TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 151 (December 2022)

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: December 2022

SCIENCE FICTION

Last Stand of the E. 12th St. Pirates
L.D. Lewis

Pledge Day
Alex Irvine

Deathmatch
Rich Larson

The Spread of Space and Endless Devastation
Stewart C. Baker

FANTASY

To my daughter, in the dark of the moon
P H Lee

One Day in the Afterlife of Detective Roshni Chaddha
Rati Mehrotra

The Metamorphosis of Marie Martin
Nadine Tomlinson

Mad Honey
Aimee Ogden

EXCERPTS

EXCERPT: White Horse (Flatiron Books)
Erika T. Wurth

NONFICTION

Book Review: To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, by Moniquill Blackgoose
Aigner Loren Wilson

Book Review: Meteotopia, edited by Chattopadhyay, Rüsche, & Verso
Arley Sorg

Book Review: The River of Silver, by S.A. Chakraborty
Chris Kluwe

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

L.D. Lewis

Rati Mehrotra

Rich Larson

Aimee Ogden

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions, January 2023

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2022 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Grandeduc / Adobe Stock Image

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

Editorial: December 2022

John Joseph Adams | 271 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 151st issue!

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers: the US Postal Service doesn’t have an official motto, but those words have been an unofficial one since they were engraved in the New York City’s General Post Office Building over a century ago. This month’s first SF short, “Last Stand of the E. 12th St. Pirates,” by L.D. Lewis, shines a hard light on what postal deliveries will be like in the near future.

A functional postal service is a critical component of city life, but so is transit. Rich Larson returns to our pages with a story about the future of car usage: “Deathmatch.” Maybe riding the bus isn’t so bad?

Our SF flash story is “The Spread of Space and Endless Devastation” from Stewart C. Baker. We also have an SF reprint by Alex Irvine (“Pledge Day”). Our flash fantasy story is “To my daughter, in the dark of the moon” by P H Lee.

Rati Mehrotra returns with a new fantasy short story full of ghosts, coffee shops, and skullduggery: “One Day in the Afterlife of Detective Roshni Chaddha.” Aimee Ogden brings us a chilly tale of wolves and prophecy in her new short, “Mad Honey.” Our fantasy reprint is by Nadine Tomlinson (“The Metamorphosis of Marie Martin”).

Of course we have spotlight interviews with all our authors, and our book review team has been searching out the best reads to recommend. Plus, our ebook readers will enjoy an excerpt of White Horse by Erika T. Wurth.

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.

Last Stand of the E. 12th St. Pirates

L.D. Lewis | 4075 words

STAND BACK DOORS CLOSING.

Dee heard the musical bing-bong of the departure warning between song transitions in her headphones, and watched as the heads of workers in line ahead of her lolled back in the universal why, God gesture of commuters everywhere.

There was only one freight car down the wall into the Flood District, and it was shared by all bulk service providers who came bearing gifts: maintenance workers, solar installers, grocery and package delivery, and the like. A bing-bong meant another fifteen-minute wait.

Dee thrummed her fingers along the handle of her hand cart and flicked through her manifest for the tenth time. Watertight boxes containing a week’s worth of snail mail for eighteen blocks of residents stacked to her chin. Bobby, her partner, stood behind her with another cart between them. She glanced back to find his mouth was moving quickly, the way it did when he was complaining. He’d only been on this route a little over a year compared to her ten, so his version of morning banter was still fuming over protocol.

Dee shrugged her sympathies and turned back around. She was just happy they made it in before Amazon.

The flooded part of the city stretched into the sea below them. Rooftops presented largely as rows of solar panels less impressive on dreary, overcast days like this. The only living green was on top of the buildings west of 17th—since tree-lined streets could no longer denote monied neighborhoods. The flood waters stopped receding the summer of 2025. There was no great catastrophe. Storm frequency had simply outpaced the plans developed to prevent it. We’d been promised a cinematic fate, drowned by a final wave, inevitable and big enough to name. The reality—that we could be undone by three inches of standing water in places no water should be—had largely registered as an affront and then became an opportunity. Rather than force resettlement on the residents who couldn’t or wouldn’t evacuate, the district had become an experiment in how to maintain infrastructure, a functioning society on top of an encroaching sea.

Dee and Bobby managed to squeeze into the next freight car wedged between a plucky greengrocer from a dry part of the city and an exhausted-looking FedEx driver with his own cart of heavy deliverables. The descent to the commercial docks was quick, accompanied by a series of pneumatic hisses and pleasant AI-voiced reminders to check sidearms for functionality and report any security concerns to the dock manager.

DOORS OPENING. STEP BACK TO ALLOW USERS TO EXIT BEFORE BOARDING.

The docks buzzed as personnel loaded and unloaded small company cargo vessels. Chatter mingled while Dee and Bobby carved a path to their slip where a pair of federal-blue USPS boats were anchored. Dee climbed aboard and lowered the ramp for Bobby to load their cargo. He was a burly young man with a neat beard and a joke for every occasion. Dee regarded him mostly as a nephew who played too much, but she was always happy to let him do the lifting while she strapped everything down.

“Morning, Andi,” Bobby called behind her.

Dee turned from her tangle of 550 cord to see a stern-looking woman approaching the slip in a salt-spattered windbreaker and glasses it must have been impossible to actually see out of. She was the dock manager and checked manifest paperwork for items requiring insurance. Too many and the delivery team would need added manpower for secured transport.

“It is that,” Andi replied, punching the screen of her tablet. “Any precious cargo?”

“Packages all standard.” Dee grunted, climbing back over the cases of mail to greet her on the dock.

“Anything going up past 17th?” Andi asked.

“Always.”

“Might want to get that done first.”

Dee was about to ask why when a helicopter passed loudly overhead. Andi pointed up at it.

“New builds getting shipments today.”

Shit, Dee thought. It was her turn to be exasperated. “Amazon?”

“Mm-hmm. They’re not playing with the pirates this time either. I’d clear out before dark. Hardware check.”

Bobby shifted his posture to point to the pistol holstered on his hip. The thing made Dee itch.

“What does that mean? ‘They’re not playing with the pirates this time?’” Dee asked.

“The Fed’s done letting any old thing happen here. They’re trying to bring in new money to keep the program going, so if an opportunity presents itself to clean up, private security’s got the green light to do it. There’s a briefing about it Monday. Check your docket.” Andi gave her a pointed look that said they’d been warned and handed Dee a stylus to sign the tablet before taking off.

Dee chewed her lip, watching boats drift from their moors into the lapping waters of South Street. She’d lived here once, and working her route was a lot like coming back home. She knew these people. And she knew the pirates. No one had cared about theft when this place was the new wild west, when laws regarding rights and property and enforcement were fluid while the new systems were put in place. She hated the way the luxury new builds were taking priority over the original residents, the way new money brought new surveillance and new penalties for people who couldn’t afford to pay them. If they could afford that, they could have afforded to leave.

Well, Dee thought, same as it ever was.

“We doing the west end first, then?” Bobby interrupted her thoughts.

“No, we’ve got people’s medications and stuff here that can’t wait. We’ll just be quick about it.” She paused in her preparations to take stock of Bobby relaxing against the side of the boat, thumbs hooked in his belt loops like a lazy cop absently drawing attention to his sidearm.

“Keep your hand off that thing,” she told him. “You’re not shooting anybody over here. You deliver the damn mail.”

Bobby chuckled. “Hey, if it comes down to me or them—”

“It’ll be you if I have to repeat myself.” Dee snapped back.

“Alright, Miss Lady, calm down.” He raised his hands in surrender but the impish smirk was still there. Dee threatened to kill him at least once a week but it was usually after lunch.

“I am calm. Just don’t make me toss your big behind overboard. I know you can’t swim,” Dee replied, chuckling at the visual in her mind as she started the engine.

“Shit, I can dog-paddle.” He winked.

Dee barked her laughter this time as Bobby nudged them away from the dock. She nodded at the captain of a bright lime grocery-bearing Shipt boat drifting by ahead of them as they cleared the block.

• • • •

“Leave and go where?” June Watterson scoffed. She was one of the original residents of the Flood District, here through every inch of the transformation because her aging mother wouldn’t leave. Their third-story apartment was now effectively the ground floor. She stood in the doorway, dark skin illuminated by LEDs in the mesh-grated walkway that served as a sidewalk. They had the same conversation every time Dee stopped by. Things had gotten better but would inevitably get worse. Either way, when it came to evacuating, you’d have to have somewhere to go first.

“You know I don’t know,” Dee always responded, handing over the month’s bills and a carton of medications.

“Did you notice air traffic is picking up here?”

“Saw a chopper earlier. Dock manager said something about increased security coming in.”

“About time. I—”

“What you mean ‘about time?’” The elder Mrs. Watterson called angrily from inside. “You know they’re not coming to be any help to us. All they’re coming to do is harass these kids.”

June rolled her eyes and Dee tried not to laugh.

“How are you doing, Mrs. Watterson?” she called, glimpsing the small woman shucking newly delivered peas at their dining room table.

“I’m fine, baby, how are you? They doing things the same way on the other side of the wall?” Mrs. Watterson replied, much of the venom gone out of her tone.

“Nothing’s changed.” Dee replied.

“Nothing ever does.” Mrs. Watterson said.

Dee checked her watch and glanced at Bobby down in the boat, tapping away at his phone screen. It was nearing noon and they were moving a little slower than she’d hoped.

“Ladies, I have to get going. We’re supposed to clear out by nightfall,” she said.

“Take care, baby. We’ll see you next week,” Mrs. Watterson called.

Dee hesitated before taking on a conspiratorial tone as she turned back to June. “Hey I don’t know if Jay’s been around lately but. . . the security that’s coming in? They’re coming for pirates. There’s an Amazon shipment coming in tonight on the west side and they’re ready if he hits it.”

June’s lips tightened and alarm sparked briefly in her eyes before sputtering out into something like resignation. Then she nodded. Jay was her nephew. Dee had known him as a child, but he’d come of age on the low seas of the Flood District. With no streets to run and minimal resources to stay idle hands, he’d made quite a name for himself as the 12th Street Robin Hood.

“That boy. . .” June sighed. “I’ll make some calls. But you’ll probably see him out there before we do.”

“I’ll tell him to come home if I do.”

Dee gave her a quick hug before moving on down the block, pulling up her hood as a steady rain began to fall. The buildings were shorter, their first two stories hidden beneath murky water crusted with neon algal blooms. Retractable bridges connected buildings across street-canals, ready to be taken up a level should the water rise again. The streets were no wider now than they had been when cars used them, and it was a careful dance trying to navigate them all at the same time. Bobby followed beneath her in the boat.

Between the gentle rain and the lighted pathways, the sounds and scents of small but happy homes, this place on the edge of the world could be quaint. If only it could last.

She stepped into an apartment building near the top of 14th Street and knocked on a Mr. Carver’s door. She once lived in the two-story building next door but it was gone. She’d watched over the years as the water line crept up and swallowed it. Even the rooftop now disappeared beneath the vibrating surface of the water.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Carver,” she said cheerily when he opened the door. A wave of lemon and freshly worked timber followed behind him.

“Miss Dee! I could hardly tell it’s been a week already,” he said, rolling his wheelchair backward so she had space to put his packages in the hallway. The flat was an open, sprawling space with broad windows that once might have fetched a pretty penny. Music radiated from somewhere within and a row of handsome wooden chairs he’d built himself lined one of the walls.

“Does seem like time’s speeding up, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, though. You remember that big old oak out back?” he asked.

“Mm-hmm.”

“I don’t think I ever had much use for clocks but I could tell time of day by that thing’s shadows.” He said wistfully, gazing out of one of the windows where there was now only an expanse of gray water. “I miss it. I miss trees.”

“There’s still trees on the dry side. You thought about moving over? I have a friend who could get you a good deal on workshop space.”

“Far enough away from the wall? You know it’s only a matter of time before that side looks like this side. I can’t afford to keep moving.”

Out in the hallway, music blared out of an open door a moment before being muffled again behind it. Dee leaned back out of the doorway to squint at a young man headed toward the exit.

“Jay?” she called. He turned around.

“Mr. Carver, I have to head out, but I’ll see you next week, okay?” she said quickly.

“Alright now, be safe.” Mr. Carver waved her off and she closed his door behind her.

“What’s up Miss Dee?” Jay smiled broadly and hugged her. He’d been a short, bobble-headed eight year-old once, but had grown into a handsome, athletic young man with an easy confidence and a boisterous intelligence. She could see him as a leader of a great many things in another time and place. Here, though, he was just a pirate.

“Nothing at all. You still being a menace?” Dee asked him.

“Never that,” he replied modestly, pulling out his phone and responding to messages buzzing on it.

Dee studied him. “I just saw June and your grandma. They haven’t seen you lately?”

“Nah, I’ve been busy. But I’ll make sure I drop by soon so they don’t worry.”

“Busy with what? Are you still taking things that don’t belong to you?”

Jay hesitated before putting his phone away, taking on the relaxed posture of someone who’d received more than a few lectures he was prepared to stand and take respectfully, even if he didn’t intend to absorb any of it. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Jay, they’re protecting that shipment tonight. This. . . game you’ve been playing all these years, they’re ending it now. Cops are paying attention. Private security is paying attention. What you’re doing is bad for business and they will take you down for it. That’s how the story always goes. Think about your future.”

“The future?” Jay scoffed. “Where?”

Dee sighed. He was right. There was no using the future against kids these days. Not when everything seemed to be winding down.

“You’re right, that was stupid. I meant—”

“Miss Dee, that wall has everybody thinking what’s going on over here won’t come for them.” He pointed a suddenly angry finger toward the entrance and the wall beyond it. “But it will. That’s the only future. Anybody moving here by choice has missed the point. The only game on this side of town is taking what you can get and whatever money you can get for it to get yourself and your people as far away from the edge of the world as possible.”

“If you try and take that shipment tonight, there’s a high chance you and all your ‘people’ will die. Violently. What would that do to June?” Dee pleaded.

He shook his head and Dee felt strangely like she’d let him down. “Like I said, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’ll bet.” She didn’t know what else she could say.

His phone buzzed again and his attention diverted as he typed his responses. Dee didn’t doubt it was about the night’s plans.

“Look, I gotta go,” he said, backing away toward the door. “I’ll tell Aunt June I’ll stop by next week. You should come for dinner or something.”

“I. . . be safe,” she blurted. He nodded and left at a jog, the door banging closed behind him.

• • • •

17th Street was a garden. The buildings here were covered in aquatic climbing vines and the walkways were trimmed with flowering plants accented by exterior lumination suggesting this place existed by design, not catastrophe. The sun had only just gone down when Dee started her rounds here. She found the doors painted a bright white or cheery pastel, and the residents enjoying the outdoor space on their fenced-in rooftops. Boat slips attached to the backs of residences were filled with modest vessels that seemed luxurious compared to the relatively stationary nature of the rest of the district.

Bobby was noticeably antsy where he waited in the boat, his head more on a swivel now and less on his phone. They’d passed many of the other cargo vessels headed back to the docks. Dee knew no one here personally, and made quick work of slipping mail through slots or leaving packages on doorsteps as she made her way up the block. She couldn’t stop herself from peering into the dark for signs of Jay when a foghorn announced the Amazon vessel being loaded in the docks. She hated when they did that. It meant everyone knew when a massive, expensive shipment was arriving and served as a warning to clear the canals of traffic so the damn thing could fit.

Dee’s heart pounded as the noise of air traffic picked up in the dark overhead. The buzzes were small and clipped and marked by blinking red light. Surveillance drones. But she remembered the helicopter and couldn’t stop herself imagining all the things it was intended for that were worse than watching.

“We need to roll,” Bobby called, watching the skies himself.

“Yeah, you’re not wrong,” Dee called back. She was scanning a label on a package she was leaving when the door opened and she nearly startled herself backward over the walkway railing.

“Oh sorry,” the man said with a professional sort of smile. He looked at the package on the ground and nudged it inside with his foot. “Is this it? I was expecting more.”

“If it’s Amazon, it’s on its way,” Dee said quickly and tried to move on.

“Do you always deliver mail this late? I thought I was going to have to confront someone when I opened—”

“Confront how?” Dee snapped. She knew what confront meant. It always meant the same thing when some people said it.

She must have made a face because the man seemed to think better of the conversation and backed into his home. “No worries. Have a good night.”

Dee finished the block but noticed her hands were shaking by the time she reached the end. She could see the future of this place, of that man and a confrontation with a boy like Jay or any of her other friends who lived here. The way it would end. The way it always did because nothing ever changed.

Bobby stared her down as she lowered herself back into the boat. He was concerned about her, about this night, but wouldn’t press leaving any more than he already had without her say-so.

“Let’s head back. Last street will have to get done tomorrow,” she said.

“Won’t hear me complaining. You want me to drive?”

“I got it,” she insisted and turned over the engine just as the drone of a helicopter began to grow louder. They watched as a spotlight started its dance over the rooftops and canals, looking for any sign of trouble. Bobby switched on the blue light that would indicate they were a federal vessel and not pirates or people with a general disdain for curfews. Dee steered them through the dark water at a clip bordering recklessness, trying to stay off the most direct route to the west side so as not to interfere with the Amazon ship’s path. It meant more side streets and more sharp, dark turns. Part of her hoped it also meant she could stumble upon Jay and his crew in time to block them.

And then it happened. 14th and Wax. Dee nearly sent the boat barreling into a matte-black behemoth emerging stealthily from an alleyway. She drilled into reverse long enough to neutralize her momentum and then shuddered into a drift at fifty feet.

“Dee, what are you doing?” Bobby hissed behind her. Dee didn’t answer, but turned their spotlight onto the black boat where a dozen masks and pairs of shining eyes had started appearing over the bow. She couldn’t make out which one was Jay.

“Jay, where are you?” She called loudly over the rush of blood in her ears, the violent drone of the helicopter terrifyingly close behind them. “Stop this! Go home, all of you.”

“You first, lady,” a boy’s voice replied.

“You don’t understand. This is not like the other nights. There are people. . . People have been authorized to kill you if you rob that ship. Jay, please.”

A low whistle went out over the boat and guns began to appear over the bow, brandished casually and slung over their slender shoulders.

“Ain’t the only ones with guns, Dee,” said Jay’s voice as he approached the front. It was low and serious, terrifying in its authority. If she couldn’t convince him alone, what chance did she have to convince him in front of his friends?

Dee heard the clicking off of the safety switch on Bobby’s gun behind her and spun.

“Bobby stand the fuck down! They’re kids!”

Bobby seethed and then reluctantly obeyed. “Dee, they’re going to shoot us or plow through us. You can’t save what don’t want to be saved,” he growled.

Over their shoulders, the helicopter was getting closer, clearing the way ahead of the ship. It would be upon them in a matter of minutes. Dee blew panicked breaths from burning cheeks and looked around them for another answer, but none presented itself.

“What…what can I say to make this stop?” she pleaded to the masked pirates. “It isn’t fair and I’m sorry. They should care more about you. They always should have. But dying here tonight doesn’t prove anything except. . . they don’t. There’s no message you can send that these people will hear if you’re sending it with their. . . bought bullshit in your hands. It’s a bad world. It never got to be as great as it could have been but there’s still so much I. . .”

Dee turned around with tears scorching her cheeks. People were standing on the walkways, illuminated in their open doors and looking on in fear.

“Look, you won’t even survive to pawn the crap, okay?” Bobby yelled. “Maybe you find another way out. Maybe you go back to piracy when you have a better plan. But don’t do this tonight. Not like this.”

“Go home to your families and figure something else out. It’s what we’ve always done. There’s always been another way,” Dee said, leaving the last word to the sea breeze and chopping blades of the helicopter.

The pirates seemed to confer with one another wordlessly for a while but Jay never turned his gaze from hers.

“Stand dow—” he finally grunted, but the blaring of a ship’s horn drowned him out. The Amazon ship had turned the corner at the top of the street, bathing them all in harsh, white light. The helicopter brought up the rear and zoomed ahead in a hover directly over Dee’s boat, spotlight shining on the pirate decks.

They’d barely had time to put down their weapons.

“Nononononono. . .” Dee stammered, waving her arms in a gesture of cease-fire. She heard Jay’s frantic shouts of “clear the deck!” behind her as she reached for the mic to her loudspeaker.

“You are in violation of—” The helicopter blared.

“There’s no trouble here! No trouble!” Dee screeched into her own microphone. “These are just kids. They’re clearing out right now. Stand down.”

“You are in violation of—”

“STAND DOWN!” Dee bellowed.

“—We will be forced to open fire. . .”

“Get out of there!” Bobby screamed. Dee could barely see for staring into the lights as long as she had. But the ship’s horn roared again as it continued its approach, threatening to crush their boat. Who knew if the kids had managed to abandon ship. Around her, outraged cries rang out from the neighbors bearing witness, and the helicopter was still threatening to open fire.

“You have ten seconds to comply,” the helicopter commanded.

Of all the ways to die at the edge of the world, Dee thought. Her mind reeled as she squinted toward the pirate ship to see the kids still scrambling. There was nowhere for them to go that wasn’t into the narrow strips of water or leaping onto nearby rooftops. Someone’s shirt was strung from an antenna as a makeshift white flag. She and Bobby exchanged desperate looks that said neither of them knew what to do, which way to flee, if they were even targets or if they’d be leaving the kids to their fate.

“Eight…”

It was supposed to be a wave.

“Five. . .”

We were supposed to drown or freeze to death.

“Three. . .”

The chaos of the end was supposed to be different.

“Two. . .”

Why did nothing ever change?

“One.”

©2022 by L.D. Lewis.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

L.D. Lewis is an editor, publisher, and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated writer of speculative fiction. She serves as a founding creator and Project Manager for the World Fantasy and Hugo Award-winning FIYAH Literary Magazine. She also serves as the founding Director of FIYAHCON, Researcher for the (also award-winning) LeVar Burton Reads podcast, and pays the bills as the Awards Manager for the Lambda Literary Foundation. She frequently bothers the publishing industry by authoring studies about the treatment and experiences of racially/ethnically marginalized authors in speculative literature. She is the author of A Ruin of Shadows (Dancing Star Press, 2018) and her published short fiction and poetry include appearances in FIYAH, PodCastle, Strange Horizons, Anathema: Spec from the Margins, Lightspeed, and Neon Hemlock, among others. She lives in Georgia, on perpetual deadline, with her coffee habit and an impressive LEGO build collection. Tweet her @ellethevillain.

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

Pledge Day

Alex Irvine | 5498 words

“Never be ashamed of who you are or where you came from,” Luke’s dad said every so often, and he meant it, but what he really meant was never let anyone talk down about the Founder, and never hide the fact that they were one of the Founder’s earliest Verified Families. Maybe not the richest, not by a long shot, but one of the first to make the choice. He said it more often as the time approached for Luke’s Hiatus, when Luke would probably do what his friends all did: Go sit in the woods for a week or do some fake-ass charity work, pretend it was a sobering and contemplative experience as the Founder had dictated it should be, then come back and Pledge, like they were always already going to have done.

Regard the miserable and the wretched with an open, generous heart—gratitude that you are set apart from them. That was a line from one of the Founder’s speeches.

The whole thing felt phony to Luke, but there was no way he could articulate that in a way that would not provoke either scorn or fury from his father. He didn’t even want to go on Hiatus—why not just Pledge and get it over with? It wasn’t like any kids of Verified Families ever decided not to. But his father made him because the Hiatus before the Pledge was an edict laid down by the Founder, and Luke’s father hadn’t worked his whole life to see his kid scoff at a Founder edict or dishonor the institution of the Pledge. “Your mother has booked your Pledge at the Cape Tower rooftop garden,” he began in his quiet do-not-give-me-any-shit Dad tone. Luke thought, of course she has. The Cape Tower was the tallest building in Maine, built so you could see it from anywhere in Portland. An ego trip come to steel and concrete life. Kind of a cool building, if Luke was being honest, but also a little on the nose. Everyone trying to prove their loyalty to the Founder’s ideals wanted to book their kids’ Pledges at the Cape Tower.

“You’re going,” Luke’s dad said, after a bunch of other stuff that Luke didn’t register. “I don’t care where. Be back in a week.”

Luke accepted this because he knew he had to. No matter what happened later, Luke resolved that he would always remember his Pledge Day with pride. Like everyone else in his family, he was going to believe in what he was about to have done.

• • • •

The last night of his Hiatus, stoned out of his mind on something Anjo gave him, watching the fog climb over the harbor islands and roll right up to the drowned waterfront. The top of the Cape Tower looms over Bug Light across the harbor. He’s spent the last six nights wading the flooded parts of Portland trying to do what the founder would have wanted, what his dad would have wanted: connect with some of the unbanked, understand their lives before he began his. But they ignored, or jeered. His father had never tried to understand them, not really. But Luke wanted to.

Hoo boy, he was wasted. Look at that fog roll in.

A memory rolls through his mind on chemical wheels.

He’s maybe ten, looking out the window of his dad’s car at a cluster of people waiting for work. One of them has a visible ragged X on his upper arm. “Whatever you do, don’t do that,” Luke’s dad says. “That guy just made sure that nobody will ever hire him to do anything except menial labor. Or something criminal. Some people don’t chip, and maybe they have their reasons.” The old man is unusually thoughtful today. “But when you just hack the chip out of your arm, you tell the whole world—the whole world that matters—you’re just saying fuck you, and Luke my son, when you say that to the world the world says fuck you right back.”

• • • •

The Founder had always admired the Amish—their simplicity, their calm resolve—so he suggested that before any new Verified Consumer Adult took the final step and rechipped, they be given a period of time among the Unbanked, the Unchipped, to experience that life in all its immediacy and fear. The Amish Rumsprigge became what the Founder called the Hiatus. A pause between adolescence and adulthood. A period of contemplation, free of coercion or influence, during which a young person could understand the gravity of choice and the fearsome liberty of being able to choose.

Although it stretched the Founder’s vital idea a bit, most kids in Portland went backpacking or some shit up into the mountains, like it was a vision quest. But since it was up to Luke and the Founder explicitly said that a young person could choose what to do on Hiatus with no judgment or pushback from parents, Luke decided to see something he’d never been able to in his life. The waterfront. The half-drowned, un-Pledged, mostly abandoned, sordid waterfront underbelly of the city he’d lived in all his life.

“People get killed down there,” his mother said.

“I get to choose,” Luke said.

“It’ll be fine,” his father said. “Everyone knows not to touch a kid on Hiatus. The lowlifes down there, if they did something to Luke they’d all be in manacles working the shrimp farms the next day.”

His mother looked at Luke’s arm, and he knew she was terrorized by the idea that soon his KidChip would be gone forever. He also knew that his father couldn’t wait. The KidChip was a tether for all of them, and Luke’s father hated tethers he had not himself knotted tight.

• • • •

He’s maybe eleven, fooling around at a construction site with some friends. None of them were supposed to be there. One of them got hit in the head with a piece of broken concrete. A chip, really, triangular, about the size that you might throw like you were skipping a rock, and then watch in dumb shock as it ricocheted off a pile of rubble and hit Oliver Zinke square in the side of the head. Ollie screamed like he’d been shot, and it wasn’t like there was even hardly any blood.

Only other part of that memory that matters is the dark anger on his father’s face when the distress signal from Ollie’s chip brought all the other parents running. Luke doesn’t want to remember anything after that.

• • • •

When the tide is high it pushes up over the armored footings of the old pier, swirling a foot deep around the benches in the old park past the ferry terminal. Perched on those benches, visible all at once as the fog briefly swirls away, are several young people, Luke’s age plus or minus a few years. They are the kind of people his father would never let him speak to if he wasn’t on Hiatus when all things are briefly permitted. They don’t look threatening. They don’t say anything. They just watch him.

This is my city, Luke thinks. I grew up here. Maybe I’m going to see what it really looks like at least once before . . .

“We’re all unchipped here, amigo,” one of the bits of human flotsam says, just as Luke was going to say something himself, but now he would never know what. “Some of us since we were like twelve. There’s a lot of money in people not being able to find you.”

Luke looks around at the group. He knows he’s pretty sheltered, and they’re deliberately challenging him, but his dad always said that true suffering inevitably makes itself visible on the face of the sufferer. That might be a Founder quote, Luke isn’t sure. The faces at the edge of the firelight look like they could tell stories that Luke wouldn’t want to hear.

“That’s right, rich boy. You’re just slumming down here, but for some of us it’s life.” He can’t tell which of them spoke.

“I’m not slumming, I’m . . .” He fumbles for the word. “I’m just trying to figure it all out.”

“Shit, let me know.” The girl who spoke that time gets up and sloshes over to the edge of the pier to piss.

“You’re one of the,” another kid says, but he doesn’t have the right words.

Luke knows what he’s talking about. “Yeah. I’m on my Hiatus before I Pledge.”

“You get a week, right? To figure all the shit out?” That’s a third kid—no, adult. Maybe as old as thirty. Weatherbeaten, a few gray hairs already showing in his beard. He sticks out a hand. “I’m Anjo. I don’t know what it is about you Founder types, but you sure seem to like this park.”

“Others have come down here?”

“Oh yeah,” Anjo says. “Confused and scared and pretending they’re more confused and scared because when you’re rich all your problems are worse than everybody else’s, am I right? What’s your name?”

Luke tells him. “Nobody else would talk to me.” It’s true, he’s been down here six days and nights, and the only words he’s exchanged with other human beings in that time have been transactional. Turns out the people down here have all the same drugs Luke is used to at school.

“Lukey-boy, I am at your service,” Anjo says. “This is a strange time for you. Probably you are trying to figure out a bunch of shit despite the fact that your upbringing has specifically denied you the tools to assess shit and figure it out, because the capacity for critical thought makes you unfit for a role as a useful cog in the world-spanning machine that’s killing us all.” He sits on a bench. Waves lap just under his dangling feet. “So. Hit me. What’s on your mind?”

• • • •

He’s nine. They’re driving past a park. They never walk anywhere if they can help it, because the wrong people might interact with them and it’s a damn shame, his dad’s saying, but people judge you on that stuff, Luke, and we just can’t take the chance. A million people are going to starve to death in the next month. A million more will die in heat waves. For Christ’s sake the National Guard is shooting people for pirating water in Phoenix.

His dad sees Luke watching a group of kids playing soccer in the park. Luke plays soccer too, in a league on fields under strict supervision by approved coaches who adhere to a specific curriculum of drills and exercises. If his KidChip ever pinged his location from this park, his mother would have a heart attack and his father would say what he always says: How can you waste this chance we’ve given you?

“Look, I could let you play with those kids,” his dad says. “They’re probably nice kids in their way. But there’s no forgiveness in this world, Luke my boy. Those kids have their path and you have yours. You take a step off it and you could lose everything. Every chance you might have. Ruined. Gone.”

Luke doesn’t say anything, but he pokes at the little lump in the back of his arm where his KidChip nestles between deltoid and triceps. He wants to play with those kids, but also he wants to be them. He wants to be anything but already decided.

• • • •

“Hiatus,” Anjo chuckled. “Yeah. The programmed dissent makes them all feel like they’re giving you a choice. I mean, you really think it makes any fuckin’ difference at all which bank brands the little bit of silicon you stick in your arm? You think the universe cares which social harvester you give first crack at your browser history?”

“No,” Luke says. “I mean, we’ll all be dead in a million years, and also fuck you. Sanctimony sucks, dude.”

Anjo laughs. A fog was coming up over the water, creeping into the harbor from the bay, swallowing up the low constellations of lights on the islands. “Day Seven, huh?” Anjo says.

Luke nods.

“So, tomorrow you’re gonna rechip? Or should I say Pledge?”

“Yeah.”

“And you didn’t decide yet what you’re gonna do.”

“Nope.”

“Well, then. What’s it gonna be, Lukey-boy? A classic like Chase or HSBC? Credit Agricole? ICB China? Or do you go with Amazon or Apple? Pegged to fiat or crypto? Stay clear of people who don’t want you to Pledge. They will attempt to beguile you with pernicious ideas such as independence and uniqueness, individuality! So they characterize themselves, but when you peel away the sweetness of the rhetoric you are left with one plain truth: They are jealous because they cannot become Banked; because they are not Banked they cannot truly choose. They are not Verified Consumer Adults. Do not be swayed from the path to your Pledge.”

Anjo sits back and rubs something on his gums. He holds the tube out to Luke, who accepts a fingertip’s worth of whatever it is and smears it across the inside of his lower lip. “That’s pretty good,” Luke says. “You sound like the counselor at my school.”

“That’s because my counselor sounded the same.” Anjo clocks Luke’s surprise and says, “That’s right, I had one too. But I was borderline, you know? I could leverage low expectations and get the fuck out. But you? Shit, you can’t get out. I mean, none of us get out, not really,” Anjo went on, drunk enough to be untroubled by contradiction. “We just decide our price.” He raised a bottle and Luke raised the bottle of whatever he had. Necks clinked. “Lukey-boy, you can’t say no to your demographic destiny any more than I can fly to the fuckin’ Moon,” Anjo said.

• • • •

He’s seventeen. His father is looking at him with pure slack-jawed disbelief that is at least three-quarters genuine. “A credit union? Seriously? Why are you doing this to me?”

Riding the tide of his idealism, Luke forges ahead. “I mean, wouldn’t it be good to keep our influence close to home? Like, to work with people we know? Maybe have some real influence over what our money is going to do out there.” He means in the world, but the vagueness of his experience of the world becomes vagueness of expression when he tries to talk about it. He remembers driving past a park where kids were playing soccer. Maybe they should have a real field. Maybe everyone should have more of what they need, and how’s that going to happen if everyone keeps grubbing after status relationships with trillion-dollar banks?

Why can’t he just say that? To anyone but his father he could.

“We went through all this Buy Local shit when your grandfather was a baby. The Founder knew, Luke. He knew that the idea behind a credit union was sound but in this world you gotta scale up. You pick the right bank, the sky’s the limit. You pick a credit union . . .” He trails off like the potential consequences are too flabbergasting even to enumerate. “I just don’t want to see you handicap yourself like that. You’ve got too much potential, Luke. I mean, you don’t have to go Santander like I did. That was the right choice for me, but you’ve got all those years of my work to give you a leg up and shoot higher.”

“I know, Pop,” Luke says. “I appreciate it.”

“Ah, it’s just what you do when you have kids,” his dad says.

Three days, Luke thinks. Then I go on my Hiatus. He’s heard from older friends that the Hiatus is either terrifying or liberating or clarifying or confusing. All Luke wants from it is a week to think about something without his dad bulldozing his way into Luke’s thoughts.

• • • •

“How come you won’t say his name?” Anjo asks.

“Who, the Founder?” Luke shrugs. “We just don’t.”

“Jackson Chopra,” Anjo says. Luke feels uncomfortable. “Yeah,” Anjo goes on. “Just a guy with a big idea he got people to believe.”

There’s more to it than that, though, as Luke has been told his whole life. The Founder transformed the relationship between Verified Consumer Adults (a status he defined and whose universal implementation he oversaw) and their banks. Everyone understood that now, or at least everyone Luke had ever known. He was from one of the old families who followed the Founder, bought in early as the chip tech matured. They were now the elders, keepers of the Founder’s legacy since he had left no children of his own, although in a way everyone who Pledged was the child of the Founder’s mind. Everyone did it now, even those who had never heard of the Founder and wouldn’t care if they had. His great accomplishment had changed the everyday lives of billions through one simple act: the Pledge. One person, one bank. Forever and ever.

Luke’s grandparents had been BNP on one side and Deutsche Bank on the other. Luke’s father exercised a tiny degree of rebellion, of which he was still proud, when he chose Santander, but that put him in several of the same social circles where Luke’s mother also moved, having also rebelled in a socially condoned sort of way. One thing had led to another, which had led to Luke.

Now he had a decision to make. Family said Santander, BNP, or Deutsche Bank. Farther back in his father’s family, many of the men had chosen Bank of America. On his mother’s side, there was a strain of Mitsubishi Financial. None of them had ever chosen a bank with less than a trillion in holdings.

By the time he explains all this to Anjo, Anjo has a knife out and is pretending to cut his own throat. Then he bursts out into hysterical stoned laughter that seems swallowed by the fog but then comes echoing back from another direction. “Fucking Jackson Chopra was just a banker who wanted to lock in access to generational wealth, you fucking dumbass.” He chunks the knife into the bench near Luke’s leg. “Take that so you can kill yourself the next time you have the impulse to tell that story, ‘kay?”

• • • •

The Pledge ceremony is less than an hour away. Luke is trying like hell to keep himself on an even keel, but his dad keeps looming over everything. Like now, he’s coming back as if he wants to rehash the credit union thing, which Luke only said to fuck with him in the first place because everything was already fucking with Luke and if he didn’t give some of it back he was going to lose his mind. It wasn’t just the world. Luke could say fuck you right back, too.

“You want to rebel?” his dad asks, rhetorically. “Knock yourself out. Get a hologram tattoo, gene-splice yourself some gills or a tail, whatever. Pierce your fucking brain stem if you want, I don’t care.” His father sweating, casting nervous glances around at the assembled witnesses to his only son’s singular rite of passage into Verified Consumer Adulthood. “This is already hard enough on your mother. She’s popping Xanax like Skittles over there because she can’t take the idea that she might not know where you are at some given moment coming up real soon. You want to add to that by fucking everything up for me?”

Luke chokes out a question that’s been on his mind for, oh, six or seven years. “Why is this about you, Dad?” Even the performative worry about his mom is just a way for Luke’s dad to rope her into his emotional arcology of self-doubt, hunger for validation, generally what you might call a martyr complex.

“Because I busted my ass for thirty years. Because my back will never be the same and my eyes are fucked up and I never had a hobby all because I wanted to make sure you and your sisters had the best leg up in this fucked-up world that you possibly could. I don’t do that, you’re right out there in the world, kid. The overheated, thirsty world. Not a rooftop garden looking down at . . .” The old man breaks off, his face bleak and confused. “Do what you want. Just . . . honor that a little.”

He walks away. Luke feels twisted, and it’s not just the minidose patches he’s been pasting onto his skin since he got up that morning. Anjo set him up and Luke is making them count. There’s a trickle of unease in his gut, like his conscience is a physical thing.

Who asked you, Dad, he thinks. I didn’t ask you. Deep inside he knows that no matter what happens today, in thirty years he’ll be giving his own kid that same sick, frightened look.

From the rooftop garden he can see across the harbor to the little park where Anjo and his crew are probably sleeping under a tarp strung from the rotting hull of a boat to the tangle of lilacs and beach roses along the old narrow-gauge railroad tracks. At least they can do that at low tide. Then the ocean will swell over it again.

• • • •

“Although,” Anjo admitted later, as the tide had crested and begun to recede, “Some kids don’t do it.”

“I heard that.”

“It’s true. You’re lookin’ at ‘em.”

“But how am I supposed to . . .”

“Yeah. Seems impossible, right? All you been told your whole life, how are you supposed to stand up against it all by yourself? Specially when if you go along, you get the chip, the bank, everything that goes with it. How many generations of Verified Consumer Adults you come from, Lukey-boy?”

“I don’t know. Four?”

“That’s great-great-grandparents. Seriously? You’d be talking about some of the first CA’s who ever got that status, like back in the 2040s or something. Shit, that’s far.” Anjo finds something in his pocket and tucks it into his lower lip. “Seriously? Five? What, your family rich?”

“No,” Luke says even though of course they’re rich, that’s the only reason he has the confidence to have a conversation like this with a person like Anjo. He wears his status like a sorcerous aura that attracts things like bank recruiters and resentment from non-Verified Consumer Adults, and he knows it. Mostly he ignores it, once in a while it comes in handy, and then there are the times like right now when everything is laid bare and Luke wishes he had been born at another time, another place, with different decisions to make.

“I gotta go, man. Day Seven.”

“I know you think you do.”

“What, should I stay here? Stand around a barrel fire and thumb my nose at all the other assholes who have a job and a place to sleep? I mean . . .”

“No, you got it figured out. Go on, Lukey. Your daddy’s waiting for you to do the right thing.”

But Luke isn’t quite ready to go yet. Technically he’s supposed to stay until sunrise ends the seventh night, and he’s determined to do things right. Anjo’s knife is in Luke’s back pocket. His Hiatus sojourn to the periodically flooded land of the unchipped will end with a relic, to be venerated when he looks back on this time later in his life. He’s never had a pocketknife before.

• • • •

Cape Tower, forty stories tall, looks down on Portland across the harbor and the older South Portland neighborhoods surrounding it. Ferry Village, Willard Beach, Knightville. A hundred years ago they were fishermen’s neighborhoods, rough around the edges. Anjo and his crew might have lived there, worked on the waterfront. What was the world like then, Luke wonders. How could it have been so different? He turns away from the view when his mother drops a hand on his shoulder and pulls him in for a hug. She’s skinny. Luke worries about her. When she steps back from the hug, her face shines with stoned pride. Luke wonders if his own chemical alterations are as visible. He thinks no, because his dad would have lectured him about it.

Everyone in the rooftop garden, forty stories above Portland Harbor, gravitates toward the rows of chairs facing a lectern and dais. They sit, all these colleagues of Luke’s mother and father, relatives from far and wide, some of his friends’ families. Luke stands off to the side of the dais. He’s itchy and he can’t get his eyes to stay still.

The celebrant steps up onto the dais. He’s a Chase, but also an old friend of Luke’s mother. This rankles Luke’s father a bit, but he believes himself to have a canny understanding of which battles are winnable, so he let this one go. Really what that means is he didn’t want a fight with Luke’s mother.

Beyond the celebrant the sky is blue and infinitely empty. “This is a big day, huh?” he says, professionally jovial. “Man oh man, it sure is. Every kid has to decide on Pledge Day. We tell them about it for years, they watch other people do it, they’re bombarded with the images of it and the idea that everything in their life depends on what they do at this moment. And you know what? They’re right.” Luke can feel his father’s gaze boring into the back of his head. “But you know what else? Everything in your life depends on what you do at any other given moment too.” Hear that, Dad? “The point is that every choice matters, and Pledge Day is both about itself and about the larger point that as a Verified Consumer Adult, each of us has to understand the value of choice.”

• • • •

“Is that, like, a thing?” Luke asks, pointing at the X-shaped scar on Anjo’s left arm. “I saw a guy with a scar like that once and my dad said he’d cut out his chip, like it was some political thing or something.” In the fog Anjo and the others are indistinct, their voices floating without origin. Luke realizes how little he’s slept these past six, now seven nights—and how much he’s drunk, how many little patches he’s slapped on the insides of his arms.

“Might be,” Anjo says. Luke can’t see his face. “Me, I never had a chip. I did it to make people think I had. Long time ago. Now it doesn’t matter. Scars tell their own story, Lukey-boy. Don’t matter what you want ‘em to mean.”

• • • •

The celebrant beckons Luke over. “Ready, pal?” he asks quietly, with a little grin and a wink. I’m not your pal, Luke thinks. He returns the celebrant’s little grin, though, because to do otherwise would be disrespectful of him, of the occasion, of Luke’s father, of the Founder himself. The celebrant does a take to the crowd—ain’t this a great kid?—as Luke shrugs out of the robe. He’s in good shape, but still all those eyes on him make him self-conscious. Good thing the patches are small and transparent. The celebrant holds up a long thin knife. “Luke’s ready,” he says, beaming. “Is the world ready for Luke?” A few chuckles from the audience. The celebrant strokes a thumb down the back of Luke’s left shoulder, finds the right spot, and cuts into Luke’s upper arm, where his KidChip has been since he was four years old. Blood trickles down to his elbow and then his wrist as a hush settles over the witnesses. The blood isn’t necessary—the entire ceremony could have been done with a cool laser to destroy the old chip and a subcutaneous injector to install the new one. But without blood it wouldn’t be a rite of passage, and the Founder wisely understood that the relationship between a Verified Consumer Adult and a bank should be ritualized. Therefore blood. Luke watches it stick in the hair on his forearm, already beginning to clot and dry.

The KidChip comes out with a little tug that’s more painful than Luke wants to show. The moment hits him harder than he expected. Unchipped for the first time since he was three years old.

His KidChip is like anyone else’s. One of his first memories is watching it go in, on the end of the little pokey thing whose name he never learned. It hurt but he sat still because he understood it was important to his parents that he sit still and be a good boy. Behave correctly. Show that he was being raised right.

Afterward his dad tousled his hair and gave him a rare hug. “We’re going places, Lukey. You’ll see. This family, together.”

His mother hung back a little, her gaze fixed on the tiny bruise on the back of his arm.

“Shells, you’ll see. I know it was a lot of money, but it’ll be worth it.”

“I know,” she said with tears in her eyes. Luke couldn’t understand why she was crying, but then again he didn’t understand why he was crying either.

“Jeez, you two,” his father said.

Now Luke looks out over the sky, the city, the harbor. Anywhere but at his dad. Instead he looks at his mother. She gazes steadily back, but her face is so tight a stray raindrop would crack it apart. Suffering is always visible on the face, Luke thinks. I could run. She wouldn’t know where I was. Nobody would. His grandparents had told him stories about running around with nobody knowing where they were. To Luke they had seemed like stories about Paul Bunyan or Lancelot or Ali Baba. How could anyone live like that?

An old question for a much younger Luke.

You can’t say no to your demographic destiny. Anjo’s voice in his head. What did that even mean.

The celebrant rests a hand on Luke’s shoulder. “You okay to go on, son? We don’t have to do it all in one day. Remember, Nine Days Quoth the Founder. This is eight. You can sleep on it.”

“No,” Luke says. “I’m ready.”

He’s not a kid anymore. But also not yet an adult.

On the table in front of Luke and the celebrant is a long flat aluminum case. He opens it, revealing a line of six chips in sterile sealed packaging. He holds the case up so everyone can see, and a murmur ripples through the crowd as various pairs of augmented glasses pick out the roster of potential banks: Credit Agricole, Chase, Deutsche Bank, Santander, BNP, Mitsubishi. All solid, respectable choices, most with some family history. Relief radiates from his parents so intensely that Luke imagines convection currents visible in the air around their heads. He wants them to be proud. He wants them to know he understands that choices matter—that being able to make choices matters.

He picks a chip, but with his head down so nobody can see that he has closed his eyes.

• • • •

“I mean, what would you do if you didn’t go through with it?” Anjo asks. “Don’t matter to me, but you should think it through, you know?” He watches Luke’s face. “Yeah. That’s not even a real possibility to you, is it? You’re like doing some kind of pretend thing, but in the end people with houses on the Western Prom don’t do shit like refuse to pledge.”

“I could,” Luke said.

“In what world,” Anjo counters.

This one, Luke thinks, but he can’t think of a way to say it that will convince Anjo, so he just sits watching the little fire as the tide rises around the pilings and the moon creeps slowly down toward the invisible horizon. Soon enough he’s alone and the fog has drifted away, receding beyond the harbor and the islands again. Light bleeds into the sky. Luke feels that he has done right by the Founder’s vision.

• • • •

The celebrant presses the injector to the skin on the back of Luke’s right tricep. It makes a sharp snap as it fires the chip into one of the deep subdermal layers of Luke’s skin, and with that snap comes a collective sigh from the audience, like they’ve all been holding their breath for minutes, hours, days, and only now that Luke has Pledged can they all begin to breathe again.

He can hear all the voices whose echoes he’s dredged up these past seven nights. It won’t make any difference. Can’t fight demographic destiny. The world says fuck you right back. Some bad decisions stay with you.

Everyone is clapping. The celebrant looks at Luke, pride shining in his eyes. The same pride shines from his father’s eyes, and his mother’s. Luke looks at his arm. X marks the spot, he thinks. I’m all grown up. He raises Anjo’s knife and begins to cut.

©2022 by Alex Irvine. Originally published on the KGB Fantastic Fiction podcast.

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.

Deathmatch

Rich Larson | 1595 words

The cab slices through the city, one small fish of a humming black shoal, while Henrik watches ads in his rain-flecked window. Today he sees carnal red sociomachines, spine-mounted, that spray pheromones and calculate human interaction. A black-and-yellow swamp whirling through space. A man screaming no at the moment of orgasm.

The product is not always clear, but the ads are always effective. He can feel money slivering off his account and slithering into the ether. The cab’s vestigial partition, now a slab of flickering smartglass, shows him that he has invested in a dozen new corporate splinters. His dollwife will be so pleased. For a moment, imagining Masha’s smile unhooks the tightness in his chest.

“Detour,” the cab whispers.

The tightness redoubles. Henrik hunches forward, peering at the smartglass. The map shows no obstruction. “For what purpose, cab?” he demands. “I can’t be late to work.”

“Deathmatch,” the cab whispers.

Henrik looks at the map again, the digital labyrinth. His black ride-tracking icon has been joined by another. They snake toward each other through the pale city.

• • • •

The cab carves left. Henrik is paralyzed in the backseat, his heart hammering, a strange foaming static in his ears and also encroaching on the edges of his sight. He has never been selected for a deathmatch before. He has considered the possibility, of course. All men do, in the days of their youth and vigor, observing their lean muscle in the mirror and fantasizing violence against anonymous offenders.

But as his hormonal irritability diminished, as his body slowly softened with age, the prospect became ridiculous to him. He asks, for a second time, if there might be an error afoot.

“Are you Henrik Schorr?” the cab whispers.

“Yes. One of many, I imagine.”

“Were you born on a Monday?”

“I don’t recall.”

“Are you frightened of cats and needles?”

“Yes.”

“Please place your hand on the smartglass.”

Henrik sloughs the sweat from his palm onto his pantleg, then places his hand on the smartglass. Laser plays up and down, reading his cracks and whorls, unhurried. The cab requests his eyeball next, scanning his retina. Lastly, it swabs the interior of his mouth and taxonifies his bacterial flora. He dares to hope.

“No error,” the cab whispers. “Would you like help preparing your profile?”

Mercury sloshes through his stomach and extinguishes the hope. He begins to picture it in earnest now: the grimy alley or public washroom, any halfway point deemed private enough by the algorithm, where he will fight for his life.

“I don’t want to go to the deathmatch,” Henrik says. He can feel a whine rising in the back of his throat. “I want to go to work.”

“You agreed to the terms and conditions of the CityCab neuro-app,” the cab whispers, “wherein it is clearly stated that all riders are entered automatically into the deathmatch candidate pool. Would you like help preparing your profile?”

The smartglass displays him in miniature, shirtless: his growing gut, his sagging breasts, the wiry hair that sprouts around his nipples. It lists his height, 1.7 meters, and his weight, 74 kilos.

“How would you describe your fighting style?” the cab whispers.

• • • •

Henrik yanks periodically at the door handle, but of course the cab is locked. He has learned new things about his body. His left hand can tremor in perfect counterpoint to his twitching right eye. The city seems to be moving past at a blur. Even worse is the smartglass map where two beetle-black icons race, inexorably, toward their appointment.

In the upper left corner, the cab has completed his profile without his involvement. His fighting style is listed as Cowardly Gecko / Desperate Orangutan.

“You have to find someone else,” he says hoarsely. “My job needs me.”

“It’s been verified that they do not,” the cab whispers.

“Masha,” he mutters. “Masha needs me.”

“Masha is an artificial organism that can be easily repurposed in the event of your death,” the cab whispers. “It will not miss you.”

“She will. She would.”

“Its cognitive capacity is in line with that of a small dog,” the cab whispers. “You would know this, but you spend most of your time fucking it, or gazing rapturously at its immaculate bone structure.”

“My family—”

“They will continue to receive your yearly facecall, if they wish,” the cab whispers. “The algorithm may even be able to strengthen your conversational skills.”

Henrik shakes his head fiercely. “I’m not getting out of the car,” he says. “I’ll just sit here.”

“That would be a selfish course of action.”

“How so?”

“Imagine the waste,” the cab whispers. “Time and fuel and emotional labor, all up in smoke. It would be deeply disrespectful to your opponent and to the algorithm that paired you.”

Another jag of fear, this one sharper, as Henrik envisions his opponent for the first time: a young man swollen with muscle, baying for blood in the back of that other cab, or maybe a whittled-down woman, murderously zen, performing breathing exercises in silence.

“So, they want to do it?” he asks dully. “They want this to happen?”

“Uncertain.”

“Why don’t you pick two people who want to do it?” Henrik feels his voice winching tighter, higher, but he can’t stop it. “Why not have people opt in? Voluntarily? It would make for much better deathmatches.”

“This is not entertainment,” the cab whispers. “That would be barbaric. Nobody will witness the deathmatch except for a state-appointed drone.”

“Then why’s it happen at all?” Henrik wails. “What’s the flipping point?”

“To keep things running smoothly,” the cab whispers.

Henrik grinds his forehead against the window, breathing hard. “I don’t want to—to kill someone,” he says, to avoid saying die.

“You’ll be fine,” the cab whispers. “You’re a killer already!”

“I’m not, though.” Henrik scratches madly at his neck. “I’m not. I can’t even stomp on cockroaches. Masha has to do it.”

The smartglass flickers. He sees a montage of children choking in lithium mines, families gunned down in infrared by border patrols, carbon expenditures rendered as rising dorsal fins. All the small tragedies too obvious to dwell on.

His stomach tumbles down a hill.

“We’re all killers, here,” the cab whispers. “And things run very smoothly for us. Would you like to see your opponent’s profile in advance of the deathmatch?”

“No.” Henrik’s entire body is shaking. “No. I would like to go home.”

“Your home is forfeit,” the cab whispers. “As is Masha. As is your job. As are your investments. They all hinge on this arrangement. They always have.”

Henrik pictures himself as a noctivagant vagrant, stalked through the streets by nanocarbon jellyfish, herded into the public pillory. Gaunt and naked. Filthy and wild-eyed.

“Would you like to see your opponent’s profile in advance of the deathmatch?” the cab whispers.

The other icon rounds a corner, placing both of them on the same street for the very first time. The collision creeps closer. Henrik swallows. He nods.

• • • •

The cab needles into a charging stall on the empty parking lot of a neon-swathed restaurant. Henrik has looked his opponent over, and over, and feels a strange intimacy with him. His name is Ibis Koskinen. He stands 1.6 meters. He weighs seventy-seven kilos. His fighting style is Existential Dread / Bowling Ball. His face is lined and kind.

Henrik already knows, with dreamy certainty, what will happen next. He and Ibis will exit from their respective cabs and walk toward each other, every step loaded with ill intent, violence rising in their eyes and wafting off their skin like steam.

But the closer they get, the slower they will walk. Their shared humanity will be as two magnets pushed against each other, throbbing outward, repulsing. They will each see themself in the other. Then the poles reverse, and they rush together, sobbing, laughing, joined by relief and disbelief.

“It’s time to get out of the me,” the cab whispers.

That is no issue, no issue at all. Henrik will open the door now, swing out onto the rain-slick pavement, stride easily toward his unmet sibling, his fellow sapien. As soon as his hand works.

“I’m rooting for you,” the cab whispers. “I was also born on a Monday.”

Henrik’s head feels like it will spill off his shoulders. His lungs are buzzing. His armpits are gouting sweat. The door opens for him, and he stumbles out into the cloudy gray morning. A few seagulls are picking through a parabola of grease-spotted trash. One gives a fluttering shrug at his approach, cocks its head to the side.

Ibis is waiting by the dumpster. He is wearing the same tie as Henrik, a sleek cobalt noose. He is slowly rolling up his sleeves. That everyday action is suddenly turned strange, unnatural, like a penis seen in sunlight.

“Deathmatch,” he says, in a trembling voice. “Who would go and invent something like this, eh?”

• • • •

Three seagulls and one state-appointed drone see the ending. It is clumsy, ugly, exhausting. Grunts and yelps. Pleading. Blood smears across soft hands and faces. Tool use becomes inevitable. Shards of broken bottle gleam from the asphalt. A cinderblock is lighter than anticipated. A skull implodes slowly, over the course of many blows.

The winner limps inside the restaurant. They go to the bathroom to rinse blood and mucus from their hair. They come out to order hashbrowns and lab-meat sausage and orange juice. When they finish eating, they vomit.

Then they adjust their cobalt tie, wipe their red mouth, and request a cab.

©2022 by Rich Larson.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rich Larson was born in Galmi, Niger, has lived in Spain and Czech Republic, and currently writes from Montreal, Canada. He is the author of the novels Ymir and Annex, as well as the collection Tomorrow Factory. His fiction has appeared in over a dozen languages, including Polish, Italian, Romanian, and Japanese, and his translated collection La Fabrique des lendemains won the Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire. His short story “Ice” was recently adapted into an Emmy-winning episode of LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS. Find free fiction and support his work at patreon.com/richlarson

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

The Spread of Space and Endless Devastation

Stewart C. Baker | 1188 words

This is the fifty-seventh time Ship has tried to stop Zander from entering the cellar.

By now, Ship simply watches over the feed as the mission gets underway. Zander and the other members of their crew open the front door and marvel at the lack of dust, the trickle of the entry hall fountain.

“It’s as if someone still lives here,” Kala says. As the crew’s historian, she is endlessly looking for ways to insert herself into the past.

“Like they just stepped out and will come back any moment.” That’s from Eun-ja, who spends xir off-shifts watching holos.

“Perhaps their ghost still roams these very halls!” And there’s Iope, who can never resist egging Eun-ja on.

“It’s just cleaning nanos,” Zander mutters from the bottom of the cellar stairs.

And that means it’s time: Ship sends an all-hands alert and the rest of the crew swarms back toward the lifeboat.

Zander ignores it, as he always does. He walks across the cellar and touches the device.

• • • •

The house is built of marble and glass, with ornate stucco flourishes on the pillars that line its veranda, half-obscured by vines.

Ship’s processors stutter every time they see it. Then their viewports zoom out.

Chaos.

Ruin.

An ever-shrinking torus of devastated spacetime. Ship doesn’t know why they can see it—why, when it comes to that, they are aware of the time loop while Zander and the others are not—but they know they have to stop it. They can’t let it reach the house. Can’t let it hurt their crew.

• • • •

The job was unusual from the start.

Kala found the listing in the local subnet of a station they were visiting. NEWLY REDISCOVERED ASTEROID, it said. STRUCTURE IN FIRST IMPERIAL STYLE; CATALOGERS WANTED. PAYS. There was no employer listed, just an anonymous number with proof of payment guaranteed by third-party bond.

Kala signed them up for it on the spot.

After yet another argument about why it wasn’t okay for Kala to accept work without consulting the rest of them first—again—the crew took a vote. Kala, Eun-ja, and Iope in favor. Zander against. (Ship abstained. They couldn’t bear it when their crew got into fights, but they also couldn’t bear to take sides.)

Zander relented with a long-suffering sigh, and Ship warped them out to the asteroid at the coordinates given in the listing.

The asteroid was so remote the warp took nearly a day. Eventually, though, they arrived, and the crew took Ship’s lifeboat down to the surface, where the house and its garden had hidden just outside of civilized space for millennia untold.

The rest, Ship thought, would be every bit as simple. Zander and the others would catalogue the contents of its house and its garden, and Ship would wait for their return. They would go home, they would get paid, they would all be happy for ever and for always. Or at least until the next time they got into a fight.

But then Zander found the device.

• • • •

On the mission’s very first iteration, Ship was the one who pointed out the markings on the cellar wall, as well as the device nestled underneath with its eerie, stuttering glow.

In the iterations since, they’ve tried everything to keep Zander away. Alerts, haranguing, reverse psychology. Pleading, bribery, ridiculous jokes. Offers to have their own nanos do everyone’s chore rotation for the next twenty years. On iteration forty-two, they reactivated their lifeboat and crashed it through the rear of the house.

No matter what, Zander touches the device.

• • • •

Ship spends iterations sixty through ninety trying to decipher the markings on the cellar wall. Are they letters? A diagram? Some kind of abstract art? Sometimes it feels like they change between loops, some form of lexical life.

On iteration 91, Ship is left with an overwhelming sense of certainty that they did understand the markings until a moment before, and they give it up for futile.

• • • •

The house is built of marble and glass.

Eun-ja lifts a vine from one of its pillars to see what’s underneath: all the people of an empire bent in supplication; a single figure, head bowed; an implosive, wheeling sun.

Kala gasps in wonder at a glazed teacup painted with circling fish.

Iope cracks a joke about undisturbed graves.

Zander touches the device.

Eun-ja and Kala hold hands when they think nobody’s looking, giggling like people half their age. (Everybody already knows.)

Zander touches the device.

Eun-ja, Kala, and Iope spend the mission in the garden, cataloguing plants and holographing statuary.

Zander touches the device.

Always, no matter what Ship does or says or tries, Zander touches the device and the devastation edges infinitesimally closer.

• • • •

By iteration 433, Ship’s attention starts to drift.

They don’t know who they are or what they’re doing. The crew has always been on the asteroid. Zander has always been touching the device, the markings always shifting.

And still the torus of ruined spacetime contracts.

• • • •

Zander touches the device.

• • • •

Ship has long stopped counting iterations when they notice that something has changed.

Zander still walks to the cellar, but the rest of the crew stands in the garden, shoulder to shoulder, looking to the sky.

No, beyond that: To orbit. To Ship.

What are you—Ship starts.

Zander touches the device.

• • • •

It takes another dozen iterations of Kala and Eun-ja and Iope in the garden for Ship to realize what’s going on. Their crew is as aware of the time-loops as they are—perhaps they always have been, all this time outside of time.

A dozen iterations after that, they realize something else: Zander’s refusal to stay out of the cellar is not some fluke of the time-loop but a sign of his willpower, implacable as orbital mechanics. He is triggering the loops on purpose to stop spacetime from collapsing while Ship still waits.

Ship’s processors nearly crash. They are not protecting their crew—their crew is protecting them. And even worse, they are keeping Kala and Eun-ja and Iope and Zander here through all these endless iterations by refusing to release them.

Still, they cannot bear it. They send message after message, imploring them all to get back to the lifeboat. Insisting there will be time for the lifeboat to reach their landing bay and for them to push away into warp before the torus reaches them.

Each and every time, Zander touches the device.

• • • •

At last, Ship sends a simple acknowledgment.

I see you, it says. I will always see you, even after you are gone.

They do not look back as they push themself into warp. They know that if they do, they will falter.

And so they do not witness Zander make his way into the garden. They do not see the torus collapse around the asteroid, around the home. They do not see, in the instant before all of it flickers out of being for good, their crew coming together—if nothing else, together, for one more last moment in time.

©2022 by Stewart C Baker.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stewart C. Baker is an academic librarian and author of speculative fiction and poetry, along with the occasional piece of interactive fiction. His fiction has appeared in Nature, Galaxy’s Edge, and Flash Fiction Online, among other places. Stewart was born in England, has lived in South Carolina, Japan, and California (in that order), and now lives in Oregon with his family—although if anyone asks, he’ll usually say he’s from the Internet where you can find him at infomancy.net

To my daughter, in the dark of the moon

P H Lee | 780 words

My daughter. Oh, my daughter! You are too young to understand, but I will tell you anyway: one day you will be a great hunter, you will be a great champion, and you will look around our village and you will wonder—is this everything? Is this the only glory left to me? Is this why my mother left, even before my seventh anno, towards the cursed spire from which there is no return?

So now I tell you: Yes. That is why I left. That is why, in your own time, in your own manner, in the fullness of your power and the fullness of your guile, you will follow me.

Because—and I do not mistake it—there will come a time when you have matched every beast in all the moors and darkwoods; when you have bested all the warriors of our village and of all our aunts and sisters; when you have led raids against the Sentinels, against the Wasters, against even the Unawakened Cult; when you have girdled your bride-groom with gold and silver; when you have fed him fine fruits whose names are long-forgotten; when there are no taller trees for you to climb; when there are no greater boasts for you to claim; when you have hunted the cruel ghost of our own fell ancestor; when you have blasphemously defeated her and claimed her skull to wear as your own mask. Yes, when you are at the end of all deeds and still sly and strong as ever, there will come a time when your eyes will fall upon that curse, that spire, that scar upon the sky, that ever-falling shadow where our mothers’ mothers built a tower to the moon and went there to hunt its alien god.

They say I am the greatest of all of us, my daughter. They say there shall never be my equal. But I know otherwise. I have known it ever since, with you still suckling, I set a knife into your infant’s hands, that you might cut yourself and know its edge in all its sharp and thinness. When of course you cut yourself—and how your father cried!—you did not bawl, you did not weep. You regarded your blood upon the blade, and the blood upon your hand, and you took it to your mouth and suckled blood instead of milk. Then I knew that though there had never, even in the times when our ancestors hunted a god across her moon, been a huntress my equal, you would be all that I am and greater still.

Your father wept and fussed. How could he understand? He is a man; he knows no knives but cookery. My daughter: This is what I fear the most. Not death, not pain, not even defeat, but that absent me your father might soften the temper of your steel, not in malice, but in love. Men will love you, my daughter, and that is good and proper, but you must never accept their love into your heart, no matter how beautiful their faces or how elegant their poetry. That love—man’s love, gentle love, love that has never known death or steel or war—is deadlier to your fame than any art of any poison. Oh daughter: Marry a man, if you want a daughter by him. Marry a man, and let him love you, but never hold his love inside your heart.

I leave now not because I hate you and not because I do not love you. My daughter! I love you more than any art can say. I go now to that accursed spire, not that I might best it and walk again the moon where our ancestors matched their greatest prey and claimed as their greatest trophy the undying curse of a dying god. I know that I shall match my power against the spire and that it will not be enough. My daughter: when at last you have exhausted every glory, I shall have already failed. When at last your eyes set upon the spire, I shall be these many annos dead.

But, my daughter: When you look and when you wonder, you must not turn away. You must not be content to be a hero; you must not be content to be a queen. You must know that spire where your mother’s power overmatched, where your mother failed against that ancient blight, that you my daughter might yourself succeed.

Look, and do not doubt. Look, and do not fear. Look, and hope instead that you shall at last avenge me.

©2022 by P H Lee.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

P H Lee lives on top of an old walnut tree, past a thicket of roses, down a dead end street at the edge of town. Their work has appeared in many venues including Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Uncanny Magazine. From time to time, they microwave and eat a frozen burrito at two in the morning, for no reason other than that they want to.

One Day in the Afterlife of Detective Roshni Chaddha

Rati Mehrotra | 8050 words

It all started with a desperate phone call from a Yamaduta.

Doesn’t it always? The new recruits are the worst. Madhav should have stuck to cleaning the Vaitarna River. It attracts debris from all the worlds. But someone had decided he deserved a promotion and transferred him to the most demanding unit of all: the Yamadutas, tasked with escorting the souls of the dead from the human world to the afterlife. Why they thought picking up trash was the same as picking up souls is beyond me.

He sat opposite me in my airless office above Auntie Nimmi’s curry shop: a round, baby-faced man with curly hair, sweating profusely, his gaze darting left and right, as if he expected the Afterlife Police to soul-cuff him already. Anyone less like a messenger of death was difficult to imagine. “Save me, Roshni,” he begged. “You’re my only hope.”

I leaned back on my ratty old chair and blew a series of soap bubbles. I don’t smoke, and Auntie Nimmi would never stand for it anyway, but detectives ought to blow rings of something. Soap bubbles are a good, cheap substitute for cigarettes. They smell nice and throw people off. Sure enough, Madhav stared at the bubbles, his shoulders sagging.

I contemplated my options. On the one hand, Madhav wasn’t much in the way of a honeypot. He had a decent job, yes, but he’d barely started. And it was dangerous to get involved in anything in the human world. There are strict rules governing what someone like me can and cannot do. I’d come close to that line enough times that a certain police officer who shall remain nameless had escorted me to the edge of one of the twenty-eight hells and given me a glimpse of what awaited should I foolishly cross it. It was not a pleasant memory.

On the other hand, I hadn’t had a case in months and was behind on my rent. Nimmi makes amazing curries, and she gives me a special discount, but she’s nobody’s patsy. A couple of weeks, at most, and I’d lose my discount. Another two weeks, I’d lose my home. It was only two poky rooms permeated with the smell of curry and soap, but it was all I had.

“It’ll cost you,” I said at last, setting down my bubble wand.

“I can pay,” he said eagerly, pushing a small red velvet pouch across the desk.

I loosened the strings and peeked inside. One gold, one silver, and one bronze coin: the traditional amount offered for a contract. Madhav boy was serious. I closed the pouch, hiding my elation. I would pay Nimmi tonight and eat curry to celebrate. “Tell me what happened.”

He leaned forward and began to speak in a terrified whisper of a voice, as if Yamaraja himself was standing behind him, trying to eavesdrop.

It was a familiar tale. I’d been expecting something like it. Madhav had been tasked with escorting a newly wed, newly dead woman to the afterlife. She’d begged to see her husband one last time. Like a sop, he’d agreed. And she’d vanished. Typical.

I sighed. “Where did you lose her?”

He shifted on his chair. “Her house. I waited outside for fifteen minutes. When she didn’t return, I went inside to fetch her. But she was gone.”

I eyed him in disbelief. “You let her go back into the house alone? Why?”

He lowered his gaze bashfully. “She said she wanted to kiss her husband and needed a bit of privacy.”

I rolled my eyes. “You’ve been had. She probably scarpered through the windows.”

“I know,” he said. “Will you find her for me?”

I chewed my lip. “Why didn’t you go to the Afterlife Police?” Why a private detective down on her luck who’d been kicked out of the force, I didn’t bother to add.

His eyes went round with horror. “I can’t let them know. I’ll lose my job. You know how strict my boss is. I don’t want to go back to the trash collecting boats.”

Losing his job was the least of his worries. He’d also face a disciplinary hearing. If the soul went rogue, he’d have to share the karmic burden of every crime it committed. And if I took his money, at least a portion of that burden would be mine. I really didn’t need any more of that crap. I have enough karmic burdens of my own.

Still, how hard could it be to find one lost, frightened soul? She was probably still drifting around the neighborhood, mooning after her husband. I took a deep breath. “Okay, I’ll help you look for her.”

A smile lit his face. “I knew I could count on you. When can you leave?”

“Midnight,” I said. “Make sure you have a token for me.” Yamadutas have a special pass, but everyone else needs a token to move between worlds. Unless you want to spend a torturous year on Yamamarga, the road between Earth and Yamaloka.

He nodded, his head bobbing like a puppet. “I have lots of those.”

I picked up my wand and blew more bubbles into his face. “Run along. I need to make preparations.”

He left, and I headed downstairs. Mostly, I needed to eat.

It was still early, and the diner was empty. Cracked plastic chairs crouched beneath gray Formica tables, and hideous paintings of Yamaloka concealed the peeling white paint of the damp walls. Auntie Nimmi could afford to renovate but, as she pointed out, why bother? She made the best food this side of the river. And on the other side was Naraka, where you were more likely to be eaten than to eat.

Fact. Sarameyadana has seven hundred and twenty vicious dogs—sons of the dog-goddess Sarama—with razor-sharp teeth who devour sinners, again and again. Maharaurava has carnivorous deer. And if you think deer can’t be that bad, picture a twelve-antlered, red-eyed, slavering monstrosity with teeth as long as your forearm ripping the flesh off screaming men and women. And of course, there’s the classic being-boiled-in-oil in the hell known as Kumbhipaka.

The hell to which I’d been escorted was a class apart: Asipatravana, the forest of sword leaves. For the heretics, the rebels, the unfilial. People like me. Even now, the memory of those blades darkened my dreams.

“You’re early.” The gruff voice brought me back to my senses. Auntie Nimmi stood behind the kitchen counter, large and glowering, fixing her beady black eyes on me. A pot fragrant with spices bubbled on the stove before her.

I walked up to the counter and slid the pouch across it. “One daily curry special, please.”

She loosened the pouch and examined the contents. Her gaze narrowed. “Have you done something senseless?”

“Not yet. I’ve got a new case.” I told her about Madhav.

She smacked my shoulder with a spatula. “How many times have I told you not to get involved in the human world? Nothing good will come of it.”

I rubbed my shoulder. “Not much for me to do here.”

There must have been over five thousand beings in Bahubheeti, but most were law-abiding workers like Madhav. This close to hell, even the ghosts kept their heads down. The Afterlife Police took care of any serious matters. My last case involved finding a ring dropped in a vat of cow dung. Don’t ask.

Nimmi pursed her lips. “At least you’re here, not there.” Across the river in one of the twenty-eight delightful hells, she meant.

“Don’t worry, I’ll be careful,” I assured her. “And now I can pay my rent.”

She gave me a sour look. “Don’t use that as an excuse. I wouldn’t throw you out.”

I grinned. “You’re only saying that because I’ve got the money to pay you now.”

She didn’t rise to the bait. “You’ve taken the case because you’re bored and fidgety. You always get like that, this time of year.”

I looked at her, surprised. “What do you mean? What’s the time of year got to do with it?”

“Ashwin,” she said, ladling curry on a bed of white basmati rice. “The seventh lunar month. After the rain, before the cold. The in-between time. That was when you came here.” She pushed the plate toward me. “It’s jackfruit, your favorite.”

I bowed and accepted the plate, the aroma taking away the sting of her words. I ate at a table near the stained, cracked windows so I could look outside. The jackfruit was dense, chewy, and delicious, the gravy rich and thick, but I barely tasted the food. Dusk in the month of Ashwin. Why do we have seasons in this, the last city on the road to Yamaloka? Why do we have time?

Perhaps to give an illusion of the world we left behind—the world none of us can go back to, not unless we cross the river and face the judgment of Yamaraja. There are ghosts who have been here for centuries. They fade, inch by inch, until only a shadow is left, an echo, or a memory. The soul erodes unless it has purpose. That’s why I’m a detective. I solve people’s problems, large and small. It makes my own problems recede. For a while, anyway.

Once, I had a rather more official status. Sub-Inspector Roshni Chaddha, that was me. Why were you kicked out, you may ask. None of your business, I’d answer.

The first customers of the evening trickled in, and the diner became livelier. Nimmi put an old Bollywood tape in her battered cassette player, and one of the regulars beat time with his hands. She’s from the 1970s, so that’s the level of technology she’s comfortable with. I tried talking to her about the superiority of CDs once, and she gave me a flat stare that shut me up real fast.

I finished eating and sat back with a cup of chai, more for the feel of it in my hands than anything else. The diner clock struck ten. I still had a couple of hours to kill before my rendezvous with Madhav.

The chair next to mine creaked, and I started.

A tall, thin, cadaverous man with sunken cheeks, shiny bald pate, and a crisp white dhoti kurta sat next to me, his dead eyes fixed on mine. From somewhere, I dredged up a dreaded name: Dandapani, the ancient chief of the Yamadutas, who reported directly to Yamaraja. I swallowed and shifted my gaze away from him. I sipped my chai, determined not to let my fear and discomfort show. Dandapani was famously reclusive and evil-tempered. He’d certainly never come to Auntie Nimmi’s curry shop before. What had I done to draw the attention of the most powerful being this side of the river? Apart from existing, of course.

“You, girl,” he rasped.

I continued to sip my chai. Auntie Nimmi was busy serving a couple of customers. She hadn’t noticed Dandapani yet.

“I’m talking to you,” he growled, tapping long black fingernails on the table. Fingernails that could easily rip my throat out. Not that I would have such an easy end.

I turned to him, raising my eyebrows. “Oh, were you? My name is Roshni, not girl.”

His lipless mouth stretched in a ghastly smile. “I know your name. It is written in my book. Five years we’ve been waiting for you.”

Five years. Had it really been that long? I set down my cup, trying not to shake. “Sorry, you’ll have to wait a bit longer. I have work to do here.”

“Do you?” He leaned toward me, his fetid breath nearly knocking me out. “You were dismissed from the Afterlife Police eighteen months ago. What have you been doing since then? Besides being a burden on our society?”

“I’m a private investigator,” I gabbled, leaning as far back from him as possible. “I help with small stuff that the police can’t be bothered with. Finding rings in vats of cow dung, that sort of thing.”

He gave a dry, hacking laugh that sounded like Death coughing. “True, you are beneath my notice. But I heard reports that one of my junior staff was here earlier today. Why was he here, Roshni?”

My name in his mouth sounded like a curse, a promise of violence. “This is a curry shop, sir. Very popular with your staff. It’s jackfruit with potatoes today. Would you like to try it?”

He frowned. A shadow fell over us, and I looked up. Auntie Nimmi. I could have cried with relief.

“It’s not often we get such an important personage in our humble shop,” she said with an oily smile that was one hundred percent fake. “Please try my food. I will give you special discount.”

Dandapani rose, knocking his chair back against the wall. The diner fell silent, multiple eyes glued on us. “No, thank you,” he said, brushing imaginary crumbs off his kurta. “Eating is an indulgence a Yamaduta must learn to renounce. I will rebuke my staff for engaging in such frivolous pleasures.” He stalked out, the door swinging wildly behind him.

“Asshole,” muttered Auntie Nimmi under her breath. She trudged back to her cassette player and flipped the tape. The lyrics of Gulzar, sung in the deep, melancholic voice of Bhupinder Singh, washed over the room, cleansing it of Dandapani’s malevolence.

I slumped back on my chair, my heart rate slowing. Nimmi came back and threw the pouch at me. “Return it,” she rasped.

I caught it. “Why?”

She laid her thick, calloused palms on the table and glared at me. “Because this is the first time in over forty years that he has seen fit to visit my establishment. Because I worked my butt off to open this shop, but he could close me down in less time than it takes to say Yamaduta. Because something smells bad—”

“That was him. He smells awful.”

“Roshni. Don’t take this case.”

I stared at her. I’d never seen her so worked up before—except that time a bunch of ferrymen got drunk and tried to take her across the river for “sightseeing”. She stopped serving alcohol after that incident.

The clock struck eleven. I grabbed the pouch and rose. “Too late, Auntie. I already took the case.”

“Roshni.”

I slipped out before she could berate me further. It was a warm, moonlit night. A thick breeze blew from the river, laden with the stink of grief and garbage. I walked away from it, but the reek followed me down the street, into the alley, and through a tunnel into the lone city park.

Such a thin slice of life between the river and the road. Why did I persist in hanging around here? I’d forgotten much of my human existence, except that there was blood at the end of it. But whatever I’d done, there was a fixed price to be paid. Once paid, I could be reborn. I didn’t want to become a ghost. I didn’t want to disappear, inch by inch, into nothingness. If only I could rejoin the force. But there was no hope of that. I’d broken the rules, disobeying a direct order.

I walked between rows of amaltas trees, wishing I could forget how I’d lost my job, like I’d forgotten so much of my past.

A mother and her child had stood on the banks of the Vaitarna River for days, begging for a ride across on one of the boats. The ferrymen had ignored her. She didn’t have sufficient “payment”—the good deeds that allow a soul safe passage to Yamaloka. She would have to swim across, braving the crocodiles that lived in its depths. She didn’t want to be parted from her child, so she stole a boat. Can you blame her?

I was tasked with capsizing the boat, casting the two souls adrift to struggle in the Vaitarna’s waters, which turn to blood and pus for sinners. I didn’t. Can you blame me?

My Superintendent certainly did. You’re not supposed to feel empathy for sinners. Everyone gets what they deserve. If she’d swum through the blood and pus and had her flesh ripped by ravenous crocodiles, as she was meant to, the burden of her sins when she faced Yamaraja would have been that much lower. I’d interfered, and there’s nothing worse than interfering with a soul’s cycle of death and rebirth.

Close to midnight, I exited the park and climbed the grassy hill behind it, a winding path that led to the city gates. Madhav was waiting halfway up the path, his face tense with anxiety. He broke into a relieved smile when he saw me.

“I thought you wouldn’t come,” he said, clutching my hand as if I might run away.

“Why would you think that?” I shook his hand off and walked ahead of him.

He ran to catch up. “I heard Big D himself visited the diner today.”

“Yeah, I told him you’d come to eat the curry.” I glanced at him. “He doesn’t know about the missing soul, does he?”

Madhav shuddered. “Not yet. I reported the soul safely delivered to Bahubheeti, vacillating on whether to cross the river or not.”

That excuse wouldn’t work for more than a few days. Sooner or later, the ferrymen—and Dandapani—would realize there was a missing soul. That would be the end of Madhav’s brief and inglorious career as a Yamaduta. Yamadutas could make mistakes—although they rarely did—but they weren’t supposed to lie about it.

It might also be the end of me for aiding and abetting his lie. But that was a worst-case scenario. Thousands of souls made the journey to Yamaloka every day. Why should Dandapani take a personal interest in this one? We just had to find the soul and bring it back before the ferrymen did their weekly quota count.

We arrived at the end of the path and were confronted by Sharvara, the massive dog who guarded the gates of the underworld. He glared at me out of four fiery eyes and emitted a bone-chilling growl that thrummed the air and made me want to run back to the safety of Auntie Nimmi’s curry shop.

“Now now, Sharvara,” cooed Madhav as if he was talking to a cute little puppy and not eighty kilos of muscle and meanness. “I have a token for her. See?”

He held out a small bronze disk under Sharvara’s dripping fangs. For a moment, I thought the dog would snap Madhav’s hand right off. I could hardly bear to watch. But Sharvara gave a suspicious sniff and stepped aside. Ornately carved black metal gates materialized behind him. Madhav pushed them open and beckoned. “Let’s go, Roshni.”

I hurried through the gateway before Sharvara could change his mind. Madhav grasped my wrist. “This may be a bit disorienting. You can close your eyes.”

I didn’t close my eyes. This was a mistake. We whirled through the air, spinning in dizzying circles over the city of Bahubheeti. Stars and planets flashed before my staring eyes. My head swam. “I’m going to be sick,” I screamed over the wind.

“What?” shouted Madhav, cupping his ear.

I gathered my breath to scream again, and landed with a thud on a patch of prickly grass. Madhav bent to haul me up, but I put up a warning hand. “Stop before I throw up half-digested jackfruit curry on you.”

He took a prudent step back. “Surely you have traveled this route before.”

“Yeah, but never so fast.” I rubbed my forehead and rose cautiously to my feet. My stomach pitched. Settle down, I scolded. We have work to do.

We stood before a decrepit old bungalow in the middle of an overgrown garden. A single bulb threw a weak yellow light on a porch filled with potted plants and an assortment of plastic lawn chairs.

Madhav walked toward a flowerbed. “This is where I was standing.” He pointed to the door. “That is the last I saw of her.”

“Roshni? What are you doing here?”

I leaped around, and Madhav fell into the shrubbery with a squeak of alarm. I groaned inwardly when I saw who was standing behind us: Inspector Ishkaan, as tall and handsome as ever, with cheekbones you could cut yourself on and eyelashes you could trip over. Out of all the officers in the Afterlife Police, why did it have to be him? In case you’re wondering, no, I do not and never did have a crush on him. And yes, he was the officer who escorted me to the edge of Asipatravana, the forest of sword leaves. Not something I’ll forget or forgive.

“I’m with Madhav,” I said.

He frowned. “That does not answer my question. What are you doing here?”

Madhav scrambled up from the shrubbery and opened his mouth, no doubt to bleat everything out and beg for help. I grabbed his elbow, pulled him toward me, and gave Ishkaan my sweetest smile. “We’re here on a date. Madhav is showing me his favorite haunts in the human world.”

Both of them gazed at me in slack-jawed surprise. “I am?” said Madhav. “I mean, of course I am. Isn’t this a lovely house?”

If you liked them one storm away from falling down on your head. “Beautiful,” I said. “Shall we go to your favorite Coffee House now?”

“Wait,” said Ishkaan, looking like someone had socked his beautiful jaw. “You’re dating a Yamaduta?”

“So what?” I snapped. “It’s allowed.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s not,” said Ishkaan. “Does his boss know?”

Madhav shriveled visibly. “Please do not tell him,” he begged.

“Yeah, don’t,” I said. “Not unless you want Madhav in several semi-conscious pieces. You’re not that cruel, are you? Come on, Madhav darling, let’s go get some coffee and leave the policeman to do his important police work.”

“You’re not supposed to eat or drink anything here,” said Ishkaan in a hectoring voice.

I refrained from sticking my tongue out at him. “I know. I meant metaphorical coffee. What are you doing here?”

He gave me a measured glance. “Following a lead. On a date, are you? Please don’t let me keep you from all the delights you have planned together.”

I sauntered out of the gate, pulling Madhav along behind me. We walked down the road in silence. The night was quiet and still, interrupted by the occasional roar of a car that made me flinch every time. Cars do that, I don’t know why. Overhead, ancient peepal trees formed an arch over the road. I put a name to the place: Lutyens’ Delhi. Home to dilapidated old colonial bungalows that cost more than entire buildings in other parts of the city. Madhav’s missing soul must have been the daughter-in-law of a minister or a judge. How had Ishkaan gotten wind of trouble? What “lead” did he have? I didn’t relax until we’d put a few hundred meters between ourselves and him.

“We may as well go to a Coffee House,” I said. “In case he follows us.”

“We aren’t really on a date, are we?” asked Madhav anxiously.

I threw him an exasperated glance. “No, you nincompoop. It was the only thing I could think of to shut him up.”

He gave a sigh of relief. “There’s a Coffee House open until three in the morning not far from here.”

“You can hide us from humans, right?” I asked.

He nodded. “They won’t notice us.”

Madhav’s Coffee House was, if anything, even more dilapidated than the bungalow. It stood in an alley in the outer circle of Connaught Place, a forlorn blue billboard advertising its simple fare: filter coffee, idli, masala dosa, vada, and cheese sandwiches. I couldn’t remember the taste of any of these things, although I must have eaten them while I was alive.

We went inside and sat at a table by a grimy window. It was a large, fairly empty place with three customers, one server, and one middle-aged ghost. The ghost slumped on a bench, staring morosely at a glass of cooling coffee. She must have evaded her Yamaduta and refused to leave. I wondered if she regretted it. Ghosts don’t last long on the earthly plane. This one was already translucent, the patterns of her worn yellow sari fading into the background.

Madhav looked at the ghost, looked at me, and we both had the same idea at the same time.

“Take her,” I urged. “You’ll be saving a soul and buying yourself some time. Two fish, one fly.”

“Dandapani will kill me,” he whispered, devouring the ghost with his avaricious gaze.

“Only if he finds out, and why should he?” I countered. “Besides, you’re doing a good deed here. Cleaning some other Yamaduta’s mess.”

The ghost must have sensed our regard, for she looked up, a frown on her once-pretty face. Her eyes widened, and she rose, melting toward the wall behind her.

Madhav leaped to his feet with a speed I wouldn’t have believed possible and tossed a flaming lasso at her. The ghost gave an ear-splitting scream as the lasso settled around her midriff. The humans in the room shifted uneasily, sensing something amiss.

“Does that hurt?” I asked, appalled. I’d never seen a Yamaduta in action before.

“It hurts the ego.” Madhav hauled the struggling ghost up to our table. “Calm down, dear lady. I’m here to take you home.”

The ghost stopped screaming. “Saale chutiye,” she spat. “Get lost! This is my home.”

Madhav tut-tutted. “A Coffee House where you cannot drink the coffee?”

“I can smell it,” she snarled.

“Soon, you will lose that, too,” I said. “Then you will lose yourself. Why not accept the ride and a chance to live again?”

She gave me a scornful up-down glance. “You’re nothing but a ghost yourself, waiting for oblivion.”

“I have a job,” I said, stung.

She cut her eyes to Madhav. “As his lackey? They’re all liars and hypocrites. Talking of the subtle body through one mouth and gorging dosa with the other mouth.”

“What?” I tried to make sense of what she’d said. “Gorging dosa?” I gave Madhav an accusing stare. “Have you been eating here?”

“Not him,” the ghost sneered. “Another chutiya Yamaduta. He ate six dosas and drank three filter coffees. I hid behind the wall and counted.”

Madhav frowned. “Impossible. Yamadutas cannot eat mortal food. When was this?”

“Three days ago.” She jerked her chin at the lasso around her. “Are you going to take this bloody thing off?”

“Sorry, no.” Madhav met my gaze. “Three days ago was when she vanished.”

We looked at each other with wild surmise. Was there a connection? A vanished soul, a dosa-eating Yamaduta, and an unreliable ghostly witness. This case was a lot more complicated than I had thought.

While we were staring at each other, the ghost wriggled out of the lasso with a triumphant screech and flew to the door, straight into Inspector Ishkaan’s arms. She tried to wrench herself away, but he twisted her hands behind her back and cuffed her. We hurried over, Madhav clucking like a concerned hen.

Ishkaan pressed the caterwauling ghost down on a chair. “Hush, Madam. If you continue to hurt my ears, I shall charge you with obstruction of justice and deposit you in the underworld prison. It is not a pleasant place.” The ghost fell silent, directing hate-filled glances at each one of us.

Ishkaan looked at me coolly. “Enjoying your date?”

“Mixing work and pleasure,” I said, matching his tone.

“Your work was running away from you,” he said. “You’re lucky I happened to come along.”

I glared at him. “You just happened to follow us?”

His lip curled. “Following you is the last thing on my mind, Roshni.”

“It must be a very small mind, seeing as how quickly it reached the last item,” I said.

Madhav plucked my sleeve. “There is no need to be rude to an officer of the law. We must thank him for capturing our errant soul.”

“Yeah, thanks,” I said. “Now give us our ghost so we can continue on our work-date.”

His eyes narrowed. “This one isn’t on your list, is it, Madhav?”

Madhav gave a nervous smile. “No, but it would be a good deed, cleaning some other Yamaduta’s mess.”

Ishkaan fixed Madhav with a pitiless gaze. “You were supposed to deliver a soul three days ago. What happened to it?”

A sheen of sweat appeared on Madhav’s forehead. “What do you mean, what happened to it?”

“It’s gone missing, right?” said Ishkaan. Madhav’s face crumpled.

“What makes you think that?” I snapped, stepping between them.

Ishkaan transferred his cold gaze to me. “The fact that you were both at that house. He’s obviously asked you for help locating the soul. And once again, you’re interfering in a matter you shouldn’t.”

I controlled myself with difficulty. We hadn’t managed to fool him after all. “You’re the one interfering in a matter you shouldn’t. It’s his job to find the soul and bring it back.”

“He won’t,” said Ishkaan.

“What do you mean I won’t?” Madhav bleated.

“I did a trace,” said Ishkaan. “Using a bit of ash from her funeral pyre. She’s nowhere on the earthly plane, and she’s not on the road to Yamaloka, and she’s not in Bahubheeti either.”

Madhav groaned. He was in deeper shit than either of us had imagined. Souls didn’t vanish. Not that fast. And even if it had dissipated, an official soul trace should have told Ishkaan exactly what happened to it.

I folded my arms. “Why did you do a trace, Ishkaan? Thousands of souls pass through the realms every day. What led you to this one?”

He stared at the ground, the tips of his ears turning red. “That is unimportant.”

I peered at him, my mind working fast. “You have a personal connection with this soul, don’t you?”

Madhav shot me a look of alarm. “Don’t accuse the officer baselessly, Roshni.” It was forbidden for officials to use their powers to track souls they’d known while they were alive.

“Who was she to you?” I pressed.

He sighed, raking a hand through his hair. “My niece.”

We stared at him, dumbfounded. Madhav cleared his throat. “Most irregular,” he said sternly.

“Yeah, how come no one comes looking for me?” said the ghost. “Where are my ancestors?” We ignored her.

“The only reason I did it,” said Ishkaan, “is because this isn’t the first time a soul has gone missing from around here. There’s one every few months, all in a radius of five kilometers from this Coffee House. And each time I request an investigation, I get denied. When my niece died, I. . .well, I was worried about her.” He shot a glare at Madhav. “This is your fault. You were supposed to escort her safely to Yamaloka.”

Madhav drew himself up to his full height of five feet two inches. “I accept that it is my fault,” he said with dignity. “I will find her. But you, Inspector, are in breach of Section Three, Article Six, Law Five Hundred and—”

“Stop,” I interrupted. “Both of you. We all want to find her, so we should call a truce.”

“I can help,” said the ghost, banging her cuffed wrists on the table to get our attention. “I’ve heard rumors of my sisters vanishing from around here. But what’s in it for me? Will you let me stay?”

“Certainly not—” began Madhav, when the blue fluorescent lights flickered. A chill wind blew over us, carrying with it the stench of blood, smoke, and rotten flesh. The humans sipped their coffee, untouched by the supernatural wind. Madhav clutched my sleeve, and the ghost coughed.

Ishkaan frowned. “Looks like we’re not supposed to be here.”

I rubbed my arms and shivered. “Let’s get out, then.”

We spilled out into the street, but the coldness followed us. I made the mistake of looking back, and my gut clenched. Eyes and fangs glittered in the shadows of the Coffee House, nightmares made real. The streetlights switched off, one by one, and we were plunged into darkness.

“We must return home immediately.” Madhav tugged the ghost, attempting to lead her away by her bound wrists.

The ghost pulled back. “I’m not going anywhere with you lot. Untrustworthy, that’s what you are, breaking the law, troubling innocent ghosts.”

There was a tremendous crack, and the road split down the middle to reveal a yawning black abyss. Kakola, the poison pit? I teetered at the edge, my mouth open in a soundless scream.

Someone grabbed my arm and hauled me back. I bumped into Ishkaan’s hard chest. “We don’t have time for this,” he snapped to Madhav. “Leave the ghost and get us out of here.”

Behind us, a series of bone-chilling howls rent the air.

“No, don’t leave me,” wailed the ghost, throwing herself on Madhav, nearly toppling him into the abyss.

“Hold hands,” shouted Madhav, pushing the ghost off himself. “I’ll get us home.”

“Oh, will you?” came a voice colder than the cutting wind.

Dandapani walked toward us from the direction of the howls, his white dhoti kurta gleaming in the dark. Madhav made a choked sound. The ghost whimpered, and Ishkaan whispered, “Hush.” I couldn’t move at all.

Dandapani came closer, his face skeletal, his eyes glowing like twin rubies.

“I’m sorry, sir,” gabbled Madhav. “I’ll find the soul, I swear.”

“You have deceived me,” said Dandapani, his voice tight with fury. “You will pay for this deception—all of you.”

Ishkaan started. “But I am not under your command, sir. I simply happened to be investigating—”

Dandapani gave a nasty smile. “What were you investigating, Inspector Ishkaan? You think I do not know that you tried to trace your niece? This is a violation of one of our most sacred laws. Consider yourself stripped of your rank. You are in my domain, and I know exactly which hell to send you to.”

The wind sharpened, cutting into my skin. The ghost keened.

“You’re overstepping,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “You don’t have the authority to send us anywhere, not until we’re ready to go.”

His gaze fell on me. “Ah, Roshni. Liar, unfilial daughter, murderer. Have you no shame? Keep your silence.”

“I’m not,” the words stuck in my throat. “Not those things you’re calling me.”

“No?” He showed his teeth in a horrible grin. “Why else have you stayed, year after year, when the rest of your family has moved on? It’s because you know, in your heart, that you do not deserve to be reborn.” My chest squeezed at his words. A scene flashed through my mind. A car, lying on its side, the front crumpled, the glass shattered. Blood pooling on the ground. The broken bodies inside.

Ishkaan gripped my shoulder. “Don’t listen to him.”

“Why not? It is time she remembered why she is here. Remember, Roshni. Remember the accident that killed you, your parents, and your younger brother. Remember that you are responsible for all their deaths.”

Each word was a shard of glass cutting into my soul. I closed my ears with my hands, but I couldn’t unhear his words. I couldn’t unsee the past.

There’d been a fight. Oh, there were always fights, but this one had been nasty. I was desperate to move out, to have my own place, to be free. But I was broke—out of college, out of work, and the despair of my parents. I wanted to start my own investigative agency, but they were dead set against such a seedy venture. We’d been returning home after a disastrous lunch with their friends. I’d been bullied into going to meet the son, who was my age and some sort of marketing manager with an obscenely high salary. I’d acted out, of course. I always did when they tried to foist potential grooms on me. They should have known what to expect. But they’d been so bitter, railing against me on the way back, telling me I wouldn’t amount to anything, that I was an embarrassment and a shame to the entire family. I’d hated them in that moment, both for being wrong and for being right.

So I’d lashed out. Said I didn’t want to end up like them, trapped in a tense, loveless marriage and dead-end jobs that didn’t mean anything. My mother began to cry, and my father turned around to berate me, and that was when the car skidded off the rain-slick road and smashed into the trees.

If I could, I’d take back those words. I’d stay silent, like I’d been silent for all twenty-five years of my unexceptional life. I’d even marry that marketing shit. Anything, for that accident to not happen. Anything, for my parents and my little brother to still be alive.

Ishkaan pried my hands away and said sharply, “Focus, Roshni. Stay in the present.”

“Yes, enjoy the fleeting, pain-free moments before the forest of sword leaves closes over you,” said Dandapani.

I wiped the tears from my face and summoned my strength. “You’re in the wrong line of work, old man. Yamadutas aren’t supposed to delight in the suffering of others. You should have been born a dog of Sarama.”

His eyes widened in shock. Probably no one had been stupid or reckless enough to talk back to him in centuries. My satisfaction was short-lived. He flicked his wrist, and a lasso of flame flew through the air toward me. I stared at it, petrified. But before it could reach me, Ishkaan threw himself in its way. He gasped in pain as the lasso tightened around him, binding his arms to his body.

“Ishkaan, you fool.” I grasped the lasso, trying to tug it off, but it burned my palms, and I flinched away.

“You could just say thank you,” wheezed Ishkaan, struggling against the burning rope.

“Don’t touch it,” cried Madhav as I made to reach for it again. Ishkaan trembled as flames licked his body.

“I thought you said it didn’t hurt!” I shouted, torn between panic and anger.

Dandapani smirked. “I am an expert in pain. First: an individual hell to suit your crimes. Second: Kakola, the black pit of no return.”

My insides shriveled at his words. Kakola was the hell reserved for the worst criminals. There was no coming back from there, no hope of expiation or rebirth.

“Wait,” said the ghost, leaning forward and peering at Dandapani. “I’ve seen you before. Three days ago, wasn’t that you hogging dosas at the Coffee House?”

What? I stared at the chief of the Yamadutas, and the pieces of the puzzle fell into place, making an awful picture.

Dandapani’s eyes bulged. “How dare you?”

The ghost cringed. “I have nothing against anyone eating dosas and drinking filter coffee. I just wish I could do the same. Lucky you, sir. Was it good?”

Dandapani’s face swelled. “Did you want the sons of Sarama? Then you shall have them.” He snapped his fingers. With a dreadful roar, four massive dogs prowled out of the darkness behind him. Black-furred, red-eyed, and slavering, they were as tall as my shoulder, with fangs as big as my hand. The ghost screamed and fell to her knees.

“Stay strong,” quavered Madhav. “Pain does not last forever.”

Dandapani gave a demonic laugh. “Oh, it can. It will.” In which century had he lost his marbles? And why had no one noticed?

As the beasts closed the distance between us, I raised my head to the sky and shouted with all the breath in my lungs, “Yamaraja, I invoke you! With all the good deeds I have done, I invoke you. Hear me, Yamaraja!”

“You dare call HIS name?” raged Dandapani. “Rip the tongue out of her mouth,” he commanded, and the dogs leaped. I closed my eyes in terror.

The ground shook, and a deep growl vibrated the air. I opened my eyes. Before us crouched a huge black dog, bigger even than the four who had been about to attack us, and who now stood with their heads hanging, looking sheepish.

“Sarama?” said Madhav in disbelief. The dog-goddess turned her head and curled her lip, revealing the elegant white daggers of her mouth. He bowed at once. “I mean, your ladyship! This is such an honor.”

My knees buckled, and I fell to the ground, weak with relief. Ishkaan and Madhav knelt beside me. Sarama’s presence could mean only one thing.

Clip-clop came the sound of hoofs, and Yamaraja appeared, riding a black water buffalo. Blue-skinned, four-armed, garlanded by flames, and dressed in gold, he bore an expression of wrath on his stormy face. My stomach curdled. What had I done?

“My Lord,” said Dandapani, sounding stunned. “You did not have to trouble yourself. I was about to punish these sinners on your behalf.”

Yamaraja ignored him. He dismounted and fixed his fiery gaze on me. I wanted to disappear. “What is this?” he rumbled in a voice like thunder. “No ghee, no soma, and you have invoked me? Is this how you welcome the god of death?”

I bent my head, heart hammering. “I beg forgiveness, Lord. I have nothing but myself. I offer you all the good deeds I have done as a present.”

“Good deeds? You?” said Yamaraja. “Are you sure you’ve done any of those?”

“I volunteered at an animal shelter,” I said, beginning to sweat.

“Ah. No wonder Sarama was keen on helping you.” The dog-goddess nipped his hand, and he gave a gruff laugh. “All right. I accept your offering, although you may regret it when you finally stand before me to be judged. Why did you invoke me?”

Dandapani stepped forward. “Do not listen to them, Lord. They are liars and sinners, deserving of punishment. This woman who has invoked you was responsible for the deaths of her entire family. Now she lingers in Bahubheeti, refusing your judgment. The policeman has used his official powers to track a family member on Earth. The Yamaduta is a disgrace to me and our entire profession. He has lost a soul and lied about it.”

Yamaraja raised his bushy eyebrows. “Is this true?”

“Yes, Lord, it is true,” I said. “But it is not the whole truth. I didn’t mean to kill anyone. It was an accident. And Ishkaan only used the trace because souls have been vanishing from this area for a while now, and he was worried about what was going on. As for Madhav, he made a mistake, and he repents it. But the real sinner is him.” I pointed to Dandapani.

Dandapani recoiled.

“What do you mean?” demanded Yamaraja. “Speak quickly and to my satisfaction, or the fate my minion has reserved for you will surely come to pass.”

I swallowed. “Lord, Dandapani has been eating mortal food, as witnessed by this ghost.”

“She lies!” roared Dandapani.

Yamaraja raised a hand, cutting him off.

I continued, “How is it possible? The more years we spend in the afterlife, the more we lose of what we were. Dandapani has been a Yamaduta for centuries. He should not be able to eat or drink in the human realm. The only way for him to do that would be if he. . .” I took a deep breath and made myself say it, “if he sucked the soul out of another human to steal their humanity.”

Madhav gave a horrified gasp. Dandapani looked at me with murder in his eyes.

Ishkaan’s head shot up. “The villain,” he said hoarsely. “Is that what he did?”

I nodded. “I asked myself why souls had been vanishing so regularly around the Coffee House, and why your requests for an investigation were always denied. Dandapani is an ancient Yamaduta of great power and authority. He is the only one who could have suppressed your requests. Besides, the ghost saw him eating.”

“A lie to besmirch my reputation,” sneered Dandapani. “I have worked for you for hundreds of years, my Lord. Do you not trust me?”

“Of course I do,” said Yamaraja, and my heart sank. “And I am grateful for all your years of service.” Dandapani preened. “That is why I think it is time for you to retire.”

Dandapani looked at him, confused. “Retire, my Lord?”

“Do you remember what it was to be human?” said Yamaraja. “I think not. You crave it, but not a single memory remains to you of your time as a mortal. It is time to rectify that. You will go to my court, face my judgment, and bear the burden of your sins. And then you will be reborn.”

Dandapani fell to his knees, his face a rictus of terror. “No, Lord, no! Anything but that.”

Yamaraja flicked his hand. “Take him.”

The dogs Dandapani had summoned fell on him and bore him away, screaming. Silence returned to the scene of our near-annihilation. The flaming lasso around Ishkaan vanished, and he rubbed his arms, wincing. The streetlights came on, one by one, and the road knit together.

Yamaraja sighed. “This is my fault. I should have seen it coming. No mortal can stay in the afterlife as long as Dandapani and remain sane.” He gazed at Madhav contemplatively. “You, child, are relatively young in the afterlife, are you not?”

“Six years, Lord,” quavered Madhav. “A river cleaner for most of it.”

“Good,” said Yamaraja. “You can take Dandapani’s place.”

“What?” Madhav’s eyes went round with horror. “Me?”

“Report to my court tomorrow to take the oath.” Yamaraja’s gaze shifted to Ishkaan. “A promotion to Chief Inspector, I think, is called for.”

Ishkaan bowed low. “Thank you, Lord.”

Yamaraja looked at me. “And you, I think, would like to rejoin the force?”

The words yes yes oh god yes bubbled up inside me and died before reaching my lips. “No thank you, Lord. I like being a private detective. It was my dream to be one when I was alive.”

“Ah.” Yamaraja grinned, revealing filed, blackened teeth. “You prefer being outside the law.”

“Alongside the law,” I said in as humble a tone as I could manage.

“So be it,” said Yamaraja. “What boon would you ask of me?”

I didn’t have to think. “One evening at the Coffee House for all of us, eating and drinking as if we were alive once more.”

“Me too?” said the ghost, perking up. “Please? After all, I’m the one who identified the dosa-eating chutiya.”

Yamaraja knitted his brows.

“It’s only fair, Lord,” I said hastily before he could take offence at the ghost’s colorful language. “I’ll take her to Auntie Nimmi’s afterward. She can stay with us until she decides to cross the river.”

“Oh, all right. I feel generous tonight.” Yamaraja waved his hand. “Enjoy the meal, children. But don’t make a habit of it.”

He vanished along with Sarama and his water buffalo. The world popped. We stood before the Coffee House, staring at the menu written on the billboard outside.

“Come on.” The ghost pushed open the door. “Does anyone have money? Or are we going to eat and run?”

“I have money,” said Madhav, as if waking from a dream.

“Your treat.” I propelled them all inside before we could lose our courage.

The Coffee House was empty. The clock showed two thirty in the morning. We had thirty minutes to eat and drink to our hearts’ content. We sat at a table, and a bored-looking server came up to take our order. We asked for four of everything, making the server’s eyes bulge in distress.

“I can’t believe he asked me to take Dandapani’s place,” said Madhav. “He must have been joking, right? I’ll go to his court, and he’ll have a good laugh at my expense. Right?”

Ishkaan and I exchanged a meaningful glance. Madhav boy was in for a shock. I patted his hand. “Yeah, sure. Let’s enjoy the meal.”

“Isn’t this fun?” said the ghost happily when the server returned with four glasses of steaming, aromatic filter coffee. “Like a double date, yes?”

“No,” Ishkaan and I said together.

©2022 by Rati Mehrotra.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

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

The Metamorphosis of Marie Martin

Nadine Tomlinson | 4420 words

This story is part of Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, the first climate-fiction contest from Fix, Grist’s solutions lab. Imagine 2200 asked writers to imagine the next 180 years of equitable climate progress, and the winning stories feature intersectional worlds in which no community is left behind. Read all 12 stories in the collection at grist.org/fix.

When her eyes were at her knees and Mama was teaching her how to swim, she told her that drowning is easy and staying alive is the realest struggle. But she was a pickney then, so the words did go through one ear and fly out the other. They fly back in again when she got pregnant at almost 15 and drop out of high school. Now, they come back, wheeling around in her head like John Crows.

So this is what it feel like fi dead.

She’s a rock, sinking. Part of her know she mustn’t drop asleep.

— Sleep is the sister of Death, Boysie did say.

Swim back to the shore.

She has to go back home. But her body not cooperating at all. It behaving like a hard ears pickney, just like what Mama used to call her.

Something not right. How mi feel so light, like mi weigh likkle and nothing?

Mama used to boast about her: “Yuh see my Bubbles? Don’t watch her size. She can do anything — climb coconut tree, kin pupalick, do splits — even though she fat. She better than seven sons. Heh! Bet oonu never know she was swimming like fish before she could walk.”

She can’t feel her legs. She looks down.

They’re not there. Like the rest of her body.

• • • •

She drew Precious into her arms, ran her hand over her hair with its neat canerows, straight and smooth, unlike the roads in Ackee Town that full of potholes. Once, a taxi man told her that if your vehicle make mistake and drop into one, you would end up in China.

“Precious, stop cry now. I soon come back.” She held her at arm’s length, brushed stray tears away.

“Miss Cunningham said eagle fishing —”

“Illegal.”

“Illegal fishing is wrong, and overfishering —”

“Overfishing.”

“Overfishing is bad ’cause there won’t be any fish left.” Precious stopped, trying to remember. “And the crawls need the fish to keep them clean and healthy.”

“Corals.”

“Yes, Mummy. Mummy, you nuh ’fraid fi go prison?”

“Precious, what ah tell yuh ’bout speaking patwah?”

“But you do it all the time.”

This chile. “Yes, but I know when to speak it. Nothing is wrong with patwah, but I want you to practice speaking standard English because,” she glanced at Sweets as she approached and stood at the entrance to the bedroom, “I want a better life for you. This is 2032, but some people will still judge you by how yuh talk. Don’t make your mouth hold yuh back in life. And yuh auntie and me not going to prison, so stop worry. We not hurting anybody, baby. We trying to survive. Listen, sometimes you have to do things that people say are wrong for a good cause.” She kissed her forehead. “You are my good cause.”

“Come, Bubbles.” Sweets clicked her tongue, patted her speargun. “We haffi go now.” She headed toward the front door.

Precious started bawling again. “Mummy, don’t go. Please.”

“Marley, stop it! Yuh finish yuh homework?”

Precious’s tears slowly dried up like the taps during water lock-offs. Her eyes round like a dinner plate, the way she surprised. “Mummy, you said my name.”

Same time, Mama rushed into the room as if she heard bad news. “What happen to har?” She moved closer to Precious and rested the back of her hand against her neck and forehead. “She never use to behave like dis when you go fishing.”

She stood up, smoothed away the creases her backside made on the bedspread. “I don’t know, Mama, and I haffi leave now.”

“Come, putus.” Mama gently led Precious out of the room.

In the kitchen, Mama took a jar of nutmegs out of a cupboard and put one in Precious’s mouth to soothe her nerves. She screwed up her face, but obeyed Mama when she told her not to spit it out and to sit at the dining room table.

Mama handed her a clean sheet of loose paper and her box of crayons. “Draw somet’ing nice fi yuh Mummy.”

Precious nodded and set to work. Mama pushed out her lips to indicate that they should go outside.

In the front yard, Sweets was sitting on the concrete staircase beside the house.

“God go wid oonu. Remember de offering fi Boysie.”

Sweets shook her head, sighed. “Mama, why yuh must say the same t’ing every time we go fishing? We always do it.”

“He was mi only son. I want him to continue rest in peace.”

“Mummy, wait.” Precious ran toward her, waving the loose sheet of paper like a flag.

“How yuh finish draw so quick? What yuh do wid de nutmeg?” Mama pretended to look stern.

“It on de,” she stopped, remembering, “it’s on the table. I’m okay now, Grandma.” She turned to her. “This is for you, Mummy.”

She took the paper, grinned at the drawing of a silver, blue, and pink fish with her name under it. “Thanks, baby. It’s really pretty.” She handed it back to her. “Ask Grandma for a magnet, so yuh can put it on de fridge.” She squatted to give her a quick hug. “Auntie and me going to bring back nuff parrotfish and snapper, okay?”

“I’m going to stop eating parrotfish.”

“Why? It’s your favorite.”

“Miss Cunningham said not a lot of fish are left.”

“Miss Cunningham is a teacher, not a fisherwoman.”

“She invited a marie blygist to class last week.”

“Marine biologist.”

“Yes, Mummy. The lady said parrotfish can save the beaches and crawls — the corals. She said sand comes from parrotfish doo-doo.” Her expression changed, as if she had the whole world balancing on her 6-year-old shoulders. “Mummy, please don’t catch any more parrotfish. You can help them.”

“Precious, I . . .” She pinched the bridge of her nose, let her hand fall into her lap. “Behave yuhself and listen to Grandma. We soon come back.”

As she shifted to straighten herself, Precious grabbed her arm and pulled her down to her level again. She whispered in her ear, pivoted like a ballet dancer, and sprinted like Usain Bolt inside the house.

“Bubbles! Bubbles!” Mama’s voice echoed as if from inside a tunnel. “Sweets, move fast and bring de bottle of white rum mek mi rub some on har face. She look like she gwine collapse!”

• • • •

She want to scream, to put down a piece of cow-bawling and roll on the ground, but her new mouth feel like it belong to a stranger. No, Jah. This can’t be real. In the broken glass bottom of a boat that cotch on a damaged coral reef, her shattered reflection make her feel like she going mad.

Mighty God of Daniel, as Mama would say.

Her silver and gray parrotfish reflection stare back at her.

How dis happen to mi? Why it happen to mi? Mi can turn back into miself? How mi going to get back home?

Tears and rage building up inside her like a Category 5 storm, but she have no way to let them out. Every time life kick her down, she kick back as good as she got.

Now, mi can’t even give it one good kick, to rahtid.

The words Precious whispered to her fly back in her ear.

No, she can’t give up. Her body is different now, but she’s still Marie Martin, Melba’s daughter, Sweets’s sister, and Precious’s mother. She’s a hustler. A survivor. Tough and stubborn to break like Jackass Corn. As much as she want to bawl her eyes out, common sense is taking over and telling her she has to survive in this new world. What would Mama say?

— Bubbles, if yuh know what good fi yuh, yuh better think like a fish.

Is nighttime, so moray eels are hunting parrotfish. Instead of being the hunter, she’s now the prey. She need to find somewhere to —

What is this now? Trouble always set like rain.

Ten, 15, likkle more than 20 parrotfish coming toward her. Right off the bat, she know which one is the Don. Living in Ackee Town teach you these things. He’s full-bodied, and look boasy in pink and electric blue. Something jump inside her like it frighten. Guilt seize her. She wish she could tell him sorry. His eyes walk all over her while the others circle her like they investigating a crime scene. Next thing she know, they nudging her. She gear up herself to fight, bite, until she sense they want her to follow them.

Jah, where them taking mi?

All of them moving like one body. She in the middle, somehow managing to keep up. Even though she shooting through the water faster than Alia Atkinson, and feel water leaving her gills to merge with the sea, she not thirsty. The seawater feel smooth like cocoa butter as it slide over her gills. The liquid air in this blue-green world is sweet like ripe Julie mangoes bursting in her mouth, the golden juice running down to her elbow, now a memory.

Her new eyes allow her to see all around her at the same time. They not burning or watering, no matter how long she stare because she don’t need to blink. The seawater is as invisible to her as the air when she walked on land. She and the other parrotfish moving like colorful light over a field of waving seagrass. Around a bend, she almost collide with a bleached coral reef squatting like a tenement yard. The corals stare back at her like the discolored faces of misguided young men and women in her community, who believe that lightening their dark complexion is a ladder out of the pit of poverty.

Two-twos, they reach a healthy reef. She and Sweets never dive in this section. It’s like a brand-new world, full of color and life. A clownfish hide among some staghorn corals when it spot her. Wait! Is a sea turtle dat? Can’t tell when last mi see one. The baby fish peep at her from the reef’s crevices. Some more parrotfish, along with a handful of snappers, watching her.

Dem know mi different? Why dem help mi?

She’s an outsider. Before her change, she was their enemy. A predator.

Something happening to her again.

Is what dis slimy substance on mi body? Yuck!

It’s on the other parrotfish, too. They settling down for the night in the nooks and crannies of the reef.

Ohhh! The slime hide us from predators.

She find a crevice, slip into it, and watch them. Sleep biting her, but she fighting it. She look to her right. The leader’s eye and her own make two.

Is like him read mi mind and know mi don’t plan to stay here.

Quick-quick, she form like she sleeping.

Maybe mi will turn back into miself once mi reach de shore.

First chance she get, she out of here.

• • • •

The sea, so quiet, unlike inside her. Precious’s words tumbling over and over in her head like when she kin pupalick. The sky was a black sheet that the moon hiding behind. Sweets’s mouth moving as she poured libations into the seawater. When she finished her ritual, she lit a spliff and blew perfect Os toward the black sheet above, just like Boysie’s habit before he began fishing for the day or night. He used to say that was how him feel the power of their ancestors guiding him. She always wondered if he smoked that day when he died.

Sweets nudged her foot with hers. “Your time.”

She leaned over the side of the Empress of the Sea and placed a calabash containing trimmings from their hair and nails, along with another calabash filled with white rice and curry goat, on the back of the seawater. Ripple by ripple, the water carried them away.

“Mikayla, promise me somet’ing.”

“Whatever it is, it must be serious. Can’t tell when last mi hear yuh call me by mi Government name.”

“Promise me you’ll look after Precious if anyt’ing happen to me.”

“Stop chat faat. Me an’ Mama not doing dat a’ready?”

“I mean . . . be her mother. You.”

“What happen to yuh tonight? How yuh sound like yuh spooked?”

“Just promise me an’ done, nuh?” She kissed her teeth.

“All right, all right. Nuh bodda get ignorant pon me. Of course. Yuh never haffi ask.” She outed the spliff between her thumb and forefinger and sucked them. “Yuh ready?” She put on her mask and fins, and took up her speargun.

“Right behind you.” She attached a dive flashlight to the lanyard around her wrist, and turned it on. “Ten minutes?”

“Nine.” Sweets slipped beneath the skin of the seawater like a whisper.

She ignored the needle-prick in her conscience when they reached a no-take zone.

Suppose de wardens catch you and Sweets?

What yuh expect we fi do? Look how much wages we lose sake o’ de sanctuary’s restrictions. How mi must help put food on de table, plus pay Precious’s school fees an’ buy her holo-textbooks if mi nuh do dis?

So what you going to do when no more fish are left?

Sweets’s hand signal distracted her just in time. She squashed the whispers in her head. Then almost forgot to keep holding her breath. A flash of the brightest blue she ever saw. The water can play tricks on your mind when your body doing its best to conserve oxygen. But she wasn’t seeing things. A pretty electric blue and neon-pink parrotfish side-eyeing them like him want to know what their business is around these parts. The speargun suddenly felt heavy in her hand. Her fingers curled around it tighter than usual. She needed the money bad-bad. Sweets gave her the thumbs-up sign. She aimed at the pretty parrotfish. Before she could shoot, it darted away.

Too late, she understood why.

A giant moray eel.

Before she or Sweets could react, it latched onto Sweets’s leg. She started doing the one thing she shouldn’t do.

— Panic kill first before de drowning, Boysie did say when he was teaching them to free dive.

Alarm bells like police sirens in her head. She turned her head just in time to see a goliath grouper charging toward her.

— Sometimes dem work together, Boysie did say. De enemy of mi enemy is mi friend.

Sweets taking in more water.

Nine minutes.

Boysie used to hold out until 11 minutes. But she and Sweets not that good.

She aimed at the grouper.

• • • •

What she did expect? Going back didn’t change a thing. She’s still a parrotfish. The taste of disappointment is bitter in her mouth as if she swallowed cerasee tea.

By now, her family must think she dead. She can’t imagine what they going through, especially Mama. She and Precious took it extremely hard when Boysie died last year. Now, they going to have to deal with the pain of losing her.

Something inside her like a long piece of rope is pulling her toward the reef with the fish. The other end is hauling her heart toward Ackee Town and her family. After dillydallying in her mind, she make a U-turn with a heavy feeling inside. Might as well go back. It not safe to be out here alone.

The bleached coral reef still look an old tenement yard. The last time she saw a forest of beautiful, healthy reefs was when she was 8 years old. Precious isn’t that fortunate. She has to depend on her science holo-textbook and visor to see moving 4D images of coral reefs when they were in their glory.

But stop! Why she so focused on the past? She was always a person to look forward, to plan for whatever was waiting around the corner. Just because she’s a fish now don’t mean that part of her change. She was just sleeping in a healthy reef, which means that there’s hope for this one and others like it. She could help the other parrotfish restore the reefs and beaches. Precious and the children in Ackee Town could get to see a thriving reef for real and play on a beach one day. She couldn’t change back and return to her family, but she could do something for them and the land she left behind that would benefit them now and throughout the coming years.

You have to say goodbye to your old life and accept your new one. You can do that?

I can do anything fi mi family. Mi want good fi dem, so mi nose haffi run.

Your new family waiting for you. Hurry up.

She sense it even before she reach. Not one of them is sleeping. They move as one toward her and form a circle around her. Sound waves sliding off their bodies. She understand them. They wondering where she did go. If she could bawl, she would. She only experienced that kind of care and concern from Mama, Boysie, Sweets, and Precious.

Inside her feel like knots unraveling. Instinct take over and she start to vibrate just like them. She going to tell them everything.

She could almost hear Mama’s cheerful, hoarse laugh.

— Come, mi dear. Mek we lap frock tail. Mi have one story fi gi’ yuh!

• • • •

The air never tasted so sweet. She gulped it, choked, gulped some more. Her eyes burned like when you make mistake and take your hand that have Scotch bonnet pepper juice on it and rub your eye.

She could barely feel her arms as she hauled Sweets toward the Empress of the Sea.

“Sweets. Sweets! Yuh hear mi?”

She coughed. Nodded. Cried out when she tried to climb into the boat.

“After three. One, two, three.” She strained to push Sweets up and over into the boat.

Sweets coughed again, sat up. Pain all over her face as she looked at the wound on her leg.

“Yuh going need stitches. No clinic is open at this time o’ night.”

Sweets rummaged through the first-aid kit. “Mi will ask Mama to sew it up when we reach back.” Her hands trembled as she cleaned the cut.

“De timing bad, but mi soon come back.”

Sweets’s head snapped up. “Where yuh going?”

“To get de spearguns.”

“Leff dem. It nuh worth it.”

“How we going manage without them?”

“Mi a beg yuh. Nuh go back down there. Mek we go home.”

“Yuh know how much money fi one speargun, not to mention two?”

Sweets coughed, spat.

“Mi nah tek long. Three minutes max.”

She slipped beneath the rippling seawater before Sweets could form another word.

Two minutes.

The spearguns were right where she and Sweets dropped them.

Her flashlight flickered.

No no no!

She knocked it two times. The light jerked on, off, on . . .

She dived quick-quick, grabbed the spearguns.

. . . off.

A cramp shoot up her right leg like a lightning bolt.

She forgot to breathe, dropped the flashlight and the spearguns. Pain forced her mouth open.

Four minutes.

She should’ve listened to Sweets. Her tired muscles felt like a rubber band that stretch out till it slack. She fighting the water and reaching nowhere fast. Only losing air like a tire with a leak.

In her ears, her heart was a slow drum beat from far away.

She’s a rock, sinking.

Her body jerked once, twice.

She landed on something rough. Dimly, she realized it was a dying coral reef.

So this is what it feel like fi dead.

Her body sank into the bed of corals.

Before everything went black, her last memory was of Precious grabbing her arm and whispering in her ear, “You’re not coming back, Mummy, but you’re not going to die.”

• • • •

What is time now? It fly like a hummingbird. She learn to mark it by the shape of the moon. Thirteen moons show their round faces since the last night she walked on two legs. The feeling of missing her human body is a memory. Everything from that time is a dream now.

The little girl in a blue dress with pink flowers is running barefoot to the beach’s hairline. What she name again? Precious. She used to miss her. That ache is lost in a distant memory. She get taller, but she still skinny like bamboo. Well, that not changing. She get her size from her father. She holding a sheet of paper close to her chest. Her eyes searching the water. Six moons she been doing the same thing.

A fat woman with hair like thin ropes the color of the rainbow is heading towards the little gi— Precious. Try remember her name. It won’t be long before she’s just another little girl on a beach. The woman . . . she name . . . Sweets. She say something to Precious that make her face light up a bit, like when a cloud can’t hide the sun’s smile.

Some people are arriving in twos, threes, fours. Not the ones she have to be careful of. The ones who try to catch her and her family. No, these people, some with dark faces, others paler, come to swim or eat or lie down on the beach, now that there are beaches on the island again and seafood restaurants are back in business. She don’t spot the ones who came a whole heap of times to examine and test the sand on this beach. They were excited can’t done, as if it was the first time they were seeing sand. Sand that came from her and her family. Special sand that she helped to create.

An older woman is coming toward Precious and Sweets. Mama. Her hair is more salt than pepper. Her body look like it’s holding up her dress. That face used to know belly-laughing and smiles. It’s strange to see her here today. The last time she step foot here was when the sand returned, six moons ago.

Movement beside her. She never have to look to see that it’s the electric-blue and neon-pink parrotfish. He started joining her whenever she came to check if Precious, Sweets, and Mama on the beach. She wonder if he remember them. She wonder how long it took him to forget that he was Boysie.

Is the sand did make her realize he was her brother. The same sand on the beach that caused those strangers to get excited. Her and Boysie’s doo-doo is different. Boysie smart, so she feel he figured it out, too.

Precious step into the seawater with purpose, her eyes seeking something. Finally, she bend down and let a gentle wave carry the paper away. Six moons she been doing the same thing. Each time, her face would screw up and water would spill from her eyes like rain. Same thing happen again. She turn and run to Sweets, who kneel down on the sand and hug her. Mama trying to stand up strong, but she look like she going to keel over any minute.

She wish she could tell them that the sea gives more than she takes. That what was lost is found. That in her previous life, she took more than she gave, but everything is balanced now because she gave the biggest gift of her entire existence, past and present. She, Boysie, and their offspring helped to restore this beach, and others on the island, better than it was before. She wish she could tell them that what was given up as dead is reborn. She wish she could show them the coral reefs, stronger than before, like underwater rainforests filled with countless fish and other sea creatures. She wish she could say, “All is not lost. Dat sand oonu standing on is hope. It will bear oonu up today, tomorrow, and for the rest of oonu lives.”

The special sand is the greatest gift she, Boysie, and their offspring can offer them from their bodies. When her and his time come, they will leave behind a strong and lasting legacy. This island and others in the Caribbean can finally exhale in relief.

More people show up, spreading over the beach like ants. She can’t see Precious, Sweets, and Mama anymore. By the next ripe moon, she might forget the blood-tie she once shared with them and think of them as strangers she recognized. Even Boysie would become just a pretty parrotfish to her one day.

As if he read her mind, he nudge her to make her know is time to leave. For a moment, as she look at him, Boysie’s shoulder-length dreadlocks and a smile like pearls on his long, dark face flash behind her eyes. Somehow, she know she would never see it again after today. But it’s okay. They’re together again, even when they won’t remember who they were to each other in a yesterday life.

The flash behind her eyes fading like when the evening sun slowly dipping into the sea. But not before Boysie grin and say in his husky voice, “Come, Bubbles. Mek we go home now.”

©2022 by Nadine Tomlinson. Originally published in Grist Magazine’s Imagine 2200: Climate fiction for future ancestors. Reprinted by permission of the author and Grist Magazine, Inc.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nadine Tomlinson is a Jamaican writer and speculative storyteller. Her short fiction and poetry explore themes that include the natural environment, and African folklore and ancestral spiritual traditions in Jamaican culture.

Mad Honey

Aimee Ogden | 2771 words

The three wolves in the sun-smeared wood did not turn and run when Aran approached with his musket in hand. Wolves were supposed to run from men with guns. This was the way of the world. Sweat and necessity made his musket slide against his palms. He gripped tighter, not wanting to startle the beasts by bringing the musket to bear too quickly.

Two of the beasts stood over the third, which reclined on its side in the patchy grass. He could count their rib-bones through their thin hides. His own hungry bones hummed in sympathy. But the world turned on toward frost and frozen ground, and necessity stilled the tremor in his chest. This was his people’s land, and it had been since the last blood prophets led them here. By the scarlet price they paid, they had remade it tame and reshaped it to human hands.

The wolves had the rest of the wide wilderness; this, here, was his.

He stepped closer, and a stick broke beneath his bootheel. All three wolves turned to look at him. Aran recoiled, but he didn’t run and neither did they. Black gore dripped from the muzzles of the pair still standing. They had torn their companion’s belly open and pulled his guts out onto the ground. The wounded one’s tongue lolled out of its jaw, almost as if it were grinning; and all three panted heavily as if they had chased the sun across the sky before stopping here to rest. Here, where only a narrow creek and the field of wild rosemary divided them from Aran’s village, from his wife and son.

This was a place for men now, not for wolves. Blood had made it so: the blood of men. A little more blood would keep it that way. But let it be the blood of beasts, this time; let it ever be so.

Aran’s finger found the outside of the trigger. He had killed wolves before, and he had seen wolves kill men. There was an honesty to that exchange, an understanding of blood and bone and bargain. Wolves and men were not so different when their pelts were peeled back.

He’d seen men kill men, long ago; had smelled the torn bowels and gas-bloated corpses of war. That too he understood, though he wished he did not have to. But a wolf killing a wolf, that was something new. The creatures’ languor now, their jagged red-stained grins, there was a wrongness to it all that clenched Aran’s belly far more than an open call to bloodletting.

The big one rolled farther onto its side as he approached. Its paw was the size of a man’s hand. To its massive muzzle clung the papery flakes of a ruined bee’s-nest. Ah, so that was all it was: a little mad honey. Holding an answer gave Aran a stronger grasp on his gun, too. He hefted it to his shoulder, laid his cheek along the barrel, remembered its familiar weight. He took aim for one of the unwounded wolves, fearless and honey-addled as they were.

A raft of ducks erupted from the wood behind. Aran startled, and fired off-kilter. The ball struck not the hale wolf but the already-wounded one, taking it clean in the eye. The beast kicked once, feebly, and its heartblood muddied the soil. Its companions scattered into the shadows. By the time Aran reloaded, they had vanished. Their laugh-like yips and yaps bounced back to him through the trees, the sound broken into a thousand fractured tracks that no hunter could hope to follow.

• • • •

The carcass was heavy, though not as heavy as the males Aran had slain as a youth in the valley, when the village was smaller and the sky wider. Not as big as a man grown, but close. Aran bent his back and pulled the beast’s paws over his shoulders, slung its head alongside his own. His musket he carried in one hand. As he walked, its lopsided weight pulled him to one side, while the dead wolf’s paws tapped his calves in soft counterrhythm to his heavy footfalls.

The white crowns of wild rosemary blossoms nodded him along as he crossed the field on his way back into the village proper. Here and there, old women in their lace caps picking tea-leaves stood out like the overgrown cousins of these fresh flowers. Aran had never developed a taste for the wild tea, as the fancy folks in the cities had. Unlike the honey made from these flowers, the tea did not drive a man prophet-mad, though an oversteeped cup might leave him too drowsy to work on the morrow. The leaf-pickers looked up from their baskets as Aran passed, but he had no breath to hail them nor a free hand to raise in greeting.

At the village square, he spied two of the farmers, whose mules drew an empty wagon. By this late-morning hour they would have already brought the day’s turnips and cabbages to the village food-share. Too late now to turn and avoid their notice; one startled when he first saw Aran, then doubled in laughter. “For a moment I thought wolves had learned to walk on two legs!” he cried. “And that one had come seeking his family’s weekly claim!”

Aran shared the man’s smile, but not his laugh. “I’ve never yet heard of a wolf who loved carrots.” He shifted his shoulders to adjust the weight, and the wolf’s slaver-stained throat rubbed his neck. “The wolves were at the mad honey.”

“What! The mad honey?” The farmer chuckled. “Will the beasts cast lots to be this year’s prophet, then?” The honey from the hives on the south side of town, where the bees grazed purple coneflowers and daisies, went into the cupboards of the food-share and into the bellies of the townsfolk. The stuff drawn from the wild nests on the north side where the town fell back before the towering wood—that was for another purpose entirely. The farmer gave his companion a sidelong glance, and looked back at Aran with a sly, tight-drawn smile. “Some folk think it’s time for another blood prophet, this winter. Give blood for honey and turn our tides for the better. What do you say, Aran?”

Aran’s shoulders pulled high and tight, drawing the wolf closer against him. “I was winter prophet last year.” Some had called for a blood prophet then, too, even as Aran’s wife’s belly strained with their growing child. The honey-dream had told him the names of the village’s new-born children, and where to dig a new well; it had even warned about a party of raiders. Armed with foreknowledge, the town had easily turned the pack of bandits aside when they came seeking coin and food and guns. Their fortunes this year weren’t so dire as that. There were still other paths to walk toward finer futures and fuller bellies. “I don’t have to draw again this year.”

The other farmer reached to peel back a flap of skin from the wolf’s side, where a loop of bowel hung down past Aran’s waist. “Shame about the pelt. You might’ve had a new jacket, with a skin that size.”

“Perhaps.” Aran had no use for might-haves or maybe.

The farmer let go of the skin-flap and shook gore off his fingers. “Bad luck, you know, to eat the flesh of a creature smarter than yourself.”

“Then it’s a wonder you can find anything to eat at all!” His friend clapped him on the back, and they got the mules moving again.

The women at the food-share stared when Aran tossed the carcass on the table in front of them. “Well,” one said, lifting a paw and letting it fall back down, “it’s meat.” Their blank faces showed no disappointment that it wasn’t a raft of tender ducks or a clutch of rabbits, but they didn’t show gratitude either. Good game was hard to find these days. Aran avoided looking over their shoulders to evaluate the food-stocks left, the stores that would get them through the long lean winter after snow stopped the trade wagons. Even without game, the farmers and poultry-keepers would surely keep them provisioned. There were worse things in the world than a few hungry months.

The women made quick work of the carcass, severing it from its torn pelt and unraveling the twisted innards. Their blades flashed over white-tinged muscle; when they struck home Aran felt the breaking of the beast’s bones deep in his own marrow. Half the meat for the town, half for Aran’s family: the way of necessity. The pelt, though, was his to keep, and he folded it to hide the exposed flesh on the inside when the stern-faced women handed it to him.

But at home, when he offered it to her, Ruta didn’t want the pelt or the wolf-flesh in the house. “It will taste foul,” his wife insisted, her stance wide and her thighs solid beneath her wool dress. The babe on her shoulder was startling white against the dark blue of her shawl. In sleep, Aran’s son looked like a rich child’s porcelain doll. “It’s not right that we should eat something that has fed on rotten carcasses and garbage and allgods know what else.”

Aran let the pelt tumble to the dirt floor, and the oilcloth-wrapped meat on top of it. “The marrow will make our son strong. And the fur will keep him warm.”

“Deer have marrow and warm fur, too.” But already she had moved the baby to the other arm, stooping to retrieve the fallen food.

“And when I see a deer in the wood again, you’ll have one to dress and cook and wear.” Aran’s hand found his musket strap, where it cut familiarly across the meat of his shoulder. “Until then we make do with what we have.”

She grunted as she struggled back to her feet with the baby on one hip and the meat on the other. “Two months till the prophet goes into the forest for the honey. Perhaps whoever it is will see us packing up and moving somewhere the gods still smile on.” She slapped the meat onto the table. “I’ll spill my own blood if I must, if it means my son has a better life than this one. Though I’d sooner spill someone else’s.”

Aran stopped in the doorway, his back to her. “Our parents already paid the blood price to bring us here.” The hungry earth had taken the life of enough good folk already. That time was done, the door to that dark-stained history best left shuttered. Enough had been sacrificed for this village to exist, sanctified, safe. “A place where the tea grows. A place without war.”

“There are other things in the world to be traded than this tea.” Babe in one hand, knife in the other; she brandished them both at Aran. “And other places. We’ve picked this one clean. I want to eat proper meat again someday before I’m an old woman with my teeth hanging on by a thread.”

There was nothing to be said to her in such a mood. Aran grabbed the oaken chair by the door and pulled it after him as he went outside. Clouds chased a patch of sunlight over the ground; he set the chair close to this moving target and sat with the musket across his legs to clean it. A well cared for musket might be the only thing standing between a man and the wild, and such things were not best left to chance.

Despite her muttered misgivings, Ruta made a wolf-shank stew for the evening’s meal. Stringy meat clotted the broth between slivers of cabbage, and its richness was undercut with a bitter metallic tang. “You’ll thank me when you don’t wake in two hours with your belly climbing your ribs,” he told her. She pretended not to hear him over the scrape of her bread in her bowl and the greedy sucking of the baby at her breast.

When her milk was gone, she swiped out the last of the stew with yesterday’s stale crust for the baby to chew while she did the washing-up. When Aran stood to help clear, the baby turned to him with a grease-smeared smile. The pearlescent tips of his teeth could just be seen through the gums. Aran slid a finger into his mouth to investigate, and he bit down hard. Aran yanked his hand back and left blood on the boy’s chin.

Ruta wrapped the wound with a spare bit of wool, but it still throbbed when Aran held it against his chest. The boy was strong. That was good. He would have to be, to take what he wanted from the world and make it his own. When the prophet went down to the winter wood this year, they would bring the boy back a good solid name. A normal prophet. A normal winter: a long and hard one, but all the more ordinary for that.

That night, as the last smoke from the fire wended curiously through the cooling cottage, Aran dreamed. In his mind, he shared his table with the wolf from the wood. Blood and foam mottled the beast’s snout, and the white shirt he wore—otherwise the mirror of Aran’s own—bore brown stains. No food had been laid out, but a clay cup of honey sat between them. Aran pushed it away from him, toward the wolf. “The honey made you vulnerable,” he, his dream-self, said. “It stole your wildness and your guile. And what are you, without that? Nothing more than meat for my table.”

“The sun circles the sky, and many things change.” The wolf’s tongue stroked his long yellow teeth. “The honey was before you. It is not a man-thing only and a wolf can be a prophet to see what things may come. A wolf can bleed to buy a better life for his sons.”

The light of the oil-lamp danced on the honey’s amber face. Aran dizzied, trying to make it stand still; he pressed his palms flat on the table to give himself its solidity. “What things are to come? What do you think you know?”

“Your laughter and your cruelty and your justice, which are the same thing before they are different.”

Aran stood and the chair crashed down behind him and the sound was one of beams breaking, walls falling in. “That’s not prophecy. That’s nonsense. Madness.”

The wolf nodded. His amber eyes had clouded over with death’s milk-white touch. “That is the same thing, too. We will have the safety of your madness, and the cruelty of your justice, and it will be our own, terrible though the cost.”

Aran lunged for the cup on the table and his fingers closed around cool clay. He upended it, but nothing poured out except darkness and the endless, chattering cold.

The man woke slowly as the bright light of dawn restored life to his frozen body. He lay curled about his mate, his bare limbs twined around and through hers, and the ice-pale babe clutched to her breast. There had been a dream, he thought, warm smoke fragments dissolving before he could see what lay behind them. Gone now. Nothing of warmth left to cling to.

He pulled closer to the woman’s body and breathed deep to capture the scent of her hair, loam-rich, the memory of flowers. Where their bodies met, a single curved line of radiance lit his world. The soft grass of the meadow held some heat around them but not enough, never enough. The sun circled the earth and the season pulled toward its turning.

Other trouble, too. He sat up, and the woman groaned in her sleep. Smoke from the wolf village rolled foul across the sky this morning. He roused the woman with a nudge to the shoulder and she awoke already rolling to her knees, ready to run. The wolves would not be glad to find men so close to their homes and their sheep-pens and their fat soft-furred cubs in their cradles. The sweet greasy smoke smell of desire and denial drove the man and his family naked and yowling out across the fields of white flowers and out into the wood, where the wind howled like an angry beast. The belly of this beast was cold, and there was no respite to be found, and they ran and they ran, for that was the way of the dark indifferent world.

©2022 by Aimee Ogden.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aimee Ogden is an American werewolf in the Netherlands. Her debut novella “Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters” was a 2021 Nebula Award finalist, and her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She also co-edits Translunar Travelers Lounge, a magazine of fun and optimistic speculative fiction.

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

EXCERPT: White Horse

Erika T. Wurth | 1403 words

Erika T. Wurth’s White Horse is a gritty, vibrant debut novel about an Indigenous woman who must face her past when she discovers a bracelet haunted by her mother’s spirit.

Some people are haunted in more ways than one. . .

Kari James, Urban Native, is a fan of heavy metal, ripped jeans, Stephen King novels, and dive bars. She spends most of her time at her favorite spot in Denver, a bar called White Horse. There, she tries her best to ignore her past and the questions surrounding her mother who abandoned her when she was just two years old.

But soon after her cousin Debby brings her a traditional bracelet that once belonged to Kari’s mother, Kari starts seeing disturbing visions of her mother and a mysterious creature. When the visions refuse to go away, Kari must uncover what really happened to her mother all those years ago. Her father, permanently disabled from a car crash, can’t help her. Her Auntie Squeaker seems to know something but isn’t eager to give it all up at once. Debby’s anxious to help, but her controlling husband keeps getting in the way.

Kari’s journey toward a truth long denied by both her family and law enforcement forces her to confront her dysfunctional relationships, thoughts about a friend she lost in childhood, and her desire for the one thing she’s always wanted but could never have. . .

Chapter One

There was something strange, mysterious even, about the White Horse tonight. Normally, it was merely an Indian bar.

My Indian bar. But there was a milky, dreamy quality to the red lights swinging over the pool tables, like the wind from the open doors was bringing them something new, something I’d pushed away for as long as I could remember.

“Debby, do we have to talk about her again?” I took another swig of my beer and slammed it back down, eyeing my cousin as I did.

She would never let this subject go, no matter how much I rebuffed her. I sighed, taking in the dank, wet-wood smell of the bar, the harsh laughter of the bikers in the booth behind me.

“The thing is, I found—” I interrupted her with a brush of my hand.

I hoped Nick, the bartender, would come by and ask if I needed a refill, but all I could see was the mirror in front of me, the words Miller High Life emblazoned in gold cursive on the front. Right next to it a sign read, first fight. last drink. permanent 86. Besides us, the bartender, and the bikers, the White Horse was empty. It was always empty, but I loved it. I loved the long wooden bar, the cats wandering in and out; the mangy orange one was my favorite. She liked to sit on top of the bar and let me pet her while she closed her cloudy eyes and purred.

Debby shifted her weight on the stool, the plastic crackling as she did, the bar stirring around me like a bad dream.

“All I’m saying is that you don’t know your mom’s story.” “Yeah, okay, Debby. That’s great,” I said.

I signaled Nick when he came out of the bathroom. “Two more,” I said, hoping he’d remember.

A couple of Diné came through the doors, quiet the way they were, and made their way to a pool table in the back. One of them saw me when he came over to order a beer, and he gave me the friendly nod, his black hair glistening red in the faint bar light. I nodded back and that strange feeling I’d had earlier flooded back into me.

“The thing is,” Debby said, “you know how we check in on your dad?”

I hung my head. “Yeah, so?”

“I went over there the other day to do that, and some cleaning, because I know the nurse is great and everything, but I like to see how he is, and I’d just come home from work, and was dropping the kids off—” “Jesus, Debby, if you’re not going to let it go, spit it out.” “Okay, okay,” she said, starting again. “So, Mom had been pushing me to clear some of the boxes in the attic. And like, we were going to haul them out and throw them in the dumpster, but Mom seemed to want to look through them. And mainly they were full of old toys, and papers and rusting appliances, but then, we found something.”

“What?” I whispered, and that dreamy quality snapped back.

“Something of your mom’s.” I was silent. My mother. The woman who had abandoned me when I was only two days old. The woman who my father had been so devastated over he began to take long drives, a bottle of Jack between his legs. The woman who had made it so that I had to care for my dad like a baby, instead of the other way around, after he’d gotten into an accident that had left his body but taken his mind. Cecilia.

“And the thing is, Kari, it was some Indian jewelry—and it’s old.” I felt like changing my drink to something stronger.

“And, like, since your mom was Apache and Chickasaw?”

I nodded.

“I’m just saying that it might be significant,” she said.

I continued to stare down at the wood of the bar, run my fingers along the rough edges.

“But the important part is, like, when she found it? When I picked it up, I felt weird.” I was silent for a long time, my heart hammering in my throat.

I signaled Nick and ordered a whiskey to go with my beer, the dark brown liquid splashing a bit over the rim of the tiny paper cup as he set it down. “Want one?”

“No, I gotta drive back,” Debby said, glancing at her clock. “It takes at least forty-five minutes to get from Denver to Idaho Springs, and I’m sure Jack’s already wondering why I’m not home.” I rolled my eyes, and we sat in an uncomfortable silence.

“You know I don’t like talking about her,” I finally said, grumbling.

“I’m just going to like, give it to you, okay?”

“Fine,” I said, watching as she dug into her purse.

She pulled an ancient hammered-copper bracelet out of her bag, a bit of patina around the edges. It hummed with power, with history. My history. It was the kind that Indians used to wear all the time, and it was old. I squinted, thinking, upon closer inspection, that it was probably turn of the century. I could see, as Debby held it out in her little pink hands, that there were different objects carved into each thick copper square, links connecting each section—symbols I recognized from Indian jewelry of the time. Stuff that was common for urban Indians, or that had been lifted from plains culture. A thunderbird. A waterbird. A spiral. A Lakota chief ’s headdress. Then there were others that I thought were perhaps Apache. Symbols for water. The sun and mountains. The moon and arrows. A war club—yes, that was definitely Apache. Stuff my Auntie Squeaker back in the Springs would know about, I was sure. And lastly, something that made me ill just looking at it—a stick figure that seemed to represent a monster of some sort. In the back of my mind, I could almost remember the name for it.

My thoughts wandered, unbidden, to my mother.

Debby shoved it into my bag, and I kept drinking, nodding as she went on about her husband, listening to the eerie, lonely sound of the wind whistling through the open door. But though I tried to focus on everything but that bracelet, it began burning into my mind, glowing almost, roping me to thoughts of my mother, and my painful, locked-away past.

Copyright © 2022 by Erika T. Wurth. Excerpted from White Horse by Erika T. Wurth. Published by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Erika T. Wurth’s work has appeared in numerous journals including Buzzfeed and The Kenyon Review. White Horse is her debut novel. She is a Kenyon Review Writers Workshop Scholar, attended the Tin House Summer Workshop, and is a narrative artist for the Meow Wolf Denver installation. She is of Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee descent.

Book Review: To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, by Moniquill Blackgoose

Aigner Loren Wilson | 442 words

To Shape a Dragon’s Breath
Moniquill Blackgoose
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9780593498286
Del Rey, May 2023, 528 pgs

In Moniquill Blackgoose’s novel, To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, a young Indigenous woman, Anequs, finds a dragon hatchling and bonds with it on the remote island of Masquapaug. In this land, the Anglish conquerors have a strict law about dragons and how they should be raised. Dragons and the people they bond with must go to the Anglish mainland and enroll in dragon school. Anequs must leave her home and family to raise the dragon, Kasaqua, and save it from being killed for not being adequately trained.

The fantasy and wonder of To Shape a Dragon’s Breath started immediately. But it didn’t feel like I was thrown into the story; more like I was joining characters and a world that existed without me. To Shape a Dragon’s Breath didn’t feel like there was an on-ramp to the world or culture. It would have been difficult in many books, but Blackgoose crafted a deep culture, society, and world that felt engaging to follow.

What first piqued my interest when I cracked open my advance copy were the chapter titles. Each one was descriptive of the events in the chapter while adding a lovely poetry and rhythm to the transitions between chapters. The descriptive titles gave each event an even more matter-of-fact or historical feel: THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED HERE, and THIS IS WHAT WAS SAID HERE.

To Shape a Dragon’s Breath is awash in themes of colonization and erasure. The way Anequs’ family and home see her bond with Kasaqua is almost in total opposition to the laws they are forced to abide by throughout the book. Anequs’ journey learning how to better bond with and understand her dragon grapples with these implications in genuine ways as she is one of the only Indigenous people enrolled in the Anglish dragon school.

Along with all the themes surrounding colonization and racism is the heartfelt and touching relationship between Anequs and her dragon Kasaqua. I caught myself more than once settling into warm feelings of following a character as they embarked on a wonderous learning journey. Blackgoose balances Anequs’s emotions of being in a world that treats her less than with her fight and willingness to do what’s right for those she cares about.

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: Meteotopia, edited by Chattopadhyay, Rüsche, & Verso

Arley Sorg | 1916 words

Meteotopia—Futures of Climate (In)justice
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Ana Rüsche, and Francesco Verso, ed.
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9788832077483
Future Fiction (Roma), August 27, 216 pgs

Climate fiction has become a catch phrase, and some see it as a genre unto itself, rather than as a subgenre of science fiction. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (bit.ly/3DXscOs) notes that Dan Bloom claims to have created the term “Cli-Fi” in 2007. Regardless, the term has become common enough that searches on bookstore sites turn up plenty of results by a variety of authors and editors, from the obscure to award-winning, such as N.K. Jemisin, Claire North, Jeff VanderMeer, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Jonathan Strahan. (In fact, see last issue for my review of Strahan’s Tomorrow’s Parties: Life in the Anthropocene; and I’d be remiss not to mention at least one of our own John Joseph Adams’ anthologies—for example, 2015’s Loosed Upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction.) There are even climate fiction contests, prizes, and awards, such as the Arizona State University Climate Fiction Contest and Omega Sci-Fi Awards’ New Suns Climate Fiction Award; plus magazines like Little Blue Marble whose focus is climate fiction. There are many more with overlapping or similar foci, and mainstream publications like The Atlantic (bit.ly/3FxvLf6) and The Guardian (bit.ly/3SQxVth) are giving chunks of magazine real estate to articles about climate fiction, covering books which we in genre would probably consider well within the boundaries of science fiction’s ever expansive (though perhaps permeable) borders.

Francesco Verso’s publishing house Future Fiction (co-founded with Francesco Mantovani) has teamed up with CoFUTURES, “an international research group working on contemporary Global Futurisms headquartered in Oslo, Norway,”—which is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program—to publish a striking anthology called Meteotopia. Unlike many of the other recent climate fiction efforts you may have heard of, Meteotopia is deliberately international: each work is by an author with origins in a different country, such as Victor Fernando R. Ocampo tagged with “Philippines” and Soham Guha tagged with “India”; notably, there are no stories by authors tagged with “US” or “Canada” or any European country. In fact, the authors are meant to represent the Global South: “those populations that suffer the most from the consequences of climate change, even though they are not directly responsible for it: all the marginalized cultures, the future generations, the living animals and plants, all those left out of political discussions, G20 events, and financial speculations.”

Better yet: this book is free!

Chattopadhyay, Rüsche, and Verso have gathered an intriguing selection of original fiction. I’ll highlight a few as a sampler and leave the rest for discovery. It’s important to note that selections vary greatly in style, approach, and even focus. “Island of the Jaguars” by Toni Moraes, translated from Portuguese by G. Holleran, leans into exposition, and utilizes the kind of third person which was more popular in classic Anglophone SFF; stylistically, the combination isn’t for me. That said, there are a lot of cool, vivid ideas. It’s also about resisting different kinds of colonization, and cultural preservation in the face of encroaching forces that would both use you up and erase your existence. Lastly, it’s grounded in historic events which, in all likelihood, many Anglophone readers don’t know about. Detailed notes provided by the translator give even more context to the story, including some notes on translation choices, which I enjoyed seeing. I have no doubt that this narrative will engage many readers, that those aforementioned details will ignite imaginations, and that many will be engrossed by the struggles of Bartyra, Anahy, and the rest of the warriors.

“Bittersweet are the Waters” by Mame Bougouma Diene deals more directly than some with climate crisis. Set in a world where the oceans have dried up, it opens with a scene describing water consumption, wherein Miyongi trades one kind of water for another—using recycled water from feces to create a kind of private garden experiment, as well as to survive. The prose is pleasant and effective while more of a generally straightforward style, and the narrative itself fuses fable and the fantastic with climate futurism to fascinating effect. Similar to “Island of the Jaguars”, the narrative sometimes feels more focused on extrapolation of worldbuilding than story, but to my reading felt grounded in its characters. And again, those same details which I found distracting, many readers will find delightful—in fact, the story is packed with cool ideas. In time the plot coalesces, becoming a tale of revolution, with near-magical seeds as the best weapon against corporate greed. There’s a bit of meditation on human nature thrown in, as well as underlying commentary around class and poverty.

Let’s talk about Tlotlo Tsamaase’s “Eco-Humans”—okay, first of all, Tsamaase’s writing is beautiful. Turns of phrase, word order, choices of sounds, and more; there are so many wonderful choices that make the lines themselves a joy to read. In fact, many of the sentences and phrases read like poetry, carefully constructed in consideration of a variety of effects. Besides moments of gorgeous prose, the story itself is about poverty and survival. The protagonist is a future kind of person, something between android and human, and is caught in the cycles of generational poverty, which means limited opportunities. While it’s a far future tale, the narrative asks us to consider poverty now, and in particular the way those who are not poor participate in or benefit from systems of inequity—including generational wealth, or just being born with relative advantages. Our protagonist is in a struggle for love, even as she is on the verge of being unable to afford to live. It’s a nuanced and wonderfully imagined tale, with layers of meaning, which shines a light on power and class and what it means to live when you start off in a very different position than most of us reading this review.

One of my favorite stories in the book has to be “Letters to my mother” by Chinelo Onwualu. In a far future ecotopia (bit.ly/3zB8MvS), long after the climate wars, an individual finds a book from the distant past. While the “present” may be harmonious, the empathy of the protagonist means they more than just read the journal entries found within, they feel the pain of the conflicts of the past. The readings relay complex stories of a fraught relationship between a mother and her child. The protagonist has to navigate unfamiliar and building traumas of a relationship which ultimately ended in severe pain. On the one hand the story has an interesting vision of the future. At the same time, it’s a piercing narrative about pain and transformation. Both powerful and beautiful, combined with a writing and narrative style which is nothing less than elegant.

A second contender for favorite is “The Shadow of the Crystal” by Gabriela Damián Miravete. This story also uses the device of journal entries to create the sense of peering into the past, as well as newspaper clippings, emails, and the like; but these are more of a framing device than Onwualu’s story, where the events—and emotions—of the past have an immediate effect on the narrative of the “present”. Where Onwualu employs a very close first-person perspective throughout, Miravete begins with a close first person, which immediately orients the reader and infuses excitement and mood of character into the experience, then pulls back with other kinds of storytelling—a technique I found incredibly effective. Miravete also thrusts the reader into a different kind of setting from the other stories: we are led into a humid cave, whose environment is so hostile it can kill you in minutes; but it’s also an environment full of that sense of wonder many of us crave from our fiction, this time in the shape of massive crystal formations. As with Diene and Moraes, Miravete writes about revolution and resistance, but from the perspective of a scientist whose main goals are to discover and protect the strange crystals, which have grown (and possibly “live”) in an off-limits part of the cave system. The mood shifts from personal to scientific as the records undertake speculation around opal formations, and then political, with a report on the abuse of water rights by mining companies, contrasted by water scarcity among Mexican households. The narrative cleverly swings back to the personal, tying everything in with the central character’s journey, relationships, and life. Simultaneously the text undertakes conversations which look at environmentalism, science, and progress from different angles. Along the way, there’s fun science and science fiction, the kind where you feel like you are learning things, and which reads like something deeply researched and grounded in fascinating science and historic events. Oh, and just to take it to the next level? The text glitters with the occasional lovely turn of phrase. Running through it all is this engaging speculation around the cause of the strange, consciousness altering sounds that come from the crystals, as well as what might have made the unusual markings they bear. There’s an important conversation lining the narrative about the intertwined nature of corporate greed, scientific discovery, and the people who get caught in the consequences of both; plus underlying themes which speak on misogyny, international meddling, and more. I’d call my experience of this story bewonderment. Yes, I had to make up a word to describe it! This one is bound to please folks who like the personal journey, as well as folks who like more science in their science fiction. Seriously—this is what cool science fiction looks like, y’all.

Meteotopia includes fantastic illustrations, some in color and some black and white, which are credited to a number of artists. The copyright page has a note: “Special thanks go to Sandro Mattioli, professor at the International School of Comics in Rome, who collaborated with Future Fiction in the creation of the contest for the cover and internal illustrations that enrich this anthology.” And whoever wrote this note is correct: they really do enrich the anthology.

All told, this is an important addition to the wealth of climate fiction. I appreciate that it showcases perspectives that are still underrepresented in genre. Also, as I said at the top: it’s free! You can pick it up here: fiction.cofutures.org. I’ll also add that the Imagine 2200 climate fiction series¹ from Grist Magazine is another great source of quality reads (bit.ly/3sJec4g).

¹. See our reprint, “The Metamorphosis of Marie Martin” by Nadine Tomlinson from this year’s Imagine 2200. —ed.

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: The River of Silver, by S.A. Chakraborty

Chris Kluwe | 732 words

The River of Silver
S.A. Chakraborty
Hardcover / eBook
ISBN: 9780063093737
Harper Voyager, October 2022, 256 pages

Hello once again, readers, and welcome back to another book review. Today I’m going to go over a book I found lushly immersive, as well as a pleasantly different perspective on a familiar setting—The River of Silver, by S.A. Chakraborty.

Some of you might remember my earlier reviews of Chakraborty’s Daevabad Trilogy (collectively: The City of Brass, The Kingdom of Copper, and The Empire of Gold), and she once again returns us to her magic-infused world of djinn in The River of Silver. This book, however, is unlike the previous three, instead being a collection of short stories and deleted/alternative content accrued during the writing of the Daevabad Trilogy, but that doesn’t make it any less enthralling than the previous entries. Instead, it gives us a deeper look at almost all of the characters, both primary, secondary, and tertiary, and fleshes them out with additional vividness that frames their actions within the trilogy in a new light.

Since there are many references to events and people from throughout the Daevabad Trilogy, I would highly recommend reading it first in order to get the full experience of The River of Silver, but if you don’t mind spoiling some things for yourself it can also serve as an excellent introduction to Chakraborty’s universe for those unsure if they want to devote the time to do so. Her writing style of exquisitely imagined environments filled with the magically mysterious and mundane alike are just as much on full display in this book as in the previous three, along with the same patient character-building that made them a delight to read, so if you do decide to jump in with this as your first introduction to Chakraborty’s work, think of it as a tasting menu of what’s on offer within the fully realized world of Daevabad.

For those who have read the trilogy, The River of Silver is a nostalgic re-acquaintance with familiar faces that feels a lot like a well-executed behind-the-scenes tour of a long-running television series. The short stories enhanced my understanding of various characters and their motivations, while also reminding me of the initial sense of wonder I had reading through the first three books, and in several instances made me want to go back and read them again to see how my views and reactions might have changed based on the new information provided. Nothing felt like it was filler content or a cash grab, but rather more like the author was kind enough to invite me into her workshop to explain all the clever little flourishes that didn’t quite make the initial cut, but were nonetheless well worth experiencing on their own merits anyways.

The only downside I can point out with The River of Silver is that it struggles to maintain a sense of overall continuity, due to several of the stories being alternative endings or prologues, along with the major time-skips to get from event to event, but it’s a minor quibble meant only for those who want their book to be a single self-contained package and might feel cheated otherwise. The River of Silver is definitely much more of a companion book/final farewell, meant to be read with the understanding that at some point you’ll go reference the trilogy if you haven’t read it already (and at this point I hope I’ve made it clear that I think the trilogy is worth your time and that you should go read it).

Overall, I felt like The River of Silver was a delightfully unexpected sendoff to a series of books I really enjoyed reading, and I’m excited to see what Chakraborty has planned for the future.

Read if: You enjoy baroquely complicated magical romances; you feel conflicted when bad guys appear to have good motivations; you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to fly a winged lion.

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: L.D. Lewis

Laurel Amberdine | 997 words

How did “Last Stand of the E. 12th St. Pirates” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

This was originally a short I’d intended to include in a climate change anthology that explored more tangible, localized impact rather than the distant/impossible macro-disaster approach that ends up being the focus of a lot of media. And then the world started catching up to the stories being written and it somehow felt less poignant and more “news at eleven.” So “12th St. Pirates” takes from existing examples of apartheid and classism and places them in a climate justice framework, positing that we are going to take our societal ills into a climate altered future. As our climate situation worsens, there are segments of society that will choose to see walls as a fix, or on-the-water living as quaint, the delivery of mail or grocery by drone as exclusive, rather than face that these are fixtures of a dire reality in which millions of traditionally marginalized people are enduring an additional layer of suffering. We will adjust our mentalities to manufacture bright spots or sing the praises of technological adaptation or of local heroes who go viral doing the basic neighborly thing in an apocalypse scenario. But we will not address the overlapping realities of wealth inequality and racism and the treatment of our youth as expendable in time for what’s now a rapidly approaching future.

I promise I’m more fun at parties, by the way.

What is your writing process like? Did this story fit the pattern?

This was an atypical experience. Usually, I have a story take root through a song or a phrase I enjoy saying out loud, or wanting justice for someone I felt was maligned in a fairy tale once. And then the story grows around an aesthetic in this sort of accumulated snow situation where sections of it grow asynchronously until they can be stitched together in a coherent fashion. This was a situation where I was more interested in other people’s perspectives on the topic and I’d have been happy to just act as the curator for them. I think I struggled with finding something to say about climate justice that wasn’t just recycled messaging about activism and the evils of corporate greed, and was also compelling as a story. This ended up being the last story I had in my metaphorical trunk, though, so I’m glad it resonated somewhere!

What is your writing space like? What do you like to have around for optimal creativity?

I hand-write (Moleskine, 0.7mm Sharpie S-gel pen in blue) all drafts and then digitize at the editing stage, so it usually means I’m writing snatches of dialogue or sentences I think are clever at random points throughout the day wherever I am. I have to be in a Mood when transferring them to my computer so I stay focused, and that usually means appropriate lighting in a dark room, a jazz cigarette, these dulce de leche donuts I found one night during an ennui drive, and the story’s accompanying playlist on loop.

Did you get stuck at any point while writing this? How did you get past that?

I had a hard time with the ending and trying not to make the approach to tension feel corny or overwrought. Which . . . maybe it still is, but the open ending I felt was important. We’re already inundated with violent imagery against children and Black bodies specifically, so I wasn’t going to write that. But also due to our cultural saturation with it, it isn’t hard to imagine the true end of that scene and I think it’s important to acknowledge that we know what likely happens and why we know what likely happens. Alternatively, a reader could choose to envision a de-escalation, something refreshing and possible in this new stage of the world, and I haven’t robbed them of that ability. Unless maybe they read this interview.

Do you have any advice for other writers?

The priority should always be your being the biggest fan of your own story. Whomever else reads it and loves/hates it, or how far you get in your ambitions for it should be secondary. A story that gets published but that you’re ultimately embarrassed or disappointed to have produced will exist until the heat death of the universe and you will have to live with that knowledge. And if it goes nowhere whatsoever, at least you’ve created something you find worthwhile.

What trends in speculative fiction would you like to see gain popularity in the next few years?

I’d like to see a de-emphasis on tropes, actually. Weird works that aim to create new conventions, or try to explore what stories can be told if one is intentionally dodging formulaic approaches.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

Lately, I’m working on shorts for a couple of collections I’m hoping to put out there. One is stories rooted in this sapphic neo-noir novella I wrote and wanted to expand, and the other is magical/dangerous stuff happening in/on/regarding trains. Also looking for a home for my mermaid duology: a retelling of The Little Mermaid, but from the perspective of Ariel and the prince’s granddaughter who has lived through the political fallout of their union only to have her throne usurped and must summon the assistance of a certain sea witch in order get it back. Also sapphic and vaguely murdery, because of course. I can be found on Twitter at @ellethevillain and links to the rest of my writing can be found at ldlewiswrites.com.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in Portland and works (remotely) for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Rati Mehrotra

Laurel Amberdine | 532 words

How did “One Day in the Afterlife of Detective Roshni Chaddha” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I enjoy paranormal detective stories and shows, especially those set in the afterlife. But I hadn’t read one set in India, drawing on Indian mythology. I had been reading Hindu mythological texts on the road to hell, the different kinds of hells, the messengers of death, and the god of death. This story was born from that research. It was great fun to write.

Do you have any advice for other writers?

Write what you love, and only if you love it, because this is a hard and often lonely business to be in. If you loved what you wrote, that’s already a win, whether or not it gets published. But if you are passionate about a particular story, your passion and your voice will shine through, and that’s what will make your story unique and stand out in a slush pile. The writing is all that’s in your hands. Focus on your craft. Get yourself a writing group or critique partners you can rely on. That makes the process less lonely—at least it did for me!

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I’m on the tenth and final collection of The Sandman series by Neil Gaiman. Such brilliant writing! I’m also reading The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack because I like torturing myself with imagining how the universe will end, and this book does it so well. The writer I most admire is Sofia Samatar for her gorgeous, lyrical writing. A Stranger in Olondria is one of my favorite books. I also love Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. They are my comfort reads when I’m feeling low.

Other than writing, do you have any other creative pursuits? What do you do to relax?

I love cooking almost as much as I enjoy eating. Food is special to me, a way to bond and a way to express caring. Experimenting with new-to-me recipes and ingredients gives me a lot of joy, as does feeding my family. It also helps me think. While my hands are busy chopping onions and tomatoes, my brain drifts to story ideas and the problems in my current WIP. I find it quite relaxing, but only as long as no one else enters my kitchen.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I have a new book out! Night of the Raven, Dawn of the Dove (bit.ly/3Fo4LyT), a YA fantasy set in an alternate medieval India, which released on October 18, 2022. You can check out my other books and short stories on my website at ratiwrites.com. Currently, I am working on a new book: a paranormal fantasy set in my hometown. Hopefully, one day in the not-too-distant future, I’ll actually finish writing it.

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: Rich Larson

Laurel Amberdine | 655 words

How did “Deathmatch” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

This story originated mid-morning in the Crown & Anchor parking lot, on a particularly potent cocktail of weed, shrooms, coffee, and booze. A friend had come through town to say goodbye before heading off to join the Navy, and he was talking to me about meth-head drywallers and ants being the earliest machine intelligence and how he hopes we eat the rich, and I was too high for it. I kept seeing flashes and texting them to myself so as not to forget:

A poisonous yellow-black swamp whirling through space, churning up vacuum. Humans as pain neurons for wind creatures, functioning like rogue receptors in their molecular minds, minds built of zephyrs intertwined, a collection of breezes shooting the breeze. Social technology represented by a carnal red omnimachine, cartoonified for logos. A man screaming no at the moment of orgasm. Rake-like automaton soldiers dressed in drab oversized fatigues, enshrined by murals, part of the resistance.

And then, most vividly:

Driverless taxi service occasionally drives two randomly selected customers to a deathmatch, deviating from their original destination to meet in a halfway point alley or bathroom or anywhere private enough for a brief struggle to the death. Black ride-tracking icons snaking toward each other through the Uber map.

What is your writing process like? Did this story fit the pattern?

The process varies; this story was one of the nice ones that comes out all at once. About a month after the parking lot, I woke up and wrote it in one long sitting. Often, it’s more painful. I’ve been chipping away at some stories for years now, and that doesn’t mean they’ll be any better—that’s just how they’re coming out.

What is your writing space like? What do you like to have around for optimal creativity?

The only important thing is that I don’t have Wi-Fi. When I move into a new place, I do not set up Wi-Fi. A few months ago, here in Montreal, I made an unfortunate discovery: by leaning out the window with my laptop muscled into the crook of my arm, I could coax one bar of the public Wi-Fi—enough to check emails, socials, forums, basketball scores, and even rip YouTube videos. Productivity plummeted.

Then, last week, salvation: some workers showed up and installed a moustiquaire across the window. Without that slight lean, I cannot get the bar, and just like that I am back in my healthy prison.

Other than writing, do you have any other creative pursuits? What do you do to relax?

This year I’m getting back into art. I go to a weekly life drawing session, watch Proko videos and read anatomy books and practice lots at home. It can be incredibly relaxing, one of those flow-state time-loss activities, or incredibly frustrating when you hit plateaus.

It’s a lot like the gym that way, actually. That’s my other big focus for the year, and the two things have begun to bleed into each other. All the anatomy study has made me much more aware of my own body parts; sometimes I’m not sure if I’m seeing the muscles grow or just noticing them properly for the first time.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

My novel Ymir came out just recently; if you liked the dark humor and algorithmic nastiness in “Deathmatch,” you’ll probably enjoy it. For short fiction, you can always pick up my collection Tomorrow Factory, or read a bunch of free stuff via richwlarson.tumblr.com. Right now I’m working on more short stories, like always.

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: Aimee Ogden

Laurel Amberdine | 542 words

How did “Mad Honey” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I’d read an article a long time ago about bees that collected honey from flowers that produce psychotropic chemicals, and after that, I’d always wanted to write a story that touched on mad honey in some way. But on its own, the mad honey was just a detail; not enough to shape a story around. It wasn’t until this idea crashed headlong into a writing prompt asking for a story touching on wolves or werewolves that everything came together.

Where are you in this story?

I seem to return over and over again to stories that feature or include a parent-child relationship. My thoughts and my writing always go back to what we owe the next generations, what we’ve cost them, and what we still have time to repay.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

Like just about everyone else, I started reading Nona the Ninth the second it dropped onto my Kindle. I also just finished Let the Mountains Be My Grave, by Francesca Tacchi, which was an absolutely engaging and emotional story about gods and monsters and finding both a reason and a way to do more than just survive, set in the mountains of Italy during World War II.

As far as writers who inspire me, I could go on all day! This is an absolute golden age of speculative fiction and I feel lucky to be alive and reading during it! Off the top of my head, some writers whose stories and books always make me ask myself, okay, how did they DO that: Yoon Ha Lee, Louis Evans, Vanessa Fogg, Nghi Vo, Kelly Barnhill, C.L. Polk . . .

Other than writing, do you have any other creative pursuits? What do you do to relax?

When I have spare time, I like to cross-stitch, which I find a happy mix between making something beautiful and not having to think, myself, about how to go about making the beautiful thing. Ditto for cooking and baking! I’m also one of those tedious people who actually enjoy exercise; there’s something very mind-clearing for me in lifting weights or going for a (short) run.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

Right now I’m trying to write a book that’s on the funny side; maybe in a few months, my beta readers might be able to tell me how close to the mark I’m actually coming. I’ve also got a new novella, “Emergent Properties,” coming out next year, about a muckraking AI trying to forge zir own path in life by breaking a big story despite misgivings from zir (human) parents/developers. And in the meantime, for those who enjoyed “Mad Honey,” “Never a Moth, Nor a Butterfly With Moon-Painted Wings” (bit.ly/3D78eyY) and some of my other work in Beneath Ceaseless Skies touches on some similar themes from a different angle.

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, January 2023

The Editors | 271 words

Coming up in January, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Isabel J. Kim (“The Narrative Implications of Your Untimely Death”) and Scott Edelman (“A Man Walks into a Bar: In Which More Than Four Decades After My Father’s Reluctant Night of Darts on West 54th Street I Finally Understand What Needs to Be Done”). We also have two flash SF pieces: “The Last Serving” from Lincoln Michel, and “A Guide to Alien Terms Useful in the Human Diaspora” by Deborah L. Davitt.

Plus, we have original fantasy by Maria Dong (“The Fifth-Day Man”) and Benjamin Peek (“The Ministry of Saturn”). We’ve got two fantasy flash pieces, too! They are “Between the Stones and the Stars” by A.L. Goldfuss and “The Changeling” from Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe.

Yes, it’s all-original issue! It’s an exciting change that we think you’ll enjoy. 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, Sam J. Miller, Bogi Takács, Carrie Vaughn, and Jendayi Brooks-Flemister.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Lightspeed:

Website

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

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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

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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.