TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 162 (November 2023)

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: November 2023

SCIENCE FICTION

The CRISPR Cookbook (Chapter Two): A Guide to Biohacking Your Own Eggs into Weapons of Destruction, to Be Forcibly Implanted into One Patriarchist at a Time
MKRNYILGLD

A Review: The Reunion of the Survivors of Sigrún 7
Lars Ahn

Confession #443 (Comments open)
Dominica Phetteplace

A Record of Lost Time
Regina Kanyu Wang (translated by Rebecca F. Kuang)

FANTASY

Last Ritual of the Smoke Eaters
Osahon Ize-Iyamu

Dr. Seattle Opens His Heart
Winston Turnage

The Moment Before the Moment
Martin Cahill

Of Death Deserved We Will Not Die
Bennett North

EXCERPTS

This Dark Descent
Kalyn Josephson

NONFICTION

Book Review: The Reformatory by Tananarive Due
Aigner Loren Wilson

Book Review: McSweeney’s 71: The Monstrous and the Terrible (edited by Brian Evenson)
Arley Sorg

Book Review: Tonight, I Burn by Katharine J. Adams
Chris Kluwe

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

MKRNYILGLD

Osahon Ize-Iyamu

Regina Kanyu Wang

Martin Cahill

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

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

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2023 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Grandeduc / Adobe Stock Image

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

Editorial: November 2023

John Joseph Adams | 265 words

Welcome to issue 162 of Lightspeed Magazine!

We’re starting the month with a new story from MKRNYILGLD: “The CRISPR Cookbook (Chapter Two): A Guide to Biohacking Your Own Eggs into Weapons of Destruction, to Be Forcibly Implanted into One Patriarchist at a Time”). The engineering continues!

We’re delighted to welcome Regina Kanyu Wang to our pages! Her story “A Record of Lost Time”—translated by bestselling author Rebecca F. Kuang—was listed in the annual recommendation list of the Chinese Science Fiction database, and selected into two annual best anthologies by mainstream literary scholars in China. This is its first appearance in English, and we think you’ll appreciate its insight into our modern crisis of constant productivity.

We also have two terrific flash SF pieces: “A Review: The Reunion of the Survivors of Sigrún 7” from Lars Ahn and “Confession #443 (Comments open)” by Dominica Phetteplace.

Our fantasy offerings this month include “Last Ritual of the Smoke Eaters,” a new short by Osahon Ize-Iyamu about the complexity of relationships. Martin Cahill brings us a story about clairvoyance in his new short “The Moment Before the Moment.” 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.

We also have spotlight interviews with our authors and a variety of book reviews to inform your next reads. And if you’re an ebook reader, you can look forward to a book excerpt.

It’s another spread of delicious speculative goodness, and we’re delighted to share it with you.

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.

The CRISPR Cookbook (Chapter Two): A Guide to Biohacking Your Own Eggs into Weapons of Destruction, to Be Forcibly Implanted into One Patriarchist at a Time

MKRNYILGLD | 1999 words

If you’re reading this, in a self-destructing DM, on the reverse strand of a plasmid, in the recipe binder you found in a deported neighbor’s belongings dumped on the curb, you’re no longer angry.

You’re hungry.

Your last co-op got raided by the Department of Homeland Biosecurity, hunting for pharmaceuticals “dangerous” to those at risk of getting pregnant. Your lab mates are bloody stains being hosed off the sidewalk. You barely escaped, but even in your grimy motel room you can’t help but keep a hotplate, a few chipped beakers, and a trusty pipette.

You’re starving. Not for more regulation of your reproductive system, as if the reversal of Roe twenty-six years ago, as if every ticking clock and prohibition heaped on our bodies since then weren’t enough. Deep within you, where everyone thinks a maternal warmth should be, is a ravening. You want to sink teeth into those majority opinions, those judges that know what’s best, rend them, chew them into bloody giblets.

A highway howls outside. On your room’s flatscreen, a politician kills a clinic with a slash of his pen and smiles. You flash your canines back. Your life is different now. You made a choice. You altered your body; or the mere act of reading the first chapter of this Cookbook altered your mind. You turned your anger inward, allowing it to transform yourself, and now you are a kind of beast with wings and talons and gaping maws. You came to me again because you want to know what to do with them.

I can give you a few ideas.

WHAT YOU’LL NEED

Eggs. You really only need one thing in addition to the materials you collected in Chapter One. Oocytes, or egg cells, or the soul of the next generation, as the groups dedicated to saving concepts as nebulous as Life or America say. What you call them is up to you, not the savers. You have (or once had) a body capable of giving birth to another human being; now you have a body capable of giving birth to a new world—to change. You’ve always had this secret ingredient, nestled deep within. You only need to extract it.

Step 1: Ovulation. But you’re so young, the fertility doctor says. Surely your ovaries don’t need to be stimulated! Even the forged referral, the affidavit from your “partner” that they want the procedure, are barely enough to convince the doctor to administer the drugs. After the final shot, he tells you to come back in a few days for the next steps. He’ll be in hot water with the DHB if he loses track of the eggs maturing in your body. You nod sympathetically. You help yourself to one of his ultrasound probes and a box of his aspirating needles on your way out.

Step 2: Retrieval. It’s not difficult to find someone with the expertise you need. Even in the heartland, there are farming co-ops that aren’t just farms. Especially in the heartland, there are ex-physicians who never stopped practicing. A whole wave of them went into hiding after the In-Vitro Fertilization Clinic Raids of 2036, after the DHB took protective custody of the unborn: thousands of embryos “rescued” from freezers, even more embryos killed by the DHB’s improper handling, and thousands of embryos already implanted into the wombs of those deemed “unfit.” Those pregnancies weren’t terminated of course, our president at the time proclaimed, wiping a tear from his eye—they aren’t monsters, after all. The mothers were given the best of facilities, and the best of re-education, until the babies could be safely delivered and taken to “safe” homes.

That didn’t stop people who can’t ordinarily get pregnant from starting families, to be sure. It all just went underground. Drive your junker down the highway, stopping at roadside farm stalls. Look in particular for ones with chickens strutting around, pecking at the dusty grass. Direct your conversation toward eggs, the shortages, how difficult it is to even bake a birthday cake these days. Ask carefully—might there be a few cartons stashed in the back of a fridge, hidden from state-mandated purchasers, that you could buy? If you play it right, you’ll be on your back on a kitchen table, with an ultrasound probe inside you and a needle aspirating your ovarian follicles one by one. Anesthetic won’t be available. You’ll leave with a lot of abdominal pain—and hopefully at least twelve vials of egg cells.

THE PRINCIPLE

Once you get your oocytes, you’ll need to handle them carefully. Transfer them into the highest quality cell culture media you can barter for. Keep them in an incubator under physiological conditions. Look at them under the microscope every day. Are they perfectly spherical? Is their cytoplasm homogeneous? Is their membrane thick, but not too thick, their polar body intact? Move the plate slowly. Don’t even breathe when you take off its lid. You have to be gentle. Eggs are fragile, so fragile. However, as our foremother once said, not fragile like a flower. Fragile like a bomb.

So make your bomb.

THE PROCEDURE

Gene editing. Egg cells are surrounded by the “shell” of the Zona Pellucida, a stronger membrane than that of the cells you worked with in Chapter One. You’ll need access to a microinjection apparatus. Thanks to the labor shortages, that won’t be difficult to get. More and more cattle farms are using them, and looking for lab technicians to operate them too. You’ll get training on how to hold a cow oocyte with a micromanipulator, remove its nucleus, and replace it with one from a high-quality steer—bam, cloned beef! Most meat these days, when you can get it, is.

On a slow day, load your own oocytes into the well and use the micropipette to insert your desired genetic material into the nucleus instead. Your egg cells are transcriptionally inactive at this point, so nothing will happen immediately. But don’t worry. The payload will go off when it’s time. Inject your trusty synCas-X vector along with guide RNAs targeted to the following genes: TP53 and PIK3CA to give your egg the extra growth push it needs. TET1 and KMT2D for the epigenetic malleability to adapt. Finally, you’ll want to make your eggs just a bit defective in DNA repair by targeting an ERCC gene or two. Just enough to scramble some of your germline variants. Just enough so that your egg can’t be traced back to you.

Implantation. If I know you, you already have a candidate in mind. A certain district judge who brags red-faced at the bar every night: I’m the one who killed the pill. That pill, and that pill, and that one. A million babies saved! I’m practically their father. Or perhaps a senator? The one who nods and says, I’m just giving the people what they want; anyone who doesn’t want it isn’t a person. Or any of the dozens applauding around them, playing with fascism as with toy soldiers, and discarding the sex workers they hire as even less than that?

You’re always so attractive to them, for a reason they can’t quite put their finger on. It’s the hunger in your eyes that reflects their own. They’ve been warned about bioterrorists with needles, but most will still let you lance them in the heat of the moment (see Diagram A). You need only whisper the magic word in their ear: virility. Despite their preaching about biosecurity, about Big Pharma destroying the bodies of the birthing population, most of them will take any kind of drug to get it up. For the needle-shy, there are hydrogel microcapsules you can form around your oocytes instead. Your eggs will travel, shielded from digestion enzymes, and latch onto the wall of the intestinal tract. From there, it’s only a short hop to the target.

Embryogenesis. Millions and millions of sperm in the epididymis, squirming so helplessly, suddenly find an oocyte among them. Of course they surge forward. Of course they penetrate. It’s only natural for a sperm to fertilize an egg—the most natural thing in the world. And at that exact moment, as the savers say, the miracle of life begins. For what forms at your injection site in the scrotum is an embryo, indistinguishable from one formed in a Petri dish, or even a womb. It’s so small as to be unnoticeable. But slowly, but surely, it grows. Only after you’re long gone does it become impossible to ignore. At that point, beautifully, it’s formed hair and teeth. It has a heartbeat. It has all three germ layers; it even has neurons, of a sort. It’s alive, as the savers cry, it’s alive! Never mind that the mass is almost certainly moribund, never mind that its environment has little to no possibility of sustaining development up to live birth. Even a one in a billion, a one in a trillion of a chance of survival is an absolute in the eyes of their God. It’s alive!

SIDE EFFECTS

The host will have to let this thing run its course. That’s simply the morally right thing to do, according to their politicians, their preachers, their CEOs. After all, it’s an embryo—it’s practically a newborn baby! Who’s to say it doesn’t feel pain? Who’s to say, up until the moment its environment can no longer support it and it necroses, taking out all surrounding tissue with it, that it’s not viable? There’s a chance that the mass may instead become metastatic and grow out of all control, killing its host, but that’s no excuse either. It’s simply a matter of principle. For if the host shows weakness, if he submits to removal of this foreign growth with half his DNA and a theoretical possibility of becoming human—then what else might he have to submit to? Those with wombs doing the exact same thing? Or, horror of horrors, that such a procedure might be a basic human right?

Such cases have become more and more common lately. The scion of a prominent family, suddenly confessing to calling the DHB on a college girlfriend, as if that will stop his own mass’s growth. An award-winning actor and spokesman for the savers tearfully begging for an exception to the law, for medications to eliminate his own twelve-week-old case. Each time, the hydra they helped put into power rises around them. Its heads debate, deny. They writhe, they chop themselves into little pieces. If they would rather destroy themselves than yield—then let them.

You’ve heard the whispers, haven’t you? Despite the assurances of the DHB, the deportations, and arrests, the youth are afraid. A certain type of youth, now that willful carelessness is no longer their God-given right. This recipe is so easy, after all. Anyone with eggs could do it. More and more of them want to get their testes removed to avoid the issue. Avoid the bars, they whisper among themselves, the dating apps. Sick bitches lurk on those. If you refuse to wear a condom, they’ll force their egg into your drink, or their saliva; even a kiss will be enough.

Then the whispers will turn to you. They will say: you should not have this power. Fertilization is natural, beautiful, but in your hands it’s violent. It’s wrong, because you could use it to terrorize the innocent, to assault their bodies, to destroy their minds. Never mind that you’ve carefully considered all of that. Never mind that you would never waste your oocytes on such a base, senseless act. Never mind the countless spermatozoa those whisperers jack off daily, unpoliced. They’ll turn to you, at the dinner table, in the line outside the grocery store, and with wide eyes, you’ll respond: It’s terrible, it’s tragic, but that’s just the world we live in now, isn’t it? Of course, we don’t have to live in this world. We could live in a world where abortion is legal and accessible instead. Until then: Sperm will be sperm and eggs will be eggs!

Do you taste it? It’s the most forbidden of fruits dribbling down your lips, burning down your throat. Its warm flesh contains all the calories you’ve denied yourself over the years, all the fats and sugars you were told would twist you into a monstrosity beyond desire, and therefore beyond worth.

You would never deem a fellow human being worthless. You’ve been taught to eat only until full, or better yet less-than-full, or best of all to puke it all up after. But you can eat this forbidden fruit, and you can keep eating. As long as we live in this world where fellow humans deny us justice, you can feast. You can gorge yourself, or you can lie in wait. It’s up to you. I only have one request. When you finally swoop down on your prey, digging into tendon and bone, when he pleads he’ll give you anything save for the basic human rights you’re due:

Don’t. Let. Go.

©2023 by MKRNYILGLD.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MKRNYILGLD (Twitter: @MKRNYILGLD) is a biologist who has the choice to give birth—or not. Her first CRISPR Cookbook short story, previously published in Lightspeed, has been selected to appear in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023.

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

A Review: The Reunion of the Survivors of Sigrún 7

Lars Ahn | 1466 words

Warning! This review contains spoilers.

To answer the question on everybody’s mind: No, controversial filmmaker Manuela Riviera’s new documentary The Reunion of the Survivors of Sigrún 7 doesn’t reveal what happened during the forty-five days the spaceship went missing on its way to Mars or how mission commander Ruben Corto died.

Much of the controversy surrounding The Reunion has been about the methods employed by Manuela Riviera. Remember, we are talking about a filmmaker who once waterboarded the protagonist in her feature The Resurrection: Back from the Dead (albeit with said person’s consent).

As improbable as it may sound, Riviera has outdone herself in her new film which became a sensation the moment we were told the four surviving members of Sigrún 7—Stanislav Kim, Loris Matzen, Evelyn N’Kono, and Isabella Quan—had agreed to be interviewed about the mission for the first time since their return to Earth thirty-eight years ago.

The film’s publicity, however, neglected to mention that the four survivors had not been informed about Riviera’s intentions in advance, resulting in the subsequent lawsuit and the delayed release.

• • • •

As a filmmaker, Riviera is known for her sparse cinematic style and, true to that, the opening shot of The Reunion is of an empty room. One by one, the four protagonists enter and are surprised to meet one another.

The real controversy occurs when the four realize they have been locked in and can’t leave the room. A distorted female voice then informs them they will only be released if they are willing to answer her questions. Riviera has been heavily criticized for her methods, but by using the locked room scenario as the frame for her film she manages to cleverly replicate the conditions for the first privately funded mission to Mars.

The crew had cameras on them 24/7, thereby turning Sigrún 7 into the first non-terrestrial reality show. That also made Sigrún 7 a sociological experiment in extreme where everyone got to see what happens when seven complete strangers are forced to spend nearly a year together surrounded by cold, airless space.

Much has been said and written about the selection of the crew where looks and personality apparently trumped skills and knowledge, but whoever handled casting did an amazing job and many people working in the space industry today gladly admit they owe their passion for it to Sigrún 7.

The crew played a large part in that. Of course, Sigrún 7 had its share of conflicts and drama but mostly it showed that cooperation and problem-solving is possible, no matter where you come from. For a while the crew of Sigrún 7 were heroes on Earth and everybody had their own favorite member (mine was Isabella Quan, the engineer geek). They were the finest role models we could wish for, which, of course, made what happened later so shocking and hard to understand.

• • • •

Why did Sigrún 7 deviate from its course and lose contact with Earth? The speculations have run from sabotage to incompetence, and the surviving crew members have only added to the mystery.

Loris Matzen’s infamous remark “I won’t speak ill of the dead” has been interpreted as an attempt to pin the blame on mission commander Ruben Corto. Because of the ensuing shitstorm, Matzen has kept a low profile ever since until Riviera forced him back into the spotlight. When the film confronts him with his old comment, he claims to have been misinterpreted but still leaves the impression that an onboard error led to the disaster.

N’Kono and Quan both say they believe in the common theory that the course had been miscalculated from the start, while well-known conspiracy theorist Kim is convinced Sigrún 7 was sabotaged by a national space agency.

Fortunately, Riviera doesn’t go down that road, but that leads to another controversial choice. By using holographic images of Ruben Corto, Dieter Hamilton, and Serafina Vlasic, she brings the crew back to its original seven.

And just when you think Riviera can’t go any further, the voice casually mentions that the room is the exact same size as the capsule the crew had to live in, having shutdown everything else in Sigrún 7 to save oxygen, water, and power.

During the four decades since the mission, Quan, N’Kono, and Kim have become worldwide celebrities, but it is fascinating to observe how quickly the four assume their old roles. Loris Matzen takes charge while celebrities like Stan Kim and Evelyn N’Kono are reduced to meek bit-part players.

At first, Isabella Quan appears to follow suit, replacing the strong and successful businesswoman of today with the shy-but-passionate nerd we all came to love. But then she recovers and refuses to play along. Her resistance adds an element of nerve and tension to the film it would otherwise have lacked, and she is the one who fights back, when the four are debating whether they should talk about the legendary forty-five days.

“Remember what we promised each other,” she says, and as a viewer you can’t help feeling conflicted. You are dying to know what happened on board Sigrún 7, but her passion also makes you root for her when she begs her former crewmates to keep the oath they once gave.

Serafina Vlasic came closest to breaking it when she published her autobiography, shortly before passing away after a long battle with leukemia. Riviera plays sequences from the audiobook which Vlasic narrated herself, and it’s her frail voice—more than anything—that manages to convey the emotions the crew went through. But even Vlasic chose not to reveal why Sigrún 7 was one member short when the spaceship unexpectedly returned to Earth.

Mission commander Ruben Corto had died in a tragic accident and his remains had been left in space, per his wishes. That was all the surviving members were willing to say, and nothing else could be drawn out of them.

Speculations ran wild, not helped by Dieter Hamilton’s suicide a few months after the return. Was Corto’s death really an accident? Had there been a mutiny onboard? Was Corto to blame for the ship going off course? Did the crew eat him when they ran out of supplies? (Riviera shoots that rumor down by documenting that Sigrún 7 had plenty of food in storage.)

As previously stated, nothing in The Reunion can be construed as a confession. We do, however, get a clear sense of the grief and guilt felt by the survivors, and the film’s strongest moments come when first Evelyn N’Kono and then Stan Kim burst into tears and start to address the holograms of Corto, Hamilton, and Vlasic. Even Isabella Quan and Loris Matzen are obviously moved by the situation and struggle to control their emotions.

We are watching a group of people who have been through an ordeal so traumatizing that none of us will ever be able to comprehend what it must have been like. But we also see a group with a profound love for each other and a bond so strong it can never be broken, no matter the years and the different directions their lives have taken them.

It is in this precise moment that Riviera’s controversial approach pays off. Even though the death of Corto remains an unsolved mystery, she finds nothing to support the accusations that it was murder. Instead, her film shows that while the four survivors are feeling guilt, it is not the guilt of having done something morally wrong. It is the guilt of having had long (and for the most part) successful lives.

Riviera seems to have come to the same conclusion. Immediately after this scene the door to the room is unlocked. Her protagonists have given everything and are free to leave.

• • • •

As usual, Riviera has refused to be interviewed so we don’t know what her original intentions for the film were. Was she hoping to learn what happened during the forty-five days? Or was she trying to push the four into finding the exact same qualities and abilities that made us admire them in the first place? She failed with the former but certainly succeeded with the latter.

Perhaps, that is why the lawsuit against Riviera eventually was dropped, finally allowing The Reunion to be shown.

For that, we can only be grateful. Sigrún 7, for all its successes and failures, boosted mankind’s dream of conquering space. The mission brought the space programs back to life and it is, without a doubt, the reason why we have bases on Mars today.

With The Reunion, we may not have gotten what we had expected or wished for. Instead, Manuela Riviera has given us the film both we and the crew of Sigrún 7 deserve.

©2023 by Lars Ahn.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lars Ahn is an award-winning author from Denmark. His latest short story collection was named The Best Danish Horror Publication of the Year, and he is a two-time winner of the Niels Klim Award for best science fiction short story in Danish. His English-language short fiction has appeared in James Gunn’s Ad Astra and in the World Fantasy Award-nominated anthology The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories Vol. 1. Born in South Korea, he was adopted as an infant and grew up in Denmark where he lives and works as a journalist. His website is larsahn.dk/english

Confession #443 (Comments open)

Dominica Phetteplace | 1312 words

I was sorry even before I got caught.

The first inkling that we were not going to get away with it came when we were messing with the AI art generator app. You know, the kind where you put some words in and out comes a trippy image.

I typed in: Gothic lemon pie running away from the sun.

I was expecting something yellow with an errant eyeball. Instead, the program generated a picture of Professor Gemain Mangleman, the guy we had accidentally killed the week previous.

Shayza tried the program next. She typed in: Abrasive guitar, with onions. She, too, got a pic of Mangleman. There were twelve of us hanging out in Lanfert’s basement. We each tried the app in turn. No matter what we typed, the dead professor’s pic came up.

Okay, well clearly he is haunting us through this stupid program, said Ylf. How about we stop using the program?

This was unusual for Ylf, who never seems to have sensible ideas. Just bad ones. Worse yet, he’s very persuasive.

It had been Ylf’s idea to hike a new trail in the first place. He had a hiking app that supposedly told him the best places to vape and drink.

Despite being rated as “easy” by Hikr, the trail Ylf led us down got dangerously narrow in some parts. We were being hella noisy, as per usual, yet we still managed to startle a gnarly looking guy coming down the pass in the opposite direction as he rounded a corner. He fell down in the canyon. Most of us wanted to call for help, but Ylf was convinced that if we sought help, the cops would put us in jail. I mean, he knew something about jail. He was on probation for dealing bitcoin at school. If he got caught doing anything shady, he might be sent back.

Frankly, the man looked homeless. Or sorry, unhoused, Ylf corrected himself. Would anyone in Berkeley notice one less hobo?

So we just let the guy die. We didn’t find out he was a famous professor until the next day, when the news hit the timeline.

I made the youthful mistake of reading every article there was about him. I didn’t understand that private browsing was not really so private.

Anyway, here is what I learned about Mangleman, the day after he died: His death was ruled an accident. He liked to go hiking wearing complicated earbuds that messed with his vestibular system. He had fallen down trails before. Apparently, his colleagues had been begging him to stop hiking on skinny trails with his weird earbuds. He had multiple concussions from past falls.

The earbuds were his own invention. They connected directly to his brain via an implanted neural interface. He was mapping his own connectome with the goal of merging it with an AI. His research was so controversial that some people even openly expressed relief at his passing. They said Mangleman was bringing us closer to the singularity, whatever that was.

The prof died quickly at the bottom of the ravine. At least he didn’t suffer.

It’s tough to learn what kind of person you are. I guess I’m the kind of person that doesn’t rush to help someone. I’m the kind of person that goes along with my friends, no matter how chudly. I don’t value the lives of my low-income neighbors. I want to work on these things. Maybe there’s an app that can help me.

I wasn’t like the others in that I didn’t think Mangleman’s ghost was haunting me. I thought his pic in the AI art app was just a manifestation of my own guilt. I stopped using the app, but my guilt found me other ways. Banner ads for Mangleman’s books would appear on whatever sites I visited. The autopilot in cars I rode in drove me past the cursed trailhead, regardless of my destination. When I shopped for clothes online, online models all bore his face, despite being ladies.

They call them cookies, right? These were cookies. I mean, obviously.

Josemarie was determined to somehow clear her browser history. There has to be a tech fix, she said. A way to start over.

There’s no way to start over, your past always haunts you, said Ylf.

Ardon said he was just going to stop using the internet. He even threw his Snap Spectacles in the trash. He said they were worthless to him anyway since they superimposed Mangleman’s head on the body of whomever he was talking to when he wore them.

Josemarie was the first of us Bad Samaritans to turn eighteen. At that point, her holo ads became enabled and images of Mangleman started following her around. They were projected on sidewalks she was walking on or walls she walked past. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the days smellovision was enabled, the scent of hot garbage would also follow her around.

The jail I’m in already can’t be anything worse than what the cops can do. Maybe if we fess up he’ll stop haunting us, she said.

First, she tried using the electronic confessional terminal outside The New New Church of Baesus Christ. When that didn’t fix it, then she went to the cops. She typed our names into the snitchbox and admitted that we had violated the Good Samaritan Law by watching the prof tumble down the ravine without trying to help him or telling anybody what we saw.

The cops already knew. Location tracking was enabled on everyone’s devices, ours and Mangleman’s, too. The fact that we read all the news articles about his death was also a red flag. And of course, the confessional terminal at the church was a mandatory reporter.

I asked my Lawyerbot why they didn’t just arrest us as soon as they knew. Why did they instead sic each of us with a haunting algorithm? Seems mean.

Well, you weren’t rated as flight risks, she said. But really, it’s cheaper this way. The haunting algorithm follows you around the internet confronting you with your crime until one of you confesses and narcs on the others. It cuts down on prosecution costs.

My last hope for freedom now rests on the outcome of a legal battle over Mangleman’s fortune. He made billions from patents related to his AI. He had no children, his heirs are all nephews. They want the fortune, obviously.

But the AI created from his Mangleman’s connectome, the reason Mangleman wore those stupid earbuds, is claiming he is Mangleman now. Like a digital Mangleman that lives in the cloud. If the AI wins the case, Mangleman is technically still alive and the charges against me get reduced to a misdemeanor.

The AI also claims that Mangleman was murdered. A subpoena shows that one of Mangleman’s nephews partnered with a bunch of anti-singularity activists to code the Hikr app. The AI claims they used spyware planted on Mangleman to track his location and that the Hikr app coordinated with the spyware to guide hikers towards Mangleman in ways that were likely to cause him to fall off the trails. If this is true, I might not have to go to jail at all. I have never wanted an AI to win so much in my life.

Whatever happens, I promise to be a Good Samaritan to the best of my ability from now on.

My Lawyerbot has advised me to be as honest as possible in this statement, which will be rated by a sentiment algorithm for both remorse and honesty. You can find the score below. I have told the whole truth, under penalty of perjury, as I understand it. I am told that the judge and jury also read the comments, so if you think I deserve leniency, please say so below. Thank you and Baesus Bless!

©2023 by Dominica Phetteplace.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

A Record of Lost Time

Regina Kanyu Wang (translated by Rebecca F. Kuang) | 7953 words

How did we end up here?

The humans before me had the same physiological traits as I did, yet still we had no means of communicating with one another.

I couldn’t understand what they were saying. Words and phrases spilled from their mouths, a torrent of sounds bleeding into one another, syllables pouring out in a drum roll, unending and uninterrupted. To their ears, my speech was perhaps like an endless song; syllables dragging at an agonizingly slow pace over a never-finished sentence.

I couldn’t see their faces clearly, either. The high-frequency movements of their facial muscles blurred their features, and their waving hands left behind after-images like the fluttering of insect wings. To their eyes, perhaps my own movements were like those of an action figure with a dying battery; propped up on its last bit of energy, but never able to reach the position it desired.

I knew that if I waited, then their black hair would rapidly turn white, that wrinkles would grow on their faces, that their teeth would fall out, that their inner organs would sicken and cease to function. They would be like the plants that surrounded them—rapidly growing and rapidly deteriorating; rotting in the mud, then replaced by the next generation. And that next generation’s speed would be even greater. Their lifespans would be even shorter. Yet still they would not sense that anything was out of the ordinary.

When all was said and done, entropy would reach its maximum level and heat energy cease to circulate. There would be no distinction between past, present, and future. The heat death of the universe, the collapse of time—all would grind to a complete stop.

There was nothing we could do to stop it anymore. This process couldn’t be reversed. We once had an opportunity, but no one had really tried. We saw it all happen with our eyes wide open—some actively, some passively, all racing to the end of the story.

I don’t know what to do, except to record a few people and their words. They’re like me: the slow and lonely ones among the masses, the ones who chose not to speed up of their own accord. They’d all glimpsed a hint of what was coming from the start, and they’d tried to escape their fate by refusing to accelerate. But they hadn’t expected the whole world to be swept up in this madness.

We were strangers who had come together by chance in the slowest dimension. We met, we spoke, and then we parted ways. I don’t know where the others are today; or which speed dimension they’re living in. The specific year, month, or day holds no meaning; our old conventions of marking dates and times don’t work anymore. But I’ll do my best to record how they appeared when I first met them, and to record everything they told me. I’ll try to leave some archival material for future generations.

That is—if there are any future generations.

Mo Xin, about twenty-seven years old, Metamedia Streamer

People in my line of work were FastForward’s first users.

Back then the FastForward had just been approved to go on the market, so the company was reaching out to lots of streamers to push their product. They launched a marketing campaign on every social media platform, targeting every audience group. I got the sense that they simply hadn’t thought through how best to position their product, so they’d opted for the simplest strategy: pouring buckets of money into advertising.

I was ranked in the top twenty on BiJie.com in terms of site traffic, and my follower loyalty and conversion rates were pretty good, so my fees and stipulations were pretty demanding for potential brand partnerships. At first, I was a bit hesitant when their marketing rep reached out to me. I’d mainly done promotions in fashion and cosmetics, and those had little to do with the FastForward. But they told me that the FastForward would be the start of a new era, that it would set off a time revolution, that everyone everywhere would want to speed up. They were, therefore, hoping to leverage my influencer reach and elite status to kick off this revolution. I was quite flattered by this. Around that time I was also trying to expand and transform into a lifestyle brand—and the compensation they were offering was quite generous besides. So I said yes to a brand partnership.

Before their first time on the FastForward, every new user had to go to a FastForward Acceleration Center for a complimentary physical and equipment installation. The physical was very simple—they just measured your heart rate and blood pressure, and if they didn’t flag any problems, then a store assistant would fit you with a headset. The FastFoward involved the newest generation of semi-invasive brain-computer interface technology, known to be the safest possible prototype on the market. It was even safe for use by children and the elderly. The device looked like a small, delicate shell—you could customize its shape and color. It was installed behind the ear, corresponding to the location of your cerebellum. Stored within the shell was a small amount of T-42, a natural element extracted from rare meteorites. It was completely harmless to the human body, but it could, by speeding up neuron activity, increase a person’s thinking and reaction speed within a unit of time, thereby increasing their efficiency.

All this I could rattle off with ease. I was a beauty streamer; I typically had to memorize even more details about the ingredients of cosmetic products I was promoting. I also knew that these ingredients and their supposed effects were just marketing phrases, something to boost the product’s premium. In this regard, I thought the FastForward was pretty clever. They weren’t just selling equipment, they were selling the necessary components and services. Think about it—this little toy was just like a skincare product. It could be used up, and therefore would need to be replenished. It wasn’t like clothing or handbags. If a customer bought one, they weren’t very likely to buy another, identical product. You had to keep designing newer versions. Everyone in this industry knew that to the average consumer, mid-to-high end skincare products had a lower entry threshold than clothing did, with strong customer loyalty and a high repurchase rate of the same product.

FastForward claimed that it could provide only a small amount of T-42 to each user every month. It was stored in the shell, and every time we needed to use the device, we would simply press down. The dose would be injected into our brains and start taking effect. It would only work for a set period of time; but when the period expired we could press it again immediately. However, when the T-42 ration was used up, we’d have to wait until the next month for a refill. Their reasoning made sense: they wanted to prevent customers from becoming addicted and misusing the product. The ingredients were so rare they were difficult to acquire, and the timely rationing would ensure the best experience . . . Of course, I knew that all this was just to manufacture scarcity to justify higher prices.

I streamed my first visit to the clinic and my installation process on my Bijie.com channel. The total number of viewers reached fifty million. When my device was installed and I tried it out for the first time, the number of simultaneous online viewers exceeded thirty million.

I still remember the feeling of that first time. When I pressed the button on the shell, the live broadcast feedback I saw to my left suddenly slowed down. The netizens who’d been vigorously flooding my screen fell silent all at once, and it seemed to take forever for their comments to start reappearing one by one.

How does it feel? Has time sped up for you?

Xinxin’s too cool, even high-tech products like these want to partner with her. Truly my idol!

The previous comment was wrong—from Xinxin’s point of view, time should feel like it’s slowed down.

God, finally caught up! I’m here to witness Xinxin making history!

A fan has sent a gift heart.

. . .

To the right of my display, I could see the viewer count steadily ticking up. A smile twitched across my mouth. I faced the holographic camera suspended in the air before me. “Thanks, everyone! I feel pretty good. Time indeed has slowed down. It’s like I’m watching a movie in slow motion. Here’s the store assistant helping me today. He’s lifting his left hand very slowly right now, which is funny.”

More sporadic comments popped up again in the left of my display.

Xinxin’s talking so fast! Cuuuute

Cut the bullshit and give it to us straight—does that thing work?

Watch your language. Don’t come into our Xin’s channel if you’re going to be rude.

The store assistant’s hand had finally reached his head. He touched the shell behind his ear. Accordingly, his movements sped up to normal from my perspective.

“Miss Mo, may I ask if you’re feeling all right?” he asked.

I nodded. “I’m fine. It just seemed like the world had suddenly slowed down.”

“That’s normal—it means that the product is working. Our experiments show that the FastForward can triple a user’s perception of a unit of time. During this period of time, your efficiency also triples. Currently, one dose of T-42 works for an average of thirty minutes. When that runs out, your perception of time returns to normal.”

I noticed that the broadcast duration counter to my right display was also ticking up three times slower than usual.

“This feels amazing. I recommend everyone try out the FastForward if you’re eligible. I can already think of so many ways to use this. It’s not just good for everyday work or study—you can also use it when you’re playing video games and shooting monsters, or when you’re running late getting ready, or if you ever get into an accident, or if you’re in danger. If you use it at the right moment, this might even change your future. I have a discount code today, which I’ll share with everyone . . .”

After that livestream, FastForward made over $100 million in sales.

And then? And then I myself became a loyal FastForward user. Who doesn’t want to be more productive? By investing just a few thousand RMBs a month, I could get more work done in a single unit of time. I could create more content, draw in more fans, and earn more money. I got my value back for my investment. At that time, my Bijie.com ranking rose by five spots—a whole five spots in half a year! I wouldn’t have even dared to imagine that before. I immediately renewed my FastForward subscription for three years.

If Mandy hadn’t noticed the wrinkles around my eyes, I probably would have kept using the FastForward forever.

That night, we were snuggled up on the couch watching a movie. By then I hadn’t watched a movie on normal speed for a long time, and I thought the pacing was too slow. But Mandy liked it—she said that old movies deserved to be watched slowly. I forget what that movie was called; I remember only that it had to do with being in love and growing old.

As we watched, I fell asleep on Mandy’s shoulder. I didn’t wake up until the closing credits. I lifted my head and saw that her face was covered in tear tracks, with more tears spilling out the sides of her eyes. I reached out and wiped her face, and she turned towards me. The fluorescent lights from the TV screen reflected in her glistening tears, rendering her both pitiful and adorable. I wanted to kiss her.

She gazed back into my eyes. Suddenly, her expression changed. She turned on the light, wiped at her cheeks with the back of her hand, and grasped my chin to take a closer look at my face.

A few seconds later, she declared, “You’ve grown wrinkles!”

Mandy dragged me to a beauty salon for a skin test. The results indicated my skin indeed appeared two to three years older than it should have given my age. I’d prematurely developed wrinkles. Usually I pay a lot of attention to my skincare routine. I’ve never stayed up late, I only use the highest quality beauty products, and I never pull at my skin; I always rub it as gently as I can.

When she saw me and Mandy heatedly debating what had caused my wrinkles, the beauty technician asked, “Do you use the FastForward?”

I nodded.

“That’s it, then.” The technician had a knowing look on her face. “We’ve seen a lot of clients like you recently—their skin prematurely ages after they use the FastForward. They’ve sped up time, after all. Keep an eye on it, try to reduce how often you use it, and take extra care with your skin. We’ve recently developed a new protective cream for FastForward use—it can help slow the skin aging process. I can give you a sample today . . .”

I bought the cream, but I stopped using the FastForward. At first, withdrawal was terribly painful. I felt sluggish at everything I did, and I was always fighting the impulse to press the empty space behind my ear. But Mandy was always by my side. Our relationship grew stronger and stronger. I also pivoted successfully to a career as a lifestyle influencer, which meant I didn’t need to spend so much time every day selecting products to promote. The pace of my work slowed down, which meant of course my income also got smaller.

But I’d thought it through. At the end of the day, speeding up time meant also speeding up aging and death. Would you think that was worth it?

Yan Dongdong, Percussion Instructor

It was during a rehearsal that I first noticed something wasn’t right. That rehearsal left a very deep impression on me, because I rarely have such embarrassing moments.

I’d graduated from a conservatory with a concentration in percussion, and my grades were middling to low. After graduation, I became a teacher, and spent several years teaching percussion to children—mostly those who needed to pass their extracurricular music exams. After a while, I got increasingly bored with it, and I began missing performing on a stage. With a resume like mine, I couldn’t imagine joining a premier orchestra—they only accepted top graduates. But after looking around for a while, I finally joined an amateur orchestra. There were about fifty musicians—it counted as a fairly small symphony orchestra—and I also quite liked their repertoire.

That day, I sat as usual at the back of the rehearsal hall, looking over the dark backs of everyone else’s heads, closely following the conductor standing at the front. He wore a rather ill-fitting black suit that frayed at the elbows. His shirt ran up whenever he raised his hands, revealing his potbelly. It probably hadn’t been tailored for this performance. Probably it was a suit left over from a wedding or something—a suit he’d been pulling out of the closet for years. It seemed serious and perfunctory both at once, just like everything else in this orchestra.

“One more time! With me—five, six, seven, eight!”

The conductor’s hand moved, and the violin and viola began playing from the sixth measure where we’d left off. I counted the beats silently in my mind—one, two, three, four; two, two, three, four. They got faster, then faster. The clarinet joined in, matching their rushing rhythm, but the conductor seemed not to react at all. Anxious, I furrowed my brows. What was going on? The pacing had gotten out of control—why wasn’t anyone yelling stop? Seven, two, three, four, eight, two, three, four . . . my entrance was approaching. I lifted my mallets, counting down the bars to my approach. Dong, dong dong, dong, dong. Dong, dong, pause, dong.

“Stop, stop, stop!” The conductor made an impatient fist. “Bass drum, what’s wrong with you? Why is your beat dragging? You’re supposed to guide the rhythm of the entire piece—how is anyone supposed to play if you’re going so slow?”

Everyone turned around to stare at me. My cheeks burned; I heard a sudden buzzing in my ears. I was the slow one? How could that be? I’d obviously come in at the speed on the score. I pulled up my score again, flipped to the beginning, and confirmed—allegro moderato, a moderately quick tempo, with a BPM of about 120. There was no mistake—120 quarter notes per minute. It was the other instruments that had gone too fast—their BPMs had increased to at least 180. They were playing at presto, really . . . but how could this piece be played at presto?

“All right—we’ll stop here for today, and get back to it when the bass drum has figured out what rhythm is. Remember—you’re delaying everyone’s progress, not just your own. Keep that in mind when you go home. I don’t care if you studied at a conservatory or not—in my orchestra, all that matters is how well you can actually play. Dismissed!”

The conductor turned and left the rehearsal hall. Some players’ holograms disappeared—they’d been attending rehearsal remotely. One by one, the others leaned over and began packing up their instruments. The strings went back into their cases; the brasses were cleaned of spit, and the woodwinds were broken down. I sat staring blankly ahead, trying to calm down.

I knew the conductor had a problem with me. He knew about my background, and when I’d first joined the group, he’d asked me out privately several times, insinuating that he could promote me directly to first chair. I’d declined. Later, he’d sent me several nonsensical drunk texts. I’d blocked him right away. Now I only ever saw his group notifications to the entire orchestra.

My friend Dong Xuan leaned over and whispered, “What’s going on, Dongdong? Why do you keep messing up?”

She was first chair in the percussion section, and she was in charge of the snare drum for this piece. She was the only person in the orchestra I was close with. I had refused the conductor in the first place because I didn’t want to steal her position—and it goes without saying that I had no interest whatsoever in the conductor himself.

I hesitated a moment, and then asked, “You think I’m the one who messed up? You don’t think they were going too fast?”

Dong Xuan’s eyes widened. She reached out and felt my forehead. Her hand was cool to the touch. “Do you think you might be sick? Everyone else’s rhythm was fine, it’s just yours that was slow. Dongdong, is it because you’re under a lot of pressure right now? Do you not have enough time to practice?”

“I—I suppose I’m a little busy.” It was summer term just then, and I did indeed have a full schedule of classes to teach. I had no spare time to myself; it was hard enough to carve out time to show up to rehearsal.

“Have you ever thought about trying the FastForward? Lots of people are using it nowadays. Catching up on a report by the end of the month, packing for a business trip, finishing the boss’s errands—people use it for all sorts of things. Me, I have time to exercise now—I’m really close to my weight loss goal! Why don’t you give it a try? It’s really popular right now, and it feels really cool to be one step ahead of time.”

I shook my head. I knew about the FastForward. Some of my students’ parents used it, but it was banned at school, so none of my students had it installed. In my profession, there’s no point in speeding up time. Besides, it was too easy to destroy one’s sense of rhythm, so I was never interested in trying it out. “No, it’s okay. Relax, I’m fine. I’ve been beating these drums day in and day out. Maybe I’m having an off day. I’ll go back and make some adjustments. I’m sure it’ll be better next week.”

“All right—we’ll talk again after you’ve given it a try. I’ll send you my referral link—you’ll get a discount that way. Goodness, look at the time—I’ve got to run to my spin class. See you next Saturday!” Dong Xuan stuffed her mallets into a bag emblazoned with a gym logo and hurried out the door.

I blinked at the empty concert hall as, slowly, I packed my things. My mind wandered to the past. At school, I’d been like this too. The percussionist was always the first to come in and the last to leave. We were situated at the far back of the orchestra. Most of the time we just waited. To the rest of the orchestra, it was like we didn’t exist. But I liked it. I enjoyed surveying everything from the back of the stage, leading the rhythm. Some said that the percussion part was like a second conductor on stage; that everyone in the orchestra depended on the drums for the rhythm. When I’d first started studying the drums, I was also criticized by my teachers for dragging behind the beat, for my hands moving with uneven force, for my uneven triplets. Day after day, I slowly corrected these problems in practice, until I could play everything with assurance. I’m not sure I believed the conductor when he said I was slow, but I also didn’t understand why even Dong Xuan thought everyone else was on beat.

When I got home that day, I turned on my metronome and set the BPM to 120. Da, da, da, da. The metronome sounded out a clear, even rhythm. Da, da, da, da. But the rhythm wasn’t quite right—this beat was obviously too fast, approaching 180 more than 120. I examined the settings for a moment, but the needle was indeed pointing to 120. Was my metronome broken?

I turned on my holographic field, pulled up an online metronome, and set it to BPM 120. Da, da, da, da. I turned on my analog metronome. Da, da, da, da. The two rhythms matched up perfectly. The problem wasn’t with my metronome—but that meant the problem could only be with me. I was greatly dismayed. I’d practiced for so many years—how could my sense of rhythm have degraded like this?

I had no choice but to practice some basic skills with the metronome. Right, left, right, left; left, right, left, right; right, right, left, left; left, left, right, right. A single beat, followed by a double beat. Right, left, right, right; left, right, left, left; left, right, right, left; right, left, left, right. I practiced all sorts of combinations of compound beats. Then came the triple notes, the drum rolls, the crescendos, the diminuendos. I stopped for a break only after I’d stabilized my sense of rhythm. I’d broken out in a small sweat, and I was getting hungry.

Most of the time I cook for myself at home. Because I’m a percussionist, I can estimate time with great precision. If the recipe says I ought to stew something for three minutes, or stir-fry something for ten seconds, I can do it without a timer, and I’ll never take something off the heat more than an eighth note late or early. All that to say, I’m a pretty good cook.

That night, and every night that following week, I burned the dishes again and again. Back then, I thought it was simply because I was distracted.

The next week, I went back to rehearse with the orchestra, played at the speed of that week’s rehearsal, and once again was told I was too slow. But I knew very clearly—it couldn’t be that I was too slow. During that week, I’d gotten up early every day and practiced for at least an hour—my speed was most certainly correct. But why would the conductor and other players all think I was too slow? Was it that I was indeed slow, or were they too fast?

Suddenly, a thought flashed through my mind like lightning. Everyone in the orchestra was playing too fast. My metronome was too fast. My food was getting burnt. Could it be that the world itself was speeding up? I shuddered at the thought, and the conductor’s criticism seemed to fade into the distance.

The world had gotten faster, and was getting faster and faster all the time.

What happened afterwards proved me right.

Wei Wei, about forty-one years old, corporate social responsibility consultant

FastForward contacted me after that incident.

Who wouldn’t know about that incident? At that time, all of the major media and social media networks were abuzz about it, how a so-called completely harmless natural substance had a radioactive period, which affected not only the users’ minds and bodies but also impacted their surroundings.

The mother was just an ordinary FastForward user. While she was trying to get pregnant, she hadn’t stopped using the FastForward—if anything, she used it beyond the typical time restrictions. At her company, using the FastForward was an unspoken rule. After she became pregnant, though she herself stopped using the FastForward, she still went into work and was therefore exposed to the environmental radiation caused by her coworkers’ use. She gave birth at just twenty-three weeks after a difficult labor. But the child didn’t exhibit any of the health problems typical of premature babies; in fact it was as healthy as a fully mature infant. Its height and weight were about the same as a baby born at forty-three weeks. But the mother suffered a torn uterus during labor, resulting in heavy post-partum bleeding. Though the doctors did their best, ultimately they couldn’t save her life.

The situation raised multiple angles of suspicion—the workplace conditions of pregnant women, employee exploitation, the doctors’ failure to perform a C-section in time, etc. But most of the blame fell on the FastForward. There were three questions at play: first, how could that company have obtained excess FastForward rations for its employees? Second, how did the FastForward impact pregnant women and their babies? Third, how could the FastForward be radioactive?

Clearly, FastForward knew this was going to be a problem. They immediately put a press release expressing their deepest sympathies over the woman’s death. They would donate a sum of money towards the newborn’s care, and cooperate with internal and external bodies to conduct a thorough investigation as soon as possible.

Their crisis PR team did pretty well. They must have met overnight, discussed countermeasures, put together a list of names, contacted people, and formed their incident response team. They phoned me at four in the morning.

I had fifteen years of experience in CSR and ESG—that is Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental, Social, and Corporate governance. At the start of my career, I’d worked in the procurement department of a factory, focusing on social responsibility in the construction and auditing of the supply chain. Later, I moved over to the sustainable development department of a foreign company, focusing on the impact of corporate production on vulnerable groups such as women and children, as well as the environment. Now, I worked as a CSR consultant. I helped companies build environmental, social, and corporate governance-related systems, issue CSR reports, and give the relevant training to their employees. There was no shortage of Fortune 500 companies and publicly listed companies on my client list, and I had the right CV besides, so it was no surprise that FastForward’s people found me.

There were six people on the crisis management team. Aside from me, there was the Sustainability Department Manager, the Chief R&D Engineer, the PR Manager, the Sales Manager, and the Product Vice President of the entire company. Everyone was very professional, and our meetings proceeded smoothly. On the first day, we drew up a response plan, listed our various priorities and deadlines, and drew up a list of experts external to the company.

That evening, FastForward issued a second statement explaining that the company in question had been using a commercial version of the FastForward that was still in trial phase, designed to help employees increase their efficiency. Even if its usage exceeds the monthly designated rations, it should have still been harmless to users. In light of this incident, FastForward would temporarily suspend all trials of the commercial version, recall any commercial products on the market, and strongly recommend that companies avoid pressuring employees to use any version of FastForward while at work. Moreover, FastForward would set up a nonprofit foundation for public welfare and invite labor law experts to act as consultants to help defend the rights of employees who had suffered unfair treatment at work.

Obviously, this statement had been workshopped to death. What on earth was a commercial version of FastForward? And of course excessive use of the FastForward would have side effects. What’s more, FastForward would never actually recall its product. FastForward and the dead woman’s employer had made sure their stories matched—this was the least damaging rhetoric for both parties. As long as none of their employees spoke out, they wouldn’t risk exposure. Of course, everyone was asked to sign non-disclosure agreements.

A few days later, FastForward put out a third statement. Due to current limitations in sample size and available data, and the lack of clinical trials, it was still impossible to confirm whether the use of the FastForward while the user was attempting to get pregnant would impact the health of the baby or the mother. The instructions “PROHIBITED DURING PREGNANCY AND BREASTFEEDING” would be prominently displayed on the FastForward’s packaging, as well as the instruction booklet. Users were supposed to read carefully and use the FastForward as appropriate for their respective physical conditions. During follow-up physicals at FastForward clinics, a sales specialist would emphasize the risks of FastForward use during pregnancy. Moreover, FastForward would collaborate with several obstetrics and gynecology experts to establish a working group to care for the premature baby. They would closely monitor their physical condition, and care for them until they’d matured.

Announcing the FastForward’s radioactive effect on time was a more difficult matter.

To begin with, this concept was still very new. T-42 was currently the only material in the world with “time radioactivity.” Even scientists weren’t quite in agreement about what this phrase entailed. But to the general public, it was broadly understood that “time radioactivity” meant that the substance didn’t just affect the way the user-perceived time, but also the time perception of people and objects in the user’s surrounding environment. The impact was not immediate, but rather lingered in human bodies and the environment over an extended period. What’s more, the effect could accumulate. Time radioactivity did not only affect one’s subjective or mental experience, but also had material effects—it would indeed actually speed up people’s metabolic and aging processes.

One could almost say that the material T-42 had been invented by the scientists at FastForward. The meteorites from which it came had been on Earth for several years now. They’d fallen from some comet pulled onto Earth’s surface as it passed by. During its descent, atmospheric friction transformed it into a rain of meteorites. Quite a lot of these meteorites made their way to Earth, and at first they hadn’t aroused any special interest. But a member of the meteorite research team accidentally discovered that the meteorite could alter a person’s perception of time, and thus resigned from his research institution to found the parent company of FastForward. He obtained all similar meteorites that were on the market, extracted the crucial substance T-42, and put it to commercial use. FastForward was only launched several years ago—the scientific community hadn’t done nearly enough research on T-42.

Moreover, it was hard to even quantify time radiation. FastForward could precisely determine the user’s perception of time acceleration while they were using the product, but they had no way of measuring the effect of time radiation. What was its range? What about the length and intensity of the exposure? All this data could only be obtained from observations on past users. After all, FastForward couldn’t do human trials, and humans were the only species that could clearly perceive time.

In the end, FastForward had long known about the time radiation effects of T-42, but had deliberately concealed it from the public. There was no way we could spin this. One might say that what they were doing now was the human trial: a large-scale, unscreened, uncontrolled, human trial on a global scale.

This was where I started butting heads with the rest of the incident handling team.

They were all FastForward executives, so I could understand that all they wanted was to protect the company’s long-term profits. But as a CSR consultant, my obligation was to guide companies towards sustainable development and actively take matters of social responsibility into consideration. Here, FastForward’s position was quite firm: do not admit fault, do not apologize, and treat everything as rumors and conspiracies.

This was unacceptable to me.

I was most struck by the words of the chief R&D engineer: “T-42 fell to Earth in meteorites long ago, which means the effects of this so-called ‘time radiation’ also began long ago. We’re only using it to benefit mankind in a fair and reasonable way. We’ve increased individual productivity rates and simultaneously sped up society’s development as a whole. We’ve already successfully extracted even higher-grade T-42. In the future, we’ll be able to put out new products that can speed up the user’s time perception even more, letting them create more value in a shorter period of time. The whole world will enter a new era of time differentiation. If the masses panic at this critical juncture, the price will be unbearably high for all of human civilization.”

All of human civilization? Were they joking? In the end, I resigned from the incident handling committee and invited them to hire someone more qualified. My NDA? Fuck that. The world was ending; what did I care?

Everyone inside FastForward had known for a long time that time radiation was real. Every time T-42 interacted with the environment, it emitted chrono-particles—essentially, a type of energy that increased the entropy in its environment, which thus created the acceleration effect. It was not the kind of thing that would dissolve naturally into the environment.

FastForward products had been on the market for eight years, with a total user base of six hundred million people, and a total sales volume of twenty-four billion monthly rations. How many chrono-particles had they released into the environment now? No one could say.

The impact of time radiation went far past anything I’d initially expected.

People have long begun to wonder: is time speeding up? Winter has gone, spring has come, and time keeps slipping suddenly away. You blink, and another year has passed.

It’s real. It’s happening.

Are other people speaking more quickly? Are you finding more gray hairs than before? Are your pets living a shorter lifespan than you expected? Do your cyber prosthetics need more frequent maintenance?

It’s all real. It’s all happening.

Time rushes past, sweeping everyone along like a great flood. If you can’t keep up, you can only fall behind.

And that flood’s destination?

Doomsday.

Cen Xiao, about thirty-five years old, ecotourism guide

The impact of time radiation wasn’t only limited to humans.

I work in eco-tourism. All year round, we take groups into the wild and teach them about nature. These past few years, the changes to the environment have been quite noticeable. Plants are blooming earlier than they should be; insects are laying eggs earlier than they normally do, and the migratory patterns of birds and fish are all out of sync. Even the four seasons themselves have gotten shorter.

This has had a big impact on our work. We can no longer count on our years of experience—rather, finding a particular species in nature has become a game of chance. Even if we find something during an exploratory survey, there’s no guarantee it will still be there the next time we bring in a group.

Some of my colleagues are partially to blame. In order to track, observe, and photograph wild animals, they sometimes used the FastForward. And the FastForward was so easy to use! All you had to do was press a button, and your movements and reflexes would become so much faster, which made tracking animals so much easier. New tour guides didn’t have to go through painstaking training in basic observational skills or accumulate practical experience over time. All they needed was a quick crash course, and they could start leading tour groups right away. They could even catch frogs, butterflies, praying mantises, and the like with their bare hands, which delighted small children to no end (though this wasn’t very good for teaching them about ecology.)

Our biggest problem was poachers. Using the FastForward, they doubled their efforts to hunt protected species, escaping after their exploits without a trace. I’d heard that in a wild bird sanctuary in a neighboring city, patrollers had found four different waves of poaching gangs in one day. They didn’t interfere at all with one another. It was as if they’d made an agreement—they went wild poaching in their own designated territories, sweeping through like lightning. The wardens still didn’t know how many birds were killed that day.

In order to deal with the poachers, patrollers and the volunteers they’d recruited also had no choice but to use the FastForward to keep pace and rescue the animals before they were killed.

That meant a lot of humans had moved through those habitats by now, and the animals had long been exposed to time radiation. Gradually, their actions became faster and faster, which made them better at escaping from hunters. A new balance was found between humans and animals. Nature was like this—as long as it had time, it could always find a new equilibrium.

On the other hand, this only made our work harder. How were we supposed to track down animals affected by the FastForward without using the FastForward ourselves? Just thinking about it made my head hurt.

We get a lot of families on our eco-tourism outings, which means we meet a lot of little kids. They chirp and burble as we lead them about, like a flock of happy little birds. Their reflexes are generally faster than those of us tour guides, and they can never keep calm—it’s hard to get them to quiet down and listen to our explanations. They’re easily distracted by anything that flies by, runs by, hops by, digs by, or swims by. Sometimes they just get up and start chasing things, or plunge headfirst into the water without thinking. It’s as if they’re testing our ability to respond.

I always thought that kids nowadays were just like this. Times were different. And the kids were younger than us; more agile and faster to respond than we were. I thought this up until one encounter, when I met a very particular child.

That day I was leading an elementary school class on their spring outing. A little girl stood at the end of the line, and she walked more slowly than her classmates. Gradually, she lagged further and further behind the other kids. She didn’t speak to them, and they ignored her. My partner was leading the team at the front, and I was overseeing the rear. The gap in the line was getting a bit unwieldy, so I tried having a chat with her.

I spotted some wiregrass at the side of the road and pointed it out. “Look—over there! Its leaves are long and thin, with a fringe branching out at the top. Do you know what that is?”

She wasn’t shy at all. She stretched out her neck, stared for a moment, and declared, “It’s goosegrass, isn’t it? Haven’t you seen goosegrass before?”

I was a bit startled. There were few children these days who could identify wild grasses. “Of course I’ve seen it. But I’ve never seen it here before. Are you familiar with this grass?”

“I’m from the village,” she responded easily. “There’s lots of them in the orchards.”

“You’re from the village? Me too. When I was a kid, I was always helping my family harvest rye. If I didn’t harvest enough then my parents would scold me. And I was never allowed to play when I got out of school.” While we spoke, I began walking a little faster, hoping that she would follow along.

Sure enough, she kept pace. “But that’s normal, isn’t it? I also have to help my brothers wash their clothes. Boy’s clothes get so dirty, they’re really hard to wash. And I have to make dinner, do the dishes, and boil water for washing our feet. Then after I’m done with all the housework I have to do homework. But I’ve always been the first in the class, and Teacher likes me the best.” Abruptly she changed the topic; she seemed very proud of herself.

Just like that, we started chatting. I learned that her mother and father were working in the city, so she and her brothers were living under her grandmother’s care. Her parents must have gone back to the village just to give birth—one child a year, three in a row. Then they went right back to work. I didn’t know where they were employed, but I knew it definitely wasn’t somewhere they could use the FastForward. The monthly fee of that thing was not low. Its consumers were mainly urban, white-collar workers and middle-class folks—the so-called elites and those striving to become elites. There were also people such as delivery cyclists who received their FastForward doses from their employers, stored directly in their helmets. They could only use it during work hours, and were strictly prohibited from private use.

This girl was only here because she’d won a scholarship opportunity to come to the city and participate in an exchange program. She was studying at the city’s best elementary school for the semester. If she passed her final exams, then she could stay on to finish elementary school. This program was intended to give children from impoverished areas an opportunity to better their prospects through education. Her teacher had snuck her out while her grandmother was in the fields, otherwise her family would never have let her go. Who else would do the housework?

“I definitely want to stay here, otherwise when I go home Grandma will kill me,” she told me. “And Teacher Liu went to all this trouble—she had to go to our house and apologize to Grandma.”

“So do you like your new school?” I asked.

“Oh, yes! Here, the desks are big, the lights all work, and I’m so comfortable when I do my homework.” Her eyes shone as she spoke.

“Do you like your new classmates?”

She blinked forward, cupped her hands around her lips, and leaned in close to whisper, “No.”

“Why not?”

“They never settle down. They won’t pay attention in class. They’re always fidgeting like crazy, it makes it hard for me to pay attention.”

I was surprised—she’d observed the same thing I had. I asked, “Is everyone like that?”

“Oh yes—and when they talk, they talk so fast. They won’t even finish one sentence before they start another. They’re always gulping down their words. And the games they play are the same. All they want to do is see who’s the fastest, but that’s so boring! Every time I try to join in, they say I’m too slow. I’m not playing with them anymore.”

“Do you have any friends here?”

“One or two. But they’re in other classes. They’re sort of like me. They came from the countryside. We talk and walk at pretty much the same speed, so we have more to say to each other. It feels like we’re in a completely separate world from the city kids.”

Her words gave me pause. In the past, wealth and capital were probably the main barriers separating two worlds, but today’s barriers were made of time. It was very clear—this had everything to do with the influence of the FastForward. The differences were already evident between young children. Would their differences be exacerbated in the future? Would they cease to understand each others’ languages and cultures? Even if they lived in the same physical space, would they still live in different dimensions of speed, without any communication between them?

Over the long process of biological evolution, different species had split across different dimensions of speed. Mayflies hatch and die in a single day. Cypress trees can live for thousands of years. As a species, humanity has already spent far too long living on the same time. Perhaps we were now witnessing the evolution of a new species. These children who had been affected by the FastForward were better adapted to the new, accelerated world. But what about those who had failed to accelerate? What paths were left to them?

• • • •

After chronicling these stories, my anxiety has eased a bit. No matter what happens, I’ve done my best. I was able to leave behind this written record. At the very least, this chronicle is a summation of my writing career.

Over the past dozen years or so, the world has changed dramatically. Because of the FastForward’s popularity, the concentration of time radiation on Earth’s environment has rapidly increased, accelerating the passage of time on an even larger scale. Those who actively embraced the acceleration technology stride ahead of time. They consume T-42, emit time radiation, create entropy, and keep sprinting at the fore. And as for those who refused acceleration technology—even if they stayed in place where they were, they were still passively carried forward, as if they were standing on a conveyor belt. The whole world’s acceleration has become inevitable.

We all know what the end point of acceleration will look like: the heat death of the universe, the collapse of time. Everything will come to a halt. But there’s nothing we can do to stop it coming. The accelerated ones think they have lots of time before doomsday arrives, which means there’s lots they can do to prevent it. But all of their actions only speed up that day’s arrival. For everyone in the slower dimensions, that day still approaches, and the only way to subjectively delay its arrival is to choose to join the others in speeding up.

Everyone I love has entered the accelerated world. I never saw them again; I lost them to another time. At times, I envy people like Mo Xin—at least she found a partner to slowly grow old with. I don’t know if I have the courage to face doomsday alone. But I’m even less certain about whether I’m willing to give in and join the accelerated masses.

At the very least, it’s not today. Not at this moment.

©2023 by Regina Kanyu Wang. Translated by Rebecca Kuang.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR

Regina Kanyu Wang is a writer, researcher, and editor born in Shanghai and currently a doctoral research fellow of the CoFUTURES project in Oslo. She writes science fiction, nonfiction, and academic essays in both Chinese and English. She has been awarded multiple Chinese Nebula Awards and finalisted for Hugo and Locus Awards for her writing, editorial, or fannish works. She has published two story collections in Chinese, a novella in Italian, and a forthcoming story collection in German. Her stories can be found in Clarkesworld, Galaxy’s Edge, and various anthologies like Broken Stars, Sinopticon, and Best SF of the Year. She has also co-edited The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, New Voices in Chinese Science Fiction, The Routledge Handbook of The Wandering Earth, the Chinese SF special issue of Vector, and the bilingual special issue of Journey Planet on Chinese Science Fiction and Space.

Rebecca F. Kuang is the award-winning, #1 New York Times and #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy, Babel: An Arcane History, and Yellowface. She has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford; she is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale.

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

Last Ritual of the Smoke Eaters

Osahon Ize-Iyamu | 4422 words

I didn’t want to eat Joshua, but he turned into dust, and the way things go in Carucchi village is that if someone turns into ashes you inhale them till there’s nothing but smoke in your lungs and redness in your eye. Sometimes we have to eat people to make us less lonely. I didn’t want to do it, but Joshua named me as his eater, so my entire village forced me down on the floor and told me it was necessary. Great-aunty Chinny held my hands and made me inhale his smoke till his entire presence was roiling through my body like the last movements of a dragon.

When Joshua had finally settled in my body, he felt like a weight in my throat.

• • • •

Joshua and I used to play by the riverside all day and night. This was before his death and before he left and before the inhalation. This was before him telling me he loved me (he always loved me). The riverside was considered to be one of the safest places in our village, the place where youth could go to avoid the dreaded dragon’s breath and the insecurity of the nation and the fear of living life in worry. The river was thought to be some anti-dragon zone, and it was believed that if we stayed there long enough, we would prevent our own deaths. We could hold space for our futures, laugh and sing and love once again, and we could hold on another day longer.

Joshua was always an adventurer. He would wade through the water like he was fighting the biggest smokebeast dragon, splashing through the river like he was slicing through its depths like a sword. He couldn’t swim properly, but when he waded all the way to the deeper parts of the river he would drag me in, as if I was his life craft. We would laugh and he would tease me for being silly and I would chase him around the water, screaming at him for getting me wet. As if no one ever went to the riverside without knowing they’d be soaked. As if wetness wasn’t everyone’s private rebellion against the heat of the dragon.

On the river shore, after we had finished playing and we were waiting for our clothes to finish drying on rocks nearby, Joshua told me he was going to join the soldiers leaving for war. He didn’t even let me speak, the way he blurted it out—he was so adamant about it, because he knew I always interrupted him. I was going to tell him that he didn’t have to go because his family were always fighters, that he didn’t have to be a hero by being a warrior, that sometimes being a hero means staying home, but you could tell he’d been thinking about it forever and he’d made up his mind. Come a fortnight from that day, the Carucchi soldiers would be raging war against the ferocious dragon territory of the East, and no one would be able to stop them.

I could see the pride in his eyes when he told me. I didn’t want him to leave, but everybody has their own personal ways of fighting, of dealing with a life under despair, and I didn’t want to stop his. I sat with him in silence, waiting for our clothes to dry on the rocks. I held his hands the whole time, my own private prayer that he would return after his departure, and smiled at him like I understood his decision.

• • • •

The weight of Joshua consumes me. It is charcoal and raw in my throat, and it presses like iron in my sleep. When I step out of my hut of mourning at dawn, everyone in Carucchi looks at me like I’m a sinner. I just want to take a walk to see my loved ones, but it’s a life full of burden for those who mourn. I walk through the growing streets like I am a ghost, like I am the shadow of something unreal, and no one will touch me or even look at me, no one will answer me when I ask for directions. No one will ever love me again the way he did. My head is so fuzzy and full of grief that I can’t even remember where anything is, not my house, not to talk of that riverside where we always swam. I don’t even know which places are now dragon territory, if there’s anything left of this world beyond the little of these huts, beyond this city.

I’ve never left Carucchi, and that’s because I’ve been told not to. But it’s so small. Limited from the world I want to know.

I keep walking aimlessly on the streets until the mourn watchers come. The soldiers always step in with their dark horses when a person leaves their hut during funeral season. Someone on the streets must have told Grand-aunty Chinny that I was found outside my quarters, so I’m not surprised when the squadron ride up to come and take me back to the place I’m imprisoned.

“You know how this goes,” one of them says, a barrel-chested man with a sympathetic voice, and I nod along with him, too weak to fight.

“I just wanted to explore, that’s all. See my family. Take some air,” I reply, and the barrel chest nods like he understands. This doesn’t stop him from clasping the iron chains to my arm, quickly latching me on to one of their horses.

“I get your plight. I truly do. But a person like you—you can’t just go out when you want. You’re not yourself. You need time to heal,” he says, giving me a sad smile. I remain silent as they carry me back to the hut. If I was strong enough. If I was strong enough, I would have told them that the process of healing should allow me to walk where I want, to explore the world, to hold him in my own way. But my head is dizzy and my mouth is full of clumps.

• • • •

Joshua was always restless. He never had a home. I could see it in his eyes—that need for instability, for lack of roots, for impulse. Even though he had a place to stay, a place he lived, that didn’t mean he didn’t want to explore new worlds. He came for dinner at my hut three times in the week before he left, eating everything my fathers cooked for us. He brought some plants from his garden and roasted them over a smoke fire with my grandma, telling her how much of a good friend I was. My grandmother laughed repeatedly at the word friend—she knew what we were, and there was no point in hiding it. Carucchi soldiers were not supposed to have loves, were not supposed to entertain any sort of relationship, but my family has always been lenient to harsh laws, and my grandma never told.

On the dinner table, my fathers discussed the details of the war with Joshua, how scary it must be to go into the heart of the dragon-world. They asked him rather quizzically, inquiring rather bluntly into the nature of things. Was he forced to go? Did he have no choice in the matter? One of my fathers asked him if he thought it was right, going to the dragons’ territory to go and harm the beasts. They were predators yes, and nobody disputed that, but is an animal a monster or just a thing that lives? Did they really deserve to be killed and made to go extinct?

Joshua said, puff-chested, that the dragons were evil beasts that needed to be exterminated. I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t quite know what to think. My whole family burst into murmurs of quiet speech—it was a tone of disapproval, and they didn’t like the way he had answered the topic. Joshua was very in-his-head about things, so much that he had a hard time noticing other people, so it was no surprise that he smiled as we scrubbed our plates after dinnertime, brushing my head with a hand full of soap, remarking to me that that went well. I smiled to him softly, but I didn’t tell him about the argument I had with my family when he left. About his views on life, about his naivete, about the way he said words like he had never been challenged on them and hadn’t chosen to challenge himself.

But it’s complicated, with the ones you love. It’s often difficult to talk to them.

• • • •

A few days after my surprising walk out, I am calmed once again. The people in my hut give me something for my sleep, and they watch over me day and night. I know from Grand-aunty Chinny’s words I am to be observed constantly, as they don’t want me taking flight. The last person who walked away from their hut after performing the rite of swallowing ashes caused a whole cassava season worth of bad luck.

The new servers that they brought to my hut are more attentive to my needs. They listen to me when I speak—about him, about my love for the water, about our stories. I tell them one of our private memories when I’m lonely, about how we used to go to the waters at midnight when everyone was sleeping. Joshua loved to see the stars when he swam, and I loved to follow him, wading my hands through the water like it was the only thing in the world.

“Was it then that he confessed his love for you?” one of my servers asks. She looks so inquisitively, and she smiles widely as she brews a cup of stewed river leaves for me.

“No,” I tell her. “It wasn’t then, it wasn’t there. He was leaving soon, and it wasn’t the right hour. If he said it before he left the first time, it would be all we’d think about, and we needed to focus. We had to be strong, so we kept it in. We had to survive.”

“That’s beautiful,” a voice says, and I am caught off guard by the person in front of me. It is that guard with the barrel chest again, standing in front of the doorway.

“Why are you even here?” I speak. I try to demand an answer, but I’m too shocked to challenge him further. I haven’t left my quarters or done anything since I walked out, so I should be allowed some peace.

“Calm down, calm down, I’m not here to grab you,” the barrel chest laughs, like it’s some sort of a joke. He points slyly towards the door, and in comes her. Grand-aunt Chinny.

She’s not exactly my Grand aunt, but the way things go in Carucchi village is that everyone who is your elder is your aunty. She is a regal woman, if cold and stoic, and she doesn’t walk with a slow step that signals her old age, but rather barges into the room like she’s fighting war. She comes wearing a dress made of dragon talons that rest at her shoulders, their skin as her shoes. She stares at the servants, and they all flee from my beck and call, moving to the other side of the prison-sized room. When she looks at me, I feel that clump in my throat.

“How are you doing?” she says, but she doesn’t care. Her words are strong and hard like jagged ice, yet more tender than I expected. I fumble around with my words, not knowing what to say, but she is so impatient that I quickly stumble on a reply.

“I’m s-surviving,” I sputter, forcing back the croak in my throat. I can’t cry in front of the Grand-Elder, it’ll just make me look pitiful.

She ignores my croak and goes on with her conversation. “I heard you’ve been going around the village in your state—you know you can’t do that.”

“I just needed some air.”

“Is air worth risking the entire village? Is it? I’m not one to hear excuses, do you hear me? You know very well that you’re in a fragile state and you choose to risk the lives of everyone around you. Joshua was a warrior, and we don’t know how you’ll react in his new body.”

His new body—how she refers to those of us who hold these lives. She thinks of me as a puppet—a museum of a warrior. I have hardly been a person ever since he passed.

I want to argue, but I bow my head instead. “I understand, Grand-Elder.”

She pays me no mind. “It is fine. You had a moment of weakness, and I’m inclined to sympathize with that. At least once. But this cannot happen again. Do you understand me?”

I respond with a layer of resignation. “I understand.”

She pats my head when she leaves, but she gives me no eye contact. She is never anywhere for long. I stay still in my sheets even after she leaves, feeling the clumps in my throat, the building and rollicking, the roar, threatening to overtake me. Joshua moves in my body like fire and dust, the weight of rebellion. But I don’t say anything. I just let her leave the room.

In the night when I sleep I see his face again, angular and righteous. Joshua is swimming like all those days before, hands outstretched like home in the river, and he’s calling me, calling me, calling me to come back to him.

But I’m hesitant.

• • • •

Joshua’s body makes me different, though.

The first week they put him in me, I fidgeted all those nights. I cried in my covers, I couldn’t sleep, I woke up every morning and the sweat beads built up on my forehead like testimonies, oily and slick. He was everywhere I went, in every breath, every blink, every vision. When the mourn-watchers came to inspect me and ask me what was wrong, I couldn’t even tell them anything. There was a fundamental shift, a change, a reckoning.

I couldn’t tell them that inside my system, Joshua and I were fighting.

• • • •

Joshua wasn’t always perfect. He wasn’t mean, truly, and he never tried to hurt me, but he wasn’t always good. But who is? On the first days after he came back from the war, he was arrogant, more than ever, a cocky man. He said words I never expected him to say and left plates for me to wash in the hut. The war had changed him, and it was clear in his eyes that he’d let himself be operated on, be charmed, be deceived. He knocked books off my reading stool, bumped into me without remorse, told me to cook dragon eggs. When he even swam, it was no longer with the tenderness of before, the love. He was cutting through the water as though he was a knife and wanted to hurt.

I tried to talk to him about the violence, the apathy, but he seemed insistent that it was nothing. He said that he was just tired from all his work, didn’t I get that, and if I wanted to help him I could just stay out of his way. Prepare him food. Give him love. He didn’t explicitly say the words, but I knew he now wanted a type of love that was built on silence and non-acknowledgment, on meekness and submission, on looking away. But I was raised in a culture of speaking and arguing, and I was reading books on past history at the time that had prompted me to start asking big questions the way my family did, to dig deep, so I couldn’t let it go. Each night I spoke to him, prodding questions concerning the war, the dragons, the costs.

“Are you sure it’s as awful as it seems? I just can’t understand how these beasts could be so bad, Joshua, to create a whole war. The dragons always used to be tamer, more docile before this, and I’ve never pictured them to be the kind of things that could—”

“You don’t stop, do you?” he snapped, cutting me off. He turned from where he slept, staring with a fierceness, as though he could spit at me. “Let me ask you this, Effiong. Have you at any point in your life carried your things and seen a live dragon?”

“No,” I said, my voice low. I could never risk the trip: the dragons were too far away, and I was scared, deep down. But I dreamed about it. “I’m not trying to fight with you. I just ask you this because I need to understand that there can be no other way this violence can be avoided. That assures me. Don’t you at least comprehend, how I, as your partner, would want you to be safe at all costs?”

Joshua’s face softened and he grabbed my hand. He grinned like a boy, for the first time since he’d been gone, and laughed like he had received a gift so precious. “So I’m your partner now?”

“Well—we have to call this something, don’t we?” I paused, flustered for words. My head was getting filled with butterflies and I felt so hot.

“Don’t worry about me, eh, partner?” He said, rubbing my head. He made me feel like stars. “I’m perfectly all right. Everything I do, I do it out of necessity. For us. And the violence is a required outcome. It always is, for war. I love you, my Effi. So much. We’re doing important work.”

That was the first time he said it. That night, it was like the water had come from the river and decided to settle our hearts.

• • • •

Grand-Elder Chinny comes in the next market week with new arrangements. She says that I am clearly hysterical, so even though I have learnt my lesson I must still be observed. She places dozens of mourn-watchers outside my hut, servants who crowd over me daily, telling me when it’s time to do my prayers, my resolutions. I am supposed to wash myself three times a day, to cleanse my thoughts of all rebellion, to let his host move in peacefully with me. But I fidget and scream all night in my sleep, and when I try to wash myself in the morning, my body feels like rancid fire. It’s like me and Joshua are repelling each other and the things we used to love, breaking apart because we struggle to bond, separating because our beliefs are different. We’re fighting because we don’t believe each other.

And Joshua was always determined to win an argument.

The barrel-chested mourn-watcher catches me wincing after my second wash, gritting my teeth, and he stands close by. He tries to look stoic, focused on his job, but his brows furrow when he talks to me.

“Are you well?” He asks. What a question.

“As well as can be.”

“Is it difficult?” He replies, after a while. He’s been losing his demeanour the more he talks to me—his hands start fidgeting. “I know it’s not easy, I mean I couldn’t even imagine what you’re going through, but . . . is it painful? It’s not supposed to be painful if you’re carrying the body of someone you love.”

I turn to look at him, not wanting to say anything. What a question. I don’t know how he expects me to answer. I pause, bite my tongue, feeling those clumps bubbling, roiling through my throat. I try to press it down but It’s hard. It’s hard. He’s threatening to come bursting through me.

“I should go,” I try to say, but the barrel-chested man grabs my hand. He looks so insistent, staring into my eyes. He’s so unsure and it’s killing him. I always wanted Joshua to look like that.

“I just want to know that I’m doing something right.”

I can’t even answer. My throat catches. The sky goes dull and hazy, swirling into a mass of brown. The cassava leaves swing on their trees, as the wind pushes them off the branches like a sandstorm. Ravens fly away from the sky, down to earth, as if to avoid this. The world around me feels gray, menacing, and in my throat I can feel something crack.

“Are you okay?” The barrel man asks me. “We need to get you somewhere safe. Now.”

But I don’t have the heart to tell him that this isn’t the weather. There’s a build-up, a charcoal swirling, the wind of a tempest, threatening to seep out of me. There’s his spirit, weighed ice, sorrow and haunting, clawing at the edges of my tongue. There’s an endless amount of iron clashing, in my vocal cords, as he fights through my body, ruining me. I can’t keep him in, yet I can’t leave him.

I open my mouth and Joshua comes screaming out of my body in the shape of a dragon.

• • • •

The evening Joshua died, I didn’t need to be told. For the past few nights, I had tossed and turned in my sleep, gotten up aching, feeling the covers underneath me burn. I had thrown up ashes in the sink, scratched myself feral, woken up from dreams where I swam in waters made of fire. I knew something was off. I just wondered how long they would keep it from me that I was mourning someone I had already lost.

The squad of soldiers came at quarter to dusk on the third day after his death, with the village flag at half-mast. They came with funeral songs, with excuses that I was far too sick to hear. They tried to placate me by giving me a dragon’s egg, by telling me that he died a hero, that he was a victim of an outnumbered dragon attack in one of the major battles. But I just wished he was there. At my bed, rubbing my head, telling me there was never any need to worry. Telling me that I should take off my shirt and dive into the water with him and remind him that we were alive.

I read a book every night. I sank to the ground and scratched blood into my eyes. I tore my clothes. I screamed all day. At night, I whispered. I sat in unwashed shame. I couldn’t see anyone that wasn’t my fathers. They begged me to calm down, but I couldn’t stop reading, about dragons, about forgotten histories, till my hands were thin. Till my eyes were gaunt. Till I had stayed up weeks after his death and realised the simple truth: that no beast in our vicinity had expressed the original instinct to attack humans. The evidence was clear. We had gone there first, decades before, and stolen the dragons’ smoke, their eggs, their talons, their land. We had gone back, season after season, to take more, to fight them, to carry all they had.

I sat with this truth with a sickness in my stomach, but it didn’t even matter. The next day, Grand-Elder Chinny came with the squadron to tell my family that Joshua had named me as his smoke-eater, and I accepted immediately. I let them force me down. I wish I refused outrightly, fought tradition, but I wasn’t strong enough. I loved him fiercely. I felt like I could do it as his partner, and I was never ready to leave him.

And deep down, I thought that if I did it, I could understand his decision.

• • • •

Joshua shoots out of my throat like an arrow launched, like a slingshot pulled back, like a released prisoner. His body goes reddish-black and full of cloud like smoke, dead around the edges, all blunt where he used to cut. His eyes come out hazy, less with that grin of his, and all that’s full of them is sorrow. I try to back away, but Joshua’s smoke-body wraps himself around me, pressing against my chest.

“Please,” he croaks. He is barely able to talk. “Don’t leave.”

I look into Joshua’s eyes and there’s no sharpness there, like there was before, no hardness. There’s darkness in his eyes, confusion, a hollowness that comes with the consequences of a violent war.

All that’s left of him is this smokebeast dragon.

The barrel man looks at me and raises his firearm, aiming it towards Joshua’s body “He’s tainted. No wonder you’ve been so sick. I have to get Grand-Elder Chinny. We have to kill—”

“Don’t shoot,” I shout.

“I have to,” he says, pistol leveled. But he’s hesitant.

I look into his eyes. “I’m begging you. I know what you’ve been taught about dragons, but this will solve nothing. He’s not doing anything. You have to trust me.”

The barrel-chested man gives me a sad smile before triggering his pistol. “A person like you—you’re not yourself. You just lost someone. You’re still sick. You can’t know what’s right.”

Joshua’s dragon looks at me, and he gives me one final gaze before he dives up in the air, into the sky, deep into the haze. The barrel-chested man shoots twice but I hit his gun away, so it misses him, misses him, and the gunpowder pellets go into the air like fireworks. Joshua was always a swimmer, and his dragon moves through the sky like a beast underwater. Before he vanishes, I can see his talons stretch out to me in the sky, calling me, calling me, calling me one last time to come to him.

But I don’t. I can’t go back. As much as he tried, we both know he could never control me.

And now, there’s too much ahead of me. There’s a buildup in my spirit, roaring, defiant in the face of submission. I grab the pistol and jump on the barrel man’s steed, and in the midst of the confusion, away I go. I’ve never left Carucchi, but it’s clear that I need to. I have to go to dragon territory. I have to fight against the violence and destruction. I have to move like the water: into the wild, fluid and on my own, past all that rocks against me. So how I flow, into my new world.

©2023 by Osahon Ize-Iyamu.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Osahon Ize-Iyamu is a Nigerian writer of speculative fiction. A graduate of the Alpha Writers Workshop, he has been published in magazines like Clarkesworld, Nightmare, The Rumpus, and Strange Horizons. You can find him online @osahon4545.

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

Dr. Seattle Opens His Heart

Winston Turnage | 647 words

When they flash his sign at the top of the Space Needle, he shoots out from the center of Lake Union and flies high into the sky. A mushroom wave erupts from where he surfaces and expands radially. Children watching from the shore jump in place and scream and point at him. The shy ones clap.

A reporter once asked Dr. Seattle how he acquired his powers. Dr. Seattle said, “There never was a French Indochina,” and after that there wasn’t. The Vietnamese resumed writing in logographs and became net importers of Indian rice. Khmer loanwords entered everyday English. We took this to mean Dr. Seattle was God.

Dr. Seattle has no features. If you look at his face, you will see one thousand faces at once, and when you look away or he flies out of sight you will fall on your knees and weep because it is a horror to see one thousand faces where there ought to have been just one. They blur his head in all the photos and on all the broadcasts.

There was a terrorist plot in Westlake last winter. A free-speech hacktivist, a warlord’s treasurer, and a nihilist walked into the headquarters of an internet company and said, “We have a big bomb.” The city functionaries flashed Dr. Seattle’s sign on the Needle—a stethoscope listening to itself, like an ouroboros—and not seconds later he landed on the street outside the terrorist-occupied building, creating by his impact a shallow crater and exposing several underground pipes and wires. From this rubble, Dr. Seattle lumbered toward the building and into the lobby.

Those who have met Dr. Seattle in conflict unanimously name this ominous lumbering as the most traumatic element of the experience. Why would an all-powerful God act tired, or injured? Dr. Seattle could inhabit any body—or several bodies, or several species, or new forms never before conceived of—but he chose to approach them in a damaged human body, slowly, the head lolling and wearing one thousand faces. Until the moment of their encounter with Dr. Seattle, these people, like most animals, had always had a sense, even if vague, of what the animate agents in their environment intended. For peers, they relied on social instincts, theory of mind. For machines, they relied on intuitive physics to make estimations like: that truck in the distance will not hit me if I cross the street now. With Dr. Seattle, they had nothing to rely on. His was a different kind of mind, driven by incomprehensible motives to execute even less comprehensible plans, something animate and powerful in the universe against which they had no defense or prayer, and they are forever burdened by the knowledge that he cannot be hidden from.

So Dr. Seattle lumbered into the building in Westlake with the three terrorists. “Detonate it,” he said.

We mourned the workers who perished in the explosion and the subsequent fire, but we did not mourn in public because Dr. Seattle can be touchy about such things. He may worry that we do not appreciate his oversight.

He duplicates in the sky, branching into thousands of himself and expanding to colonize the firmament with a hexagonal grid of his own bodies. The children continue jumping and pointing but their affected enthusiasm falters. Their mothers fearfully command them, through their own strained smiles, to keep fucking smiling if they want to live. When Dr. Seattle’s expansion stops, there is one of him above every ten-foot stamp of land in the city, the bodies hanging a hundred feet above ground like limp puppets strung up by their thoracic spines, each one staring down unblinkingly at whoever looks up.

His many bodies begin to chant, at first out of phase and under-enunciated, but then clusters of them sync up and intone consonants. “I love you,” they say.

©2023 by Winston Turnage.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Winston Turnage writes fiction and essays from Seattle. His writing has appeared in Meridian Magazine and here in Lightspeed. You can follow his future publications and subscribe to his essays at his website, inarticulate.xyz.

The Moment Before the Moment

Martin Cahill | 5639 words

Azahn had been the ninety-third Imperial Foresight to the Dynasty of Silken Flame for only three weeks when he was forcibly retired.

His body had been blessed by the holy waters of the Sky-Vein River, and he had earned the named-blade Stalwart Thy Mind, Strong Thy Arm, even now strapped to his back. He had trained his entire life to wrestle the great lion-headed guardian that lies at the top of the world, Yagadhan, who he grappled with for a day and a night until surrender.

Azahn was having trouble being told that all of his accomplishments had all been for nothing.

Kneeling before the Phoenix-Touched Empress, the deity-upon-earth he had sworn to defend until his dying breath and even undeath, Azahn struggled to listen as she spoke.

“My loyal blade,” she said, voice deep in her middle years, brow aflame and burning as she looked on him, sorrow bright in her molten eyes. “I know you have worked your whole life to serve me. You’d not have eaten of the Tomorrow Root if you did not see a comforting future stretching out before you. I see in your eyes, even now, the holy plant works its magic.”

Azahn looked away, desperate to hide the kelp-green and flower-gold flecks he knew floated across his pupils, a sign of his station, his purpose. To be Foresight was to know what came next, to see the fractal shadows of futures yet to come and act accordingly, all to keep Her Holiness safe from those that would extinguish her flame.

The memory comes back, unbidden. The pride at besting Yagadhan, panting and beaten, watching him with proud, gilded eyes. Azahn’s hands, weak and shaking, as he reached into the earth and plucked free the green and gold root of the Tree-At-The-Peak-Of-The-World, which towered above him like a column of silver fire.

He had been crying. Why, he could not say, did not remember.

The root was chewy, rough on his tongue and teeth. Bitter in ways he hadn’t expected; blood flavored the mythic plant as it tore open his gums. For the next week, he felt a piece of the root stuck between two of his back teeth. It was a painful and humbling haunting in the week his body was purified in oils, chanted over, draped in silks.

When he flossed it free, he felt relief and heartbreak twin through him at its loss.

“Your Majesty,” he finally ventured, “have I done something to offend? I know that I’m new, I know your last Foresight was cut down—”

She raised a perfect hand. Azahn shut his mouth. “No, my Foresight,” she said, with just a fraction more kindness, “what happened to your Auntie has nothing to do with you, nor have you done anything to offend. In fact, your reverence for this station, this throne, only makes you glow brighter in my eyes. The fact of the matter is,” she said, eyes turning amber and sad, “that your station is being dissolved. As is the rest of the Dynasty.”

Azahn’s eyes widened. “B-but . . . the Dynasty is eternal. In every future I see, it goes on and on, lives a thousand and more generations, I—”

With deadly kindness, Her Holiness said, “You will learn to see other futures, my Foresight. My Azahn. The future that is coming is not a world of dynasties and crowns and palanquins carried on the bones of the past. No. It is a time for new ways. For people’s voices to be heard. I will remain as one of those voices, but as we move into a world of democracy, my Foresight, I will be afforded no special guard or crown or station. I will be what I’ve always wished to be: simply a person. You have that chance now, too,” she said, infusing such hope into the statement that Azahn felt a deep and profound despair.

Why would he want to be a person when he had trained all his life to be Foresight?

• • • •

Less than a month later, Azahn moved back in with his Uncle Shan. Unlike his wife, Shan hadn’t worked in the Palace of the Smoldering Will and he’d had very little interest in steel that wasn’t used to cut bread or debone fish. So, he had lived apart but still within sight of the Palace.

Azahn arrived at his door in a daze, a pack on his back, the blade Ash’ih at his side, feeling neither stalwart nor strong.

His uncle looked older, but there was a spark of warmth in his eye; Azahn hadn’t seen him since the funeral. At the time, Mira’s loss had hollowed him out. It seemed some joy had grown back in the years that Azahn was away training. “My Azahn,” he said, hands dusty with flour, cupping his nephew’s brown cheek. “It is good to have you home. It’s been so quiet since Mira left us.”

She didn’t leave us, Azahn wanted to say. Assassins were sent from the School of the Jaguar. They trapped her in a valley. Two hundred of their best archers aimed straight for her heart and even she could not see a future out of that. It’s how I wanted to live. It’s how I wanted to die.

Instead, he said, “Uncle, this hasn’t been my home for some years.”

Shan, if he felt sour about it, didn’t show it. Instead, he gestured for Azahn to come inside. “Well, we’ll do our best to make it home again for as long as you’re here then, eh?”

Azahn followed, wilting at the smell of fresh-baked bread and the ghost of perfume his Auntie had worn; the moon-shadow of lavender and plum. It sat on his tongue, melted away like sugar, and he was sadder for it.

It was difficult following his Uncle through the house. Azahn should have had hours of his day dedicated to parsing the fractal vision he now had, learning to determine this future from that. Her Holiness had said he could still train with Master Qin, but that would require going back to the Palace. Azahn was still too heartbroken to even look north.

So, he coped. He walked right behind his Uncle, ignoring the hazy shimmer of potentialities springing in Shan’s wake, eager half-stutters of blue shadows, any of which could become true with the right choice. Master Qin had said that the future was always happening; it took training to find the right one to bring into bloom or cut off before misfortune locked in.

For a desperate moment, Azahn glanced around the room, hoping to find the future in which he had purpose again. When nothing happened, he sighed, and continued into his old room. For all the futures he had to sort through at any time, it was here, looking at the past, that he felt truly overwhelmed.

“I’ve not really touched it, save to keep it free of dust and the occasional lizard,” his uncle was saying, “but I understand if it feels a little youthful for a proven imperial guard. I hope it’s okay.”

But the room was perfect, even as it felt like hot steel under his fingernails, the past creeping into the joints of his present, prying him open bit by bit: The pearl-blue blanket that lay with not a wrinkle on the small bed. A lovingly haphazard pile of comic books and pulp novels, the familiar domino mask of Mattara the Masked Marauder peeking out from beneath other four-color dramas. A worn sketchpad, the first half filled with half-hearted attempts at comic book heroes of his own design.

Azahn smiled as he remembered that the second half was filled with sketches of his Auntie Mira. Laying in the sweeping shade of springtime river willows, Shan feeding her the flesh of new oranges. Wielding Ash’ih in the traditional armor of the Foresight, all cobalt plating and golden filigree, covered in dust and sweat. Asleep under the palace’s jacaranda trees, peaceful in dreaming beneath their lavender crowns. Her grave in the Valley of Future’s End, stone marker wreathed with herbs and ash, alongside her brethren; Azahn didn’t know if he’d be buried there or not anymore.

Azahn drank in the little room, full of clothes he’d outgrown and notebooks from half-remembered classes and plush animals he’d kept for sentiment. He found he didn’t miss the cold, unwieldy sprawl of the massive, marble room that had been his in the palace, even if it did have a balcony that faced the rising sun.

In fact, this room and that room only had the one thing that made them feel like home: both still smelled like Auntie Mira and that was enough for him.

“It’s wonderful, Uncle,” he said, and he meant it, bringing the old man into a tight embrace.

Shan left him to get acquainted, promising dinner soon; an old favorite, lentils and yellow rice and root vegetables plated with fresh rolls and salted butter, both riddled with onions and shallots. After closing the door, Azahn lay down on his old bed and stared at the ceiling, losing himself in the scent of hard-working yeast and minced allium. He traced the constellations of clay cracks above him, muttering half-remembered stories to himself of a star he had named here, or a great war waged there.

As he lay absolutely still, Azahn could not see any blue-shadow futures, not even for himself. It should have scared him.

Instead, relief washed over him, a cold compress to his forehead after weeks of fever.

• • • •

Another month passed before Azahn saw the Phoenix-Touched Empress again.

Shan became frustrated with him, which was fair; Azahn dropped the grocery bag as he fell to his knees, head bowed, right in the middle of the market. His Uncle attempted to talk sense into him, but some things were too baked into muscle memory, the cooked clay unyielding. Azahn stayed that way until a divine hand gently pulled him upright.

His Empress insisted he call her Uyla but this was tantamount to blasphemy, so Azahn said nothing, only standing silent before his former charge.

Her brow no longer burned with the light that had been stolen from the dawn-being. Her eyes no longer glowed with the fires of rebirth, cursed white-gold with eternal knowledge. She was no longer weighed down with raiment after raiment, jewels of ruby and rings of platinum and collars of obsidian, no longer a walking splendor. She was an Empress no more. She no longer had the air of an implacable god on earth; she was simply an older woman in autumn garb, a saffron robe with a belt of black and red leather.

She did seem a lot happier, he had to admit. Standing behind her was a single honor guard yawning in armor that looked scuffed and worn. How many times had this fool bested Yagadhan?

“You’re staying with your uncle, then?” Uyla asked.

Azahn nodded, keeping his eyes downcast, as he’d been trained. “I am. He’s been very patient with me as I . . . adjust.”

Next to him, Shan smiled at her former majesty. “Uyla. It’s good to see you.”

“And you, Shan,” she said, giving him a kiss on each cheek. “I missed you at dinners after Mira returned to the Cosmic Will.”

He couldn’t see his Uncle’s face, but Azahn tasted the melancholy in the air, sweet and tart. “Ah, you have my apologies. I found I could not attend to my grief and my Empress at the same time. I hope you can forgive a widower’s sorrow.”

“Always.” Azahn saw a tear roll down the face of his former Empress. “Don’t forget, she was the flower of my eye as well. Please know I mourned with you, dear Shan.”

Shan took her hand and kissed the back of it with reverence. “Thank you, Uyla. Maybe we can have that dinner sometime soon since we have done our duty to grief. I know Mira would only encourage mourning through celebration. We can catch up like old times. Azahn, would you enjoy that?”

He nodded, eyes wide, trying to find a way to be normal about his old Empress coming for dinner. “I would. Of course. It would be an honor to have . . . Uyla in our home.”

She looked relieved that he’d used her name, and Azahn was proud of himself for doing so. “I fear my life is a lot more boring these days, Shan. No raucous discussions of politics or mythic battlefronts. A lot of paperwork and bureaucracy.”

His uncle shrugged. “I only speak of what I know: yeast, breads, and marmalades. So, you can’t say you haven’t been warned, too!”

The two of them laughed and Azahn wondered if he’d missed something in their exchange.

Around him, those blue shadows stuttered. He focused, watching as something ephemeral snapped into place; a potential future becoming certain, he knew, locking into reality like a puzzle piece. It was only in the warmth and depth of that shared look between Shan and Uyla that Azahn realized what had just become.

This twinge of bittersweet joy, it wasn’t unfamiliar, but it was rare; that moment hope alchemized into something true, the moment a maybe became a yes. Azahn watched the future of two people he loved connect, and his smile was small, secretive, and mostly for himself. They’d understand soon enough.

But he was not so distracted that he didn’t see the arrow coming.

His hand moved to a space in the air that was empty one moment, and the next, was not. His fingers closed around the wooden shaft of an arrow, whose steel head stopped eight inches from Uyla’s skull. Spinning on his heel, he grabbed the knife from his belt with his other hand and threw it into the blue-shadow path that led to the assailant’s stomach.

He did this without sight, without thought, without breath. This was what he had trained for; it didn’t require any of that.

It should have felt right, just. To do what he had been trained for finally, after months of stillness, it should’ve lit his heart up like a winter bonfire.

So why did he feel so empty?

The world, which had slowed, regained its speed. A scream of pain, then shouting as the honor guard and those in the market ran in all directions. Uyla looked around, breathless and confused, as Shan stared at Azahn in awe. Maybe fear.

“Apologies, Uyla,” Azahn said, voice level and numb. “I know you have a man for this, but . . . I thought it might be rude not to grab the arrow.”

She did her best to smile. “You . . . You’ve done as you were trained to do, Azahn. Thank you. Are you well?”

Did she notice his hand trembling? Did she see the empty light in his eyes, waiting for the fulfillment to arrive at a job well done? “I’m . . . I have these gifts and I use them and I don’t feel anything from them. Like everything I do with them is the wrong thing.”

Shan’s knobby, strong hand on his shoulder, an earnest smile on his face, as Uyla looked on with concern. “We’ll figure it out, Azahn. There is a life out there for you. Value for who you are, not what you can do. We’ll do it together. Yes?”

Behind him, the unknown assassin screamed in agony, bleeding out from Azahn’s actions. A life ended, senseless. But wasn’t it what he was made for?

“Yes, Uncle.”

• • • •

Azahn wandered with no destination in mind. He had been aimless for months and it was only as winter swept across the city that he realized how lost he was.

No one quite knew how to help him. Shan encouraged him to help in the kitchen, but Azahn was driving him up a wall; he was jumping at blue-shadow futures of knives dropped or fingers gone, third degree burns, oven mitts catching flame, and more. When in the kitchen, Azahn was paralyzed both by indecision and an unwillingness to let any single destructive future come to pass. But it meant he got in the way and prevented any yeast or slab of butter from doing its delicate work.

Uyla invited him to help her in the Communal Gardens, tasking him with uprooting potatoes and carrots, leeks and onions, those bulbs in the earth whose futures ended on tables, in stews, in bellies. But every vegetable unearthed reminded him of the training he’d worked towards, their severed roots disconcerting, their bodies bleeding dirt and soil. Once his hands started shaking, they hadn’t been able to stop.

Even Master Qin, trainer of Foresights, whose mothers had conversed with the Cosmic Will in the shade of the Tree-At-The-Peak-Of-The-World, could not help. He ran test after test, mental and physical and magical; Azahn passed each with top marks.

Finally, Master Qin put a gnarled hand on Azahn’s shoulder and said with grim humor, “Azahn, all I can find is that you have depression. And depression’s message first and foremost, is that we have no future. I can imagine for someone as clairvoyant as yourself, this is causing the majority of your struggles.”

When asked how to fix it, Master Qin hesitated. Then, in as kind a voice as possible, he told Azahn that depression was not an illness with any single antidote. Many who had it, even with aid, wrestled with it daily, much as Azahn had wrestled Yagadhan. “If you could beat such a ferocious opponent, a beast set to task by the Cosmic Will, you can surely tackle this new challenge.”

Something clicked in Azahn’s mind. If anyone knew how to make it to the next day when tasked with a mighty challenge, it was the immortal lion-headed guardian.

And so, making his way back to the Tree-At-The-Peak-Of-The-World, Azahn sought out Yagadhan and found that the lion-headed man was not on guard, but packing a bag.

“W-what are you doing, mighty Yagadhan?”

The shaggy, goldfire mane bounced around his leonine face as he turned to Azahn, milky, dandelion eyes looking at him with surprised delight. At his feet, there was a large leather satchel. “Well, well, well, look who it is! To what do I owe the pleasure, Foresight?”

“You . . . you’re leaving?”

Yagadhan had the good sense to blush. He scratched the back of his head, eyes unable to meet Azahn’s. “Ah. Yes . . . about that. I’m going to be setting out for a little while. Word reached me that your world has no use for Foresights anymore and so the Cosmic Will has . . .”

He trailed off, watching Azahn, sensing something shift in the silence. Then, a wince as he raised a massive paw towards Azahn. “Ah. Damnation. My apologies, young one. I didn’t mean for that to come out the way it did.”

The little spark of will inside Azahn went out, snuffed like feeble candlelight. Yagadhan was right, of course. No use, no need for him. He and Yagadhan were alike now: relics of a bygone age.

Too many stories read as a boy, Azahn realized. Warriors with future vision wrestling lion-headed immortals in the shade of a mythic tree at the top of the world? It was childish. Stupid, even. In those stories, heroes won, monsters vanquished, and the story ended there. The hero didn’t suddenly find themselves up for tax evasion, the monster running late for work, real life catching up to them past story’s end.

Yes, Yagadhan was right. They were like those stories now. Useless.

A touch on his shoulder shook him from his spiral, depression’s claws pulling him deeper into the darkness of his own thoughts. This close, even towering above him, Yagadhan was gentle, eyes bright and boring into Azahn’s with concern.

The last time we were this close, my forearm was locked around your throat; you nearly bit my leg off at the hip. You laughed as I choked you out. Did that mean nothing?

“Hey, kid,” he said, crushed velvet voice in his ears. “Would you want to come with me? I’ve been assigned to the Tree here for a few centuries, lots of places even I haven’t seen across the Painted Swath of Worlds. Magwar, the Delver’s Delight? The Writhing Coast? The Bubble Palace of Twynbre? I’ve got a friend out in the Drifting City on the Flatblade Sea, you’d love her. Unless you’re afraid of snakes, then you might not! But I don’t know, guy like you, you’re not scared of much, right?”

Could he see it in Azahn’s eyes? That awful truth. Ever since I learned to see the future, I’ve been nothing but scared, Yagadhan.

The paw flexed on his shoulder, pads digging in just a little bit, the hint of claws beneath them. In a softer voice, the lion-headed man said, “C’mon, it can’t be that bad, right?”

Azahn finally let himself cry, tears rolling down his face as his breath left him; above, the sprawling branches of the Tree-At-The-Peak-Of-The-World shone with stars glimmering in their thousands.

“Can you take it from me?” he said, choking on his words, daring now to speak it into existence. “Can you p-please take it from me? I don’t want it anymore. I can’t. Please. I can’t stand to see all these futures, all these paths not taken. I’m sick of them. Please, give me silence.”

Two mighty arms wrapped around him, and Azahn instinctually clung to Yagadhan’s massive, furred frame. He didn’t know how long he wept nor how long the immortal guardian held him. But Azahn heard him say, “I can’t, Azahn,” and knew the true shape of despair. “The root is within you, a part of you. I’d have better luck removing your heart or your spirit.”

Azahn stepped out of the embrace, wiping his face, feeling cold at the top of the world. He could barely look up at the tree for in each starry bough was the future of another galaxy; he was blinded by all the futures above him, and he hated each of them. “So, this is it? I’m to wallow and wither away, cursed forever because the world deemed me obsolete?”

Yagadhan sighed as he slung the satchel over his shoulder. “Azahn, I’m sorry about what happened. But the world cares not for our plans and makes no change in its ever-forward course, despite the wishes of titans and tinkers alike. I empathize, my young friend, I do. Do you think I was always the guardian of the tree?” He gestured to the expanse of snow and stars and roots around them. “When I was created, I was designed to build songs for Ijitorata the Will-Aspect of Sound. And I was good at it. Over a thousand years, I built songs. One time I spent ninety years making sure a leitmotif really worked. But then my sibling here on the mountain decided they were done, and I was given this role. And now, something else might happen. Maybe I’ll come back. Maybe someone else will be assigned here. Maybe I’ll go back to songwriting. Life is never just one thing and if you’re having trouble seeing a future for yourself, then maybe you’re looking in the wrong places.”

“But you’re immortal,” Azahn spat back, leaning into the sudden venom in his voice, the hurt made manifest. “You’ve got all the time in the world! I’m not. I’ve barely a moment compared to the likes of you!”

Yagadhan fixed him with that brilliant pale-gold stare and it was like the judgement of the morning sun had arrived. “Then you’d best get a move on, Azahn. I know you’re fighting your battles, and I know it hasn’t been easy. And it may not be easy again for some time. But you will get there. You will find your future. And if you can’t, then you will have to make one.”

With a solemn nod, Yagadhan turned toward the tree and walked toward a split in the trunk; a golden light had etched itself onto the bark, becoming a doorway. He looked back at Azahn with a faint smile. “And I promise, my invite always stands. Just come to the tree and speak my name. You don’t have to do this alone.”

Azahn nodded and watched as Yagadhan, immortal lion-headed guardian of the Tree-At-The-Peak-Of-The-World vanished, leaving his post for stranger shores.

The silence around him was welcome, even as fractal futures shone above him. Azahn found himself sitting in the snow at the base of the Tree-At-The-Peak-Of-The-World.

He sat, cold, lost in Yagadhan’s last words, as dawn found the mountaintop and him upon it.

• • • •

In the end, bread saved his life.

It was a month or so after Yagadhan left and it seemed Shan had accepted Azahn’s solemnity; he’d stopped asking him for help around the kitchen or the house, only making gentle remarks about getting fresh air or sunlight if he went too many days being inside.

But it was a busy morning, Shan being pulled in every direction, when he asked Azahn for help. “My boy, please,” he said, running from one room to the next, “I’ll only be out for a handful of minutes, no more than a half hour. Please just keep an eye on those loaves. They mostly run themselves, but still.”

And Azahn, sitting on a stool, did just that. He watched.

The massive clay oven that took up half the humble kitchen had always been his favorite part of the house. He’d sat here and studied with his Auntie, who made time for him even after her long days as Foresight. He’d marvel at Shan’s innate understanding of when to grab the wooden paddle and shift a doughy loaf, always in motion, an understanding between him, the fire, and the yeast.

So he found himself there again, depression yoked around him like an iron collar, when he noticed something. A faint blue-shadow lingering near the flame in the back, which was not as robust as Shan normally made it. He must’ve forgotten a log in his rush this morning, Azahn thought.

One by one, little blue-shadows sprung up around the eight loaves before him. Azahn’s heart stopped. Uncertainty, here? What sort of futures would be upended here, of all places?

For a moment, Azahn despaired seeing these shadows. An urge to close his eyes and turn away filled him. But that urge ran straight into the heavy weight of duty, a task his uncle had asked of him. Bread would best him, truly? And he’d let down his uncle all because he couldn’t handle even this tiny thing?

It’s only bread, he thought, breathing through his nose, looking into the oven. You grew up in this kitchen. You can do this.

A lesson came back to him from Master Qin, the hush and rush of water dripping down stone and leaf in the Burbling Gardens. “To be Foresight is to see the moment before the moment. As a future locks itself into certainty, you will see its myriad paths, the shape it could be, not must be. And in time, you will learn how to nudge them, a hair this way, an inch the other. Such minute distances influence vast outcomes in the Cosmic Will.”

Everything else around Azahn fell away. The potential futures of knives and rolling pins and rusted pans and even the flame at the heart of the oven, he shoved them all out of mind.

And in those eight loaves, he saw their potential future unfold: the heat was too low and the yeast was running thin on air. These loaves, Azahn knew, would flatten, becoming hard, stale before their time. Shan would be lucky to give them away, let alone sell them.

Without thinking, he grabbed the great, worn wooden paddle that was off to the side, and with delicate flicks of his wrist, his green and gold flecked eyes darting this way and that, Azahn maneuvered loaf after loaf into a more ideal spot, nearer to the flame to keep the cooking continuous. Tinkering with the flame was out of the question until the bread was removed.

For the next twenty minutes, Azahn let go of thought, of worry. He danced from one side of the clay oven to the other, adjusting, spritzing water to increase rise, spinning loaves in their heated waltz. As he moved, he focused on one blue-shadow for each loaf; it was like balancing a stack of books on his head, an exercise from his early training.

A little part of him really wondered if this was worth his talent; he had been destined to protect the heart of an empire, a phoenix given form, to continue the mystic tradition of his family, his dynasty.

But that part was drowned out as he removed each loaf at the exact moment their future as a delicious, golden-crusted loaf became certain. He stared at each as though they were children freshly born, precious and new, tended by caring hands.

His hands.

That small voice within went quiet as he realized that this was something he could hold, a result of using his abilities to tend to the life of his uncle and himself, their community even. For this bread would feed families. It would put coin in his uncle’s pocket. And it gave him something to take care of.

In this way, Azahn felt rather than saw his own future lock in, that he could use his hands to create and make; that he could be a person of beginnings, not endings.

It was a lightness in his heart he hadn’t felt in months.

It felt like freedom.

As each loaf steamed on the counter, fresh and warm, the kitchen heavy with the mouth-watering scent of new bread, Azahn turned and saw his uncle standing in the doorway, mouth agape. “Azahn,” he ventured. Was it wonder on his lips? Relief? Azahn realized it didn’t matter.

For the first time in months, he smiled at his Uncle. “These are fresh, Uncle. If you wanted to bring them out to the market, I’d do so now. And I’m happy to start on the next batch. I’ve a feeling they’ll go quick.” Turning to the flame in the oven, he focused, seeing which future lay in the fire. “I’m going to add about three and a half logs, though, Uncle. It’s running cooler than we’d like. Is that okay?”

Shan wiped a thumb under his eye, dabbing at a little water there. Nodding, he said, “Of course, nephew. I trust you. I’ll be back soon. Something tells me the handiwork of the neighborhood Foresight will sell fast.”

Neighborhood Foresight, Azahn thought, chuckling to himself as he went to fetch firewood. I like that.

The oven warmed. Azahn’s hands went into motion as he tucked fresh balls of dough, watching the life of the yeast within stir, eager for heat, for life. With practiced ease, he ran a paring knife down the center of each, slashing just so.

Azahn, delirious with new joy, lost himself to baking.

• • • •

“Yagadhan.”

A moment passed before a golden line of light split the massive trunk of the Tree-At-The-Peak-Of-The-World. Through it, the massive lion-headed warrior emerged. His old armor had been replaced by some sort of loose, patterned shirt and a pair of shorts. He lifted tinted glasses off of his head and smiled down at the scene before him. “Why, my Foresight, what have you crafted here?”

They’d set up the feast before calling him. Uyla, Shan, Master Qin, and a few other close friends of Azahn’s and his Uncle had arrived early, clearing away snow, setting up tables and chairs, and making a rousing campfire to huddle around in the chilly mountain air.

Across each table were mountains of food, much made by Azahn. Masa cakes and slow-roasted fig-glazed pork, light, airy dumplings filled to the brim with vegetables and spicy seafood, thick slabs of brioche surrounded by salted butter and tamarind jam, and more and more.

Already, Yagadhan’s mouth watered. He looked down at Azahn with something like pride. “And what are we celebrating, my Foresight?”

Azahn gestured for Yagadhan to join everyone at the fire. “Today will be the anniversary of when we lost my Auntie. It’s also the day I was chosen to begin my true training. It’s been . . . a hard few years for all of us. But it feels important to celebrate these things today, after everything. And I wanted to do it with friends. Would you join us?”

Yagadhan inclined his head. “It’s my honor, Azahn. Of course.”

Azahn introduced the immortal guardian to his family and walked around, delivering morsel after morsel onto the plates of those gathered, always certain when someone was ready to eat again. He stopped the tea at the height of its steeping, filling wooden mugs as Yagadhan told tales of the Drifting City and the trouble he had gotten up to, Master Qin eager to ask questions, Uyla and Shan holding hands, happy to listen.

Azahn, heart at peace and content here on the mountaintop, noticed today was nearing. He pointed off in the distance. “Look, everyone. The sun is rising.”

Everyone joined him at the edge of the mountain, in the shadow of the tree, which shone above them like a silver fire. In silence, they raised their glasses, saluting the sun and the memory of Mira.

A new day began, golden and brilliant. And for the first time in a year, surrounded by family and friends, Azahn found himself grateful and excited that he didn’t know what it would bring.

©2023 by Martin Cahill.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

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

Of Death Deserved We Will Not Die

Bennett North | 720 words

The sweet air of the temple district is what makes the bread taste so good, Mama says. The shafts of sunbeams that come through broken stained glass pick up a honeyed fragrance on their way down and warm our rising dough. The breeze that wheezes through chinks in crumbling stone walls stirs up ghosts of ancient incense and perfumes our airy loaves. The ovens that once burned the dead now bake our bread.

No one from the city will buy our bread but the others who live here outside its walls are eager for it. They pay us in found things, chipped pottery and handfuls of nails and worm-eaten wood and sacks of bones. They eat the bread in the street, tearing into the loaves with sharp teeth, pulling out the soft insides with long fingers.

I think the bread will make me strong. I practice in the courtyard when I’m not helping Mama. I run at the wall, dig toes into gaps, leap for the next handhold. My fingers seek out the tiniest holds, little ledges only deep enough for the first joint of my fingers. Every day I climb a little higher, but there’s always a point when my fingers give out and I drop back down.

Get more flour, Mama says, so I go. There aren’t any farms outside the city walls and the people inside won’t trade with us, but the grindstone still grinds and there is always grist for the mill. I bring home the sacks full of heavy flour and Mama goes to work.

Mama never stops baking. She kneads the dough with gaunt knuckles, dusted with flour up to her elbows. I haul the water up from the well and sometimes I knead next to her. It feels so nice when you make it right, when the dough is warm and baby-soft. I’m always cold these days but I dig my fingers into the dough and push and fold and push and fold. The grit of wall-dust from my hands gets slowly kneaded in, disappearing into the pillowy folds like a drowning man in the sea.

The city gates used to open. I barely remember it, but once they never shut. Then the sickness came and the buildings burned and people screamed in the night. Mama and I got sick, and by the time we got better, the gates were closed for good. Do they think of those of us they left behind? Do they wonder how we’re getting on? Do they mourn for us?

Every day I climb a little higher.

The customers are always at our door, hungry, long fingers, sharp teeth. I dole out the bread and take in the payments—broken chairs and baby clothes and sacks of bones. I tear the clothes into strips to weave into rope. I chop the chairs into wood for the fire. I put the sacks by the door to take to the mill.

Do the people in the city see how we thrive down here? How alive we are? Do they see how well I can climb now? The walls are very high and maybe they don’t look this way anymore, although at night I see their watch fires. I don’t think they forgot about us. Maybe they just got used to that door being shut. I’m sure it’s not that hard to open if you really wanted to.

Tend the ovens, Mama says, and I do. I shovel out the ashes and freshen the kindling. I fish out the loaves and set them out to cool. Mama’s busy so I rip one of them open, tear off a bite with my sharp teeth. It’s painfully hot and crunchy but it tastes so good, so fresh and sweet and filling. For a moment, it fills my belly. I’m always hungry these days.

I meet the customers at the door. They hand me old coins, dirty blankets, sacks of bones. I push the bread loaves at them. Eat, eat. They need their strength. The plague took so much out of us all.

When my duties are done, I go back to the courtyard to practice. I’m strong now. My fingers are long and they grip the wall like spiders.

Every day I climb a little higher.

©2023 by Bennett North.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bennett North is a writer, artist, photographer, and gardener living between Providence, RI and Boston, MA. When not doing all those things, Bennett co-edits Translunar Travelers Lounge, a biannual speculative fiction magazine. Bennett’s work has appeared in F&SF, Escape Pod, Podcastle, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and other markets.

EXCERPT: This Dark Descent (Roaring Brook Press)

Kalyn Josephson | 2745 words

The Shadows Between Us meets Six of Crows in this spellbinding new fantasy full of intrigue, romance, and pulse-pounding action, where the eldest daughter of a renowned family on the verge of ruin joins forces with a rogue enchanter and an ambitious heir to win a deadly race.

“A fierce and darkly magical thrill ride that will keep you on the edge of your seat.” — Ava Reid, bestselling author of A Study in Drowning

Mikira Rusel’s family has long been famous for breeding enchanted horses, but their prestige is no match for their rising debts. To save her ranch, Mikira has only one option: she must win the Illinir, a treacherous horserace whose riders either finish maimed or murdered. Yet each year, competitors return, tempted by its alluring prize money and unparalleled prestige.

Mikira’s mission soon unites her with Arielle Kadar, an impressive yet illicit enchanter just beginning to come into her true power, and Damien Adair, a dashing young lord in the midst of a fierce succession battle. Both have hidden reasons of their own to help Mikira—as well as their own blood feuds to avenge . . .

Steeped in Jewish folklore, This Dark Descent is a pulse-pounding new fantasy full of forbidden magic, sizzling romance, and epic stakes. In a world as dangerous as this, will the need for vengeance butcher Mikira’s chances of winning the Illinir . . . or will another rider’s dagger?

Out now from Roaring Brook Press.

CHAPTER 1

MIKIRA

Horses will speak to you, if only you listen.

That was what Mikira’s father always told her. It was in the way they pricked their ears, in the swish of their tails through still air. It was even truer of enchanted horses, whose blood thrummed with magic, bestowing untold abilities. Whether it be speed or surefootedness, good luck or the uncanny ability to always find their way home, such horses were deeply in tune with the world around them.

It was those enchantments that Mikira relied on now. Dressed in all black, from her worn riding boots to the plain mask obscuring her face, she sat tall on Iri’s back as the stallion tossed his head, nickering impatiently. Enchanted for speed, the desire to run was as much a part of him as bone or blood, just as it was a part of Mikira.

The twisting maze of Veradell’s tunnels—tonight’s racecourse—stretched into dimly lit shadows ahead. The city’s underground passages would be narrow, the turns tight and easy to miss. Breathing deep, Mikira shut out the excited murmur of the crowd, the sharp scrape of hooves against stone as horses jostled for space at the starting line, and the ever-present reminder that she could not go home empty-handed tonight.

“Are you all ready to see some action?” called Jenest, the race’s owner and announcer. A slender, muscular woman with brown skin, she barely approached the riders’ shoulders, even standing on an empty gun crate in the middle of the tunnel. Still, you couldn’t miss her, dressed as she was in an ornate jacket covered in glass jewels and sequins—a mockery of the extravagant garments favored by the nobility—and a blue-and-white scaled mask emulating the Great Serpent, Lyzairin, one of the four Harbingers said to have brought magic to humanity.

People whooped and clapped as she dipped into a bow. “You know the rules!” Her deep voice resonated from her charmed loudspeaker. “All four types of enchantments are allowed, but no weapons! This isn’t the Illinir, and I won’t have blood spilled on my nice clean floors.”

A chuckle emanated through the crowd. The tunnel’s floor was nothing more than a swampy mixture of dirt and runoff from the canning factory above, a far cry from the flashing cameras and manicured tracks of the official races Mikira longed for. She hated being down here, but it was the only safe place to run such makeshift contests. With how tightly controlled magic was, enchanted races required a permit and a hefty tax to the city of Veradell. Jenest was risking prison by operating without one.

And by competing in them, so was Mikira.

“Twenty silver marks to the winner. First rider around the loop and back here wins the purse.” Jenest jingled a small pouch above her head, the real reason Mikira was here. “Take your marks, get ready, race!”

The horses bolted. Iri easily beat half into the first turn, their enchantments either not for speed or too weak to bestow any real advantage. Mikira forgot everything but the feel of the race as they barreled along the tunnel. Her body moved with Iri’s like a reflection, adrenaline rushing through her in a heady thrum, sharpening everything into stark focus.

As they leaned into the second turn, a rider wearing a green and brown half mask imitating the Harbinger Rach approached them. Something glinted, and Mikira barely dodged their blade. Freeing one of her own knives from her hip, she blocked the second swipe, then disarmed the rider with a twist of her wrist.

They rode well, their horse’s physical enchantments clearly stronger than the others. But it wasn’t enough—not against an enchant bred from the Rusel lines. Not against Mikira, whose father had once led Veradell’s racing elite.

Taking the final turn, they entered the straightaway where the race had begun, and Mikira let Iri go. The horse’s speed all but doubled as he careened down the last stretch and across the finish line.

A knot released in her chest at the crowd’s cheer as Iri trotted back toward Jenest. The woman seized Mikira’s pale hand, holding it up in triumph. “Nightflyer wins again!” she called to the whistles and shouts of the crowd. “I know, I know, you’re all shocked. Don’t you worry; I promise I’ll find our little flyer a worthy competitor soon.”

Mikira grinned at the applause. These people loved her, and she couldn’t deny that even without the need for money, she would compete just for the way they looked at her—like she could do anything.

Feeling a different kind of stare on the back of her neck, Mikira turned, catching the gaze of the Rach rider. She was tall, with curious hazel eyes and tawny skin. Mikira could turn her in for the knife, but that wasn’t the first time someone had pulled a weapon on her, and it wouldn’t be the last. The rider crooked the smallest of smiles before guiding her horse into the dispersing crowd.

Everyone would leave through the myriad of tunnel entrances, careful not to raise suspicion. The Anthir didn’t bat an eye when a noble house squeezed every last copper mark from one of their tenants or conscripted them into the Eternal War in neighboring Celair, but if the city guard came across an enchant racing ring without the requisite paperwork and taxes? Everyone involved would spend the rest of their lives in prison.

Her brother used to say that you could murder someone in broad daylight in Veradell, so long as you had the proper paperwork. Unless you came from a noble house—then you didn’t even need that.

Jenest held out the winning purse. “You know, one of these days I’d like to meet the person behind the mask,” she said. “Grab a drink or two.”

Guilt panged through Mikira. She liked Jenest. Her upbeat, teasing attitude reminded her of her childhood friend, Talyana, who she hadn’t seen in years. But she was here for coin, not friendship, and no one could know who she was.

“Thanks for the race.” She took the purse and tucked it into her pocket, pointing Iri toward one of the exits. Small engraved arrows marked the way out for those who knew where to look for them, remnants from when the tunnels were used to transport gemstones. After most of the city’s mines dried up, the tunnels were forgotten.

Now the walls had become a mural of one-way messages, from peeling recruitment posters for the Eternal War to notes chalked onto the stone. Most were from Celairen refugees flooding in from the war being fought over their land, hoping lost friends and family would pass the same way, but others were last words left by Enderlish fleeing the kingdom’s military draft, both driven by the war to exchange places in the tunnels’ darkness.

Her brother had never gotten the chance to run—because of her.

Mikira leaned forward to scratch behind Iri’s dark ears. “Someday we’ll ride in a real race. For Lochlyn.”

The horse’s ears flicked at the sound of her brother’s name. Iri had been his, once. But Lochlyn had died in the war, and all Mikira and Iri had left of him was each other.

They emerged from the tunnel into the early morning light of Ashfield Street, where preparations for the upcoming Illinir were already underway. Hosted once every ten years by House Kelbra, the Illinir was a brutal series of four magical races that would take place throughout the month alongside the Illinir festival, all in celebration of the day the Goddess Sendia sent the four Harbingers to bring magic to humanity.

People would visit from all over the continent, from southeastern Kenzeni merchants selling new technologies to Vynan politicians desperate to keep the Eternal War from spreading northward. She’d heard there was even an entrant from as far south as Yaroya, where enchants were fast growing in popularity.

Soon, vendors and performers would swarm the street, children and adults alike donning sinuous tails reflecting the Harbinger Lyzairin, or masks made to look like hammered metal in honor of Rach, the Armored Bull. Already she spotted a young girl bearing Skylis’s crimson wings, her arms outstretched as if to carry her into the air like the great bird she mimicked.

A memory tumbled loose, taking her back ten years ago, when Lochlyn had gone as Aslir, the Bright Star. Mikira, displeased with her Skylis wings, had cried until he placed his mane of white feathers about her neck and said, “There. Now you shine too.”

An enchanted coach blared its horn, startling her and Iri, but she kept him steady as the horseless vehicle jerked around them. The tumult was enough to spook any country horse without a docility charm, and Iri was enchanted to sense danger: to him, that meant everything in this cursed stone jungle.

Eager to escape the noise, she took a shortcut to the Traveler’s Road encircling the city, where they passed only the occasional messenger or cart full of coveted grain heading for the military outposts near the border. A short ride later, she diverted Iri up the gravel path to her family’s ranch—and nearly pulled him to a halt.

Something wasn’t right.

She knew the ranch like her own heartbeat. The rich, earthy scent of it. The sounds of horses and gentle feel of the place that always calmed her like nothing else.

Instead, as Iri trotted up the winding drive, her family’s white two-story farmhouse was quiet—too quiet, like the deafening moment after a gunshot. Her father ought to be in the pastures already, her sisters chasing each other through the long grass beside him, clinging to their last moments of freedom before they went to school for the day.

But the yard was empty.

She leapt off Iri’s back and sprinted up the front steps. Throwing open the door, she staggered into the foyer, stumbling over Ailene’s carelessly discarded shoes.

She’d barely regained her balance when a voice called, “Kira? Is that you?”

“Father?” Relief swept through her as he appeared in his study doorway, clutching a pale gold verillion stalk. Dark shadows rimmed green eyes heavy with sleep, his simple vest and shirt rumpled from another late night spent poring over old books. He blinked at her, then at the open door letting in the daylight.

“Is it morning already?” he asked. “I must have lost track of time.”

Mikira choked out a strangled sound. He’d lost himself in his research again. That was why he hadn’t been out in the fields.

“You can’t keep doing this,” she said tightly.

“I’m getting close, Kira, I can feel it.” He held up the verillion plant. “I think the answer is in how the verillion’s magic binds to things. Actually, can I borrow your knives? The stone—”

“Stop it!” Mikira snapped.

The silence that pooled between them was deep enough to drown in. Mikira averted her gaze to the plant in her father’s hand, its glow of magic gone. Like this the verillion was harmless, but when plucked fresh from a field, the stalks burning with a golden light, they were full of magic people craved. She’d seen the way it consumed people, poisoning them from the inside out like it had her mother years ago.

Her father was convinced the ranch’s salvation lay in innovative enchantments, using the verillion to harness new wonders, rather than just breeding what enchants remained in their stables. But with every night of research, he put his life at risk. As an unlicensed enchanter, all it would take was one hint of magic to the wrong person, and the Anthir would come for him. The Council of Lords claimed the enchanter registry was meant to prevent a repeat of the Cataclysm, when the four Heretics destroyed the kingdom of Kinahara in their pursuit of magic, but Mikira knew the truth: it was all just for profit and power.

“I left you dinner in the oven,” he said as if she hadn’t just all but spat in his face. He didn’t ask where she’d been. Where his seventeen-year-old daughter went every night and why she returned with bags of coin. He simply smiled, his eyes crinkling at the corners in a way that never failed to warm her. She let it, because being angry at him was more than she could bear.

If only her father could use his magic openly, they could diversify and strengthen their breeding lines, save their failing ranch. But every horse’s origin was closely tracked, and people would question it if they suddenly possessed a powerful new enchant. All they could do was rely on the careful game of legal breeding and hope they made enough sales to purchase new stock.

That, and Mikira’s races. Without her winnings, they would never make their monthly tax payments to House Kelbra.

“Kira!” A high voice barely preceded the girl bounding down the stairs, her alabaster skin flush with excitement. At thirteen, Ailene was already taller than Mikira, with a lean, athletic build that she put to use besting the boys in backyard races. Part of Mikira always longed to warn her that soon they’d get tired of her competitive nature, her excitability. That a time would come when instead of loving her for these things, they would judge her, like they had Mikira. But she couldn’t bring herself to break her sister’s spirit.

“Kira, can I stay home from classes today?” She clasped her hands together. “I’ll help you with your chores.”

“Don’t listen to her!” Nelda appeared on the stairs, her lips pushed to the side in what Ailene called her “mothering scowl.” Despite being four years younger than Ailene, she’d always had the disposition of an old lady, something their brother had often teased her about. “She just wants to go to the races with Era Keene.”

“That’s not true!” Ailene shot back.

Mikira smiled at their bickering, until she heard it: that sound that haunted her waking moments—the crunch of gravel beneath wheels, unaccompanied by hooves.

There was only one person who ever visited them in an enchanted coach.

Copyright © 2023 by Kalyn Josephson. Excerpted from This Dark Descent by Kalyn Josephson. Published by permission of Roaring Brook Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kalyn Josephson works as a technical writer in the tech industry, which leaves room for too many bad puns about technically being a writer. She grew up in San Luis Obispo, California, and graduated from Santa Clara University with degrees in Biology and Creative Writing. Currently, she lives in the Bay Area with two black cats (who are more like a tiny dragon and an ever tinier owl). She is the author of the Storm Crow duology and This Dark Descent.

Book Review: The Reformatory by Tananarive Due

Aigner Loren Wilson | 654 words

The Reformatory
Tananarive Due
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781982188344
Gallery/Saga Press, October 2023, 576 pgs

In Tananarive Due’s latest novel, The Reformatory, Due places another entry in the Black horror canon. Famed for such books as My Soul to Keep, The Good House, as well as her work on Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, it’s no surprise that The Reformatory is a well-researched and terrifying book. The novel is set in the 1950s and follows a young Black boy, Robert, who is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory known for abusing and killing the children sent there. He’s sent there after defending his older sister, Gloria, from a sexual advance made by a white teenager in their Florida town.

Set against the Jim Crow South, The Reformatory doesn’t hide any of the terrible realities that were a part of everyday life during this time. This type of attention to witnessing puts readers on a heart-wrenching journey through the horrors that lurk both among the living and the dead. Due’s meticulous attention to historical detail and emotional rawness connects her own relationship to the subject matter. The character Robert is based on Due’s great-uncle who, in 1937, went to the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida.

In a manner reminiscent of Due’s other works, the horror and salvation for the characters are interwoven with the racial prejudice they face, creating a chilling atmosphere. The novel is a dual POV split between Gloria and Robert, showcasing different parts of the same struggle. While Robert’s time in the school is filled with beatings, haints, and worse, Gloria’s chapters are just as horrible as she’s at risk of being attacked for trying to help her brother. Due’s ability to capture both voices of the characters despite the age differences and experiences they deal with keeps the story moving at a constant, charged pace.

Robert and Gloria both possess unique abilities, allowing them to see people’s futures and pasts, haints, and a sort of sixth sense for events. These supernatural elements aren’t the horror of the story, though. Dead boys with knives in their backs and skin burnt crisp, while horrible, aren’t the things that kept me scared throughout the story. It was the people, the real live people who were whipping boys, beating them, and hurting them even after they had died that is what petrified me.

The Reformatory is the scariest book I’ve read all year (and I’ve been reading It by Stephen King). The way I felt while reading Due’s book are similar, or near identical, to ways I’ve heard people talk about their experiences reading King’s It. The brutality against children in both books is so disturbingly clear, but with The Reformatory, it was so horrifying it was sickening.

The Reformatory is the perfect example of an American horror story. It takes readers on an honest and horrific narrative journey through a dark chapter in American history. And Due does it with care to the victims. Even the most frightening dead boys at some point made me want to cry, made me want to reach through the page to try and save them. Due’s storytelling is powerful and evocative and will leave you shaken. If you’re looking for a truly terrifying read that is also deeply rooted in history, this is the most terrifying book you’ll encounter, and a must-read for fans of Black horror.

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: McSweeney’s 71: The Monstrous and the Terrible (edited by Brian Evenson)

Arley Sorg | 2344 words

McSweeney’s 71: The Monstrous and the Terrible
Brian Evenson, ed.
Hardcover
ISBN: 9781952119644
McSweeney’s, October 17, 2023, 336 pgs

Full disclosure: I’ve never read McSweeney’s (properly: Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern). But I’ve long seen them as a probably interesting source of fiction—if you read a lot of speculative fiction anthologies and collections, you will see their name pop up from time to time in copyright pages. For quite a while now I’ve had the impression of a literary journal which dabbles in the speculative, thinking they probably pick up pieces which hit whatever marks the editor feels the word “literary” requires. Having looked at this installment, I am even more curious about the series than I was before.

This gets tricky because The Monstrous and the Terrible is guest edited by Brian Evenson, who is very well known in speculative (especially horror) circles; and it has a special focus—in fact, it’s their “first-ever issue-length foray into horror . . .” So, I wonder, is it really representative of what they generally do? Does having a great time reading this one mean you might also have a great time with other issues? I glanced at a few random but recent installments, quickly looking over tables of contents, just to see if any “speculative” names stood out. I spotted Yohanca Delgado (Issue 69), whose story “Plink” I enjoyed in Infinite Constellations. Issue 63 has a story by Deep As the Sky, Red As the Sea author Rita Chang-Eppig. 53 has Laura van den Berg, Kate Folk, a letter from Alexander Chee, and more. So, yeah, it’s fair to say that if your reading habits are a bit broader, if your reading habits occasionally go beyond speculative works, and if you see a number of authors whose writing speaks to you, there’s a good chance you might like what McSweeney’s is all about. If this particular installment works for you, it might be worth giving some of the other McSweeney’s numbers a glance.

Well, let’s talk about this installment!

Evenson sets up his mission statement in his introduction. For him, this book is all about building bridges; or, another way to look at it might be that it’s about dispelling the myth of a separation between “genre” and “literary.” Evenson says, “I hope this issue will open up for you ways of thinking about contemporary horror that weren’t open before, will break down those walls you might have erected without being fully aware you were doing so.” A lot about the way these divisions work comes down to assumptions, many of them very wrong, according to Evenson: “If we’re signaled that a piece is literary, we look at it a certain way; if we’re signaled that it’s genre, we look at it another way. That generic pre-positioning limits our ability to see the full strengths of a story.” You know how sometimes you have your group of friends from one place—say, college, or some club, or heck, if you’re reading this, maybe even from conventions—and then you have your friends from work . . . or your friends you met at bars . . . or your friends from gaming night  . . . and you know how it goes if and when you decide, “Hey, wouldn’t be cool if my two groups of friends could hang out with each other?” Or: maybe it’s that person you’re dating, and you decide it’s time to introduce your person to your friends? Well, this project is also kind of like that.

Evenson says, “My hope . . . is that if you’re a regular McSweeney’s Quarterly reader but don’t know much about horror . . . you’ll find things here that surprise you, as well as a few things that feel just familiar enough to keep you reading. If you’re someone familiar with contemporary horror, this issue will still expose you to some horror writers who have been hiding in plain sight in the literary landscape, and to some new writers you either haven’t heard of or didn’t think of as horror writers. I think there’ll be surprises no matter which side of the genre line you think you stand on as a reader—or even if, like me, you’ve come to feel there’s not really a line there at all, that the best work on both sides of the so-called genre line has a great deal in common.” Following this, Evenson offers a set of sixteen original short stories and seven letters (in looking through the aforementioned tables of contents, I found the “letters” are a thing McSweeney’s features. They read like something between personal essays and straight out anecdotes—they are clearly written to a theme, and most likely by invite, but lean into personal experiences and perspectives). I’ll go over a few of the fiction pieces, but this is a seriously strong issue, so there’s even more for you to discover.

“Heartwood” by Kristine Ong Muslim is a brief exploration of a near-future where nature fights back. It’s mostly an idea piece, but rendered vividly, and Muslim expertly works drama and conflict and human flaws into the story. It helps that the idea is cool, and folks who like horror will enjoy the darker elements, including the overall mood.

Gabino Iglesias gives us “Don’t Go Into The Woods Alone”—there’s something remarkable about the way Iglesias establishes character and narrative voice right at the outset. What looks like a standard story opening is actually rich in nuance, created by specificity, and by the way he quickly establishes relationships, revealing a lot about the main character and more in a few quick strokes. As the story progresses Iglesias pulls you in by developing people that seem unique, interesting, and real all at once. He also establishes a moment which feels resonant and important. Despite the repeated phrase “don’t go into the woods alone,” which is a fairly classic (but still effective) horror refrain, Marta goes into the woods because it’s where she feels a sense of connection with a grandmother who died. In less skillful hands this setup would read as both cliché and forced but here it feels believable, and if I hadn’t been reading to review (having to stop to take notes and so on), I’d have eagerly continued reading through, driven by narrative voice. When the perhaps inevitable encounter with the strange happens, Iglesias demonstrates mastery via the conflict between vibes: perfectly pleasant versus underlying suspicion. Since you know this is a collection of horror stories, as a reader, you have certain advantages, expectations, and there are certain things you might guess about where it’s all going. And yet, with this one, you want to keep reading, you need to know how this is all going to play out. Don’t worry: Iglesias has a sharp, brutal turn in store.

“A Plague of Frogs” by Brandon Hobson dunks the reader into pure misery from the beginning. It’s an effective and suffocating opening, the lines strung together into an irrevocable experience, blending a terrible environment with being loathed and oppressed, being abused while trapped in some kind of captivity. The point of view is “we,” and although it reads as if a singular voice is relating the tale, events are expressed as a collective experience, something I don’t see often (I’m not even sure if I’ve really seen it before) but which works very well here. As a matter of survival they (“we”) turn to imagination, delving into an elaborate fantasy, with seemingly no other options available, since fully, consciously, and continuously dealing with reality being too much to bear. What follows is something which is both fugue and surrealism while also in some sense being literal: imagination, the fantastic, and terror all intertwined. Familiar elements, such as certain specific behaviors and the kinds of things certain types of aggressive men tend to say (“food stamps for the lazy” for example) grounds the reader in the real, making the experience of continual abuse a visceral one. The story seems to deliberately leave room for reader interpretation along several important points, which may leave some folks unsatisfied. For me, this creates an even more thought-provoking narrative. There is, in my interpretation, a relationship drawn between people and nature, and the focus of the story is on survival as resistance. Even in this structure, in these choices, my thinking is that the style itself is a type of resistance, standing against the constraints of prescriptive and formulaic story requirements, and succeeding massively in what it sets out to do.

Senaa Ahmad’s “The Wolves” is a less common take on wolf transformation, one where glorious, merciless wolves become ordinary people for four days out of each month. Luckily for anyone who reads it, Ahmad delivers this take via beautiful writing. For example: “They came out of the winter night. Slipping out of holes in the iceslicked steppes and thorn forests where they bided their time, gargling saliva sour with hunger. Their eyes cut from the sharp swords of old stars.” Ahmad’s sentences urge you to keep reading. The story is related by an older woman to a boy, as she tells him about her escape from the attack of Genghis Khan and his wolves. It’s a story of fleeing, of brutality, and of survival; and it’s as horrific as it is gorgeous. It’s also incredibly fascinating, as strangers (in the sense of people you see around town but don’t really know) are thrown together, because the strangers and their circumstances are rendered in intriguing detail. Ultimately it becomes an engrossing, multilayered examination of complex relationships, human nature, self-reflection, storytelling itself, and more. Seriously wonderful work.

Mariana Enríquez has “The Refrigerator Cemetery” in this issue, translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell. What makes this piece initially really chilling, and frankly, for me, more chilling than the rest, is the sheer realness of the nonspeculative narrative elements. In this sense it reminded me of “Lords of the Matinee” by Stephen Graham Jones, wherein a father-in-law is slowly, painfully killing his wife by deliberately letting metal shavings from a slightly faulty can opener drop into her food (in the anthology Final Cuts, which I reviewed in the June 2020 issue of Lightspeed). In “The Refrigerator Cemetery,” the voice is convincing, and anyone who has read a few headlines or even had a few less-than-totally-safe adventures can see similar tragic possibilities in their own lives, histories, and decisions. “Tragic events kept secret” has become something of a horror trope, arguably popularized by movies like I Know What You Did Last Summer. In this story, the tragic event involves a group of young kids playing around a field of abandoned refrigerators, and it’s easy to envision something similar with our own neighbors, or kids around town. It is perhaps even easy to wonder if you might have narrowly escaped something in your own childhood, your own play sessions. Moreover, to wonder, if tragedy had happened, if you had been among the survivors, what decisions you might have made as a kid. What you would do to stay out of trouble. What you might think you can get away with. We see the terrible decisions many kids make these days, enough of them ending up as horrific events in the news. The power of this piece, at least for me, lives in the potential relatability, in the possibilities of play sessions gone wrong, and the probability of some kids covering it up in lies. In this sense, “Cemeteries” is immediately about our own capacity for bad decisions, even reprehensible decisions—as well as the vulnerability of kids, the ease with which we lose control of their safety—in a setting which (while being evocative and really cool) also perhaps supplies commentary on the way the decisions of people in power directly and indirectly affect everyone else. There is a subtle parallel being drawn by the narrative: the self-serving children who don’t want to get in trouble and the self-serving adults who are likely driven by greed and the lust for power. This all underscores self-interest, and perhaps even the way we normalize it, the way it has become ubiquitous. The first few paragraphs alone are striking, compelling, noteworthy, and the story just . . . drags you under from there, forces you to stare at the darkness. Some folks, perhaps especially genre readers who may be carefully eyeing the speculative elements, might feel that there aren’t any surprises in the read. But the point of the story isn’t necessarily innovation; rather, it’s all about our multi-faceted and too often dark human nature, or perhaps human culture. Arguably, the perspective itself, the approach, and the voice are where innovation lives. Like some of the other pieces in this book, it’s seriously unsettling.

Evenson says in his introduction, “these are stories that try to provide the satisfactions of horror fiction and of ghost stories, while at the same time expanding the notion of what horror is and what it can do.” I definitely think he’s accomplished what he set out to do. I’m glad he introduced me to his other friends (I think we may have even hung out before?) and I hope they liked hanging out with me. If you like well-written tales which lean dark, I wholeheartedly recommend you spend some time with these pages.

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: Tonight, I Burn by Katharine J. Adams

Chris Kluwe | 852 words

Tonight, I Burn
Katharine J. Adams
Trade Paperback
ISBN: 9780316551816
Orbit, November 2023, 480 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review! This month we’ll be getting lost in a lusciously dark tale of fantasy and magic filled with sorrow and hope—Tonight, I Burn by Katharine J. Adams, the first book in the Thorn Witch Trilogy.

Tonight, I Burn follows the story of Penny Albright, third granddaughter of the current Thorn Witch, one of the five covens of captured magic currently controlled in the fearsome golden grip of the Warden. Penny’s coven is responsible for keeping the veil between Life and Death safe, a task that involves a member burning themself alive every night, then using their magic to return safely home the following morning. Penny, on the eve of her twenty-first birthday, has yet to burn, but that changes when one of her sisters, Ella, doesn’t come back from her nightly patrol. What follows will test both Penny’s resolve, her relationships, as well as her very understanding of how her world works.

One of the first things that immediately captured me about Tonight, I Burn was the vivid and intricate descriptions of both the world, the characters, and the nature of magic. Adams does a superb job of blending some familiar fairy tale elements with unique touches of flair to create a style all her own, and it immediately sucked me into the book. I wouldn’t quite call it “gothic,” but there is a lingering sense of melancholy in almost every aspect of the story that does wonderful work making the reader understand that everything about the world Penny lives in used to be better, and that its breaking was the result of conscious decisions. The desolate sands didn’t always used to be that way, but somehow life finds a way to go on, always hoping for something better.

The second thing I found fascinating in this tale is that there is a lot going on underneath the surface of “young witch has coming of age story.” Themes of the oppression of patriarchy and the struggle of women not to be simply things to be used run throughout the entirety of the book, and Adams does excellent work in capturing the nuances of what she wants to convey without detracting from the characters or sledgehammering the reader in the face. There are also some more subtle representations of the perils of unrestrained capitalism and the failures to address runaway ecological disaster that I felt were extremely well done, with Adams building her message through worldbuilding and plot instead of longwinded rants in dialogue a lesser author might have used.

The third thing I really enjoyed about Tonight, I Burn is that it could have been very easy to crush the reader with a world gone wrong coupled with characters doomed to suffer in it, but Adams carefully weaves in both exceptional character growth as well as humanity’s natural urge to find happiness wherever it can. Penny (and others) are stuck in a world of monotonous grays and whites and blacks, but there is always a splash of color to be snatched for a moment or a new relationship to nurture like a kindling spark. This background level of sorrow is perfectly balanced so it’s not quite overwhelming, and it really highlights the joys and successes that Penny (and others) are able to claw back for themselves.

Finally, I want to highlight Adams’ character building. Penny and her family are complicated, messy, and feel exactly like a real family stuck in an impossible situation. There is generational trauma to be unpacked, hidden relationships that might or might not be approved, and all the tiny little flaws and foibles that make a family a family are delivered with care and grace. Penny’s relationships with other characters outside of her family also unfolds organically, with plenty of twists that will leave the reader wondering who can be trusted in a world of pain and loss, and whether love is even possible in such a place.

Overall, Tonight, I Burn is a book with layers beyond the obvious and one I greatly enjoyed reading, even if some parts made me sad. It feels like green shoots poking up after a forest fire, and I couldn’t help but want Penny and all her compatriots to find a better life in the broken world they were born into. If Adams can keep delivering on writing of this quality, then I can’t wait to see what happens next in this story, and I think you’ll feel the same.

Read if: You know a little knowledge is a dangerous thing; you’re not a fan of golden idols; you’ve ever felt the need to burn.

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: MKRNYILGLD

Mayookh Barua | 561 words

I, of course, understand the timely nature of reproductive rights which must have been one of the inspirations behind the formation of both of your CRISPR stories. But I also wanted to know if there were any stakes (personal or political) that you wanted to bring about more through these pieces.

People of all genders can become pregnant, and the purpose of these stories is to empower them to do whatever they want with that. I want those people to know: the ones trying to take your reproductive rights away are lying. They don’t give a shit about hypothetical children. They don’t give a shit about you. They want bodily control of you, nothing more and nothing less. They don’t have control over you. They’re afraid of the worlds we can create and for good reason, because those worlds have absolutely no place for them.

The form of both these pieces is unique to each story as well as interconnected. What made you finally take the form of recipe-cum-experiment-cum-instruction manual format to present this story?

My goal was to make these stories as realistic as possible to show that futures where we fight for our reproductive rights are just as close as futures where they’re taken away. Biology is a wonderful, liberating science which has sadly been twisted to oppress others for too long. I want readers to see the true biology—the biology that could empower people to write their own futures in their DNA. If readers have been intrigued by these stories, I encourage them to engage with the biological sciences in the real world, whether that’s in a farming co-op, community college class, or even a DIY biology group.

As a writer, I am always interested in what inspires another writer to write the story they did and the kind of work that goes into crafting a story. I am really interested in hearing more about the kind of research you did in order to get some of the science together. Was it challenging or comfortable?

I’m a working scientist doing biological research. There is some overlap in my day-to-day work and the science of these stories, so doing the research to write them was a familiar, cathartic, and supremely challenging experience at the same time. I have to be vague now, but I hope there’ll come a time when I can share that in more detail. For now I’ll use this space to encourage my fellow scientists as well: Think about the ways you’ve been trained to use your science and the systems they support. Science fiction can be an amazing way to speculate how your science could be used to change things.

On a broader level, do you think your stories can be categorized as satire?

Only as much as the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe and the efforts of certain groups and judges to ban birth control and so on and so on can be considered satire :)

Lastly, are you hoping to expand further on this idea?

I’m not hoping for a future where it will be necessary to write more of these “recipes” but part of me feels like they’ll keep coming.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Mayookh Barua (s/he/they) is a Los Angeles-based writer from India who is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Creative Writing Department at the University of Southern California. His work explores sexuality, art, mythology and family through a queer South-Asian voice. A 2023 Roots.Wounds.Words Non-Fiction fellow, his works have appeared in The Audacity by Roxane Gay, Espace Art Actuel, The Third Eye, Mezosfera Magazine and elsewhere.

Author Spotlight: Osahon Ize-Iyamu

Laurel Amberdine | 368 words

How did “Last Ritual of the Smoke Eaters” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I think it came about in two ways. When I was much younger, I wrote a lot of stories that were told in the vein of traditional epic fantasy novels, and I wanted to write a more recent version of those. Specifically, one that involved dragons. I was really drawn to the idea of a story that portrayed the complex dynamics of romantic relationships within a fantasy world, and so this story was my attempt at capturing that.

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

I did! I do usually get stuck whilst writing a lot of my stories (it’s fully because I cannot outline), and I think in this one it was hard knowing where each scene would go. What usually helps me get past it is thinking about what themes I’m trying to convey, as that gives me a clearer view of the story.

Do you have any advice for other writers?

My favorite piece of advice is to continually challenge yourself and experiment. It really is the best way to find your authorial voice. I feel like you constantly discover new things about your writing every time you push the boundaries of genre, form, or storytelling. Have fun with it, be bold, and you’ll surprise yourself.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I’m reading way too many things at once, but currently I’ve been getting through Caleb Azumah Nelson’s “Small Worlds” which has the most beautiful sentences. I’m always so inspired by the work of K-Ming Chang, Pemi Aguda, and Eloghosa Osunde.

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

I’m about halfway through a linked short story collection, which is exciting. I have a science fiction short story that will also be coming out soon involving futuristic ancestral homes in Nigeria, which I’ll share more on at a later date.

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: Regina Kanyu Wang

Laurel Amberdine | 831 words

How did “A Record of Lost Time” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I have been thinking about time a lot. How people define it differently in different places and eras. How temporality varies for different people. What is time essentially? And then the Chinese title of the story came to my mind—陨时, which literally means the collapse/fall of time and a homonym of meteorite. I love story titles that sound familiar but actually mean something different and unusual. (And I equally love the English title that Rebecca came up with!) So the story grew from there.

I guess I am not the only one who feels that time flows faster and faster nowadays. The pace of life in the twenty-first century is much faster than that in the twentieth or before. We all try to do more things with the same amount of time and achieve more. If there is a product that can make you more efficient in a time unit, definitely some people will be willing to use it. What if there is a cost of the product that you don’t know? What if people still want to use it, even if they know the cost, simply because it’s beneficial? It’s like fossil fuel and climate change. You know there’s a cost but you simply cannot stop using it. And it is not you alone. In the end, the result will be disastrous.

Where are you in this story?

I am probably the writer in the story, who tries to take down some notes of what she sees and feels, to record the lost time. She wants to do something, but she doesn’t know how, except for writing. She is not even sure whether writing is of any use, but she feels the responsibility. She has to make a record, of this era, now.

What led you into writing genre fiction?

I have been a science fiction and fantasy fan since primary school. Those story worlds that are different from our reality in one way or another always attracted me more. When I grew up, I joined the university SF club, and co-founded SF AppleCore, an association of university SF clubs in Shanghai. We organized a lot of events and invited many writers, which was a lot of fun. I loved SFF and fandom so much, so I wanted to do SF research for my masters, but ended up in creative writing. Thus, I started to write fiction, and I had to write what I like, which is genre fiction. Now I have been writing fiction for almost ten years, and I am finally doing SF research. That is fate, I guess.

Is there anything you want to make sure readers noticed?

When I wrote this story, I was thinking of all the narrators as women or nonbinary characters. It’s not clearly stated, but that’s what I have in mind. It is inspired by Gu Shi’s amazing story “Introduction to 2181 Overture, Second Edition” (translated by Emily Xueni Jin), which features all-women characters.

Also, I want to re-emphasize that this story is a translation from Chinese to English, which is done by Rebecca F. Kuang, and she is equally important to what you have read here. A great many thanks to all translators who have been working hard to bring stories to the readers in other languages!

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I have been reading lots of works by women and nonbinary writers in China in the past three years for my PhD project. There are so many names that I can drop here: Gu Shi, Xia Jia, Chi Hui, Xiu Xinyu, Nian Yu, Chen Qian, Zhang Jing, Li Shuangyin, Congyun “Muming” Gu, Shuang Chimu, and many more. For a simple summary, my article on a brief “herstory” of Chinese science fiction might be interesting: bit.ly/45ftGxF.

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

I am mostly working on my PhD dissertation now! It is about contemporary Chinese SF, especially from the gender and environmental perspective. For fiction, the English version of my Hugo-nominated short story “Zhurong on Mars” (translated by S. Qiouyi Lu) should come out in this month as well in Machine Decision Is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence (edited by Benjamin H. Bratton, Anna Greenspan, and Bogna Konior). There is a list of previous publications in my bio, which I don’t want to repeat here, but I do want to highlight the two anthologies that I co-edited, The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories and New Voices in Chinese Science Fiction, which I am very proud of.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in Portland and works (remotely) for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Martin Cahill

Laurel Amberdine | 1215 words

How did “Foresight” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

It started as most stories do: a what-if that wouldn’t leave my mind, that demanded an answer. What if you had someone with precognition that somehow couldn’t see their own future? Their own tomorrow, a mystery. Initially, there was something a little funny in that idea, but as often happens with my stories, the little bit of humor caved in, fell away, and gave way to a deeper set of struggles, many of which I too was struggling with, as well as many around me.

I often let the first few pages tell me what a story is going to be, and Azahn found himself where a lot of people do: a life off-course, forces outside your control taking you from a tomorrow you’ve been preparing for your whole life, and without it, who even are you?

As for inspiration, my favorite stories often combine the epic and the intimate, raising and lowering the intensity of each aspect throughout, so balancing Azahn’s incredibly epic world, the journey to become Foresight, the legacy of his Auntie, alongside the very small, intimate, human fears, struggles, anxieties, and joys that Azahn faces were some of my favorite moments to navigate.

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

I got stuck about two-thirds of the way through because while I understood what Azahn was facing, I didn’t know how to navigate it.

So often in stories of magic and mental or physical health, one expects the former to solve the latter; many would tout, what’s the point of being in a fantasy world if that which is fantastical cannot solve the quote-unquote ordinary troubles and injuries of our own world? There are a multitude of reasons why I avoid that, not the least of which is that it doesn’t make for a very compelling story, and most of which is that it’s not the truth of our own world or ourselves. I have Anxiety, Depression, and ADHD, and those aren’t things I need to fix or solve about myself, but like Azahn, are aspects of life that need to be understood and worked with in order to manage them. While these things are exacerbated by his mystical condition, it would be a lie to think they could be solved by that same magic. So in becoming stuck, I was glad for it; that time let me work through how Azahn’s precognition would interact with his depression and anxiety. And how, through those interactions, I could approach the growth and management of his mental health in true, honest, and real ways that incorporated his abilities but didn’t use them to “fix,” or “solve,” things.

Where are you in this story?

I think I’m just really excited by a good, freshly baked, hot loaf of bread. But in all seriousness, as much as I want to say I’m present in Azahn’s mental health issues, his caring and supportive family trying to help him, and his continued struggle with what tomorrow could possibly be his, I think I’m most present at the end. Mostly because I think it’s a lesson I’m constantly trying to remember and embody as best I can; that tomorrow really is what you make it. That all you can do is your best. That the most powerful thing you can give yourself is grace. And maybe some of the best healing can be found in giving. In using your abilities to create and lift up, to nourish others in body or soul. Because I’m there with Azahn in his struggles, his fears, and his anxieties, in his weeping at the top of the world. But I aspire to be there most at the end, baking and laughing and feeding and celebrating, losing myself in the moment of the work, the care of others and myself, and not the long blue-shadow tomorrows of days yet to arrive.

Is there anything you want to make sure readers noticed?

I mean, more than the prose, the characters, the worldbuilding . . . I really hope readers noticed what it took for Azahn to begin to come to terms with his situation. Patience. Love. Grace. Flexibility. Empathy. Time. Having been the person going through it, overwhelmed and underwater, it’s never impatience or anger or demands that help move me back to a place of stability, but instead those aforementioned qualities. And I think it can be hard to tap into those things; I think impatience and anger and all that are natural and understandable. But if one is able to hold that space for a friend or family member having a tough time, to lend an ear, a hand, a shoulder, a word, I think more than anything, that is one of the true magics on display in this story.

Azahn got there in a moment all to himself, but he wouldn’t have gotten there if all the people in his life hadn’t given him the chance to get there, the space and grace to fuck up until he got it right, and when he does, celebrate that with him. I know it’s what I would hope for from those who love me.

I hope readers, at this time when it seems that everyone is just going through it, can hold even a little bit of empathy and understanding not just for friends and family, but for any fellow soul in the twenty-first century of today. Because we’re all going through it in our own ways and even a little grace extended to our neighbors, whether we know them or not, can make the world a better, kinder place.

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

Still working on my sentient hotel fantasy book, so maybe someday that will be done! In the meantime, you can expect the following stories from me in the years to come. A short, sharp piece coming in Lightspeed about a very quiet, very terrifying alien invasion. Two pieces forthcoming from Tor.com, one of which is about an older woman, an exorcist, and thirty-two angels who will not go quietly into that good night, and the other about an aging barber in a country besieged by imperialism, who must decide if he will give the closest shave in the world to a monster of a man sitting in his chair. Finally, I’ve a story in Sunday Morning Transport about two young people across time meeting each other at one of the most important sixty seconds one will ever go through: dying. I hope readers seek out these new pieces and enjoy them, and if they’re so inspired, they check out my older work on my website! As always, I’m forever grateful to anyone who takes a little time out of their day to visit my worlds, read my words, and hold my heart.

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 | 217 words

We have original science fiction by D. Thomas Minton (“Carbon Zero”) and Adam-Troy Castro (“Seed”). We also have two terrific flash pieces: “Dandelions” from Martin Cahill and “Do the Right Thing and Ride the Bomb the Roundabout Way to Hell” by Andrea Kriz.

Plus, we have original fantasy by Carlie St. George (“We’ll Never Die in the Woods”) and A.T. Greenblatt (“Mindfulness and the Machine”). We also have a flash story (“Whispers From the Sea”) from Oyedotun Damilola Muees, and another (“To the Waters and the Wild”) from Izzy Wasserstein.

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: Sloane Leong, P H Lee, Everdeen Mason, Oyedotun Damilola Muees, and Caroline M. Yoachim.

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 Lightspeed and/or Nightmare, 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 Lightspeed and Nightmare 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.