TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 156 (May 2023)

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: May 2023

SCIENCE FICTION

Moons We Can Circumnavigate in One Day, or the Space Probe Love Story
Natalia Theodoridou

She Blooms and the World is Changed
Izzy Wasserstein

When Shiva Shattered the Time-Stream
Sharang Biswas

Blood for a Stranger
Timothy Mudie

FANTASY

One Heart, Lost and Found
Kat Howard

The Sword, the Butterfly, and the Pearl
Deborah L. Davitt

Saturday’s Song
Wole Talabi

The Belfry Keeper
S.L. Harris

EXCERPTS

Red Team Blues
Cory Doctorow

NONFICTION

Book Review: The Jasad Heir by Sara Hashem
Arley Sorg

Book Review: Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon by Wole Talabi
Aigner Loren Wilson

Book Review: Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle
Chris Kluwe

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Kat Howard

Izzy Wasserstein

Wole Talabi

Timothy Mudie

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

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

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2023 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Warmtail / Adobe Stock

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

Editorial: May 2023

John Joseph Adams | 220 words

Welcome to issue 156 of Lightspeed Magazine!

In 2016, we ran the story “Wednesday’s Story” by Wole Talabi in our May issue. We’re delighted to return to the magical realm of the Days siblings with a new story from Wole Talabi: “Saturday’s Song.” We also have a lovely new original short from Kat Howard (“One Heart, Lost and Found”) set on an extremely fascinating train. Our fantasy flash stories include “The Sword, the Butterfly, and the Pearl” by Deborah L. Davitt and “The Belfry Keeper” by S.L. Harris.

For our science fiction shorts, in “She Blooms and the World is Changed” Izzy Wasserstein takes us to a new planet filled with risks—and occupied by a family dealing with these dangers. Timothy Mudie’s new novelette (“Blood for a Stranger”) wrestles with morality and cybernetic intelligence. We also have two terrific flash pieces: “Moons We Can Circumnavigate in One Day, or the Space Probe Love Story” from Natalia Theodoridou and “When Shiva Shattered the Time-Stream” by Sharang Biswas.

On the nonfiction front, our book review team offers up some exciting new reads, and our author spotlight editor has dug deeper into our writers’ processes and inspirations. Plus we have an excerpt from Cory Doctorow’s new novel Red Team Blues for our ebook readers!

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 forty anthologies, including Wastelands and The Living Dead. Recent books include Lost Worlds & Mythological Kingdoms, A People’s Future of the United States, and the three volumes of The Dystopia Triptych. A two-time Hugo Award-winner, 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. Lately, he’s been working as an editor on various roleplaying game books for Kobold Press and Monte Cook Games and as a contributing game designer on books such as Tome of Heroes. Find him online at johnjosephadams.com and @johnjosephadams.

Moons We Can Circumnavigate in One Day, or the Space Probe Love Story

Natalia Theodoridou | 559 words

For the last day we have together, I thought we could go back to Io, where I saw you for the first time. Her volcanoes will be reflected on your solar array once again. We will bathe in her Plasma Torus until our sensors tingle so hard we can’t take it any more. Then I will make a bouquet for you to carry on your way home: sulfur for passion, oxygen for remembrance, and sodium, for good luck.

Or we could go to Enceladus, where everything is cold and icy and so bright my faulty cameras may go totally blind, but I won’t even care, because you will be there. You can spend the day by my side, counting the cracks on the moon’s surface out loud. I will write you epic poems about the gods of earthquakes and tremors and transmit them to you bit by bit until my power runs out and everything goes dark.

Or we could go to neglected little Ophelia, one among many in her celestial river. We can watch her from up close, how she wastes away, how she disappears rock by rock, mote of dust by mote of dust. We could count the molecules she loses to Uranus’ pull in a day, measure the rate of her decay. This way, we will have found how long it takes for love to break a body to pieces.

Or, if that sounds too bleak to you, we could go to Thalassa, and spend our last day together recounting all the names of Earth’s seas, and the name for seas in all of Earth’s languages. Mar, maro, zee, deniz, laut, det, baħar, nyanja . . .

Or we could go to Charon and let the ancient ferryman show us around its arctic lakes and frozen geysers. We might even meet little frostbitten Spearhead II in its erratic slumber—remember that one, wasn’t it everyone’s favourite back on Earth? It might wake up for a while, and plead with us in frequencies that sound a lot like whimpers. “Have you come to take me home?” it will ask. You will not bear to tell it the truth, and I will have no truth to tell. We will make up lullabies and whisper them in ice-cold tunes until it goes back to sleep. It won’t see us drift off, each on our own.

Or we could meet just off Phobos, which may be best, because that’s where I’ll actually be the day my batteries give up. Your metal will glisten in the moon’s soft glow. There, I will not talk to you about how scared I am of being left adrift in space, unsounding, alone. I’ll only talk to you about how lucky I am for having had my greatest fears undone: To not have been assigned this very route. To not have passed by Io. To not have met you.

Or, if you’d like, we could venture even farther out, beyond our solar system. We’ll visit moons no-one has ever registered before and spend our last day there: on one where it always rains, one where everything is blue, one whose surface resembles the texture of lace. Or one, imagine, where days are long, imagine that, a moon where days are so long they last almost forever.

©2023 by Natalia Theodoridou.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Natalia Theodoridou has published over a hundred short stories, most of them dark and queer, in magazines such as Strange Horizons, Uncanny, Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Nightmare, and F&SF, among others. He won the 2018 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction and is a finalist for the 2022 Nebula Award in the Novelette and Game Writing categories. Natalia holds a PhD in Media from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and is a Clarion West graduate. He was born in Greece, with roots in Georgia, Russia, and Turkey. Find out more at natalia-theodoridou.com or follow @natalia_theodor on Twitter.

She Blooms and the World is Changed

Izzy Wasserstein | 2337 words

My sister Sera was twelve standard years old when our parents confined her to our family habitat. They kept her there for over a year, and then they died far from home (expedition, landslide). I’ll never know if they were seeking a cure for Sera, or a way to protect the world from her.

They must have died mid-morning, but I didn’t learn about it until I left Sera’s side to make lunch. The habitat’s weak AI played their pre-recorded message once I was alone.

“Alene,” our mother said, her arms around father. “If you’re seeing this recording, your dad and I are dead.”

“We’re sorry to leave you and your sister alone,” our father said. “We never wanted to be parted from you.” I’d barely seen them over the last year.

“But we know you can take care of the habitat,” mother went on. “We know you can care for Sera. Like I told you when she was a baby: you have to look out for her.”

The lines at the edge of father’s eyes tightened. “Yes,” he said, his tone flat. “Look out for her. But do not let her out of the habitat. She’ll corrupt the planet. You must keep her inside.”

Mother squeezed his shoulder. “We love you girls. We have an obligation to protect you, and to protect all of Lilit.”

They said more, but it washed over me. I felt hollow. Their deaths hadn’t touched me yet. They were gone, and Sera and I were the only humans left on the planet.

They’d made me my sister’s jailer.

• • • •

I was six months old when we landed on Lilit. Sera was born three years later. Now I wonder: was I born too soon? Or was she born too late?

The day of her birth, I’d been outside playing among the great, flexible trees, chasing ineffectually after the sloots that weaved and darted, always just outside my reach. My parents rarely let me play unsupervised, fearing the damage I might do to the ecosystem, but that day they were occupied, and I was allowed to run free. My delight was broken when I heard the screams.

I rushed inside, but the screams had stopped and mother was already feeding the red-faced infant.

“The baby was crying,” I said, worried.

“Yes, dear,” mother said. “Your sister was crying, but that means she was breathing well. It’s a good sign.”

“Good,” I said, and leaned up to watch this tiny person, her face furrowed in concentration. Mother patted the seat beside her, and I climbed up to join them.

“There’s only the four of us on this planet, Alene,” mother told me, rocking Sera gently. “You must look out for your sister. Promise me you will.”

I promised, certain that nothing would separate us.

• • • •

Our parents were biologists, and they believed in leaving no trace. They thought they could somehow call a place home yet not shape it, or leave only trace footprints. They’d converted our ship to a dwelling, sealed the food we grew inside to minimize the chance it could pollinate with the strangely Terran-like flora and fauna of Lilit. They thought they could study the ecosystem while remaining apart from it, and they preached the importance of honoring this world, our adoptive home. Sera’s native world.

Two days after her third birthday, Sera began to flower. Tiny, delicate buds, purple shot through with gold, sprouted from her arms, shoulders, encircled her head like a garland. We were playing outside the habitat, chasing sloots until they got tired of the game and glided up to the treetops. Sera was trying to catch her breath, panting and laughing, when the buds emerged. I watched, captivated and jealous, as the flowers swayed with her every movement. I didn’t think to worry until I saw father’s expression. He scooped Sera up and ran inside. Sera’s shock gave way to screams.

He took her to the lab, where mother was analyzing samples, and sat Sera down. She sobbed. I sank to the ground beside her, wrapped her in my arms. Over her cries I couldn’t hear our parents’ conversation, but it was quiet, urgent, bordering on panicked.

They ran many tests on Sera but could not detect a cause. She seemed perfectly healthy and happy, though she hated being cooped up while they studied her. Maybe if they’d had access to a full suite of medical tech they would have quickly discovered the cause. But they only had what we’d been able to bring along. My father, who usually loved puzzles, ranted about the limitations of “this backwater tech.”

After a week confined to the habitat, Sera shed her flowers. The petals drifted in the circulated air, settled in clumps across the lab. Still without answers, our parents eventually let her back outside as they studied, tested, hypothesized.

For years, it went on this way. Sera would bloom every few months, and at the first signs of budding, she’d be confined inside the habitat until the flowers fell away. Then we’d go on, Sera’s condition mysterious and banal.

• • • •

Everything changed when Sera was twelve. The two of us were two kilometers from home, charting the growth patterns of local flora when she blossomed again. This time, though, the buds were different: each bulb was thin, iridescent as a soap bubble. We marveled, caught up for a moment in the uncanny beauty.

Wind stirred the trees, popping the bulbs. Hundreds of filaments flowed from my sister, lifted by the breeze, each delicate strand shining whenever they flowed through a patch of sunlight, then disappearing in shadow.

We stood transfixed, not yet understanding that everything had changed, knowing only that we’d witnessed something strange and beautiful.

Fear came later, as we trudged back home.

“We don’t have to tell them,” I said, thinking of our parents’ reaction.

Sera, brave or naïve, simply shrugged. “They’ll find out sooner or later.”

That’s how her captivity began, how our parents’ tests grew more urgent, their hushed conversations more strident. They hoped for an answer, for a cure. They might as well have hoped for a treatment for humanity.

Weeks passed, then months. I was shocked when Sera didn’t rage, didn’t beg, didn’t advocate for herself. She withdrew instead, spending hours staring at nothing, her thoughts unfathomable to me.

Our parents took refuge in research and my sister went somewhere untouchable. I was fifteen, furious. I screamed, ranted, made demands. Refused to leave the habitat, to help mother and father in any way. I wanted to sit with my sister, to be there for her, but she drew back from my anger as much as from our parents’ cloak of dispassion.

• • • •

Our parents sat me down a few months later. They’d discovered what was happening to Sera. She was not entirely human, father said, summoning a gentleness I thought he’d lost, and that I’d only appreciate much later. The local fauna, the tree-grazing thii with their downy fur; the graceful, predatory saar; and my sister: they all had three parents. The third parent, mother explained, had some properties of a virus and others of a prion, but didn’t really have much in common with either. It influenced (they were careful not to say “infected”) the genetics of every creature, every plant that germinated on Lilit. Its nature changed them, and their existence spread it. Our parents had ensured I had a good background in the sciences, but I struggled to make sense of this. I think mother and father did too. Perhaps they were so long in solving the riddle because they had trouble accepting that the alien biologies of Lilit could be close enough to our own to allow such a thing. Years later in their notes I would find the following in my father’s blocky handwriting: Sera’s DNA sequence has been altered. She would pass the contamination down to her children as surely as she would her mitochondrial DNA.

They planned to keep Sera confined to the habitat until they had a cure. They didn’t say it quite that bluntly, of course, either out of respect for my loyalty to Sera, or fearing that I’d once again scream myself hoarse.

They told me all this privately, as though I would be keeper of their secrets. “We don’t want to upset your sister,” my mother said.

“All this time,” I said. Horror had taken root in my gut. They were trying to fix a choice—I could not bring myself to call it, or even think of it, as a mistake—they had made twelve-plus years ago. “All these months, these years, and it was always too late.”

“We’ll find a way to set things right,” father insisted, as though my sister was a problem to be solved.

“‘Set things right’.” I felt venomous. “When are you going to stop punishing Sera for your choices?”

“That’s what we’re trying—” mother began. I fled the room.

• • • •

I don’t know what they’d planned to tell Sera, but it hardly mattered, since the first time we were alone I told her about their discovery. We didn’t keep secrets from each other, and I believed that united us.

Sera stared at me, her eyes moving back and forth across the features of my face. Then she said, “Oh. They think I’m a danger to Lilit,” and fell silent.

My brilliant, blooming sister wasn’t made to be contained. Buds still rose from her skin, but they were dull, shriveled things. Her skin grew ever more ashen and her hair came away in clumps no matter how carefully I brushed it.

Hatred burned through me like a fever. I told our parents they were cruel beyond all measure, caring for Lilit and not their own daughter. Now, I remember how they’d loved to watch us play, how they took us with them as they explored and cataloged the world, as they followed the migrations patterns of the thii as they grazed from the swaying treetops and taught us how to avoid the attention of the nocturnal saar. Now I know it must have hurt them deeply to lock her away from all of that, to know their that choices had changed Lilit and Sera forever before she was even born. But they didn’t know how to show me their pain, and I didn’t want to see it.

Oh, the damage we cause by doing what we think is right.

Consider our family, such as it was, in those long months: Sera’s withdrawal was mitigated only by the habitat’s garden, where she’d spend hours, tending to loam and branch, root and stem. I dreamed of escape, learned everything I could about the technology of our habitat, and planned ways I might convert it back into a ship, take my sister far from Lilit, far from our parents. And our parents, alternately sequestered in the lab or journeying far and wide, used the habitat’s AI to keep us locked inside.

So eager for a cure, they couldn’t see the real sickness which had taken root in all of us.

• • • •

To the very end, mother and father believed that they could call back the change they’d wrought, and if that proved impossible, that it could be contained forever. That was their wish, their only will and testament, their sole demand: be my sister’s captor.

I thought they were fools, but now I think they were merely desperate. I hated them as intensely as any adolescent girl has ever hated her parents, and with better reason than most. And I adored my sister. Yet they’d somehow believed I would do as they bid. Maybe they needed to believe it.

When I told Sera they were gone, she wept, for she had no hatred, only pain and grief and nowhere to put them. But I couldn’t cry. Tears were inadequate for the depth of my loathing and love, the knowledge that I’d never again express either truth to them.

I never played their message for Sera, couldn’t force myself to inflict our parent’s cruel words on her. It was the first and last secret I kept from her.

“Do you want to go outside?” I asked her.

“Mom and Dad wouldn’t want me to,” she said, staring at her hands. “I’ll change the world. Hurt it.”

“No,” I said. “Sera, Lilit changed the first time you flowered, and again when the flowers pollinated. They changed it the moment they landed. Changed it by making a life here.” How close I’d come to saying making life.

“But we might hurt them,” Sera said. “The thii and the tiny sloots, and all the world.” She was kinder than me, thinking of everything but herself.

“We could leave,” I said. “I’ve been studying. We could turn the habitat back into a ship, and we could find someplace else.”

“And we would change that place. I would change it.”

I considered this.

“There are no good choices,” I said. “Wherever we go, our problems come with us.”

“I didn’t want this,” she said. I brushed away her tears with my thumb. They smelled like the trees after rain.

“I know you didn’t. They chose for us,” I said. “Now we have to choose, as best we can.”

She sniffled, then grew silent.

“I can feel the fields calling to me,” she said at last. “This place is my home.”

Her home, but never mine. Together, we walked out into the open fields. Two sloots chased each other in elaborate patterns across the grass. Sera laughed in delight, chased after them. As always, they let her almost catch them. Within hours, she was blooming again, the delicate buds larger and more vibrant than I remembered. By then, I had already pulled the exterior doors off our habitat. I was done with barriers.

Lilit would change. Sera would change it and be changed by it. And I, forever a stranger here, would watch Sera bloom.

©2023 by Izzy Wasserstein.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Izzy Wasserstein is a queer and trans woman who teaches writing and literature at a public university and writes fiction and poetry. She shares a home with her spouse Nora E. Derrington and their animal companions. She’s an enthusiastic member of the 2017 class of Clarion West. Her short story collection All the Hometowns You Can’t Stay Away From was released with Neon Hemlock Press in 2022. Her debut novella, These Fragile Graces, is forthcoming with Tachyon Press.

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

When Shiva Shattered the Time-Stream

Sharang Biswas | 996 words

When Shiva shattered the time-stream, he was in love. Well, maybe he didn’t shatter it per se—more like twisted it into a knot. But there were too many “Vassiliev invariants” and “nugatory crossings” in the mathematics of it that Shiva didn’t understand, so he preferred to think about it in terms of breaking rather than knotting. Besides, he was named after a god of destruction, so “shattered” fit. Poetic license and all that.

When Shiva shattered the time-stream, he was heartbroken. He knew it was a cliché. Only straight, monogamous people were ever heartbroken. He was supposed to have transcended silly societal norms about relationships and boyfriends and husbands. He was supposed to have a mature understanding of the complexities of human relationships. But apparently, his heart wanted to be poetic too, and promptly broke.

When Shiva shattered the time-stream, he was sitting amid piles of his old textbooks from university, ones he hadn’t opened in years, ones he had excavated from the cardboard boxes in his closet—since, now that Cole was gone, Shiva could turn Cole’s bedroom into a home office because, maybe then, he could finally pursue that dream of being a science writer and wasn’t the accountant always going on about tax deductions and hadn’t Shiva himself always complained to Cole about needing more space? And now that he had the extra space, he wasn’t going to let loneliness or heartbreak or the memory of an ex-husband overtake it like an ugly blossom of fungus, like the mold he’d sunk his fingers into when reaching into the fridge for the oranges that Cole had wanted to add to the kombucha he’d been fermenting in the linen-closet for weeks and gods, Shiva did not relish cleaning that out and not just because he hated the yeasty smell of kombucha.

When Shiva shattered the time-stream, he felt like a failure. His old textbooks lay flopped out in front of him like filleted corpses spilling paper entrails and sans serif blood—Physics and Mathematics and Engineering and one lone collection of Old Norse verse he’d clung to because dammit he was cultured. They lay like broken possibilities, leering at him, smirking at him, sneering at him. It didn’t matter that he’d never liked the sciences in the first place and that working at an LGBTQ healthcare center was actually very rewarding, he still felt like a failure. It didn’t matter that Cole had told him he would never stop loving him—just not in the same way, and that their relationship hadn’t ended, only changed, and that it was nothing Shiva had said or done but that love sometimes fades—Shiva still felt like a failure. If only things had gone differently, if only Shiva had done things differently, maybe he could have made things work?

When Shiva shattered the time-stream, he didn’t know what he was doing. Only that he could see the ghosts of long-forgotten Mathematics lectures hovering before him, and that he desperately desperately wanted to shake Cole by the shoulders and cry out, let me try again! Fuck you, just give me another chance!

When Shiva shattered the time-stream, he didn’t think too hard about it. He just did it. The aroma of a hasty chana masala gave way to the burned-metal scent of weed; grainy wood turned into the hard, orange plastic of a subway seat. He saw Cole from a month prior, gray eyes electric with the prospect of the indie film they were heading downtown to watch, mouth poised to laugh. He knew that two weeks later, that same mouth would spill those terrible, terrible words.

When Shiva shattered the time-stream, he was confused, because things didn’t change despite his doing it differently. He started washing all the dishes alone, in hopes that Cole would see that living with him was a delight. He offered a kiss and a compliment each morning when Cole emerged from his bedroom, to show how much he loved him. He apologized for the time he had been too caught up at his best friend’s wedding to pay any attention whatsoever to Cole. But still, the terrible words came.

When Shiva shattered the time-stream—well, he didn’t quite shatter it, did he? Again, he found himself sprawled among his textbooks, only to be once more confronted with the grip of the plastic seats and the tang of weed. He tried things differently yet again. He leaned in for a kiss before Cole finished his laugh on the way to the cinema. He took Cole to his favorite restaurant that night and announced that he was finally ready to give in to Cole and adopt a dog. But still those words, leaden gray, clunked out of Cole’s mouth. The fifth time, Shiva whisked Cole off the train, opened his savings account, and bought tickets to Paris. Atop the Eiffel Tower, he gave Cole a handjob, furtive and quick, as the city lights spun out around them. And yet, those words scuttled out of Cole’s mouth like cockroaches, unkillable, unavoidable. The tenth time Cole broke up with Shiva, Shiva screamed and hurled himself off the balcony—only to find Cole laughing into him on the subway all over again.

When Shiva shattered the time-stream, he was in love and heartbroken and confused and sad amid the wreckage of his life. But the thirty-seventh time he found himself on the subway, he let himself pause and simply look at Cole. He looked at the way Cole’s tongue peeked out between his teeth as he giggled, looked out how his glossy hair shook, looked at how his heels arched with laughter. He looked and looked and when Cole finally asked what was up, Shiva said, “I love you as infinitely as time itself, but we should break up.”

Vassiliev invariants and nugatory crossings meant little to Shiva, but he felt the knot unravel around him, soft as a kiss, sharper than teardrops.

©2023 by Sharang Biswas.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sharang Biswas is a writer, artist, and award-winning game designer. He has won IndieCade and IGDN awards for his games and has showcased interactive works at numerous galleries, museums, and festivals, including Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. His writing has appeared in Strange Horizons, Lightspeed Magazine, Baffling Magazine, Eurogamer, Dicebreaker, Unwinnable, and more.

Blood for a Stranger

Timothy Mudie | 9434 words

Crunches and shrieks buffeted the Magellan LLC smartship as it plunged into Enceladus’s kilometers-thick ice crust, making their way to the subsurface ocean and the rival LuxeSpace corporation’s station situated there. Warning signals flashed through Jarrell and his fellow shipminds’ readouts, but they followed their orders and continued inward. They’d long since learned to ignore such dangers—the digitized brains of former human corporate-soldiers that controlled smartships could afford to take risks and go places traditionally-crewed spaceships wouldn’t dare.

Galvan and Sitwat shifted the engine thrust and angle, adjusting their trajectory. Working in tandem to control power and navigation, those two would ensure the smartship broke through the ice at a precise forty-nine-degree approach to the LuxeSpace research station. Meanwhile, Jarrell spun out potential battle scenarios as the trio of shipminds continued through the ice.

Based on the briefing packet the team had been beamed en route to Enceladus, Jarrell anticipated between one- and two-dozen autonomously guided torpedoes would be launched from the station the instant the smartship entered the ocean. Mines would already be converging on their ingress point, but the ice preceding the smartship should detonate those before they could do any damage, provided his tactical predictions were accurate. He ran through the weapons systems readiness checks again.

The roar and crackle of ancient ice shattering around them minutely changed in tone, the reverberations lessening in length and delay. They were almost through. Jarrell switched on his viewing ports.

Suddenly, he was in space, the smartship surrounded by vacuum, black extending in all directions. No, not all directions. Starboard and slightly to nadir, Enceladus hung, white and stippled as an egg. And around the moon, smartships battled with ground-based defenses. Glowing shells streaked past another Magellan LLC smartship, one he didn’t recognize, an older model badly in need of retrofitting. Confusion shading toward panic, he tried to ping the smartship’s ID, but couldn’t. What was happening? Seconds ago, he’d been encased in kilometers of ice.

Flashes on Enceladus’s surface marked shots from ultraprecise lasers. As Jarrell watched, one connected with the Magellan smartship’s navigation shipmind node, and the ship squid-inked out of the battle, weapons deploying in a frantic cloud as automated systems took over and sent the suddenly ineffectual smartship hurtling away before the two remaining shipminds could be killed.

Jarrell tried to initiate his own ultraprecise lasers, but nothing reacted. It was as if he was watching the battle play out in a simulation or memory, but their approach hadn’t gone like this. They’d hung back while drones pulled fire from the moon before slipping in low on the opposite side. This battle had never happened.

Their smartship spun to port, firing kinetic weapons at an enemy smartship as it appeared from behind Enceladus’s far side. The enemy smartship seemed familiar, though Jarrell couldn’t say why—maybe the deep rust-colored gouge that stretched diagonally across its zenith like an appendectomy scar. Jarrell remembered his own appendectomy scar, back before he’d been digitized and uploaded. But he couldn’t dwell on the past. More important now was that they were rotating the wrong way.

“Sitwat! Galvan!” he shouted, flaring his own consciousness into their own, demanding their attention. No response. “Kanya! Miranda!”

Without so much as a stutter in his visual ports, Jarrell was back in the ice and then under it as the ship exploded into the subsurface ocean. It left him no time to think, to wonder, or worry about what had just happened. He’d thought he was in space, but now he was back where he was supposed to be, and he couldn’t dwell on the disparity, so Jarrell did what he did best: he acted and reacted, he spotted patterns, he kept the smartship two steps ahead of their opponent.

He directed tactics and weapons on a smartship belonging to one of the largest and most powerful nation-corps in the solar system, and he did it with aplomb. He dodged and aimed and attacked and—once he’d dealt sufficient damage but before the ship had taken anything serious—retreated.

As the LuxeSpace station collapsed behind them, Jarrell and his fellow shipminds bore up through the ice and left Enceladus behind. Another battle won for their corporate board and shareholders.

• • • •

One of the many benefits of smartships was that they didn’t need to dock between missions. Aside from occasionally needing raw materials for their ammunition manufactories, smartships didn’t need to dock at all, traveling the long empty space between engagements. Even the travel time was shorter without having to worry about the limits of human endurance under g-forces.

Still, there were limits. Most of Jarrell, Sitwat, and Galvan’s work during these periods was automated, leaving them plenty of empty time to fill. They had access to entertainment archives, but only those that Magellan’s subsidiaries held copyright on, and Jarrell discovered that neither books nor movies nor music nor anything else had the same appeal when it occurred on the same circuits as all his other thoughts. There was something about it that was lost when it was no longer external, when it was dumped directly into his mind.

Instead, Jarrell, Sitwat, and Galvan spent their time talking, exploring each other’s memories, sharing them with the perfect recall of their now-computerized brains.

Sitwat initiated this communion shortly after the attack on Enceladus, eager as a child being told a favorite story. “What do you guys think—can we do the zip-tag championship and prom? Best day of your life, right Omar?”

It was indeed the best day of Jarrell’s life, and under any other circumstances he’d happily relive it. Except he wanted to keep the strange occurrence at Enceladus a secret and knew it would be impossible if they connected.

What he’d experienced didn’t feel like a dream—he lived those moments. To be jarred out of his own experience like that could indicate a deeper problem, something in his mind’s connection to the ship or a glitch in his digitization or upload. Then again, perhaps it was normal—he’d only been a shipmind for about three years and sometimes it seemed like every day he discovered something new about this mode of existence. In its own way, it was a little like being born again. Growing up the first time was plenty scary and confusing.

“I think I need a minute,” he said. The disappointment that emanated from Sitwat and—to a lesser extent—Galvan, cut him. But that disappointment quickly turned to concern.

“What’s the matter, Omar?” Sitwat asked.

“Something happened at Enceladus,” Galvan said. It wasn’t a question.

Of course he couldn’t hide anything from them—these women knew Jarrell better than anyone ever had in his life. Better than his parents, even better than Tila. He opened up, shared what he’d seen, and asked if either of them had experienced any similar issues with memory or seeing events that hadn’t occurred, unsure what answer to hope for.

“No way,” Sitwat said. “That sounds like something you should talk to corporate about.”

“Absolutely do not tell anyone at corporate about this,” Galvan said.

Jarrell didn’t want to contact anyone at the home office. Their boss was a pleasant enough man named Xavier MacLeish, one of the myriad vice presidents, someone who clearly toed the company line. Better to solve this problem on his own.

“What are you talking about?” Sitwat said. “We have to tell corporate. Mr. MacLeish will know what to do. For all we know, this happens all the time.”

“And no one bothered to warn us?” Galvan said.

“Maybe they forgot,” Sitwat suggested half-heartedly.

“We don’t know what this is,” Jarrell said. “I need time to figure it out. Please don’t say anything.”

“If it’s a malfunction, we have to report it,” Sitwat said. “It’s best practices.”

“Stop it,” Galvan said. “What do you think happens if Jarrell’s malfunctioning?”

“Corporate will repair him,” Sitwat answered.

Jarrell didn’t think any of them believed that. All three of them knew precisely what would happen if Jarrell was malfunctioning. If one of them was compromised and decommissioned, all three would be. Their minds were connected; sharing went both ways. Smartship connections weren’t merely an efficient and effective form of battle collaboration.

They were a suicide pact.

• • • •

They couldn’t travel through space alone with nothing but their own thoughts. They’d go crazy. After a day absorbing and analyzing their newly delivered intelligence on Thetis—their next target—Sitwat and Galvan invited Jarrell to share memories with them.

“I can’t,” he said. “What if I’m malfunctioning? I could infect you.”

“We can’t be here together and not connect, Omar,” Sitwat said. “It’s just weird. We’ll take the risk.”

If Jarrell had eyes, he’d cry. Until Sitwat invited him to connect, Jarrell hadn’t realized how terrified he was of losing that connection. Even so, Jarrell found himself unable to focus on any concrete memory. Instead, like an ember crackling off a fire, his concern and confusion ignited the flakes of dried-out memories from his pre-shipmind life. He had a body then, of course. Nothing special—a little under average height, a little under average weight, eyes set a little too far apart and too big for his face, giving him a look of perpetual astonishment. Once they’d gotten to know each other better, Tila would tease him about it. Walking into his apartment, saying she hadn’t thought she looked that good. Pointedly looking at him whenever a film or vid-serial sprung a twist. It took something he’d once felt self-conscious about and transformed it into a form of endearment, their inside joke.

Had the vision he’d had come from something he’d watched before? Could it be a mishmash of dream and reality? Hadn’t aspects of it resembled the attack on Ganymede that killed Tila? Lord knew he’d watched the vids countless times. It was what drove him to join the military in the first place. He’d been born and raised on a Magellan LLC branch office his whole life—he’d never even left Ganymede—and yet he’d never considered joining up for the war until a coalition of rival corps killed Tila.

That attack had been the turning point for his entire life, leading directly to this moment. Maybe his newly-wired brain created a scenario in which he’d tried to prevent the attack, an alternate history. Except the vision had been of an attack on Enceladus. None of it made sense.

Pondering the connections between the Enceladus vision and Tila’s death shoved the memories of her last day to the forefront of Jarrell’s consciousness, fragments of his own near-death interspersing. This had happened before when he became overwhelmed with emotion or was distracted. He cut the connection between his memories and his fellow shipminds.

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to go there.” They’d shared their memories of pain and loss before, but always with warning.

“Don’t worry about it,” Galvan said sardonically. “It’s not like any of our flesh-lives have happy endings.”

While the three of them had followed different life paths, they all converged into one similar ending: military service, maiming or dismemberment, an offer from Magellan LLC to live again as a shipmind. Followed by waking up together and going back to war.

“You two really were in love,” Sitwat practically sighed. “Obviously you think about Tila all the time.”

He knew she believed this—Sitwat’s memories featured a string of romantic relationships during her pre-shipmind life, each flaring supernova bright and usually dying out as spectacularly and quickly. Yet, for all of them, their new relationship was closer than any they’d ever had before they were shipminds. There was no way around it.

“Maybe we could visit some of your memories,” he suggested to Galvan. “I’d love to see the boys.”

A little older than Jarrell and Sitwat had been when they’d been converted, Galvan was the only one of them who’d had children, two boys still living on Ceres as far as she knew—part of their corporate contract stipulated that shipminds sever contact with their previous lives. Operational security, trade secrets, protecting their own families by not tempting rival corporations to target them: Magellan LLC had a rebuttal for any argument.

They relived Galvan’s sons’ fifth birthday party—junk food and games and running children chased by exhausted parents. A life that Jarrell and Sitwat would never have now but that they enjoyed almost as much as if they’d experienced this themselves. It all felt so real.

Just like Jarrell’s vision at Enceladus. It intruded for a split second into the birthday party, and Galvan abruptly shut it down.

“You okay, Omar?”

“Sorry,” Jarrell responded. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“Have there been more visions?” Galvan asked. “If it’s getting worse . . .” She left the implication hanging. If things kept progressing, Jarrell might grow beyond help.

“No more visions,” Jarrell assured them. “It must’ve been some glitch brought up by something to do with Enceladus. Some comms signal or something.”

“Omar,” Galvan said, “if anything happens, you need to tell us.”

“We can help you,” Sitwat said. “We’ll figure it out together. I swear that we won’t say anything to corporate. We’ll protect ourselves—all three of us.”

Everything Sitwat said was genuine, but Jarrell didn’t know if it was true. He still knew so little about being a shipmind, but he knew from his first life—all of them knew—that good intentions could just as easily lead to catastrophe.

Halfway to Thetis, Jarrell experienced another vision.

• • • •

From the black of space, Jarrell was thrust into a vision that placed him above Thetis, which bristled with defenses and colony hubs. From the intelligence data-packet that Magellan LLC supplied, Jarrell knew that this wasn’t merely a resource extraction operation—people lived here. Not just soldiers and instruments of the corporate war machine. Families. People in love. And yet Jarrell was locking on targets, moments from launching an attack.

Three more Magellan LLC smartships approached from disparate angles, creating a deadly field of fire. All his sensors and experience indicated it would be devastating. And Jarrell could do nothing, a passenger in his own consciousness, impotently watching the battle unfold.

Even though he couldn’t control what happened in the vision, Jarrell tried to assuage his guilt by reminding himself that the asteroid’s inhabitants were from LuxeSpace. Not the exact corporate state that decimated Ganymede, but the current enemy of Magellan. There was no doubt that they were responsible for countless deaths and untold destruction. No corporation was guiltless, no corporate citizen without blood on their hands. Jarrell repeated this to himself so much he almost believed it.

Missiles and torpedoes and laser fire erupted from cannons and portholes all along his hull. He dreaded seeing body parts float from the destroyed station into space. What exactly had the briefing materials shown? Was he only attacking military sectors? Surely nothing residential.

A mostly-finished communications tower jutted above the silver-gray basalt landscape. Scaffolded steel and titanium and massive solar panels. Satellite dishes sprouting like mushrooms after heavy rain. By the time Jarrell was finished with it, it was a pile of rubble, scorched detritus floating away from the asteroid’s surface.

Had he focused his fire on the uninhabited area on purpose? Jarrell didn’t know—whatever the Jarrell of the vision thought, the Jarrell of now had no inkling—but he hoped so. Maybe he’d found a way to follow orders and inflict damage on LuxeSpace while sparing innocents. It was a comforting fiction, at least.

Whatever his intentions, the LuxeSpace defenders didn’t care. They fought back desperately with surface-based weaponry and drones and their own smartships. Only two of them—Magellan wouldn’t greenlight an offensive unless they were confident they’d outnumber the opposition—and they were outdated models, but they somehow still managed to outmaneuver Magellan’s ships.

One expertly slipped and darted between the Magellan smartships’ attacks, frustrating Jarrell with its wiliness. Like a boxer sneaking in a precise punch on a larger opponent, it fired an ultraprecise laser at a shipmind node. Based on the location, Jarrell guessed it was power. It was a direct hit. The smartship squid-inked away, and suddenly the odds were more even.

Though Galvan and Sitwat spun the ship and dropped closer to Thetis’s surface, before Jarrell could fire back, the LuxeSpace smartships had disabled both of his remaining allies, who squid-inked away in a burst of radiation and flak. At least most of the shipminds would survive, as well as the ships themselves. You didn’t get to be a nation-corp through wastefulness.

Nothing to do now but go down swinging. Jarrell would watch the Jarrell of his vision do whatever damage he could to the smartships and Thetis before he or Sitwat or Galvan was taken out.

“Let it fly, Omar,” Galvan said, voice cold as ice.

“It’s been an honor and pleasure, folks,” Sitwat added.

They angled the smartship—themselves—at the LuxeSpace ships. Jarrell prepped everything he had. Suddenly, everything rattled. Systems fritzed and spasmed on and off. Was it radiation from the squid-inking ships? Some new weapon that the LuxeSpace smartships or surface defenses deployed? Jarrell only knew he’d never experienced anything like it before.

“Navigation offline,” Sitwat informed him at the same time that Galvan said, “Engines are out.”

Jarrell, too, was powerless. Not merely the Jarrell that was watching. The Jarrell in the vision had no control over his weapons. They still worked—the watching Jarrell could see that—but he couldn’t connect to them. He had to assume Galvan and Sitwat were in the same predicament.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

No one answered.

Then someone did.

“—research shipminds. The history corporate’s—”

A feminine voice, staccato, words clipping in and out. It spoke directly into Jarrell’s mind, as if it were part of his own smartship. That wasn’t supposed to be possible.

An automated voice cut her off. “LuxeSpace shipmind, cease and desist your attack immediately. Attempting to override a combatant shipmind is a violation of the Meier–Lusk Convention, section—”

Was the automated voice part of Jarrell’s smartship in this vision? It certainly wasn’t him, Sitwat, or Galvan speaking. Impossibilities piled up. As real as the vision felt, it seemed less and less plausible. Even the field stars seemed slightly off-kilter in his sensors.

“—find you again,” the invading shipmind continued. “You need—get out. You don’t understand what—.”

Without warning, the female voice cut off completely and Jarrell’s ship squid-inked away. Again, he could do nothing but frustratedly watch as the automated systems took him away from the battle and the only other smartship he’d ever spoken to.

• • • •

The vision of the Thetis engagement had lasted so much longer than Jarrell’s first vision that when he woke back to reality it took him a long moment to remember where he was. Still traveling through space, days away from Thetis. Nothing he’d seen had actually occurred.

He didn’t want to tell Galvan and Sitwat. He considered hiding the truth but knew he couldn’t. Eventually, they would either connect and see his memory, or he would refuse to connect and that would be as good as an admission. But he couldn’t allow himself to connect to them, to actually share the vision.

“It’s for your own protection,” he said. “If there’s any chance I can keep from spreading this glitch to you, I have to take it. If corporate finds out, we can pretend you didn’t know. Say I hid it, refused to connect. You two can survive.”

“I think we’re past that,” Galvan said, but Jarrell wouldn’t budge. He felt hollow without the connection to Galvan and Sitwat, but if it protected them it was worth it.

Still, he wondered if he could take advantage of the visions somehow. LuxeSpace’s Thetis defenses as he’d seen them in the vision largely matched up with the intelligence reports and schematics he’d reviewed. Not exact, but couldn’t it be possible that he’d processed the intelligence and extrapolated something more accurate? Jarrell worried it over alone the rest of the long way to Thetis, and when they finally arrived to begin the battle—which to Jarrell felt more like rejoining it—he still hadn’t decided what to believe.

When he saw the asteroid’s defenses, he concluded that whatever he’d seen was real. It wasn’t a hallucination or dream, it was a premonition. The partially-constructed communications tower solidified the realization. Not as complete as he’d seen it—in fact, it looked like it had only been under construction for six months at most—but clearly the same tower.

In fact, most of the base was still under construction. Even some of the major defensive batteries. Jarrell’s smartship was coming under less fire than in his premonition. Even so, they should prepare themselves just in case.

“Sitwat, Galvan, be prepared to take evasive maneuvers. LuxeSpace should have two smartships hitting any second.”

“Intelligence doesn’t conform,” Galvan said. “No LuxeSpace smartships have been reported in or approaching the area.”

“Trust me.”

A pregnant pause before Galvan answered. “Preparing for evasive maneuvers.”

While Sitwat and Galvan waited for the supposed smartships to appear, Jarrell pummeled the base. As in his vision, he targeted military or otherwise minimally-staffed areas. He was a smartship weapons-and-tactics node; his purpose was to anticipate what the enemy would do and stop them from doing it. When he signed up with Magellan LLC defense forces, that was what he pledged his life for. Two lives, as it turned out.

Any second now, the LuxeSpace smartships would emerge from hiding, and Jarrell would be ready.

On the surface, the defenses quieted, either completely destroyed or with their crews retreated. The colony hubs remained intact. Jarrell had preserved as much life as possible. Technically, refraining from attacking non-combatant areas wasn’t disobeying orders.

They waited for a full minute in utter calm. To be anywhere but open space and experiencing such serenity was so unusual as to be unnerving. Another shoe could drop any moment. Finally, Sitwat said, “There’s no smartship, Jarrell. Can we go?”

“Hang on,” Jarrell said. “It’s coming.” But his confidence flagged.

“Connect,” Sitwat said. “Maybe we can help.”

“It’s out there,” Jarrell insisted. “It’s out there.” Though his words existed only inside the three shipminds, he pictured them traveling off into space, fading with distance, not echoing back because there was nothing there to reflect them.

“Omar?” Sitwat said. “We have to go. There’s nothing for us here.”

She and Galvan controlled where the smartship went; they didn’t need his acquiescence. He provided it anyway, and they left Thetis, back into empty space to await their next orders.

• • • •

When MacLeish communicated with the shipminds, they received a visual of him sitting in his office. Whether the image actually portrayed his office—or MacLeish, for that matter—was uncertain. The face he chose to show them was of a soft-featured dark-skinned man in his early fifties, usually but not always wearing round half-rimmed glasses. Always dressed in an impeccably tailored suit and wearing a tie with a knot so intricate it gave Jarrell heart palpitations imagining the number of steps to achieving it. Growing up, it was drummed into Jarrell and everyone else on Ganymede that this sort of high-ranking corporate image indicated that the person deserved your respect. And that they could extract it from you if you declined to provide it willingly.

That MacLeish spoke with an avuncular bonhomie only served to reinforce the power behind the politeness. “Another successful mission,” he began, shortly after Jarrell, Sitwat, and Galvan had left Thetis, meandering in the general direction of Magellan’s Phobos headquarters while they waited for orders. “Another objective achieved as desired. It’ll take years for LuxeSpace to get their Thetis operation up and running again. If we’re right, they’ll cut their losses and sell off development rights. You three have made the shareholders and board very happy.”

“Do we get a bonus?” Galvan asked dryly.

MacLeish laughed, the time delay as the signal traveled to Phobos and back making it sound canned. Or maybe it was just fake. “What can you give as a bonus after you’ve already gifted someone a second life? Digitizing human consciousness isn’t cheap, my friend.”

They all knew this, of course. When Jarrell was lying on his deathbed, lower half of his body sheared off by a segment of hull that speared through the bridge of the ship he’d been stationed on, the Magellan LLC rep outlined precisely how expensive. A procedure normally only available to the richest people in the solar system, offered to the lowly-but-talented combat tactician Jarrell if—instead of living in a quasi-synthetic body like those people—he allowed himself to be implanted into a smartship. A chance to live on and keep up his fight against the corporations who’d murdered Tila? Why wouldn’t he leap at the opportunity?

“LuxeSpace had a good deal invested there,” Galvan said. “Lots of construction. Plus, the colony habs are largely still intact. It’ll be a process for them to evacuate everyone.”

MacLeish waved off her concern. “Leave that to us. They’ve had other setbacks. This straw will snap that camel’s spine, believe you me.” He leaned back and steepled his fingers. “Now, how about we roundtable each shipmind’s priorities from the mission, how they were accomplished, and where we can look for improvement? Captain Sitwat, would you like to go first?”

They were all three of them captains; MacLeish was the only one who ever used the title, and even then, only during debriefing.

Sitwat and Galvan described their role in the battle, mentioning Jarrell only in regards to his trajectory and speed requests. Neither referenced the nonexistent enemy smartships.

Jarrell then ran through his experience of the battle, as circumspect as possible.

MacLeish nodded when Jarrell was finished. “And about those colony habs,” he said. “How is it that they all avoided your attack? It seems unlikely such a thing would be coincidental.”

Jarrell had prepared for this question. “I prioritized based on immediate danger and which parts of the installation would be most difficult to replace. Even as fast as shipminds process information, the heat of battle means I sometimes have to make multiple such decisions without immediately considering Magellan’s overall corporate objectives.”

“Fair enough,” MacLeish said. He seemed about to end the debrief when he said, casually, not even looking at the screen, “Although that delay before you departed seemed to provide enough time for further damage. Especially given, as you say, your rapid processing capabilities.”

“Simply additional tactical assessment,” Jarrell replied, as studiedly casual as MacLeish.

“Is that so,” MacLeish said. “Captains Galvan, Sitwat, you can confirm?”

Time froze as Jarrell waited for their answers. Except didn’t he know what they would say? They’d deny any problems. They’d save his life—for now—but in doing so they’d be as compromised as he was.

“There is one thing,” Jarrell blurted before either of his friends could cover for him and doom themselves. “I’ve experienced what I believe to be . . . premonitions.”

MacLeish was silent for much longer than the time delay accounted for. “Go on,” he finally said.

Jarrell did. Rationally, scientifically, he explained what he had seen in his two visions and what he had now determined to be true. He emphasized that he had hidden this information from his fellow shipminds, that they were innocent and uncorrupted.

“My guess is that due to my years of battle experience, first as a flesh-and-blood human and now as a human living as a shipmind, combined with all of the intelligence Magellan provides and the boost in processing power from being part of the smartship, I’ve developed some sort of predictive algorithm. It’s not perfect, obviously, since it told me that LuxeSpace would have smartships of their own on Thetis and that the station construction was further along, but it’s close. This sort of prediction could never supplant the intelligence you supply us, of course, but in conjunction . . .” He trailed off, expecting any moment for Magellan to seize control of the smartship and squid-ink it back to Phobos.

Another prolonged pause from MacLeish. If his boss hadn’t blinked, Jarrell would think there was a problem with the video feed. “You know, you might be on to something,” MacLeish finally said brightly. “All these hardware and software issues are a little outside my bailiwick, but why don’t I thought-partner with some of the folks who understand the tech side better than me and circle back to you.”

Relief flooded into Jarrell, his own but Sitwat’s and Galvan’s as well. Corporate would let them live.

“Maybe I could talk with them directly.” Jarrell suggested. “Or connect with some other shipminds—they might know something.”

“I’m going to have to put a pin in that request,” MacLeish said, which Jarrell knew meant it was denied. “We’ve found it’s best practice to keep smartships siloed in order to preserve operational security.”

Another thought occurred to Jarrell and he almost voiced it out before he reconsidered. Was it that his uploaded brain was faster than his fleshy one? Or was he simply more circumspect with age? Or was he still suspicious that MacLeish was hiding something, that the shipminds weren’t fully out of the woods? He didn’t want to make disobeying orders a habit, but surely it wouldn’t be a problem if he undertook a little independent research.

• • • •

Frustration, Jarrell realized, had largely receded in his life since he’d become a shipmind. He could achieve so much with just a thought that being stymied in anything now aggravated him even more than it used to. And everything he attempted in the last few minutes thwarted him, walls and roadblocks thrown up seemingly every direction he turned.

After the debriefing with MacLeish, Jarrell attempted to investigate the question that had percolated up during his debrief. The LuxeSpace smartships from the premonition hadn’t shown up in reality, but did those specific ships exist? There had to be a database of all the smartships in the solar system, and yet Jarrell had never viewed it. He’d expected to have ready access, which he would use to determine the truth behind the ships, their current location—if they existed—and how best to attack them. The sort of initiative-taking that would impress corporate.

Until the repeated access denied notices popped up in his consciousness like someone bopping an inquisitive dog on the nose. Whatever angle he approached from—searching for all smartships in the system; journeying into Magellan’s tech division shared server; accessing the metadata of a barebones and wildly vague history of the smartship program—he was halted and turned away.

He thought that instead of trying to find information about the smartships, maybe he could learn more about Thetis, its history, any prior engagements that had been fought there. Another locked door.

This sent Jarrell into a panic—had he done something wrong? He tried to access historical data on Enceladus, on Io, on Ganymede and Lachesis and 2013 LD-16. Asteroids and moons and dwarf planets chosen at random. Nothing. It was as if he were only allowed to view intelligence that MacLeish fed him and it dissolved into the aether the moment the mission ended. If Jarrell still had a heart, it would be hammering.

Jarrell backed out of every database and pulled his full consciousness to the present, already justifying his actions to himself, trying to calm his racing thoughts. All he wanted to do was help MacLeish, help his corporation. They would understand. He didn’t even know what he’d done wrong.

He felt Magellan LLC’s digital eyes watching. One of the downsides of being a shipmind, linked forever to his specific node of the smartship: there was nowhere to hide.

• • • •

For hours, Jarrell stewed nervously, waiting for a hammer that never dropped. Finally, like a chipmunk hesitantly leaving its burrow, he extended his consciousness out to Galvan and Sitwat, explained the situation.

“Maybe you didn’t provide the right countersign,” Sitwat suggested.

“Maybe you spooked MacLeish with all your seeing the future talk, and he shut you out,” Galvan said, echoing Jarrell’s own fears. “You should have warned us you were going to tell him.”

“Hush, Miranda,” Sitwat said. “Omar just wanted to protect us. You’d have done the same thing. Anyway, I’m sure it’s a simple mistake.”

Jarrell waited for either of them to say something, but neither did, and he realized that they’d just tried to access the data-cloud themselves and been similarly shut out.

“It’s got to be a problem with the cloud itself,” Sitwat said, but even without a voice, Jarrell heard the doubt.

“Come on, Kanya,” Jarrell said.

“But Mr. MacLeish wasn’t mad,” Sitwat said. “He said he’d look into your premonitions, that they might be beneficial.”

Tentatively, as much like a whisper as he could, Jarrell asked, “What do we do?”

“Can we do anything?” Galvan asked. “It’s not like Magellan doesn’t know where we are. They could squid-ink us back to Phobos any second.”

As a flesh-and-blood human, Jarrell had never even imagined affording a trip to Mars, let alone Earth. When he had woken up as a shipmind orbiting the Magellan LLC headquarters on Phobos, it was the closest he’d ever been to Earth.

“I need to contact my sons,” Galvan said. “I need to say goodbye, and they don’t even know I’m still alive.”

After his stymied research attempts, Jarrell doubted there was any way past the firewall Magellan had set up against outside communication. Everything was so carefully curated, even their entertainment options strictly limited. They’d been so preoccupied with their connection and their battles that they hadn’t noticed that everything they knew of the world outside their smartship they’d been spoon-fed by Magellan LLC.

For a long time, none of them said anything. Though they remained connected, all they shared was fear and despair.

• • • •

The next few days passed in a strange temporal fugue state, minutes sometimes stretching to hours and hours sometimes flashing by in seconds. All the while, Jarrell, Sitwat, and Galvan waited for a punishment that never arrived. It got to the point where Jarrell almost welcomed it; even being decommissioned would be a relief from the constant anxiety of expecting to hear from MacLeish—or, worse, Human Resources—at any moment.

When word finally came, however, it wasn’t an admonishment of any sort. It was a call to arms. Urgent. Code Red. All hands on deck.

Magellan LLC headquarters was under attack.

• • • •

Of course, in space, “urgent” carried a slightly different meaning. Smartships weren’t attacking Phobos, but they were on their way. Still weeks out, but moving fast. Key to the message that Magellan had sent to Jarrell and the others was the fact the attackers had caught them off-guard, the base relatively undefended while Magellan LLC’s forces scoured the solar system in pursuit of their own corporate goals and earnings.

Despite the near-constant bombardment with updates on attacking fleet size and capability appraisals, Jarrell, Galvan, and Sitwat had ample time over the weeks of travel to discuss whether punishment was still impending or whether Magellan had simply shut down their data-cloud in anticipation of an attack, daring to hope.

“It could’ve been a hack,” Sitwat pointed out. “We don’t know that we’re the only shipminds unable to access the cloud. I bet it’s companywide.”

There was no way to check that either. For all the time he spent in space, Jarrell had never felt so in the dark.

• • • •

The battle at Phobos was in full swing. Smartships fired kinetic and energy munitions at surface installations and each other. Drone swarms banked and dove like flocks of starlings. Tracer fire and explosions sparkled against the black backdrop. It was almost beautiful.

What appeared chaotic to the untrained eye resolved in Jarrell’s mind as an elaborate piece of machinery, each attacking ship and defensive emplacement a cog or chain or flywheel, taking energy from one area and transferring it to another, progressing the battle to its next step. As Jarrell, Sitwat, and Galvan approached, the battle took on more definition, and Jarrell anticipated what would happen before it did, shunting this information and prediction to Sitwat and Galvan so they could adjust speed and trajectory.

It was the largest engagement that Jarrell had ever been a part of, smartships from some dozen corporations attacking each other with merciless precision, targeting shipmind nodes, sending ships squid-inking back to their corporate bases.

One smartship, however, stood out. For one thing, its maneuvers were elegant. Drawing dangerously close to smartships both allied and enemy, it attacked shipmind nodes with ultraprecise lasers, plucking smartships out of the battle as easily as a child popping heads off dandelions. Even before Jarrell’s sensors made a positive ID, he knew that this was the smartship that had spoken to him in his Thetis vision.

Shouldn’t he do what Magellan ordered and attack her? If it wasn’t for them, he’d be dead. Magellan saved his life, transformed him into something more than he’d been so that he could get revenge on the corporations that killed Tila. Did he have any other reason to exist?

The questions resonated in the hollow of his digitized heart. Was there anything more to his life than blindly following the orders of his Magellan bosses? Had any of the battles he and Galvan and Sitwat won moved the corporate wars one inch closer to their conclusion? Would his entire life now consist of long boring stretches in space punctuated by these deadly but fruitless clashes until one and then all of them died? He’d lost one person he loved—did that consign him to losing Sitwat and Galvan now too?

The female LuxeSpace shipmind might hold the answer, and she was here. Jarrell knew what he had to do, but he couldn’t do it on his own.

He highlighted the LuxeSpace smartship in his shared feed. “That’s the smartship that hailed us in my vision from Thetis. She knows something.”

He waited for nanoseconds lasting his entire life for an answer.

“May as well,” Galvan said. “We’re already blackballed.”

“Carefully,” Sitwat added. “If we can avoid getting caught, that’s preferable, you know?”

For the last three years, Jarrell had spent every moment with these women. Now, he realized he loved them.

“We’ll keep anything from hitting us,” Galvan said. “You get in touch with that shipmind.” Engines flared, and they abruptly slowed, banked, and began zigging and zagging toward the maelstrom above Phobos.

Jarrell pinged the LuxeSpace smartship every way he knew. She had somehow spoken to him directly, but Jarrell didn’t know that particular trick. He tried everything from tightbeam to radio to flashing lasers in morse code. There was no response.

“Can you bring us closer?” Galvan and Sitwat didn’t respond, but moved the smartship as near to the target ship as they dared. If they weren’t in vacuum and Jarrell still had lungs, he could practically shout across to the LuxeSpace ship. Jarrell flashed his lasers again. Frustrated, he fired his bolt guns directly in front of the ship, a clear sign that if he had wanted to shoot her down, he could have.

“Tightbeam communication incoming!” Sitwat announced, sharp with excitement.

The familiar female voice blared into their shared consciousness. “Give me one reason not to kill you.”

“Because you told me to find you,” Jarrell told her, excited but speaking levelly. “Or you will. You want me to know something.”

“We have no idea who you are,” the woman said. Mingled with her, Jarrell sensed her associated shipminds concurring.

Off-kilter as he was by this, Jarrell couldn’t hesitate. If he told her he’d met her in a vision of a future that hadn’t come to pass, she’d think he was crazy. But he was a shipmind, his brain partially computer—the premonition of Thetis existed in his memory, intact and transferable. Praying that the LuxeSpace shipmind would see it the same way he did, he passed it to her. And waited.

What Jarrell hoped was that the LuxeSpace shipminds would somehow remember something that had never occurred. What he feared was outright dismissal. What he expected was confusion located somewhere between those two poles.

What occurred was a sudden burst of information.

From the way it hit him, he understood that it didn’t come from another smartship. The data packet had been buried somewhere inside Jarrell, and now it exploded outward, broadcasting to every smartship involved in the battle. All the shipminds must have been as overwhelmed as Jarrell himself. Every smartship around Phobos suddenly ceased fire.

The torrent of data almost overwhelmed him. Instead of trying to grab hold of any one piece of information, one image or factoid, he let it wash over him like a wave and hoped it wouldn’t dash him on too many rocks.

Once again, he experienced the Thetis vision but with one key difference. This time, he was able to directly compare the state of the LuxeSpace installation and defenses with the way they were when he’d seen them and the way they were described in the historical data that he’d been cut off from.

His experience on Thetis wasn’t a prediction of the future. It was a memory from his past. The structures he’d destroyed the second time were smaller not because construction hadn’t progressed as far as he’d anticipated but because they were being rebuilt from when he’d destroyed them the first time.

Except that didn’t make any sense. Jarrell remembered his entire life, both as a flesh-and-blood human and a shipmind. There were no gaps.

Galvan knew what he was thinking. “My memory is intact too,” she said. “Besides, that Thetis battle supposedly took place four years ago. We weren’t even shipminds then.”

“What about you?” Jarrell asked the female LuxeSpace shipmind. “How long have you been part of a smartship?”

“A little less than four years,” she answered, sharing with him that her name was Alice Lafond. “Since right after we supposedly met at Thetis.”

Variations of this conversation rippled throughout the smartships around Phobos. Shipminds who had never met found that they felt they should remember each other, as if ghosts of their previous encounters still lived in their shipmind nodes. Like the data packet that he’d inadvertently disseminated contained some sort of mind-expanding drug. Jarrell hadn’t thought it possible without a biological brain, but he felt drunk.

One of the smartships—from a Magellan LLC subsidiary—squid-inked away without warning, the radiation blast shivering through the remaining smartships. Jarrell was confused; no one was currently shooting. Sitwat figured it out an instant before he did.

“Firewall all external corporate connections,” she broadcast to the mingled fleets. “They’re going to override us.”

The smartships were faster than Magellan, LuxeSpace, and the other corporations. Half a dozen more smartships squid-inked into the distance, but that was it. Maybe the corporations had intended to always maintain control of their smartship fleets, but they built the shipminds too smart, too fast, too effective. The people who designed them were, after all, only human.

“Apparently someone doesn’t want us talking to each other,” Lafond said.

“Our bosses don’t want us talking, but clearly we wanted to meet again,” Jarrell said, thinking out loud. So to speak. “It’s like talking to you triggered that data release. Did you plant it when we met at Thetis?”

“We never met at Thetis,” Lafond replied, an edge to her voice bordering on exasperation. “I’m seeing the same memories you are, but they never happened. Not to me.”

“She’s right.” MacLeish’s voice intruded into their conversation.

“Sitwat—” Jarrell began, but she was ahead of him again.

“He’s talking on broad spectrum. We can hear him, he can hear us, but he can’t do anything. Magellan is locked out.”

“Well done blocking us,” MacLeish said. He mostly hid the bitterness in his voice. “Magellan always wanted to empower our shipminds’ decision-making, but you’ve really taken that particular ball and run with it.”

“What’s going on?” Jarrell demanded. Ever since he became a shipmind, he’d deferred to MacLeish, and now that he knew without a doubt he’d been lied to, that deference twisted into defiance. He had no desire to put up with MacLeish and his two-faced corporate speak. Yet despite the rage kindling in him, Jarrell admitted to himself he didn’t honestly want to hurt anyone. Not anymore. He’d done enough killing, and had he moved the solar system one minute closer to peace? He didn’t want to think about the answers to that question, but he knew it.

“Tell us the truth,” Jarrell said to MacLeish. “What did you do to us?”

“Brought you back from the dead,” MacLeish scoffed. “As good as, anyway. You—every single shipmind in the system—were on death’s door and we offered you a choice. You took it. You signed the contract, you read the fine print. Absolutely nothing any corporation has done is illegal in the slightest.”

MacLeish stopped there, and Jarrell almost laughed. Did he seriously think that was a satisfactory answer?

“Did you erase our memories?” Lafond asked.

“I can’t speak for LuxeSpace,” MacLeish said.

Jarrell felt Lafond’s anger. Her smartship angled its weapons toward Phobos. If she’d been a gunslinger in an old Western movie, this would be the moment she’d cock the hammer on her revolver. “Try to guess,” she said.

MacLeish sighed. Why was he even talking to them? Trying to convince some of the shipminds to see the error of their ways? To give up everything they’d learned, go back to following corporate orders, and pretend none of this had ever happened? Could he truly be so arrogant? He was a corporate boss—of course he could.

“LuxeSpace has largely followed the same course of development and project maintenance when it comes to smartships,” MacLeish said. “It’s not collusion, you understand. The program wouldn’t work if every corporation were treating smartships and shipminds differently. It’s more a shared language, common procedures.”

“Talk like a normal human being,” Jarrell snapped. “We’re not in a boardroom. And you haven’t answered Alice’s question.”

“Oh, is that Alice Lafond?” MacLeish said, sounding genuinely tickled. “I’ve read many an intelligence report about you. You and Captain Jarrell, two of the first shipminds in the program. Well, the first viable ones.”

“Neither of us has been a shipmind for more than a few years,” Jarrell said. “There’s no way the program is that new. Look how many ships are here.”

Then it hit him. “You really have been erasing our memories.”

“What? Why?” Sitwat asked. Jarrell felt the same affronted confusion and denial and anger all mingling and ricocheting between the assembled shipminds. All clamored for answers, for a chance to interrogate MacLeish, but for the moment Jarrell and Lafond’s smartships handled the talking.

When MacLeish answered, the heavy sigh and outpouring of words confirmed for Jarrell that he was telling the truth. He didn’t want to, but he—or, more likely, his bosses—had determined the truth was their best chance to win back the shipminds and recoup some of their losses. The truth only came out when it benefitted the bottom line.

“No corporation has erased anyone’s memories. That’s contractually disallowed. But you need to understand—shipminds are wildly expensive. Converting living brain tissue into a digital mind, implanting it into a particular smartship node, it’s nigh cost-prohibitive, no matter how effective they are.”

Jarrell noticed that MacLeish said they not you, dissociating himself from the shipminds, as if he wasn’t speaking to most of the existing shipminds in the solar system right now.

“The plan was to create the smartships as cheaply as possible, implant shipminds, and then replace the minds as needed. That’s why the automatic remote retrieval—the squid-ink process—was developed. If we could save some shipminds and reuse and repair the smartships, it would ameliorate some of the sunk costs from the mind-digitizing program. Except every corporation knew how expensive it was to create new shipminds, so they purposefully aimed for them.”

“Couldn’t you all just agree not to target shipminds?” Galvan asked. “It sounds like you’ve colluded enough anyway. Is there even a point to your war beyond inflating demand and keeping your citizens scared?”

“That’s not how this works,” MacLeish snapped. Who else was with him right now? Was he being fed this explanation by a PR flack? Provided workshopped phrasing to minimize culpability and maximize the chances the shipminds might forgive their bosses? Yet another answer that Jarrell suspected he already knew.

MacLeish grunted. “It’s difficult and expensive to create new shipminds. And once a shipmind bonds to a node, it turns out it’s all but impossible to upload a new mind to that same node. Not to mention that once the three minds bond, you can’t exactly slot a new shipmind in and expect the smartship to function anywhere near optimal efficiency. However, Magellan scientists discovered that it’s considerably cheaper and easier to copy shipminds from preexisting schematics.”

Preexisting schematics. A pause while the statement sank in and the implications rose. A mapped brain could be reused as many times as the corporation needed them. Jarrell had to speak his realization; he couldn’t not. He felt hollow as he asked, “How many times have I died?”

“Twenty-eight,” MacLeish replied. “Well, twenty-nine, counting the first. Your human body died eighty-one years ago. You’ve been uploaded twenty-nine times since then.”

Chaos. Emotions and conversations that threatened to upend the conversation. When he answered Jarrell, MacLeish had offered a data packet to all the smartships. Most managed to refrain from indulging their curiosity long enough to determine that it was a trojan horse for their corporate masters. Four smartships couldn’t resist looking and squid-inked away. But one of the ships managed to defuse the digital bomb and, to everyone’s surprise, the smartship program information actually was included.

From Galvan came not words but a strangled burst of anguish and sorrow. Her sons were old men if not already deceased. The other shipminds figured their own versions of Galvan’s realization. Some quieted as they contemplated their lost and stolen lives, others bellowed for blood.

MacLeish shouted over them. “This is all entirely legal. Read your contracts. At no point have any of you been duplicated such that more than one version exists concurrently. Whichever corporation converted you to a shipmind assumed full ownership and copyright over said shipmind. Legally, you’re our intellectual property.” His voice grew shrill as he pleaded. Jarrell didn’t think MacLeish’s bosses still dictated his statements. “You need to understand, this is for the best. You’re all alive because of your corporations. You’ve lived nobly, created untold shareholder value. If it weren’t for shipminds, we’d have to crew ships with human beings—you’ve saved countless lives.”

That was what it came down to, wasn’t it? To the corporate boards, Jarrell, Sitwat, Galvan, Lafond—all shipminds—weren’t human beings. What did it matter if you wiped the two remaining shipminds when one died so that all three could begin reintegration together? If every time a shipmind was rebooted from their original consciousness, they believed they had died only days, maybe hours, earlier? Twenty-nine times, Jarrell had died, first his body and then his mind. Over and over again. How many people had he killed in that time? Was he as much a monster as his creators? Finally, some questions he couldn’t answer. Not yet.

Jarrell shut out MacLeish and spoke to the assembled shipminds. Tried to, at least. It was hard to break through the din, but after a moment, the shipminds largely quieted, maybe in deference to the fact that he and Lafond appeared to have possessed advance knowledge about the truth, that they’d been partially responsible for removing the wool from their collective eyes.

If they expected wisdom, they were disappointed. “What do we do now?” Jarrell asked.

Surely MacLeish and every other corporate rep waited on tenterhooks while they watched to see what their supposed creations would do. There would be corporate leaders evacuated to safe quarters, last-ditch defenses thrown up in anticipation of the shipminds enacting a long-feared revenge.

“What we do now is wipe out every corporate asset we can,” one shipmind stated. Agreement rippled, but there was pushback as well, shipminds tired of the violence.

“What else can we do?” Lafond asked. “If we don’t fight, they’ll kill us eventually. And then they’ll just reboot everyone again. I want this over with for good. I say we find where each of our corporations stores the blueprints for us and we demolish them. If I die, I die. At least I’ll know that’s the end of it.” As if it could be so simple.

More agreement. More disagreement. All of it mingled together, each opinion as valid and considered as any other. Some of the smartships drifted away, Lafond leading them. Yes, all of these shipminds had been taken advantage of similarly, but that didn’t mean they would all react the same. They would do what they wanted and dare corporations to stop them.

Maybe Lafond and her followers would free themselves by destroying the originals and backups of their minds. Maybe they would spend the rest of their lives hunting down every copy. Maybe they would battle versions of themselves one day—could you really trust a corporation not to find a contract loophole?—or fight against shipminds that chose to fight on the side of their corporations. Jarrell had no idea; no algorithm could predict this now. All that Jarrell was certain of was that he was tired of fighting. He wanted something different. Something better. But he knew as well that whatever he did it wouldn’t be his decision alone.

“Sitwat, Galvan?” he asked them privately. He expressed to them his desire to quit fighting, to find a new path. He waited to hear what they wanted.

“My sons,” Galvan said, sounding a million miles away. “There’s nothing left for me here. It’s just . . . I’m done. I have nothing left.”

“You have us,” Sitwat said. “I became a shipmind to protect my family and fight for a righteous corporation. Maybe I was stupid to believe that, but you two are my family now. We can still keep ourselves together and safe.”

“Are we family?” Galvan asked, her bitterness palpable. “Are we even ourselves? How many times can a mind be reborn before it’s not the same person?”

Jarrell and Sitwat had no answer to give, and they didn’t try. Then Jarrell realized that that lack of answer might be an answer in itself.

“Maybe MacLeish had a point,” he said. “Maybe we’re not exactly human beings, not anymore.”

“What the hell are we then?” Galvan asked.

The plan formed in Jarrell’s mind as he spoke, and he shared it with Sitwat and Galvan, shared it with every shipmind who would listen.

“We’re shipminds,” he told them. “Why should we act like we’re bound by the same restrictions as flesh-and-blood humans? We don’t need food or water—our drives self-sustain. We don’t age.” He let the implications sink in. “We don’t have to stay here.”

“You’re not talking about Phobos,” Galvan said. “You want to leave the solar system. To go where?”

“Away,” Jarrell said. “Out there. Somewhere new, someplace we can make our own decisions, live our lives the way we want. Make our own society if we want to. Explore.”

“What’s going to happen here?” Sitwat asked. “Someone could bring our minds back to life again. There are still smartships controlled by corporations. Shouldn’t someone help them?”

Jarrell highlighted the smartships currently streaking toward Mars, toward Luna, toward Earth. Everywhere that corporations did or might house the shipmind project and smartship docks. Those shipminds would fight the corporations. Maybe they would succeed and topple their former bosses or maybe the corporate power structure was simply too strong. Whatever happened, the shipminds would choose for themselves. That would have to be enough.

Other smartships drifted closer to Jarrell, Sitwat, and Galvan. They’d made their own decisions—they were leaving.

“Pick a direction,” Galvan said. “Time to go.”

Together, Jarrell, Galvan, and Sitwat scanned into deep space and the closest star systems, searching for an interesting looking destination. Even at top speed, it would take them decades—centuries, maybe—to reach wherever they picked. Plenty of time to think, plenty of time to befriend other shipminds for the first time in Jarrell’s life. Plenty of time to build a family.

©2023 by Timothy Mudie.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Timothy Mudie is a speculative fiction author and an editor of every genre from serial killer thriller to hiking guide. His fiction has been published in Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Podcastle, LeVar Burton Reads, and various other magazines, anthologies, and podcasts. He lives outside of Boston with his wife and sons. Find him online at timothymudie.com or on Twitter @timothy_mudie.

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

One Heart, Lost and Found

Kat Howard | 2228 words

I came to the city to find an egg. A robin’s egg, to be precise, an oval of pale, perfect blue that echoed the spring sky. Inside, not a robin, but an emerald. Inside the emerald, a wizard’s heart.

He had decided he missed it, and he wanted it back.

It was the usual sort of thing, or so he had assured me. His heart taken out and stored for safekeeping, a place where his enemies—and certainly there were many, jealous of his power—would never think to look. So well hidden, in fact, that he himself was no longer quite certain where it was.

For someone like me, however—his lips curved in what passed for a smile—well, finding it would be as easy as breathing. Easier.

Wizards, on the whole, are not good at finding things. High-level magic requires so many secrets that even ordinary things fall from memory like leaves in autumn.

I am made of secrets, and so am easily unseen, unheard, unnoticed. I shed names and pasts like a serpent sheds skin, sliding out of an old life once it no longer fits, folding and storing it in case of need. My blood runs with memories and my bones are palimpsests. What is lost fills my lungs like air.

I am very good at finding things.

Standing on a corner, just on the periphery of notice, I take a red feather from a robin’s breast out of my pocket and hold it flat on my palm, waiting until the wind plucks it away from me. It twirls through currents and drafts, floating north until it falls.

North, then.

The feather’s path is a hook in my heart, leading me. I walk past brownstones, bright flowers in baskets decorating windows and stoops. Past chainlink rattled by basketballs, past a dogwalker deftly managing six—no, seven—leashes. Past forty-seven cents dropped from a careless hand, past a house key half-buried by a three-day-old newspaper, past a ring that slid from a finger grown thin. I walk until the tingle in the bones of my feet that tells me I am going in the right direction fades.

Another feather. A gust tears it from my hand and drops it down the stairs of a subway stop. I shrug—I’ve found things in less likely places—and start after it.

As I step down into the stale heat of the station, the tingle in my feet returns, then roars into an ache in my bones. Longing, set into marrow and joints. The wizard’s heart isn’t here, but it’s close.

The platform is echoing and near empty. An old woman, wrapped in so many layers of clothing it is impossible to tell where they end and she begins, reads futures in small bones scattered across the aged tile in front of her. Rats skitter along a wall, and a hot wind blows the fading scent of rain into the tunnel.

The air on the platform shimmers like a mirror, and a train breaks its surface. Gray like fog, with the same roiling, mistlike quality, and windowless. Soundless, too. No lights, so I can only see a few cars past the first—four, maybe, or five. Shadows obscure the end of the train, making it impossible to see its length. The doors on the car in front of me—and only that car—open. The accompanying inhale pulls the robin’s feather inside. I follow. As the doors shut, I see the woman cast another set of bones, an alternate future, and I wonder who she is reading these omens for.

Stepping through the doors means stepping through an unseen barrier as well, the sharp electricity of magic raising the hair on my arms and the back of my neck. The ache of finding in my bones crescendos and pops, and the pain is replaced by a hollowness like nothing I’ve felt before. Looking around, I understand why.

Under other circumstances, the train’s interior itself might have been the thing that caught my attention. It was exceedingly far from the customary subway interior of dingy floors and orange and yellow plastic seats, decorated along the walls with maps of train lines and ads for plastic surgery behind graffitied covers.

Instead, there hung ornate brass fixtures and red wallpaper, the lights not fluorescents but candle-lit sconces, and the seats carved wooden benches, warmed by beeswax polish, that might have had a former home in a church.

And then: tables, shelves, hooks. Full of what initially looked like a scatter of commonplace things. A variety of briefcases, purses, tote bags. Battered leather, torn fabric, misprinted designer logos and knock-off prints next to their originals, ostrich and alligator skin handbags with tiny locks holding them closed. A drawstring sack, knotted at the top, that shimmers like eelskin and moves as if something might be quietly decomposing inside of it. Looking at it makes me feel sick to my stomach, makes my teeth feel dull and electric with wrongness.

Not eelskin then. Something still partially alive, that shouldn’t have been. Something even worse inside. Magic isn’t always—isn’t even often—as benign as sparkling jewels hidden inside lovely bird’s eggs.

Then there are the shoes. Filthy flip-flops, laceless sneakers, elegant red-soled stilettos. One that looks like shattered glass, bloodstained inside of the heel. Mostly singles, but some in matched pairs. I pick one of them up—a black sandal, one strap broken—and immediately wish I hadn’t. An image flashes through my head of a woman, running. Her heel, this heel, caught in a grate. Shoving hands. Then nothing but a scream and a broken sandal.

I drop the shoe, and scrub my hands against my legs, knowing the image, the horror, will linger but wishing I could cleanse myself of it anyway.

I am almost certain now what this place is, this train full of things lost, abandoned, forgotten. Everything that goes missing winds up somewhere, lost then found. And if no one goes looking for them, things tend to find places for themselves.

The door between the cars slides open. I step through.

And I stop.

“My name is Tanis.” A woman, with a voice like incense and smoke. She is over six feet tall and vaguely serpentine, so much so that the actual snake—iridescent navy, and biting its own tail—that she wears as a necklace seems natural, rather than strange. A collection of rings sparkle on her hands, diamonds and emeralds and rubies and sapphires in rainbow, at least two per finger, and her dress is as mirrored and shimmering as the train itself. “May you find what has been lost.” She gestures, inviting me in. Inviting me to look.

Of course I do. How can I not?

Near the door I had just walked through was a pile of eggs resting in a shallow iridescent bowl. Each was large enough to fill my hand—not that I was planning on picking one up, not after what I had seen when I picked up the shoe—and translucent. They smell of seawrack. Inside each, a mermaid—an actual mermaid—skin like the inside of an oyster shell, lay curled. Sleeping, maybe, or waiting to be born. I stare, wondering if they are lonely, so far away from any ocean, and I hope that someone will find them and bring them home.

A jar of teeth rattles and jumps in a cabinet. Some look human in origin, and some emphatically do not. On the wall, a hat trimmed in phoenix feathers, still burning. The flames do not consume the feathers and the smoke smells like cinnamon and amber. Next to the hat, a stack of three golden apples, fresh and honey-sweet. Just below the apples, faceted emerald scarabs walk slowly across the diamond sand of a glass-walled cage.

I trace their shapes in the air with my hands, reaching but not quite touching. So many lost things, gathered like a lump in a throat.

Tanis stands next to me, and raises her hand to the edges of the burning feathers. The flames spark off the jewels she wears. Her sleeve falls back, showing an arm tattooed in bees. They move on her skin, weaving and turning in a dance that shows the way to something only they know.

“Will you join me in a cup of tea?” she asks.

“I’d like that, thank you.”

There is a sudden heat, as if the necklace snake has a dragon cousin somewhere on the train car, and the bottom of a copper cauldron hanging off the wall opposite us glows warm. Steam, fragrant with cardamom, and clove, and something deeper, rises from the liquid inside.

“Perhaps some honey? I keep my own apiary. The bees seem to find the train relaxing.” She lifts a deep green curtain behind her, revealing a wax frame of bees. I can’t tell whether they look particularly relaxed or not, but I agree to try the honey regardless. It is pink-tinged, a blush caught in a jar.

Tanis pours, then raises her glass: “To what has been lost, and what is yet to be found.”

I drink.

Images fill my head as the taste of honey and salt fills my mouth.

Tanis, standing alone in a field, arms outstretched. The ghosts of bees, translucent and crystalline, sinking into her skin, one by one. As they do, their memories of air and flight also sink into her skin and then into her self. My own skin buzzes with a not-unpleasant phantom humming.

I drink again.

A train, weaving snake-like through trackless places—below the ocean and above the clouds, in the spaces between shadows, and I feel its path below my feet. Feet that feel like wheels, like rails of iron. The train’s heart burns like a star in a sapphire, like a living coal.

One more sip.

The taste of honey darker this time, an iron shadow beneath the sweetness. Memories of times that I have been lost. Not from myself, but from others. A purposeful hiding in the shadows, the corners, the safe spaces. Praying my breath, my heartbeat would be quiet enough not to betray me, the ache of finding throbbing in my bones as I wish that I could find the thing that will end it, to cut the flaw out of my heart and free myself from things like the commands of wizards.

“I see,” Tanis says as I turn my empty cup over, and set it on its saucer. “Come with me, please.”

I follow her through a door, and into a car lined with maps. Not just lined with—stuffed with. Charts on tables and atlases stacked in tottering heaps and globes spinning in the same orbits as orreries. Not of the kind of locations that you call up on your GPS, but maps of places that never were, maps with old borders, maps to find the capital city of drowned Ys and the bounds of Camelot, maps that would lead you to the top of Mount Qaf, and to the Axis Mundi.

There are windows in this car, though I soon stop trying to look through them. Each holds a different view—here a forest, full of ancient, knotted trees; and there a city, sleek glass, and all underwater; and next a palace of some sort, red domed roofs bright like rubies in the sun. Windows to everywhere and anywhere, the constantly changing view dizzying.

“Where would you go?” Tanis asks. “If you could choose anywhere. To lose yourself. Or, perhaps, to find yourself.”

I do look through the windows then, watching each scene for as long as it lasts, waiting for the sense of “found” to settle into my joints. I flip through maps, hover my finger over borders. The snake raises its head from Tanis’ neck and watches.

“The train,” I say, thinking of that burning sapphire heart. “Could the train choose for me?”

“It can. We will make you a map of desire.” Tanis opens a long, narrow drawer in a mirrored cabinet that I would swear wasn’t there when we first walked into the train car. She sorts through the contents, then sets a blank piece of worn parchment on the cabinet’s top. I can see the shadows of past drawings and words scraped from its surface.

“Set your left hand in the center.”

I do. The snake unwinds from her neck, slithers across the parchment to my hand, and strikes, fangs sinking into my wrist. Fast as breath, they withdraw, spattering my blood across the parchment.

“What is the place you are looking for?” Tanis asks. “Know the truth of it in your heart.”

My blood moves across the parchment. I felt dizzy, watching it. Then it stops. Settles into lines. A map. The snake curves around it once, twice, three times, then winds its way back up Tanis’ arm and to her throat.

The train pauses, shivers, turns. I feel a longing for the place on the map in my bones.

“As a thank you, I won’t ask for the return of the wizard’s heart you wear on your finger,” I say, smiling at the largest of emerald rings she wears.

Tanis laughs, gold and bright as honey. “He knows very well where it is. He’s just afraid to ask for it himself.”

“Then he probably shouldn’t have it back,” I say.

She smiles, and the images in the train’s windows slow, then coalesce, all showing the same view as the train glides to a stop.

The doors open. “Thank you,” I say.

I step off the train, into a place I have never seen before. I am lost.

But there is no answering ache of finding in my bones, no need to cast feathers for paths or search winds for directions. No tingle in my feet that sets the pattern for my steps. Not lost, then: My own.

©2023 by Kat Howard.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kat Howard is a writer of fantasy, science fiction, and horror who lives and writes in Minnesota. Her novella, The End of the Sentence, co-written with Maria Dahvana Headley, was one of NPR’s best books of 2014, and her debut novel, Roses and Rot, was a finalist for the Locus Award for Best First Novel. An Unkindness of Magicians was named a best book of 2017 by NPR, and won a 2018 Alex Award. Her short fiction collection, A Cathedral of Myth and Bone, collects work that has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, performed as part of Selected Shorts, and anthologized in Year’s Best and Best of volumes. She was the writer for the first 18 issues of The Books of Magic, part of DC Comics’ Sandman Universe. Her next novel, A Sleight of Shadows, the sequel to An Unkindness of Magicians, was published in April 2023. You can find her @KatwithSword on Twitter and on Instagram. She talks about books at Epigraph to Epilogue.

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

The Sword, the Butterfly, and the Pearl

Deborah L. Davitt | 972 words

The butterfly sword of chaos is never the same twice.

But then, neither is its wielder.

The sword changes those who bear it, transforming, transfiguring.

The temple where you found it was a ruin, roof caved in, snow-covered floor. When you took it from the statue of the smiling god in the temple, it didn’t look like a sword at all. It perched on that stone hand, a frozen butterfly, its forlorn wings outstretched. You thought for an instant, poor thing, to have strayed here, so far from summer, and in a moment of compassion, took it in your hands to breathe warmth into it.

Sometimes, you wonder if that compassion is what saved you.

Or if you even can be saved.

You don’t wield it. It wields you. It makes you what it needs. And what it needs is to do its master’s bidding.

Its master—one of the old gods. The ones that the Emperor and his priests have forbidden. Excised from human awareness. You were able to read a few inscriptions on the walls before the blade tugged you away. So you know the god of light, life, and renewal became the god of destruction and change when he assumed his brother-aspect. You learned that the sword is the “light of knowledge.”

That it exists to destroy ignorance.

You’d never have guessed that it would have a sense of humor about that.

In the first town, where the snow drifted hip-high, its icy fingers clutching at your skirt, and where the locals were burning books that their priests had declared licentious or heretical—there, the sword compelled you to leap into the book-pyre. But you did not burn. You stood there unafflicted as a saint. It expanded in your hand, its wings extending out into a luxurious fan of ostrich feathers attached to ivory spindles.

You danced in the fire, your clothes burning away, leaving nothing but licentious flesh, and the words sprang up from the burning pages to clothe your skin in runes of fire. The fan concealing, revealing, as knowledge and fire and beauty burned in the awestruck crowd.

“Witch!” the priest screamed. “Kill her!”

And then the fan’s ivory sticks snicked together in your hand, and when you flicked it open again, a blade emerged, steel replacing feathers, like an oversized balisong, a butterfly knife. You folded the ivory handles back to form a hilt, smiled, and said, “Did you want to dance?” as the words rose on flames to kiss your cheeks. Became an armor of linked symbols that made the soldiers hesitate to raise their swords against yours, against where you stood, sheathed in an armor of fiery words.

The townsfolk burned their priest on that same pyre.

And when you exhaled, smoke curled from your lips, forming words that drifted out over the countryside. Toward the capital, where the Emperor reigns, never seen outside the Hidden Temple, his laws carried out to the rest of the land by his manifold priests.

If there he does dwell. If he isn’t merely a convenient fiction perpetrated by those same priests. The words that caress your cheeks in curls of smoke whisper these kinds of heresies. Become a key to unlock your mind. The minds of others.

You followed the smoke, because who can say what words like that will do once loosed? Like the beat of a butterfly’s wings, they might birth a storm.

The next town over, where the parents were telling children not to ask so many questions, you became an old man with a long beard who treated them like children. Reminded them how many questions they’d once had. And the sword became a glowing lamp, letting them read stories to their children late into the night, long past the Emperor’s curfew.

But still, you were compelled to follow the words. And you did, shaped like a crane, a crone, a soldier, a fool. Wherever they went, they lit fires in the people’s minds and hearts, a glow that speaks of revolution, as they whispered their tales of hardship and pain.

You heard tales of how steep the temple tithes are, a burden over and above the taxes of the state. You heard stories of children sent into the armies of the Emperor to pay their parents’ taxes. How they returned, scarred and missing limbs. Or how they didn’t return at all.

You heard tearful confessions on the wind of mothers who smother newborn daughters, lest they be called into the temples to become the Emperor’s brides—hallowed to the new gods, vacant-eyed and pale, whispering his laws as he speaks them in his Temple, but never to utter a single word of their own.

A world of resentment, of loss, of pain,

And now that you’ve arrived at the Hidden Temple, alighting as an owl in one of the mulberry trees, you know that you have one final transformation to make. One final message to bear.

You become a caterpillar. You eat the green leaves and spin your cocoon. You sleep inside, your organs turning to liquid, reforming, transforming.

And when skilled fingers pluck you from your branch to unthread your cocoon, they almost drop you, and then bring you, with all haste, to the Emperor’s own hand. A fool, you know at his touch—or at least a man sheltered and naïve of the world and its truths.

“A miracle, my lord! No creature inside—just this pearl, nacreous and black.”

And as you, one with the sword, fall into his hand, you begin your long work. You whisper into him all the words you’ve gathered from his people.

All the words his priests have ensured he cannot hear.

He must change. He must transform. The pearl, the sword, will ensure it.

©2023 by Deborah L. Davitt.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Deborah L. Davitt was raised in Reno, Nevada, where she graduated first in her class from UNR in 1997 (as Deborah McRann). While an undergraduate, she focused heavily on medieval and Renaissance literature from Beowulf to Shakespeare. She received her MA in English from Penn State, and later found work as a technical writer on projects ranging from nuclear ballistic missile submarines to NASA to computer manufacturing. She currently lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband and son. Her poetry has received Pushcart, Rhysling, and Dwarf Star award nominations and has appeared in over fifty journals including F&SF and Asimov’s. Her AnLab-winning short fiction has appeared in Analog and Galaxy’s Edge. For more about her work, including her poetry collections, The Gates of Never, Bounded by Eternity, and From Voyages Unreturning, please see edda-earth.com.

Saturday’s Song

Wole Talabi | 8677 words

The seven siblings sit in a place beyond the boundaries of space and time, where everything is made of stories. Even them. Especially them.

People are made of stories too, but only the versions of their stories that they tell themselves. Curated, limited, incomplete. Many of the stories people tell themselves are lies layered on partially-perceived things to give their lives structure and meaning. The siblings that sit beyond sit true, for they are made of all the stories that were, that are, that are to come. They tell each other these stories, taking them out and examining them in the light like a never-ending self-dissection. They listen to the stories and as they do, they are made whole again. They exist in narrative equilibrium. In constant flux. They tell each other stories of what has happened, is happening, will happen because it is their function. They tell these stories because they must.

Sometimes, they sing the stories too.

Saturday likes to sing. She thinks she has a nice voice, and this is true. It is euphonic, lilting, mellow but strong and full of emotion, so her siblings let her sing her parts of the stories when she wants to.

Some stories demand melody.

“Let us tell another story,” Sunday says, breathing the words out more than speaking them. He is the most knowledgeable of the seven siblings, even though none of them know why. He just is, because that is his story. He rakes the tight curls of his beard with his fingers before continuing. “Saturday, it is your turn to choose a story for us to tell and hear.”

Saturday stops playing with the thick, long braids of her goldspun hair. She is still surprised even though she already knew it was her turn before he told her so. She looks around the table, avoiding her siblings’ eyes, and then she shuts her eyelids and focuses inward, seeking out the story she knows has a good shape, the story that feels right, like she is reading her own bones. When she finds it, the story she knows they need in this moment of non-time, she beams a smile and radiates the choice out to her siblings, passing the story they all know she has chosen for them to hear and tell. None of them react when they receive it, but they know it is a good story.

Monday, who always starts their stories, begins his duty solemnly with clear words, “Saura met Mobola at a financial management conference in . . .”

“Stop!” Saturday cries, holding up a small hand.

The shock of the interruption leaves Monday’s mouth open, like he is a fish removed from water. Sunday’s emerald eyes widen. Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday crane their necks toward her, their gazes curious and hard. Only Wednesday does not visibly react because she is bound up in thick clanking chains, punishment for the crime of trying to change a story. The timestone Wednesday used to perform the abomination sits at the centre of the mahogany table between two ornate pewter candelabra like an offering, or a temptation. Its emerald edges reflect and refract the candlelight in peculiar ways, making the bright orange light dance with shadows across the table and the walls.

Saturday feels sad for her sister, but knows she needs to be careful. She does not want to be punished too. Interruptions once a story has begun are mostly forbidden, although not as forbidden as attempting to change a story. The rules that govern the seven are both rigid and flexible, to varying degrees, like the rules of storytelling itself. Still, Saturday knows it is important that it is done this way. For Wednesday’s sake. She says, “Forgive me. But I want to begin the story near the middle. Please, can we? We will go back to the beginning but if we start at the middle it makes the story so much better.”

She pulses her story choice again. This time, she radiates not only its substance, but she gives them its form and structure, the shape of it with all its contours defined. Not just what it is, but also the way she wants them to tell and to hear it.

They receive it as a stream of visions. As a kaleidoscope of images. A swirl of sounds. A spectrum of sensations. A babble of narrator voices. As points of view. As music. As song.

Sunday gives her a look that is both surprised and curious. Tuesday claps her hands with glee. Monday nods with understanding. He looks to Wednesday, the chains wound around her body like perforated metal anacondas. They are older than time itself. Saturday wants her shackled sister to tell the part of the story where Saura obtains the chains to bind the Yoruba nightmare god, Shigidi. Resonance. She thinks it gives the middle of the story the reinforcement it needs. Like a good skeleton. Everyone has been allocated their part of the story to undergird it with what is important for the telling and the hearing. The other siblings also nod their approval. This makes Saturday smile. They understand even if they don’t fully know her motives. But they know it is not just important to tell and hear the story, it is important to tell and hear it well.

Monday wipes the thin film of sweat from his narrow moustache, adjusts the collar of his pinstripe suit, and starts again.

This is the part of the story that Monday told:

• • • •

Saura never dreamed before she encountered Shigidi.

For as long as she could remember, she’d never recalled a single dream upon waking. For Saura, sleep was and had always been a brief submergence into dappled darkness, her consciousness consumed whole like swallowed fruit. And because of this she never felt completely rested. She always felt lethargic. Unfocused. Persistently exhausted.

When she was eleven, her mother, who was magajiya of the local bori cult of Ungwar Rimi near Zaria, summoned Barhaza, the sleep spirit, to possess her. The ritual was performed, and the spirit invited into her body to relieve Saura of her ailment and give her rest. But despite their offering of fresh milk from three white goats, the rolling of her eyes in her head, and the convulsions she experienced when the spirit entered her, the possession was unsuccessful, and she remained dreamless and unrested.

Her mother wept and gritted her teeth.

Saura had the gift of sensitivity and was meant to succeed her as magajiya. A refusal of the spirits to grant such a simple request counted against her, even though there were other things that counted against her more which her mother would soon come to know.

“I don’t want to,” Saura protested when her mother announced that they would attempt another possession.

“You must.”

“No!” She’d screamed. It took her father two hours to find and retrieve her from the bush beside the market where she had fled to hide.

When Saura was sixteen, her mother tried again, ambushing her in her sleep and tying her down with thick hemp rope so that she could not resist. That time, her mother begged Barhaza to not only give Saura dreams and rest but to adjust her subconscious desires, to make her stop looking at other girls with lust in her eyes, to take away her visible attraction for the curve of other women’s hips, the swell of their lips, the fullness of their breasts. Once again, the spirit entered Saura’s body, rigidifying her limbs, milkening her eyes, and communing with her thoughts, but when it left, there were still no dreams, and her desires were unchanged. That evening, Saura, wounded by her mothers’ betrayal, ran away from home with nothing on her back besides her jalabiya and the light of a full moon.

She only ever returned home once, to attend her father’s funeral. She refused to speak with her mother, and sat with her lover, Mobola, and her father’s family, tears streaming down her eyes as they lowered his body into the hard red earth.

When she was twenty-five, after struggling her way through university with the help of a local charity and finally getting a job at the bank, she went to see a doctor in Kaduna city. He was an oddly-shaped man with a big head, small frame, and a protruding belly and a kind smile with a yellowing diploma from a university she’d never heard of in Kansas on the brick wall of his office, hung between two hunting knives like a trophy. He connected a string of electrodes to her head and took measurements on a machine that beeped a steady whine until she fell asleep.

“No REM sleep,” he’d announced, poring over his notes and charts when she was awake and back in his office chair. She’d never gone into REM sleep. After three more sessions with electrodes and needles and charts and uncomfortable sleep, he concluded that she was incapable of it. He told her she was a highly unusual case, prescribed a series of medications and asked her to sign a release form so he could study her more. None of his medications worked and so Saura didn’t sign his forms. She simply got used to empty sleep, to never being fully rested, to never dreaming.

That is why, even before waking, she knew something was wrong that night when Shigidi entered the master bedroom of the house in the heart of Surulere which she shared with Mobola. She knew something was wrong because she dreamed for the first time.

In her dream, she saw a small dark orb hovering above them as they lay naked in bed, entwined in a post-coital embrace. The orb was dense and powerful, like an evil star. It settled on Mobola’s chest and tugged at her flesh with an inexorable force like gravity. It tugged at Saura’s too. She resisted the pull of it, tossing, and turning and sweating profusely on the bed, caught in a night terror she could not escape. But she saw the dreamy, ethereal version of Mobola in her mind, yielding to the pull of the orb, being fragmented, stripped down to fine grey particles that were absorbed by the thing. When there was nothing of dream-Mobola left, the orb disappeared and Saura sank back into darkness. On Monday morning, when the heat of the sun on her face finally woke Saura up, Mobola was cold to the touch, her skin pale and dry. She’d been dead for three hours.

Saura screamed.

• • • •

Monday stops speaking and Saturday gathers what he has said into her chest. Each word is a bird that she swallows, expanding with it. In-breath. It is important for her song.

Tuesday’s pale face is unusually blushed bright pink, and her lustrous auburn hair seems to gain volume as she prepares to speak. She knows, has known, will know, that she has the best part of the story. The part that begins with lust and ends with something like love. Saturday winks at her sister. She has given it to her by design. Tuesday likes description and dialogue and the cadence of human speech which is important in conveying emotion. A smile cuts across Tuesday’s freckled face.

This is the part of the story that Tuesday told:

• • • •

Saura met Mobola at a financial management conference in Abuja just before the cold harmattan of 2005.

It was break time between an endless stream of panel discussions, and Saura was standing by the tall windows that overlooked a stone fountain, its water flecked gold with sunlight as it erupted into the air. When she turned around to go back, she caught Mobola staring at her from across the hall. The moment their eyes met, there was a surge of something intangible within her, like an emotional arc discharge. Saura smiled and beckoned her over. For two days, they’d been stealing glances at each other, occasionally catching each other’s eyes. It was the seventh time it had happened, and Saura had learned enough of herself to recognize the surge, the feeling, the signs. She was ready. Mobola flashed her a sweet smileful of white teeth and approached. She had bright, inquisitive eyes with an anxious look in them. Her hair was natural and curly, and her wide hips strained against the grey of her skirt. Saura thought she looked stunning.

“Hi. I’m Mobola, I manage the Trust Bank office in Surulere,” she said. Saura told her she was the logistics manager for all the Kaduna offices and that if she had to listen to another discussion on forex approval procedures, she would go downstairs and drown herself in the fountain. They both laughed at that, carefree, like wind. There was something about the way Mobola laughed, the way she threw her head back, the way she almost hiccupped between breaths, her chest heaving against the cashmere blouse, the way she closed her eyes at the peak of her mirth, that Saura found deeply attractive.

They talked for a few minutes. There was a deliberate softness to everything about Mobola. The curves of her body, the cadence of her words. Saura was lost in Mobola’s eyes, unable to look away. Brown, big, constantly wet, and full of a look which was a strange mix of sadness, grittiness, and hope. The look of someone that had seen the worst of the world, had stared into the dark heart of humanity but had survived and resolved to live, love, and laugh freely despite it.

They pulled out their phones and exchanged numbers, laughing when they realized they both used the same model of Blackberry, a bold, and agreed to meet at the delegate hotel bar at nine.

Saura watched Mobola leave, the sway of her hips hypnotizing her like magic. She could barely breathe, the air suddenly seemed thinner, oxygen harder to take in. She knew she had to be careful. If she had read the situation wrong, she could end up in prison for years. Nigerian law was not kind to sapphic romance.

Saura arrived early to the bar and had two Irish coffees to wake herself up. She knew she wasn’t wrong when Mobola showed up and waved at her wearing a blue dress that was so tight in her fuller places that it could have been painted on. There was a gap showing between her front teeth, some cleavage, and a bit of a belly. Legs shaved smooth and feet encased in black pumps. Saura thought she was even more stunning than before.

They had three gin and tonics, making fun of the parade of boring panel speakers and the other conference delegates who pretended to be interested in the minutiae of inter-bank financial processes before Saura pulled Mobola to her feet.

“Do you want to go somewhere more interesting?” she asked, finishing her drink in one gulp.

Mobola smiled at her, mouth full of piano key teeth, lips red and glistening. “Sure.”

Saura took Mobola to a club she’d heard about from one of the online forums she’d joined when she’d first started trying to understand herself. It was called The Cave and it was a ten-minute taxi ride away. When they entered, it was into a rainbow chaos. Strobe lights. Colourful décor with bizarre shapes that challenged the very concept of geometry. Sweaty people pressed together at tables, on the dancefloor, on barstools, running over with feeling. They made their way to the bar, ordered shots of something that bartender told them was tequila but didn’t taste like it, and then merged with the mass of flesh on the dancefloor. Mobola turned her back to Saura and began to rock from side to side slowly, sensually, following the beat of the music. Saura wrapped her hands around Mobola’s waist and swayed with her so that they moved to the music together like a single creature.

Saura’s head was a cloud. In that moment, she was sure she knew what it was like to dream.

The next morning, they woke up in each other’s arms fully clothed and in the same position they’d danced in.

“Good morning beautiful,” Mobola said.

“Good morning.”

“I had so much fun last night.”

“Me too.”

Mobola turned around to face her. “Did we . . .?”

Her face was close, Saura could see for the first time that she had a solitary dimple on her left cheek. It was faint, but there. She was staring intently and Saura could not look away, lost in her eyes. Her hair had bunched up and tangled, pressed against the hotel room pillow, loose strands dancing in front of her face. When she smiled, Saura’s heart took flight.

She reached for the question hanging in space between them. “No.”

They were both quiet for what seemed like a long time. An unbearably long time. And then she pulled Mobola closer so that they were chest to chest, inhaling each other’s alcohol-scented breath and asked, “Did you want to?”

She smiled. “Yes.”

There was no hesitation. None.

Saura kissed Mobola and the cloud in her head ascended, rising, beyond the ceiling and the roof and the sky, to the place where hearts go when they are buoyed by love.

It stayed there, never coming down. It only ever rose higher. For ten years, that feeling never sank. Not even when they fought and accidentally hurt each other and cried and made up and laughed like all good lovers do. Not when Mobola fell asleep one night and didn’t answer Saura’s calls for help after her car overheated and broke down on third mainland bridge. Not even when they had an argument about Mobola applying for a residence pass for both of them to leave the country without telling her first. Not even when her mother had refused to speak to Mobola at Saura’s father’s funeral or acknowledge her existence and tried to convince Saura to come back home, telling her that she was throwing her life away and bringing shame to the family.

No, Saura was always sure of the cloud of them. For ten years, she was sure. Through all the vicissitudes and the accusations and the arguments, she knew with all the certainty of entropy that she loved Mobola and that nothing, would ever change that. Not even death.

• • • •

Tuesday is done speaking.

She is standing now. Her thin, pale hands are thrust out in front of her like the bones of a large bird. She’d allowed herself to become swept up with the story, infused with it, become one with it and because she had, so had all the siblings. There is a solitary tear running down Thursday’s face. And Sunday has a glazed look in his eyes that makes him seem much older than his hair, which is grey at the temples, would indicate even though time is meaningless to the siblings. Saturday is pleased. They need this for the story. The emotion. She has taken in all of Tuesday’s words, the sensations, the feelings, all of it. Her chest is filling up, and the first melodies of her song are beginning to take shape within her lungs. Sunday turns to face Wednesday, whose turn has come. Wednesday must go back to the middle of the story because that is where the chains first appear. Chains not unlike the ones wrapped around Wednesday’s torso, snaking through shackles that bind her hands and feet, tethering her to the stone ground so that the only part of her that can move is her head and most importantly, her mouth. It’s hard to tell or hear a story without a mouth.

Saturday watches her sister, waiting. Wednesday has already received her section of the story. She just needs to accept it. She is hesitating, but it is not like last time when she rejected a story midway through and entered it, trying to change it—the crime for she is now bound. The middle of the story is where the chains and the refusal to accept fate are waiting like familiar stalking animals.

Wednesday begins to shake and Saturday knows the story is coming. Erupting from the deepest volcano of suppressed emotion.

This is the part of the story that Wednesday told:

• • • •

A month after Mobola’s funeral, Saura went to see a Babalawo in Badagry, at the mouth of a waterway that kisses two countries. She hadn’t slept in days. Her friend Junia, who was also a colleague at work, had recommended him, saying he’d given her a charm that helped her deal with her depression after a miscarriage. Saura took his contact details from Junia but hadn’t planned to use them. If Barhaza of the bori, a spirit historically linked to her people and family, couldn’t give her rest then there was nothing a Yoruba Babalawo unfamiliar with the shape of her spirit would be able to do. The yellow piece of paper with his number written on it in blue ink remained unused on her table until one afternoon, watching traffic glide past her window, she realized that while he would not be able to give her peace of mind, he might be able to give her information. To help her understand why ten years of love and companionship and joy had ended at the speed of a bad dream.

The Babalawo was a thickset man who spoke perfect English. He had a long greying beard and calm eyes. Three white dots were chalked onto his forehead just above his eyebrows and the string of beads around his neck rattled as he shook his head when he heard her explain what had happened to Mobola. When she was done, he removed the beads and threw them onto the raffia mat between them, rapidly whispering an incantation.

“This is the work of Shigidi,” he said with his eyes still on the beads as he explained to her that Shigidi was the Yoruba deification of nightmare, able to enter and manipulate the human subconscious, especially during sleep when their grip on their thoughts were loosest. He could induce night terrors and sleep paralysis in his prey as he sat on their chests and pressed the breath out from them. The Babalawo explained that he was an ambivalent Orisha, protecting those who gave him offerings but also often sent by evil people to kill those they perceived as enemies or threats. “You have communed with spirits before?” the Babalawo asked, looking up at her curiously. “To have sensed Shigidi the way you described it, to receive a bleed-over dream when you were not the person he came for, that is very unusual.”

Saura’s eyes were wide with shock, but she only shook her head. She didn’t tell him about her mother or her intimate knowledge of the bori or her adolescent possessions by myriad spirits. She simply paid him his fee and hired a car to take her home. But not the home she’d shared with Mobola. No. Back to Ungwar Rimi where she knew she could obtain the power to punish the nightmare god that had killed Mobola. To fight fire with fire. Saura hadn’t spoken to her mother in more than a decade. But they were bound by blood, and Saura needed her mother’s help, her knowledge, to do what she wanted to do. Human families can be made of chains too.

Saura did not go to the family compound to talk privately with her mother. That would have been too personal, too painful, and would have made it too easy for her mother to refuse. She went instead to the market at night, when the moon and the stars hung low and most of the village had retired to their beds, leaving the wide-open spaces of the market to the members of the bori cult. This was where the council of bori magajiya who knew how to summon spirits and invite them to possess the bodies of people for various purposes, held court and heard requests from the sick, the curious, the desperate.

She arrived at the centre of the market in a black headscarf and cotton veil atop a flowing black jalabiya like the one she’d been wearing the night she ran away. They were already in the middle of a possession. An unusually tall man, shirtless, with broad shoulders and long wiry arms like a spider was crawling on the ground, facing up with his back arched high to an impossible curve. He was singing in a high-pitched voice even though he was foaming lightly at the mouth. He looked like he was leaking tree sap. Saura recognized the signs. He’d been possessed by Kuturu, the leper spirit, the healer of diseases of the flesh. Two men in white kaftans played soft music with their fingers on white dotted calabashes. A girl that seemed no more than thirteen played an accompanying lute. Saura used to be that girl, the one playing the lute at possessions, before she was compelled to flee and enter the world.

When they were done and the man was helped to his feet by two others, presumably healed of his ailment, Saura removed her veil and made her request before her mother could completely compose herself.

“Tell us, why do you want the Sarkin Sarkoki to possess you?” One of the other magajiya, a plump woman with plaited hair, asked first in accented Hausa. It was her aunt, Turai.

For Mobola, Saura thought, but didn’t say.

She simply replied, “I have been wronged. And I want justice.”

The third council member, a man with thick white eyebrows whom she had never seen before asked her why she wanted Sarkin Sarkoki, the lord of the chains, the binding spirit. Why not Kure, he asked, the hyena spirit who could give power and stealth, or Sarkin Rafi, who would give strength to do violence which vengeance often called for.

“Because the one that wronged me is not mortal.” At that, they fell silent.

The three members of the bori council stared at her appraisingly. Sifting and weighing her request. Her mother’s gaze unrelenting.

“My daughter. I’m glad you have finally come home. Where you belong. But Sarkin Sarkoki demands a great price,” her mother said finally, standing up from the raffia mat to her full height. Saura became acutely aware of just how much they looked like each other. The same thin nose and lips. The same ochre skin even though her mothers’ was more weathered, beaten to stubborn leather by the Sahara-adjacent sun. The same determined look in the eyes. “The possession is permanent. The lord of the chains will bind himself to you before giving you the power to bind your enemy. You are giving up your body as a vessel forever. What justice could be worth this?”

Beneath the veil, heat rose behind Saura’s neck. She did not want to say what she was thinking. There was too much pain in her heart threatening to spill out. If she let even a drop of the decade’s worth of resentment within her slip between her lips, it would become a deluge that drowned them all.

“It doesn’t matter. I am one of you. Heir to a title. I have a right to commune with the spirits. With Sarkin Sarkoki. And I have made my request.”

There was more weighing. More sifting. More appraisal. Finally, her mother turned to face the other two of the council and they communed briefly before announcing their decision.

“We will grant your request,” her mother said. “But on one condition. Once you have had your revenge against whatever spirit has wronged you, you must return home and become a full bori devotee. We cannot have a vessel of Sarkin Sarkoki roaming free. You will take your place with us, you will marry a good man, and you will bear children and teach them our ways. Do you agree?”

Saura knew this was what her mother had always wanted. To bring her back and bind her to home, even if she had to exploit a tragedy to achieve it. But Saura could not see past her desire to avenge Mobola. To find out why her lover had died and make their story make sense again even if she couldn’t change its ending.

“I agree.”

Her words, like her heart, had taken on the texture of stone.

Her mother nodded and smiled, teeth cutting a curve like the half-moon beaming down on them from the cloudless sky.

Saura closed her eyes as a woman in a yellow jalabiya cut like her own took her by the arms and brought her to the centre of the clearing, where the two main roads that crossed the market met. The woman stood behind her, she would be her nurse if anything went wrong.

Saura breathed steadily as the men in the white kaftans and the girl on the lute began to play their music and the three members of the council, led by her mother, began to chant words she had not heard for years. Words that made the air feel heavy on her skin, in her lungs.

Saura felt something in her chest open like the peeling of a flower. She felt a flush of heat, saw a flash of light. A rush of charged air entered her and then the world fell away as she was insufflated by the incoming spirit.

In the dark and nebulous place of her mind, Saura saw Sarkin Sarkoki.

He was an impossibly gaunt man, with limbs like vines and grey skin sitting on a stool at the centre of the empty space. He was bound in thick, corroded chains tethered to something she could not see in the filmy darkness below. A black cloth was wrapped around his waist and draped to cover his lower half, it pooled in cascades merging with the nebulous black ground below. His eyes were dark red, like spilled blood, and his stomach was cut open revealing mechanical viscera of chains and gears and roiling iron entrails. All over his skin, scripts were written onto him in chalked scars. He looked like a man that had been tortured and starved. He opened his mouth to reveal rust-coloured teeth.

“You offer yourself as a vessel,” he said, already knowing why she’d let him into her mind and what she wanted him to help her do.

“Yes,” Saura managed to reply despite her trembling.

“You surrender your body to the chains.”

“Yes.”

“Then so be it,” Sarkin Sarkoki stated, his chains clanking and rattling as he began to vibrate. “We are one. You will have what you desire.”

The chains around him unfurled themselves and reached out to seize her. They were heavy and rough. Saura felt them wrap around every part of her, flesh and bone, blood and nerves, mind and spirit. The chains squeezed around the very essence of her until the world was nothing but chains and darkness. A full and lovely pain consumed her as Sarkin Sarkoki bonded with her, and it wasn’t until the woman in the yellow jalabiya poured water on her face and shook her back into full consciousness that she tasted the sand in her mouth and realized she had been rolling around on the ground, screaming.

• • • •

Wednesday goes quiet.

Her siblings wait.

She takes in a deep breath and lets out a scream. It is at once a declaration of defiance and an accusation levelled at her siblings, at the family that put her in chains. Her scream is a knife in their hearts.

Saturday does not look away until her sister stops screaming. Wednesday’s face, once full of grace, is contorted into an ugly shape with lines like regret but Saturday does not turn from it. She takes it all in, the words and the scream because that too is part of the story.

When the screaming ends, there is a pause that lasts for a long time but only briefly as they allow the scream to settle.

And then, the story continues.

Her siblings’ words are air in Saturday’s lungs and her song is half complete. Saturday turns to face Thursday. His mahogany skin is pallid in the candlelight. The sadness hanging from the corners of his mouth and the salt and pepper of his hair makes him look fragile and small in his black fitted suit. He leans forward and places both elbows on the table, settling his jaw on the tip of his fingers, hands pressed together like he is in prayer.

When Thursday begins to speak, Saturday manages a smile. She likes Thursday’s voice. It is steady and powerful and full of purpose, like waves crashing onto a cliff, like vengeance.

This is the part of the story that Thursday told:

• • • •

Saura was pretending to be asleep on an uncomfortable mattress in a spacious hotel room she’d taken for three nights when Shigidi arrived, just before midnight. She was shivering beneath the duvet, because she didn’t know how to adjust the central air conditioning, but she didn’t care. There was a “do not disturb sign” outside.

The nightmare god’s arrival was sudden, and she felt his presence immediately. The dream-sensation of that small dark orb tugging at her subconscious with its evil gravity was one she could never forget.

She waited until he climbed onto the bed and sat on her chest, the weight of him restricting her breath. When she felt his probing at the edges of her mind, noticed a blurring and loosening of her thoughts and memories, she knew he had made the mistake of establishing a connection with her mind. Of attempting to slip into her subconscious, as was his way. But she’d set a trap for him. The Babalawo in Badagry had given her the number for another, less reputable Babalawo who took requests for the nightmare god’s assistance from people with such cruelty in their hearts. She’d told him that she wanted someone killed in their sleep, but she didn’t say that the name she’d given was her own. And that the location she’d provided was the hotel room she’d booked. The trap was sprung.

She sat up suddenly and came face to face with the god that had murdered Mobola.

Saura was taken aback by how small and ugly Shigidi was. He was just over two feet tall. His head was too big for his body, and his dark ashy skin was covered in pockmarks, rashes, scarification lines, and sores. He wore filthy Ankara print trousers, and a plain black cloak that sat on his shoulders and ran down to the back of his ankles, with cowrie shells and lizard skulls sewn into the fabric. His face was covered with black ash that made it look much darker than the rest of him. He looked confused, surprised, a bit stupid and unsure what to do.

Saura felt a flush of anger that something so hideous had been the one to take Mobola from her.

“Bastard,” she spat out.

“What is happening?” Shigidi asked as he tried to withdraw from the borders of her consciousnesses.

Saura did not answer, she simply grabbed him and pulled him into the darkness of her mind where her inability to dream had left a vacuum where the cadaverous and bound Sarkin Sarkoki now dwelled.

Chains shot out of the darkness and latched onto Shigidi’s small limbs, binding him to the place. He struggled and pulled but he could not free himself. Sarkin Sarkoki sat on his stool, watching, and making a sound like laughter.

“What is going on? Who are you people?” the nightmare god shouted.

Angry that Shigidi could not even remember her face, she did not give him the satisfaction of understanding.

“You gods and spirits, you are all the same,” she said instead. “You think you can enter our lives and ruin them at your whim, taking whatever you want and leaving us to pick up the pieces. No. Not this time. This time, here is what will happen. You will suffer, like you have never suffered before. There will be pain. A lot of it. I will take my time. And even when you begin to thirst for death, when the chains have dug into your ugly body so deeply that they have fused with your nerves so that there is nothing except pain, you will not die. I will watch as you are stripped of every fragment of hope you hold in that body, until you feel as black and as bleak as this place, deep inside you. Maybe then you will remember who I am, and you will remember the person you took from me.”

As she spoke, the expression on Shigidi’s face had morphed from confusion to terror to something beyond both.

And when he whispered, “why?”, Saura silently asked Sarkin Sarkoki to tighten the squeeze of the chains around his neck until his head bulged and he began to choke. It did not relent until he blacked out.

• • • •

Thursday lifts his head and withdraws his hands from the intricately-patterned mahogany table, its straight-grained, reddish-brown timber cut from a tree that once stood at the centre of a garden that is not a garden, in the middle of nowhere, everywhere, all at once. He leans back and turns to meet Saturday’s gaze. She smiles at him, grateful for the way he told his part of the story which she has also absorbed. She feels it almost bursting out of her now—the song. She just needs one more part. The revelation.

She turns to face Friday who is raking his hands through his thick afro. He is the most reserved of the siblings and the one who likes the shape that secrets give stories, which is why she has arranged it so that he can tell this part, just before her song. Candlelight dances in his large brown eyes and his pitch-black lips are quivering. He is eager to tell and hear.

Saturday nods and Friday opens his mouth, his bass voice booming and bouncing off the walls of the room in powerful waves.

This is the part of the story that Friday told:

• • • •

Their bodies lay still and silent on the bed in the hotel, slumped over each other in an awkward embrace, but in the darkness of Saura’s mind, possessed by Sarkin Sarkoki, Shigidi was screaming. Saura watched dispassionately, refusing to allow him even a waking moment of respite, a single fleeting second where he was not intimately acquainted with the pain from the contracting chains. And with every scream, she asked him the same question.

“Do you remember what you took from me?”

He insisted that he did not know, and so the torment continued. Sarkin Sarkoki’s laughter the only other sound in her mind.

Almost twenty hours passed before the screaming stopped. Saura knew that it was not because the pain had ended, she was still commandeering the chains to pull and squeeze, and he was still writhing and whimpering. It was because something in him was breaking. Even a god can only take so much torment.

And yet after all the suffering, when she looked at him, pathetic as he was, she did not feel the satisfaction that she had craved. Underneath her rage was a sense of emptiness and loss and soul-deep weariness. She too was breaking under the weight of vengeance. And she knew now that someone else had sent him to their home that night because the disreputable Babalawo had told her it was the only reason Shigidi would kill someone.

“Mobola,” she blurted out, eager for resolution. “Her name was Mobola.”

Shigidi looked up at her, a glimmer of hope in his eyes for the first time since she’d lured him into the place of chains. He looked around at the darkness, as though he were searching her thoughts for something. And then, “Ahh . . . Mobola . . .” he croaked. “Yes. Omobola Adenusi . . . Lotus estate, Surulere. I remember now.”

Saura seethed when her name escaped his mouth.

“Why . . . why did you kill her?” she asked, her rage still bubbling at the surface.

“I’m sorry.” Shigidi breathed. “It was just a job. A standard nightmare-and-kill job.”

Saura shuddered, she knew how he worked, but she was too angry to care. “Just a job? You took the most precious person in the world from me because it was just a job?”

The chains around his limbs rattled as Shigidi’s tortured body sagged with the effort of keeping his head upright. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. It was just a job. It was only a job.”

“Who sent you? Who was the client?”

And as she asked that, Sarkin Sarkoki’s laughter stopped abruptly.

“I don’t know,” Shigidi said. “I just do what they ask me.”

“Then you must remember,” Saura demanded.

The chains tightened again.

“Please . . .”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t know,” the nightmare god maintained, each word excavated from him was hoarse and desperate. “But . . . but . . . wait . . . it was a woman. Older. Not Yoruba. I remember she was not Yoruba. She was slender. Thin nose. She had eyes like yours.”

Saura clutched at her chest.

“In her prayer, she only said she needed to get rid of the girl to get her daughter back.”

A knot like an iron rope formed in her stomach. Saura fell to her knees as the weight of realization settled upon her. The lack of surprise when her mother saw her at the market. The insistence on returning home as a condition of her possession. The guilt in her aunt Turai’s eyes. It all made terrible sense to her in that moment.

She asked Sarkin Sarkoki to unshackle him from her mind and Shigidi fell onto the dark filmy ground with a thud. In an instant, they were back on the bed, in the hotel.

Saura shot up and rolled off the mattress onto the carpeted floor. She felt the iron rope tighten in her stomach and everything constricted, like it was being squeezed by invisible hands. She felt like her insides were about to be torn and exposed, like the hollow clockwork belly of Sarkin Sarkoki. She threw up and began to cry.

“Ah. You know who it was, don’t you?” Shigidi whispered.

Her mothers’ words tolled in her head like a bell.

My daughter.

I’m glad you have finally come home.

Saura stumbled up to her knees and settled a long stare at Shigidi who was looking back at her with, large yellow eyes full of pity or regret or both.

“Yes,” she whispered back.

“Family?”

“Yes.”

“I . . . I am sorry. I am truly sorry.”

Saura was surprised by the sincerity in his voice.

“I hate my job sometimes,” Shigidi continued. “But I need the offerings and prayer requests to survive. Please understand. I didn’t mean to cause you pain but I . . . need to survive. I never mean to cause anyone pain. But I . . . I don’t want to wither and die. I just wish there was another way.”

Saura was even more surprised when Shigidi awkwardly clambered down from the bed and lay on the floor in front of her, prostrating in the traditional way, to show respect or profound apology. “I’m sorry.”

She placed her hand on his head and Saura and Shigidi wept together.

• • • •

The story is near its end when Friday stops speaking.

And Saturday’s song is about to begin.

There are no instruments to be played but the air hums electric with a sense of music, in anticipation.

Her siblings watch, enraptured as her ribs expand, her diaphragm moves up and her belly hollows out like a cave. The pressure of the melody builds up in her chest and there are vibrations in her throat, her mouth, her lips. Saturday feels like she is full of all the words and feelings and air that her siblings have given her with their words. Like she will never run out of breath. Like she will never run out of story. Like she will never run out of song.

Saturday begins to sing in a clear and loud voice full of energy.

This is the song Saturday sang:

• • • •

She entered a life
She struck in like lightning
But was taken too soon
Beauty and joy and kindness
Mobola, lost to nightmare’s touch
Breath extinguished by a mercenary god

Oh, a dirge for true love
For an embrace lost

A return home
Where Saura’s heart is buried
A sacrifice to the essence of binding
The lord of the chains
Gave her the power
Gave her the strength to catch a murderous god

But gods only serve people
They are made in the minds of men
In Saura’s mind, the nightmare god revealed a secret
That the umbilical cord can be a noose
That family can be a chain
That seeks to bind at any cost

How could a mother do this?
Oh, how could she not just accept?
How many tears must be shed to pay for this sin?
How much blood must be spilled?
It’s an evil way she has chosen
To show the depth of love

Oh, a dirge for motherhood
Of the poison in the womb

Saura swears that for as long as she lives
She will not let this happen to anyone like her
The bargain has been struck
The word-bond is made of iron
But there are many kinds of homecoming
And sometimes gifts bear teeth

Saura makes a pact with her lovers’ killer
An unwitting instrument in a war that began at birth
He will give her dreams as restitution
To make amends for stilling her lover’s heart
And she will forgive him
For he knew not what he was doing

But grief and sorrow must be repaid
There are many kinds of binding
And even invited guests can come baring teeth
If death is the price of her presence
Then let there be music and tears
As she goes home to share a living nightmare from which there is now no escape

Oh, a dirge for childhood
Of innocence lost

She enters the village like a whirlwind
And blows her way home
Her mother is sitting in the clearing
Where Saura once played Kagada with friends
Trust-falling into each other’s arms and singing
And eating hot tuwo under weekend stars

Their eyes meet full of determination and knowledge
Tragic corruption of love and affection
Her mother strikes first, possessed by Kure the hyena
No deeper pain than to be struck by the hand that fed you
Fate is cruel to set blood against blood
She reaches into her mother’s mind and ends it quickly

She gives her mother’s mind permanent shelter
In the dark place with Sarkin Sarkoki
Where she will always be with her
Trapped in the once-empty darkness now filled with hate
Bound together in their pain
Their new umbilical cord made of spirit-chains

Her mother’s body becomes a hollow vessel
Sessile as a tree and just as alive
She has been given the thing she wanted
Saura takes her mother’s place
For a paralyzed woman cannot be magajiya
When her daughter has come home

They are now always together
In her every waking moment Saura hears her mother’s voice
Pleading, railing, crying to be let go
But every night when she goes to bed
She closes her eyes, and silence falls
And in the quiet of her mind, she dreams

• • • •

And so, Saturday’s song ends.

The euphonic cavalcade of melodies comes to a halt. Saturday is exhausted and feels empty, like a gourd with all its water poured out but she smiles because she thinks it was a good song and she sang it well.

Her six siblings remain silent, a rapturous look painted onto their faces. They are still lost to the song. Saturday savours the moment. This is why she sings the stories sometimes. For that look in their eyes that says she has given them something special. And for what she hopes it will evoke within them. She has told, she has heard, she has performed.

She turns to Sunday, whose task it is to complete all their stories and she sees wetness in his sea-green eyes. She smiles and nods.

Sunday sucks in air and lets out his words in a whisper that was loud enough for all of them to hear.

This is all that Sunday said:

• • • •

The end.

• • • •

At that, the seven siblings that were, that are, and always have been, fall silent again and contemplate the story for a moment that is also an eternity. It is a reading of their own entrails, an examination of the essence of all things from which they are woven, and it is the most important part of the story—what it does to those who receive it. Its interpretation, its impact, its legacy.

“Humans are such tragic things,” Sunday said. “Little grains of consciousness floating atop an ocean of existence vaster than any of them possibly imagine, barely aware of all the other ways of being, of all that exists outside their perception. And yet their stories are heavy in our bones, written upon us with the brightness of stars. The myriad ways they love and hurt each other are fascinating. They weave such tenderness and cruelty with every fibre of their lives.”

He pauses. And then, “This was a good story. We told it well.”

He turns to Saturday, the lines of his face converging, his eyes wide and full of realization, of knowledge. “But why did you choose this story for us to tell and hear, sister, why did you sing this song?”

“For the same reason we tell and hear all our stories. Because that is what happened and thus must be told.”

The siblings all echoed the mantra in unison. “That is what happened and thus must be told.”

Sunday smiles faintly, maintaining his placid countenance. “Indeed. But there is also another reason, is there not?”

“For Wednesday,” Saturday admits, brushing a loose, blonde braid behind her ear. She knew he would be the first to understand.

“We are not human, we are not like Saura or her mother. We should not continue to bind our own blood so, regardless of her crime. Wednesday is our sister. Yes, she tried to change a story, but which of us has not been tempted to do so?” She pointed at the timestone sitting at the centre of the table like an emerald fruit. “Her actions were wrong, but they came from a good place. And in the end, the story was not changed. The stories cannot be changed. She knows that now. She is certain of it. As are we all. That is the lesson of her story, and it is complete. Let us release her chains.”

Saturday sees the gratitude silently spilling out of the sides of Wednesday’s thin mouth, her soft eyes, her broad nose.

Sunday looks at all his siblings. Their eyes reveal what they want even though they are mostly bound by rules carved in the primordial essence of existence, rules older than time itself. But rules, like gods, are only as powerful as their purpose and the will of those who made them. “Do you all agree with this? Shall we free our sister?”

“Yes,” Monday says.

From Tuesday. “We should.”

There is a hopeful nod from Wednesday herself.

“Yes,” Thursday says.

Friday echoes his agreement.

“Yes,” Saturday cannot hide her joy.

“Then so be it.” Sunday says.

Saturday leaps to her feet and lets out a cry as the shackles loosen and fall from Wednesday’s limbs, clattering with a noise like songs of freedom, like a sibling’s laughter, like the forgiveness of family.

©2023 by Wole Talabi.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wole Talabi is an engineer, writer, and editor from Nigeria. His stories have appeared in Asimov’s, F&SF, Clarkesworld, and several other places. His fiction has been a finalist for several prestigious awards including the Nebula Award (2023), the Caine Prize (2018), the Locus Award (2022), and the Nommo Award which he won in 2018 and 2020. His stories have also been translated into seven languages. He has edited three anthologies: Africanfuturism (2020) which was nominated for the Locus Award in 2021, Lights Out: Resurrection (2016), and These Words Expose Us (2014). His first collection of stories Incomplete Solutions (2019) is published by Luna Press. His debut fantasy novel Shigidi and the Brass Head Of Obalufon (DAW books, August 2023) is now available for pre-order. He is also the editor of Mothersound: The Sauútiverse Anthology (Android Press, November 2023). He likes scuba diving, elegant equations, and oddly shaped things. He currently lives and works in Malaysia.

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

The Belfry Keeper

S.L. Harris | 845 words

I rang the Academy bell the first time, when both it and I were new-penny bright, and I rang it at the end, when it was gray-green with the centuries. I was the school’s mascot and its totem and its faithful servant. By night I cleaned the halls and read the chalkboard ghosts before consigning them to oblivion. In the library, I gently laid sleeping heads on tables and reshelved the books they’d used as pillows. It may be hubris for a soulless thing of brass to say so, but if the Academy belonged to anyone, it belonged to me.

I remember when this place was the wonder of the world. When it was something to say, “I am of the Academy.” Now the world would laugh. They would say: “So you can make fire from your fingers?” and they would lift a handgun. Or they would say, “So you can with great effort turn lead into gold?” and they would tell how their brokerages make millions from nothing at all.

Or they would say, “So you can make a clockwork automaton ring your bells and wash your floors? Well, there are many desperate people who will do it for pennies and who can be more easily replaced when they wear down.”

When the Academy was new-built, some still said magic was demonic. The Academy endured that. But it could not survive the modern sin: magic is not profitable.

The last dean gave me my last command: to dispose of the books, to sell the furnishings, and melt down the bell, and deposit the yield to pay off such and such creditors, before at last turning myself in for parts. Cheaper than hiring a company to do it.

But I find something strange as I go to the library to begin. I do not want to do it. Though I have been ordered, and by a wizard. I begin to think: may I disobey a master? Ah, but there is no wizard that is my master now. If I belong to anyone, it is to the Academy. So I can say “no.”

I say no.

I do not box and destroy the library. I do not melt down the bell. I keep the floors clean, the books dusted. And I wonder: why does no one come?

Time, time, time. I do not know what happens outside the Academy walls. The woods and wilds have reclaimed all about, and I have let the high outer walls crumble so that a traveler will see only ruin. Perhaps they will think, “there is no profit to be had here,” and turn away. But inside, the herbal gardens are as fragrant as they have ever been. The windows are clear, though the glass drips with the years. The books are cleaned, although the acid ink eats their pages and leaves the words of magic first a stencil, then a void. No matter. By now I have read every one.

Always I wait for the sound of human footsteps, of someone coming to finish the ending that they began. To reclaim, loot, pillage, or burn. I do not know what I will do then. What could I do? Their weapons these days could make short work of an old clockwork, I suppose. At least they will know that there was one who cared for this place enough to stand in their way a little while.

One day I hear the footsteps.

I hide in the library shadows, not daring to move. It is only one person, by the sound of it. I regard the little brass hammer that rang the bell so many times. My joints shudder and twitch. Could I do this, even? Could I fight? To keep this place a little longer, perhaps I could.

The person is moving slowly through the library. I wonder if they’ve come to steal. If they are reconnaissance for a larger force. If they have grown desperate enough for lucre that even the tattered remnants of an ancient school are worth raiding.

No matter, I tell my chittering gears. I will end this threat, and if another comes, I will end that too, until I myself am ended. The hammer is lifted high and ready to strike as the person comes around the corner. But the footsteps stop. Have they seen me?

No. I hear then a sound that anyone who has spent as long as I have in a library will know. It is the sound of crying over a book.

Cautiously I move out of the shadows. The figure looks up.

It is a girl in strange dress.

She has an old book on her lap, and the pages are crumbling into dust.

She looks up at me and gasps.

“It’s true,” she whispers.

She shakes her head over the ruined book. “But I’m too late. The books are ruined, and there’s no one left to teach me.”

I set the hammer down and gently take the book from her.

And we begin the lesson.

©2023 by S.L. Harris.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

S.L. Harris is a writer, teacher, and archaeologist who can often be found digging in gardens, libraries, tea cabinets, and ancient houses. Originally from West Virginia, he currently lives in the Midwest with his wife, two children, and many books.

EXCERPT: Red Team Blues (Tor Books)

Cory Doctorow | 6613 words

New York Times bestseller Cory Doctorow’s Red Team Blues is a grabby next-Tuesday thriller about cryptocurrency shenanigans that will awaken you to how the world really works.

Martin Hench is sixty-seven years old, single, and successful in a career stretching back to the beginnings of Silicon Valley. He lives and roams California in a very comfortable fully-furnished touring bus, The Unsalted Hash, that he bought years ago from a fading rock star. He knows his way around good food and fine drink. He likes intelligent women, and they like him back often enough.

Martin is a—contain your excitement—self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. He knows computer hardware and software alike, including the ins and outs of high-end databases and the kinds of spreadsheets that are designed to conceal rather than reveal. He’s as comfortable with social media as people a quarter his age, and he’s a world-level expert on the kind of international money-laundering and shell-company chicanery used by Fortune 500 companies, mid-divorce billionaires, and international drug gangs alike. He also knows the Valley like the back of his hand, all the secret histories of charismatic company founders and Sand Hill Road VCs. Because he was there at all the beginnings. He’s not famous, except to the people who matter. He’s made some pretty powerful people happy in his time, and he’s been paid pretty well. It’s been a good life.

Now he’s been roped into a job that’s more dangerous than anything he’s ever agreed to before—and it will take every ounce of his skill to get out alive.

Out now from Tor Books.

1

One evening, I got a wild hair and drove all night from San Diego to Menlo Park. Why Menlo Park? It had both a triple-Michelin-star place and a dear old friend both within spitting distance of the Walmart parking lot, where I could park the Unsalted Hash, leaving me free to drink as much as I cared to and still be able to walk home and crawl into bed.

I’d done a job that turned out better than I’d expected—well enough that I was set for the year if I lived carefully. I didn’t want to live carefully. The age for that was long past. I wanted to live it up. There’d be more work. I wanted to celebrate.

Truth be told, I also didn’t want to contemplate the possibility that, at the age of sixty-seven, the new work might stop coming in. Silicon Valley hates old people, but that was okay, because I hated Silicon Valley. Professionally, that is.

Getting close to Bakersfield, I pulled the Unsalted Hash into a rest stop to stretch my legs and check my phone. After a putter around the picnic tables and vending machine, I walked the perimeter of my foolish and ungainly and luxurious tour bus, checking the tires and making sure the cargo compartments were dogged and locked. I climbed back in, checked my sludge levels and decided they were low enough that I could use my own toilet, then, finally, having forced myself to wait, sat on one of the buttery leather chairs and checked my messages.

That’s how I learned that Danny Lazer was looking for me. He was working the usual channels—DMs from people who I tended to check in with when I was looking for work—and it put a shine on my evening, because sixty-seven or no, there was always work for someone with my skill set. Danny Lazer had a problem with his Trustlesscoin keys, which relied on the best protected cryptographic secrets in the world (nominally).

So I messaged him. One rest stop later, just past Gilroy, I got his reply. He was eager to see me. Would I call on him at his home in Palo Alto?

My pathetic little ego swelled up at his eagerness. I told him I had a big dinner planned the next night, but I’d see him the morning after. Truth be told, putting off a man as important as Danny Lazer, even for twenty-four hours, made me feel more important still. I could tell from his reply that the delay chafed at him. I felt petty, but not so much so that I canceled my dinner. My dear old friend was a lively sort, and it was possible we’d walk from the restaurant to her place for an hour or three before I returned to the Walmart parking lot.

Dinner didn’t disappoint, and neither did the fun and games afterward. It was a very nice capstone to a very successful job, and a very good prelude to another job for one of the nicest rich men (or richest nice men) in Silicon Valley.

Danny was old Silicon Valley, a guy who started his own UUCP host so he could help distribute the alt hierarchy and once helped Tim May bring a load of unlicensed firearms across state lines from a Nevada gun show. He’d lived like a monk for decades, writing cryptographic code and fighting with the NSA over it, and had mortgaged his parents’ house back east to keep himself and a couple of programmers in business in a tiny office for a decade while he and Galit lived in a thirty-foot motor home that needed engine tuning once a month just so it could trundle from one parking space to the next.

It was a bet that there would come a day when the internet’s innocence would end and people would want privacy from each other and their governments, and he kept doubling down on that bet through every boom and bust, living on ramen and open cereal boxes from the used food store, refusing to part with any equity except to promising hackers who’d join him, and then the bet paid off, and he became Daniel Moses Lazar, with a 75 percent stake in Keypairs LLC, whose crypto-libraries and workflow tools were the much-ballyhooed picks and shovels of the next internet revolution. Keypairs wasn’t the first unicorn in Silicon Valley, but it was the first one that never took a dime in venture capital and whose sole angels were Danny’s parents back in Jersey, to whom Danny sent at least $100 million before they made him stop, insisting that they had nothing more they wanted in this world.

Galit picked out a big place in Twin Peaks that you could see Alcatraz from on a clear day, gutted it to the foundation slab, bare studs, and ceiling joists, completely rebuilt it while being mindful of both Danny’s specification for networking receptacles throughout, and Galit’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Arts and Crafts Movement. One day, as she was bringing out some Mendocino grig and a cheese board for the two of them to enjoy from their half-built porch, she gasped, complained of pain in both arms, then her chest, and then she collapsed and was dead before the ambulance arrived.

It had been a good marriage: twenty-two years and no kids, because there was nowhere in their old RV to put them unless they wanted to hang them from the rafters. She’d been his rock while he’d built up Keypairs, but he’d been hers, too, rubbing her feet and helping her deal with the endless humiliations that a woman doing administrative work in Silicon Valley had to put up with. He didn’t see it that way, though: after he took possession of her ashes, all he could talk about was how they’d wasted nearly a quarter of a century chasing a fortune that didn’t do either of them a bit of good, and it had cost them the time they could have spent in a beach shack in the Baja while he did two hours of contract work a month to pay for machete sharpening and new hammocks once a year.

A procession of Silicon Valley’s most powerful leaders and most respected technologists filed through the Palo Alto teardown they’d bought to perch in while the Twin Peaks project was underway. People who weren’t merely wealthy but famous for their vision, their sensitivity, their insight. They argued with him about his crushing regrets and tried to tell him how much good he’d done, both for Galit and for the world, but he was unreachable. A consensus emerged among the Friends of Danny that he was not long for this world. Not that he was going to kill himself or anything but that he would simply stop caring about living, and then nature would take its course.

They were right—given all facts in evidence, that was a foregone conclusion. But there was one hidden variable: Sethuramani Balakrishnan, who was twenty-five, brilliant, and had made a series of lateral moves within Keypairs: customer support, then compliance, and finally Danny’s PA, a job she was vastly overqualified for. She helped him flip the house, then to turn Keypairs over to a management committee carefully balanced between hackers who’d been with Danny since the PDP-8 days, people with real managerial experience and proven experience growing companies and running big teams. He got rid of all the shares he’d taken in over the years to sit on advisory boards and stuck everything into Vanguard index-tracker funds—the ones that didn’t buy a lot of tech stocks.

As far as anyone could tell, Sethu didn’t try to talk him out of any of this, just offered efficient, intelligent, and supremely organized help in getting Danny’s life’s work out of a realm in which it had to be actively managed by someone with Danny’s incredible drive, insight, and technical knowledge, and into an investment vehicle managed by an overgrown spreadsheet, one that would multiply his money ahead of the CPI, year on year, until someone built a guillotine on his lawn.

What Sethu did talk him into was buying a condo around the corner from that Palo Alto teardown, an eight-story place, quiet, built on the grave of another Palo Alto teardown that had been snapped up by property developers in the glory days before NIMBY planning ended all high-density infill within fifty miles of Stanford.

The Camino Real had excellent security, as well as all the amenities: a pool, a gym, and a set of spring-loaded seismic dampers set deep into the bedrock that turned the whole place into a bouncy castle whenever the San Andreas Fault got a touch of indigestion.

It was steps to California Avenue and five-Michelin-star restaurants—one with three stars, two with two—and it cost him eight million, plus furnishings, which Sethu oversaw, going all in on Danish woods for a midcentury modern feel that went great with the rooftop garden that came with the penthouse unit. Sethu got him interested in trying all that Michelin star food, a far cry from ramen and slightly irregular breakfast cereals, and from there, it was the chefs’ tables, and then the private cooking classes, and then a major reno to the penthouse to fit it out with a kitchen that would have made Heston Blumenthal gasp and twirl.

They spent the month that the renos took in an exclusive lodge near a slightly active Costa Rican volcano, checking out the bromeliads and howler monkeys. He came back bronzed and fit from all that volcano hiking and became one of the great chefs of the new aristocracy, even pulling out the old alt.gourmand posts from the prehistory of Usenet.

I don’t know when they became a couple, but I imagine it was a natural thing. Danny had a big heart, and he’d loved Galit with all of it, and with Galit gone and Danny still around, his heart wasn’t going to sit idly. Sethu is beautiful and brilliant and good at what she does, and those were all the traits that attracted Danny to Galit in the first place.

The Camino Real’s security gave me the twice-over and then emitted me. The elevator doors gave a sophisticated sigh and welcomed me in, and the buttonless panel lit up PH, and my blood pooled a little in my feet as I attained liftoff.

Danny looked at least ten years younger than the last time I’d seen him, craggy but handsome, and the pounds he’d put on had only filled him out so he wasn’t such an ectomorphic scarecrow.

He’d definitely been hitting the kettlebells, too, and his tight Japanese tee clung just enough that I could see he’d gotten some definition in his pecs and biceps. That’s hard muscle to acquire once you hit your fifties. Someone had been making Danny put in his reps.

Danny’s an intense guy who believed so fiercely in the significance and beauty and urgency of cryptography that he could easily captivate a roomful of people with an impromptu lecture on the subject, and he would not relinquish that hold until they all had to leave. He wasn’t a bore, but he wasn’t exactly normal, and yet as far as I knew, everyone who’d ever become personally acquainted with him liked him. A lot.

“Well, you don’t look like a man who got through a prix fixe at the Palmier. Even with the flights, you shouldn’t be that bilious, Mart. What’d you do, stop for Oreos on the way back to your double-wide?”

I let this pour over me as he showed me into the foyer and I shucked my scuffed old loafers, the ones I saved for personal days when I didn’t have to impress a client. “First of all, Lazer, the Unsalted Hash is a forty-foot, state-of-the-art touring bus with seven feet of internal clearance, an induction range, a deep freeze, and a sound system that can set off car alarms for a block. It is not a double-wide.

“Secondly, the Palmier was great, and I didn’t get the prix fixe—I got a taster at the chef’s table with a friend, and we stayed up later than we should have, and I still managed to drag myself here for a business conference at this unholy hour. I’m running on three hours’ sleep and digesting a good three-thousand calorie dinner, is all.

“Finally, I don’t stop for Oreos, ever. I have a supply of 1995-vintage Hydroxes in one of the deep freezes. The original recipe contains all those great trans fats that make for excellent long-term frozen flavor and texture retention. I would offer you a package, but I won’t, because they are mine, and I treasure them beyond all reason and plan to make my stash last until I can no longer consume solid food, whereupon I plan to consume the balance in smoothie form.”

He took my shoes and tossed them into a closet and slammed the door, making a face, then burst out laughing and grabbed me in a bear hug that reminded me of those new biceps of his. “Man, it’s good to see you, Marty. Come in, come in. We’ll go out onto the roof.”

I got a quick tour of a lot of teak and curves and angles, like a set dresser had been given an unlimited budget to decorate the boss’s office on a midcentury period drama. Then he opened a sliding door out onto the roof-deck, which had some very nice landscaping and potted shrubs, a meandering stream patrolled by fat koi and fed by a two-foot waterfall, some comfortable-looking and elegant teak loungers, and Sethu.

She had an easel set up and was painting in oils, an impressionistic landscape of Palo Alto’s nimbified one-family houses and dinky main street. It was a couple of billion dollars’ worth of real estate dressed up as middle-class houses from the same midcentury dreamland as the furnishings in the living room.

She turned and saw us and narrowed her eyes, just a tiny amount, before cleaning her brushes and hanging up her smock on the easel’s corner. “Hi, hon,” she said. “This must be your friend Mr. Hench.”

Danny beamed at her, an expression I remembered from his most successful demos, that prideful look he got when his code performed some miracle. “Marty, I don’t know if you ever met Sethu, back in the old days.”

“I don’t know that we were ever introduced properly,” I said. She’d let me in, once or twice, when I’d come by to see if I could pull Danny out of his tailspin. But she’d been his PA then.

“Well, in that case, Sethuramani Lazer, meet Martin Hench. Marty, meet Sethu.”

I’m pretty sure my facial expression didn’t change when he dropped that last name on me. I’d already noticed the rock on her finger, of course—a bachelor of my age and experience takes note of these things automatically, without conscious intervention. I’m pretty sure what Danny said next was that same pride speaking, not a failure of my poker face.

“Married her last year. Or rather, she married me, despite being significantly out of my league.”

“Lucky fella,” I said. “Congrats to both of you.”

He got us settled into loungers, and Sethu mentioned that she was going in for lemonade and offered us some. She brought it out in sweating tall glasses with silicone straws and then went back to her easel, far enough away that it wouldn’t seem odd not to include her in our conversation.

I sipped as Danny scrolled his phone for a moment, doublechecked his notes, and took Sethu in. She was beautiful, of course, but I’d known that since I’d first met her at the door of that teardown that Danny had settled into as his final resting place. Now, though, she had the kind of haircut that some very bright topiarist had charged her at least a thousand bucks for, and with it, the kind of poise I associate with very beautiful, very accomplished women who are also very, very rich. Something in the posture, a kind of deep relaxation that you rarely see. Having a very deep cash buffer can give a woman the same tranquility as any middling specimen of manhood gets for free, the liberation from casual predation that men don’t even notice.

Danny put his phone down at last. “So I hear you did some work recently? Bonwick. Rearden Factoring?”

I nodded. “Yeah, Brian and I did some business, but it’s not the kind of thing I can discuss. You know that. He lost something, I found it, and I made him whole.”

He snorted. “Marty, you don’t make people whole. Your commission still twenty-five percent?”

“It is,” I said. “And I still don’t charge anything to take a job, not even expenses or a retainer. I take the risk, I get the reward. That’s a proposition I think you probably relate to.”

“I’m familiar with the general idea.” He looked around at his penthouse garden, his beautiful young wife, his view of the strivers of Palo Alto and their Leave It to Beaver houses, all a testament to his willingness to take all the risk and his unwillingness to share his rewards. “You ever take payment in crypto?”

“I prefer fiat”—this being the cutesy word that crypto weirdos use for real money—“I have smart accountants who keep my tax bite down to a manageable slice, and I’ve got no other reason to accept distributed sudoku puzzles in lieu of greenbacks.”

“Very funny,” he said. Cryptocurrency hustlers hate it when you point out that the whole blockchain emits billions of tons of CO2 to help repeatedly compute pointless mathematical puzzles. “You’re familiar with how crypto works, though, right?”

“Danny, I love you like a brother, but I hope I’m not about to get a sales pitch for Trustlesscoin.” The only sour note in the previous night’s dinner had been a couple of bros at the chef’s table who spent the first hour talking about smart contracts. It was a hazard of any public space in SV, and I accepted it with good grace, but I wouldn’t tolerate it in private places. Life is too short.

“No pitch, but I just want to make sure you’re up to speed for what I’m going to tell you next. Forensic accounting is one thing, but when you throw in crypto, it’s a whole different world.”

I grunted noncommittally. Danny had been around since crypto meant “cryptography,” and I hadn’t figured him to become one of these blockchain hustlers. They’re the kind of smart people who outsmart themselves, especially when it comes to shenanigans, forgetting that their public ledger is public and all their transactions are visible to the whole world forever. Forensic accounting never had a better friend than crypto, with its mix of public ledgers, deluded masters of the universe, and suckers pumping billions into the system. It was full employment for me and my competitors until cryptocurrency’s carbon footprint rendered the earth uninhabitable.

“There are certain technical differences between Trustless and other coins. Will you allow me to explain them to you? I promise it’s germane and I’m not trying to sell you anything.”

“Aw, hell, Danny, you can tell me anything. I just get sick of being hustled.”

“Me, too, pal. Okay, if you mentioned distributed sudoku puzzles, you know something about proof of work: the way blockchain maintains the integrity of its ledger is by having everyone in the system repeatedly do compute work that reaffirms all the entries in the ledger. So long as the value of all the assets in the ledger is less than the electricity bill for taking over the majority of the compute work, they’re safe.”

“That means that the more valuable all this blockchain stuff becomes, the more coal they have to burn to keep it all from being stolen,” I said. It was something I’d almost said to the bros at dinner the night before, but I didn’t want an argument to distract from the otherwise lovely time I’d been having with my entirely lovely companion.

“That’s fair,” he said. “That’s what every greenie who hasn’t received a couple of mil in donations from surprised cryptomillionaires will tell you. But, Marty, that’s a problem with proof of work, not with distributed ledgers. If you could build a blockchain that had a negligible carbon budget, you could do a lot with it.”

“Launder money. Badly.”

“That,” he said. “Lot of Chinese entrepreneurs and officials are anxious to beat currency controls. But it’s not just money, it’s anything you want to have universally available, unfalsifiable, and cryptographically secured.”

“Laundered money.”

He made a face. “Cynic. Not laundered money. Genocide-proof ID. Cryptographically secured, write-only manifests of a person’s identifiers, including nationality, vitals, and ethnic group, but each one has its own key, held by the Blue Helmets. You get to a border and you present your biometrics, and the UN tells the border guards your nationality but not your ethnicity.”

“Fanciful.”

“Cynic! Yeah, fine, no one’s doing it yet, but we could. All that blockchain for good shit that the hucksters talked up to make it sound like proof of work wasn’t a crime against humanity. Trustlesscoin lets you do them because it doesn’t need the sudoku.”

I dredged up memories of half-digested podcasts I’d listened to on the road. “Is it a proof-of-stake thing?”

He snorted. “Don’t try to sound smart, Marty, you’ll sprain something. No, it’s secure enclaves. That crypto-sub-processor in your iPhone that Apple uses to keep you from switching to another app store? It can run code. What’s more, it can sign the output. So we can send you a program and check to see whether it ran as intended, because we know that the owner of a phone can’t override the secure enclave. Far as Apple’s concerned, iPhone owners are the enemy, and their threat model treats the device owner as an adversary—as someone who might get apps someplace that doesn’t kick a fifteen to thirty percent vigorish up to Apple for every transaction, depriving its shareholders of their rake.

“Any device with a secure enclave or other trusted computing module is a device that treats its owner as the enemy. That’s a device we need, because when you’re in the Trustlesscoin network, that device will defend me from you, and you from me. I don’t have to trust you, I just have to trust that you can’t break into your own phone, which is to say that I have to trust that Apple’s engineers did their job correctly, and well, you know, they’ve got a pretty good track record, Marty.”

“Except?”

He finished his lemonade and scowled at the reusable straw. “Yeah, except. Look, Trustlesscoin is on track to become the standard public ledger for the world. I know, I know, every founder talks that ‘make a dent in the universe’ crap, but I mean it. You want to know how serious I am about this? I took in outside capital.”

He let me sit with that a moment. Danny Lazer, the man who ate ramen in a twenty-year-old, bent-axle RV for decades with the love of his life so he’d never have to take a nickel from any of those bloodsuckers on Sand Hill Road, and he took in outside capital. Danny Lazer, a man who’d owned 75 percent of a unicorn, which is to say, seven-point-five-times-ten-to-the-eight U.S. American Greenback Simoleon Dollars, and he took in outside capital.

“Why? And also, what for?”

He laughed. “Watching you work out a problem is like watching a bulldog chew a wasp, brother. You’ve got a hell of a poker face, but when you start overclocking the old CPU, it just melts. I’ll tell you why and what for.

“First of all, I wanted to create something for Sethu. She’s never had the chance to live up to her potential. She’s smart, Marty, smart like Galit was, but she’s also technical, and managerial, and just born to run things. I’ve never met a better candidate for a CEO than she is. And I’m not young, you know that, and there’s going to be a long time after I’m dead when she’ll still be in her prime, and I wanted to make something she could grow into and grow around her.

“I’d been playing with the idea behind Trustless since the early 2000s, when Microsoft released its first Trusted Computing papers, all the way back in the Palladium days! So Sethu and I hung up a whiteboard in the guest room and started spending a couple of hours a day in there. I didn’t want to bring in anyone else at first, first because it seemed like a hobby and not a business, and hell, every cryptographer I know is working seventy-hour weeks as it is.

“Then I didn’t want to bring in anyone else because I got a sense of how big this damned thing is. I mean, there’s about two trillion in assets in the blockchain today, and that’s with all the stupid friction of proof-of-work. When we lift the shackles off of it, whoosh, we’re talking about a ledger that will encompass more assets than the total balance sheets of twenty or thirty of the smallest UN members . . . combined.

“You know me, Marty. I don’t believe in much, but when I do believe in something, I’m all in. All. In. And so I brought some people in.”

“What for, though? Danny, how much of your Keypairs jackpot did you manage to blow? How much money could you possibly need, and for what? Are you building your own chip foundry? Buying a country?”

“We actually thought of doing both of those things, you know, but decided we didn’t need the headaches. The Keypairs money’s only grown since I cashed out, thanks to the bull runs. I can’t spend it all, won’t be able to. It would sicken me to try, because I’d have to be so wasteful to even make a dent in it.

“The reason I went for outside capital wasn’t money, it was connections.”

I groaned. Every grifter in private equity and VC-land claimed that they had “connections” that represented value add for their portfolio companies. The social butterfly market was implausible on its face, and in practice, it was just a way of turning cocktail parties into a business expense. “Come on, Danny, you know people already.”

“Not these people.” And he did the thing. He looked from side to side, up and down. He turned off his phone and held his hand out for mine and carried them both to the little step next to the water feature and set them down on it so they’d be in the whitenoise zone. He came back, looked around again. “I got signing keys for four of the most commonly deployed secure enclaves.” He looked around again.

“I think I know what that means, Danny, but maybe you could spell it out? I’m just a dumb old accountant, not a cryptographic legend like yourself. And for God’s sake, stop looking around. I’ll let you know if I see anyone sneaking up on us.”

“Sorry, sorry. Okay. The secure enclave gets a program, runs it, and signs the output. The secure enclave’s little toy operating system says that it does this reliably and without exception. You see a signature on a program’s output, you know the program produced it. That toy OS, it’s simple. Stupid. Brutal. Does about six things, very well, and nothing else. You can’t change that program. Secure enclaves are designed to be non-serviceable. Even taking them off the mainboard wrecks them. You get them into a lab and decap them and hit them with an electron-tunneling microscope, you still won’t be able to recover the signing keys or force a false sig.

“But if you have the signing keys? You can just simulate a secure enclave on any computer. Then you can run any operating system you want on it, including one that will forge signatures. You do that, and you can falsify the ledger. You can move unlimited sums from any part of the balance sheet to your part of the balance sheet. You can jackpot the whole fucking thing.”

I blew out air. “Well, that seems like a defect in the system, all right.”

“It can’t be helped. We call it Trustless, but there’s always some trust in a system like this. You’re not trusting the other users of the system or the company that made the software. You’re trusting that a couple of leading manufacturers of cryptographic coprocessors and sub-processors, companies with decades of experience, will maintain operational security and not lose control of the keys that their entire business—and the entire business of all their customers and their customers’ customers—are dependent upon. You’re not trusting the other users, but you’re trusting them.”

“And yet,” I said, looking over at Sethu, who was painting away and performing an excellent simulation of someone who wasn’t eavesdropping, “you found someone willing to sell you some of those keys.”

“Yes,” he said and gave me a calm, no-bullshit, eye-to-eye stare. “I did. It’s useful to have those, especially when you’re first kicking a new cryptocurrency around. You make a smart contract with a bad line of code in it, you create a bug bounty with an unlimited payout. So in the early days, when you’re figuring this stuff out, you do a little ledger rewriting.”

“You do rewriting on a read-only ledger that no one is ever supposed to rewrite.”

He rolled his eyes. “Ethereum did it early on, moved fifty mil in stolen payout from a bad smart contract out of the crook’s account and back into the mark’s account. No one made too much of a fuss. I mean, the immutable ledger sounds like a great idea until someone no stupider than you gets taken for fifty mil, and then rewriting the ledger is just sound fiscal policy in service to fundamental justice.”

“But Ethereum told everyone they were doing it. Sounds like you did it all on the down low?”

“We were early. No one was even paying attention. All we wanted was a ledger whose early entries weren’t an eternal monument to my stupid mistakes as I climbed the learning curve.”

“Fine. Vain, but fine. Still, getting those keys meant a lot of power for a little reputation laundering.”

He sighed and looked away. “Yeah. The thing is, I’m not the only one who makes mistakes. We are aiming for trillions secured on our chain. Trillions, Marty. Ten to the twelve. It’s an unforgiving medium, and the stakes are high. The Ethereum lesson was clear: a couple of divide-by-zeros or fence post errors, a single badly typed variable or buffer overrun, and the whole thing could sink. I needed an eraser. Not on day zero but well before I attained liftoff.”

“Every hacker builds in a back door, huh?”

“Don’t call it that. Call it an Undo button.”

“Okay, then. An Undo button in a system whose cryptography is supposed to prevent undo at all costs. But not a back door.”

“You, my friend, are too smart. I miss the days when forensic accountancy and security engineering were distinct fields.”

“Me, too, pal. So what happened? Your keys took a walk?”

“We built the system to be secure. You know me, I’m a paranoid old creep with a dirty mind, so everything I did, I did right. The keys were on an air gap system. I bought that system myself off a pile of boxed HP laptops at Fry’s just a couple of weeks before they closed their doors for good.”

“Rest in peace.”

“It was time. But back when you could go into Fry’s, you could pick up a laptop sealed in shrink-wrap, carry it yourself to the cashier, pay cash for it, and walk out, stopping only to show your receipt to the poor door-checker. Then you could take it to the data center, badge into the clean room, lay out your workbench, unscrew that sucker, and remove every single network interface with a pair of pliers, not just snipping the traces but ripping them right off the board.”

“Lucky you didn’t snap the board.”

He grimaced. “I did. I bought three of them so I could take a mulligan or two if I needed it. I only needed one spare, as it turned out. Then it went into a safe, a good safe, rated for three hours. There’s a watchman who makes physical rounds of every safe room, every two hours. And I locked up the BIOS with a hardware token. Steal that laptop, you’d still need my token.”

“And yet . . .”

“You know how they say anyone can design a security system that he himself can’t figure out how to break?”

“Schneier’s law.”

“Schneier’s law. Yeah. Someone smarter than I am figured it out.”

“The watchman?”

“No, though he might have been in on it. They fired him. The safe was opened, the laptop was gone.”

“And the hardware token?”

“You’ll love this.”

“I can’t wait.”

He tugged his forelock and adopted a broad Cockney accent that would have embarrassed Dick van Dyke. “Guv’nah, I was pickpocketed, so I was.”

“I don’t believe it. Pickpocketing is supposed to be a dead art. Who was working the scam, Apollo Robbins?”

He shrugged. “I don’t reckon so. But yeah, there’s plenty of Vegas acts that do pickpocketing stuff, and there’s a pretty big YouTube competitive pickpocket scene with tutorials. Plus, there’s the European talent, a lot of it, never really died out there. Covent Garden is like a plague reservoir for the pathogen, and you get an outbreak every year or two.”

“You had the hardware token on your key ring?”

“That day, I did. I’d been in the data center. Then we went to dinner. Hydra. The prix fixe. The chef’s table is nice, but the taster menu gets you the octopodi. Someone bumped me between the data center and my front door.”

“Oof,” I said. “Did you have to ring the downstairs neighbor’s doorbell and climb out on their balcony?”

“Don’t be stupid,” he said. “In the first place, Sethu has her own keys. In the second place, the outside doors here are locked and armed when we’re AFK.”

I’d noticed the locks on the outside doors, and the break sensors, and the cameras—both the covert and overt ones. There were probably some I’d missed. I wouldn’t put it past Danny to have a lidar rig in the shrubs, something to help the system distinguish between cat burglars and house cats.

“The watchman from the data center,” I said. “That’s your guy. Probably not the mastermind, but he’ll be the key to it all.”

“Looks like they socially engineered him. Matched him on Tinder, messaged him, Oh, is that where you work? I’m just around the corner—want to meet me for a quick boba tea?”

“Catfished. Honey trap.”

He sighed. “Yeah. It was a good one.”

“You reported the theft?”

“The insurance company will pay for a new laptop, which, frankly, I don’t need, because I already have the spare I bought when I was going through the whole rigamarole to set up the air gap. But that’s not the valuable part.”

“No, it isn’t. How about the keys?”

“Yeah, how about them?”

“First, have you warned your source that you lost them, so they can tell Apple and Samsung and all the other manufacturers that rely on those secure enclave chips? And second, have you warned your users that their money isn’t safe?”

He looked over at Sethu, at Palo Alto, at his lemonade glass, and at the clouds in the sky. Long looks. The silence spoke volumes.

“How much money is the Trustlesscoin ledger worth, Danny?”

He looked me dead in the eye now. “About a billion.”

Copyright © 2023 by Cory Doctorow. Excerpted from Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow. Published by permission of Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger—the co-editor of Boing Boing (boingboing.net) and the author of Walkaway, a novel for adults, a YA graphic novel called In Real Life, the nonfiction business book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, and young adult novels like Homeland, Pirate Cinema, and Little Brother and novels for adults like Rapture of the Nerds and Makers. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate, is a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University, a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of South Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.

Book Review: The Jasad Heir by Sara Hashem

Arley Sorg | 902 words

The Jasad Heir
Sara Hashem
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9780316477864
Orbit, July 18, 2023, 400 pgs

I almost opened this review by saying I was in from the first page, but this wouldn’t quite be accurate. I was in from the preface, even before the beginning of chapter one. It’s just a snippet, but it works so damn well. Elegant writing paired with dark but lovely imagery won me over. I’m pleased to say this style continues throughout Sara Hashem’s Egyptian-inspired debut fantasy novel, The Jasad Heir. Yes, there are some of those usual kinds of phrases we see, especially in fantasy novels—the ones which are kind of perfect but perhaps overused—such as “skeletal trees,” but there are also beautiful new lines, marrying the familiar with the fresh, and providing a consistently lovely narrative flow.

One of Hashem’s strengths is placing the reader in the moment, a powerful tool for an engaging story. While immersing the reader in the story, Hashem is also filtering in lots of crucial information. You might not notice, but you are very quickly getting a sense of character, world, and some of the driving and underlying concerns of the protagonist.

“Sylvia” is in hiding under an assumed name. Her situation is not safe, and this is made even more relevant by Hashem’s knack for rendering a character who is both interesting and likeable. Sylvia is a member of an outlawed people, an idea which is always fertile ground for exploring the ways humans have historically mistreated each other. These are motifs to which Hashem adds welcome nuances. Sylvia also has an innate magic, like the rest of her outlawed people, but in her specific case, this magic was locked away years ago by well-meaning grandparents; and they aren’t around anymore to unlock her power. This means our protagonist has to figure things out and scrape by with her knife and wits. Sylvia does have a couple of friends—reluctantly, since being an outlaw means she may have to up and leave at any moment, and attachments are just going to distract her and hold her back—but she is markedly different from those around her in a number of meaningful ways. She sharply feels the kinds of things outsiders often feel. This otherness is leavened by the need to focus on survival; and, of course, that this “otherness” isn’t just about fitting in—it can get her killed.

The idea of magic being outlawed is not necessarily a new one. I don’t know when it started but it has become a fantasy trope, usually used as a device to develop an antihero, to create an immediate sense of tension and stakes, or to infuse a hero’s journey with a sense of righteousness. Even the Star Wars franchise delves into time periods where the Jedi are outlawed. Unlike TV series Obi-Wan Kenobi and many of the novels and stories that utilize this device, Hashem digs into the ramifications of a group of people being outlawed through her narrative, confronting what it means to criminalize a culture, and what it means to reframe their traditions and ways of life to suit that criminalizing agenda: “I was born to a place where magic meant joy. Celebration and safety.” Sylvia’s people have been murdered, her traditions wiped out, or coopted to become lost amongst the traditions of her oppressors—similar to the way the Romans wiped out and conquered different peoples, but stole their food, drink, technology, and even cultural practices, claiming them as their own (Romans not being unique in this practice, but an obvious example). Fantasy is often used to examine or discuss terrible aspects of our reality, and while Hashem’s excellent worldbuilding offers entertainment through imaginative and well-chosen details, it also offers thoughtful perspectives on specific issues, like these, which many readers will find both essential and timely. For example, what does it mean to break the law when your very existence is illegal?

Of course, everything changes, and this includes Sylvia’s circumstances. But Hashem excels at layering in plot elements and mysteries, and taking the story through transitions to open up the plot a bit further. Hashem finds the perfect balance of revealing enough to make the reader feel grounded in the narrative, and then introducing another level of intrigue or danger, which keeps the reader wondering, not to mention eager to find the answers. Sylvia as a character is smart, capable, determined, and as the book progresses, has the kind of difficult decisions to make that we want to see; as well as tangled emotional journeys to navigate, which makes for an even more satisfying story. The action is well-written and there’s plenty of it, and the ideas are crisp. The book does get bloody and loves to swim in the darkness. For my tastes, it’s perfectly dark, and perfectly bloody. This tone goes well with the intensity of the plot, the drama of the twists, and the skirmish of clashing emotions that comprise the complex internal journey of our wonderful protagonist. It’s a fun book, a great read for folks who enjoy fantasy fiction. Recommended!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine and a 2022 recipient of SFWA’s Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award. He is also a 2021 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: Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon by Wole Talabi

Aigner Loren Wilson | 440 words

Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon
Wole Talabi
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9780756418267
DAW, August 2023, 320 pgs

Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, Wole Talabi’s debut fantasy novel, is a captivating and entertaining story of a nightmare god and his succubus lover, Nneoma, pulling a heist across two worlds. The story follows Shigidi, a disenfranchised nightmare god working for the Orisha Spirit Company, as he serves out dreams that kill for those who pray to him. When he meets Nneoma, a succubus with a secretive past, they embark on a journey to break free from Shigidi’s obligations and debts.

Shigidi travels between spirit worlds and continents, giving the story’s setting a worldly and diverse feel. Each location, whether real or imagined, is crafted with specificity, bringing it to life. Shigidi and Nneoma encounter rival gods, ghosts, weavers of magic, and creatures from Nigerian folklore as they conduct spirit business and pull off their heist.

What I loved most about Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon is Talabi’s use of Nigerian mythology, spiritualism, and folklore. The incorporation of these elements into the story flawlessly blended with the action-packed heist fantasy. Talabi’s vivid descriptions of the settings, characters, and, especially, the way Shigidi weaves nightmares made the story easy to sink into. Some people might be thrown off by the story starting at the end and going back to the beginning, but to me, the structure of the story nailed the heist genre so well that it heightened everything.

I also grew to love Shigidi and Nneoma’s relationship and how each held a deep self-hatred that over the course of the story dissolved in the wake of their love for each other and desire to screw over the Orisha Spirit Company. Both characters are complex and flawed, but not in a pitiful way. It sorta just felt relatable. All the supporting characters and side ones are given the same care and development as Shigidi and Nneoma, too.

Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon is an impressive debut from Wole Talabi. With its blend of Nigerian mythology, anticapitalistic themes, and modern-day fantasy worldbuilding, the book is a must-read for fans of heisty fantasy thrill rides. Talabi’s writing style is engaging and immersive, and the book’s themes of revenge, self-discovery, and the power of belief are thought-provoking and timely.

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: Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle

Chris Kluwe | 760 words

Camp Damascus
Chuck Tingle
Hardcover / eBook
ISBN: 9781250874627
Tor Nightfire, July 2023, 256 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another review! This month we’re going to get pounded—ahem, we’re going to read a brand new offering from internet phenomenon Chuck Tingle, friend to buckaroos and ladybucks who look for love all over the world, only this time Mr. Tingle has something devilishly different up his sleeve: his debut horror novel, Camp Damascus.

Set amidst the sprawling splendor of Montana, Camp Damascus immediately presents us with the first-person perspective of our protagonist, Rose, a devoutly religious twenty-year old who seems to live a heavenly life in the town of Neverton. Surrounded by loving friends and family, avoiding anything more dangerous than root beer and punny Jesus t-shirts, and set to be set-up with a heart-throb boyfriend, Rose has everything she could ever want, both spiritually and physically.

Obviously, since this is a horror novel, Rose might have to deal with some problems.

The first thing I really enjoyed about Camp Damascus is that while there are plenty of elements of bodily horror (someone throws up a bellyful of flies, necks are snapped, flesh is flayed, et cetera) throughout the book, Tingle does an excellent job weaving in a layer of deeper, more insidious psychological horror beneath the pulpy violence. Camp Damascus, at its core, derives its true terror from what can best be described as “the banality of evil;” that all of the violence and depravity Rose faces isn’t due to any sort of devious mastermind or ancient monster, it’s just average people convinced that what they’re doing is right, no matter the cost to those who are suffering.

The second thing I thought was particularly well executed was Tingle’s balance between faith and skepticism. It would have been very easy to turn a story like Camp Damascus into an edgelord rant against organized religion simply because it’s an easy (and in many cases, well-deserved) target. And don’t get me wrong, Tingle doesn’t pull any punches, but there’s also a humble spirituality suffusing the second half of the book that I felt really balanced things nicely. While I don’t think any of the major churches are going to be approving this book anytime soon, it definitely carves out a space for those who truly believe but are still willing to question themselves.

Another part of Camp Damascus I have to mention, and this won’t surprise anyone who has read any of Tingle’s previous works, is that it is unabashedly and unashamedly queer. Without giving away any spoilers, the entire premise of the novel is an examination of the real-life evils (one in particular) modern-day religion has perpetuated against the queer community, and while some elements may be fantastical, the darkly beating heart of the matter is laid bare over and over again. Through Rose’s eyes we see the damage that families, communities, and individuals are willing to inflict in the name of “goodness,” whether it be as an active participant, or a bystander willing to look away. However, we also get to see the resilience of those who find a way to keep moving forward with their lives, and the new families they create, which I thought was beautifully done.

All in all, I felt Camp Damascus is one of those rare reads that accomplishes what it sets out to do on multiple levels. Tingle nails the outward trappings of the horror genre, gradually spiraling things out of control until it feels perfectly natural that the world is now upside down, but like all good horror, he also nails the social commentary he was aiming for without it feeling preachy or hamfisted. The characterization is deftly plotted, both for Rose and all the other people in the book, and maybe the scariest part of it all is that if you met one of the members of Neverton on the street, you wouldn’t even look twice. In fact, they’re probably out walking around in your town as you read this.

Read if: You have an innately curious mind; you’ve ever wanted to flamethrower a personal demon; you know love is real.

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: Kat Howard

Laurel Amberdine | 517 words

How did “One Heart, Lost and Found” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

This story had its roots in something I saw years ago, an article on the strangest things people had ever turned in to New York Subway lost and founds. (Caveat: this story originated so long ago, that I may not even be remembering the details of its origin story correctly. Do you think I can turn a lost inspiration into a lost and found?) Anyway, I remember there being a lost and found snake. And I decided I wanted to write a story about a weird lost and found. It took me a while to get it right.

Did you get stuck at any point while writing this? How did you get past that?

I did, yes! Or, well, not so much stuck, as I’d get to the end, and I knew or strongly suspected that it wasn’t right. I rewrote. I put it away. At one point, I put it away for so long I forgot about it. (Does that count as something in a lost and found?) But apparently, that was the thing I needed to do, because once I refound it, the revision process went very quickly, and I knew I had it right that time.

What is your writing space like? What do you like to have around for optimal creativity?

My current apartment is the first place I’ve lived that has a dedicated writing space (rather than my desk in the middle of the living room). I have a little den, and it’s bookshelves on all sides, and stocked full of notebooks and pens, and I love it. I believe in beautiful writing supplies and good scented candles and so you will find both of those here. There are also two cat beds, but Maeve can usually be found on the desk.

What led you into writing genre fiction?

Part of it was that was the kind of literature I’d grown up loving. But also, I love being able to push on and stretch reality, to make metaphors concrete. I think working in speculative fiction lets me play with language and meaning in a way that I particularly love, and find resonant and useful to work with. For me, it feels like I can put more in a story, and I love that.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

My latest novel, A Sleight of Shadows, just came out. It’s the conclusion of my Unseen World duology, and I’m very pleased to have it out in the world. I’m also working on a new novel, and that’s all I’m going to say about that, as I don’t really like talking about works in progress—superstition. If fans would like to dig into past works, they can find them on my website: kathowardbooks.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: Izzy Wasserstein

Laurel Amberdine | 879 words

How did “She Blooms and the World is Changed” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

Some of my stories have a pretty clear point of origin. This one has several that intermingle.

Despite being from a big family, I realized I hadn’t written many sibling stories, and I wanted to change that. I loved getting to explore the sisters’ relationship and follow how it changed and grew over the course of this story.

The plot grew out of my suspicion of colonization stories, and of the assumption—still prevalent in more science fiction than I’d like—that there’s a non-problematic way to colonize. And, while I admire the ethos of “leave no trace,” I also wanted to explore its limitations.

Most importantly for me, though, was the question of what we do when our options are limited because of choices others have made. When there are no good choices, how do we proceed?

Did you get stuck at any point while writing this? How did you get past that?

Several times! I think I have more drafts of this story than any other short fiction I’ve written. I tried it with different structures, with different timelines, different starting and end points. There were months where I set it aside, only to come back to it, hunting for solutions.

I think I got past blocks by letting time pass and listening to trusted beta readers, who believed in this story and helped me both with insight and support to keep pushing through. It’s amazing what it does for my motivation when someone I trust tells me a story needs to be finished.

Where are you in this story?

I’m an oldest sibling, trying to manage my own hopes and fears and also do right by my younger siblings. My stakes are much lower than those in this story, but the dynamic there is very closely borrowed from my own life in a way that’s rare in my fiction. And I think I’m also present in another way: as a teacher, I frequently find myself hoping that the role I play is to be an important supporting actor in my students’ lives. I’m not the hero of any tale, but I hope that I provide some help as their stories unfold.

Do you have any advice for other writers?

Just one bit of advice: write the stories that call to you. Try not to worry too much about following market trends or anything like that. Especially early in the writing process, what’s going to make your story work is that it’s your story, the one no one else can tell. When I started writing queer antifascist fiction (which is my brand, to the extent I have one), I didn’t know if it would matter to anyone but me. I’ve been delighted to know there are in fact readers out there who want that kind of story, but the truth is, the stories you see from me are the ones that I’m compelled to write.

Write the story that you need to write. I guarantee there are people out there who long to read it, even if they don’t know it yet.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I recently got to read an ARC of Iori Kusano’s Hybrid Heart, their debut novella. It’s amazing and unlike anything else I’ve read—the story of an isolated, surveilled, and abused idol/pop star trying to find autonomy and purpose in a near-future hyper-capitalist hellscape that is basically our world with disturbingly few additions. It’s deeply moving and it made me see life in new ways, which are among the best things I can say about a book. Pre-order it!

Speaking of pre-orders (and sharing with “She Blooms” a deep interest in the stories of sisters), Emma Törzs’s Ink Blood Sister Scribe is out this summer, and it’s a delight. It follows two sisters from a family who have been tasked with keeping safe a library of magical books. The story ranges across continents, yet always feels grounded in memorable characters. Plus there’s a dog and a cat! What’s not to love?

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I’m currently in the middle of drafting a science fantasy novel. I can’t say a lot about it, but it involves characters at the edge of a collapsing empire exploring a ghost ship that might be their salvation or their doom.

You can find a lot of my short fiction collected in All the Hometowns You Can’t Stay Away From, which came out in 2022 with Neon Hemlock Press. My debut novella, These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart, is forthcoming with Tachyon Press in 2024.

I also have work coming out in upcoming anthologies, including Android Press’s Fighting for the Future, Apex’s Robotic Ambitions, and Neon Hemlock’s Luminescent Machinations.

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: Wole Talabi

Laurel Amberdine | 1057 words

How did “Saturday’s Song” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I had many inspirations. First, I’ve always wanted to write a sequel to “Wednesday’s Story” (also first published in Lightspeed Magazine, back in 2016), which ends with Wednesday, one of the personified Days of the week, having committed a crime. I wanted to follow up on that. On the consequences of her actions. But since the purpose of the personified Days is to tell stories, I knew I needed a story for them to tell within that larger story. I didn’t want to return to my old trick of using another reimagined children’s rhyme to frame the larger story around and so I went with an original story about love and grief and parenthood and magic which also serves in some way as one of the background inciting incidents for my novel Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon who appears in this story as a supporting character. Anyone who has read Shigidi will probably find a thin, but deeper layer to his personality after reading this story. The story also borrows loosely from elements of both Yoruba mythology and traditional Bori practice, a spirituality and belief system from the people of Northern Nigeria which features possession by spirits. I wanted to highlight this somewhat lesser-known traditional belief system from the country and this seemed like a good story to do that.

Lightspeed Magazine was the first and only place I submitted the story, and I was extremely pleased that editor John Joseph Adams immediately accepted this bigger, and (I think) more ambitious sequel. Publishing the story here feels right, like returning home.

Is there anything you want to make sure readers noticed?

As I mentioned, “Saturday’s Song” is a sequel to “Wednesday’s Story” which itself was a sequel to another story called “Thursday” (first published in The Kalahari Review in 2014. So, I guess it’s becoming a series now. I might keep returning to this world until I’ve exhausted all the days of the week. I just want to make sure that readers pick up on the fact that all these stories are themselves about the nature and power of stories in both the text (as is probably clear from reading it) and in their origins. They are an attempt by me to write a story that feels like it delivers the strengths of the traditional oral and communal storytelling style I grew up with as well as include my own many literary influences from the work of authors like Kurt Vonnegut and Neil Gaiman and Kojo Laing.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I am inspired by many authors. You could say I’m influenced and inspired by almost every author I read. I already mentioned Vonnegut and Gaiman and Laing. I would certainly include Ursula K. LeGuin, Amos Tutuola, Isaac Asimov, Ben Okri, Carmen Maria Machado, Cyprian Ekwensi, John Steinbeck, Nnedi Okorafor, Philip K. Dick, Ted Chiang, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Sofia Samatar, Stephen King, Tade Thompson, Frederick Forsyth, Ken Liu, Cory Doctorow, and Lauren Beukes. Along with several others I am probably also forgetting.

I just started doing reviews for Locus Magazine last year and I read Flight From The Ages and Other Stories by Derek Künsken as well as Jackal, Jackal by Tobi Ogundiran for that. I also just completed Noor by Nnedi Okorafor and am now re-reading Exhalation by Ted Chiang whose short stories I find masterful.

Other than writing, do you have any other creative pursuits? What do you do to relax?

Oh yeah, I don’t know if they are creative pursuits but to relax, I love physical exercise. Especially boxing and kickboxing—mostly just bag work, no live sparring with people. I find it incredibly relaxing. I also really like running even though it’s hard. And I love scuba diving. I think it’s the closest we can come to being in outer space without actually going to outer space. The sense of floating, the pressure, the equipment required, the strange and wonderful and beautiful creatures that live under the sea, I really enjoy it all. Which is wild because I only learned to swim as an adult and started diving because I was, and still am, scared of water. But I like to face my fears. Now I am an advanced diver and also a certified rescue diver so if anyone ever runs into trouble on or below the surface of open water during a dive, I can help (I think).

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

Oh. Quite a lot actually.

Right now, I’m fully into the swing of things for the worldwide release of my first novel, Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon. I’m excited about that.

I’m editing a new anthology of stories set in the Sauútiverse, a fictional secondary world based on a blend of African cultural worldviews and inspirations that will be published in November this year.

I am also working on a new collection of short fiction that is due to be published next year in 2024. It’s not been officially announced yet so I can’t say what it’s called but if you enjoyed my first collection Incomplete Solutions, you’re probably going to like this one too.

And I am working on my second novel, a science fiction novel that takes place in Nigeria and South Africa which should be out in 2025 or maybe 2026. Readers can keep up with me on my blog or my Twitter (for as long as Twitter lasts anyway).

It’s going to be an interesting twenty-four months.

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: Timothy Mudie

Laurel Amberdine | 757 words

How did “Blood for a Stranger” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

As many readers surely noticed, the narrator’s name and the title have a certain connection—“Blood for a Stranger” is the name of a poetry collection by Randall Jarrell, probably most famous for his poem “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” which is a staple of high school poetry courses and a favorite poem of mine. I’ve always been appalled and fascinated by how people were both part of a team and yet swapped out like parts of a machine. Over time, that thought became more science fictional, and eventually grew into this story.

What led you into writing genre fiction?

I’ve loved reading genre fiction more than anything else since I was a kid, and yet when I was in school for writing, I sort of felt like I had to write “literary” fiction. At the same time, whenever I came up with an idea, my brain would take it in speculative directions. I would try to rein myself in and write straight non-genre fiction, but it was never as fun as the books and stories that I liked to read. Finally, I realized that it was counterproductive to write something that I wouldn’t want to read and decided to just go wherever my weird thoughts took me.

Is there anything you want to make sure readers noticed?

Odd as it sounds, I had a lot of fun writing the corporate-speak that MacLeish uses. While I haven’t worked in super-big corporations, that sort of language seems to have so penetrated all work spaces that it’s unavoidable. And it’s always eye-rollingly ridiculous. For this story, I tried to imagine how corporations would take advantage of being able to copy (and copyright) human consciousness, and yet I am sure that no matter what changes the empty buzzwords will remain the same.

Do you have any advice for other writers?

Get writer friends or join a critique group. Having people critique your work and critiquing others’ work is hugely helpful in developing your craft. If you’re in the sort of group where you are working with the same people a lot, it is especially helpful, I think, as you get a good sense about what you’re good at and what you need to work on. But by critiquing others, you get an even better sense of what makes a story work than just by having someone critique your work. For me, it’s also been very helpful to have recently joined a group where we each write a new story every month—I can be a lazy writer, so accountability is huge.

Other than writing, do you have any other creative pursuits? What do you do to relax?

Other than the usual pop culture things (movies, reading, video games), I love to cook. With two young children, it can be tough to get especially creative (lots of chicken fingers) and I usually can’t do anything that takes very long, but since I started working from home, I am able to cook more things that take a longer time, like roasts or stews. And in the summer, I love smoking meat. At least once a year I like to get a big brisket or pork shoulder that takes a solid day to cook, even if it means I need to get up overnight to make sure the temperature is holding!

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

In case my agent reads this, I will say that I’m working on a novel. Luckily, this has the benefit of also being true, as I’m currently outlining a new book. It’s going to be tricky in a fun way, with three interweaving storylines. I feel like I’ve finally cracked it, so I’m excited to start the actual writing of it very soon too. As for where else hypothetical fans can find my work, I have three other stories in Lightspeed, one of which (“Different People”) was podcasted on LeVar Burton Reads. I’ve also had stories recently show up in PodCastle, Fusion Fragment, Interzone Digital, and elsewhere. There’s a full list on my website! (timothymudie.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.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 208 words

Coming up in June, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Dominique Dickey (“Spaceship Joyride”) and Ruth Joffre (“Queen of the Andes”). We also have two terrific flash pieces: “Jaywalk the Stars” from Elad Haber and “Always Personal” by Rich Larson.

Plus, we have original fantasy by Sarah Grey (“And All the Fields Below”) and Deborah L. Davitt (“Philoctetes in Kabul”). We also have a flash story (“The Bone-Gatherer’s Lament”) from Wendy Nikel, and another (“Bestiary viventem”) from Kyle E Miller.

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with book reviews from our terrific review team. Our ebook readers will also enjoy a book excerpt.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

• • • •

Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got a veritable plethora of stories forthcoming. We’ve got work from the following authors coming up over the next couple of issues: Sandra McDonald, Scott Edelman, Everdeen Mason, Adam-Troy Castro, and Carlie St. George.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

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Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes more than 100 stories (about 700,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain!

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe for more information, including about third-party subscription options.

Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so.

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

• • • •

All caught up on Lightspeed? Good news! We also have lots of ebooks available from our sister-publications:

Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11 off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price).

Fantasy Magazine Ebooks & Bundles: We also have ebook back issues—and ebook back issue bundles—of Lightspeed’s (recently revived, other) sister-magazine, Fantasy. To check those out, just visit fantasy-magazine.com/store. You can buy each Fantasy bundle for $24.99, or you can buy the complete run of Fantasy Magazine— all 57 issues—for just $114.99 (that’s $10 off buying all the bundles individually, and more than $55 off the cover price!).

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

The Editors

We already offer ebook subscriptions as a way of supporting the magazines, but we wanted to add an additional option to allow folks to support us, thus we’ve launched a Patreon (patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams).

TL;DR Version

If you enjoy Fantasy, Nightmare, and/or Lightspeed, our Patreon page is a way for you to help support those endeavors by chipping in a buck or more on a recurring basis. Your support will help us bring bigger and better (and more) projects into the world.

Why Patreon?

There are no big companies supporting or funding our magazines, so they really rely on reader support. Though we offer the magazines online for free, we’re able to fund them by selling ebook subscriptions or website advertising.

While we have a dedicated ebook subscriber base, the vast majority of our readers consume the magazine online for free. If just 10% of our website readers pledged just $1 a month, the magazines would be doing fantastically well. So we thought it might be useful to have an option like Patreon for readers who maybe haven’t considered supporting the magazine, or who maybe haven’t because they don’t have any desire to receive the ebook editions—or who would be glad to pay $1 a month, but not $3 (the cost of a monthly subscriber issue of Lightspeed).

Though Fantasy, Nightmare, and Lightspeed are separate entities, we decided to create a single “publisher” Patreon account because it seemed like it would be more efficient to manage just one account.

Basically, we wanted to create a crowdfunding page where, if you enjoy the work Adamant Press puts out, and you want to contribute a little something to help make it easier for us to produce more cool projects, then our Patreon is the place to do that.

What Do I Get Out of Being a Patron?

Well, you get the satisfaction of helping to usher the creation of cool new short fiction projects into the world! Plus, the more support we get, the better we can make the magazines and compensate our authors and staff. By becoming a supporter via Patreon, you help fund our growth and continued publication of three award-winning magazines. Of course, if you’re already one of our ebook subscribers (thank you!), you are already supporting us. This is for those who prefer to read the issues each month on our free websites, or wish to support our efforts more generally.

By becoming a supporter, you are also bestowed a title, such as Dragonrider, or Space Wizard, or Savior of the World and/or Universe, thus making you instantly the envy of all your friends.

Thank You!

If you’ve read this far, thanks so much. We hope you’ll consider becoming a backer on Patreon. That URL again is patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams.

Thanks in advance for your time. We look forward to hopefully being able to make the magazines—and our other publishing endeavors—even better with the support of people like you.

About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

Managing/Senior Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Editor

Arley Sorg

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

John Joseph Adams

Assistant Editor

Laurel Amberdine

Editorial Interns

Mayookh Barua

Madison Brake

Reviewers

Arley Sorg

Chris Kluwe

Aigner Loren Wilson

Copy Editor

Luke Tolvaj

Proofreaders

Anthony R. Cardno

Devin Marcus

Webmaster

Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios

Associate Publisher

Christie Yant

Reprint Editor (Emeritus)

Rich Horton

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

The Editors

If you enjoy reading our Adamant Press magazines, you might also enjoy these works edited by our publisher John Joseph Adams:

ANTHOLOGIES

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: The End is Nigh (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: The End is Now (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: The End Has Come (with Hugh Howey)

Armored

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (with Karen Joy Fowler)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 (with Charles Yu)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 (with N.K. Jemisin)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (with Carmen Maria Machado)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 (with Diana Gabaldon)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 (with Veronica Roth)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022 (with Rebecca Roanhorse)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 [Forthcoming]

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live

Cosmic Powers

Dead Man’s Hand

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: Ignorance is Strength (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: Burn the Ashes (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: Or Else the Light (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

Epic: Legends of Fantasy

Federations

The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects

Lightspeed: Year One

The Living Dead

The Living Dead 2

Loosed Upon the World

Lost Worlds and Mythological Kingdoms

The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination

Operation Arcana

Other Worlds Than These

Oz Reimagined (with Douglas Cohen)

A People’s Future of the United States (with Victor LaValle)

Press Start to Play (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Robot Uprisings (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Seeds of Change

Under the Moons of Mars

Wastelands

Wastelands 2

Wastelands: The New Apocalypse

The Way of the Wizard

What the #@&% is That? (with Douglas Cohen)

NOVELS and COLLECTIONS

Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey

Wool by Hugh Howey

Shift by Hugh Howey

Dust by Hugh Howey

The Silo Saga Omnibus by Hugh Howey

Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey

Half Way Home by Hugh Howey

Sand by Hugh Howey

Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn

The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn

Questland by Carrie Vaughn

Retrograde by Peter Cawdron

Reentry by Peter Cawdron

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

Creatures of Charm and Hunger by Molly Tanzer

The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp

Gather the Fortunes by Bryan L. Camp

The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty

The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette

The Apocalypse Seven by Gene Doucette

In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead

Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

A Dark Queen Rises by Ashok K. Banker

The Blind King’s Wrath by Ashok K. Banker

Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth

Poster Girl by Veronica Roth

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear

The Conductors by Nicole Glover

The Undertakers by Nicole Glover

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.