TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 150 (November 2022)

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: November 2022

SCIENCE FICTION

Beyond the Shore
Tania Fordwalker

The Blindfold
Tobias S. Buckell

Double Occupancy
Ben H. Winters

Therefore What the Multiverse Has Joined Together, Let No One Separate
Dominica Phetteplace

FANTASY

What If the Whole Camp of Kids Learned How To Liquefy?
Maria Kelson

The Dragon’s Hand
Alex Irvine

The Graphology of Hemorrhage
Yoon Ha Lee

The Noon Witch Goes to Sound Planet
Kristina Ten

EXCERPTS

Ocean’s Echo
Everina Maxwell

NONFICTION

Book Review: Liar, Dreamer, Thief, by Maria Dong
Aigner Loren Wilson

Book Review: Tomorrow’s Parties, edited by Jonathan Strahan
Arley Sorg

Book Review: Poster Girl, by Veronica Roth
Chris Kluwe

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Tania Fordwalker

Alex Irvine

Ben H. Winters

Kristina Ten

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 Roman3d

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

Editorial: November 2022

John Joseph Adams | 276 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 150th issue!

For the last few years, every science fiction writer has wondered: When will it be okay to write a story about a pandemic? But I think we can all agree that disease has been with us for all of human history, and that ignoring it does nothing to make anyone feel better. So we’re kicking off this issue with Tania Fordwalker’s new short story “Beyond the Shore.” It’s certainly about a pandemic . . . but not one like any disease humanity has ever lived through.

We’re happy to welcome back Ben H. Winters, whose new SF short “Double Occupancy” is about both the dangers of time travel and not knowing yourself. Dominica Phetteplace also returns with a flash story, “Therefore What the Multiverse has Joined Together, Let No One Separate,” and we have an SF reprint by Tobias S. Buckell (“The Blindfold”).

In our fantasy offerings, Alex Irvine brings us “The Dragon’s Hand,” a tale of magic and a reluctant bond between a traveler and a dragon. Kristina Ten takes us back to the contemporary world with a story of magic and a massive music festival: “The Noon Witch Goes to Sound Planet.” We also have a flash piece (“What If the Whole Camp of Kids Learned How To Liquefy?”) from Maria Kelson. Our fantasy reprint is by Yoon Ha Lee (“The Graphology of Hemorrhage”).

Our review team has been exploring new releases for recommendations, and of course we have spotlight interviews with our authors. Our ebook readers will also enjoy an excerpt from Ocean’s Echo, the newest novel by Everina Maxwell.

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.

Beyond the Shore

Tania Fordwalker | 2006 words

February 2060

Nobody noticed the first few.

They walked. One by one, in the beginning. Isolated instances. On every continent, mid-meal, mid-shower, mid-work, mid-fuck, right out the door of a pulled-up car in the middle of a freeway—ordinary people turned their backs on their ordinary lives and walked.

They walked, shedding their hair in clumps along the way, sloughing their skin in translucent sheets to reveal pale grey beneath.

On bleeding feet they walked down highways and lanes and trails, unerringly taking the path of least resistance to the nearest coast.

They crossed the sand. The sea cooled their aching calves. Still, they walked, until the waves broke over their smooth heads and pulled them under.

They didn’t drown.

May 2060

The aircon barely cut the sweltering heat hammering the walls of the small lab where Dyl Gibson stood staring into space. He tapped absently on a holding cage. The juvenile chimp inside turned bright eyes his way. After all these years, there was still no better model for vaccine testing than a chimpanzee; genetically, they were practically human. The chimp hooted softly and tapped back, but Dyl’s attention was fixed on a Japanese innernet feed streaming into his retinal implant. He doubleblinked to max the image.

On a stainless steel table under the hard white LED lights of another laboratory, a naked man keened and thrashed against restraints. The usual swelling around the crotch had almost subsumed his genitals beneath smooth mounded flaps. A slight steel-haired Japanese technician, masked, gloved, and coated, pressed a hypodermic needle to the grey skin, and jerked back. She held the syringe up to camera. The needle had snapped clean off where it met the blue plastic hub.

That was a 12-gauge needle. Christ.

Dyl had been eight during the first year of COVID-19. Ten, during the much worse second wave. He’d survived the H37Rv pandemic, lived through the Silence, and sat safely in a full lockdown zone during the ebolavirus galveston outbreak that killed his tough-as-nails mother. That was the virus that had driven him headlong to med school, where he’d armoured himself in science and the high-pressure atmosphere within countless hazmat suits, battling the nu-viruses that proliferated in the steamy greenhouse of the forties and fifties.

He was a freelance bug-stomper. He’d seen everything there was to see, but he’d never seen anything like this.

We are the dam holding back the flood. He and his colleagues would fix this. They always had before. They just needed time.

Eyes unfocused, he tapped absently on the bars of the chimpanzee’s cage.

July 2060

In the centre of the pine breakfast table between Dyl and his wife and daughter, the flickering hologrid rendered two masked Community Protection Officers standing in the middle of a Florida highway. They were trying fruitlessly to round up a group of eight half-naked walkers.

The shoal—as the innernet had dubbed them—weren’t mindless. They could think and even speak for a while after the change began. They just couldn’t see a reason not to walk into the ocean, and no amount of persuasion or force could keep them from that end. Like migrating birds, like addicts to the score, they were compelled.

One of the shoal sent the smaller CPO reeling. She pulled out her truncheon.

Sixteen-year-old Kai ran a shaking hand over her golden hair, which she’d shaved to stubble two days before. “Why don’t they just let them go?”

Cordelia pushed her granola away. “Please turn it off. I’m trying to eat.”

“No holos at the breakfast table, Kai,” Dyl said. “Not the news, at least.”

“Try this instead.” With a flick of her silver-ringed fingers, Kai cast her personal stream onto the grid, and the road dissolved into a sparkling bay that would have been called “tropical” back before the tropics overtook most of the world. Now the air shimmered with heat. The crumbling brick walls of a drowned tourist village jutted from the water like tombstones. Among the ruins, the shoal darted and splashed with dolphin grace. No clothes. No hair. Their grey skin shone in the steamy day. Their passingly human forms only threw the inhumanity of their features into sharper relief. Kai watched, her face alight with wonder.

Cordelia grimaced. “Poor creatures.”

“They’re sick,” said Dyl.

“They don’t look sick,” Kai murmured.

“It’s a mutation. An endogenous retrovirus. The chimps and I are working on it.”

“On the radio they said it came from China,” said Cordelia.

Dyl laughed humourlessly. “The Chinese think it came from us.”

“I think it’s a punishment,” Cordelia said darkly.

“Mom, you’ve gotta stop listening to that prehistoric radio crap.”

Cordelia ignored that. “It’s poetic, don’t you think? A reverse Noah’s Flood. Don’t bring the water to us; send us into the—”

With a soft ping, the holo gave way to the grinning mop of dreadlocks that was Kai’s boyfriend Pistol. Behind him, half-naked human bodies roiled to a loud doofshuffle beat. Behind them, the sea glimmered an invitation. He smirked into the lens he’d had implanted into his middle fingernail. “So are you coming, or nah?”

Kai hastily flicked her feed out of the grid and back into her head. She muttered, “I’ll call you back,” and tapped her temple to hang up.

Cordelia punctuated the brief silence that followed with a single arched eyebrow. “Absolutely not.”

“Mom! It’s just a party!”

“At a beach! In the middle of a plague! Are you all trying to catch it?”

Kai hesitated a moment too long.

It dawned on Dyl at last that his daughter’s freshly-shaved head might signify more than just her latest attempt to annoy her mother. “Kai, are you sick?”

“No! No.” She pursed her lips and tilted her head toward the renewed view of the holographic shoal frolicking in their flooded bay. “But I don’t think they are, either. People are saying maybe they’re just something new.”

“It’s an ancient RNA virus, honey. Nothing supernatural about it.”

“I didn’t say supernatural. Ten percent of the human body is made up of RNA. You taught me that, Dad. This is just . . . part of us.”

Dyl knew the sick were never to blame, but the evangelical shine in his daughter’s eyes stabbed ice through some instinctive part of him and he snapped, “They’re not human anymore!”

“And what do humans have to look forward to? Cooking to death in drowning world? Look at them.” Kai waved at the flickering hologram. “They look happy.”

“We don’t know what they feel. They don’t talk. They—”

But Kai was no longer listening. She’d turned inwards, and her expression twitched neural commands as she navigated the streams, watching people changing, changing.

• • • •

Within a week, she was gone. She left behind everything she owned, along with a dusting of short golden hairs on her pillow.

September 2060

He couldn’t stand it. He took to driving the roads—highways, byways, dirt tracks—to the ocean, looking for Kai.

Cordelia took to locking herself in the bedroom all day, immobilised by grief. The tiny physical radio that had been her quaint lifelong hobby babbled softly on the bedside table.

After a while, the swarms of shoal on the roads made driving impossible. Dyl returned to the lab.

One by one, the feeds from the other labs went silent.

Dyl began testing his formulations on himself. The chimp watched him work. He smiled at her, and lightly tapped the bars to say hello.

October 2060

He came home one night in the fall—a misnomer in recent years; the trees would remain lush well into November. When he stepped through the door, pulled down his mask, and inhaled the stale humid air, he knew instantly that something was wrong.

The bed he’d shared with Cordelia for seventeen years lay dishevelled. Empty. The radio on the bedside table whispered static like the hiss of sea on sand. A delicate tumbleweed of blond hair, caught by the breeze of his entry, danced in a circle and came to rest against his shoe.

Deep in the house, water flowed, a tap trickling into a tub. The bathroom door was locked. He called out. He hammered the wood with the heel of his hand.

Cordelia answered in a gurgling whisper: Don’t come in.

He broke down the door.

His Cordelia curled in on herself in the overflowing tub, naked, grey, her fingers threaded with clumps of moulted hair and skin. The smell of her filled the room, salty-sour, like seaweed drying in the sun. It was the smell of something rotten, a creature out of place, and as she sobbed and apologised—apologised!—he kissed her slick face and rocked her like a child. She begged him to lock the door and leave her to die human.

He sat with her through the warm night. Before dawn, she rose silently. Dyl followed. He guided her into the car and drove her to the ocean, and when she reached the sand at 9 a.m. on the 26th of October—the last date he ever bothered to count—her feet were whole and unbloodied.

Sleek heads broke the water. The shoal watched her come. Cordelia walked into the waves and didn’t look back.

• • • •

The next morning, Dyl returned to his lab for the last time, and propped the door open to the blazing day beyond. He found the chimpanzee asleep. He unlocked her cage, and tapped gently on the bars, as he had done so many times before.

She blinked at him. He took her almost-human hand and helped her down to the floor, to the open door, and wished her luck. He hoped she might find others out there. It would be a terrible thing to be the last.

Early 2061

At first he searched for other survivors on the innernet, but even the news feeds had gone stagnant. He found nothing but eerie preprogramed ads serving themselves into eternity.

After that, he got ideas about preserving what he could of human history, but paper libraries had long fallen out of fashion.

One by one, the automated feeds went dark as power stations failed and server farms shut down for the last time.

The change never came for Dyl. One of his formulations had worked.

2062

Desolate, he went to the beach at last, to the place where he’d let Cordelia go a year and a half before. He stepped onto the sand human, whole and entire; entirely alone.

As though it was waiting for him; as though it had been built for him, in the middle of the sand stood a door. The door connected to a glass tunnel, and this sloped down the sand to sink beneath the waves. Frowning at it in puzzlement, Dyl only noticed the lone member of the shoal lounging in the warm shallows at the rocky end of the beach when it raised a webbed hand in greeting.

Bemused, he raised a hand back.

The shoal male turned to the ocean. At some silent signal, sleek heads broke the waves, and Dyl recognised two of them instantly; he had known them down to the shape of their bones, the angles of their jaws, the curve of their necks, and these things, at least, hadn’t changed. He wasn’t sure those firm lipless mouths could smile anymore, but his daughter’s eyes were kind as she motioned Dyl toward the door.

The tunnel took him down, down, beneath and beyond the breakwater. Here, where the glimmering surface still admitted green-tinged sunlight, the passage opened into a small glass room, comfortably furnished with a single bed, a desk, and a variety of books which were only slightly damp.

The shoal emerged through the gloom outside, moving with dolphin ease. Curious children crowded around the tank, pointing and pushing. Cordelia put a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. Kai reached out to him.

Dyl smiled at her, pressing his hand to the thick wall between them.

Gently, Kai tapped the glass.

©2022 by Tania Fordwalker.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tania Fordwalker is so commitment-averse she can’t even decide where to live, and presently splits her time between two small Australian islands: one quirky and subtropical, the other chilly and gothic. She’s usually found either skating or writing (or thinking about skating or writing, which surely counts). Part of the Clarion West class of 2022, she has published work in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, PodCastle, Reckoning, and more. She’s doing her PhD chiefly to escape the whole Miss/Ms/Mrs dichotomy, and to obtain a silly hat in the most difficult way possible. At any other time in history she’d definitely have been burned at the stake.

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

The Blindfold

Tobias S. Buckell | 4482 words

I’ve got a mother that wants to get in on a long-term financing agreement to change her son’s race for a trial, Ecstasy pings you. His court date is coming up; the hearing for the random race generator is next Thursday.

Thursday. That doesn’t leave a lot of time. But, then, that’s why E is pinging you.

They’re paying in cryptocurrency, Ecstasy says. My commission is the usual 10 percent. They’ve already set up the chain; you just need to agree to be on the other side.

Local judicial computer systems have shit security. It’s always been the case. The nature of trials and the mysterious workings of the law aren’t usually of strong interest to a hacker (though you think of yourself more like a fiddler and digital spelunker than hacker) other than in a more abstract, philosophical sense. In the past, someone like you would pay enough attention to judicial security so that you could delete yourself from a jury-duty pool, but you never spent a lot of time worrying about the actual sausage-making until scooped up by police for doing something illegal.

But that has changed lately with the equal-representation laws.

Math, statistics, and algorithms for fairness became important after the turn of the century. Before then, those things just reported the inherent unfairnesses. Run an analysis of the number of cases where similar crimes happened. Sort them by race. Compare the results.

What do you get?

Judges give different sentences. The data is there. Undeniable.

But the more important question became not whether human beings were flawed but what could we do about it?

Consider this: Analyzing the prison sentences judges handed down based on how long it had been since they had something to eat shows a pattern of longer sentences given the longer it has been since they ate.

Is it fair for one person who smoked some weed to get one sentence in the morning just after breakfast and for someone close to lunch to get a longer sentence just because Judge So-and-So’s blood sugar is dropping?

People started jockeying for times, suing about being given pre-lunch hearings, and then finally someone passed a law requiring judges to use one of those diabetic pill monitors you swallowed to test blood sugar and beam the results out to a phone. Later, judges were mandated to have IV drips when on the bench in order to keep blood-sugar levels even.

There. Everyone has an equal chance at sentencing.

Well, sort of. There are still the differing race results. You can’t IV-drip your way around structural and implicit racism.

Then came the smartphone filters. Phones getting so good they could put face paint on live video of your digital face. It had once taken movie studios big money to create that effect.

So some lawyer had the bright idea of mandating that a client of his be tried as a white man because the jury had been selected of only white people. Not really a “group of his peers.” If the jury, who had not seen any details of the defendant ahead of time, wore tamper-proof helmets running software repainting their client’s skin tone, then this could be a fair trial.

Again, lawyers clamored that everyone be tried as a white male.

Instead, after a lot of legal wrangling, jurors had to wear the helmets and the sex and race of the defendant was randomized.

There were a lot of other details hammered out about what lawyers and prosecutors could and couldn’t say about the physical details of the defendants. There was a lot of fighting about whether the filter could be applied.

But, in this case, it had been. And Mom wanted to make sure her son was going to be perceived as white.

Your services wouldn’t be cheap. She’d be paying that loan for ten years. But you would make sure the randomized software wasn’t so random.

You order pizza and set in for a few long days of poking at the state-level security systems.

In movies, the edgy cool music starts up now. The clock on the wall starts spinning hands to show time flying by. You tap at the keyboard and lines of code stream across any of your three screens. There are usually cables running fat with wire draped across the background.

You’re a minimalist, don’t like cables, and work off a fifteen-inch laptop on your couch. Most of your software uses graphic interfaces, though you’re happy to dip into the command line when needed.

A lot of what you’re doing is watching programs crunch away, trying to log in randomly to weak spots while you binge-watch a new season on the TV.

That is, until alerts start popping up all over your screen.

Someone is tracing you right back to your location.

And they’ve shut down all the security weaknesses you’ve found.

For a moment you just stare as it gets worse. These people are burrowing back down into your shit. Deep. Like, find-your-real-name deep.

• • • •

Bug-out time.

You’ve planned for this. Someone doing the things you do has to have a plan for what happens when the tables get turned. You shut the laptop down and place it on top of a large electromagnet plugged in next to your coffeemaker.

The lights dim as it kicks on.

Hard drive toast—the only gadget you keep in the apartment—you wrap the laptop in a plastic bag and walk out to the porch while wearing a ski mask. Lake Erie glitters with Cleveland lakefront lights as you inflate the helium weather balloon and let it go, laptop dangling underneath.

Within a minute it’s a bright speck heading up into the clouds.

You’ve always followed protocol going in and out of the apartment, zipping up a dinosaur-face hoodie. You pull that old friend back on and get out.

Ditch the hoodie a few blocks away and then you are zigzagging through the streets, running it all through your mind. The reverse attack on your device had been fast, as if backed by some heavy machinery.

That wasn’t state. Federal counter-intrusion?

Something worse?

NSA.

It had the speed and power of high-level government or military programming.

Taking on this job has put you in some sort of bull’s-eye, and you’ve lost the nicest apartment you’ve ever paid cash for. It’s burned; you can’t go back.

“Fuck!”

You can hoof it down to a nice bar in Shaker Heights. Maybe go find a book to read somewhere while you quiet your racing mind. Don’t make hasty decisions. Be calm and deliberative.

There’s a retirement fund in cryptocurrency tied to a string that you spent four months memorizing before you destroyed the only printout of it when you converted your savings over. Is it time?

But . . . you keep thinking about what you saw happen on the laptop’s screen. How aggressive it was.

It’s like scratching an itch. You can’t help yourself. You have pride. And you’re pissed about losing the apartment.

After some asking around, you find a public library. An hour later you’re in a virtual window to some heavy shared computing in a blockchain farm in Ghana. You’re using the equivalent of a city block’s worth of computing power, paying out the ass per second, to brute-force a look-see at the defenses around Cleveland’s municipal servers.

This time you’re using a virtualized supercomputer, something with neural-net learning, to hide the location of your attack.

It ain’t the city of Cleveland putting up a virtual Hadrian’s Wall around its systems. It’s a moat that’s getting triggered by anyone sniffing around this particular case.

“Russians,” you grumble, tracing back a few calls.

• • • •

“Hey, E,” you say over the cheap prepaid cellphone you picked up from one of your bank boxes later in the afternoon. “Why did I just get burned by Russians?”

“Burned? How bad?”

“I lost my apartment.”

“You launched from within—”

“Don’t lecture me. I thought this was a municipal job,” you snap. “Why is military-grade counter-intrusion software made by Russians protecting Cleveland municipal servers?”

You could have spent time figuring this out at the public library, but after time spent dueling Russian cryptography, you figure less time logged in is best. Easier to ask the person who had a good view of the situation.

Ecstasy sighs. “This is bad.”

“You think? Why is this happening?”

“I think we just stepped into the middle of an info-sec war,” Ecstasy says. “You know, way back in the original Cold War, the old USSR used to recruit black intellectuals by pointing out how horrific capitalism had been. Enslavement. Jim Crow. Segregation. Major inequality between races all the way. And the best propaganda is that which lands closest to the truth. Muddies everything up. I think our case lands in the middle of that.”

“How?”

“Mrs. Mandi wants us to change her son’s race to help his chances of not getting indicted. The jury is all white. She knows that, even today, it’s an uphill battle in a Midwest state.”

“What did the son do?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yeah,” I say, surprised. Ecstasy has never really been any kind of social activist, so the question catches me off guard. “I want to make sure I’m fighting on the right side, you know?”

“Well, in that case, are you with the Russians who want to destabilize us or against that?”

“Against.” You say that quickly and firmly. “But I don’t want to help a murderer or something.”

“You weren’t worrying about that when you took the job just for money,” Ecstasy pointed out.

“No,” you protest. “Leveling the field so that, no matter what he did, like any other person, he got the same consideration. That’s all.”

“Fair enough. What you want to be fighting for is the integrity of the system, right? Making our kid white in the eyes of the jurors only means we’re leveling the field, I agree. Even if Russians are meddling, whether with elections or not, making sure systems stay in place means civilization continues.”

“But they’re meddling for a reason.”

Ecstasy sighs again. “It’s another moment of very public injustice in Cleveland, when an all-white jury convicts a black kid. The Russians are already creating Facebook protest groups on both sides of the issue. They’re telling people to show up outside the courthouse to protest, and then they’re calling for armed Midwesterners to counter-protest them. They’re hoping that if they throw enough gasoline on the small fires, a big fire will break out. Then they rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. If we dig deep enough, we may even find out they stacked the jury pool white.”

“E, I think they might have my true name.”

She’s quiet for a while. “Shit.”

“I can’t help that mother. But if it’s fire they want, I can burn them right back.”

“Be careful. And I should tell you never to call me again, but . . .”

You’ve been working together two years now.

“I’ll let you know how it turns out,” you say. “Are you okay? I think I hear sniffling.”

“The damn flu,” Ecstasy says. “It’s going around.”

Hmmm, you think. It is going around.

• • • •

In the old days you blew the lid off a secret by sending the documents to a reporter. They check sources, do some footwork, then publish the shocking story. Everyone reads it, the information is out. Public opinion turns nasty.

It’s not like that anymore, though, is it?

You do a full document dump on a third-party leaks site, brushing over your tracks on the way out.

A few nibbles come to an encrypted temporary email address.

An old-school media group runs the story. RUSSIAN INFLUENCE ON LOCAL TRIAL. They explain that both protestors and counter-protestors are being recruited by Russian groups.

Then the shit hits the fan.

Within a few hours of the story going out, the bots all ramp up. That document dump was from a hacker trying to throw the case to free the kid, the bots say. Your actual, real name is suddenly floating out there. But they don’t have pictures yet. Your paranoid years scrubbing that from the world is helping you out.

But a lot of strangers on the internet are calling for your death. Some of them are really good at it, and you get found.

They try to kill you.

• • • •

The way the assassination attempt goes down is like this: Someone on the other side of the world who tracked where your replacement laptop was called the local police and said you were standing in the park (you were; you had hopped onto the public Wi-Fi). They said you had a gun and described you as black . . . ish. Because although there are no pictures of you out there, your census form notes that Daddy has a fro and Mommy was a white woman.

Now, the town is south of Cleveland. Ohio is the Midwest, where folk have been Southern-aspirational for a while now. Ohio may have been on the Northern side of the Civil War and supplied an above-average number of troops. Ohio may even have a number of small towns with plaques that mark them as stops in the Underground Railroad. But these days Confederate flags have proliferated on more and more trucks and started appearing in more and more houses, even though Ohio’s proud history is that it helped put that insurrection down.

That’s strike one of three.

Strike two is that the park you’re in is near a school, so won’t someone think of the children? Never mind that Bubbas wander out onto Main Streets like this with combat rifles more heavily accessorized than a ten-year-old’s full Barbie accessory kit. You and I both know that the second amendment is only respected if you’re a certain shade. You’ll never see the fucking NRA defend a black person for carrying a gun. Hell, they helped draft gun-control legislation back when the Black Panthers were pulling the original open-carry stunt with machine guns. That freaked white people out enough to change gun laws.

You have an antidote to the first two strikes, however. When the Barney Fifes roll up into the park, one of them jumping from a moving car with their gun out, looking for the dark-skinned person with a gun, there’s just you sitting on a bench with a laptop.

And you, as far as anyone here can tell, look white as all fuck.

All that time inside hacking away on computers means you don’t even have a tan.

Anyone who ran into your dad on a street in this town would most definitely tag that man as a brother. Mom was the pale one. Gave you all those white skin genes. From Dad you got the face, the height, and some of the curliness in your hair. But you keep that shaved short, so the uniforms that surround you don’t have any reason to doubt their eyes.

You pass.

The assassin doesn’t know that. The assassin lives on the other side of the world and only sees that you are “biracial.”

So you get to live.

Oh, strike three. That’s really delicate. There’s a video of you doing something really horrible to an underage girl. Now, the video was made using rendering software by the same people who hired the assassin, so they got details wrong. It’s weaponized disinformation.

Still, they hacked the system to put out a warrant with the video attached, hoping that a video of a brown man touching an underage white girl will further get you shot.

But you’ve spent three days studying county records to make sure you’re temporarily safe from this sort of vector of attack.

This place has dismissed, buried, and delayed more women’s statements about sexual violence than anywhere else in the state. The local high school football team all but got a high-five for some rapey shit that went down a few years ago. This place wants to be the next Steubenville.

Because of all that, you know that this is the safest place to get arrested while that fake video is out attached to a fake warrant for your arrest. Once they see that you look white and male, they’ll chill the fuck out while you wait for reinforcements to arrive.

A lot of white people claim they don’t “see” race. They claim they wear a blindfold when it comes to the subject, even though statistics show that just isn’t the case. You’ve been around as a white-looking dude long enough to know that your very existence puts lie to the claim.

Once you’re booked, safe, and your lawyer appears on your phone to teleconference in on the statement, you explain all of the above to the younger cop videoing you.

Only you leave out all the reasoning above. No reason to antagonize the local PD by calling them Steubenville Lite™ or Confederacy Aspirational, even if you would have been shot by now if several strands of your DNA had decided to split just a bit differently.

And even these county folk here know about SWAT-ing. It’s usually some basement dweller pissed off at someone online calling in a fake high-tension 911 call. They’ll say something like, So-and-so is inside their apartment at address such-and-such and they have a nine-year-old girl hostage with a gun to her head. They’re hoping the police response fucks up the person they’re angry at.

What’s newer is it being weaponized by foreign agents, as in your case.

“So why does someone on the other side of the world want to try and kill you by police?” the officer asks.

You take a deep breath before giving the next part of your statement. Because now comes the part where you’re going to have to admit your white-collar crimes.

The future is getting a little murky.

But there is nowhere to go but through. Your lawyer, Doug, with the gleaming perfect smile and five-thousand-dollar suit, has a great deal lined up for you with the state department for all this information.

Time to squeal.

You pick up the candy bar that they’ve given you for a snack. Packed with peanuts. Some protein. A little boost in the blood sugar.

You explain how you hacked into the Cleveland municipal systems to give a kid on trial a fair shot.

“See,” you tell the small-town police officer as you put down the candy-bar wrapper. “At this point I’m fighting a full-on state-sponsored political info-sec war, and I’m just one person. I’m losing because I started out thinking of this as a person-to-person fight I had to win.”

As this entire story comes out, the officer listens calmly, carefully making notes as we go along.

“So, by morning, talk shows are getting call-ins. People are calling for my arrest, people are defending me and saying we should hack for social justice, some good debates about the nature of juror selection are happening, and other people are debating whether I’m a Russian agent.”

You sip some coffee gratefully.

“And that’s when the video comes out,” he says.

“Yeah, and did you see it?” you ask him. “It should be attached to my arrest warrant.”

He nods.

You plop your arm down on the table. Pale white against industrial fake brown wood. “See, when they made that video, they didn’t have pictures of me yet. They do have my official description. That I’m mixed race, have shaved-close brown hair, green eyes, and that I weigh one-eighty. But see the mistake they made?”

The officer nods. You take a moment to note his name tag. Reynolds. He’s gotten you food, been chill. Doesn’t seem like a dick. He’s been handling the statement’s revelations with aplomb. “You’re white. The man in that video, he was light brown. Didn’t show his face well, so we could assume it was anyone that matched the size.”

“Right. I’m light, not white,” you say. Officer Reynolds frowns. “My father was black, my mother white.”

“But . . .”

“Sometimes we come out like this. Sometimes we pass. It used to scare people in the old days; that’s why they had the one-drop rule. Didn’t want folks like me mixing in. Undercover brothers.”

“No shit.” Reynolds is taken by the idea and is grinning.

Okay, maybe Barney Fife is more chill than you gave him credit for.

• • • •

You’d been eating a burger and fries in a dive bar when the video came on over the news with your name attached and your face apparently obscured by the shadows. The Russians had gone nuclear against you by making a video like that.

If sentiment had been against you before, it got lit the fuck on fire after that.

What to do?

What you did was, using some cryptocurrency stashed under another set of authorization keys far from your usual online haunts, you grab a cab. You sit in the backseat and let the car drive you around the city aimlessly, staring at the empty wheel turning this way and that in front of you.

You give Ecstasy your latest prepaid phone’s number and she calls. “I just saw.”

“It’s bad. I’m on the move.”

“Me too.”

“Why do I feel like this is East Germany during the Cold War and I’m running away from spies in the shadows?”

“You should retire. Go somewhere nice and sunny before they find your face,” Ecstasy says. “That’s what I’m doing.”

You look out the window. Cleveland’s small, compact downtown slides past. The Health Line is crowded with med students getting out late. You stare at them for a moment, letting your brain free-associate.

“I don’t like the idea of getting beat like this in my own country,” you say.

“They smacked you down pretty hard.”

“I’m burned, but I looked up the kid. Kwame. He’s being tried as an adult.”

“It’s a sad situation.”

“Forget Russia, forget the fact I’m burned,” you say. “I’m just thinking about being fifteen and holding a phone up to record my bestie getting shot. I would have struggled against anyone when they came for it like that.”

Was it a better step forward to force jurors to wear helmets that, if the random skin-tone choice came up white, made Kwame look less intimidating? You aren’t sure. But . . . you remember all those cops who keep describing young black kids as monsters or in the same way one described large older men: Hulking. Brutish.

The only thing that separated you from being a hulk, a brutish thug, a scary thing, was a couple small expressions in your spirals of DNA that switched a sliver in another direction.

And all the other stuff swirling around, you set that aside.

“I think I can still help the kid,” you tell Ecstasy. “But I’ll need you to find me a good lawyer. I don’t have a lot of time to do that and get what I need ready. I’m not rolling over.”

And that’s when you start looking for a rural town to go hide in, because you know it’s only a matter of time before the enemy uses even more-dangerous tools against you.

• • • •

You don’t explain all of that to Officer Reynolds. You admit to trying to hack the municipal servers. You’ve shown up and used your identity to prove that you aren’t that person in the video. You’ve admitted to trying to expose the Russians.

Doug the lawyer with the magic teeth has set up a deal while you’re confessing mostly everything. You’re only talking because he ordered you to come in and spin the whole tale. The feds want your testimony and insight.

You’re so happy to give it. But you know not much will happen on that front, as so many of the senators, poisoned by that one election, are still unwilling to admit Russian interference is even a thing.

• • • •

Ecstasy cashes out some cryptocurrency for you and, even though it will take months or longer for your legal situation to sort itself out, you’re pretty much free to go, as long as you don’t leave Ohio.

That’s fine; you already have a place scoped out to hide low and start a semi-retirement. It’s off the grid, solar powered (though what isn’t these days?), and sits on a nice well so you don’t have to worry about water shortages.

Reynolds uncuffs you, you sign all the necessary documents, and a car drives itself up to the front to pick you up.

You slide in. The woman on the front passenger side has slightly graying hair pulled back in a tight bun.

“Hey,” she says.

“Ecstasy?”

She’s wearing a plastic Halloween mask, so you can’t see her face. You know you’ll never find out her name. But she nods and turns her head to look back at you. “Since you’re burned and out, I figured I could come see you. You were my number-one client. You made us rich.”

“Now it’s over.”

She hands over a basket. It’s wrapped with plastic, but you can see unbelievably expensive chocolates and scotches under the gleaming transparence. “I thought it was the least I could do.”

You take her hand and squeeze it. “Thank you.”

“So,” she says. “How did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“The jury’s hung; it was a mistrial. It doesn’t look like the state will retry.”

“Well, for one, by law,” you say, spinning the empty candy-bar wrapper around your fingers. “The judge has to be plugged into a drip to make sure their blood sugar is solid. I hacked the vending machines in the courthouse. Their cameras now have a facial-recognition scanner that recognizes the judge and makes the machine beep and drop a candy bar whenever he’s near.”

Ecstasy laughs from behind the mask. “No way.”

“Yeah. The Russians likely are messing with his sugar. Wanted to make sure the judge was in good shape.”

“But the jurors, they’re still all white,” she says.

You smile.

It took you a long while to find what you were looking for. But not as long as you feared. The year you were born, a majority of Americans thought having mixed-race babies was wrong. Somehow immoral. Gallup did a poll.

Now the number that truly, deeply believes that is barely double digits. There shouldn’t be any, but progress is progress. And because of that, you’re not as alone as you used to be.

In the end, you realized you didn’t need to go up against the Russians in code.

You hired people sick with the flu to walk up and down the sidewalk anywhere between the courthouse and the jurors’ homes and sneeze at them.

Sometimes that’s all justice leans on: one person and a candy bar.

Or a sneeze.

You just needed to find out how many jurors it would take to fade away sick before someone like you could show up. Someone who was light, but not white.

©2019 by Tobias Buckell. Originally published in A People’s History of the United States edited by Victor LaValle & John Joseph Adams.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in the Caribbean, Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times Bestselling and World Fantasy Award winning author. His novels and almost one hundred stories have been translated into nineteen different languages. He has been nominated for the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, World Fantasy Award, and Astounding Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. He currently lives in Ohio.

Double Occupancy

Ben H. Winters | 6672 words

1.

“This is a disaster!”

“What?”

“This is an absolute disaster!”

“Did you say something?”

Jessica Martin closed her laptop and put her head in her hands. Her old friend Todd, who was in her big bean chair in the corner, watching a movie on his phone, took out his earbuds.

“What is it, dude? It’s not working?”

“Oh, it’s working,” she said. She stared angrily at her invention, which stood in the middle of her room, the size and shape of a refrigerator. It was, in fact, her family’s old refrigerator, which she had stripped down and rebuilt.

“It is working, Todd. It’s working perfectly. That is the problem.”

“Oh,” said Todd, and then, “totally,” and then, “what?”

Jessica sighed. “Don’t worry about it.”

Todd was super nice, and had been her neighbor and her best friend for most of her life, but he didn’t really have the kind of mind that could keep pace with Jessica’s. He was in the regular-science track, and she was in the accelerated-science track—though as of sophomore year she’d actually gone past the accelerated track and was now on a special track that was just her, and which she had actually designed for herself.

But this invention wasn’t even for school. This was her entry in the National Competitive Exhibition in the Physical Sciences, and it was the ticket to the rest of her life, if she could just get the stupid thing right.

“Okay, so hit me,” said Todd, who had heaved himself up from the chair and was slowly circling her invention. “What’s the problem?”

“The problem is, there is a significant issue which I have not solved, and which should mean, theoretically at least, that the invention does not work.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, but . . . well, here.” Jessica picked up a quarter from a short stack on her nightstand. “Watch.”

She opened what used to be the refrigerator door, when the invention was still a refrigerator, and dropped a quarter in the vegetable drawer. Then she closed the door and rapidly typed a series of commands into a touchscreen interface on the front. Then she opened the door again and—

“Whoa!” shouted Todd. “It’s gone!”

“Well,” said Jessica. “Not exactly.”

“This is amazing. Could I put Mr. Langer in there? Then we won’t have the stupid vocabulary test on Friday.”

“No,” Jessica said distractedly. A tiny alarm sounded from the interface; twenty seconds had passed. She opened the door again and the quarter was back.

“What?!” cried Todd, throwing up his hands as if to celebrate a touchdown. “No way. How did you do that? Is that the same quarter?”

“It is.” Jessica couldn’t help it: she smiled. Todd was no genius, but his enthusiasm was very sweet. They’d been friends since they were little, although these days they hung out in very different social circles. He was friends with the skate punks, and a few of the football players, and hung out at the Westdale Mall. She was friends with basically no one and mostly hung out here, by herself, in her house.

“I sent the quarter twenty seconds into the future. So when I opened the door, there it was. Waiting for us.”

“Dude,” he said. “Dude.” Todd gaped at her. “You built a time machine? For a science contest?”

“I did. Yes.”

“Okay, well I think you win, then. Right? When there’s a time machine, the time machine wins.”

Jessica wished she could be so confident. It wasn’t just that she wanted to win the contest: she had to. Her whole future depended on it. The top prize was a first-year scholarship to the college of one’s choice. Jessica would use that money to attend MIT, which was right here in Cambridge, and which she had been driving past, wide-eyed with wonder, since she was a tiny kid. She would graduate with honors in physics, and then get her doctorate, and eventually become a world-renowned professor and inventor. That was her plan. It had been her plan for a long time.

“A time machine. I can’t believe it.” Todd was peering at the touch-screen interface. “How could you possibly be worried?”

“Because,” she said, “the judges are going to ask how I solved the double-occupancy problem, and I won’t be able to explain.”

“How you solved the what-now?”

As she explained, Jessica used a tiny screwdriver to open the rear panel of the refrigerator and peer searchingly at the motherboard.

“The causal problems associated with forward-moving time travel have been essentially resolved. But when an object moves backward in time, it necessarily encounters the prior existing version of itself, which would mean it occupies the same physical space as itself. Hence the double-occupancy problem.”

“Got it.”

“Really?”

“No. Not at all.”

Jessica, meanwhile, had noticed an empty space in the motherboard, a narrow gap between two circuits like a missing tooth. She furrowed her brow, irritated: this was not the sort of careless error she liked to see in her work. She reached out and felt the tiny space, delicately brushing the motherboard with the very tips of her two fingers.

“Hey, Jess?” Todd said, and she drew her hand back, as if caught. “If you really decide to bail on this thing, you could always come with me to Rodney’s uncle’s lake house.”

“What?” said Jessica, but just barely. She wasn’t listening. She was still staring at the motherboard.

“Oh, no, just like, I thought it might be cool for us to, you know . . .”

“Todd! Wait!”

“What?”

“I’ve got it,” she said, and laughed. “I’ve totally got it.”

“You solved the double—the double—thing? The double-double problem?”

“The double occupancy problem, Todd. And no, I didn’t solve it. But I know how I can.”

“How?”

She turned to Todd and squeezed his arms, and he grinned. “Because I know that I will solve it! The machine works. It’s working. Hence I will figure out how to make it work, at some point in the future. All I need to do now is go ask for help from the person who has already figured it out. You see?”

“No I do not.”

But Jessica had rushed back over to the machine. She tapped furiously on the interface, and then stood back, beaming.

“Jessica?” said Todd. He sounded a little worried. “What did you do?”

What she had done was adjust the settings. Instead of sending something twenty seconds into the future, she would be sending it twenty years.

And instead of a quarter, she would be sending herself.

Jessica opened the fridge and got inside.

2.

The Mechanics of the Natural World was apparently an extremely popular course.

The only empty seat Jessica could find was way in the back, and to get to it she had to squeeze down a row, muttering “excuse me” and stepping over knees and ankles. She tried her best to look mature, trying to pretend she was of college age—although most of these kids were utterly absorbed in their laptops or handhelds, except for a few who were encased in glossy black helmets, with their hands outstretched, typing sightlessly in the empty air.

Otherwise, the future looked pretty much the same. The lecture hall looked like a lecture hall. Starbucks cups were everywhere.

A moment after Jessica sat down, a striking woman with long hair swooped into the room, dropped her leather satchel next to the podium, and clapped her hands sharply for attention.

“All right, people,” said Dr. Jessica Steinmetz. “We are continuing with Heisenbergian uncertainty. I will assume you did the reading, and so I, like an object in motion, will remain in motion.”

The professor chuckled, though none of her students did. Jessica’s heart swelled, and not just because she frikkin’ loved Heisenbergian uncertainty. There she was! Her future self! In the future, it appeared, Jessica had grown out her hair and ditched her glasses for contacts. She wore a long red cape and a high-waisted skirt, which Jessica assumed to be the height of 2042 fashion. Plus at some point she had apparently married someone named Steinmetz, who (Jessica assumed) was another brilliant professor and/or a male model.

“Oh my God,” said Jessica. “I’m amazing.”

“Well, that was random,” said a handsome college dude in horn-rim glasses next to her, and Jessica flushed. But it was true. She was amazing.

When class was over, Jessica rushed down the tiered steps of the lecture hall. She was wild with excitement, not only because her plan had worked, and now she would learn the solution to the double-occupancy problem, but because Professor Steinmetz was confirmation that her life was on the right track. In twenty years’ time, she was going to have gone to MIT, or some prestigious university. She’d have gotten her doctorate, and now a full professorship. Everything was going according to plan.

“Excuse me?” she said, and Dr. Steinmetz looked up from packing her satchel. “Hi. Sorry.”

“Yes?” The professor’s voice was tight with annoyance and Jessica, jangling with nerves, stepped backward and almost fell over a chair. She took a deep breath. Get it together, sister, she commanded herself. Take it easy. It’s just you.

“Professor, I am wrangling with a particularly vexing physics problem, and I’m hoping you can help me.” Jessica smiled impishly. “Actually—I know that you can help me.”

Dr. Steinmetz looked her up and down. “You don’t look familiar. Are you enrolled in this class?”

“No. Not exactly.”

“Sorry, doc? Grab you a half sec?” This interruption came from a short, grimy-faced custodian in overalls, who had pushed a large cart, overladen with tools, into the lecture hall. “I got a message that a monitor in here is busted, needs to get hauled.”

“Not in here, no,” said Dr. Steinmetz with irritation. “In my office.”

“Shoot. You sure?”

“Am I sure? Of the repair that I requested? Yes, thank you, I’m sure.”

The custodian took off the ball cap to scratch their head, and Jessica screamed.

“Whoa. You okay there, kid?” the custodian said.

Under the cap, the glasses, the shapeless coveralls, the custodian’s face was familiar. It was very familiar.

Oh, no, thought Jessica. She felt light-headed. She pointed.

“You . . . you’re . . . are you . . .”

“Young lady?” said Dr. Steinmetz, meanwhile. “Are you all right?”

No. She was not all right. Because she looked at the custodian’s name tag, and the name tag said JESSICA MARTIN.

3.

“One more time,” said the custodian. “Run it down for me one more time.”

“It’s really not that complicated,” said Jessica, trying to keep impatience out of her voice. Not to mention despair. “I am you. And you are me.”

“Huh,” said the custodian, squinching up her face. “But you’re not me. I’m me. I’m standing here.”

Where they were standing was by the custodian’s electric pickup truck, just outside the magisterial red-brick Physical Sciences Building. It was a beautiful day, and kids were walking every which way across the quad, coming to and from their classes.

“Right,” said Jessica. “But you were me. At one time. And I will be you.”

“It all seems kind of crazy.”

This was exasperating. It was like talking to Todd! She stared at the custodian, with her misshapen dirty coveralls and her mass of frizzed-up hair. The name tag said JESSICA MARTIN, but she’d already explained that everybody called her JJ, which in Jessica’s opinion was a dumb nickname. So far, actually, everything about the future Jessica, Jessica the custodian, was appalling. Not that there was anything wrong with being a custodian, the world needed custodians, but it was definitely a long way from being a full professor at MIT.

“So, what, you came to the future just to meet me?” JJ extended her arms to either side, revealing patches of sweat in both of her armpits. “Ta-da. Here I am.”

“No, see, I—I came because I need something.”

“What’s that?”

Jessica felt ridiculous even saying it. She was going to present the thorny complexity of the double-occupancy problem to this person? JJ, meanwhile, pulled out a pack of cigarettes from one of the pockets of her coveralls. Jessica gaped at her.

“You smoke? People still smoke?”

“Not that many people. Just the real idiots, I guess.” She tapped out a cigarette and lit it up, while Jessica’s heart sank yet further.

But she had come this far—it had to be worth a shot, right? She explained the double-occupancy problem as succinctly as she could: about the persistence of objects through time, the problematic intersection of spatiotemporal worldlines, and the ontological dilemma created by the simultaneous existence of two non-synchronous versions of the same object in the same space.

“Ontological dilemma,” echoed JJ softly. “I hear ya.”

Her face was etched with intense concentration, and for one bright and hopeful moment Jessica’s heart surged. She’s got it! This lady was her, after all, this was Jessica, and beneath that great frizz of hair there surely remained a brilliant scientific mind. She was about to open her mouth and solve the whole thing.

But no. She had seen a bird. She pointed over Jessica’s shoulder.

“Check that out,” she said. “Check it out!” Jessica turned and looked, but it was just a small yellow bird, flickering in the bent arm of a towering oak.

“What?”

“That right there? That’s a Buff-bellied hummingbird. Used to basically hang out in the Gulf of Mexico. With temperatures changing lately, now we get ‘em all the way up to the Canadian border. Climate’s been so screwy lately. Which is bad, obviously, but . . . God, look at ‘er! Gorgeous.”

“Yeah, I see,” said Jessica curtly. “It’s a nice bird. What do you think about the double-occupancy problem?”

“Oh. Right.” JJ dropped the butt of her cigarette and squashed it under her boot. “No idea. To be honest, I started tuning out all that sciencey stuff a long time ago.”

Jessica’s heart sank. That sciencey stuff?

“Hey, though, cool to meet you.” JJ gave her past self a jokey little salute. “Hope everything works out good for me.”

Then she hopped in her truck and pressed a couple buttons on the dash and zoomed away. Jessica watched her go, chuckling bitterly. This crude, unambitious woman with her coveralls and her cigarettes? She hopes everything works out good for me, huh?

Well obviously, it doesn’t!

• • • •

Jessica walked back across Cambridge and found that her modified refrigerator/time machine was right where she’d left it, in the rear storage room of the frozen-yogurt store that had, at some point in the last twenty years, been built where her house used to be. She snuck in the back of the yogurt store and stood there, surrounded by cardboard boxes of sprinkles and freeze-dried fruit, staring at her invention.

It was time to go home.

She opened the door, and then stood for a while, staring inside of it.

This mission had been a total failure. She had found future-Jessica, but future-Jessica had been no help at all. Future Jessica was a disaster. She was more interested in hauling garbage and looking at birds, than in the marvels of the physical world.

But Jessica didn’t get in the time machine. She stood there with the door of it hanging open, practically hearing her mother’s voice in her head, telling her to decide what she wanted and close the fridge already.

She stepped inside.

Then she got out again.

“No,” she told herself. “No way.”

She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t just give up! If she got in that fridge now, and went back to the past, then how would she solve for the double-occupancy problem? Which she had to do; she literally had to; because otherwise how had she gotten here in the first place? How was the machine even working?

It was a hell of an ontological dilemma to be wrestling with, in the cold smelly closet of a frozen yogurt store. But the real problem, Jessica knew, was that she wanted to stay. She needed to. She was going to figure this out and win that contest. She wasn’t going to let anyone talk her out of her dreams. Least of all her stupid future self.

Jessica slammed closed the door of the fridge, walked out into the alley and came around to the front of the yogurt store.

“Excuse me?” There was a bored kid at the counter, watching a movie on his phone. She asked him where she could find a bookstore, and he blinked at her.

“What’s a bookstore?”

4.

JJ Martin wrapped up her last job of the day, laboriously resetting the busted electric radiator in the Library Annex, and drove back to the on-campus apartment provided to her as part of her salary. She walked up the three flights, turned down the hallway, and found her younger self waiting for her, arms crossed, legs planted on either side of a tall stack of books.

“Whoa,” said JJ. “How’d you figure out where I live?”

“I’m a genius,” Jessica pointed at JJ. “So are you. Speaking of which, I brought you some reading.”

What she had brought were Fermi’s writings on thermodynamics; an advanced textbook on Classical Mechanics; the complete Oxford lectures of Richard Feynman; HC Verma’s renowned primer on quantum mechanics; and one last book that Jessica had included pure for sentimental value: Edwin Abbott’s weird and marvelous Flatland, the very book that had inspired her interest in physics in the first place.

“What am I supposed to do with all this?” said JJ, fishing in her pockets for her keys.

“Read them,” said Jessica. “Become inspired. Reignite your lifelong passion for the physical sciences.”

“Oh, okay,” said JJ, stepping carefully around the stack as she opened her door. “Cool.”

But she didn’t so much as look at the books. She ambled through her small, cluttered living room into the even smaller and more cluttered kitchen, with Jessica marching after her, the books cradled in her arms in a wobbling pile. She was deeply offended by the utter chaos of the apartment: the empty and half-empty beer bottles, the stubbed-out cigarettes, the anime posters hanging limply on the walls. Jessica caught up with JJ in the kitchen and slammed the books down on the table.

“Careful,” said JJ. “That table’s pretty old.”

Jessica shook her head. “How can you live like this?”

“Like what?” JJ talked over her shoulder while she rooted around in her fridge. “I got tons of friends and a solid job.” She turned around, holding a beer in a green bottle. “I basically work for myself, and they give me this apartment rent free. I promise you, in time you’ll understand the value of such things.” She cracked open the beer on a corner of the counter and took a long swig. “Oh—and—here—look out the window.”

Jessica, cringing, peeled up one corner of the grimy window shade. “What? What am I looking at?”

“Nothing right now. But during the daylight hours? I get some of the best bird traffic in the city.” She took another very long swig of her beer, and set the empty down with a clank. “Don’t worry about me, dude. I live great.”

“But—but—” Jessica let the disgusting shade drop and planted her hands on her hips. “What about the unseen intricacies of the physical world? The mystery of subatomic particles, the great dance of the planets in their orbits?”

“Honestly?” JJ was back in the fridge, pulling out another beer. “All that stuff’s going on whether we’re studying it or not. I’d rather be blissfully ignorant, and happy. Not like I used to be.”

Jessica glared. “But I’m like you used to be.”

“Yeah,” said JJ. She smiled a very small smile. “No kidding.”

Jessica sputtered. She jabbed a finger at JJ. “You know what you’re doing? You’re turning your back on your destiny.”

“Hm. Well, I guess I don’t see it that way.” JJ angled the second beer up till it was nearly vertical and drained it in one long swallow. “Looks like you’re going to have to figure out this little double-fault problem on your own.”

“Double occupancy.”

“Oh, right. Shoot. See? I’m useless.”

“No,” Jessica protested. “Uh-uh. You’re only useless because you are choosing to be useless. You are squandering my promise. I refuse to spend the rest of my life—our life—drinking beer and fixing toilets.”

“I rarely fix toilets. I do a toilet maybe once a year, tops.”

“It’s just . . . I mean . . .” Jessica realized, to her absolute horror, that she was crying. Why was she crying? “It’s just that I love this stuff so much. This is the world that I love, and I . . .” She grabbed Flatland and held it to her chest. “I want to live in it forever.”

There was a pile of dirty napkins bunched up in the center of the table; JJ found the least dirty and handed it gingerly to Jessica.

“Take it easy, kiddo,” said JJ. “Hey, do you like graham crackers?”

“Like them?” Jessica laughed through her tears. “I love graham crackers.”

This, then, was at least one thing that Jessica and herself still had in common. After they went through a sleeve of graham crackers apiece, JJ put in a frozen pizza for dinner, and they settled on the old, gross futon to watch TV. In the future, as it turned out, there was still Netflix, and it had all the episodes of Friends.

It was only after Jessica had fallen fast asleep that JJ tiptoed back into the kitchen, just to grab one more beer, and instead found herself standing in the center of the room, tracing her finger across the familiar cover of Flatland.

After another moment, she picked it up, sighing, and began to thumb through it. The table of contents . . . the diagrams . . . the strange cartoons of men, bent into bulging and unfamiliar shapes. The long, mysterious equations, spiky with mathematical symbols and Greek letters.

“Oh, damn it,” said JJ, and then, without really thinking about it, she had pushed the empty frozen-pizza box off the chair.

She sat down and started to read.

5.

When Jessica woke up the next morning, her future self was nowhere to be found.

The TV was still on, Netflix’s algorithm aggressively and endlessly suggesting what to watch next. Through a crack in the shade she could see the courtyard, and paused for a wide-eyed moment to watch a bright blue bird careen in for a perfect landing.

“JJ?” she called, and then, louder. “JJ?”

She went into the kitchen, and saw that the stack of books was gone.

She grinned. She called again: “JJ?”

“Stop yelling!” JJ’s voice came from outside the apartment. “I’m trying to think.”

JJ was out in the hallway. She had colonized the long stretch of wall between her apartment door and the next one, and covered it with equations written in marker. As Jessica watched, her heart soaring and singing, JJ scribbled more notations, paused, and then underlined three times the word “electromagnetic pulse” before stepping back and scratching her ear furiously—a gesture Jessica herself did when she was lost in thought, and which she mimicked now, unconsciously, her eyes flicking from place to place on the wall.

“Wait,” said JJ to herself. “That’s wrong. Shit.”

“It’s the Delta,” said Jessica from the threshold. “The Delta variant needs to be adjusted to allow for the electromagnetic force. Here—can I—”

“Yes! Please, yes!” said JJ, and handed her the marker. “Of course. Go. Do it.”

They worked side by side in the cramped hallway for an hour, and then for another hour. One Jessica would write a word or two, or a set of numbers, and then when frustrated or unsure would hand the marker to the other Jessica. Every once in a while they would both step back, hands on hips or scratching at ears, and then one or the other or both at once would dart forward and start writing again. Equations and lines of text blossomed like flowers all over the board, curling and connection and interlacing, running eventually past the next apartment door and all the way to the stairwell.

By the end of an hour, Jessica and JJ had sketched out the overlapping set of problems that represented the issues of double occupancy in mathematical form; by the end of two hours they were closing in on the solutions. By mid-day they were swapping hypotheses around how to adapt the refrigerator to allow for what JJ called “achronological elision,” a mechanism by which the particles comprising the forward-moving traveler would make a minute “shift” in space-time, briefly entering what Jessica called “a co-equal dimension,” just long enough to avoid collision with the stable extant object.

“That’s a boss idea,” said JJ and Jessica said, “I know,” and JJ gave her a fist bump, and they returned to their furious scribbling . . . until, at precisely 2:45, an alarm went off on JJ’s phone, and she said, “Okay. Break time.”

“What?” said Jessica. “Wait. No! We’re so close.”

“Yeah, no, I know, but I have a date at three every day.”

“A date? What kind of date?”

JJ just waggled her eyebrows, and put down her marker. She dragged Jessica with her, down the stairs and out of the apartment and into the courtyard, where they stood together looking up at the sky.

“What are we—”

“Wait.”

“JJ.”

“Wait.”

And there it was. A bird, and not even a bird, and not just one bird, either. A flock of the most extraordinary birds that Jessica had ever seen.

“Whoa!” she said softly.

“I know,” said JJ.

“What . . . what are those?”

“Pterododococks. Some scientist in New Jersey was trying to make some kind of point about reversing extinction cycles. These beauties are part dodo, part peacock, and part pterodactyl. There was bit of a backlash, though, to the whole mad-scientist thing, so only a handful of these babies got hatched before the guy’s funding got revoked. He might have gone to jail, actually.”

Jessica was only half listening. She was staring in awe at the big, strange birds as they beat their massive leathery wings and cawed with their long, razored beaks and trailed their elaborate multicolored plumage. And maybe Jessica wouldn’t have expressed it quite this way, but it felt good to just stand there doing nothing—just looking, just feeling.

They stood together for a few moments, eyes up toward the sky, until the last of the pterododococks was gone and JJ said now they could get back to work.

But Jessica hesitated. “Hey, JJ?” she said. “Can I ask you something, please?”

JJ frowned. “Yeah?”

“I really just want to know what happened. And I know, I get it, there’s nothing wrong with your life. I hear you. But the thing is, I’m me. I know exactly where I want my life to go. And it’s not . . .” She gestured around. “No offense, Okay? But it’s not here. So I guess I just really want to know what it was that took things off the rails.”

JJ smiled, and sighed, and opened her mouth to answer, but then she closed it again, and shook her head, and merely said: “Life, you know?” She turned and headed back inside, and Jessica followed. “Life happened.”

• • • •

They worked as a team, all the rest of that day and into the night. But it was JJ, ultimately, who found the solution to the double-occupancy problem, although that may just have been because Jessica, despite her best efforts, had begun to drift off to sleep.

“Hey,” said JJ, and Jessica jerked her eyes open. She was lying curled up on the thin carpet of the apartment-building hallway. She said “wha—?” blinking and yawning into her fist.

“Come,” said JJ. “Come and look.”

What she had to show Jessica was way on the other end of the hall, by the stairwell. It was a schematic, a drawing of a simple computer chip they would need to somehow manufacture and fuse into the existing circuitry of Jessica’s invention.

Jessica was wide awake now. She reviewed the drawing quickly, and then again, and then she threw her arms around JJ, nearly overcome.

“You did it,” she cried.

“No,” said JJ. “We did.”

She tossed the marker in the air with a flourish and held up one hand, palm out, and Jessica slapped it. They turned together to what was written on the wall, and both wore the identical expression: the sly smile, the self-satisfied flush of having done something and done it right.

“All right,” said JJ, pointing to the diagram. “Now we just have to figure out how to manufacture this thing.”

“Don’t you still have 3-D printers, in the future?” Jessica asked.

“Sure, but I don’t have one.”

“But you’re the custodian. You’ve got the keys to the Physics Building, right? So—”

“Whoa,” said JJ. “Stop.”

“No. Why? It’s perfect.”

“Not if you’re suggesting breaking into a professor’s office to make unauthorized use of a fifty-thousand-dollar printer. Oh no. No, we are not doing that.”

She turned away. But Jessica grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her back.

“We can’t quit now,” she said. “We’ve come this far. Don’t you want to see if this thing works?”

“I don’t care if it works.”

“You can’t lie,” said Jessica. She looked into JJ’s eyes. Into her own eyes. “Not to me.”

JJ sighed. She fished in her pocket for her keys.

“Man,” she muttered. “I am such a pain in the ass.”

6.

They waited until it was near midnight, dressed themselves all in black, and crept silently across the quad to the Physics Building. Jessica stayed on the driveway, looking out across the wide yard to make sure the coast was clear, while JJ lifted her key fob to the door so it beeped open. Together they slipped inside.

JJ hooked up her laptop to the printer and opened the software to which she had transferred the schematic.

“God,” murmured Jessica, looking over the shoulder of her older self, shaking her head.

“What?” JJ was typing, preparing the thing to print.

“It’s just—it’s really so simple. It’s beautiful.”

“Thanks.”

But JJ was very focused; she was all business. She pointed to the diagram on the screen, even as she pressed PRINT and the thing itself began to emerge from the printer. “You see the connectors here. You’re going to have to make space on the motherboard inside your machine.”

“Our machine. And yeah, I know. It’s no problem. And . . .” She trailed off, touching her hand to her temple. It was the damnedest thing; the strangest feeling. She shivered. “. . . actually, I—” She laughed. “I think it’s already there. I think it may already be there.”

“What?” said JJ, turning around.

“Yeah, I know—it’s—”

Suddenly the lights all went on at once.

“What the hell are you people doing here?”

Dr. Steinmetz stood glaring at the threshold of her office, holding hands with a young man that Jessica recognized as the handsome dude with the horn-rim glasses who had been sitting next to her in the lecture hall.

“What are you doing here?” said Jessica. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“That’s—” Dr. Steinmetz flushed brightly, and dropped the young man’s hand, “That is obviously none of your business. This is my lab and you have no call to be here, and you certainly have no call to be using my printer! Who even are you?” She wheeled on JJ, who stood frozen, looking extremely alarmed. “Aren’t you the custodian? This is an outrageous intrusion. The university will hear about this.”

Dr. Steinmetz stormed out, and Jessica could hear the clack of her heels, and the young man saying “awwww . . .” until the big doors of the Physics Buildings slammed shut.

“Oh God,” said JJ, dropping her head into her hands. “Oh no.”

“Hey,” said Jessica. “Who cares? We did it.” The chip they had designed had finished emerging from the 3-D printer. Jessica grabbed it and held it aloft, beaming. “We have it.”

“What do you mean, who cares? I care!” said JJ. She stood and stared at Jessica, her eyes glinting with anger. “I’m going to get fired. I’ll lose my housing. I’ll lose everything.”

“But you don’t have anything. I mean—wait—you know what I mean!” She winced but pressed on, putting the chip down in front of JJ. “You just solved the double-occupancy problem. That is a world-historical contribution to the physical sciences. Forget this job. You can have her job. You might win the Nobel Prize!”

But JJ, shaking her head furiously, stormed past Jessica and headed out the big main doors. Outside, the sun was coming up. Pinks and yellows stretched out across the quad.

“Hey!” said Jessica, emerging a moment later. “Hey! Wait!”

“Haven’t you been listening?” said JJ, jamming an angry finger into her chest. “All that shit—being a professor, winning the Nobel. Those are your dreams, not mine.”

“But they are your dreams. You’re me!”

“I am not you.” JJ threw her hands up in the air. “I was you! I was a prissy, self-involved, overworked, uptight little jerk. But I’m not anymore. Has it seriously not occurred to you that people want different things at different times in their lives?”

“You know what?” Jessica planted her hands on her hips. “That’s just an excuse.”

“An excuse for what, exactly?”

“For giving up! For wasting your life! For wasting my life. For turning into a pathetic loser!”

She stood there, breathing hard, waiting for her future self to protest, to continue the fight, to tell her again that she was an uptight little jerk.

But JJ didn’t say anything else. She fished the chip from her pocket and handed it over. She said, “Here, kid. You forgot this.”

Then she turned slowly and began to walk back toward her apartment.

7.

The back door of the yogurt shop was still propped open, and Jessica’s time machine was right where she’d left it, standing in the dark, surrounded by boxes of toppings.

She fished the chip out of her pocket and held it in her fist while, with her other hand, she opened the side panel of her machine and inspected the motherboard.

She blinked. She looked again. There was no gap in the motherboard.

She opened her fist. A moment ago it had held the tiny chip, and now the chip was gone.

The chip was already installed. It had been there all along.

It had always already been there. She had done it: she had found her future self and convinced her to help. Her crazy idea had worked. Everything had gone according to plan, and she should feel elated.

But she felt nothing. Nothing but a strange hollow kind of sadness.

There was a noise from the front of the yogurt shop—the click of a lock and then the jangle of the door chiming as it opened. The first of the yogurt-store workers, arriving for the day.

It was time to go.

• • • •

Twenty years earlier, Jessica emerged from the refrigerator into her room, and everything was the same. Here was her half-finished glass of water, right where she had left it; here was the indentation on her bean bag chair where Todd had been sitting. Slowly, she looked around her familiar room—the shelves lined with books about physics, and books about math, and books about both physics and math. Her eyes fell on her old favorite, Edwin Abbot’s Flatland; she ran her finger down the spine and then she turned the book over and let it close.

“Hey sweetie?” It was her dad, calling from down the stairs. “You ready for some dinner?”

Dinner time? Jessica looked at her phone and saw that in her whole adventure in the future, hardly any time had passed in the present. This fact in and of itself was fairly astonishing, and would require further study. Jessica sighed.

“Sweetie?” called her dad again.

“Yeah. I need a sec. Just, uh—” She looked at her invention. “Just one sec.”

8.

They waited until it was near midnight, dressed themselves all in black, and crept silently across the quad to the Physics Building. Jessica stayed on the driveway, looking out across the wide yard to make sure the coast was clear, while JJ lifted her key fob to the door and beeped it open. Together they slipped inside.

But when, a few minutes later, JJ had called up the schematic on her laptop and plugged it in to the professor’s printer and the prototype chip emerged, Jessica found something else waiting by the printer: a single piece of paper, with one word scrawled on it.

Jessica stared at it. She picked it up.

“Hey. Hey, JJ?”

“What?

The paper said RUN.

“Whoa,” said JJ. “Where did that come from?”

Jessica didn’t know, except that, suddenly, she did. “We gotta go,” she said. “We gotta go now.”

So they weren’t in Dr. Steinmetz’s office a few moments later, when the professor and her student came in, giggling and holding hands; they were standing just outside the grand doors of the Physics Building, having just watched them rush past.

“Whoa,” said JJ, looking at Jessica curiously. “Close call.”

“Yeah,” Jessica agreed.

Outside, the sun was coming up. Pinks and yellows stretched out across the quad. JJ handed Jessica the chip. Jessica took it, and folded it closed in her palm.

“Listen,” said JJ. Her voice was soft; tender, almost. “There’s something I want to tell you.”

Maybe she was going to say, “I’m glad you came.” Or “This meant a lot to me.” It’s even possible she was going to say she had decided to quit being a custodian, and she was going to continue the groundbreaking research they had begun together.

But Jessica would never know, because before JJ could finish her thought, she grabbed her arm and said, “Holy shit! Look!”

It was a single pterododocock, winging past, fluttering its great polychromatic tail, so close they could almost touch it. They stood together, side by side, holding hands, feeling the brush of air as it whooshed away.

9.

Jessica Martin, in the end, did not win the top prize at the National Competitive Exhibition in the Physical Sciences. She didn’t even win second prize, or third. This was a hugely surprising result, to those who knew Jessica and how hard she worked, but it was less surprising when you factor in that she didn’t actually show up.

Because—after dinner on the night she returned home from the future—Jessica opened up the side of her invention and removed the crucial chip that she had gone into the future to find, and unceremoniously flushed it down the toilet. While it circled down and down and out of sight, she smiled, remembering JJ’s firm insistence that only very rarely did she fix a toilet.

Later Jessica would ask her dad to call a junk hauler or whoever to help get rid of the old refrigerator. No need to have a big piece of useless trash taking up space in her room. But for right now, she had a call to make.

“Whoa! Jester!” said Todd. “What’s up?”

“I think you mentioned a—some kind of party? This weekend? Is that still happening?”

“You mean the party at Rodney’s uncle’s lake house? Heck yeah it’s happening.”

On Saturday, Todd came over around 8:30, and they got dinner first and then they went to the party together.

©2022 by Ben H. Winters.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ben H. Winters’ most recent novel is The Quiet Boy (Mulholland/Little, Brown). He is the author of many previous works of fiction, including Golden State, the New York Times bestselling Underground Airlines, The Last Policeman and its two sequels, the horror novel Bedbugs, and several works for young readers. His first novel, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, was also a New York Times bestseller. Ben has won the Edgar Award for mystery writing, the Philip K. Dick award in science fiction, the Sidewise Award for alternate history, and France’s Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire. He writes frequently for New York Times Book Review. In TV, he was a producer on the FX show Legion and the upcoming Apple+ show Manhunt, and he is presently working as creator and executive producer of The Never Game, upcoming on CBS. He lives in LA with his family.

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

Therefore What the Multiverse Has Joined Together, Let No One Separate

Dominica Phetteplace | 1105 words

Dear Next,

You’ve seen the original picture. If you’re anything like me, you know it by heart. The image that came out of the first (and at the time of this writing, only) discovered white hole was a flower. It was gray and pixelated, but it was beautiful.

When it was finished, I was invited to the vault to view the flower. Not because I was anyone important. I mean, I had millions of followers on social media, my content regularly went viral, and I had written a dozen best-selling books. But to the scientific community, I was a personality. An influencer. Not serious. Not like Yxa.

I’m not like Yxa, it’s true. And neither are you, I’m guessing. But perhaps talent like hers skips a generation. Are you good at math? I’m terrible at it. And even if I’d had the talent, I think I would have gone into astronomy and not computing.

I would have studied the one known white hole and looked for others like it. It’s a black hole, but reversed. Nothing can enter it, but stuff spews out of it: light, interstellar dust, even entire stars. And ultra-long sheets of crystalline carbon.

Ribbons was how Yxa described them in her notebooks. From the very beginning, she thought of the message as a gift. The ciphertext was encoded as qubits, found by analyzing anomalies of the spectra of the crystallized carbon. I’m sorry if I’ve gotten any aspect of this explanation wrong, I don’t really understand it myself.

Yxa wrote the algorithm that converted the qubits to pixels, but because the interception of the ciphertext was so slow, she died without seeing the picture completed. She got only the lower third: the bottoms of narrow clusters of petals, the serrated leaves and skinny stems.

Symphyotrichum firmum, she wrote, glossy-leaf aster. Purple. She was just guessing. It’s my favorite color too. In her day, some were opposed to decryption. They thought the encoded information might be weaponized somehow. Malware that would attack the optic nerves of those who looked upon the pixels or something, I don’t know. Again, it’s hard to explain something you don’t understand. And so, some people hated her. And hated me. And will hate you. Carry on.

Yxa never got to see the full picture. She never got access to the second message that was found later, layered under the first. It was a genome. DNA. Had the ciphertext come from a second Earth? A future Earth? Or was DNA the optimal storage message for genetic information and thus used by lifeforms across the galaxy? No return address had been detected. A lack of information is also information.

I testified at the UN in favor of bringing the flower to life: “This might be our only chance to make first contact within our lifetimes.” I’m not saying I made the difference, but the vote was very close. Some people, the same ones that opposed Yxa at every step, thought the organism might be a hostile entity. They protested the plan to bring the genome to life.

As a compromise, work on the flower was done in a highly secure location. The easiest way forward was to begin with the genome of the most similar Earth organism and then cut and replace. This turned out to be S. Puniceum, not S. Firmum. Yxa was a genius, but botany was outside of her field of expertise. It was purple, she was right about that. As early versions of the flower failed to germinate, the scientists used more and more of the S. Puniceum genome. Once it finally took root, critics said it was more like a genetically modified Earth organism than an extraterrestrial.

I disagreed, as you can imagine. Take us, for example: Just because our genomes had been altered to remove diseases and repair damage didn’t mean we weren’t Yxa’s clones. No replica is exact. That’s life. No other lifeforms have been detected anywhere. Not on Mars or Europa, not by our telescopes and satellites. Perhaps this is no longer true? And if so, lucky you. The universe is too lonely. Yxa thought the message from the white hole was meant to cheer us up.

The flower was kept under glass. I was warned before viewing that selfies were not allowed. I wasn’t prepared for how beautiful I would find it. You’ve seen pictures, but pictures don’t do it justice.

It made me sad to see it. Be prepared to miss me even though you’ve never met me. I missed Yxa, even though her death is the only thing that enabled my existence. As of this writing, you’re only allowed one clone at a time. Even the Pope, even Jeff Bezos. Perhaps this will have changed by the time you enter the picture? If so, lucky you.

The Universe is finite, but the Multiverse is not. There is some universe in which she and I viewed the flower under glass together. Where we held hands and wiped tears from our faces as we crept as close as we could, feeling both more alone and less alone than we’ve ever felt. Feeling like specks of dust on dust but also feeling like we mattered. Our thoughts, our feelings, our contributions, they mattered. This flower was for us.

I hope more messages are found. I hope you will have an entire alien botanical garden to visit. I hope you think of me when you do. I know you will. But think of her also. None of it would have been possible without her. I’m so happy you exist, even though I’ll never get to meet you. That’s why I’m writing you. No one should have to make first contact alone. This letter is for the moment just before you enter the vault. Know that I am with you in some form, even if that form is only genetic memory.

In the meantime, I’m working with a team that is replicating the qubit crystal technology that came from the white hole. I have no technical expertise to add, unfortunately, but they want help with the message. We want to send something through a black hole with the hope that it will come through a white hole elsewhere, either in this universe or another. It’s unlikely we’ll know where it lands. Those that receive it might mean us harm, so best to keep it anonymous. There’s much debate about what we should say, but Yxa had a definite opinion on this:

Send flowers.

And I agree. Don’t you?

Yours,

Previous

©2022 by Dominica Phetteplace.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dominica Phetteplace writes fiction and poetry. Her work has appeared in Zyzzyva, Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, Clarkesworld, Uncanny, Copper Nickel, Ecotone, Wigleaf, The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy and Best Microfiction 2019. Her honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Rona Jaffe Award, a Barbara Deming Award and fellowships from I-Park, Marble House Project and the MacDowell Colony. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley and the Clarion West Writers Workshop.

What If the Whole Camp of Kids Learned How To Liquefy?

Maria Kelson | 1237 words

When she melts, it’s like a balloon collapsing, but fast. Her body turns to an inky puddle, a pool of shadow.

Then, in a snap, she goes clear. Shimmering.

When all the other children are asleep, when the guard is looking at something else, when the camera eye is on something else.

That’s when this happens. When she becomes a shadow, then a shimmer, and slithers out from under her thin silver blanket, onto the ground.

She can slide, fast fast, between gray sleep mats with kids snoring, gray sleep mats with kids crying, she can slide past a gray sleep mat where one boy pulls up the corner to bang his head on the concrete floor, she goes fast under the bars of the cage where they sleep, then under the canvas walls of Tent 4B, out into the open, where starlight picks at the skin of night so high and far while she’s down on the ground sliding her shimmery self under the barbed wire fence that keeps all the children’s tents inside its prickles, and she’s loose in the wide night, fast fast across the desert she slips, over the big wall and down hundreds of miles south toward her mami.

Just a flat shimmer running over the ground and quick as a blink she’s in her mami’s house. She can ripple over anything of her mami’s and become it. One night, she became her mami’s shoes. She could feel the whole weight of her Mami on her, it was heavy, and sweet, and she loved that feeling, it was so comfortable. She could feel her mami’s whole foot sink over her. Then, her mami sat down and pushed off her shoes, and the girl was back in her cage. Some kids were joking, they were playing a game with their fingers, each finger was a different family member, they had their fingers talking to each other, and curling over each other for pretend hugs or kisses, and that’s how they were, awake and waiting for their breakfast.

Good. She’d gotten back in time before the count, before the guards started shouting. The kids on the mats around her barely looked up from what they were doing because a lump of a girl under a crinkly blanket where before there was only air, was normal. At least, for this place.

She’s been slipping away, then re-appearing, each of the nine nights she’s been here.

Once, she became an earring. She felt the warmth of her mami’s earlobe as she traveled all the way through her mami’s flesh.

But when Mami pulled that earring out, she was right back here again.

Every day, whether she’s trying to hold hands with a kid she likes, or sucking her breath in to make herself skinny so she won’t brush against a kid she doesn’t, whether she’s holding out her wrist so her plastic stripe bracelet beeps the shower-entrance machine quick and neat, or whether she’s shivering with her clothes back on, coming out the other end of the shower room, shaking with rage and embarrassment that she had to get under the hard jets of water again with girls she doesn’t even know, there’s one thought she plucks like a harp string: have to see Mami.

When it’s nighttime, when it’s safe, have to run clear and fast to her, see if she’s still sad. Every time the girl comes to her mami as a shimmer, her mami’s the type of sad that’s nervous and tired, putting a few stitches into her sewing, then setting it down to boil a pot of water, then forgetting it on the stove because she’s busy standing at the window pulling the hairs at the tops of her eyebrows, which sometimes come out.

The girl had heard water boil over before. Seen sewing unfinished. But pinching eyebrow hair between fingernails is something new.

She wants her mami to know it’s her, she’s there. So Mami won’t be sad or nervous. But she can’t turn into an air horn with a little girl’s face. She can only turn into this silent shimmer that covers the ground or covers the things her mami wears.

One boy in the camp who’s a few years older, who sat by her in the eating tent and told her how to act and what to do, who taught her a few words of English when she first got in, he’s heard about her trips. A few of them. She told him about them because he seemed nice.

The girls around her never ask her where she’s been, probably because that question is buried under mountains of questions that surround them every time they all wake up in this same place again.

Well, it was a mistake to tell that boy. He went from nice to bossy. Mean.

“Show me how to do that,” he says. “Show me how to do that melting thing or else I’ll pinch you real hard right here on your side where no one will see, and you’ll get in trouble for yelling and crying. Show me how to do that or else I’ll mash your toes with my foot when no one’s watching.”

He hasn’t actually done anything, yet, but she feels like he will. So she’s made up her mind. Today, at breakfast, she’ll say, “I won’t help you unless you promise to teach someone else.”

Guess he has a mami he needs to see, fast fast, but he shouldn’t get something good just for being mean. He’ll need to share what he gets from her to make good come from his bullying.

When breakfast comes, she says, “I’ll only teach you if you promise to teach someone else.”

“Yeah, ok, fine,” he says.

The next problem: How does she explain how to make this change from a body to an inky flow to a clear shimmer? The only way she knows to do it is to breathe her thoughts into shape. Can he do that? And what if there’s never one quiet moment in the boy’s tent where his cage is?

Then someone will see him, and try to trap him as liquid, or burn him up, or something.

Unless, unless.

“I want you to teach everyone in your tent,” she says.

But she’s thinking bigger. What if the whole camp of kids learned how to liquefy? She can already see it, a night in the future: A whole camp full of children collapses into pools of shadow, then goes clear. She hopes they can slide outside and then slither up the walls of the tents. So that, together, they can cover the entire camp with their warm shimmer.

Her older brother back home once showed her a picture on el internet of how her country looked from hundreds of miles above the earth.

She hopes when they cover the camp their shimmer will be so hot and bright you can see the light from space.

She hopes her mami will drop her hands from her eyebrows, walk outside at night and look north. Even though she’ll be tired, just wanting to sleep, something will pull her outside. She’ll look north and see a glow. A warm radiance. Maybe she’ll stare at it long enough to see it pulsing, like the beat of her very own heart.

©2022 by Maria Kelson.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maria Kelson writes speculative stories and crime fiction. Her mystery novel-in-progress won the Eleanor Taylor Bland Award for Crime Fiction Writers of Color from Sisters in Crime. Short works have appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, About Place Journal, and at strandmag.com. As Maria Melendez, she published two books of poetry with University of Arizona Press. She believes every writer on earth should either teach or take multiple online Clarion West workshops, because they are the absolute best (being that they saved her imagination during lockdown). Connect on Twitter: @mkelsonauthor.

The Dragon’s Hand

Alex Irvine | 2226 words

A boy traveling alone was beset by bandits on the outskirts of a strange town at sunset. They left him stripped and bloody in a ditch by the side of the road in the deepening dusk, as a bright full moon appeared over the trees. The boy watched it moving across the sky, his pain and shame a kind of trance. For a long time nothing happened.

When he heard footsteps on the road, he was afraid, but something was broken inside him and he dared not disturb it by moving. Still he looked up at the moon, filling himself with its light. He felt a distance growing between himself and his body.

The traveler’s steps paused.

Are you dead, boy? I think not, for I can see your breath; yet you are no longer precisely alive.

With a crackle of dry weeds and a pop of old joints, the traveler settled near the boy. So I will tell you a story, the traveler said. It is the only help I can offer.

The boy said nothing. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the rough cloth of the traveler’s cloak and the end of his stick where it prodded the ground. He reminded himself to breathe even though it hurt. Was the moon still moving?

When I was very young, and dying, you see, someone stopped to tell me a story. To ease my passage. Since then, I have done the same. Sometimes it seems to me that it is all I have ever done. You will protest that I am not dead, or that you are not dying. That’s as may be—yet many changes overtake us in the spaces between our breaths. In extremity truth is revealed. Now I will tell you that story.

Young dragons, like the young of all other hunting animals, challenge themselves. Thoughtless and heedless, they rage against prey, enemies, rivals—the world itself is a proving ground. To a dragon the mountain is an enemy. Do you know why? Because the mountain will not move when the dragon commands, and it will not die of the dragon’s fangs or fires. There is a book about dragons. What that book does not tell is the dragon’s relentless hatred for everything in this world that will not yield.

The boy knew some people like that. A man like that was the reason he was traveling alone.

You may think you know some people like that, the old traveler said. But never make the mistake of thinking we are like dragons. Now. This young dragon. He was not fresh from the egg, nor yet fully scaled. His fires were lit, but they would not burn with a grown dragon’s heat—which, as I have said, is born of hate. This young dragon left his mother’s nest and came to a mountain, on the far side of the desert near the Riven Lands. The sides of the mountain were pocked with caves, and those caves breathed out the scent of what lived within.

Because you are a stripling lying in a ditch, I am sure you know nothing of the creatures that live inside mountains. Once they were human. Over centuries they have become . . . something else, monstrous and greedy, caring only for the veins of ore and the gemstone seams that thread the deep heart-rock of the mountain. The young dragon smelled them, and hated them for not having already submitted to him, and also he hungered, for one way that people and dragons are alike is that their half-grown boys are stupid and always hungry.

The dragon worked his way through the twisting passage and found the upper galleries of a mine. He ate the miners and remained. He ate the other creatures coming up from the lower galleries. They organized and fought, but even a half-grown dragon was too much for them. He suffered wounds, but in the end he fed on them all. When they would no longer come up, the dragon forced his way into the lower galleries and ate them there. Then he clambered back up to the highest gallery. Years had passed. Nothing now lived in the mines except the dragon, and he made to leave—but he had grown, and now he could not pass back the way he had come.

He raged against the walls of the gallery, and they began to collapse. Outside, the mountain shook. Avalanches and rockslides scarred its flanks.

For years there was silent darkness. Possibly decades. Then, a wanderer entered the chamber. Traditionally a boy but I tell you it was a girl. Fifteen or sixteen, with strong legs and capable hands. Eyes that missed nothing and a mind uneducated but quick. Old enough to have seen things she shouldn’t, young enough not to know how long a shadow a child’s suffering may cast.

She had with her a torch. Before the flame guttered and went out she saw the outlines of the once-grand mine . . . and she thought she saw something else. Then the darkness surrounded her. The sound of her breath, of her heartbeat, seemed to echo through the vast gallery. She feared to move, but feared to remain still, because every shift in the air felt like the first sign of Death reaching out to lay a bony finger on the skin of her cheek.

Then, another sound. All around her, as if born of its own echoes, she heard a voice like a hot desert wind.

Free me and live.

Imagine fangs looming out of the darkness, each one as long as your arm, backlit by the fires banked deep in the dragon’s belly as his mouth opened a little wider and his tongue flicked out to sample the girl’s scent.

Free me and live, the dragon said again.

No, she said. If you kill me you will stay here forever. Even a dragon must eventually starve.

The dragon grumbled, a sound like the mountain shifting its weight. Then it bent its head down toward her. Show me your hands, it said.

She did.

Can you write?

She could.

Which hand do you use?

She raised her left.

The dragon bit it off.

Help me, it said when it had swallowed, and I will give you back your hand. But move quickly.

No, she said. You’ll have to do better than that.

The dragon loomed closer. A flick of my tongue and you die, he said.

Do it, then, she said. I am helpless and you will cheat me in the end no matter what you say now.

The dragon chuckled. You speak as if you know dragons.

All I know are stories. How will you give me my hand back? In the light of the dragon’s banked fire, she saw that her arm was scarred but not bleeding. How did you do that?

The dragon no longer had any interest in speaking. Go. Find a way to free me or live without your writing hand.

The girl found her way out of the cave, climbing by the light of the dragon’s fire and then the countless tiny glowing worms that lined the cave’s ceiling nearer the entrance. She went to the town nearest the mountain, a day’s walk along the river. Or in some tellings, she went to another town because she was fleeing the nearest town to avoid a marriage. In the town she spoke to the elders and told them there was a dragon trapped inside the mountain. The elders were greedy and said they would wait until the dragon died and them make use of its scales and fangs, which could be made into powerful weapons and armor.

What about my hand? the girl asked.

Go and ask the dragon to give it back, the elders said. Stupid girl. They put her out of their minds and set to dreaming of their riches. Every year when the passes cleared, they sent a man up to the mountain, to pass through the cave and learn whether the dragon had starved. The problem was that when the dragon ate those men, it could live a little longer. After a few years of this, the town decided that sending a man once every ten years was enough.

The next spring, the girl—now a young woman—went down again to the dragon to tell it of the elders’ new plan, and to tell it she was sorry she could not help. The dragon asked her to tell him about the sky, for he had been underground so long he had forgotten what it looked like.

She did, and when she was done the dragon said, Soon I will die. Only a few years. When that happens, you must come here before the townsfolk have gathered their courage. You will have your hand.

The woman did not ask how. Her scars gave her magic, and she survived in the village knitting small enchantments for the jealous and fearful. Some of the villagers would have driven her out, but she was useful, and an air of the dragon hung about her, making them reluctant to challenge her. Who knew what she might be capable of?

Every spring when the river grew swollen with snowmelt, the woman traveled up the flank of the mountain to the cave entrance. She traveled down the cave passage until she could hear the dragon’s breathing.

The seventh time the woman did this, she stopped as always at the final bend in the cave passage before the vast gallery. She waited an hour, but no breath disturbed the silence of the ruined gallery just beyond that final bend. When she entered the gallery, there were only bones, and the woman wept out of pity for the creature trapped and knowing no help would come.

Then she saw the eggshells.

The old women of the village, spinning stories as they spun wool, had told her that male dragons could make themselves female, and lay a clutch of eggs. She had never believed it, even though the same was said of frogs and eels. But here was the truth, before her eyes. Still a brutal lonely death, but perhaps in her final moments the dragon had heard the crackle of hatching eggs, the soft scrape of the hatchlings finding their way through invisible passages to sunlight and open air. These pitiable consolations, sometimes they must suffice.

Among the bones something gleamed. The woman went to it and found her hand, covered in a thick, waxy slime. She fitted it to the stump of her left arm and the slime knit it there as if it had never been severed. Its mother-of-pearl color blended into the tone of her own flesh in swirls she found beautiful. The fingers and thumb moved just as they always had. The dragon had not lied to her. And she had left the woman a gift, for her hand was imbued with some of the dragon’s magic. She went forth from the cave and lived her life.

It was not altogether a happy life. She was driven from many places, for the pearly sheen of her hand and for her magic which was different from other magic because it was born of a dragon’s body and not hers. Over time the dragon’s magic began to change her, and she realized that her hand drew power from the dying, just as the dragon’s own dying had made it.

So you see, the traveler said to the boy, I am not just here to ease your passage.

The boy did not answer.

There is another telling in which she frees the dragon, the old man said. What do you think the dragon might have done then?

Still the boy made no sound.

We are all the dragon, said the old man. Or we are all the mountain, holding in the fires that rage within us.

Something about the boy’s insistent skyward gaze drew the old traveler’s gaze in the same direction. Away from the full moon, now drifting down toward its rest, stars dappled the sky, bright as the tiny glowing worms on the ceiling of the cave that led to the dragon’s bones. Maybe I am the dragon, the old man said, because this is a parable, but a parable of what neither you nor I know. I thought of this years ago, but long after I first heard this story from the woman herself as she was dying. She wanted me to hear it, as if by hearing I guided her along the path to her next life, and from her dying I was born. She was pleased to die, and I to be born, and I am grateful to the dragon for its power that transformed us. I carry on her work, shepherding the dying in their last moments, telling a tale in exchange for a small taste of the magic of their final breath.

The moment had come, as it always did, when the old traveler could not tell whether the hour was too soon or too late. He reached out toward the boy, with a hand pearlescent and smooth, gathering the moonlight and glimmering faintly in the dark. Listening, listening for a telltale breath.

©2022 by Alex Irvine.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alex Irvine’s original fiction includes Anthropocene Rag, Buyout, The Narrows, Mystery Hill, A Scattering of Jades, and several dozen short stories. He has also written graphic novels and comics (The Comic Book Story of Baseball, The Far Side of the Moon, Daredevil Noir), games (Marvel Avengers Alliance, Space Punks, The Walking Dead: Road to Survival), and a variety of licensed projects including the best-selling artifactual “metanovel” New York Collapse. Originally from Ypsilanti, Michigan, he lives in South Portland, Maine. Find out more at alex-irvine.com or on Twitter @alexirvine.

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

The Graphology of Hemorrhage

Yoon Ha Lee | 4509 words

Rao Nawong, aide to Magician Tepwe Kodai, had not been on the hillside for long with her. The sky threatened rain on and off, and the air smelled of river poetry, of lakes with their scarves of reeds. Water would make their mission here, in the distant shadow of the Spiders’ fortress, more difficult, if not outright impossible. The Empire’s defeat of the upstart Spiders, whose rebellion had sparked a general conflagration in the southwest provinces, depended on the mission’s success. At the moment, Nawong found it hard to care. His world had narrowed to Kodai’s immediate needs, politics be damned.

Kodai was scowling at the sky as she drew a roll of silk out of a brass tube. She had clever hands, which he had always admired, precise in every motion, as good with a brush as she was with the pliers and hammers and snippers that she used for the gadgets that were her hobby. “I still think it’s going to rain,” she muttered. “But this has to be done.”

Nawong hesitated for a long time before he said what he said next. “Does it?” he asked at last.

She looked at him sidelong, no doubt guessing his intent. Waited.

His hands tightened on the umbrella he had brought just in case. Stupid thing to carry in the field this close to the enemy, but the nature of graphological magic meant protecting Kodai’s ink while it dried. He had once asked, when they were both new to each other, why the hell couldn’t magicians use a pencil. She’d explained that the nature of the instrument changed the nature of the marks: you got different strokes and thicknesses and curves with a piece of graphite than you did with the traditional brush, and this in turn affected the spell framework in such a way that you’d have to discard centuries of research and start over with a completely new way of constructing spells. For the longest time he’d thought she was making this up to shut him up. Only gradually had he realized that this was not, in fact, the case.

“The spell-plague,” Nawong said. “Don’t do it this way. Use one of the traditional spells.” One of the spells that wouldn’t kill her in the casting, he meant. But he didn’t say it outright.

Kodai began unrolling the silk, then stopped. Waited a little more. When he thought he would have to make another plea, she surprised him by speaking, in a low, rueful voice. “You know, you’ve spent years dealing with the fact that I cart around so many books and documents. Yet I’ve never once heard you complain about making the arrangements. Why is that?”

While it was true that he didn’t believe in talking just to hear himself talk, he couldn’t claim he never complained, either. “It’s the nature of your work,” he said.

Her eyebrows raised. “Be honest,” she said, as though he was the one who needed sympathy.

It was Nawong’s turn to be silent. He met her eyes, although he had a hard time doing so, trying to figure out what she wanted of him.

The Empire had developed a class of spells linked by their destructiveness: storms of fire, sheets of blading ice, earth swallowing cities. Such spells were not without their limitations. The performing magician had to know the languages of the region so they could bind the magic to its target, and copy out the spell, adopting a handwriting with the particular characteristics dictated by the spell’s effects, whether this was the volatility of fast writing or the murderous intent of clubbed vertical segments or the fire nature of certain sweeping diagonal strokes.

The few other military magicians Nawong had met had little interest in reading their victims’ writings after wielding fire or ice or earth to destroy their civilizations. Kodai was different, however. Kodai treasured her books and poems and crude posters, even if they belonged to the Empire’s enemies. She’d carried them around even after the ability to read them was burned out of her, never to return.

This last mission, against the Spiders, was different. The Spiders’ writing system was based on the Imperial writing system, which made it impossible to focus a spell on them without losing literacy in Imperial. It was a terrible thing to ask of a magician, someone trained to the nuances of writing and literature. But then, beyond being exiled to the military in the first place, Kodai being sent to this particular assignment—putatively on account of her brilliance—was a punishment. More relevantly, from her superiors’ point of view, the entanglement of the two writing systems meant that anything that hit the Spiders would also hit the Imperials in the region, and a full evacuation would cede too much territory, enable too much mischief. They trusted that she would find a workaround.

Kodai’s solution, if you could call it that, was to come up with a completely new class of spell. The difficulty, from Nawong’s point of view, was that it would require her to sacrifice her life.

“Lieutenant,” Kodai said. She had averted her eyes and was tensed as though she expected rain to fall like blows. “I have to do this one way or another.”

“We don’t,” he said, meaning that we. “We could desert. I don’t imagine you’re very good at hunting or foraging, but my mother used to take me into the woods to gather greens and mushrooms. We’d find a way to survive, far from here.”

“Just what kind of livelihood do you think there would be?” Kodai said. “Do you think the Spider rebellion is going to stop if we don’t stop it?”

And it was true. It would be enormously risky to look for a hiding place elsewhere in the Empire. The disorder in the southwest might make it harder to track them into the outlying lands, but was a threat in itself. The Empire was little liked by its neighbors after the past decades of expansion. They would have difficulties wherever they went.

“It’s a terrible chance,” Nawong agreed. “But it’s better than no chance. Which is what you’re proposing.”

“We are doing a terrible thing here,” Kodai said. He didn’t miss how she, too, said we: generous, considering the most he could contribute was to hold an umbrella for her, or carry her ink sticks. He wasn’t the one with the specialist knowledge. “Maybe, if I carry through with it, other magicians will see just how terrible it is.”

He wanted to shout at her. “That’s a ridiculous reason.”

“Someone has to fight,” she said. “Even fighting with ink and brush. And some of the Spiders are as ruthless as we are.” She was referring to the tactician who had taken out an entire division, which had included one of her old classmates. Nawong remembered how little she had eaten the entire month after that incident. “I will do this last thing, since it would disgrace my family for me to fail, and then I will be done.”

Curiously, it was the mention of her family that stopped him from pressing the point. The Tepwe line was a proud one. She had spoken rarely of her family in all the time he had known her. The tremor of her voice when she mentioned them now did not escape him.

“Then you may as well get started,” Nawong said, feeling each word like a knife.

Kodai smiled at him without smiling—her eyes shadowed but alert—and spread the silk upon the grass. Nawong weighted the corners with the ritual stones, heavy at heart.

• • • •

Magicians in the Empire ranged from those who told auguries to the Empress’s court to those who copied out charms for millers and farmers. Kodai’s original trajectory should have been toward court. Magicianship was overwhelmingly the province of the nobility, and for all its importance, the military enjoyed much less prestige than the literati. So Kodai’s parents, who had anticipated benefiting from their daughter’s connections for years to come, reacted poorly when she enlisted.

It wasn’t entirely their fault. Kodai’s father had never quite understood his daughter, consistently giving her gifts, like sentimental adventure novels, that his oldest son would have appreciated more. (And did, actually. Kodai and her brother swapped books regularly.) On the other hand, their relationship wasn’t so bad that he would have had reason to expect that she’d run off to the army.

As for Kodai’s mother, she had romanticized visions of her daughter having erudite discussions on poetic forms in scented parlors while zithers played, or practicing calligraphy beneath gingko trees turning color. The fact that a number of court magicians led such existences didn’t help. It came as quite a shock to her when Kodai broke the news to her.

What Kodai’s parents never knew, and were never going to find out, was that the choice to enter the military had never been a choice. Sleeping in a leaky tent, picking at moldy biscuits, having to wear a uniform whose dyes ran in the rain, to say nothing of the run-ins with dysentery . . . no one would have considered Kodai, with her love of rhyme schemes and assonance, to be the sort of person who’d sign on for that if she could sit in a pavilion sipping tea and reading fortunes in people’s pillow books.

At academy, Kodai and three mechanically minded classmates came up with movable type. They weren’t the first in the Empire to do so, but the prior discoveries were classified, so they deserved credit for their ingenuity. Two of her classmates were also sent to the military as punishment. The third hanged herself.

Movable type seemed like a good idea at first. It would eliminate all the troublesome irregularities of human handwriting; it would replace personal deficiencies with a machine’s impersonal perfection. Kodai and her friends worked out a simplified system for the Imperial script, reducing it to a much smaller set of standardized graphemes. It was moderately clever, and could, conceivably, be learned more quickly than the original script itself.

The head of the academy disapproved for entirely orthodox reasons, as had others before him, because of the democratization of literary magic that movable type implied. (“Democratization” was anachronistic; “vulgarization” might have been truer to the Imperial term.) It was one thing for the Empire’s statutes to be enforced by the writings of ministers indoctrinated in the Empire’s philosophies. Think of the body of Imperial writings, as one of Kodai’s instructors often said, as the living map of the Empress’s will. It was another thing for this to become available to people whose training consisted merely of combinatorial arrangement, rather than dedicated calligraphic toil.

On the other hand, the head of the academy was also a pragmatist. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust that the military sometimes accomplished useful things, but he recognized that Kodai was the most promising of the miscreants. Sending her to languish in a backwater unit would waste her skills. After her initial assignment, he had his agents keep an eye on her. When her initial performance in the military did, in fact, bear out her potential usefulness, he had a relative in the War Ministry pull strings to assign her to the problem of the Spiders.

• • • •

Kodai collected letters, especially Spider letters. A love letter from Captain Arvash-mroi, for instance. Arvash was the Spider tactician who had come suddenly and unhappily to the Imperials’ attention in general, and Kodai’s in particular, when he arranged to demolish a dam on top of an Imperial army that was fatally certain the Spiders couldn’t manage the trick so quickly. One of Kodai’s three classmates had been part of that army.

She had obtained this love letter by bribing a Spider messenger. While all Spider captains used the same seal, Arvash consistently perfumed certain personal letters, which were delivered to a local town rather than his home city. The messenger endured hard days of riding and inadequate sleep in exchange for a salary that never went as far as it ought to. Kodai’s agent, for his part, persuaded the messenger that some coin in exchange for the loan of a piece of personal correspondence was harmless enough. After that, it didn’t take Kodai too long to copy out the letter—so close it could have been mistaken for the original—and substitute that to be given to Arvash’s lover; like most magicians, Kodai was excellent at forgery.

Whether Arvash or his lover noticed the letter’s delay was an open question. If the Spiders’ official messenger service was anything like the Imperial one, message delivery time varied anyway.

The fact of Arvash’s letter suggested that his lover was also literate, although the man might also have had someone to read the letter to him. (It was not entirely proper for Arvash to take a man as a lover, but as long as he kept the affair out of sight of his wife, it was not a terrible sin, either, since there could be no child. A female lover would have been another matter.) While it was the case that the Spiders used Imperial writing, some of their calligraphy forms had diverged from the Empire’s over time. Imperials argued over the interpretation of, say, the formation called the Swindler’s Hook. Most Imperials said it should retain its meaning of an untrustworthy or vacillating personality. The Contextualists, a graphological school that had become politically irrelevant twenty-nine years ago, insisted that the interpretation should instead be drawn from the Spiders’ conventions and community of use. Kodai had subterranean Contextualist leanings, but in this instance she was on the fence. The Spiders called the same formation the Widower’s Hook. Maybe it pointed to a lack of interest in his wife.

Most magicians would have left it at that, but Kodai wasn’t just a magician. She had been one of the best magicians of her class. And her mastery of graphological principles had only improved in her years of field practice.

So Kodai put together the puzzle pieces: the telltale leftward drift of the columns of text, the elongated water-radical and its association with strategic thinking, the slight tendency to roll the brush at the end of horizontal strokes (unattractive, but no one was perfect), even the preference for brushes too large for the size of the handwriting. The finicky attention to detail, with no smears or smudges or thumbprints. Kodai reflected that her instructors would have liked her to be this good with ink. Not that trying harder would have saved her from exile.

Captain Arvash-mroi’s letter mentioned a gift of a fine bolt of cloth and (in surprisingly mawkish terms) anticipated embraces. It then launched into a tirade about how his boots pinched his toes. Interesting. Kodai would have expected him to be able to afford better than army issue.

More interestingly, the graphological signs in Arvash’s letter spoke of conquests. Not just in bed, although Kodai saw that, too, especially in the vigorous club-ended downstrokes. But there was more, pointed at by forked marks and tapering lines and narrow diagonals: villages encircled and eaten by fire. Torched women. The lamentations of the drowned. The ugly seesaw balance of fire and water dominated his writing, as sharp as swordfall.

Kodai kept track of these traits, using them to focus her hatred of Arvash and writing them down in a notebook with dog-eared pages. Whenever she grew weary of her mission, she returned to the notebook and reread her notes, and went to the next page to write the name of her dead classmate over and over again in stab-shaped columns.

• • • •

Nawong remembered the first time he had met Kodai. She had been sitting in a precarious folding chair, lips moving slightly as she read a book and, occasionally, nibbled green tea cookies. He had been prepared to dislike her; he couldn’t imagine that a daughter of the Tepwe family wouldn’t be spoiled rotten. But instead, when he saluted, she waved him down and said, “Lieutenant, I trust you will consider it your duty to help me finish this box of cookies?” She added, “I used to love green tea cookies, but there’s love and then there’s being inundated with the things.”

He was dying to find out what a Tepwe daughter had done to get herself exiled to the military, when she could instead be languishing amid silk cushions and (presumably) a greater variety of cookies. But it wasn’t for him to ask. As much as she confided in him about everything from cookies to insect bites, she rarely dropped any hints about that part of her past.

So Nawong contented himself by making up stories, none of which he expected to have any relationship to the truth: Kodai was the reincarnation of a general who had died without winning their last battle (not that most people in the Empire believed in reincarnation). Kodai had followed a lover into the army—except she showed no signs of being lovesick. Kodai had fled an unhappy engagement—but would her family have permitted such a thing? All in all, he liked the reincarnation story best. If nothing else, it gave him an excuse to speculate about the legendary generals she could be.

He should have remembered that legendary generals rarely enjoyed happy endings.

• • • •

Kodai collected books. One of them was a collection of military aphorisms, which she treasured. It wasn’t the only such collection she owned, but it came from a country called Maeng-of-the-Bridges, which no longer existed. Maeng was conquered by the Empire half a generation ago and razed the way all things beautiful and defiant were razed. Kodai knew a little about Maeng, about its dueling aristocrats and its high gardens with the prized sullen orchids and the fabled crown of its king, set with seventy-six sapphire and aquamarine cabochons. (The rumor that nine of the aquamarines were in fact heat-treated topazes of much lower value was surely invention.)

She had carried it for the length of the Spider campaign, even when she was footsore and sleep-deprived and any modest decrease in the weight she was carrying would have brought her ease. Although no one had been able to teach her to read the dead Maeng language, she could still say a little about the calligraphic style. That was what mattered, not the book’s fragile but exotic stab binding, in contrast to the link stitches favored in the Empire, or the book’s cover, in fibrous dark red paper that was worn at three edges.

The book’s aphorisms weren’t organized in any useful manner, as though the unattributed author simply sat down to dinner and spilled out whatever came to mind. They were written untidily. Kodai got headaches when she examined the characters too closely. Both the Maeng and the Empire wrote with the brush, and in times past Kodai pored over the calligraphy style used in the book, which bore a distant resemblance to the Imperial one called The Stars Fall Slowly. Kodai’s least favorite instructor in academy had used The Stars Fall Slowly, yet she couldn’t deny the beauty of the script, with its deceptively relaxed spacing and dramatic, almost blot-like serifs.

Lately Kodai hadn’t opened the book at all. In the evenings leading up to the ritual against the Spiders, Nawong had watched her sitting with her head bent, book cradled in her tense hands. Open it, he had wished her, but she refused herself that small comfort, as though she didn’t think she deserved it.

• • • •

When spoken indistinctly (and face it, drunken soldiers were a universal), the name of the nation of Pekti-pehaktuch sounded similar to the Imperial word for “spider.” Thus the Imperials called the Pektis Spiders.

Kodai was familiar with the official Imperial maps of the region. The old surveys weren’t as useful as she had hoped, given the cartographers’ tendency to stylize topographical features and the fact that local roads were easily damaged. For military applications, she relied heavily on the scouts’ investigations and on local informants.

Still, the official maps did hold some interest for Kodai, and this was in the realm of (what else?) calligraphy. Imperial cartographers were a conservative lot, and they wrote in what was called, unimaginatively, Cartographers’ Hand. The characteristics of Cartographers’ Hand had proved stable despite the ebb and flow of calligraphic fashion in the Imperial court and among the government’s ministries.

Cartographers’ Hand (according to Kodai’s notes, terse but readable, and the few remarks she made to Nawong on the subject) had the following traits: extreme vertical alignment, as though the calligrapher labeled everything while being hounded with a knife-edged ruler. This signified rigidity, conformity, reverence for tradition. Minimal variation from the beginning and end of a brushstroke, in contrast, for instance, to the dramatic flourishes favored in Evening Flight of Swans. In fact, the permitted variation was so minimal that it made reading the script at small sizes difficult. The implication was of narrow vision and institutional incestuousness.

One final quirk of the cartographers’ art was that borders were not drawn with simple lines (if any line, following the twist-weave of political entanglements, river boundaries, and the habitations of different ethnic groups, was ever simple). They were inked, carefully, with the same character repeated over and over, like textual bricks: lio, for Imperial jade. In other words, the Empire was being carved out of the substance of other nations, which existed for this purpose.

• • • •

Kodai had her favorites in the collection of letters. Her interest should have been strictly military, focused on the task of reducing the Spiders to a name spoken only by the wind. But she was human, and anyway it was impossible not to take interest in the Spider soldier Gevoh-an’s recipes when she spent so many days eating cold rice and longing for jellied anchovies, pickled lotus root, or beef braised in summer wine—any smidgen of flavor. She liked to talk about food with Nawong: specifically, she talked about food, and he made fun of her nostalgia for anchovies. They both took a certain consolation from this conversation.

Her favorite recipe was the one for shadow soup. Gevoh’s instructions neatly paralleled those for some of the fish soups that they’d eaten in the past. Kodai hated fish, but not more than she hated starving. In any case, the concept was to catch a shadow in a pot with green onions, ginger, winter melon, and whatever other vegetables you could steal from stores or bully from the local peasants. If you boiled the shadow for long enough, it might become palatable. Or nourishing. Or something.

Gevoh’s recipes had inconsistent letterforms, although in this case this indicated a partial education—he might even have been self-taught—rather than mental instability. His columns drifted right and left in the minor way that indicated humor rather than the major way that suggested a dangerous temper.

Kodai showed some of the recipes to Nawong from time to time, and they shared a chuckle over their fancifulness. But when she came to the one for shadow soup, her eyes darkened, and she murmured, “It may be a fake soup, but that’s real hunger talking.”

• • • •

Kodai first explained the solution to the Spiders to Nawong on a cold, sleety night while the ruddy light of a full moon filtered through the clouds. They had been talking about something else entirely—the way local berries were mouth-puckeringly unappetizing, which guaranteed that the cook would incorporate them in desserts—when Kodai said abruptly, “If you think about it, graphology is stratificational.” Her voice was soft but not drowsy in the slightest, above the soprano cry of the frogs. “We’ve been focusing all this time on characteristics, as though people and their cultures could be factored into motes. But a person is more than the sum of their traits, just as a grapheme is more than the sum of its strokes. A person is a character, just as a word is represented by a character. If you can specify people entire, not just the traits, you can narrow the focus of the spell. You can direct it against Spiders rather than against Imperials. The Spiders won’t know what hit them.”

Nawong wasn’t a graphological theorist. But he wasn’t stupid, either, and he didn’t like where this was going. “You can’t say that,” he said with more familiarity than their relative stations would ordinarily permit. Except it was a cold, sleety night, and they had come to know each other well. “‘Character,’ like a person in a book.”

“Oh, but everyone’s in a book,” Kodai said, suddenly fierce, “if the whole damn Empire and its ever-growing pile of decrees and statutes and declarations is a book.”

Now, several years after that discussion, Kodai and Nawong were on the hillside, hoping it would and wouldn’t rain. No frogs this time. Kodai was gnawing her lip, not realizing it, as she wrote more and more exactingly, approaching the knot of characters that would complete and activate the spell.

She paused, withdrew her brush so it wouldn’t drip over the paper, grimaced. Nawong, recognizing the signal, bent to massage her shoulders. She let him do this for a while, then straightened. He backed off, resolved to watch. For a moment, he thought she was about to say something. Then she lifted the brush and wrote the final few strokes with a sure hand.

• • • •

Here’s the final piece, the key, the piece you must have discerned from the beginning: █████’s own hand, distinct from the style she would rather have used, itself distinct from the style she was originally taught by tutors in her parents’ house.

Extremely crisp brushwork, as though chiseled. A broadening of the spacing of the characters as the text marched across the page. Vertical strokes like perfect spear hafts. Most of all, if you looked sideways at the page, diagonal spaces falling through the columns like rain.

█████ couldn’t read any of this anymore. █████, as she had known, and had explained to her aide, was gone. The side-effect of writing the Spiders into the narrative of their own destruction, even if she spared the Imperials, was that the author, too, was an implicit character in that selfsame narrative.

She had been obliterated along with them.

• • • •

Everywhere the Spiders bled from punctures like crescent moons, in the villages, in the towns, upon the battlements of castles. Their bones burned up from the inside and candled the night. Their outposts ran red like hemorrhage and black like rot.

On the hillside, Lieutenant Nawong lingered beside the crumpled mass of charred meat that had once been █████, knowing that he would never remember her name, and trying to anyway. After all, there was no hurry now. Then he gathered up the spell-pages, even if █████ couldn’t read any of them anymore.

Like the Spiders she had destroyed, she was no longer part of the story.

©2015 by Yoon Ha Lee. Originally published in Operation Arcana, edited by John Joseph Adams.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Yoon Ha Lee’s debut novel, Ninefox Gambit, won the Locus Award for best first novel and was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke awards. Its sequels, Raven Stratagem and Revenant Gun, were also Hugo finalists. His novel Dragon Pearl won the Locus Award for YA and the Mythopoeic Award. His latest book is Tiger Honor, a companion to Dragon Pearl. His short fiction has appeared in venues such as Tor.com, Audubon Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Lee lives in Louisiana with his family and an extremely lazy cat, and has not yet been eaten by gators.

The Noon Witch Goes to Sound Planet

Kristina Ten | 9056 words

The Noon Witch is not a cat person. She likes the color purple, hates police procedurals, loves breakfast foods, thinks scented bath products and anchovy pizza are gross. Hates platform shoes. Hates walnuts in brownies. Used to like the electropop group all the girls at school like, until they used too much synth on their latest album, so now she hates them too.

The Noon Witch isn’t an overcritical person. She’s just at that difficult age when you’re desperate to figure out who you are, so you lean too much on your likes and dislikes to try to cobble together what you think should be your personality. She makes long lists in her journal—she hates the word “diary”—of things she likes, like roller coasters and nail polish, and things she doesn’t, like movie theaters and snakes, until every page has two neat columns, with nothing in the middle, in the insufficient, black-and-white way of being eighteen.

One thing the Noon Witch particularly hates? Being called the Noon Witch. So let’s not do that. Let’s call her by her other name: Hailey.

• • • •

Hailey is just a regular kid. Dyes her blonde hair purple, eats her Pop-Tarts cold, couldn’t wait to turn sixteen so she could drive her hand-me-down Corolla an hour to the newly built theme park off the I-5. It’s her mom who’s the real Noon Witch, the one from all the storybooks. The one who used to show up in the fields at the hottest part of the day and make all the workers sick? The one who signaled her arrival with whirling dust clouds? And whole communities would hold bonfires and ritual dances and sacrificial offerings to try to ward her off? You know, the Noon Witch. Lady Midday. Sunstroke personified.

Yeah, that’s Hailey’s mom. That was back in the old days, though. She’s retired now, or as retired as a Noon Witch can be. At the beginning of the last century, she fell in love with a man—an unfortunate thing that happens sometimes—and it changed the course of her life completely. He was a field hand in one of the southern districts, a rough-faced wheat harvester named Grischa, who had dirt everywhere, even in the creases of his eyes, and who recited classical poetry as he worked.

And Hailey’s mom, the real Noon Witch, couldn’t bring herself to strike him down as she had all the others. So she did the only other thing she could think of, and they were married the very next week.

She lived out the rest of his days with him in a modest cabin full of love and laughter—and rats too, altogether too many rats for her liking, but that was how things were back then and there wasn’t much you could do about it. And when his days were through, the Noon Witch lived on, as Noon Witches tend to do.

While Grischa was alive, she dropped the Noon Witch stuff: the appearing-magically-among-the-crops stuff and the inflicting-men-with-heatstroke stuff. After his death, she tried to get back into it—it was her calling after all, divinely preordained, et cetera—but it was never quite the same. She’d go through the motions, watching them flush red and slur their speech, watching them stumble dizzily about, vomit once or twice, and eventually tumble to the ground. But the field equipment got bigger and louder, and the new tractors with the sharp teeth in front made things complicated. And really, she’d just lost the verve for it, was how Hailey’s mom explained it to Hailey later on.

Much later on, in fact—after decades of puttering half-heartedly from wheat field to wheat field, after deciding she needed a change and reading a brochure about the high-desert agriculture of LA. Apricots and cherries, lemons and nectarines. All these sweet, wet things. After the fall of the Soviet Union in the early nineties, when so many people were leaving that she figured even a demigod could go largely unnoticed, the Noon Witch went too.

She moved into an apartment in Simi Valley and it happened again, this time with the general manager at an organic U-pick orchard not far inland. His name was Nate, and he didn’t speak a lick of Russian, and he is Hailey’s father.

Really, Hailey feels she has much more in common with her dad, who likes sailing on the weekends, than with her mom, who used to give men kidney failure by the thousands, so she extra resents being called the Noon Witch, even though, technically, that’s what she is. Especially now that her mom is officially retired. And the magic was passed down, after all, even though it got pretty diluted along the way. Meaning Hailey can warm up her food without a microwave and use her curling iron without plugging it in—baby Noon Witch type things like that—but her mom thinks she could learn the bigger stuff if she committed herself to it.

Her mom has tried to explain that it’s not about hurting people, it’s about protecting the Earth. Reminding people of the balance required, and the Earth’s ultimate power. That’s the Noon Witch’s place in all this, and it’s noble and necessary. But when her daughter throws back the argument that you didn’t want to do it, so why should I? well, that’s hard for a mother to reason with.

The problem is that Hailey looks just like her mom, which means she looks just like the Noon Witch. And because they live in a big Russian community, with Ventura County’s highest population of expats, everybody has read the storybooks and knows exactly what that is. A woman tall as corn-stalk shadows in the early morning. Eyes the color of fresh-tilled soil. Hair like so many ears of wheat. No matter how many boxes of purple dye Hailey goes through, her hair resists it, and it’s back to blonde within the week.

They’re alike in another way too. Around the dinner table, at Up Your Alley Bowling on family night, Hailey and her mom have to act normal, do the happy wife and happy daughter thing. Forget that they’re both going to outlive Nate by, like, a lot.

Still, for the most part, Hailey is just a regular kid. So it’s not fair she got blamed that time Alex Pasternak got third-degree sunburn on their class field trip to the botanical gardens in the third grade, or that time Becca Smolina had to go to the nurse’s office for heat exhaustion during the timed mile in junior high. Or the other times, which were all coincidences, weren’t they? More likely to happen than not when you’re dealing with heedless kids and the temperatures of southern California.

It’s not fair the way they blamed her, either: not out loud, not directly, because it wouldn’t be cool to admit, in this day and age, that they actually believed those old stories about the Noon Witch. But everyone was at least a little superstitious, and everyone would rather play things safe. So early in her childhood, Hailey stopped getting invited to picnics and pool parties, beach days and any other activity deemed high-risk for a maybe-possibly-Noon-Witch to attend. Teachers eyed her sideways at recess. Becca Smolina refused to be on her Frisbee golf team in gym.

And through it all, her last friend, her only friend, was her music collection, with its howling riffs and lyrics about standing alone. Music was there for her all those years while she told herself to be patient, that this was temporary. That at least when high school was over, this all would end.

So it’s especially unfair that that wasn’t the case. That her mom’s reputation followed her all those years, and when she graduated, it followed her still. For some reason, Hailey thought that when she went on to the local community college to get her degree in business administration, things would be different. That the college, being on the other side of town, would be a whole new world, and the students wouldn’t be the same ones she’d had in every class growing up.

But a bad reputation is a kind of story, and stories love to travel. And sure enough, her first semester, an unseasonably warm fall rolled into an unseasonably warm winter, and no one wanted to study with her in the quad.

Not fair, not fair, not fair, Hailey writes in her journal. Hates college. Hates her situation. Hates that she’s apparently never going to be able to be her own person. Every day, her “hate” column is full and her “like” column is mostly new bands she’s been trying out since that electropop group she used to like went all unbearable eighties synth explosion.

And that’s when it hits her. She’ll show them. She’ll prove to them, once and for all, that she’s not the Noon Witch—not the one they’re thinking of, anyway.

This year, she’s going to Sound Planet.

• • • •

Sound Planet takes place the third weekend in April, just as the days are getting longer and the nights warmer and every kid in America is aching for summer break to start. It’s held on the same site every year, in a sprawling meadow in a desert valley a few hours due east of LA. Everyone says the drive there is brutal, a whole bunch of hot, flat nothing. But eventually the pavement and tumbleweeds give way to fields of poppies and purple and yellow wildflowers, and a big wooden welcome sign with letters twenty feet tall. And next to the sign, a line of festival attendees wait to take their picture with it, to collect proof that they, in fact, have arrived.

The music festival has been the talk of Simi Valley since Hailey can remember. The buzz starts when the lineup’s announced, picks up when tickets go on sale, and reaches new heights in March, when all the outdoor stores start offering discounts on their entry-level tents: the kind of tents that people buy for a weekend of late nights and bad sleep at Sound Planet, then shove to the backs of their closets and never think about again. You only have to be sixteen to go, which means Hailey’s had a couple shots already. Except no way anyone’s inviting sunstroke incarnate to a desert festival.

Hailey’s plan is simple. So everyone thinks she’s a monster? So everyone thinks she was put on this earth to make them sick? Well, joke’s on them. She’s going to go to Sound Planet, the most extreme, exposed environment she can think of, and when everyone comes out of it hunky-dory, the picture of good health, they’ll have no choice but to believe her.

So when she gets the four-person tent with double vestibules at Epic Sports Simi Valley, it’s not because she has three friends to go with. It’s because she needs space for her supplies.

In the Noon Witch’s safety kit for happy campers, there are: twenty gallons of filtered water, two hundred chocolate-cherry energy bars, ninety electrolyte gel packets, sixty wide-brimmed straw hats, fifteen family-size bottles of sunscreen, a mini cooler stuffed with ice packs and Gatorades, five extra shade structures, at least three dozen battery-powered hand fans, and as many assorted snacks as she can grab from the pantry without earning a lecture from her parents on whether she thinks grocery money grows on trees.

She blows almost all her savings on it. She would have packed more if she could have, but then again, the Corolla can only hold so much. When her mom sees her packing up the car on Friday morning, she brings out a party-size bag of corn chips Hailey must’ve missed.

“Don’t let those kids get to you, honey,” her mother says. “It’s not your life’s mission to change their minds.” She’s wearing her house slippers, and the black asphalt of the driveway absorbs the heat pouring out from her soles.

Hailey tosses the chips on top of everything else and slams the trunk door shut. “I bet I know what you’d say my life’s mission is.”

Her mom sighs. “Now, don’t you think I know my daughter better than that? Besides, Polevoi has that more or less taken care of.”

“Uncle Polevoi?”

“We always called him your uncle, yes. But he’s more, let’s say, my counterpart. Anyway, he has five children now. Five! All with the powers, and all but one are carrying them on.”

“What about the other one?” Hailey remembers the smiling faces on the Polevois’ Christmas card stuck to their fridge.

Her mom shakes her head and laughs. “She’s a dentist now, believe it or not. No interest in the family business whatsoever. She just opened her own practice in Moscow.”

“I believe it. Why wouldn’t I believe it?” Hailey says defensively. “People believe crazy things all the time.”

Her mother looks at her sadly, then kisses her forehead and smooths her hair, dyed last night and already fading to the pale wheat color of her own. When they hug goodbye, it’s awkward, like hugs can sometimes be between teenage girls and their parents. Nevertheless, Hailey has to admit there’s something pleasant about it. It’s cozy between the two of them. Exceptionally warm.

• • • •

By the time Hailey arrives at Sound Planet, the edges of the meadow are already littered with clear plastic cups and a peppy blend of funk and acid jazz is wafting over the parking lot from the main stage. She lugs her stuff to the adjacent camping area, finds an empty spot, and sets up her tent—because she’s in a hurry, a little haphazardly, not bothering to clear rocks out of the way or stake the corners down. Then she throws the basics of her kit into a backpack and marches out onto the grounds.

Sound Planet is pretty much the worst place to be if you’re trying to avoid sunstroke, whether or not the fabled Noon Witch is there. Wide-open meadow, not a single tree or wisp of cloud cover to speak of. Bright-eyed festival goers bouncing feverishly from stage to stage, from stage to Bikram yoga session, from there to a friendly hula-hooping competition, then to interactive art installations, vendors selling fur coats in psychedelic patterns, tetrahedron jungle gyms whose metal rungs are almost too hot to touch. Themed bars sling vodka slushies and light beers the color of liquid gold and dare to call themselves, in chalkboard writing over the bar, Official Sound Planet Hydration Stations.

And if anyone remembers to stop by the food court to shove something down their gullets before throwing themselves back toward some dance floor or mosh pit, well, Hailey doesn’t see it.

What she sees is throngs of people in bikini bottoms and mesh tank tops, jumping up and down with the beat, cramming into hammocks, and lolling together in the sun. And the music is legitimately good, she has to admit, perfect for the atmosphere and not overproduced. And it all feels so wonderful, so much like something she wants to be a part of, until she checks her phone and sees the temperature: 101 degrees.

She adjusts the pack on her shoulders and gets to work. She jogs from group to group, passing out hats and spray bottles and reminding people of the location of each of the festival’s four medical tents. It doesn’t take long for her to run into Becca Smolina, who everyone knows goes to all the festivals. Becca’s next in line at the henna station, and when Hailey walks by, Becca flinches sharply and leans over to whisper something in her friend’s ear.

“What, are you a nurse or something?” A gangly, freckled kid farther down the line looks Hailey up and down skeptically. He motions for his friend to pass him a drink, and she squeezes a glob of sunscreen into his outstretched hand.

“Something like that.” She smiles politely, then moves on to what looks like a combination meditation-acroyoga class nearby. They’re in the pose where one person is lying on their back with their legs in the air, holding their partner on their feet so it looks like the other person is flying. Hailey walks toward them, this happy flock, and almost feels guilty interrupting. But then the sun glints off the sequins on one yogi’s shorts and Hailey, remembering its ruthless presence, quickens her pace.

Hailey thinks about collective nouns a lot. Flocks, herds, pods, swarms. Names for pluralities. Groups of people being together, not alone.

After sunset, Sound Planet really gets going. The best bands play back-to-back sets to crowds waving glow sticks and flashing LED bracelets, and the whole meadow comes alive with strobe lights and laser shows. After sunset, in the gentle dark, Hailey doesn’t have to worry.

She watches the colors flicker through the fabric of her tent—fuchsia, aquamarine, electric green—as she crawls, exhausted, into her sleeping bag and shoves a pair of earplugs into her ears. She can feel the foam expanding inside her ear canals, hear the music fading, leaving only the steady vibration of the bass against the ground.

It’s comforting, almost. Feels like it’s coming not from the stages but from somewhere deep, deep within the earth. It makes her think of a mother rocking a baby, the way the baby can feel the hum of the mother’s song through her chest.

Her mom must’ve done stuff like that, too, Hailey imagines. Even if she was too little to remember. Even if a lot of the time, it felt like she was the Noon Witch first and Hailey’s mom second. What she does remember is that they never had gas and electric bills like Hailey’s classmates did, that her mom could light a stove with the point of a finger and boil a pot of water just by holding it and pull sunbeams into a chilly room with the swipe of her hand. Hailey remembers, too, that she could never fake being sick to get out of a test at school. Her mom knew a real fever when she saw one, and you couldn’t trick her with all the hot water bottles and theatrical sneezing in the world.

But whatever annoyances her mom dealt Hailey growing up, they were nothing compared to the effect she had, and still has, on her father. Because Nate is mortal, like Grischa, like all the field workers, he’s more susceptible to the Noon Witch’s powers. Which means he’s never gotten used to the above-average temperature of their house, or the way every night their bedroom, as she snores, basically becomes a sauna.

“A small price to pay,” he always says, smiling at his wife adoringly, throwing another load of undershirts into the wash. He sweats through them so quickly that their machine seems to run around the clock.

That’s what the repeated thump of the bass reminds Hailey of most of all: the spin cycle, the persistent banging of wet clothes against metal drum. The soundtrack of her childhood.

She’s thinking about the goopy blue of liquid laundry detergent, the piercing blue of stage lights, as she drifts off to sleep.

• • • •

When Hailey wakes on Saturday, the inside of her tent is already—she checks—ninety-five degrees, and outside she hears what sounds like a stream of water falling onto something hard and plastic.

She scrambles out of her sleeping bag and hurriedly unzips the tent door, blinking against the morning light. She’s about to yell out something about the imprudence of water waste and how everyone should be accounting for 1.5 gallons per person per day, when her worst nightmare materializes before her eyes.

Her ex, Leshy.

The problem with Leshy is he’s one of those people who looks good in pretty much anything he puts on, including the paisley harem pants, leopard-print top hat, and steampunk goggles that Hailey is sure he picked up from one of the stands as soon as he got in. Leshy is like that, has this uncanny ability to fit in anywhere. Even though his hair is the color of uncut grass and falls, tangled, all the way to his hips, and even though when he walks up to you it’s like the sound of trees falling.

So when Hailey peeks her head out of her tent and sees him with his ridiculous harem pants pushed down, taking a leak on the side of a porta-potty, her first thought is, jeez, what a gross thing to do.

And her second thought is that if anyone could look good doing this gross thing—absurdly, annoyingly good—it would be Leshy. As if he doesn’t have enough superpowers.

When he’s done, he steps aside to admire his handiwork, and Hailey sees that, on the blue plastic, he’s written his name. Not Leshy, but his other name.

Scott.

His two older brothers, the others in the current Leshy line, come around the sides of the porta-potty, pulling up their matching sparkly gold leggings and absolutely laughing their heads off. One reaches up to slap the other high-five when Scott turns his head and spots Hailey filling her pack with Gatorades and energy bars.

“Well, well, well. If it isn’t the world-famous Noon Witch.”

The other problem with Scott, and any Leshy for that matter—his brothers and their father, now retired, too—is that he’s a total troublemaker. Mischievous woodland spirits like him are the reason that people like Hailey’s classmates take the storybooks literally and fear the old days and think that the old magic, passed down, will be used against them in the same ways. All through high school, he made a habit of shapeshifting into wolves and bears, scaring everyone in his gated community senseless. For his senior prank, he coaxed two hundred porcupines out of Los Padres National Forest and left them in the girls’ locker room.

Now here he is, heading straight for Hailey’s tent with his skin like beech bark and his eyes like distant stars. And even though they only dated for, like, four months in the tenth grade, she gets a knot in the pit of her stomach like she’s still hoping he’ll ask her to the homecoming dance.

He pushes his goggles farther up on his forehead and grins. “Hot as ever, I see.” Hailey rolls her eyes. He always made stupid jokes like that when they were together. Hot, sizzling, scorching. Bringing the heat. Making ’em hurt. Man killer. That Hailey was unpopular at school never bothered Scott. He isn’t like her; he doesn’t spare a thought for the opinions of mortals.

Hailey arranges her face in what she hopes is a detached smirk. “I told you, it’s just Hailey. Not Noon Witch. Shouldn’t you be at that other festival anyway? What’s it called, the one in the forest?”

“Back of the Mountain,” one of the brothers chimes in. Sam or Sean or Steve, Hailey can’t remember.

Scott nods. “We were just there. Came, saw, conquered. Kind of a bust this year, actually. It’s not exactly a challenge getting people lost in the woods when they’re already going willingly, for a preplanned midnight drum circle or whatever.”

“Or a guided microdosed nature walk,” the other brother adds, looking disgusted. “With maps and flashlights and GPS.” The three shake their heads in unison like they’re wondering what this world is coming to.

“Bummer,” Hailey says, jostling her pack to make extra space at the top for a couple of hand fans. “Sucks that you’re having a hard time luring people to their deaths.”

Scott whistles his familiar whistle, like wind through the tops of poplar trees. “Shots fired and landed, Noon Witch. But don’t be so dramatic. We’re not as big on the death part as your crew.” He pokes her pack with a bare foot. “What’s all this?”

Hailey has no interest in explaining herself to Scott, in part because now her phone says ninety-seven degrees and she’s on a schedule, but mostly because she knows he won’t get it. While she refuses to take up her mother’s work—ever since they read a Noon Witch story during story circle in daycare and she saw the looks of horror in the other kids’ eyes—Scott and his brothers are all too happy to follow in their dad’s footsteps. Hailey’s mom and Scott’s dad knew each other back in Russia, worked in different districts but ended up moving to the States around the same time. But while Leshy married Samodiva, the vindictive forest nymph, making their three sons full-bloods, Hailey’s mom always had a soft spot for mortals. A trait she apparently passed down to her daughter.

“Wait.” One of the brothers kneels down to get a closer look. “Is this SPF 95? I didn’t even know they made it that high.”

“Noon Witch, Noon Witch, Noon Witch,” Scott chides, furrowing his bushy eyebrows into a show of disappointment. “You didn’t come all the way out here to help these people, did you?”

“These people are my friends.”

“Oh, they’re your friends, huh? My bad. Which ones are you here with?” Scott casts his head around, pointing to a shirtless guy playing ukulele to the right of them, then a group of girls hot-gluing jewels onto each other’s shoulders to the left.

Hailey crosses her arms, indignant. “They could be my friends, is what I mean. Anyway, you”—she thrusts her chin at Scott—“shouldn’t be pissing on festival property. But if you must, at least pay attention to the color. Dark yellow is a sure sign of dehydration.” Then she picks up her pack, gives them a tight-lipped smile, and walks briskly out of the campground.

Behind her back, she hears the brothers jeering: “When’d she turn into such a narc?” and “Gee, thanks, Mom!” She wonders if she ever really liked Scott, and if he ever really liked her, or if they only got together because people expected it: the Noon Witch and Leshy, how perfect is that? Regardless, those days were some of her darkest, the most painful for her to remember. She isn’t proud of the way she acted back then. She was right by his side while he terrorized his neighbors; he howled at their dogs and she blew out their AC. On her sixteenth birthday, he took her to a sketchy tattoo parlor that he knew wouldn’t card them and they got tiny matching wolf tattoos.

Still, fond and not-so-fond memories aside, she can’t let Scott’s presence at Sound Planet derail her. In fact, she’ll probably have to work twice as hard now, to counteract whatever havoc the brothers Leshy are sure to wreak.

• • • •

It’s a big enough festival, with enough hair-braiding stations, body-painting stations, and chakra-centering stations, that Hailey doesn’t cross paths with Scott again for most of the day. A rush of people came in overnight, since the most popular bands play on Saturday, so the meadow is even busier than before. There’s Chris Babin-Roberts from AP English maneuvering a remote-controlled truck through a sandpit. And there’s Alex Pasternak playing hackysack with a few kids Hailey doesn’t recognize. He looks like he’s had about four growth spurts since she last saw him. When a wayward kick sends the hackysack flying in her direction, Alex starts jogging over to retrieve it, then he sees her standing there and pivots quickly back to his friends.

The more Hailey walks past groups drinking and dancing and snapping silly pictures together, the more alone she feels. The people she knows from home—and there are quite a lot of them—keep a safe distance because, to them, she’s the Noon Witch. The people she doesn’t know—and there are plenty of those too—don’t give her the time of day because, to them, she’s nobody. She sees Becca Smolina again, walking toward the frozen slushie stand between two friends, their elbows interlocked, and she thinks about tossing them a few energy bars, like a nutritionally balanced olive branch. But the way Becca rolls her eyes when she sees Hailey, the way she steers her friends in a wide, dramatic semi-circle around her, Hailey can’t take it anymore. She doesn’t know what comes over her; she swore she’d never use her powers against mortals. But by the time Becca and her friends get their blue raspberry slushies, they’re melted down to a pool of sugar water. The way the three sip happily, though, it’s hard to tell if they mind.

Still, Hailey never feels more alone than when she’s trying to erect the E-Z UP.

The sun has reached its peak in the sky, and she’s collected herself after the slushie incident and restocked her supplies twice, when she encounters a group of women twirling batons in the middle of the meadow. She waits for a break in the music to pass around what she’s come to think of as her keep-sunstroke-at-bay goody bag, but when the music stops, the twirlers keep going. It’s as if they’re in a trance: they move in slow, synchronized circles, the batons spinning around their wrists and elbows, the tops of their pinkening arms. When she suggests a water break, they show no signs they’ve heard her.

So Hailey does the one thing she can think of. She runs back to her tent and grabs an E-Z UP.

The most poorly named product in Hailey’s kit, hands down, the E-Z UP is meant to go up easily and instead takes her forty-five minutes and all her remaining strength and patience to assemble. The directions packaged with the shade structure are for two people, so Hailey figures that’s part of it. But with the wind blowing the canopy off every ten seconds and one of the legs dropping to the ground just when she gets the other three extended, she thinks it would take an army to do this. And an army is the one thing she forgot to pack.

She’s just about ready to give up and resort to steering the baton twirlers toward safety at the nearest campground when, in a blaze of red hair and crochet, Laurel appears.

If Scott and his brothers are the bad crowd Hailey fell in with in high school, Laurel is the worse crowd she managed to avoid. If there’s anything that could have made Hailey even more untouchable than she already is, it would have been that.

Laurel is a year younger than Hailey, in the second semester of her senior year, and Hailey thinks it’ll be a miracle if she graduates with the rest of her class in May. That’s because Laurel is what the guidance counselor, Ms. Merrill, would call “a wayward young person”: she simply won’t be told what to do. And as far as Hailey has observed, getting through high school is almost entirely dependent on doing the things a series of older people—teachers, parents, coaches, Ms. Merrill—demand. But Laurel hardly ever shows up to class, and when she does, she doesn’t pay attention to the lecture, choosing instead to draw little permanent-marker doodles on her arms or read from the romance novel in her lap.

It’s not that she isn’t smart, or good at other things. Hailey remembers her being an amazing runner, actually. She was poised to become captain of the track team until one day, at the regional meet her junior year, just as she was rounding her final lap, she slowed down and, of all things, she began to skip. Afterwards, when someone from the local paper interviewed her about why on earth she would do such a thing, she shrugged and said she wanted to see what it felt like. And when he asked, okay, what does it feel like, she said that it was really interesting. That when you’re bouncing, you can really feel the rubber in the track.

He said, he meant what does it feel like to lose regionals single-handedly, by just four points.

Hailey figures Laurel’s acting out because she’s the principal’s kid. Principal Stucky is this imposing, mustachioed man who puts the flag up himself every morning before announcements and who Hailey only ever saw wear one of three things: a well-pressed suit, a Santa Susana High jacket on game days, or a Stanford hoodie. Rumor has it he still hopes Laurel will go to college there, like her old man, after the gap year she’s announced she’s taking. But fat chance Laurel is going to do anything just because someone else has done it.

“You need a hand with that?” she asks cheerfully. She’s wearing a crochet halter top and a matching crochet skirt, and Hailey winces when she sees the holes in the knit, all the places the sun can get through.

“Sure,” Hailey says, glancing at the welt forming on her hand where it got pinched by one of the E-Z UP’s metal joints. “That’d be great, actually.”

Nearby, the baton twirlers are still at it. Laurel grabs one side of the canopy and motions in their direction. “What’s with them? Hypnosis?”

“Sun poisoning, probably,” Hailey mutters.

Laurel laughs. “Nah, they’re just in the zone. I used to get that way at track practice. It’s easy when you’re all wearing the same thing, doing the same thing, to get kind of locked in, you know? To go on automatic. Like you’re part of the herd.”

Hailey shakes her head and starts stretching her side of the canopy over the legs. “They’re like robots. It’s creepy.”

“I wonder what a herd of robots is called.”

Hailey thinks. “An intelligence? A google?”

“How about a beep-boop.” Laurel puts on an exaggerated robot voice: “Beep-boop, beep-boop—band?”

The two girls laugh.

Her classmates have always been allergic to Laurel, in part because no one knows what she’s going to do next, which is an uncomfortable feeling, and in part because, whatever it is, it’s probably going to piss off the principal, and they don’t want any part in that.

But Hailey has one good memory of Laurel, from back when they were in elementary together. It was before the incident at the botanical gardens, so she was still getting occasional invites to parties, the ones kids’ parents sent out of obligation to everybody in the class. At this one party, Phil Kozlovsky’s seventh birthday, Phil said his only wish that year was for the Noon Witch to light his birthday candles. And Hailey said she didn’t think she could do that, and Phil whined please, please, and his mom and dad stood there holding the cake twelve inches, then six inches, then four inches from her face with expectant looks in their eyes. Everyone else was staring at her, half-interested but mostly hungry and annoyed at having to wait, and one particularly grumbly kid asked another, “Why won’t she just do the trick already?” Hailey was on the verge of tears, trying to concentrate on the seven candles spiraled like barbershop poles, willing something, anything to happen, as the minutes ticked painfully by, when finally young Laurel pushed her way to the front of the crowd and shoved her whole hand into the cake.

“I’m bored,” she said, bringing the crumbling fistful of funfetti to her mouth. “She doesn’t wanna do it. Let’s eat.”

Laurel rescued Hailey then and now she’s rescuing her again. Before Hailey knows it, the E-Z UP is erected and they’re lifting it over the mesmerized baton twirlers, bathing them in sweet, merciful shade. One tosses her baton and it bounces against the fabric ceiling, then plummets to the ground.

“Here,” Hailey says, digging a travel tube of sunscreen from her pack. “Take this. As a thank-you.”

Laurel brings it closer, inspecting it like the weird gift it is, then tucks it into the waistband of her skirt. “I gotta get going. But maybe I’ll catch you later. I like your hair, by the way. The faded thing looks good on you.”

Hailey feels her face grow hot and takes a step back under the shade structure. Laurel’s own hair is wild and curly, a strawberry red that looks unwashed and muted from the dust it’s picked up over the past two days. It swishes to and fro as Laurel skips in the direction of the food court.

“Stay cool!” Hailey shouts after her, and immediately regrets it. It makes her sound like a mom, like she’s from a different decade, a different century. Even though she meant it literally.

• • • •

If problem one with the youngest Leshy is that he looks infuriatingly good in everything, and problem two is that he’s always up to no good, problem three is his magnetic personality—people are inexplicably drawn to him. So Hailey isn’t surprised when she finds him surrounded by a mob of people between two competing kombucha stands two hours before sundown. What surprises her is that Laurel is among them.

Hailey’s making her last rounds of the day, distributing water bottles, laying straw hats over the faces of sleeping people who have dozed off away from their tents, in broad daylight, still worn out from Friday night’s shows. Today was harder than yesterday. She even had to break out the ice packs, a last resort, for a guy in a tie-dye jumpsuit who was complaining of dizziness and kept calling his fanny pack Fanny, carrying on whole conversations with it like it was his dog. She managed to bring him back from the brink, but she knows tomorrow will be even harder. After that, though, it’ll be over. Sound Planet will be a wrap and she’ll be out from the Noon Witch’s shadow at last.

Last night, she was too tired to go to any of the shows, even though some of the headliners looked pretty awesome. She can already tell this evening will be no different. And here’s Leshy having the time of his life, in the same paisley pants and a sequined vest this time, and he’s teaching the crowd around him how to glove.

Gloving is . . . an art? Hailey guesses. A skill? In the way anything, if one person knows how to do it and another doesn’t, could be considered a skill. It involves making shapes with your hands and fingers, shapes that look cool, allegedly, when it’s dark and you’re wearing light-up gloves and everyone around you is drunk or high or both. It’s also called finger dancing, Scott explains, and demonstrates by performing a move he calls the combo figure-eight stacked finger roll.

Hailey thinks it might be the stupidest thing she’s ever seen.

The gangly kid from Friday is there, trying to mirror what Scott’s doing and looking instead like he’s playing the air piano, and badly. Others are too transfixed to move, lost in the changing, liquid space between Scott’s palms. Laurel is sitting cross-legged before him, her mouth slightly agape.

Which seems rather unlike Laurel, Hailey thinks: one, to let something hold her attention for so long, and two, to blend so perfectly into a crowd.

And that’s when she realizes it.

“Leshy,” she hisses into his ear, yanking him out from the circle. “You can’t enchant these people. I know what you’re doing.”

“Ah, Noon Witch.” He grins, letting his hands drop to his sides. “I was wondering when I’d bump into you again. Glad to see you’ve come around on the family names.”

“I haven’t. It’s still Hailey. And quit trying to change the subject.”

He sighs. “Okay, Hailey. Why not? You know who we are.” He waves toward his brothers, who Hailey now notices are holding their own gloving seminars nearby. “You know why we’re here. It’s our nature, baby.” He winks. “Terrible pun intended. So why don’t we leave you to your little, uh,”—he searches for the word—“mission? And you leave us to ours.”

“Because your mission is frying these people’s brains,” Hailey objects. She can feel a migraine coming on. “How long have you had them out here? Two hours? Four?” She frantically feels around inside her near-empty pack and pulls out one of those novelty umbrella hats, shoving it onto the first head she finds.

“Give it a rest, Noon Witch. We’re just going to take them to the reservoir a few miles up.”

“And, what, drown them?”

Hailey can sense Scott losing patience. His hair, usually soft and green as groundcover in a forest grove, is turning brown and brittle at the tips. “Statistically unlikely. Probably they can swim just fine. And if they can’t,” he scoffs, “what are they doing in California?”

“Wait, you mean the reservoir past the festival grounds? They can’t go there. It’s no reentry. Once you leave, you’re not allowed back in.”

Scott’s eyes sparkle. “Now you’re getting it.” Then he pats her shoulder and returns to his admirers. Laurel, Hailey’s horrified to find, has progressed to drooling.

No way. No way. Hailey feels the panic welling, feels she must look like a cartoon character, the kind with smoke coming out of their ears. No way is she going to let the lesser Leshys lead a hundred people into the desert and strand them there with no shade besides the occasional skinny Joshua tree and—she can’t be sure about the reservoir, but since the Leshys are involved, she’s willing to bet—no potable water. She’s so close, so close, to a complete Sound Planet weekend with zero casualties. No chance in hell she’s going to watch it happen and then take the blame.

The Noon Witch is not a cat person. She likes the color purple, hates police procedurals, likes roller coasters and nail polish, loves breakfast foods—hey, breakfast foods. She hasn’t had a good pancake in a couple of days. Come to think of it, she hasn’t had much of anything. Which is why, when she storms the main stage at Sound Planet just as the Saturday sunset show is about to start, her stomach is growling and her head’s getting fuzzy and her legs are a little weak.

But the Noon Witch has a job to do, so she doesn’t notice.

The openers are a croony dream-pop trio: a strange choice, Hailey thinks, for the twelve-piece jamgrass band that’s scheduled to follow. The audience that’s gathered isn’t dancing much, just kind of swaying absentmindedly and tapping on their phones, and Hailey almost feels bad for the band and what she’s about to do. Until she sees one of them plug in the synth.

All the missed barbecues and block parties of her childhood flash in quick succession before her eyes. All the party dresses her mom made for her that she never got to wear. The time she went out for Star Scouts and they said they lost the paperwork. The time she signed up for sleepaway camp and they said, darn it, they’d just filled the last slot, isn’t that rotten luck, so she spent the whole summer in her room, alone, just like all the other summers. Just her and her headphones and the music. And her blood boiling, Noon Witch style.

She climbs the steps and there’s even a little “Woop!” from the onlookers, like maybe this set won’t put them to sleep after all. Like maybe this surprise guest, with her furious expression and her purple-blonde hair matted into a nest is going to liven things up a bit. When she gets to the center of the stage, she drops the oversize backpack from her shoulders, revealing pale strips of skin where the straps used to be, and on either side of them, deep crimson red.

The croony trio stops crooning and makes confused gestures at each other behind her. Staring out at the crowd, Hailey sways side to side, almost losing her balance, struck by a sudden blast of doubt. Her resolve weakens. Maybe Leshy is right. All the energy she’s put into helping these people, her ceaseless running around, and has a single one of them shown an ounce of gratitude? A word of thanks or a friendly nod? It would be easier to just do it, to be exactly who they think she is. It didn’t feel bad, actually, melting Becca’s slushie earlier. It almost felt good. She thinks about how not-bad-almost-good it would feel to melt something else. Someone else, the way her mother did it, cooking those farmers’ insides. She imagines what the Leshys would look like with their green hair on fire, knowing forests burn fast.

She loves the image as much as she hates it; she holds the two feelings inside her at once. Then she pushes it—that ugly, dangerous thing—out of her mind.

Hailey grabs the mic stand with both hands, leans forward until she feels the cool metal crosshatch on her lips, and lets a thought run through her head that’s part spell, part prayer, part promise:

No sunstroke on my watch.

Then she screams.

She screams and she screams, and Sound Planet has never heard anything like it. She death-metal screams, crust-punk screams, full-volume-screamo-on-the-Corolla-stereo screams. Some screams take the shape of words, like “Leave them alone!” and “Get away!” while others are more guttural, animal, like from a time before people had language, a time before Noon Witches were even around. The festival’s state-of-the-art sound system amplifies her voice so that it punctures everything on the meadow: every train of thought, every conversation, and every malicious enchantment—if you believe in such things.

She sees the first of the Leshy brothers’ followers snap out of their stupor and turn, bewildered, toward the stage. Then several more. They all blink, disoriented, looking first at Scott gloving manically at them, desperate to keep their attention, then at Hailey, red-faced, veiny-necked, eyes bulging, then they shake their heads and walk away. One by one, they pull themselves back to themselves and the Leshys’ crowd dissipates, until fewer than ten remain.

Among them, Hailey sees Laurel.

The group stands in unison, still under the spell, and follows the brothers away from the stage, toward the fence that separates Sound Planet from the rest of the world. And still Hailey screams, louder than ever. High and low, mad and plaintive, until it sounds almost like a song.

Hailey leaves her guts on the stage.

Then she passes out, flat on her face.

• • • •

When Hailey wakes up in med tent three, she can see dusk on the other side of the open canvas flaps. Good, she thinks, she isn’t too late, and throws her legs over the side of the cot.

An ice-cold IV tugs at the inside of her elbow.

“Hey, you’re up!” Laurel stands from a nearby camping chair, a stack of thumbed-through comic books spread out on the ground beside her. “Not so fast, though. We gotta get one of the medics to give the green light before you go.”

“You. You’re.” Hailey’s head is pounding. Her mouth feels like it’s holding an entire sleeve of cotton rounds and she’s finding it impossible to form a complete sentence.

“Me, I’m, yes. I’m here. In the flesh.” Laurel does a little twirl and the fringe on her suede pants swings back and forth. Hailey eyes the fringe ruefully. For the first time since arriving at Sound Planet, she wishes she’d stopped by one of the stands selling festival attire.

“But. I thought. You went with Leshy, didn’t you? Scott, I mean.”

“Oh, yeah. I did.” Laurel peers around the tent, trying to flag down a medic. “It was fun for a while. But then I was kind of over it. Then we passed by this pierogi stand that smelled so good. Much better than the stuff at the food court. And I was like, bye!”

“And you just . . . left?”

“Well, yeah. My dad makes these amazing mushroom pierogis. He says they’re the best recipe west of the Rockies.” Laurel scrunches her nose and smiles. “So I had to try these and report back.”

Hailey feels dizzy, like the med tent’s thick beige fabric is a long spinning skirt she’s trapped under. She pulls her legs back onto the cot. “I thought you and your dad didn’t get along.”

Laurel shrugs. “We get along fine. I mean, he’s a bit much sometimes, with his up-at-five thing and his rah-rah-Stanford thing. But it could be worse.”

Hailey leans back and closes her eyes, willing the spinning to stop. “But the skipping class and the quitting track. I guess I just thought you didn’t want to be like him.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning. . .” Hailey flushes. “He’s the boss of the school. And he has everything one-hundred-percent together.”

Laurel looks surprised. “I don’t want to be like him. He always talks about me making something of my life, and right now I’m just trying to have fun.” She frowns and turns her attention to her left pant leg, fingering an especially long strand of fringe. “But I don’t want to not be like him either. Not specifically. You know what I mean? I don’t want to be the opposite of someone else. I just want to be myself.”

Hailey nods. She thinks about her lists of likes and dislikes, and how many of those things are related to her mom. Like brownies with walnuts: does she really hate those? Or is she just remembering the time her mom made a batch as a pick-me-up after Hailey got uninvited from a pumpkin-patch trip with some of the kids from school?

“They can’t uninvite you,” her mother argued.

“What do you mean, they can’t? Of course they can. They can and they did,” Hailey snapped. And when she cried that night, her mom did too, and their tears dried the instant they hit their faces, as Noon Witch tears tend to do. But Hailey didn’t remember that part, until now. All she remembered was the awful taste the walnuts left in her mouth.

Maybe Laurel’s right. Hailey could try to be her own thing, instead of her mother’s opposite. Or maybe it’s silly to take advice from someone who, just like her, has no friends, and is no better off.

A medic comes by and takes Hailey’s temperature, raises an eyebrow, and scribbles something on a notepad. “Bit higher than we like to see. But promise you’ll take it easy the rest of the day and you should be good to go.” She begins to unhook the IV, glancing at the clock hanging on one of the tent walls. “And not a moment too soon. Gates close in an hour. We’re closing up shop here, too.”

Hailey realizes the tent is entirely empty except for the three of them. “An hour . . .?”

“That’s right, sleepyhead,” Laurel beams. “You snoozed the whole day away. I’m not exactly shocked. Seems like you’ve been running on empty.”

The medic grunts in agreement. “First festival, huh? Fluids are gonna be your best friend at these things. Sunscreen. Shade. Salty snacks. Plenty of rest. Sunstroke’s one of the most common issues on the festival circuit, but that doesn’t mean it should be taken lightly.”

Laurel puts her hands on her hips and wags a finger at Hailey. “Yes, you really must take better care of yourself.”

The medic rolls her eyes and hands Hailey a pamphlet with KNOW THE SIGNS printed in big orange letters above a sun-drenched field of wheat. “Weird thing is, we didn’t see any other cases this year. The whole staff thought we might set a record. But then some kids brought you in.”

Hailey flashes a look of appreciation at Laurel, but Laurel says, “Don’t look at me. Pierogi quest, remember? Anyway, you didn’t miss much. Sunday’s shows are always too mellow for my taste. And yours too, clearly!”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you totally turned your powers up on that stage last night. Sound Planet will never be the same.”

Hailey balks at this and heaves herself off the cot. When Laurel offers her hand for balance, she swats it away.

“I did not use my powers. I don’t use them like that, on people, ever. The whole reason I came to this stupid festival is because—”

“Hey, hey.” Laurel holds her hands up like trying to call a truce. “I meant your voice. Very cool, very death growl. I heard it rattled the jungle gyms all the way in camp zone two. Major superpower.”

Hailey relaxes and thinks back on the previous night, grinning in spite of herself. “I don’t know about that. But I’ll agree it’s better than your”—she mimics Laurel’s impression from earlier, swinging one arm at the elbow to achieve the full effect—“Ro. Bot. Voice. Beep-boop. Beep-boop.”

Laurel walks Hailey back to her tent, which, because she assembled it so hastily, didn’t even bother staking it down, is laying crumpled on its side, a victim of the desert’s high winds. What’s left of her supply kit is strewn about the campground: dented gallon jugs, a half-empty water bottle bowing at the waist, a couple of hand fans missing most of their blades. And right there by one of the vestibule doors, the party-size bag of corn chips her mom brought out to the car at the very last minute, the Friday morning that’s simultaneously three days and three thousand years ago. Hailey figures time is funny like that for everyone, not just for an ageless demigod who’s still a kid.

She packs as quickly as she can.

The bag of chips is miraculously unopened. She pops it between her hands, struck by a sudden, overwhelming craving for salt and what it means: sustenance, recovery, that someone cared and cares about her. The girls pass the bag back and forth between them, crunching happily, as they walk together through the wreckage back to their cars in the waning light.

In the driver’s seat, after they’ve said their goodbyes, promised to meet up before the school year’s through, Hailey holds a chip between her fingers, studying its uneven surface. Its flecks and bubbles, rough edges and gently raised corners. She smiles to herself and toasts it lightly before tossing it in her mouth.

©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

EXCERPT: Ocean's Echo (Tor Books)

Everina Maxwell | 3945 words

Ocean’s Echo is a stand-alone space adventure about a bond that will change the fate of worlds, set in the same universe as Everina Maxwell’s hit debut, Winter’s Orbit.

Rich socialite, inveterate flirt, and walking disaster Tennalhin Halkana can read minds. Tennal, like all neuromodified “readers,” is a security threat on his own. But when controlled, readers are a rare asset. Not only can they read minds, but they can navigate chaotic space, the maelstroms surrounding the gateway to the wider universe.

Conscripted into the military under dubious circumstances, Tennal is placed into the care of Lieutenant Surit Yeni, a duty-bound soldier, principled leader, and the son of a notorious traitor general. Whereas Tennal can read minds, Surit can influence them. Like all other neuromodified “architects,” he can impose his will onto others, and he’s under orders to control Tennal by merging their minds.

Surit accepted a suspicious promotion-track request out of desperation, but he refuses to go through with his illegal orders to sync and control an unconsenting Tennal. So they lie: They fake a sync bond and plan Tennal’s escape.

Their best chance arrives with a salvage-retrieval mission into chaotic space―to the very neuromodifcation lab that Surit’s traitor mother destroyed twenty years ago. And among the rubble is a treasure both terrible and unimaginably powerful, one that upends a decades-old power struggle, and begins a war.

Tennal and Surit can no longer abandon their unit or their world. The only way to avoid life under full military control is to complete the very sync they’ve been faking.

Can two unwilling weapons of war bring about peace?

Available now from Tor Books.

CHAPTER 1

Tennalhin Halkana arrived at the party fashionably late, which might have meant something if he’d been invited in the first place. Tennal often set out to make trouble, it was true, but this evening, he was genuinely here for a drink and a good time.

That was a lie. He also wanted an architect, and this party would be full of architects.

The party was in the penthouse of the most exclusive hotel in the city. It was a glittering front for an underground gambling ring, so it was full of dangerous people, but Tennal had stopped caring who he mingled with some time ago. Tennal floated from one gambling meetup to another these days, always just interesting enough to be kept around, never involved enough to get in serious trouble. As a lifestyle, it had its ups and downs. As an escape plan, it was an amateur one, but he could keep it going as long as he had to. He just needed the right architect.

He didn’t risk the private drone service ferrying people up to the balcony. Instead Tennal flirted his way past security in the hotel lobby and walked into the elevator as if he belonged there. There was no security at the penthouse door. People didn’t go to this kind of party uninvited, but Tennal had found there were very few things you couldn’t do if you didn’t care about fucking up. Tennal was low on money, low on options, and didn’t have a lot left to lose.

The penthouse was a dark fug of noise and low-level sensory vibrations. It was dimly lit by colored glows under tables and light filaments like sprays of vivid flowers in the corners. Dozens of people gathered around various games, or the bar, or smaller tables where more serious business was being done. Under the talking and the music, there was the low, vibrating drone that people on certain chemical substances found enjoyably hypnotic. Some people were obviously high already. Tennal was envious.

But he’d been right. There were architects.

That woman over there, with the flint-and-gold necklace and the weapon at her belt, was an architect. So was the gray-haired tough picking over the buffet. So—interestingly—was the ethereally beautiful twentysomething waif who looked like someone’s trophy boyfriend. Tennal didn’t often meet architects his own age.

None of them were that good. They weren’t slinging around mental commands at the bar or anything, but Tennal could see it: architects gave off an aura, if you knew how to look for it, like light radiating from a star. The ones he was watching were pretty faint. They might be able to take over someone’s mind for a split second, but only if they really tried. Tennal was looking for someone else. Someone better.

Of course, every architect in here would be careful what they used their mental influence for. Using it on the wrong person in the street might get you a warning from law enforcement, but in here, it might get you shot. And architects had the acceptable kind of power.

Tennal was too sober for this.

He slid into a seat at the bar and smiled glitteringly at the bartender. “What’s free?”

There was usually something free at these things. The bartender paused and squinted at him suspiciously, as if Tennal didn’t look quite wealthy enough or dangerous enough to be here. Tennal didn’t show any signs of backing off, though, and eventually a shot glass came sliding across the bar.

Might as well ask. Tennal tilted his head at the dozens of conversations behind him and said, “So, which one’s the boss?” The boss might refer to any number of people in the city of Sanura, but in here, it meant the leader of this gambling ring, the one who owned this hotel. “I was told he’s an architect.”

The bartender’s hand stopped on the table. Tennal felt a sudden spike of wariness from them. They met Tennal’s eyes and shrugged.

At that point, someone tapped Tennal on the shoulder, and he flinched.

He tried to cover up the twitch as he turned. He had to get that kind of reaction under control. If the legislator had really found him, it wasn’t as if her people were going to gently tap him on the shoulder and start a conversation.

This wasn’t much better, though. A young woman in an armored vest stared down at him, her hand resting on a holster at her hip. This was somebody’s bodyguard.

There was no security at the door for this kind of thing because everyone brought their own security. If you turned out to be law enforcement, it was very simple: you left, or somebody’s bodyguard would shoot you. Tennal wasn’t law enforcement, though if they’d known exactly who he was, he wouldn’t have totally blamed them for shooting him.

“I don’t think you were invited,” the bodyguard said.

Tennal raised his hands in front of him, fingers spread. “I’m unarmed. Promise. Unless you count three tissues and a pack of soothers—and honestly, I’d have to get very inventive.”

She gave him a thin, unimpressed stare. Flint ear studs glinted under her short hair. “I’ve seen you before.”

A jolt went through Tennal. She couldn’t know. Could she?

Tennal’s mind was always a little too open to the universe. He wasn’t an architect, because that would have made life too easy. No, he’d ended up with the unacceptable kind of powers. He nudged his senses further open, just a fraction, and read her mind.

The instant he opened himself up, a dozen minds flared in his perception. The party was crowded; each person moved in a haze of their own moods like a shimmer of light. And if architects were faint stars, pulsing with intention and influence, Tennal was the opposite. Nobody had ever told him what his mind looked like from the outside, but he had his suspicions: an unsettling void, a black hole.

As far back as he could remember, Tennal had always been aware of a low-level drone from the minds around him. It was like an indecent form of tinnitus. Random impressions drifted in his direction, and if he actively tried, he could read them: vague emotions, nonspecific intentions, nothing particularly helpful. People’s surface thoughts were seldom interesting, in any case— right now, from the crowd in the room, Tennal could feel hunger, irritation, interest, boredom. All standard.

Reading that kind of background mental drone wasn’t illegal. Not quite. After all, it was only a step above watching people’s body language; he wasn’t going any deeper. Tennal focused on the bodyguard, looking for threat.

Nothing. She wasn’t interested in threatening him, and there was none of the prurient interest that would suggest she knew who his family was. She was just fed up with her long shift, overdue for a break, and Tennal was paranoid.

“I’m just here to ask a favor from the boss,” Tennal said, leaning back against the bar. “Is that a crime?”

He could have tried announcing the reader thing, but he needed to save that for when it would make an impact. Being a reader—they were rarities—made him just scandalous enough to be interesting, and Lights knew nobody was inviting him anywhere because of his delightful personality.

She gave him one of the most unimpressed looks he’d seen in his life, and Tennal was a connoisseur of unimpressed looks. “Ask the boss for what? Three square meals and a job?” She slapped a hand on the bar to get the bartender’s attention. “You should clean up and get out of here. I hate the ones who get in over their heads.”

The bartender, who obviously knew her, slid her a plate of food. Tennal paused in the act of popping out a mild soother from the pack in his pocket. Yes, he was coming off a days-long hangover, and yes, his meals and sleep were all over the place because the concept of scheduling was fatally dull, but surely he didn’t look like that much of a mess. “I’m doing fine, but I appreciate the concern.”

She took the food without looking at Tennal. “I’m back on duty in an hour. You should be gone before then.”

“Or I could get your boss to invite me to stay,” Tennal suggested. He got a flash of irritation and knew his guess was right: she worked for the host of this party. He could use that.

“Lights,” the woman said to the ceiling, as if a divine Guidance might come to her aid and throw Tennal out a window. She jerked her head at the bartender. “Get him some food. Put it on the party tab; fuck knows these nights cost thousands. Maybe he’ll sober up and leave.”

Tennal was thrown. He opened his mouth to say he didn’t need charity—or at least not this kind, not pity—but she’d taken her sandwich and gone.

Tennal vindictively ordered the most expensive plate on the menu, the one that came with gold leaf scattered around artistic constructions of pastries and fruit. He ate the pastries while he watched the crowd and scanned for clues to the boss.

As he watched the bodyguard leave for her break, he made one more attempt to read her. He had to be careful. Reading was draining, and if he went any deeper than the surface layer, she would feel it. And if she felt it, he would be in a lot of trouble.

All he got when he tried was a pulse of vague awareness from her toward one corner of the room, where a small knot of older people had gathered to play cards.

Tennal examined the corner. The gamblers there looked like military veterans; most people with any kind of power on Orshan had been in the army at some point. Their clothes were dark, but most of them wore colored division paraphernalia: pins, medals, colored bands. They had their own private drinks cart. When Tennal casually moved across the room and opened his mind—he had to be close to read someone’s aura with any certainty—they pulsed like a cluster of suns. Tennal breathed out. It’s one of you.

Tennal was out of options. Time for his plan of last resort.

Nobody stopped Tennal from walking up to the game. This corner of the party was quieter and more private. Hanging lights shed a dim amber glow over the card game, the only other illumination the night skyline through the windows. Silver jewelry glinted in the darkness on wrists and chests. Tennal would bet money that these were the leaders of all Sanura’s gambling rings.

He could feel himself being watched. He glanced at the armed bodyguards casually standing not too far from the table, which just confirmed it.

Tennal was fine with being watched. He smiled back at the hostile stares and surface-read the bodyguards until he found the one who was at slightly heightened stress levels, the sort that might indicate you’d been a two-person team, until your partner took their break, and now you were covering the post alone. Tennal paused and zeroed in on the gambler that bodyguard was watching.

Found the boss.

Not all the ringleaders had been playing this round. One was at the drinks cart. He was pale, built, and expensively dressed, with a wooden gender-mark on his bracelet like the one on a casual silver chain around Tennal’s neck. Tennal would have given him the time of day even if he hadn’t been an architect. When Tennal looked through his reader senses, though, there wasn’t any doubt about the architect bit.

Tennal slipped in beside him and leaned over the selection of drinks.

He should be careful. If he had the right person, this man owned the underground racing market, half the financial district, and the weapons trade. Tennal should be polite and circumspect. But Tennal had never been careful, and he only knew a few ways to get someone’s attention.

He reached out and jostled the man’s arm so he dropped his glass.

“Whoops,” Tennal said insincerely. “Let me get that for you.” The man grabbed his wrist without changing expression. Tennal felt a flash of anger from him.

Time for the party trick. Tennal passed a hand over the lavish collection of imported drinks and picked the one most prominent in the man’s thoughts: a small blue bottle of distilled silverberry, which had embossing from some galactic backwater and was probably worth its weight in gold. Tennal thought it tasted like neat oil. Bad choice for a favorite; his opinion of the man’s taste went down.

Tennal carefully poured it into a new glass without dislodging the man’s grip on his wrist. “I heard you do favors for readers.”

The man released his wrist. He smiled faintly. “Direct. I do favors for readers who do favors for me.”

Tennal opened his mind and focused on him. The man wasn’t giving much away on the surface—mild interest, a condescending sense of being in control of the room. He had met readers before, so maybe he thought he knew what Tennal could do.

Readers were scattered and rare. Most reading didn’t actually tell you that much about what someone was thinking. Tennal, like any reader, could focus on someone and read them on a shallow level whenever he wanted, though he would only pick up a vague outline of their feelings and intentions, and if he left it open for too long it gave him a headache. Even that shallow reading level was illegal, but it could be useful if you were discreet about it.

Readers who could go deep, beyond surface emotions, were even more of an anomaly—so much so that many people didn’t believe they existed. Tennal might have appreciated being an aberration more if it hadn’t nearly gotten him arrested several times when he was growing up. But hiring out his deep-reading skills wasn’t an option because people had a habit of noticing you were doing it. And he didn’t want to get too far into a criminal operation. He’d have to pretend to be good, but not too good. “I might be able to help you out.”

“I work with readers now and then,” the man said, watching him. “Before we go any further, though, tell me—how good are you at defending yourself? You’re not much use to me if the first architect you meet can make you spill your guts.”

Tennal let a lazy smile creep onto his face. He twirled the embossed bottle. “I’m hard for architects to get to,” he said. “You want me to prove it? How about a bet?”

The boss cleared a table for them with a look. His bodyguard didn’t even have to step closer. He waved a hand for Tennal to sit opposite him.

At the back of his mind, Tennal knew this was further than he’d ever gone. He was taking risks he wouldn’t have imagined a few months ago—but it was fine. It was all fine. It had to be fine, because Tennal had run out his welcome everywhere else. He’d be out on the streets if he didn’t find something. Going home wasn’t an option. “Let’s make this easy,” Tennal said. He held out his glass for a refill. “I bet you I can go three minutes without drinking that. Start the clock.”

The boss laughed. “If I don’t write you, you mean.”

Writing was the informal term for the way architects bent your mind into compliance. It was more accepted than reading, since at least you knew it was happening—and there were so many bloody architects, you couldn’t turn a street corner in Exana without tripping over one. Tennal had never seen why that was so much better for society than reading. “How good are you?” Tennal asked, with enough skepticism to sound like a challenge. This man was obviously an architect, since he glowed bright to Tennal’s reader senses, but Tennal had seen better architects. “Try me.”

The boss gave him a second look, eyes flicking up and down. “All right, then.” He looked over at his bodyguard and tapped his wristband.

After a few moments, the bodyguard silently laid a display case on the table. He flipped up the lid and stepped back.

Tennal tried not to react. It was totally innocuous: a display set of liquor glasses, the high, flared type common in this part of the world. They were emblazoned with the full set of military divisions. Red for Cavalry, charcoal for Infantry, Archer gold, Vanguard blue, the full dozen was there, even the smaller divisions with no political influence.

“Pick your poison,” the boss said, watching his face.

This was a test. The first architects and readers had been created by the military, twenty years ago, so anyone Tennal’s age must have got the reader gene from a veteran parent. That meant Tennal’s family was tied to one of the divisions: if not Cavalry, which was currently in charge of the legislature, then maybe Infantry, or Navy, or one of the others. Military politics mattered everywhere on this bloody planet. You couldn’t escape it. The man wanted to know if Tennal would admit who he was connected to.

Tennal ignored the vivid red of the Cavalry glass and picked one of the others at random. Yellow glinted between his fingers as he slid it over to be filled. “Three minutes,” he said. “Try writing me.”

“And what do you want if you win?” the man said.

“You own this hotel,” Tennal said. “The people I’ve been rooming with want me out. I need a place to stay for a while.” He tried to sound casual. He’d been kicked out this morning, not to put too fine a point on it, but that was an unnecessary detail. Tennal didn’t like the word desperate and saw no reason to apply it to himself.

“That’s all?”

Tennal felt it. The first touch of an architect command, like a solar flare in his peripheral vision. He didn’t react. “I’m buying time,” Tennal said. He leaned back in his chair, the liquor glass between his fingers. “Why, can’t you afford to let me have a room? Business not doing well?”

The boss struck.

Being written by an architect felt like unshielding your eyes in front of a furnace. A bright mental light flooded Tennal’s eyes, his whole brain, a dazzle that shoved out every other thought. If Tennal found an architect strong enough—or took one of the small neuro-enhancer pills currently nestled in his pocket—he could sink into that white blaze and turn his brain off. As unnerving as it was, it was always a break from the never-ending, relentlessly dull business of existing as himself.

Of course, Tennal was almost sober, and this didn’t cut it. The architect’s command glanced off his mental walls like sunlight off a mirror. Raising an ironic eyebrow would probably have been suicidal, so Tennal inspected the glass in his fingers instead.

The man tried again. The timer ticked down.

A little pool of silence grew around the table as people realized what they were doing. The mental battle took place in complete silence, the boss staring at Tennal as though he could bore a hole in his head through sheer willpower. Tennal slung one ankle over the other and tapped his fingers on the glass. Light beat vainly on the walls of his mind.

The timer beeped softly.

Tennal met the boss’s eyes over the table. “My win.” There was a dangerous moment when the man leaned forward, a sudden twist of anger radiating from him like a sour note. A shot of adrenaline went down Tennal’s spine. He lived for this kind of high, even as he knew it was a bad idea. But if he had fucked up—if he’d finally gone too far—

Then the boss relented. He shrugged and clicked his fingers at one of the hangers-on nearby. “Get him a room. Long-term stay.”

He kicked his chair back from the table and rose. “We’ll talk another day.” He paused. “Your accent is from Exana?”

It was a question. Not to get information but to see what Tennal would say when prodded. Tennal had a reaction ready. “Left it behind, obviously,” he said. “Why would I want to be around the politicians? I’m here to have fun—party capital of the planet, what’s not to love?”

The man smiled without warmth. “I hope you have fun, then. Enjoy your night.”

It was a dismissal. Tennal’s moment in the spotlight was over. It was time for him to dissolve back into the crowd and be safely anonymous.

Instead Tennal knocked back his horrible drink, looked up, and said, “Have you got anything better?”

Copyright © 2022 by Everina Maxwell. Excerpted from Ocean’s Echo by Everina Maxwell. Published by permission of the author and Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Everina Maxwell is the author of Winter’s Orbit. She lives and works in Yorkshire, where she collects books and kills houseplants.

Book Review: Liar, Dreamer, Thief, by Maria Dong

Aigner Loren Wilson | 418 words

Liar, Dreamer, Thief
Maria Dong
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781538723562
Grand Central Publishing, January 2023, 336 pgs

Maria Dong’s debut Liar, Dreamer, Thief is a speculative fantasy about the world a young woman creates alongside the ordinary one, and how she may not be alone in seeing forests and oceans where corporate buildings and highways exist in the real world. Liar, Dreamer, Thief charges furiously along as it follows Katrina Kim as she tries to solve a death and a life while holding on to friends, life, and the fantasy world that has always made things easier to understand.

When Katrina believes she’s found someone who also sees and lives in two worlds, her compulsions lead her to focus on her co-worker in hopes of finding the truth, whatever that may be. And that search for the truth leads her to tragedy and answers she never could have imagined.

Every reader whisked away by a great fantasy story can relate to how Katrina holds Mi-Hee and the Mirror-Man so dear. Books have the power to make sense of things we can’t understand or grasp in our everyday lives. Mi-Hee and the Mirror-Man helped Katrina with so many things when she was younger that it became her whole world. It became her other world. The world she escaped into for security and the world that pulled her in when the real one became unbalanced.

Dong writes out Katrina’s habits, disassociations, compulsions, and slips from the real world into her fantasy world in a way that gives the story an irresistible charge and force. But it also showcases anxiety, depression, and mental health in a realistic way to those who experience it. Even the conversations Katrina has with people throughout the story are strikingly rendered to feel the pain, disregard, and frustration in trying to communicate the world we’re experiencing to those in the world people think we should be living in.

Liar, Dreamer, Thief took hold of me and lifted me away into a world of Dong’s prose and Katrina’s voice. Dong’s book is wonderfully unique and strangely familiar. It’s a fantasy for people who like mysteries and a mystery for people who love fantasy.

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: Tomorrow’s Parties, edited by Jonathan Strahan

Arley Sorg | 1542 words

Tomorrow’s Parties: Life in the Anthropocene
Jonathan Strahan, ed.
Paperback
ISBN: 9780262544436
MIT Press, August 2022, 232 pgs

Jonathan Strahan has not only read more science fiction than many folks will ever read, but he’s probably published more science fiction than many folks will ever read. So it’s no surprise that he would gather a stunning team of authors for his editorial contribution to MIT Press’ Twelve Tomorrows anthology series.

Tomorrow’s Parties: Life in the Anthropocene offers ten original stories, plus an interview with author Kim Stanley Robinson, and art by Sean Bodley. “We are living in the Anthropocene—an era of dramatic and violent climate change featuring warming oceans, melting ice caps, extreme weather events, habitat loss, species extinction, and more. What will life be like in a climate-changed world?” The tales range in vibe and voice, as well as how much they focus on character and narrative versus science fictional concept(s). The Twelve Tomorrows series is known for its high quality science fiction. In this entry, the science fiction ranges from story embellishment to The Whole Point, from lighter, easy fare to deliciously dense and complex. Even the writers’ approaches to the brief range, from pieces which barely make use of the concepts—stories which could, with a few easy strokes, take place, well . . . maybe not now but now-ish—to stories which really embody the anthology’s theme. All this said, every author in here knows how to put together something interesting. I’ll discuss a few of the stories on offer as a sample set.

I first read Meg Elison’s work when her story “Endor House” (bit.ly/3SrcZd1) appeared in Lightspeed. I then grew to really admire her as a writer when I reviewed her collection Big Girl (bit.ly/3UNqYvn). For Tomorrow’s Parties, Elison gives us “Drone Pirates of Silicon Valley.” Danny goes to a baseball game with his dad but ends up inspired by a drone demonstration to get his friends together and hijack “Babazon” drones. Elison’s short fiction is often immediately engaging, with cool concepts and provocative story front loaded. This one is a bit more of a slow burn, but it does glitter with Elison’s wit. See, for example, the fact that the big fancy drone demonstration is the delivery of hot dogs at a baseball game. It’s Americana, it’s satire on capitalism, and it’s a classic Meg Elison smirk. The story starts with the father and son bit, and the father is appropriately archetype-ish, so that Elison can effectively set up what we can see but Danny can’t: that the capitalist world isn’t all that great for everyone. Before we get there, the narrative transitions into a heist story. Once things get going, it gets even better, digging into interesting ideas around the present and future of the labor force, capitalism, and corporate law, with a healthy dose of class commentary. The ending is fantastic and makes the piece very well worth the journey.

Malka Older’s “Legion” begins with an immediate, searing narrative cauterization of male, somewhat chauvinistic entitlement. A man walks into a room and expects all eyes to be on him, only to find that those eyes are glaring in anger. This sets the stage for an up close examination of the interiority of Brayse, a future version of today’s TV talk show personalities. The story quickly becomes a vivid discussion of power and toxic behavior through the kinds of actions that some defend as innocuous. Brayse, however, is typically self-centered, and faced with a guest who has no interest in respectability politics. As his guest discusses a Nobel winning app, the story shifts to examine inequity and safety and different kinds of violence; moreover, the fact that so many problems aren’t even addressed in any meaningful way, aren’t even seen as “real problems.” While this story scorches the edges of the page with its rage, it also highlights both the essential problem(s) and offers a thoughtful solution: community action. Yes, the community action in the piece is tied to a near-future science fictional concept, but at heart, it comes down to the meaning behind the title: Legion—many folks coming together and finding empowerment in mutual support. Brayse is a stand-in for, well, just . . . too many people. And dear reader, I urge you to digest the things Brayse does, moment to moment. Even the things you think aren’t a big deal. Digest and reflect.

In Saad Z. Hossain’s “The Ferryman,” Varga is a corpse collector in the distant future. The air is filled with pollution, death is rare for the middle class, and pretty much unknown to the wealthy. On the one hand, the story reads as a frame upon which the author can paint ideas. But the ideas will definitely appeal to true science fiction lovers. While a lot of the narrative space is reserved for worldbuilding, and the dialogue is, at times, a fairly obvious prompt to explain concepts, there are also significant themes on both class and caste. Varga being a “below caste” protagonist is important and socially powerful. Whereas the Elison and Older stories, arguably, could dispense with climate change elements and be pretty much unchanged, in this story, the significance of a future where science has defeated death but culture retains both class and caste should not be missed. The latter part of the tale changes direction, ultimately seeing the bereaved and hateful lady of the house become sympathetic towards Varga, and of course serves to deliver more shiny science fiction ideas. It also amps up the violence visited upon Varga. While the science fictional elements are wonderfully imaginative, readers should not mistake the generational class and caste issues, not to mention the maltreatment of Varga, as pure fiction.

Perhaps my favorite story in the book is Tade Thompson’s “Down And Out in Exile Park.” Cosmo shows up at the door of Francis Cotillard after what may have been a twenty-year disappearance. Cosmo was a friend of a friend in college, and as far as Francis remembers, was taken away at gunpoint. Now, hungry and unshowered, Cosmo shows up wanting Francis to “come see something.” I tend to be annoyed by stories that lean too hard on withholding something from the reader as a narrative driver, but something about this set up—and/or the way Thompson wrote it—is actually really intriguing. Also, Thompson’s style moves things along nicely, dropping in just the right amount of tantalizing information, switching directions at just the right time, and leaving room around interesting ideas for the reader to ruminate on subtext. Besides all this, the details of the Exile Park concept are really cool. From there, Thompson begins to layer in more ideas, to expand on established ideas, to combine them, and to take everything to the next level, with the smoothness of an expert magician. You know there are tricks involved, but damn you’re enjoying the show. Better yet, all the sparkly ideas make sense to the story; Thompson never loses narrative focus. When the ending comes, I feel like I’ve just read something incredibly well done, but I don’t have too much bandwidth to dwell on it, because the story itself has also given me a lot to think about. For me, this one is a really great read, and also happens to be one of the pieces which makes the brief integral to the story itself.

Even in the best anthologies, any given reader will find stories which work for them and stories which don’t. I think this is even truer here, given the spectrum of styles and approaches. In a sense, with just a handful of pieces, Strahan is showing us how many shapes the conversation can take, and how many tones it can have, which in itself has great value. Just as there are many kinds of science fiction reader, there are many kinds of science fictional visions, and Strahan’s book offers fantastic reading for many of us.

Back in 2020 I reviewed a previous installment in the Twelve Tomorrows series, Entanglements (bit.ly/3UT0AAa), edited by Sheila Williams. Based on these two books (and reputation) I’d say if you love science fiction, Twelve Tomorrows is a good series to get into. My one note: while I enjoyed what both Jonathan Strahan and Sheila Williams have done with their installments, and while I have no doubt that the other series editors gathered together fine pieces, it is my sincerest hope that MIT press will also move into the future, by commissioning some people of color to edit a few of these anthologies.

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: Poster Girl, by Veronica Roth

Chris Kluwe | 800 words

Poster Girl
Veronica Roth
Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
ISBN: 9780358164098
William Morrow, October 2022, 288 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review. This month we’ll be taking a look at a near-future dystopic meditation on guilt, surveillance, and what comes after the revolution; Poster Girl, by Veronica Roth.

Poster Girl initially starts off in a prison ghetto of political leftovers from the previous Seattle-Portland megalopolis regime (the Delegation), set within the actual sprawl of the mega-city. One of the survivors, Sonya Kantor, is trying to scrape together something resembling a life after losing her entire family—a difficult task made even more so due to her previous role as the literal face of the overthrown surveillance state’s propaganda posters, which has earned her the epithet “poster girl.” To make matters worse, the new government (the Triumvirate) has decided to set her what seems an impossible task—find a girl who went missing more than a decade ago and return her to her parents, in exchange for freedom. Left with no other choice, Sonya accepts, but her search will reveal far more secrets than just the fate of a missing girl.

The first thing that really struck me about Poster Girl was Roth’s writing style, a sparsely evocative collection of words that build over time into rich tapestries, invoking the worn-down and threadbare feel of a frayed society barely clinging together. Whether it’s the Delegation settlement that Sonya initially starts in, the surrounding environs of the megalopolis, or the crumbling outskirts bleeding away into resurgent wilderness, every location Roth introduces us to is simultaneously the sketch of an intricate painting as well as a fully realized piece of the painting itself, and this isn’t just limited to the worldbuilding. Roth’s characters are given even more attention, slowly filling in shades of memory and regret that swirl together in a tangled web of guilt and remorse, and by the end of the book I felt like I understood everything about what drove them, as well as the traumas they endured.

The second thing I thought was extremely well done was Roth’s focus on surveillance without making it an overbearing part of the book. It’s clear that Roth has spent quite a deal of time considering the repercussions of an omnipresent surveillance state, both the positives and negatives, and what that means for the citizens of that state in both their daily lives and long term dreams. The contrast between Sonya’s previous life under the surveillance-heavy hand of the Delegation and her current life under the backlash of the Triumvirate is exquisitely crafted, and the book raises numerous warnings and questions about our own society and where it might lead. I do wish Roth had spent a bit more time on a particularly interesting thought that came up near the end of the book, that of a surveillance economy being used to guide people into desired roles/lifestyles, but overall I was very satisfied with the depth and presentation of Roth’s ideas.

Finally, I’d like to talk about the theme of guilt that pervades the entirety of Poster Girl, particularly as it relates to Sonya, the protagonist. Roth does a superb job of taking us through Sonya’s evolution from embittered survivor to slightly more experienced and world-wise survivor, but her journey isn’t a typical catharsis of absolution and happily ever after. Instead, Roth chooses the more complicated (and realistic) path of illustrating how trying to make amends means understanding that forgiveness is up to those you’ve hurt, not whether or not it’s something you feel you deserve, and regardless, life goes on anyways.

Overall, while Poster Girl may not be the most uplifting book (though it does retain a core of bleak optimism), it’s one I greatly enjoyed reading, both because it made me think and because it built a world I could easily see us veering into. Roth should be highly credited for taking the coldly functional state dystopia formula (made famous by novels such as 1984 and Philip K. Dick’s work, among others) and turning it into something uniquely her own, as well as doing it in a way that feels both topical and timeless, and I highly recommend Poster Girl to anyone who cares about who might be watching.

Read if: You click “no” to cookies; you wonder who watches the watchmen; you’ve ever seen technology change but human nature stay the same.

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: Tania Fordwalker

Laurel Amberdine | 951 words

How did “Beyond the Shore” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

In stories like this one, particularly when the central conflict is built around a pandemic or climate change, happy endings often come in the form of restoring the status quo—we win by overcoming the new threat and setting things back the way they were.

In reality, this thinking doesn’t work for climate change because “the way things were” is what got us into this mess in the first place. The only way we win now is by embracing radical change: in ourselves, our behaviour and our society. I wanted to write a story that made the metaphor literal.

You’ve got a world afflicted by climate change and a pandemic, and a main character who is resisting change, and rather than becoming the trope of the hero scientist who develops a vaccine that sets the world to rights, he realises too late that the world has moved forward and left him behind. I’m also taking aim at a certain kind of person who scorns each new social change (because it didn’t arise when he was young and therefore it must be wrong), and who believes so wholeheartedly in his own rationality he has trouble comprehending the possibility that he could ever be wrong.

What is your writing process like? Did this story fit the pattern?

I have ADHD, so until recently, my “process” for writing short fiction involved not touching a keyboard for six months and then finding some way to run off and lock myself into a cabin for a several days to do nothing but hammer out stories day and night, forgetting to eat or drink. Rinse and repeat. And yes, this story fit that working pattern. I lack the focus to write in little stolen chunks before work or over lunch, so my approach has always been very feast-or-famine. But attending Clarion West earlier this year showed me I could work with more discipline if a daily structure was imposed upon me. When I got home, I thought about how to create that kind of structure in my everyday life.

I work as a freelance copywriter, a job with a lot of flexibility, so I rearranged my hours to leave the mornings on Tuesday through Friday clear for writing. Four days a week, for four hours at a time, I lock myself in my study and turn out 500-1500 words. It’s working beautifully. Four hours seems to be my productivity sweet spot. When I finish a story, I let it sit for a few days, then give it a preliminary edit—I don’t like to inflict raw first drafts on people—and send it to my crit partners for feedback. Based on that feedback, I make a list of edits, work through them from easiest to hardest, do a final polish, and then start submitting.

What is your writing space like? What do you like to have around for optimal creativity?

My very tolerant partner let me completely take over our tiny spare room as a home office and writing space—along with his fold-down secretary desk, an antique passed down from his great-grandfather. It now incongruously houses my Macbook Air. I make a coffee, pop on noise-cancelling headphones, light a (battery operated!) candle, set a pomodoro timer, and start bullying my brain into action. My secret weapons for optimal creativity are Scrivener, caffeine, and a very good chair. I cannot overstate the importance of the chair. If you’re reading this and you’re only in your twenties, you might think you don’t need to invest in the chair. Trust me: get the chair.

What trends in speculative fiction would you like to see gain popularity in the next few years?

They say it’s all cyclical, so I’m calling it: time to revive post-apocalyptic settings. That’s right: it’s a setting, not a genre. You can set any kind of story after an apocalypse. A murder mystery. A romance. A thriller. A roadtrip buddy comedy. Give me your finest genre-bending post-modern post-apocalyptic novels, please and thank you. Beyond that, I hope the increased diversity of SF/F stays with us and grows (more bisexual characters please; even if you’re not invested in representation, you have to admit we shake up literary love triangles), and I’d like to see the industry move away from its reliance on genre pigeonholing and snappy elevator pitches to take more risks with complex, genre-defying works.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

My work has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, PodCastle, Reckoning, Aurealis, and more—whenever I publish a short story, I list it on Fordwalker.com. Would that I could point you to my first novel, but it’s currently out on sub. (If you’re in the market to publish a sweeping post-apocalyptic adventure, call my agent!)

Lately I’ve been hard at work on my second novel, a YA SF that is essentially The Goonies in space, but way more queer and antipodean. I’m at that stage of drafting where I emerge from my writing session each morning drunk on Book. Regardless of what I’m supposed to be doing, all I’m thinking about right now is Book. I can functionally carry on a conversation, but underneath it all? Book. I am here, but I am also There. (“There” is Book.)

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: Alex Irvine

Laurel Amberdine | 997 words

How did “The Dragon’s Hand” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

The germ of this story was a little flight of fancy I had one day, involving a young dragon that went into a cave and then grew so much that it couldn’t get out. Then I realized it fit into a series of stories I’ve been writing off and on for (eek) fifteen years now. This is the fourth to be published, after “Wizard’s Six,” “Dragon’s Teeth,” and “Chisel and Chime.” Several more are in progress. The twin guideposts for all of them are Earthsea and Viriconium.

What is your writing process like? Did this story fit the pattern?

Insofar as I have a single writing process, it tends to go something like: Have intriguing thought. Ruminate on it. Scribble down notes and ideas. Repeat for several years. Figure out what story is actually trying to be. Finish story.

The “several years” part is really the only consistent element, although generally I can’t write the beginning of a story until I know the ending.

What is your writing space like? What do you like to have around for optimal creativity?

For years I wrote in bars and coffee shops. Then COVID came along and I started drinking less coffee, so I rented an office. Now I do most of my writing there. I find that when I’m home, I’m easily distractible. Nothing like a perplexing story problem to make you want to do the dishes, you know? Plus if my family’s around, I would usually rather do stuff with them. Walk the dogs, go hiking, play pickleball, etc., etc. But at the office, I really have to work.

Did you get stuck at any point while writing this? How did you get past that?

I get stuck with every story I write. The trick for me is to put it down, go away from it for a while, let all the ideas and impulses and images ferment a little more. It just takes time and patience.

Do you have any advice for other writers?

I’m not sure my career is a useful model, but if I was going to offer advice it would be: Keep making yourself uncomfortable. Try everything. I started off writing short stories, poetry, a play once in a while. Then I tried a novel, and that was A Scattering of Jades. Then people started inquiring: Did I want to try games? Sure! Comics? You bet! Licensed and tie-in novels? Why not?

The one mistake I made was letting licensed stuff take over for a while. I went several years writing very little original fiction, mostly because I had bills to pay and licensed work combined with games made for a reliable income—which I needed, because I’ve got four kids and a mortgage. But that cost me in another way, I think.

I remember before my first comic came out, an editor at Marvel told me that everyone who read my comics would run right out and buy my novels, and that did not happen. In fact there’s been virtually no overlap between audiences of my licensed stuff and my original books and stories. So when I focused on the licensed work, I went more than ten years between original novels, and that’s more than enough time for people to forget who you are. You lose momentum, you don’t show up on awards ballots, and so forth. Most of the stuff I published in the ’00s is out of print now. So maybe that’s Item Two of my advice: Make sure you keep carving time out for your own stories. I started doing that again about five years ago, and I’m glad I did.

Also, I write all different kinds of stories, which has probably made it difficult to develop a following. The people who liked A Scattering of Jades are not always the same people who were going to like Buyout or Anthropocene Rag. But I decided early on that I was going to write the stuff I wanted to write. So I don’t really have a brand as a writer, I don’t think, and that’s okay with me. I kind of admire people who write the same kind of story over and over, or spend years writing long series, but I can’t do it. There are too many things I still want to try.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

Ten books I’ve read recently and would recommend:

Night of the Living Rez, Morgan Talty

The Violent Century, Lavie Tidhar

A Psalm for the Wild-Built, Becky Chambers

Transit, Anna Seghers

Ormeshadow, Priya Sharma

The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, M. John Harrison

Jakarta, Rodrigo Marquez Tizano

The Books of Jacob, Olga Tokarczuk

Cult of Chaos, Shweta Taneja

The Turner House, Angela Fluornoy

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I have another story coming in Lightspeed shortly after this one, I believe. More Borea stories will be coming soon. I recently finished a new novel, so we’ll see what happens with that, and the next novel after it is already cooking. Also it’s been a while since I did any comics, so I’ve got some new projects cooking on that front. Anyone who’s curious can check out a sporadically updated website at alex-irvine.com or follow me on Twitter, where I’m @alexirvine.

As always, thanks 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: Ben H. Winters

Laurel Amberdine | 585 words

How did “Double Occupancy” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I love time travel stories, and I always have. Not just time travel stories, but time-bending stories, time-jumping stories, any kind of time-futzing—I’m there for it.

The novel I’m writing now is called Big Time. It’s a time-manipulation piece, and it had me doing a lot of research on theories and mechanisms of time travel. I think this story came from that work. So it’s a bit of a subsidiary to the novel I’m working on—although it’s a very, very different piece, both in plot and tone.

In terms of inspiration, Back to the Future is an obvious one; anything where you’ve got a hero, especially a self-confident, clever kid, traveling through time, you’re in BttF territory, although “Double Occupancy” takes things in a different direction. She meets her future self, rather than her past. But the big theme for me, the big question under consideration, is the idea of stability over time. Just because we are who we are doesn’t mean we will be who we are, which can be both exciting and kind of scary. This is why I love time-travel stories—they really do help us think about what it means to be a person.

What is your writing space like? What do you like to have around for optimal creativity?

During the early days of pandemic, I got used to working all over my house. Like so many writers, I work from home, and suddenly I was dealing with the fact that my whole family was also working at home—wife, three kids, and new pandemic puppy. So there was this daily question of who was going to be working where, who needed to be online when, etc.

Eventually I moved down to the basement, which is really the garage, and kind of carved out a space. I think it’s an undervalued skill in writers, to be able to work anywhere, and for any amount of time. The world will rarely give us a cushy space and unlimited time to write. So I try to be ready to write anytime, anywhere. Sometimes I’m better at it than other times!

Other than writing, do you have any other creative pursuits? What do you do to relax?

In my middle age I’ve become a runner, and I do that most mornings. Now, usually, with the aforementioned pandemic puppy, who needs to be worn out! I really love it. Running is not a creative pursuit, of course, but it is relaxing—it’s meditative. It evens out my spirit. It reminds me of that life of the physical body, since so much of my life is about being in my head, chasing these ideas around in circles.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I’m almost done with the first full draft of Big Time, which should come out late next year from Mulholland Books. The paperback of Quiet Boy, my last one, also comes out next year. And as I’m writing this I’m in Canada, shooting the pilot for The Never Game, my adaptation of the thriller by Jeffrey Deaver. With any luck that’ll be on CBS in the fall.

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: Kristina Ten

Laurel Amberdine | 432 words

How did “The Noon Witch Goes to Sound Planet” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I’ve seen lots of Baba Yaga retellings and modernizations—and don’t get me wrong, the old witch is fascinating, deserving of every ounce of attention she gets. For this story, though, I wanted to cast one of the figures of Slavic folklore I don’t see revisited nearly as often: Poludnitsa (also known as the Noon Witch, or Lady Midday). Pulling from my own experiences, I threw in some teenage angst, some intergenerational dissonance, and a Burning Man-esque desert setting that’s going to be make or break for our modern Noon Witch.

Where are you in this story?

Like Hailey—like most of us—I know what it is to want to get out from under someone else’s shadow. To be able to honor and celebrate those who came before me, while still charting my own path forward. To deeply love and appreciate where I come from, and, as an expression of that love, always reserve the right to criticize it.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

Recent favorites include K-Ming Chang’s Gods of Want, Isabel Yap’s Never Have I Ever, and Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century. I’m taking a class on Dostoevsky as part of my grad program, so sprinkle The Double and Notes from a Dead House into that mix. I’m inspired by fearlessness and invention, and by all those writers out there telling the stories in their hearts, the stories only they can tell.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

My story “The Dizzy Room”—about Dell Dimensions, darker dimensions, and the perils of assimilation—will be out soon in Nightmare. It’s for anyone who, like me, was raised by computers. Other stories can be found at kristinaten.com, including my most recent: “The Queen of the Earless Seals of Lake Baikal” (published here in Lightspeed, bit.ly/3fPwpK4) and “Seven Days in the Kingdom of the Misplacer” (bit.ly/3e4Lbwo, in Passages North). In both, I was thinking about fairy tales, unbalanced power dynamics, and the trouble with getting in way, way over your head.

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 | 225 words

Coming up in December, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by L.D. Lewis (“Last Stand of the E. 12th St. Pirates”) and Rich Larson (“Deathmatch”). We also have a flash piece (“Marble, Stucco, Endless Devastation”) from Stewart C. Baker, along with an SF reprint by Alex Irvine (“Pledge Day”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Rati Mehrotra (“One Day in the Afterlife of Detective Roshni Chaddha”) and Aimee Ogden (“Mad Honey”). We also have a flash piece (“To my daughter, in the dark of the moon”) from P H Lee, along with a fantasy reprint.

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: Sarah Grey, Maria Dong, Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe, Isabel J. Kim, Adam-Troy Castro, and Carrie Vaughn.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Lightspeed:

Website

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Destroy Projects

www.destroysf.com

Newsletter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2

Podcast Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/itunes-rss

Twitter

www.twitter.com/LightspeedMag

Facebook

www.facebook.com/LightspeedMagazine

Subscribe

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe

Subscriptions and Ebooks

The Editors

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes more than 100 stories (about 700,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain!

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe for more information, including about third-party subscription options.

Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so.

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

• • • •

All caught up on Lightspeed? Good news! We also have lots of ebooks available from our sister-publications:

Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11 off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price).

Fantasy Magazine Ebooks & Bundles: We also have ebook back issues—and ebook back issue bundles—of Lightspeed’s (recently revived, other) sister-magazine, Fantasy. To check those out, just visit fantasy-magazine.com/store. You can buy each Fantasy bundle for $24.99, or you can buy the complete run of Fantasy Magazine— all 57 issues—for just $114.99 (that’s $10 off buying all the bundles individually, and more than $55 off the cover price!).

Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

The Editors

We already offer ebook subscriptions as a way of supporting the magazines, but we wanted to add an additional option to allow folks to support us, thus we’ve launched a Patreon (patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams).

TL;DR Version

If you enjoy Fantasy, Nightmare, and/or Lightspeed, our Patreon page is a way for you to help support those endeavors by chipping in a buck or more on a recurring basis. Your support will help us bring bigger and better (and more) projects into the world.

Why Patreon?

There are no big companies supporting or funding our magazines, so they really rely on reader support. Though we offer the magazines online for free, we’re able to fund them by selling ebook subscriptions or website advertising.

While we have a dedicated ebook subscriber base, the vast majority of our readers consume the magazine online for free. If just 10% of our website readers pledged just $1 a month, the magazines would be doing fantastically well. So we thought it might be useful to have an option like Patreon for readers who maybe haven’t considered supporting the magazine, or who maybe haven’t because they don’t have any desire to receive the ebook editions—or who would be glad to pay $1 a month, but not $3 (the cost of a monthly subscriber issue of Lightspeed).

Though Fantasy, Nightmare, and Lightspeed are separate entities, we decided to create a single “publisher” Patreon account because it seemed like it would be more efficient to manage just one account.

Basically, we wanted to create a crowdfunding page where, if you enjoy the work Adamant Press puts out, and you want to contribute a little something to help make it easier for us to produce more cool projects, then our Patreon is the place to do that.

What Do I Get Out of Being a Patron?

Well, you get the satisfaction of helping to usher the creation of cool new short fiction projects into the world! Plus, the more support we get, the better we can make the magazines and compensate our authors and staff. By becoming a supporter via Patreon, you help fund our growth and continued publication of three award-winning magazines. Of course, if you’re already one of our ebook subscribers (thank you!), you are already supporting us. This is for those who prefer to read the issues each month on our free websites, or wish to support our efforts more generally.

By becoming a supporter, you are also bestowed a title, such as Dragonrider, or Space Wizard, or Savior of the World and/or Universe, thus making you instantly the envy of all your friends.

Thank You!

If you’ve read this far, thanks so much. We hope you’ll consider becoming a backer on Patreon. That URL again is patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams.

Thanks in advance for your time. We look forward to hopefully being able to make the magazines—and our other publishing endeavors—even better with the support of people like you.

About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

Managing/Senior Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Editor

Arley Sorg

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

John Joseph Adams

Assistant Editor

Laurel Amberdine

Editorial Interns

Mayookh Barua

Madison Brake

Reviewers

Arley Sorg

Chris Kluwe

Aigner Loren Wilson

Copy Editor

Luke Tolvaj

Proofreaders

Anthony R. Cardno

Devin Marcus

Webmaster

Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios

Associate Publisher

Christie Yant

Reprint Editor (Emeritus)

Rich Horton

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

The Editors

If you enjoy reading our Adamant Press magazines, you might also enjoy these works edited by our publisher John Joseph Adams:

ANTHOLOGIES

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: The End is Nigh (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: The End is Now (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: The End Has Come (with Hugh Howey)

Armored

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (with Karen Joy Fowler)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 (with Charles Yu)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 (with N.K. Jemisin)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (with Carmen Maria Machado)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 (with Diana Gabaldon)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 (with Veronica Roth)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022 (with Rebecca Roanhorse)

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live

Cosmic Powers

Dead Man’s Hand

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: Ignorance is Strength (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: Burn the Ashes (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: Or Else the Light (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

Epic: Legends of Fantasy

Federations

The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects

Lightspeed: Year One

The Living Dead

The Living Dead 2

Loosed Upon the World

Lost Worlds and Mythological Kingdoms

The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination

Operation Arcana

Other Worlds Than These

Oz Reimagined (with Douglas Cohen)

A People’s Future of the United States (with Victor LaValle)

Press Start to Play (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Robot Uprisings (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Seeds of Change

Under the Moons of Mars

Wastelands

Wastelands 2

Wastelands: The New Apocalypse

The Way of the Wizard

What the #@&% is That? (with Douglas Cohen)

NOVELS and COLLECTIONS

Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey

Wool by Hugh Howey

Shift by Hugh Howey

Dust by Hugh Howey

The Silo Saga Omnibus by Hugh Howey

Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn

Sand by Hugh Howey

Retrograde by Peter Cawdron

Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer

The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp

The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty

The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn

The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette

In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead

Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

Gather the Fortunes by Bryan L. Camp

Reentry by Peter Cawdron

Half Way Home by Hugh Howey

Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth

Creatures of Charm and Hunger by Molly Tanzer

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear

The Conductors by Nicole Glover

A Dark Queen Rises by Ashok K. Banker

The Apocalypse Seven by Gene Doucette

Questland by Carrie Vaughn

The Undertakers by Nicole Glover

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.