TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 147, August 2022

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: August 2022

SCIENCE FICTION

My Future Self, Refused
Adam-Troy Castro

Among the Marithei
Mary Anne Mohanraj

SyncALife
Ruben Reyes Jr.

The Disappearing Dream Engineer
Rati Mehrotra

FANTASY

Red
Malinda Lo

So, You Married Your Arch Nemesis . . . Again
Merc Fenn Wolfmoor

Welcome to Oxhead
Julianna Baggott

The Clockmaker and His Daughter
Tobi Ogundiran

EXCERPTS

The Book Eaters
Sunyi Dean

NONFICTION

Book Review: The All-Consuming World, by Cassandra Khaw
Aigner Loren Wilson

Book Review: Tune in Tomorrow, by Randee Dawn
Chris Kluwe

Book Review: Our Shadows Have Claws, edited by Méndez & Ortiz
Arley Sorg

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Adam-Troy Castro

Merc Fenn Wolfmoor

Ruben Reyes Jr.

Tobi Ogundiran

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: August 2022

John Joseph Adams | 245 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 147th issue!

Our first piece of science fiction, “My Future Self, Refused,” asks a classic question: If you met your future self, would you be able to trust your own advice? Don’t miss this time-traveling tale from Adam-Troy Castro. New to our pages is writer Ruben Reyes, Jr, whose story “SyncALife” is about a service promising to ease the loss of a family member’s death. It’s a powerful mix of technology, familial trauma, and the poetry of war. Our flash SF piece is a tale of inadvertent teleportation: “The Disappearing Dream Engineer,” by Rati Mehrotra. Our SF reprint is from Mary Anne Mohanraj: “Among the Marithei.”

As for our fantasy offerings, Merc Fenn Wolfmoor returns to bring you a touching new short, “So, You Married Your Arch Nemesis . . . Again” about superheroes and the legacy of tragic endings in queer fiction. Tobi Ogundiran carves an enchanting tale of heartbreak and imperialism in his short “The Clockmaker and His Daughter.” Julianna Baggott blends elements of The Stepford Wives into the fantastic in her flash story, “Welcome to Oxhead.” And of course we’re delighted to reprint Malinda Lo’s story “Red.”

The nonfiction department has brought us our regular array of spotlight interviews with our authors and our book reviewers have hunted down some terrific new reads. Our ebook readers will enjoy an excerpt from The Book Eaters, a new novel by Sunyi Dean.

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.

My Future Self, Refused

Adam-Troy Castro | 9113 words

This much was clear.

At some point in my future, I would have access to a time machine.

This was a ridiculous sentence and a tragically irrelevant concern while my wife Judi was on the floor and possibly dying, but there it was: nonsense, in the presence of death.

This was the central tragic absurdity of the day. My future self had materialized in the corner of the room, as solid as a blow to the face, and it was not even my most important concern.

My most important concern was Judi, who lay on the floor of the guest room in the house where we had been staying to take care of a dog named Beri. Judi was indeed entering her final cascade, though I did not know that yet. She would be gone in just a few days. I had not known how sick she really was, during the four hours it took me to get her to agree to an ambulance.

It was our friend Edie, called for advice, who blew up at me. “Take charge, damn it.”

So I took charge. I told Judi I was calling an ambulance.

Her anger had been frightening, edging on incoherent. She was stoic, my wife, even when the circumstances were as frightening as they were now.

The last thing I’d needed right now was my own future self, my much older or least much thinner self, looking pale and mournful in the corner.

This is what you need to know about me. My name is Adam-Troy Castro. At the time of Judi’s collapse, I was sixty-one years old, an old straight white man. I am among other things a science fiction writer, as well as a horror writer and a writer of children’s books. In my professional life and in my life as a prolific reader I’d had too much experience invoking well-worn tropes like time travel to have the usual incredulous conversation the protagonists of fantastic stories have, whenever the visitor introducing the fantastic element must spend several hundred words making sure that they’re well and properly convinced. This had always been an aggravation to me. To my mind, when a floating green man appears in a puff of smoke and tells you that he’s a genie, it is crazy to argue. It’s stupid to doubt. But the stories always had these maddening dialogues where the protagonist refused to believe whatever the situation clearly was, and the visitation had to say, Yes, I am from another planet. Yes, I am a robot. Yes, I am a vampire. Yes, I am Death. As a reader as well as writer, I had come to loathe the rationality of protagonists who spend pages on end needing to be convinced, even when the evidence is present and the evidence is gross. Saving us both the time, I knew that the newcomer who had just appeared in the corner was my future self, arriving during my wife’s medical crisis, and that nothing about his presence boded well.

I spoke only two words to him. “Help her.”

My future self shook his head. “I can’t. To me, This has already happened.”

I wanted to scream, then why the hell are you bothering me?

Judi had tried to get out of bed. She had fallen to her knees and then to the floor and she had refused all attempts to get her back into bed. She’d been adamant that all she needed to do was lie there for a while and gather her strength, at which point she would be able to do it for herself. I’d listened to her because she was a chronic pain sufferer who was never not in pain and because there had been a number of incidents like this in our shared past, incidents that had indeed ended with her marshalling her resources and returning to her life, to our lives. When I’d begged her to tell me if there was something I could do she’d demanded Gator-Aid—“lots and lots” of Gator-Aid, she said, no doubt thinking that whatever was wrong this morning could be fixed by an infusion of electrolytes—and I’d willingly abandoned her long enough for a frantic Publix run, already feeling this to be insane. At Publix I’d stopped an employee in green apron to speak the most tragically ludicrous words of my life, I don’t have time to look, I need Gator-Aid for a medical emergency. But the magic juice had not helped Judi. She guzzled one bottle and then rolled over, to use the twelve-pack as what must have been a hideously uncomfortable pillow, and there she had remained for hours, drifting in and out of sleep and openly angered by my questions, our brief spasms of conversation drifting further into irrelevance as her voice grew more slurred, her thinking processes more and more incoherent. At last, hours in, I’d just a few minutes ago listened to Edie, exercised my will over Judi’s, and summoned the ambulance, but they were not here yet. Only the future version of myself was, standing there in the corner of the guest bedroom, with folded hands and mournful eyes.

I did not have the stones to interrogate him further. I had no particular reason to, either, not at that moment, now that he’d shot down my plea for assistance. My entire attention was owed the woman who’d come into my life only after I’d reconciled myself to being alone, who had become my best friend before I realized that she was also the love of my life, the woman who I still believed was suffering one of her regular medical crises, no worse and no more lasting than any other. There had been quite a few over the years. Just the other day we’d laughed about it, driving past a local hospital. I’d said, you know, you’ve had many multiple-night hospital stays, over the years of our marriage. Surgeries on your ankle, on your stomach, on your heart. I haven’t been in the hospital overnight for over twenty years. I demand parity. She’d been at the wheel because she couldn’t stand my driving. She wasn’t particularly amused. Whatever. That was an actual conversation we had. And so this specific collapse still seemed routine, somehow: an incident only a little bit scarier than most. She was going to be okay. She was going to be okay. She was going to be okay. She was going to be okay. She was going to be okay. She was going to be okay. I still believed it. I rejected any connection between what was happening and the arrival of my future self. I did not wonder why he was here. He was an extraneous element. The ambulance was coming. She was going to be okay.

I did not study the future version of myself, but he was there, in the room with us, and it was impossible to avoid taking his measure. He was old. I don’t know how much older he was. His face was drawn and lined, the look of someone eighty or ninety, though some of that may have been the effect of his significant weight loss. I had been obese for many years. I had topped out at a terrifying 270. I now weighed about 215, after a diet-driven weight loss. I was still fat, in that I could stand to lose another thirty pounds, but I’d lost multiple sizes and my pants hung on me a billowing tent. Judi and I had been less than eager to buy more size-appropriate clothing that might itself need to be replaced if I lost too much more. Her own lifetime weight peak had been a staggering 502, but she had lost most of that years ago and had of late been losing more. We thought we were getting healthy, insofar as we could. The time traveler’s appearance established, at the very least, that I would continue to diminish. He was underweight, almost emaciated. The protruding belly, a companion since my late teens, was gone on him; so was the big butt. He still had my bad posture, the weak chin I hid with a beard. But he had something I’d been missing for many years, and was still missing today: visible cheekbones. He looked gray. He had a cluster of liver spots on his forehead. He supported himself with a deeply wrinkled hand on a wooden cane. His eyes were sad.

He was in short exactly what I’d pictured, for that one story I’d published in Nightmare Magazine, “The Old Horror Writer,” about the ancient, retired version of himself who got to use his story-generation smarts against a malicious supernatural visitation; except maybe not quite as old. It was impossible not to remember that for that story I had depicted myself as a long-time widower. He looked old and I was terrified and on the phone with the 911 operator, who now broke in to tell me that the paramedics were less than two minutes away and I should go stand at the front door to wait for them.

I told Judi, “They’re coming. I’m just going to open the door for them. I’ll be okay. I promise.”

Judi muttered something that processed as another irritated whatever, and I ran for the front door.

The future version of myself left by the time I returned.

• • • •

The paramedics, huge and professional but patient and helpful and the closest my life had ever come to the presence of angels, arrived in their masks and gloves and made their way to the guest room, where they clustered around Judi, asking her how she felt and apologizing for the rough handling as they lifted her into a rolling desk chair procured from the office. They took their measurements. She answered their questions coherently enough, though her voice did not sound like her own. It sounded drunken and whiny, nothing at all like the Judi I knew. The paramedics determined, via methods invisible to this layman, that she had not had a heart attack or a stroke. They started negotiating an evacuation to the emergency room, overcame her resistance, got her grudging acceptance, and took her. Even before they had her loaded into the back of their van I got into our car and preceded them to the hospital.

This was on 12 July 2021, at the height of the COVID crisis. I should have expected that when I got to the hospital, I would not be allowed into an emergency room bay with her. Instead, I was sent to a teeming waiting room, where I lingered and went quietly crazy. I called and tried to get updates. I was told that she was being looked at and that no information was available. I went more loudly crazy. I got on my phone and called anybody I could think of who needed to know: Judi’s sister Lori. My sister Jill. Our friends Elena, Chris, George, Edie, Janna, David, Deb, the traveling Brad and Laura. I heard the embryonic mourning in their reactions. I wanted to call my mother, too, but she had died only a few months earlier. I wrangled what tears there were, from the living. They were already readying themselves for the worst, but the situation cast me as the grown-up one, the present authority who had to tell them that there was still hope. She was going to be okay, I said. I believed that she was going to be okay. I barely thought about my future self, who I had not seen since the coming of the paramedics. Instead, I drifted and did what fiction writers do, craft scenarios for the way this day would shake out. I crafted two, a highly dramatic one where Judi died, and a highly happy one where she lived and where the biggest of the various professional balloons I had floating out there in the aether of possibility came in for a successful landing, allowing us to prosper. For us to get back in the realm of positive numbers. To travel.

Then the phone rang. It was one of the doctors working on Judi. No, I could not see her today. No, they did not know what was wrong with her, not yet.

Then he said the words that shattered my world.

“She’s on the brink.”

He actually used that phrase. On the brink. Jesus.

“What?”

“She’s critical,” he said.

“What’s wrong with her?”

“We don’t know. We’re addressing the symptoms.”

“You don’t even know what it could be?”

“We’re running tests. But this is a crisis. She can go at any time.”

“Can I see her?”

“No,” he said. “The Emergency Room is closed to visitors.”

It was a firm no. Blame COVID.

Judi was going to be moved to the intensive care unit as soon as a bed opened up, which wouldn’t happen until almost midnight. I wouldn’t be able to see her until tomorrow morning so there was no point in me staying in the waiting room, not while I could wait in more comfort, even in frantic comfort, at the house only a few minutes away.

I went outside. I sat down on a stone bench, right outside the waiting room entrance.

It was a hot day and the heat baked in the body odor stench already rising after hours of stress and tension. I realized that I’d never showered this morning—I’d risen to the crisis—and that I had to reek. This struck me as a tiny consideration.

The thing was, I felt no high drama. I only felt numb.

I made a few more calls, giving the same update to multiple people Judi loved until I tired of repeating the same non-information. When I ran out of energy to inform anyone I glanced up at the roof of the emergency room overhang, and saw a magnificent hawk. It reacted to my movement and made what qualifies as eye contact, from a bird that certainly could not have cared less. I had the writerly thought, Depending on how this works out, I can later say that this was an omen of Judi’s death, or a comforting advisory that she was going to be okay. Forgive me. I am a writer, and sculpting the narrative is a reflex I can’t turn off. In truth, the bird offered no helpful advisories. Based on current data, it was value-neutral.

Then I glanced back at the stone bench and saw my future self sitting there. He held his cane between his gnarled hands, and he regarded me with glassy eyes red-rimmed with tears.

I still didn’t have the patience for the dialogue so familiar with my chosen genre, where the man meeting his future self demanded proof of the time travel. Instead, I sat down next to him and said, “Is she going to be all right?”

“I can’t tell you,” he said, in a tired voice that showed another couple of decades of wear. “That much is against the rules. I’ll be yanked back to my time if I even try.”

“Then what good are you, then?”

My future self emitted a soft wheeze that might have been embittered laughter. “I’ve been asking myself that question since before I was you.”

The area around his eyes had picked up a couple of additional skin tags in the gulf between my current era and whatever year he came from. His glasses were thicker, distorting the features behind them to an extent that testified that my already impaired vision would someday get far worse. I also saw that he was missing some teeth, a feature that reflected my many decades of flawed oral hygiene.

“How did you even get here?”

“I guess you can call it a time machine. By the time you’re my age there’ll be commercial services that can project people into the past. I don’t want to get into the physics or how they avoid time paradoxes. I don’t even want to tell you what it costs.”

“Judi would hate that,” I said.

“I know.”

Of course he knew. I—him and I—had published a story, “My Wife Hates Time Travel” (bit.ly/WifeHatesTimeTravel), based on Judi’s long-expressed aggravation with the subgenre. Stories of the sort drove her crazy. And yet she adored Doctor Who. Go figure. It occurred to me that she might have seen her last Who episode, and with this silly manifestation at joys that might have been lost to her I felt the first manifestations of deep grief, premature as they were.

I said, “You said it’s expensive. You have money?”

Because things have always been tight. I’m a writer, like I said.

He shook his head. “In coin other than money.”

I did not want to know the coin he was talking about.

He went on. “Anyone who goes must file a detailed travel plan. It’s subject to the approval of the operators, who keep tight control of things. I can be recalled for any reason, if I misbehave or if you say that you no longer want me around. But I’ve been permitted to come back and tell you a couple of things. They’re three separate things that you’ll need to know, and I can only tell them to you when they’re appropriate. So it’ll be one now, one later, and potentially a third some months from now, if you agree to hear it then. You’ll have to give me permission each time. I tell you now that it’s the third one I most care about. But the others will make more sense to you, now. And you’re more likely to hear me out, later, if I demonstrate that you can trust me, now.”

A lifetime spent telling stories of the fantastic leads to intense familiarity with that familiar trope, the wise old figure giving the protagonist the ground rules. Here are the rules that govern zombies, vampires, deals with the devil, or for that matter time travel in this particular universe. It is a function of this strange form of fiction where otherwise everything would be as arbitrary as they were in this world where a woman can be enjoying a barbecue meal with friends on Sunday night and, as that doctor had said, on the brink the next morning. But Judi and I, who were plugged into story structure because of the way I spent my professional life, had come to see such moments as clumsy, and many were the nights when we’d been streaming some stupid science fiction movie and found ourselves greeting this moment’s arrival. Here it is, we’d cry. The rules speech! An old recurring gag . . . which might never recur now.

. . . I covered my eyes with my hand.

He remembered, of course. “Yes. The rules speech. Judi always hated that.”

I tried to change the subject. “I don’t suppose you could tell me what happens with global warming. Or if the fascists take over America, Or if . . . if . . .”

My wife was dying, but what I had started to ask was whether my writing, respected in quarters but never successful enough to make me rich or a household name, would ever break out. Damn me. Even now, that question came to mind, establishing once and for all that I was a selfish prick.

He spared me the memory of saying it out loud. “No, I can’t tell you that.”

I wanted to strike him. I could. He was solid. Who was he, to bother me during my vigil? He who already knew how it was going to work out? But being a science fiction writer and a horror writer to boot meant that I knew what the protagonists of all those stories mostly failed to appreciate, that the rules were there for a reason, and that you broke them only at your extreme peril. I didn’t need to know the cosmology involved. I just had to accept it. And so I said, “What can you tell me?”

“Do I have your permission to tell you the first thing?”

Drowning in certainty, I said, “Yes.”

He placed his hand on my wrist. Despite the sun, it felt cold, in the way of the touch of very old men, like it had been a very long time since his blood had warmed it. But it was not an unpleasant coolness. It was the comfort of one closer to the grave than myself, and I remembered after too many years the similar touch of my Grandpa Meyer, and in more recent times of my father, who had died rough not too long ago, in the scheme of things. I shuddered and watched the world blur.

He said, “In the days to come, you will wonder if the delay calling the hospital made the wrong kind of difference. You are in fact already wondering that. The doctors will tell you that Judi might have been heading for this as long as a week ago, that she was probably already in serious condition during last night’s dinner with John and Louise. They will say this to you, and you will still torture yourself wondering whether they’re lying just to comfort you. I am a time traveler, and I can determine things that these doctors cannot know. If you had called the ambulance at sunrise, it would not have changed anything that’s going to happen. If you had called them five days ago, or ten, it would not have changed anything either. The damage has been happening, invisibly, for weeks. You cannot affect it. Don’t make these events worse with guilt.”

I took no comfort whatsoever. “Is she going to die?”

But he had flickered out of existence and was gone.

• • • •

Of the next few days, I can only say that it was an exercise in alternating pronouncements of doom with dollops of hope.

The doctors told me, Nobody comes back from these numbers.

The doctors told me, This metric is just one notch above death.

The doctors told me, There’s probably too much damage.

The doctors told me, We need to be guarded about this, but her numbers are a little bit better.

The doctors told me, She’s fighting.

The doctors told me, The improvement is downright phenomenal.

The doctors told me, You know what? In just a few days we can start talking about rehab.

I sat by her bed whenever I was allowed to be there and I watched as color returned to her cheeks and I started to listen selectively, giving the good news more weight than the bad. Yes, I was warned that her recovery if any would likely be a long and difficult one, and that even if she lived, she would likely be even more physically challenged than before. She would almost certainly spend the rest of her life on dialysis. But I clung to the sheer likelihood of survival, of the false promise that we could go home and return to giving each other merry hell. We were witty people, the two of us, and boy did we give each other hell. I deeply missed it, already, and I wanted it back, wanted her presence in the bed back. I concocted promises that she would be back, and never felt closer to it than the morning they weaned her off some of her meds, and entered the ICU to the welcome news that she was awake.

I leaned over her bed and said, “Judi.”

She startled. She focused on me. She could not say anything, because she was intubated, and this forced her mouth into an O of astonishment, that was now matched by her questioning eyes. It was the look of a woman with no real understanding where she was, who had suddenly had something familiar pop into the center of what was otherwise a shifting abstract.

My voice broke. “I’m here, Judi. You’re getting better. Can you squeeze my hand?”

She did not squeeze my hand. Maybe she did not possess enough muscular control and maybe she did not possess enough understanding. Maybe—and this still tortures me—maybe that look of recognition was as illusory as the reflexive smile as that other Florida patient Terri Schiavo, who years before had ignited a political firestorm by smiling, without any real thought or recognition, whenever lifted into a sitting position. But I think not. I think there was recognition there. Judi’s brain was still active. I think there was thought there. And if there was further consciousness, I think she had time to wonder, how do I tell him? These things he needs to know, how do I voice them?

I glanced away for a second and when I looked back, her eyes had closed. She had either passed out or fallen asleep.

It was all I got, all I ever would get.

• • • •

This woman who had taken a man who considered himself worthless and given him a reason to consider himself valued, who had taken charge of me, who had laughed with me, who had made love to me, who had traveled with me, who had written a couple of stories with me, who had shared dreams that had come to fruition and dreams that had come to naught and dreams that we still hoped to realize, the woman who called herself Fiona to my Shrek, the woman who had been Mommy to our cats and the light of my life and the one solid place to anchor in an ocean where no other land deigned to show itself, this woman who had been my partner in endless deliberately baffling conversations that we had in public just for the joy of confusing strangers, this woman who had also warned me time and time again, that she knew she would die long before me, a warning I always shrugged off with the advisory that I did not want her to talk that way, that woman, the one I brought to conventions and introduced to writers I had not seen for many years, who quietly took me aside and said, “Seriously, Adam, you hit the jackpot,” that woman, my favorite person in all the world, never opened her eyes in my presence again.

The Doctors said, She had a bad night.

The Doctors said, We can’t wean her off the meds.

The Doctors said, She’ll be gone within the next day or two.

The Doctors said, She’s going even faster than we expected.

The Doctors said, You need a CMO order. Comfort Measures Only.

The Doctors said, She’ll be gone in a few minutes.

The Doctors said, She’s gone.

The official time of death was 10:50 PM on July 15, 2021.

And for the next week I was what that Pink Floyd song calls “Comfortably numb.”

I was aware that I should be wailing but I was in shock, treating visitors as a reason to be upbeat and hilarious. And boy was I upbeat and hilarious. I expressed worry that something was wrong with me, that I should be suffering more. I was advised by those familiar with grief that I would be, that my current callousness was temporary and that I was headed for a crash. The possibility seemed remote. I dithered. I made plans for the funeral. I wrote a eulogy, and delivered it, and asked my hosts if I could stay two more days, just to decompress before I got in the car and drove the five hours to where Judi and I had been living. It was necessary, I think. And I also think it was a way of putting off whatever came next. I had no idea what that would be.

My future self did not arrive for our second session until late one afternoon when I was sitting on the backyard patio of my hosts, warming myself in the sun and still, for the most part, not feeling anything.

I heard the rush of air displacement, immediately to my right, and without looking said, “You bastard.”

“I lost her too,” my future self reminded me.

This made me look, and damned if he didn’t look even older.

I couldn’t blame the light. It had also been a bright and unclouded day when we’d last spoken, just outside the Emergency Room. I remembered the sun glinting on his great bald head, somehow farther into hair loss than even I was. But he seemed to have deteriorated more in the time since then. He had among other things the feature I’d seen on many very old people, the eyes lined with blood-red color where the lids had turned up just enough to reveal a thin strip of their natural interior color. I could only wonder: how much time has it been for him? Not the mere ten days it had been for me, surely. Maybe years.

And he must have remembered me wondering that, because he said, “No, Adam. It’s only been a few hours for me. I told you that time travel had a price not related to money. Accelerated aging is just one of them, one reason I won’t be able to do this more than three or four times, altogether; a limitation that prevents us time travelers from going back to make pests of ourselves, every time our prior selves have a life crisis. We cannot use sports almanacs to make our prior selves rich. We have to pick the most important things to say, and in this case, well, I have to tell you, they get important the farther we go. This one’s bigger.”

I found myself shaking. “Who dies next?”

“No one. Do I have your permission to tell you what I came to say?”

The little bit he’d given me before had, I realized now, made a small difference during the four days it had taken for the most important person in my life to arrive where the universe had decided that she always would. The doctors had assured me the same thing, repeatedly, that a few extra hours of treatment would not made a difference, and so I only blamed myself the amount that most men in my position would have, which is to say, incessantly. It was still preferable to the degree I would have blamed myself had I not received his advisory, which is to say, enough to wipe all other thought from my mind, all other cushioning from the part of me that would have to receive the blow. And so I said, “Yes.”

He said, “It gets better.”

I almost laughed in his face. How banal was that? I’d heard those three meaningless words more times in the last few days than I had in my entire life. You didn’t need a time machine to say that kind of thing. You just needed a love of bumper-sticker wisdom, of the empty platitudes we all say that in the end don’t help at all.

But before I could tell him that he didn’t have to come back in time to say what everybody was saying already, he went on.

“But first, it gets a whole lot worse.”

I stopped laughing. He had already advised me that nobody else was going to die, at least, not while I was working this out. I wasn’t sure I wanted to live through this if he was right, that I had to look forward to worse. I said, “How?”

“I can give you the Reader’s Digest version. You will learn who among the people you treasure is a friend and who is not. You will receive help from at least one person you have every reason to despise, and you will have your knees kicked out from under you by someone you think you have reason to love. You will exhaust the good will of some friends who will give all they can, until they can give no more. You will long for death. You will lose your mind, a little bit. You will briefly become a dangerously unstable and physically dangerous person. You will know homelessness. You will picture yourself huddled under overpasses. You will think of high places to jump from. But you will also be offered a lifeline at your moment of greatest distress, and it will offer a thin guiding line back to sanity. Make no mistake. You will still want to die. You will erupt with sudden rages. You will weep, often and uncontrollably. You will become tiresome, an inconvenient person. And yet you will know outpourings of love and a conspiracy of kindness greater than any you can even imagine. It will be months, Adam, months that will seem like years. But in less time than it seems possible to imagine, the pathway back to a functional existence will seem not only possible but inevitable. You need to know that it will get better by year’s end and to prepare yourself for all the ways, more numerous than you can stand, that it will first get worse.”

My mouth was dry. I felt my lips moving and was aware that no sound was coming out. His return look was infinitely weary and infinitely compassionate. I reminded myself that he had been through everything he’d just warned me about—in particular that it would get better—and that it was history to him; and I thought of the tired, knowing look in those familiar eyes, and I wondered about just what one has to go through, to wake up one day with eyes like that. I wasn’t sure I could survive that. And yet he had, which functioned as proof that I would.

It didn’t seem to help. How could it help when your future self tells you that you are about to go through hell? The knowledge that I’d come through the other side was nothing, to my perspective, not compared with the awareness that I’d first have to live it. Judi’s death was already more than I should be asked to take, than anyone could take. How much more—

But he was gone again, the ancient old son of a bitch.

• • • •

Everything he said came to pass. The betrayal. The homelessness. The driving around in my car with trunk and back seat stacked with all my clothing. A day when I came as close to ending myself as I ever have. The craziness. I tortured people I love with despairing phone calls, hinting at imminent self-destruction. I found quiet places to scream at the top of my lungs.

I won’t write about the betrayal. That’s too big a subject. But it was my lowest point in those months, probably lowest ever. In response to that, my sanity bent to the breaking point. Ridiculously, the phone call that promised a route back to viability as a human being also came that same day, the same morning really, only a couple of hours later. It was a miracle of timing that I, the storyteller, understand to have probably been too convenient for any believable work of fiction.

I can tell you that the conspiracy of kindness was beyond spectacular. Thanks in no small part to being the kind of guy who relates the doings of his life online, I became the recipient of help from all over the world. I may find it hard to believe that I deserved it, but it came, both from people I knew well and from people whose names I had never heard. An old friend of mine named Ed Bungert said to me, “Face it, Adam, you’re George Bailey,” and this was a reference to Jimmy Stewart’s character from It’s a Wonderful Life, the discontented small-town man whose greatest moment of despair was also countered by incredible generosity from those who he had never suspected loved him. I won’t say that this completely halted the spasms of soul-crushing despair. I have always been prone to those. And I was always waiting for other shoes to drop. But the knowledge of what had been done for me blunted them. I owed the conspiracy what it had paid for, hope.

In early November I secured an apartment which, unfortunately, would not be ready for a couple of months. Having worn out a reasonable welcome at the homes of friends who had spare rooms and couch space to offer, and heading into a season where hotel space would drain my coffers in record time, I resorted to a measure that some of my personal critics would never believe functioned as austerity. (To at least one of those, I was “gallivanting” and “living high on the hog.”) To wit, I went on three consecutive Caribbean cruises, one on the Royal Caribbean Jewel of the Seas and two on the MSC Seashore. The cost of an interior cabin for a week was less than the cost of a run-down poverty hotel for the same period, with the added advantage of all the food I cared to eat.

I told myself that I wasn’t going to relax.

I relaxed.

I discovered that the quiet and the break from all the stress gave my battered soul time to do what it been too beleaguered to do all this time, heal. I went to the shipboard shows. I lay on deck chairs, enjoying the breeze and sun. I went ashore in Costa de Maya and in San Juan and in Puerto Plata. I went to the beach on shore excursions, and swam in the ocean. Between cruises one and two my friend Chris Negelein got a brand new Chromebook into my hands, and I found myself writing again, at a daily wordcount that averaged to well more than I usually managed in even the happiest times. I wrote a story called “Cards on the Table.” I wrote half of the new novella starring my series characters, Minnie and Earl. It was confirmation that this, at least, had not permanently fled me.

I began to realize that my future self’s prophecy had come true. Things had gotten worse, and they had gotten better. Not yet perfect. The problems were still overwhelming. But I was taking them as they came. I would, I finally believed, survive this.

One day we were at sea, and I spent a few hours reading a paperback by the pool. I got less reading done that I would have, not too long ago. The knack, which had abandoned me in the worst of times, was not yet back. But that didn’t matter. I put the book aside and looked out at the sparkling sea, enjoying the way the afternoon turned the waves into so many sparkling jewels.

There was no one around.

I tried an experiment. “Judi’s gone.”

The thought made me sad. It did not make me crazy.

I said it again. “Judi’s gone.”

And it still made me sad, but there was a difference between this sadness and the all-out, raging grief that I had descended into, not so long ago.

I missed my wife. I missed everything about her. I even missed the sardonic name she always called me, “Pain.” I missed telling her I loved her and hearing her customary response, “I tolerate you.” But I did not mind missing my wife. Missing her was, I realized, a way to not let go of her, and I could be fine with that. It could be enough.

If any moment established that I was going to make it all the way through this, it was that one.

At the end of the three weeks, I returned to the Port of Miami. I went back to couch-surfing. But I could see the end of the journey up ahead. My new apartment would be ready in just a few weeks. I had waited for so long that it seemed like no time at all.

As a sad footnote that doesn’t really mean anything, one of the ships I’d been on hit the national news four days later. On the next cruise, the very next cruise, only four days after my disembarkation, a suicidal fifteen-year-old boy leaped from a high deck and died. Part of me thought that maybe the suicidal thoughts that had never gone away, for me, had resonated to and fro aboard the ship, achieved resonance with all those polished and mirrored surfaces, and taken up residence in someone else. This is another pitfall of being a writer: your imagination runs all the time. What I concluded was that, of course, it was just a sad event that meant nothing. What I felt, with a shudder, was that another soldier in line had caught the bullet. Maybe I would write a story about it someday. And maybe I wouldn’t.

And then one day, less than a week before I was to move into my new apartment, I was in the backyard of the friends who were hosting me then, watching the dog as I supervised her search for a place to pee, and I heard that familiar rush of displaced air.

He was back, looking worse than he ever had before. You know how very old people look when it seems impossible for them to survive their next breath. This is how he looked. He still relied on his cane, but before it had seemed like his problem was weakness in the leg. Now it seemed like the price of seeing me this third time must have been a stroke, that had paralyzed his left side and made any form of remaining upright a nigh-impossible chore.

I was nevertheless ridiculously happy to see him. “Hello!”

“Hello,” he wheezed. There was a graveyard rattle in his throat. “I won’t be long. I was right about things getting better, yes?”

“They’re starting to,” I said. And I felt the wonder that comes with saying a good thing out loud for the first time, and knowing that it’s true. “And I’ve got to thank you, man. I never would have gotten through these past few months if you hadn’t let me know.”

“Nonsense,” he said. The single word seemed to exhaust him, and he stood there, replenishing breath and swaying on his twig-like legs, while he worked out what to say next. “I’m a time traveler. I know. And one thing I know is that there are worlds where I never came at all, and where you arrived at this place of hope you now inhabit, without any intervention by me. You want to know who got you there? Judi. You got this far because you couldn’t betray Judi.”

He was right. That thought came often, these days, almost constantly, in fact. But it had morphed, somehow, from How can I ever live without her to What would she want me to do now? As always, I suffered a flood of regrets, from my failure to take her to the countries she’d always wanted to visit, to the ways in which my less-than-financially stable career had often forced her to do without; in particular with the attempts we’d made to adopt a child, that had resulted in the money we’d put aside for that purpose being taken by scammers, not the only time in our lives together that we’d trusted the wrong people.

I’d also come to understand that regrets were part of the deal. I’d loved her and she’d loved me, and many were the people who’d said that we were made for each other. That would have to be enough. And I felt an unseen, imagined but no less real presence telling me that this was the way to think, and I concluded something very mawkish that also happened to be very true: that she was not really gone. I’d internalized her. I’d built a ghost out of my memories, that would always be with me.

I came out of that reverie and found him still watching. “What?”

He said, “You remember. I have one more thing to tell you.”

“Who’s dying?”

His mouth curled into a black horizontal crescent, and I realized another way in which the ordeal of time travel had aged him. I have always struggled with dental health and I was considerably surprised, sometimes, by the happenstance that any teeth remained in my mouth now. That all of his were gone not from indifferent flossing but from time travel was small comfort to me. It looked terrible.

“You are,” he said. “Eventually.”

I felt a lurch. “Soon?”

“That depends on your definition of soon. It’s always soon. If it helps put you at ease, that clearly won’t happen until somebody invents time travel, but I won’t tell you whether it’s a year from now, or five years from now, or ten, or thirty. That’s more than I’m permitted to tell you. I am allowed to tell you something else, something even more important. Do I have your permission?”

I could have done what I’d done before and told him to go ahead, but there was something untrustworthy about the sneering curve of his lips, something that could only be understood by someone who had lived self-destructive madness from the inside.

I somehow knew for the very first time that what he wanted to tell me today was not a dispatch from anyone who had my best interests at heart.

And yet I could not just tell him to go away. He was me.

“What kind of information is it?”

He grimaced. “You still need an explanation? After all we’ve been through together?”

“If it’s what all this has been heading for, yes, I do.”

The dog came up to him and sniffed his ankle. It looked at me and then at him again. I think it was fortunate that it had only canine intelligence and was under the threshold of the Dunning-Krueger effect. It knew that there were things that it did not know, and was therefore comfortable with being confused by things beyond its ken. It emitted a thin whine, before toodling off in search of another place to pee.

He said, “You’re a writer. I’m a writer. We know how stories work. We both know the fundamental thing about happy endings: that they’re false and temporary. People who have slain the dragon end up having to face another problem, maybe a worse one, a year later. The handsome prince and beautiful princess get tired of each other. The underdog who becomes a champion is forgotten, and gradually becomes a sick old man, yearning for the end. This reflects real life. You know it does. You have endured a personal hell, but that doesn’t mean more bad times aren’t coming, more days when eating a bullet will seems like the most sensible solution.”

I didn’t like the direction this was headed. “Yeah. So?”

“So: I’ve lived through all that already, and I’m here to tell you that while you’ve already lived through the very best times life has in store in for you, there are still joys coming . . . and some valleys deeper than you can guess, separating them. There will always be times of great sadness when you’ll say to yourself, how can I possibly live through this, and where you’ll endure by remembering what happened this year and thinking, but it gets better, it has to. A limited number of times, that will be accurate enough.”

“And?”

“And,” he spread his hands, “At one point, that will no longer be true. At one point, thanks to disease or circumstance, there will be no more happy days left: just a succession of steadily worse days, with no joy left to be had. Where that promise of things getting better will be a pernicious lie. Where there will be no hope, illusory or otherwise, and where it’ll be just a rocky descent to the end, going on longer than you would ever be willing to believe.”

I’d only thought my mouth was dry before. Now, it was the swirling sands of the Gobi. “And?”

“And I, myself, am well past that time, and I am willing to give you a precise date, the fixed point in time when surviving your then-current troubles will no longer reward the effort. I tell you this and you know precisely when you should give up the hope that will only torture you.”

The blood roared in my ears. I considered just how much I would have to suffer, someday, in order to take pleasure in making this offer to myself—and I knew that it would have to be more than I’d suffered this year, maybe more than I’d suffered throughout the long summers and winters of a life that had known more than its share of self-pitying despair. I was a volatile personality, a connoisseur of despair, somebody who had imagined himself a depressive until I was able to tell Judi, I only imagined myself chronically depressed all those years. But it was only unhappiness, and it went away when I married you.

Now I was being offered a firm timeline of how many years I had—if it even was years—before that feeling would make sense, where giving up would make sense.

For at least part of me, the part that seemed to enjoy the self-dramatization possibilities that went with misery, it seemed an unimaginable gift.

I said, “What good will it do?”

“You’ll know. You’ll make the choice that makes sense.”

“You mean killing myself.”

“Only,” he said, “when there’s no joy left to be had. All you have to do is give me permission, and I’ll give you the exact date.”

And here’s one thing you need to know about me, something true even if it’s not something I’m particularly proud of. And that’s this: as a bullied kid who never was any good at fighting, who never won any protracted fight in his life, who never successfully dodged a blow in his life, I happen to possess a rarely-used, but undeniable talent for the one thing that once or twice enabled me to put a tormentor down.

I have a knack for the sucker punch.

I don’t know how he didn’t see it coming. He was me, after all. But then maybe that was the explanation. He was me. I’d never been able to see sucker punches coming: ironic preparation for what happened with Judi.

He lay flat on the grass, staring up at me. It was the first time I’d ever successfully broken somebody’s nose, and I felt a dizzying pleasure from the moment, that I knew would at some point evolve into shame. He coughed, a sound that testified to various illnesses eating him up aside, and then he rasped, “Are you insane?”

“You know I am,” I snarled. “And you know how much.”

“I’m you. You’ll feel that punch someday.”

“And on that day,” I told him, with a pleasure that came close to euphoria, because I felt Judi standing behind me, and feeling proud of me, “I’ll deserve it. Imagine being the kind of person eager to take away someone else’s hope. I don’t ever want to be that person. Judi would want me to spend me the rest of my life making sure you never happen.”

He became whiny, a voice I knew and hated from those many times when I had thought I was being treated unfairly. “Don’t you see, I’m trying to save you—”

“You’re a bitter old man and you’re trying to erase whatever hope you have left, so it can stop torturing you. If I listened to you, I would lose that battle today. And it’s too nice outside for such a stupid surrender.”

He said, “You need to be warned—”

“I don’t need anything you’re offering. Get lost. Go back to where you came from. Stew in your misery and don’t bother me again.”

At 61, I am already too slow to rise from any position on the floor. At whatever age he was, he was slower. He grunted and groaned and made audible spinal creaks as he dragged himself to his feet, managed a version of upright equipped with uncomfortable stoop, and then straightened, at least as much as I, with my terrible posture, ever straightened.

By the time we were eye to eye again, he looked even older, older than I’m willing to survive, older even than I might ever could survive. His eyes now looked clouded, I was unsure that he really saw me; certainly not as clearly as my dear wife saw me, at that one point on her deathbed when she was startled by that moment of recognition. I was pretty sure that she’d taken some comfort, if not found any clarity, from that moment of eye contact.

He’d aged dramatically in the last few seconds. “You’ll . . . become me.”

“Not if I can help it. Go away, damn you.”

And he did.

I stood there for almost a full minute, my heart pounding, my mind racing from the narrowness of my escape. It was not an escape I ever would have managed, alone, even though any rational observer would have said I was alone. But no one’s really alone, I guess, if they can remember someone they loved, and as soon as I had that thought I suffered an immediate spasm of authorial remorse. No, That part’s mawkish. It’s gross and obvious. If I write these events down, I’ll avoid underlining them with anything that goddamned corny. Even if it’s true.

I took a deep breath. It was the first deep breath since this last visitation had started. It tasted like sea air, even though this specific backyard was too far from the water for that scent to carry. I figured that maybe I’d stored some while at sea. It was a nonsensical theory, but it would do for now; as would any theory that involved the influence of an invisible Judi, underlining the epiphany I’d had on deck.

All in all, I thought Judi would approve. She wouldn’t have wanted me to count down the days to the one when no further optimism was possible. She would have kicked my ass, and even if that angry old man wasn’t totally full of shit, and there was no way to avoid someday standing in his shoes, she would have been right. I would have deserved her kicking my ass.

I turned my face toward the sun, enjoying the warmth of the light on my face.

God help me, it and I felt brand new.

— For everybody who joined in the conspiracy of kindness.

©2022 by Adam-Troy Castro.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam-Troy Castro made his first non-fiction sale to Spy magazine in 1987. His twenty-six books to date include four Spider-Man novels, three novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and six middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of young Gustav Gloom. Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun (Japan), and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, one World Fantasy Award, and, internationally, the Ignotus (Spain), the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and the Kurd-Laßwitz Preis (Germany). The audio collection My Wife Hates Time Travel And Other Stories (Skyboat Media) features thirteen hours of his fiction, including the new stories “The Hour In Between” and “Big Stupe and the Buried Big Glowing Booger.” His most recent collection is The Author’s Wife Vs. The Giant Robot. Adam lives in Florida with a pair of chaotic paladin cats.

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

Among the Marithei

Mary Anne Mohanraj | 3117 words

Sergey hummed under his breath as he walked to the Marith temple. His steps retraced a path he knew so well, he could have walked it at night, in the dark, even under assault. Yet the Marith enclave was the most peaceful place he’d ever been—so calm that Sergey didn’t even need to hum to soothe his newborn daughter, fast asleep in her sling, bound tight against his chest. Three days old, and still Katya mostly slept, which both his wife and the doula had assured him was normal. They laughed at his anxieties, but they didn’t understand how Katya’s small griefs pierced his soul. He was no Marith empath, but he felt what she felt.

“This is your—spawn?”

“Daughter,” Sergey corrected, smiling up at his tall friend, who had stepped out of the temple gate to greet him. “Spawn is technically correct, Bila, but humans prefer child, son, or daughter. Daughter indicates a female child.”

The Marithei bowed down to peer closely at Katya, the pale green fronds that framed his face going temporarily flat. Sergey appreciated the gesture—otherwise, they might have brushed against the baby and tickled her awake. “How can you know the sex so young?”

Sergey said, “Well, you can’t, really. But humans like to take a first approximation. It’s convenient.”

Bila straightened, shrugging, a smooth gesture that involved his whole body, or what could be seen of it under the loose cloak that most Marithei wore in public. “That seems confusing. But to each according to their needs, as the One would say.”

“So you tell me.”

Bila lifted a feathery eyebrow. “Still not a believer, after all these years?”

Sergey did try. He came to services religiously every sixday, took his place in a green-blue sea of nude Marithei, tried to lose himself in the chanted words and song and undulations. They had such unity, as if choreographed. Yet Sergey was left outside their shared communion. Forever a stranger, in his own heart, at least. It would hurt Bila if he said so, though. “The fault is mine, Bila. After all your people have done for me, if I could believe, I would.” The Marithei had come to a war-torn planet, taken a small, terrified human boy, and given him solace.

Bila brushed a frond against his arm, a reassurance. “We did only what the One called us to do. It was nothing.”

“It was everything,” Sergey said gently.

“That too,” Bila agreed, rippling his fronds in what Sergey had come to understand as laughter.

“If Katya won’t disturb the service, I’d like to bring her with me today.”

Bila turned, gesturing Sergey forward into the temple courtyard. “How could the daughter disturb it? The service is what it is, and will encompass your child as well.”

“That’s what I was hoping.”

• • • •

Sergey had had no hope, in his first years as a child on Nadezhda. His parents had brought him to the colony world, fleeing war on Old Earth, only to find war had followed them. The same old battles, the same cry that blood must have blood. It had started over language and religion; it had continued over sharp memory, the meticulous accounting of the injured and the dead. Our Pyotr; did you see what they did to him, to his body, after? Yes, yes, we saw! We saw everything. Remember!

The war had taken his parents from him, and that would have been bad enough for a child of six, to be left bereft, alone. But then the militants had found him, and put a laser rifle in his hands; they’d promised he would feel better when he took his revenge, but he had felt nothing. The smooth action of the rifle felt like nothing, the body, arcing in the air and then falling, had been nothing, too. Well done, Sergey, they’d said.

They’d lined up the youngest, told them of the glory they would win, the rewards in the worlds beyond, where they’d be reunited with lost parents. When they asked who would be brave enough to strap on a bomb vest and sneak into the enemy’s village, Sergey had almost volunteered, eager to please. But then he’d felt the brush of his father’s hand against his hair, an incongruous memory. And the same words, Well done, Sergey, for some small task—lacing his vest, perhaps, or remembering to check the air on his oxygen breather. Sergey’s father would not want this ending for him, so he did not volunteer. When they put the rifle in his hands again, Sergey aimed to miss.

Then came the bombing of the camps and the poison gas. When the air finally cleared, the Marithei came, bringing bandages and fresh water and songs of healing. They were an old species, and though they fought bloody battles amongst individuals on rare occasion, larger wars such as this seemed behind them. They found Sergey in the rubble of the factory complex, a small boy with a broken arm, screaming. Bila was the one who reached down to him, slowly, afraid perhaps that he would scare the child. But Sergey climbed awkwardly into his arms, clung to the strange body, as if it were his hope of heaven. Bila carried him safely away.

Sergey didn’t remember much of the months that followed—only that he flinched away from humans when Bila tried to return him to his people. In truth, there were none of his kin left—any relatives were back on Old Earth, a long and expensive Jumpship ride away. The war finally ended, in an uneasy peace, but there was the aftermath to deal with. When the human government workers finally came, exhausted from their long labors, to the Marith enclave, Sergey screamed again at the sight of them. So they left him to Bila’s care, and he’d spent the remainder of his childhood and adolescence in the haven of Marith peace.

• • • •

It was a small miracle that he’d married. Sergey had met Marta here, in this courtyard, only three years ago. Many humans came to the Marith services now, though he doubted they understood them any better than he did. Still, they came, and Marta among them.

“You’re Sergey, aren’t you? The editor? I’m Marta Popovich. I’ve been following your work.” The human woman was almost a foot shorter than he was, which was disconcerting; he was used to being surrounded by taller Marithei.

“You’re joking.” Sergey blinked down at her, trying to sense whether she really meant it. After so much time among the Marithei, he sometimes had a hard time reading other humans’ emotions. On occasion, when Sergey took something seriously, he found that they meant to be funny, or vice versa.

“No, no. I’m serious.” Her eyes were intent on his, uncomfortably direct. “I know Yakov Dezhnyov; you took his paper and made it almost understandable. You’re a wizard.”

He shrugged. “Yakov is very smart.” He hadn’t ever met the man, but that much was obvious from his work.

Marta laughed. “Oh, of course. But he can’t be bothered to slow down and translate his brilliance for the rest of us. I don’t know how you got him to agree to your edits, but thank you—from the entire scientific community, thank you.”

“It was my pleasure,” Sergey said. It actually had been—after years of studying alone, trying one field after another, Sergey had found his deepest pleasure in helping others say what they meant to say. The words were always there, the precise, beautiful words, and it was his job, his gift, to find the right ones, so minds could speak.

Ironic, perhaps, given how poorly he communicated with other humans. Bila tried, had insisted that Sergey leave the Marith enclave, attempt human things—classes, sports, clubs. But after a few weeks of misery, Sergey always fled back to the alien haven. Humans were just too much. Too loud, too emotional, too intense. They sent him back to the camps again, in his mind, to being a small child, buffeted by noise and shouting.

Even here in the courtyard, where Marithei and humans mixed freely under the twisted cover of giant shenshei trees, as they waited for the services to start—even this, Sergey could hardly bear. Which was why he came, service after service, to try to learn to bear it. Bila had never required attendance of him, but gentle, patient encouragement had its own steady weight. The courtyard crowd was getting easier, with practice. And Marta seemed straightforward, which helped.

She took a step closer, almost unnervingly close, but not quite. “I wonder if you’d be willing to take a look at my work. It’s not as challenging as Yakov’s, but I think you might find something of interest there. I’m studying Marith empathic patterns, specifically the way they merge emotions during services.”

“I would be fascinated.” He really would; nothing else drew him as strongly as the harmonies the Marithei created together, the ones he seemed forever barred from joining. If Marta had soft brown eyes and waves of curling hair, a lush shape hinted at under the respectful Marith robe, that only influenced Sergey’s decision a little. Or so he told himself.

• • • •

Sergey and Bila paused in the shade of a shenshai tree, grateful for its relief from Nadezhda’s bright yellow sun. Around the courtyard, a growing crowd was doing the same, clustering in small conversational groups. Mostly humans with humans, Marithei with Marithei, but occasionally a brave human would attempt to penetrate a Marithei group. They opened, welcoming her in, then closed again, engulfing her like the waves of the sea. Bila said, “Marta isn’t with you today.”

“She is still exhausted; it was a difficult birth.” He tried to encourage Marta to sleep as much as she could; Sergey pulled the covers up around her and hummed old Russian lullabies until she fell into slumber, a stone sinking into a weary sea. “I have had to do much of Katya’s care.”

“Had to do” was technically inaccurate—Sergey had been desperate to do it, to spend as much time as possible with this incredible small creature. It frightened him, how intensely he loved this child, though she was still barely there. He knew every curl of eyelash, the way Katya’s tiny fingers clenched into little fists when she was hungry, raging until food was delivered. Her needs were intense, but also simple—Sergey found it easy to assuage her. The doula and Marta were delighted that he was so good with the child.

“And how is your new house?”

“It’s good, Bila, thank you.” It was an immense relief. When Sergey and Marta had first wanted to move in together, they could only afford an apartment in the heart of Novorustov. They’d constantly been running into neighbors in the hall, even hearing them from within their own apartment. Sometimes Sergey would turn a corner to see a body, a face, unexpectedly near; he’d almost jump out of his skin, pulse racing, sweat breaking out on his brow. Finally, a few months ago, they’d saved up enough for their own little house, on the outskirts of the city; it was a longer commute for Marta, but she’d said it was worth it, to see how much happier her solnyshko had become. Sergey had never felt like a “little sun” before Marta, but with her, he shone brighter.

Now, on the increasingly rare occasions when he woke up screaming, from nightmares of the camps, there were no angry neighbors banging on the walls, demanding silence. Sergey had even made friends with the neighbors in the surrounding houses; it was a novel delight, waving to them across the yard while gardening, or even joining them at their homes for a meal and a game. The Marithei didn’t play board games.

Bila said, “We are considering spawning ourselves.”

“You and your partners?” Katya fussed a little, twisting in the sling, and Sergey shifted position, making her comfortable again. Her hair, fine and golden, caught the light rippling through the leaves. Had he ever seen anything so beautiful? If Bila spawned soon, perhaps Katya could grow up with an adoptive Marithei for a playmate. They would run in and out of the enclave together, knowing the path between their homes as well as he did. “But you’ve only been partnered for a few moons; I thought that usually spawning came later?”

Bila’s fronds rippled again. “No, that’s right. I was speaking metaphorically; I meant the entire enclave.”

Sergey stifled a small sigh of frustration; metaphorical speaking was one of his least favorite things. It could be beautiful, brilliant even, when done well, but more often than not, it was just confusing. But wait—what had Bila said? “The enclave is spawning? What would that mean?”

“We’ve grown a great deal, the last twenty years. The nets are full to bursting; it’s time for some of us to divide off, move elsewhere. We’re planning a second enclave in Pharos City.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Pharos was more of a backwater than Ruso, less cosmopolitan. Even here, there had been a few incidents of violence against Marithei, xenophobic humans who found the strange upsetting. And across the Charted Worlds, incidents of anti-alien violence were increasing. War was coming again, had already arrived on other worlds. Mad fanatics who invoked the supposed purity of the human race, a purity that had to be defended with their lives. “It might not be safe.”

Bila said, “Little one, it is not our purpose to be safe.”

Sergey knew that, of course. Most of the Marithei never left their watery homeworld, spent the majority of their lives under the ocean waves. Bila had only come here because he belonged to a religious sect that considered it their duty to travel, heal, and teach. On Marith, they’d traveled from one watery body to another, and eventually, from planet to planet in their own system. When their species had discovered Jump technology, they’d simply extended their ministry outward.

But Sergey didn’t like it. And then a worse thought occurred to him—“Would you leave? If you spawn a new enclave in Pharos?”

The courtyard was filling up now, the doors about to open for the service, and the noise surrounding them was growing, a cacophony of hundreds of voices. Someone jostled Sergey as they moved past, with only the briefest apology.

His tall friend said softly, the words almost lost in the rising din, “I intend to go to Pharos.”

No, oh no. Katya must have sensed his distress; the child shifted again, started to wake, and Sergey had to quickly jiggle her, humming to soothe her back to sleep. It wasn’t time for her to eat again; Katya needed her sleep. He couldn’t let his emotions upset her. The motion and the humming helped him, too; by the time she was settled, Sergey had control again. He wasn’t a child anymore, and the Marithei had done so much for him already; they didn’t owe him anything more. Still.

He fought to keep his voice calm, composed. “I don’t know how I’ll manage without you.”

Bila’s fronds rose and fell, in a pattern he hadn’t seen before, that he didn’t know how to read. “Sergey. You are settled now among your own people, as it was always meant to be. You do not need me anymore.”

He supposed Bila was right. For all Sergey’s attempts to communicate with the Marithei, to learn their ways, he had never truly been one of them. On a fundamental level, he did not understand them, and they did not understand him.

They’d loved him, though. That had been enough.

“I will miss you.” Those words came out steadily, at least, belying the sharp pain in his chest.

“And I, you,” Bila said gently.

The bell hung at the temple roof began to toll, and the wide wood doors slid open, admitting a stream of people. The Marithei moved smoothly through the doors, in their accustomed harmony; the humans were less orderly.

“Shall we go in?” Bila asked.

Sergey shook his head. “I think I’ll head home, actually.” He could bring Katya to services another time. Right now, what he really wanted was to be home, with his child and his wife. “Marta will be waiting for us.”

Bila bent and touched his forehead to Sergey’s in acknowledgement, then turned away, joining the crowd entering the temple. Sergey began pushing his way, moving against the stream. Maybe that was why he saw it. More likely it was his childhood, the years of war.

There was nothing to see, exactly, in the broad-shouldered human male at the far end of the courtyard, shrouded in the same Marith cloak as everyone else. Nothing obvious about his body, or even his bearing. But there was something—a look in his eyes, perhaps, of terror and determination. Sergey had seen that look too many times. The man was moving forward swiftly, and would be inside the temple within moments. The temple crowded with what must be a thousand worshippers by now, an enclosed wooden building, so vulnerable to attack. Sergey had been trained, as a child, to see such vulnerabilities.

He could flee. There was Katya, warm against his chest; there was Marta, waiting at home. No time to maneuver his daughter out of the sling, to pass her to safety. No one would fault him for turning away, for fleeing. The Marithei weren’t his people, after all. They didn’t even want him anymore.

That thought came in a moment and was as quickly dismissed. That was the fear and loneliness of the child he had been. The man he was knew better. That thought was gone by the time he took his first steps toward the man, and with each successive step, a solid certainty grew. Sergey had misunderstood, that was all, had been confused, as he so often was. There was no us or them; the All encompassed them, as Bila would say. If Sergey was right, and the man wore a bomb, it would take far fewer lives in the courtyard than if he made it into the confines of the temple.

Sergey shouted a warning, knowing it wouldn’t be enough. Humans and Marithei were both too slow to comprehend, to react. Words, much as he loved them, were insufficient now.

In that moment, as Sergey flung his body and his daughter’s toward the man, Katya now awake and crying at his breast, he felt the peace of the Marithei settle in his heart.

©2021 by Mary Anne Mohanraj. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mary Anne Mohanraj is author of A Feast of Serendib, Bodies in Motion, The Stars Change, and twelve other titles. Other recent publications include stories for George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards series, Perennial: A Garden Romance (Tincture), stories at Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, and Lightspeed, and an essay in Roxane Gay’s Unruly Bodies. Mohanraj founded Hugo-nominated and World Fantasy Award-winning speculative literature magazine Strange Horizons, and serves as Executive Director of both DesiLit (desilit.org) and the Speculative Literature Foundation (speclit.org). She is Clinical Associate Professor of fiction and literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Find her at maryannemohanraj.com.

SyncALife

Ruben Reyes Jr. | 6617 words

As I read Dad’s eulogy, my mind was on the FedEx delivery that’d bring him back to me.

“My father was a thoughtful man,” I said. “In his poems and in his life, he sought to understand people’s complexity. He didn’t believe that people were good or bad. He was most interested in gray areas. With generosity, he saw the world’s ugliness and tried shining a kind gloss on it wherever he could.”

“That was a really beautiful speech,” Manuel said. We weren’t together at that point, but he’d driven down from Davis for the funeral, even though I hadn’t asked him to.

“Thank you,” I said. I didn’t mean it. We both knew the eulogy was too kind, too convenient. More fluff than anything.

At the reception, everyone wanted to make small talk or share happy memories about Dad, but I kept replaying what’d happened the night before. Someone from SyncALife visited the morgue and drilled a small hole into Dad’s head. They took a chunk of gray matter back to their facilities, reanimated a few of the dead cells, and implanted them in a metallic gray robot, about eighteen inches tall, with jointed limbs like a drawing mannequin. It all had to be done before Dad was lowered into the ground at Forest Lawn.

No one at the reception knew I was waiting for my purchase. I couldn’t admit I’d already spent my ten-thousand-dollar inheritance. The guests spoke about how much Dad had loved me.

“He did love me,” I finally admitted, ushering people out the front door of the two-bedroom Highland Park home I grew up in.

“Call if you need anything,” Manuel ventured. He wanted to say more, but I told him it wasn’t the right time.

Before I’d made it back to the door, I caught the bright glare of headlights in my periphery and heard the soft crackle of loose asphalt on tires. A delivery man, his paunch heavy and pushing against his shirt like Dad’s had, made me sign for the package before grabbing it from the back of the truck.

I tore through the tape and Styrofoam peanuts, cradling the robot in my arms. Its limbs were limp and turned into its body, as if curled in pain. The instruction manual said that once it was powered up, it’d be able to support its own weight, but I had to gently stretch its limbs until finally it stood on its own.

“Hello,” I said, as instructed.

The robot didn’t respond. A glowing blue line ran across its “face,” a cell-phone sized screen mounted on its aluminum shoulders. It reminded me of the vital monitors in the hospital, except that the robot was silent. I reread the instruction manual, to see if I’d done something wrong. All SyncALife robots required a few weeks for the artificial intelligence software to fully develop, so their linguistic capacity was limited at first, but they were supposed to respond from the moment they first booted up.

“Dad, can you hear me?” I said. The robot stirred. The sounds didn’t coalesce into words, but the babble and gurgling were unmistakable. It was Dad’s voice.

• • • •

From Dad’s collection, Sins of War and Man:

nightmare

blood bursts from my chest
muddies dirt I slept on
soaks comrades sleeping still as restless night

blood bursts from my chest
springs like holy fountain
into mouth of the Lempa River

blood floods the bank
bodies of dead indios, guerilleros, children,
float in endless red river Styx

covered in blood from my sinner’s chest

• • • •

The cruel thing about grief is that it doesn’t care where you are or how you’re feeling. Out of nowhere, a random memory descends, even if your mind has been running a hundred miles an hour over the hundred things on your to-do list. The memory could be of the most mundane, ordinary day, and still it’ll send an ancient sadness through you. The sort of sadness you imagine humans have felt since creation, but that you never imagined you could experience so deep inside.

That’s how it was with Dad in the days after I buried him. There I was, listening to my manager explain that he’d love to give me a raise, especially after my loss, but that the call center simply didn’t have the budget. I was about to say I really needed the money, and that I didn’t know how I’d pay the bills on my own, when boom: a memory. Out of nowhere. Shell-shocked me. My manager stared me down when I went silent for too long, lost in thought.

“Okay. Thank you,” I said, my financial situation unresolved.

The memory was from when I was nine. Dad and I went back to his hometown of Santa Tecla. It was the first time he and I had been to El Salvador together, the first trip after Mom left, taking the buffer between us with her.

All summer I’d begged him for the Nintendo64. There was nothing I loved more than playing Pokémon Stadium at a friend’s house, and all I wanted was to be able to do that every day, but Dad refused to buy me one. When we got to Santa Tecla and pulled into the parking lot of the gated colonia where Dad had grown up, he opened up his suitcase and pulled out a brand-new console, still in the box.

I thought he was surprising me, but it turned out the N64 was for one of his comrade’s kids. Dad said he’d appreciate it more than me. I went on to spend the whole summer with that boy, playing Pokémon Stadium and Star Fox 64, and we eventually kissed, which led to all the yelling, but that wasn’t the point. Dad was dead and he’d gifted a Nintendo 64 to a kid who otherwise couldn’t have afforded it. Grief made it a tender memory. I missed Dad.

The SyncALife robot was waiting for me where I’d left it. I figured I’d try communicating with it again, since the purchase was supposed to stave off the loneliness and grief that’d seeped in anyway.

“How are you feeling, Dad?” I asked. It was one of the phrases suggested in the instructional manual as a way of speeding up linguistic development.

“Meh cien toe leek um days per tan dough fromage dream,” it muttered. “Eye om nut sheer key in Aries too.”

“I don’t understand you, Dad,” I said. It’d been speaking like this for days, in a jumbled-up soup of sounds that almost sounded like words but didn’t coalesce into anything I could decipher.

“Meh cien toe leek um days per tan dough fromage dream,” it repeated.

“Okay Dad,” I said. “We’ll talk later.”

SyncALife had a refund policy on the off chance the robot never acquired language. All I had to do was flip the switch on its foot, verbally confirm that I wanted to terminate the service, and hit the switch again. A part of me wanted to do it then. Dad was still dead, I still missed him, and even though the robot mumbled in a register that was unmistakably Dad’s, I couldn’t talk to him like I wanted to. Plus, I needed the money.

Hope is priceless, though, so I didn’t send the robot back. I’d do anything for a Dad that was kinder than the dead one had been.

• • • •

When the paramedics called to say that Dad had a fainting episode he was lucky to have woken up from, I stuffed all my clothes into the trunk of my Corolla and drove down from Davis for good.

Manuel asked why I’d willingly put myself back in a bad situation. Dad wasn’t happy that I’d moved in with Manuel. He stopped helping me with tuition and rent, in retribution for “abandoning him,” and though it was a fair price to pay to be away from everything I’d endured under his care, it still stung.

Manuel had a point, but I told him I had no choice. Even then, I had the sense that my decision might lead to a breakup, which was especially ironic since I’d only come out to Dad because of Manuel. But if I could be home to help Dad if he passed out again—well, of course I would. I’ve never been a bad son. At least, not in my estimation.

Dad was a subdued version of his old self then, which meant that he still got angry with me but in a passive-aggressive way. He didn’t shout or throw things, but I still felt his frustration.

To avoid him, I shut the door to my room and watched amateur interior designers give online house tours. Their living rooms didn’t seem lived in, and they all stole ideas from the same sources: Kinfolk, Ikea catalogues, overused Pinterest boards. But there was something pristine and aspirational about their homes. They were quiet, minimalist spaces. So different than the home I’d grown up in.

During one of these videos I got an ad. SyncALife is a state-of-the-art technology that preserves the memories of your loved ones after they’ve transitioned out of this life and into the next. A pair of Stanford grads conceptualized of SyncALife as a malleable, personally adjustable robot that’d mimic the behaviors of the deceased. Initially, the company developed it for children’s pets. Dogs, cats, and hamsters were easier to “bring back to life” since their personalities were less complex than a human’s. But soon it was clear that the real money maker would be technology capable of imitating a dead loved one. They figured out how to reanimate brain cells and coupled them with AI software. Customers’ orders were based on their loved ones, but the company couldn’t guarantee they’d be identical to the deceased, a disclaimer buried in fine print.

Buyers, like me, convinced themselves that SyncALife was selling better versions of the people they’d known, and though the company never promised that much, they also didn’t dissuade anyone from shelling out their savings to cure their grief.

• • • •

From Sins of War and Man:

cruel reminder

more than the break of dawn
or vinyl singing in an empty room
or phantom carcass in bedsheets’ folds

our son reminds me of you
of the cruelties that left
the room empty
the sheets phantoms
dawn broken like me

• • • •

After a few days of gurgled sounds, Dad put words together. Babytalk pulled from the two languages he’d managed to wrap his tongue around in his lifetime.

“No say woo eye em,” he said, this time as I was clearing out his room. This version of Dad didn’t need cologne or polo shirts. “There ease so men y bags in hair. Decking son?”

“There’s a lot of stuff to get rid of, Dad,” I said, assuming he could understand me. The instruction manual said to speak to the robot as I would anyone.

I tied a white trash bag to the bedframe and began to throw things away. Dad watched from the doorway, until I walked over and held his aluminum hand, pulling him into the room. He toddled at my side and let me guide him.

“Can you help me out?” I asked. It didn’t seem like he recognized the piles of objects in the room as his own, but if they really had put Dad’s brain matter into this robot, there had to be a way of drawing out recognition. I handed Dad a bottle of Nautica cologne. It was a cheap fragrance he’d gotten from Ross and used often. The phantom scent of perfume mixed with his sweat assailed me.

“Wise diss?” he asked. SyncALife Dad held it out in front of him, as if it were a piece of space junk. Fascinating, but foreign. He held onto it for a while, which had to mean something.

“How about these shirts, Dad?”

I handed him a small stack of polos that used to press against his stomach. He tossed them aside.

“Dent want dos.”

We went like this for the rest afternoon: me handing my dead father’s stuff to his reincarnated robot and taking his reaction as guidance. I was guessing—it wasn’t always clear whether or not Dad liked whatever he was holding—but still it felt like he was choosing what to throw away and what to keep, taking the burden off me. In the back of my head, I knew it didn’t matter. Dad didn’t need anything. He was dead. I should have thrown it all away.

That night, I went to the grocery store to get some vegetables. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d put something green in my stomach. Probably at the post-burial reception. When I put my debit card into the machine, the cashier looked at me apologetically.

“It says it’s been declined. You can try again.”

I shook my head and pulled out my credit card instead, and swiped it, before rushing to the car in embarrassment. The total was less than twenty dollars but paying the mortgage that month had wiped out my checking account.

Watching spinach sizzle and shrink in the saucepan, I realized I couldn’t drag my feet any longer. If I was going to keep living in the property my father had spent the better part of his adult life paying off, I’d have to supplement my income somehow. The call center wouldn’t cut it.

“What am I gonna do, Dad?” I asked him, though I had an obvious solution in mind. One he would have hated.

“Meh cientoe leek um days per tan dough fromage dream,” he muttered. “Eye om nut sheer key in Aries too.”

“I don’t know what you’re saying Dad. Can you try again? Please Dad. Por fa.”

“Meh siento like I’m desper tanto from a dream. Eye um not sheer quien Aires tu.”

“You feel, what? A dream?” Dad was getting closer and closer to words I understood.

“Me siento like I’m despertando from a dream. I am not sure quien eres tu,”

“I’m your son,” I cried. “Soy tu hijo, Dad.”

“May soon. Mai sun. My son?” he asked. “My son.”

Dad sat there, watching as I ate forkfuls of spinach. It was impossible to tell whether he understood what having a son entailed, but my gut told me he did. SyncALife warned that they had no way of knowing what details from life their AI would cling to, but I hoped he’d at least remember what it meant to be my father. The good parts, the happy moments, at least.

• • • •

From Dad’s collection, Genesis:

Hebrews 13:14

Dream of the Holy Place
Scripture calls the city that is to come
Gleaming through gates as
Peter asks for a hand, proof
Of tender love, of a life lived
In His Name

Cry out when Peter sees
Dirt in the creases of your palm
When he sends you back to
The city that does not endure
That crumbles at your touch

• • • •

Before Dad knew I was attracted to men, our relationship was normal. Or more accurately, as normal a relationship possible between an emotionally repressed, former-guerrillero and his son.

He was an unexceptional sort of man in that he loved me but couldn’t say it plainly. Instead, he did the sorts of things too many men get away without doing: supporting me financially, coaching my recreational soccer team for a couple years, talking to me about condoms and sex and the way a child can derail your life if you’re not ready for it. It was a kind of love, but not the kind I wanted as a boy.

What I wanted was the unconditional, explicitly stated, I’ll-die-for-you sort of love Dad had shown the men he spent his twenties with.

The guerrilleros were working to establish a freer El Salvador with more political space for debate and fewer kidnappings and killings. But to stage such a war meant taking to the overgrown hillsides of the rainforest, where they spent days evading government soldiers and planning counter attacks. As the vines nipped at their ankles, Dad and the other men slept in hammocks next to each other. To pass the time, they read verses of poetry out loud. They embraced, cooked together, and found solace not simply in their cause, but also in each other.

That was love between men. Dad was capable of it, but never showed it to me. As a boy, I figured it’d come one day—when I was old enough and man enough to understand the world as he did. When I learned that most of Dad’s comrades had been murdered in the war, I understood him better. If every “I love you” conjured memories of those I’d lost, I’d struggle to say it too.

That didn’t make his hesitation hurt less, and it definitely didn’t prepare me for his reaction when I revealed my relationship with Manuel. Despite all he’d been through, I never imagined he’d choose violence and call it love.

• • • •

From Genesis:

Penance

O Lord, I hear thy lessons of love
Thy commandments rattle loud in my ears

Thou shall not kill
But my murderous words maim others

Thou shall not commit adultery,
But my palms slide down other men’s wives

Thou shall not take the name of Lord your God in vain
But anger boils on my tongue

O Lord, repentance is not an action
But a promise

I break again and again
O Lord

• • • •

The week Dad began speaking in full sentences, Manuel sent a message saying he was moving down to Los Angeles to start a new job. He chose email, I guessed, because it’d be easier for me to ignore than calls or texts. Manuel respected boundaries, and though I did miss him, I didn’t respond immediately, telling myself I was busy teaching Dad about the world.

We spent evenings revisiting activities we hadn’t done together since before Mom left. On the shaggy white rug, we tossed down Uno cards, laughing when we’d curse the other with a Skip or Wild Draw Four card. We went for walks around the neighborhood, and Dad would stop to pet a dog if we encountered one. Together, we watched 27 Dresses, 13 Going on 30, and old reruns of Fear Factor.

Mostly, I answered his questions: who I was, how to turn on the television, how rain happened. He never asked anything too serious, but with every question, he got closer to asking questions I wouldn’t know how to answer: what he was like when he was alive, how our relationship had been.

Before I knew it, another month’s bills were due. To distract him for the evening, I sat Dad on the couch to watch Saturday Night Live. It was a show he’d liked in life, and as the cold open began, I could tell he was enjoying it. Proof that he’s himself again, I told myself.

I went into my room and got onto all fours, sticking a hand deep underneath my bedframe until my fingers touched the slim edges of a box. Dust covered the top, and I ran a finger through it, leaving a greasy line. I opened it and carefully laid the black wig on my mattress. Next to it, I unfolded the sequined purple body suit.

A familiar routine followed, but it’d been months since I’d done it—ever since I moved back in with Dad—so it felt exciting in a way it hadn’t since the very beginning. I combed the wig, getting every strand in place. Though I left my boxers on, I pulled on my dick and tucked it in-between my thighs before slipping into the one-piece, one leg at a time. The glittering fabric was tight on my hips and chest, and I turned in a circle, feeling the bellbottoms sway at my ankles. Once the hairnet was tight against my skull, I put the wig on and there I was: Selena under the lights of the Houston Astrodome in ‘95. Smiling, shining, precious as a gem.

The camboy website had saved my password, so logging in was easy. I made sure my bedroom door was locked, then I hit the “Broadcast Now” button. The chatroom filled up quickly. There were ten, then fifteen, then thirty people watching. I began to strip off my clothes, slowly, and as more of my skin showed, more usernames popped up in the chat. Take it off sexy, one user typed, after donating a hundred tokens. I listened and pulled the jumpsuit down to my knees. I was hard.

My boxer briefs were tight and black, and the wig swung against the waistband. I ran my fingers through the strands, over my nipples, down my body, and continued taking men’s requests. The tips were flowing, and the idea of all these anonymous men with their eyes on me turned me on. Would love to worship that cock, a user wrote once my underwear was around my ankles.

When I turned the camera off, the jumpsuit splattered with my cum, I didn’t feel disgusted at myself. I felt beautiful. And I’d made the money I needed for the bills.

• • • •

From Genesis:

1 Corinthians 6:19-20

for Flaco

The body is not a temple
But a cage: skeleton dome
Tender muscle base, fluttering heart

When the bomb bursts
Flaco’s cage shatters
Shards of marrow in
Bloody pools of flesh

His fluttering heart loose,
Ground-bound canary,
Of civil war mines

• • • •

Camming brought in enough money to pay the bills as long as I put shows on regularly, so I quit my job. Guilt seeped in briefly, but not because I’d turned to sex work. I’d sustained myself by camming in the months I was financially cut off, but doing it inside my childhood home with Dad in the house—even this growing, learning version of him—felt dirty.

I did it anyway and invested money to buy wigs and outfits to replace all the ones I’d gotten rid of when I moved back home. In a short bob and silk slip dress, I was Hollywood glamor. A pink wig, corset, and plaid miniskirt made me a popstar daydream. For the camera, I became half-a-dozen different women. Sometimes, I didn’t wear a costume. Logging on in nothing but my boxer briefs was also liberating.

Online, I could be whoever I wanted to be and there’d always be admirers. By being everyone, I was no one, and the anonymity of that lack of identity was freeing.

I was in the middle of a show when Manuel’s contact photo popped up—a shot I’d taken of him sitting in a sea of poppies—so I let the phone buzz. When I’d finished wiping cum off my fingers with a tissue, I called him back. He was glad that I’d finally responded to his email.

“Would you want to grab lunch?” he asked. I told him I’d think about it.

The sound of audience laughter came from the living room, so I changed into a new pair of underwear and joined Dad at the couch. He sat silently, occasionally turning from the sketches. Whenever Dad spoke, the blue line on his screen spiked, but as we watched, it flatlined. It was strange, because when we’d watched SNL together before he died, he always had commentary.

“You should watch the old stuff,” Dad had said once. He was glaring at Lady Gaga’s back-up dancers, wearing skirts and gold belts fashioned into corsets. “I used to watch it when I lived in Miami. So much better than this shit. Hans and Franz—we want to pump you up!—in those accents. Even that guy, who dressed as a woman. Church lady. Even that was funny. This stuff . . .” He’d trailed off.

That evening, though, he laughed occasionally, a deep and hearty joy that sent a small quiver through his aluminum limbs. The laugh was the same one he’d always had, but one I had heard rarely. Dad seemed remade. I could come out again.

“I’m bisexual,” I said. I figured it’d be best to say it as simply as possible.

“No entiendo.”

“Romantically, I like men and women.”

“You would marry either, hombre o mujer?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

Dad turned back to the television. The show had ended, and the host was saying the final goodbye with the cast behind him. As the credit rolled, the cast members embraced each other, some dancing to the closing music and the audience’s applause. I had an urge to hug Dad, but it was a stupid thought. He was a robot. He’d be cold against my skin.

• • • •

I came out to Dad, the first time, because I was in love. A giddy, can’t-get-my-mind-off-you kind of love. The sort of love I’d only ever felt for women before, and that I assumed I’d never feel for a man.

The boys before Manuel had come and gone in a flurry of headless torsos pictures and 3 a.m. “u up?” texts. We met in the dark, in the backseat of their cars or the cramped space of their dorm rooms, but it never amounted to much. I convinced myself that I didn’t actually love men. I just loved the feeling of their bodies on mine, or inside me, or slick on my skin.

But Manuel was different. We met the same way—online, under the pretenses of sex. Soon, though, he was coming around often. He’d text me to ask where I was studying, and then would join with an iced coffee I hadn’t asked for, but gratefully accepted. His love was unflinching, unashamed.

I wanted more with Manuel, a real relationship and maybe a future, so I had no choice but to come out.

Here’s what I remember: I said what I had to. My hands were trembling, so I gripped my knees. Dad said nothing, until he said no. No, he said. I don’t believe it. I didn’t raise a maricón. I reassured him it had nothing to do with him, that I couldn’t help what I felt. I was about to tell him about Manuel when suddenly he left. Slammed the door behind him and left for a walk. I thought he’d left to clear his mind, and that when he returned we’d ignore what I’d said. I was okay with the idea that Dad would ignore who I really was as a way of coping. As long as he knew, that’d be fine.

But when he came back, he was still fuming. He came up to where I was sitting on the couch, loomed over me, and began pummeling me with his fists. It was so unexpected, and I could have probably fought back, but I didn’t. I covered my head with my hands and took the blows. I was crying by then, and he only hit me for a few seconds, before shutting himself in his bedroom. I could smell his cologne, even after he’d left the living room.

• • • •

From Sins of Man and War:

on the occasion of my son’s birth

crying wife / squeaky halls / blinding bulb
pink skin / bruised temple / alien face
bloody mask / shrill shrieks / body lean

the most beautiful baby boy
I’ve ever seen

• • • •

“I remember the house,” Dad said to me one day, about three months after he’d been delivered.

“Really?” I asked. He’d had moments like these, where his past came back to him in snippets. It filled me with joy to know that the man I buried was hiding somewhere inside the robot.

“What do you remember about this house?”

“There was a hole once in the drywall. I fixed it myself because I didn’t want to pay a contractor.”

It was a random memory, but it was true. He’d made the hole himself, when I was living in Davis, though I imagined his fist against the drywall for months after he told me about it. When I moved back, I worried that he’d be violent again, but he never was. Maybe he regretted his actions. Either that, or the illness had made him too weak. Maybe I’d ask, someday.

“Do you remember living alone at home?” I asked instead.

“Did I live alone?” Dad said.

“No,” I lied. “I’ve always been here with you.”

• • • •

From Sins of War and Man:

as gunshots pierce the countryside

roosters crow on storm-soaked
farmland, halved-open bulls rot
giving worms wriggling new life

the farm hiding me echoes
who I’ve become
broken animal of a man
reborn but not repaired

• • • •

Manuel and I met at Guisados on Cesar Chavez. The conversation was easy, both of us reaching for the relationship we’d had before the break-up. I apologized for the ways I’d sunk the relationship: saying long-distance would never work, failing to admit that I hadn’t outgrown the shame my father instilled in me, quitting because things got hard. By the end of lunch, I knew we were getting back together. The love that had been there—dormant, untouched—blazed.

We stumbled through my front door, our hands interlocked, and in our hurry to get into my bedroom, Manuel knocked Dad over.

“Shit,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Dad said. He lifted himself off the ground, his joints whirring quietly. He stood at Manuel’s knees. Awkwardly, I introduced them, though my tongue felt heavy. I hadn’t told Dad that Manuel and I were seeing each other again.

“Nice to meet you,” Manuel said.

“Likewise,” Dad said. “I’ll get out of your way.”

In my room, with Manuel pressed against me, all I could focus on was his body. His cock inside me, the way his hips knocked against my ass. Sweat dripped down from his temple, and as he leaned over me, pressing his cheek against mine, the slickness made its way onto my skin. When we were done, we lay in bed together, silent, but smiling into each other’s bodies.

“You must have spent a small fortune on him,” Manuel said.

“Ten grand,” I admitted, only because I knew he wouldn’t judge me, even if he disagreed with my choice. Meeting Dad must’ve conjured the horror stories I’d told about him, the same way Dad’s voice triggered those memories for me sometimes.

“He’s kinder,” Manuel said.

“He doesn’t care who I date anymore. He’s changed in that way.”

Despite what I said, I was starting to think Dad hadn’t ever really returned. He liked what I liked, and passively followed my lead. For the first time ever, I was the man of the house.

“Sorry I didn’t tell you Manuel was coming over,” I told Dad after Manuel left.

“You’re an adult. Sos adulto,” he said, which was true. The anger, yelling, reprimands, ugly stares—none of it came. “Just be safe.”

I had always wanted Dad to be this way, measured and slow to anger, but now that he was, it made me feel as if the person I spoke to daily wasn’t Dad at all. Without the short fuse, and the desire for control, how could I pretend that this was my father?

• • • •

From Dad’s collection, Genesis:

Genesis 1:27

My father loved God more than he loved me, so
I hated God more than I hated my father

Genesis says He created man in his image
And my father was cruel which meant
Father up above was crueler

I rediscovered God after years of
Cold church pews on my flogged back
Learned that His love exists for those
Who follow His word, unlike my father

Father, made in His image
Me, made in his
Son, made in mine

Legacy of hurt created by men
Godly devotion, my antidote

• • • •

According to the instruction manual, SyncALife customers who felt that their loved ones were missing essential pieces of their personality could use mementos to teach their robots about who they used to be.

I knew what I had to do.

Every night, Dad and I read a couple of pages from his collections. Most poems were new to me, though a couple I remembered from readings I’d gone to or from the awkward Chicano Literature course I’d taken as a freshman. The professor was a fan, and though I never said anything about it, he spent a whole lecture talking about a couple of poems from Dad’s second book.

“Do you remember writing that?” I asked Dad after we were done reading for the evening.

“Si. Yes,” he said. “Santa Tecla, 1989.” Or “Miami, 1994.” Or “Los Angeles, 2006.”

He never said more than that—the place and year where he’d written the lines I read out loud—but it was reassuring to know he remembered.

The online forums were right: his personality was coming back. He scolded me for buying fast-food so often, saying the grease was showing in my cheeks. I ignored him, as I had learned to do as a teenager, but began throwing the bags in the trash bins outside so he wouldn’t see them. We still watched Saturday Night Live every weekend, but he became pickier with other shows. Romcoms and reality television no longer interested him. Part of me thought he’d insult me to my face, saying that what I watched was inane, childish, girly. Instead, he silently got off the couch to wander the house. Our conversations became slimmer, more timid.

Still, I liked reading to him. Even when it was clear that Dad could read for himself, I insisted we flip through his books together. We went chronologically, and as we reached the end of his last collection—published a year before his death—I found myself rationing the poems. Instead of two or three a night, I only read one, and despite the slowed down pace, we got to the end of the book. The poem that closed it out was about me.

The room was still. The refrigerator’s muted buzz came from the kitchen, louder than the shallow pulsing of my own chest.

“Que bello, mijo.” Dad struggled to get the sentence out.

“Your words,” was all I could muster.

“Te quiero,” Dad said. I stayed quiet, so he tried again. “I love you.”

Dad had loved me when he was alive, even when he had hated parts of me, but he almost never put his feelings into words, despite being a writer. Hearing them now, the syllables sweet and silky, sent a pang through me.

Again, I resisted the urge to hug him. It’d ruin the illusion. Not the illusion of love, because the love was true, but the illusion that Dad was the same Dad I’d grown up with. He wasn’t, neither in body nor in spirit. Not fully, at least. It didn’t matter then. Sinking into my delusion, I smiled at him and said it back.

“I love you, Dad.”

• • • •

With Manuel back in my life, there was finally another person to invest energy into. He and Dad got along fine, and though Dad didn’t have much to say to him, he didn’t flinch when he came over. I took it as another sign that Dad wasn’t as cruel as he’d been in life.

Loving Dad had always been hard, and loving Manuel was easy. Maybe that’s why I ended up camming more than I needed to. If nothing else, I could show this new version of Dad love by providing for him: a roof to sleep under, a cable subscription to quell his boredom. He required less of my time, and though Manuel kept me busy, I had the urge to give, so I spent hour after hour dressing up and getting naked; touching myself and climaxing to the chimes of tips being sent my way.

Then it happened.

A black bob grazed my shoulders. Sequins fell down to my knees, and small circle of makeup gave my cheeks a perpetual blush. Giving 1920s-Flapper-girl glamour was intoxicating as always. Manuel was on my bed, out of frame, watching me perform.

Hiking the hem up to my hips, I pulled down my underwear but kept the dress on. My eyes were closed, and I had my hand wrapped around my cock, stroking it slowly but deliberately, ensuring that viewers could see my palm slide down my shaft.

The door must have creaked, but engrossed in the moment, only the sounds of the chat rung in my ears. When I heard Dad, it was too late to cover up or feign an excuse.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Dad spit out.

What could I say? Even if I’d managed to formulate my panic, embarrassment, and shame into words, there’s no chance it would have been louder than Dad’s shouts.

“In my house? What is this bullshit? You’re dressed up as a girl. The boyfriend, whatever. I got over that. But this? This? I didn’t raise you to be a pinche maricón, hijueputa.”

It was the first time Dad had yelled, but it was unmistakable. His voice boomed, and though he stood only slightly larger than a doll or action figure, I felt tiny.

“Mare in con,” he said, stumbling on the word, trying to find language for whatever he felt at the sight of me, exposed and dressed like a woman. Immediately, I knew what he was trying to say.

“Mar y cone.”
“Mary con.”

“Maricón.”

He kept repeating the slur, louder and louder.

“Maricón!”

The word became unbearable. The door was still open, so I took him by the head and tossed him outside into the hallway before slamming the door. Unphased, he kept yelling, the words barely muffled.

“Maricón!”

“Maricón!”

I slipped out of my dress, tossed my wig onto my bed, and swung the door open. Wearing nothing but my underwear, I stepped towards him. Manuel watched over my shoulder.

Dad paused, taking in the sight of me chulón, my skin exposed in a way he hadn’t seen since I was a toddler. Quickly, without hesitation or appeals to his logic, my hand wrapped around his leg and turned him upside down. I flipped the switch on the bottom of his foot.

A distorted version of Dad’s voice came from the robot, like he was speaking to me from the other end of a long tunnel.

“Are you sure you want to terminate your SyncALife?”

I dropped him.

Grief had made me bring Dad back, and though I’d tried my best to meld him into the father I’d always wanted, he’d found a way to hate me anyway. It was my own doing, but I was still angry at him for all the ugly words, all the ugly actions. I looked to Manuel for guidance, but his face reflected what I knew: the choice was mine, and mine alone.

“I’m sure,” I said, grabbing Dad from the ground.

I pressed my thumb to the switch. The blue light on his face went out. The house went quiet. Manuel approached me from behind, wrapping his arms around my waist. His chest was fleshy and warm against me. I lowered myself to the ground, cradling the robot in my arms. Manuel’s balmy breath tickled my ear as he whispered that he loved me, and that everything would be okay.

I’d convinced myself that I wanted Dad back, but really, I was reaching for a version of him that had never existed. When he returned, I couldn’t lie to myself anymore. I had to let go. Dad hadn’t changed, but it felt wrong that I had to see him die once more. How cruel, that I still loved him, and that I’d miss him again.

©2022 by Ruben Reyes Jr.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ruben Reyes Jr. is the son of two Salvadoran immigrants. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Harvard College. His writing has appeared in Audible Originals, The Boston Globe, Strange Horizons, and other publications. He lives in Brooklyn.

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

The Disappearing Dream Engineer

Rati Mehrotra | 1057 words

The first time Reema disappeared was in the middle of an argument with her husband Dean.

No, not an argument. Let’s not be euphemistic about it. It was a full-blown battle with words flung like knives during a circus act.

It ended with Dean hurling a lava lamp at Reema. That was the moment she vanished. The lamp sailed through a Reema-shaped hole in the air and smashed to pieces against the wall. Reema reappeared a minute later in front of her stunned spouse with no memory of where she’d gone or the fight they’d been having. Dean decided he was hallucinating and went to bed for three days, by which time Reema had moved out along with Sooty the cat.

The second time Reema disappeared was in the Metro Toronto Convention Centre during a media presentation on the latest version of a virtual escape DreamLabz had developed. The audience thought her disappearance was part of the presentation. She reappeared a few minutes later to the sound of applause and scattered laughter.

“How did you do that?” whispered her colleague from the marketing department after they had disconnected the mike and walked her off the cameras. “It was so cool.”

“Do what?” said Reema, bewildered. She couldn’t quite remember what she was doing there, although she had a hazy notion it was to do with product development and how to lie effectively in front of a large audience.

“Not telling me Virtual’s secrets, are you?” He grinned. “We don’t care, as long as the dream sells.”

Reema took the sky train back to her new home—a three hundred square foot studio on the thirtieth floor of a hip new building on the lakeshore—feeling out of sorts. She called in sick the next day and phoned her mother. In retrospect, this was probably not a good idea, even though she remembered to turn the video off. The conversation went like this:

Mom: Why are you calling me? What’s wrong?

Reema: Nothing. Just wanted to see how you are after the operation. How’s the new knee?

Mom: That was five months ago. Now it’s my hip that needs replacement. Switch on the video, I want to see how you look.

Reema: Er . . . it’s not working. I guess I need a new phone.

Mom: You need a new husband too? Poor Dean. He called last night.

Reema: What do you mean, “poor Dean”?

Mom: Don’t you raise your voice at me, young lady. I gave birth to you, fed you, cleaned your bottom-

Reema: With remote-controlled wipes!

Mom: When is the last time you went to the temple?

That was when Reema disappeared for the third time. She was gone for fifteen minutes. When she returned, her mother was still talking, in the same aggrieved tone of voice.

Reema ended the call, disoriented. There was no getting away from it. Something was definitely wrong. She was missing bits of her life. She suspected they were unpleasant bits, but still.

Sooty wove between her legs, purring in delight to have her back. Reema picked him up and stroked his pretty head. If she was forgetting stuff, maybe Sooty could help her by recording it. She fetched a pair of unopened retinal cameras and fitted them on his cat-eyes.

It wasn’t easy. Sooty had some dog-like tendencies, but he was no pushover. In the end, she had to sedate him before she was able to slip the lenses on.

That was how, when Reema disappeared for the fourth time (following a tense phone call with Human Resources), she had actual proof of it.

She watched the video with a bag of buttered popcorn on her lap. Sooty cuddled next to her, having forgiven her assault on his eyeballs. She played the video twice, watching herself disappear and then reappear after a gap of twenty minutes. She switched off the player, exhausted and exhilarated.

She had vanished. Just when things were getting stressful too, with HR demanding a medical certificate of leave and Tony shouting about how he needed her back in Virtual, she was his best engineer, dammit.

Of course, Reema knew that merely disappearing for short bursts of time wouldn’t quite cut it. She had to stay away for much longer durations for problems to actually recede. Perhaps this was something that could be achieved with practice?

She went to work the next day, more clear-headed and confident than she’d been in years—ever since she’d joined DreamLabz, in fact. She excused herself from testing that day and started work on a new design, Tony breathing quite unnecessary words of encouragement in her ear.

At lunchtime, Reception called. Dean had shown up, demanding to speak with her. Reema rose from the desk, grabbing her specs.

“Sorry, can’t,” she said firmly. “I’m trying out a new dream.”

“But,” expostulated Tony, “we haven’t run the safety tests yet.”

“I’ll be the test.” Reema strode to the Dream Scanner, affectionately nicknamed “coffin” for the way it looked, and fed her specs into it. Then she gave Tony a little wave and climbed into its womb-like depths.

Tony waited for the usual fifteen minutes, but Reema did not emerge. Finally, after half-an-hour of frustrated pacing, he over-rode command of the scanner and opened it up.

There was, of course, no one inside. And although he was in therapy for years afterward, the shock was something Tony never quite recovered from.

• • • •

It was a lovely dream about a woman who could travel between worlds. Reema sat on soft lemon-yellow grass, shaping and reshaping the clouds in the banded sky. Her hand trailed the emerald-cool water of a pond. A school of tiny clownfish tickled her palm. It was time to go back. But the problem with going back was that she would remember none of this.

A shadow fell across the pond and she looked up. A golden bird-like being beat powerful wings across the sky. Reema rose in astonishment and delight. No way she’d thought that up. What other secrets did this world have from her?

She started across the field, her eyes fixed on the wondrous creature above. With every step she took, the world she’d left behind receded further, until it was no more than a mote in her mind’s eye.

©2022 by Rati Mehrotra.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born and raised in India, Rati Mehrotra now lives and writes in Toronto, Canada. She is the author of the science fantasy novels Markswoman (2018) and Mahimata (2019) published by Harper Voyager. Her YA fantasy debut novel Night of the Raven, Dawn of the Dove will be published in October 2022 by Wednesday Books. Her short fiction has been shortlisted for The Sunburst Award, nominated for The Aurora Award, and has appeared in multiple venues including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, Apex Magazine, Podcastle, Cast of Wonders, and AE – The Canadian Science Fiction Review. Find out more about her at ratiwrites.com or follow her on Twitter @Rati_Mehrotra.

Red

Malinda Lo | 2818 words

The east is red when Xiaohong leaves the two-room apartment that has been allocated to her and her parents—two rooms carved out of a once-grand courtyard home, now divided between five families by order of the local Party authorities. The manor has been forced into a new identity, with makeshift kitchens elbowing their way into the sky well, and the walls pasted over with red posters of Chairman Mao quotations. The speaker for the public address system, installed in one corner of the sky well, blasts announcements at all hours, but it has been mercifully quiet so far this morning.

“Take this to your Popo,” Xiaohong’s mother had told her, handing her a small covered basket. “She is sick, and I cannot visit her today.” Inside the basket is a feast saved up carefully from their rations: two plain steamed buns, a small tin bowl of bean curd stir-fried with bits of pork, and a bottle of pork bone broth. Popo, Xiaohong’s grandmother, lives outside of town in a dilapidated mudbrick farmhouse, alone now that Xiaohong’s grandfather, who was branded a counterrevolutionary, has died.

The morning is cool and slightly damp; the night’s rain has left traces of bright water in the ruts on Anti-revisionist Street. Xiaohong has walked the three miles to Popo’s house countless times before, and she likes to start out early, while the town is still quiet and the sky has not yet fully lightened. She likes to watch the sunrise spreading red and then gold like a spilled yolk over the old town wall. Thinking of eggs, her stomach rumbles: she has not yet eaten. She peeks beneath the red cloth that covers her basket, gazing hungrily at the plump white buns, but does not steal a bite. Popo is elderly and has pneumonia, while Xiaohong is only sixteen and perfectly healthy, even if she is all too accustomed to an empty stomach.

On the corner of Anti-revisionist Street and Red Guard Road, a lanky boy pushes a motorbike out of the shadow of the town wall. He wears a khaki uniform with a red armband tied around his left bicep. When he sees Xiaohong, a wolfish grin twists his face. “Xiaohong, you’re out early,” he says.

The boy is Wu Lang. They went to school together, before the schools were shut down last summer so that they could make revolution. “Wu Lang,” Xiaohong says warily. “Hello.”

“Where are you off to?” he asks.

He is pretending to be casual and friendly, but Xiaohong knows better. “I’m bringing this food to my Popo,” she answers carefully.

He moves to block the street in front of her with his motorbike, and then saunters over. “How is the famous Lin Popo?”

Xiaohong knows he is baiting her by using the word famous. She ignores it and says, “She is sick. I should go.”

“If I remember correctly, your grandmother lives three miles away. Are you walking there?”

“Yes.”

“What food are you bringing her?” He comes closer and plucks the red cloth off the basket, tossing it onto the ground. His fingernails are grimy, and Xiaohong suddenly remembers the way he caught Yulin’s kitten in his hands last year, squeezing the animal’s furry little neck until it squealed, its tiny white teeth useless against him. “Mmm, looks delicious,” he says, studying the contents of the basket. “I haven’t eaten yet.”

Without asking for permission, he takes both buns and devours them in two bites. Xiaohong glimpses the dark red cavern of his mouth, his teeth slick with saliva. She hastily kneels down to pick up the fallen red cloth, tucking it back over the basket before he can take more of the food.

“I’m off to see your grandmother too,” Wu Lang says.

She looks at him in shock. “You are?”

His mouth curves into a cold smile. “I wonder who will arrive first?” Then he jumps onto his motorbike and twists the handlebars, gunning the engine. “Long live Chairman Mao!” he cries.

“Long live Chairman Mao,” she echoes. He salutes her as if she were a Red Guard like him, but she knows he is only mocking her. His motorbike roars and cuts a track in the dirt road as he jerks it around, speeding through the town gate.

Fear is a meaty hand squeezing her lungs. Her heart pounds as she hurries after him.

• • • •

Wu Lang has never been to Xiaohong’s grandmother’s home, but he knows where it is. There is only one counterrevolutionary widow who used to be a famous Shanghai actress living in the area. Indeed, Wu Lang and the other Red Guards often discuss where the counterrevolutionaries are located. If they are to make revolution, they must root out the black elements among them.

It isn’t long before he reaches the derelict farmhouse on the empty country road. A middle peasant and his family also used to live there, but the middle peasant hanged himself a few months ago, and his wife and children moved back to their home village, a hundred miles away. Now the only person still living in the farmhouse is Xiaohong’s grandmother.

The front door is closed tight. The dirty white wall is bare of any decoration—not even a photograph of Chairman Mao torn from the People’s Daily. Wu Lang cuts the engine of his motorbike, and silence descends like a knife across the morning. Not a single bird sings as he strides up the dirt path to the wooden front door.

Wu Lang pounds on the door, and it shakes on its hinges. “Lin Popo,” he calls. “Let me in!”

There is no answer. Wu Lang’s anger builds in the thick silence; his breath is hot as a furnace in his lungs.

“Lin Popo!” he shouts again, and though he might have heard her whispered response had he been listening, he does not listen.

He shoves the door; the bottom hinges give way and the door sags open. He enters carelessly, not bothering to take off his shoes. Inside, the farmhouse is cold and dark. A shovel and a scythe lean against the wall, the curve of the scythe’s blade catching the sunlight slanting through the front door. He stomps through the main room and turns to the right. The room is empty, but at last he sees Chairman Mao. A newspaper article about the Great Leader’s famous swim across the Yangtze River is taped to the wall just inside the door.

“Lin Popo!” Wu Lang yells. He goes back through the main hall to the other room. This is the kitchen, lit by a single hanging lightbulb, and a fire is burning in the stove.

“You have found me,” croaks a voice behind him.

Wu Lang turns toward the sound and sees a cot set up in the dim corner. In the cot lies Lin Popo, the blankets drawn up to her chin. Wu Lang strides over and peers down at the old woman. Her face is wrinkled and wizened as a walnut; her white hair escapes in spider silk-like wisps from beneath the black cloth she has tied over her head. But her eyes are bright and clear as a robin that has spotted a worm in the ground.

“What do you want?” Lin Popo asks.

“To carry the revolution through to the end!” Wu Lang answers. “To drive out the Four Olds!”

“I admit,” Lin Popo says, “that I am old.”

“You are decadent bourgeoisie,” Wu Lang declares.

Lin Popo smiles coyly, and though her cheeks are sunken and her skin is spotted with age, the beauty she was in her youth is still visible, like a ghost, in the curve of her mouth and the shine of her eyes.

This glimpse of her bourgeois past infuriates Wu Lang. He spins around, searching for evidence of her pre-communist decadence. The room is bare of anything obviously incriminating; there is only a small wooden table and chair, a wooden cupboard, and the cot. Wu Lang yanks open the door to the cupboard; inside are two bowls, chopsticks, a dried-out knob of ginger, a battered black pot, and a cleaver. While he is bending over to look in the cupboard, he realizes there is space to hide something beneath the cot. He goes back to Lin Popo’s corner, gets on his knees, and peers underneath.

A book has been shoved back against the wall. He pulls it out; it is a Buddhist tract. “This is one of the Four Olds,” he announces. “We must break away from old ideology, old culture, old customs, and old habits! There is no place for this in modern China.”

“Modern China arises from the old,” Lin Popo says.

He rips out page after page in fury, and a photograph flutters from the book toward the floor. It’s a hand-colored picture of a beautiful young woman wearing a white qipao embroidered with pink and red flowers. Her lips are vividly red, her cheeks rouged as pink as the Chairman’s. Her eyes are Lin Popo’s eyes, and he realizes it’s a photo of her from forty years ago, when she was an actress.

It disgusts him. He crumples up the photo, preparing to throw it into the fire, but obliterating it is not enough.

The bourgeoisie must be destroyed. Lin Popo must be destroyed.

“Revolution is not a dinner party,” Wu Lang recites as he glares down at Lin Popo.

Her face is serene as a deep mountain lake, and it enrages him.

“It cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle,” Wu Lang continues, the Great Leader’s words rolling off his tongue like thunder.

Lin Popo does not flinch as he hurls the book and her picture into the fire.

“A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence,” Wu Lang snarls.

Lin Popo only watches him implacably as he picks up the cleaver and stalks toward the cot.

His lungs heave, filled with revolutionary fervor. She closes her eyes so that she does not have to look at his monstrous face. She feels the blade bite into her neck—the same blade she used to prepare food for her children—and her blood spills bright red upon the thin pillow, redder than the sunrise in the east, redder than the band on Wu Lang’s arm.

• • • •

Xiaohong has run almost all the way to her grandmother’s house. Her skin is wet with sweat when she arrives, breathless, and sees Wu Lang’s motorbike parked outside. The farmhouse’s front door hangs open on one hinge, like a sleeping mouth partially agape. Xiaohong’s stomach churns with dread. She enters the house on trembling legs, and hears the sizzle of meat in a wok. The unmistakable scent of ginger hangs in the air. Confused, she wonders if her grandmother has miraculously risen from her sickbed to cook a meal. Hope buds in her, and she takes off her shoes and tiptoes toward the kitchen.

Wu Lang stands at the stove, tossing slivers of meat together in the wok. There is no trace of the cot where Popo slept, only a smear of something dark and shiny in the corner where it used to stand. Xiaohong’s hope shrivels.

Wu Lang sees her in the doorway. “Xiaohong,” he growls. “Have you eaten?” He scoops the cooked meat out of the wok and into a waiting bowl, placing it on the table next to an earthenware teapot and cup.

“No,” she says. Her skin crawls at the savage smile on his face.

“You must be hungry,” Wu Lang says. “Come in.”

She yearns to flee, but she forces herself to stay. She sets the basket of food on the floor. “Where is my grandmother?” she asks.

“She has gone out.” Wu Lang approaches her. “Sit down and eat.”

When she does not obey, he lunges toward her and clamps his hand around her arm, dragging her to the table and shoving her into the chair. She cries out in pain. He pushes the bowl of meat toward her and pours a dark, steaming liquid from the teapot into the cup. Has she imagined the claws on his fingertips? They click against the pottery.

“I am not hungry,” Xiaohong lies.

Wu Lang looms over her. “I could hear your stomach growling from a mile away,” he says. “Eat and drink. Your grandmother would not want you to go hungry.”

“Where is Popo?” she asks again.

“Eat and drink,” Wu Lang says, grinning, “and I will tell you.” Has she imagined the sharp points of his teeth, like daggers?

Shuddering, she reluctantly draws the bowl of shredded meat toward her. It has an unsettling fragrance. She smells the ginger, but there is something else too, something oddly familiar, like the scent of her grandmother’s skin: crushed roses, milk, and soap. Her empty stomach clenches, and she gags on the burning acid that rises hotly in the back of her throat.

With a growl of frustration, Wu Lang thrusts the chopsticks into her hand. She recoils from his touch, her blood curdling as she looks up at him. His eyes are extraordinarily large. Has she imagined their golden gleam? They are lupine; ravenous.

She drops her gaze hastily, and the glistening meat is waiting for her. She knows that Wu Lang will force her to eat it. She hears the angry exhalation of his breath as he watches her. Before he can touch her again, she raises a bite to her mouth—

And to her shock, the meat is soft and tender, more delicious than anything she has ever tasted. It is miraculous: like a single perfect pearl within the clutch of an oyster’s muscle, like the sweet flesh of a lychee as it emerges from its vermilion shell.

In that instant, she understands everything. Wu Lang has killed her grandmother and made a meal of her. It should taste polluted: foul and contaminated as the stench of Wu Lang’s breath. But it does not.

It is as if her grandmother has offered up her soul to Xiaohong as nourishment, as if she is whispering in her ear: eat me.

Xiaohong picks up the earthenware teacup and sips the hot, thick liquid. She tastes the power of her grandmother’s blood on her tongue, earthy and rich as fermented bean curd. Every year of her long life is a fire spreading through Xiaohong’s blood. Ten thousand memories in one deep breath, the taste of love on her lips, bone-crushing pain and bittersweet wisdom like flakes of salt on her tongue. She eats every bite. She drinks all of the tea.

Wu Lang watches her, gloating. “Dragons give birth to dragons, and phoenixes give birth to phoenixes,” he says, “but a rat’s descendants can only dig holes. You will never be more than your parents and your grandparents. You will always be a bastard!”

Xiaohong raises her eyes to meet his. She feels Popo rising within her like a phoenix stretching its wings. “You are right,” she says. “I will never be more than my parents and my grandparents. Fortunately, they are great people!”

She stands up and runs toward the main hall. Wu Lang growls and lunges after her. In the shadow of the broken front door she reaches for the scythe. She spins to face him. His shadow stretches wolf-like along the floor, his muzzle dripping with long thick threads of spittle, and he swipes at her with his paw-like hands.

The scythe whistles through the air and slices off his hand. It tumbles onto the floor, scattering a spray of black blood in its wake. Wu Lang yelps like a wounded animal and clutches the stump of his arm close to his body, shrinking away from her.

But the hand on the floor is not a human hand—it is a wolf’s paw. The fur is black with gore, the claws sharp as razors.

“As Chairman Mao proclaims, letting ghosts and spirits out of their hiding places makes it easier to annihilate them,” Xiaohong says. “We must sweep away all monsters and demons!” She raises her scythe high, advancing on him.

Wu Lang flees, running into the yard and jumping on his motorbike, holding on with his remaining hand as he speeds away. Standing in the doorway, Xiaohong watches until she can no longer see the dust trail behind the motorbike, and then she puts down the scythe and steps around the wolf’s paw that lies like a dead rat on the floor.

She goes back to the kitchen and opens the iron door to the stove’s firebox. Inside, a photograph is wedged between the glowing coals, but the paper is unburned. She pulls it out, shaking off the ashes, and gazes down at the picture of her grandmother. She smiles up at Xiaohong across the decades, unharmed. Her cheeks are still pink as lotus flowers, her lips red as dates.

©2019 by Malinda Lo. Originally published in FORESHADOW: The Magic of Reading and Writing YA, edited by Sharyn November. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Malinda Lo is the New York Times bestselling author of Last Night at the Telegraph Club, winner of the National Book Award, the Stonewall Book Award, and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, as well as Michael L. Printz and Walter Dean Myers honors. Her debut novel Ash, a Sapphic retelling of Cinderella, was a finalist for the William C. Morris YA Debut Award, the Andre Norton Award for YA Science Fiction and Fantasy, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, and the Lambda Literary Award. Malinda’s short fiction and nonfiction has been published by The New York Times, NPR, Autostraddle, The Horn Book, and multiple anthologies. She lives in Massachusetts with her wife and their dog. She writes the biweekly newsletter Lo & Behold on writing and culture, and she can be found on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Her website is malindalo.com.

So, You Married Your Arch Nemesis . . . Again

Merc Fenn Wolfmoor | 6644 words

Interview with Sol Undertaker, hosted by Eli McCarthy on Episode 319 of Capes For Justice

MCCARTHY: Welcome back, listeners! It’s me, Eli McCarthy, your go-to podcast host for allllll the juiciest super drama. I’m thrilled to be coming to you live from the maximum-security containment wing of Site 92, where I have the pleasure of interviewing Sixten Graves, known by most of you as Sol Undertaker. For those of you living under a rock [chuckles], Sol Undertaker placed themself voluntarily in prison here after the Second Tunguska Event, as fans are calling the showdown.

GRAVES: It was nowhere near that destructive.

MCCARTHY: Well, you did both come in like wrecking balls, or should I say asteroids? [laughs]

[five seconds silence]

MCCARTHY: [clears throat] For our loyal listeners, you might be wondering where my co-host is, and I assure you, Teodora’s on site! The prison only lets in one “visitor” at a time, which is a shame, but you get the dulcet sound of my solo voice as compromise. So, let’s get started. First off, congratulations are in order! You defeated Voidshadow.

GRAVES: Yes.

MCCARTHY: You don’t sound too happy about it.

GRAVES: Should I be?

MCCARTHY: Considering you leveled seven-hundred acres of a national forest in the process, I would hope the victory would bring you some joy.

GRAVES: I’m sorry about the trees.

MCCARTHY: I think most people are sorry your battle fried all the camera drones there to record! Big outfits like Virtual Entropy can afford the equipment loss, but oof, some of us took quite a financial hit and nothing to show for it.

GRAVES: You’re responsible for your own damages.

MCCARTHY: You don’t pull punches, do you? Ha! Get it? Anyway. Sans footage, tell us the juicy details. How did you finally overpower Voidshadow and kill them?

GRAVES: It’s not much of a victory when your nemesis won’t fight back.

MCCARTHY: I think the forestry department would disagree about the fight! [laughs]

[seven seconds of silence]

MCCARTHY: C’mon. Elaborate, won’t you? You’re the famous Sol Undertaker, a modern legend among even the biggest superhero names, outclassing even some of the old Excaliburs! And we all know that Voidshadow, under the mundane name Mattias Graham Blackburn, was your most hated foe. You both practically invented the, what’s the term, “lovers to enemies”?

GRAVES: That term is from fanfiction.

MCCARTHY: Whatever, fucking to fighting, right? [chuckles]

GRAVES: No.

MCCARTHY: No? No, what?

GRAVES: We were never lovers.

MCCARTHY: Oh reeeeeally. Well, according to your official biography—

GRAVES: Not official.

MCCARTHY: —you and Voidshadow were married before the, and I quote, “most cataclysmic break up of all time.”

GRAVES: We were married, yes. We’re both ace and sex-ambivalent.

MCCARTHY: Suuuuuure. Must’ve been pretty infuriating, given how hot you both are! Is that where the conflict arose? Sexual frustration?

GRAVES: No.

MCCARTHY: Well, wrecking ten miles of the arctic ice shelf and causing a tsunami is quite the way to declare a divorce!

GRAVES: Don’t go there.

MCCARTHY: The death toll was staggering, you must admit, though I’m sure not everyone blames you—

GRAVES: I want you to stop talking.

MCCARTHY: —since Voidshadow was always the violent one, right? Sexy, evil, the works. From their powers to how they constantly— [choking sounds]

GRAVES: Stop. Talking. About. Matty.

MCCARTHY: [unintelligible wheezing]

GRAVES: This interview is over. Sorry about your vocal cords. I hope your insurance covers surgery.

• • • •

A Burden of Tomorrows (The Forever Peace, Book 3) — Prologue

The ruins of both fleets drift like starry ash across the void. Ruptured hulls spill corpses and ruined ship-guts. Space gulps down the million dying screams.

Admiral Xentsiu Keardennt stands on the bridge, electric sparks dancing in the smoke that wreathes their dead crew.

On the viewscreen, leaning on a broken war sword, stands their nemesis: Admiral Thracius Mabb Gham-Karlant, the Butcher of the Void.

Thracius’ black hair hangs in bloodied tangles around their face, their make-up smeared in ragged lines across cheek and brow. “You have one cannon left,” Thracius rasps.

“So do you.”

Thracius’ mouth twists in a bitter smile. Their ship’s shields are in tatters: The Carrion Dragon cannot sustain another hit. Neither can Xentsiu’s flagship, The Grave of Sol.

Admiral Xentsiu grips the command console, only its mooring keeping them upright.

“How did we come to this?” Thracius’ voice softens, digging up painful memories from childhood of when they spun tales of far-off galaxies, when both Xentsiu and Thracius were innocents of war.

Xentsiu grits their teeth, their palm on the weapons trigger. “You had to be stopped.”

“Look what it cost us,” Thracius says, scarcely above a whisper. “So much death . . .”

Xentsiu swallows against the knot of grief.

Long ago, Thracius and Xentsiu were like siblings, young warriors divided only by a line on a map. They were the closest of friends. They attended academy together. Rose through the ranks side by side. Inseparable. Xentsiu and Thracius, forever comrades.

Before the rift grew, before each was forced to choose a side, before friendship wilted into the bitterest of rivalry. It’s like a dream, all mist and shadow, Admiral Xentsiu thinks, trying to remember the precise point something broke inside and they began to hate Thracius. When they swore to defeat the Butcher of the Void, no matter the cost. They wish with all their soul this wasn’t real, that there was another way, another ending for themself and for Thracius both.

There isn’t, and there never has been.

Thracius Mabb Gham-Karlant sighs, sinking to the floor and letting their sword clatter at their side. “I loved you, once, Xentsiu.”

“I know.”

There can be no surrender, no peace. Admiral Xentsiu will not let it. They fire the last cannon, plasma igniting like a supernova and engulfing The Carrion Dragon.

It is over. The war is won.

Interview with Sol Undertaker, hosted by Teodora Webb on Episode 319 of Capes For Justice

WEBB: Hi everyone. Teo Webb here, partner in drama to Eli McCarthy who is, uh, indisposed. Welcome back to Capes For Justice, live from Site 92, where we’re—welp, I guess it’s just me now. Anyway, I’m continuing the exclusive interview with legendary super Sol Undertaker, known mundanely as Sixten Graves.

GRAVES: Why don’t you just host this show by yourself? You’re always the better speaker.

WEBB: Oh my god, you listen to our show?

GRAVES: Sometimes.

WEBB: Thank you! Hear that, folks? Hit the subscribe button and leave us a review if you too like the show!

GRAVES: [sighs]

WEBB: Right, sorry, old marketing habits are hard to shake. So, just to catch our audience up, on the break you laid out some guidelines about what we can and can’t talk about, the conditions for which we can continue the interview after Eli’s, uh . . . emergency exit. Mind if I share?

GRAVES: Go ahead.

WEBB: Great! So the showdown battle is a bit of a touchy subject for you. I know our listeners are dying to—

GRAVES: Careful.

WEBB: Shit, sorry, my bad. [clears throat] So folks are definitely eager to hear the details about the climactic defeat of Voidshadow. We’ll come back to that. You said that it’s fine to ask you about your life prior to the battle, which gives us a lot of ground. I know there are holes in your biography—

GRAVES: Unauthorized.

WEBB: —yeah, of course. Actually, I’ve always been curious about how that works. Couldn’t you have told the imprint not to publish it?

GRAVES: Voidshadow insisted we let it be. We’re public figures.

WEBB: Makes sense. Do you plan to ever write a memoir of your own? So the world can see things from your point of view?

GRAVES: The world makes up its own mind.

WEBB: Well, to Annalise Lee’s credit, she did cite a lot of documents of public record. You guys make the news a lot!

GRAVES: Did. We did.

WEBB: Erm, yeah. So, the timeline is something like this: ten years ago, you and Voidshadow showed up, almost from nowhere. Costumes, powers, relationship, the works. Walked into a red-carpet awards gala and stole the spotlight together! Annalise Lee tells us your origin story is the one thing you won’t talk about—

GRAVES: That was Voidshadow.

WEBB: —oh! Sorry, I misremembered. You know, the general consensus is that it was cosmic radiation that gave you powers . . . wait, does this mean you would talk about your origin story?

GRAVES: No.

WEBB: Fair enough. Anyway, you and Voidshadow dominated the gossip cycles almost non-stop. You fought other super villains together, most notably Professor Nanite and Cryptshow. As a power couple, you defeated the Witch-Who-Watches, and she had a notoriously high, uh, kill count. Over a dozen heroes died trying to take her down.

GRAVES: She just wanted to be left alone. I’m not proud of that victory.

WEBB: You did impressive work, regardless! Imagine how many more supers might have died if not for you and your partner’s exploits.

GRAVES: Change the subject.

WEBB: Okay, sure. We know Voidshadow funded the construction of this facility. It was meant to hold Cryptshow, except he was killed in the infamous Houston Showdown. Is it true they meant this facility originally as a rehabilitation center?

GRAVES: That’s what they wanted.

WEBB: But it turned into a supermax prison for supers instead.

GRAVES: Healing is harder to publicize.

WEBB: Is their involvement why you voluntarily committed yourself here?

GRAVES: It’s safest if I’m not . . . outside, right now. In the world.

WEBB: I absolutely respect that. And you. I’m a huge fan. Sorry, fangirl moment! Still can’t believe I got this interview.

GRAVES: It’s okay.

WEBB: [papers shuffling] So back to . . . the falling out between you and Voidshadow. Did it really come out of nowhere, like people claim? I mean, there was the costume design change last year that gave us hints—Voidshadow’s cloak turned dark red instead of lavender, and your ensemble shifted to monotone grays and blacks instead of the purple and silver—and paparazzi sometimes spotted beer bottles in hotel rooms when Voidshadow didn’t return to your shared home. There were rumors that Cryptshow seduced them and wanted them to be his partner in evil. But no one had any idea you were enemies, let alone arch nemeses! What was the breaking point? What changed so dramatically for you? What did they do to become a villain?

GRAVES: It wasn’t their doing.

WEBB: Was it something you did?

GRAVES: I don’t . . . I don’t remember.

[scraping of metal chair on concrete]

WEBB: Uh, are you okay?

GRAVES: Do your commercial break thing. Now.

WEBB: Sure, sure. We’ll be right back, folks. Alec has a word from our sponsors.

• • • •

Cage the Devil In Red (a Detective Grave novel)

They weren’t a dame nor a gent, but they smelled like trouble—whiskey, cigar smoke, a hint of floral cologne—and dressed like a butcher’s calling card. Long red jacket rich as a blood bank, crisp fedora of the same felt, and heels sharp enough to cut down God.

“You must be the infamous Detective Solomon Grave.” Their voice was deep and silky, a cello bow purring over the D string. They leaned a hip against the doorframe, angling themself in shadow between the hallway light and the dimness of my flat.

I tossed back the last of my drink, and the liquor dug nails down my gullet. “What’s it to you, bo?”

They flicked a gloved hand and a roll of twenty large met my desk with all the finality of a judge’s hammer. “For your services. I need a bodyguard for tonight.”

I grunted. That much cash would clear my debts in spades. I braced for the catch. “Twenty thousand bucks means you got heat.”

“That’s how Hell pays.” They flashed me a smile that hit like a knife in the ribs. “You trick the Devil, expect to get burned.”

They tipped back their hat and stepped inside. The neon street glow slatted through the blinds lit their face. Those molten-dark eyes, that wide jaw, brows thin as a razor edge, the puckered scar pulling up the corner of their mouth.

My heart dropped faster than the crystal tumbler in my hand. Glass shattered across the desk.

“Marius?” I choked out their name. Shock punched me low and dirty, sucking out my breath. “Marius Graham?”

I’d thought them dead, long-since damned trying to save my wretched hide. Ten years. Ten goddamn loneliest years of my life, nursing the bottle, every night cradling my service revolver and wondering if I had the balls to eat lead and be done.

“Told you I’d come back, Sol,” they said.

I vaulted the desk, planting one hand in the broken glass, but I didn’t feel the cuts. Their gloves soaked up the trickles of blood from my palm. They tugged me close and I hugged them. I breathed deeper than I had in a decade. A first real breath. When I dreamed, they vanished soon as we touched. This was real. Marius Graham was real.

I’d burn down Heaven and uproot Hell before I’d let them die again.

“Do we have a deal?” they asked.

“I don’t need your lousy money,” I said, crushing them against my chest. They shivered under the coat and scarf. “I have your back, Mar.”

“And I have your heart.” They rested their forehead against mine. “Thank you.”

The room lit up red and blue, and not from the streetlights.

“Shit, we got company,” I said. The brittle windows rattled and I heard the rumble of the bull’s iron engines. Sulfur crept through the vents.

“‘Til dawn, Detective,” Marius Graham said in my ear. “If I survive until the sun rises, the deal is done and I’m free.”

“Then dawn you’ll see,” I promised them, and pulled my piece from the shoulder holster.

We raced through the night, the shadow-drenched street and rain-slicked alleys never cover enough for long. We were so close, in the end. It was a stray bullet that brought on the big sleep. I didn’t see it coming.

I held their body as the sun came up over the wharfs, the sky redder than the Devil’s tears.

Unaired clips from the Interview with Sol Undertaker, hosted by Teodora Webb

WEBB: Hey, I’m really sorry, I didn’t . . . shit, I don’t even have any tissues on me. Want me to ask the guards for—

GRAVES: I’m fine.

WEBB: You’re crying.

GRAVES: I hate this.

WEBB: Look, I know this is a once in a lifetime opportunity for me but I’m gonna feel like shit forever if you’re upset doing it. Hell, I turned down a job at Virtual Entropy precisely because of this kind of crap. Sorry. We can end the interview if you want.

GRAVES: No. [long inhalation] I’ll finish this.

WEBB: Alec is a genius, they can totally spin out more airtime if you need a minute.

GRAVES: No. We’ll resume.

WEBB: You’re sure?

GRAVES: I am. Even if . . . It still hurts. It always hurts.

WEBB: You miss them? Voidshadow?

GRAVES: It doesn’t seem to fucking matter what we do. I kill them, or they kill me, or we kill each other, or we die together, and the next time it’s all the same. There’s this crack that just . . . I don’t know why.

WEBB: You, um, you lost me. You’re saying this has happened before? Like reincarnation?

GRAVES: [sniffs] Doesn’t matter what the world is like. Where we are. I’m the same, and so are they, and . . . it always ends in death. We shouldn’t be enemies and we shouldn’t have to die. I hate this.

WEBB: Uh . . . I’m afraid this is a bit above my pay grade. I don’t really understand—

GRAVES: Neither do I!

[sound of a metal crunching against a wall]

WEBB: Shit!

GRAVES: Sorry, the chair didn’t deserve that. [footsteps pacing] I’m not going to hurt you.

WEBB: [shaky breath] Thanks? D-do you want me to ask for another folding chair?

GRAVES: No. I’m fine.

• • • •

JUDGE RUIN 2: Cataclysm [from White Ibis Games]—Third from final level, last cutscene

“On your six!”

You whirl around. Butcher’s shotgun barks and a demon’s head explodes in a gore shower.

Green viscous blood splatters your helmet screen before you swipe it away. “Thanks, bud.”

You hear the grin in Butcher’s voice. They holster their shotgun and swing their plasma ax in a vicious arc, cleaving another hellion through the middle. Their power armor is drenched in demon guts and the reddish mud of Mars. “Admit it, Judge, you’d be human caviar on toast for these motherfuckers without me.”

“In your dreams.” You wind up the chain gun and let it rip, spewing bullets in a hail of death that demolishes a dozen imps in one arc. The kill-count ticks higher in your HUD. “Keep up, loser.”

Butcher toggles the map and you pinpoint your destination again: the overrun supply base in an excavated crater, now occupied only by demons from the cracked dimensions.

The stretch of open ground is clear. A hundred meters over arid, hostile terrain and you’ll be at your target. Once you’ve cleared out the infernals, you can radio orbital command for backup and the mop up crew will meet you and Butcher, then secure the depot.

You sweep your sensors in a wide grid, but there’s no pings from hell-energy.

“I don’t like this,” Butcher mutters as you jog side-by-side.

You gotta agree, something’s wrong. Not just the demons—the distinct lack of them. You can’t have wiped out all the hellion spawn so fast. You’re Judge Ruin, terror to every enemy of humankind . . . but if there’s one facet that never changes, it’s that Hell has eternally more demons to throw at you.

Ahead is the garage entrance, half-propped open with wrecked ATVs and a tangle of rust-red I-beams that’ve seen better days.

Still no red dots on your HUD.

“We should call for backup now,” Butcher says.

You grunt. “No, we got this. Just stay on guard.”

“Always, Judge,” Butcher says. They cock their shotgun in one hand.

You slow as you reach the garage. That’s when you notice the ground is greenish brown, not from terraforming but demon blood. There’s a slaughterhouse’s worth of corpses sprawled on the cement slabs outside the structure.

“Did we get support early?” Butcher quips.

You flip your visor through the spectrum settings, trying to scan any radiation signature that’ll give you a clue.

The carrion-dragon comes out of a portal in the sky almost on top of you. Motherfucker laid a trap: an abattoir’s worth of demon corpses so you’d lower your guard. And damn if you nearly fell for it.

The thing is fucking huge: ten wings, twice that many spidery legs thick as a tank, mandibles dripping acid, its hundred insectoid eyes glowing with hellfire.

“Watch out!” you scream, emptying your grenade launcher into the dragon’s maw as it swoops at you.

Explosions ricochet across the mega-demon’s face. It roars and thrashes, but you’ve barely scratched its armored shell. You back into a crevice of ruined vehicles jammed into the garage’s entrance. The beast’s throat glows white-hot as its infernal breath builds.

Your railgun clicks empty. You’re out of bullets and your armor’s power cells are at sapped at 13%. You don’t stand a snowball’s chance in Hell of surviving the next five seconds.

Your body tenses. You clench your fist, dropping the useless gun. All your arsenal is spent. There’s no ammo caches in sight. So this is it—

Butcher launches themself from atop the garage’s low roof, bellowing a war-cry. They land between you and the carrion-dragon just as it spits death.

Butcher’s mini-nuke whines as they fire. The missile pierces the gout of plasma. The monster chokes for an instant before the nuke detonates inside its gullet.

The explosion hurtles Butcher into you, smashing you through the rusty blockade, and you both go flying across the garage. You hit the wall and your HUD goes haywire, white static and red feedback.

The ringing in your ears is like a damnation theme. You crawl from the ruined wall and roll Butcher over. Their armor is ruined, their life signs flat. Half their head is missing from the blast.

You sit there, cradling their body, and distantly, your comm buzzes: “Mission objective complete, lockdown crew inbound . . .”

Interview with Sol Undertaker, hosted by Teodora Webb on Episode 319 of Capes For Justice

WEBB: Where were we? Right. You don’t do many interviews—actually, I think the official total is like five? And all of those were done with Voidshadow, is that right?

GRAVES: Yes.

WEBB: You’re the first power couple to be out as non-binary, which is awesome. I know a lot of folks were so excited to have this kind of representation. Did it put undue pressure on you?

GRAVES: I don’t understand your question.

WEBB: You know, dealing with a lot of misgendering and harassment—well, I guess you don’t really have to worry about that last part, right? At least from normals. You’re a superhero and Voidshadow is . . . was . . . well, I mean, when you have superpowers it must be pretty easy to ignore trolls online and smite assholes, right?

GRAVES: I don’t smite. I obliterate.

WEBB: Uh . . .

GRAVES: That’s a joke.

WEBB: Oh! Ha ha, of course. Right. I mean, as a woman on the internet, co-host of a huge podcast like Capes For Justice, I get plenty of hate, and sometimes I wish I could have smiting powers.

GRAVES: Do you want me to destroy your harassers?

WEBB: What? Oh my god, no! That’d be, like, two thirds of the internet!

GRAVES: So?

WEBB: Are you . . . being serious right now?

GRAVES: Yes. I came here willingly. I can leave whenever I want.

WEBB: [clears throat] How about I get back to you about that smiting?

GRAVES: Offer’s open.

WEBB: Wow, okay . . . Hear that, guys? Better be on your best behavior. [strained laugh] Anyway, Mx. Graves, after the Second Tunguska Event, and you voluntarily committing yourself here in Site 92, what’s been going through your mind? If you could go back and do things differently with Voidshadow, would you?

GRAVES: What?

WEBB: You’re one of the most powerful superheroes in history! You outclass even the top Excaliburs during the Resurgence. You said yourself in a Q&A with Levar Orlando on Tomorrow Night’s Show a few years ago you weren’t even sure the extent of your powers, or those of Mx. Blackburn. Is that true?

GRAVES: I’ve . . . never tested it.

WEBB: Let’s play hypotheticals, then. It’s a feature on our show—but you know that, right?

GRAVES: I listen occasionally.

WEBB: For listeners joining us for the first time, this section of Capes For Justice is where we ask our guests big “What If” questions. Candid answers only, please. So, Mx. Graves, if you could go back in time and tell yourself one secret or important piece of advice, what would it be?

[ten seconds of silence, breathing]

WEBB: Take your time. Usually we edit out dead air, or Alec our audio engineer adds some effects, but as we’re broadcasting live, I’m asking listeners to be patient. I’m sure the answers will be worth the wait.

GRAVES: How far back does this hypothetical take us?

WEBB: As far back as you like. Usually Eli does this segment. An example I’ve always wanted to use, and excuse me for centering this on myself, but since, uh, Eli is indisposed, he can’t do his “monetize the show from the start” bit. [short laugh] Anyway, if I could go back in time and meet my sixteen-year-old self, I would tell her, “It’s okay that you like girls.” Um, wow, guess I just came out on live broadcast! Fuck it, right? We’re being candid. I’m bisexual.

GRAVES: That took courage. I admire you.

WEBB: Wow, thanks. That felt really good.

GRAVES: You deserve respect and happiness, Ms. Webb.

WEBB: Heh, I’m not sure if listeners can hear it, but I’m blushing so hard right now. Thank you, Mx. Graves. That really does mean a lot, coming from you.

GRAVES: If I could change reality, I would find where I keep breaking. Being broken. [slow inhale] I would save Matty. Every time.

WEBB: Matty? Is that . . . I’ve never heard you refer to Voidshadow that way.

GRAVES: Only I can.

WEBB: Fair enough. Honestly, I’ve always kind of wondered why you both took on such, uh, sinister pseudonyms in the first place.

GRAVES: They make a statement.

WEBB: Can’t argue with that. So. You would save Voidshadow? Even though they’re your arch nemesis?

GRAVES: Yes. We deserve a chance at peace. At being whole.

• • • •

Lord of the Betrayers (Book 1 of the Queenslayer Cycle)—Epilogue

Steel clashes.

The hillock is an old burial site, generations past having their bones rested in the hallowed earth. You first met Hiasburn here; first held their hand on this summit as you watched the rising dawn; first pledged yourself to them, as they did to you.

The battle around the foothills rages, yet seems so distant, so surreal. Like a dream.

“The war won’t end until one of us is dead,” they say, their arm unwavering as they hold their sword at the ready.

“I know.”

You cross blades. It’s a dance, a duel for ballad-singers and legends. Steel sings and your blood roars in tandem. Around the hillock you fight: slash, riposte, block, parry, thrust.

Your heel catches an old root, wrapped about older bones, and you crash to the ground. Your sword flies from your hand, and in a moment, Hiasburn is atop you.

The breath you take is the longest in your life, as your eyes meet theirs. The battle has faded now to a memory-hum; the apex tree that has hoisted the banner of victors for generations sways in the wind.

You throw them off, scrabbling to your feet. Their sword arcs past your shoulder, nicking flesh. You lash backwards with an armored fist, hear the grunt in pain, and you use the opportunity to reach for your sword.

Sharp pain drives up your ribs and you look down. Hiasburn’s dagger has plunged into your side. You meet their eyes as your knees give out, your strength suddenly dissipating like mist at sunrise. Blood fills your mouth.

Then Hiasburn is catching you, lowering you to the battlefield’s chill ground. You press your knuckles against their cheek, your hand cramped from old wounds. They lean into your touch, tears streaming down their face.

Only one flag will unfurl now, and it will not be your sigil the armies see. It will not be your victory that is celebrated when the bloodshed lulls.

“Don’t weep for me,” you rasp. “Today, this is . . . the only way . . . it could end.”

“I know, Solgra,” they whisper back, and kiss your hand. Darkness claims you and you welcome it, for even if they are your enemy, to see Hiasburn’s eyes one last time before you die is enough.

Interview with Sol Undertaker, hosted by Teodora Webb on Episode 319 of Capes For Justice

WEBB: We talked a bit about . . . repeating loops. Like cyclical behaviors, or toxic relationship decisions someone makes over and over.

GRAVES: [cloth rustling, footsteps pacing] Yes.

WEBB: You mentioned you would save Voidshadow “every time.” That implies, well, more than once, right? Like your souls have been repurposed in other realities, in other timelines. You keep living out the same loop, just with the details changed.

GRAVES: I remember them in so many ways. I think they remembered, too. I saw it in their eyes when we fought above the forest. [shaky breath] That’s when it all flooded back, before I . . . killed them. Again. We were enemies over and over against our desires. I don’t know why. We’ve always been soul mates and forced into the role of arch nemesis.

WEBB: Like someone’s pulling your strings? Manipulating you?

GRAVES: Yes. I feel like we’re all being written into stories that aren’t meant for us. Matty and I. Our pain mined for profit. And I want it to stop.

WEBB: You’re . . . um, glowing? I didn’t know you could do that?

GRAVES: I’m not some authorial plaything. Voidshadow and I don’t deserve this constant grief.

WEBB: Should I be . . . ow, that’s really bright—um, Sixten, could you . . .

GRAVES: I WILL NOT BE BROKEN AGAIN.

[static]

REALITY

You jump, brilliant light surrounding you. You smash through Site 92’s roof; higher, through the clouds, into the stratosphere like an inverse meteor shower. You fly into the void beyond. Past the moon, past the sun, past the boundaries of the solar system, and still you fly, unslowed, undimmed, your fury a trail of light that the galaxy will never forget.

Deeper you go, through dark matter, through uncharted systems, through theory and absolute zero and probability. Somewhere, in the center of existence is the answer: the true nemesis you have always faced, the thing that condemns you to die, to kill, to grieve, to suffer.

And finally, sharp as epiphany, you arrive at the absolute heart of everything.

A nebula unlike anything you’ve seen: it’s soft, translucent, an artist’s rendition of a dream. This isn’t the hell you expected.

There, in the center of the nebula, you find the focal point. It isn’t an omnipotent god, or a terrifying entity carved from void and malice. It isn’t a monster spawned from the pits of a black hole.

It’s a child, surrounded by books. They’re suffused in a directionless glow of light, walled in with thousands of stories, each color a hue in the spectrum. This is what you must destroy?

The child doesn’t notice you. Messy hair hangs about their shoulders and falls over their eyes. They sit cross-legged, a thick book splayed open on their lap, their breath shallow as they mouth the words on the page.

Careful not to upend the precarious library the child lives in, you kneel by their side and peer over their shoulder.

You’re there, on the page. In full battle armor, sword dripping blood, back-to-back with Matty against a horde of animated corpses.

Hollow, dead eyes were lit with sorcery. There was no end to the horde. This was the final stand. Gaveon knew it to be the end—but with their last breath, they would buy time for the Prophesied One to escape. He would save the world, honoring their sacrifice.

“Afraid?” Gaveon said, smiling grimly.

“Not when I’m with you,” Marcus Larkin replied.

The undead closed like a great pincer, and though their swords flashed and their lungs burned with battle cries, first Larkin and finally Gaveon fell amidst the mountain of corpses . . .

“Oh no,” the child whispers, and a tear splashes the page. “Why don’t they get to live?”

You strangle a curse, and grab a nearby book. You flip it open. There you are again—or this story’s analogue of you. There’s Matty. Sometimes you are both together, sometimes you are a lone presence in the story. Hero or villain, the ending is always the same. You’re doomed from the start, over and over. Your death scenes have tear stains.

You frantically scan dozens more books, all lovingly worn with cracked spines and tattered page corners. Different authors, different eras—and yes, different characters, whether you or other non-binary people—yet everything is entwined with an inevitability of loss. As if the cosmos cannot accept the probability of your joy.

The child sniffs, closes their book, and picks up another one. “Maybe this time they’ll be happy,” the child says aloud, a hope sent into the universe. It’ll be shattered against the cold light of stars and vacuum.

The images swirl in your mind as the pages turn, and you know what you’ll see in the text: dueling admirals, staring each other down over the remains of their fleets. You’re a backdrop for a boy and a girl to become heroes of the galaxy. You’re the footnote to someone else’s glory.

Gently, you tug the book from the child’s hands and close it. They reach for a new story without noticing you. This book has a quote from a bestselling author: “Breathtaking prose . . . a welcome dash of diversity in the superhero genre!”

From the blurb: . . . makes a splash with his newest stand-alone title, featuring the world’s first non-binary superheroes in WHITE VOID, DARK SUN . . .

The child’s heart skips. “Yes,” they say, and eagerly flip to the first page.

There you are. Side by side at the red-carpet award show with Voidshadow, both of you in bold costumes, arms linked, so openly in love.

Your guts clench as you read along with the child, remembering every page before it happens. The marriage ceremony. The epic battles. The people you saved. The cities you kept from crumbling. Then Voidshadow’s drinking problems, the fissure growing between you. Their seduction to the path of evil, and your inevitable confrontation where you must kill your best friend, your soul mate, your heart. Because the narrative demands your blood and suffering.

That’s not how it goes, you want to yell, but you can only kneel there and watch the child’s heart break again.

You brush hair from the child’s forehead, and they glance up, puzzled. So you can affect their reality, bound so intimately with your own multiverse. You could stop them reading, and you’d be free—if oblivion is freedom.

That’s not what you want, is it? You want your due. You want your story to end not in tragedy but in triumph.

As gently as you can, you take the book from the child’s hands and rub your thumb across the last few pages. Ink smears and vanishes, leaving blank paper in wake of your touch. The child frowns, looking around.

Your power has always been malleable, infinite—bending to whatever needs arise. This is your need now, and you materialize a pen. This power will serve your purpose, not those who would exploit your grief and your pain.

You write a new ending.

Then you give the book back to the child and let them finish reading.

Interview with Sol Undertaker and Voidshadow, hosted by Teodora Webb on Episode 319 of Capes 4 Justice

WEBB: Welcome to this week’s episode of Capes 4 Justice! I’m your host, Teodora Webb, and today we have two special guests joining us! Sixten Graves and Matthias Graham Blackburn. They’re everyone’s favorite ace power couple. Also, you guys are celebrating your ten-year wedding anniversary, right? Which, if you weren’t aware, listeners, they spent defeating Cryptshow over the New Camelot National Forest only yesterday. [laughs] Very romantic!

BLACKBURN: We like to spice things up.

GRAVES: The trees will be okay.

WEBB: Yes, you managed to subdue Cryptshow without any collateral damage, and the footage was epic. Especially at the end, when it looked like Sol Undertaker would have to kill you, Voidshadow. My heart was in my throat the whole livestream!

BLACKBURN: Thrilling, wasn’t it? The roleplay we did to lure Cryptshow out of his lair was delicious. He honestly thought I’d turned evil. [chuckles] It was rather exhilarating. I think I understand the appeal of acting!

WEBB: You had us all on pins and needles! That reversal? Where you vanquish Cryptshow, then hug your partner in triumph? I’m convinced the whole city was cheering in unison. Do the pressures of the job ever feel overwhelming? Do you have days where you question why you do this?

BLACKBURN: Honestly? No. If we don’t take up the mantle of responsibility, who will?

. . . Gaveon and Larkin shake off the undead remains, standing now on a mountain of rotting flesh and cracked bone. They turn to each other, gore-soaked and bleeding, but alive, and they laugh . . .

GRAVES: Sometimes I have doubts. When I do, I imagine this kid. Maybe like I was once. Reading our stories in the years to come. I want them to cheer for a happy ending. I fight for them. For who they will one day be.

BLACKBURN: I don’t fear what’s to come. Every day is perfect when I can be by Sol’s side.

GRAVES: Same.

. . . Admiral Xentsiu does not fire the last cannon, nor the first; there is no ruined fleet under their heels, for in the beginning, they choose instead mercy, and Thracius surrenders to them when they ask . . .

WEBB: You two are so cute! And honestly, hashtag relationship goals. My wife and I were just discussing what great role models you both make. Loving, respectful of each other’s agency and needs, committed to peace and equality—God, I could use the whole hour just praising your efforts at restorative justice! So tell me, what motivates you each day? You’ve done so much, I don’t think anyone would blame you if you retired and went to live somewhere by yourselves.

. . . I stood breathless on the quay, back-to-back with Marius. I braced for the end, expecting a storm of bullets and pain. At least I’d die beside my partner, not alone. But then, sharper than the Devil’s tongue, the sun rose in the east and the infernal enforcers melted away. I sagged against Marius, and they laughed in triumph, alive and free . . .

BLACKBURN: I sometimes have nightmares where I’m watching the world crumble and burn around me, and in the dreams, I do nothing. Then I wake up beside the love of my soul, and I think, I have this power to do good. For them. For our people, our global siblings, and those generations to come after us. For our future. It is duty and honor that keep me rising each day to fight for those who cannot.

GRAVES: What Matty said.

[laughter]

. . . the nuke takes out the carrion-dragon, the explosion hurling you and your partner across the garage. Your shields are down to one percent. You pull the health stim from your pack and yell, “Don’t you fucking die on me!” as you inject it into Butcher’s suit. They gasp, grabbing your hand, and you hold them steady as reinforcements arrive in a hail of laser fire that scatters the last demons into the void . . .

WEBB: You know, it’s funny, I had the weirdest moment of déjà vu just before we started this interview. It was like we’d been here before, but sadder, lonelier. I had a moment where I thought someone had died.

BLACKBURN: That sounds awful, Teo. Are you okay?

WEBB: Oh, yes, I’m fine. Just one of those weird brain blips, you know? I’m glad real life isn’t as bad!

. . . their knife hovers over your heart, and the sounds of battle fade until all that’s between you is your ragged breathing. You expect the pain, but Hiasburn lowers their arm and drops the blade. “Not today,” they whisper. “Not today,” you agree. You lie down side by side, staring at the eagles wheeling in the graying sky, for tomorrow you will start again. A new day, a new story, a new ending . . .

BLACKBURN: What are you smiling at, love?

GRAVES: At the knowledge reality is healing.

©2022 by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Merc Fenn Wolfmoor is a queer non-binary writer from Minnesota, where they live with their two cats. Merc is the author of the short story collections So You Want to Be A Robot (2017) and Friends For Robots (2021), and the novella The Wolf Among the Wild Hunt. They have had short stories published in such fine venues as Lightspeed, Fireside, Nightmare, Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Escape Pod, Uncanny, and more. Visit their website: mercfennwolfmoor.com or follow them on Twitter @Merc_Wolfmoor.

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

Welcome to Oxhead

Julianna Baggott | 1375 words

You should know that we thought our parents were normal, ordinary, super basic. But they weren’t, at all. Let’s start with the way we found out, what some call “how it ended” and others call “the start of it all.”

The grid went down. It covered Oxhead and Oxhead Woods and The Annex at Oxhead, the gated communities within the one large gate. It was sudden. One father dropped to the bottom of a shower stall, water still beating down on them. A few mothers collapsed onto kitchen tile, heads lightly bouncing. A half dozen parents stopped, mid-breaststroke, while doing laps. They floated then slowly spun, face down in the community pools. (Oxhead had so many pools.) A lot of parents folded over steering wheels—jerking and slumping as their cars bumped curbs or rolled into traffic or trees or across lawns or cars banging into cars. Their legs went slack, sliding off of gas pedals, causing so many slow-motion accidents.

But they didn’t just go from animate to inanimate. One thing we agreed on: light inside each of them—something like a soul—had been there and then not. Their inner lights went out, one by one. We were witnessing someone’s death. Therefore, they had to have been alive.

• • • •

We can’t blame ourselves for not knowing. We were too young to start off, then too consumed with surviving middle school. By high school, we were sexually obsessed. High school was ripe with longing. Sex floated in the air like a thick and gauzy pollen. It was everywhere and clung to us. An electrified pollen. Something that made us buzz—as if each of us was a bud with a Queen bee trapped inside.

And the tech was really good. And the outside world was not great—when has it ever been great? People think there were Good Old Days, but there’s only that cataract-past, seen through a blinding fog. Why question a gated community that takes care of its own?

Most of all, we’ve learned this: what you present to a child as normal is normal. They have no other context. Parents translate humanity, the world, its dangers, and its means of survival. So, when it broke down, two things happened—as our parents lurched and fell and twitched and died: 1. Nothing made sense. We were shattered. And 2. The truth came together for each of us at different speeds and then we had to make decisions.

The people who saw it as the end didn’t question what life offers.

Those who saw it as the beginning started asking questions.

• • • •

Sex. That was the cause. It’s fitting. One generation’s quest for sex led to the older generation’s death. It’s not Freudian in a tidy way, but it mucks around in the same mud.

Lei Chiang and June Lessing wanted to have sex and couldn’t find a secluded spot. We had so much surveillance, the neighborhood watch cameras, the constant eye of home security. Even the wooded lots reserved for future developments (Oxheads on and on as far as the eye could see) were tracked.

Lei and June were tech geniuses, A-level gamers who wanted to have sex. Protected sex, they weren’t naïve. The plan: take down the grid so that they could get out of their houses and have sex—unseen—in the secluded storage room of the community greenhouse. From their bedrooms, they worked virtually, in sync. Their hack had to be perfect, their hits time-released, precisely.

They chose a Friday. They wanted a couple of hours, ideally, to feel like grown-ups, to linger on the cot in the greenhouse’s storage room, amid seeds and soil bags, the acrid pinch of light fertilizers. They chose late afternoon. If things went well, dusk would settle in and they’d walk the greenhouse in the gathering dark, lush whisper of ferns, bobbing fruit, the bristling nettles. They’d hold hands and look up at the sky beyond the foggy panes.

How could they have known that our parents were connected to the grid, that our parents were part of the network, each firing to the next like synapses within a massive head —Oxhead itself?

• • • •

We realized in retrospect that our parents’ scents were off. Riding beneath colognes and perfumes, there was something medicinal with the dusty burn of a heater or a curling iron slightly singeing freshly shampooed hair.

What we remember most clearly about that night? When they died, a flowering scent, a gusty release, a sweet rot plumed from each body. The air seemed almost misty with it.

Kids emerged from houses, calling for help. We shook our parents’ shoulders. We climbed out of dented cars and wandered into neighboring yards, in shock. We jumped into pools and dragged our parents’ bodies out.

The grid was completely down. Electricity surged—a distant thunderous boom—then went out. No way to call for an ambulance.

We attempted resuscitations in yards and on den carpeting, in beds, on sofas and patios and slate porches . . . We failed to bring them back and fell down on top of their bodies.

With the shouting, crying, calling for help, each house became a box vibrating with terror—reverberating through all the Oxhead neighborhoods. Every household had children. This was something else we should have noticed but didn’t. Why were there so many kids? When you’re a child, you think the world revolves around you. Oxhead did revolve around us.

• • • •

It got dark. We gathered in the street. We didn’t want to go home. The theories started. That we’d been orphans—all along. “This is an orphanage run by replicas of our real parents.” (Many of us resembled our parents.) “Our parents loved us but knew they were going to die, maybe. And so they created this place.”

“What if they’re still alive and mega rich and this is elaborate babysitting?”

“I know my mother has been in there! I know it!” one girl said. “She looks at me in this way sometimes that’s so deep! What if this thing is an avatar she hops into and out of?”

We always came back to this: Why would anyone do this? We cried and hugged each other.

• • • •

June and Lei found their dead parents—both dads grilling, one mother gardening, the other in her office, working late. They told no one what they’d done, not that night. Lei sprinted to June’s house. They told each other that the grid would be repaired. They’re not dead. It’ll go back to normal, it will! And they had sex in her bed. But won’t sex always be tinged with guilt and loss for them?

• • • •

Shortly after midnight, lights came on. Ceiling fans began to rotate. Our parents flinched and gasped. They rolled over. They patted their chests as if they’d been coughing. They threw up pool water. They cried out. They stood up too fast. They called for us by name. Oxhead ringing again with voices in the dead of night.

• • • •

In the following weeks, disinformation followed—You had a collective virus, children. The virus causes mass hallucinations. It happens. Let us show you this video . . .

Factions formed. Some decided to believe the disinformation and deny what they had seen. They wanted their parents back, regardless. They believe that if you’re lucky to be offered a safe childhood, you should accept it. Lei’s senior project included this line: Animals that are risk-takers—note the condor—are more likely to go extinct.

June was part of a group that wanted out. We believe that you can’t live a lie. We need to trust that people around us, the world, are real. We still want to have sex, but we’re afraid that whatever happened to our parents had to do with having us. We didn’t want to sacrifice ourselves for offspring. (We were too literal and didn’t understand parenthood.) We gathered our things, kissed the representations of our parents—we still loved them deeply. June had arranged for a limited hit to the outermost gate. We slipped through it.

The air felt like real air. The sky looked like the same sky.

We still don’t know what love is.

©2022 by Julianna Baggott.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Julianna Baggott is the author of over a dozen novels, including Pure and The Seventh Book of Wonders, both New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Her work is in development for film/TV with options at Warner Brothers, Disney+, and Lionsgate. She has a forthcoming story collection, I’d Really Prefer Not to be Here with You, and a novella, The Wick. She teaches screenwriting at the Florida State University Film School.

The Clockmaker and His Daughter

Tobi Ogundiran | 4329 words

Gaza looked down at the city of Nyss, surveying his creation. He thought it was perfect.

Well, almost.

In the city centre stood several griots spinning a tale to a captive audience, their camels and brightly-coloured caravans sheltering in the shade of palm trees. The griots should be dusty—after all they had travelled some distance, spent several months weathering the harsh terrain of the desert. As it was they looked too pristine, glistening as they were with fresh coats of paint. So Gaza plucked his brush, dipped it in a bowl of dust and worked some dirt into their wooden grains until each griot looked appropriately aged and travel-worn. After a moment’s thought, Gaza moved a young boy from the steps of the library and placed him in the audience. There. Now it was perfect.

“Daughter,” Gaza called. “Come!”

The door swung open. Gaza pushed back his dismay at the sight of her. He would never get used to seeing his daughter this way, the stone-like scales eating her skin until the healthy brown flesh was nearly overtaken. The sickness had taken half her body, and her entire left leg was all carapace so that it was useless and snagged on the floor whenever she walked, making a sound like a rolling boulder. If it ever reached her heart . . . he shook the thought from his head. Ufa leaned against her walking stick, the weariness stark in how she carried herself, in the way her shift clung to her frail form. But as she took in the city, sprawled on the floor of what used to be their bedroom, the light came back into her eyes.

“Papa!” She said. “You built . . . you built Nyss!”

“Do you like it, Ufichka?”

“I love it!” She cried, shivering with excitement. “I can see Yonju’s bakery! And here, the bathing pools—and the Square of the Dancing Maiden! Papa!” She turned and hugged him tight, and he held her in that careful way he had come to learn, for fear of causing her pain.

Ufa loved to roam the city, but ever since the Stone-sickness took her, her strength had dwindled until walking became exceedingly painful, and running around the city, impossible. At first, whenever Gaza could pry himself from work, he would put Ufa in his cart to push her all over the city, but even that soon became too unbearable for her. So he spent the past two months cutting wood to construct this replica, painting and sanding and refining each clockwork figurine until they moved with grace. This Nyss was not quite as big as the real thing, of course. But it was big enough for one with a mind like hers. To imagine that she was truly there, to lose herself in the miniature streets. Seeing her eyes light up, seeing how much she appreciated it . . . that was everything.

She peeled away from him, looking at the city in silent wonderment. “There are people. You made people. But . . .” she frowned. “It is . . . a little different, papa. This building, this is where the university is—”

“This is the Nyss of my youth, of before . . .”

Before the coming of the Anukhi and the conquest of Nyss. Now his beloved city was marred with the mark of foreign occupation; hard utilitarian structures sprouted up at every corner, the hideous effigies of their sun god Yaveh defaced the faces of sleek Nyssini architecture. The Anukhi were slowly eating the city, as surely as they had eaten its peoples.

It was the Nyss of his youth, but it was also the Nyss of his dreams. At the very end of the Street of Light stood a two-storey brick structure he could never afford, with large glass windows, and rustic shale roofing, and a drainpipe that ran down the leeward side, curving like an elephant’s trunk. A sign, embossed in gold lettering, ran over the glass windows: MASTER GAZA’S EMPORIUM OF CLOCKS, CHRONOGRAPHS AND OTHER ASSORTED TIME-PIECES.

“Here,” he said, “let me show you something.” He reached for the drainpipe, wound it until it was taut. Then he released it.

The city sprang into life. Dirigibles sailed overhead, palm trees waved in a non-existent breeze. The houses lit up with the warm glow of electricity, and clockwork Nyssini went about their business: here, a mother tugged her two boys to the temple of Light. Here, some acolytes of Faun gave alms to the poor.

“It is alive,” breathed Ufa, the lights dancing in her eyes.

Gaza looked at it again, feeling his heart swell with joy. If he tried, he could almost imagine he couldn’t hear the faint tick of gears as they turned, that he couldn’t see the near-invisible cables that held the dirigibles aloft. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine that yes, truly, the city was alive.

• • • •

The air was thick with the smells of the market as Gaza made his way down the street: coriander and black pepper and curry and paprika. He saw one or two Anukhi soldiers, looking like fire ants in their red armour as they clanged past, but there were less Anukhi here than there were in other parts of the city. Their constitution couldn’t handle the spiced market air, which burned their throats and brought tears to their eyes.

Although dusk had fallen, the air boiled as the streets and buildings gave off heat trapped from a full day of sun, and Gaza found his clothes sticking to his back. Once or twice he ducked as an airship flew past, dirigible engines chugging. The invaders sometimes monitored them, peering down in their long scopes, looking for suspicious gatherings or signs of uprising. Not that there had been one in over thirty years. The Nyssini were thoroughly conquered and perfectly docile.

A bell announced Gaza’s presence as he stepped into the apothecary’s. Laila was a small, severe woman, wrapped in shawls even in the sweltering heat. She didn’t look up, didn’t even acknowledge him, but stood pouring a purple liquid into a decanter. Gaza stood politely while she worked, enduring the stink of medicine and herbs and old sweat.

Laila held up the decanter to the light, then placed it carefully on the counter before turning to glower at Gaza. “Yes?”

“I need medicine,” he said.

“Well, I no imagine you come here for bread or face paint for your beloved.”

“. . . what?”

She waved an impatient hand. “Which kind medicine you be wanting?”

Gaza licked his lips, glanced over his shoulder at the dusty shop windows darkened with night. “Asha’s Tears.”

Her eyes went round. “You mad, nuh?”

Asha’s Tears. The tear-shaped fruits that hung from the tree in the middle of the palace. The reason the Anukhi had invaded in the first place. Some said that Asha the first queen of Nyss, upon hearing of the death of her only son broke down and wept. And from where her tears fell sprouted a tree. Others said her pain had been so unbearable that she transmogrified into a many-limbed tree, tall and white with salty-sweet fruit. Gaza remembered seeing it as a boy, where it grew in what used to be the city centre, watching pilgrims come from every corner of the country to worship at its roots. It was believed to have healing powers, and indeed it did, for not one Nyssini who ate of its fruit ever took ill. Sickness had been a concept as foreign as the Anukhi. Over the years people tried to regrow the tree, planting its seeds in other parts of the country, but it never took. There was only the one tree, in the very centre of the empire, with its bountiful fruit. It didn’t take long until word spread, and the Anukhi turned their covetous eye on it. If Asha’s Tears could heal any disease, they reasoned, then it could stay the dark hand of death, and prolong the life of their wretched emperor. For what was death but the succumbing of the flesh to the disease of time? And so they came, and built their hideous palace around it, and claimed the tree for themselves.

“You wan’ get me killed, eh?” said Laila. “Talking bout Asha Tears. Get out me bloody shop.”

“I will pay you,” he said, clinging to the counter.

“Are you deaf or what?”

The tree belonged to the Anukhi now, where behind the palace’s ivory gates alchemists worked day and night trying to create a life elixir from its juices. Some made its way to the black market, to apothecaries like Laila—the rotted ones, the gnarled ones. But Gaza was desperate. He would take even a dried husk if there was a chance of saving his daughter.

“It’s not for me.” He was of a dying generation of Nyssini, of which they were scant few, who had tasted Asha’s Tears in the pre-war days and could not fall ill. “It’s my daughter. She has . . .” he took a deep breath. “Please, she is in pain. I don’t . . . I don’t want her to die.”

Perhaps it was the desperation in his voice, perhaps it was the knowledge of his daughter’s ailment, but Laila’s scowl softened somewhat. “What she ‘ave, your daughter? I can make ointments, tinctures . . .”

What poor healers they made, when for generations they had not had the need to learn medicine. Now disease ate through them like wildfire, and the Anukhi responded in the only language they knew, banishing the sick to the desert, and in the case of the highly contagious, those with Stone-sickness, they burned.

Gaza shook his head, tears leaking from his eyes. “You cannot help her.”

And in that moment understanding passed between the two of them. Laila sighed. “How old is your daughter?”

“She’s seen twelve full seasons,” said Gaza. Asha grant that she sees her thirteenth.

“S’not right,” muttered the apothecary. “One so young shoont ‘ave to suffer so much.”

Gaza looked at her hopefully. “You will . . . you will help us, then?” And without waiting for an answer, reached into his pocket. “Here,” said Gaza hastily, placing a cloth-wrapped package on the counter. He unwrapped it to reveal a clock. “This is all I have. My most expensive piece. Take it.”

Through rheumy eyes Laila squinted at the clock. It was a beautiful piece, the finest work of his craftsmanship. He had made it when Ufa was born, and had been saving it for her dowry. But right now, he needed her to live. He could always make another. A long moment passed in which Laila stared at the piece, in which Gaza prayed silently that she would agree to help him, then she placed a proprietary hand on the clock, sliding it towards herself. “Come tomorrow, then. Thirteenth bell.”

“Thank you,” said Gaza, bowing repeatedly. “Thank you so much, oh thank you . . .”

Gaza left the shop considerably light of heart. It felt as though a great weight had been lifted off his shoulders. Hope! How he hadn’t dared to hope. And now . . . the dark fog that had wrapped itself around him with each passing day was not quite gone, but he could see through it now. Just a bite of Asha’s Tears and his Ufa will be made whole again.

“Ufichka,” he called as he stepped into the house. “Good news!”

He found her sprawled facedown on the threshold between the living room and dining room. Gaza’s mind when black with panic as he rushed over to her. He was too late. He had dawdled too long, and now—

“Aaah,” a feeble cry as he turned her over. The Stone-sickness had nearly consumed her face, the previously smooth brown skin was now hard as wood, lined with fissures like water-starved earth.

“What happened?” He asked, his heart thrashing in his chest.

“Sorry papa,” groaned Ufa. “I was . . . trying to reach the city.”

“You shouldn’t—you shouldn’t move when I’m not around, I told you that!” He carried her gently and set her on the chair. “I thought . . . I thought . . .”

“You said you had good news.”

“Yes. I’ve been able to purchase Asha’s Tears for you.”

“Really?” She brightened. “How? Can we afford it? What if the Anukhi—?”

“Don’t you worry yourself, Ufichka,” said Gaza, smoothening her hair. “All that’s important is that by this time tomorrow, you’ll be whole again.”

They had a satisfying dinner of mouldy bread and curdled jam. But they were in such high spirits that even the bread tasted sweet. It pleased him to see Ufa eat so ravenously.

Later, he carried her to the bedroom, to the miniature Nyss, where they sat, two giants, at the edge of the city.

“We’re wrong, papa.” Said Ufa.

Gaza frowned. “Wrong? What about?”

“Asha’s Tears. It’s not a healing tree. I heard it from the griots a long time ago.”

She touched a hand to the griots near their caravans, who were frozen before their small audience. It looked like a moment captured by the deft hand of a sculptor, as if by the breath of wind they might resume their lives, griots and audience alike, enraptured with wondrous tales of an age long past.

“Okay, and what did you hear?”

“It is a wishing tree, papa. You make a wish as you eat the fruit, and it becomes true. But our ancestors were so ravaged by diseases and all they wanted was to heal themselves and be free from sickness. So whenever they ate it, they wished for good health, until the fruits did only that. Healed. Asha’s Tears is like a clay which bends to the will of the potter.”

“If what they say is true, then the Anukhi emperor would have wished immortality for himself.”

“But they don’t know.” She looked up at him. “We don’t know. Our ancestors forgot.”

“I see . . .” he said. Then, gently, “Ufichka, there is a reason no one listens to the griots anymore. Memory is fallible, humans doubly so. You see, tales often morph in their retelling, until you can scarcely tell truth from embellishment. It is better to trust in the written word.”

“But people can lie, can’t they?” she asked, turning to look at him. “They can easily write lies in books too.”

“True . . .” said Gaza slowly.

“So? What’s the difference? One way or the other we’re beholden to those who tell us things.” She shrugged. “We choose what we believe.”

“Ay, you this girl! When did you get so smart, eh?”

She beamed up at him, her grin stiff and lopsided. “When you were sleeping, old man.”

• • • •

Gaza knew something was wrong even before he arrived at Laila’s shop. It was in the way the streets were nearly empty, devoid of the usual press of roiling bodies. It was in the dark looks that were darted his way as what stragglers remained hurried off. When he arrived in front of the lopsided shop, he found the door shut, the windows dark.

“Hello?” He called, knocking on the door, but there was no reply. He pressed his face to the dusty windows and was confronted with an impenetrable darkness. There was no one in the shop.

Gaza stood for a long moment, staring at nothing in particular.

She had tricked him. The woman had collected his payment with no intention of holding up her end of the bargain. But . . . that wasn’t right. She wasn’t some street peddler with no fixed spot he would never be able to find. She had a shop—and he knew how costly those were to rent in Anukhi Nyss—so she wouldn’t abandon it all for some clock. Although it was an expensive piece . . .

Someone clutched at him.

Gaza turned to find a filthy man hanging on to his sleeve, the other hand proffering a rusted collection cup which he rattled in Gaza’s face. “Alms for the poor?”

Gaza pried himself free of his grip. “Sorry. I have no . . . do you know where the woman went?” He asked, pointing over his shoulder at the shop. “The apothecary.”

The man turned his jaundiced eyes to the dark shop, then back at Gaza. Slowly, he thrust out his collection cup.

“Fine.” Gaza rooted in his pockets and came up with a few bits of nickel which he deposited in the cup. “Well?” said Gaza impatiently. “Where is she?”

“Ants,” croaked the beggar. “Fire ants.”

Gaza’s blood turned cold. The man was talking about Anukhi soldiers, in their red armour. “They took her?” He asked, hoping—praying—that that was what it was, and not what he was beginning to suspect—

“Nuh. She took them.”

“By the Light,” he breathed, shaking his head as he stepped backwards. “No, no, no . . .”

And then he was running, flying down the street, willing his old bones to move faster. His mind skittered. If he could get there before them, he would grab Ufa and flee the city. Go somewhere they would never be found, if need be to the farthest reaches of the empire where Anukhi influence was virtually non-existent. Gaza couldn’t have said how he crossed half the city, but he soon found himself on his street, his home—

Gaza gave a strangled cry at the sight of the door hanging by its hinges. He had been hoping he was wrong, that Laila hadn’t led the soldiers to his house—however she knew how to find him—but that had been a fool’s hope.

Then came the voices. Raised voices. Angry voices. And rising above them, Ufa’s voice: screaming for him.

He burst into the house. Two soldiers turned as one in his direction. They looked a menace in their armour, the room too small for them, their swords and batons silently promising violence. But in that moment Gaza found that he did not fear them, did not fear for himself; there was only Ufa on his mind.

“Where is my daughter?” He demanded.

Two more soldiers emerged from the bedroom, Ufa hanging between them like a sack of stones, screaming in pain. A blind madness overcame Gaza.

“THAT IS MY DAUGHTER!” He yelled, dashing towards them, “GET AWAY FROM MY—oof!”

The soldier nearest him drove a gauntleted fist into his belly, cutting short his advance and folding him in half. Gaza dropped wheezing to his knees, clutching his belly.

“Papa!” Ufa screamed when she saw him. “Papa! Help me!” Tears streamed down her cheeks, splattering to the floor. He could see the terror in her eyes.

“Leave her be—” he gasped. “Please. Can’t you see you’re hurting her?” But they paid him no mind, were already stepping over him as though he did not exist, heading for the door.

Gaza scrambled to his feet, still gasping for air, and moved to block the door. “No,” he said. “You will not take her.”

The soldiers looked mildly irritated, almost bored. As though they had only come to take out the trash and found a territorial rodent. As though it were not his daughter they were taking to her death.

A soldier stepped forward, gently unhooking his club. “Step aside,” he said softly. “I won’t ask again.”

“You will have to go through me.”

The soldier moved fast. One moment Gaza stood at the threshold, clutching the posts; the next he was flying through air, flipping head over heels. Lights exploded in his vision as he cracked his head against the wall, then sank onto the table. It came down in a chaos of splinters and broken crockery and food from their half-eaten lunch. The room swam. Darkness seeped into the edges of Gaza’s vision, but he shook his head, shook the ringing from his ears as he wrenched himself from the wreck and started to crawl towards the now empty door and the rapidly receding screams of his daughter.

Gaza gave a great hoot of pain as a boot crushed his hand. He looked up to the see the soldier, dead, passionless eyes staring at him as he ground the small bones of Gaza’s fingers. And then he swung the other boot, cracking it across Gaza’s jaw.

The world went black.

• • • •

The long shadows of dusk were stretching across the room when Gaza came to. His jaw was swollen shut, and every inch of his body was alight with pain. It felt as though he had been dragged through the streets, or trampled beneath a herd of enraged elephants. At first he sat there in the darkness, trying to fit together the jumbled pieces of his mind. Then it all came flooding back.

“Ufa,” he cried.

How long had he been out? A long while by the looks of it. They would have taken her to the palace. And she . . .

He burst into tears. It was too late. He had failed his daughter.

Gaza couldn’t say how he found himself on the streets, but he limped along, clutching his side. He thought of going to the palace gates, of raising a ruckus, demanding that they give him his daughter. But he was too much of a coward for that. He realised that he did not want to die. And he hated himself for it. What did it say about him that he clung on to a life that was no longer worth living, for what would life be without Ufa? Without his dear Ufichka?

It wasn’t until he stood outside the dusty windows that he realised where his feet had carried him. Gaza pushed open the door and stepped into the dank shop.

Laila was in the middle of preparing a tincture. She started to snarl at whoever had intruded when she saw him. A look of shame passed across her papery features.

“Why?” said Gaza, limping towards her. “You’re one of us. Why would you side with them? Why would you let them take her?”

“She was in pain,” she mumbled. “One so young shoont ‘ave to suffer so much.”

“That’s why I came to you! To cure her. I don’t understand why you couldn’t just . . .” something clicked into place in his mind. “How much?” He asked.

Laila looked away, looked down at her hands, which she had folded neatly on the counter.

“How much did my daughter’s life cost?”

“Thirty pieces,” she said, still not meeting his eyes. “Thirty pieces of silver.”

Gaza burst into laughter; a long hyena-like cackle that belonged to the veld. Pain spasmed through his jaw as he laughed, but he couldn’t help himself. “Thirty pieces!” He choked, wiping tears from his eyes.

Laila reached into the folds of her skirt and produced a fat brown pouch, tinkling with coins. “Take it.”

Gaza was overcome by fresh gales of laughter. He didn’t know which was worse, that his daughter had been priced for such a meagre sum, or that the woman was trying to give it to him.

“No,” he growled. “I will not absolve you. You will think of her when you spend that money. You will know that you condemned a child to die.”

He turned to leave.

“There is no more Asha’s Tears,” Laila said as he pushed open the door. “Has not been many seasons. Alchemists took too much. The tree died.”

Gaza stumbled out of the shop, numb with shock, with pain, with despair. Of course, there were no more Tears. Of course, they took too much. That was all they were good for. They took and took until there was nothing left. They had taken the prosperity of Nyss, and now they had taken his daughter from him.

• • • •

It was dark by the time Gaza found his way back home. The door still hung by its broken hinge, clacking as it swung in the breeze. The room was still in disarray, signs of struggle everywhere.

He limped towards the bedroom where he found the miniature city in ruins: buildings trampled, people lying crushed, mechanical innards spilling out. In some of the buildings the lights flickered on and off, as if trying to wrest some semblance of order amid all the chaos. It looked like the aftermath of war. Like the aftermath of the Conquest of Nyss.

Gaza returned to the living room, then stopped dead in his tracks.

In the middle of the room stood a plant. A single white shoot which barely reached his chest, but a plant nonetheless. And at the end of the slender stalk hung a single tear-shaped fruit.

“What in the world?” He breathed, limping slowly towards the plant. He had missed it when he passed, but his eyes were now adjusted to the dark, and there was no denying what he was seeing.

Gaza dropped to his knees. It made no sense. Hadn’t people tried over millennia to regrow the tree? Hadn’t they failed? And yet, here it was in his living room, sprouting from the floorboards! Around the young roots he could see dark wet marks, as though the floorboard had been soaked by water . . . or tears.

And from where her tears fell sprouted a tree.

“Ufa . . .” He breathed as he plucked the fruit. It was warm and soft in his palm. And as he sat there in the dark, turning the golden fruit in his hands, Ufa’s voice came loud and clear to him: It is a wishing tree, papa. You make a wish as you eat the fruit, and it becomes true.

With trembling hands, Gaza brought the fruit to his mouth and bit into it.

Then he made a wish.

©2022 by Tobi Ogundiran.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tobi Ogundiran is a Nigerian writer whose dark and fantastical tales have appeared in journals such as Lightspeed, Podcastle, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies; and in several Year’s Best anthologies, including The Year’s Best Fantasy, edited by Paula Guran and The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction, edited by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki. His work has been nominated for the British Science Fiction Association, Shirley Jackson, Nommo and Ignyte Awards. His debut collection, Jackal, Jackal, is out from Undertow Publications in summer 2023. When he’s not crafting wondrous tales, he works as a physician. Find him at tobiogundiran.com and on Twitter.

EXCERPT: The Book Eaters (Tor Books)

Sunyi Dean | 6138 words

Sunyi Dean’s The Book Eaters is “a darkly sweet pastry of a book about family, betrayal, and the lengths we go to for the ones we love. A delicious modern fairy tale.”  — Christopher Buehlman, Shirley Jackson Award-winning author

Truth is found between the stories we’re fed and the stories we hunger for.

Out on the Yorkshire Moors lives a secret line of people for whom books are food, and who retain all of a book’s content after eating it. To them, spy novels are a peppery snack; romance novels are sweet and delicious. Eating a map can help them remember destinations, and children, when they misbehave, are forced to eat dry, musty pages from dictionaries.

Devon is part of The Family, an old and reclusive clan of book eaters. Her brothers grow up feasting on stories of valor and adventure, and Devon—like all other book eater women—is raised on a carefully curated diet of fairy tales and cautionary stories.

But real life doesn’t always come with happy endings, as Devon learns when her son is born with a rare and darker kind of hunger—not for books, but for human minds.

Coming August 30, 2022 from Tor Books.

CHAPTER 1

DEVON BY DAY
PRESENT DAY

We have just begun to navigate a strange region; we must expect to encounter strange adventures, strange perils.

—Arthur Machen, The Terror

These days, Devon only bought three things from the shops: books, booze, and Sensitive Care skin cream. The books she ate, the booze kept her sane, and the lotion was for Cai, her son. He suffered occasionally from eczema, especially in winter.

There were no books in this convenience store, only rows of garish magazines. Not to her taste, and anyway she had enough books to eat at home. Her gaze skipped across the soft porn, power tools, and home living publications down to the lowest strata, where children’s magazines glowed pink and yellow.

Devon ran short, ragged nails across the covers. She thought about buying one for Cai, because he seemed to like reading that kind of thing at the moment, and decided against it. After tonight, his preferences might change.

She walked to the end of the aisle, linoleum squishing beneath her heeled boots, and set her basket at the checkout. Four bottles of vodka and a tub of skin cream.

The cashier looked at the basket, then back at her. “D’you have ID?”

“Pardon?”

“Do you, have, any ID?” he repeated, slowly, as if to someone hard of hearing.

She stared. “I’m twenty-nine, for Christ’s sake.” And looked every year of it, too.

He shrugged, crossed his arms. Waiting. Wasn’t much more than a kid himself, at most eighteen or nineteen, working in the family shop and likely trying to follow all the rules.

Understandable, but she couldn’t oblige him. Devon didn’t have any ID. No birth certificate, no passport, no driver’s license; nothing. Officially, she didn’t exist.

“Forget it.” Devon shoved the basket at him, bottles clinking. “I’ll get a drink somewhere else.”

She stalked out, annoyed and flustered. Hordes of teenagers bought booze from other corner shops all the time. It was a daily occurrence around here. That someone would choose to card her, so clearly an adult, was ridiculous.

Only after she’d crossed the badly lit street did she realize that she’d left without buying the skin cream. It was a small failure, forgetting the lotion, but she failed Cai so constantly in so many different, myriad ways that even this tiny mistake was sufficient to wring her insides with fresh anger.

She considered going back for it, then checked her watch. The time was pushing 8 P.M. Already in danger of running late.

Besides, eczema was nothing compared to his hunger. Much more important to feed him.

Newcastle-upon-Tyne was a pretty enough city, if a little rowdy for Devon’s liking. This time of year, the sun set at 4 P.M. and the sky was already fully dark, the lamps abuzz. The lack of ambient light suited her mood. Compulsively, she checked her phone with its short list of contacts. No texts. No calls.

She slunk past a row of decrepit terraces. Passersby drifted up and down the pavement. A tight knot of people huddled outside one of the houses, drinking and smoking. Music leaked through curtainless windows. Devon took a left off the main street to avoid the crowds.

There were so many things to remember when she was out and around humans. Feigning cold was one of them. Thinking of it, she drew her coat tight around her, as if bothered by the chill. Walking with sound was another. She scuffed her feet with deliberate heaviness, grinding gravel and dust beneath her heels. Big boots helped with the plodding tread, made her clunky and stompy like a toddler in adult wellies.

Her vision in darkness was another awkward one. Having to remember to squint, and to pick her way across a detritus-littered pavement that she could see with perfect clarity; having to feign a fear she never felt, but which should have ruled her. Solitary human women walked with caution in the night.

In short, Devon had always to act like prey, and not like the predator she had become.

She picked up the pace, keen to get home. The flat she rented (cash only, no questions) occupied a squalid space above a tire shop. In the daytime it was noisy, reeked of oil, and filled with the conversation of customers. The evenings were quieter, if no less foul-smelling.

Down the alley, up the stairs to the back entrance. There was no street-facing door, but that was a good thing. Meant she could come and go by dark side alleys, unwatched by curious eyes—and so could her visitors, when she had them. Privacy was essential.

Devon fished out a set of keys, hanging around her neck on a lanyard. The cord was entangled with a brass compass on a steel chain. She shook the lanyard free, slotted the key in, and wrestled briefly with the lock before stepping inside.

Since neither she nor her son required light, the flat sat in perpetual dark. It saved on the energy meter and reminded her a little of home, back when home had been welcoming: the cool unlit calm of Fairweather Manor, with its shade-tinted hallways and shadow-layered libraries.

She was expecting human company, though, and switched on all the lights. Cheap bulbs flickered into anemic existence. The flat contained only a claustrophobic living space, a small kitchenette with fold-out table, a bathroom veering off to the left, and a locked bedroom to her right where her son spent much of every day. She dropped her bag by the door, hung her coat on a hook, and clunked across to his room.

“Cai? Are you awake?”

Silence, then the faintest of shuffles from within.

“No lotion, sorry,” she said. “They were out. I’ll get some tomorrow, aye?”

The shuffling stopped.

Always, she was tempted to go in and offer comfort of some kind. By the three-week mark, starvation would have ravaged him to thinness, his suffering spiraling into unbearable agony as his body began to produce toxins. The madness already gnawed his mind, incurable except through his next feed, and even after feeding, the craving would remain ever-present. He would either sit in a corner, huddled up and unresponsive, or else attack her in a frothing rage.

Impossible to know which reaction she’d get and so, fingers shaking, she checked and double-checked the bolts instead of going in. One on the top and one on the bottom, both solid things she’d installed herself, and one regular lock that required a key. The room had no window, courtesy of its awkward layout in relation to the shop; no additional security needed there. For once.

Someone knocked at the entrance to her flat. She jumped, felt chagrined, then checked her watch. Ten past eight; bang on time. Just as well she’d not gone back for the lotion.

Devon went to let in her guest. He had a name, but she would not allow herself to think it. Better to consider only his role, his profession: the local vicar. He needed to be no more and no less.

The vicar waited anxiously on her doorstep, wearing a black-and-mustard coat that might have been fashionable forty years ago. He had kind eyes, a quiet demeanor, and impressive patience with his quarrelsome congregation. Not touchy-feely with kids and no severe personal problems that she could find after two weeks of intense stalking. Everyone had small vices and little problems, always, but that was a given, and she could cope with the small stuff. They were only human, after all.

“Thanks for coming.” Devon hunched herself smaller. Be uneasy, be reluctant, and above all, be vulnerable. The sure-fire act that suckered them every time. “I didn’t think you would.”

“Not at all!” He offered a smile. “As I told you on Sunday, it’s no trouble.”

Devon said nothing, looking sheepish and fiddling with the compass around her neck. She’d done this conversation or some variation of it so many times, tried all kinds of lines, and found it was better to let them take the initiative. Probably she should have put on something more feminine to look even more unthreatening, but she despised dresses.

“May I come in?” he ventured, and she feigned embarrassment for her rudeness, stepping aside.

His gaze snagged on the dilapidated interior. Devon couldn’t blame him. She gave the usual, awkward apologies for the state of the flat while he gave the usual demurring reassurances.

That ritual completed, she said, “My son is in a bad way. I spoke to him earlier, and he didn’t answer. You may not have much luck, I’m afraid.”

The vicar nodded, lips pursed with concern. “If you are happy for me to try, I will see if I can speak to him.”

Devon clenched her teeth to hold back a contemptuous laugh. As if talking could solve problems like this. Wasn’t the vicar’s fault, she’d been the one to say that Cai had depression, but hysteria crept up on her nonetheless.

The vicar was still awaiting a response. She managed a tight nod, hoping he’d read her emotions for the right kind of conflicted, and led him to the locked door.

“You lock your son in his room?” He sounded shocked, and she could feel the weight of his judgment as she undid each bolt. No doubt he thought she had something to do with Cai’s present mental state.

If only he knew.

“It’s complicated.” Devon turned the key and paused, aware her heart was racing. “I need to ask you something.”

“What is it?” The vicar was wary, his senses alert to a danger that his eyes could not perceive.

Didn’t matter. He’d been lost the moment he stepped inside.

She met his gaze. “Are you a good person?” The question that consumed her, every time. Every victim. “Are you kind?”

He frowned, considering his words. Trying to understand what reassurance she sought, not that he had a cat’s chance in hell of guessing. Still, his hesitation was its own reassurance. The bad ones lied, quick and smooth—or worse, brushed it aside, sometimes with humor. Only those with a conscience would stop and evaluate her question.

“None of us are truly good,” the vicar said, at last. He put a hand on her shoulder, so gently, so kindly, and she almost threw up on the spot. “All we can do is live by the light we are given.”

“Some of us don’t have any light,” Devon said. “How are we supposed to live, then?”

He blinked. “I—”

Devon caught his wrist, wrenched the door open, and shoved him in. The vicar wasn’t frail but Devon was far stronger than she looked and had the element of surprise. He stumbled forward, startled and gasping, into the darkness of Cai’s room. Devon yanked the door shut and held it hard.

“I’m so sorry,” she said through the keyhole. “I’m just doing the best I can.”

The vicar didn’t answer. He was already shouting and thrashing.

Really, it was pointless to apologize. Victims didn’t want your sorry-so-sorrys when you were hurting them, they wanted you to stop. Devon couldn’t oblige, though, and apologies were all she had these days. Apologies, and booze.

The noise of the vicar’s muffled struggling trickled away in a minute or less. She could never decide which was worse: the wailing, or the silence. Maybe they were equally bad. After a moment of dithering, she let go of the doorknob. No point locking up. Cai wouldn’t be dangerous, not anymore, and better to make sure he could leave his room if he wished.

The flat oppressed, mildewed walls crushing her spirit to flatness. After so many days of ravenous hunger, her son would need to sleep off his feed. In the meantime, she wanted a drink and there was no vodka in the house.

No, wait. She still had a half bottle of whiskey, left behind by the previous person she’d brought to her home. Devon didn’t like whiskey, but right now she liked being sober even less. A couple minutes of rifling through the cabinets turned up the errant alcohol.

Bottle in hand, Devon locked herself in the tiny, dingy bathroom and drank into oblivion.

CHAPTER 2

A PRINCESS OF THE MAGIC LINE
TWENTY-TWO YEARS AGO

She was a princess of the magic line. The gods had sent their shadows to her christening.

—Lord Dunsany, The King of Elfland’s Daughter

Devon was eight years old when she met her first human, though she did not realize what he was at the time. Or rather, she did not realize what she was.

Growing up, there had only been the Six Families, scattered across different regions of Britain. Devon’s family was the Fairweathers, whose North Yorkshire estate was wedged between low-lying hills and wild moorland. Uncle Aike was the patriarch of their manor because he was the wisest, even though he was not the oldest. Under him were a succession of other aunts and uncles ranging from barely adult to discreetly ancient.

And under them were the seven Fairweather children, of whom all except Devon were boys. There were very few women around, for girl-children were rare among the Families. The uncles outnumbered the aunts, just as the brothers outnumbered their sister, and no brides were in residence at the time.

Devon’s own mother was an unremembered face, having long since moved on to another marriage contract.

“You’re the only princess in our little castle,” Uncle Aike would say with a wink. Tall and gray-haired, he enjoyed folding his lanky frame into comfortable chairs and drinking copious quantities of inktea. “You get to be Princess Devon. Just like in the fairy tales, eh?” He would make a little flourish with his hands, a smile crinkling up the corners of his mouth.

And Devon would laugh, put on a crown made from braided daisies, and run around the yard in her tattered lace dress shouting I’m a princess! Sometimes, she tried to play with the aunts, because if she were a princess then they ought to be queens. But always, the older women withdrew from her with anxious glances, rarely leaving their own bedrooms. Devon eventually decided they were boring and left them alone.

The house itself was a ten-bedroom building, three stories high. It might have been quite ordinary for manors of that type if not for the haphazard collection of parapets, extensions, tile roofs, and Gothic flourishes. (“Courtesy of your great-uncle Bolton,” Uncle Aike had said once. “Architecture was his, ah, treasured pastime.”)

Beneath the ground, more levels sprawled with delightfully twisted passageways. Devon knew every nook and corner, from the dark sublevel halls to the sun-filled music rooms of the upper floors.

And the libraries. Like the other Families, the Fairweathers had libraries with a flavor all their own: vintage books stitched from carefully aged leather—the darker, the better—with textured, embossed covers. When opened, the brown-edged pages flaked in soft, dry puffs, smelling faintly of March rain. One bite and Devon’s bookteeth could sink straight through those covers and chewy strings of binding, tongue alive with the acidic tang of ink-tinged paper.

“Biblichor,” Uncle Aike liked to say, rolling the word in his mouth. “That is a word that means the smell of very old books. We love biblichor, here. And other old things.”

“Everything in the house is old,” Devon giggled. Like the paintings in the downstairs dining room; four hundred years old, apparently. “I think you’re very old!”

Uncle Aike always laughed, was never offended. “Maybe I am, princess, but you’ll never make it to my age with that tongue of yours!”

That tongue of yours. Lots of people commented on Devon’s tongue. She stuck it out, sometimes, inspecting it in the mirror. There was nothing special about her tongue that she could ever see.

The land they lived on stretched vast to the eyes of a child. Rocky hills couched moorland, full of hollows and peat bogs. In summer, when the moors bloomed purple with heather, Devon chased rabbits and grouse birds. Twice she found otters, whose little fangs looked like her own growing bookteeth. In winter, the grass dried up and crisped with frost. She built snowmen with her brothers and they ran together, ever barefoot, through the hillocks and valley forests.

And then, one January morning, eight-year-old Devon went out on her own in search of snow buntings and red fox vixens. She had heard the foxes barking in the night and hoped to catch a glimpse of one scampering across the snow, like flame racing across paper.

She’d hardly gone three hundred yards, crossing into the small wood behind the house, when an unfamiliar noise snagged her attention. Someone was crashing through the trees and snow with loud, clumsy steps. No one at Fairweather Manor walked so heavily and Devon, intrigued, went to investigate.

A man she didn’t recognize slogged and huffed through freshly fallen snow. He was of indeterminate Adult Age, with dark hair and warm brown skin, his chin fully bearded. A curling black moustache framed his nose. Weirdly, he wore heavy boots, long trousers, funny knitted things on his hands, and bizarre puffed clothes that buttoned up to his chin. Another knitted thing sat on his head.

It took her a moment to recognize his gear as gloves, coat, and hat. They were things she knew from stories but had never seen on a real person. He looked so different from adults on the estate, who were rather paler and mostly dressed in dusty old suits. She wondered if he might be a knight of the Six Families, but knights usually traveled in pairs, on motorcycles, with a dragon in tow. He had no partner and no dragon and definitely no motorcycle.

She circled behind and tapped his shoulder. “Hi,” she said, and snickered when he nearly fell over with shock. How had he not seen her? All that fabric must have muted his senses.

“Holy—!” He checked himself, took a breath. Frost dusted his dark sideburns, and the hems of his trousers were soaked from melted snow. “Where did you come from, little one?”

Devon was utterly delighted. It’d been at least two years since she’d managed to sneak up on anyone. “Are you one of my cousins?” She skipped around him in a circle. “I haven’t seen you before. Why aren’t you in a car? I thought all the cousins came in cars.”

“Cousin? No, I don’t think so.” For some reason, he kept staring at her bare feet and knees, and her sleeveless linen dress. “Aren’t you cold, love?”

She stopped in her tracks, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

She knew about cold from eating all the right books. Cold was what made snow happen, instead of rain, just like in the Snow Queen story.

It was snowing now, light flakes landing on her arms and filling in her footprints. And it felt different from heat: balmy, instead of spikey. But cold was a part of the world and its seasons, a sensation detached from reaction. Not something that you had to do anything about.

“Strong kid,” he said, eyebrows raised. “To answer your question, I’m not a cousin. I’m a guest, I suppose.”

Now that, Devon understood. “You’re very rude, then,” she said, hands on hips. “If you really are a guest to the house, you’re supposed to tell me who you are and where you’re from.”

She knew that non-Cousin people existed in the world: humans, who ate animal flesh and dirty plants plucked from the soil. But guest or not, Family or not, everyone had to show what Uncle Aike called basic courtesy.

“Is that so?” A tentative smile. “Very well, my apologies. I’m Amarinder Patel, or ‘Mani’ for short. I’m a journalist from London. Do you know London?”

Devon nodded. Everybody knew London. That was where the Gladstones lived, far down south. They were the biggest, richest, and most powerful of the Families. She’d met some of their visiting cousins once.

“And you are?” Mani’s smile stabilized, became more genuine.

“I’m Devon Fairweather of the Six Families,” she informed him. “All of this land belongs to Fairweather Manor.”

“The Six Families?” he echoed.

Devon gave up being polite. “What’s a jerna . . . jernaliss?” If he wasn’t going to do the right words, then neither would she.

“Jour-na-list,” he said, with slow emphasis. “The investigative kind. That means I do research and go chasing strange stories. Sometimes, the things I discover appear on the telly. Isn’t that exciting?”

“What’s the telly?”

Another pause, shorter this time. He was learning to hide his surprise.

“Devon . . . interesting name, by the way . . . I actually came here in search of your family. There are rumors about a remote clan living in the moors. I was hoping I could write a story—”

“A story? Like, a new one?” Devon was immediately interested. “Can all jour-na-lists write stories?”

“Well—”

“Will you write one just for me?” Questions burst from her in an excited flurry. “Can I eat it when you’re done? I’ve never had a story written for me to eat!”

The smile slid from his face, like melting snow from a roof. “Eat it?”

“Is that how stories are made? I always wondered but Uncle Aike said he’d tell me when I was older. How do you write a story? I can’t write a story. Will it be a book when you’re Finished? Do all stories become books?”

“You can’t write?” he said, bewildered.

“Huh? Of course not!” She goggled at him. “How can we write?” If book eaters could write, they wouldn’t need other people’s books. The uncles had told her that.

Mani let out a slow breath. “I see.” He turned up the collar of his coat. “Do you have a mum or dad?” When she looked confused, he added, lips twisting, “Someone who looks after you. A grown-up.”

“Oh. D’you mean Uncle Aike?” Devon said, trying not to let her disappointment show. Uncle Aike got all the visitors. “I guess I could take you to him.” She knew the stranger wouldn’t be wanting to see the aunts, because nobody ever wanted to see the aunts.

“Sure,” Mani said darkly. “Let’s meet your uncle Aike.”

Devon skipped through the snowdrifts, disappointment giving way to self-consolation. So what if the visitor wanted to see Uncle Aike? She’d found him first. Ramsey would be so jealous. Her other brothers, too, but she didn’t like them as well as Ramsey; most were much older and very boring and didn’t play with her so much. Anyway, she would rub it in Ramsey’s face all week. Maybe two weeks.

The forest thinned rapidly into rocky hills whose hard edges were softened with frost. The house unfolded into view, giving the illusion of a pop-up children’s book, the ancient parapets jutting uncomfortably against failing winter light. A few of Devon’s brothers were kicking a ball in the wild, overgrown gardens out front. None of them paid any attention to her except Ramsey, who looked over in pure astonishment. Devon took smug pleasure in his shock.

“No power source, no crops, no adequate clothing for any of the children. House in a state of disrepair, and the grounds look poorly tended. Yet they have modern cars on the drive.” Mani was muttering into a small black device with a red flashing light. “Can’t help but wonder what they eat. Insular and isolated, either way. Could these folks be the source of those old local legends?” He caught her staring and smiled disarmingly.

“Follow me!” Devon said, and tugged him, strangely reluctant, beneath the yawning archway into the entrance hall beyond.

A once-rich carpet lay tattered and flat over a rough-hewn stone floor. Crystalline light fixtures hung darkly immaculate, barren of candle or bulb. If they’d ever been lit, Devon had never seen it. The rooms they passed contained low couches or polished wooden tables, the chandeliers and lamps also unused. Walls were thickly lined with shelves, unending shelves. The scent of biblichor suffused everything.

She took a sharp left at the end of the hallway and skipped into the drawing room, Mani trailing after. Several of her uncles were gathered around a particularly large oak table, playing a game of bridge and drinking inktea. The moment Devon and her prize visitor walked in, all conversation ceased. Every head swiveled their way.

“Uncle!” Devon said. “I found a guest!”

“So you have.” Uncle Aike set down his fan of cards. “Who are you, sir?”

“Amarinder Patel, freelance journalist,” Mani said, and extended a hand. “I was looking—”

“This is private property.” Uncle Aike rose slowly. When not stooping, he stood over six feet. “You are not allowed to be here. Journalists, in particular, are not welcome.”

Devon looked on, bewildered. She had never seen her favorite uncle so unfunny. So lacking in Basic Courtesy.

Mani lowered his hand. “I’m sorry, I would have called in advance, but I wasn’t even sure you and your family lived here. There’s no listed phone number on the land registry, no names on the electoral register—”

“Quite so.” Uncle Aike leaned forward, knuckles pressed to the table. “Did it occur to you, Mr. Patel, that perhaps we have no wish to be contacted? Least of all by a journalist. Private citizens are entitled to private lives.”

The air seemed to thicken, stifling Devon’s questions. Something was happening that she didn’t understand, though nobody seemed to be mad at her.

Mani adjusted his glasses. “Very well, I’ll see myself out.”

But Uncle Aike pointed to an empty seat and said, “Nonsense. Done is done, and you are already here. Take a seat, please.” A muscle jumped in his cheek. “This is what you have come for, yes? To find the members of my Family? Well, come and speak to us, and we shall converse like adults.”

“I . . .” Mani fidgeted with his small black machine, turning it over and over in his hands. To the perspective of this fully human man, he had entered a dark and somber room lined with crumbling tomes and populated by looming, pale-faced figures in old-fashioned suits. Not a situation for the faint of heart.

But after a moment, his professionalism and rationality won out. Mani edged over and sat down, squashed between Uncle Bury and Uncle Romford.

“Dev, my dear.” Uncle Aike did not take his eyes off the journalist. “Go and play, yes? We will be a little while, having a chat with Mr. Patel.”

“But . . .” Devon glanced mournfully at the table, where her guest sat rigid. She always had to leave when the grown-ups talked, and it was never fair.

Uncle Aike shifted his gaze toward Devon, shoulders and face softening a little. “Tell you what. Take yourself up to my room, little princess, and find one of the special-edition fairy tales. But off the lowest shelf, mind. Nothing naughty, aye?”

“Oh! I will, I will!” Devon scampered out of the room in excitement. Though fairy tales were all she ever ate, some were better than others, and the special ones in her uncle’s study tasted exquisite: the crisp gold bindings, ribbon bookmarks, bright illustrations with multihued inks. An explosion of color and sparkles, words dangling and lingering on the palate.

The last thing she heard before darting up the stairs was her uncle saying, “Romford, shut that door, if you please.”

She forgot all about them by the time she reached the top of the stairs. Uncle Aike’s study occupied a smallish room on the east wing, and it was here she headed.

Devon slipped in soundlessly. These walls held Renaissance paintings and an eclectic selection of instruments, including a Chinese lute, none of which Devon had ever heard her uncle play. Gifts from ’eaters in other countries, back when traveling abroad had been a little easier. Too much paperwork, nowadays.

A desk and some chairs made for a cozy sitting area; a king-sized bed took up much of the remaining floor space. The windows had long since been boarded over on the inside and fitted with yet more shelves. The closest shelf housed multiple copies of various Arthurian legends; those were usually given to her brothers. Full of stories that girls didn’t need to know.

Below that was a row of fairy tales. “Beauty and the Beast,” “Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty,” and “Snow White.” Various others. All stories of girls who sought and found love, or else who fled their homes and found death. She could almost hear him saying, The lesson is in the story, my dear. That was the shelf her uncle had specified.

Devon had other ideas.

She dug out the little wooden stool her uncle kept under the bed and dragged it over. She could, if she stood on her toes, just reach the tallest shelf, which was much more exciting.

From this vantage point she couldn’t see what books were there, but it didn’t matter. All of those books were forbidden, and thus desirable. Even the most diligent of children got tired of the same meal, day in and day out; she couldn’t miss the chance to try something different.

Her fingers closed around the edge of a paper-bound spine and Devon pulled the book free, nearly losing her balance. Her uncle would be cross if he found out, and she might have to eat nothing except boring dictionaries for a whole week, but the excitement of something forbidden seemed worth the risk.

She sat on the stool and examined her prize. Jane Eyre was stamped across the binding in a perfunctory script. The red leather cover was embossed with an illustration of a young woman surrounded by flowers. The printing date meant that the author was long dead. A shiver ran through her. That words could remain, printed anew and afresh long after the original writer had died, never failed to amaze. Devon flipped it open at random.

Something of vengeance I had tasted for the first time; as aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy: its after-flavour, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned.

How delightfully naughty, how ungirlish and un-princess-like! The idea that vengeance might taste like a particularly exciting book was deeply intriguing. This novel, whatever it was, would surely be far more interesting than the usual fairy tale.

She opened her mouth, teeth unsheathing—and halted. A strange urge came over her to not eat the book at all, but simply to pocket it. To read it, in fact, which was possible to do, if a little wrong.

Reading was a shameful thing. We consume written knowledge, her aunts and uncles had said so many times. We consume and store and collect all forms of paper flesh as the Collector created us to do, clothed as we are in the skin of humankind. But we do not read, and we cannot write.

Which was fine, except that everybody knew the Collector was never coming back. The book eaters would live and die without ever passing on their gathered information to the Collector’s unknowable data vaults. She couldn’t see the purpose behind their purpose.

Besides, taking a book from the top shelf was already wrong. It would not hurt to be just a little bit wronger.

One sin beget another; the decision was made in an instant. Devon stuffed the book inside her shirt to take it back to her own room, over in the western wing. She picked her way through the loft to the other side of the manor then climbed down, slipping into her room. By the time she’d read a chapter and hidden the stolen copy of Jane Eyre under her mattress, nearly an hour had passed.

She re-emerged into the hallway, straightening her dress and trying not to look criminal. The manor was very quiet, even for a wintry afternoon. The aunts were likely sequestered up in their quarters, from which they rarely emerged. The only sounds were the raucous yelling and shouting of her brothers milling outside but even that seemed muted, and more subdued than when she’d brought Mani through.

She jolted upright. The journalist! How had she forgotten about her guest? Devon took the steps two at a time and half sprinted back toward the drawing room.

But her guest was already gone. In fact, the drawing room was empty except for Uncle Aike, who sat by the fireplace with his feet on a stool. He looked up as Devon entered, and waved her over. “Come in, love. Have a seat.”

She snuggled into the chair next to her uncle. “Where’s the jour-na-list?”

“Mr. Patel is resting, in a room in the cellar.” Uncle Aike had the gentlest hands, never snagging or tugging as he finger-combed through Devon’s tangles. “Tomorrow morning, knights will come to take him away.”

“Away?” She had only met knights once. They’d been serious and scary, not at all nice or funny like her uncle. “Where to?”

“To Ravenscar Manor,” he said, after a moment of hesitation. “It is near the coast, many miles from here. The patriarch there has a use for humans.”

“Oh,” Devon said, crestfallen that another house would get to steal her guest. “I wanted him to stay.”

“I’m sorry, princess. I know you did. But I’m afraid Mr. Patel was not a pleasant man. He wished to tell stories about us to other people.”

“Stories are good things. Aren’t they?”

“Not all stories are good things, no.” Uncle Aike kissed the side of her head. “You only have the right books to eat in this house, because we only give you the right stories, appropriate for a little princess. However, some stories are certainly bad, and your poor Mr. Patel would have written very bad stories.”

Devon mulled that over. “Does that mean he was a broken writer?”

“Of a sort.” He seemed amused by what she’d said. “Yes, that is a good enough description.”

“Oh, I see! Are the Ravenscars going to fix him, Uncle?”

“They certainly will, love,” said her uncle, gazing into the fire. “They certainly will.”

Copyright © 2022 by Sunyi Dean. Excerpted from The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean. 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

Sunyi Dean is an autistic author of fantasy fiction. The Book Eaters is her debut novel. Originally born in the States and raised in Hong Kong, she now lives in Yorkshire with her children. When not reading, running, falling over in yoga, or rolling d20s, she sometimes escapes the city to wildswim in lonely dales.

Book Review: The All-Consuming World, by Cassandra Khaw

Aigner Loren Wilson | 392 words

The All-Consuming World
Cassandra Khaw
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 978-1645660200
Erewhon, September 2021, 288 pgs

As an immortal criminal who comes back from the dead in different cyborg bodies, death has touched Maya more times than she’d like. It’s all a part of the lifestyle of a space bandit, though. Crimes. Death. Resurrection. Still reeling over the last unfortunate heist with her crew, the Dirty Dozen, leaving some of the team dead and gone for good, Maya wants to pick at the scab and find answers to what went wrong on planet Dimmuborgir. So, she gets some of the crew together, and it’s just like old times, except there’s way more at stake.

The All-Consuming World by Khaw has an all-consuming voice that kicks off from the start and never seems to let up. Even though the perspectives change from Maya to other important characters throughout the story, each characters’ voice carries the same intensity through the whole debut novel. Together, the characters help weave the intricate mystery at the heart of Dimmuborgir and Maya’s past.

While positioned as your regular old “let’s-assemble-the-old-crew-and-pull-another-heist”—you know Gone in 60 Seconds but in space with sentient planets, dangerous AI, cyborgs, and all manner of future crime activity—The All-Consuming World is less about the criminal and heist aspect and more about the characters and how their search for truth will hopefully set them free from their disastrous pasts and how it all shapes them.

While reading this novel, sometimes I felt like it was going so fast I didn’t care what was happening, I was just glad to be along for the ride of Khaw’s beautiful prose. How each of the characters would express themselves often caught me off guard and made me think about how we, in real life, communicate. Which is always what I want great thought-provoking science fiction to do: make me question the real by playing out themes in the unreal.

Khaw’s fictional world (and its characters) is a wonderfully unreal and imaginative backdrop for this story of cyberpunk rebellion.

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: Tune in Tomorrow, by Randee Dawn

Chris Kluwe | 889 words

Tune in Tomorrow
Randee Dawn
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 978-1786186300
Solaris, August 2022, 464 pages

Greetings, everyone, and I hope you all know what time it is—that’s right, time for another book review! This month we’ll be looking at a clever comedic romp through the mysteries of fae reality television in Randee Dawn’s debut novel, Tune in Tomorrow.

When I first started reading Tune in Tomorrow, I have to admit I wasn’t expecting much. As someone who is most definitely not a fan of reality television (but occasionally forced to consume it due to my spouse’s viewing habits, please don’t talk to me about housewives of any city), I figured the plot would be a simple repackaging of familiar reality TV tropes with a light dusting of fantasy sprinkled on top, about as substantial as a cotton candy umbrella.

I am happy to tell you all that I was completely wrong. Tune in Tomorrow is a hilariously well-constructed story with surprising complexity, and one that uses its reality TV premise not as a destination, but as a jumping off point to create something uniquely interesting that stays entertaining the entire way through.

A summary in brief—our protagonist, Starr Weatherby (stage name, obviously) has been looking for her big break in New York for the past ten years, but the only thing breaking is her spirit. Ready to give up entirely, she’s approached to join a show that sounds a little out of this world, which it in fact is—it’s the longest running reality show on the other side of the Veil, where the assorted folks of the fae get their kicks watching humans be, well, human (for a given value of human). Assorted hijinks ensue, which I won’t spoil here because it’s far more fun to read them happening in the book, and Starr finds that she might just have what it takes after all.

The first thing that really struck me while reading Tune in Tomorrow is that Dawn is clearly knowledgeable about the ins and outs of reality television, especially the blending of scripted events and natural reactions (wrestling fans know this as “kayfabe”), but the way she deploys her knowledge is always in service towards a deeper objective—whether it be Starr’s emotional growth, building the intricacies of the world beyond the Veil, or advancing the mystery at the heart of the story—rather than using it as a “look what I know that you don’t” piece of filler. I genuinely felt like I got to look behind the curtain of what goes on during a reality show without it feeling forced or out of place, which is a tricky needle to thread, but Dawn does it wonderfully.

The second thing that stood out was how much Dawn cares about the mythology of the fae. It would have been easy to slap on some mushroom circles and pixie dust and call it a day, but Dawn draws from multiple cultures and references to create the world beyond the Veil, and as a result it feels beautifully chaotic in a way that makes it real. The inhabitants (including several of Starr’s coworkers) of the Veil shift effortlessly between recognizable humanity such that you wouldn’t be surprised to have coffee with them at a nine a.m. meeting, and terrifyingly alien personifications of magic older than time (that still expect you to show up to that nine a.m. meeting ready to go to work), and it’s a testament to Dawn’s writing skill that she makes them flow seamlessly from one to the other. The world of Tune in Tomorrow was never quite what I expected, and that was a very good thing indeed.

The last, and I think most important thing, is that Tune in Tomorrow is a book filled with heart. There’s an underlying acknowledgement that, yes, reality TV as a thing is inherently silly, a modern day soap opera that isn’t necessarily “real,” but that there are still people who devote their time and passion to making it as real as it can be, that care about what they’re doing, and there are a lot of other people that care about what’s being made, despite being able to see past the illusion any time they want. Dawn doesn’t ask us to care about the plot of Starr’s show, because the plot of any reality show is always going to be absurd, she asks us to care about the people, and in that she succeeds admirably.

Overall, Tune in Tomorrow is an excellent read if you’re looking for something to make you smile; a story that holds a mirror up to a shallow surface and shows us the depths lurking on the other side; and well worth your time.

Read if: You’ve ever wanted a river of rum; you appreciate the importance of brownie unions; you hate glitter.

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: Our Shadows Have Claws, edited by Méndez & Ortiz

Arley Sorg | 1399 words

Our Shadows Have Claws: 15 Latin American Monster Stories
Yamile Saied Méndez, Amparo Ortiz, eds.
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781643751832
Algonquin Young Readers, September 2022, 368 pgs

Those of us who use Twitter know that it can be a truly terrible place. As an open forum with no fees, it draws a range of folks, not all of them well-meaning. But it can also be a great place: an easy way to meet people, to do business, or to find inspiration. Amparo Ortiz writes in her acknowledgements to Our Shadows Have Claws: “It all started with a tweet . . . I asked editors to put together an anthology featuring monsters from different Latine cultures. People asked me to edit it instead and offered to contribute their stories. Turns out, others were craving more Latine horror.”

I’ve reviewed a number of anthologies whose purpose, at least in part, is to amplify voices of folks who aren’t being seen as much in genre. This includes Latinx Screams, Reclaim the Stars, El Porvenir, ¡Ya!, and others; and there are a number of other anthologies I didn’t review (but which you should still check out) like Speculative Fiction for Dreamers, Latinx Rising, and more. You might be tempted to wonder why readers would still be craving a book like this.

But . . . please don’t.

Okay, I can’t keep you from wondering, or even asking. But instead of giving you some statistics, I’ll give you homework: go to the Barnes and Noble site, or the Waterstones site, type in the words “horror anthology” and see what comes up. Sure, there are some good books. But you still don’t see a lot of anthologies edited by people of color pushed onto that first page. The books are out there, friends, and they are awesome! (I invite you to browse through my Lightspeed reviews for a few recommendations.) And if you look through the tables of contents of the anthologies that do come up, you’ll find only a few authors of color in most of them. In fact, some of these books will actually have no authors of color. End of the day? The average reader is seeing maybe 400 stories or so on that first page alone, and very few of them are by Latine authors.

The authors are out there! Books are happening! But the struggle is still very real, y’all.

Yamile Saied Méndez and Amparo Ortiz have gathered an assortment of fun horror pieces in Our Shadows Have Claws. Each of these authors knows how to put together a story. You could buy this book, kick back on the couch with a glass of wine (dark red, of course), pick a random story, and be entertained. But I’ll talk about a few that I particularly enjoyed.

“Leave No Tracks” by Julia Alvarez centers on Guapa, whose father left her mother to raise a more “acceptable” family. The dad kept Guapa and her mom a secret, mostly helping to raise Guapa by proxy and by money. While Guapa didn’t want for material things, she definitely wanted for that paternal relationship. At the outset of the story, Guapa’s mother commits suicide. Guapa’s loneliness is sharpened, and to complicate things, she leaves her home to accompany the body, to meet relatives she has never met before. In the course of her journey, she must reconcile the disparate parts of herself, not only learning more about who she really is, but figuring out how to embrace that intersectionality. It’s as much about discovering yourself as it is about belonging, or letting yourself belong, especially when you’ve been raised by one group of people to see yourself (or to be seen) in only particular ways. The story is smoothly told and well-delivered.

Gabriela Martins contributes “Bloodstained Hands Like Yours,” about an orphan named Olivia who just turned eighteen. Her best friend Jenny found a home just in time, but Olivia finds herself sleeping nights by a statue, along with just over twenty other people—most of them, she’s not sure she can trust. Her sense of worth plummets. Needing some sense of purpose—especially seeing Jenny’s many options—when Olivia finds out people have been going missing, she swears to get rid of the killer. Unfortunately for her, the killer may have taken notice . . . The narrative gives us the journey of a strong-willed individual finding her purpose, and her sense of self-worth, while simultaneously offering sobering observations about the failures of important systems, such as the child welfare system. It’s a strong entry which layers meanings while never losing sight of the central character and her journey.

One of the strengths of “The Boy from Hell” by Amparo Ortiz is the author’s clever turns of phrase. Combined with a lilt of humor and a lovely conversational style, this story is just a pleasure to read, and to smirk along with as you do. “Hell is a pretty face with bad intentions,” it begins, and if that isn’t a good opening line, I don’t know what is. (And I actually do know good opening lines!) Diem is a monster hunter in training, and her family has a history of bad blood with a specific frío, El Vampiro de Moca. Turns out that this particular frío may be active again. When one of Diem’s classmates comes to her, concerned for the safety of his sister, Diem decides it’s time to deal with the shadow that’s been hanging over her family since her grandma’s time as a hunter. It’s an engrossing piece, with good subtext on gender and empowerment, colorism, and more.

Many of the stories in this book feature great characters, but Pinky was one of my faves. In “Sugary Deaths” by Lilliam Rivera, Pinky is a fierce young girl who dominates the local Pac-Man table. One day, a young man shows up, aged twenty-three to her seventeen. He knocks her out of the top score spot. Then he challenges her to play, but she senses that something is . . . off, so she declines. He’s handsome and just arrogant enough and, of course, everyone is eager to befriend him. It doesn’t take long for Pinky to figure out what is off about him, and she decides to do something about it. The narrative style is straightforward, which propels the story, and the family dynamics add a level of enjoyment. It’s a really cool piece.

“The Nightingale and the Lark” by Chantel Acevedo is something of a Romeo and Juliet story. In fact, the main characters are Julio and Rosa. In this version, Rosa is a young monster hunter and Julio is from a family who believes in saving and protecting monsters. The piece is well-told, with descriptions that make the read immersive. The tale first leans into the romance, then the conundrum of the conflict between the two families. The standard family conflict is further nuanced, however, by class conflict, and nuanced again by examining ideas of monsterhood. The pieces are familiar, but they are all put together very nicely, making a lively read.

Many of the stories share certain thematic elements. There are conversations around race, around gender, around family, and a fair number of them tackle different kinds of belonging or self-acceptance (or both). What’s wonderful about these selections is that they don’t lose sight of telling a good story; they keep it entertaining, while shining a light on the truths that are around us every day. There’s a lovely range of monsters to be discovered, and part of the fun is in discovering the different ways they’re utilized across narratives and perspectives. The book also features illustrations by Ricardo López Ortiz, which adds to the overall pleasure of the read. Sometimes bloody, sometimes sharp, this set of stories is worth adding to your collection. Pick it up, pay money for it, and help those bookstore algorithms to showcase a much broader range of works!

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 and a 2022 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 a 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, run workshops, and been a guest for Clarion West, the Odyssey Writing Workshop, Cascade Writers, Augur Magazine, and more. 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: Adam-Troy Castro

Laurel Amberdine | 305 words

How did “My Future Self, Refused” originate?

Alas, this story originated with life and death. You can see that I am the viewpoint character, and that the drama taking place in the foreground is the events concurrent with the sudden illness and untimely death of my wife Judi. I wish the story hadn’t originated, but we can’t always get what we want. It is the second, and I hope, final story specifically driven by this loss (the other being “Judi”— bit.ly/JudiStory—also on Lightspeed), but I suspect that this life input will be showing up in stories for some time.

What is your writing process like? Did this story fit the pattern?

Usually I write between a thousand and two thousand words per day. With this story it was 4500 words a day. It was autobiography with a science fictional twist, and it was therapy, and it came out in a kind of explosion. It needed to exist.

Is there anything you want to make sure readers noticed?

Because this story references other Judi-inspired stories that have appeared in Lightspeed, its publication here comes complete with links to those stories.

Do you have any advice for other writers?

Don’t be comfortable. If what you write strikes you as routine, it will feel routine. Dig deep.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

This summer you will find new stories in Pulphouse and in the anthology, Three Time Travelers Walk Into . . .; I have a new collection, The Author’s Wife vs The Giant Robot And Other Stories.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in Portland and works (remotely) for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Merc Fenn Wolfmoor

Laurel Amberdine | 928 words

How did “So, You Married Your Arch Nemesis . . . Again” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

It started with a snippet of dialogue, I think it was one of the opening conversations between Sol and Teo (though I don’t recall exactly which bit), that popped into my head one night before bed. This seems to be a common means of inspiration for me. Initially, I was thinking the story would just be the interview, but that felt incomplete when there was nothing for Sol to change by the end.

Around the same time, I’d been thinking about a space opera project I have been dabbling on for ages, and I was playing Skyrim again and having fun reading all the books. It sort of clicked in my head that maybe what this story was lacking was the “in world” texts . . . so I started with one, and then it just expanded wildly from there and the connected narratives of identity and representation and connection all gelled in my head. Also, I have always wanted an excuse to write a video game cut scene.

What is your writing process like? Did this story fit the pattern?

So, in general, I am almost incapable of writing in order, in a chronological sense. I may start at the beginning, but then immediately I tend to jump around until I have assembled a bunch of pieces and I can see how they fit together. For short stories, it tends to be easier—and there are, in fact, times I’ve probably written something start to finish in chronological order, I just can’t think of examples, haha—because something <7.5k words is more manageable when juggling the different scenes and figuring out the narrative flow. (Longer fiction is . . . challenging at times.)

For this story, it totally fit my internal patterns, because I wrote everything out of order and then in revisions, went back and arranged things. For example, I believe I wrote the opening scene, the “unaired” conversation, and then the ending as one “chunk” and then went through to add the interconnected scenes that would lead up to the climax. I also wrote all the book excerpts separately and then planted them throughout; that was tricky because it was like writing five different stories with dual endings and then weaving them into the podcast narrative.

It was a blast, but it was hard.

That does sound complicated! Did you get stuck at any point while writing? How did you get past that?

Oh, for sure—when I had the initial “podcast” parts of the narrative figured out, I kept getting stuck with where to place the different excerpts. I juggled them around so much! Because I was playing with multiple genres (space opera, DOOM-esque video game cutscenes, noir, high fantasy, zombies) and the framing story is an interview podcast, it was a lot of trying different combinations of where things “felt right” in relation to the interview segments.

Eventually, I just made multiple copies of the document, placed the textual pieces in different orders, and then read through the story to see which felt the most natural and flowed the best. This was important to get right because I wanted the final ending sequence—when we see how the stories have been changed—to flow and build to a triumphant conclusion, while also staying more or less in the same order as the snippets appear in the narrative.

I think the drafting itself took a couple weeks, and then the refining/revision stage took me months to get it right. I’m super happy with the ending result though.

What were your favorite elements to write in this story?

Oh man, I loved writing the interview segments but I think my heart goes out to the DOOM homage cutscenes and the noir sections. Those were so much fun. (I also now want to write a full-length story in the noir ‘verse . . .)

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

Recently I’ve been devouring (heh) a lot of the horror story collections published by Velox Books, from various authors. I’ve long admired—and been inspired by!—John Wiswell, and it gives me such joy to see continually more and more stories from him out in the wild. If you haven’t read “The Coward Who Stole God’s Name” then I recommend rectifying that immediately, because it’s awesome.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I’m participating in the Inkfort Press’s 2022 Publishing Derby which means the Secret Project I’m writing won’t be revealed until October, and I can’t tell you anything about it. But I am hella enjoying the process of writing something based on a cover/pen name and maintaining a secret identity.

I’m also working on finishing up a new short story collection that I hope will be out the end of August (titled These Imperfect Reflections: Short Stories) and a December release, Monster Girls Don’t Cry: Short Stories.

(I have . . . a lot of short fiction. I never realized how much until I started assembling collections!)

The best place to find my stuff is my website: mercfennwolfmoor.com or my newsletter (linked on the site) for updates.

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: Ruben Reyes Jr.

Laurel Amberdine | 557 words

How did this story originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

In the months before drafting “SyncALife,” I experienced a loss that made me think about how easy it is to fondly remember a loved one, but miles more difficult to discuss the harm they might have caused in their lifetimes. This felt especially true of men—and paternal figures—who seem to receive more grace when it comes to their shortcomings. This story was a way of exploring the long-term effects of hypermasculinity, which led me to create the father-son dynamic in the story, which is an extreme, made-up situation that let me work through these themes.

What is your writing process like? Did this story fit the pattern?

It depends on the story, but I usually write an unnecessarily long draft that I can then tighten. This was my experience with this story, though the general plot remained the same throughout. After workshopping the story during my MFA, I tweaked some of the details to give the story more tension and quicker pacing. It would have been a far worse story without my classmates’ careful and thoughtful feedback, so a massive thank you to them.

Is there anything you want to make sure readers noticed?

Even though the narrator is in a relationship with a man, I thought it was important that he be bisexual. In part, I made the choice because bisexual representation is so rare in popular media, but also because I wanted the story to work against easy binaries. It’s also why his gender expression remains dynamic throughout the story and as he works as a camboy. Ultimately, the story is about the dangers of forcing someone to fit into a stereotypical role when it comes to their gender or sexuality, so it was important that the narrator remained true to his own identity, regardless of what his father desired from him.

What have you been reading lately?

My reading life spans a lot of different genres. Recently, I’ve loved Valleyesque by Fernando A. Flores, How Not Drown in a Glass of Water by Angie Cruz, and Diaries of a Terrorist by Christopher Soto.

What trends in speculative fiction would you like to see gain popularity in the next few years?

For much of its history, speculative fiction has upheld some really dangerous ideologies—white supremacy, patriarchy, the police state. I’m most excited by authors who use genre fiction to critique systems that continue to hurt the most vulnerable people; writers like Octavia Butler, Nana Kwame Adeji-Brenyah, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, and Brenda Peynado, among others. I hope that critical, socially conscious speculative fiction continues to be published. We’ll need it to survive the perilous times we’re currently living through.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I recently completed a short story collection and novel that I’m shopping around. If readers liked the robot in this story, they can check out a story I published about migrant cyborgs from Central America. They can find it and other recent publications at my website, rubenreyesjr.com.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in Portland and works (remotely) for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Tobi Ogundiran

Laurel Amberdine | 529 words

How did “The Clockmaker and His Daughter” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I was doomscrolling through Twitter, as one does, when I came across this lovely illustration by Serena Maylon (bit.ly/3QXpT2c), of a man who seemed to be a giant sitting in the middle of a city he was creating. It looked like something out of a fairytale, and it intrigued me to no end. I immediately wanted to know his story, why he was creating the city, and in seeking the answers to these questions, a story was born.

Do you have any advice for other writers?

Read widely. Read any and everything, but also read consciously. The process of reading is one-half of apprenticeship. Just as you can’t be a carpenter without first studying and understanding the works of those before you. With conscious reading you start to get a feel for what works and what doesn’t, the things you’ll like to try your hands on.

The other thing is to write and finish what you start. It’s really easy to start, but finishing is a whole other beast. But it is important you learn to take a story from conception to completion. Only then can you really see the whole picture, and refine appropriately to tell the story you want to tell.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

Lately I’ve been reading and enjoying Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. I’ve also just started Alex Jennings’ The Ballad of Perilous Graves and am loving it—music as magic is a trope I’ll die for. As for writers that inspire me, there are a whole lot of them, but I find myself returning often to the works of Neil Gaiman, Ursula LeGuin, Ray Bradbury, Octavia Butler, and Joe Abercrombie.

Other than writing, do you have any other creative pursuits? What do you do to relax?

In my spare time I love to make music. I am a multi-instrumentalist (acoustic and electric guitar, keys, drums and bass). I’m also trying to learn the saxophone. I used to make beats but haven’t had time for that in a while. I’m one of those outlier writers who can never write to music because then my music brain kicks in and I’ll spend the session analysing the vocal harmonies, chord progressions, and key changes that I won’t be able to focus on writing. So I write in silence.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I’ve recently completed a fantasy novella about Yoruba gods. Hopefully that gets to see the light of day. My debut collection of dark and fantastical tales, Jackal, Jackal, will be out from Undertow Publications in summer 2023, so that’s something to look forward to. Links to my other short fiction are available on my website at tobiogundiran.com/fiction.

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 | 230 words

Coming up in September, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Adam-Troy Castro (“Conflagration at the Museum of You”) and RJ Theodore (“The Application of Strawberry Lip Gloss in a Low-Gravity Environment”). We also have a flash piece (“Civilian Assumptions”) from Dominique Dickey, along with an SF reprint by Karl Schroeder (“Eminence”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Kristina Ten (“The Queen of the Earless Seals of Lake Baikal”) and Martin Cahill (“Her Five Farewells”). We also have a flash piece (“The Inheritance of Dust and Leather”) from Jenny Rae Rappaport. Our fantasy reprint is by Cody Goodfellow (“The Sister City”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with book reviews from our terrific review team. Our ebook readers will also enjoy 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: Alex Irvine, P H Lee, Maria Dong, John Wiswell, Rich Larson, 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) [forthcoming]

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live

Cosmic Powers

Dead Man’s Hand

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: Ignorance is Strength (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: Burn the Ashes (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: Or Else the Light (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

Epic: Legends of Fantasy

Federations

The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects

Lightspeed: Year One

The Living Dead

The Living Dead 2

Loosed Upon the World

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.