TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 161 (October 2023)

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: October 2023

SCIENCE FICTION

Where the God-Knives Tread
A.L. Goldfuss

The Void Wyrm’s Guide to Devouring Stars
AJ Wentz

Excerpts from a Scientist’s Notebook: Ancestral Memory in Europan Pseudocephalopods
David DeGraff

FANTASY

Four Self-Care Secrets for a Long and Happy Life
Tina S. Zhu

Immortality Soup, Or, An Excerpt from the Cookbook of the Gods
Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe

A Small God
Jeff Reynolds

What You Are and the Wolf
Jae Steinbacher

EXCERPTS

Womb City
Tlotlo Tsamaase

NONFICTION

Book Review: Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas
Aigner Loren Wilson

Book Review: Paula Guran’s The Year’s Best Fantasy, Volume 2
Arley Sorg

Book Review: Generation Ship by Michael Mammay
Chris Kluwe

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe

A.L. Goldfuss

Jae Steinbacher

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 Luizishan / Adobe Stock

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

Editorial: October 2023

John Joseph Adams | 226 words

Welcome to issue 161 of Lightspeed Magazine!

This month we’re serializing A.L. Goldfuss’s SF novelette “Where the God-Knives Tread.” This two-parter is a delightful mix of mystery, space exploration, and archaeology. We also have two terrific flash pieces: “The Void Wyrm’s Guide to Devouring Stars” from AJ Wentz and “Excerpts from a Scientist’s Notebook: Ancestral Memory in Europan Pseudocephalopods” by David DeGraff.

If you’re looking for the recipe to a magical reading experience, don’t miss “Immortality Soup, Or, An Excerpt From the Cookbook of the Gods,” our first fantasy short story of the month, which is written by Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe. Jae Steinbacher remixes Little Red Riding Hood in their new story “What You Are and the Wolf.” Our flash includes “A Small God” by Jeff Reynolds and the very magical “Four Self-Care Secrets for a Long and Happy Life” by Tina S. Zhu.

Our book reviewers have been devouring and evaluating new books so they can bring you their monthly array of recommendations. As always, spotlight interviewer Laurel Amberdine has sat down and interviewed our short fiction authors so you can get better insights into their work and their processes. And our ebook readers will also enjoy a book excerpt from Tlotlo Tsamaase’s novel Womb City.

It’s another terrific month of SF/F fiction!

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 anthologies include Out There Screaming (with Jordan Peele), The Far Reaches (from Amazon Original Stories), 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.

Where the God-Knives Tread [Part 1]

A.L. Goldfuss | 7874 words

Editor’s Note: Instead of two original science fiction short stories this month, we have for you a single novelette (presented in two parts) by A.L. Goldfuss, which is about twice the length of a regular Lightspeed story. So, although you are getting one original SF story instead of two this month, you’re still getting about the same amount of fiction. We hope you enjoy this minor deviation from our usual offerings, and rest assured we will return to our regularly scheduled programming next month. —eds

When the ship’s scanners first chirped in the dead of night, Sien figured it was another misfire: light reflecting off asteroid ice, solar radiation, space dust. But xe still slid from xir berth into the chilly, cramped cockpit, eyes bleary as xe ran the numbers again. And this was no misfire.

Metal alloys, glass, carbon. Ratios ripped from a history book. The unmistakable signature of an ancient Teshiarr pleasureship.

“Shit,” Sien whispered, rubbing xir shaved head as the report sped by. Xe flipped on a series of switches to warm up the engines and punched open a comms link overhead.

“Jaks, I found it,” xe said. “I found Thousand Dancing Beetles.”

Jaks was next door; that was, she was in the same solar system. Her Preservationist research vessel, with its twin decks, stocked library, and kitchen automatics, hung over the only planet orbiting the cold star. From there Jaks could study scraps of old ephemera on her beloved screens and coordinate search efforts without spilling a drop of tea. It was a cozy setup.

Sien’s ship was a different story.

Sien tapped chunky keys to bring up a two-tone display, squinting at the bright submenus in the dark. Xir ship was economical, sacrificing windows for storage, and Sien needed the long-range scanners to paint a picture of the wastelands outside. A flat triangle representing xir ship lit up on screen, surrounded by rotating squares of various sizes. Asteroids, some larger than the ship itself, all lazily spinning and razor sharp.

It’s dangerous, Jaks had said, pouring Sien another cup of tea. But it’s important.

“Sien?” The comms buzzed, and Sien smacked the speaker absent-mindedly until the sound cleared. “Sien, are you sure?” Jaks sounded tired, but she would. It was the middle of the night for her, too.

“Have I ever let you down?” Sien said, then sent along the scanner report to prevent an honest reply. “It looks like your ghost planet theory was right. The ship was hiding, right here, in the Narrows.”

The Narrows was an asteroid field stretched over half of the uninhabited Fatagana solar system, composed of billions, if not trillions of ice-glazed rock shards. Even on Jaks’ research scanners it showed as white static, preventing any sort of deeper visuals. But Jaks was brilliant, one of the best Preservationists the program had ever produced, and she had theorized the existence of a planet hidden within the noise. The perfect crash site for a Teshiarr legend.

And with the larger Preservationist vessel unable to navigate the Narrows’ corridors, Sien had volunteered to conduct reconnaissance alone. Had insisted on using xir single person skiff.

Sien zoomed in on what the scanner had found: a hole in the asteroids. The absence of squares in a large space. And within that void, enough metal alloys, glass, and carbon for a small city. Sien initiated the ship’s navigation algorithm to calculate a trajectory through the sharp, dead seas. Xe was wide awake now.

“I knew it.” Jaks crackled through the speaker. The distance delayed communications, meaning Jaks had started speaking as soon as the scans flashed across her screens. “There was a mistranslation in the Quenco collection of Vinnali’s final papers. ‘Our enemies shall be slain at the seat of divinity’ didn’t mean Vinnali’s throne, but an actual home of the gods; and according to Vinnali’s journal, the Narrows was a sacred place.” Sien pictured Jaks leaning back in her rig, a triumphant smile on her face as she recited her arguments. “And with rumors of a rebellion, of course Vinnali would seek solace in a religious pilgrimage.”

Sien rubbed warmth back into xir fingers and stared at the console. The void in the asteroids stared back.

“Naturally, such a pilgrimage would be perfect cover for a military rendezvous.” Jaks’ voice dipped into her trademark pedantry. “Vinnali indulged his priests’ occultism when needed, but he certainly wouldn’t share such preposterous beliefs. No doubt this system has ties to ancient trade routes or an auxiliary station. Although, the planet’s signature is odd—”

“Jaks, you did it.” Sien punched over her incoming stream. “Your big brain found Thousand Dancing Beetles, the lost pleasureship of the Teshiarr Empire. Let’s leave the details to the Society scientists and just enjoy this moment.” Usually Sien would be content listening to Jaks unwind every step in her victory, but xe triggered the overhead compartment lights, eager to start packing. “Why don’t you make some of the good tea—” Jaks loved tea “—and I’ll gather more data about the planet.”

Sien closed the link, unwrapped a celebratory fish cake, and slid a tape into the cockpit’s deck. Moments later, xir ship filled with the tinny strings of a historical melodrama overture, followed by the commanding tones of the story’s narrator.

The Teshiarr Empire once studded the galaxy, its influence a silk brocade stitched into the very fabric of space. Its glorious cities jeweled its many territories, and within their shining walls thrived scientists, scholars, poets, and merchants. The Empire boasted a dazzling fleet of pleasureships, each its own floating city, and the flagship of this fleet was Thousand Dancing Beetles. But when the Empire was threatened, with trouble at the galactic gates, its Empress boarded Thousand Dancing Beetles and never returned.

The music swelled to a soppy crescendo before opening onto a scene of Empress Vinnali and his favorite consort hiding behind a curtain. Teshiarr dramas always centered around Empress Vinnali and his consorts, advisors, attendants, generals, and loyal citizens. The stories were full of palace romance and supernatural intrigue and always, always about the uniting force of the Teshiarri people. Sien knew every inevitable betrayal, every warbling coronation stanza, and could almost taste the sips of perfumed broth shared in the bustling agora.

Sien floated around the small, poorly-lit cabin, unzipping pouches to rearrange their contents as xe packed xir landing bags. Sien’s ship had essentially four functions: cockpit, berth, toilet, and airlock. It was a model similarly used by long-haul pilots or smugglers, and Sien was always knocking xir shoulders into storage pouches and banging xir knees on the toilet door. Still, even when docked with Jaks’ comparatively palatial vessel, Sien slept here.

Meet me on the bridge of my finest ship, Vinnali’s voice actor whispered in the background. All is not lost.

Of course, Thousand Dancing Beetles never returned, and the Teshiarr Empire crumbled under the weight of its absent crown. Its people scattered into other cultures, its ruins became the rootbeds of new civilizations, and its tantalizing secrets were lost to time. Which was where the Preservationists came in. And Jaks.

The console dinged and Sien kicked over to where the simple navigation display presented a viable route through the asteroids. Xe initiated the route and opened comms as the small ship hummed with movement.

“I’m on my way. I’ll be there in four hours, Narrows willing.”

Sien concentrated on finishing xir fish cake and was swallowing the last salty-sweet mouthful when Jaks crackled over the speakers.

“By yourself? But I’ve already instructed the automatics team to meet at your coordinates. They have all the base camp equipment.” There was a soft clinking behind Jaks’ voice. Whenever she was uncomfortable, Jaks paced in her rig like a big, beautiful crab, her slender metal legs connecting with the polished floors. She would prefer to come herself, would do so later, but endless environmental data piped through an army of ever-watchful automatics would have to suffice for now.

The last thing Sien wanted was babysitters.

“Look, this is the find of the millennium. Who’s to say Pando isn’t hot on our trail, with the latest and greatest field ships? Time is never on our side, and we both know what’s at stake.” Xir last sentence hung heavy on the wire, and a flush shadowed xir face.

Thousand Dancing Beetles, the last lost Teshiarr pleasureship, had housed vast chambers, lush gardens, and a wondrous grand hall. And in that hall, a treasure clothed in myth, which could tip the modern scales of power.

The Eye, carved from pure teshiarrite.

“All right, Sien, you win. But please be careful.” Jaks sounded soft, as though she was leaning into the mic. “There are more important things than a dusty shipwreck.”

Jaks couldn’t really mean that, but it didn’t matter. Sien had to get there first. Alone.

“Don’t worry, Jaks,” xe replied, with genuine warmth.

• • • •

Behold! Our Empress Undying
He anchors the light with our breath
He anchors the light with our flesh
Together, together, together
Together, together, together!

Seventy-sixth coronation song of Empress Vinnali Teshiarr
Preservationist Society, private collection

• • • •

The ghost planet was a dwarf planet or maybe a protoplanet, Sien didn’t know or care. What mattered was it had its own gravity and, surprisingly, an atmosphere. Xe could have even breathed without a helmet, if there had been more of it. And if it hadn’t been inhospitably cold. Still, this meant xir oxygen tanks could refill without lugging around heavy filters, and that was a stroke of good luck.

Sien was guiding xir ship through the hazy shroud of condensation when the scanners started pinging off multiple forms a hundred meters up from the surface. They were so skinny the scanners didn’t register anything until the ship almost clipped a wing, and Sien had to retreat and tread air while confirming the readings.

Plants. Very tall plants.

Sien had insisted on using xir ship for this work, so Jaks had insisted on some upgrades: solar panels for orbital charging, autonav for instant home routing, and an aftermarket catch-and-release beam. Sien rode the latter down to the surface, bundled in a refurbished Pando Industries vivosuit (a touching concession from Jaks) and carrying two bags of equipment. Here and there a plant would slice through the mist—thick, dark stalks—then swerve away again.

The ghost planet’s surface was hard beneath Sien’s boots and hidden by wisps of fog. Visibility wasn’t terrible—Sien had scouted through forest fires before—but the world was softened, a pane of frosted glass. Around xem rose the singular plant stalks, disappearing into the dark sky, and coupled with the mist they gave the distinct impression of being at the bottom of an ocean in a prehistoric kelp forest.

Xe drove a homing marker into the ground and activated it. The device would route xir communications back to Jaks and also anchor the ship to this location for retrieval. Useful for all sorts of spelunking. Sien clicked open comms.

“Established base. This place is like that Saturna graveyard with the outpost catacombs. You’d love it.” Xe flipped open a suit panel on xir forearm to examine the Teshiarr ship’s signature, timing the comms delay in xir head.

Finally, Jaks’ voice rang out inside Sien’s helmet. “The cemetery with the tall columns? Didn’t that place have booby traps? You almost lost a foot.” Jaks sounded calmer and more awake, although Sien doubted she had been able to go back to bed. Maybe some tea and breakfast. Sien liked that for her.

“Almost doesn’t count. I’ve got a lock on Thousand Dancing Beetles about five kilometers away. Check in later.” The beacon confirmed successful transmission, and Sien didn’t wait for a reply.

There was enough light from the distant pale sun to make out the smudge of a mountain on the horizon. The materials signature also came from that direction, so Sien used it as a visual guide and headed out.

Sien had been voidborn, grown to work on long-haul freighters with a small crew. Xe could choose three things: xir name (the color of soil in the kitchen herb garden), xir pronouns (same as the medic, a wetborn dreamer who wanted to see the stars), and xir bunk position (there was only one free). Ideally the freighter crew would have become xir family unit over time; but two cycles into xir contract the small freighter fleet had been bought out by Pando and everyone but the pilot replaced with automatics. So it was at a backwater station bar, half into a bottle of PanJu, that Sien first met Jaks.

Jaks rolled up beside Sien’s table—hands folded on a blanket across her lap, prissy brooch on her sweater, hair perfect—and nodded at Sien’s physique. “Freelance deckhand? I’m in need of some hired help.”

Sien, less than three cycles out of the tube and raw with emotions xe didn’t understand, responded: “Oh? Can’t reach the top shelf?” Followed quickly by “Ow! Fuck!” as Jaks ran over Sien’s toes with the edge of her chair’s tread.

“The bartender says you’ve been in this seat for almost two weeks, drinking and moping. A voidborn deckhand whose contract was bought out by Pando and now doesn’t have a bunk or purpose. But I have a purpose for you.” She patted the arm of her chair with a smooth, dark brown hand. Sien’s own hands were a scuffed beige, the color of cargo holds. “I’m a scholar whose time is best spent in study, not lugging heavy equipment through the mud. And you seem well-suited to lugging.”

Sien wiggled xir toes in xir boot; nothing was broken. “I can lug, carry, stack, chop, heft, fix, punch, and run. And I’ve got better things to do than be your butler. Tomorrow a new freighter rolls in, and I’ll be heading out on it.”

Jaks’ hand shot out past Sien’s bottle and snatched the tape case off the table, nonplussed by Sien’s grunt of surprise. “Looks like you’re well-equipped for a freighter ride. Book Twelve of The Teshiarrite Moon? Isn’t that the one with the three-part opera? You must be really desperate for escape.”

“Give it back.”

“All those stories of community bonding probably fill a certain gap, don’t they? You picture yourself wandering the annexation gardens, uncovering palace secrets, and reporting to join like a good citizen?”

“Give. It. Back.”

“I think we can help each other.” Jaks set the case back on the table and tapped it with a polished nail. “I’m part of the Preservationist Society, and I’m recovering Teshiarr artifacts before Pando Industries claims them. I’ll teach you everything I know about the Teshiarr Empire: language, customs, history. The real Empress Vinnali. I just need a deckhand to make the work go faster, so we can beat Pando to the artifact sites.” She drew her finger across the table as though checking for dust. “Besides, there can be truth in myth, and having someone familiar with those provincial stories may prove useful.”

Sien retrieved the case and tucked it in xir jacket pocket. Speaking to this woman was like taking a face full of barbs, but it was also the most conversation Sien had enjoyed in days. “Preservationist Society? You mean those pompous anarchists raising a fuss about Pando’s expansion?” Pando had started inserting public service announcements about the group during melodrama breaks. “Pando has the best ships, the best tech, the best routes. They even have something like this—” xe nudged Jaks’ chair tread with xir boot “—but better. So why not make your life easier?”

Jaks’ eyes were steady, but something worked at the corner of her mouth. “I like my chair. I designed it. I programmed it. It was made by a wonderful craftsman to my specifications. Pando could never match it.”

She straightened on her throne and stared Sien down as xe forced xemself to take a casual sip of the thick, sour PanJu. There was something about this woman, an elegant confidence, that pulled Sien toward her event horizon.

“So, why do you need me? Can’t your Society give you a full crew to go search through the trash?”

Jaks glanced at the table—a small hint of vulnerability—then raised her steady gaze again. “Pando’s reach has caused the Society to consider a new direction, and they are looking to partner with the corporation in exchange for research time with certain artifacts. They are giving me some support, but nothing official. I’m on my own.”

Now that was a predicament Sien could understand, even though xe had nothing in common with this scholar and her effortless poise. Sien dug a nail under the PanJu bottle wrapper and kept xir voice light.

“So, you want to rope a stooge into a race around the galaxy to try and beat an industrial powerhouse at its own game? When your own people only feed you scraps? Good luck with that.” Sien steered xir eyes away to pretend anything in the noisy station bar was more interesting than the woman at xir table, but the deception failed. Jaks smirked and leaned in.

“Empress Vinnali’s thirty-first consort kept a diary of their trysts. I have a copy.” She backed her chair away from the table, but turned around to add: “Dock sixteen. Gate A. See you in the morning.”

On the ghost planet, the comms link clicked on with a rasp of static.

“Don’t get cocky down there.” Jaks said. “Send environmental readings to the automatics team when you get back from reconnaissance. And Sien, take pictures. For me.”

Sien had several sassy replies, but said none of them. The communication delay meant they had to converse in chunks, and anything could be potentially recorded for posterity. Best to wait until xe had something official to report.

Sien paced xemself, alternating bags between shoulders and pausing now and then to relax xir knees. Xe tried to stay in shape, but resistance band training in a closet of a ship could only do so much. The ghost planet’s low gravity was doing most of the work.

The alien kelp stalks stretched up into the fog like unlit lamp posts, and the mountain ahead seemed bigger than xe remembered. Or perhaps the ghost planet was smaller than xe had realized and the proportions were off. Either way, it loomed through the mist, a sharp scrape of gray.

Sien sucked cool water through a tube by xir chin, the bitter edge of vitamins coating xir tongue. It was a cocktail of electrolytes measured out to xir exact needs, like everything else with the vivosuit. The vivosuit cooled some muscles, warmed others, massaged others still. It was constantly measuring, evaluating, and mediating, and Sien did xir best not to think of it as a writhing organism encasing xir body. It was wholly mechanical, but there was something distinctly organic in its rhythmic pulsations.

The vivosuit, as with the catch-and-release beam and the bank of scanners Jaks refused to use, were all proprietary patents of Pando Industries. The shipping company had been nothing special, one of many available options, until about seventy cycles ago, when it started churning out innovative equipment. First the designs supported Pando Industries exclusively, then it sold last-cycle’s models to competitors, then it bought the competitors. Now it was a galactic behemoth.

Jaks despised Pando and was constantly listing its sins, such as cutting off low population areas to streamline trade routes or discontinuing a specific type of meat substitute so consumers had to adjust. Sien was sympathetic; but, having been grown to work on freighters xemself, xe couldn’t really fault Pando for following the money. Besides, Pando was also leading a revival in Teshiarr aesthetics and had published all the melodramas in Sien’s collection. Hard to stay mad in the long run.

The panel on Sien’s arm pinged and vibrated with an increasing frenzy. Data flew up the embedded screen: composition percentages, estimated age, depth, height. An alien wind rustled away the curtain of mist, and Sien stopped in xir tracks.

The mountain rose above xem. It wasn’t a mountain at all.

“Vinnali’s gilded foot,” xe swore.

The colossal ship slashed through the sky in sweeps of gunmetal black, a tangle of impossible angles that had gouged a scar through the rocky ground stretching back to the horizon. The ship’s exterior still shone with a polished gleam, right down to where the hull disappeared into the ghost planet’s surface and a craggy pile of debris marked the point of impact. And where the cold sun touched the void of metal, spidery designs flowed, silvery and thin. Recognizable patterns and motifs from Jaks’ endless lecture slides.

Thousand Dancing Beetles slept in its silent grave.

A gentle alarm sounded in Sien’s ear signaling xir heart rate had increased, and a fan on xir back started to whirr to speed up oxygen processing. If xir readings reached a critical level, the vivosuit would notify the research vessel.

Sien steadied xir breath and got to work. Xe dropped another beacon into the ground as a retrieval mark for xir ship and activated it while consulting aerial reports. The panel scanner indicated the Teshiarr ship was so large that an external inspection on foot would take well over a day, time Sien didn’t have. But there was an area by the debris pile that was blacker than black, and xe carefully climbed the small boulders, pulling the Preservationist labeled bags in xir wake.

The impact had split the smooth hull into a jagged mouth, its lips softened by swirls of fog. The mouth curved around the bow in a grin longer than Sien’s ship and tall enough that xe only had to crouch slightly to step inside. Which xe did, after resting xir hand on the smooth metal to pause for breath but not thoughts.

Sien had joined Jaks’ expedition for the money, intending to hop onto the next real crew whenever Jaks stopped for supplies. That had been over ten cycles ago, and in that time the pair had explored lost Teshiarr ruins sleeping under bustling cities, camped in cave systems tracking down a rumor, and split many packets of soup while waiting for the next Preservationist ration drop. Jaks had filled every slow moment with lectures about Empress Vinnali, the linguistic spread of the Teshiarr diaspora, and the endless mistakes in Sien’s beloved melodramas. Somehow, the freighter crew calls had always appeared halfway through a lecture thread, and Sien had always missed the next ship-out.

Now xe stood on the bridge of Thousand Dancing Beetles, the showpiece of the Teshiarr pleasure fleet. The cavernous chamber bubbled overhead into windows not visible from the outside, letting in weak daylight onto the criss-crossed levels of skyways stretched across the open space. Everything, including the skyways, was a polished black, like lashings of volcanic glass, but a closer look revealed flush panels and gossamer circuits.

It was the largest room Sien had ever been in, larger than any cargo hold or shipping dock, all surfaces seamless and alien smooth. Sien’s life was a clunky hodgepodge of claustrophobic shuttles, second hand parts, and rusted right angles, and the sheer height of the bridge’s ceiling threatened xir surefooting. Every curve and eddy of the glossy walls shocked the senses, disorienting and impossible.

The mist had thinned inside, but still nipped at Sien’s heels and made the thought of crossing the expanse treacherous. Xe retrieved a small fan from the bags. Usually meant to clear away dust from entombed artifacts, it made excellent work of carving a path through the fog as xir bootsteps echoed off the curved walls.

Small holes dotted the sides of the great room, and Sien’s eyes slid over them several times before xe realized what they were. Most dramas called them joining stations, but Tears of the Empress called them soul alcoves, which Sien preferred. They were a fixture of Teshiarr society, both in Sien’s dramas and Jaks’ historical texts. Teshiarr citizens used soul alcoves at least once a day as part of a communal ritual, although specifics had been lost to time. Still, any decent drama would have a scene where Empress Vinnali shared an alcove with his closest advisor and learned they were secretly in love with him.

Sien stood in the center of the bridge chamber and snapped photos with the camera interface inside xir helmet. When this ship had been a living, breathing city, these skyways would have teemed with citizens taking in the sights or waiting their turn in the alcoves. How wonderful it must have been to walk among them, to be a citizen, to have a place. Now it was only Sien, alone.

Sien exhaled and the vivosuit ate xir steam. Jaks was a strident frump who insisted on archaic academic software for all their equipment and paid twice as much for tea and vacuum seals to avoid Pando partners. She never pronounced Teshiarr terms the same as Sien’s dramas and always used years instead of Pando Standard Cycles. She was an acquired taste, astringent on any palate. And right now, more than anything, Sien wished she was beside xem on this beautiful bridge.

Sien sent the photos and moved on.

• • • •

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION]

Purple-black stone measuring 3 cm square. It is perfectly smooth on its surface with no evidence of tool marks.

[IMAGE CAPTION]

Teshiarrite chip recovered from Teshiarr mural during storage vault remodel on Dratuk Second. Spectroscopic analysis of chip resulted in unexpected backscatter. After several weeks of experimentation, it seems the stone holds data sequences that can be reverse engineered into digital media. Linguistics is researching the cipher used in the recovered text, but the illustration appears to be some sort of environmental suit.

Pando Industries, secure archives

• • • •

The ship’s belly was a sleeping volcano, all shiny black tunnels yawning into large bubbled chambers, slick as spilled ink. And everywhere the walkways, winding up and down, with no railings to stop Sien from tumbling over the side. The ship had landed blessedly level, leaving few pockets where Sien had to lean into the grip of xir boots. But it would be downright treacherous for Jaks, her rig legs slipping on the glassy floors, and a stab of guilt zinged through Sien whenever xe transmitted more photos. Hopefully Jaks was still enthralled.

Sien trudged through the ship, pit sweat lapped up by the vivosuit lining. Past the bridge chamber the fog had dissipated, so xe had exchanged xir fan for flares that xe tossed into the darkness to paint the pristine ruins red. Here was perhaps a mass sleeping chamber and over there perhaps a public bath. There was no map on file for Thousand Dancing Beetles, but the archives had diagrams for other Teshiarr ships, and Sien occasionally overlaid them onto xir visor to judge xir route to the grand hall. Xe would have a long trek back with xir prize.

The conservatory appeared roughly halfway to xir destination, right as Sien was gritting xir teeth against the rusty red pain in xir knees. Xe dumped the duffel bags at the entrance with a small groan and leaned on the wall for a moment to take in the whole room.

Gardens had been a focal point in Teshiarr ships, for practical and aesthetic reasons. The greenery supplemented oxygen recycling while providing refuge from a long day of pleasure. Hundred Laughing Foxes reportedly had a conservatory five times as large, used for competitive hunts, and Sixty Weeping Turtles had installed an actual swimming pool. Even Screaming Shrew, the military shuttle from Tears of the Empress, had a room with some potted ferns. Jaks had told Sien there was no shuttle on record with that name, but that didn’t matter. It existed in Sien.

(And Jaks had only mildly protested the limp seedlings Sien brought back from traders to arrange in Jaks’ study. Had only complained the first few times Sien interrupted her reading to water one pot and rotate another. Had used it as a springboard for her lecture titled Teshiarr Assimilation via Botanical Cultivation, one of Sien’s all-time favorites.)

The conservatory was a welcome shock of pale floor and straight lines. Long ceramic tiles plated paths wandering through what were once raised flower beds, open green spaces, and shaded nooks. Now anything living was long-dead, freeze-dried and petrified. Sien had expected everything to be piles of dust, gone to the ages, but something in the combination of frigid atmosphere and alien bacteria (or lack thereof) had slowed decomposition. Everything was dead, yes, but it was still possible to pick out the black, emaciated trunks of trees and the dried-out snakes of vines on the ground.

Sien had a mission—the Eye slept deeper in the ship—yet xe couldn’t help a brief detour through the winding paths. At one point, this garden would have been subtropical and lush, with greenery so thick it blocked visitors from seeing around the next corner. Even now it had a sculptural beauty, like an art installation or old colonial cemetery.

As Sien explored, xir visor caught the Teshiarr glyphs on conservatory signage and translated them before xir eyes. “Crimson Fan Shrub” claimed a lump of twisted branches. “Shimmering Fern from the Waterfall” was a puff of brown lace. Everyone knew Empress Vinnali had hailed from a failing, barren outpost, which meant every plant in here was a prize of annexation. It had been Teshiarr tradition to let the prevailing military commander rename their favorite finds once they returned home in glory.

At the center of the conservatory curled sweeping white walls with person-sized scoops bitten out of them. Soul alcoves. Sien placed a hand above one of the egg-shaped impressions and leaned in for a better look. There was a shelf two-thirds down to sit upon and what was perhaps an indentation for a head above. Swirls of filaments in that odd script glinted dull against the pale wall.

No one knew exactly how Teshiarr joining had worked. It was present in every level of recovered literature—poems, songs, coronations—but had never been recreated. Preservationists knew the Teshiarr lived to join, did so at least once a day, but the actual mechanism and benefit remained a mystery.

But a chair was a chair, and Sien needed a rest.

Xe ducked into the immaculate alcove and sat on the flat seat with a grunt of relief. A tube in the vivosuit delivered berry-sweet sludge to xir waiting tongue, while hidden rollers worked on aching thighs and cooled swollen joints.

The state of the vegetation really was a marvel, down to the brown, curling petals of a complicated flower (“Sun Station Lily”). What leaves remained were completely intact, with nothing marred by alien bug bites or winds. Even the seed puffs dangling from elegant stalks retained their wisps of fluff. Which highlighted a glaring omission.

Sien opened a comms link.

Closed it.

Flipped open the panel on xir arm and typed in a query. Narrowed xir eyes.

Thousand Dancing Beetles had a passenger manifest of one hundred thirty-one thousand. Records from the time indicated a collection of priests, palace attendants, and various civilians aboard during the ship’s last voyage. Yet, despite an obvious collision on a distant planet, there were no corpses. No cairns of bones lining the pristine hallways. No piles of clothing or long-dried stains.

Alarming thoughts flickered in and out of focus, but Sien had trained for deep space stress. True, there were irregularities, but that was a puzzle for Jaks to untangle. For now, Sien needed to lean back into the strangely ergonomic alcove and rest a moment. The sweet nutrient sludge was already at work buttressing cartilage and tendons, absorbing lactic acid, and supplying much-needed protein. Xe would be headed to the Eye soon. Xe would be back on track.

The alcove seat cradled Sien’s body, and xir eyes fluttered once, twice, then closed.

• • • •

The Terkal subsystem had been a spit spray of somewhat habitable planets where one could find a type of rock useful for polishing industrial parts. The mining outpost had kept the subsystem on extended shipping maps up until the overworked miners drilled too deep and unleashed toxic gas into the settlement, which had to be abandoned. The noxious gas still hung on the air, requiring an env suit to even touch down, and had eaten away at the town buildings’ smooth exteriors.

So, of course Jaks had them pressing into the sloping cave systems at the height of storm season.

“One of the survivors described unusual patterns on the stone right before they hit the gas reservoir. Mind you, no one was asking about Teshiarr ruins two-hundred years ago, so the insurance report stops there.” Jaks spoke over the comms link in Sien’s helmet, and the lack of echo from the cave walls made the whole scene feel flat and unreal. “It’s a small note, and this place is tucked so far away that I doubt Pando has been here yet.”

“Lucky us.”

“Lucky I enjoy reading administrivia from folded business ventures.”

Jaks was in front, picking her way down the stone tunnel in her new rig. Her beloved chair—the one she had once glided over Sien’s toes—had finally sighed beyond repair, and the artisan who made it had closed shop. So Sien had carted home a Pando model after it mysteriously tumbled off the back of a cargo ship into a pile of rugs. It was light and dexterous, the very latest in Pando mobility technology, and Jaks hated it.

Sien wasn’t sure what was worse about this expedition: the vacant domiciles above with their pitted doors and dusty plates, or the endless rock tunnels below illuminated through overhead shafts as a constant reminder of how deep down they’d gone.

“How far do you want to scout today, boss?”

“As far as we can. And don’t call me ‘boss.’”

“Doc.”

“Deckhand.”

“Doctor Ephendra Jaks.”

“Sien?”

“Ma’am?”

“How many times—” A beeping on Jaks’ arm panel cut her off. She flipped it open and paused, silhouetted by a beam of overhead sunlight. “Ship says there’s an electrical storm coming. Fast.”

“Isn’t that a feature of this place?”

“It’s a feature that will disrupt our link to the surface, possibly fry our env suits, and cause a cave-in if it hits the sun shafts with the right resonance.”

“Right. Where to then?”

“Deeper. The first checkpoint is up ahead.”

They picked up the pace, Jaks scurrying on her many metal legs and Sien humping the equipment bags fast as xe could. Preservationist env suits were dead things, no preternatural comfort systems to cool and massage. They were basically bags of warm air, so Sien was sweaty and breathless by the time they reached the old encampment.

“We’ll ride it out here,” Jaks said, flipping on her headlamp. The light shafts ended as the tunnel widened into a hollow filled with the shambling remnants of mining carts, pulleys, drills, and sleeping tents. Tucked at the edges of the shadows lay the desiccated lumps of the miners left to rest forever.

“Cozy.”

“It’s not ideal. Put down those bags before you keel over.”

Sien turned to comply when the cavern filled with a mournful sound, the low moaning of high speed winds whipping across the many light shafts piercing the tunnels beyond. The cave groaned, heaved, and whistled as the giant hollow breathed through cracked ribs.

“Two Groaning Bovines.” Sien settled in among the bags. “Remember that one? From Sacrifice of the Empress?” Jaks didn’t answer, but Sien was used to her moods. Xe broke out xir best melodrama narrator voice. “Vinnali Teshiarr, Empress of the Glorious Tapestry, slid down the side of the great mountain. His skin was bloodied and his fingernails broken, yet still he climbed. Suddenly, a voice called out from the ether. ‘Little Empress!’ it said. ‘I am Two Groaning Bovines. A god in another realm. I can carry you in my mighty arms to the very summit that you seek, if only you bring me forth. I need flesh to house me and spirit to anchor me. Then I am at your command.’ Vinnali considered the god’s words, and—”

“Likely an allegory for geothermal activity.” Jaks was inspecting the cavern around them.

“Right, of course. And Twelve Sprinting Salamanders is an allegory for noodle slurping.” Sien mimed slurping down a big bowl of salamanders, which would have earned an exaggerated eye roll and reluctant smirk across the dinner table. But Jaks was focused on a stack of safety harnesses and the shriveled corpse beside it.

“They’re myths, Sien. Tall tales the Empress allowed to exist because they suited his purposes and provided a united cultural touchstone. There are no god-guardian sentinels haunting the hidden corners of space.”

“Yes, yes, I know. I mean, Empress Vinnali didn’t actually kill—”

“How do you know?” Jaks looked at xem. Then, after a moment: “Sometimes, Sien, you care too much.”

Jaks’ tone was terse and strained, more so than usual on expeditions. She paced in the dark on her many slender legs, a mesmerizing display that also signaled worry.

“How long do you think the storm will last?” she asked, and it clicked. Sien had plopped out of xir pod twelve cycles ago, teenaged body ready to work, blank mind ready to comply. Jaks was wetborn and had spent over forty years touching her own skin whenever she chose. She didn’t want to be stuck down here all night in an env suit.

“Probably not long. So, what do you think we’ll find down here? Fully-functional soul alcoves? Vinnali’s secret throne? A note from Pando saying, ‘We give up. Enjoy the old shit.’?” Prompting Jaks into a lecture was the best way to steer her from worry. But instead she kept tapping her legs, and Sien’s headlamp cast their shadows into a giant spider web on the stone wall.

Jaks stopped pacing. “I think Pando is getting its invention designs from teshiarrite artifacts. I think they discovered a cache seventy years ago—or longer—of blueprints stored in the teshiarrite chips. And that’s why they suddenly have vivosuits and catch-and-release beams and suspension pods that don’t leave you catatonic. That’s why they’re suddenly digging for artifacts not even the Preservationists cared about. They’re rebuilding Teshiarr technology piece by piece, and it’s made them rich.”

Jaks’ visor lights didn’t offer much definition, basically a mouth and two black holes for eyes, but she was worried and dead serious. Sien wasn’t sure where to begin.

“Well, that’s—I mean—why would you think that?”

Jaks tilted her helmet with the same confidence that had drawn Sien toward her back in that station bar. “Because I’ve done it myself. Two days ago.”

“What! Jaks, that’s amazing! You have to tell the Society.”

“I have. They don’t care.”

“How can they not care? Don’t they understand how much money—”

“We’re Preservationists, Sien. We preserve. We don’t exploit.”

The cold cave floor numbed Sien’s butt through the env suit. “Then let them worry about it. Jaks, we’re in a hole in the ground surrounded by corpses. For what? The hope of finding some chunk of teshiarrite full of . . . soup recipes? Dance moves? Is this really how you want to spend your life?”

“Of course not!” Jaks threw up her hands, and the front two legs of her rig copied the motion. “I was top of my class, promised a full staff and an office in the central stacks! The universe is endless, life is finite, and there is so much to know. But what Pando is doing with these artifacts . . . it’s too much unchecked power in one place. Nothing good ever comes from that. So we must beat Pando at this game, because it’s the right thing to do.”

Jaks tucked her hands back onto her lap as though she had a blanket there, and for several minutes there was nothing but the crying of the storm outside. Preservationist env suits were awkward, bulbous outfits, but Jaks had never looked so small. Sien wanted to scoop her into a hug, but also not impose, but also leave her here and go punch every Preservationist in the face, so xe did nothing.

Jaks straightened in her rig. “Sien, we’re going to wait out this storm. We’re going to go back to the ship. And I’m going to show you what I’ve been working on in the Quenco translation of Vinnali’s final papers. Because, if I’m right, it will be the most important thing we’ll ever do.” Her visor light outlined the determination in her jaw. “I need you with me, Sien.”

The event horizon again. Sien gave the only answer xe could.

“I’m with you, Jaks.”

• • • •

A white-hot thread shot between Sien’s ears, and xe flailed out of the alcove back into the sepulchral conservatory chamber. The dizzying pain gave everything auras, and even the joining station appeared to glow with an ethereal purple light. But after a moment xir head cleared, and the soul alcove was once again a dark hollow.

Sien had been thinking about—something—important and sad. But it eluded xem now, a crumpled span of cassette tape. Xe had sat down in the alcove and must have dozed off before a hypnic jerk woke xem up. And xe had never been good at holding onto dreams.

Sien paused in the silence, flexing xir fingers and toes, waiting for xir oxygen tank fans to settle, then broke away from the soul alcoves and strode through the other side of the garden toward an odd gloom beyond the petrified trees.

Nothing made sense on this wreck. The jewel of the Empress’s pleasureships stocks itself with occultists, priests, and riffraff for a voyage to the Narrows? There had been no Teshiarr outpost here, no city known to any Preservationist accounting. The only mention of this star system was in fringe religious texts, as a land of sentinels. A land of gods. One of the many sacred points in the galaxy.

Despite Jaks’ best efforts, all Sien really cared about was the folklore behind xir many melodramas. A certain Teshiarr sect had believed in mysterious god-guardians dwelling in an invisible layer of space. At least, that was what Preservationist scholars could piece together from myths and decayed rhymes. Even by Teshiarr standards it was an ancient belief, the annexation of a culture older than even Empress Vinnali himself. But it had a mysterious ring to it that the opulent Teshiarr empress had loved, and the names of those sentinels had bled into common curses, fabric colors, and even ships. Their designs had been stitched into shawls, laid into murals, and painted over doorways. Hundred Slashing Stars. Twelve Choking Raccoons. Thousand Dancing Beetles.

Why had this ship crashed?

Sien slipped in something and lurched awkwardly, grasping at air until xir hands found the powdery branches of a petrified tree. It burst into dust at the assault but broke xir fall enough that xe merely stumbled, vivosuit intact.

Xe whirled around to inspect the slick section of floor. It was coated with a dark substance, simultaneously dry yet greasy under xir boot. The mobile spectrometer in xir helmet scanned and threw up its best guess—odd percentages and readouts—but definitely organic. Tree sap? No—

Blood. A large puddle of blood.

A chill slid down Sien’s spine, and xir oxygen tank fans whined gently. Xe wasn’t a stranger to death; it came hand-in-hand with exploring ruins and excavating accident sites. But those deaths usually made sense, such as the miners in Terkal or the cartographer in the decommissioned subway. People who were in the wrong place at the wrong time and died more or less in one piece. But a puddle of blood stretching across a courtyard was different. It seemed intentional.

And then there was what lurked behind xem. The wrongness through the trees.

This side of the conservatory, with its tiered garden plots and constructed streambed, vanished into a massive crater in the floor.

Sien tapped the sharp edge with the toe of xir boot. It wasn’t crash damage. The floor dipped downwards into the chasm, not upwards from impact with the ghost planet. Something had struck from within the conservatory—within the ship—and left deep gouges in the tiles and wall on its way through the hole.

And on the wall, marred by whatever could scratch Teshiarr metal, something written in torso-high glyphs.

Sien snapped an image, cleared xir throat, and clicked on comms.

“Jaks, I’m sending you a photo of some writing. The auto-scribe can’t figure it out; guess Pando’s language libraries could use a patch. If it’s Vinnali’s long-lost love poems, don’t forget I found it first.”

Xe clicked off comms and the silence clung to xir fingertips. The conservatory stretched out with the twisted graves of forgotten annexations, the floor bruised by piles of bark dust. It was cold in a way not even the vivosuit could fully mollify and swiped at Sien’s elbows and toes. The only warm place in the universe was Jaks’ study, with the rescued plants and cups of tea.

Sien turned back toward xir duffel bags to find an alternate route to the Eye.

Xe had a job to do.

Fuck this place.

• • • •

Meet me on the bridge of my finest ship. Our enemies shall be slain at the seat of divinity, where the god-knives tread, and I will deliver the sacrifice by my own hand. Gather the loyal, the devout, the desperate, the abandoned, and let them repay the Empire for its kindness . . .

Empress Vinnali’s final papers
Quenco translation

• • • •

Every Teshiarr metropolis, town, and hamlet had featured an agora, the community centerpiece for shopping, conversing, and joining. It was where one received their daily meals, heard news from leaders, and reported to communal soul alcoves. In each throne city, the agora had been a grand bazaar at the foot of the palace spire. On Hundred Singing Eels it had been the public baths and on Seven Darting Hawks the wrestling arena. On Thousand Dancing Beetles, it was the grand hall.

Sien stepped onto a balcony and thought for a moment xe had stepped outside. Overhead was the pale gray of the planet’s sky, fringed with streaks of kelp stalks like the lashes of a giant eye. But it was an illusion: the entire hall was domed in the same polarized glass material as the windows on the bridge. The effect was impressive. In space it would have seemed as though you could skip too high and drift away into the nearest nebula.

The hall was vast and felt as though one could fit the rest of the ship inside it. Each side had an arched doorway topped with a fanned balcony and walkways draping down to the floor. Framing the center ballroom ran gleaming columns, stretching from floor to tall ceiling and demarcating the many market stalls lining the agora. In one hollow ran dozens of counters for serving the daily meals. In another rested the petrified remains of sofas and chairs for lounging and conducting business. Still another held more soul alcoves matching those dotting the bridge chamber on the other side of the ship. Everything perfectly preserved, not even a crack in the glassy column faces, as though the agora, ceiling, and ship itself were held together by unseen hands.

But Sien had climbed this high for the view.

Thousand Dancing Beetles beckoned. The dazzling mosaic stretched the full width of the ballroom floor, rendering the image of the ship’s namesake in millions of colored tiles the size of Sien’s thumb. The ballroom floor was cream but the god-guardian’s visage was a thick blue-black, peering up through the shadows. It was a beast of many legs, disjointed angles, far-reaching grasp, and an odd, segmented quality in its form, as though pixelated or abstract.

And it didn’t resemble any beetle Sien knew. But that didn’t matter. What mattered lay in the center of the mosaic, the belly of the beast, and it glinted in the dim light with an unnatural shine.

The comms clicked on with a short bark of static.

“Did you reach the grand hall?” Jaks asked. “Can you see the Eye?”

The Eye stared up to the heavens, glossy as an oil spill, a pool of liquid gunmetal. It was solid teshiarrite, the most famous of Teshiarr creations, known in original texts as Vinnali’s Blood. The Teshiarr had bedecked themselves with teshiarrite jewelry, embedded chips of it into their mosaics, and spun it around decorations during high holidays, but a mass of this proportion had never been found.

Sien skidded down the glassy ramp dripping from the balcony to the ballroom floor and marched toward the center.

Jaks had isolated some of the chemical compounds of teshiarrite, had theorized, in fact, that it was organic in origin like a fossil. She had shown Sien flecks under microscopes and demonstrated her dizzying discovery that certain electrical currents could prompt a data burst in response. Jaks thought any sort of power—from electrical charges to physical force—could trigger a data release.

Sien was more familiar with the popular associations of teshiarrite, such as the glittering ornaments embedded in dusty murals. The belabored comparisons in sapphic poetry: your teshiarrite heart. And, of course, all the storylines in the various period dramas. Sien had a considerable collection of tapes for long haul stints, and roughly half included recovering the Empress’s teshiarrite crown.

But none of those productions captured the color quite right. Even though Sien knew the disk was solid material, it still rippled with ribbons of iridescent blue and ultraviolet black, miniature nebulas spinning out next to xir feet. Sien set xir bags on either side of the Eye to admire its size—roughly the width of xir torso—and how perfectly it played its part in the unwinking face of the ancient god. It would have watched the stars streak past while passengers strolled to shops during the day and waltzed in balls at night.

Jaks believed teshiarrite was a storage method, an eternal data cache used by Teshiarr citizens. She hadn’t fully deciphered the snippets she had recovered, but she had scraped images of jewelry receipts, suit schematics, and floral arrangements. She thought Pando had discovered the same, only they had an entire team of Jakses and had reverse-engineered whole blueprints. Any teshiarrite still left to be found would be worth a fortune. And anything stored in a cache the size of the Eye must be the most important find in the universe.

Sien unzipped one of the duffel bags and withdrew a battered pack, the only pouch not bearing a Preservationist mark.

Xe sighed, hefting the pouch in xir hands.

The Pando bigwig had been easy to spot in the usual station riffraff: ridiculous jacket, greasy hair, and a nose permanently squished from sticking it where it didn’t belong. He had crooked a finger at Sien like he was ordering a drink and stretched his arms along the back of the booth as xe slid into the other side.

“What’s your poison? I never do business sober. Actually, do voidborn even—”

“Here are the terms.” Sien folded xir hands in xir lap. “Jaks gets a VP title and an entire independent research department. State of the art equipment, three field ships, as much tea as she wants to drink, and round-the-clock unfettered access to Pando archives. Also, Pando will fund a custom chair buildout to her specifications. I will get you the name of the artisan.”

The Pando rep—Raxler was his name—held up his hands. “Yes, yes, I already agreed to all this. Whatever you want. If you can deliver.”

“Jaks hasn’t been wrong once. I will get you the Eye.”

Sien stood to leave, and he reached for xir elbow. “Betraying your boss to get her a cushy position. What’s in it for you?”

Across the crowd a dock worker had unloaded three wilted plants onto the bar. Sien had shaken xir arm free from the man’s sweaty grasp. “I have everything I need.”

Everything I need, the mosaic taunted under xir feet. Everything I need.

Sien knelt and opened a comms link.

“Bad news, Jaks,” Sien said, spiking charges into the tile around the Eye. “Someone else got here first. The Eye is gone.” Teshiarrite was harder than diamond and stronger than steel. It wouldn’t be scratched by some surveying charges, but the blast should knock it free from its socket. Sien attached a detonator and strolled to the nearest market stall to crouch behind a decorated bread stand.

Overhead, the final rays of weak sunlight kissed the dome’s edge. The grand hall stood silent as darkness tucked it in.

“I’m sorry,” xe whispered to no one there and pressed the detonator button.

The blast sang through the thin air, pealing off the mathematically perfect ceiling and vibrating inside the glassy walls. A cloud of dust followed, showering Sien’s helmet with microscopic pings and forcing xir oxygen recycling fans to pause. The debris settled quickly, coating every surface with a fine layer of mural.

Sien emerged, trailing dust like a tree shedding pollen.

Where there had been an Eye there was now a mouth, lips parted in the ballroom floor. It wasn’t too wide, about the length of a tall corpse, but inside was pitch black and still. The blue-black mosaic tiles now appeared matte gray compared to the depth of coal blackness underneath. And somewhere below, difficult to say how far, the impossible wink of the Eye.

Sien secured a rope to one of the market stall columns and clipped carabiners to the hooks on xir suit, so that combined they made a sturdy harness. Those Teshiarr designers had really thought of everything, and Pando Industries had spared no expense. Sien selected an edge of the hole with the least amount of jagged points and began xir descent into the black.

Sien had done solo spelunking before when mapping buried aqueducts for the automatics team, and xe knew how far a vivosuit headlamp should reach. But the blackness consumed it greedily, until xe was several body lengths under the ballroom floor and could no longer see xir boots. Xe flipped the headlamp off to conserve battery, and focused on the friction of the rope in the vivosuit gloves as xe released and gripped, released and gripped, down, down, down.

Xir boots made contact with solid ground, and Sien sighed into xir bent knees, leaning into the taut rope for a breather.

The ground down here was odd, lumpy and dense with some give. It shifted beneath xir boots in a way Sien associated with thick rubber maintenance tubing and something else on the tip of xir tongue. And beneath the softness there was also something hard, like metal rods or tree branches. It was likely a pile of garbage from the smashed cargo hold, combined with dirt and debris swept in through some hull breach. The inky blackness and sense of endless, unexplored space made Sien uncomfortable in a way xe didn’t want to acknowledge. Xe wasn’t going to waste time inspecting ancient trash.

The Eye rested a few steps away, the only source of texture in the void. It was as though it suctioned every spare micron of light into its glinting facets, giving Sien just enough guidance to find it. Xe hefted it in xir hands and examined its oil spill face, the treasure of the ages, Jaks’ ticket to a real life.

Attaching it to the vivosuit took a moment. Sien fumbled in the darkness, patting around for spare hooks and fastening a clumsy rope cradle for the Eye before lashing it to xir chest. It stuck out a bit farther than xir rib cage, but xe could still move xir arms enough to climb back up the rope, vivosuit massaging and cooling xir aggrieved limbs.

The top lip took some tricky maneuvering, but after several attempts Sien was able to pull xemself over the edge on xir belly, keeping both legs bent to avoid tearing the vivosuit on the threatening hole. Xe yanked xemself forward hand over hand, until xe was far enough away from danger that xir brain waved a white flag, and Sien collapsed into a puddle on the dusty tiles.

Jaks interrupted immediately.

• • • •

Indira,

Here’s the blueprints the lab extracted from the latest teshiarrite chip. Check out the photos the field team took of the mural before demolition. It’s one of those god images we keep seeing, Spiders Something, but it’s given me an idea. Tons of legs with some sort of mass in the middle . . . could be a mobility rig? I bet we could whip it up on our own. Send it to R&D and tell them I want a prototype by the next expo.

Unito Raxler

Chief of Acquisitions, Pando Industries

• • • •

“What do you mean, ‘gone’? Are you sure? What’s the state of the hall? Maybe the Eye fell below due to impact damage. Send me a full sweep.” The barrage bounced around Sien’s helmet with an urgency that dripped sour guilt into xir stomach. On the other side of the Narrows, Jaks was facing her worst nightmare, and the antidote was strapped to Sien’s chest. Xe almost couldn’t bear it, almost came clean right there.

Then Jaks said: “I’m en route. We’ll search together.”

Shit.

Sien rolled over and scuttled to xir feet, Eye throwing off xir balance on the wider movements. How long had xe been down there? When did Jaks embark? Hidden in the floor of Sien’s ship was a specially-constructed compartment, Eye-sized and shielded, waiting for its cargo. Xe had to get back before Jaks landed or got in range to use the really fancy scanners.

First things first: Sien flipped open xir arm panel and called xir ship to the beacon right outside the crash site mouth. It would take multiple hours to make it out of here, but at least xe would have a ride waiting. Then Sien repacked the duffel bags, lumbering with the awkward weight of the Eye, xir suit feeling three times as wide. Jaks was likely waiting for scans and photos, but xe could think of an excuse later, when the prize was safely stored under xir berth. Now it was a matter of balancing one bag on xir shoulder against the Eye on xir chest as xe bent over to heft the remaining equipment pack.

Underneath the bags lay a section of not-dirty floor, and here one could get a better look at the intricate tilework. From afar the design had seemed pixelated and lumpy, but up close that clarified into delineated forms within the overall design. At close inspection, the god-guardian mural consisted of thousands of small, separate links.

Sien unclipped the rope at xir waist and headed to the end still tied around the column, scraping dust off the mosaic with xir boot to see how far the linked design went. The comms channel clicked on.

“By the way, I finally translated that writing. It was a challenge, given the unique slang observed within different ship’s crews and the lack of detailed lingual ciphers—” The mosaic design wasn’t links like in a chain. They had their own offshoots, four on each, like limbs. Tiny arms and legs. Which would make those small, rounded tiles the heads. “—wouldn’t pass muster on a Preservationist dissertation defense, but it essentially says: We anchor the light from the heavens.”

Something poured out of the hole.

It bubbled up, black as tar, and spilled across the floor at a steady pace. Overhead the fresh night rose, veiling the teeming mass as it wriggled and clattered on the tiles. Sien froze, vivosuit monitors blaring a warning, as the mass swelled and stacked like an ant colony working in tandem.

The pieces were irregular and moved independently, some breaking apart and rippling open or closed to fit together into other hollows. There a bundle of femurs twisted into a pointed foot. Here some mandibles acted as a joint. Elsewhere chains of spines and ulnas rolled into a carapace, descended into legs. It grew past the second level of the grand hall, throwing a deep shadow over its likeness below, all blackened, freeze-dried flesh and shocking strips of white bone.

Thousand Dancing Beetles awoke.

The vivosuit monitors screamed in Sien’s ear as the recycling fans blared. Xe swallowed dry air and withdrew a string of surveying charges from the duffel bag.

The many-legged crab god shivered and tested its countless sharpened points on the ruined mosaic; the sound of knives on concrete. It flexed its many knees and bent over, carapace tipping up in back, to focus its attention on the trespasser with the giant jewel strapped to xir chest. The quivering maw—phalanges and patellas and ribs—opened wide enough to swallow five shuttles whole and roared with a chorus of mummified vocal chords.

Sien skipped the charges across the floor, ducked behind a column, and slammed the detonator.

The blast knocked xem backward into a countertop, bags spilling onto the floor, and a new tone of alarm sounded in xir helmet. But xe could still breathe and xe could still move, so xe rolled off and began to run, weaving in and out of the shop chambers and columns.

If Sien had paused, even for a moment, xe may have noticed three things. The first being a low hum in the room, as though something large and electrical had booted up. The second being the Eye on xir chest blooming with a pale purple light. And the third being an invisible connection, a doorway to another world, rooting in the back of xir head.

But xe ran, driving xir boots into the tiles like jackhammers. The low gravity was now an obstacle, making every step more like a bounce, stripping momentum off xir heels. Xe was part balloon, and the Eye was an anvil weighing xem down; but still Sien pounded ahead, clawing at the walls to push xemself forward as the damaged oxygen fans fought to keep up.

Another roar sounded, a chorus of voices dying, victims pushed off a ledge. The ground shuddered as legs the size of trees turned after Sien, who knew better than to look back.

This time xe noticed the hum in the air and the light on the floor as the curlicue circuits and designs lit up under xir feet, painting a path to the main doorway beneath the balcony xe had entered through. Sien followed the trail, abandoning xir duck-and-weave maneuver to run out in the open, across the legendary hall xe had been the last person alive to see intact.

The doorway loomed tall and opulent, curved upwards like a cathedral, and xe skidded through it into the dark.

On the other side was a short hallway, a throat opening into a swallowing abyss of glossy pathways. Xe stumbled at the edge, almost falling in, and the light followed swiftly to illuminate the walkways and curved walls.

A voice rang out in the empty space of the room, a voice outside xir head. It sounded recorded, automated, and its inflection implied a question Sien didn’t understand.

Behind xem, the low bass explosions of the god-guardian’s feet shattered tiles with each heavy step. It was closer to the doorway now, its carapace hidden by the peaked entrance.

The recorded voice repeated its question. Sien knew that tone. It was a customer service tone.

The Eye pulsed a purple flash, and the doorway inside Sien’s head opened a crack, letting something slip through.

Xe stepped out onto a thin, glassy walkway, avoiding the cavernous drop below.

Another gargantuan footstep. Dust falling from above.

The question, again.

But this time, Sien understood it.

“Get me out of here!” Xe shouted in a language xe did not speak. “The bridge! Take me to the bridge!”

“Complying,” responded the walkway and melted beneath xir boots.

Sien cried out as xe dropped, but xir boots only sank three fingers into the liquid glass before it hardened around xir heels with a snug fit. The walkway thrummed through the thick vivosuit boots as it pulled xem forward, melting and hardening instantaneously, so xe glided across the chasm on black ice.

A rushing, crushing sound echoed into the chamber, and xe twisted in place to check behind. The god had disassembled and was pouring through the doorway like sand through a keyhole, bones and sinew globbing back together on the other side. Out of the pulsing pile rose spindly legs and sharp knees, sticking out at all angles like cowlicks until the shielded carapace re-knitted and locked everything together again.

It moved like Jaks. Only bad.

The beast spilled out over the edge, skyscraper legs skidding down the smooth sides of the room just as Sien whooshed through a door on the other side.

The walkway whipped xem through a hall the size of a shuttle hangar full of other walkways, some headed up and others down, some meeting at junctions hanging mid-air. The doorways had the same arch as the soul alcoves dotting the walls, giving the space the aesthetic of a massive, black bee hive.

And occupying those alcoves and strolling onto walkways and rising out of the black glass all around Sien—chatting and laughing and adjusting their luxurious robes—glimmered the purple silhouettes of people. A guttural cacophony bubbled out of the shimmering people’s mouths, strange sounds refining into clear conversation:

Can’t believe I won a ticket to a pleasureship.

I hear the Empress himself may be aboard.

Papa, I want to go on the carousel!

I always need a nap after paying my tithe.

The alcoves here really pack a punch.

The priests are gathering in the gardens?

Sien skated through rooms large and small, each lighting up a breath before xe entered with the shimmering people, revealing religious mosaics and triggering long-silent contraptions to whir into movement. A dining hall of endless long tables and crystalline constellations unfamiliar to Sien etched into the floor. A stadium with some sort of athletic field and three teams of purple outlines scrimmaging for the ball. A vaulted room with a massive ring, its interior lined with person-shaped depressions. Public baths, lounge areas, corners with scenic window views.

Then a new voice, dripping with authority, rang out against the domed halls.

Empress Vinnali requires all citizens to sync immediately. The ship is having engine difficulties. Please report at once.

The people on the walkways dissolved and reappeared in the alcoves on the walls, sparkling up and down the vast expanse until Sien flew through a purple galaxy of souls.

But I already paid my tithe today.

If the Empress commands it, it must be necessary.

Did the priest just cut himself? Stars, he’s writing on the wall—

Papa, it burns—

My head, my HEAD—

The outlines writhed and shrieked in the dark, and the Eye on Sien’s chest brightened with interest, sniffing blood in the air. The tortured silhouettes wailed into an agonizing crescendo before silencing as one throat, and the lifeless forms slipped out of the alcoves, down the walls, and out of sight until Sien reached—

—the conservatory.

Time—or perhaps the walkway—slowed as the scene played out beneath xem. Still the same twisted black copses and flowerbeds, but now a group of purple outlines with tall hats stood in a ring by the wall and recited prayers in a sacred tongue.

Flesh, breath, worthy anchors.

We sacrifice for glory!

And as they beckoned, the people arrived, bodies dragging along the floor in disturbing angles and splitting into pieces as they reached the center of the ring and an unseen locus of power.

The ghost of Thousand Dancing Beetles rose from the sacrifice, a scintillating behemoth that flexed its many legs in a familiar fashion before devouring the very priests who worshiped it and battering its sparkling carapace into the floor where the jagged hole resided. It disappeared into the lower decks, taking the purple light with it, and shrouding the conservatory and Sien in darkness with only the low violet throb of the Eye.

The real Thousand Dancing Beetles took its place.

Sien let out a sound that was both a cough and a scream, jostling xir bruised ribs into misaligned muscle rollers, and reality sped up again. The walkway slammed xem across the conservatory and out the other side through the ship that stretched out beyond the edge of memory, as though the first breath xe had ever taken had been under the ballroom, standing on a mass grave.

That mass grave now hunted xem—three screams behind, but getting ever closer. It slid through passageways with ease, stretching and hardening while hardly breaking stride. Its maw was a thresher of sharpened femurs, lined with metacarpals, and draped with tattered skin. And every foot of it was a person, had been a person, and now those people lived inside Sien’s head.

I’ll never see my mother again.

Hold my hand, darling, I’m here with you.

They were going to marry me, I know it.

Who will water my garden now?

I can’t see. I can’t see!

Thousand Dancing Beetles roared, and the Eye surged like a lightbulb about to burst. Sien wrapped xir arms around it as though that would remove xem from the sentinel’s radar, interrupt this call-and-response. The god roared again—now right behind xem, in another open room of walkways and junctions—and xe gripped the sides of xir helmet, wishing xe could cover xir ears.

The Eye flared, blinding xem, and the voices twisted together in mass inosculation.

Stay.

Stay with us.

Come back, clever anchor.

Pay your tithe again.

STAY.

The walkway shuddered and lurched as the god landed a pounce and fought for purchase on the slick sides. It dug its drillpoint legs into the glasswork, shattering the lit panels, and clawed its way toward its prey. Sien was still locked into place, feet encased in black concrete.

It was a shuttle-width away, pushing xem forward with the pressure of its howl.

Sien shut xir eyes, pictured a study with verdant ferns and two steaming cups of tea.

“Arrived,” chimed the walkway and released xem.

Sien stumbled forward, almost tripping flat onto xir visor. The walkway had pushed xem back up, hardened, and turned off, along with every activated swirl on its panels. The thundering herd of bones vanished. The voices choked. Xe stood in the center of the silent, dead, bridge chamber, one hundred meters from freedom. And right behind xem, perched off to the side at a joining walkway, stood Jaks.

• • • •

CONSORT GENESFRE
My Lord! The palace has fallen, and the enemy has the Teshiarrite Key. We must get you to safety.

EMPRESS VINNALI
All is not lost. Meet me on the bridge of my finest ship. There, we shall join at last.

CONSORT GENESFRE
After all these lifetimes together, why speak of joining now? For power? For glory?

EMPRESS VINNALI
For love.

Valor’s Last Voyage, Book Fifteen
Sien Voidborn, personal collection

• • • •

“Did you just glide here on that skyway?” Jaks asked, face incredulous through her own visor. She sat strapped into her rig, its slender legs hugging the icy path. “How did you do that? Do it again.”

Sien hyperventilated into xir helmet, head swimming, as the vivosuit sucked in the air and defogged the glass. Xe flexed xir hands, stiff in their gloves, and expanded xir lungs as far as they’d go.

“Run!” Sien cried and took off for the exit.

Sien bounded along the narrow path, propelled by adrenaline and tunnel vision, never pausing to consider the sharp and sudden drop. The walkway squeaked under xir heels and haggard sobs clogged xir ears as xe approached the serrated mouth leading out into a hazy night.

Behind xem followed the needlepoint tings of Jaks’ rig as she navigated the sophisticated terrain.

“Sien, wait! What’s the matter?”

Sien paused at the exit, one hand grasping the rippled edge, grip threatening to tear xir vacuum seal. The needle tings slowed as Jaks reached xem.

“Sien, are you all right? What happened?”

Sien turned, urgency in xir throat—

“What is that?”

Xe froze.

Jaks pointed at xir chest, somehow conveying authority and poise through a dozen layers of nylon. The Eye hung dark, no longer thrumming with the disembodied voices of the sacrificed, but still very large, heavy, and glorious.

“Is that what I think it is? You said it was gone.”

Sien’s mind was a shuttle crash. Panic spiked in xir veins, but underneath lay the strewn wreckage of xir sanity and the sheer exhaustion of xir limbs. Xe was drained, emotions frayed, heart stuttering in xir chest. The empty bridge chamber played games with xir senses, mocking Sien with its banal, misty quiet, until xe no longer trusted xir own memories.

And before xem was Jaks, who read Teshiarr poetry aloud while Sien unpacked ration containers and watched politely when Sien re-enacted the throne room battle from Vinnali’s Sword using a mop and stack of broken chairs. Who kept an extra room made-up for Sien at all times and didn’t press when Sien left for xir ship’s berth instead.

Sien flipped open a comms link, realizing it had been closed this whole time.

“I’m sorry.” Xir eyes pickled with tears. “I’m so sorry, Jaks. I was just trying to do something good for you, to repay you for all you’ve done for me. I wasn’t supposed to live this large, you know? But you’ve always—you didn’t have to—” Gentle fans spun up inside xir helmet, drying stiff salt tracks onto xir cheeks. “You’re all I have, Jaks.”

Sien had been voidborn, grown to shut up and work, valued for xir sturdy back, unflappable constitution, and lack of complaint. Sien knew xir heritage and always hurried to lift the heaviest box and sleep on the hardest patch of ground. And whenever Jaks had waxed on about cartography over twin bowls of noodles, Sien had thought xe took the place of a mannequin or pet. Something to speak at, not to speak with. But Jaks had an entire society of scholars at her fingertips for deep conversations. And she had chosen Sien’s company every time.

“Sien,” Jaks said. “I think you’d better give that to me. We can figure out the rest together.”

Sien nodded, tongue thick and dry, and fumbled at the straps with numb hands. Xe snapped open clasps and unscrewed carbineers, until the Eye released into xir arms with the heft of a tombstone. The dark nebulas swirled within its facets, mysteries xe had no right to know.

The comms link crackled in xir helmet, a brief, grating sound that caught xir attention with its sudden depth.

“I said, it means: We anchor the light from the heavens. Did you hear me? Or did something shiny distract you? And why is your respiration rate going off the charts?”

The link clicked off, and Sien swore it echoed in the silence. Before xem, Jaks waited, arms open to receive the Eye.

“Something the matter?” she said, but her voice was muted, as though underwater. Her rig legs flexed in a swaying, hypnotic rhythm. A motion Sien hadn’t seen before.

“Jaks,” Sien said. “You’re moving wrong.”

The room shifted with the same motion and certainty as a new slide clicking forward in a lecture. One moment Jaks waited before xem, elegant eyes full of pity, the next she was gone. In her stead towered the puzzle block mass of corpse pieces, molded into spiky legs, broad carapace, shaking mandibles. And staring right at Sien was an eye, or rather eyes. Thousands of human eyes packed together like seeds in a sunflower, some fluttering in place, others sagging out of their sockets. They regarded Sien in concert, pupils dilated in the dark, and xe briefly wondered where xir own would fit among the gobs of jelly.

The maw—lined with reaching skeletal hands—gaped wide before xem.

Sien leaned against the wall, legs finally giving out, and tumbled backwards through the gash in the hull.

Xe twisted as xe fell, using the Eye as a sled to slide down the pile of debris. The hard ground slammed into xir helmet, clacking xir teeth together and bloodying xir nose on the sturdy visor; and Sien clutched the Eye at the bottom of the pile as though the blanket of fog would protect xem.

Through the soupy murk, mere hands away, blinked a soothing green light. The retrieval beacon.

“Up,” Sien whispered to xemself. The oxygen fans let out one final whine before breaking down. “Up. Up.”

But up to where? The ground trembled beneath xem as Thousand Dancing Beetles began emerging from its metal cocoon. Even if Sien started running, it would easily catch xem on open ground.

The Eye pressed into xir aching ribs, vibrating through the vivosuit as bone hit rock.

“Up,” xe commanded. “Up. UP.”

A familiar chirp answered in Sien’s ear—the cheerful sound of xir ship—and xe lifted off the ground. The ship had entered the lower atmosphere and deployed the catch-and-release beam.

Sien rose steadily through the air, hugging the Eye close, as the sentinel gushed out of the hull to an empty spot of dirt. The sight of it scrabbling below filled xir helmet with hoarse, dark laughter.

“Up up, you bony bitch!” xe said. “You rotting rat bastard! You calcified cow—ah!”

The Eye blazed with purple fire, slashing through xir polarized visor and blinding xem with its rays. Ropes of electricity sped down xir arms and locked them in place around the hard edges of the Eye right as an invisible force squeezed xir body and yanked xem back toward the ground. Below xem the dark and broken mass of the guardian quickly congealed once more, and the eye of many eyes stared up at Sien from the pile of rot.

Sien screamed, both from the pain in xir arms and the unbearable tension of the beam pulling xem up as the sentinel wrenched xem down. The vivosuit sprang into action, digging malfunctioning fingers into fresh, deep bruises and belching protein sludge all over xir chin. Xe kicked and writhed mid-air as spots bloomed in xir vision, and the door in the back of xir head slammed wide open.

Searing claws hooked into the furrows of Sien’s brain and dragged xem back, back into the black—away from the Eye and the pain and the god and the ship and the world—until xe arrived, standing and shaking in xir thermals, before a bustling crowd.

Dual suns shone upon a gathering of elegant people, clothed in garments of bewitching fabric that seemed to shift in color and texture as Sien’s eyes jumped from robe to robe. They strolled around a large bazaar punctuated with massive floral displays and shaded groves in every twisty corner. Street stands grew out of the mosaic tiling, some minded by shopkeepers but others filled with incredible automatics that fried fish and stoked bowls of hot broth along winding assembly serving lines. Swoops of buildings and skyways fanned out along the edges of the bazaar. And overhead, attempting to scratch the sky, what must be Kessine Spire. One of Empress Vinnali’s thrones.

A Teshiarr agora. Filled with Teshiarri.

Sien’s arms were empty yet leaden as xe touched xir lips in wonder, freed from the crush of the vivosuit and enrobed in the magic of the scene. Cycles upon cycles spent with xir eyes closed as Pando-produced dramas described these sights, and here xe was at last. No more cramped cockpits and powdered soups, but an airy city filled with noble beings, all smiling warmly at xem as they strolled by.

“Greetings, Citizen,” one said as they passed Sien.

“Report to sync, Citizen,” said another on the other side.

“Must pay your tithe to the Empress, Citizen,” still another.

“Time to sync, Citizen,” more.

Citizen. The word danced along Sien’s skin and fluttered around xir heart. It was hallowed and honeyed, dipped in welcome and dusted with purpose. Citizen. Xe knew every Teshiarr poem, every warbling coronation stanza, every herb steeped into the bowls of perfumed broth. And now, at last, it was time to slide into silken robes, pick pastel flowers, and join the dazzling agora crowd.

Sien sighed off a long winter as the Teshiarri continued strolling by, greeting and instructing.

“Find an alcove, Citizen.”

“You must sync, Citizen.”

Over and over came the polite command, until clockwork patterns emerged in the crowd. Teshiarri stuck in the same choreographed routes, caught in an endless loop. Never stopping to eat or pick a flower. Only walking in intricate circles to whisper in Sien’s ear.

“Pay your tithe.”

“Go and sync.”

“Stay with us.”

“Citizen.”

The scene pulled focus until it was defined not by wonder but by absence. No warmth from the bright dual suns. No umami scent of the fried fish and broth. No floral softness from the flowers. No music from the string players. No laughter. No throat-clearing. No footsteps, yet the people walked on and on and on.

“Citizen, have you synced tod—” they stopped as Sien grabbed their arm. It was cool and hollow.

“This isn’t real,” Sien said sadly. “You’re dead.”

The Teshiarri—long hair pinned up in an elaborate display, twinkling implants arched over one brow—shuddered at the words like a machine breaking down. Their skin began to flake away into the ether, and underneath pulsed a violet sorrow streaked with vibrant green. As the green veins fattened, the person’s left arm and entire waist decayed away into nothing.

“Thank you,” they said with the remains of their mouth and evaporated, leaving a green shadow on the mosaic underneath.

Sien croaked an apology, hand still extended, lips twisted in regret. Xe had meant to do more—offer an explanation or expression of gratitude—but something in xir words and touch had run through the citizen and changed them from the inside out. Now they were gone, a smudge of green on the polished tiled ground. A death, however accidental.

Sien steeled xemself and caught a person at random—a Teshiarri with broad shoulders and a feathered brooch. Again the words (“You’re dead”) and again the creeping green, the whispered thanks, the dissipation. Not easier than the first, but a confirmation of what xe must do. Sien turned toward the bustling crowd of immortal anchors.

Teshiarrite was a data storage device. And data could be erased.

One by one, Sien buried the dead. Xe observed each farewell with grace, bearing witness to shivering fingers, crumbling legs, and eyes turned up to the heavens. One hundred thirty-one thousand deaths awaited xem; a lifetime of reaping borne in a place without life or time. Scientists, scholars, poets, and merchants. Never a consort; never the Empress. Only his victims, who outlived him in the end.

Once the first thousand citizens had gone, the edges of certain stalls began to blur and far-off buildings faded away. The agora, city, and spire were all memories from thousands of eyes, and the edifices flaked and vanished along with their stewards. Sien paused here, wavering on the threshold. This place, however false, was the last Teshiarr city. Each citizen’s burial also buried the crystalline skyways and intricate automatics and extinct patches of flowers. The citizens anchored the god-guardian, but releasing them also meant releasing everything they knew. They deserved to be remembered.

So, Sien became a Preservationist. Xe took breaks from the message, the fading, and the grief to walk the annexation gardens and the long, empty halls of the spire. Xe studied each mosaic tile and memorized each scrap of graffiti tucked into courtyard walls. The endless stacks of the palace library. The gilded market canals. Music festival posters. Robe patterns. Shopping lists. Repair manuals. Medical journals. Love letters. Graves.

Sien witnessed and remembered it all, rewriting the stories from the melodrama tapes and setting the record straight. Soon, xe would be alone in this place, with an eternity of new stories inside xem.

The last Teshiarri was a child—cropped hair, basket of flowers—and Sien knelt to hug them with weary arms as xe uttered the final words.

But as those words fell and the child disappeared, the void around Sien sputtered and shook in a violent upheaval, rejecting xem from the world xe had sought for so long. Xe fell back with a howl, hurled through a gash in the sky as the world folded and caved—

Sien slammed back into xir body, much older in spirit but alive and screaming in flesh. The Eye blazed pure green now, the color of rescued seedlings gathered in a quiet study. Sien had wiped the data cache clean, put one-hundred thousand souls to eternal rest, and replaced them with a firm silence. If Pando ever captured the Eye, all it would find was static.

And below, still trampling the ground of the ghost planet—seething and grasping and waiting—churned the dead god, its invisible feelers still pricking at xir brain.

Sien shoved the claws out of xir mind and the Eye out of xir arms. It tumbled down with its payload into the black whirlpool of decay, and Thousand Dancing Beetles rose to meet it. But at contact the sentinel recoiled, a ripple racing through its writhing mass. Mandibles fumbled with the Eye, disintegrating as the jewel grazed them, and tossed the prize to legs that sloughed off into piles of bones onto the cold ground. The carapace crumbled, the maw rotted away, and the eye of eyes slid off the quivering face. The god convulsed and roared, decomposing at last, until it collapsed into a mountain with the Eye at its summit, releasing its invisible grip on Sien.

Sien shot up through the sky, lungs full of broken glass, nosebleed lacquering xir lips. The ship, sentinel, and Eye disappeared under a blanket of mist and towering kelp, and the ordeal was already half a daydream when xe slid into the airlock.

Except—“Sien? Sien?” Jaks’ voice in xir ear, even as xe fell into the dark womb of xir ship. “What was that transmission just now? You’re sorry about what? Sien, please respond. I’m still four hours away. Please.” And, quieter: “You’re all I have, too.”

Jaks. The real Jaks, more concerned and tender than ever before.

Sien dragged xemself the short length of xir ship, body heavy and numb as petrified wood. The vivosuit helmet sputtered in xir mouth and muffled all connection to the world until xe wrenched it off and sent it flying across the narrow space. It clattered off a line of inset drawers and rolled into a corner, visor staring back at the lost person with a mind of mulched memories and a crooked grin.

“One Manic Jackal, at your service,” Sien whispered.

Xe cackled at xir joke, gulping breaths of stale air and massaging xir face with gloved hands, marveling at the texture. There were tears coming, too, but not before xe did something right. Xe needed to do one thing right.

Sien hoisted xir torso into the pilot seat and slammed open comms.

“Turn back,” xe rasped. “Forget this place, Jaks. I’m coming home.”

Xe stared at the crude console screen as though it would show xir warning weaving between the Narrows, evading the grasp of the ancient god and making it safely to Jaks. Soon it would be in Jaks’ ear, and Jaks was very smart. Jaks was the smartest person Sien knew.

Sien punched buttons at random until the homing route activated and slid to the floor as thrusters hummed beneath xem. The small ship rumbled, swaddling Sien with a promise of safety and deliverance. Xe was going home. Xe was going to Jaks.

A distinctive clink echoed in the cramped quarters, followed by the soft whirr of a tape starting to turn.

All is not lost. Meet me on the bridge of my finest ship. There, we shall join at last.

Sien’s lip trembled and hot tears splashed onto the cold metal deck.

Join with me. For love. For love.

Empire crooned into Sien’s ear as xe curled up on one side, sobs crackling in xir throat, xir wet eyes staring up, up, to the heavens.

©2023 by A.L. Goldfuss.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A.L. Goldfuss lives in the Pacific Northwest with xir twin collections of tea and carnivorous plants and looks forward to riding trains again someday. In the meantime, you can find xem at algoldfuss.com.

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

The Void Wyrm’s Guide to Devouring Stars

AJ Wentz | 1116 words

The smaller creatures of the universe have called me many names: She Who Darkens the Sky, Star-Blotter, The One That Unstitches Constellations. None of them knew how right they were. They named me for my shadow, my sinews that blocked starlight from their clods of dirt. They didn’t realize that the shadow merely preceded a greater darkness, the engulfment of their sun and the end of their short lives. I have consumed entire galaxies. As I’m sure you recognize, this makes me uniquely qualified to take you against my scales and teach you the intricacies of star-swallowing. You’re lucky to be traveling with me.

It would take a millennium for me to teach you all I have learned, but I shall do my best to train you in the little time we have. Pay close attention, and it will not take you a lifetime to learn my life’s work. Our journey will—oh, do not fret over my wellbeing. I am fine. Let us move on.

When you were a wyrmling, you fed on sanguine stars, sucking on their edges for billions of years until they collapsed. Now that you are grown, you need more sustenance than sanguine stars can offer, no matter how sweet their flavor. Leave those red stars for the next wyrmling that comes along. I know they are what you are accustomed to, but it is time to put away childish things. When the infants are finished and the star has collapsed and moved through its nebulous phase, the sanguine star will become a silver star worth harvesting, dense and hot.

Space is cold, little one. The cold grows within me, as it grows within you, and the primary consideration when selecting a star-meal is heat. The hotter the star, the less the cold oblivion around us will gnaw at our stomachs. To this end, blue stars are the most satisfying, with white being a close second. These are the stars you should turn your attention to.

I am fine, I said. It was merely a spasm.

Warmth is the primary consideration when selecting a meal, but that does not mean that you cannot snack for pleasure or for flavor. Planets can make for a piquant appetizer, some with the surprisingly cohesive blend of water and earth surrounding the molten core, some with the tang of gaseous air, though they do not burn with the necessary intensity to sate our hunger. Just make sure that you eat any planets you want before consuming the star they orbit—eating the star first can damage the planets, or eject them from the area, making more work for you in tracking them down. And don’t play with the rings—it’s quite juvenile.

One of the most important lessons I can impart to you is that a key component of devouring is cultivation. Do not drink stellar clouds or eat yellow stars—they are not yet ripe for plucking from the void. If you wait, they will become stars worth harvesting. Similarly, do not delay in devouring blue stars before they become cardinals, both because blue stars are more nutritive and because it is dangerous to allow cardinals to grow. If such a star then ages to nova and becomes a great void, it is useless to us. Worse than useless: avoid great voids and their call—there is nothing for you inside their gaping maw, just like there is nothing for a star inside our bellies. Yes, child, there is a possibility that a cardinal nova will resolve in an ambrosial star, but the risk is too high to take that chance. Better to forgo the possibility of ambrosia than to risk the creation of a black hole.

I had one, once. I didn’t get to a cardinal fast enough to consume it before it collapsed. I waited for the nova to end—I was youthful and foolish, and I held out hope. That hope was rewarded, and I watched the creation of an ambrosial star, was the first wyrm there to scoop it up in my maw. There were more of us back then, and choice stars sometimes resulted in scuffles. The taste of it on my tongue, the heat of it in my belly . . . I will never forget it. It tasted of finality, completion, perfection. Insubstantial words for such a substantial meal, perhaps; it was a bright, sharp taste, but the flavor that lingered afterward was smoky and smooth. It burned in my gut, keeping me warm for several hatching cycles before fading to embers. The ambrosial star was both stronger and more subtle than the tart, sweet taste of other stars.

The void can be lonely, youngling. There are so few of us left anymore, and time stretches thin between my meetings with others of our kind. I’m glad that I found you—so that you will not feel alone, of course. I benevolently offer you my company as well as my wisdom. Yes, I am quite tired. May I ask . . . would you mind allowing me to lean on you for a brief while? Thank you.

It is important to find a safe place to digest your meal, a location where you can coil and sleep, swallowed stars warm in your belly. This is, after all, the only time we are vulnerable to the predators who would delight in attacking us as we digest. I’ve known wyrms who staunchly believe that the best place to slumber is wound through a solar system or a meteor field. Those wyrms have been eaten by weaker creatures than they. Do not become food for a lesser species. You should sleep in the middle of blank space, your dark form casting no shadows and being caught by no starlight. There you will be safe.

Now for technique. To properly devour a star—Yes, that is the border. See the shimmer at the edge of your vision? That is the threshold of the edge of the universe. You have ably escorted me to my destination, little one. I appreciate that.

Oh, no, crossing the border is not death. Death is blood and screams and finality. This is traveling to a place where I can rest my tired scales and bask in the warmth and nourishment of the Great Star. The threshold has been calling to me for some time, and I am ready to retire. I am not afraid of moving to the next stage of life any more than I was afraid of graduating from sanguine stars to silver and blue. All the same, thank you for being with me, in the end.

©2023 by AJ Wentz.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

AJ Wentz writes speculative poetry and prose. Her work has appeared in Fantasy, Apex’s Strange Libations, Eye to the Telescope, and elsewhere. When not daydreaming about other worlds, AJ strives to make this one better through her work as an attorney. She lives in Arkansas with her husband, cat, and more books than their house can reasonably hold. AJ can be found at ajwentz.com.

Excerpts from a Scientist’s Notebook: Ancestral Memory in Europan Pseudocephalopods

David DeGraff | 704 words

1. When I was five years old, my mother left for Europa as part of the expedition that discovered the Europan Pseudocephalopods, which have a superficial resemblance to squid. My mother wanted to call them Icypods but was overruled. Now I’m standing in front of a tank of live Icypod specimens, the very creatures that may have killed her. I’m going to finish her work. But I’m not going to let my work take over my life. I will be home every night to spend time with my husband and daughter.

• • • •

5. Even with Europa’s low gravity, the ocean under seven kilometers of ice is under tremendous pressure, equivalent to 900 meters in Earth’s oceans, so we store our Icypod school in a large hyperbaric chamber. The specimens explode when brought into the air, and the sulfurous smell of rotten eggs evacuates the lab. Kayleigh laughs when I tell her the story at dinner, but I don’t burden her with my next thought. Cameron holds me when I wake from a nightmare—my mother smelling sulfur when her submersible cracked and the cold Europan ocean rushed in.

• • • •

17. Each tentacle has a series of eyes. What use do they have for eyes? No sunlight penetrates the seven kilometers of ice, and Icypods are not bioluminescent. Perhaps other creatures beneath the Europan ice are. Or maybe the Icypods dive down to the glowing volcanic vents at the Europan sea floor. At dinner, Kayleigh says she remembers catching fireflies last summer, when she was three.

• • • •

37. The eyes are also ears. Sound waves passing through the eye generate electric signals.

• • • •

82. I have lost a lot of time staring into these eyes, watching them stare back at me like they knew me. Will Cameron or Kayleigh have the same reaction?

• • • •

131. Icypods gain tentacles as they age at a seemingly irregular rate.

• • • •

156. When a specimen is returned to the main tank after being separated and trained, they play and snack on each other’s tentacles. An Icypod can successfully swim through a maze it has never seen before if it has eaten the flesh of one that has been trained in that maze. They grab any novel item placed into their tanks. Could they be trying to eat these as a way to learn about them? I put a lot of toys in my mouth when my mother was on her mission. Eating things may be a way to learn for us too. I cracked a toy submersible in my mouth and I was convinced for a long time that caused my mother to sink to the Europan depths. Kayleigh outgrew mouthing her toys before she was three, for which I am grateful.

• • • •

187. We roast marshmallows outside after dinner. I think Icypod eyes are for the volcanoes. If memories are stored in their limbs, that would be a shared trait throughout the ecosystem, like brain stems in Chordata. If they learn via cannibalism, they might also gain the memories of the other species they eat. Cooking would break down the memory proteins, and they could eat their food without experiencing their prey’s death. They may even use tools to hold the food in the hot water above the smoking volcanoes.

• • • •

241. It took me several weeks to get superheated water into a tank at a hundred atmospheres of pressure. The specimens are drawn to the mock-volcanic vent, but don’t seem to want to cook their food, even after I provided them with skewers to hold the smelly tube worms we feed them. But the tube worm meat does not contain the memories of their death from explosive decompression.

• • • •

244. Europan metabolisms are ultimately based on sulfur from the volcanic vents. Icypods taste as terrible as they smell. I won’t be bringing one home for a calamari dinner.

• • • •

245. I know a few things for certain now. One: We need to send our Icypod specimens back to Europa so they can live free again. I need to be on the expedition there. I’m sure Cameron and Kayleigh will understand. Two: My mother loved me.

©2023 by David DeGraff.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David DeGraff teaches physics and astronomy at Alfred University in Alfred NY. In addition to the usual physics and astronomy classes, he’s also taught (or co-taught) classes on the science in Star Trek, Doctor Who, Harry Potter, Superheroes, and Supervillains. The Supervillain class was too successful and will never be taught again. His fiction has (or will soon) appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Translunar Traveler’s Lounge, and in Carbide Tipped Pens, edited by Ben Bova & Eric Choi. He’s online at DavidDeGraff.com.

Four Self-Care Secrets for a Long and Happy Life

Tina S. Zhu | 1142 words

Welcome to my seminar, Self-Care Secrets for Immortals! Few foxes make it to over nine hundred years old in this day and age, but you’ll be one of them with four of my time-tested, battle-honed secrets.

• • • •

1.) DO steal skincare products.

Forget “thou shalt not steal.” Steal to your heart’s content. Humans exchange pieces of paper, metal, and plastic for goods, so unless you prefer backbreaking hard labor, steal. Pro tip: the first and most important items to acquire are skincare products.

Shapeshifting magic does NOT give you clear skin by default, which many now-deceased foxes have learned the hard way. As I refused to be chased out of town by humans for bad acne, I applied this tip to secure a position in the royal court. I convinced the daughter of the Jade Emperor that I was the daughter of a no-name warlord because of my dazzling beauty, all thanks to my flawless complexion (thanks, stolen moisturizer and toner!).

Sleight of hand skills also impress everyone from commoners to royalty. During my time at court, I would swipe necklaces and bracelets that the princess was wearing without her noticing, raising my credibility at court. I gained her trust as a confidante, and she would tell me all the palace gossip and the latest advancements in royal beauty products.

You will gain the ability to modify memories on your one-hundredth birthday. Put those new powers to work! I made all the lords and ladies believe they were late to a nonexistent masked ball. While everyone scrambled to put together last-minute outfits, the Jade Emperor’s famed crown, jewels, and (most importantly) elixirs for clogged pores were mine for the taking. I then made off with the treasures in a two-person carriage, escaping the golden-roofed imperial compound into the capital.

2.) DON’T get too close to humans.

Do not, and I repeat, absolutely do NOT talk to humans unless necessary. This novice mistake was why I failed to escape the capital with my treasures. The more you talk to humans, the more chances you give them to figure out there is an imposter in their midst. If a human discovers the truth, she will either A.) kill you, or B.) befriend you. Choice A appears more dangerous at first glance, but B is the more insidious one. You might get attached.

Attachments to humans will only hurt you in the end. A princess you had befriended could appear in front of the city gates. She could beg you to help her escape an arranged marriage and royal duties. In your weakness, you might agree. Because there isn’t enough room in your carriage, you smuggle her instead of the heavy trunk full of priceless treasures.

If you fall prey to weakness (as is only natural with dignified princesses), do not take her to your hideout in the forest. Fifty years could pass. Fifty years, I may note, are a blink of an eye for you and a lifetime for her. Don’t be fooled by beauty or poetry-writing prowess. Think about how in mere decades she will break you by leaving and how you will become the evil forest witch that mothers everywhere warn about. Your skincare routine will falter as you mope, leaving you with nothing but poetry gathering dust on the shelf and dry skin—the worst tragedy of them all.

3.) DON’T be tricked by other foxes.

More dangerous than humans are other foxes. Do not talk to the foxes who visit you, especially ones peddling goods or services. Traveling salespeople are the most dangerous type of fox because they have mastered the art of skincare, fashion, and conversation techniques.

As you would expect, only foxes over one thousand years old are powerful enough to take up this vocation. Some of them will try convincing you that they can raise the dead. Do NOT listen to them. Absolutely do not turn over the years of poetry as payment for raising the dead, as those crumbling, yellowing pages are the last remnants of the human who did the unforgivable to you.

If you slip up and let them rip the books into shreds for their spells, do not let the other fox sneer upon facing a paper-scrap puppet given a familiar face. The puppet with a princess’s nose will open its mouth, and it will laugh and jeer with the voice of the fake necromancer. To secure victory against the enemy, simply cast one of the fire spells from my Advanced Self-Defense for Foxes seminar (and enjoy an extra ten percent discount with the coupon code ADVANCED10).

4.) DO annual spring cleaning.

One ritual a certain human princess (who was, despite her flaws, well aware of the utmost importance of self-care) taught me was annual spring cleaning. There was a time when I had not done spring cleaning in centuries, but between the smell of smoke and the bloodstained sheepskin rug, I had no choice but to bring it back.

Sometimes you will discover the unexpected during spring cleaning. For example, you could discover a page of haikus under the rug, the only page to survive intact. Don’t panic. Instead, take it to the garden. You have a few options, but I suggest burying it next to the blank rock above where she lies.

Another fact you could discover is that you no longer want to live in your newly clean home. This is normal, and listening to that voice in your head is part of self-care. Set your old home on fire using the spells from Advanced Self-Defense for Foxes.

Despite how you leave the forest with blackheads and acne galore, there will come a time when your face will be flawless again, even though you may not think it possible. Take your skincare one day at a time. Take everything one day at a time. I promise that if you put the four secrets from this class into practice every day, you will someday relearn the joy of escaping from humans rightfully accusing you of shoplifting concealer and designer stilettos.

Someday, you could also be teaching seminars in a convention center that was once the imperial compound. You might bump into an aspiring poet. Despite your reservations, strike up a conversation and grab coffee with her—not getting too close to humans doesn’t mean you can’t be casual acquaintances or yoga buddies. Think of it as spring cleaning for the soul: cutting ties with toxic necromancers and kindling new ones with unexpected sources of happiness.

• • • •

Keep these four secrets in mind, and you will live as long and as happily as I have. I will be hosting another seminar here at the Imperial Convention Center for my one thousandth birthday party next year—see you at Letting Go of Grudges for Immortals!

©2023 by Tina S. Zhu.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tina S. Zhu writes from NYC. Her work has been published in Tor.com, Fireside, and Strange Horizons, among other places, and she can be found at tinaszhu.com.

Immortality Soup, Or, An Excerpt from the Cookbook of the Gods

Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe | 3127 words

Chapter Ninety Three
Immortality Soup

Hello, there.

If you are reading this, then I assume you are either a mortal who somehow stumbled upon this text or a young demigod seeking to ascend closer to Eledumare’s throne. If you are the latter, I welcome you. Soon you shall sit with me and the other gods in Ọ́run. You shall be able to descend into hell, Apadi, and the fires shall not hurt you. You will live forever, enjoying the praise and adoration of the mortals on the earth below. You will be a god.

If you are the former, I advise you to turn away immediately. Shut this book and forget you ever read these words. If you persist, you will either run mad or get obsessed with the disastrous recipes on these pages. There are instructions here on how to prepare foods with power to poison the gods themselves. Of course, you probably wouldn’t be able to find most of the ingredients anyway but prevention is better than a cure. We cannot risk this knowledge falling into the wrong hands. Farewell, human.

So, young demigod, shall we begin? I haven’t introduced myself, have I? I apologize.

I am Eshu, god of pathways and trickery, god of lost souls and thieves, god of magic and chronicler of the heavens.

I am the most powerful Orisha, but this story isn’t about me. It is about turning you into a god, so settle down on your mortal butt and read. Read and memorize, for you cannot consult lines and pages you have read before. Such is the magic of the gods. Ready? Here we go.

• • • •

This is how you prepare a meal to grant immortality:

1

Gather your ingredients.

List: onions, peppers, salt, seasoning, meats, water, oil, random leaves and seeds, godblood .

Guide:

Peppers & Onions

You’ll need the tatashe, fiery red peppers that can only be found growing at the foot of Sango’s fiery mountain. Be careful not to breathe in the volcano’s poisonous air. Sango is always performing some experiment or the other in his volcano and he couldn’t care less what happened to the environment. Yes, he’s a real prick, but don’t tell him I said that. He may be a weirdo but he gets angry easily and he’s the god of thunder plus the king of the gods. Not a good person to cross.

Do not pick the tatashe with your bare hands or your skin will peel right off. I recommend metal gloves, if you can find them. Yes, I’m serious.

The tatashe must be stored between hot coals while you prepare the other ingredients. Be watchful and fan the coals regularly or better still, replace them regularly to keep the tatashe’s temperature up. If they are not stored appropriately, they will lose potency and turn to ash.

Next, locate the rodo. Unlike the tatashe, these peppers are not fiery. They sting instead. You can only find these tiny peppers in Apadi. Yes, hell. They are nicknamed hell’s peppers for a reason. Of course, you won’t survive a trip to Apadi so you’ll probably have to bribe a lesser god to get it for you. I know for a fact that Afẹfẹ, the wind god, runs an illegal smuggling business between Ọ́run and Apadi. He loves honey so if you can get him a pot of fresh honey, he will get you whatever you want. Be careful though, Afẹfẹ is one of my children and possesses all of my cunning. He will certainly try to trick you. Don’t believe a thing he says and don’t pay him until he gets you the rodo.

The final pepper you must gather is shombo. This is perhaps the most important pepper and the most difficult to get. I know what you’re thinking. A wacky god’s volcano and hell itself . . . what could be more dangerous? Well, I never said it was dangerous. The word I used was difficult.

The shombo grows only in the garden of Ọya, the mother of creation and wife to Sango. This garden is located somewhere on earth or Ayé, the world of the humans, and it is said that only the pure of heart can locate it. Maybe that is why, despite several attempts, I have never found the garden.

There are several rare fruits in the garden with extraordinary powers that not even the gods possess. There are plums capable of granting anyone the ability to control every single human in Ayé. There are pomegranates that can wake the dead and actually restore them to life, something not even the gods can do. There are oranges that can give one power that temporarily eclipses the combined might of the other Orisha. Of course, the last one is what I’m after. Don’t ask me why.

You must sneak into the garden, which is guarded by winged spirits called Igún. They will let you pass if your heart is pure. Don’t try to fight them. I have tried and every time their claws have drawn blood from my skin. You must locate the shombo quickly and ensure you are cleansed while picking them. This means you must not have any kind of carnal relations for seven days before you venture out to find the shombo. After picking them, get out as fast as you can because Ọya will be after you and trust me, she is one goddess you don’t want to face.

I have to tell you this (and it’s not because she has caught me trying to find her garden to raid it on more than a thousand occasions) but Ọya is really scary. She has to be, I suppose. How else would she cope with my brother’s unstable emotions? Anyway, if you can get your hands on the shombo then that’s it for the peppers. Store it in a cool dark place that the light of the sun cannot reach because if sunlight can touch it then Ọya can find it and if she finds you . . . I’ll leave what comes next to your imagination.

Now, you must collect the alubosa, onions that grow under the earth in places where blood has been shed for a rightful cause. These onions are purplish green in colour. Do not confuse them with the reddish brown ones. Those are alubosha. Note the difference. The alubosha grow under the earth in places where blood has been shed unjustly, and if you add them to your ingredients instead of the right onions and eat them, you will not become a god. You will become an alujonu, a demon. I am not joking. Harvesting the alubosa you need is quite simple, though it has always been difficult to say for sure what the definition of a righteous cause is, so be careful.

That’s it for the first set of ingredients. What? You forgot something? Didn’t I tell you to take notes at the beginning of this chapter? I didn’t? Well, start taking notes.

All right, then. Let’s continue.

Salt And Seasoning

This is left to you, really, and shouldn’t make much difference whether they’re included or not. Of course, I don’t think food prepared without salt would be edible. Also, you would totally miss the flavour that seasoning would provide, right?

You can use the normal salts that humans use to prepare their food but to be honest, they won’t bring out the flavour of your other powerful ingredients.

I advise you to visit the salt mines under the sea. Olokun, the sea god, is even more temperamental than Sango but he is vain. Praise him eloquently and he’ll let you dive to the bottom of the sea for his pure salts.

Seasoning can be gotten from the seeds of the adùn fruit. These trees are easy to find in the human world: look for trees with red leaves, leaning to the east. When you get the fruits of the tree, split them and take out the seed. Grind them into powder. They’ll grant your soup exceptional sweetness. It was with these seeds that Ọya, Sango’s second wife, prepared a meal for him and bewitched him into falling in love with her, but you didn’t hear that from me.

You have your salt and you have your sweetness. Now, let’s get to the next ingredient.

Meat

I am aware that there are gods who don’t eat meat, like Ọsun and Ọrunmila. Several humans take after them as well. I have nothing against them but I think they’re really missing out. If you are one of these . . . vegetarians, you may skip this section. You probably won’t be as powerful as you should be if you omit one of the ingredients, but who needs power anyway? As long as you’re an immortal Orisha, eh?

The meat that should be included in the soup is the flesh of Lakatabu, the immortal golden elephant.

As old as the first gods themselves, the golden elephant is one of the Creator’s first works. Eledumare made the animal from his godblood, the same way he made the first gods. Lakatabu is a fearsome creature with foot-long tusks and speed that belies its enormous size. Since it does not require food for survival, it is not carnivorous, but it kills beings that trespass in its territory.

What you must do is approach the elephant when it is asleep. This is almost impossible, though. Lakatabu is wise and has experienced several demigods venturing into its territory over the years, trying to harvest a chunk of its body to add to their soup. It doesn’t matter that it heals itself without stress. It is the disrespect that actually rankles it.

You have two options. You either approach the golden elephant and carefully state your purpose. If it deems you worthy, it may allow you to cut a part of it. Of course, the chances are quite high that you’ll die immediately as it sees you, its tusks skewering your stupid heart before you utter a word.

The best option is to put it to sleep with music from the same magic flute the legendary human hero, Akin, had used when he walked into heaven and stole power from the gods. The flute is located in Ayé, hidden in a temple. You should have no trouble finding it. Make sure you return the flute when you finish your mission.

Once you’ve cut out what you need from Lakatabu, store the fresh meat in a calabash. Keep it there and then go get everything else. Fear not, the meat will not decay.

Now, you must get the next ingredient.

Water

You cannot just take water from any stream to use as base for your soup. You must use only the purest freshwater and that can only be found in Ọsun’s streams.

Ọsun is Sango’s other wife. She is the nice one, goddess of mothers and purity. I like Ọsun because she doesn’t judge. Unlike the other gods, she never makes snide remarks about my activities. She doesn’t try to say I am not a real god. She views everyone through the same eyes. Perhaps this is also why she is the goddess of balance.

Ọsun should let you get water from her streams easily. Just ensure you are cleansed, just like the time you got the shombo from Ọya’s garden. Give Ọsun your thanks and leave without looking back.

This is certainly the easiest thing to get on this list.

Oil

I am not aware of special requirements for this. You may use palm oil or groundnut oil. It depends on you and isn’t necessarily an ingredient that must be added. Let’s move on.

Leaves and Seeds

The leaf you need is the one humans use for ẹfọ riro, their vegetable soup. However, you must go into the forest and find it in a place where it grows wild. It must be at dawn, when the leaves are wet with dew. Gather the leaves right there using only your right hand. Do not touch them with your left hand or they won’t work. When you have plucked a sufficient amount, walk backwards ‘til you reach the path. Then you can turn and return home. Do not utter a single word ‘til you are far from the forest.

Store the leaves in a dark room then go look for the melon seeds used to cook the delicious ẹgusi soup. Gather as many unripe melons as you can, then open them with a knife. You will see the seeds inside. Pick every third seed aside and when you have a good number, discard the rest and take the seeds you set aside. These are what you will add to your soup.

Be patient, young demigod. We are almost there.

Godblood

This ingredient comes last because it is almost impossible to get. You might as well go ahead and prepare your soup with the ingredients listed above. You won’t be a god, but you will live longer than other mortals and as a demigod, you will possess certain enhanced abilities. But you won’t be a god.

Godblood, the silvery liquid that runs through the veins of the Orisha, can be used for several things. You can create draughts of death from it if you’re a talented alchemist, it can be used to create an elixir of immortality without the other ingredients, and it is also needed if one was to create a poison to kill the gods. Yes, it is that powerful.

You have two options. You can go to any of the numerous lesser gods around and beg them for a drop of their blood. Due to the magic in their godblood, you will certainly possess some of the characteristics of those gods. If you get blood from the minor god Afẹfẹ, for instance, you will inherit some of his wind controlling powers.

Getting godblood from lesser gods means you have to worship them first, and since most of them are not worshipped regularly, I predict that they will quickly grant you any boon you desire. If you have little ambition and you don’t really like power, go ahead and solicit a minor god for their blood.

The second option is to approach any one of the first gods and ask for godblood. This is almost impossible, of course. You will certainly be rejected, and with good reason.

As you know, the first gods were created directly by Eledumare, formed from his own godblood. Their blood is the purest among gods. They cannot just give it away. Some of the vain ones, like Ogun the war god, might ask you to go on quests to prove you’re worthy of receiving his blood. The crazy ones like Ṣàngó may challenge you to a duel to the death. The rigid ones like Ọrunmila will tell you no and nothing else.

I cannot blame them. Few weapons can pierce the skin of gods and fewer creatures can hurt us. The Igún, the hybrid vulture guides of Ọya’s garden, are an example of such creatures. When a god bleeds, bad things happen.

I will not delve into the details here but the pain a first god feels when they bleed . . . it’s terrible.

So, get godblood. I cannot help you get this. It may take you a year or ten or twenty. It may take you your entire lifetime to gather this final ingredient but once you do, you will finally be ready to cook.

You will be ready to ascend.

2

Cook

Make sure you cook at night, under the full moon. Dress yourself in white garments and make sure you are cleansed. Recite the incantations in the book of rites which you must have read before reading this book. If you haven’t, you can find it in Ọrunmila’s library.

After reciting the incantations, begin cooking.

Your flames must be produced by firewood as this gives the soup a special flavor. Set a big pot on the fire and pour the water in it. Add your ingredients in the order which you gathered them. This is very important.

Wait for seventy minutes between the addition of each ingredient.

As you add each ingredient, offer prayers to Eledumare. Pray for his mercy. If he doesn’t deem you worthy, no amount of delicious food will persuade him to elevate you to full godhood.

Do not leave the pot unattended. Do not speak except when you are praying or reciting necessary incantations.

By the time you add the last ingredient, the godblood, the soup should be reddish brown in color, with the vegetable leaves remaining green. Add the godblood and it should turn even redder and glow, bubbling with sudden power.

Offer your thanks to the creator and snuff out the flames. You are done cooking.

3

Eat

There are no rites here. Eat however you want. I recommend making staple food and eating the morsels with soup.

You can pour cassava flour in boiling water and make ẹba from it. You can also make àmàlà from yam flour. Just make sure you finish the soup in one sitting.

After eating, you should sleep. Eledumare himself will manifest in your dreams and tell you what you must do.

Enjoy!

• • • •

Before you go, you should know that there are other ways to become a god. You can get blessed by Eledumare at the point of death. You can use the dark arts to give yourself immortality and great power. You can even trick the creator himself. The last one is what I did.

Yes, I used to be human. One day, I found a fatally wounded demigod in the forest. He was upright and steadfast, a true believer. He was on a quest to attain immortality when something happened and he was left on death’s doorstep.

I had learnt a lot about the gods at that point and possessed some considerable magic skills so I knew Eledumare would probably bless him with immortality. So I killed the demigod and cast an illusion to look like him.

I make it sound so simple but of course, it isn’t. You can break out of the box, like me, and get your godhood through unconventional means or you can use the soup.

Writing this book is one of the eternal punishments I was given for breaking the rules. I have four thousand chapters left so I must stop here. Someday, after your ascension, come find me in my prison, also known as Ọrunmila’s library. Maybe we can share a gourd of palm wine. It gets quite lonely sometimes.

Farewell, young one, and happy feasting! I wish you luck.

©2023 by Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe is writer of the dark and fantastical, a poet, and a reluctant mathematician. He has poetry and fiction published or forthcoming from Podcastle, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Baffling Magazine, Lightspeed, and elsewhere. When he’s not writing about malfunctioning robots or crazed gods, he can be found doing whatever people do on Twitter at @OluwaSigma. He writes from a room with broken windowpanes in Lagos, Nigeria.

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

A Small God

Jeff Reynolds | 562 words

A small god once lived far out among the hidden objects that plied the stardust between galaxies. They were not a handsome god, nor an ugly god; not an intelligent god, nor an ignorant god. They were neither tall nor short, fat nor thin, powerful nor weak. They were, as gods went, plain and humble.

They were, though, quite lonely.

Their home was a hollowed-out comet that had through the whims of gravity been cast from the system of its creation. They’d found it alone, looking for a companion, and had stepped upon its surface and made it part of Their existence. It served as a bedroom and a vessel, carrying Them through the darkness, leaving a long tail behind whenever They passed close to a star.

Each day They stared out of the craters of Their comet into the vastness of space and wondered about others like Themself. Did They exist? What where They like? Did They live on solitary comets and eat the radiation of stars to fuel Their bodies? They would spend long days, weeks, years dwelling on the questions, but found no answers in the pinpricks of light They stared into. Then They might sleep for a while—a few days, or a millennium—and They would dream of the Others. The Others were handsome and powerful and loving and sensual—so many things They were not—and They would wake to a remembrance of beautiful hair, strong muscles, smooth, perfect skin. They would long for the Others, then—and sometimes return to sleep immediately to dream some more.

One century They woke from a long slumber and found Their asteroid had drifted into a star nursery. Brilliant, blazing balls surrounded Their home, washing Them in blue and yellow and red light. They rubbed the sleep from Their eyes, casting the seeds aside to become tiny new asteroids that joined Their growing armada of little worlds. As They and Their fleet drifted near one star, They reached out to touch it. They dragged Their fingers through its plasma, and it shifted its course at Their touch. Slower than They, but trailing Their little world in the emptiness behind. They tipped Their head to the side and pondered its motion, saw the way it repositioned itself and formed a new pattern among the old one.

They had an idea.

They moved through the field of stars and touched each in turn, until Their fingers blackened with the heat. They laughed then, for it was the first time They felt something other than the nothing that came before, the cold that stretched through infinite memories. It was pain They felt, yes, but it tickled Them that such could be experienced. This was new and different, and They felt Their heart beat faster.

Six hundred and thirty-three thousand years later, Their fingers had burned away. Their body was scorched by the heat until They were as dark as the void between stars. They completed the great work and moved on upon Their little world, healing as time passed. Out of the star nursery and into the void once more, looking back as the many balls of plasma shrank and became pinpricks of light again, until They could read the patterns They had made.

“Hello,” the stars read. “Is anyone there? I need you.”

They waited for an answer.

©2023 by Jeff Reynolds.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeff is a science fiction and fantasy writer from Maine whose work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Escape Pod, Daily Science Fiction, Apparition Literary Magazine, and GigaNotoSaurus. Jeff works for Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, home of New Horizons, Parker Solar Probe, and the upcoming Dragonfly mission to Titan. Unfortunately, he’s just a software licensing analyst and doesn’t do any of the cool stuff, like building space probes or hanging out with Brian May. He’s a graduate of Viable Paradise writers’ workshop, as well as the Stonecoast writers’ conference, and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Simulation and Digital Entertainment from the University of Baltimore. You can learn more about Jeff and find links to his published stories on his website: trollbreath.com.

What You Are and the Wolf

Jae Steinbacher | 3169 words

His long voice weaves itself into your dream with a promise: I’ll come for you. I know you’re not who they think you are.

Your mind sharpens as you wake, the voice thinning to the howl of a lone wolf. Your mother is up, her steps in the other room as she checks the bolt on the door and then the scrape of metal against stone as she banks the fire. You sweat beneath your quilt.

In the morning, Ma braids your hair and sends you to the meadow to pick flowers. A bouquet for her shop front, and a bouquet for grandmother, whose severe nose and brow remind you of a father you barely knew.

“Don’t stray from the path. Don’t stay too long. And don’t let your guard down,” your Ma warns you. She’s been saying these things as long as you’ve been old enough to go to the meadow on your own. “Keep watch for the wolf. He eats little girls like you.” You flinch away from the words.

“Why can’t I help the men like Aleks does?” you ask. You used to make dolls out of sticks and clay with the neighbor’s boy, but now he follows his father to bring back lumber, meat, and pelts. You’re taller than Aleks, and you know the forest plants better than any of the boys.

But Ma only shakes her head. “Hurry along, and don’t keep your grandmother waiting.” She pins your red cloak closed and kisses your forehead.

You make a game of sprinting from tree to tree on the path, sometimes clambering up a trunk to scout the way ahead. Your grandmother used to meet you in the meadow and teach you all the plants’ names—soft blue harebells, cups of gold, teeth of purple lupine, blood-red paintbrush. She taught you how to spy the bird’s nests and the deer trails. So when you arrive at the meadow’s edge and see prints in the soft grass, you stop short.

One set is like yours, but a little smaller. Bare feet; a child’s? And the other set stands up the hair on your whole body—a triangular pad with four toes. The wolf.

You look about you in a daze, swallowing with a dry throat, skin abuzz. The birds are still singing though, no warning calls. You’re safe. You inspect the prints again and see it’s not one after the other, the wolf stalking the child. They walked side by side, disappearing at the edge of the woods.

“Fairy business!” Your grandmother exclaims when you tell her. “Under last night’s full moon.”

You think of your dream. Maybe another child answered the wolf’s call.

Before she sends you home, your grandmother adds, “Don’t tell your mother, you’ll only worry her.”

But you’ve never been one to do what you’re told.

• • • •

The next time your Ma sends you into the meadow, the story flies right off your tongue. “They were walking with the wolf. What if they belong to the lost child from the village across the river?” you ask.

Her face goes white. “I don’t want to hear of it.”

“But there was no blood, Ma. No sign they were injured. They could still be out there!”

The smack of her open palm against your cheek silences you. You blink away tears, though you’re more startled than hurt.

“I said no more.”

You clench the handle of your basket, heavy with a cake and a bottle of beer for your grandmother.

“Stay on the path. Don’t dilly-dally.” Ma belts your cloak roughly, pushing the air from your ribs, and pulls your hood low over your face. “Don’t go into the woods.”

Fury builds with each step you take toward the meadow. She’s never listened to you, but always to her fear.

When you reach the clearing where the flowers beckon, you take your shears and snip off your braids, shhhk, shhhk. And then you uncork grandmother’s beer and drink from it until you’re stumbling, flattening a patch of poppies. Covered in their glistening red petals and beads of golden pollen, you break your grandmother’s cake and eat it.

This is how the wolf finds you—half drunk and alight with bees, confused by the pollen and brew. Your slovenly mind has just come around to the fact that you’ll face a caning when his pointed muzzle emerges from the grasses.

You scramble half-upright, tangled in your red cloak. The wolf’s dark eye regards you, and you wait for the sly curl of his lip and fangs at your throat. But instead he yips, high and fast, and you know he is laughing at you.

“If you’re here to eat me, I’ll put up a fight!” You swing the shears in his direction, but he doesn’t flinch. He sits on his haunches and scratches an ear, then shakes his head.

I’m not here to eat you.

Hope bubbles through you. “Are you here to take me to the other child?”

His ear twitches. So you did hear my call.

“I know they were here with you, in the meadow.”

He ducks his head below his arm and chews at the fur of his belly, grooming himself. After a moment of this he looks back to you, still on the ground. I’m not here for you today.

You set your teeth. “Isn’t that what you do? Steal away little girls?” You rise indignantly to your feet. “Am I not good enough for you?”

The wolf stands, and you nearly fall again. He is almost as tall as you. His snout, held level, points to your breastbone. Is that what you are? he asks quietly.

The question holds you frozen like a doe. Can he smell it on you, this wanting to be something you’re not?

And then you do what many people, when faced with something terrifying, do—you run. All the way to grandmother’s house, where she appraises your shorn hair and unkempt cloak, the beer on your breath and crumbs on your face.

“Did he hurt you, girl?” she asks.

You shake your head, wondering what she thinks. You can’t stop trembling. Grandmother wraps you in a blanket and sets you to sleep in her bed, and it isn’t until hours later that you hear your Ma’s voice in the hall.

“. . . with a boy,” Grandmother whispers. You start when you realize this is what they feared.

“Have to marry her off soon, then,” your Ma replies.

You feign sleep, though your fingers tighten around the shears you kept close.

• • • •

After she weeps over your hair and scrubs the grass stains from your clothes, Ma keeps you on your toes and underfoot at all times. You bake cakes, collect wash, sweep the floor, mend clothes. You don’t leave the shop, giving coins instead to one of the village boys to deliver Grandmother her cakes. He’s asked to pick her a bouquet as well, but after he mistakes nightshade for clematis they don’t send him to the meadow anymore. As spring deepens, you imagine the flowers coming to their fullest and then languishing.

Meanwhile, Ma gossips with every wife who comes by about the men in the village—those hunters and tree-fellers. Whose boys are of age, are there any widowers, would any of them take a girl with no fortune to speak of? You keep your face splotched with flour and eggshell in case one of these men wanders by.

Each night as you lie in bed you think about the wolf’s question. Is that what you are? Sometimes you touch the aching flesh on your chest or feel your chin and upper lip as though they’ll begin to sprout dark hair like your legs. Whatever you are isn’t drawn by an arrow from your body. More and more you wish you’d been ready to listen to the wolf. You wait to hear his call, but a moon passes without his lonely howl.

One day after Ma sends you to wash up for dinner, you come to the table to find a strange man at Father’s seat. Ma clasps her hands as she waits to introduce you. Your heart thumps inside you like a rabbit’s.

“This is Pietr,” Ma says. Pietr is tall and lean, lines carved into his cheeks from age and harsh winters. He could be handsome, if you were the girl ready for marriage everyone thinks you are. His gaze unnerves you, though—more wolfish than the wolf’s ever was.

“Why don’t you serve our guest his plate?” Ma asks. You grimace and her smile turns cold. You sulk into the kitchen and find the portions pre-arranged—his the choicest breast, the heapingest pile of pole beans, the softest cut of bread. Ma’s and yours are split between the remainders. You want to spit on Pietr’s, but even the thought of him swallowing your saliva makes your stomach roll.

So you bring the plates out, Ma’s and Pietr’s first. Pietr’s strong hand catches yours as you set his plate down. You won’t meet his eyes and slip your hand free. He smells harsh as pine sap and strong as spoiled onions.

You gag in the kitchen, retrieving your own plate. Each step back to the table seems a meadow’s-length. Ma chatters on at Pietr and gestures at the bouquet her boy collected for the occasion. You drew him the flowers to pick this time. The lilies’ overripe odor rises through the other scents.

Ma calls your name and you take a deep breath before returning to the table. Pietr hasn’t waited for you to begin eating. His dirty nails tear into the meat, grease on his lips and chin.

“She can mend and clean. She keeps the house tidy while I’m in the shop; helps with the baking too . . .” as Ma lists off all the ways you’ll make a fine wife, you feel yourself shrinking. There’s no fire, but the room is unbearably warm.

Pietr’s voice cuts in. “And does she bleed?” he asks.

You stare at your Ma in horror. This doesn’t belong to anyone but you. Before she can respond, your arm shoots out as though of its own mind and you knock the water jug across the table, flooding the tablecloth and your plate. You catch it before it tumbles to the floor and shatters.

“I’ll get more,” you say, knowing that with Pietr here your Ma won’t follow you to the pump. Outside you gulp deep breaths, set the jug down, and run. The old familiar path to the meadow is less well-trod than before. Stickers catch your skirts and branches scratch your face. Somewhere behind you is the baying of a hound, men on a hunt. You’re nearly at the clearing when a body tackles you, shoving you unceremoniously to the dirt.

“Aleks!” you gasp. He gets off you quickly, his face alight with excitement and embarrassment.

“Your Ma said I needed to keep you safe.”

You pick yourself up, an oozing cut on your knee and a scrape on your face. “Well done.”

Twigs snap and a doe bursts from the brush, leaping right over you. Aleks pulls you aside as a pair of hounds crashes after her. “Come on,” he says, a hand still on your arm. He nods to the men at the hunt as he escorts you home, and you realize even a boy like Aleks sees you as quarry.

Your Ma takes one look at you and sends you to your room with no supper. “Pietr said he would come back,” she warns. “You’ll be on your best behavior.”

That night, the village feasts on venison. You smell the charred bones from your room. The night sky is clouded over. The moon hides her face.

• • • •

Your cheek stings where Ma has rubbed in starch to hide the scrapes. She bade Aleks gather enough water to fill the tub and scrubbed you pink and raw. You’ve heard the rumors from the shop. Pietr’s name in the mouths of customers, and yours. Another meal, this time a feast on each plate. You’re ready to refute his proposal, until you see the dress your Ma has spread out for you. Her own wedding dress.

“You told him yes?” You withdraw from her guiding hands on your shoulders, but she grips you harder.

“This is for your own good,” she hisses. “I told you not to stray from the path.”

“Ma, that isn’t what—” but she ignores your protests, dresses you like a doll with fixed limbs.

“Don’t cry, girl,” she says, almost soft. But when your pleading eyes meet hers, she shakes her head. “You’ll mess your face.”

The ceremony is planned for your own small yard, between the front path and the clothesline. The wash still hangs in the late evening sun, fluttering festively in the last rays.

You wait. Ma and Aleks and a small gathering of village women with sad bouquets fuss over you and the preparations. “So pretty,” they mutter. “You’ll be a good wife. He looks hard, but he can take care of a woman.” All their words make you shrink smaller and smaller.

“Where is he?” Ma hisses to Aleks, who takes off down the path to find your groom.

A wish sprouts in your chest. He won’t come. He’s the wolf in disguise. He’s lost in the woods. Any of a million possibilities that die with a collective hush from the women as Pietr arrives with the onset of night.

He wears simple clothes, clean ones at least. His craggy face doesn’t change when he takes you in. Ma leaves your side and lights the bonfire in the center of the yard.

There is an exchange of gifts before you may take hands. Your stiff fingers clutch a pocket watch that was your father’s. His gift to your mother on their wedding, and until you, the most valuable thing she could claim to own.

Pietr takes it from you, hefting it appraisingly and sliding it into a pocket. He offers a small wooden box that opens to present a crown of dried flowers. You recognize their shapes, and your grandmother’s handiwork—pink phlox, harebells, daisies white as snow—all from your favorite part of the meadow. Idly you wonder if he paid her for the work. Pietr sets the crown on your temple and nods.

“A lovely crown for a lovely girl,” he says.

Before your Ma can speak the words to give you away, Pietr removes one more thing from a satchel on his belt. It’s dark and musky, and as he drapes it across your open hands you realize it is the wolf’s tail.

“The gift of security,” Pietr says, adding under his breath, “No more straying from the path.”

Your vision narrows and just like before, you gasp in breaths, choking suddenly on the bonfire smoke and your own squeezing lungs. No other path, no escape from this life that isn’t you. Someone shrieks, and you pitch forward, clutching the wolf’s tail. The flames rush up to meet you.

But your Ma moves to catch you, and it’s the dress that ignites at the hem, not your skin. One of the women grabs your red cloak from the wash line and throws it to your Ma, who beats at the fire by your ankles. Aleks tosses an arc of water at the flames. Pietr stands unmoved, waiting for everyone to get on with it.

Your Ma clicks her tongue at the damage. “Are you hurt, child?” she asks.

You shake your head, tracing your fingers over the wolf’s tail. Oily hairs over thinner, finer ones.

“Just the dress,” Ma sighs. One more disappointment to add to all the others, you think.

“She won’t be needing it much longer.” Pietr steps forward to take your hands, but Ma shoulders him off, wrapping your red cloak around you.

“There you are,” she says. At her show of care, you begin crying. As she holds you, looking into your face as though she’s seeing you for the first time, something changes in her eyes. She turns to Pietr. “It’s a bad omen.” Murmurs of assent in the gathered crowd. “Perhaps we should wait another moon.”

The people of the village nod and begin to disperse. Pietr’s hands flex, and a vein in his temple emerges. “You promised her to me,” he says.

“But I haven’t given her up yet.” Ma takes your hands in hers, the wolf’s tail twining between you. “You should go,” she says, staring at Pietr but squeezing your hands. “While it’s still twilight. While you can still make your way by sight.”

She releases your hands and once again blocks you with her body. “Go now,” she says. “My child needs to recover from this.”

Pietr doesn’t move, but you do. Into the house, so he doesn’t catch on, and then through the back door. The moon peeks through the trees, and you’re a drop of blood in her eye, winding through the forest.

You touch the flowers at your crown—to grandmother’s? Only safe there for so long. Pietr will find you.

You wipe the powder from your face and make a decision. First the meadow.

It glows in the moonlight, grass lush and shining, flowers rampant. Some of their faces closed to the night, others alight. You kick off your shoes and move into the middle. Moths flutter through the grass at each step you take.

The thickest patch of flowers stands taller than you. With the wolf’s tail in your hands you throw your head back and give a howl of defiance, of regret, of mourning. A cry to say I’m still here. A question: Where are you?

Soon enough Pietr and a gang of men will come through the meadow searching for you. They’ll light the flowers into a blaze that nearly matches their fury at being deceived. But for now you hold the stems of sunflowers and summer lilacs, wild roses grasp your cloak and moonflower twines at your ankles. You ask the moonlight for a little magic. Wolf magic. Or whatever he saw in you.

A voice joins yours, deep where yours is high, haunting where yours soars. He comes to you through the clearing, petals catching in his fur and perfuming each step. Your wolf.

You find your hands empty and reach for him, twist your fingers in his fur. His eyes shine in the night, his tail whole and unsevered. The wolf’s breath is clean from spring water and gnawed bone. He waits as you lean your head against his shoulder and breathe.

“I’m ready,” you say.

He lowers himself to the ground so you can straddle his back. His coat so soft between your knees. When he stands, you tower over the tallest flowers, in full view of the moon. You lift your head and lean forward against his neck. “Let’s go.”

©2023 by Jae Steinbacher.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jae Steinbacher is a queer nonbinary trans writer living on unceded Duwamish lands. They have been published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Baffling Magazine, and elsewhere. Jae is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and North Carolina State University’s MFA program. Find them online at JaeSteinbacher.com or @JaeSteinbacher on various social media.

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

Womb City

Tlotlo Tsamaase | 4776 words

This genre-bending Africanfuturist horror novel blends The Handmaid’s Tale with Get Out in an adrenaline-packed, cyberpunk body-hopping ghost story exploring motherhood, memory, and a woman’s right to her own body.

Nelah seems to have it all: fame, wealth, and a long-awaited daughter growing in a government lab. But, trapped in a loveless marriage to a policeman who uses a microchip to monitor her every move, Nelah’s perfect life is precarious. After a drug-fueled evening culminates in an eerie car accident, Nelah commits a desperate crime and buries the body, daring to hope that she can keep one last secret.

The truth claws its way into Nelah’s life from the grave.

As the ghost of her victim viciously hunts down the people Nelah holds dear, she is thrust into a race against the clock: in order to save any of her remaining loved ones, Nelah must unravel the political conspiracy her victim was on the verge of exposing—or risk losing everyone.

Set in a cruel futuristic surveillance state where bodies are a government-issued resource, this harrowing story is a twisty, nail-biting commentary on power, monstrosity, and bodily autonomy. In sickeningly evocative prose, Womb City interrogates how patriarchy pits women against each other as unwitting collaborators in their own oppression. In this devastatingly timely debut novel, acclaimed short fiction writer Tlotlo Tsamaase brings a searing intelligence and Botswana’s cultural sensibility to the question: just how far must a woman go to bring the whole system crashing down?

Coming January 23, 2024 from Erewhon Books.

04:44 /// THE DEVIL’S TONGUE

Jan’s at his home somehow. I’m on my street. My family home’s driveway. Engine still humming. The roar of the garage yawns open, its lights flare on. The car gently revs itself inside. I’m too terrified to touch its steering wheel; I whimpered in the dark as it drove through the winding highways, taking me home. I give it my thumbprint to switch off.

“Don’t forget to switch off the remote. It can’t intercept your microchip for more than twelve hours,” Jan had reminded me before we parted.

I stroke the tiny device that saved my life tonight, press the center, and the light turns red. I’m back online, and my microchip sees everything now. I swing the door open, topple out of the car. I gasp at the house opposite ours, its deep shadow looming toward ours. A man’s silhouette in the dark. From where he’s sitting, he’s got a clear view of me. The streetlight pours light across my body. He watches me stagger out of the car, covered in blood. Intoxicated with the stench of death. Neighbor. Donald. Up on his balcony. Can he see? No. It’s too dark to see. He’s up there, cigar red-lit in his mouth. A whiskey glass in his hand, his nightcap. Even so, the blood may gleam under the light, but he can’t discern it as blood. Maybe some liquid. But not blood.

But this memory will be a snitching witness, a field day for the CBE’s simulation when I go under. No. I have at least eleven months to worry about it. Eleven months to un-fuck my life. Quite sufficient, I think.

I smile, half-wave, pretending everything’s hundreds. Donald doesn’t wave back, never does. His company has lost tenders to mine; he’s always second to me. Still, the darkness sways in my chest. Don’t panic. You overreact when you panic. I won’t apply for the next tender. He’s sure to win then. Let bygones be bygones. Maybe call him up for a chat, throw him a piece job. Should shut him up. Better an ally than an enemy who won’t lie for you. Corruption is a crutch sometimes. And I need a crutch, something to lean on.

I get into the house at the witching hour. Burn the bloody clothes in the braai stand, in a way my husband won’t notice, out by the laundry room. The microchip can’t report me; there’s nothing illegal about incinerating clothes. Every piece of the fabric’s ash sweeps away into the mouth of the breeze. I drench myself in a cold shower, sneak in beside him, spoon against his peaceful-sleeping body. It’s this thought, this thought that terrorizes me: God, what have we done? My brother was right about me, something’s not right about me. My soul won’t stay for long; something will pocket it soon enough. My mind jerks backward, rewinds to my forensic evaluation day and Serati’s words strike my bones coldly: “Matsieng understands your blood intimately; if you were dangerous, Xe would’ve flagged you to the Murder Trials.” My blood has committed murder, and it’s mysteriously connected to Matsieng, who is connected to the ever-suffocating existence of the Murder Trials. What does this mean for me?

I can feel the devil’s tongue on my shoulders, my neck, making my hair stand on end. Something evil lives inside my body. Something even Matsieng could not see.

10:44 /// ICEBERG OF A SECRET

In sleep, the words drift into my dreams clear as day: Nelah Bogosi-Ntsu, you are not obliged to say anything or act in any way, but anything you do or say, any of your actions, may be used as evidence . . . Where were you on Saturday between the hours of one a.m. and five a.m.?

I wake with a jerk, with terror, and realize the reason for my dreams. I’ve slept ceaselessly for only five hours. My husband must have let me sleep in, with him starting his morning late, too. So I slip back into sleep. Morning light slits my eyes open. Nature is so nauseating, so disturbing. Dread. I’m choked by dread. Like I’ve done something wrong. It couldn’t just be a hit-and-run, could it? No, you had to dump the body.

The alarm hammers against my mind, disrupting my chain of thought. My neck aches. A blood-pumping headache beats behind my eyes. Bloody migraine. I envy his being at the Matsieng Fertility Fund last night, looking after our daughter, little Naledi, our name for her. If he loved me better, if our marriage wasn’t so parched, last night wouldn’t have happened. I hate myself the same way I hate him. But I can’t blame him.

I can hear him downstairs. Chuckling. Chatting on a call. Happiness gliding through his body. I am drained, shaking, trying to get up, but the bruises yank me back. Dry tears tremble down my face. The shock drags fear into my body. Last night. Jan and I just went out. Had a couple of drinks. A few drugs. That’s it. Everything else has to be a nightmare. A hallucination. I check my phone. Dead. Covered in mud crusts. Evidence?

“No, go away.” I scrape the mud crusts off. My voice is hoarse from all of last night’s screaming, arguing, negotiating.

What to do, what to do?

Bloody bliksem, my career.

Bury the body, bury the secret.

That’s a human. A life. That’s someone’s—

It doesn’t matter. What matters is we have drugs in our bloodstream. We’re fucking high and drunk.

Life, a wretched bloody poem. Bury the body. Bury the secret. No. I’m not a murderer. Silence and light shadows intermix, a misty body invading our bedroom. Every sound muffled. The long stretch of window overlooks our garden’s trees, which are normally fresh and green. But today, they are blank, bleak, and grey as the storm-cast sky.

“It’s raining.” My voice startles me. I didn’t realize that it’s raining. “She’s out there, lying in the rain. In the mud. The cold eating at her skin,” I silently whisper in shame. I’m here, in this fluffy bedding, this warm home that cost us an entire year of my business’s earnings to acquire. That feeble thing of a girl. Out there.

No. It’s her fault. What was she doing there in the middle of the night? Just standing there. In the way. Toying with us. Toying with death. She wanted to die. And she got us roped into her morbid plans. Couldn’t she have offed herself with a gun, a rope, or a knife? Why use us as her props? Stupid. Stupid girl. Jesus. My heartbeat won’t fucking shut up. I can’t have this. Not this morning. I have a meeting. A business to run. I have an unborn daughter. A beautiful daughter who needs me. Bills to pay. What obligations did she have? Clearly nothing for her to stand in the middle of nowhere like a ghost. She’s haunting me now. But the silence . . . no sirens, no murder-mist in the air.

I scramble across the comforter, throw a couple of pills down my throat. Please silence these voices. Please silence these voices. Please silence these voices. Evict her from my memory, her small body. Her thin fingers. I lean back against the headboard, and pain strangles my neck. I pull up my gown to conceal traces of where her fingers scraped me. The morning is quiet, so is the sun, its rays not raising fumes leading to the body we buried. Only on Sunday, in sixteen hours.

I can imagine how it’ll go down tomorrow morning: a scent that emanates from the dead, grows potent, grows through the soil, a plant seeking daylight. The blossomed pheromones hover eagerly above the crime scene, above the makeshift grave, above the dismembered body parts, the loose tissue thrown amok, the bone tossed aside with reckless abandon. The scent will hover, grow citywide, waiting waiting waiting for the sun to wake up, for a particular building exterior to breathe.

The perforated outer façade of the Gaborone Police Precinct building is retrofitted with a storage of chemicals, automated to hiss and exhale these noninvasive chemicals into the air. We will breathe it in. Dead bodies will breathe it in. Even dead bodies lying fifty meters below ground. Chemicals will come into contact with the corpse’s pheromones, and the sun, in his clear, cloudless haven, will burn this tousling fusion into a cloud-like sapphire blue, and this flame of a serpentine trail will light up the city, twisting through the highways, the narrow neighborhood streets to the outer edge of the city, the place where we buried her, where our DNA lies. This is the new cadaver dog, and on its trail will be the police, news vans and news drones and EMTs.

Murder is a toxic beauty against the sky’s skin.

The CBE may fail.

The microchip may fail.

The sun will not.

I will be found. Exposed. The crime I’ve committed.

Sunday is tomorrow. Sunday is tomorrow. Sunday. Tomorrow. Will Jan and I have figured things out by then?

I’m about to conduct an online search of how to erase the scent released from a dead body. Then I remember a digital trail is just as damaging as DNA left at the crime scene. I wonder how it used to be to kill someone before, to hide it in the earth, and it might go unnoticed for days or even years. What a privilege. I close my eyes, hating myself for thinking that. What if it were me, placed in the earth, in the dark, in the forest, all alone?

“Babe?” Sticking his head into the room, my husband asks, “You alright? You came in late last night, ja.”

He can’t even tell, can’t smell the death clinging to my skin. It’s part of his job. The police staff’s olfactory organs are surgically fine-tuned to the perfection of a cadaver dog’s. Perhaps it’s good that he can’t detect my immoral acts. I have time to right things.

“Jesus, what happened to you?” He sits down on the bed, touches my cheek. It hurts.

I stab the charging cable into my phone and switch it on. “Mxm, fucking work drunkards. Had me drinking more than I could,” I lie. “I fell. Have another meeting this morning.” I helped you pay for my lobola. What have you done since then besides chow and chow? I hate panicking. It sends out all my demons. All of my anger. I snap at anyone.

He tilts his head, leans against the headboard—stares too long. “You’re overworked.” He crawls onto the bed. It’s your fault. Yet you don’t have blood on your hands. “Let’s go on a holiday. Get some rest. Last night, you were talking in your sleep. Clearly, you’re overwhelmed.”

Bloody bliksem, even my mouth is snitching on me. “W-w-what did I say?” I can’t let him see my eyes, the fear, the hatred, the anger.

“You were talking about someone.” He chews the inside of his cheek, always when he’s analyzing a situation. Eyes scanning, rolling back as if to see the memory printed into his brain’s archives. “Some woman. You kept telling her to get out of the way.” He pinches my chin, turning my face toward him. In the opaque stillness of dawn, his eyes are dark, unreadable, scanning my face, his skin a still, quiet brown. “Every time you have a nightmare, it always reveals something that you’ve been hiding.”

I hate my nightmares. Little snitchy bastards that infiltrate our minds and thoughts when we lie unconscious, use our lips like their vuvuzela. I thought the sleeping pills would knock me out cold—yes, even on top of the cocaine—seal my mouth shut. Kill the nightmares, at least.

His fingers tighten around my chin. “Who is this woman? Do I need to be worried?”

Something’s stuck in my throat. Won’t get out. My lopsided smile, I twist it up my face. “My mistress,” I joke. Attagirl. Look cool. Look normal. Look hundreds.

I squirm, getting away from his grasp. His lips turn down. I hate it when I hurt him. I’m exploding. Overreacting. Losing control of my boundaries. Breathe. Stay intact. Stay in control.

“Just . . . things are complicated right now,” I whisper. “The project I’m working on is a bit of a headache. I’ll be done soon, and then we can go on holiday.”

“I’m here for you, nè?”

Tell him tell him tell him, my thoughts erupt.

In comfort, he rubs my knee. Always seeming understanding, baiting me for the catch, to reel me in.

Still leashed to the charger, my phone buzzes. Instead, I glance at my wrist. A text blips across my skin screen:

Janith Koshal: It’s raining. What if the thing washes out onto the surface?

A knell tolls in my chest. The iceberg of a secret, tipping up, lulling above ground. It must be sunk.

11:11 /// MY HUSBAND’S GUN

The stillness in the bedroom is stuffy, silence cocked into my neck, alternating with the intermittent buzzing of my phone. My phone, blade-thin, see-through. I reach for it, again, before Elifasi does.

Janith Koshal: Bloody bliksem! Aren’t you the queen of architecture? The grave is in a construction site! How did you not get wind of this? It’s in the same fucking industry as you! The same fucking ballpark. Parked in your backyard. Are you trying to get us caught

Expletives as intense as his passion. Unlike him. His morning messages used to be morning, love, last night has stained me. You drive me crazy. I miss you already, the taste of you.

Anger distorts him. Probably why he’s going through a messy divorce.

Janith Koshal: Oh, God, what if she’s microchipped?

Janith Koshal: Fuck, fuck, fuck! I forgot to check.

The phone’s screen clicks to black. My trembling hand sets it face down on my lap. If she were microchipped, her drone would’ve appeared, but it didn’t. Unless it was intercepted like mine. If those construction workers dig up that land, we’re screwed. Someone might have seen us nearby. Our number plate. My number plate. I want to rewind last night. We got high. My body was laced with drugs. We were naughty. It was supposed to be fun.

My husband cranes his neck. “Who is that?”

How does a man of such high intelligence leave evidence in my phone? Connecting us. Bloody hell. Get yourself caught, not me. What if his wife finds the messages he’s sending me? She’d rat us out to fuck him over in the divorce. Of course, I live this life of dancing around every oppressive law fine-tuned to my microchipped world that only a man as power-drunk as Jan storms through freely and stupidly. He said I could trust him, yet he’s already fucking up. Wait, Jan navigated his father’s control the same way I maneuver through this world, so he wouldn’t be so stupid to spill our secret on our phones unless . . . I stare at my phone, and the messages have disappeared. There’s no trace of them. I shiver from Jan’s calculative mind of keeping our trails hidden. So I can trust him.

Makes no difference, anyhow. Our phones must’ve pinged to the cell towers—little fucking snitches—when we drove by them.

“My secretary,” I whisper.

My husband’s eyes are searchlights, appraising me. His scientific gaze grips me without noticing the woman in me. I cover up without wanting to. I exhale in relief when he looks away, stares at his wristwatch. “It’s time.”

My heart races at the equivocal moment the microchip vibrates in my neck. Now it’s suddenly a tjatjarag thing when last night it was quiet? Was there something wrong with the area we were in that interfered with it? I stare at the jangle of keys on the dresser, sharp as knives. I want to run them like blades down my nape to extract the piece of microchip metal, the barcode in my neck—removing it would kill me.

His abrasive stare washes over my bruises from the girl’s hands. “I fell down outside my office building, scraped my whole body against the brick wall,” I quickly respond, a reflex to his constant interrogations. Duplicity is no longer required—just his stare makes me talk. If I don’t, we go down a labyrinthine path of arguments, and I end up not recalling what we’re fighting about anymore, except that I’m wrong. I’m always wrong.

I scramble across the carpeted floor to our walk-in closet, paneled in mirrors. I stand in front of one mirror, embedded with the AI assessor. I reach out, hesitate. I shield my eyes. The smoke, the glare of headlights. Handprint against it. Palm against it. But the mirror pays homage to last night: a bruise stapled to my neck; love bite, I can still feel Janith’s lips, still taste them, that deep, raw hunger in his baritone vibrating through me. A landmass of bruise marks across my chin. A deep scratch down the side of my neck. She has my skin cells trapped beneath her nails. Fuck.

My husband stands beside me. I scrunch up my gown around my collarbones. Tell him the truth. For poorer or for worse. Maybe he can save me. For once, trust him. But I can’t read his eyes, so deep-set, lying under the dark shadow of his protruding brow. I feel uneasy, and I shrug out from his grasp. “Do you always have to watch?”

It’s impossible for last night to have happened. My microchip was supposed to send red-flag signals to one of those bot controllers in the police towers. Someone was supposed to stop me. To stop us.

His hand presses into the small of my back. “I’m not your ordinary public servant, babe. Better to have me as your witness as COP of the police force.” He kisses my cheek. His teeth flash, lips thin and cold. Alibi doesn’t get any better than that. His profession offers him immunity, doesn’t it? As if he’s Jesus, incapable of criminal acts. I’m the unhappy, mistreated one who ends up with blood on her hands, but he gets everything.

I inch forward. The assessor will tell him what I did last night. He will fetch his handcuffs and send me for processing. His moral loyalty toward his profession supersedes his love for me.

“My daughter,” I blurt. “I want to see her.”

He narrows his eyes, nudges me forward. “Let’s determine if you are pure first.”

Fear clenches my gut. I grip my mouth as bile rises into it. I take a deep breath. My daughter needs to be safe. I have to be safe for her. “It must be nice to be you, nè,” I bite back. “Every police officer has the privilege of a body with no criminal history.”

“Babe.” He tips his head toward the mirror. “It’s time.”

“But honestly, if I did do something terrible, would you arrest me?” I ask, staring deeply into his eyes.

His dark-brown irises waver in the sunlight pouring through our windows. “Never.”

And I know he’s lying when he adds for humorous effect, “I’d pack our bags and flee. We’d live an adventurous life on the run. I, of all people, know all the tactics we can apply to evade the law successfully.”

He’d sacrifice me rather than his badge, I know that for sure. He wouldn’t want to look stupid in front of his colleagues. He wouldn’t want them to know that I either hid a crime from him or I somehow manipulated him into covering for me, which only emasculates him. Because women’s vaginas are so seductively nefarious, according to the euphemistic news reports regarding the tiny blobs of crime in the city. But what would I do if we switched places? Would I keep his crime a secret? Go on the run with our only still-in-the-Wombcubator daughter? When I look at it like that, I don’t think I’d do that to my daughter. She comes first, before saving our skins, so I understand why he lies to me, to band-aid my anxiety. Maybe I’m desperate to believe there’s still someone loving under there. He may not love me the way he did in the past, but he cherishes my daughter. And that’s all that matters to me. I’d flay myself to keep her warm from a cold, evil world.

“Ja nè, you’re right,” I say, which always cheers him up.

“Exactly. Now chin up. Do it.”

My heartbeat paces fast in my chest as I plant my palm against the mirror. My microchip can’t read my thoughts until my husband peruses them for our weekly Sunday movie night tomorrow. I have some time. I must pass this test. My heart rate must be even, my breathing, my body calm. I love my husband. I love my daughter. Breathe in. I did not kill someone. Breathe out. I did not kill someone. Concentrate. I believe the lie. The lie is the truth. The lie is the truth. The lie—

“Good morning, Nelah. How are we feeling this morning?” The mirror’s surface ripples, sound waves appear as the AI assessor speaks.

My neck burns. Breathe. Relax. Maintain eye contact. “Please scan my microchip.”

I still my heart, I slow down my breathing, and I blink only naturally, not too rapidly, not too slow, for I know what comes next.

“Are you experiencing any sociopathic tendencies?”

Cold air plagues the room.

“No,” I say, though my voice comes out squeaky. My husband stares. “No,” I say, steadily. Focus.

“What were your activities yesterday?”

My husband’s gun is in the third set of drawers to my right. In a safe. Code: 3967. Can I get there before him? I mean, if it came down to it, would I let him just take me in? No, I can’t have gunshots fired off in our home. My daughter will grow up with that story noosed around her entire life. He’s unaware that I know his passcode. I feel safer because of that fact. No, of course, I’d never shoot my husband. I’d never do that to my daughter, leave her without a father. Here’s the deal: If the mirror reveals to him what happened last night, I’ll fall to my knees, cry and plead with him to keep me safe. Sell my soul to him if I have to. Promise to do anything that he wants. Surely, that’ll move him, right?

My husband nudges me. I zoned out, terrified.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear the question,” I say. Relax. Focus. I love my husband. I love my daughter. It is a beautiful day.

“What were your activities yesterday?” it asks. The microchip wasn’t recording for nine hours because of Jan’s device—instead, it received manipulated data of our activities last night, the cleaner version of us. I recall Jan’s words: “Just remember that your story has to correlate with that of the manipulated images fed to your microchip if your morning assessor interrogates you about your whereabouts.”

I stare at the sound waves drawing in and out, wanting to swallow me. Act normal. Act normal. “I was at work from around nine in the morning until late, preparing for my firm’s award this week. I later attended a work party to celebrate with my colleagues and returned home in the early hours of the morning.”

Technically true. Jan is a colleague in the industry, singular yes, but with his fleet of companies, one could consider him as equal to several colleagues. We did go out. Killed someone. “Shut up,” I blurt, trying to still my thoughts. “I mean, I had to shut up one of the male employees. He was overly drunk and pestering his female workmates.” Jan was pestering me deliciously. My husband smiles at this, squeezing my arm. I must add this because my movements are tagged into the car’s GPS system. “Then I drove out of the city. To survey a site. Take note of prowlers.”

“Have you been feeling unlike yourself lately? Are you experiencing any sociopathic tendencies?”

“No,” I say. The lines are steady as hell.

“Have you recently experienced unexplainable bursts of anger or other emotions?”

“No.” I need to live through the full term of this body before being consciously transferred again. I want to make certain that my daughter and I will always be together. I must act normal. Act normal to keep this life. Breathe in, breathe out. Focus. I believe the lie.

“Are there any problems? Malfunctions?”

“No.”

“Have you committed a crime that the microchip failed to detect?”

“No.”

“No.”

“No.”

I hardly compute the questions, but the AI assessor sure is analyzing them. God, what’s the verdict? The wait tortures me, the air tightening around my body although I keep my breathing even, my heart steady.

Elifasi tilts his head. “Mm, it normally doesn’t take this long.”

My knees buckle. I open my mouth to sing, but I believe the lie, I believe the lie, I am the truth, I am the truth, I am the—

The assessor’s voice stitches into the air. She reports my results, “Your physiological logical responses are steady and indicate no signs of deception.”

I’m shocked. Elated. Scared. But shocked.

She’s a lie detector, and I’m a self-taught pathological liar.

© 2023 by Tlotlo Tsamaase. Excerpted from Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase. Published by permission of Erewhon Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tlotlo Tsamaase (xe/xem/xer or she/her/hers) is a Motswana writer. Xer novella, The Silence of Wilting Skin, is a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and was the first Motswana nominee for the Rhysling Award. Tlotlo received support from the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, and xer story “Behind Our Irises” jointly won the Nommo Award. Xer short fiction has appeared in multiple best-of anthologies, Africa Risen, New Suns 2, Chiral Mad 5, and other venues. Womb City is Tlotlo’s debut novel.

Book Review: Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas

Aigner Loren Wilson | 703 words

Vampires of El Norte
Isabel Cañas
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9780593436721
Berkley, August 2023, 384 pgs

With her second novel, Vampires of El Norte, Isabel Cañas crafts a suspenseful romantic vampire tale set along the Texas-Mexico border. The novel is a dual POV tale of yanquis, war, vampires, but more importantly, love and how it protects and shapes the two main characters and points of view in the novel: Nena and Néstor. The two find themselves growing up in different stations in life; Nena is the daughter of a ranchero and Néstor is a vaquero who worked on the ranch where Nena grew up.

The two are close as young children and begin to fall in love as teens, but then a mysterious attack leaves Nena believed dead and Néstor on the run. The beginning of the novel mainly follows Néstor as he buries his grief in work and women until the Mexican American War calls him back to the ranch he left years ago. Upon his return, he learns that Nena is alive and has written him off as abandoning her. As the novel flashes between the two POVs a charge builds between the characters. The reader can feel their connection and the passion they hold for each other even after all the years apart.

Brought back together due to war, Nena rides along with Néstor and the rest of the ranch, including her father, to help as a curandera. While healing the men fallen in battle, Nena and the rest of the healers are attacked and set upon by Texas Rangers and vampires who are taking advantage of the blood and dead left the wake of the Ranger attacks. Néstor saves Nena and the two go on the run back to the ranch to try and save their home from the threat of vampires.

Néstor’s chapters are drenched in Mexican western vibes. He occupies a rustic world where dust and the demons of the past intermingle. On the other hand, Nena’s chapters pulse with bridled desire and a longing for a life that isn’t chained to family obligations. Cañas uses her research and writing skills to craft an authentic voice for both characters, making for an exciting exchange between the two perspectives throughout the story.

I’ve spent most of this review talking about Nena and Néstor because the story is primarily about the bond and passion between the two and how it plays out in 1846, during a time of so much change. There is also the supernatural element of the vampires preying on people throughout the land and causing a sickness called susto that drains the victims of life. While the vampires are constantly in the background, the story feels very much like a gothic romance. Despite not being a huge presence, whenever the vampires do appear, it is absolutely terrifying.

This has a lot to do with how Cañas describes the actions and emotions of the characters in the story, making each of these scenes gripping and horrifying. Some vampire literature that tries to step into new territory with the classic monsters comes across clunky, cheap, and confusing. Vampires of El Norte presents a new form of vampire that is well-crafted and enthralling for longtime vampire fans. Cañas crafts her vampires with an artistry that conjures Nosferatu-like creatures who are grotesque entities devoid of any humanity.

How specific and concrete Cañas writing style is throughout Vampires of El Norte helps a world come to life in the reader’s mind. There are hues of historical romance fiction, gently stained with the shadowy undertones of dark fantasy. While some people may find frustration in how little of a role the vampires play on the main stage of the story, die-hard fans of vampire fiction and dark romance will list Vampires of El Norte as a new favorite.

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: Paula Guran’s The Year’s Best Fantasy, Volume 2

Arley Sorg | 2202 words

The Year’s Best Fantasy, Volume 2
Paula Guran, ed.
Paperback
ISBN: 9781645060499
Pyr, August 15, 2023, 406 pgs

When I was younger, I was eager to devour Year’s Bests/Best Ofs, seeing them as not only a concise survey of what’s out there, but also feeling as if they gave me quick access to the very best stories the world had to offer. Now, considerably older and far more knowledgeable about the publishing industry, I see them very differently than I did back then. I’m more aware of trends and transitions, of the tides of genre politics, and of women and marginalized folks being historically overlooked.

Best Ofs/Year’s Bests have long histories, traditions both implied and explicit. If you search “Year’s Best” in ISFDB [the Internet Science Fiction Database] filtering for “fiction titles” you get 257 results, publications going back to the 1950s, and even this is probably an incomplete set of all the Year’s Bests genre has seen (and doesn’t include the many Best Ofs). Most of the notable editors who put them together when I was younger are no longer around. And, importantly, if you flip through those tables of contents of years gone by, including books by celebrated editors, you’ll get the impression that many of them didn’t see the word “best” as applying to women or people of color.

Nowadays we have newer editors and newer publishers offering their own Year’s Bests/Best Ofs, such as Neon Hemlock’s The Best Queer Speculative Fiction series and Lavie Tidhar’s The Best of World SF series. Our own John Joseph Adams edits The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, pulling in guest editors (such as Rebecca Roanhorse, R.F. Kuang, and more) to make the final selections. We also have a few folks who edit Year’s Bests/Best Ofs—books that are, in theory, broader in scope, some editors with a huge list of publications to their name. Paula Guran is such an editor, having put out anthologies for decades, and currently running both The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror series as well as The Year’s Best Fantasy series. This is the second year for the current iteration of The Year’s Best Fantasy, and hopefully it will be a long-running series featuring a strong array of work. Many of the selections spoke to me, and I found the book to be worth celebrating. This one is stuffed with notable selections! I’ll discuss a sampling of a few of them and leave the rest for your discovery.

“3 A.M. Eternal”—well. As a rule, Eden Royce can be counted on to flex as a masterful storyteller. Here, Royce grounds the reader in details, quickly sketching a scene with believable characters, while also threading in world building pieces. Running through this is an undercurrent of lovely tension. Longtime friendship is counter-positioned with a mom who might be missing, and before you know it Royce has you tangled up in the story, needing to know what happens next. The way Royce plays with tropes is a delight, giving enough of the recognizable to let readers smile in familiarity, while also touching things up with fun but thoughtful embellishments. Witches, haints, and more—oh my! But Royce never forgets that the narrative itself is important. As protagonist Mik and friends search for the might-be-missing mom, she starts to learn that she might not have known her mother as well as she thought. During the search, we get a sense of a fairly complex relationship, and the complex feelings that go with it. Royce brings things to a satisfying, somewhat heartwarming conclusion, which is about discovery, while also being a very relatable story.

Let’s talk about “The Massage Lady at Mungjeon Road Bathhouse” by Isabel J. Kim. It’s awesome when stories center folks that are essentially treated like extras in so many narratives. The world is comprised of numerous perspectives, and there are far more flight attendants, cashiers, and Massage Ladies than princes and princesses. They deserve to be in stories, too! This particular Massage Lady scrubs the future from a client’s skin, a fantastic story idea in itself. Clean prose and grounded dialogue allow the ideas to shine. Main character Jinah is relatable and interesting, even when her interiority starts to lean dark. The tale becomes a meditation on choices, expectations, opportunities—or lack thereof—and one’s lot in life, as Jinah is offered an opportunity which feels to her like a trap. Kim brings everything to a beautiful place, one which will have you reflecting on your own life.

Tanvir Ahmed’s “The Miraculous Account of Khaja Bairaq, Pennant-Saint of Zabel” is about a sentient banner, Khaja Bairaq, and let’s face it, making a flapping pennant the hero of a story—a story that works, mind you—is in itself quite a feat. The oral storytelling style helps, as well as moments of humor; and the tale itself is captivating. The pennant acts against the king of Zabel, who has a dragon helping him to defend the kingdom, but the king also lets the dragon eat his own people. This isn’t the end of the king’s terrible habits, of course. Strong themes about power and hope and resistance run through the narrative, making it a worthwhile read.

Wen Yi-Lee’s “Love-Heart Soup” begins with a basic soup recipe, then adds the literalization of love as a seed that Sama can spill from her heart to cook into the soup. What makes the story initially interesting is the introspective journey through various kinds of love, and the expectations others have (and pressures others exert) about what love is supposed to look like or be. The soup serves as a focus of sorts, drawing out Sama’s story of the loss of her family. It’s also an important metaphor for the way she engages with the people of her village, in relation to loss and the way it affects her love on particular days. As can be expected, some days are harder than others. Running through it all is the notion of food as love, as connection, and this leads right up to a peaceful ending.

“The Short History of My Mother” proves yet again that Priya Sharma can write. In fact, Sharma makes beautiful storytelling seem effortless. Here Sharma invokes a tentative sense of the fantastic from the beginning, alluring readers with possibilities. This is blended with captivating details of an immigrant experience: a mom and dad going from India to England in the late 60s, with very little money and not much more than that. From there, the narrative shifts perspectives, slipping in and out of storytelling styles, but always setting the reader firmly in the experiences of its characters. It’s an absolutely engrossing read, punctuated by the surreal and the magical, which leaves you feeling as if you’ve been on a deeply personal journey.

“The Book of Unwritten Poems” by Curtis C. Chen is a clever piece told in direct address, where a person is telling you (the reader) about a mysterious book. The technique works really well here because Chen folds the speaker’s personal story into the address, so it’s not just someone describing a thing, but also someone relating their experiences in a somewhat reluctant way—experiences which are connected to the central idea, but not immediately directly. The voice of the piece is conversational, and convincing, which goes far in making the story so good. It’s thoughtful and interesting and a great example of writing about an idea but interweaving something relatable, producing an engaging and entertaining story.

“March Magic” by WC Dunlap is a brilliant story about a witch who has more or less become part of the swamp. She uproots from her peaceful state for a battle which is about to take place across social, physical, spiritual, and political fields. Dunlap’s style and voice provide both readability and strong visual and tactile details, steeping the reader in the narrative. Subtext? YES: the places that some see as dangerous are, for her, home, a safe haven, away from “yoke and the whip”. In other words, the real dangers are not gators and muck and strangely shaped tress, the real dangers are people. The narrative leads to a gathering of witches, a scene which vibrates with creativity, everyone coming together to stand against racism on a certain eventful day in 1963. If you didn’t read this one in Africa Risen, Guran is doing you a favor by giving you another shot.

It would almost be weird for me to not mention “Potemora in the Triad” by Sara S. Messenger, but I will only mention it briefly. It’s beautifully written, super inventive, seriously engrossing, and it’s a story Christie Yant and I published in Fantasy Magazine, so I’m far more than a little biased.

As with many long-running anthology series, or anthology projects headed by editors in general, staying in the anthology game is not always easy. Publishers can pick you up but they can also drop you; anthology projects often make the editors very little money; and it can be a tremendous amount of work (and stress!) just to make an anthology happen, from concept, through all the steps along the way, and up to final production. Different anthologies put together by different people will have different demands, of course; and no two anthologists are the same. That said, the anthologists with a slew of books out who are still in the game are quite often succeeding by virtue of a lot of hustle/hard work, dedication, and a readership which has learned to trust their taste.

There are many more stories in The Year’s Best Fantasy Volume 2, of course: 28 in all, including an array of sparkly names most readers will recognize (such as Sofia Samatar, Elizabeth Bear, Aliette de Bodard, Alix E. Harrow, and more), plus notable writers whose short fiction delivers time and time again (such as Theodora Goss, A.T. Greenblatt, Kaaron Warren, Sam J. Miller, and more) I began this column by talking about how my view of Year’s Best/Best Of anthologies has changed. I see them now as limited by the taste and scope of the particular anthologist. The word Best in these books always represents an opinion, a way of reading. With the wealth of fiction available to read out there, no one will read literally every eligible short story. Best will tend to mean, “the best according to this person, based upon their reading of and feelings about a particular set of works.” In this sense, a Year’s Best or Best Of says more about the editor than it does about the field, and could probably be titled something like “My Favorite [Fantasy] Stories of the Year”—albeit with the understanding that the editor in question is usually someone who reads far more short fiction than most folks. The more that your taste lines up with a given editor, the more you are likely to agree, saying enthusiastically to whomever will listen: these are the best stories! This person got it right.

If you have read my reviews, even if you’ve only read a few of them, then you will know that there is a world of diverse perspectives out there, of amazing stories told by all kinds of people. These days, I am suspicious of “Bests” that fail to embody diversity, that have, for example, very few or no works by authors of color, by queer folks, by trans folks, by women and nonbinary authors, and so on; for it means that either the editors aren’t reading from a decent range of sources, or they aren’t able to appreciate a range of experiences—because y’all, the stories are out there, and they are wonderful.

Looking through the copyright notes for this book, I would have liked to see more surprises, to see more works pulled from interesting or unexpected places, and to see one or two voices—perspectives that are underrepresented in genre in general—in the table of contents that, to me, are missing. That said, I’m here to say that this is a great book. It has heaps of lovely fiction by talented and skilled authors. It feels like Guran put in a lot of work and thought, infusing this project with heart. Importantly, in my opinion, it’s a massive improvement compared to the glaringly homogenous tables of contents of so many books published across decades gone by. Strongly recommended.

What are you waiting for? Get a copy, settle in, and enjoy!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arley Sorg is an associate literary agent at kt literary. He is a two-time World Fantasy Award Finalist and a two-time Locus Award Finalist for his work as co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine. Arley is also a SFWA Solstice Award Recipient, a Space Cowboy Award Recipient, and a finalist for two Ignyte Awards, for his work as a critic as well as his creative nonfiction. Arley is senior editor at Locus, associate editor at both Lightspeed and Nightmare, a columnist for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and an interviewer for Clarkesworld. He takes on multiple roles, including slush reader, movie reviewer, and book reviewer, and ran a series of interviews on his site: arleysorg.com. He has been a guest instructor or speaker at a range of events—and for a variety of audiences—from Worldcons to WisCons, from elementary students to PhD candidates. He was a guest critiquer for the 2023 Odyssey Writing Workshop and the week five instructor for the 2023 Clarion West Workshop. 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. Arley is a 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate.

Book Review: Generation Ship by Michael Mammay

Chris Kluwe | 824 words

Generation Ship
Michael Mammay
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9780063252981
Harper Voyager, October 2023, 384 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review! This month we’ll be looking at a hardish sci-fi book that’s not so secretly a treatise on current political affairs and the timeless element of human nature—Generation Ship by Michael Mammay.

Unlike Mammay’s previous works (some of which I’ve reviewed before, because I think they’re worth your time to read), Generation Ship leans more toward the Arthur C. Clarke or Ben Bova model of science fiction (one focused more on science fact rather than space wizardry) as opposed to the military sci-fi that Mammay has become known for in his Planetside series. In this novel, humanity has sent out a colony ship from Earth to a distant planet on a multi-generational journey, the culmination of which is at hand, but the arrival is not going as smoothly as anyone on board wants. The ship’s society has changed over the hundreds of years of the journey, giving rise to various factions who find themselves at cross-purposes, and that’s before adding in the inexplicable natural hostility of the planet itself. Will anyone survive? Better read the book!

The first thing an astute reader will notice upon reading Generation Ship is that it is an extremely topical encapsulation of the current fractures threatening to splinter the United States of America into warring subdivisions, and it’s here that I have to give Mammay a lot of credit. It would have been very easy to make the characters one dimensional caricatures (the Scheming Politician, the Fascist Security Man, the Naive Radical, the Uninvolved Centrist) but every person in this book has depths that frequently upend the reader’s expectations and reflect the messy complications that involve actual human beings. There aren’t any “bad” people in this story, even though there are villains aplenty, which is a difficult tightrope to walk. Instead, Mammay does a phenomenal job of giving the reader ways to understand the motivations behind the characters’ actions, so readers can empathize with even characters who they might not personally agree with. The second thing an astute reader will notice is that Generation Ship isn’t just a novel concerned with the current hegemonic empire spanning our globe, it’s a story concerned with our survival as a species, and this is where Mammay really delivers. This book, and I cannot stress the point enough, is a snapshot of our planet as a spaceship traversing the deadly void of space and how all of us collectively are destroying the environment that allows us to exist. For all the petty power struggles that the characters in Generation Ship engage in, they all understand that they need the ship intact in order to survive, which is a lesson I hope everyone reading this book not only internalizes, but also makes clear to everyone else in their life who hasn’t read it. In addition, Mammay takes the next step (which is a rare thing to see in this type of story) and makes it clear to the reader that repeating the same mistakes in a new environment isn’t something that’s necessarily going to pan out, in stark contrast to the pro-colonial attitudes that previous hard sci-fi authors have espoused.

The third thing an astute reader will notice is that this is simply a fun book to read. The conflict and drama between the various crewmembers provides a chapter to chapter tension that keeps the pages turning, and major plot beats occur frequently enough to drive an overarching investment in the overall outcome. I think the highest praise I can offer is that while I was reading this novel, I had to pull myself away from it several times to take care of real world obligations, and every time I did I was frustrated that I wasn’t able to keep reading and see what happened next.

Overall, if you’re looking for a book that’s more concerned with the people behind the technology than the technology itself, and you care even the slightest about our planet, you can’t go wrong with Generation Ship. I fear it’s going to be a niche success that future generations look back on and ask themselves, “why didn’t we pay attention?” (assuming books are still a thing), but hey, maybe everyone will prove me wrong.

Read if: you’ve internalized Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl; you’re capable of thinking of future generations; you can see the grass for the birds.

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: Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe

Laurel Amberdine | 452 words

How did “Immortality Soup, Or, An Excerpt From The Cookbook Of The Gods” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

This story was originally written for a FIYAH food-themed issue, but wasn’t a good fit so I polished it and sent it out four more times before it found a home in Lightspeed.

I have always been fascinated by Yoruba mythology, especially the many untold stories it contains. Eshu is a god who isn’t represented enough in the few stories that draw inspiration from Yoruba myths and I saw this as an opportunity to write a character I could have fun with.

What is your writing process like? Did this story fit the pattern?

I don’t do a lot of plotting before writing. Once I get a story idea, I put it down in my Docs and it could sit there for weeks without development. Sometimes, all I have is an interesting title that pops into my head, so I have to build a story from it.

With this story, I got the general idea and came up with a title at the same time. I couldn’t stop thinking about what I wanted to do with this really interesting character, so I started writing the first draft. I finished writing the first draft of this story in less than a day. I don’t usually write humorous stories, tending to favor darker characters and tones but this story and this character forced me to change and I’m grateful for that.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I just finished The Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea Stewart and I’m currently reading the Red Rising series by Pierce Brown. I am inspired by many writers including R.A. Salvatore, Brandon Sanderson, Chinua Achebe, Suyi Davies Okungbowa, P. Djèlí Clark, and many others.

What trends in speculative fiction would you like to see gain popularity in the next few years?

I would love to see more work that resists—stories that push the limits and define themselves. More representation of Black people and our different myths and cultures.

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

I am always working on approximately twenty short stories in various stages of completion. I am also working on the first book in a novella duology focused on Eshu and his adventures.

My speculative stories and poems have been published in several mags. You can read them through this link: linktr.ee/oluwatomiwaajeigbe

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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: A.L. Goldfuss

Laurel Amberdine | 751 words

How did “Where the God-Knives Tread” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

The initial spark, the image I built the entire story around, was a scene from the FromSoft game Echo Night where the player must return the eye of a large fish mural. It’s not a particularly important part of the game, but I found the concept charming and wanted to turn it inside out. The story itself coalesced in a matter of minutes, and I wove in my love of deep sea exploration, botanical gardens, space opera, space gothic, and cosmic horror, plus my history minor and four years of high school Latin. At first I was very focused on aesthetics, such as replicating the feel of an underwater shipwreck in deep space. But the story soon bloomed into a love letter to sprawling space adventure, palace dramas, and monster movies.

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

When I read the first draft, I thought it was unsalvageable. At the time it was the longest piece I had ever written, and it was a garbled and incoherent mess. The basic story was the same: Sien goes into a shipwreck, steals the Eye, gets chased by a god-monster. But nearly everything else was different, and I thought it wasn’t worth saving.

But I knew I wanted to write longer stories, which would also mean editing them. So I mentally wrote this story off and decided to use it as editing practice. I wanted to see how much I could do. I stripped the story down to the studs, lifted the frame off the ground, and repoured the foundation. Sien’s entire backstory and motivation changed, xir relationship with Jaks changed, the worldbuilding backdrop changed. I added the bar scene, cave scene, and agora scene. I added Pando. I realized I could use the story to explore imperialism, capitalism, and escapist media and looked for ways to enhance those themes.

And since I was still convinced no one would ever read it, I let myself be incredibly self-indulgent. I added Sien’s melodramas as a nod to my love for Chinese and Korean costume dramas. I added the mixed media worldbuilding bits, because I love piecing together history and culture through scraps of ephemera. Thousand Dancing Beetles was always Thousand Dancing Beetles, but I expanded on the other god-guardian names and folklore, as well as the names and plots of Sien’s many beloved melodramas. Jaks hates her spider rig, but I think it looks cool. Having fake Jaks be exposed by the established comms delay? What a blast to write!

Basically, if there’s something in this story you love, know that I love it, too. Making this story fun got it over the editing wall and out into the world.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

So far, my favorite reads this year have been Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, and The Devourers by Indra Das. Each one is a masterclass in gorgeous prose and deep feeling. I also read a Toni Morrison book every fall, which is coming up soon. I can’t wait.

What trends in speculative fiction would you like to see gain popularity in the next few years?

Fucked up characters and lush prose, please! I read to experience places and feelings that I haven’t experienced in real life, especially those I wouldn’t want to experience. I like happy endings; but happy endings are even happier when the characters (and readers) have been through hell first. So, please write me some fucked up characters, wet sex, and weird shit. Write me something deep and real. Make me cry. Make me wonder who I can even share your story with because it’s so raw. Take me somewhere I’ve never been and make me believe it. Don’t just drive me around the block.

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

I’m bouncing between short stories and editing a chunky novella. You can find my past work and newsletter at algoldfuss.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: Jae Steinbacher

Laurel Amberdine | 897 words

How did “What You Are and the Wolf” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

“Little Red Riding Hood” is a fairy tale that’s always captivated me, especially because I like stories of sexual awakening, and I’ve loved wolves since I was a child. Its many retellings and different endings also make it a rich playground for experimentation.

I wanted to play with the power dynamics of the tale, both by empowering Red, and by changing the story’s villain. I wanted to push back against the gendered assumptions of Red as a powerless young woman and the use of the wolf as a symbol of evil.

The image that inspired this story was actually of Red riding the wolf into a portal that opened for them in the forest. My first draft included an epilogue where we see them arrive on the other side; ultimately, that focus took away from this story, which is more about Red coming into their own understanding of themself and their power, as well as escaping the trap laid for them.

What led you into writing genre fiction?

I owe my shift into writing genre fiction to a college writing instructor who is now a friend. She steered me toward Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin and introduced me to the Clarion workshops (although I didn’t become involved with those until much later). In the years since she was my instructor, both of us came out as trans, so I wonder if she knew then that I needed to explore worlds with expansive ideas about gender. “Bloodchild” and The Birthday of the World blew open a lot of the ideas I’d internalized from a fairly conservative upbringing. Writing speculative fiction gave me the tools to interrogate the expectations placed upon me as someone assumed to be female and to dip my toes into very different waters.

Is there anything you want to make sure readers noticed?

A friend gave me a zine on the queer language of flowers and flower symbolism. There are a couple nods to these in the story, or to specific color groupings. I also took inspiration from wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest.

The flower imagery serves a secondary purpose as well, since flowers are so often equated with femininity. Red’s ability to distinguish between plants isn’t appreciated beyond the superficial task of selecting a colorful bouquet. And of course, Red is seen and understood by most in their life in the most superficial way, where their greatest value is to be an obedient daughter and wife.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I just picked up The Bruising of Qilwa by Naseem Jamnia, and I can’t wait to dig deeper into this tale with its unique magic system and exploration of immigration and ethnic marginalization. I adore second-world fantasy, and I love that the narrator’s nonbinary gender and asexuality are just as natural in this world as cisgender heterosexuality.

This spring I read through all of Nghi Vo’s published books—I aspire to write such clean, elegant, and effective prose! If you’ve been sleeping on the Singing Hills Cycle, I urge you to check it out. Two other books I read recently that surprised me in pleasant ways are Isaac Fellman’s Dead Collections and The Genesis of Misery by Neon Yang.

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

I dabble in different visual and fabric arts. I enjoy embroidery for the ability to transform something—a bag, a hat, any piece of fabric!—with colorful string and my hands. I’m also always taking pictures of flowers on neighborhood walks and learning more about edible plants. Last fall I took a songwriting class, and lately I’ve been doing taekwondo. I’m not sure it helps me relax, but it does work out some of the tightness from sitting in front of a computer!

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

I have a fantasy novelette at Beneath Ceaseless Skies and another story in the pipeline with Lightspeed. More of my work is linked at jaesteinbacher.com.

I enjoy short fiction because I like zeroing in on one story and then jumping to a completely different world. Committing to one world, really digging deeply into it, intimidates me! But there is a novel project I’ve been researching with a setting based on Al-Andalus during La Convivencia. This is the period in medieval Spanish history when Muslims, Jews, and Christians coexisted in some cities in Southern Spain. It wasn’t necessarily a harmonious time; there were a lot of inequities and prejudices, and power was constantly shifting as leaders of the Catholic Church and the Caliphate changed.

My story centers around a group of “cursed girls” with unexplored powers—one of whom can level part of a city. Some factions see them as demons requiring exorcism, others as weapons that could turn the tide of conquest; they are just trying to protect their found family and survive.

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 | 233 words

Coming up in November, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by MKRNYILGLD (“The CRISPR Cookbook (Chapter Two): A guide to biohacking your own eggs into weapons of destruction”) and Regina Kanyu Wang (“A Record of Lost Time”). We also have two terrific flash pieces: “A Review: The Reunion of the Survivors of Sigrún 7” from Lars Ahn and “The Confession” by Dominica Phetteplace.

Plus, we have original fantasy by Osahon Ize-Iyamu (“Last Ritual of the Smoke Eaters”) and Martin Cahill (“Foresight”). We also have a flash story (“Of death deserved we will not die”) from Bennett North, and another (“Dr. Seattle Opens His Heart”) from Winston Turnage.

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: Carlie St. George, Oyedotun Damilola Muees, Everdeen Mason, and Adam-Troy Castro.

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

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Lightspeed:

Website

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Destroy Projects

www.destroysf.com

Newsletter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2

Podcast Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/itunes-rss

Twitter

www.twitter.com/LightspeedMag

Bluesky

bsky.app/profile/lightspeedmagazine.com

Facebook

www.facebook.com/LightspeedMagazine

Subscribe

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe

Subscriptions and Ebooks

The Editors

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

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

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

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

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 (with R.F. Kuang)

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

The Far Reaches

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

Out There Screaming (with Jordan Peele)

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.