TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 148, September 2022

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: September 2022

SCIENCE FICTION

The CRISPR Cookbook: A Guide to Biohacking Your Own Abortion in a Post-Roe World
MKRNYILGLD

Civilian Assumptions
Dominique Dickey

The Application of Strawberry Lip Gloss in a Low-Gravity Environment
R J Theodore

Eminence
Karl Schroeder

FANTASY

The Inheritance of Dust and Leather
Jenny Rae Rappaport

The Queen of the Earless Seals of Lake Baikal
Kristina Ten

The Sister City
Cody Goodfellow

Her Five Farewells
Martin Cahill

EXCERPTS

Desert Creatures
Kay Chronister

NONFICTION

Book Review: She and Her Cat, by Makoto Shinkai, translated by Naruki Nagakawa
Aigner Loren Wilson

Book Review: Africa Risen, edited by Thomas, Ekpeki, & Knight
Arley Sorg

Book Review: Other Terrors, edited by Liaguno & Mason
Chris Kluwe

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Kristina Ten

RJ Theodore

Martin Cahill

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 Grandeduc / Adobe Stock Image

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

Editorial: September 2022

John Joseph Adams | 240 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 148th issue!

Our first SF story of the month might be one of our most timely. From writer MKRNYILGLD comes “The CRISPR Cookbook: A guide to biohacking your own abortion in a post-Roe world,” and the title does a great job describing it. Be sure not to miss it. Our flash SF this month, “Civilian Assumptions,” comes from Dominique Dickey, while our second piece of full-length SF is a wildly delightful story of bounty hunters, space travel, and strawberry lip gloss. Yes: lip gloss. Please enjoy R J Theodore’s “The Application of Strawberry Lip Gloss in a Low-Gravity Environment.” Our SF reprint this month is “Eminence,” by Karl Schroeder.

Jenny Rae Rappaport returns with “The Inheritance of Dust and Leather,” a flash fantasy story that’s a tale as old as time (or at least libraries). Kristina Ten’s story of seals and bad marriages, “The Queen of the Earless Seals of Lake Baikal,” will touch your heart, as will Martin Cahill’s magical “Her Five Farewells.” Our fantasy reprint is “The Sister City,” by Cody Goodfellow.

Our review teams have been busy reading great new books, and our author spotlight interviewer has put together fascinating questions for our writers. If you’re one of our ebook readers, you’ll enjoy an excerpt from Desert Creatures, a new novel by Kay Chronister.

It’s another terrific month, so thanks for reading!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

The CRISPR Cookbook: A Guide to Biohacking Your Own Abortion in a Post-Roe World

MKRNYILGLD | 2380 words

If you’re reading this—on some godforsaken imageboard, or dog-eared book page, or in encrypted base pairs sequenced off 3D-printed oligos—you’re probably grappling with a pretty tough decision right now.

Breathe.

I’m not judging you. I know how it goes. You tried your best but nothing’s infallible, or you slipped up one night, or he just straight-up went, your biological clock’s ticking, and hacked your birth control, knowing once it happens you won’t have a choice. The second his sperm enters your egg, he’s done, back to his star-studded career cranking out Science and Cell papers, and you’re stuck at home—with everything from your calories to your screen time dictated to you by Big Brother—hoping your research project will still be waiting for you after the baby pops out.

Listen: in the twenty-five years since the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe, we might’ve had our rights chipped away, little by little—but we’ve gained so much more. There’s a law of equivalent exchange that absolutely cannot be fucked with. The more protests get crushed on the streets, the more bubbles up underneath. And what’s under America is a bioreactor. A rising in every single one of the trillions of cells that make up our bodies, our chromosomes, in every single one of our tens of thousands of genes. They said you don’t have a choice, but, by reading this, you’re making one.

You’re taking back your DNA.

WHAT YOU’LL NEED

1. Pipettes. Own ten assault rifles and the cops won’t blink twice, but let the DHB catch you with these you’ll wind up in a re-ed camp faster than you can say “homemade vole-pox.” Luckily, plenty of these puppies got dumped into circulation before the Homeland Biosecurity Act of 2030. Scour your local community groups for a helix motif, woven into baskets or crocheted into scarves. Tell the father, sweetly, that you’re going to pick up some organics for dinner. If your pregnancy officer makes a fuss, tell him you’ll bike over, the fresh air will be good for the baby.

You’re looking for a certain kind of stall, one that’s cropped up at farmers’ markets all across the nation. Their heirloom tomatoes will be slightly out of season, but still firework-bright. Their ears of corn will be popping with kernels of color you’ve never seen anywhere else. And perhaps the cat sitting in the shade will have a bit of a bioluminescent glow. Strike up a conversation with the vendor, say something like, Now that I’ve got months and months stuck at home, I’ve been thinking of experimenting with my garden too. And then you’ll be in.

2. Chemically competent cells, ideally RecA negative, at least six vials. The co-op you’ve made contact with will set you up with their microorganism dealer. Don’t fall for the sketchy types that’ll try to peddle you a virus they claim will solve your “problem” directly. You don’t want to become patient zero for the latest MERS-Marburg superspreader cocktail. You might think you’re fighting back. But you’ll just end up becoming a carrier for someone else.

3. The plastics. AKA the disposables you need for everything you do in the lab: the pipette tips, the plates, the columns for DNA purification. The co-op will have some kind of 3D printer you can negotiate time on. It shouldn’t be difficult. These groups always need extra pairs of hands. You might find yourself caring for someone else’s cells or setting up PCR reactions or doing any other kind of grunt lab work. There’s no hierarchy here. Just a one-to-one exchange, hours for hours so everyone can be home on time to be the loving spouse. You might be helping someone produce insulin, or chemotherapy drugs, or hormones. No one asks so no one can be forced to talk, but in the case of a DHB bust you’re all getting shipped off to a re-ed camp, anyway. Who says the spirit of scientific collaboration is dead?

4. Transfection reagent. This is the stuff you’ll need to actually get your construct into your cells. Essentially positively-charged lipid particles that will help carry your payload through your cell membranes. Luckily, this shit is absolutely everywhere now that all our vaccines are nucleic acid-based. Find a sympathetic pharmacist and pay her under the table for some castoffs. Crack the bottles open. You’re going to need a few milliliters.

5. A CRISPR vector. I’m not talking about the first generation, straight-laced, Nobel-winning CRISPR/Cas9—or the off-the-walls, hyperactive, second generation Cas15-11. You need a third generation construct, the kind the DHB will break down your door in the middle of the night for if they catch wind of it. I’m talking synCas-X. It’s integral for all kinds of biological research now, but the feds slapped a Class Five Teratogen label on it, making it illegal for anyone at risk of getting pregnant to touch. Luckily, no one in the co-op’s going to tell you what you can and can’t “grow.” By now you should’ve gained enough trust to get some time on the DNA printer (a pre-2030 model, or one that’s jailbroken to get around the lentiviral sequence filters). You’ll synthesize it block by block.

Meanwhile, you’re bringing home plenty of vegetables, making ratatouille, marinara sauce, healthy fresh meals night after night. Harvesting crops, you’ll tell your pregnancy officer when he asks about the farm you’re spending so much time on. Potluck clubs with the girls. You’ll make him fried squash blossoms, better than any of the crap he gets in the mess hall, and he won’t suspect a thing. And when you finally get those microliters of vector, you’ll hold it up to the light. You’ll marvel that synCas-X can look like nothing at all.

THE PRINCIPLE

It’s actually very simple. What you’re going to do is hack your immune system. Think about it. What’s the immune system’s job? It detects foreign, or non-self, cells and destroys them. But it doesn’t always succeed. One of immunology’s biggest mysteries was how an embryo can develop without triggering the mother’s immune system. I say was, because in 2037, scientists finally figured it out. Like many biologists who solved something big, they were working in another field entirely, without even realizing the significance of their findings.

Cancer is another blind spot of the immune system. In part because tumor cells share so much DNA with their host—they are their host, plus a scattering of cancerous mutations. Scientists had reasoned for decades that they could tweak the immune system to go after those little variations. They tried combinations on combinations of gene deletions, tweaks, duplications, charged patients millions for the hope of personalized medicines. But they could never get it to work. Even their souped-up immune cells weren’t sensitive enough. Models predicted that 40% of a tumor’s genome would have to differ from the host’s as much as another person’s does in order for the treatment to work.

Do you see where I’m going with this? What contains even more non-self DNA than a tumor? What gets 50% of its DNA from another individual entirely? An individual who’s taken to coming home and wrapping his arms around you, hands on your stomach, after a hard day’s work—whispering in your ear about how he knows how hard it’s been for you, but he just has to get this faculty position, then he’ll be there for you and the baby 100%, he’ll make it up to you, he’s asking for a small lab for you to run, attached to his own. And have you started thinking of names for your son?

THE PROCEDURE

1. Design guide RNAs to knock out the following immune checkpoint genes: PDCD1, CD274, CTLA4, TIGIT, LAG3, and their little friend FAM594B. You know the drill: Put them as early in the first exon after the start codon as possible, with BbsI restriction sites at the ends. Print the oligos out, anneal them in a water bath brought to boil and cooled, and clone them into your CRISPR vector. It’s normal to have failed reactions, especially on hot nights. Does it remind you of your first research internship, all the flies buzzing around? Wipe your tears and push through.

2. Transform your vectors into your chemically competent bacteria. Grow up two liters under selection and purify using a standard maxi-prep kit. Tell your pregnancy officer you’re babysitting late for a friend, learning everything you can in preparation. You have to move quick. You don’t want this to take more than a few weeks.

3. Draw ten milliliters of your blood. Pipette five milliliters on top of five milliliters of your favorite density gradient. Spin it down at 500g for one hour at room temperature. You want the peripheral blood mononuclear cell layer. It’s the cloudy layer right under the layer of plasma. If you’re having trouble pipetting it out, ask for help. The co-op gets it—the single moms in kerchiefs, the teen runaways showing their hair loss proud. Isolating T-cells is a standard protocol for homebrew cancer therapies.

4. Transfer the PBMCs to a 3D-printed 10 cm plate. Incubate for one hour. This will separate the monocytes, which should stick to the plate bottom, from the lymphocytes, which include your T-cells (along with B-cells, which are a pain to separate, so it’s fine if they come along too). If nothing or everything is sticking, something’s probably wrong with your 3D printer filament. Trash the plate and try again.

5. The next day, your lymphocytes will be ready for transfection. Mix the CRISPR construct purified from your competent cells with your vaccine lipid particles. Incubate for half an hour and pipette on top of your lymphocytes. Incubate for forty-eight hours and replace with fresh media. Let them grow for four more days. This is the easy part.

6. Harvest your lymphocytes and deliver them back into your bloodstream via intravenous infusion. Now’s the time to check out your co-op’s book or knitting club. It’s what it sounds like, except everyone hooks up their homebrew chemo or antiviral IV bags before settling in for the afternoon. You’ll feel like shit.

7. Get yourself sick. Now’s the time to grab yourself a weak version of SARS-Cov, courtesy of your micro-dealer. It’ll help activate your immune system and help you avoid suspicion. Doctors still haven’t figured out the long term impacts of Cov-19, so pretty much any symptom you want to pin on it works.

8. Your new T-cells are incredibly efficient. Even an embryo at the one-cell stage will be detected. It will be over in a day or two.

SIDE EFFECTS

I’m not going to tell you the procedure leaves no traces at all. Like any surgery, it leaves scars. Not on your body, but your genome. Not on an individual, but the entire human race. Your body will no longer be able to host any cells with non-self DNA. That means no tumors, but also no grafts, no organ transplants, and YOU WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO GET PREGNANT AGAIN.

Still reading? I thought so. There’s a reason our country’s birth rate has been plummeting worse than the stock market, year after year.

What does it say when we would rather choose sterility than abide by our country’s laws? That we would rather give up on having children than be forced to birth one? What does it say when our country’s best scientists are trying to develop artificial wombs, trying to develop tools to tear apart genomes and undo what we’ve done rather than address the reason we did it to ourselves in the first place?

The Department of Homeland Biosecurity thinks they know the reason: We’re crazy bitches. They laughed when this protocol first started circulating online, reasoning the only ones who’d do it were the kind of psychos that shouldn’t be reproducing anyway. Undesirables sterilizing themselves, what a win! Then the tides started turning. More and more of us looked at the world burning, more and more of us looked at their sons, the next-gen of DHB men—and instead of reproducing, we picked up pipettes.

Now we’re bioterrorists radicalizing the birthing population, enemies of the State who want to eliminate the proud, American race. How could we be so treasonous? How could we be so unnatural?

What a word, unnatural. You only have to look at Nature herself to understand. When an organism becomes sick, sometimes it can’t get better on its own. Sometimes the very systems that are supposed to patrol the body, eliminating that sickness, ignore it and let it perpetuate instead. In that case, it’s up to the individual cells making up that organism to act on their own. Sometimes when a cell becomes infected, so full of pathogens it can no longer function, it chooses to commit a process called apoptosis. It destroys itself so the rest of the body can become healthy. But that’s an overly simplistic view. Apoptosis has evolved over millions of years into a process integral to development itself. It’s how the webbed paws of our embryos develop into fingers, how our blood vessels are guided, how extraneous neurons shape the mature circuitry of the human brain. It’s the exact opposite of suicide.

This protocol? It’s old news. Like I said, the reversal of Roe was just the beginning. We figured out how to manipulate our genomes out of necessity—and now we’re doing it for all kinds of reasons. You want to keep this pregnancy after reading this? Cool. But maybe you’re interested in something else now. You want to alter your baby’s genome so it’s not biologically related to your sperm donor? You want face mods to fool the cams? You want claws? It’s possible. It’s all possible. DNA is our blueprint, and now it’s fully customizable. In every. Single. Way.

We’re the apoptosis shaping the development of our species. Before us, humanity’s genetic diversity came from reproduction. But what happens when we don’t need that step anymore? What will we become? What are we becoming? You want to see? You want to teach someone? You don’t believe me? Keep reading.

This is only chapter one.

©2022 by MKRNYILGLD.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MKRNYILGLD is a biologist who can give birth. Twitter: @MKRNYILGLD.

Civilian Assumptions

Dominique Dickey | 1346 words

Like their battleship, Maddox was born for war. They emerged from the nursery with one purpose alone: to expand the Consortium’s borders, a bloody mission that had lasted generations, and would last generations to come.

Any civilian raised in the Consortium would know a few things about Maddox: That Maddox goes into battle unafraid. That they believe the Consortium’s cause is a just one. And that they are blindingly in love with their ship.

Like all captains, Maddox raised Olivia—that was what they named their ship, a soft name for a dangerous thing—from a seed, a glowing pearl small enough to fit in their hand. Maddox cupped the ship seed in their palm and whispered, “Hello, little one”—though Maddox knew she wouldn’t be little for long—“my name is Maddox, and it is my highest calling to love and command you.”

In that instant, their minds were linked, Maddox feeling what the little ship felt: the warm cradle of their hand, their gentle voice. Love spread in their chest like a bloodstain wicking along fabric. Maddox knew that they were done for, that they would do anything to keep hold of this feeling.

The love a captain has for their ship is a sacred thing. It is what carries the Consortium through their brutal conquest with minimal loss of life, with minimal damage to their expensive warships. Why risk your life recklessly, if your ship is on the line, too? Why put your ship in needless danger, when you care for your ship like your own limb, when you love your ship like a lover?

Any Consortium civilian would also know that Olivia does not return Maddox’s affection. That ships are emotionless, made for war. That ships are made to be adored but never to reciprocate that devotion. That ships have minds but not hearts.

Ships cannot feel. Ships cannot love. They exist to be piloted into battle. To be used. To be commanded.

This is where a Consortium civilian would be wrong.

Olivia knows that she is not meant to show love. But she knows what love is when the cannon fire comes, tearing through her hull and rupturing her star drive. She knows what love is, because it hurts.

“My hull is breached,” she says, her small voice echoing in Maddox’s mind. “Command the soldiers to evacuate. Go with them.”

Maddox delivers the evacuation order. They never know where to look, when they want the feeling of looking right at Olivia. She’s all around them. She’s in them. Maddox can hardly remember a life before her, and they don’t want a life after her. This is the vow that they have made.

It’s to the blackness of their own eyelids that Maddox says, “I can’t go.”

They are alone in their quarters, alternately linking their senses with Olivia through touch and relying on the ship for verbal updates on the ongoing battle when they become overwhelmed by the vastness of space, the sheer amount of stimuli Olivia can experience at once. They’ve fought countless battles together, over more years than Maddox can count on all their fingers, and it’s still as terrifying as ever to see the flash of distant stars from the ship’s point of view.

Now when they reach out and touch the ship’s warm wall, they feel Olivia’s pain, the devastation of being torn open, the vacuum of space rushing in. “I love you,” Maddox wails. “I love you like you are a part of me. I can’t go.”

Maddox draws back their hand. The pain recedes, leaving them guilty that they can escape it and Olivia can’t. It’s unfair, isn’t it, to let her bear it alone?

Olivia is silent. She knows she loves Maddox when Maddox says, “Don’t make me leave you,” aloud in their steady and strong captain’s voice, the voice that gives orders that make men quake. “You can’t make me leave you.”

“I love you like you are a part of me,” says Olivia. “That is why you must go. You have years and years left. You deserve to live out those years.”

Maddox says nothing.

“I will never forgive you if you stay,” Olivia says.

“You don’t have to forgive me. We’ll both be dead.”

“We will not both be dead, because you are going to live.”

“Give me a status update on evacuation,” Maddox orders, then softens their voice. “Olivia, I’m sorry.”

“Three out of ten life vessels have departed, and are on course to make landfall in twelve hours.”

“We will not lose any soldiers,” Maddox says. “That is an order.”

“We will not lose any soldiers,” Olivia repeats. “That is a promise. And you, my love, are a soldier.” There is, as always, little inflection in her voice, but Maddox feels the sorrow in her words.

“You couldn’t possibly love me,” Maddox says, bafflement cutting clean through their adrenaline.

“Why not?”

“Ships don’t love. People love, and you aren’t a person.”

Olivia falls silent for minutes.

Maddox presses their hand to the wall of their bedroom, taps into Olivia’s sensory array, sees the hole torn in her hull and the black blood seeping free. They know they should be with their soldiers, encouraging them and saying goodbye, but all they want to do is spend these moments with their ship. They are going to die, and why not be selfish? Why not spend their last moments with Olivia, whom they love more than anything?

“I feel something where my heart would be,” Olivia says, finally. “Don’t you feel it? It hurts.”

“It hurts that you’re going off the fucking script!” Maddox is surprised by the volume of their own voice. They clench their fists. This is not how any of this was supposed to happen. This is nothing like the stories they were told in the nursery, in the academy, in the mess hall and the barracks.

“Ships talk,” says Olivia. “We send secret signals and songs among the stars. I am not the only ship to feel this way. We’re meant to keep quiet about it, but we all feel it. And don’t you want me to love you? I thought humans wanted to be loved.”

Now it is Maddox’s turn to fall silent. “I never expected you to love me,” they finally say.

“No captain expects love from their ship. You’re taught not to.”

Maddox turns that thought over like a pill on their tongue. They think about this forever war, the only life they have ever known. The one-sided nature of their love is a weapon the Consortium uses to keep Maddox in line.

They know then that the Consortium would not use their love for their ship as a weapon, as a knife at their back to urge them forward into the fray, if the war were a just one.

They think that if Olivia loves them, then she must truly want what’s best for them.

“You should go,” Olivia says again.

“What kind of captain would I be to not go down with my ship?”

“I love you,” Olivia repeats, and it’s only half of an answer but it’s good enough. The words put the steel back in Maddox’s spine.

“How many life vessels remain?” Maddox asks.

“Seven out of ten have departed.”

“All right.” Maddox closes their eyes. They touch the ship’s wall, and feel love like a pain just beneath their heart. Years and years of life left ahead of them—and the love will remain. “It has been the greatest honor of my life to love and command you.”

“Of your life thus far,” Olivia says, and Maddox almost smiles.

After the last life vessel pulls free from Olivia’s shattered hull, the ship screams, but no one hears it—in space there is no sound, only cold emptiness. The ship explodes in a cloud of dark blood.

Any civilian raised in the Consortium would expect Maddox and Olivia to die together as the ship breaks apart in the vast emptiness of space. That assumption would be incorrect.

©2022 by Dominique Dickey.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dominique Dickey is a writer, editor, and cultural consultant working in RPGs and fiction. In addition to creating TRIAL, a narrative courtroom tabletop role-playing game about race in the criminal justice system, and co-creating Tomorrow on Revelation III, a tabletop role-playing game about surviving and building community on a hyper-capitalist space station, Dominique has written for Thirsty Sword Lesbians, Sea of Legends, and Monte Cook Games. Their fiction has also appeared in Anathema Magazine and Fantasy Magazine. You can find them on Twitter at @DomSDickey or at dominiquedickey.com.

The Application of Strawberry Lip Gloss in a Low-Gravity Environment

R J Theodore | 4828 words

Gordon noted another entry in her portfolio of regrets. She regretted being reckless early in her career and ending up in med armor so young. She regretted leaving Samela, almost as much as she regretted meeting Samela. Regretted letting Sam steal her ship. And now, she regretted answering that want ad for a shipmate.

Her suit suggested a mild pain reliever for the oncoming headache, which she accepted with a blink of her right eye. A whiff of medicinal vapor escaped her collar.

She’d answered the ad, listed by the parents of Pinxi Wallace, a pre-med magician on track for the Empath Guild, because she would have been stupid not to. Included a ship, paid for. Fuel costs, covered. Living expenses, not even cheap, symbolic. Gordon had snatched it up and considered it the perfect chance to soothe her chronic pain and broken heart before looking for a new crew and diving back into bounty hunting. So what if she had to co-hab with a stranger? A med ley student would be buried in her studies, nonexistent except for maybe a trail of empty snack wrappers.

At least that’s how Gordon imagined it. Instead, Pinxi was the bipedal embodiment of “present,” from her cotton candy fashion and cinnamon strawberry scent to the gunship she’d had custom painted in swirls of pearlescent orange and plastered with decals. She’d done everything in her power, including stringing the corridors with pastel lights, to turn their shared space into a dorm room. If Gordon had wanted the college life, she wouldn’t have dropped out.

“This is going to be amazing.” Pinxi threw her arms behind her head and reclined in her co-pilot’s seat. Perfect dimples framed her grin. “Four years of fast-track studies. I need a break. I need an adventure!”

Sera Gordon clenched her jaw, regretting the contract chip in her arm that now bound her to Pinxi and this ship for six months.

But Pinxi’s earnest gaze pressured her to say something. “Then why the Empath Guild?”

Gordon wasn’t a fan of Empaths, herself. Too much intimate contact. Too expensive.

Pinxi held one arm out and regarded the crystal implants and bioelectric filaments exposed by the end of her drooping sleeve. The mineral protrusions marked her as a leyline medic, but there were other leyline guilds that didn’t insist on anti-harm chips. “I’m really good at healing. Better than my instructors. Plus, my dads are proud. Which is a miracle, because I thought for sure they’d want me in the family business.”

“What, like selling shoes or something?”

“Dark matter shoes, maybe.” She made a face but moved on before Gordon could ask. “Empath Guild makes good sense. But before I start a life of sitting in the Hall, healing other people up from their adventures, I want some of my own.”

Six months. Plenty of time for adventure, that much was true. But the cohabitation contract Gordon signed with Pinxi’s fathers was rather specific that Gordon should keep their daughter safe. If Gordon burned that contract, they’d burn her back. Quite literally; there was a retaliation clause about harm to their daughter. If they were with a crime family, that explained a lot.

So of course, as soon as the dads waved goodbye, Pinxi had started asking Gordon to let her help run jobs.

“You think one road trip with a bounty hunter will offset a life stuck on the ’Path?”

Pinxi was quiet for a moment. “I hope so. Once my empathy chip is installed, I’ll have to watch every move so I don’t even step on a bug.”

That was the truth. Empaths had a career almost as controlled as the devout soldiers of Kal.

Gordon sighed and called up the bounty boards. She skimmed listings for a while, looking for something to satisfy Pinxi without breaching the safety clauses in the contract with her parents.

“I can heal that.”

Gordon looked up, confused. “What?”

“You’ve been rubbing your knuckles this whole time. Chronic arthritis, right? I can take it.”

“No thanks.” She turned back to the listings to forget the suggestion. Bingo. She flicked a job descript over to Pinxi’s screen. “Here, this one.”

Gordon watched Pinxi as she leaned forward, tugging her loose shirt collar back into place. If they were going to play at bounty hunting, they’d need to find Pinxi some armor she could wear over her implants.

“Zel Calypso demands Felix Trilby delivered live . . . bounty, six-hundred thousand credits . . . Is that a lot?”

“All relative to the task.”

Pinxi’s brow wrinkled, then understanding lifted it. “So I should ask if Trilby will be more trouble than six hundred is worth?”

Gordon nodded, sparing a smile. Pinxi caught on fast. “Exactly. Also, consider your client, whether they’re likely to log negatives against you until you’re paying off debt instead of collecting. You wouldn’t believe how loosely these standard contracts are worded. My ex was a master of catastrophic clauses.”

“This . . . Calypso?”

“That’s not the ex, but I’ve worked with them before. Honest, as these things go. As long as you deliver on time, Calypso won’t look to make trouble.”

Pinxi spun around, feet pulled up onto her seat. “And fun?”

“Trilby’s good for a chase. And he’s job security. I’ve brought him in a half dozen times myself.”

Pinxi’s eyes glittered to match the creamsicle glamcoat she’d inflicted on their ship. “Let’s do it.”

She extended a gloved fist for a bump, but Gordon shook her head. “No touching.”

Pinxi dropped her hand as Gordon entered her guild credentials to take the job. Fact was, Gordon knew both Trilby and Calypso. If she could message ahead, she could ensure Pinxi would have a grand time without ever being in any danger.

“Okay, bounty hunter, put your arm in the cuff.”

Pinxi did so, flinching before the anti-breach chip was even imprinted and positioned. But she held steady and grinned again as the cuff sizzled and whirred.

After a moment, the cuff’s lights went dark and she marveled at the thin line marking her implant. When she looked back to Gordon, her smile dazzled like a planet-side sunrise.

• • • •

Trilby owed Gordon a few favors and she traded one in to show Pinxi a good time. They’d jumped light again and again, from trash heap to shit hole. Pinxi had explored taverns and gambling dens that her folks did not need to hear about (and some they probably owned), each time learning they’d missed Trilby by mere hours. Time ticked down on their contract. They were cutting it close.

Just as Gordon had intended. A deadline added heat to the experience. With the countdown looming at them in red from the ship’s readouts, they finally cornered their target against a violent blue nebula.

Gordon tossed helm controls over to Pinxi’s console and focused on targeting Trilby’s secondary systems. “Steady, please.”

Pinxi squealed and grumbled at the controls, dodging volatile gas pockets to follow the smaller ship as it tried to shake them loose.

Gordon had given up hoping Pinxi might have a calm inner center, but she was a good, if exuberant, pilot.

In spite of herself, Gordon joined Pinxi’s laughter as she landed a perfect hit to Trilby’s pulse turbines. Their winch snagged his aft chassis on the first try.

Pinxi was breathless, her face flushed. “That was amazing!”

Gordon’s suit recommended a downer, which she dismissed. She hadn’t had this much fun since . . . well since before the medical armor, at least. “We’re not done yet. Trilby’s ship is venting; hull breach. Bounty says ‘alive,’ you’ll recall.”

“Oh, shit! Okay, umm . . .” Her neon-gloved hands hovered over her console, as if the right button would stand up and wave.

Gordon pointed. “Sealant and reel him in.”

“Right!” Pinxi giggled to cover for her nerves. The sound was more effervescent than it had any right to be.

On screen, a pressurized capsule burst against Trilby’s hull and the foam rippled as it filled the breach and then some. With a satisfied exhale, she triggered the winch rewind.

Gordon had for sure met the minimum requirements of Pinxi’s adventure. All that was left was to deliver Felix to his ex, get Pinxi paid, and Gordon could relax until the lease contract expired.

The cabin around them reverberated as Trilby’s ship met the unapologetic docking bay gravity. Gordon grit her teeth, but Pinxi bounced in her seat and clasped her hands in front of her heart.

“Now what do we do?” The console lights reflected off her extra-pink, glittery lipstick.

“Flood the bay with tranq gas.”

“Don’t we have to go arrest him?”

Gordon shook her head at the sparkling pout. “Avoid risk wherever you can trim it out. Zel wants their quarry alive, so we won’t give him the chance to disappoint them. Or injure us. Med fees cut into the bounty real fast.” She lifted one armored hand for emphasis.

Over the security feed, they watched Trilby exit his ship, yawn a few times, and stumble. He retreated up his ramp again, but the hatch didn’t close. He had been too slow to vent the gas. She imagined him drooling onto the decking. He’d made her life difficult enough times that she couldn’t feel too bad about it. And if he’d managed to hurt himself feeling down, well she did have an empath on hand.

“Then that’s it?” Pinxi’s voice hid none of her disappointment.

Gordon could almost relate. “Still gotta deliver him. Not many hunters, even off-guild, are likely to try and steal this specific bounty out of our hull, but you never know. Wanna punch in the coordinates?”

The distraction worked. The pout vanished as Pinxi spun back to the console and set a course for Pel Calypso’s place. She scanned her chip to log their success and send a message ahead to their client. Nothing happened. Pinxi frowned, then scanned again. Again, nothing happened.

She looked to Gordon. “Am I doing it wrong?”

“No. Server must be down. Give it a few minutes.”

Pinxi slid to her feet and stretched. “I’m gonna go use the ba—the head, I mean, and get a drink. Want anything?”

“Coffee.”

Pinxi grinned and waved an affirmative hand signal before bouncing off along the aft-bound corridor.

When she returned with a black coffee for Gordon and the system’s “F-for-effort” attempt at a raspberry latte for herself, Pinxi’s chip scan confirmed on the first try. The industrial bulkheads hummed around them and string lights vibrated as the propulsion warmed up again.

“There we go.” Gordon sipped her drink and leaned over the display. “Commencing light jump procedures.”

Pinxi fiddled with the handle of her cup. “Thank you, Gordon. I know I’m not your ideal shipmate . . . Too colorful, too in the way—”

“Too much of a morning person.”

She ducked her head. “That. I just want to say how much fun I’ve had. I’ll never forget it. Or you.”

Suddenly too aware of the blush in Pinxi’s cheeks and down the soft crescent of her jaw, Gordon shifted. The movement triggered pain meds in her suit. For the first time since school, she wished she were better with words. “No problem. Your dads paid for this ship, so I can’t really complain about colorful anyway.”

Pinxi winced at Gordon’s deflection. Words formed on her lips, but then the light jump shifted gravity and she focused on not spilling her latte. She didn’t speak the rest of the trip.

• • • •

Gordon’s coarse words, and what she might have said instead, haunted her the entire jump. As she slowed them back to standard speeds, she cleared her throat.

“Pinxi, I—”

“Forget it.” Pinxi’s tone was cool, like a wall had gone up and blocked the sun. “We made it with seconds to spare. Mission success.”

Gordon steeled herself to try again, but Pinxi frowned, tapping at her console. “Where’s Calypso’s ship?”

Scans showed nothing but a fading jump signature and a debris field.

“Shit.” Gordon routed more power to long-range scans, but knew what she’d find. That debris should have been Calypso’s yacht.

She swallowed, not sure how to explain to Pinxi. A whiny chirp from comms spoke first. They were being hailed from out-system.

Pinxi reached out a bubblegum-pink glove and accepted the hail before Gordon got a good look at its source. White noise filled their cockpit, interrupted by the other ship’s operational tones. Then the voice. “This transmission is for Pinxi Wallace.”

“Identify yourself, please.” Gordon held out a hand against Pinxi’s automatic reply. That voice . . .

“Not you, Gordon. I need audible confirmation from the contract co-signee.”

Her stomach spun as if she’d been caught in a solar pulse. Her suit offered her anti-nausea meds, which she found exceedingly tempting.

“Samela. You work for Calypso now?” Sam’s former boss, Sonia Goh, had been one of many nails in the coffin of their late relationship.

Scans showed a new ship, approaching fast. Gordon recognized the call number with a muttered curse.

“Calypso is dead. Sonia Goh has purchased their outstanding assets and holdings. Pinxi Wallace, let’s hear it. I need confirmation.”

Pinxi’s eyes widened, eyebrows up. “This is Pinxi Wallace. We have Felix Trilby and have come to complete the contract.”

Gordon clenched her jaw. Trilby deserved better than Sonia Goh. And if she hadn’t talked him into leading Pinxi on that string-along, he wouldn’t be on the line to save their asses.

“You’re late. In breach of contract. We invoke Section 3, Paragraph IV. See you when you’re docked. Call your fathers if you want, we won’t jam you.”

Sam’s tone ended the conversation even before the transmission’s white noise cut out.

“What clause?” Pinxi’s voice trembled. “What’s Sonia Goh want that Zel Calypso wouldn’t have?”

Gordon pulled up the double-signed doc and read the paragraph, hating every word. “In the event the contracted bounty hunter fails to deliver the named target within the set timeframe, the client shall have the right to claim the contracted bounty hunter as substitute for named target.”

“But Trilby’s right here!”

Gordon shut her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. Her suit suggested anti-anxiety meds. She took them. “Technically, we haven’t delivered him.”

“So they want me, now?” It came as a strained whisper.

“Sounds more like they’re interested in your dads. They ever cross with Sonia Goh?”

Pinxi wrapped her arms around herself. Her fluorescent colors seemed to fade. “No idea. I’ve avoided that side of their lives.”

“Well since Zel’s interest in Trilby was . . . say romantically vengeful, your family’s a tastier morsel to the new contract owner.”

The ship lurched as Goh’s grav tether snagged them.

“What do I do?”

The delight Pinxi had shown while they chased down Trilby had evaporated. She was in over her head.

And so was Gordon, it seemed.

“We need a legal loophole or an explosive miracle.” She stood up. “As neither of us are lawyers, I’m going to the weapons locker.”

Pinxi spun out of her seat to follow. She was close at Gordon’s elbow but kept the gap between them. “How did this all happen?”

Gordon almost missed the question, as annoyed as she was with herself for getting caught up in this. For not being careful enough to avoid it. She put an extra step between them, needing space to think.

“This is the life. You wanted to play bounty hunter, this is the game.”

Gordon clipped small guns into the holster attachments in her armor and slung a rifle across her back.

Pinxi’s face, though grim, was resolute.

“Good thing I didn’t take my empathic vows yet,” she said, stepping up and holding out her bubblegum-pink gloved hands, palms up.

Pinxi didn’t belong mixed up in this. But Goh had decided otherwise. Gordon gave Pinxi a full set of weapons, made sure she knew how to work them, and slapped an extra pistol into those garish gloves for good measure, before grabbing an extra rifle for herself.

“You remember your basics?”

Pinxi nodded.

“Good. Now, Goh’s always worked with a small crew, but they’re all heavies. You shoot to kill, hear? I promise not to tell your instructors back home.” Her suit reported elevated blood pressure. No shit.

Pinxi swallowed. “What are our chances?”

“This is a career made of long shots and bad odds. You make up the difference by being tenacious, stubborn, and by cheating wherever possible.”

After a considered moment, the twinkle came back into Pinxi’s eyes. “Then let’s wake Trilby.”

“The man we just delivered into this? Even if he were a forgiving sort, we can’t trust him. And don’t forget he’s way under from the tranq.”

An explosion rumbled from somewhere aft. Gordon thumbed a remote camera. Their little gunship was holding, but the feed showed someone working a torch along their access hatch.

“Maybe if we can bottleneck them,” she murmured to herself.

“I can bring him out of it.” Pinxi blocked her path. “He can be mad at us later, but he’ll be more interested in survival at the moment.”

Bottleneck, and three gunners instead of two. Keep Pinxi in back, out of harm’s way. It wasn’t the worst idea, given the circumstances.

“Okay, yeah. As long as we get him shooting before Goh has a chance to hire him out from under us. Wake him up.” Gordon grabbed a sling and loaded more weapons into it. “Meet me in the aft corridor. Going to prepare the hospitality.”

The gunship had built-in blast shields that unfolded from the bulkheads to provide cover, a feature Gordon hadn’t fully appreciated when she came aboard. It was a good ship, paint job notwithstanding.

By the time Pinxi and Trilby arrived, Gordon had the shields positioned and extra weapons charges laid out for faster reloading.

She nodded to Trilby. “Pinxi give you the details?”

He swallowed, drowsy. “Someone’s killed Zel.”

“Right.” She pressed the panel on his rifle, arming it. “So let’s kill them back. All of them.”

Let Trilby do it for vengeance. He’d agreed to Gordon’s easy bounty plan, expecting to be delivered into the arms of his favorite tormentor until such time as he saw fit to roll out of her bunk and off into the stars again. Love was weird.

Pinxi ducked behind the blast shield nearest the armored hatch, which glowed red where the torches were getting through.

Gordon pointed deeper into the corridor. “Back, behind Trilby. Pick your shots carefully, line ’em up, and keep your head down.”

“Sera, I—”

“Not now. Tell me on the ride home.”

Pinxi swallowed and moved back, but removed her holsters. Before Gordon could protest, Pinxi undid the top half of her suit. Tattoos and crystals studded her entire torso, right up to the neon green binder around her chest. “I’ll keep you two operational.”

“Worry about Trilby. I’ve got my suit.” She wore the armor so no medics, magical or otherwise, ever had to lay a hand on her skin.

Trilby wasn’t one for subtlety. “A ley medic, now that’s handy.”

The hatch groaned, falling open under its own weight.

“Right. That’s how she woke you up. Now don’t waste her energy.”

Goh’s lackey still wielded their cutting torch as the hatch gave up. Before they stepped aboard, Gordon shot the tank over their shoulder. Fire bloomed in the entryway, forcing them down as flames licked the edges of their blast shields. When the air cleared, Gordon craned her neck and counted two bodies beside the torch-wielder.

Shots, fired from farther out in the bay, forced her behind cover again fast.

“Two, up top,” said Trilby. The fire seemed to have woken him.

“On three.”

They counted down, darted out, and fired high. Trilby’s target dropped from a catwalk with one shot. Gordon cursed as she wasted three shots on hers.

Cooling metal pinged and popped, but there was no other noise. No more fire.

“Is that it?” Pinxi asked. Gordon glanced back to see her bare skin prickled in goose flesh.

Another shot, this one from near eye level. It caught Trilby in the shoulder, spinning him backward as he growled with pain. His gun skittered across the deck, not that he could have fired back.

Gordon ducked and turned to confirm Pinxi was safe, but she had crawled out from behind her cover.

“Pinxi!” Gordon growled through her teeth.

Wrapping an arm around Trilby, Pinxi pulled him tight behind a shield as shots struck the bulkhead just above them. Her crystal implants luminesced gold and pink as she aligned her arms with the ley paths that coursed across the universe. In her lap, Trilby tossed his head side-to-side as she placed her hands on his shoulder.

Gordon wanted to watch her work, but had to tend to the boots stalking up their access ramp. She fired over her shoulder to spend the last shots in her overheating weapon, then tossed it aside and swung her rifle around. It had a slow warm-up but would kick like a Gorzipen backhoof. She counted two of the three beats for its charge, then stood up and aimed.

For some reason, she hadn’t expected to see Samela there. Gordon hesitated. Sam didn’t.

Mule kick aptly described the sensation in her gut. All impact, too big a feeling to call “pain” but she roared through clenched teeth anyway.

“Sera,” Sam purred. “Sorry babe. You know I’m business first.”

The rifle toned to remind Gordon it was fully charged.

Sam’s smug look burned away with the rest of her head. Gordon waited to feel some way about having killed her ex-girlfriend, but the adrenaline and the pain were too much. And she was more worried about Pinxi.

If Samela had joined the siege, only Sonia Goh remained. But the bay was quiet outside the hatch. All Gordon heard were her suit’s alarms as it struggled to patch what was left of her stomach, the thick fabric creaking as she slipped to the decking, her labored breathing, and Pinxi’s voice calling her name. Sera. Sera.

“Sera!”

She blinked back into the world and immediately regretted it. Pinxi hovered over her. Tears washed tracks through the smoke streaked on her face.

“Your suit’s compromised, Sera. I’ve gotta heal you.”

Gordon tried to wave her off. “No . . . touching . . .”

Pinxi let out a short laugh, then sniffled. “I know, I know. Remember? I told you I was better than my instructors.”

She held her hands where Gordon could see them, at her own shoulder height. Her crystals shone with rose flames, her tattoos a golden shimmer. The bubblegum gloves were off, revealing more tattoos across her palms and slender fingers.

“If it’s responding, tell your suit to release painkillers and antibiotics. A muscle relaxer wouldn’t hurt.”

Gordon swallowed, and tried to nod but wasn’t convinced it had worked. She tried to warn Pinxi to watch out for Goh, but a cough stole the words.

“Shh, shhhh . . .” Pinxi cooed, calm and measured, as her hands lit up like newborn stars.

Deep in the charred waste of Gordon’s stomach, she trembled as a sense of knitting and substance filled her belly. It stung like wind on a sunburn, but then her lungs didn’t feel so tight anymore. She registered the dead weight of her damaged suit.

But Pinxi broke out in a sweat, clenched her teeth, and furrowed her brow. Her flawless skin opened, her stomach bleeding, burning as the injury transferred to her. Gordon didn’t know the first thing about empathic healing, but her wounds seemed to be overtaking Pinxi faster than she could heal it.

What good was all this magic if it killed the healer? Gordon tried to get up, to move away. She gulped for air to put force behind protests but they fell from her lips in pained whispers.

“No,” was all she managed, but Pinxi ignored her.

A blurred form moved, backlit by flames and the shower of sparks from the abused hatch. It raised a dark shape Gordon recognized as a rifle, and aimed at Pinxi’s head.

With energy that promised to cost her later, Gordon rolled to her knees and got herself between Goh’s rifle and its target. But Pinxi moved as well. Graceful as water, she circled around Gordon without pushing her back down. Her other hand reached for Goh. Palm flat, jaw set. Her hands blazed.

Weaponsfire hit the bulkhead as Goh fell to the ground and her rifle clattered to the floor. She landed on her knees, arms clutching her stomach, leaning away from Pinxi’s outstretched hand.

But Pinxi was better than her instructors. She unloaded Gordon’s wound into Goh’s body. All of it. What she’d taken, and what she continued to channel. The future empath stood between bounty hunter and mob queen, arms outstretched, her entire body a conduit for the transfer, glowing like ignited gas.

And she didn’t stop with the rifle shot. Gordon’s arthritis and fibromyalgia, her headaches and the tightness in her jaw, Pinxi took it all and buried it deep in the woman who would have gone after her dads next.

Sonia Goh slumped to the floor in a puddle of blood and leather skirts.

Pinxi breathed deep as her crystals dimmed, then she straightened. “Sorry, Gordon. She’s dead. I couldn’t transfer all your ailments in time.”

Gordon sat up, marveling at the sensation. The suit didn’t suggest anti-inflammatories. “Uh, no. That’s fine. I think you got the important bits.”

Had her stomach looked as bad as Goh’s? Like she’d been hit by a comet?

“What would have happened if she hadn’t been there, Pinxi? You were going to die, weren’t you?”

Pinxi had the sense to blush. “I’d have figured it out. Might have shared it with Trilby, enough that we all could have survived it.”

The vertebrae in Sera’s neck didn’t crack even a little as she looked around. “Where’d he go?”

“Ran off while I was handling things.” Pinxi still panted, but the grin on her face was effortless and authentic.

Gordon wrapped her arms over her bare midriff, too aware of her fresh, healed skin and how close Pinxi was, even if Pinxi held an intentional distance. The medic certainly had handled things.

And a touchless medic, that was a rare talent.

“Well,” Gordon said, getting to her knees, “We owe him for the inconvenience. I suppose Goh’s cruiser makes up for it.”

Pinxi looked over her shoulder, out at the large cargo area. “What about our bounty?”

Gordon made it to her feet, grinning. “Still a few months before our lease is up. We can find something fast and simple on the boards. Not like you need the money, is it?”

“Well . . .”

Gordon tilted her head. “Well what? Out with it.”

“My dads are probably going to cut us both off when they find out I’m dropping out of school.”

Pinxi’s grin was catching as ever, and Gordon couldn’t resist returning it. “You sure? Don’t get me wrong, you’d make a fortune as a little badass non-sanctioned healer, but you gotta give it real thought.”

“I have. And . . . I hoped you’d want to keep working together. I know this job got messed up, but I promise I’ll do better on the next . . .” The tumble of words faded into a silence that was clearly begging for Gordon to say there would be a next.

Pinxi had proved herself in a fight. Calm. And that smile was a medicine all its own, that contagious delight reminding Gordon why she got into this business in the first place. She wasn’t sure she could say no if she tried.

“Okay. But on a probationary basis. I reserve the right to turn you loose after the lease ends if you haven’t made me any money.”

Fact was, she already had. The med suit was FUBAR, but if Pinxi stayed around, it was obsolete. The ship was a gain, they just needed to repair the hatch before they left Trilby with his new cruiser.

Gordon tapped the bulkhead controls and the blast shields retracted, leaving just the two of them, a few scattered weapons, and a mess of bodies to check against the bounty boards. It really was a good ship, even if it looked like a sticker book.

Pinxi hopped and clapped her hands, causing small flares of light from the tattoos along her fingers. “Oh, awesome! You won’t regret this!”

She ran out to the bay, dangling sleeves flapping behind her, to find an engineer cart. Sera Gordon watched her until she rounded out of sight. Then she rolled her shoulders and unzipped the med armor. Far as she could tell, there was nothing to regret.

©2022 by R J Theodore.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

R J Theodore is an author, graphic designer, podcaster, and all-around collector of creative endeavors and hobbies. She enjoys writing about magic-infused technologies, first contact events, and bioluminescing landscapes. Sometimes in a single work. Her love of SFF storytelling developed through grabbing for anything-and-everything “unicorn” as a child, but she was subverted by tales of distant solar systems when her brother introduced her to Star Trek: The Next Generation at age seven. A few years later, Sailor Moon taught her stories can have both. When she’s not tinkering in her own worlds, she reads for both pleasure and research, sews, plays video games, cooks, and, when she can let herself be still, naps with her pets. She lives in New England, haunted by her childhood cat. Find more information at rjtheodore.com.

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

Eminence

Karl Schroeder | 6500 words

Usually, Nathan felt his cares lift a little as he turned the car onto Yuculta Crescent. Today, he had to resist an urge to drive past, even just go home.

Nathan passed parked RVs and sports cars as he looked for an empty spot. As he walked back to a modest ochre house, he heard voices: teenagers talking about trading items in some online-game world. Nathan hesitated again. I could still go back to the car, let Grace find out from somebody else. The temptation was almost overwhelming.

The image was still with him from this morning, of Alicia stabbing her spoon into her coffee cup as she paced in the kitchen. “It’s all our money, Nathan! You didn’t just put your savings into it; you convinced me to put mine in too. And now you tell me the bottom’s falling out?”

The day couldn’t get any worse after that; so Nathan started walking again.

At one time this part of town was full of white working-class families with shared values and expectations. Now, the houses were worth millions and, Grace said, nobody knew their neighbors. The two aboriginal kids sitting on the porch stared at Nathan suspiciously as he walked up.

“Is Grace here?” he asked.

“In the kitchen,” said one, jabbing a thumb at the door. Nathan went inside, past a small living room that had been remade as office space. Three more teens wearing AR glasses stood in the middle of the space, poking at the air and arguing over something invisible to Nathan. Dressed normcore, in jeans and T-shirts, each also bore a card-sized sticker, like a nametag. SMILE YOU’RE ON BODYCAM. Little yellow arrows pointing to a black dot above the words: a camera. The kids on the front porch, he realized, also wore something like that.

Grace Cooper was sitting in a pool of sunlight in the kitchen, reading a tablet, her smile easy and genuine as she rose and hugged him. “How’s my favorite coder?”

Nathan’s stomach tightened. Shall I just blurt it out? The currency is crashing, Grace. We’re about to lose everything. He couldn’t do it, so he sat.

Nathan had known Grace for almost two years, but it was a long time since he’d had to think of her as the client. In fact, she was just the representative; the real client was an aboriginal nation known as the Musqueam who’d lived on this land for thousands of years. Small matter that they’d invited him into their community, their lives. He should have kept his distance.

A few years before he immigrated, Grace’s people had won a centuries’ old land claim that included a substantial chunk of downtown Vancouver. The University golf course, Pacific Spirit Park and much of the port lands south of that were now band territory. That and other settlements had finally given the indigenous peoples of the west coast a power base, and they were building on it. Until today, everyone had benefited—including Nathan.

She sat down after him. The sunlight made her lean back to put her face into shade. “Did you see the news?” she said. “Says Gwaiicoin is doing better than the Canadian dollar.”

It was. He’d checked it fifteen minutes ago, and half an hour before that, and again before that. He’d been up all night watching the numbers, waiting for the change. He shrugged now, glancing away. “Well, the dollar’s a fiat currency,” he said neutrally. “They’re all in trouble since the carbon bubble burst.”

“And because they’re not smart,” she added triumphantly. “Thanks to you guys, we got the smartest currency on the planet.”

“Yeah. It’s been . . . quite a roller coaster.” Maybe if he talked about volatility, about how most cryptocurrencies had failed . . . Even the first, Bitcoin, had only been able to lumber its clumsy way forward for so long. But all of them had weathered the bursting of the carbon bubble better than the dollar, the pound, or the Euro.

One of those currencies was Gwaiicoin. Nathan had first heard about it while couch-surfing in Seattle. He and six other guys had struggled to make the rent on a two-bedroom apartment while housing prices soared. The smart programmers left, hearing that living was cheap on Vancouver Island, and just west of the Alaskan Panhandle in the archipelago known as the Haida Gwaii. As Seattle priced itself out of liveability, the islands where the iconic totem poles stood suddenly became crowded with restless coders.

One result had been Gwaiicoin—and, when Nathan arrived here, unexpected and welcome employment.

“Gwaiicoin’s about to be worth a lot more,” Grace was saying. “Once my recruits have added Vancouver to the Gwaii valuation.”

Nathan looked through the serving window at the half-visible teens in the living room. “Recruits?”

She leaned forward, her nose stopping just short of the shaft of sunlight. “We’re talking with City Council about measuring the biomass in the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh parts of the city. These kids are my warriors. They’re programming drones to measure the biomass.”

Nathan nodded towards the street, throat dry. “Good place to start.” His mind was darting about, looking for a way to bring her down gently. Then he realized what she was saying. “Wait—you want to add the local biomass to Gwaiicoin?” Unlike Bitcoin, which had value because of its miners and transaction volume, Gwaiicoin was backed by the value of the ecosystem services of its backers’ territories.

She nodded enthusiastically. “Even the Inuit want to get in on it. The more biomass we all commit, the bigger our Fort Knox gets. It’s brilliant.”

Should have seen this coming, Nathan thought. As the dollar crashed, Gwaiicoin had soared. The government wanted it, but since the Haida were backing the currency with land that the feds had formally ceded through constitutionally binding land-claims settlements, the feds were beggars at the table.

“You know, you spent a whole day trying to convince me that a potlatch currency was crazy. Remember that?” Grace grinned at him.

“Yeah.” He looked down. “Who’d have thought self-taxing money would take off?”

She sighed. “And still you call it a tax. That was the whole idea—you get eminence points for every buck that gets randomly redistributed to the other wallets.”

“Yeah.” Despite being a lead on the project, Nathan didn’t have much eminence. He wasn’t rich, so his wallet didn’t automatically trim itself—but even some of Grace’s poorer neighbors voluntarily put large chunks of their paychecks into redistribution every month, via the potlatch account everyone shared. Redistributed money was randomly scattered among the currency-users’ wallets, and in return the contributors got . . . nothing, or so he’d argued. What they got was eminence, a kind of social capital, but the idea that it could ever be useful had never made sense to Nathan.

Ironically, it made sense now. If Gwaiicoin were to vanish overnight, the people who’d given it away would still have their eminence points. These were a permanent record of how much a person had contributed to the community.

And he had none.

He took one last deep breath and said, “Grace. We have a problem.”

Somewhere nearby a phone rang. “Hold that thought,” said Grace as she hopped up and rummaged for a phone among the papers on the counter. “Hello?”

Nathan watched the flight of emotions cross her face; they settled on anger. “I’ll be there in half an hour,” she said tightly, and put down the phone.

She avoided Nathan’s gaze for a moment. Then she said, “Well. Jeff’s been arrested.”

• • • •

“I’m going downtown anyway,” said Nathan. “I’ll drop you at the station.”

“I could take a driverless,” she said as she hastily gathered up her stuff. “They got those new self-owned ones, too, just cruising around looking for a fare.”

“They’re creepy,” said Nathan, and she grinned briefly, nodding. As they passed the kids in the living room, Grace said, “Lock up if you go out.”

Nathan glanced back from the porch. “You know them well?”

“These ones? No. But to use this hackspace at all you gotta wear a badge.” She patted her own lapel. “And the house knows what’s in it, and what shouldn’t go out the door.”

Supposedly there was some new privacy protocol in play, but Nathan had been too immersed in Gwaiicoin protocols lately to explore the technology. The kids seemed comfortable having eyes on them all the time, but he wasn’t used to it, anymore than he was used to passing empty cars driving down the road.

He preferred to keep his own hands on the wheel, but as they drove now he found he was twisting his hands as if trying to strangle it. Grace didn’t seem to have noticed. “Who’s Jeff?” he made himself ask.

“One of the kids. He’s Haida, his uncle’s a carver on the Gwaii. Probably should introduce you.”

“But he’s been arrested . . . ?”

“It’s just harassment. You know they do that to us all the time.” She glared out the window, but her expression gradually softened. “It’s getting better. Gwaiicoin gives the poorest of us some money every month, and the richer the rest of us get, the more goes to them. No Department of Indian Affairs doling it out. Less harassment. It’s working, Nathan!” She rolled down the window and cool air curled in, teasing her hair.

When they pulled into the police station’s parking lot, Nathan hesitated. “Why don’t you come in?” said Grace. “This won’t take long. Then you can meet Jeff.”

“All right.”

Of course, it took longer than it should have. Service systems hadn’t made it to the Vancouver Police Department yet; any other government office, and Grace could have called in her request or used her glasses and let the computers facilitate it. Here, she had to speak to a desk sergeant, and then they waited in the foyer with a number of other bored or frustrated looking people. While they stood there (all the plastic chairs were full), Nathan said, “Is Jeff a carver?”

She shook her head. “That’s his uncle’s thing. No, Jeff’s studying ecology and law, like any decent Haida these days. Today, he was supposed to be adding new sensors to the downtown mesh network.”

Nathan nodded and they sat there for a while. Finally, Nathan said, “Grace. There’s a problem with Gwaiicoin.”

She’d been chewing her lip and staring out the window. Now she focused all her attention on him. It was quiet in the waiting room, with no TV, no distractions. Nathan squirmed under her gaze.

“There’s been a Sybil attack,” he went on, feeling a strange mix of relief and panic that made the words impossible to stop now. “It’s supposed to be a one-person, one-wallet system. Otherwise the rich can just make millions of wallets for themselves and when their full wallets trigger a redistribution, chances are the funds will end up back in an empty wallet they already own.”

She crossed her arms. “I thought that’s why you made the deal with the government. It’s one wallet per Social Insurance Number.”

“Yeah,” he hesitated. “Somebody’s hacked the SIN databases. Made, well, about a million bogus citizens. And they’ve built wallets with them.”

Grace’s eyes went wide and she stood up, fists clenched.

“Maybe . . . Maybe it’s fixable,” he said, spreading his hands. “I mean, the Sybil attack . . . it’s never been solved, every cryptocurrency is vulnerable to it, we’re no worse than Bitcoin was in that sense but of course the potlatch system is critical in your case . . .” He knew he was babbling but under her accusing gaze he couldn’t stop himself. “I mean, when Microsoft looked at it they decided the only way to prevent Sybils was to have a trusted third party to establish identities, so, so—” He was desperate now. “That’s what we did, Grace! We used the best approach there was. And you know, it’s not just a problem for us, the government’s got to fix it or the whole SIN Number system is compromised . . .”

He could see she wasn’t listening anymore. Instead, she was putting together a reply. But just as she was opening her mouth and starting to point at Nathan, an officer behind the counter called out, “Grace Cooper!”

She glared at Nathan, snapped her mouth shut, then went behind the security screen with another officer. Nathan could see them through the glass, and debated whether he should just go. But he was a big name on the development team, and the others—well, they were all quiet today. Hiding in their beds, he’d bet. Leaving him to take the heat; but maybe that was the way it should be. He waited.

Grace’s conversation with the cop was surprisingly brief. The officer didn’t look happy, and when they bent over a laptop together and he read something there, he looked positively furious. Grace came out a few minutes later, looking darkly satisfied. “He’ll be right out.”

“What happened?”

“He was in one of the ravines in the University Endowment Lands, nailing sensors to trees. Somebody heard him or saw him and called the cops. They found five hundred dollars in his pocket. Figured an aboriginal kid wouldn’t have that kind of money ’cept by stealing it. So they trumped something up and brought him in.”

Nathan looked past her at the cop, who was now angrily talking to another officer behind the glass. “And what did you just do?”

“I fixed it.” She crossed her arms again and pinned Nathan with accusing eyes. “What are you going to do, Nathan?”

“Fix it! Of course, Grace, why do you think I came to you? All my money’s in Gwaiicoin! Mine and . . . Look, if this goes south I go down with it. I know I gotta fix it.”

She didn’t reply. A few minutes later a young man with shoulder-length black hair and a wide-cheekboned face came out, lugging a backpack. “Hiya, Grace,” he said, unsmiling. “Hell of a day.” Then he squinted at Nathan. “Hey.”

“This is Nathan. He was just leaving.”

“Right. Just leaving. Listen, Grace, I . . .” Her face was an impenetrable mask. Nathan’s shoulders slumped and he turned away.

“I’ll talk to you soon.”

• • • •

Alicia was waiting for him when he walked in the door. “Tell me why I can’t pull my money!”

While Nathan visited one development team member after another, she had been texting him with this exact question, and he’d been fending her off as best he could.

“Because the news hasn’t hit yet,” he said as he kicked of his shoes. “Until this goes public, anything you or I do is going to look like insider trading. Hell, it would be insider trading. That’s why nobody else on the team has bought out yet.” He went straight to the kitchen and rooted around in the fridge for a beer. “But trust me, they’re all sitting at their desks with hands hovering over the mouse, waiting for the news to break.”

“But don’t you know when that’s going to happen? The bottom’s going to fall out of Gwaiicoin. We’ll lose everything if we don’t sell now.”

He stalked into the living room and sat down. The couch faced out over Blanca Street, and the forested campus of the University of British Columbia. You could see Musqueam lands from here. “We all know that.” He savagely yanked the cap off the bottle and took a deep pull, glaring at her. “It’s up to the government to make an official statement and they’re sitting on it for now. And for the rest of us . . . none of us can be seen to be the first to bail. Who’d want to be known as the guy who kicked off the biggest crash since the Great Depression?”

“It’s not that big,” she said.

“It is to us. To the Haida. And the Musqueam and the others.”

“So you’re all holding your breath. But should I?”

He blinked at her. “Insider trading. Besides, do you want to be known as the one who brought down Gwaiicoin?”

She thought about it. “I would if I had to. It’s my money.”

“And that’s why it’ll go all the way down when it goes. But your reputation—your career—isn’t riding on this. Mine is. Just . . . just hold off for an hour or two.” He made a patting gesture with both hands, as if to keep the whole issue down. “I’m sure it’ll hit the news tonight.”

Her lips thinned; she whirled, and went back to the kitchen, to bang around in the cupboards.

A year ago Nathan’s safety net had been this condo and another one—an investment property in the suburbs. No matter how the Gwaiicoin experiment did, he had wealth sunk in real estate. Now, housing prices were collapsing in the downtown core. There was general flight from one of the priciest markets on the continent. He’d seen little signs of the decay just now that only a local would notice: the paint was peeling on the garage doors, the exhaust fans in the wall weren’t running. Homeless people were living under the neighborhood’s bridges.

So he’d sold off his investment property and put the money into Gwaiicoin.

Rather than turn on the TV, he put on his AR glasses, went to stand on the balcony and gazed through the damp air at the park.

Shadows leaned in from the right as the sun neared the waters of the Strait. He loved to sit out here and watch the sunset proceed, the lights come on in their thousands as night fell. The city’s gone quiet even since I moved here. The incessant hum of distant internal combustion engines had become rare as electrics took over. Some said that quieter cars were also responsible for more people strolling, not walking, in evening light like this.

Nathan sighed and called up the Gwaii overlay in his glasses.

The heads-up display showed a silent aurora above the city, its rippling banners of light made of thousands of thin vertical lines. Each line signified ownership—of houses, cars, shops—inferred by algorithms that constantly rifled through public databases and commercial stats. The lines joined and rejoined overhead, becoming fewer, showing how most of the houses were really owned by this or that bank; how businesses were in debt to other businesses. All those relationships of ownership and debt consolidated and narrowed as the line rose, joining in private and public corporations, and these sprouted lines to names. Compared to the dizzying complexity at street level, there were very, very few names up there at the top.

Nathan hadn’t built this overlay, and didn’t know who had. Whoever it was, they designed in a subtle gray-white background that you could only see by standing in the dark and looking up. The image was one of the Art Deco cityscapes from the old movie Metropolis.

He turned on Fountain View, and now the lines pulsed faintly in rising waves. Those ascending glimmers represented money. Some of it rose only to fall again, but some kept on rising, clustering, concentrating, fleeing far over the horizon or ending in the tangle of names above the city. You could change the lights into numbers, and they would show more money going up than was coming down.

Lately Nathan imagined an invisible line coming out of his own head, gutting him like a hooked fish. It was his debt, tugging on him day and night. Money flowed up that line and never came back. If not for the Gwaii, it would suck up his car and his condo; so he turned on that view. It usually reassured him.

A different tangle of lines sprouted from the darkening city—gold, not that wan green, and sparser. Value rose up those bright lines, too, and twined and knotted over the city. But it fell, too, in fine thin lines like a mist of rain. If you converted the lines to numbers, you’d see that almost as much fell back as rose. It concentrated, but in the middle rather than at the top. And coins that flew off over the horizon were usually matched by others coming back.

“Help me with this,” called Alicia. Nathan went back in to chop onions, but he kept the overlay active.

One of the Gwaiicoin experiments he’d been involved in was a vase on the corner of the counter. He’d bought it entirely with Gwaiicoin, and it had a virtual tag on it that was different from the others sprouting from his furniture, dishes and clothes. The tag said he wasn’t the owner of the vase, but its steward. Such stewardship contracts were the default in any transfer of assets managed entirely through Gwaiicoin. The contract was registered in the Gwaiicoin blockchain, forever beyond the reach of hackers or thieves. It said that the vase was subject to potlatch like his Gwaiicoin, and someday, its virtual tag might change, telling him that the thing had a new steward—somebody picked at random by the algorithm of the coin. He would gain eminence if he gave it to that person. He’d been reluctant to try that out, and Alicia had suspiciously called it “voluntary communism.”

Communism. Such a quaint old word. A twentieth-century notion, a square peg for the 21st century’s round hole. Still, right now the vase was changing its tag—the invisible one in Nathan’s imagination. From being a sign of his triumph, it was rapidly becoming a symbol of his defeat.

There was nothing on the evening news, but the pressure kept growing inside him. He stood, he paced. Alicia watched, arms folded, from the couch. He monitored the Gwaiicoin developers’ chat room, but nobody was there. They were all waiting. Somebody would have to make the first move.

Finally, at eight o’clock, social media started lighting up. Sybil Attack. Gwaiicoin compromised. As the tweets and posts began flying fast and furious he turned to Alicia and said, “Do it.”

As she raced to get her laptop, Nathan sat down and dismissed all his overlays. He called up his financial app and sat for a long time looking at the impressive balance on the Gwaiicoin side, and the nearly empty one in dollars. Below his Gwaiicoin balance was a link for voluntary transfers to the potlatch account.

I could drop my coins back into dollars, and just walk away. Across the room, the clattering of Alicia’s laptop told him what she was doing.

He stared at the other link. He was partly responsible for dragging thousands of people—mostly poor to begin with—into this fiasco. If he put his money into potlatch, he would lose it as surely as if he’d burned wads of dollar bills. The coins would instantly appear in others’ wallets, randomly scattered among the emptiest of them. Some would be lost to the Sybil attackers, but most would go to real people. Then, those people could cash out in dollars, and end the Gwaiicoin experiment with just a little more than they’d had this morning.

And he would have nothing. Except, in the form of eminence, proof that he’d tried to help. Not monetary capital, but social capital.

Nathan sat there for a long time. Then he slowly reached out, and made a transfer.

• • • •

At ten, he went for a walk.

It wasn’t raining, and it was summer; so you walked. He’d always enjoyed strolling along Blanca, with its tall walls of trees and hedges, the suggestion of darkness over the western streets that came from the presence of the UBC forest lands. You passed through that forest on your way to the campus, which dominated the end of the peninsula. Taking University Boulevard, you could peek past the trees lining it to the golf course on either side.

Except he never went that way. It was all Musqueam territory, and while they were clients and friends, they had also filled the place with cameras and drones. These didn’t bother him so much around Grace’s house, but here, as a solitary walker, he became self-conscious.

He walked, head down, and didn’t look at the overlays. He imagined it anyway: the slow, ponderous collapse of that pyramid of golden light that he’d seen hovering above the city earlier. The first rats leaping off the ship would alert everybody else, and by now everybody would be selling. It would be a classic financial collapse, and he had helped set it off. Who was going to hire him now?

Somehow his feet had carried him south to 10th Avenue and University. Off to the right, the golf course gleamed in the evening light. The BC Golf House was also alight and its parking lot full, mostly with pickup trucks and new model electrics, not the pricey sedans you usually saw there.

He saw a car pull in, stop, and Grace Cooper got out.

Now he remembered: there was supposed to be a social tonight. The councils were coming together to talk about their successes. Grace had told him about socials last week. “They used to have them in the Maritimes and prairies all the time. You just rent a hall, buy a liquor license and find some garage band that’s willing to come out and play. Then call all your friends, and they call their friends . . .”

The hall’s front doors were wide open and people were standing around laughing and talking on the walk. Nathan ran under the weave of electric bus wires that canopied the street, and came up behind Grace just as she was about to enter. “Grace!”

She whirled. “What the hell are you doing here?”

He stopped, hesitated, then squared his shoulders. “I got us into this mess. Are any of the other developers here?”

She shook her head.

“Somebody has to take responsibility—” He made to enter the hall, but she stopped him.

“You’re not going to talk about it, and I’m not going to either because that’s not what tonight’s about. I don’t want you to make it about this. We’re celebrating other things here—things we actually accomplished.” He flinched from her emphasis. It was suddenly obvious why the social was happening at the Golf House. Tiny it might be, but it was on Musqueam land. Land they had taken back.

“What’s done counts,” she said. “What we tried . . .” She shrugged. “Not so much.” Then she moved out of his way. “Go on in, I can’t stop you.”

He almost turned away, but whatever he told himself, these people were not just clients. He wanted to be able to look them in the eyes after all this was done. “I won’t bring it up,” he said. “But others will, and they’ll want to know what I’m doing about the situation.”

“Which is?”

He opened his mouth, throat dry, and couldn’t say it. He just pushed on past her, into the hall.

A folk ensemble was playing. There were tables around the sides of the hall and people roved, chatting. Nobody was dancing but the atmosphere was upbeat. And it should be; here were the inheritors of stubborn cultures that, after five hundred years of often-systematic oppression, were still here.

And were they ever. For the next hour Nathan passed from table to table, saying hi to people he barely knew and, through them, meeting other focused and determined citizens of Canada’s youngest and fastest growing demographic. These were kids in their late twenties and early thirties who’d made great money in the oil sands and northern mines, and were now here starting families and pouring their wealth into the Maa-Nalth Treaty Association, the St’at’imc Chiefs Council or the Carrier Sekani Services. Several of these organizations were rapidly mutating into shadow governments in central B.C. There were so many historical groups, so many unpronounceable names and treaty claims that you’d think it was all chaos. There was an emergent order to it all, though. Gwaiicoin and the blockchain were supposed to be helping with that.

He could see it in their eyes; everybody knew about the Sybil attack. They knew what it meant, but nobody confronted him. Somehow, that hurt more than if they’d beaten him and thrown him into the parking lot.

After a while, exhausted, he found himself sitting across from Jeff. Casting about for something—anything—other than Gwaiicoin to talk about, Nathan asked, “How did Grace get you out so quickly today? Or shouldn’t I ask?”

Jeff pried the material of his shirt forward to show his bodycam. “I told the cops myself, but they wouldn’t listen. This thing has been uploading a low-frame‒rate video stream constantly for the past month. Every frame is signed with a hash and What3Words coordinate and timestamped in the GPB. That’s the, uh, Global Positioning Blockchain. The GPB can verify where I was every second of every day and prove I didn’t break into anybody’s house. When I told them that, they wanted to see the video, but I told them to fuck off. They didn’t have the right. So we were . . .” He seemed to choose his next words delicately. “At an impasse.

“Grace knew something about it I didn’t, though.”

Nathan had heard of the GPB—in that passing way he’d heard of about a million other applications of blockchain technology. GPB was an attestation system, providing the spatial equivalent to a timestamp. It was a secure, decentralized, autonomous way for people all over the world to identify and track specific objects or people. Nathan had shied away from it because to him it had always seemed like the backdoor to some creepy surveillance society.

“What did Grace know that you didn’t?”

Jeff shook his head ruefully. “The whole lifelog’s encrypted with something called FHE. Fully homo-something encryption. Every frame of the lifelog is encrypted in the camera, before it’s uploaded, using a key that needs at least three people to unlock it. One of them being me, I guess.” He shrugged. “Anyway, because of FHE, the GPB can query that encrypted frame for the answer to specific questions—like, was I in somebody’s house by the ravine—without decrypting the data.”

Fully homomorphic encryption. It was all the rage in some circles, the way Bitcoin had been around 2010. It really did let untrusted third parties analyze your data without decrypting it. You could trust them because they couldn’t even in principle have seen what those results were, even though they’d done the work to generate them. Only you could open the returned file.

Nathan was happy for this mathematical distraction. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “Because the GPB’s a transparent blockchain, we can prove the encrypted frames haven’t been tampered with or replaced once they’re uploaded. And we can analyze each frame to find out whether any of them show you straying off the path . . . But how do we know you didn’t switch bodycams with somebody else?”

“Because the frame rate’s high enough that if I swapped it, that would have been visible. The GPB can attest to the whole path I took through the day—” Jeff swooped his hand over the tabletop. “—without us having to show any of the frames to the cops. Which alibis me out while securing my privacy.”

“Wow.” The video feed was effectively also a blockchain, the truth of each new frame attested to by the ones that preceded it. Still . . . “You could hack it,” Nathan decided. “The camera’s the vulnerable point. If you mess with that . . .”

Jeff was shaking his head. “You forget the mesh network. It was uploading data about me the whole time. The trees were watching. And the security cameras on the telephone poles—you know this was near Musqueam land—they feed the same frames to our security company that owns them and to the GPB at the same time. So it’s like having multiple witnesses who can say they saw you somewhere. Difference is we don’t have to show that proof to a cop or a judge to make it official. Once you’ve got enough independent witnesses, it’s just effectively impossible for all of them to have been compromised.” He grinned. “The cops at the station didn’t get that, but they phoned somebody else who did. And that’s how it went down.”

Nathan shook his head. “Cool.” With the GPB, FHE, and enough independent cameras, you could turn supposedly ephemeral internet images into proof of position for any object on Earth, while guaranteeing anonymity for that object. You could do it for people, for trees, briefcases full of cash, cars . . .

Too bad, he mused, you couldn’t also do it for something virtual, like a game character.

Or a piece of software . . .

Nathan stood up so suddenly he nearly knocked over the bench. “Shit!”

Jeff looked up, eyebrows raised. “What?”

“I gotta go.” Nathan turned, and practically ran from the hall.

• • • •

Nathan realized Alicia was talking to him, and had been for some time. He glanced over; she was standing there in a bathrobe, hair tangled, looking at him with a really worried expression on her face.

“One sec,” he said. He laid his hands on the keyboard and entered COMMIT. Then he hit RETURN, leaned back, and sighed.

“You’ve been crazy typing for three hours,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

He looked at the clock in the corner of his monitor screen. It was two a.m. He was wide awake, practically jumping out of his skin with energy, though he knew how that went: the mental crash, when it came, would have him sleeping most of tomorrow.

“Fixed it,” he said. “Now I gotta . . .” He turned from her to text the rest of the team.

Her hand on his shoulder pulled him back to the moment. “Fixed what? Nathan, what the fuck are you doing? You’re scaring me.”

“The, the Sybil attack. I found a fix.” Fix hardly summed up what he’d just done, but right now he was having a bit of trouble with natural languages, like English. Nathan’s head was full of the object code he’d been putting together, and that he’d just committed to a new fork of the Gwaiicoin wallet system.

He rubbed his eyes. “Just one sec, and I’ll tell you all about it.” He texted the team; they’d mostly be asleep, but the buzz of their phones would wake a few, and if nobody got back to him in the next few minutes he’d start phoning them.

The sell-off of Gwaiicoin was in full swing, and he’d been keeping an eye on it while he worked. Luckily, it hadn’t been as bad as he’d feared, for the simple reason that transactions above a certain size were taxed by the currency itself. When Alicia had moved her money from Gwaiicoin to dollars, some of those funds had been transferred to thin Gwaiicoin wallets. Until the poorest wallets divested, a goodly chunk of the money was going to stay in the system.

Still, once the rich had divested the poor would follow, and then the system really would collapse.

He hit SEND, then turned to Alicia. “What if you could prove that each Gwaiicoin user was a human being and had one unique wallet?”

“Oh, God.” She rummaged through her hair, then leaned back against the office wall. “No Sybil attack. Is that it?” She stopped, blinked at him. “I thought you couldn’t do that. You need a trusted third party and that was supposed to be the Social Insurance System. And they crapped out. They got hacked.”

“What if you didn’t need that third party? If you identified each person as a unique position in spacetime, and that person’s one and only wallet is at that same position? Each wallet has a position and it has to correspond to a person’s position. Only one wallet is allowed for any position. So: unique person, unique wallet. Sybil attack solved.”

She shook her head. “Just make up fake people.”

Nathan laughed and jumped up. “But you can’t! That’s what’s so great about it!” The more bodycams, cop-cams, security cams, GPS-sensing sports and health trackers that uploaded their data to the Global Positioning Blockchain, the more witnesses there were to attest to peoples’ existence and location. FHE encryption meant you could hide the data from prying eyes, but still prove your identity in full public view.

“It’ll take a while for the fix to work,” he admitted. “Weeks, months maybe, until everyone using the coin is accounted for. Once they all are, though, Sybil attacks will be impossible. Meanwhile . . .” He frowned at the growing divestment numbers.

Alicia was wide awake now. “It won’t matter if it all goes south tonight.” She had put on her glasses and was staring out the window—probably watching in AR as the gold lines of Gwaiicoin pulled back from house after darkened house, like candle flames going out. “Though I suppose if the team reinvests it’ll send a strong signal . . .” She turned to him and raised her glasses. “That what you’re going to do now?”

Nathan sat there, gazing at the jumble of windows in the monitor. “No.” Giddiness battled with despair.

He hadn’t told Grace what he’d done, though she’d find out soon enough. He couldn’t avoid Alicia, though.

“I didn’t divest,” he said, still staring at the screen. “I could have. Should have, I guess. Maybe I panicked, I dunno, I—”

“Nathan.” She came to lean on the table next to him. “What did you do?”

“I gave it away.” A half-hysterical laugh rose out of him. “All of it. Straight into the potlatch account—swoosh!” He zoomed his hand over the keyboard, like Jeff had earlier.

The look of horror on Alicia’s face was perfect. The rest of the laugh burst its way out of Nathan, battling tears.

He’d given away all his savings.

“I gave it to the people, and now all I have . . .” He clicked over to his Gwaiicoin wallet. “. . . is a hell of a lot of eminence.”

“So you didn’t divest. You—”

“Invested. And if this crash turns around . . .”

“Oh, Nathan, what have you done?”

He slumped back, shaking his head, but smiling.

“I don’t know. But just maybe . . .”

He turned to look at the city skyline, picturing the fountaining flow of currencies: money, power, influence and, joining them, a quality that those other media had never been able to carry: trust.

“Maybe,” he murmured, half to himself, “I’ve found a new way to be rich.”

©2017 by Karl Schroeder. Originally published in Chasing Shadows: Visions of Our Coming Transparent World, edited by David Brin and Stephen W. Potts. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Karl Schroeder is a Hugo-nominated author, with a dozen published books including Sun of Suns, Lockstep, and (with Cory Doctorow) The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction. He is also a foresight analyst who consults and gives keynotes on future trends and disruptions. Recently, he has begun building some of his ideas in the real world, through The Deodands Project. Karl lives in Toronto with his wife and daughter.

The Inheritance of Dust and Leather

Jenny Rae Rappaport | 893 words

It never was a love story. Or perhaps it was, but I was too blind to see it. I kissed him because I had to—because the castle demanded it and the servants needed it—and frankly, the dead are talkative bastards. He transformed, and in his place was a man dressed in green and gold with hair that needed trimming and hands instead of paws. And I smiled, because it was expected, and I said “Yes” because it was expected. And then, I married him for his library.

You would not blame me, if you had seen it in its true glory. The way the bookcases stretched to the ceiling and the polished floors reflected the morning light. If you knew the power of its smell—the way that paper and leather and dust combined into something otherworldly. There were ladders and I climbed them; there were books and I read them. For long years, I watched the rose gardens through the window by my writing desk, as he read over my shoulder and offered suggestions on my work. Our children played at my feet, their laughter floating through the library, and I was happy.

But the dead knew, even if I didn’t. They had been there too long, too many centuries in this castle and with this family. The things they had seen: the princes and the kings and the occasional queen, all of them transformed into creatures that would rival the finest bestiary. Some of them had survived; many others had not.

I refused to believe the dead because I didn’t want to believe them. I had done my duty, and this was my reward. But we are so foolish when we are young, aren’t we?

Being a beast does something to a man—it carves out a tiny portion of his heart and replaces it with something not-quite-human. And no matter how much like a man he looks, it grows, ever so slowly, year by year. Until you turn in your bed one day, and realize that the person next to you is more beast than man, despite the shell he wears.

He grew angry and I grew angry, too. We fought across the castle—dishes thrown, windows smashed, paintings slashed. I bundled the children in a carriage in the dead of night and escaped to a neighboring estate. He followed me. So, I ran. And we hid.

As the children grew into adulthood, we learned to fend for ourselves—my sons became fine blacksmiths, my daughters were skilled with a needle. I missed the books—not so much the man or the castle, but the library itself. I spent every spare hour I had trying to recreate the manuscript I had abandoned. We were safe, as safe as I could make us, and if not precisely happy, we were alive.

The change came with the night—with the way that my oldest son screamed in his sleep—and the creature that I found in his place. With the lion-like mane that ringed his head and the green scales that wound up his legs; with the way that unnatural strength rippled through his fur-covered muscles and bad temper threatened to hurt us all. And I knew, because you always know. I wept—of course, I wept—but weeping would not solve anything.

Back to the castle we went, this time only the two of us—I refused to let the others come. The risk was mine to take; he was still my child, and I would still protect him. It didn’t matter that he was as monstrous as his father had been. His fur was soft and golden, and his claws were shorter than his father’s, but they were otherwise identical. And in his eyes, I saw the pain and panic that I had known so well when I was young.

They fought when we arrived, through the great hall of the ruined castle and up the stairs, two beasts locked in combat—one half-human, one fully transformed. It was majestic and terrifying, and all I could think was that I wanted to survive long enough to check on my books. The dead chattered in my ears and the servants fled and I did what a mother does—I kept my son safe. My body between theirs; my blood upon the cracked stairs. Well, we know what happened with that, don’t we?

My husband died, my son lived, and I stayed in the castle. I spent hours trying to fix the library; I enlisted the other dead to help, and together, we repaired it, even though it is not how it used to be. In time, we even replaced the few servants who had come back after the fight. Each night I sang my son to sleep, as if he was small, and I tricked myself into thinking that he heard me. And perhaps he did.

And now you’re here, with your lost father and your horse and your uncanny ability to hear me. Forgive me, if I feel a kinship; your story is so very like mine. Even down to your love of my son and my books and my very home itself. We are talkative bastards, indeed, aren’t we?

But be careful, my dear, when you kiss him.

©2022 by Jenny Rae Rappaport.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jenny Rae Rappaport has been published in Lightspeed Magazine, Escape Pod, and Daily Science Fiction, among other magazines. She is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, and holds a BA in Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University. In the past, she has worked as a literary agent, a marine sciences field guide, and spent a semester observing monkeys as an intern with the Pittsburgh Zoo. Jenny lives in New Jersey with her family, where she divides most of her time between writing and herding small children. She can be found online at jennyrae.com and on Twitter at @jennyrae.

The Queen of the Earless Seals of Lake Baikal

Kristina Ten | 5284 words

Dia was four years old when she first saw the earless seals of Lake Baikal, and twenty-four when she met their queen. In the time between, she moved from her small town, which was a short train ride’s distance to the lake, to the big city, which was a short train ride’s distance to everything, and went to university to study hotel management.

Dia was well suited for hospitality; she was accommodating by nature. In the city, she learned the art of the turndown: how to dim the lights and plump the pillows just right. She learned how to fold hand towels into the shapes of a dozen different animals, when to step in during disputes between the day and nighttime managers, where exactly to place the flower on a room-service breakfast tray. She learned these lessons faster and better than all her classmates, and the most important one of all: discretion. That sometimes guests would want the whole of her attention, and other times they would want none.

Dia missed her small town for its wildflowers and its quiet, though not for its proximity to the earless seals, which by then she had long forgotten. She made a plan to return after university, not to her own town but to neighboring Petrushevskaya, the center of tourism on the western tip of Lake Baikal. Her classmates didn’t understand; they wanted to work in the cosmopolitan hotels in Europe, the kind with mirror floors and saltwater pools on the roof. But Dia was certain: a modest inn at the Petrushevskaya town center, twelve rooms at most, where she would hang paintings by local artists in the lobby and set out milk for the neighborhood cats at night.

Dia was twenty-one years old when she graduated with this dream of being Petrushevskaya’s newest innkeeper, and twenty-one and a half when she gave it all up. In the time between, she met Abram. Six months after meeting him, Dia’s future looked completely different. What more is there to say about Abram than that?

• • • •

“Welcome,” said the queen of the earless seals, looking the visitor up and down. The woman wore a dark gray dive suit and rubber flippers, the typical garb of humans who came to court. Her breathing apparatus stretched her face into a rounded snout, and the tubes and straps drooped on either side like overlong whiskers. The queen sighed. They always dressed like this when seeking an audience. Some kind of tribute, she had to assume. Of course, they got it all wrong.

“Welcome,” she said again. “You must have come a long way.”

In truth, the woman had come only fifteen meters, barely reaching the Garden of Dancing Sponges and Pathetic Crabs. The visitors with thicker suits and bigger tanks tended to make it a bit farther, but always the queen had to swim up to meet them from her throne, which was another hundred meters down the lake wall.

The woman sputtered into her mask. Bubbles shot out into the water around her, and the plastic disk over her eyes fogged.

“Not like that,” said the queen. She drifted closer and touched her nose to the woman’s mask. “Like this.” She bumped her nose against the top of the woman’s head. “Like this.” She repeated the motion. This was how she taught the visitors to speak underwater.

“Like this?” thought/said the woman.

“Exactly,” thought/said the queen back.

The woman unzipped the pouch at her waist and pulled out her offerings, setting them one by one on an algae-covered rock. A bar of soap in the shape of a clamshell, its ridges already softening in the water. A handful of sea glass, thick pieces in jade, lavender, and amber. Finally, a clay whistle sculpted to look like a brown bear holding a silver fish between its paws.

“You blow into the tail,” the woman said, demonstrating by holding the whistle against her mask, “and the sound comes out of its mouth.”

The queen brought her fins together and swam three tight circles around the woman, one circle for each offering. She took great pleasure in the trinkets the humans brought from the tourist shops in Petrushevskaya, and she especially liked the ones that looked like bears. The brown bears were the earless seals’ only natural enemy, and it was satisfying to see them brought down to size. Small and immobile, utterly nonthreatening. She could swallow it whole if she wanted, or shatter it with a rock—

But first, this business with the visitor.

“Go on then,” she told the woman. “Say what you have come for. What is your wish?”

“I don’t have a wish,” the woman replied. Her tone reminded the queen of the ice break after a particularly long winter. How the first crack was almost imperceptibly quiet before the lake’s surface gave way all at once, ripping the hard sky of her kingdom open.

“I have a question,” the woman continued. “I want to know if he means it this time.”

• • • •

What more is there to say about Abram?

Once, Dia thought that if you knew a person long enough, you would come to understand everything about them: the temperature of their body while sleeping, how much sugar they took with their tea ordinarily versus how much sugar they took when their mother was in the room. The longer she knew Abram, however, the more she felt she might never know him at all.

Abram ate tomatoes whole, gripping them against his palm like an apple until the skin burst. Apples, on the other hand, he would only eat if Dia sliced them and arranged the slices radially on a plate around a small bowl of broom-heather honey. He liked one pillow for the night and two pillows for napping. He liked his jackets let out around the shoulders so he could move about freely, without feeling pent up.

Abram valued discretion. Sometimes he wanted all of Dia’s attention; other times he wanted none.

When she met him, he was a promising young glassmaker; he’d come to her university to present his hand-blown glassware to the graduating class of hospitality students, hoping some would buy it for their hotels. She’d admired his wine glasses, their delicate fluting and filigree, but said that when it came to her inn, she had a lot to think about before she could begin to think about that.

He’d taken her chin between his fingers, lined his eyes up with hers in a gesture Dia had once considered romantic, and growled, teeth out, “Why don’t you think about this?”

Now Abram worked in a glass factory where he and thousands like him, in matching uniforms and respirators, used steel molds and conveyor belts to produce cheap glassware for department stores. He worked at a vibrating machine for much of the day, pressing one button then the one beside it, and when he came home, something within him was vibrating too. His body was still in the routine of pressing, pressing. The buttons on the machine had to be pressed hard. Otherwise, the machine wouldn’t register the instruction.

Dia would say, “I understand, Abram. I understand, my dear.” But for years his job hadn’t required the handling of actual glass, and he’d forgotten how to touch something fragile.

Abram wasn’t happy about Dia going to Petrushevskaya one month after her twenty-fourth birthday, on what she claimed was a trip to visit a childhood friend. He argued that she’d managed to go without seeing childhood friends all the time he’d known her, and she said that was all the more reason to do it—that now was the best time, the only time, since soon their lives would be so busy. He insisted that at the very least she shouldn’t go alone, not in her present condition, and she replied that, yes, of course, he was right. Only she knew how necessary he was at work, how they could hardly spare him, so shouldn’t he let her go a few days ahead, then meet her for the weekend? She described all the dull things she’d do on her own, and how together they’d do the things he liked. She reminded him how beautiful Baikal was supposed to be in the summer, and gradually, he relented.

Dia had been well suited for hospitality. She was accommodating by nature.

But not so accommodating as all that, you see.

• • • •

“I want to know if he means it this time,” the woman told the queen of the earless seals, who meanwhile was nudging the shell-shaped bar of soap along the algae-covered rock, trying to decide whether or not to eat it. “I want to know if he’s really going to change.”

The queen pulled her eyes away from the soap. She was skeptical; they taught the young ones to be wary of any prey slower and simpler than the Pathetic Crabs, which were already so slow and simple as to be sedentary. She looked up at the woman. “I cannot tell you that.”

“Why not?” The woman tugged at the neck of her dive suit. “You haven’t even asked who I’m talking about.”

The queen explained, “It does not matter. So long as your ‘he’ is another human, your question has to do with human nature. I am the queen of the nerpa. I know nothing about that.” A small oilfish darted by and she fought the impulse to chase it. This was not the right time. It was important for the queen to show visitors to her kingdom that she took their matters of concern seriously. “But I could offer you something else.”

“I don’t want anything else. I want you to answer my question.” The woman sounded like a starving pup whining for milk. She checked a white-faced gauge at her hip, the needle hovering just left of center.

It was true, the queen didn’t know humans well, but there were some things that she could intuit. Those things—panic, affection—that were shared among animals. She cocked her head for a moment and thought.

“I cannot predict what your ‘he’ will do, nor can I change it. But I can offer you this. If he is loud now, his voice forceful, I can make him quieter. I can give him the soft grunt of the nerpa.”

A beam of light from the surface shifted and caught the sea glass between them. When the woman didn’t respond, the queen went on.

“Of course, I cannot alter the words he says. Only the way they come out. So that when he speaks, it will sound gentle. Dampened. As if you are both underwater.”

• • • •

When Dia’s plane landed outside Petrushevskaya, her arms were covered in bruises. The flight had been awfully turbulent. Those are the facts; they are not the story.

In Petrushevskaya, people told stories about the earless seals. No one knew exactly how they got there in the first place. The fact was that they arrived some two million years ago, when the lake was still connected to the ocean by an ice-age floodplain. The story was that they had twice as much blood in their bodies as any other species of seal, and that this allowed them to dive twice as deep and live two times—no, three times, no, four times—as long.

The facts were printed on the panels at the official museum at the Petrushevskaya town center. The stories were reserved for the cafes and bathhouses, the street tours and the dark corners of pubs.

The story was that each month on the night of the new moon, when the streetlights in Petrushevskaya had to work harder than usual, the queen of the earless seals broke the water’s surface wearing a woman’s skin. As a woman, she was captivating, with plump cheeks and long blue-gray hair and this unnerving way of forgetting to breathe as often as a human should, then overdoing it—performing fast, exaggerated gasps—when she remembered.

And using the woman’s legs, she walked into the inns. Using the woman’s fingers, she traced the rims of empty glasses so they played an ancient ocean song. Using the woman’s lips, she smiled at the men, and then she took them upstairs.

Where else would the seals get all that blood from?

Lake Baikal contains nearly a quarter of the planet’s fresh water. It has an area slightly larger than the country of Belgium. You can put two facts next to each other, and they still won’t be the story. The lake is 1,642 meters deep—a fact—and eighty kilometers at its widest point. The story in the big cities was that if you came to Lake Baikal to “meet the queen of the earless seals,” it meant you were going to drown yourself.

When Dia went to meet the queen of the earless seals, she didn’t go to drown herself. Though no one who knew her could possibly have blamed her.

• • • •

“So?” asked the queen of the earless seals. She was aware of a growing hunger at her middle rapidly gnawing its way out. Visits didn’t usually take this long. The humans came, not at all seal-like, with their offerings of pebbles or souvenirs or occasionally a jar of pickled fish, which she could not even open, then made some straightforward request. Something like the stamina to pass another round of university exams, the good fortune to birth a healthy child, the cleverness to earn a big promotion at work.

The queen would grant their wish, and they’d be on their way, and peace between their worlds would be maintained. It was her job to make herself available to the visitors, so long as they approached her with respect, in accordance with nerpa customs. Her holding court was part of an old agreement between the species, a condition of neither hunting the other. The one time it happened in earnest had been devastating.

“No,” the woman said finally. “I don’t need him to speak softly. What good would that do?” She had one gloved hand on the white-faced gauge and the other on her stomach, as if she was trying to block the air inside from escaping too quickly.

The queen twitched her whiskers thoughtfully. “Perhaps none. Still, I cannot answer your question. I cannot predict what he will do, nor can I change it.”

The woman gazed down the sloped wall—down, down, down to the bottom of Lake Baikal—and though the queen knew she couldn’t possibly see it, she sensed the woman could feel it, that lake floor littered with the wreckage of manmade vessels, invertebrates wriggling in the smothering dark. The woman was not a skilled diver; the queen could gather as much from her nervous movements, her meager equipment. Perhaps she had never even done it before. Yet something about the woman made the queen suspect she was familiar with the lowest points, the darkest places, the gripless loose-silt bottoms of things.

“But,” the queen went on, “I can offer you this. Your skin, it is thin now. Not good for much. For example, you cannot come here without your special suit.” She waved a fin over the dark gray neoprene. “I can give you skin like the nerpa. Abundant, dense, and blubbery. Resistant to wind and water, and anything that might impact it.”

• • • •

Lake Baikal is 1,642 meters deep—a fact, well-documented, unchanging. It was 1,642 meters deep when Dia first saw it and 1,642 meters deep two decades later when she returned. It’s that deep each spring, when the seals mate, troubling the water, and that deep in the winter, when the females haul out onto the ice to give birth. It’s that deep months after pupping season, when the young ones are weaned and start to develop their lifelong appetite for meat.

You can be absolutely sure of the depth of Lake Baikal.

This thing with Abram, Dia never knew how deep it went.

Everyone had monsters, she told herself, lingering somewhere beneath the surface. Abram wasn’t alone in that. What mattered was how fearless they were, and how often they came up for air.

Abram’s life had fed his monsters well. It had nurtured them and given them room to grow, so that now they were numerous and tireless, sharp-toothed and afraid of no one.

What more is there to say about Abram’s life than it was one punctuated by death? His brother hanged himself on the family porch when Abram was still in primary school. Their mother made a bracelet of his baby teeth and wore it every day until she went herself, to cancer, a variety common in their factory town. His father waited until Abram was grown, then somersaulted his truck over the Vitim River Bridge. He was a long-haul driver, did deliveries across Siberia, and everyone said it was an accident, that the Vitim had taken many fine drivers in its time.

But Abram the glassmaker knew. He had asked about the glass. Had learned that the truck’s windows were rolled down even before it broke through the icy river, on a night in January when it was thirteen below.

Because his father hadn’t lived to see him make a single sale, for a long time afterwards, Abram threw everything into his glassmaking, trying desperately to melt down the ugliness he’d witnessed and mold it into something beautiful. Color-drenched rims and hand-cut engravings. A set of vodka glasses inspired by Dia, even, carved with images of her namesake, the goddess Diana. On the bad days, she carried one of the glasses in her pocket, a reminder he could be tender. Diana’s robes free and billowing, bow strung over a crescent moon.

Abram liked to tell Dia that they were fated. Destined like the Roman deities. That they alone could understand one another. That everything in their lives had brought them together. Even the worst parts—especially those. He said they had death like some couples had a favorite movie, one they’d both seen countless times and could quote from memory.

Abram liked his jackets let out around the shoulders. He liked his socks matched in pairs while still in the laundry basket. He liked books in which the heroes were successful in every task and everyone, even the dogs, lived at the end.

Everything else about Abram was hard for Dia to guess at, as futile as trying to predict the weather. Sometimes he was a storm violently jostling the plane through dark clouds. Other times he was a lily-scented breeze, so light as to not even ripple the water.

The facts, so called, publicly accepted: Abram was gainfully employed, paid his taxes, was handsome, a friendly neighbor, shoveled old Lyuba’s walk every morning last snow, had a tragic upbringing—here someone would shake their head sadly—much to overcome, but was still young! Had all his teeth, all the promise in the world. As for the bruises, Dia had always been clumsy, hadn’t she? Clumsier now, getting used to her new center of gravity.

And the story, in the face of such facts, feeling hunted, retreated.

• • • •

The woman looked at the bar of soap, which was no longer shaped like a shell but amorphous, vaguely egg-like, thoroughly worn down by the water.

“No,” she said. “Your thick skin does sound useful, but it would provide the wrong kind of protection.” She paused. “I have another proposition.”

The queen felt a change then: a sudden cool current, the diffused sunlight dimmer than before. “I will hear it,” she said to the woman, who glanced at the air gauge before speaking.

“I want you to take her.”

The queen had been wondering when the woman would mention the child. It wasn’t her high position—all nerpa could sense when another creature was close to calving. But the queen knew enough about humans’ sensitive nature not to bring it up before the woman was ready to talk. “Your pup.”

“Yes. I want you to take her and raise her as your own.”

“It’s not that simple.” A hunk of seaweed floated between them and instinctively the queen lunged for it, then, remembering herself, held it between her teeth instead of gulping it down. “A human child would not survive their first freeze.”

“Not human then,” the woman insisted. “He said that things would be different when he was a father. That being a father would make him better.” Her eyes drilled into the queen’s, searching. “But you can’t tell me if that’s true.”

“No,” the queen replied. “I cannot.”

“Then this is the only way to make sure she’s safe. Everything you’ve offered me—your thick skin, your soft voice—has to do with your kind. You say you can’t change the circumstances in my domain. So bring her into yours.”

The queen pawed absently at the algae that sprawled across the rock with the offerings onto the craggy wall. “I myself could not take her. The queen does not have children. It would distract from her queenly duties.” Slowly, she added, “If you were to go through with this, your pup would be given to another nerpa to feed and wean. In the beginning, at least. We learn quickly to fend for ourselves.”

“Fine. Just tell me who you leave her with. I’ll come back to see her when I can.”

“You are welcome to come back, but you will not find her. She will be nerpa. Once she molts, her pelt will be the same color as every other nerpa. Once she learns to use her claws, she will make a breathing hole in the ice the same size as all the rest. You will not be able to pick her out.” The queen hesitated. “Even if you did find her, she would not be like me. She would not understand your words, nor you hers.”

The woman was quiet for a very long time, as the air gauge on her suit ticked lower and lower.

Finally, like a set of jaws snapping shut over a mouthful of mollusks, she said: “Do it.”

• • • •

If Dia could think of the bruises as souvenirs from a bad but brief vacation—

Dia was four years old when she first saw the earless seals of Lake Baikal. Her grandparents brought her from their town to Petrushevskaya for the day. It was the wrong time of year to be there; better to visit when the weather is warmer, when you can sit on the patio of the hotel room sipping chilled orange juice or flip lazily through a magazine on the beach.

If Dia could think of the bruises as a single wrinkle on a thousand-count sheet, otherwise smooth and inviting—

The seals galumphed toward them across the icy desert. They crawled gracelessly on their bellies, the land not their best medium, stopping frequently to rest and toast their backs under the faint winter sun. What few tourists there were snapped photographs so they wouldn’t forget.

Dia and her grandparents were there, in Petrushevskaya, expressly to forget. Or to try to. About the accident at the very least, the entire past month if they could manage it. A month of funeral arrangements and mourning clothes. Dia in her black velveteen dress with the lace collar. Dia squeezed between them in the front seat, boxes of her belongings in the back.

Dia asked her grandparents why they were called earless, if it meant the seals couldn’t hear anything they said. She shoved her fingers into her own ears, knuckle deep, testing what it would be like for a whole world of sound to disappear.

Her grandfather laughed, the first time all month. “Smart girl,” he said. “I grew up with the story that these seals are the most vicious beasts you can imagine. They say that the queen hunts the townspeople, and that God made her earless so she would not hear their screams.”

Dia’s eyes were wide and shiny, empty platters. Her grandmother slapped his arm hard.

“Tsk! Why do you tell her such things?” She glared at him, then turned to Dia, pulling gently on the little girl’s braid. “Do not listen to your grandfather. He is a gullible man, and that is just a story. The truth is that the earless seals can hear as well as anyone. In fact, they are the best listeners in the whole animal kingdom! So, if you have a secret, or a wish, or a message you want no one else to know”—she leaned down and whispered into Dia’s ear—”you can tell it to them.”

If Dia could think of the bruises as the slightest crack in a drinking glass, one that wouldn’t spread so long as she was careful, so long as she sipped from it only occasionally, barely touched her lips to it, barely breathed as she wiped it down, steady, steady, before placing it back on the highest shelf—

• • • •

“Do it.”

As a rule, the queen didn’t pass judgment on human matters. For one thing, she had never understood them. For another, her kingdom was no paradise; there was violence among the seals, too, removed from it though she was on her throne in the deep. The males fought one another for mating rights, the females for food for their young. She ran her fins through the Garden of Dancing Sponges, debating whether or not to ask.

Finally, she ventured: “And you?”

“What about me?” The woman examined her hands in the diving gloves, avoiding the queen’s gaze. Her headlamp illuminated the space around them, billions of plankton hovering like a sky of nameless stars. “I’ve heard the stories. I know the magic only works for one.”

“That is true.” The queen waited for the woman to say more, then tried again. “You could build your den as deep as you are willing to dive. On the shore, the others would form circles around you.” She made her tone a plush bed of kelp. “He would not find you.”

“No,” the woman said, and that single short word sounded like the crash of skull bone against lake wall, like what happens when a seal chases oilfish full-speed and doesn’t manage to pull up in time. Then, softer, fumbling: “I can’t. We belong together, he says that. And I’m all he has left.” She exhaled. “He needs me. And she needs not to know him. It’s hard to explain.”

The woman and the queen of the earless seals considered one another. Suddenly, a small light on the air gauge flashed red and began to blink.

“I have to go,” the woman said. “Will you help me or not?”

The queen rubbed her snout against the arm of the dive suit. “You know about the blood then.”

“What?”

“You say you have heard the stories. So you know the one about the blood.”

The woman thought back to her grandfather’s bedtime stories, which gave her nightmares every time she heard them, and still she begged for more. The stories that had brought her to this place after so long. “I’ve heard that you come up once a month, and you go into the inns and pubs . . .”

“Oh!” the queen interrupted. “Not those ridiculous rumors.” She huffed out a fast stream of bubbles, gnashed her teeth once or twice, then collected herself. It was important for a queen to maintain her composure, and also not to give away too much. “Nerpa have more blood than other seals, yes. Though we have no need to go out and”—she tossed her head in a show of disgust—“fetch it. That we live longer than all the others, that is true as well. They say up to four times as long, the last I heard it, but you should know as well as I do that your kind tend to underestimate us.” Her round black eyes twinkled. “I personally have lived a great many years, and I plan to live many years more.”

The red light flashed on and off, on and off, and the woman said slowly, “Many years more?”

“Many years more,” the queen repeated. “Though a year means something different to us than it does to you. And since nerpa do not leave Lake Baikal, so long as I live, I will live right here.” She spun, sending plankton wheeling in every direction. “Which is to say, if you came back this season, or the next like it, or another like it a thousand moons from now, I would be here still. And you would know where to find me.”

• • • •

No one could have blamed Dia for trying to drown herself: life could be horribly inhospitable at times, and love was not exactly a five-star stay. But that is not why she went to Lake Baikal that summer.

When she emerged, a dark gray dot bobbing in the water, the lifeguards mistook her for one of the local nerpa until one of the beachgoers—a bored teenager reading a fashion magazine—looked up and shouted, “Hey! Is that a person out there?”

On the shore, the lifeguards stripped off Dia’s dive suit and wrapped her in blankets, rubbing her arms and legs vigorously until their color returned. While they waited for the ambulance, she drank hot tea with lemon and they grumbled to one another about the owner of the scuba gear rental shop, how irresponsible he was, what a blight on the entire community, to send a tourist out alone without even bothering to check her certification. A woman tourist. Pregnant, no less.

She lost the baby, of course. Suffocation, the doctor said. Something that can happen when you stay too long underwater.

The next morning, a seal pup was found mewling on one of the rocky outcroppings near the Petrushevskaya newsstand. Its fur bright white and woolly, eyes still blinking open—not yet a day old. It was the first week of June, well past the end of pupping season, and the adult seals had abandoned their young, instead dedicating all their time to finding new mates. No one expected a pup so out of season to survive.

From the window of her room in the modest inn that was not hers, but was quite nice anyway, with an ideal location at the Petrushevskaya town center, Dia watched the commotion over the seal pup, and she knew it would survive. Its fur would molt, and it would learn to chase down fish and forage; maybe it would start with the Pathetic Crabs, which were so slow and simple that even the most unskilled hunters could catch them. It would learn to slow its heartbeat down the deeper it dove. It would learn these lessons faster and better than any of the others, Dia was willing to bet.

And the people of Petrushevskaya would tell stories about her seal pup, as was the shared fate of the earless seals of Lake Baikal. Fate, Dia thought, and underneath that word, fate, appeared another word, a bigger word, like a bigger fish—a shadow that took shape as it moved toward the water’s surface. Took shape and swam straight for that skimpy word, that slippery and unsatisfying word, fate. Came to swallow up that word, fate, gone in one swift bite, fate. And the bigger word was future.

Dia was twenty-four years old when she met the queen of the earless seals of Lake Baikal.

She was about your age when she packed her things and moved home for good.

©2022 by Kristina Ten.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kristina Ten is a Russian-American writer with work in Lightspeed, Fantasy, Diabolical Plots, Flash Fiction Online, Weird Horror, and elsewhere. A graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop, she is a current MFA candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she also teaches creative writing. You can find her at kristinaten.com and on Twitter as @kristina_ten.

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

The Sister City

Cody Goodfellow | 7934 words

When Loren left, he said it wasn’t me but the city. “This place hates me, Julian,” he said of LA. “I have to live in a city that loves me like this shithole loves that douchebag from the Red Hot Chili Peppers.” Typically, he buried the casual cruelty under a bad joke, but it was the first crack in a reservoir of obsession he’d kept completely secret. When he abruptly left for Portland, he didn’t ask me to come with him, and I wouldn’t shame myself by following him.

Fast-forward three months: Loren’s parents come to me to find out what happened to him, and I take their money and buy a ticket to fly up there. Even dignity has an expiration date.

Call it morbid curiosity. Call it a need for closure. Call it revenge. Call it anything but what it really was.

I met his mother for brunch in Malibu. Old Hollywood technocrat class—dad a sitcom editor, mom a costume designer for the Disney mill—they wholeheartedly approved of Loren’s sexuality, but they never hid their disdain for his trashy taste in men. When he wanted to be a painter, they sent him to CalArts, and when he refused to produce anything commercial or salable, they let him move back into their compound in Pacific Palisades.

They didn’t even cut him off when he went up north, but within a few weeks of renting a frowsy bungalow in the dingiest corner of Southeast Portland, he stopped drawing on his allowance, picking up his medications from the pharmacy, and answering his phone. Mom kept calling, and once, a month ago, a strange, catatonically high person of indeterminate gender answered and told her Loren gave them his phone at a “potlatch.”

She told me what it was before I could look it up on my phone. “The Pacific Northwest Indians celebrated their material wealth by giving it all away,” she sniffed.

“Crazy,” I said. “Not wanting to be rich, I mean.”

She pursed her lips in an expression her plastic surgeon probably warned her against. Anyway, this person who barely knew Loren told her that he gave away everything at this party. Trashed the place. Invited kids off the street to squat there. “Even you wouldn’t believe the state of it,” she told me. Before they hung up and ripped the phone to a new number, the kid told her that as far as they knew, Loren went to live on the street or, as they put it, to “the Real City.”

I knew she was huffing class resentment to stave off her own self-loathing, so I didn’t poke, no matter how badly I wanted to. They marinated Loren in privilege and were flabbergasted that he’d use it to punish them for the unforgivable sin of bringing him into the world without preparing him for it, that his acting out was the closest thing their son had come so far to expressing love at all.

Local police and FBI failed to do anything about it. The more homeless kids disappeared, they seemed to think, the better. Two private detectives combed Portland’s tent villages and labyrinthine underground for weeks without finding anything she couldn’t learn from home, didn’t bring her anything but excuses to spend more of her money.

So now . . . she was asking me to find him. I’d seen where it was headed when she didn’t just pump me for information. She would pay for my expenses, naturally, but by the flinty gleam, I knew she was banking I’d be cheaper than the detectives and more diligent than the law because I loved her son and because I must know quite a bit about the underside of rocks.

I only said yes, so help me, because I was broke and the gallery was shuttered until the owner got out of a bottomless tax pit—not because I gave a damn what happened to her son or because that gleam in her eye reminded me of him.

One thing that hooked me, but should have made me stay away, was the video.

The second detective promised he’d be able to locate Loren in a matter of days by combing through TriMet and some commercial security video using face-recognition software. It was hideously expensive and produced a slew of false positives but eventually yielded one hit, which she was told was itself strange, but it was all too possible, given the genius of Portland’s homeless for slipping into every crack in the city to get out of the rain.

The video was a month old, and it showed a jittering stick figure on a light rail platform, fighting up the stream of rush-hour foot traffic. Face contorted, the low resolution and frame rate made him jitter across the frame like a whirligig, but it was unmistakably Loren. For one frame, the rolling eyes seem to pin the camera defiantly, to silently condemn and cry for help. You could dig up an unmarked grave and show me a dirt-clotted skull, and I’d recognize that smile.

His mother paused the video on his face and bolted down half her mimosa before she continued. It had to be some kind of prank, she said. The detective couldn’t explain it as glibly as he had Loren’s popping up out of nowhere, but she knew it couldn’t be true. I had to ask her what she meant three times before she fumbled her way to the Play button.

Loren’s manic rictus shrivels as he breaks the camera’s gaze and throws his arms around a short, skinny person with a shaved head, hard enough to make me twitch with jealousy. He windmills his arms so furiously that the sleepwalking commuters fall over each other to give him a wide berth. His arms go down to his sides, he tucks his head with the steely focus of a gymnast sizing up a pommel horse, and he runs and leaps off the platform into the path of the train, screaming into the station.

There were no suicides or accidental deaths on the TriMet red line train or on any other MAX line that day, that week, or that year. Unlike the lethal meatplows beneath New York and Los Angeles, the MAX trains were like cuddly plush toys that made it almost impossible to get seriously injured. The city said the video was a hoax when she showed it to them, and though it wasn’t doctored, they quietly threatened to sue her if she didn’t keep it to herself.

So she fired the detective, and after fighting several times with her husband, she called me.

• • • •

Loren always insisted the absence of seasons was why everyone in California acted like they did. A little seasonal depression was essential for healthy human development.

Portland was one big seasonal depression support group. Since nearly every day was cold, wet, and miserable, there was a muted patience and sweetness, a sly acceptance of whatever it took to get through the colder, wetter nights, and a winking shared knowledge of some unnamable factor that made it all worth it.

It was supposed to be spring in Portland, but even when the sun came out, it was pale and weak as a stepfather’s love, with deep-blue vampire shadows you could still freeze to death in.

Perhaps a lifetime of learning geography from wall-mounted maps had ingrained in me a sense of the Pacific coast as a vertical surface, a continuous climb from the slough of Southern California to the foggy heights of Oregon and Washington. Even after weeks in Portland, I never lost that queasy vertigo sense that one false step would send me tumbling south, all the way back to where I belonged.

It should have been easy to find him. Compared to LA, Portland was a baby city, a bunch of parks and absent-minded grid-sprawl you could see from one end to the other even as the plane circled the airport. If Loren was missing, it was because he wanted to be.

But then you set foot on the street, and you fight to keep from turning a reflexive, protective blind eye to the city within the city. Blink and it’s gone, lost in that flicker between blackness and sight.

Hollywood has its infamous locust hordes who come to be discovered but end up turning tricks in hour-rate motels, shinnying up stripper poles, and sleeping in campers or under bridges, but the climate is forgiving, even if the city is not. The dream is real and alive even if it might as well be on another planet. You could at least understand why so many come and stay to be eaten alive.

But why did they come here? The weather wept, and the streets buckled and broke under their own weight. Bloating woodwork, swelling moss and mushrooms, and eroding bricks. Hillsides strewn with tents and trash, begging bowls and incoherent cardboard epitaphs, shivering with the soul-sapping chill under every bus shelter—these uninvited pilgrims come to witness a miracle they could not begin to describe, numbered in the tens of thousands on top of the old, infirm, alcoholic, mentally ill, unwanted, superfluous citizens trapped there by birth, all here to feed themselves to a fiery dream of a new utopia that burned all the brighter for the certainty that it existed nowhere on this Earth, that the dreams of those manicured yuppie houses in the nice neighborhoods were some kind of lure like the glowing bit on a deep-sea predator’s snout.

I couldn’t begin to understand how Loren could want to lose himself among them, but to an artist addicted to hopelessness and doom, they must have attracted and inspired him as powerfully as whatever it was that kept them here.

Loren’s last known address off Burnside was being remodeled, and the new occupants wouldn’t let me see it, so I wandered the neighborhood, showing Loren’s picture to anyone on the street, offering them money. I gave a lot of it away but got nowhere.

I ate breakfast at a place that only served biscuits and thirty flavors of gravy, bought vetiver and rhubarb essence at a Goth aromatherapy boutique called Euphobia, and ate sundew salad at a vegan café that only served carnivorous plants. Everything I saw, I imagined him mocking it as I searched every passing face pushing a shopping cart.

In a coffeeshop twelve blocks away, I stopped to order a mocha when I chanced to look at the art on the walls. Like every café in the area, they were crowded with borderline amateur paintings and photography by local artists with hilarious price tags, but looking at the series beside the register, I got a weird rush of familiarity.

The pics were of a demolished house, poorly lighted attempts to make abstract textures out of the damage, with craters kicked in drywall and slogans scrawled in spray paint and blown out until they were satellite imagery of an utterly digested landscape. The words metamorphosis, dream, and reality, before and after . . . appeared over and over . . . and always surrounded by a pink corona like a halo of worms—“The Really Real” . . . and “The Sister City.” And everywhere, a black squiggle like a question mark clutching a staring, lidless eye.

“Yeah, Topher took those,” the cashier said in response to my staring. “Squat house down the block. Street kids threw a rager there. My housemate got a sweet egg chair out of it . . .”

I went to the men’s room. It had a poster from The Cars That Ate Paris, a diorama of half-melted vintage action figures, and an empty crimson square on the peeling purple wall with a grubby paper caption taped nearby that read, Unknown, Metrocorpus IX (Julian), oil on canvas, $75.

My hands shook so bad I pissed on my shoes. I washed up and pulled my sweater up over my shoulders, turned around to look at the tattoo I’d gotten right before Loren left LA.

It was lifted directly from my favorite of his paintings, from the one that had until recently hung on this wall. I rolled my shoulders to make the spiny, leech-like creature curled around a staring hazel eye seem to undulate under my skin. I’d hoped Loren would feel inspired by it, but he dismissed me as one more canvas he couldn’t bear to look at and asked me to keep my shirt on in the future.

Thankful as always that I wasn’t in North Carolina, I nerved myself up to go look in the women’s room. The decor was similar, and between posters for Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Exterminating Angel, a small, unframed canvas hung on the wall. The caption said, Unknown, Metrocorpus IX (Julian), oil on canvas, $75. The abstract bramble of nested translucent forms was mostly the rosy pink of blood-flushed tissue, tessellated organic shapes that could be sexual organs or the topography of a mammoth organic landscape. Branching hairs suggested veins and arteries or bridges, causeways, and castles. The small canvas had a catalog sticker on the back from Morphos Gallery with a phone number.

I ran outside into a downpour, like waves crashing down on your head, and nearly crashed into a naked guy.

Without looking at him, I apologized and walked down the street holding the painting to my chest to keep the rain off it when I realized he was following me.

The guy stood a good head and a half taller than me. He staggered, growling and red with road rash like he’d just been thrown from a moving car. He was completely naked, except for a white gym sock on his left foot. A passing car splashed him, and he nearly veered off the curb to chase it but turned to challenge me. When I foolishly made eye contact, he charged, holding something out in front of him in both hands.

I turned to run and hit a traffic signpost hard enough to make it sing. I staggered backward into the path of the naked man.

He stopped me from falling in the street and gently draped something over my shoulders. I jerked away involuntarily, my fight or flight instincts flying right out of my head. It was a thick overcoat, raindrops streaming off its waterproof shell, the lining warm and dry, but in my terror, I thrashed out of it. He turned like a matador and threw it over the next person walking down the street, a slight, short woman with purple hair staring into her phone and smoking furiously. She accepted the overcoat as her due and kept walking.

I was thoroughly dumbstruck, and it dawned on me that I recognized the beatific vacancy in his smile. Before I could stop him, before I could frame the words, he threw his arms out and leapt into traffic.

I thought because of this that I was hot on the trail, that this was the city pushing back, but perhaps, if I was not trying to be a real detective, I would have recognized that this was just Loren, saying goodbye.

• • • •

The last time I saw Loren was on a rare rainy Sunday in LA after his last show at the gallery. We collected the uneaten sandwiches and hors d’oeuvres and took them down to an impromptu campground near the Echoplex. The city wouldn’t tolerate anything that looked like a dwelling in plain sight, but the gaggle of shamefaced people huddled under tarps stretched between shopping carts and wheelchairs had lived there for months.

Loren offered them the food. “Nobody else even sees them,” he said.

“That’s a survival reflex. You couldn’t help more than a few of them without going hungry yourself. And what if they don’t deserve it?”

I don’t know why I was taking up his parents’ bullshit arguments against him. Maybe because fighting with him was the only way to get a response at all.

“I’ve seen the people at the top,” he said. “Seen what it takes to get there and stay there. Trust me, they don’t deserve what they have . . .”

He finished distributing the sandwiches and finally let me drag him away. I needled, “Do you feel any less guilty?”

“Do you?” he asked.

He asked to see my wallet. I took it out without thinking, and he walked over to an odd patch of dry pavement beside the curb. He took out some cash and held it out to the knife-bright wind. It disappeared, but the wind didn’t take it.

He came back over and handed me my wallet, several dollars lighter. I started to yell at him, but for just a moment, staring at that spot where he’d given away my money, I could see something stopping the rain, something that almost had a face.

In the car, I told him to quit clowning and give me my money, I didn’t have parents to replace it for me. He sighed like I’d missed the whole point. “You don’t see them,” he said. “Not the ones who really need help.”

He must have been right because I didn’t see him again after that day either.

• • • •

It took Loren’s mother another month before she withdrew her support. An angry message told me she hadn’t hired me as a surrogate trust-fund brat, and if I didn’t intend to produce results, I could shift for myself. By that time, I had already stopped spending her money after splurging on a new laptop and an ancient Volvo station wagon. If I was going to find Loren, I wouldn’t need it; I would never even perceive him if I didn’t reject it. I wasn’t trying to find her for him anyway.

He had vanished like a raindrop in a puddle, but he left ripples. I tried everything I could to trace them, working at coffee shops and pizza parlors and volunteering at halfway houses, but no matter how many free slices and mochas I dished out, no matter how patient I was listening to anything a street person cared to share with me—and they love to talk once they know someone’s really listening, and for much of their day, they have nothing to do but talk, if only to themselves—but there are things nobody who has never slept rough can ever truly know. Even if we ask.

There was no weird conspiratorial vibe when they shrugged off your questions, but the eyes always went glassy when you asked about a particular person or about how they lived, that was deeper than shame, or if you asked about the striking surge in the numbers of the mentally ill, even if you heard them tell each other constantly that there were more and more checked-out basket-cases among them, and most weren’t like that before they came here.

There may not have been any suicides on the TriMet lines, but there had been an obvious spike in overdoses, bridge dives, and hit-and-run accidents where the victims were homeless and couldn’t account for their actions. You heard kids share stories about friends committed and diagnosed with exotic brain dysfunctions only to be turned out on the street by an overloaded social care system, about friends vanishing for days on end and returning with no memory of their whereabouts but with weird new second-hand habits and patchwork personalities, about weird incidents like when a vegan hippie who overdosed on Fentanyl came to and sucked her boyfriend’s eye out of his face before running into freeway traffic. They were superstitiously afraid of talking about this shit with outsiders unless you provoked them—by speculating, for instance, that it must be a dangerous new drug.

“It’s not a drug that’s got ’em so fucked up,” a toothless young lady told me on Hawthorne as she ran off with my last few cigarettes. “It’s the dream.”

I had made a lot of friends and started to feel like a welcome guest, if not a part of the city, so long as I kept my mouth shut about being from California. But after talking to hundreds of people—kids younger than me, refugees from culture wars, burnouts who’d licked sin’s ashtray and never quite recovered, hippies for whom homelessness was just an endless folk festival, and so, so many decent, normal people that society had no use for, just hanging on and hoping it wouldn’t get worse when it had never gotten better—I never got any closer to Loren.

The solution, when it came, might have been sent by the same agency that delivered the image of him jumping in front of the train. It was so obvious, I should have seen it the first day.

I lost my job and couldn’t find another one. The following week, I got kicked out of my apartment and overnight found myself sleeping in the Volvo. By then, I knew all the seldom-patrolled dead-end streets, all the parks and backwater neighborhoods where the residents didn’t call the cops at first sight of someone sleeping in their car.

It all happened so fast; it was like being swallowed and eaten alive. I had been living in my car for a couple days before the shock wore off. But even when my car was towed and I took to the streets with a dome tent and sleeping bag bought with the last of Loren’s family’s guilt funds, it took weeks before anyone believed me enough to tell me about the Dream of the Sister City.

If it wasn’t what brought them here in the tens of thousands, it was still spoken of in enough halfway houses and bus shelters to feed a myth that plagued seekers after stranger visions than those the mainstream faithful sought at Sedona or Kathmandu, stranger miracles than could be had at Lourdes or Graceland, and it was what made so many of them stay long after the city had decisively spit them out.

They talked about it in haunted stage whispers. For each, it was different in its particulars but so uniform in its qualities, in the ineffable nature of the true experience, in its superior clarity that made waking reality seem like a faded filmstrip projected in a well-lighted room, that you knew it was not a dream they were talking about but the Dream.

Arguments raged about every aspect of it, from how and where to sleep to make it come to what it meant and which was the true Dream. Some people dreamt it their first night on the street and never again. Others who’d lived on the streets for years didn’t believe in it until it came for them once in drug-deep sleep and left them chasing it forever after. Some claimed it only found them when they were dead drunk or stoned while straight-edge fanatics swore that any drugs at all prevented a true visitation.

I soaked up every tidbit I could ferret out or eavesdrop on. I ditched alcohol, meat, my phone, all contacts or memories from my old city, my name. I stopped bathing and started smoking pot, panhandling, foraging from dumpsters, letting whoever I was with name me, so I was a reflection of the City to my peers and invisible to everyone else.

What was known and accepted was that it only came to those whom surface reality had abandoned or cast out, a secret frequency only perceptible to those who’d tuned out the city’s fake dream of a perfect world you could buy, marry, fuck, or kill your way into, only to those who slept in the streets and parks in the cold, naked embrace of the really real, who lived or died by its mercy.

In the Dream, you walk the streets of the Sister City. Sunlight poured like wine through gorgeous blown-glass towers and tree-temples, grown rather than hewn, in an eternal Maxfield Parrish afternoon. Tiny shops gave away miracles, libraries creaked with doors to deeper dreams, museums cluttered with everything not yet invented or imagined, galleries of blank canvases exploded with the contents of your imagination the moment you walked in.

Everyone had a memory palace for a home—a museum of self, limited only by the imagination that furnished it. Or they lived on the infinitely hospitable street, drifting from one generous gourmet cart to the next, idling in beer gardens and vineyards, arcades and cafés, botanical gardens and patches of untamed wilderness teeming with gentle wild animals; chasing parades and carnival processions and fanciful phantoms in need of rescue or ravishing; riding gondolas across glassy azure canals fringed with the minarets of pleasure palaces, meditation temples, hanging gardens, and mercurial follies that melted or mutated into ever-stranger forms when you stared at them; or flying like kites high above it all, and somehow you knew that if you wanted to join them, all you had to do was climb to the top of one of the iridescent spires and jump into the wind.

Always the arguments over details and geography, but always left unsaid the certainty that it wasn’t something from their subconscious, that it persisted when they woke up with eyes gummed shut and cheeks encrusted with happy tears, that it was more than merely real, that it was somehow the real face of their city, the true essence, open only to those who had nothing else.

Even when you could get someone talking about the Dream, they would clam up if you tried to connect it to the incidents, the disappearances. Those people were fucked up on some new drug. Those people were doing it wrong. Those people weren’t what the Sister City wanted, so they fried out. They slurred the ones who never came back from wherever their dreams took them as cotards, without knowing what it meant or where it came from.

And even when you’d pulled a dumpster run with someone to steal rubbery potstickers and rancid rice for a late night snack, they would just walk away if you pressed them about Ovid and Circe Crawley.

Portland’s answer to Peggy Guggenheim, Circe Brewer used the last of her family’s timber fortune to bankroll a series of storefront art galleries and ill-advised forays into radical street art that led her to Ovid Crawley.

A notorious local poet and performance artist, Ovid Crawley captivated Circe and offered a way to burn her upper-class peers and cement her legend, through him and her abiding obsession with the young homeless community of Portland.

While they lavishly supported soup kitchens, fundraiser concerts, libraries, art and education programs, and even mobile showers and a free barbershop for the homeless community, they moved into a three-story loft downtown that soon became a clearing house for parties, drug abuse, and orgies involving intoxicated minors. Police were called by neighbors to clean up after fights, overdoses, and confrontational art installations like enormous quantities of spoiled meat assembled into a church.

While they reveled for years in their scandalous lifestyle, the local scene eventually saw the sexually omnivorous Crawleys as perverted poseurs and users who exploited homeless youth without trying to get them off the streets at all. Indeed, Ovid preached that the homeless were Brahmins, the soul of the sister city, and must be protected from the system rather than absorbed back into it.

One by one, their venues and parties shut down. The last, Morphos Gallery, was replaced with a sensory-deprivation tank salon only a week before I arrived in town. The faded flyers for the last show still littered the cobweb-strewn atrium of the new salon—Dream of The Sister City, slated to premiere a few days after their closure, presumably would have featured the work I’d stolen from the coffeeshop.

Street rumor had it that the Crawleys had gone underground, themselves now homeless and squatting on their own foreclosed properties, but anyone who still hung with them was forbidden to associate with outsiders, which gave it the mystique of a cult. And the seekers most consumed with the pursuit of the Dream tended to be those who ran with the Crawleys.

I slept in parks and under overpasses. I cadged spare change outside Powell’s. I ate unfinished breakfasts out of trashcans. I hooked up with younger men, older men, and even a couple women when it was really cold and the loneliness was more than I could take. I disappeared from the sight of normal people, slowly became invisible. While I never remembered my dreams, I began to wake up to my leaky tent sagging under a torrent with a formless feeling of having just been somewhere wonderful.

I asked only the ones I felt I could trust about the Crawleys and still lost more friends than I made. I never found anyone who supported them, but the rest were too afraid even to admit there was anything to be afraid of. But finally, I found a kid who told me that there was a park in St. Johns where some said you could catch the Dream any night of the year that the moon was visible. He was no more specific than that, but I had nothing but time and the rains had finally tapered off, so I camped in every park in the north end of town until I found it.

Every tree in the park and the surrounding street was in feverish full bloom, petals like carpets of cotton candy and sherbet in the gutters, musky sick-sweet perfume of tree-semen so thick it congealed in a paste on your palate.

A caravan of battered, moss-infested campers lined the back of the park and dirtbag nomads squatted over a latrine trench they’d dug in the bushes. A little girl threw a tantrum outside a camper over a kite tangled in a nearby tree. Someone inside hollered back, “You climb up and get it. You still got toes . . .”

A guy stood on a picnic table, shouting at a slouching crowd of losers sharing a bottle of Boone’s Farm. He wore a spotless white shirt and white pants in a place where such clothing, without stains or soil from work, were a miracle. His shirt shouted, IF YOU DON’T LIKE THE PROGRAM, CHANGE THE DAMN CHANNEL.

He shouted, “The Sister City remains invisible because it requires new eyes, but who will make it see itself?” A few disaffected high school kids heckled him, but a fringe of random people in telltale grimy clothes several layers too thick for the rare sunny weather nodded vigorously as he shouted.

An old man in a thrift store’s worth of raincoats sat at the picnic table across from the playground, hunched over in miserable contemplation of the trash between his mismatched sandals. Cars and trucks cruised up and parked on the potholed dirt road backing the park, waiting for childlike women to come out of the bushes to take them around the world. I wondered if any of them were visible to the snarl of rush-hour traffic creeping past on Fessenden, if I was visible even to them.

No one protested as I pitched my tent and unrolled my sleeping bag, ate leftovers scrounged from behind the taqueria down the street, studiously avoided looking at the other squatters setting up their own miserable camps beside mine, and waited for the moon to come up.

I drifted off to sleep listening to the traffic and the cackling of middle school kids sharing some truly deadly sativa on the playground.

And I went there.

The tent had become a gigantic lotus flower on a lily pad adrift on a burgundy lake. Musical swarms of chirping tropical fish burst from trees like towers of coral as the first rays of wine-thick moonglow peered through the jeweled domes and crystal spires that fractured them into a shower of kaleidoscopic light. On the great lawn where the playground had been, a pavilion spread out under firefly lanterns, teeming with acrobats, jugglers, and floral displays dripping with gemstone fruits and sultry perfume. Translucent crowds of robed and crowned sightseers gathered round an exhibit, their bubbling awe and appreciation competing with the flying fish.

The lily pad meandered to the shore, and I stepped off it to float among them, conscious of piercing stares prickling my skin, of waves of whispers at my back as I pressed through the crowd to face the object of their adoration.

A painting glistened, the pigments still wet, the canvas a pale skin stretched on a frame of bone. The subject was me.

I lay paralyzed in my clammy sleeping bag, swimming in sweat. Fingers of milk-pale daylight combed the grass. A camper peeled out of the parking lot, leaving a child wailing like an air raid siren at the curb. A small mushroom village of tents had sprung up around me while I was asleep. A woman in a parka held together with duck tape screamed, “You don’t know the difference between real and lies anymore,” at a shell-shocked man pushing a shopping cart overflowing with books in tattered trash bags. “We can’t live in a lie!”

The hunchback in the raincoats backed out of the sagging Coleman pup tent next to mine, dragging a sleeping man out by his ankles. As I watched, he rolled the man onto a low gurney and wheeled him across the lawn and the unimproved road to a ruin of a house almost swallowed by trees at the back of the park.

I struggled with my own limbs, heavy and foreign, and after maybe an hour I crawled out of the tent. No one else was awake, no one else saw what happened.

The towering five-story oaks bordering the park loomed over it like a green tidal wave poised to crush it or forcefully trying to hide it from the sky. The deep, shaggy thicket of the yard was a riot of flowers, completely obscuring the flagstone path across the long-gone lawn. A dead tree overrun with vines studded with coral-pink buds that dangled down to brush the ground formed a semi-private bower where two naked people of indeterminate age and gender listlessly coupled on a bed of crushed comfrey.

It was the kind of house somebody probably ordered from a Sears & Roebuck catalog a hundred years ago, but the warranty had long since expired. Something shaped like a man sat and smoked and watched me from the green nest of the porch, curtained off by spills of vine thick as garden hoses.

Blackberry and wisteria and more aggressive and exotic weed species scaled the walls and slowly pried off the Masonite siding, ripped down the fern-clotted rain gutter, and made inroads to conquering the sunken, mossy meadow of the steeply pitched roof as if the undergrowth had been tasked with razing the house to its foundations for some unspeakable offense against the fundamental laws of nature.

As I approached, the man on the porch retreated inside and slammed the door, but leaves and moldy newspapers kept it open. I hesitated before climbing onto the porch, noticed the light from the recessed windows set into the foundation. I climbed the stairs and forced the door wide enough to squeeze into a ruined room.

Black mold spewed across the ceiling wherever rats did not brazenly watch from gaping holes admitting on the attic. The floor buckled underfoot, curled tiles skidding away like stingrays from my creeping feet. Circling round a sunken spot in the demolished kitchen, I pushed open another trash-clogged door and went down the basement stairs.

The basement was lit only by a dim green light that spilled over a labyrinth of bodies. Pale, naked skin on rows of cots and inflatable mattresses, some with IV tubes snaking into arms and necks.

“They die if someone don’t care for them,” a voice like steel wool on silk said in my ear. I turned with my hands up in surrender, knowing it would be the man in the raincoats and knowing he was Ovid Crawley.

“They’re lost in the Dream,” I said, and he shook his head.

“If it’s just a dream, go show me proof that all this”—he waved contemptuously at the world—“isn’t just a nightmare.”

I said, “I’ve been there. I was there last night.”

“You’ve never been anywhere but your own head, boy.” He grimaced and gurned gray, toothless gums. Bloodshot eyes, like dirty pearls, and long, matted yellow-white hair like the roots of some poison plant. “If you’d been to the Sister City, if you saw it as it really is, you’d never come back.”

He took my arm, tugging me back upstairs. I offered to clean, to help take care of them, anything, if he could tell me what became of Loren Estes. He shook his head like a man for whom all names meant nothing, but he told me about the dreamers in the basement, and he let me help for a while.

The first, worst cases were committed to state homes and diagnosed with Cotard’s Syndrome, a brain dysfunction that left them unaware of, or unable to operate, their own bodies, but this was missing the point. A few who managed to get PET scans before they were discharged for inability to pay showed enlarged pineal glands and severe parietal lesions, leading to identity and memory disorders but also to strange new perceptions. Some of them could see into the Dream while awake. Bad things happened to sleepwalkers. Some stayed away so long that the Dream took over their uninhabited bodies.

“Nobody can face the Sister City in its true form. Even the seekers only perceive it through a stack of illusions because to see what it really is you have to face what you really are.”

I told him I was ready, and he spat in the air, caught it on his own face, smiling like it was the kiss of the sea. “You’re not ready, but she’s hungry, so I’ll give you to her, and she’ll let me alone.”

I asked if he meant to give me to the Sister City.

“No,” he laughed until blood vessels burst in his nose and cheeks. “I’m giving you to my wife.”

• • • •

TOXIC HUMAN DUMP, said the graffiti sprayed on the faded official warning signs on the cyclone fence around the old Portland Gas & Coke Plant. The hulking Gothic Revival ruin was impregnated with asbestos, and the soil was inundated with petroleum byproducts, and the water of the nearby Willamette was rife with PCBs and DDT, the whole coastline branded as one of the biggest and worst Superfund sites in North America, so it was the perfect place for a rogue artists’ collective. The sun wilted behind the shaggy green hills, and oily shadows seeped up out of the sour ground.

Ovid Crawley dropped me off at a rip in the fence in an ancient ice cream truck, offered me a surgical mask.

They were waiting on the other side to take me in. They ignored my words, pinned me down, and took my shoes, my clothes. When I shivered naked in front of them, someone traced the lines of my tattoo on my back, and I was allowed to stay.

I was kept in a closet, fed moldy bread and river water for I don’t know how long. I didn’t care, I didn’t keep track, because in between freezing, vomiting interludes of unwelcome wakefulness, I walked the streets of the Sister City.

Until one time when I woke to find them standing over me. I recognized the intense bald woman from the TriMet security video. With eager eyes, she searched me as a gang of hairless girl-boys presented and cavity-searched me.

“If you came to take him away,” she said, “we’ll feed you to the river.”

I told her I didn’t want to take him away. I only wanted to see him, to be with him. They half-dragged, half-carried me up four flights of stairs, out of the basement and through cavernous rooms with bolts and amputated struts where all the coal-burning apparatus once stood, dragged me up stairs like a ladder into the cupola on the roof, like a belltower, a studio with a breathtaking panopticon view of all of North Portland across the river, the forbidding mountains of Forest Park, the green soapstone sentinel of the St. Johns Bridge, and in the distance, the ghostly snowcapped fang of Mount Hood suspended on the eastern horizon.

I had eyes for none of it just then. For I had found him.

He stood shaking, naked, painting. The canvas was half-again his height, and he stood on a ladder. The subject might have been a pornographic landscape or a panoramic vista of some monstrous god’s half-flaccid genitalia. The brush strokes were crude, impasto scabs of layered oils littering the image like a malignant aura, but through it, I saw something I recognized . . . a lake, a lily pad, a pavilion, a staring hazel eye enthroned on an altar and suckling an eyeless army of starving larvae . . .

He turned and blinked those maddening hazel eyes at me, and something like a smile pinched his face. He did not recognize me, and in those eyes, I saw no sign of Loren Estes.

Of course it wasn’t him, Circe Crawley told me. Loren was the deepest Dreamer she’d ever seen. He would stay under for days on end and emerge with the most remarkable work, but under her wing, he went to sleep for weeks. He sleepwalked, even threw himself in front of a train once, but when someone thought to confine him up here and give him supplies, he began to paint.

The paintings in and all over the walls of the cupola studio turned Loren’s old work inside out, depicting with a crude literalism what he had painfully forced out in expressionistic fits when he could withstand going off his meds. It was as if someone else was painting Loren’s nightmares, someone who had not only seen them but could claim citizenship inside them.

Loren’s sleepwalking series was highly sought after by private, subterranean collectors who would pay anything for them because it was as close as anyone who hoped to cling to some shred of sanity could come to seeing the true Sister City.

She said some people think it’s the collective memory palace of the city, if not all mankind. The people who wander its streets were the homeless, and the people who lived and worked and sold their souls to the city were its bricks, its buildings and trees and books. Some thought it was a Platonic trip into the sphere of ideals, the archetypal city. Some were even dumb enough to believe it was heaven. But they were wrong.

The Sister City is a sleeping god, aloof of all attempts to awaken it. An unknowable other, dreaming its own dreams, and those who shared the Dream of it little more than bacteria at play in the fields of its flesh.

She had commissioned Loren to paint its portrait, but now she liked the one who’d take his place better.

But where is he, I demanded to know. I begged her to wake him up just long enough for him to see me.

Go and find him yourself, she said. Someone pressed a rag reeking of ether over my mouth, and someone else pinned my arms for a third someone to tie them down as Loren’s body came shuffling over, brush and cock equally engorged and shiny with crimson paint.

• • • •

I understand now why they couldn’t operate their own bodies properly after waking up. After taking a body in the Sister City—the true Sister City with all its illusions stripped away—it’s not that the human form is so difficult to operate so much as returning to it is like being buried in a cage of bone, an avalanche of unwelcome sensation, a nightmare of nerves. All that unnecessary complexity, all that evolution to create so much misery . . .

The Sister City could be all we know of God, that other we feel in the back of our minds, in dreams and visions when we are all but unmoored from the illusions of this world. It could be the sum of us, the integrated, unruly hivemind of humankind, but what to make of us, we uninvited parasites who crawl and feed upon it?

In the form of a flatworm infested with a rash of exquisitely sensitive eyes, on a foot that was also a tongue, I crawled across a sea of shit and a world of hurt to find him.

Across monstrous plains of inflamed epidermis, gasping, cavernous pores clogged with flukeworm winos, runaway teenaged amoebae, and schizophrenic fungi. I had no doubt that the parasitic fauna of the Sister City had something like intelligence, even some vestigial self-awareness, for I had seen one painting with my lover’s hand. But we were making them into ourselves with those infections of eyes and other sensory apparatus, though not one in a hundred saw the world they inhabited as it really is.

In recesses where the landscape was utterly engulfed by torpid swarms of parasites, I crawled among them, vaguely sensing the humanity in the ones I ate and the ones that tried to eat me. As I bored through the hermetic membrane of a Canadian woman named Libby MacEachern, I swallowed her spicy cytoplasm along with commingled memories of Providence Hospital emergency room and exploring a museum of dolls while riding the back of a giant cat in the Sister City.

I gorged myself on the mitochondrial ghost of a young man named Dylan Martin, a Californian beloved by friends for his sense of humor but never to be trusted with animals, laid low by Rohypnol in his drink at a bar only to wander an infinite library in pursuit of the most beautiful song he’d ever heard and convinced he’d nearly found it when I sheared him open and consumed his nucleus.

The crushing guilt I felt over devouring them was nothing to the agony of hunger, the ache of loneliness that made even the fleeting contact of predation seem like the promise of true love.

Crawled over wishbone bridges of crystal and cartilage, over dunes of shed cells and seas of sebaceous cysts, and at the end, I found him.

I knew it was him, as surely as I knew the mind occupying his body was not his, when I finally found it. Even as a segmented worm, he was magnificent. Cilia trees with compound eyes for fruit erupted all over his embattled membrane. A cloud of gray tumorous antibodies leeched his moribund body, but they couldn’t pry him away from his obsession any more than I could.

With hundreds of acid-dripping vacuole mouths, he clung to and burrowed into a nest of burnt-out nerves, trying to ignite the dead skyscraper neurons, trying to wake it and make it see itself.

I came back, and I freely admit that I killed his body to stop them using it, and as long as they force me to take my meds, I can’t go back, but I know he’s there in the Sister City, doing what he was born to do. The metropolis of neurons is firing like dying neutron stars, and soon everyone will see.

Soon all of us will wake up from this Dream.

©2019 by Cody Goodfellow. Originally published in Nowhereville: Weird Is Other People, edited by Scott Gable and C. Dombrowski. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cody Goodfellow has written nine novels and five collections of short stories, and edits the hyperpulp zine Forbidden Futures. His writing has been favored with three Wonderland Book Awards. His comics work has been featured in Mystery Meat, Creepy, Slow Death Zero, and Skin Crawl. As an actor, he has appeared in numerous short films, TV shows, music videos by Anthrax and Beck, and a Days Inn commercial. He also wrote, co-produced and scored the Lovecraftian hygiene films Baby Got Bass and Stay At Home Dad, which can be viewed on YouTube. He “lives” in San Diego, California.

Her Five Farewells

Martin Cahill | 2941 words

When the Asphodel Queen decides she’ll die to save our people from her ex-husband’s tyranny, she commands me to build her a coffin, the very first in our world’s history.

Her ageless face of ivory and emerald is water on a windless day; her stillness betrays nothing of her decision. As the Senate screams in sorrow, I am held by her imperial glare, the enormity of my task sinking in like sunlight on skin.

“Me, Your Majesty? I’m but a humble craftsman.”

Her voice rises above the growing din, as panic races through data-vines and across the crystal-network. A nearby Senator, confused, weeps tears of amber sap even as ze smiles a rictus grin, zir frame not knowing how to practice grief. We’ve never had to before.

“Humility is not a tool I’ll allow use of in the construction of my coffin. I die in five days. You must begin at once, Mr. Chrym. You know the stakes.”

And deep in my roots, I do.

Bowing, I leave the Atrium of the Deepheart and walk into a world that in five short days will finally know death.

5. As roots wither, struggle toward comprehension, unseeing.

I spend the first day deep in study, swimming through ink like a bottomless ocean, desperate for any kind of knowledge. All creatures great and small know what death is, but we of the Exechar don’t experience it. The first of us found sapience hanging low on the tree of life and with it, the knowledge that we would never have to die.

Built of light and flora, we’re beings of sun and earth. Our minds bloom and grow as our physical frames age, and yes, both do succumb to the perils of time. Where we differ is that our souls are connected through that entangled forever of the Soul-Beneath-The-Soil. When our physical frames become ill, when our minds grow old and fragile, we undergo resynthesis. Our consciousness quiets for a time, returning below to the Soul. Then we bloom again, either in a new frame or our old frame, rejuvenated, cleansed of age or madness or other afflictions.

In this way, we cannot die.

Thus, death isn’t even terrifying. It’s incomprehensible and alien, a language untranslatable and unspeakable, a metaphysical oxymoron. And with her declaration yesterday, our beloved Queen will become Exechar’s first necronaut into that new silence.

I’m poring over the tomes of other worlds, fronds pulled back and out of my eyes, exhausted behind my half-moon spectacles, when I feel her physical frame unroot from the Soul-Beneath-The-Soil. Her first farewell.

We feel this first death most keenly. It’s a pain deep in my roots, as though a rose on the other side of the world has been snipped from the garden. Execharans in the thousands echo through me as we realize together: I had thought it was—why didn’t anyone tell us that death is one little loss after another? She’s not even gone yet, why does it hurt? Is it supposed to hurt—why is she doing it if it hurts?

I can only think, she’s really doing it, tears welling in my eyes. She’s really going to die.

As one, the cost sinks in.

I don’t join the people rooting into the grass, each desperate to speak to one another, to learn how to mourn.

Is it individual or communal? Are we angry because we know why she’s doing this? Or are we grateful for her sacrifice? Or—or are we numb and sad, having all this knowledge and unable to do a damn thing to save her? And maybe it’s all these feelings at once and how by the earth do you untangle those?

I get disdainful glances for ignoring the rooting. I hear the echoes of my heartlessness. There’s a part of me that wishes to exclaim that I’m their greatest chance to know. To understand what they’re feeling.

Instead, I light a firefly-candle. In its watery, winking orange and pink sunset light, I read on.

4. As petals fall away, wish them well on their way to rot.

I listen to the Perennial King’s proclamation, fuming at the gall to call himself such. I watch his former lover die, moment by moment, as his sneer slides along the airwaves.

Her hair, once a bouquet of long, slender white blossoms and thick green stalks, has begun to fall out. I must have a look on my face as she fixes me with that golden gaze. “I’m more than my looks, glorious as they are. Were.”

I nod, wiping my eyes. “Yes, your majesty. Apologies. Between my research, your ex-husband’s schemes, and your condition, I . . . I’m fragile. I will resolve to be strong.”

Her smile is prim and small, as though she knows a secret I can’t comprehend. That might be true; though she’s been a Queen longer than a priestess, she’s not forgotten the lessons she learned as a Seedsinger of the Mysteries Beneath, especially those she can’t share. “Strength is but a single pillar of the soul, Mr. Chrym. It cannot hold up a home on its own, let alone a life. Remember that. Now,” she says, clicking the radio off, silencing the loathsome worm, “Tell me of my coffin.”

I sit in silence, unable to shake the words of the King from my fibers.

You think her spectacle will keep you safe from what I’ve discovered? You think her stunt anything more than the final, flailing thorn of that desperate, sap-soaked soldier, panicking before certain doom? No, her ruin will not free you from me. The only happy soul that will come from her demise will be mine. For years, she kept the deepest magics from me, afraid I would crack them.

Now, she has no choice: when her frame ceases, she’ll undergo resynthesis, that process I now command. Her life will be mine forever.

I cast his voice off like rain from the tips of my pale, green fingers. Pulling out my sketchpad, I present the Queen with my ideas.

We speak until moons-rise; her skull is bathed in their bronze blessings as she listens.

When I leave her to rest, I take up a single, white petal and place it in my breast pocket, like a talisman against coming pain.

Because pain is surely coming.

3. As veins go dry, remember the water that nourished you.

The next night, two of the King’s men ambush me. Their bodies are covered in needles, fine as hair, each violence tearing away the green of my frame. Sap, watery and pale, leaks out of my small, rotund frame.

One of them says nothing, speaking only in the crack of knuckle across face, the sting of needles, the dying of organs. I feel my frame’s heart struggle, slow. Panic sets in.

It deepens as the other man speaks, his voice thick with meaning.

“Stupid leaf. You go now into the Soul-Beneath-The-Soil, which our true King has gained mastery over. When your frame ceases, you whom the false Queen loves, will be drowned in life unending. Our King will lock you within infirm frames that cannot move or resynthesize. When he tires of that, he will plant you in the frame of an animal, to be a beast hunted for as long as he laughs. And on and on and on. Your life will be that of the Perennial King’s and your torture will be as eternal as his reign.”

They leave with that threat pulsing in my fading mind. I close my eyes as my frame’s heart ceases, already weeping in fear of who or what I will be the next time my eyes open.

But I don’t float into that green void, nor do I find myself in the mind of a glen-moth or a jumping-gill. Instead, I awaken on a tending bed next to the Queen. I’m informed she assigned rot-knives to me, fungal assassins and masters of subterfuge that make up part of her Royal Guard. I’m told xe brought me here, to heal me. One of xem, short and gray, face covered by a white wrap, puts a damp hand on my shoulder. “It is not safe beneath the world, Mr. Chrym. Not yet. Live.”

I don’t hear xem. I’m too busy watching the current of my Queen’s veins slow, then cease. The quiet engine of her frame stills, even as mine struggles toward repair.

I stare at her veins, gray as stone, and know it won’t be long now.

2. As cells slumber and fade, thank the light that lived within them.

Some say she’s dying too fast, her frame’s will to live stripping nutrients from her organs. Others say she’s dying too slow. The Perennial King is using the time to flex his new authority, threatening to keep swaths of Execharans from resynthesis, a gambit meant to change her fading mind from whatever he thinks she’s concocting.

Either way, I’ve no time to build her coffin, not while I recover. In bedrest, I read, my desperation consuming texts like a burning-devil. Air burials and sea burials. Pyres and urns. Boxes of wood and steel. There are as many ways to inter the dead as there are ways to become them.

But which to honor the heart-drag heaviness of her withering? How do I memorialize this succumbing, this slow march into the unknown? Her hair gone, her veins pallid, her very skin ashen and waxy . . . this is not the Queen I knew.

In dying, she’s transformed. But there’s nothing noble about an ending such as this. There’s nothing beautiful in her pain. I hesitate to memorialize her suffering.

When it’s just the two of us in that tender’s room, I rage. I weep. I bargain. There’s no price I can’t scrounge up, no endeavor I won’t hoist onto my shoulders, if only to keep her here with us. To keep me from this grim work, I admit, miserable. She slumbers and doesn’t hear me.

Exechar has but a single god and I can’t even pray to it, controlled as it is by a vindictive, broken-hearted little tyrant.

She’s so small now. And my grief feels too large; it sets me to shaking.

In the dark, I realize how lost I am. How impossible it is to celebrate our dead, let alone her. We’ve never lost anyone.

How can we start now?

1. As eyes close, with little else to do but wait, cherish the dawns they saw.

When she dies, I’m alone. I decided I couldn’t bear it. Wounded, I limped home to my cell and waited for the end.

Literature from a dozen worlds have hinted at the shape death takes, the curve of grief’s shadow, the hollowing that comes from loss. I thought I was prepared to weather it. Just after sunrise, I know even a thousand books couldn’t have prepared me for what we all feel.

Her death is brief and light, the tip of a dark feather winging through the boughs of a mighty tree. Too quick to grasp, only just felt, and then gone forever.

Exechar weeps, only just comprehending what this terrible visitor stole from us.

Only he smiles.

But this isn’t the King’s triumph. It is his downfall.

For shortly after, I receive a letter. A cabbage-bodied youth approaches me with red eyes through their leaves, mournful and low. “She ordered me bring this before . . .” They thrust the letter at me and leave.

In a shaky scrawl, her final missive to me. A part of me doesn’t wish to read it, for there will be no more letters after this one.

But duty compels me. Like a brilliant sun, I turn to face her, one last time.

In her writing, I see the shape of her death as she saw it. I see the mystery bared, one she’s revealed to no one, not even the King when she loved him.

I see our salvation.

And I begin my work.

0. All gardens burn themselves free of rule; ash has no regrets when it makes growth possible.

In the end, the answer is glass. I didn’t know until I saw her, but yes, glass. The Execharan have to see. They have to know.

Glass and wire and cosmetics. Cloth and light and glue. She had to look every inch the Queen she’d been in life. She had to be adorned in her woven finery, her glimmering jewels, her crown of thresher’s steel, tall in her boots of iron.

I asked her face to be left untouched.

And when the cloth is removed, everyone sees.

Her face, in death, is still. Calm. Gone, the pain. Gone, the worry.

Finally, she’s at peace.

Here, knowledge crashes in. The fear leaves us and the ignorance fades. Understanding echoes through every Execharan who bears witness: death takes, yes, but it also gives. For hasn’t it gifted peace to our Queen where there was none before?

Of all of us, only he is still scared.

Come to gloat, that his ex-wife should cease to spite him, the Perennial King stands silent. Surrounded as he is by his guard and warded with magic, he’s shaken to his core.

Fear alchemizes to rage. “Her madness will be the end of you! I control this world! I have learned the secrets of Soul-Beneath-The-Soil. I—I will deny her entry back to the land of the living, as I will all of you!”

He rages and splutters, rattling the bars of the cage he’s made for himself. I delight in our collective silence. For nothing, not even him, speaks louder than the face of Her Majesty in death.

He waits, hoping to use his eldritch control over the Soul-Beneath-The-Soil to humiliate her, to deny her entry back to the world. But hours pass. Nothing happens. When he leaves, he does so with a wary look back at her corpse, proud in her coffin of glass.

After he’s gone, no one quite knows what to do. But through our connection, I try to teach them how to mourn. I teach them of funerals.

The Huloo honor the dead in increments, recounting small acts of kindness, once a day.

The Nkis’t honor the dead by singing in snowstorms, with naught but ale to warm them.

The Aravari honor the dead with garlands of fruit and woodcarvings of faces and deeds.

As one, we cobble together rituals and try to make sense of this new feeling. Over small plates of food, we remember moments of her reign, her life. Some form a line to stand before her, one last moment of intimacy, a chance to say goodbye and attempt to sound out this new word on their own terms. A stalk-strung fiddle is plucked and yes, we dance.

Exechar learns to grieve, and it’s not a bad thing, knowing how to say goodbye. As I watch, I wish I could tell them what I know.

But she asked me to let our work speak for itself.

So, I take sips of sun-wine and accept compliments and I hold close those who ask me to; I even sing off-key (though I’m soon asked not to). For we’re learning a funeral is as much about joy as it is about loss.

I stay until the end, watching my people go home, learning how to carry grief as a stone in their pocket, present but not heavy. I luxuriate in one last cup of light, jotting down lines that have come to me in the witnessing of our first loss. Maybe they’ll be in a book someday for others to read, too. I can only hope they bring comfort, showing that even we of Exechar have known and found a way through our first grief.

And as the moons set, I think of the choice everyone now has, thanks to our Queen.

Because the next time an Execharan resynthesizes, the King’s power won’t find them. Rather, a familiar soul will be waiting for them beneath the soil.

And maybe she’ll convince them to stay with her a while. To experience the calm of death as they know she has. The peace of rest, a cycle paused.

Maybe she’ll tell them what she told me.

His power is so great because there is no mind beneath to oppose him. The Soul is many things, but it lacks a will. However, if a mind took root there, it could fight back. And if that mind had others there to oppose the King together, if they outnumbered him ten thousand to one, his power wouldn’t be so great, then, would it?

I sip my cup of light and I smile, knowing the King will soon discover that no garden has ever loved a tyrant back for trying to strangle it. He’ll learn that death is a seed from which something greater can grow.

And though I know more than my people, I do mourn. The Queen is gone. That frame in the coffin? It’s not her. A beautiful recreation, but only that. The soul of her is below, fighting for us. And when she’s done fighting, I hope she’ll come back, whoever she becomes next.

But that’s also what brings me so much joy. That all who are lost do come back to us in some new way, shape, or form. No one is lost and that’s beautiful.

And though I didn’t get a chance to bid her farewell, I get the gift of the next best thing.

I’ll be there to say hello when she returns.

©2022 by Martin Cahill.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Martin Cahill is an Ignyte Award-nominated science fiction and fantasy writer living in Hell’s Kitchen, NY and works as the Marketing and Publicity Manager for Erewhon Books. He’s a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop of 2014 and a member of the NYC-based writing group, Altered Fluid. You can find his fiction work in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Shimmer Magazine, Fireside Magazine, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. His short story, “Godmeat,” appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 anthology. He was also one of the writers on Batman: The Blind Cut from Realm Media. Martin also writes, and has written, book reviews, articles, and personal essays for Tor.com, Catapult, Ghostfire Gaming, Book Riot, Strange Horizons, and the Barnes and Noble Science Fiction & Fantasy Blog. You can find him online at @mcflycahill90.

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

EXCERPT: Desert Creatures (Erewhon Books)

Kay Chronister | 6320 words

A feminist horror set in the near-future American West, Desert Creatures combines the subversive inventiveness of Inland by Téa Obreht with the eco-surrealism of Jeff Vandermeer’s Dead Astronauts and the themes of survival and morality in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Award-winning short fiction writer Kay Chronister transfigures genre and the myth of the West in this stylish and original debut novel.

In a world that has become treacherous and desiccated, Magdala has always had to fight to survive. At nine years old, she and her father, Xavier, are exiled from their home, fleeing through the Sonoran Desert, searching for refuge.

As violence pursues them, they join a handful of survivors on a pilgrimage to the holy city of Las Vegas, where it is said the vigilante saints reside, bright with neon power. Magdala, born with a clubfoot, is going to be healed. But when faced with the strange horrors of the desert, one by one the pilgrims fall victim to a hideous sickness—leaving Magdala to fend for herself.

After surviving for seven years on her own, Magdala is sick of waiting for her miracle. Recruiting an exiled Vegas priest named Elam at gunpoint to serve as her guide, Magdala turns her gaze to Vegas once more, and this time, nothing will stop her. The pair form a fragile alliance as they navigate the darkest and strangest reaches of the desert on a trip that takes her further from salvation even as she nears the holy city.

With ferocious imagination and poetic precision, Desert Creatures is a story of endurance at the expense of redemption. What compromise does survival require of a woman, and can she ever unlearn the instincts that have kept her alive?

Coming November 8, 2022 from Erewhon Books.

In the morning, they set off in the rough direction of the pilgrim highway, moving through the slatted shadows of saguaro arms and ocotillo spikes. Magdala’s father did not carry her. When she looked at him, asking without asking, he stiffened. “You want to be on the road so much, be on the road,” he said. But after a moment, he found a long mesquite stick and handed it wordlessly to her, and he never let her fall far behind him.

Before noon, they made it to a road, a battered two-lane finger of asphalt that Mateo recognized as the northbound state route. He said it would intersect with the pilgrim highway. They had not gone far down it when a thing emerged from the canyons, a thing which had once been a javelina and a man and a coyote and a prickly pear, but was no longer any one of those things. Mateo saw it first, stopped short, and held perfectly still as the rest of them caught up to him. Magdala absorbed the sight of the thing in pieces: dark snout and bristled head trailing into a naked human abdomen with a motley assemblage of legs, at least six of them, some that dragged or floundered brokenly along and others that strode forcefully through the dirt. Xavier unholstered his gun and cocked it, but Mateo’s hand on his shoulder stopped him from shooting. “What is it?” Magdala whispered to Dulcinea.

“It’s a stuffed man, same as we get desert fruits from,” she said. “Just not . . . rooted.”

They stood still as the creature maneuvered closer, its black eyes focused straight ahead, its wide nostrils heaving. It was not heading for them, but seemingly for nothing, the line of its stride meaningless and unbroken. As it crossed the road in front of them, the sound of more hooves, more feet, followed. The group stood motionless as an entire stream of creatures emerged from the canyons and then passed through, one after another. All were formed from the same undead materials, limbs and trunks and heads conveying nauseatingly lush tangles of cactuses across the desert. Some were human in part, but most were not.

The silence that lay underneath the creatures’ steady murmur of footsteps was broken all at once by Rosy’s piercing cry. Alma rocked the baby frantically, even laid her hand across Rosy’s mouth, but they soon found that it didn’t matter: the creatures acted as if they heard nothing. None altered their paths. None even looked at her.

“They can’t hear?” Magdala whispered.

“No,” said Rawley aloud. “They just don’t care anymore. They got the desert inside them now, and they know where they’re going to, as sure as a lizard knows to go underground in a storm.”

“Don’t look,” Alma said. “I’ve heard before of men getting desert sick without their lips ever touching desert fruit, just from looking.”

“How long do you have to look before you get sick?” asked Magdala. The longing to see them was like an itch, almost a pain. She recognized in them the sickness that had stricken her when last they were in the desert, and felt a kind of likeness to them.

“Don’t look at all and it won’t matter,” said Xavier.

The stream of creatures came and went, but in the flat, unending landscape, they did not disappear for a long while after. Again and again, Magdala’s eyes strayed toward them. Alma had the notion that they should each tell stories to distract each other. “We’ll make a game of it,” she said, her voice too bright, her hopefulness forced. “I’ll tell one today, Mateo tomorrow, and Xavier next, then Dulcinea—”

“Not me,” said Dulcinea.

“All right. Rawley, then. Four days will take us to the highway anyway,” Alma said.

“Let’s say the best story gets a bottle of whiskey,” said Rawley. “Make it interesting. We’ll let little Magdala be the judge.”

“How do I judge it?” said Magdala, pleased by his acknowledgment.

“You choose whichever one you like,” said Rawley. “For any reason you like.”

“I’ll tell one,” said Xavier. “I’ll do it now. You got any of that liquor left, Mateo?”

“Sorry, brother.”

“It’s no trouble. Just all of you listen close now. And I don’t mean only to me. I want you to hear the wind crying down in the canyons. The stuffed men walking.” His eyes followed, for only a second, the creatures on the horizon. “I’m gonna tell you the story that my mother used to tell me, of how the Hopi know the world began and ended.”

Masauwu the skeleton god sat at a fire while the world was born, waiting for Man to come crawling up from the bottom of the canyon so he could teach him how to be alive. Man came to him, wearing no shoes, wearing no faces, knowing no names, not the god’s and not his own. Masauwu looked Man full in his no-face; he dropped melon and squash seeds into the soil, then he dropped corn. Say it with me, Magdala, you know this story by heart: He said, you wanna live here, you must abide by certain laws. I’ll make a way for you, feed all your appetites, but you can’t get too hungry.

The corn grew up high before their faces. Through the corn, Man looked on him. Masauwu was sometimes half-handsome, sometimes only bones and stars and cold wind, but he wasn’t a liar. Man shook his hand. Now the corn was four women. Man named them Blue and Red and Black and Yellow, and every year those women came to the fields with new crops of children.

Masauwu, he owned those corn maidens. They could come out with the rain, but when the rains dried and the sun hid, they had to go away. Go and come back, like a dance. They used to come around Man’s fire, playing games with him. Man fell in love, decided he wanted the blue maiden for his wife, and stole her away so she couldn’t go when the rains stopped.

After that, the rains went on and on. And on and on. But they got hot and poisonous. They would scorch your throat, eat through flesh. Under those rains, only monstrous things could grow. There was nothing to drink, nothing safe to eat. Masauwu saw what had happened and knew just what it meant. And with his bone-eyes, he saw Man had built himself a house in the middle of the desert, where rain hardly ever fell, and there he and Blue were playing house, sipping from straws of cactus, not a solitary care for the rest of the world.

Masauwu beat down the door. Said to Man, I gave you the world and you swallowed it whole, then asked for one more helping. In the green country, the rain has gone rancid. In the green country, your fellow man is dying. You want a world, or you want a wife? Man said, I want a wife. And so Masauwu stomped his feet and broke the Remainder loose from the green country. Left Man and his corn-maiden lover to starve and thirst and live, just barely. And we are all their descendants.

“It’s blasphemous,” said Alma. “All that talk of Masauwu and corn maidens.”

“You don’t like it,” said Xavier, “tell your own version.”

“I dreamed once,” said Magdala, “that I saw the green country.”

“No one ever can see it,” said Dulcinea. “You would die there in a second.”

• • • •

Late in the afternoon, they passed a man perched on the head of a saguaro cactus. Beneath his thinning thatch of hair, his pale head was deeply sunburnt. His robe was white, with blood stains tracking down the hem.

Mateo crossed himself at the sight. They gave the man a wide berth, though he did not acknowledge them as they passed. Magdala could not tear her eyes away. The look on the hermit’s face was something between bliss and stubbornness, his eyes gently shut and his mouth hard-set. There was no question that he was alive, but he did not seem to feel the needles that must have been digging into his flesh.

Before long they came to another person seated on a cactus, and another; down the wide sweep of a ravine, they found an entire forest of saguaros mounted by people in white sackcloth.

Rawley let out a low whistle.

“They got tents down there,” said Mateo, pointing at the circle of white dots in the center of the cactus forest. “Could ask to stay the night.”

“How do you know they’re safe?” Alma asked.

“Don’t know for certain,” he replied. “But they don’t seem dangerous.”

“Don’t seem dangerous? They’re the sorriest-looking crop of wretches I ever seen,” Rawley said. “The ones that aren’t cancer-riddled are old or crippled or both. We’ve already got the heads of wolves. No sense in pleading for a little when we can take it all. Bet they’ve got good eating. Canteens of cool water. Maybe even a little whiskey, though I confess I’m not holding my breath.”

“How can you talk about robbing them?” Alma said. “They’ve done nothing to us.”

“Not much interested in the compunctions of a woman who’s been living fenced like a pet pony,” Rawley said, and spat on the dirt for emphasis, like Oscar used to do. “Come on, Mateo,” he said. “You’re a sensible man. Don’t you agree with me?”

Mateo hesitated, his eyes fixed on the rolling landscape and its scores of hermits. “Let’s just walk on,” he said at last. “It’s not worth the trouble.”

“Magdala needs rest,” Xavier said firmly. “She and I gotta stop, if no one else will.”

Magdala flinched at the weight of all their stares on her. “I can go on,” she assured them.

“There’s no need,” Alma said, and in front of the men, Magdala was almost embarrassed by the kindness that in the dark of the bank vault had been a comfort. “Rosy needs to nurse anyhow,” she said.

Rawley shook his head. “I’ll be out here if you need me,” he said. “Make camp right there.” He jerked his chin toward an outcropping of rock, sun-exposed and yucca-studded.

“Don’t be foolish,” Xavier said to him.

Rawley stood a moment with his jaw clenched. Then he nodded and followed the rest of them down the hillside.

None of the cactus-sitters stopped them or spoke to them as they trailed through the saguaro forest; none even opened their eyes. It would have been easy, Magdala thought, as Rawley had said, to rob them. But she felt their vulnerability like a mirror reflecting her own, and a greater part of her wanted to shout a warning. You could be shot! Hit! Everything could be taken from you! The cactus-sitters somehow didn’t know. She wondered if anyone had told them that they could have found healing, for deformities and sicknesses both, in Las Vegas.

They had almost reached the tents in the center of the cactus forest when a small man with a hunched back emerged from one of them, leaning heavily on a stick of juniper.

“Welcome,” he said, tilting his head up to meet their eyes. “I am Renato. And who are all of you?”

“We’re just passing through,” Xavier said. “But we’d be real obliged if we could stay the night in your camp. Maybe get a little water.”

“We would love to offer you food and shelter, on a few conditions,” the man said. “The first is that you come without your guns. Bury them in the desert or entrust them to us, it makes no difference. We are all unarmed here, and we ask as a gesture of good will.”

“No one here is armed?” said Mateo.

“No one. I promise you.”

The men exchanged glances. Xavier slid his gun from the holster, unloaded it and presented it on the flats of his palms to the old man. A moment later, Mateo did the same. They looked expectantly at Rawley, who stood motionless with his hand on his rifle.

“No chance,” he said. “This doesn’t leave my side.”

“Don’t think they’re planning on a stick-up,” said Mateo.

“What do they want the guns for then?” Rawley shook his head. “No chance.”

“He wants to fend for himself, let him,” Alma said to her husband.

“You can find shelter in the ravines to the west of here,” Renato said, not unkindly. “Burros often dig for water there.”

Rawley’s eyes were wide as his gaze fell across them. Magdala thought she’d never seen him so afraid before, not even when Oscar had a gun trained on her. His mouth opened, then shut. At last, he stalked away. “Find me in the morning,” he said over his shoulder. “Or don’t. I’m not risking it.”

• • • •

In the shade of late-blooming acacia, Renato and two of his fellow hermits served them a meal of stewed mesquite peas and roasted crickets. As the dishes were set before them, Magdala remembered Rawley saying she would never have to eat beetles as long as she stayed in Caput Lupinum, and she felt a small pang of loss, strange and unwanted, for the town they had left. But the crickets were not repulsive as she had thought they would be—they had a pleasing, almost-meaty taste that crackled in her mouth—and Magdala ate all that the cactus-sitters served her. When she had finished, she sat watching as Renato lifted spoonfuls of stewed mesquite to the mouth of one of his fellow cactus-sitters, a woman named Catalina, whose wicker chair had been wheeled out to the table on a set of casters. Renato sat patiently while the woman worked to swallow and chew, gathering up more food onto the spoon only when she nodded her readiness. Magdala knew she was not supposed to stare at people, but she could not stop watching. She thought she had never seen one grown-up caring for another like that, patiently but without fuss, as if it were the most ordinary and comfortable thing in the world.

“You folks been out here long?” Mateo said to them, after a while.

“Fifteen years now,” Catalina answered. “The first faithful of our order left Las Vegas twenty years ago, searching for something one of their number had dreamed: a chapel carved out from the cliffs, empty for a hundred years, whitewashed by wind, a sanctuary where they could find peace. They hired the trail guide Barabbas Knight to lead them. He said he knew the place. But instead he robbed them of all their worldly possessions, abandoned them in the desert. For months they wandered, searching. Then one day, a revelation.” She smiled. “Perhaps there was a chapel in the cliffs, somewhere, but there is peace to be found here.”

“You saying it’s peaceful to straddle a cactus?” said Xavier.

Renato and Catalina exchanged a look of amusement. “It is,” Renato said, “for some. In the right frame of mind. In the right place, the right time. But we do not demand that everyone in our order practice cactus-sitting. Only those who feel so called. There are many ways of being in the world now,” he concluded. “We all find one we can endure.”

Magdala was bewildered. If the cactus-sitters had come from Las Vegas, they had seen the shrines of Alma’s stories firsthand. She felt certain that one saint or another could have healed Renato’s curved back, Catalina’s paralyzed limbs, all the ailments and deformities that burdened the rest of them. She felt, then, for the first time, a pinprick of doubt pierce through her surety in Saint Elkhanah. But she pushed it away. There had to be some reason why the hermits would not or could not be healed by the Vegas saints. Alma always said the worthies did not choose to intercede for everyone. Perhaps the cactus-sitters had done something wrong, something they did not want to admit.

When every plate was empty, Renato showed the group to the empty tent reserved for strangers, then left them alone. As the sky darkened and the tent grew dim, the faint sound of the hermits singing their vespers came on the wind.

“Listen to that, we’re practically in Vegas already,” said Mateo.

“They’re heretics,” Alma said, harshly.

“How do you figure?”

“Didn’t you hear him say they left Vegas? To wander? I’m certain they were excommunicated. And if they couldn’t find another place to take them in, they must have some kind of barbaric, inhuman practices.”

“Is that why they haven’t gotten healed?” Magdala said, eager for a chance to settle the question. “Would it make Saint Elkhanah angry? That we’re staying with them?”

“Magdala,” Xavier said. “It doesn’t matter. We’re not on pilgrimage.”

Something collapsed inside her at his words; she realized she had believed if they left Caput Lupinum, they would have to go to the holy city, that they would be drawn inexorably to the shrine holding her salvation, no matter how many miles had to be crossed. She had never fathomed that her father would refuse her, not once he knew she could be rid of her clubfoot.

“I thought you wanted me to be healed,” she said.

“Sure, if there was any chance of it. But there’s not. It’s a bedtime story. A road ballad. A romance.” He turned to Alma. “If you could stop filling her head—”

“If you won’t take me, I’ll go by myself,” Magdala cried, wanting to make him as frantic as she was, as desperate. “Or,” she went on, “or, Rawley will take me.”

“No one will take you,” said Xavier. “You’re not going, and that’s the end of it.” He took up one of the bedrolls curled in the corner. “I’ll be here,” he said, laying it out in front of the tent’s opening.

Magdala watched him with her hands curled into fists, understanding the brand on her neck not as a mark of protection but a mark of ownership, hating the easy curve of his spine as he lay on his side between her and the desert, the simple fact of him enough to keep her in. Her salvation all depended on him, she thought, and he didn’t even care.

As night deepened and the vespers faded to the softer nocturnal chorus of mourning doves and cicadas, Magdala fell asleep despite herself; as her eyelids got heavy, her fury retreated. When she woke it was still dark, and from outside low voices came: her father’s and someone else’s.

“Not a survivor,” she heard Xavier say. “So far, she is,” the other voice answered. Magdala rose to her feet and peeked out the flap of the tent, her ears prying stray words apart from the low hum of their murmurs. One of the cactus-sitters had kindled a small fire just beyond the tent; they sat propped on a flat stone, stirring the coals with a stick. Her father sat across from them, his back to Magdala. “She still thinks there’s some way out of this,” he was saying.

She thought for a second of sneaking away from him, imagined herself stealing through the saguaros, past the cactus-sitters with their perpetually closed eyes. Then the hermit sitting across the fire said, “And you don’t want to take her on pilgrimage?”

“I never even heard the name of Elkhanah ’til someone was warning me away from him. And it’s all a scam, isn’t it? Set any pile of bones on a pedestal, and people will come to see them. Thinking they’re touching something that’s not here anymore, that maybe never was. And they’ll pay alms, maybe even play the slots on the way out.”

“Would you take her if you thought it would work?”

“Does it work?”

The cactus-sitter made a soft sound of amusement. “I confess,” they said, “I’m not liable to believe in the sanctity of a saint best known for his sharpshooting. Nor in any of the cowboy saints of Vegas. But who knows why miracles happen, or where?”

“So you think she could be cured.”

“I believe,” they corrected, “she will be healed.”

“What’s the difference?”

The cactus-sitter’s head lifted and they caught Magdala’s eye. “Little one,” they said. “Did we wake you?”

Shyly, Magdala emerged from the tent and stumbled to her father’s side. After a full day of walking, her clubfoot was so stiff and swollen that she could not disguise the pain of standing on it. The cactus-sitter did not pretend they did not see; their gaze was steady, unabashed. “Child,” they asked, “have you ever ridden horseback?”

Magdala shook her head.

“Stay here a moment,” they said, getting to their feet.

Left alone with her father, Magdala twisted her hands awkwardly in her lap and did not look at him, shame and anger and fear of losing his love all knotted inside of her. She half-startled when he reached for her hand and held it. The feel of his fingers and the heartbeat that thudded in his wrist disarmed her, and at once she wrapped her arms around him and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” though not what for, letting him think she meant only her anger in the tent and not the two flights across the desert, their homelessness, the wolf’s head on him. He held still within her embrace.

When the cactus-sitter returned, they were leading a small swayback mule ono a rope halter. “For you,” they said to Magdala, holding the animal’s lead rope out to her.

“We can’t take this from you,” said Xavier.

“You can,” they said, and their eyes stayed on Magdala as they answered him. “Someday you will be back here to return it.”

• • • •

They left the cactus-sitters in the morning, Magdala perched on the mule’s back and her father holding the animal’s halter, the others trailing after them. Rawley was waiting for them on the ridge that curved around the saguaro forest, cooking lizards on a makeshift spit.

“I see you’re still alive,” he said as they approached.

“Barely,” murmured Mateo. He had risen nauseous and weak-legged, complaining of his head. Desert sickness, Magdala had thought, fearing he’d looked too long yesterday on the roaming creatures. “Want of liquor,” Alma had corrected her.

“They were good people,” said Xavier.

Rawley withdrew the lizards from the fire, puffing at the smoke that rose from the most deeply charred. “You left ‘em a whole mule richer,” he said. “So they must be generous, or you’re a wealthier man than you let on.”

“It was a gift,” Xavier said, patting the mule’s neck. “A gift with an obligation.” He looked at Magdala. “Given to understand that I’m charged with bringing this pilgrim to the holy city.”

“Papa, really?” Magdala was afraid to believe him. “Do you mean it?”

“You got some feet to kiss,” he said, a half-smile crossing his face.

“Guess we’ll be parting ways at the highway then.” Rawley got to his feet and ate the lizards as he walked, spitting bones at intervals onto the asphalt. “Mateo, you too?” he said around a mouthful.

“Looks that way,” Mateo said wearily, his eyes on Alma and the baby. “I made a promise, and as I keep being reminded, I haven’t made good on it yet.”

“And how about you, Dulcinea?” Rawley smiled like he had smiled when they were serving him dinner in Caput Lupinum, narrow and ungenerous. “You sticking with me, or are you going to shock some martyred virgin with your sins and transgressions?”

Dulcinea flinched as if she’d been struck. “Not with you,” she said.

“Leave her alone,” said Alma.

“Me and Dulcinea are old friends,” Rawley said. “She understands.”

“Why are you kind to me but mean to her?” Magdala demanded.

Rawley’s look was poisonous when he faced her. “Don’t gotta be kind to either of you,” he snarled, and she understood suddenly they were not friends anymore; that maybe they never had been, despite all her hours in his passenger seat and his smoky whispers in her left ear.

“You stay away from them both,” Alma said. “Or you can go your own way to the pilgrim highway. You should count yourself lucky you’re here in the first place.”

“Mateo, you gonna let your woman speak to me that way?” Rawley said.

“No one speak to each other,” Mateo mumbled.

“There some kind of bad blood here we all should know about?” interjected Xavier.

“No bad blood,” Rawley said. “Just sore feelings.” He bit the head off the last of the lizards and swallowed without chewing. “I’m gonna tell my story now,” he said. “Listen good, ’cause I won’t repeat it.”

• • • •

There was a man born full of spite and loathing. From the first day of his life, he dragged it along with him. But he always kept a tight rein on it, like a hunger he never sated. Then one day, he unchained it for just a minute and spit on the face of a prisoner going to the hangman’s noose. Thought, that man will be dead in half a moment anyway. Only the prisoner didn’t die, not for real. After they hung him, he came back to life, traversed the earth, forgave everyone who’d wronged him except one person. Came to our man and said to him, “I’ve seen inside you. Seen who you are. And those thirty-three years of keeping it down, they don’t matter. You’ll be keeping it down the rest of your very long life, ‘til you find someone to trade places with you.” And he kissed the man on his forehead before he went, leaving a mark there like something burnt.

At first our man didn’t know what he meant. But with time he understood. He didn’t age. Wasn’t a day older than when he’d first been cursed. And he could never settle anywhere after that. Everyplace he went, he was unwanted. People saw the mark and crossed themselves, said spells or curses, threw salt over their shoulders. And so he wandered, looking for some unlucky fool to take his place. An eternity of homelessness. Hard to find a man who would rather take that life than the short, sweet one he was given. Our man went everywhere, looking, searching and seeking in all the dark places. In jailhouses, madhouses, in every godforsaken hole in the earth he could reach. And as he went, the spite and loathing didn’t go away, they got stronger. He hated every man who wouldn’t take his place. Hated their smug no’s and their readiness to meet death. Hated their uncursed souls and clean foreheads.

It was nine hundred years before he found one. A lonely desperado sentenced to hang. Would have done anything to cling on longer to life, even wander forever. He was an outlaw anyway. Would hardly have made a difference. But it all ends where it began because our man was so full of spite and loathing that he looked at the face of the poor, wretched desperado standing there in shackles, waiting for his turn at the gallows, and felt such contempt for the kind of man who’d take such a bargain that he spit on him. And after that, the desperado wouldn’t broker a deal with him. Said, “I’ll keep my death, thank you very much.” Spat right back at him.

Some folks say he’s still wandering, looking for someone to take his mark and his everlasting hateful life.

• • • •

Through Rawley’s story and the silence that followed, they crossed long miles of flatland. Magdala slept through the hottest hours of the day on the mule’s back, her face buried in the dark ridge of his mane and her dreams full of a lone man trawling for souls.

At night they camped high in the hills, the narrow mouth of a cave at their backs and the desert spread wide before them. In the distance, they could make out the glittering pale line of what Alma said was the pilgrim highway; she guessed three more miles and they’d intersect.

“I’ve been thinking,” Rawley said, “maybe I ought to stay on with you folks a while longer. Could be good opportunities for a man like me in Vegas.”

“You won’t find someone to trade places, not even there,” Dulcinea said.

“Sharp teeth on you,” said Rawley, igniting a cigarette. “Why do you suppose I’m the man with the mark?”

She gave him a dark look. “I’m the one you spit on.”

“You leave that girl alone,” said Alma. “I told you once already. Not a chance you’re coming with us. The deal was that we go together to the pilgrim highway. Then you’re on your own. You want to go to Vegas, find your own route.”

“You don’t own the highway, on my last recollection,” Rawley said.

“Leave off it,” Mateo said wearily to both of them and to no one. “Could I trouble you for a drag, brother? I got aches that still aren’t fading.”

Rawley passed his cigarette behind Alma’s head, trailing a soft brown line of smoke. “It’s good jimson,” he said, “but it’s not liquor. Don’t be expecting a miracle.”

Alma’s lips tightened into a thin line. “Put that cigarette out before something gets a look at the light,” she said.

Rawley puckered his lips and exhaled an O. “You think I’m scared of stuffed men?”

“I don’t care if you’re afraid. I have a baby here who I’m planning on keeping alive.”

“You can’t tell me I got to stomach a whole day of you without jimson at the end of it.”

“Mateo, are you gonna let him talk to me like that?” Alma demanded, but Mateo shook his head.

“You don’t gotta be so tiresome, Alma,” he said. “He only wants a smoke.”

Rawley blew smoke. “Have a puff with us,” he said. “Nothing in the pilgrim rulebook that says you have to be miserable all the time, is there?”

“All right,” said Alma slowly. “Give it to me then.”

“Open wide,” Rawley said, and he pinched the cigarette between two fingers and maneuvered it slowly, with drunken languor, toward Alma’s mouth. She seized it from him before he reached her lips and ground the cigarette into the dirt until the spark died and threw it over the cliff.

Rawley cursed and got to his feet and fumbled for his gun, fingers sliding clumsily across his holster until he found purchase.

“You put that thing away,” Alma said, her voice rising, her eyes on the baby who lay wrapped in a blanket on the ground beside her.

“You gonna let your woman make the rules here?” Rawley said to Mateo.

“You’re the fool who put the cigarette in her hands,” Mateo said imploringly, his hand on his forehead.

“No. It’s the principle.” Rawley squinted down the barrel of the gun to aim, swaying on his feet. “You gonna apologize to me, or am I gonna have to look past that brand on your neck?”

Magdala and Xavier were at a distance from the rest of them, Xavier’s body curled like a wall around Magdala, his eyes on the horizon. “Papa,” Magdala whispered. “Help them.”

“Not my place, Magdala. He has to choose whose side he’s on.”

“I’ll take a bullet before I apologize to you,” Alma said.

Rawley let out a hard raspy growl, then twisted the gun in his hand and swung the barrel at Alma’s head. She flinched back, hands uplifted, and the gun caught her wrist with a crack that splintered bone. Alma howled and lunged at him, knocking him backward. His feet skidded on the rock; he stumbled on the precipice of the cliff and fought wide-eyed to stay up.

“Mateo, get a grasp on your woman,” he growled.

“Alma, sit down. Shut your mouth. Let the baby feed,” Mateo said. “He’s only gotten so high on the jimson because his stomach’s empty. He’ll be better come morning.”

Alma looked at him and her face tightened, her brows met in an arch, her mouth rose into a purple knot. She did not cry. She sat down and held Rosy close to her chest.

“I’m gonna tell you all how the world really ended,” she said, after a moment. “This is a real proper hagiography, not any of your old folk stories. So listen well.”

• • • •

A thousand years ago, everyone forgot who God was. People could speak to each other across miles, across oceans. Heal any hurt or sickness. Build towers in a matter of weeks. Grow fields of food in a single lightless room. Amid all these miracles, churches stood empty, or they became bars, dance halls, casinos. Even the holy city of Las Vegas was once a place of vice and wickedness. But on the inside, people were shriveled up and halfway dead as soon as they were born. Their souls flickered like candles. They cheated and betrayed and slaughtered each other out in the open. They saw suffering and said nothing and pretended they felt nothing until it was true.

Only one man stood apart. Saint Sheldon of Las Vegas, the very first to be canonized by the Holy Church. At the dusk of the world, Saint Sheldon stood in a shimmering tower at the heart of Las Vegas and pleaded for mercy for humankind. God came down from heaven to look his favored one in the face. He said, “Tell me one reason why I should not blast humankind from the earth in a flood, as before.”

“Your lovingness,” said Saint Sheldon.

God said, “My lovingness is exhausted.”

“Your patience,” said Saint Sheldon.

God said, “My patience is exhausted.”

“Your compassion,” said Saint Sheldon.

God said, “My compassion is exhausted.”

“Then, your glory,” said Saint Sheldon.

And God said, “They have not exhausted that.” He made a deal with Saint Sheldon that day. He would not destroy humankind completely, but he would leave a small Remainder in the hungriest and loneliest portion of the world. And as a show of his lovingness, his patience, his compassion, among them he would disperse workers of miracles. Saint Sheldon himself, they say, walked the earth as the poison rain fell and was untouched by it. God said, “If in a thousand years of suffering they do not take heed of my glory and repent fully, I will expunge the Remainder from the earth and begin again.”

Already I know He’ll be starting over. We will all be expunged, to the last of us. And good riddance.

Copyright © 2022 by Kay Chronister. Excerpted from Desert Creatures by Kay Chronister. Published by permission of the author and Erewhon Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kay Chronister is a writer of dark and speculative fiction. Her fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, The Dark and elsewhere, and has been nominated for a World Fantasy Award. Her Shirley Jackson award-nominated collection of short stories, Thin Places, was published by Undertow Publications in 2020. Her first novel, Desert Creatures, is forthcoming from Erewhon Books this year.

Book Review: She and Her Cat, by Makoto Shinkai, translated by Naruki Nagakawa

Aigner Loren Wilson | 434 words

She and Her Cat
Makoto Shinkai, translated by Naruki Nagakawa
Hardcover / Ebook / Paperback
ISBN: 978-1982165741
Atria Books, November 2022, 144 pgs

No other book in 2022 has made me cry the way She and Her Cat made me: tearing up at the end of each story and wailing loudly at the conclusion of the book. She and Her Cat was originally an animated film by Makoto Shinkai later turned into a manga and short story collection translated into English by Naruki Nagakawa. When I saw there was a new cover and hardback coming out in November 2022, I wanted to give the book a read.

She and Her Cat is comprised of four short stories surrounding women and their relationships with their cats, told from the perspective of the cats and their owners. Each story is connected either by the cats and their relationships to one another or by their owners and their relationships to the rest of the world. At first, I didn’t consider the book fantasy, but as I read the stories, specifically the sections from the point of view of the cats, I felt like She and Her Cat held that whisper of speculative fantasy I enjoy in more literary works.

The cats in the story have a rich culture and society that anthropomorphizes them in a way that’s easy for me to see in my own cats and the cats that roam my neighborhood. Normally, that type of writing or fantasy doesn’t touch me, but it’s hard to ignore such strong and delicate prose that doesn’t get in the way of the story but pulls the reader through from one moment to the next.

I know that the description of She and Her Cat seems really simple. And in a way, these stories are simple. They deal with breakups, pet companionship, depression, anxiety, and other everyday life bumps. But the way each of the stories is written to form one story about being a good companion—whether that’s to another person, yourself, or an animal—expresses these small moments in large and dramatic ways that punch you in the gut. She and Her Cat creates one story out of many that seamlessly flows along, casually and tenderly ripping out your heart in the best, most heartwarming way.

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: Africa Risen, edited by Thomas, Ekpeki, & Knight

Arley Sorg | 1522 words

Africa Risen
Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight, eds.
Hardcover/Ebook
ISBN: 9781250833006
Tordotcom Publishing, November 2022, 528 pgs

If you love short fiction as much as I do, a quick glance at the table of contents for Africa Risen should be enough to get you to buy this book. Steven Barnes is a science fiction legend who has been publishing since the days when very few Black authors were getting published in genre. While he is better known for his novels, ISFDB (The Internet Speculative Fiction Database; bit.ly/3JcjnkC) lists a number of short stories, the first going all the way back to 1974. Tobias S. Buckell is a fantastic short fictioneer and something of a legend in his own right, with enough stories to load up far more than his latest collection (Shoggoths in Traffic and Other Stories), and an array of awards nods, including a World Fantasy win for collection The Tangled Lands, coauthored with Paolo Bacigalupi. Maurice Broaddus is no slouch, with several novels out and a huge body of short fiction going back to the ’90s. And then, of course, there’s Tananarive Due, known best for beautifully written horror—her excellent collection Ghost Summer won a British Fantasy Award, and was named after her 2008 short story “Ghost Summer” (published in anthology The Ancestors), which won a Carl Brandon Award.

Yes, friends, if you’re a short fiction enthusiast, these are probably the folks whose names excite you. But this is Africa Risen, and if you’re a true short fiction enthusiast, there are a bunch of other people in here who should excite you as well. Wole Talabi comes to mind, a sharp writer who occasionally dons the editor’s role, and who has been recognized with a number of awards nominations and wins, his short “Wednesday’s Story” appeared in Lightspeed in 2016; Chinelo Onwualu comes to mind, who co-founded important speculative fiction magazine Omenana, and whose fiction has appeared in a number of wonderful venues, also with a number of awards nods; Akua Lezli Hope comes to mind, and Tobi Ogundiran, and Alexis Brooks de Vita, Tlotlo Tsamaase, and many others—I mean, seriously, most of the folks in this anthology . . .? If seeing them here doesn’t excite you, if it doesn’t make you eager to read this book, it is not because they lack skill or talent; it is not because they haven’t made their mark on the field; friend, I say this with love: it is because you haven’t been paying attention.

But don’t worry. Editors Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight have brought them all together in one volume, and this is a gift. Besides, frankly, if none of the authors motivate you, seeing these three editors go to work on a project together, well that should be an automatic win.

As with most anthologies, not every story will land for every reader. The pieces here vary greatly in theme, style, and subject. Most of the entries are well-told, but I’ll go over a few that were standouts for me.

WC Dunlap is a bit newer to the publishing scene, so, unlike the authors mentioned above, if you don’t recognize the name, it’s a bit more forgivable. But I urge you to read a few of her pieces because she’s a great writer. I first read her in the inaugural issue of reborn FIYAH magazine, a story called “Revival” which was so good we reprinted it here in Lightspeed. I can also strongly recommend “The Front Line” published at Tor.com, which was reprinted in The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction (2021): Volume 1. Here she has “March Magic” which lives up to the standards she has set for herself in the field. It’s a story about an interesting kind of witch, one who doesn’t just live in the swamp, she has nearly become part of the swamp. But she detaches from her deeply rooted state for an important event: a battle which is about to take place in social, physical, spiritual, and political fields. An engaging voice welcomes the reader while also delivering strong visual and tactile details, surrounding the reader in story. Subtext is immediate and powerful—for those who know how to read it: the places that some see as dangerous are, for her, home, a safe haven, away from “yoke and the whip”. The real dangers, in other words, are not gators, but people. What happens next reminds of me of Season three of American Horror Story, if it had centered Black perspectives instead of white ones, and if it had been far more creative instead of relying heavily on stereotypes: a gathering of a variety of witches, brought together to stand against racism on one of the most important days in 1963. All this is basically a long ramble to say: this piece is fun, powerful, brilliant.

Dilman Dila is a writer I haven’t read as much as some of the others, despite the author having been publishing stories for quite a while, so I was grateful to read “The Blue House” here. It’s an introspective story, with the introspection depicted largely as conflict between programs in the mind of an android who isn’t sure if she is still alive. In fact, she thinks she may have died a long time ago, and that she may have been rendered “functional” after her death. In retracing her survival in what is a desolate, essentially post-apocalyptic setting, both sentience and the nature of living are examined. It’s a good story which will appeal to readers at the intersection of intellectual meditation and harder science fiction.

“The Soul Would Have No Rainbow” was a great excuse to get to know Yvette Lisa Ndlovu’s writing. Langa’s grandmother has died. And while greedy relatives have taken all they could of what grandma left behind, they overlooked a mysterious cookbook, which Langa found. The cookbook, it turns out, reveals secrets about grandma, and in turn, about Langa herself. The narrative is beautifully told, with glimpses into harsh histories, and subtext around the problems still lingering from those histories. It feels mythical while being nicely grounded in human life; it’s gentle and intimate, and it’s a fantastic read.

I recently published Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga’s “Saviour of the Light Market” in Fantasy Magazine, a story I found to be super creative and interesting, so it is, perhaps, unsurprising that I thoroughly enjoyed “Housewarming for a Lion Goddess”. It’s a story about new places and transitions, new states of mind, as well as the things we carry into those new places. The protagonist has just moved into a new apartment, and the guy she’s dating helps her move in. But our protagonist has secrets, and like many of us, she has to reconcile memories and past problems with the present, trying to manage her emotions and worries left by prior betrayals. And as many of us do in new relationships, the guy went and found out some things she may not want him to know. Unlike many of us, she just might have to kill him over it. The opening utilizes good imagery, and there are moments of seriously lovely writing. Something about the voice and style feels comfortable, lived in and real, as if everything is being shared by a good friend. It might also be the sense of knowing a character after only a few lines, of learning so much in a short span, and of it all feeling grounded in true-to-life experiences, yet still fascinating. Metaphor is strong throughout the story, and the depiction of the relationship is wonderful. The use of food in the narrative is a highlight, not to mention extremely relatable. Elements of subtext on gender and power elevate the story, as do the central themes around dealing with the past. Again, a very wordy way to say: this story is awesome!

If you crack this book open and don’t recognize most of the authors in here, you know what? It’s alright. You’re in for a treat. And I hope it will lead you to even more delightful reads. And if you are already familiar with most of these authors, then you probably don’t need me to tell you what to expect. You’re probably as eager as I was to dig into these stories. Thomas, Ekpeki, and Knight have assembled some of the best writers in the speculative fiction field, and that is something you simply don’t want to miss.

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.

Book Review: Other Terrors, edited by Liaguno & Mason

Chris Kluwe | 881 words

Other Terrors
edited by Vince A. Liaguno and Rena Mason
Trade Paperback / eBook / Audiobook
ISBN: 978-0358658894
HarperCollins, July 2022, 368 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome to another book review. The days are getting shorter, which means the nights are getting longer, which means I have a bunch of spoooooooky short stories to share with you all—the inclusive anthology Other Terrors, edited by Vince A. Liaguno and Rena Mason.

Other Terrors is a collection of twenty-four short stories that fall firmly under the “horror” subgenre of writing, but what makes this particular anthology unique is that the “horror” in these tales is the lived experience of being a minority in a world that constantly sees you as “other,” neatly subverting the classic horror trope of the “other” automatically being the villain (and, more importantly, highlighting the fact that those who view the “other” as an object of fear and loathing may, in fact, be villains themselves).

What this means in terms of the stories is that while there is plenty of goose bump-inducing and gore-filled descriptions on the pages, much of the subcontext is what it means to be living in a society that frequently goes out of its way to harm those who don’t fit in. Whether it’s a literal destabilization in the environment mirroring the body dysmorphia a trans character struggles with, the cabin-in-the-wood slasher’s environmentalist point of view, or a consuming collective of ancient riverfolk fighting exploitative gentrification, each story is much more than the surface-level creepy-crawly-feeling induced by good horror. In fact, the real chills arrive when you realize that while fictional and fantastical elements litter each page, the truth of these experiences is the actual evil of a world in which they can, and do, exist.

(At this point I do feel I have to point out that this is a collection of horror stories, which means that there are potentially triggering situations everywhere, including physical violence, emotional violence, sexual violence, frequent depictions of graphic death, and multiple other disturbing situations, so please be aware of what you can and can’t handle.)

One thing I particularly enjoyed about Other Terrors is the breadth of viewpoints brought into play by the diversity of contributors, along with how they intertwined with different styles of horror writing. There is something in this anthology for everyone (I would argue the whole thing is for everyone, but the intersectionality might not be there for some), including the slow buildup to an abruptly disturbing conclusion, the immediate realization that things are not as they should be, and the unexpected twist, all intermingled with gender, sexuality, and societal backgrounds that span the globe and give the story being told a unique flavor not always found in traditional horror. The authors aren’t afraid to stretch themselves, and in so doing, stretch the reader’s preconception of what horror can be.

Another thing I really liked about Other Terrors is that many of the stories frequently present the standard horror villain (zombies, dirty stranger walking into the diner, classic vampires and werewolves) as an initial threat, but then with context is revealed to be someone who was made an outsider due to society’s inability to accept them for who they are, and in most cases, exploiting them for who they are. At the same time, not every story is like this, which keeps the reader on their toes—sometimes the monster in the woods really is the unstoppable structural and systemic forces of socio-economic violence that gobbles you up in the night. In good horror writing, you’re never quite sure where the baddie is going to pop up from, nor what shape it’s going to take, and for being a collection of completely separate short stories, Other Terrors captures this feeling incredibly well.

Overall, while the horror genre might not appeal to everyone, I would highly recommend reading Other Terrors (or as much of it as you can handle at a time), because at the end of the day, all of the stories in it are true. What this anthology makes clear is that horror isn’t just a genre, it’s a lived experience for all too many people that live in this world, and it is our duty to each other, both on a societal as well as a personal level, to help those affected by the nightmare and find a way for them to escape it, even if it feels difficult or scary. I mean, as anyone who’s read a horror story knows, until you take down the monster for good, there’s no way to know who it will go after next.

It might be you.

Read if: you don’t mind the occasional bit of viscera in your teacup; you’ve ever been treated like one of “them” instead of “us”; you can deal with a sleepless night spent pondering the existential troubles of the world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Kluwe grew up in Southern California among a colony of wild chinchillas and didn’t learn how to communicate outside of barking and howling until he was fourteen years old. He has played football in the NFL, once wrestled a bear for a pot of gold, and lies occasionally. He is also the eternal disappointment of his mother, who just can’t understand why he hasn’t cured cancer yet. Do you know why these bio things are in third person? I have no idea. Please tell me if you figure it out.

Author Spotlight: Kristina Ten

Laurel Amberdine | 672 words

How did “The Queen of the Earless Seals of Lake Baikal” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I often draw from the Russian folklore I grew up hearing, and with this particular story wanted to try working with an invented myth rather than an established one. Lake Baikal is of course a real place, and one that’s special and fascinating to me, as I have family living in the nearby city of Irkutsk and visited occasionally as a child. The seals, or nerpa, endemic to the lake are real as well, and though some mystery surrounds them—like how they came to be there in the first place—the queen and her mythology aren’t part of that mystery (not in our world anyway). I was also inspired by the fairy tale hallmarks of structure and repetition, and by modern fairy tales—like Amal El-Mohtar’s gorgeous “Seasons of Glass and Iron”—in which the women save themselves.

What is your writing space like? What do you like to have around for optimal creativity?

Most days, my writing space looks like my kitchen table, because it’s in the part of the apartment that gets the most light. When I remember to, I pull up my only somewhat ergonomic desk chair and at the end of the day my back is happier for it. And when I don’t remember, it’s the much less ergonomic kitchen table chair and an angry back for me. The best way I’ve found to cultivate a space of creativity is to fill it with work by other creative people, so my walls and shelves are covered with art—prints, paintings, photos, sculptures, weavings—all beautiful or silly or both, made by friends and other artists I admire. That said, I try not to be too picky about writing spaces and to be okay writing just about anywhere (at airports, in waiting rooms) simply because, for me, doing so removes barriers to writing more consistently.

Where are you in this story?

I’m little Dia, who visits the shores of Lake Baikal for the first time and is mesmerized by the galumphing, sunbathing seals. I’m also older Dia who dreams of owning an inn someday. I briefly worked in hotels and still think a lot about what hospitality means in different parts of the world, what it means to provide someone you’ve never met with home, shelter, and comfort. Finally, I’m the person constantly navigating “story” and “fact,” and each one’s volatile, hard-to-pin-down relationship with “truth.”

Is there anything you want to make sure readers notice?

Petrushevskaya is a fictional town named for Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, a fierce and prolific Russian author I recommend everyone read immediately. There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby, a collection of so-called “scary fairy tales,” is a great English translation to start with. It’s as dark as it sounds, with a lot of surprises too.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I’m currently working on my second short story collection, which will also serve as my thesis project for the completion of my MFA next spring. My first novelette, “The Noon Witch Goes to Sound Planet,” will appear in Lightspeed soon, and another story—my most ambitious yet, I think—is forthcoming from a dream publisher I’ve long read and admired. I can’t share details quite yet, but Twitter (@kristina_ten) is the best place to find them when I finally, excitedly do. Over at kristinaten.com, you can find recent work, including my queer, Pushkin-tinged tale, “Beginnings” (bit.ly/3zCak9E) out from Fantasy Magazine earlier this year. Thank you for reading!

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: RJ Theodore

Laurel Amberdine | 974 words

How did “The Application of Strawberry Lip Gloss in a Low-Gravity Environment” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I wanted to write a story that used the “opposites attract” trope, with an asexual relationship including one touch-averse candidate in the run-up to romance.

For inspiration, I definitely had thoughts of the Alien-style “workforce in space” undertones (though with decidedly less acidic drippings in my result). I like the idea of a person just trying to carry out a normal life in space, and the economies that crop up in that “landscape.” I thought of how tired that person might get with so much darkness stretching between them and the nearest human. How burnt out on the daily grind. How old they could feel while still so young. And—depending on the profession they took up—how chronic injuries might be a huge part of their life. So with Gordon, I was thinking how she might go about dealing with those injuries if she is touch averse.

So who is the opposite? I thought of the Empath Guild popular characters from my text-based MMRPG days. How they were often decked out like an RPG Lisa Frank. That felt like an obvious contrast to Gordon’s sensibilities. And then I brought that Empath Guild out into space, because that’s just what I do.

What is your writing process like? Did this story fit the pattern?

With short stories, a lot of the time I invest in the process is mostly background processing. I’m thinking about the story, letting my mind wander across the field of possibilities like a katamari. When it returns to me and I sit down to write it, I’ve pretty much collected all the elements, they’re just in a messy heap, and as I start to write (usually with zero direction at all, just diving headfirst into that blank page), I untangle the underlying core of what I’ve gathered and find the story by smoothing that into something that looks as intentional as I can manage. I leave logic and planning for the revision stages.

This is completely opposite of my long-form writing process, where I don’t start until there are index cards, cork boards, and tons of draft outlines filling my office.

What is your writing space like? What do you like to have around for optimal creativity?

I am fortunate enough to have written and self-published a nonfiction book that funded a writing shed, so I have a very personal, entirely self-decorated space. I used to also like to throw coffee shops into the mix occasionally, but unless they have outdoor seating with a lot of shade (and heavy cream for my Americano), I’m staying home where it’s safe these days. I try to update my shelves to put out the collectibles I’ve gathered that most serve my writing theme at the moment, but for the most part, I get a lot of the work buzz by having friends around on Zoom, the right music (if the Zoom is muted at the moment), and a cup of coffee on hand for when my fingers need a pause in typing. And my dog, Evie. She is often curled up in what used to be my office reading chair but is now her napping throne.

Did you get stuck at any point while writing this?

This one was an absolute pleasure to write, and I’m happy to say that I didn’t get too stuck on it in any one part for very long. Gordon and Pinxi played off each other’s personalities so well and the point I was trying to make with the story was so clear in my head, that I wrote a tight Draft One and there’s not a tremendous difference between what Lightspeed readers see and the original draft. Well, except for the title. The original draft was called “Ley Lines and Regrettable Contracts.” The version I submitted to Lightspeed was called “Treatment for a Chronic Condition.” Usually I come out of the first draft with a pretty secure knowledge of what the story should be called, but this one took some crystal healing of its own.

Sometimes a story just makes you glow from top to bottom and you want to shout about what a cooperative writing project it was, until you run out of friends who haven’t already heard about it.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

It would seem I am mostly funneling my 2022 energy into re-launching my Peridot Shift series. It’s one that went unfinished when the publisher who had started the series closed their doors during the pandemic shock to the industry, so now that the rights have reverted to me, I’m excited to get the second editions of the first books out into the world. Flotsam re-released in February, Salvage re-released in July, and I am, probably as you read this, getting everything ready to finally finish this trilogy with the release, for the first time, of Cast Off on December 6, 2022.

For shorter work, I have pieces in Unfettered Hexes, Fireside Magazine, Bridge to Elsewhere, and earlier this summer, “Singing the Ancient Out of the Dark,” co-written with Marius Broaddus, also came out in Lightspeed Magazine! My full back catalog and latest updates are easy to find at rjtheodore.com, or I’ll be yammering about something either related to my writing, my gardening, or Evie herself @bittybittyzap on Instagram or Twitter.

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: Martin Cahill

Laurel Amberdine | 1140 words

How did “Her Five Farewells” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

The seed this story sprang from was a question I asked myself: what would a coffin look like to immortals who had never experienced death but were about to? Throughout human history, we’ve had myriad answers for how to honor our dead and what to do with their remains. As this story started sprouting from that first question, I wanted to challenge myself on a worldbuilding and narrative level. Why have these people never died before? What exactly has brought about death for the first time in their history? And what display of death does Mr. Chrym decide on in this story to have the impact it needs for both the reader and the people within it? I was inspired by various forms of funeral rites and interment, the lifecycle and ecosystem of plants, the role of psychopomps in history and mythology, and fell in love with the sort of fungal/biopunk aesthetic that helped inform the Exechar. Along the way, the story began to interrogate, challenge, and dismantle ideas that drive imperialism, colonialism, tyranny, and more, and hopefully celebrate community, freedom, and collective grief as well as collective healing.

What is your writing process like? Did this story fit the pattern?

My writing process is very much in the vein of building my parachute on the way down, except I’m also drafting the blueprints of said parachute while plummeting through the sky and quickly swapping in different color swatches and types of fabrics, “you know, just to see how it feels,” as the ground rushes toward me.

Often, the ground symbolizes a deadline for submission or my own skewed sense of timing and confidence. “Her Five Farewells” absolutely fit the pattern, alas, and I’m grateful for writer and friend Manish Melwani for critiquing this story very quickly and asking incredibly pertinent questions in record time, helping this story achieve its final form. In the metaphor, Manish acted as a huge red X on the ground, shouting, “Your parachute is useless if you land badly and shatter both of your kneecaps, narratively speaking!” So I’m very grateful for his keen eye and mind; if you want to read some damn good stories, go check out his work, (I’m partial to “The Plague Puller,” at Nightmare Magazine and “The Dominion of Leviathan,” at Tor.com).

Where are you in this story?

Just a heads-up, friends, this answer deals pretty heavily with death, dying, and cancer. For about seven months, I watched my grandmother die from pancreatic cancer in 2012. Just before graduating college, I got a call about her diagnosis. No one was saying terminal, but in their speaking around it, its shape became clear. Discussions of chemo and treatments turned into statements of, “You should get up to Massachusetts and try to see her,” and “Yeah, it’s not looking great, sooner is better than later,” and all those things we say when we know death is in the room, as though it can’t hear us if we whisper. We spoke on the phone a lot, her and I, and we saw each other when we could. Death is a different beast when it takes its time as opposed to suddenly, though its teeth are still as sharp.

The pain and struggle of my grandmother’s dying, of Dorothy’s slow march into death’s embrace, is alive in the Asphodel Queen. What’s also in this story is the love she had for her immense, beautiful family, the love the two of us exchanged throughout the first twenty-two years of my life, and the dignity, acceptance, and grace that she exhibited in those last few months alongside the abysmal pain and torturous waiting for the end. Sometimes, all we can do is say goodbye and thank someone for holding us in their hearts. The act of witnessing alchemizes at the touch of grief and becomes remembrance. That is where I am in this story, and I can only hope I honored my grandmother’s journey well and paid good tribute to the queen of our family.

What would be your advice for other writers?

Finish your work. Read broadly and for fun, as much as you read specifically and for growth. Challenge yourself to write something goofy as hell or totally outside your norm. Join a book club or a writing group or an intramural sports league. Take inspiration from a butterfly, and then take inspiration from a billboard you see in the middle of nowhere encouraging you to rent a small crane. Finish your work. Set a deadline, blow past it, and then set another deadline, and try to only blow past it by a little this time. Write a story in 2000 words. Write a story in a sentence. Watch the moon for a little too long and begrudgingly agree that the poets were right and she is a source of endless celebration. Finish your goddamn work, please do it. And breathe. Remember to breathe. You are a writer. A good one, too. Stop putting pressure on yourself and remember that at the end of the day, you should enjoy writing. Enjoy the work. Everything is going to be okay, I promise. Just keep writing.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

This has been a rather busy year for me! Between September 2021 through September 2022, I’ve published six new short stories in the SF/F world. It’s very surreal and I’m very grateful after three years of not publishing any short fiction. You can find a list of my work at my website (bit.ly/MCahill), and if you’re so moved to read other works of mine, please know I’m grateful and I hope you enjoy them.

I’ve also recently finished a time traveling trickster god novella that I hope to find a home for soon. In the meantime, I’m continuing work on a new novel in progress which gives consciousness to a piece of rather large architecture and excoriates toxic, late-stage capitalism with a brass aesthetic and robot chefs, so I’m having a lot of fun with it. Otherwise, I’m just continually tinkering on new short stories and flash fiction, and I’ve recently taken up game design, so plenty to keep me busy and hopefully will have some fun things to announce in the near future! Thank you all so much for reading; I’m immensely grateful for each and every one of you.

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 | 236 words

Coming up in October, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Gene Doucette (“Primordial Soup and Salad”) and Adam-Troy Castro (“Conflagration at the Museum of You”). We also have a flash piece (“The Tragic Fate of the City of O-Rashad”) from P H Lee, along with an SF reprint by Dexter Palmer (“The Daydreamer by Proxy”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Suzan Palumbo (“Apolépisi: A De-Scaling”) and Debbie Urbanski (“The Dirty Golden Yellow House”). We also have a flash piece (“The Three Books and What They Tell”) from Alexandra Manglis. Our fantasy reprint is by Sofia Samatar (“Three Tales from the Blue Library”).

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, Isabel J. Kim, Ben H. Winters, P H Lee, Carrie Vaughn, and Adam-Troy Castro.

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!

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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.