets out with a great voice, visual style, and the occasional pleasantly sarcastic observation. But it’s also just. . . exciting. By the end of the first section I was actually grinning. On the one hand, it’s about the way people often slide through the reaching fingers of accountability. But it’s also about stepping up, and taking control, even if people seem to think you can’t. It’s even occasionally touching or heartwarming. At face value the premise is a fairly standard vengeance story, but Vourvoulias develops it into something glorious.

Aimee Liu’s “Faith” was originally published in 2004’s Other Voices. As with Young’s story, it takes on a topic which, by its nature, is brutal. The narrative tracks the survival of a young girl who boards a truck in “war-struck Korea,” believing she is one of many who will be given work, but instead ends up in a so-called “comfort station,” enslaved by Japanese soldiers. The entire piece is arresting, perfectly executed, and beautifully written, despite the atrocious content. Sometimes subtle, often sharp subtext on power, gender, and more glows through the text. This piece is not speculative, but it’s absolutely extraordinary.

Dreams for a Broken World collects twenty-four stories, and, as you can see from the sample above, it’s a mix of originals and reprints. Innocent Chizaram Ilo, Benjamin Parzybok, Veronica Schanoes, Charles Payseur, Marie Vibbert, and Robert V.S. Redick have proven their talent and skill across a number of venues, and all have original pieces here. In most cases the reprints do what I personally believe a good anthologist should do when it comes to reprints: bring excellent work to new readers from sources you aren’t likely to have read. Sheree Renée Thomas, Vandana Singh, and Usman T. Malik are among the reprint contributors, and if you know your short fiction this should be a major draw. Whether or not you are interested in where the money goes or the larger mission of Reckoning Press, this anthology offers seriously admirable work. Highly recommended.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine and a 2022 recipient of SFWA’s Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award. He is also a 2021 World Fantasy Award Finalist, a 2022 Locus Award Finalist, and a finalist for two 2022 Ignyte Awards: for his work as a critic as well as for his creative nonfiction. Arley is senior editor at Locus Magazine, associate editor at both Lightspeed & Nightmare, and a columnist for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He takes on multiple roles, including slush reader, movie reviewer, and book reviewer, and conducts interviews for multiple venues, including Clarkesworld Magazine and his own site: arleysorg.com. He has taught classes and run workshops for Clarion West, Augur Magazine, and more, is scheduled to be a guest at both Cascade Writers and the Odyssey Writing Workshop, and has been a guest speaker at a range of events. Arley grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado, and studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in the SF Bay Area and writes in local coffee shops when he can. Find him on Twitter @arleysorg. Arley is a 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate.

Author Spotlight: S.G. Demciri

Laurel Amberdine | 545 words

How did “The Crowning of the Lord Tazenket, Vulture God of the Eye” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

Funnily enough this story started out as “Ariadne and Theseus in space”—at some point in the ideation stage it took a sharp left from its origin. I think if you squint you can still see bits of it, but Ihuet has a different fate and Tazenket is as different from Theseus as day is from night. But as my agent says, this is the ideal mechanic of inspiration. I never feel bound to where an idea comes from or what its first form is. I draw a lot of inspiration for the texture of my worlds from ancient civilizations in the Mediterranean. Part of this is that I’m Maghrebi, but most of it is that I love the texture and ritual of ancient civilization and I love its complexity. I find that its great grist for the mill of my imagination.

What is your writing process like? Did this story fit the pattern?

I always start with what I call a “scratch sheet” which is just a list of questions, ideas, and scenes I come to a story with. I usually poke at it for a while until I have a summary and from there I write out an outline, then begin drafting, knowing that significant parts of the outline will change and whole scenes will get moved around, excised, or re-imagined. For short stories once I have an outline I usually write them in a haze—a week to ten days—because I can see the structure so clearly and I want to excise it as quickly as possible. Tazenket was like that—from outline to first draft was about ten days, if not less.

What is your writing space like? What do you like to have around for optimal creativity?

I work from home and my work space is also my writing space. I have a great L-shaped desk, an enormous monitor, and a mechanical keyboard (Gateron brown switches—anything louder drives me nuts), and an enormous window behind me with a ledge for my cat. The number one thing I need when writing is music—its almost always movie soundtracks. Lately, I’ve had Dune ambience music running in the background. For Tazenket it was “Chevaliers de Sangriel” by Hans Zimmer, “The Wave” by Clinton Shorter, and “Cursed by Beauty” by Tyler Bates.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

Right now I’m reading Brotherhood of Kings by Amanda Podany, which is a history of diplomacy in the ancient Near East as we understand it through the archive of the Amarna letters. It might sound dry, but it’s truly fascinating. I think Tazenket makes it clear I love ritual, and these letters and the attendant archaeological history is chock-full of it!

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I just wrapped another short story, so be on the lookout for that hopefully sometime in the future. After that, it’s back to revising the novel my agent signed me for!

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: Arden Powell

Laurel Amberdine | 642 words

How did “Zen Solaris and the God-Child” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

The initial aesthetic was inspired by Mad Max: Fury Road and Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, both colourful, post-apocalyptic dystopian stories. Ratter’s tattoo machine is based on the real-life prosthesis of tattoo artist JC Sheitan Tenet. The themes of gender and extinction come from my own anxieties about current events. I’m fascinated by the concept of human extinction—not from a fear of social collapse or a natural catastrophe but from a bird’s-eye-view of the planet’s history and the inevitable end of the so-called Anthropocene.

What is your writing space like? What do you like to have around for optimal creativity?

I’m so specific about my space. I need to write in my room at my desk, with everything as quiet as possible. This was true even before I switched from typing to dictation, which obviously doesn’t work with background noise. I have a window by my desk so I can stare at the clouds or the trees when the words don’t come, which is less dangerous than getting distracted online, though I do plenty of that as well.

Did you get stuck at any point while writing this? How did you get past that?

I didn’t get stuck, but it definitely took me a while to figure out what the story needed. It was originally over 9,000 words, about twice as long as its published form. Every time I reread it I cut it down more and more to try to get to the bare bones of the thing. I was really ruthless in my editing, and the further away I got from the original draft, the easier it became to trim the excess. Despite all those words cut, I actually added a new ending. The original ended in the Oracle’s cave when the god-child reveals the apocalypse-seed. It was only after I had cut several thousand words from the story that I realised I needed to write the aftermath and give Zen the closure he had been running away from all that time. Some stories have to exist imperfectly for a while before they can get finished.

Other than writing, do you have any other creative pursuits? What do you do to relax?

I love art, especially illustration, but I don’t spend as much time on it these days as I’d like. As far as relaxation, my writing might give this away, but I really like spending time around plants. I don’t have access to a garden at the moment, but I have more houseplants than I can count. I don’t have a particularly green thumb, but the plants that survive their first few weeks with me generally thrive. I love watching them wake up from their winter dormancy and send out fresh shoots every spring, new leaves unfurling to take over the room. There’s something simultaneously calming and exciting about checking in on my houseplants.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I have a handful of books published, mostly novellas, all in the queer fantasy genre. An extremely high percentage of them involve menacing plants or trees, if not the outright eco-terrorism of “Zen Solaris and the God-Child.” I have short stories out with Baffling Magazine and Wizards in Space, and a couple more coming out soon in anthologies. My current project is a novel featuring a possibly sentient, possibly holy, carnivorous tree. You can find me on Twitter @ArdenPowell where I talk about my writing and share books and art I enjoy.

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: P H Lee

Laurel Amberdine | 378 words

How did “The Turnip, or, How the Whole World Was Brought to Peace” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

“The Turnip” is a re-telling of a fairy tale by the same name, which for my money is the single strangest story in the entire Grimm canon. The original “Turnip” has always been a source of fascination to me, because it is so clearly parts of two different stories cobbled together, and because one of those is clearly drawing on ancient Germanic mythology (the whole hanging-upside-down-from-a-tree-for-wisdom bit). It’s also a fascinating story in that it just abruptly ends, right in the middle of the story.

The original impetus for writing the story was an argument with a friend, who was trying to say that fairy tales don’t have secret morals and are sometimes just nonsense. He used “The Turnip” as an example and challenged me to do a rewrite of it. That was over fifteen years ago, but I am happy to have won the argument at last.

What was your process like writing this story?

Unlike the other stories in Tales of the Great Sweet Sea, I mostly left the structure of the original alone, both because I think it’s a pretty extraordinary structure and because it’s not exactly a well-known story, so I didn’t worry about boring my readers by repeating things that they already know. I also felt like I probably couldn’t get away with the original ending (which cuts off with the scholar hanging from the tree), so I added a third act with the invasion and so on.

Did you get stuck at any point while writing this? How did you get past that?

Yes! This story has been incredibly problematic. I was stuck on a bunch of language and structure issues for a very long time, mostly trying to replicate the flowery, nested language of Grimm. I got past it by taking around fifteen years to become a better writer.

Is there anything you want to make sure readers noticed?

This is the only story so far where Dusty Boots explicitly disavows responsibility for whether or not it’s true.

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 | 231 words

Coming up in July, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Peter Watts (“Critical Mass”) and R J Theodore & Maurice Broaddus (“The Archivist”). We also have a flash piece (“Ursus Frankensteinus”) from Rich Larson, along with an SF reprint by Samuel Peralta (“Liberty: Seeking Support for a Writ of Habeas Corpus for a Non-Human Being”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Lyndsie Manusos (“An Old Man Cometh And He Is Overgrown”) and Micah Dean Hicks (“Hungry as the Mirror Bright”). We also have a flash piece (“Stay”) from Isabel Cañas. Our fantasy reprint is by Catherynne M. Valente (“The Sun in Exile”).

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: Adam-Troy Castro, Julianna Baggott, Merc Fenn Wolfmoor, Tobi Ogundiran, 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

Destroy Projects

www.destroysf.com

Newsletter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2

Podcast Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/itunes-rss

Twitter

www.twitter.com/LightspeedMag

Facebook

www.facebook.com/LightspeedMagazine

Subscribe

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe

Subscriptions and Ebooks

The Editors

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes more than 100 stories (about 700,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain!

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe for more information, including about third-party subscription options.

Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so.

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

• • • •

All caught up on Lightspeed? Good news! We also have lots of ebooks available from our sister-publications:

Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11 off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price).

Fantasy Magazine Ebooks & Bundles: We also have ebook back issues—and ebook back issue bundles—of Lightspeed’s (recently revived, other) sister-magazine, Fantasy. To check those out, just visit fantasy-magazine.com/store. You can buy each Fantasy bundle for $24.99, or you can buy the complete run of Fantasy Magazine— all 57 issues—for just $114.99 (that’s $10 off buying all the bundles individually, and more than $55 off the cover price!).

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

The Editors

We already offer ebook subscriptions as a way of supporting the magazines, but we wanted to add an additional option to allow folks to support us, thus we’ve launched a Patreon (patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams).

TL;DR Version

If you enjoy Fantasy, Nightmare, and/or Lightspeed, our Patreon page is a way for you to help support those endeavors by chipping in a buck or more on a recurring basis. Your support will help us bring bigger and better (and more) projects into the world.

Why Patreon?

There are no big companies supporting or funding our magazines, so they really rely on reader support. Though we offer the magazines online for free, we’re able to fund them by selling ebook subscriptions or website advertising.

While we have a dedicated ebook subscriber base, the vast majority of our readers consume the magazine online for free. If just 10% of our website readers pledged just $1 a month, the magazines would be doing fantastically well. So we thought it might be useful to have an option like Patreon for readers who maybe haven’t considered supporting the magazine, or who maybe haven’t because they don’t have any desire to receive the ebook editions—or who would be glad to pay $1 a month, but not $3 (the cost of a monthly subscriber issue of Lightspeed).

Though Fantasy, Nightmare, and Lightspeed are separate entities, we decided to create a single “publisher” Patreon account because it seemed like it would be more efficient to manage just one account.

Basically, we wanted to create a crowdfunding page where, if you enjoy the work Adamant Press puts out, and you want to contribute a little something to help make it easier for us to produce more cool projects, then our Patreon is the place to do that.

What Do I Get Out of Being a Patron?

Well, you get the satisfaction of helping to usher the creation of cool new short fiction projects into the world! Plus, the more support we get, the better we can make the magazines and compensate our authors and staff. By becoming a supporter via Patreon, you help fund our growth and continued publication of three award-winning magazines. Of course, if you’re already one of our ebook subscribers (thank you!), you are already supporting us. This is for those who prefer to read the issues each month on our free websites, or wish to support our efforts more generally.

By becoming a supporter, you are also bestowed a title, such as Dragonrider, or Space Wizard, or Savior of the World and/or Universe, thus making you instantly the envy of all your friends.

Thank You!

If you’ve read this far, thanks so much. We hope you’ll consider becoming a backer on Patreon. That URL again is patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams.

Thanks in advance for your time. We look forward to hopefully being able to make the magazines—and our other publishing endeavors—even better with the support of people like you.

About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

Managing/Senior Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Editor

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.