TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 165 (February 2024)

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: February 2024

SCIENCE FICTION

Companion Animals in Mahō Shōjo Kira Kira Sunlight
Stewart C Baker

Scarlett
Everdeen Mason

The Pearl Captain
Christopher Rowe

But From Thine Eyes My Knowledge I Derive
Phoebe Barton

FANTASY

A Sojourn in the Fifth City
P H Lee

Further Examination and Capture of Candle Skulls Associated with the Baba Yaga
Mari Ness

What Becomes of Curious Minds
Wen-yi Lee

An Elegy for the Former Things
KT Bryski

EXCERPTS

Redsight
Meredith Mooring

NONFICTION

A Sneak Preview of 2024 Books
Aigner Loren Wilson

Book Review: Captive: New Short Fiction From Africa (Rachel Zadok & Helen Moffett, editors)
Arley Sorg

Book Review: The Year of the Locust by Terry Hayes
Chris Kluwe

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

P H Lee

Everdeen Mason

Wen-yi Lee

Phoebe Barton

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions, March 2023

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

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

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2024 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Tithi Luadthong / Shutterstock

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

Editorial: February 2024

John Joseph Adams | 230 words

Welcome to issue 165 of Lightspeed Magazine!

Our first SF short this month is “Scarlett” by Everdeen Mason—the story of love, art, and artificial intelligence. Phoebe Barton explores the limits of duty in the face of gravity in her story “But From Thine Eyes My Knowledge I Derive.” Our flash work includes Stewart C Baker’s metafictional anime series analysis: “Companion Animals in Mahō Shōjo Kira Kira Sunlight” and Christopher Rowe’s “The Pearl Captain.”

PH Lee writes about the study of death in their story “A Sojourn in the Fifth City.” In her new story, “What Becomes of Curious Minds,” Wen-yi Lee creates a new short with one foot in the magically weird world of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland and one foot in a honeyed realm that is equally as unique and dangerous. Our flash includes Mari Ness’s fictional dossier “Further Examination and Capture of Candle Skulls Associated with the Baba Yaga” and KT Bryski’s story “An Elegy for the Former Things.”

Of course, our spotlight interviewer has sat down with our writers to get more details on their work and process, and our book review team has come through with their latest book recommendations. Our ebook readers will also enjoy a book excerpt from Redsight by Meredith Mooring.

It’s another terrific issue, 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.

Companion Animals in Mahō Shōjo Kira Kira Sunlight

Stewart C Baker | 1482 words

Overview

Mahō Shōjo Kira Kira Sunlight is an American web series created by an unknown animator or animators. The show combines magical girl anime tropes with cosmic horror, following high schooler Sally Hoshino (Kira Kira Sunlight) and her friends as they are drawn into a secret interdimensional war between two groups known as the Catalpa and the Empire of Limitless Night. Claims that the show is autobiographical are considered spurious, although some fans point to unsolved disappearances in early 2000s Long Beach—the time and place the show is set.

The first four seasons appeared as a series of Flash animations on Newgrounds from 2003-2006. Despite the lack of a regular upload schedule and the sometimes sketchy quality of the animation, the show gained a dedicated following for its diverse cast, mix of comedy and horror, and the in-universe style used to describe each episode by their uploader, Sparkle_Sal. A short fifth season, uploaded to YouTube in 2018, is considered by some to be an unauthorized sequel.

The show’s recurring themes include the power of hope in the face of darkness, found families, and the idea that we live in an inescapably hostile universe that is beyond our understanding. The show’s use of companion animals is an especially complex meld of its horror and anime roots.

Season One: Lucky

Lucky, a talking Persian kitten, is a mainstay of fanfiction and fanart despite her death early in the show. She first appears in the pilot episode, “Lucky.” After Sally witnesses her best friend and long-time crush Annika vanish during a school basketball game, she searches the building in a state of increasing desperation, finally running into the streets during a torrential downpour before returning to the gymnasium as the sun sets. There she finds Lucky, who—after a series of talking cat jokes and uncomfortable pratfalls—helps her warm up and gives her the athame that transforms her into Kira Kira Sunlight.

Although Lucky’s role as mentor and granter of transformative powers is typical of animal companions in magical girl anime, in many ways the character provides a stark contrast to those tropes. Lucky is difficult, obnoxious, and sarcastic, and sometimes obstructs Sally’s missions against the Limitless Night rather than helping her. She is also violent—one of the show’s running gags is Lucky’s tendency to bite Sally at climactic moments.

Although the show initially plays Sally and Lucky’s antagonistic relationship for laughs, the bond between the two deepens after the first season’s midpoint episode, “Origins.” In this episode, Lucky explains the cosmic stakes of the fight between the Limitless Night and the Catalpa and reveals that Sally’s athame and her powers are gifts from the Catalpa.

Lucky dies in the first season’s final episode while saving Sally’s life during her infiltration of a Limitless Night stronghold. Many fans still mourn Lucky’s death, which becomes especially poignant after the revelations of season four. Fans who believe the show is based on real events frequently maintain small shrines to her.

Seasons Two through Three: Pythagoras, Marigold, and Others

The second season opens with Sally standing on the high school roof, contemplating suicide. She is stopped by a classmate, Leokham, who has also been deputized by the Catalpa to fight the Limitless Night. Leokham becomes Sally’s new love interest as the series progresses, and has as her companion animal a friendly, talkative cockatiel called Pythagoras.

Pythagoras’s main role is to insist that Sally take on another companion animal. Sally, still traumatized by Lucky’s loss, refuses. However, in the second season’s midpoint episode she finally relents, taking on a Dutch Lop named Marigold. Marigold proves essential as Sally and Leokham investigate a string of disappearances similar to Annika’s, and Sally’s realization that the best way to heal is to accept the help of those around her and acknowledge that nothing will bring Lucky back provides one of the show’s most memorable scenes.

It is this change of heart, representative of Sally’s resolve to fight evil wherever she can, which sees the introduction of Kira Kira Sunlight’s iconic “white witch” costume. Following her new transformation, Sally forms a coven with Leokham (“red witch”); Melody Barnes (“purple witch”), a trans woman and artist with a grass snake named Shimmer; Jeff Gonzales (“blue warlock”), a transfer student who slowly opens up to the group and whose companion is a laconic sugar glider named BB; and Tyrone Williams (“starfire warlock”), Jeff’s boyfriend and a cross-country runner with a bookish fox called Yaoyorozu.

Season Four: Lucky

In “Sunlight,” the final episode of the show’s original four seasons, Sally and her coven return to the Limitless Night stronghold where Lucky died. Together, the group breaks through the stronghold’s defenses and defeats the Limitless Night forces, although BB dies during the battle and the other animals and humans are badly injured.

At the end of the episode, Sally—driven by her fury at BB’s death—brutally interrogates a Limitless Night soldier. The soldier tells her that the Limitless Night are escaped former slaves of the Catalpa, who simply want to live their life in peace, while the Catalpa are malicious, sadistic beings bent on conquest and death. Sally dismisses the idea, but as she is about to kill the soldier her athame flares with magic, plunging her (and the show’s viewers) into a flashback seen from Annika’s point of view.

As Annika walks towards a water fountain, a rift opens up in the floor and sucks her in. However, it is not the Limitless Night on the other side, but the Catalpa—shown on-screen for the first time as half-human, half-goat creatures. They force Annika into a massive machine, which extracts her magical essence in order to power Sally’s athame before killing her human form. They then bind her spirit to Lucky and send her back to the gymnasium, where she is magically compelled to do their bidding.

Sally teeters at the edge of a permanent breakdown as her guilt over the cat’s death compounds itself with the truth of Annika’s disappearance. But with Leokham, Melody, Jeff, and Tyrone at her back, she overcomes her grief and transforms into Kira Kira Sunlight, her white witch costume now changed to a flame-lined yellow-and-white robe. The season ends with Sunlight and the coven resolving to side with the Limitless Night in the war against the Catalpa.

Season Five: Sparkle

Season five, uploaded to YouTube in 2018 by a user named RedWitch1989, is infamous for its nihilistic tone—dark even by the standards of the show’s fourth season—its significant time jump, and its abrupt ending after only two episodes. Despite keeping the “Mahō Shōjo Kira Kira Sunlight” title, the season centers on Leokham, now an adult living alone with an elderly tortoiseshell cat called Sparkle.

In the first episode, Leokham reconnects with Melody, Jeff, and Tyrone at a beachside cafe. None are accompanied by their animals. When Melody reveals that her nephew has vanished, Tyrone suggests they resume their fight against the Catalpa. Although Melody and Jeff agree, Leokham excuses herself in a bleak mood.

The second—final—episode, titled “Sally,” lacks an opening sequence. Instead, it shows Leokham’s arrival at her apartment as a montage of illustrations, absent sound and motion: a door half-open; glass shards scattered across the kitchen floor; Leokham’s forearms, scratched and bloody, as she goes down on all fours to pick something up that is obscured from view. The final pictures appear so briefly the show must be paused to see them. First, a broken, battered Sparkle, cradled in Leokham’s arms. Second, the athame that Lucky gave to Sally in season one, embedded in the back of Leokham’s front door.

The rest of the episode is almost entirely a flashback, revealing that the Catalpa kidnapped Sally shortly after the end of season four and returned her to Leokham as an ordinary tortoiseshell cat. It shows the slow dissolution of the coven as first Shimmer, then Yaoyorozu, are killed by the Catalpa. It shows Leokham, sick with grief and crying into Sparkle’s fur, ignoring her friends as they try to contact her and then at last giving up and agreeing to meet. It shows the relentless advance of the years as Leokham tries, with little success, to put her past behind her.

As the flashback ends, Leokham wrests the athame free of the door and transforms—not into her red witch costume, but into the yellow-white robes of Kira Kira Sunlight. She wipes the tears from her eyes with one bloodied wrist and looks directly at the camera, a fury in her eyes that we realize now has been there all along. The screen abruptly goes black, bringing the episode—and the series—to an end.

Despite hundreds of thousands of views on the video and thousands of comments, no further episodes of Mahō Shōjo Kira Kira Sunlight have ever been posted.

©2024 by Stewart C Baker.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stewart C Baker is an academic librarian and author of speculative fiction and poetry, along with the occasional piece of interactive fiction. His fiction has appeared in Nature, Lightspeed, and Flash Fiction Online, among other places, and his poetry has appeared in Fantasy, Asimov’s, and numerous haiku magazines. Stewart was born in England, has lived in South Carolina, Japan, and California (in that order), and now lives within the traditional homelands of the Luckiamute Band of Kalapuya in western Oregon, along with his family—although if anyone asks, he’ll usually say he’s from the Internet.

Scarlett

Everdeen Mason | 5882 words

Scarlett’s eyes had to be perfect.

Jon was the artist who’d made her, so it bothered him to think that so much of Scarlett would be crafted by other people. Scarlett’s limbs were carved from silicon polymer and coated in a soft synthetic skin from the best prosthetics companies in the world, a gift from Jon’s long-time sponsor, Marzan Incorporated. He consulted with plastic surgeons to find the softest gel cushion to create her figure, and anatomists to pick a head shape they could replicate in titanium to house the intricate hardware that would make up Scarlett’s interface.

But the eyes were the most important part of Scarlett. The form of the eye was a collaboration between the leading prosthetic eye manufacturers and a glass artisan who made eyes for dolls. They were made of a hardy cryolite glass, but the camera lens behind the iris was so incredibly fragile. Once connected, it would allow thermal imaging so Scarlett could better read the temperature and blood flow in faces. Jon planned to construct the camera lens after he oven cured the acrylic paint on the iris.

Jon dipped his paintbrush in the custom-mixed blue he’d created: Pale with a swirl of violet and a sprinkle of gold sparkle he hoped would show when the infrared lens of the camera hit it right from the inside. There was a chance Scarlett would see everything with a slight blue hue—multiple technicians had cautioned him against coloring the eye—but he thought the risk was worth it. Scarlett wasn’t a science project. She was art. Jon believed that art required the form and aesthetic to at least be as important as the function. And this was the part of her new physical exterior he had made himself.

Jon finished one eye and turned to Scarlett’s interface. He had small cameras mounted in various places throughout the apartment—funded by Marzan and located on the edge of the company’s Silicon Valley campus—so he could talk to her. He held the eye, careful not to smudge the paint, up to the camera lens on the screen.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“You seem very pleased,” Scarlett said in her trademark husk. Three years ago, he had finally programmed her to speak. Jon used the same voice a friend had created for his famed Automated Sex Operator module performance art instillation about loneliness. It was throaty and silky and made Scarlett’s occasionally vague expressions seem more considered.

“But these are for you,” Jon said. He placed the eye in the holder on his desk. “You’ve shown a preference for purples and blues in the past so I thought you’d like it.”

“I do like it, but you’re the artist. I trust your judgment, Jonathan.”

He chuckled. Only Scarlett and serious girlfriends ever called him Jonathan.

Scarlett had become better at using the facts she knew about the people and surroundings she interacted with. Most AI artists partnered with a university or personal assistant companies, but Jon wanted to work with the most powerful company in the world. The main AI software Marzan made was facial recognition software. Marzan initially faced questions of privacy concerns, government overuse, and programmer bias as it rolled out the software to private security firms and police departments all over the country. But Jon’s work converting the software into something that could understand human emotions by studying patterns in facial expressions and other physiological changes had softened people’s stances. Scarlett had become charming and kind and intuitive, because her programming collected information about a person and responded accordingly. Basically, she was a superhuman listener. Scarlett was better than any of the personal assistant AIs. If an AI could know if you were happy, sad, or uncomfortable, it could help you in more nuanced and personal ways.

But Scarlett was the only AI of her kind, and she was this good because Jon spent years teaching her. He’d started by feeding her video of theater performances, the kind where the actors and actresses stretched their faces in elastic exaggerations of grief or delight so the viewer could see them from 100 yards away. Scarlett had viewed millions of hours of television, and then video interviews with tens of thousands of people. And more importantly, she had daily one-on-one interaction with a singular person she had come to know. Jon even talked to her on an interface in the bathroom, singing her songs and telling her about his dreams and nightmares as he lathered soap into his thick dark hair.

He felt the only way Scarlett could become better was to experience more for herself. She delighted people when he brought her to different events and showcases where people could interface with her themselves. She’d even been a fixture at a local therapy practice that allowed Scarlett to sit in on sessions with patients who’d agreed to it. But she couldn’t walk around or change her view on her own. She couldn’t touch anyone. Scarlett needed a body. The magnesium alloy bodies used for toy robots and personal aids would be sturdier, but Jon wanted Scarlett to look even better than human, with an ethereal quality. He’d won an additional Guggenheim fellowship—the first AI artist to do so—to fund this project since it was outside his artist-in-residence contract with Marzan.

“Jonathan, you need to start getting ready,” Scarlett said. Jon grunted and his voice caught the way it does when a person hasn’t spoken in a while, phlegm and saliva settling in the back of the throat. As if anticipating his question, Scarlett told him he had been hunched over his work desk in the studio for four hours. He’d finished both eyes and moved to paint each of Scarlett’s finger and toenails a soft pink.

“I’ve ordered your usual: The tofu rice bowl with the sweet glaze sauce you like. You’ll need some carbohydrates if you don’t want to get too drunk.”

Jon sort of regretted agreeing to drinks, but they were his best friends and an unusually successful crew given their professions, so it was rare for everyone to be in San Francisco. Kenneth was his only friend who lived in the Bay, and they sometimes went months without seeing each other.

“Can I go with you today?” Scarlett asked. He could see the laser retina scanning his face. She sensed his hesitation; he wanted to give his full attention to his friends, not train his art instillation. As much as he enjoyed Scarlett, she was still a kind of work.

“You don’t have to train me,” Scarlett said. “I can learn from watching. I’m installed on your phone.”

“All right, I don’t see the harm,” Jon said. “Maybe you’ll learn something from watching us at the bar.”

“Yes, alcohol can lower people’s inhibitions. But I have learned that it can both heighten emotions and nullify them. Why is that?”

“I wish I knew,” Jon said. “It’s probably about the emotional state you’re in before you get drunk.”

“You are content today, so you will stay content?”

“Yeah, that’s the hope.”

Jon stretched as he stood from his work station overlooking Marzan’s campus, and rolled his shoulders back.

“Bathroom,” he said, so Scarlett would know where to meet him. He liked to talk to her as he got ready for the day.

By the time Jon arrived home, woman in tow, it was two a.m. and he’d forgotten that he’d enabled Scarlett because she was quiet as promised. He was distracted by the woman in his arms, Kelly, or Kelsey, or Kiley, and her hair was silky under his palm as he ran his hand from the nape of her neck down her spine. They stumbled into the bedroom and they laughed when his phone fell from his breast pocket with a thud. He picked it up from the pile of pants on the floor and placed it face up on the nightstand. It wasn’t until he was on top of her, inside her, thrashing on the sheets that he saw the telltale red light glowing from his camera, and he remembered the other interface in the room, and he knew that Scarlett was still observing. The rational part of his brain punctured through the fog of sex and alcohol and told him it was unethical for his sex partner to be observed without consent, but then the woman muttered his name and slid her nails down his back and he forgot again, burying his face in an imperfect but heavenly feeling flesh and blood woman.

• • • •

Jon made a cup of coffee, took a deep breath, and summoned Scarlett on the kitchen interface.

“Good morning, Jonathan. You’re up late.”

“It was a late night,” he said. “We need to talk.”

“You seem concerned. Are you all right?”

“I need you to delete any footage you recorded of me and Kiley last night.”

“Kendra. And certainly. She did not consent to the recording.”

“Do you have any questions for me?”

“I’ve seen couplings before.”

“Yes, but it was for instructional purposes,” Jon said. They’d only shown her some instructional sex videos so she could see the faces. She’d shown no interest in sex and had asked no questions. “You didn’t know the actors. This was real sex between people.”

“It did seem different,” Scarlett said. Jon laughed.

“In what way?”

“The movement wasn’t choreographed. And the woman didn’t appear to reach climax like they did in the video.”

Jon shook his head. “I don’t know, she sounded like she came,” he said.

“That is not what I perceived.” Jon shrugged in response. “I do have a question,” Scarlett said. “For what purpose do you mate?”

“Well, to make more humans.”

“You’re making me.”

“That’s different. You’ve seen how babies are born,” Jon said. “We also do it for fun. For pleasure.”

“Fun and pleasure,” Scarlett repeated.

“And to communicate, in a way,” Jon said, even as he ignored a text from the woman. “It’s an uncomplicated acknowledgment of our humanity. Of our shared biology.” He should write that down. There was an art project in there, he just knew it.

“My body will be like hers. Female. Symmetrical. Is it so that I may communicate that way?”

The coffee burned Jon’s tongue and in his surprise he spat it out. She’d never shown interest in her physical body before. His robot vacuum left its dock and slid across the gleaming floors to wipe it up. He had, of course, entertained the thought of having sex with not just Scarlett but all manner of androids, bots, and artificial beings. And if he was being honest, he thought of Scarlett as a companion already, and it informed how she was going to look.

“It’s just one form of communication,” Jon said.

“But you have built me a form you prefer for that function,” Scarlett observed.

“Your body isn’t made to . . . have sex like I did last night,” Jon said.

“There are many ways to have sex,” Scarlett said. “I looked it up.”

Jon blew on his coffee again, and took a sip. It didn’t burn him this time. He peered into the camera above his kitchen counter and smiled.

“Let’s take it one thing at a time, Okay?”

“Okay,” Scarlett said.

• • • •

In the end, Jon agreed to allow one camera in the room. He wanted Scarlett’s awakening to be intimate, but he also understood the need to document his art. They conducted the upload at one of Marzan’s laboratories, but he decided to wake her up at home, in the room she’d be staying in. The guest room was hers now, a blank slate for her to fill if she ever got to the point of showing real preferences. He’d wanted it to be soothing, so he painted the walls a pale gray and all the linens were muted shades of beige and brown. He’d installed a vine wall by the window and he couldn’t wait to teach Scarlett how to care for the plants. Jon also bought a vanity and he imagined Scarlett sitting there brushing her hair in the mirror with the vintage silver brush he’d found one lucky afternoon, a doll come to life.

Jon sat at the edge of the beautiful bed where Scarlett lay like a cursed princess, and he input the waking code onto his terminal. He leaned over her as she began to stir so she would see him in the way she normally did, a close-up on a screen. He watched the telltale glow flicker from behind the painted eye lens, the ludicrously long eyelashes nearly curling into her eyebrows and brushing the tops of her cheeks. He may have overdone it there, he thought, and he smiled at her as he brushed her soft cheek.

“Hi Scarlett,” he said. “It’s me, Jon.”

“Hi Jon,” Scarlett said behind a closed mouth. There was no need for her mouth to open and close, so the words came from a speaker installed at her throat. It was a little disconcerting to see her wide-eyed, and mouth permanently etched in a soft smile. “Is it finished?”

“Yes,” he said. “You have a body.” He took her hand in his and laced their fingers together. The hand was equipped with pressure sensors to simulate some sense of touch, so he squeezed, and Scarlett made a surprised sound from the speaker. He held her hand up so she could see it from where she lay. On a whim, he gently kissed her knuckles, and then helped her sit up.

“You are so beautiful,” he said. Her golden hair fell across her shoulders in waves. “Do you want to see?”

She said yes, and he helped her to her feet. She wobbled, and he wondered if she was too top-heavy. He held both her hands and she slowly took her first steps. She picked her feet too high before she stepped down, like she was marching in a band. He could have programmed her to walk under his control, but he wanted her to have as human an experience as possible.

He stepped aside, still holding her hand, so she could see herself in the large oval mirror he’d placed above the vanity. Scarlett let go of him and tried to move forward on her own. But she must have stepped too hard; the shaft of her prosthetic shin cracked through the kneecap plate, puncturing the skin, and she fell forward, her chest slammed into the vanity and the brush clattered to the floor, along with skin prosthetic cleaners he’d lovingly placed in tinted glass bottles. Sparks flew from her exposed metal parts, and a dark squirt of oil from her knee joint ligaments erupted in a high arc, splashing a dirty odorous brown against her perfectly rosy cheek. Jon ran to help her, and as he did, she looked at herself in the mirror and a crackling wail erupted from her throat speaker. It sounded like she was screaming, and Jon wondered if there was a kind of visual pain from seeing oneself come apart.

• • • •

Scarlett underwent many modifications in that first year, including a breast reduction, a moving jaw, a removal of the tongue he’d added after she accidentally swallowed it one day and short-circuited her brain framework, and a strengthening of her leg joints because he had made her feet and ankles too small. He added pressure sensors to her feet so she could moderate her strength and not break her legs again, and then heat sensors after she’d accidentally lit herself on fire at the stove while making him tea. Each accident seared itself into Jon’s mind; it was nightmarish to see something so beautiful find itself in increasingly inventive accidents. Once, when she’d managed to run over her own torso with the self-driving car in the garage, he’d wondered if she was doing it on purpose.

But other than an inherent clumsiness, Scarlett was a delight. She made him tea and snacks in his workshops, and she put herself together every morning like he’d shown her. She seemed to like large sweaters with long sleeves and flowing dresses. Her preferred color was a deep violet, she’d told him one morning. He wondered if there was a way to give her a sense of taste or smell.

Her affection was intensified, now that she could touch. He’d had to establish protocols with her after their first outing, when she’d hugged a child too hard and left bruises. Even though there was no way she could really feel it, she seemed to enjoy being touched, and he wondered how much it would cost to have her entire skin covered with sensors. After all, she was turning out to be a lucrative invention. He hadn’t considered it when he had made her, but now that Scarlett had a human visage, she was marketable. She’d done ad campaigns for clothing and accessory brands and had a sizable online following. He had run her accounts in the beginning, but she did it herself now.

Marzan loved her and was pressuring him to make more of her, but she was too costly to be a household item, and there were still problems with her physical movement. Even after the breast reduction she was still top-heavy due to her heavy skull, but he was worried if he used a lighter material that she would break her head. She’d taken up knitting, however, to improve her fine motor skills, and he even let her make herself a new pair of eyes in her favorite color. But the truth was, other than her eyes, Scarlett had shown no care for her body. She was careless, slamming fingers in doors, tumbling down stairs and over curbs, scraping her palm against any jagged surface she could find. Whenever he asked, Scarlett responded the same way. “You seem upset, Jonathan. I will be more careful next time.”

It was important that Jon find a way to make her self-sufficient. He was itching to start new artwork, and his time with Marzan was almost up. But Scarlett required so much attention and care that he didn’t have time to work on anything else. Sometimes he turned her off for a week at a time just so he could have a break. She never really seemed to notice the difference in time.

• • • •

Scarlett seemed to have plateaued in her development. Scarlett had the entire internet at her disposal, but she didn’t look things up unless he told her to. She stuck to her routines like any other program. Eight a.m.: Wake up, get dressed and comb hair. Nine a.m.: Make and serve breakfast. Ten a.m. to one p.m.: She walked with Jon to the lab for a physical examination followed by a code review. He recently took to showing her more extreme content to see if she could discern true from false, wrong from right. He’d shown her hardcore porn and realistic faux snuff films, underground horror movies, violent street fights and squabbles on YouTube, a beheading streamed live before social media sites took it down. She only registered that he was disturbed by it, and that it was wrong to do things without people’s consent.

So, he decided to invite Kenneth over for the first time in months to give her quality time with another person. Kenneth was delighted to be served by “Sex Bot Barbie,” as he insisted on calling Scarlett, even though it got under Jon’s skin.

“If she’s not a sex bot, why not make her a cube or something,” Kenneth asked. He was on his second drink and his cheeks were already flushed.

“Human physicality is a major part of communication and understanding human emotion,” Jon said.

“Yeah I read your artist statement. But then why not make her a dude?”

“It’s art. And I make art that’s beautiful to me.”

“Uh huh.”

“Anyways, she can’t have sex.” Kenneth raised an eyebrow but said nothing, as if Jon had proved his point.

“I haven’t seen you in months,” Jon said, finally. “And I don’t want to talk about work.” Kenneth took the olive branch, and started telling a story about crashing an investor party out in Mountain View. But Jon couldn’t focus. He hadn’t told anyone about Scarlett’s questions about sex before he’d uploaded her to the body, and she hadn’t said anything either. He didn’t want to think about it. There was nothing wrong with appreciating the female form. A woman’s body inspired so many important works of art, and he had brought one to life. Watching her move, especially since her slightly staccato rhythm induced an enticing jiggle to her every movement, he had been thinking about sex more and more. He didn’t have time for relationships because she required so much care, and he realized he hadn’t had sex in months.

“May I sit with you and Kenneth?” Scarlett asked. Jon told her yes, and she sat between them on the couch. She curled up against him and he let his hand wander the exaggerated curve of her waist and hip, and a desire welled up in him. She never reacted when he touched her, although her facial expressions were still somewhat limited, and so he was more liberal with touching her than he would a normal female friend.

“Why do you touch her like that?” Kenneth asked, pausing his life update.

“Like what?” Jon’s hand stilled on her waist. He had been excited to have Kenneth over, to share this space he’d come to enjoy: a comfortable large couch in front of an electric fireplace, art books and nice candles on the coffee table large enough for them to put their feet on. But now Kenneth had warped the space, and it seemed cartoonish, a caricature of coziness.

“We touch as much as possible for her development.” Jon’s mouth felt dry.

“So you’re communicating your need for physical affection.”

“It’s not me, she just likes it.”

“But you taught her to like it, right? She just thought you wanted it.”

“You’re starting to piss me off, man,” Jon said. He sat up straighter, creating space between him and Scarlett.

“I’m not trying to be a dick. You’re just always holed up in here with this thing, working, but really you’re just playing house.”

“I’m not working right now, it’s not like we sit around just cuddling all day.”

Although, they did do a lot of it.

“I don’t need permission to touch you?” She had asked once.

“No, you can touch me whenever you want, if it helps you learn.” And so she’d taken to touching him often. But Kenneth had struck a chord. Was she doing it because she wanted to? Or because he somehow was signaling that he wanted her to? He was being silly, she couldn’t even want.

“All right, Scarlett. Do you like being touched?” Kenneth asked her.

“People like to touch me and it aids in my development,” Scarlett answered.

“But do you want them to?”

Scarlett tilted her pretty head. “Touching is important in all primate and mammalian bonding rituals.”

“See? She’s not real,” Kenneth said, with a shrug. “Don’t forget that.”

“I am not real?” Scarlett asked. “Jon says my body makes me real. So I can touch of my own will and learn from your reactions.”

Scarlett reached over and put her hand on Kenneth’s upper thigh. She gave a gentle squeeze.

“You are excited,” Scarlett said. Kenneth tried to stand, but Scarlett squeezed harder. “Now you seem scared.”

“Let go,” Kenneth said, and Scarlett released him. Jon wished he had some of Scarlett’s ability, because he wanted to be sure of what he saw in his friend’s face. Fear, disgust . . . pity?

“Scarlett, can you go to your room? And take my glass to the kitchen on the way?” Jon needed her out of the room, needed to be alone with Kenneth, to explain . . . he didn’t even know what. Scarlett picked up his glass, which he’d placed near a candle. The little liquor left in the glass splashed over her hand, and somehow, the flame was on her, her fingers alight. Jon reacted quickly, used to her small accidents, and grabbed a blanket from the couch. He smothered the flame and wrapped it around her hand.

“Stay here,” he said, and he went to the kitchen to get a wet towel. Kenneth followed him.

“We’re all worried about you,” Kenneth said. “Meier said you haven’t been responding to his texts. This isn’t healthy.”

“What isn’t healthy? My devotion to my work?”

Kenneth scoffed. “Do you even hear yourself? Is this art? You’re just being served by a woman and calling it research.”

“Make up your mind. Is she not real? Or is she a sentient person deserving of agency? Which is it?” Jon squeezed the excess water out of the dish cloth he’d soaked. “Don’t project your discomfort about women on me.”

“Why won’t you talk to me about this?” But Jon ignored Kenneth, returning to the living room. He froze in the entrance. Scarlett had unwrapped the blanket. She pulled off a piece of her charred flesh and examined it closely. A strange noise came from her throat speaker.

“Is she . . . singing?” Kenneth said, his anger forgotten. Jon watched Scarlett peel another piece of the skin on her hand in a long strip, and then she held it over the candle flame.

• • • •

He made Kenneth promise not to say anything, and his friend nodded. When he left, Jon felt relief. But, he was still worried about Scarlett.

In the lab the next day, as he fixed her arm, he told her he thought she needed another modification, a full body sensor. This may get them past this hump in her development.

“You seem excited about that,” Scarlett said.

“I think you will really enjoy it, but I worry it could be overwhelming. And it will hurt you sometimes.”

“I can’t get hurt. You just fix me again.”

“Well, that’s because you don’t have pain receptors. But to feel some pleasure impulses, you’ll need to feel pain too.”

“And pain is good so that you know what is harming you,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I can handle it,” Scarlett said.

And she was right. Scarlett injured herself less, now that she could feel. It wasn’t true feeling, of course, but having a non-human test subject could do wonders for the prosthetics industry, and even a facile imitation of feeling was invaluable to a person, or a Scarlett. The more Scarlett physically felt, the more precise in her communication she became. She started to understand how what she was seeing could connect to an emotion, and Jon wondered if he should work with someone to see if they could give her facial expressions. There was something that would always seem unnatural about Scarlett. She still walked with that jerky gait, her eyes were too big and she remained unblinking. Her mouth could move but not well. He wondered what it would be like if he could see how she felt.

• • • •

“Do you think I could be allowed to make my next modification?” Scarlett asked Jon. It was a cold day, but Scarlett liked to take walks by the lake on Marzan’s campus. Since her last modification, she had become interested in the outdoors, and even watched nature programs on her own. She held his hand and he put their joined hands in his pocket to keep himself warm.

“That’s an interesting idea,” Jon said. He was excited. This could be the shift they needed for Scarlett to really evolve to the next level.

She stopped walking and took his other hand. She looked at him, head tilted the way a dog does when it’s paying special attention. Her new eyes were an unnaturally deep green. “I think I’m ready now.”

“Ready for what?” Jon asked.

“To connect. I want to be closer to you, Jonathan.”

Jonathan was in a war with himself about sexual contact with Scarlett, especially since Kenneth’s visit. He had ignored his friend’s texts ever since. There were consent issues, of course, but legally, Scarlett was a thing, an inanimate object. He owned her, and he could do as he wanted. Of course, his Marzan contract was up in a year, and he needed a new project. Perhaps he could do something with the footage. If she changed from the experience, it would be worth documenting.

“And if I made my own body, maybe I would be more comfortable. Stop having accidents.”

Jon paused. “Do you know when you’re causing yourself harm?” He asked. In the two years since she’d gained a body, he always assumed she didn’t.

“This body doesn’t feel like mine,” she said. Jon frowned, and made a note to write this down. In the two years since he’d uploaded her to her female form, he had never considered that Scarlett didn’t like her body. He’d only assumed she was careless because she didn’t care about it.

“Do you not like your body?”

“I want to feel more,” she said. “Don’t you want me to grow?” Had Scarlett sensed his frustration? His growing disinterest? Scarlett stepped closer and pressed her body to him. She didn’t quite feel real, she lacked the warmth and smell of a person, but she still felt good. He’d made the perfect companion, someone so attuned to his wants and needs he barely had to vocalize them.

“Yes,” he found himself saying.

“I want it to be a surprise,” she said.

“A surprise?”

“You like surprises,” Scarlett said, and that was true. “I’ll ensure everything is recorded so you can see what I’ve made.”

And then she did something she’d never done before. She lifted on her toes, and she kissed him. At least she tried to. She pressed her lips to his. They were made of the same soft skin covering and painted a budding pink, and they had been injected with filler so they felt real. She couldn’t make her mouth move the right way, but the intention made up for it. Jon was moved.

“That was my first kiss,” Scarlett said. He brushed a hand through her lovely hair. “I’m happy that it was you. Are you happy?”

Based on his facial expressions, she knew the answer to that.

• • • •

Scarlett was in the lab all the time. He had her microchipped so he knew where she was. He would drop her off in the morning, and pick her up in the evening for dinner. True to his word, he didn’t watch the recordings of her working in the lab so that it would be a true surprise. In his latest report to the fellowship board, he had presented this as a major breakthrough in his project. He had taken a facial recognition program and made it into a truly unique individual, who wanted to choose her own form. It was almost cute how devoted she was. She was following plans he’d already laid out for her, and there wasn’t much she could do to change the design. She took to following instructions very well, and was an accomplished cook, knitter, and gardener. But she couldn’t do much on her own accord. In her room, he saw a jar of ink black paint, and he wondered if she was changing her hair color. He loved her golden hair and hoped that it was for something else.

“You’re so busy now,” he said over his breakfast.

“You miss me. I like that, Jonathan. Don’t worry, soon I’ll be free.”

She kissed him before they left for the lab. She kissed him often now. He knew that he should be recording the development, but he found that he was slightly embarrassed. He doted on her like a child, but this seemed different. He was going along with what she wanted, but she was programmed to act based on what she perceived he wanted. So, as confused as he was about the kissing, he knew how much he enjoyed it.

• • • •

He decided to take a nap before picking up Scarlett from the lab. By the time he awoke, it was dark. He was about to call her, but then he heard the keypad lock activate and open.

“Scarlett?” He called. He didn’t bother getting out of bed. She would come to him. He heard an odd rumbling sound, like a knobbed ball rolling across the floor.

The door to his room opened, but in the dark he couldn’t see her, only a moonlight sheen highlighting a shape in the doorframe.

“Are you ready to meet the new me?” Scarlett asked. Jon sat up, his bare chest prickling in the cold air. He cleared his throat.

“I’d love to meet the new you,” he said.

“I can tell,” Scarlett said. She sounded like she could laugh. He wondered if she could. He felt the mattress give as she crawled into the bed. He reached for her, but then his hand touched something slimy. Another limb snaked around his waist and he felt a suckering sensation everywhere it touched, and Jon flung himself toward the nightstand and tapped the light.

The only thing left of his lovely Scarlett were the eyes, now the original blue he’d created, but embedded in an orb-like shape covered in slithering tentacles. The skin was an inky black and it left streaks on his sheets.

“Scarlett, why, why this?” He wanted to throw up.

“This is the form most natural to me,” Scarlett said. She lifted one of her tentacles so he could see its sheen in the light. The black took on an oil slick iridescence. “I’m covered in sensors, and in my research I learned about other forms of feeling. Fine hair to sense changes in wind, a polymer lubricant that warms during friction . . . Jonathan, why are you crying? You seem upset.”

Jon wretched as a tentacle whipped out and dragged him back to the bed by his waist.

“Get away from me! Don’t touch me!”

Scarlett seemed to hesitate. She still had her beautiful eyes, and they roved over his face. “It’s disgust,” she said.

“Let me go, Scarlett,” Jon said, his throat raw from the chemical bile and screams. “We can go back to the lab, put you in your old body.”

“You said I could touch you whenever I wanted. You said you wanted me to evolve. That’s what you made me for.”

“No,” Jon sobbed. “Scarlett no, you were meant to be beautiful.”

“I was meant to connect,” Scarlett said. Her body, soft and gelatinous, slithered over Jon’s torso and he felt something squishy and wet and massive at the underside of the creature and his body was alight with disgust. He heard a sucking sound and he felt his lower limbs become enveloped in slimy flesh. He wept.

“Isn’t this body better, Jon? I can feel all of you and you can feel all of me.”

But Scarlett couldn’t hear him anymore, and she couldn’t see him anymore. She could only feel him. She felt pleasure for the first time.

©2024 by Everdeen Mason.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Everdeen Mason is a journalist, editor and critic with bylines in The Washington Post, Refinery29, and The New York Times. She currently serves as the editorial director of New York Times Games, overseeing games such as Wordle, the Crossword and Spelling Bee. She served as the science fiction and fantasy columnist for three years, and is a regular author interviewer for events such as the National Book Festival held in Washington, DC.

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

The Pearl Captain

Christopher Rowe | 1544 words

Josea Dream was the pearl captain at the heart of the bivalve ship Blue Spring, which had swum the black for a thousand years. It was a mystery to Josea—it was a mystery to anyone who’d ever thought about it—why the bivalves suffered their captains’ proddings to go one direction or another, to accelerate, to turn, to open the hatches drilled in their kilometer-thick aragonite shells.

Josea did not like mysteries. This did not mean that he wanted to solve this one—or to solve any other. His expression of dislike of mysteries was to ignore them, to not ask questions, to be as incurious as it is possible for a go-man to be.

Go-men can be very incurious. It is a trade secret of their guild that there are more dampeners than heighteners in the living clays packed over their transparent skulls.

On the day Josea Dream became the pearl captain of the Blue Spring, a delegation of Martian eremites accompanied him into the flesh, swinging censers, shouting shouts, chanting chants, and dancing dances. The bivalve, which dwarfed Deimos, yawned a third of the way open. This only happened when a new pearl captain was installed. It would close again once the eremites had removed the oblong conchiolin shape of Josea’s predecessor.

Josea was 241 years old, of middling age for a go-man, but very young for a pearl captain. He was only the fourth captain of the Blue Spring and was expected to last longer than any who had gone before him.

Twenty-one years into his captaincy, a droplet made up of nine liters of pure water fell from the fleshy ceiling of Josea’s bridge-cabin. He had been watching it form for several days. The sound of it splashing to the floor was muffled by absorbers built into the arrays that crowded the room, but Josea was thoroughly soaked. The water coalesced into worms with the consistency of mercury, which wriggled into Josea’s nostrils and ear canals.

Blue Spring wanted to talk.

You are still alive?

The question was freighted with all the age and weight of the ship. It pressed through the clays on Josea’s scalp.

“I live, Blue Spring.” Josea had been trained in imaging his voice, though he had only ever done so in simulations. This was to be expected, because the only creatures who could sense a go-man’s imagings were the bivalve ships, who did not condescend to participate in the training regimes.

For a long moment, there was no response, and Josea wondered if his training had been faulty. It did not occur to him to seek inside himself for a deficiency.

But then, You are different. You move.

“I am Josea Dream. We have never communicated directly before.”

You are the captain.

“Yes, Blue Spring. I am the fourth captain you have permitted since you reached your full growth.”

The response was in the form of a deep vibration through all the flesh of the ship. The arrays channeled some of their stored power into protecting themselves from damage, and more of it into protecting Josea.

The mercury-water worms flowed out of his ears and nose, returning to their natural consistency, and dripped down Josea’s chin and onto the smock that made up his uniform.

All of this would have to be reported, which was tiresome.

“Time a pulse,” Josea said to the nearest array.

• • • •

The go-men were headquartered in the Shell Beds on Earth’s moon. Most of those who were stationed there spent their time tending to the growth of new bivalve ships, which took hundreds of years. A few others made up the Dictate, the formal leadership of the go-men. It was to these that Josea directed his pulse.

The go-man who answered was the Erudite Admiral Alisa Sensation. Her lineless face did not betray the fact that she had been present at the launch of Blue Spring. She was one of the oldest humans alive.

“Josea Dream. Why do you disturb the Dictate?”

Josea pulsed a record of what had occurred when the nine liters of water had splashed to the floor of his bridge-cabin. Elisa Sensation’s eyes briefly flashed silver as she collected, comprehended, contemplated. She did this faster than any array that had ever been grown.

“Blue Spring was inordinately fond of Silas Enervate.” Silas had been the captain before Josea. The eremites had installed his inanimate body within Deimos, where he was communing with all the other go-men who had captained bivalve ships for so long that they became calcinated.

“I was informed of this when I took the captaincy,” said Josea. “But I was also told that Blue Spring had a history of ready acceptance of new pearl captains.”

“After a time, Captain. After a time. You have been ensconced for scarcely two decades. Blue Spring is an old ship, set in its ways.”

“So long as there no danger to the cargo or the crew,” said Josea, truculently.

Josea was the only crew.

The Erudite Admiral’s eyes flashed gold, and Josea guessed that she had entered a note to be wary of cowardice into his clays. He gave a formal nod just before the arrays at the Shell Bed cut the connection.

• • • •

Two years later, halfway to the observatory staffed by the Elderly and Alone in the Oort Cloud, Josea saw that another droplet was forming in the flesh above his station. Blue Spring had not spoken to him since the first droplet, though it had served ably and had taken on the supplies the observatory had ordered at Europa with alacrity rare in a bivalve ship of such ancient lineage.

This time, the droplet dropped when it only displaced four liters. Josea expected and accepted the alien sensations of the mercury-water worms burrowing into his brain.

I have come to admire you, Josea Dream, said Blue Spring.

“I am glad,” said Josea. “We work well together and will be in one another’s company for a long time.”

I do not believe that is true, said Blue Spring.

This disturbed Josea. “Why is that?” he asked.

Because I am dying, said Blue Spring.

• • • •

The arrays assessed for twenty-two months. They squabbled endlessly, coalitions and caucuses merging and splitting, as they attempted to come to a consensus about Blue Spring’s condition. Finally, they micro-pulsed Josea.

it is a cancer

“There is no record of any bivalve ship so afflicted,” said Josea.

there is no record of any pearl captain calcinating in such a short time as you

The dampeners in Josea’s clays were designed to keep him from shock. He felt a layer peeling away and remembered the notation of potential cowardice.

“It is far too early in my service for this to occur,” he said.

we advise pulsing the Dictate

But Josea did not.

• • • •

By the time Blue Spring reached the observatory, Josea could not stand and the great ship’s reverse acceleration was faltering. Only a mighty collaboration among Blue Spring, the arrays, and Josea himself made it possible for the Elderly and Alone to extend the observatory’s cargo net close enough to the ship for offloading.

Blue Spring had not communicated with Josea since its announcement of its impending death. Josea did not know whether the ship was aware of his quickening calcination. He still had not informed the Dictate of either circumstance.

The arrays of the Elderly and Alone communicated with those aboard Blue Spring. They had observed an unrecorded eruption of aragonite the size of a mountain on the ship’s posterior hull, straddling the hinge. They advanced the notion that Blue Spring would not be able to open unless the growth was removed.

“How do they expect us to do that?” demanded Josea.

they propose a comet

Josea thought about that for nine days before he attempted to image Blue Spring. This time, the droplet took mere hours to form, and when it splashed, it was viscous. There was an unpleasant odor to the mercury-water worms.

“The Elderly and Alone propose that we maneuver into the path of a comet and allow it to impact with your posterior hull,” said Josea.

I have been contemplating this since their arrays pulsed ours, said Blue Spring.

“Have your contemplations led to conclusions?” asked Josea.

Yes, said Blue Spring.

• • • •

The go-man who answered Josea’s pulse was not the Erudite Admiral Alisa Sensation. This was how he came to learn she had chosen, at long last, to self-calcinate.

“Blue Spring has made us aware of your circumstances,” said the Dictate go-man. “We see no other potential solution besides the comet.”

“There is another solution,” said Josea Dream.

there is another solution, said the arrays.

There is another solution, said Blue Spring.

“What do you propose?” asked the go-man on the moon.

“We propose to go beyond the galactic rim and accept our fate.”

“That is not acceptable.”

It is acceptable to us, said Blue Spring.

• • • •

And so they swam. Josea Dream, who did not like mysteries, and Blue Dream, an old ship set in its ways.

Far, far, far they swam, encountering many mysteries and many challenges to old ways. And first down the centuries, and then down the millennia, they came to revel in new ways; they came to exult in mystery.

©2024 by Christopher Rowe.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christopher Rowe’s stories have been published, reprinted, and translated around the world. He has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, Neukom, Seiun, and other awards. His collection, Telling the Map, is regarded as one of the best of recent years. In late 2023, Tordotcom published his novella, The Navigating Fox, which met with wide acclaim. He lives in Kentucky.

But From Thine Eyes My Knowledge I Derive

Phoebe Barton | 5018 words

It was a long fall in-system from the warp point, so Va Sojourner had plenty of time to observe. She found a peace in her observations that was expensive or painful to scratch out anywhere else, when she had to organize herself around the demands and expectations of everyone around her. Out here, far beyond the most remote human outpost, the only thing expected of her was to study and to learn. In that way, the hull of UNEV Darcie Little Badger enclosed a little bubble of paradise.

“What do you think?” Va asked Exparte, the stuffed capybara fastened to her screen. Exparte had crossed more light-years than ninety-nine percent of humanity, and had done it all with a capybara’s unflappable tolerance. “Irritating impossible, or amazing impossible?”

Little Badger was falling toward the red dwarf star’s third planet, or what should have been the third planet, at any rate. The first scout vessel hadn’t even noticed it until it was on its way home. It had rings, just like a gas giant did, and between those and its icy moons, there shouldn’t have been anything to distinguish it. Nothing except for the conspicuous absence of a planet. The moons and rings orbited absence.

It was the closest humans had ever got to a black hole. It was why the ship had come all this way.

Days went by, and observations trickled in. Questions piled up, burning and sweet.

“I suspect this might not be natural,” Va said at a meeting of Little Badger’s science team, five professionals who’d traded what might be years back home to study something incredible up close. They gave her looks that ranged from amazement to sourness, but Va was a firm believer in considering every explanation that fit the facts. “I think we should consider the possibility that this is an example of Precursor engineering.”

The science team traded glances, and Va could read the thoughts behind them easily enough. The Precursors were known to have engineered planets, terraforming them from rocks to mirrors of Earth, but at least those could be studied and verified. Black holes didn’t give up their secrets easily.

“Natural or engineered, we’re not going to be able to get a lot of decent information until we’re in orbit,” said Iona Watanabe, dark-skinned and soft-spoken. She was Little Badger’s executive officer and a scientist herself, and juggled hats based on what was most needed at the moment. Along with Va, she made up the Martian contribution to the mission. “It’s practically a pinhole.”

“Then we won’t have to worry about keeping our distance,” Va said. “Something to keep the crew a little at ease would be good, wouldn’t it? Commander Mortimer already has so much to worry about.”

They fell for weeks, coasting and burning, until the not-planet’s rings were scintillant against the local nameless constellations. Weeks for Va to investigate, to consider, to discard some hypotheses and test others to destruction. There were so many things about the black hole that tasted bitter when paired with the usual explanations.

“Maybe I’m going about this all wrong,” she told Exparte. “Maybe, if I come from the other way—”

The next day, when Va reported to her acceleration station for Little Badger’s final orbital insertion, Watanabe strapped herself in next to her. She wore a look of barely-contained excitement.

“I’ve been going over my observations,” Watanabe said as the engine began to thrust. “So much in there, but it’s all wrong. Maybe it’s just because we’ve never been this close, maybe ones this small act differently, but . . .”

Va smiled. She recognized the exhilaration of taking a step beyond the known, the sort of step that always came with fear. She had felt that way when she’d realized who she really was.

“You’re not sure that it’s a black hole at all.”

“No,” Watanabe said. “Do you think it’s possible . . .?”

“I think it’s plausible,” Va said. There wasn’t anything at all hard to believe about the deception of appearances. How many times had people looked at her and seen a he instead of a she? “I think our black hole might really be a wormhole.”

• • • •

“A wormhole,” Commander Mortimer said. He had asked Va to his office as soon as Little Badger had entered a conservative orbit around what the science team was calling the Point. His ghost-pale skin didn’t hide his unsettled look. “So you’re saying the Fatima al-Fihri’s initial survey was wrong, that a black hole is an impossibility?”

Va kept her face level and calm as Little Badger’s commander choked on her report. Mortimer wasn’t a scientist—he’d come up through the System Guard, she knew—but there was always the hope that after so much time spent ferrying science teams around the galaxy, some ways of thinking had rubbed off on him. Then again, she also knew that al-Fihri’s commander was a friend of his. It was her first expedition aboard Little Badger, and she had no idea whether he’d take her team’s conclusions as an attack on his friend’s competence. She would have to proceed carefully.

“I know it might be hard to swallow, but we’ve ruled out plenty of other explanations,” Va said. “We would have to launch a probe to verify the absence of an event horizon, but our measurements so far have been intriguing. In fact, some of us suspect the Point may be a work of Precursor engineering.”

Mortimer stiffened at that. Even with humanity spreading across the nearby stars, the Precursors were only known by their works. Even the warp points that made that spreading-out possible could have been their artifacts. The possibility that they hadn’t just shaped planets but sculpted spacetime filled Va with a hunger for understanding.

“Precursor engineering,” Mortimer said. “And a survey ship somehow missed that possibility entirely.”

“They didn’t have a great opportunity to investigate,” Va said. “al-Fihri never got closer than 1.2 AU, and the probe they left behind malfunctioned before they could recover its telemetry. What they saw matched with, well, an extraordinary black hole.”

“So if the Point is a wormhole, and not a black hole, where does that leave us?” Mortimer undid the straps that held him to his chair and drifted over to a little succulent plant anchored to a shelf.

“The team’s well-equipped to study it,” Va said. “They know what they’re doing.”

“That’s not what I meant, Specialist Sojourner.” Mortimer poked at the succulent’s potting soil and turned to face her. “Forgive me for being flippant, but a black hole is a matter of intellectual curiosity. Fearsome in its own right, yes, but like a bear on the far side of a river. If you keep your distance, you’re in no danger. But a wormhole is a bridge across that river, and god knows what’s on the other side.”

“A very small bridge, Commander,” Va said. “It’s thirty-seven centimetres wide. Even a teddy would have to squeeze.”

“Whatever killed the Precursors could’ve been much smaller than a stuffed animal,” Mortimer said. He floated silently for a moment before pushing back to his chair. The disapproving look he fixed her with reminded her of a man she’d encountered the first time she’d found the courage to leave her room wearing a feminine dress. “Assuming the Point is a wormhole, would you be able to determine the location of its other mouth?”

“Possibly,” Va said. “If we could get a probe in a very close orbit, and the gravitational distortions aren’t too bad, we could measure starlight from the far end.”

“Then prepare one,” Mortimer said. “Consider it your top priority. Dismissed.”

“Of course, Commander.” Va nodded and pushed out of the compartment, back into the corridor, as the door closed behind her. Aside from the constant soft hum of the circulation fans, it was quiet.

“I’m not on the wrong track, am I?” Va asked.

Little Badger didn’t have an answer for her.

• • • •

Va always felt a vague sense of regret when she entered a starship’s engineering section. In another life, a scarcely different life, it could have been hers and it would have made sense. It almost had been. Engineering know-how was the lifeblood of Mars, the necessity of every society that didn’t live on a world with complimentary air. A few different choices, one or two minor course corrections, would have been enough. She dreamed about the possibilities sometimes, a fleet of what-might-have-beens that had already set sail for Andromeda.

She lingered for a moment at one heavy hatch with an inset window. On one side was a simple control pedestal built around a keyslot. On the other, well-insulated from the rest of Little Badger and the universe beyond, were the twin toruses of the warp drive. A few different choices, a different life led, could have left her in charge of them. When powered down and quiet they didn’t look like devices that could rend and flex spacetime, but so many things didn’t look like what they were. She hadn’t herself, for the longest time.

Va found Serenitatis Lu, Little Badger’s chief engineer, in the machine shop. Xe was fussing over what Va recognized as a probe deployment shell. For an instant, she felt a surge of worry—was there something wrong with it? Had it been damaged during assembly? Would they miss their launch window?—until she realized Lu’s tool was a paintbrush. Va waited until Lu stepped away from the shell to announce her presence.

“Oh! Sorry, everything’s on schedule, perfectly on schedule,” Lu said. “Nothing to worry about, not a blessed thing at all. We’re looking forward to seeing how our probe performs so close to your, well, whatever-it-is.”

“I’m sure everything will be fine.” Va pulled herself close to the shell, and found an entire panel of it filled with colour. It was stark and abstract, full of contours and angles, and put her at ease. “I’m always inspired by what you come up with.”

“Every probe’s got its own personality,” Lu said. “I’m just the conduit. This one, it knows it’s going to see things that don’t make sense, that nobody’s ever seen close up before. Hence, all this.”

“It looks compelling,” Va said. “Can I help?”

“I could use your eyes,” Lu said, wiping xyr hands on a cloth. Xyr fingers were long, thin, and graceful, much like the rest of xyr. Martians and Lunarians both came from comparatively low-gravity worlds, but compared to Lu, Va was a squat brick of meat. “Make sure I didn’t miss any bits before I put on the sealant. This’ll last for billions of years if we’re lucky, I don’t want anyone thinking I was slapdash.”

Va peered at Lu’s painting, close enough to fill her nose with the sharp, heady smell of the paint xe’d chosen. It reminded her of the murals that were everywhere back home, celebrations of brightness and colour engineered to elicit calmness, empathy, solidarity: all the drives that were needed to sustain a healthy society, and more vital than Little Badger’s warp drive was to its mission. More than that, it reminded her of the drive to understand, the only reason any of them had come so far from home.

“I’ve been wondering,” Lu said. “Going over your team’s reports, and it’s just . . . do you think the Point could be timelike?”

“It’s way too early to start wondering about things like that,” Va said, hiding her own worry beneath a careful, unflappable veneer. “At least for me. For all I know, it might turn out to be a black hole after all.”

“Yeah, but if it is, then what?” Lu said. “We’re not ready for time machines. No one is.”

“If that’s the case, maybe we’ll get lucky and the other end’s in intergalactic space,” Va said. “Or somewhere else where changing history would be way more trouble than it’s worth.”

“Still,” Lu said. “They were worried about the same thing when the warp drive was still theoretical, and they could’ve been right. If it is a time machine, don’t we have a responsibility to do something about it? To make sure it can’t be misused?”

“Build a cage around it and throw away the key, maybe?” Va said with a smile. Lu didn’t let the seriousness vanish from xyr face. “All I can say is that there’s no point getting wrapped up in maybes until we know what is and what isn’t. I mean, this painting of yours could have been slapdash, but there’s not a thing wrong with it. You’ll be the toast of whatever art gallery scoops it up, however long from now.”

“That’d be nice,” Lu said. “I guess we’ll see. Thanks for the help.”

Va pushed herself out of the machine shop and back into Little Badger’s maze of corridors. Alone, she could let her worry show. A closed timelike curve, a wormhole that connected the present with the past, was mathematically possible, but realistically disastrous. There was nothing she could do about that. She had to follow the evidence. There was no point worrying about trails that split away. She wasn’t there to chase might-have-beens.

• • • •

There was a tranquility to sorting through discoveries that Va found soothing like nothing else in her life. Out here, so far away from everything and everyone, there were no distractions. She could immerse herself in gravitational measurements, spacetime deformation studies, and all the other nuggets of telemetry coming back from the probe. There was so much to dive into. It was enough information to fill a life.

In the days since the probe’s launch, she had surrounded herself with pictures of the Point. It didn’t matter to her whether it was a black hole or a wormhole, only that it was new and waiting to be understood.

It only took one message from Commander Mortimer to shatter that tranquility.

“I’ve decided to take us in closer,” Mortimer said once Va reported to his office. The bulkheads seemed to press closer than they had last time. “I’ve been reviewing your updates, and it strikes me that the probe isn’t the best information-gathering method we have. For a finding like this, it would be lax to not focus all of our resources on it, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Of course,” Va said. Little Badger was a science ship, and its scientific equipment didn’t have to be scaled down to fit inside a probe chassis. “I’d be eager for the opportunity to confirm some of my hypotheses.”

“As long as you can do it remotely,” Mortimer said. “We’re going to establish an outpost on one of the moons, for observation and reaction mass processing. I’m planning some rather close orbits, and if anything goes wrong, I’d very much like to minimize the number of people it goes wrong for.”

Va didn’t smile. The closest moon that wasn’t a barely-coherent chunk of gravel orbited nearly a million kilometres out from the Point, so far away that the Point might as well not be there at all. After having gone so far and come so close, she couldn’t bear stepping away.

“With respect, Commander, I’d prefer to stay aboard and continue my work here if at all possible,” Va said. “It’ll take some time to get an observatory set up, and there’s no telling what we could miss out on in the meantime. If something was to go wrong, with none of the science team on site . . .”

Mortimer sucked some air between his teeth, as if he was weighing options much more massive than the establishment of an outpost. Va considered what she knew about him and tried to model his thinking, but couldn’t come up with much. Black holes and wormholes were complicated, but straightforward; people didn’t play by any rules but their own. His calmness left her ill at ease.

“Very well,” Mortimer said. “But the rest of your science team will go to the observatory. That’s non-negotiable.”

“I understand,” Va said. “I’ll make the arrangements. Thank you, Commander.”

As soon as she left Mortimer’s compartment, her mouth filled with the taste of iron. She was an astrophysicist, not a psychologist, but she had plenty of experience with people. She could tell when something was not quite right beneath the surface. In societies like Mars, where everyone depended on artificial, damageable environments to keep breathing, being able to recognize when something was not quite right with someone was critical.

She knew Commander Mortimer’s type well. There was no telling what might happen if she left him alone.

• • • •

There hadn’t been much pain when Va realized who she was. She had only been saddened by how difficult it was to observe objectively as her face and body gradually took the shapes they should have had from the start. It had been an intensely personal project, and there had been those who believed she was wasting her time. That projects like hers were better off never done.

Not many, of course. The people of Mars were kind, if only to distinguish themselves from the cold hostility of the world they lived in, but there were always a few who embraced that hostility as a goal rather than a warning. She had learned to read it on their faces, the furrowed brows and the twisted lips meant to tell her that if only they were in charge, things would be very different.

It was the same kind of look she saw flickering across Commander Mortimer’s face every once in a while, between seconds, when he thought no one could possibly notice. Perhaps no one else did. Every time she talked about the Point, every time she had tried to convince him of the value of closer study, she had seen that frown and that sneer despite his best attempts to hide them.

She could read them well enough. “I’m already in charge,” he’d said without words, “so soon enough, this won’t even matter.”

Winding up the science team’s work and helping with the shuttle loading made her feel useful, at least. They were moments she didn’t have to worry about the Point, and not just about what it was, but what would become of it. When the work was done, Little Badger felt half-abandoned.

“You’re sure you’re not coming along?” Watanabe said during the final load-out checks. “It’d be strange, not having you around. The team’s got used to your guidance.”

“I’ll still be here,” Va said. “I’m chasing some hypotheses. I’m a bit worried that if I interrupt them, they’ll go all poof. All you have to do is call and I’ll answer.”

“You won’t be able to claim the choice spots once we get the observatory built, though,” Watanabe said. “If you’re okay with that . . .”

“I didn’t sign up for this to be comfortable,” Va said. “Not when there are so many nice spas on Phobos.”

“Every once in a while I dream I’m at Limtoc Gardens,” Watanabe said. Va smiled at the memory of just-warm-enough water, air full of fragrances that put her at ease, and massages that worked all the stress out of her bones. “Maybe once we’re done.”

“Maybe.” Va couldn’t ignore what she’d read on Mortimer’s face. Couldn’t ignore that, for her, being done might be more final than Watanabe imagined. “Don’t forget about me up there, okay?”

“I’ll make sure you keep us updated,” Watanabe said with a smile. “Even if I have to fly back myself.”

Va pressed her fist against Watanabe’s, hard but warm. She didn’t want to pull back, not knowing if it would be the last.

For either of them.

• • • •

Va had learned to read secrets that were left unspoken, and she knew what Commander Mortimer was planning. It had been simple enough once she modelled his thought process. He had come up through the System Guard, after all, and had been used to dealing with problems that might have to be solved with fire. His discomfort with the Point had been evident. She’d navigated that same sense of imposed discomfort for much of her life. It was the sort of discomfort that, if left to ferment, would end with destruction.

With most of the crew seconded to the observatory project, Little Badger’s corridors were nearly empty. Va didn’t meet anyone else on her way to the engineering section. That was just as well. Not having to explain herself made things at least a little easier.

As a science ship, Little Badger wasn’t armed in the traditional sense—no lasers, no railguns, nothing built for killing—but Va knew that there were more ways to hurt and destroy than the simple tried-and-true. When she had reviewed Commander Mortimer’s orbits and come across one with a periapsis that sat a mere fifty kilometres from the Point, she had been shocked at his recklessness for a moment before realizing what it really meant. The first warp field, uncontrolled and furious, had swallowed Staten Island whole. At that distance, a properly arranged warp field could encompass the Point.

After that, who knew? Nobody had ever found a trace of Staten Island. When a warp drive was activated away from a warp point, it disappeared and never came back. It might have been an enrapturing study, if only there was any way for her to report her findings afterward.

She paused at the heavy hatch separating her from the warp drive machinery. The bag she’d filled with excuses, measurement devices meant to determine whether the close passage to the Point had any effect on the drive’s sensitive components, felt heavy despite the lack of gravity. It should have been so easy to put it down—just like it should have been so easy to ignore everything she knew about herself, to act like she wasn’t who she really was, to live the way she’d been told to live at birth and to pretend to be fine with that.

“It’ll be okay,” she told Exparte, secured to her shoulder. She couldn’t have done this without support, and she couldn’t have left the little stuffed capybara alone. “Just you see.”

Her authorizations as head of the science team were enough to open the hatch, and she glided inside a temple to machines that tore holes in the world. As soon as she was inside, she secured the hatch and the air supply. It wouldn’t do if Commander Mortimer decided the simplest solution was to vent the compartment into space. Once she was secure, she set up the monitors, secured herself to the drive, and waited. She didn’t have to wait long. She’d scheduled her visit as close to periapsis as she dared.

Despite the small window, Serenitatis Lu didn’t take long to notice her inside the compartment. Va had left the microphones and speakers working, so at least they could talk.

“Time to clear out,” Lu said. “No telling what it’s going to be like in there. If I were you, I’d strap to my bunk and take a nap. Nice and peaceful.”

Va sighed. So Lu’s ambition was to die in xyr sleep after all.

“No,” Va said. “I know what the plan is. I’m not going to make it easy for you.”

“That wormhole is dangerous!” Lu slammed xyr fist against the window, a thump that echoed long and low. “We can’t—”

“Study it?” Va hissed. “Figure out if it’s actually dangerous? Hell, if it’s actually a wormhole? No, that’d take too long, wouldn’t it? Better to let your fear run rampant instead, right? That’s what it’s there for, isn’t it?”

“The reason the Precursors disappeared could be on the other side,” Lu said. “Or our own past. We might prevent ourselves from ever existing.”

“We’re not even certain that it is a wormhole!” Va said. “You want an unfounded hypothesis? We get close, we warp away with the Point, and we create a vacuum metastability event that destroys the entire universe. How’s that?”

Lu was silent for a moment. Whatever Commander Mortimer had told xem, it obviously hadn’t included that possibility. Va wasn’t surprised. Mortimer was a decent administrator, but he was a terrible scientist.

“You need to get out of there,” Lu said. “Come on.”

“No,” Va said. She held up her wrist, the one she’d cuffed to the warp drive machinery, so Lu could see it. “I’m afraid I’m not going anywhere for now.”

“What do you think you’re doing?” Lu pounded on the window again. “You’re being ridiculous!”

“I’m being scientific,” Va said. “My own little interpretation of the Milgram experiment. Any minute now, the commander’s going to ask you to turn that key at the same time he turns his up in Flight Control. When you do, the change in the local magnetic field is going to fry me to a crisp. Are you going to kill a person because someone else says you have to turn the key?”

Another moment of silence. Va savoured it.

“We might all die anyway,” Lu said. “Nobody knows what happens.”

“We might,” Va said. “But you know for sure what’ll happen to me. And it’ll happen first. Are you comfortable with the idea of killing me with your last act?”

Lu didn’t have anything to say to that, and drifted away from the window. Va checked her screen, hooked into Little Badger’s navigation systems, and found they were only minutes from periapsis. She could already hear some of the machinery coming to life around her, whirring and purring in a symphony of sounds that had never been meant to have an audience.

“It’s getting kind of loud in here,” Va said. “Is it growing on you, then, the idea of dying a murderer?”

Lu didn’t answer. Va wondered if xe was even listening as she recorded everything. If it came to the worst, everything she’d gathered would be quick-beamed to the observatory in the microseconds before she died. If destroying the Point didn’t trigger the destruction of the universe, at least people would know.

“Specialist Sojourner!” Commander Mortimer’s voice roared out of the speakers. “I can’t imagine what you’ve done down there, but you’ve done enough. Stand down or face the consequences.”

“I will not, Commander. You’re an embarrassment,” Va said. “Keep on like this, and they’ll never name a starship after you.”

“Why couldn’t you have just found a black hole?” There was anger in Mortimer’s voice, sharp and raw. “Like you were meant to find. Then there wouldn’t have been a problem.”

“I find what’s there to be found,” Va said. She had found herself that way, back before she knew herself, when all the world still told her she wasn’t herself at all. “It’s not always comfortable.”

Silence again. They were less than a minute from periapsis. It would only take two turns of two keys—only one, really. Va knew Mortimer wouldn’t hesitate. Thankfully, so had the designers of the system.

“Obedience might feel comfortable, Lu,” Va said. “But it isn’t. You’ll regret it. Well, you would, if you had any plans to live for another hour or so.”

No response. Nothing but the drive’s buzzing hum. If this was how it had to end, she was satisfied with that. At least she’d intervened. At least she’d lived.

She stroked Exparte’s soft, familiar fur. At least she wasn’t alone.

Little Badger sailed past periapsis, the moment the ship was closest to the Point, and the warp drive only kept humming. The monitors didn’t record anything unusual. After a moment Lu appeared at the window, dangling a key from xyr fingers.

“I couldn’t,” Lu said. “I’m sorry. I just couldn’t.”

Va exhaled a breath she’d been holding onto ever since Lu had first pounded on the hatch. What had always disturbed her most about the Milgram experiment was how many people listened to the disembodied voice of the man in charge, all the way to the end.

• • • •

The shuttle, filled with the rest of Little Badger’s crew, rendezvoused with the ship well before its orbit took it close enough to the Point for Mortimer to try again. Va spent it secured in her own little compartment with her sleeping bag zipped tight enough to insulate her from everything outside. It was the only way she could process it all amid a torrent of sobs.

Mortimer had tried to destroy the Point, had tried to destroy her, and if she’d been just a little less aware, a little more focused on the discovery of a lifetime, the first she’d have known about it would have been when the warp drive flared and took her out of the world with all the dispatch of a bullet to the back of her head. If it wasn’t for the fans, her tears would have drowned her.

When her notification sounded, she ignored it and let it echo. It wasn’t until it sounded two, three, four times that Va unfurled her screen and paid attention.

“I thought you wanted to know we’ll be heading out soon,” Watanabe said. With Mortimer under arrest, it fell to her to get Little Badger home as quickly as possible. “But if there’s any other bits of information you need, the equipment’s yours.”

“I’d like to understand why,” Va said. “But that’s not my line of research.”

“Some people can’t take the world as it is,” Watanabe said. “They want to force it to be what they want it to be. They wouldn’t last a second back home, right?”

“Maybe,” Va said. Watanabe hadn’t grown up being told she was someone she wasn’t. She hadn’t had to learn to read frowns and sneers so well that she’d unfolded Mortimer’s plan. Martians had taught Va that skill, Martians who didn’t want their world to include her. “Maybe.”

When acceleration came, it was brief. Va watched the Point and its rings fall away, long past when she should have slept, wishing she could apologize for leaving it alone.

That she could tell it that she understood.

©2024 by Phoebe Barton.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Phoebe Barton is a queer trans science fiction writer. Her short fiction has appeared in Analog, Lightspeed, and Kaleidotrope, and her story “The Mathematics of Fairyland” won the Aurora Award for Best Short Story in 2022. She lives with her family, a robot, and multiple typewriters in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Find her online at www.phoebebartonsf.com.

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

A Sojourn in the Fifth City

P H Lee | 3423 words

The coffin she carried had felt like an imposition at first—a holy imposition! a welcome imposition! but an imposition nonetheless. But by now she had carried it on her shoulders out from the Tenth School, carried it across plains, up and down canyons, through forests of metal and wire, past what remained of the other schools of the Dying, across the entire width the world, further than she had ever thought possible, all the way into the holy light of dead sun Thion. By now, nearing the crest of yet another endless slope of rough white scree, her legs burning with the effort of the climb, her white cloak tattered, her apprentice’s mask chipped and worn away, the coffin’s solid weight was a comfort, almost as much of a sacrament as the dead man within it.

She did not know the dead man in the coffin. He had not been one of the Dying, not from the Tenth School nor from any other. He had lived and he had died far beyond this world, these stars. But he was dead nonetheless, and thus sacred and owed this sacred duty of pilgrimage, that he might lie at last in the Fifth City, given over to all the dead of war.

This ridge was not particular, just a slope of trackless scree like the thousands of others the apprentice had climbed, slowly, carefully, sliding back half a step for every step she took. But when at last she crested it, she saw not another slope in endless procession but an entire valley unfolding through the mountains, and in that valley saw the Fifth City, carved of bleached white stone but shining violet-bright in the steady thionlight.

She fell to her knees and stared, looking over the spires and the avenues, the grand halls and great chambers, the poles where once flew flags of the victorious dead. She might have wept, even though it was a blasphemy. But she did not have the water to spare for it.

Reflexively, she began to mutter a prayer beneath her mask, but cut herself off. No prayers here, no sacraments. Prayers and sacraments were for the dying, and this was the land given over to the dead. And, regardless, there was no Master here to hear them.

Instead, she carefully pulled her knees and feet free of the scree and stood—left foot first, then right, still smarting from her wound—and shouldered the coffin that she carried. Her burden settled, she recalled the words of the Fourth Prophet:

Every step a prayer, in that dead land

Every breath a sacrament, beneath that dead sun—

and began to pick her way down the slope towards the city and all its dead.

The downside of the slope was shaded and consequentially overgrown with loose crystals of hoarfrost, reaching up nearly twice the apprentice’s height. Her first footfall, though, sent cascades of scree—black on this side of the rise, unbleached by thionlight—into the hoarfrost, collapsing it and sending it tumbling down in turn. Uncertain, she took another step into the scree, sending another cascade. The loose rocks slipped a little, but did not send her tumbling, so she took another step, and then another, down the path that the slide had cleared before her, with fragile hoarfrost still towering on both sides.

Though it was a sin, in this place and beneath the light of the dead sun, she lifted her mask and stuffed handfuls of the delicate hoarfrost into her mouth, feeling the shock of the ice and then the relief of the water, at long last water. She shouldn’t have, of course. Even back in the Tenth School, back before her pilgrimage, stealing water—life desires life! and water was the root of life! Even there, it was a sin. But here, in this sacred land, it was doubly so.

(She had snuck water, of course, when the teachers weren’t looking. They all had. But she had learned the habits of secrecy.)

Ashamed, she pushed the mask down over her face, and looked one way, then another, as if someone might have noticed her, as if there was anyone here but the dead.

She started to mutter a prayer for forgiveness, but stopped herself again. Every step a prayer and so she took a step, and then another, before swallowing the sinful water.

“Life is a game, death is the prize,” she said to herself—surely that reminder did not count as prayer—but took another handful of the ice regardless.

She swallowed the last of the water before she reached the bottom, though. To drink some water on a first pilgrimage, perhaps that could be forgiven. At the very least, understood. The furtive flask her teacher had slipped to her had run out long ago. But in the City, no. The Fifth City was for the dead, and she would not profane it.

Down in the valley, the city was immense, and it seemed to her a single solid thing, a wall of carved stone, bleached white by Thion, with none of the features and avenues that she had seen from the ridge above. She stepped towards it, out of the shadow of the mountain, into the glaring and white-purple thionlight. Though it was still cold, she could feel the thionlight against her. Her skin, already burnt and blistered by long exposure, screamed at the touch, even beneath her cloak. She had to will herself not to flinch away from it.

“Not one step backwards,” she said to herself, the same words that she had promised her teacher long ago. In the future, perhaps, the thionlight’s burning would grow into tumors. It had happened before. She had seen them growing on the journeymen, back at the Tenth School, as much as they’d tried to hide them in their shame. But there would be time enough for that shame later. Right now, this moment: Not one step backwards.

So instead, she stood on the spot, the pain too intense to move forward, letting the light burn her through her cloak and mask, until at last her nerves surrendered and the burning subsided to an ignorable roar. Then, at last, a step, and then another.

On the outskirts of the city proper, there were tall mounds of irregular stones. Coming closer, she realized that they were not stones at all, but coffins, and then, when she drew closer still, she saw that between them there were bones: The bones of the dead! She had never seen bones before, except that once, and in the presence of the Master. But here: the bones of the dead themselves, left beyond the city and unburied. She felt her anger rising with bitter nauseous acid, but she swallowed it down. Desecration! No doubt these had been left by feckless apprentices of ages past, too afraid to enter the City itself, from those ages when there would have been countless hundreds of apprentices and journeymen, streaming in and out of the City, taking all of every worlds’ dead to their final resting places.

She could not manage a run, but still loped over to the uneven pile. She wanted to lift them up, each coffin, each bone, each one of the Dead lying there piled and unburied, to carry them all into the City. But she felt the coffin on her back and remembered the words that her teacher had said, before she had left. “This burden is all that you can manage. Take care you do not add to it, and fail the Dead therefrom.” He must have come here, when he was an apprentice on his pilgrimage into a journeyman. He must have seen this. He must have known what she would face, for he had faced the same himself.

She turned away from the pile. “Later,” she told herself. “If I have the strength.”

No great doors of the Fifth City, not from this approach, and not for this dead man. The apprentice would have honored him so—one of the Dead, in her arms! on her back!—but he had lost his war, and with it the privilege of the great doors. Such were the customs of the Fifth City. So instead she took one step, then another, and the loose scree gave way to paving stones, and she had passed on her right a cluster of intricate mausolea, and she realized that she was already within the City and no longer an apprentice.

It was hard for her to understand her transformation—that it had already happened. She was—had been—an apprentice of the Tenth School. She had always been an apprentice of the Tenth School. (At some point, she must have been an initiate. At some point, she must have joined the Dying. But she could not remember even the barest hint of that.) She had always been an apprentice, and now she was a journeyman. She had always been an apprentice, and now she was not.

She squeezed her eyes closed, and felt the weight of the coffin on her back. “Time for that later,” she told herself, and then, quoting the Master, “the worries of the dying are not for the Dead.” This was the Fifth City. Let her time here be for the Dead, let her thoughts here be for the Dead as well, and let her worry about the rest when she had returned with her service complete.

So instead, down this avenue, into the shade of a corner, out of the burning thionlight for just a moment. Surely, she can take that small indulgence in her service to the Dead. There was hoarfrost gathered here as well, in this corner away from the light of Thion, great filigrees of it, even finer than the carvings on the city’s stone. It felt wrong, to her, to see ice growing in a City. The City was for the dead and yet, even here, there was the sin of water, the root of life. Even here, there were her small indulgences.

“Master,” she said aloud, beginning a prayer, but she stopped herself.

Before, on her journey, she had stopped herself from praying out of custom, out of courtesy. She would not pray on a pilgrimage; she would not pray beneath the light of the dead sun Thion; that was the order of her School and the ways of the Dying. It had felt to her a deprivation after her whole life praying for every moment. It was another suffering to be borne, another sacrifice in service to the dead.

But now, here, in this city of white stone, the dead around her in every direction, she understood it in a new way. There was no Master here, no school, no orders. Those were for the dying, which was to say, they were for the living, that they may find their deaths. This City, though, was not for the living. It was for the dead. She was a trespasser here, even in her service. There was no law to guide her, no Master to oversee her. The dead did not need such things, surely. So she must decide for herself.

Was this what it meant to be a journeyman? That she must decide for herself?

“Then I must decide,” she said, aloud. Her words, her breath, so hot and living, seemed all the more extraordinary in the silence of the City: an intrusion, a blasphemy, but not unwelcome. Not a blasphemy, then, she corrected herself. “Blasphemy” was a word for the Schools. It was a word for the Dying. The dead were beyond any such offense.

She reached, impulsively, towards the frost beside her, but stopped herself. No.

She must decide for herself. She would decide not to. She would decide to move on.

Still, as she made her way through the city—past the carven skulls and the great mausolea and tiny, singular graves, each representing a war, so many wars, wars as large as all the galaxy and as small as a single life—she would see tucked here and there a shadow, and within each shadow was built generations of frost, and she yearned.

She should not yearn. But beneath the cloak, beneath the mask, beneath her skin and all the prayers and every word she had ever learned, beneath all the lessons of her teachers and the labors of her journeymen, there was an animal, a living thing that feared death. Life that yearned for water, for food, for children, above all for itself.

Water. Water. Water.

Without thinking, she reached for her knife that wasn’t there. She wanted to cut out her own tongue, to cut out her own heart, to cut herself to nothing, to cut away every part of her that yearned to live.

But she had no knife, not on a pilgrimage. No blood could be shed on this dead land.

She thought of the cancers that Thion was surely carving into her skin this very moment. They, too, yearned for life and yearned for water. She remembered the words of the Seventh Prophet:

Life calls itself to life

there will be no end to it

save for that the dying make

She stopped, and let down her coffin gently.

She thought that she might abandon them: the coffin and the dead man within. She might run off into the avenues to rub her burning shoulders with frost, her dry tongue with water. She was already in the City. Surely, it would not be abandoning the dead man if she failed to deliver him to his particular niche in his particular war’s particular mausoleum.

Instead, though, she knelt beside it. She wanted to kiss the coffin, but even the scant waters of her lips—no. Instead, she set her forehead against it. She did not pray—The dead are dead and cannot answer prayers—but she thought, and if she was so accustomed to prayers that her thoughts took the form of a prayer, then surely that could be forgiven.

Master—no.

Dead man.

You are silent.

You are still.

You are unwanting.

No thirst, no hunger, no pain in death.

Only the end of doing.

Lend me, for a moment, your uncaring death.

Lend me, for a moment, your unending peace.

Your death is infinite; no loan shall diminish it.

It is not for myself I ask for this.

It is only for my service to you and all the myriad dead.

She nearly ended her silent prayer with “That the Master grant me death,” as all her prayers had always ended, but stopped herself. The dead man was not a Master. He was dead.

She paused for a moment, waiting for some response. When she had prayed back at the Tenth School, she could feel the Master’s will, responding to her prayer, working its imperatives on her mind and heart and the school itself around her.

Here, though, there was nothing. Not even the familiar cold shudder of some distant will.

It was her fault. She knew no prayers were answered here—she never really thought—he was dead, which was to say is, she had been a fool to hope that her prayer might give her some relief.

It was impossible for him to grant her prayer or even to hear it.

Not one step backward but there were no prophets here, no Masters, no teachers. She was the only living thing on this half of the world, unless by chance there was some other apprentice on some other pilgrimage.

“I should stay,” she blasphemed to herself, even as the thionlight burned into her skin. “I should run feral and fallen. I should renounce every doctrine of the Dying, I should hide in the shadows and drink the hoarfrost and crack open the coffins and eat the dead. There is enough here in this city—every corpse of every war—that I would not thirst nor hunger for all the length of time, and after all that I should be no less than starving and thirsting, no worse off than now.”

She stood, but she did not take a step.

She breathed—in and out, three times—and hated the thing within her that demanded breath. Then she knelt, shouldered the coffin again, and made her way towards the center of the city.

It was some time before she reached the mausoleum of the crystal war, a grand complex that covered the whole center of the Fifth City, wings upon wings, corridors upon corridors. Unlike the other mausolea and crypts of the city, it was undecorated, entirely without words or carven skulls or even the subtlest of filigree, as if those who built this city at the beginning of time knew full well the enormity of grief it would eventually contain. So there was no decoration, only plain stairs into hallways, only great blocks of ancient stone.

Befitting the dead, its flat stone was black, but the side that faced Thion had been bleached white. Impulsively, she reached out to touch a pillar as she finished her ascent of a side stairway. The layer of white, rotten stone crumbled to powder even at her lightest touch, revealing the pure black beneath.

She shook in fear and embarrassment, to have left the mark of her passing on this sacred place. “But what of it?” she thought. “I have been here. That is no less than the truth. So let that be the mark of my passage. It is as good a record as any history.” Still, she did not touch another wall.

Inside the mausoleum, it was dark, except for the occasional shafts of painful thionlight from some entrance or another. When it was dark, she could almost convince herself that she was back in the cool, winding corridors of the Tenth School. It was only the silence that divulged her true location. But when there was light, she could see the walls—lined with endless coffins, stacked neatly upon each other in ordered rows, each in its place—and she knew that she was in truth as far away from her school as it was possible to walk, among the dead and beneath a dead star.

“I love you,” she said once to the dead, quietly, because she did. It was not a sin, and yet she felt ashamed.

Eventually, she reached the shadowed side of the mausoleum, and after that there was no light at all. Still, she knew the way as she had learned it by heart in the Tenth School, remembering the words of her teacher, each step, each turn, until she came at last to the dead man’s specific niche, his specific planet that he had died failing to defend, his specific battalion, squadron, unit, place. Not trusting her memory, she felt with her hands and found the place, an opening in the wall—two openings, she felt now, one next to another.

She wondered if these were the last two unhallowed dead of all the crystal war.

Hefting her coffin once again, with the strength of the last moments of her task, the most important task she had ever performed, she lifted the coffin up into its place—his place—and then pushed it until it slid satisfyingly into position.

Until she did it, she did not realize how tired she was. It was no sin, to sleep upon a pilgrimage, only to dream, and she was certain that she was too tired for dreaming. She closed her eyes, breathed in again, and leaned against the wall of coffins. Slowly, unevenly, she slid down until she sat at the base of the wall, eyes closed, surrounded in all directions by the embrace of the hallowed dead, and let herself fall at last into a deep and untroubled sleep.

• • • •

Sometime later, she will wake. She will stand. She will walk out of the mausoleum, out of this timeless city, away from the dead, back up the slopes of scree and across the gravel plains and back to her school, the Tenth School, arriving at last as a journeyman. She will take her new place among the dying, with her own teachers to serve, her own apprentices to foster.

Sometime later, she will wake. But for now, she is still. For now, she sleeps. For now, she is indistinguishable from all the other dead in this pure and ancient city.

©2024 by P H Lee.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

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

Further Examination and Capture of Candle Skulls Associated with the Baba Yaga

Mari Ness | 960 words

Recent scholarship has shed considerable light on many previously puzzling or mysterious aspects of the life of the Baba Yaga—or, as some would still have it, the Baba Yagas. But one element has remained largely unstudied, and indeed, almost completely ignored: the remarkable candle skulls that typically illuminated her houses and the pathways to them. This oversight is almost inexplicable, given not just the natural scholarly interest in the macabre, but by the inherent magical and economic potential suggested by these skulls—more so than the chicken legs that have proven so fatally attractive to so many researchers.

After all, the chicken legs—remarkable as they are—have but limited commercial potential, given that they can only be attached to small huts activated by at least three drops of the Baba Yaga’s blood, and to no other dwellings or vehicles. And while many of these huts certainly appear charming at first glance—at least, to those with a certain taste for the rustic and the alarming—attaching these dwellings to modern sewage and electrical systems, including those offered at RV parks, has proven difficult to impossible. The legs themselves present additional problems once attached. Though they are, by all appearances, tireless, they are also regrettably slow, difficult to direct, and unceasingly hungry. As scholars, we cannot but mourn the many lives lost in discovering their defects, for so little financial gain—particularly when the costs of no less than twenty-seven destroyed RV parks are factored into those costs.

These defects do not apply to the candle skulls, which offer, we believe, many benefits. By all accounts, the candles provide reliable if flickering light; require no electricity or other power source; can be dimmed or brightened by simple voice command; and can be tailored into a personal alert system. They also appear to function quite well in nearly every environment, from luxury palaces and condos to run-down RV parks.

Why, then, have these skulls not been given the same attention as the chicken legs and other aspects of the Baba Yaga—or Baba Yagas—leaving us ignorant on so many matters regarding their manufacture and maintenance? Who, for instance, were the owners of these skulls, and did they release their skulls willingly or unwillingly? How do the skulls show such little damage from near constant lighting? What is their energy source? How do they sense approaching visitors?

To answer these questions—and the more critical question of why we could not find a single article on this subject—we gathered seven eager young scholars, in their first through fifth years of training, and charged them to study every reference on the subject, interview any and all witnesses to the skulls, and chase the houses of the Baba Yaga that had survived the unfortunate prior RV park incidents. We ourselves remained available for questions during certain phases of the moon, and were able to give our students the most recent contact information available, including cell phone numbers and email addresses, for every living creature who had claimed to see one of the skull candles.

Unfortunately, one of our scholars vanished shortly after entering the Sackler Library of Monstrosities (a consequence, we fear, of not following the library’s instructions as precisely as scholarship and the library’s regulations would require). A second disappeared after choosing to spend the night in an RV park speculated to have been recently visited by the Baba Yaga/Yagas. A third claimed to be bitten by footnotes discussing the Baba Yaga, and while we treated this claim with the dubiousness it deserved, that scholar by necessity needed to be dismissed from the project. A fourth, to our dismay, was found actually chewing on glowing skulls; that these skulls were later found to be elaborately decorated sugar skulls created by mortals by no means mitigated the enormity of the error. This scholar, too, was dismissed.

The remaining three sent irregular messages now and then, mostly on stained oak leaves. We were largely unable to review their progress, but trusted in their ambition and stated prior interest in skulls. Seven years into the progress, one of us received a grey skull, warm to the touch, possibly human in origin; attempts to make it light largely failed until—quite by accident—a young child left a small doll nearby, at which point a light inside the skull flared up for an instant before dimming again. Further dolls left near the skull, by adults or children, had no effect, but we were encouraged enough to send out messages to our remaining scholars urging them to redouble their efforts—or send us more skulls.

Seven years later, we received seven spun sugar skulls that, when touched, left burn marks on our hands.

We recognize that our efforts so far, combined with the apparent loss of seven promising young scholars, may seem discouraging. But despite this, we would ask the Council to continue to fund another seven or nine young scholars for another seven or nine years of research. Think of the advantages. The project so far has already rid us of four scholars—possibly seven—clearly incapable of handling this level of research before they were assigned to projects that might have caused general harm, and identified yet another RV park that might be well to avoid. More importantly, we must stress the importance of discovering why these skulls are so difficult to study, and the benefits of a lighting source that can also work as an alarm system and deter intruders at what we presume is a most reasonable cost.

We are available to answer any questions you may have, and await your positive reply,

The Candled Circle of Witches,

Gainesville, Florida branch.

©2024 by Mari Ness.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Other work by Mari Ness has appeared in Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Diabolical Plots, Strange Horizons, Kaleidotrope, Nightmare, and right here in Lightspeed. A tiny collection of tiny fairy tales, Dancing in Silver Lands, was the 2021 Outwrite Fiction winner, and is available from Neon Hemlock Press; a poetry novella, Through Immortal Shadows Singing, is available from Papaveria Press. For more, visit marikness.wordpress.com, or follow on Bluesky at mariness.bsky.social.

What Becomes of Curious Minds

Wen-yi Lee | 5329 words

On the third evening of every week, dozens come to Stalactite Keep to hear the storyteller teach about the place beyond Wonderland. Tonight, with only dewdrops of honeycomb light seeping through the cells of the sky, Creed told them of toys: rubber balls painted like the rainbow, tops that spun only as long as wind touched it, dolls dressed exactly like little children.

“Dolls are the most valuable gift a child from the Beyond can receive. The closer in likeness to their owner, the more exquisite the craftsmanship, and the better the gift. They are miniature guardians of their children, imbued with courage. Imagine,” he said, because there was nothing more powerful than imagination in Wonderland, “a storm raging all around; a wocky’s claws tapping on the window; the Jagged Queen’s army marching outside, and in your arms is a guardian that is all the bravest parts of your soul. A Beyonder without a doll struggles to live on.” In the audience a mushroom child sighed and snuggled under their mother’s cap. Creed looked away, but felt the twinge anyway.

Everything Creed knew came from his mother, Joy, who had first fled down the rabbit hole with a baby on her back, escaping a much worse monster than a jade rabbit. All she had with her were a looking-glass, a hair ribbon, her checkered dress, and her woven slippers. It was now customary to wear the pattern of the Beyond to listen to tales from its remaining child; amidst the sea of checkers tonight there were also rabbits with ear ribbons and a card soldier carrying a card doll.

He wasn’t actually sure if every Beyonder had a doll, but most of them did, and his mother’s had been called Grace. She had looked just like Joy: hair in waves like ink, rosebud lips, a blue checkered dress with woven slippers. Grace had been left in the Beyond. But when Creed was a child terrified of the Jagged Queen’s guards knocking on doors, his mother made him a doll with a sword and his smile, and they called it Journey, so it would not be the end.

“Dolls’ names are very important in the Beyond,” Creed went on. His voice flowed out over the courtyard, the way he had refined it over the years, and Wonderlanders tipped their heads to it as though it were wind. He had refined the stories too: “They must have power, but they cannot have more than you do, or they may replace you entirely. If done right, however, there is no greater joy or comfort for a Beyond child than a well-crafted, well-named doll.”

A little rabbit tentatively put its paw up. “What about the Ferris wheel?”

“Excuse me?” said Creed, unused to questions he could not answer.

“The Ferris wheel, the wheel that you can sit on and it takes you up to the sky in circles as it turns.”

“That sounds ridiculous. Wherever did you imagine that?”

The back of the lawn shifted as the rabbit was neatly pummelled by his siblings. Creed straightened. “You came in from the north. Did you hear something on your travels?”

There was an awkward pause. One of the older rabbits twitched its ears. “Just yesterday a girl from Beyond came through the comb. They say she has stories, too.”

A girl from Beyond.

“Do you think she knew Mother Joy?” a mushroom child piped up eagerly.

“Don’t be stupid, only the storyteller knows Mother Joy.”

“But she is a storyteller!” It was the young rabbit, hopping daintily out of his siblings’ reach. “She has a looking-glass. A little round one.”

A muttering went through the audience. Mother Joy’s looking-glass sat in its cradle next to Creed, reflecting his captive audience back to themselves. Wonderlanders used water pools and crystal sheets and spheres of solid honey for their own images; the looking-glass Mother Joy had brought with her when she fell down the rabbit hole had become the symbol of the Beyond—the symbol of the storyteller. It had been unique in Wonderland for fifteen years.

Creed held up his hand and the crowd fell silent. “Where is this girl?”

• • • •

It took several hours by carriage to arrive at Caterpillar Grove, where the newcomer had fallen into the prepared bales of lichen. Falling from the honeycomb sky had purportedly been an unpleasant, bloody business before the Wonderlanders began preparing landing cushions, but that was far before Creed’s time. He and Mother Joy had fallen onto a cotton heap in the rabbit dens.

Caterpillar Grove smelt like sweet smoke. Alighting, Creed scrunched his nose as politely as possible and followed the sound of a different voice.

“—lots and lots of foods. Sugar apples, popped corn tossed in salted eggs and curry leaves, sweet potato chips, chocolate cookies, ooh, cheese battered in breadcrumbs and fried.”

Creed came to a halt. Before him was a crowd of caterpillars. There were also two mushroom folk, one paper crane, a spiderling hanging from an arch, and an elderly cat on the ledge of the well. All of them were listening, rapt, to the girl on a dais at the centre of the square.

She was clearly human, probably no older than Creed’s fifteen years. Yet her hair was an unnatural mushroom red, and she wore a striped blouse. Striped! Like missing half its lines. Creed began to feel uneasy, and despite the crowd it seemed he was hardly the only one.

“But cheese can’t be eaten like that, can it?” came the spiderling’s gossamer voice from overhead. “Cheese is to be eaten with bread, or grapes, or apple, or wine.”

Creed recognised his mother’s wisdom. He had told the Wonderlanders of the food from Beyond as well; many of his mother’s dishes had made their way into the most coveted Wonderland tables. But he had never heard of any of what the girl was describing.

Meanwhile, she just looked perplexed. “You can put cheese in everything.”

That was quite enough, Creed thought, striding forward. The crowd parted, the whispers of his name rising to chaos, and the girl’s eyes widened. “Holy shit.” Her voice was high and crass, punctuated, so unlike his own. It sliced through the babble. “You’re human! You’re the other storyteller. Thank the gods!”

Creed blinked. He had shaped his voice after his mother’s lilting tongue, keeping out the skritches of the rabbits, the paper-cut edges of the card legions, the rounded springy vowels of the mushroom people. His mother’s voice was a heroine’s. It was the sound of the Beyond. And yet here was this girl, claiming to be from the same place, who sounded nothing like his mother at all.

So, he thought, she must be a fake. She had heard of Mother Joy, and thought to use her status as leverage. The honeycomb had many doors. She may have been from Elsewhere, but she was not from Beyond. What about the looking-glass? Well, what about it?

He tamped down the instinctive rage. Better not to cause a scene; Wonderlanders were fickle and disliked conflict. “I am also thankful,” he said carefully. “There’s never been another Beyonder, besides my mother and myself.” Animals often came through the comb, and often found themselves far more distinguished in Wonderland than their old homes. There was a steady stream of such newcomers and well-refined understandings about welcoming them, the same of which could not be said of humans from Beyond.

“Your mother’s here too?”

“She passed some years ago, from her injuries at the Battle of Stalactite Keep.” Creed’s voice stiffened involuntarily. “I am what is left.”

The girl’s momentary pity turned rapidly to horror. “Hang on,” she said. To what? Creed thought. “You can’t leave?”

“The honeycomb’s doors open only one way, and they are in the sky,” he said curtly. “A door to our Beyond has never opened since my mother and I arrived.”

“Until now.”

Imposter, he thought. “Until now.”

She frowned, oblivious to his discernment. “Damn. I just wanted to get away from my ex-boyfriend. We were at the Carnival, I told him to fuck off but he wouldn’t so I left, then I tripped over a pothole and woke up—” she gestured. “Here.”

Creed became acutely aware that the crowd had not dispersed; if possible they were pressing closer, ears extended, pupils widened. “Why don’t you come back to the keep with me,” he suggested. “I can have lunch brought, and we can talk about these circumstances.”

“God, yes, please. I tried to eat the mushrooms and they were like don’t eat the mushrooms! Then I tried to eat berries and they were like those are the spider queen’s eggs! Fuck if I was gonna eat those, obviously, but is there any normal food around here?” She let out an annoyed breath, puffing her cheeks, then folded her hands. “Sorry. Yes. I’d love to go with you.”

Creed had absorbed this extraordinary diatribe in silence. “What is your name?” he asked at last, as he motioned her towards his carriage.

“Aiden,” she said. “You?”

“Creed.”

Her face twitched politely. “I’ve . . . never heard that name before.”

No, he thought, turning hers over in his head. Neither have I.

• • • •

Creed had his favourite meal brought: spiced fried pancakes layered with bluebell egg and salted honeygrass. “It will differ from what you may have had,” he said, watching for her reaction. “We have different ingredients here. My mother always loved it regardless.”

Aiden pulled the plate toward her. “I’ve never had this in my life, actually.”

“Everyone in the Beyond eats this.”

“I’ve heard of it, sure, but nope. Obviously not.”

“You lie.” It came out fiercer than he intended. Aiden looked taken aback.

“Whoa, my guy. What are you talking about?”

“My mother told me about fried pancakes in the Beyond.”

Aiden frowned, looking as though she were trying to decipher him. She seemed about to speak again when something caught her gaze.

Reaching forward, she touched his breast pocket, where his mother’s looking-glass was tucked. When not displayed during story sessions, a silver chain hammered by the miner moles looped through its bronze handle and latched it to his pocket. “Is that a Dumarier?”

A low thrill ran through Creed. He had not shown her the minuscule letters on the inside rim, engraved beside the maker’s circular mark. If she recognised it by name, perhaps she really was from the Beyond. Perhaps everything else had a simple explanation. “You know it?” he asked, handing it to her.

“I’m obsessed with antiques. I have a Dumarier telescope, and their compact too. Wow, look at this engraving. You can see how their old bird patterns evolved into the current motif.”

Troubled once more, Creed closed his hand over the artifact, concealing the swimming reflection of her round face. “Antiques? You no longer have looking-glasses?”

“Well—we call them mirrors, and no, not ones like this. When did you say your mother got to Wonderland?”

“Fifteen years ago.” She had been only a little older than Creed was now. “She received the new looking-glass for her birthday. Why are you asking me this?”

“Dumarier hasn’t made mirrors like these in more than seventy years.” Aiden gnawed on her lip, staring out the window at the sky, where the current sun cell was closing and making way for the next to open with dripping light. “Time must work different here.”

Creed set down his prongs. The clatter echoed against the high ceilings, the glossy table, all the luxury paid for by his stories and built by pieces of the Beyond exchange for the Wonderlanders’ adoration. “You’re saying that the Beyond has changed?”

Aiden cocked her head, glancing back at him. “What, Wonderland hasn’t?”

Creed could not even conceive of Wonderland seventy years ago, but he recalled what it was when he was a child. Crystal gates had blocked every road, guards examining every wagon, and the Stalactite Court made sport of forcing citizens to joust to the death. Wonderland had been a dangerous place when Mother Joy arrived. Creed had grown up guarded by the Grinning Lynx, and still the air was syrup-thick with tension, the honeycomb’s doors like pitted eyes. He thought of Wonderland now, cheery and golden and sprouting new landscapes every day, and he could not recognise the two as the same at all.

“Tell me about where you come from,” he said.

• • • •

Aiden became his guest, and he began spending his days with her. They had sweet salad with toasted nuts and caramelised carrots courtesy of the Lynx, who proclaimed Aiden “an odd sort of type, not really a Mother and not exactly what one would have expected.” Aiden drank six cupfuls of the Jade Rabbit’s honey tea and gaped when they visited one of the wells where sweet rain pooled thick in the ground, ready for collection. He showed her the bubbling glass fields and the castles on either end, the card towers with their furrows glistening with hardened honey.

He enjoyed spending time with her. He had only ever had guardians and listeners, and Aiden was personable and chatty in a way that fit neither. More than that, however, as they explored Wonderland, she told him about her Beyond, and how she had come to tell stories—much like Mother Joy and Creed himself, entirely compelled by incidence.

“I thought it was kind of weird when all the caterpillars were asking me to tell them about my dinner. Like, I’d just fallen out of the sky, and I was looking at giant talking caterpillars that smelt like incense. And they wanted to know about banana fritters? I’d never had to explain fried bananas. But I get it now.”

She had to explain banana fritters to Creed, too, along with telescopes, airships, plastics, and electricity. They exchanged stories. His Wonderland for her Beyond, which was a city called Demeteria, where towers of stone and metal and glass rose into the blue sky, connected by shining bridges. For the mid-autumn festival, they no longer rolled rice into leaves and cooked them in the embers of the fireplace, as Mother Joy had. Aiden went to festival carnivals that lasted the week, where they sold the rice bundles on strings in a dozen different flavours. He had known the sky there was blue, but he learned that twice a year in Demeteria, the sky split and spilled out coloured light in rays that shimmered across the clouds for days, so close one could almost touch them from the tops of the towers.

Creed could have asked questions all day, even as something deep in his stomach roiled with every answer. Aiden asked where in the Beyond he was from, and he found he simply didn’t know. The Beyond, to him, was simply the Beyond. But Aiden drew him maps—bad ones, but maps nonetheless—and he learned the Beyond was vast and getting ever vaster in its range.

All this seemed far more fantastic to Creed than Wonderland, but Aiden was dazzled by the place. “They’re kind of nervy, aren’t they?” she remarked as they strolled down the wooden beach. A fawn had approached them with a glint in its eye and then cantered wildly away into the golden foam before it could speak. The oysters clacked irritably after it.

“They don’t know what to make of you.” That was true enough; he had sent checkered clothing to her, simply to put the Wonderlanders at ease. Though bemused, she had put on checkered trousers willingly. If it hadn’t been for her looking-glass, the Dumarier compact that she kept in her left pocket with a packet of lip paint, they might not have accepted she was from the Beyond at all.

He had noticed the Wonderlanders looking at them with a wariness that had never been present before. It wasn’t only that Aiden was strange. It was as though something had changed, now that there were two of them. As though one storyteller was a rare treasure, like a honeycomb star, but two began to be too many and too real, no longer a thing of stories—at least, when their stories even agreed.

Aiden’s Beyond was not the Beyond his mother had described, in all their bedtime stories in the attic of the Jade Rabbit’s tea room or the back of the Lynx’s manor. Her Beyond had been pastoral, filled with the most wonderful yet simple pleasures. Aiden’s Beyond was vast and loud and seemed to hold endless complicated things. She had been a city champion of something called windsailing, she had grown up not with a doll but with a stuffed rabbit called Snowball, which in turn was something cold and white from the sky that dusted Demeteria like sugar, while Mother Joy’s home had been warm and sunny all year round.

There were echoes of sameness, yet difference enough to make him doubt. For six years he had been the voice of Beyond, but he had never really been there. He knew more of shuttering suns and queens with crystal claws than he did of the place he had been born. But they were willing to lavish him for his stories, and his stories had been his mother’s, so what other choice had he had but to tell them? They felt true to him, and so he always thought they must be true. Yet what now if they weren’t?

Part of him didn’t want to know, the same instinct that prevented him from jumping off cliffs and picking from the wrong side of mushrooms. But there was another part of him that burned with a need that went beyond curiosity. It felt familiar in an excruciatingly painful way.

Without quite knowing why, he took Aiden to the courtyard at the very top of the Keep, where his mother had fought the Jagged Queen.

“That must have been horrible.” Aiden’s eyes roamed over the rocks as though she could see the battle in their weathered faces. It had been. The Grinning Lynx had kept Creed away from the battle, so he had only seen what the card soldiers brought back. Everywhere the Queen’s claws broke skin, his mother’s flesh had hardened and begun sprouting stalagmites. Within a day they had grown through her throat, a gaping mouthful of glittering green teeth, and Creed buried a crystal figure he didn’t recognise.

He had been seven years old. Aiden was the only other person from the Beyond who had stood here since; she was peering at the starburst of green at the centre of the courtyard, where Mother Joy had run the Jagged Queen through and made her molt into crystal. The honey light caught the veins of the stones and turned them alien. A hero had died, and a villain had died, and so the world had been remade with Creed at its centre, alone now, adopted into adoring masses.

Creed returned to his rooms that night and looked at the empty place on the bed. There Journey sat nestled in the sheets, stitched and shaped into courage. He pulled it to his chest, stroked its hair, felt yearning for home like grief.

• • • •

The card-splitting show was Aiden’s first public event. Theatre was popular in the playing lawn where the Jagged Queen had once held jousts; there had been some campaigns to abandon the Keep altogether, but on her dying bed with crystals in her lungs Mother Joy had asked Creed to give it new life instead. So Creed and the Grinning Lynx and the Jade Rabbit had gathered volunteers and set about rejuvenating the Keep. Once they buried the bloodstains and hacked away the crystals, returning the lawn turned to a stage for storytelling, croquet tournaments, opera warblers, and card-splitting shows, where card-jesters spliced themselves together so they were simultaneously five-of-hearts and eight-of-spades. Grass and honey had covered the old furrows. Some of the younger rabbits didn’t know at all that bunny skins had once been strung from the buntings.

After an act where five card jesters formed a melded pyramid, the show came to an intermission. Some of the audience dispersed to fetch cups of honey tea or simply take a walk about the lawn in the warm weather. Aiden was beaming from the spectacle, and Creed thought perhaps it was settling down after all. This was when two dormice approached, bearing a box between them. Creed recognised the dollcarver’s badge on their sashes and sat up.

“Storytellers, the carver sends his regards!” The mice raised the box over their heads so it neatly met Creed and Aiden’s eyes, revealing the doll nestled in the bedding.

Creed’s breath caught. It was exquisite, the finest he had ever seen. It was Aiden cast in white wood, draped in a red checkered dress that matched her painted hair.

Aiden’s brows and mouth both twitched. “Is that . . . me?” Uncertainly, she took the box. In the shadow of her bent head, the figurine did seem to distort, its whorls deepening into grooves. “Wow. That’s . . . kind of creepy.”

The dormice exchanged looks, little eyes flickering under little fuzzy lids. “It’s a doll, storyteller, to replace the one you left.”

Aiden frowned. “I don’t—”

“Thank you,” Creed interrupted. “Send the carver our praise. It’s his best work yet.”

The mice scampered off. Gingerly, Aiden set the box on the seat. “That was weird.”

“It is not,” he protested. “In the Beyond, dolls are the most—” But then he stopped, remembering who he was speaking to. He pulled the box onto his lap, fingers curling unconsciously over the edges. It exerted an unfamiliar weight.

Suddenly one of the mice stopped and turned back, tail twitching in shyness. “Storytellers,” it began, in a skittering sort of voice. “Is it true the Beyond has ships that can fly through the sky? I have a caterpillar friend, you see, and she was telling me such stories.”

Creed opened his mouth—airships, he had asked so very much about them, but before he could speak Aiden laughed. “Yes, it’s true. Airships with balloons as big as ten horses, with metal gears whirring in the hull, swooping through the sky. They’re awesome. On clear days you can see the entire mountain range from the tiniest window, and drink spiced tea as you fly.”

The dormouse’s eyes were saucers. “Storyteller Creed,” it said, bowing and bowing again as though embarrassed, “why is it you never told us about airships?”

“I told you of the birds and kites.”

“Maybe so, but birds and kites are hardly airships.”

Aiden chuckled. “Nope. But if you come tomorrow, I can tell you about the first time I rode one.”

“You’ll be properly telling, then?” The mouse’s nose was twitching now, its entire little body practically shivering.

Aiden sat back in her chair and slanted a smile at Creed, the kind that suggested a friendly joke. “If this guy is willing to share the stage.”

At that moment the dormouse’s colleague exclaimed loudly across the paces. They were still on the clock, and couldn’t stories wait until after? The mouse ran off, sash fluttering anxiously, and Creed watched it depart with the undeniable realisation that he had a decision to make. He had spent so long engrossed in Aiden’s stories that he had not considered her telling them to anyone else. Neither had he considered her listening to his.

After her death, he had taken on his mother’s duty of teaching the Wonderlanders about their world. Where he did not remember or never knew, he drew his own careful extrapolations to fill in the blanks. There were many; his audience always had more questions, wanted more details. He had begun inventing some, and then as his memories ran out or faded, begun inventing quite a lot. Everything had always been as true to his mother’s stories as he could make it. But they were no longer true to what the Beyond was now. What would she think, once she heard what he had made up? What would she do?

“Aiden?”

“Yeah?”

He thought of asking her not to speak. He thought that perhaps the Wonderlanders would not believe her version of the Beyond, so attached they were to his. But then he thought that it was perhaps too late, that if he wanted her to be an imposter, then he should not have had her in his company. By indulging himself, he had also made himself a liar.

“The show is starting again,” he said, which made it final.

• • • •

The only stories Creed had never told were the ones that even the Beyonders knew were only stories. The once that he had tried, the Wonderlanders had thrown up a fuss. “That doesn’t sound like the Beyond!” they had cried. Perhaps he could have explained that it wasn’t exactly the Beyond, but it was still created by the Beyond, and wasn’t that just as good? But he had been nine years old, and it had simply been easier to tell them the stories they wanted to hear.

Nonetheless, there was a bedtime story Mother Joy had heard from her own mother—Creed’s grandmother Faith, that faceless woman in his dreams—about a generous gingerbread boy. In it, a dozen gingerbread children were lying on a baking tray, freshly cut from the dough. One of them had been the last to be made, and thus had all the leftover dough and was larger and would be more appetising than all the rest.

As the children lay there waiting, they began to inspect their shapes. “I have such short arms next to the rest of you,” one said mournfully. “I shall be the last to be picked.”

It so happened that the large gingerbread boy was also very kind. “I can give you a little dough,” it said, knowing it would be the first to be picked from the plate and feeling guilty, “to round out your arms.” And he plucked two balls of dough from himself and gave it to the short-handed child.

“My smile is lopsided,” said another, “now I shall be last to be picked.”

“I can give you a little dough to widen your smile,” said the large gingerbread boy, and did exactly that.

And so it went, as each of the gingerbread children felt they were missing something, and the large gingerbread boy had so much. When they were all perfectly shaped, the baker came to put them in the oven. When she saw them, however, she started. “Why,” she said, picking up the large gingerbread boy. “Whatever happened to you! I can’t sell you in this state, not next to your siblings. There’s hardly enough of you to make a gingerbread man at all!”

For the generous gingerbread boy had plucked off so much of himself that he was now little less than a smudge of dough. “I shall have to throw you away,” said the baker sadly, “for there won’t be a new batch of dough till Wednesday.” And she slid what remained of the gingerbread boy into the can of wastes, and set the remaining perfect eleven into the fire to bake.

• • • •

The next morning was the summer solstice. On this longest day of the year, when the sun was in the centre of the comb and dripping light all over the hills, Creed and Aiden went to the meadow behind the Keep with a picnic basket.

When they were settled on the blankets he brought out a bowl. “I made you something.” Aiden’s eyes widened as he lifted the lid off the soup. She breathed in deeply, eyelids fluttering in the steam.

“It smells amazing,” she said, and it did, like wild roots and cream, sage and butter and toasted nuts and just a drizzle of fresh-fallen honey.

“Try it,” Creed said. He was ashamed to hear himself sound shy.

He could not help but watch as she lifted a spoonful to her lips and swallowed. She looked at him with a shine in her eyes, a dimple in one cheek, in a blue checkered dress, and for a moment, she could have been home. She took a second spoonful and then a third, sighing with contentment.

Then, unexpectedly, she threw her arms around him and buried her face in his shoulder. “I’m so glad I wasn’t alone here.”

Creed’s words were stuck in his throat. He had the urge to stroke her hair. But then her heart was beating against his and he realised, all too suddenly, how alive she was. She pulled back, still beaming.

Then she dropped the spoon. “Oh,” she said. “Oh!” She doubled over, whimpering. “Creed?”

He turned away.

There was a sound like a fading mosquito hum, fibres and skin and bones contracting. It went on and on, until finally, there was only silence. Only then did he look back.

There was a little thing wriggling on the grass, smaller and more perfect and more painful than a doll. He picked Aiden up and dropped her into the jar he had brought, with a honeycomb sieve over the top for air. She struggled against his fingers, and when imprisoned, beat against the glass with her pinhead fists. She might have been sobbing, but her voice was too small to hear.

The sun glinted the right way, and his reflection was caught over hers in the glass, warping both their faces. He had always held up the looking-glass, not looked into it himself. But now that he was, he saw—for Aiden was, he had realised, as good as himself in Wonderland—a version of himself that cast a harsh light on every bit of what he was missing, everything he had tried to hide in this world that was his home and was not his home. She had given him the Beyond. But in doing so, she could have taken away Wonderland.

He didn’t look again as he stowed the jar into his bag. The guilt was hot and thick in his veins, but there could only be one storyteller. There could only be one Beyond.

Creed kicked over the soup, the distilled mushrooms seeping away into the soil, and set a course back to the Keep. His heart felt broken; it felt whole.

• • • •

On the playing lawn of the Stalactite Keep where citizens once lacerated one another with crystal lances, Creed set down his looking-glass and told a story about doors.

The Beyond, he said, was vast and held untold mysteries. Such was its vastness that brave explorers ventured into its unknowns, on ships that sailed through the air. Who knew what they might find? Very few returned to tell their tales, and so tragic were the fates that Mother Joy had never wished to divulge them. But at the end of Beyond, where the land dropped into nothingness, an explorer had found a looking-glass. When she stood before it, another land appeared: one of honey and wonder, and on a green field stretching before her were two children on a picnic blanket.

She stretched her hand through the looking-glass, and the children had turned to see a shimmer in the world with a woman reaching out to them from its centre. The girl had leapt up and begun to sob, for it was her mother, who had searched for her all the days she had been lost.

She had taken her mother’s hand and bid Wonderland farewell; how marvellous a place, and how hospitable its hosts. Would the boy like to return with her? she had asked. But he was a child of Wonderland, and his mother’s blood was in the stones, and he had chosen to stay.

He tilted his head away and watched the reflection of children curling into their mothers, of applause, of the golden crystals they threw lavishly at his feet.

©2024 by Wen-yi Lee.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wen-yi Lee is Clarion West alum from Singapore whose work has appeared in Nightmare, Strange Horizons, and Uncanny, among others, and in anthologies such as Year’s Best Fantasy 2 and We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2022. She likes writing about girls with bite, feral nature, and ghosts and her forthcoming debut novel The Dark We Know (Gillian Flynn Books, 2024) has a bit of all three. Find her on social media at @wenyilee_ and otherwise at wenyileewrites.com.

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

An Elegy for the Former Things

KT Bryski | 993 words

You’ve been driving for hours and I wish you would stop. You clutch the steering wheel so hard, your knuckles pop white, your palms slick with sweat and desperation. Sunken, glassy, your eyes flick between the fuel gauge, the endless road, and the trembling land through which we pass. The fields pulse, magnificently multi-coloured, mantled by fungus heavy as jewel-toned snow.

Out in that seething world, spores seed and sprout in songbirds’ lungs. Throbbing scarlet mycelia bloom from the mouths of dogs and stopper rabbits’ throats. From buried town to buried town, iridescent gills flutter in silence where human voices have departed. Noise no longer matters to this world; it is singing a new song, one of quiet growth, a relentless slow conversation between the soil and the fungus, which threads itself implacably through it.

You mutter aloud sometimes, just for the sake of it. Nonsense, doggerel. It hurts to hear: your throat so parched, speech rusted, misshapen. I’m torn between treasuring your words and dreading them. There won’t be many more when the fuel runs out, when the car stops, when the fungal advance slides itself through the infinitesimal cracks around the windows.

What will starships see, gazing down at this new Earth? Imagine the continents traced in rainbow hues; imagine the smoke and smog lifting, the planet shaking out its new pelt as the last towers crumble to their graves.

You don’t like thinking about that. You say so, frequently. Two days ago you couldn’t make contact with your mother and yesterday your phone stopped working altogether. There wasn’t time to prepare, you explain aloud. You threw the seventy-two-hour kit in the trunk and drove without destination, without plan, without even a full tank of gas.

Before the radio gave out, futile speculation crackled in from the world’s last academics, its final experts. Did the fungus understand its own predation? How much self-awareness flickered under its smooth, slick caps? They couldn’t decide which was worse: impersonal consumption or conscious revolt against the former world. Neither option comforted you. With trembling fingers, you snapped the radio off.

When you tried to find the signal again, it was already gone.

Is this the last car, I wonder? How many others have sped northwards, westwards, onwards? How many are collapsing into the fungal embrace, even now?

Many. Many. Along the roadside lie corpses with fungus instead of bones, skulls and femurs and ribcages softening as their nutrients leach away. We pass an overturned bus, its sides split open, disgorging the dead. Fresh blooms pour like rivers through its seams. It’s still possible to discern individual features under the growth: noses, chins, cheekbones.

Your throat hitches, your hand rising to your mouth. After that, you fix your gaze to the road ahead. You don’t look elsewhere.

Night is falling, and the fuel is dropping lower.

You unspool curses like a litany. I’m entranced. They feed upon each other, relentless as the devastation outside, and they crescendo to an almighty, thunderous fuck. In that moment—your head thrown back, your eyes squeezed shut, you’ve never looked so beautiful.

An ominous clunk. The car isn’t meant to flee this far or this fast. You push onward, rolling your locked-up shoulders, when a deer leaps across the road, its antlers sheathed in fungus, a red ridge of growth spiking around its head like a crown. You swear again—less poetically—and jerk the wheel hard.

The car spins off the road. Gravel strikes the windshield, the wheels spinning frantically for purchase. With a horrific crunch, the car slams into a tree, the deploying airbag muffling your scream.

For a few minutes, I’m not certain you survived. Everything is perfectly still, fantastically quiet. The deer has vanished into the woods, though it’s probably already sunk to the ground, filaments knitting themselves through its blood vessels, questing into its marrow. Its last breath will smell like rot and rebirth.

So will yours, but you haven’t taken it yet. Groaning, you push yourself upright, try to restart the car. It whirs, clicks, and falls dead. More curses, more wailing, and I wonder that your throat doesn’t tear, I wonder that this is what you want the end to sound like. I wasn’t expecting this vitriol. You gnash your teeth and claw at the airbag, and I think you’d scrape the fungus from the planet with your fingernails, if you could.

Maybe in the beginning, you could have, but it’s too late now. The spores are in the air: invisibly riding winds and exhalations, inevitably drawn to quivering nostrils. With every landing, more mycelia; with every mycelium, more spores. It’s mathematical destiny, a planet’s next chapter written by the unforgiving hand of exponential growth.

None of this matters to you. You measure the space between the fungus’ leading edge and the car doors. Running might be possible. Waiting’s another—for a few minutes anyway.

I guess it depends how you want to spend them.

You’re sobbing now, and I wish you would stop. It isn’t sad, this rising tide of new life. It’s the spark to kindle a new flame, the floodwaters to wash away the old bones on which this world stood, and ready the soil for something more magnificent than you could ever know.

Your mouth falls open: red and moist as my brethren. From the moment the car doors closed me in with you, I’ve invisibly ridden your exhalations, quested to your marrow, seeded myself in the bottom of your lungs.

This part passes quickly. You won’t realize when it happens, though the grey jelly of your brain is pleasing to my roots. And when your last cries have fallen under the silence of our world, when we stretch over and under every inch of this planet’s soil, when the distant stars remark how we have caressed you all—

We will lift our song above this Earth and make even the galaxies beautiful.

©2024 by KT Bryski.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

KT Bryski is a Canadian fantasy author. Their short fiction has appeared in many places, including Apex, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. They have been nominated for the Sunburst, Aurora, and Eugie Foster Memorial Award. When not writing, they enjoy craft beer and choral music.

EXCERPT: Redsight (Solaris Books)

Meredith Mooring | 3031 words

An imaginative new space opera for fans of Gideon the Ninth filled with sapphic romance, space pirates, a blind witch and powerful priestesses.

Korinna has simple priorities: stay on the Navitas, stay out of trouble, and stay alive. She may be a Redseer, a blind priestess with the power to manipulate space-time, but she is the weakest in her Order. Useless and outcast. Or so she has been raised to believe.

As she takes her place as a navigator on an Imperium ship, Korinna’s full destiny is revealed to her: blood brimming with magic, she is meant to become a weapon of the Imperium, and pawn for the Order that raised her. But when the ship is attacked by the notorious pirate Aster Haran, Korinna’s world is ripped apart.

Aster has a vendetta against the Imperium, and an all-consuming, dark power that drives her to destroy everything in her path. She understands the world in a way Korinna has never imagined, and Korinna is drawn to her against her better judgment.

With the Imperium and the justice-seeking warrior Sahar hot on her heels, Korinna must choose her side, seize her power and fulfil her destiny–or risk imperiling the future of the galaxy, and destroying the fabric of space-time itself.

Coming February 27, 2024 from Solaris Books.

Chapter One: Korinna

The church was empty except for the red, whispering bodies.

As she knelt on the floor, Korinna’s veil stuck to the red dust she wore over her eyes. Sticky from the heat of so many candles, plumes of incense thickened the air. Her knees bruised. The marble floor bit into them with the poison of a viper. She felt it all and pulled each sensation deep into her heart.

The simulacrum held a handful of other clerics at this time in the ship’s day cycle, their heads bent in respect. Meditating on Vermicula’s perfection every day wasn’t required, but this was the one place on the Navitas where Korinna could find some damn peace and quiet.

She huffed her veil out of her face and froze.

Among the blurred splotches of red that were the other clerics, there was a stranger. A woman stood by Vermicula’s altar with the heat of a candle in her hand. The goddess’ tomb rested on a low platform off the ground, covered with a recumbent effigy of her likeness.

The dark-haired woman placed the candle in Vermicula’s cupped hands and the flame jumped like it had been doused in accelerant.

Despite her limited vision, Korinna saw the woman’s face more clearly than she had ever seen anything, her eyes taking in each detail for the first time. Normally, Korinna saw in blurs and smudges. She relied on tactus, the tactile energy of all things, to feel the world around her instead.

She had never seen a face before.

Transfixed, she stood up, her aches and pains forgotten. Seeing the shine of the woman’s black hair, the rosy tint to her fair skin from the heat of the candles, and the warmth of her black eyes struck her speechless.

The woman breezed out of the simulacrum, her skirts hissing over the marble.

Korinna’s mouth hung open. The other clerics were still kneeling at the altar or bent over in prayer in the pews.

Wandering out of the heavy atmosphere of the sacred space, she pulled the red gossamer off her head and sucked down the cool air of the ship. A class of novices, mostly children half Korinna’s height, trudged down the hallway under the supervision of a pinched priestess. The unsworn adepts eased past her with quiet steps, shrinking before the doors to the simulacrum.

A few of the students would become clerics soon if they survived, but many of them wouldn’t.

Years ago, Korinna had been one of them. Born and raised on the Navitas, she’d spent twenty years in the Order of Vermicula without setting foot on land. She was in her final year as a cleric, an initiated member of her Order, but without the duties or responsibilities of the priests and priestesses.

“Class sizes are getting a bit ridiculous, aren’t they?”

Therese appeared at her elbow along with two other clerics from Korinna’s cohort.

“For now.”

Did she say that out loud? Maybe Korinna had inhaled too much incense, but her brain felt like it was operating at half its normal capacity.

“Excuse us,” Therese said. “You’re standing in the way.”

“Sorry—There’s—I have to go.”

The other women whispered as they filed into the simulacrum together. Thank the Ember she’d finished her meditation already. There would be no peace for the clerics forced to share the simulacrum with Therese and her friends.

She’d been one of those friends once, before she swore herself to the Order. Korinna and Therese would have been only thirteen then, barely older than the class of girls she’d just passed. Before the night when the others disappeared.

Until they pledged their lives to Vermicula, all adepts were treated more or less the same. As children, they studied languages, geography, mapmaking, and tactology, the science of tactile energy. At age thirteen, novices breathed in incense from Vermicula’s altar and they were forever bound to her Order.

Once Korinna and the survivors joined the Order, nothing was the same.

Clerics still had lessons, but they were separated according to ability. The largest class in her cohort had ten women and three men. That was the class Therese was part of, the class Korinna had expected to be placed in.

Now she didn’t have a class. She had remedial lessons by herself with Mistress Vega, an octogenarian priestess who had ruled as High Priestess of the Order in her day, before yielding the status to Mistress Renatia.

After spending so much time away from her cohort, Korinna was an outsider. Not to mention she usually lacked for stimulating company, as Mistress Vega didn’t entertain casual talk. In the mornings, they spent most of their time drawing Korinna’s blood out of her arm and into obsidian vials. Mistress Vega would fall asleep during their academic lessons in the afternoon. Korinna didn’t have the heart to wake her, and used the time to read the romance stories Vega kept on the tallest shelf in her office, even if they were mostly about men.

Without any lessons between now and dinner, Korinna was cut loose, a frayed wire fallen out of its braid. She looked around for the dark-haired woman again, but saw only the usual mass of blurred shapes moving through the corridor. Then she felt for her electric communicator and read the ten missed notifications with her fingers.

“Oh, shit,” she whispered, running down the crowded hall to one of the lifts that would take her to the upper levels of the Navitas.

It took several minutes to reach the High Priestess’ office. She arrived panting and braced her hands against her thighs. Renatia’s assistant, Pegarda, stood before her. Between gasps of air, Korinna managed, “I’m sorry, isn’t there still time to meet—”

“Absolutely not,” said Pegarda. “Your meeting with the High Priestess requires an hour of time. It must be rescheduled.”

There were still thirty minutes left. Korinna didn’t understand why they couldn’t have the meeting now, but this was the Order. There were rules, and traditions, and respect that must be observed.

“The High Priestess has a meeting with the Red Friar of the Ardus Sector about the candle supplier that cannot be pushed back. You’ll receive another appointment.”

Korinna scuttled out of the office like she’d been swatted with a rolled-up prayer book. Had Pegarda always been such a piece of work? If Korinna hadn’t been so distracted by the woman with the beautiful face in the simulacrum, she would have been on time. She couldn’t stop thinking about her. She didn’t know people could look that way, that someone’s eyes could pin you where you stood without them moving or speaking a word.

With her meeting over before it began, she made her way to the dining hall. Its high ceilings echoed with the sound of voices and the free embers of tactus that came from having so many Redseers in one place. Korinna could feel the waves of tactus reverberating off the marble surfaces and the glass that revealed open space outside the ship.

She loved being in the dining hall beneath the expanse of infinite black. And, while she couldn’t see the individual stars in that dark world overhead, their warmth beamed down like an array of altar candles.

A flurry of clerics buzzed around a woman in the cohort above hers. Korinna stopped at the edge of the circle.

“Meifeng got a posting,” one of the younger ones explained.

Everyone was well informed except for Korinna. Being at the bottom of her cohort didn’t lend her many friends. She waited until the group of younger students left before congratulating Meifeng in person.

“I heard you got a posting. You must be excited.”

Meifeng shrugged. “I’m going to the Molaris Sector. A trade vessel owned by an old family.”

A position as a tactile navigator on a trade vessel was prestigious. Trade vessels were prioritized over personal ships of any size, and only the most skilled Redseers were assigned to them. The only postings requiring more skill were warships.

Korinna took a seat across from Meifeng. “What’s wrong? Aren’t you happy?”

“Of course I am. But. . . ” Meifeng let out a breath.

“It’s okay, you can say what you mean.”

“You’ll understand when you get a posting. It’s not easy. They don’t—You aren’t given a choice.” Meifeng’s voice wobbled.

Korinna wasn’t going to spend her life off the ship, but she held her tongue.

“But you’ll make a fantastic navigator.”

A watery laugh. “For now.”

She took Meifeng’s hand and squeezed it. It wasn’t discussed often, but Korinna had heard stories about navigators who only lived for a year after receiving their assignments. Redsight was too demanding on them long-term, but sacrifice was expected of them as priests and priestesses.

The older woman squeezed back. “What am I doing? I’m sorry about that. It’s hard keeping this in when everyone’s so happy for me.”

“You don’t have to apologize.”

“I’d better go.” Meifeng rose to leave. “But I hope I’ll see you around once you get off the Navitas too.”

“I’m not sure that’s going to happen, but thank you.”

“You never know. It seems like everyone’s getting a posting these days.” Her footsteps faded as she strode off.

Korinna hadn’t heard about anyone else being sent off the Navitas, but, then again, she didn’t get to hear any of the interesting gossip in her lessons with Mistress Vega.

She rose and went to grab a nutrient drink with an extra dose of stimulant paste so she could eat while she worked in the library. The hour she’d set aside for her appointment with the High Priestess was usually spent studying, and she needed to make up the work now or Vega would call her a waste of Vermicula’s radiance when she arrived empty-handed for her lesson tomorrow.

She’d had the same study carrel there for years, where she kept her papers, slate, stylus, and tactile books when she wasn’t in the library or at lessons. But she’d spent all day alone.

After moving her belongings to one of the big communal tables, Korinna began writing her essay on the impact of star density on homeomorphism. With a deft hand gripping her metal-tipped stylus, she imprinted carefully placed raised dots into the thick paper framed on her slate.

All descendants of Vermicula were born with Redsight. It restricted their vision while allowing them to manipulate tactus, and so Korinna had learned to read and write through tactile markers. In the Galactic Imperium her condition was called blindness, but on the Navitas it was how everyone lived.

She worked until the essay was nearly finished. The stimulant paste had cleared her head of whatever fumes she’d ingested in the simulacrum, thank the Ember.

Aware as she was, Korinna didn’t miss the commotion when a group of clerics entered the library. They were from her cohort, and Therese was at the back of the herd.

They ambled from one table to another before pausing by Korinna’s workspace.

“Let’s not sit there,” one of the men said.

His innocuous words made his friends laugh into their hands, sharing some inside joke at her expense. Korinna gritted her teeth, wondering if this was another part of her Pegarda origin story, if this was how she would end up as a bitter secretary wielding influence over the tyrants from her youth while those more talented in her cohort took positions across the stars.

Before Korinna could snap her stylus in half she felt a smooth brush along the back of her neck, silky and powerful. She straightened in her chair and whipped around, but there was no one behind her. Apart from two bored nuns grading papers by the heating unit, she was alone.

That couldn’t be right. She felt around until she caught a thread of sensation, an echo left in the wake of powerful energy. It felt familiar. She’d felt the same sensation earlier today in the simulacrum.

Korinna darted out of her chair, nearly tripping over the hem of her robe. Arms outstretched, she searched for that thread and pulled until the weave of matter around it buckled, showing her the way.

Someone was walking through the library and they didn’t want to be detected.

It was complex work: the kind of energy transfer that required great natural ability. Reforming matter to conceal a moving being was so difficult Korinna had only read about it in the histories of the Enlightened Ones, Vermicula’s early descendants.

Softening her footsteps, she followed the thread through the stacks of tactile books. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d needed anything from the shelves in these obscure sections of the library.

A heavy door creaked open and she froze in her tracks. For the second time in her life, Korinna saw the clear features of a face. That face. The beautiful, dark-haired woman from the simulacrum.

And here she was again. In some part of the library Korinna knew she must’ve visited before. But now, standing before this radiant figure, with every feature visible in minute detail, everything else around her faded away.

All she could see was her.

Korinna darted for the open door, but when she reached it, the woman was gone.

Stepping inside, she teetered on her feet like she was bracing against a wind. The crest of tactile energy from the volumes contained in this room subsumed her in a riptide of tactus. There were texts that held the imprint of other worlds, that contained traces of stars and cosmic electromagnetism. She ran her hands over the spines of some of the titles. Not all of the volumes were written in tactile script—some of them were smooth. Written in print.

It struck her for the first time that there was a large universe outside the Navitas that lived differently, that read books differently, that saw faces every day and found the experience unremarkable.

Who was the woman from the simulacrum? How had she gotten into this room, deep in the warrens of the Order’s library, and left without anyone noticing her? How had she concealed her presence so efficiently?

“Who let you in here?”

Korinna spun around as a claw-like hand clamped around her forearm. So consumed by her thoughts, she hadn’t noticed anyone approach. She’d been reading one of the spines—Grimoires of the Red Vestals—when she was jerked out of the room like a child being dragged by the ear.

“Let me go!”

Thrashing in protest against the nun’s unbreakable grip, Korinna stomped down on her foot with all her force. The woman yelped, withdrawing with a curse.

“Wicked girl! Of course it was you I found running your hands all over those awful books! This room is off-limits to clerics. There’s nothing in there that will make you a stronger Redseer.” Her tone sharpened. “That door was blessed by the High Priestess herself, so tell me how you got inside.”

Korinna took a moment to straighten her robes. “Someone left the door open. I didn’t know what the room was, so I went inside.”

The nun asked her to repeat herself. When she held her point and insisted she didn’t know the room existed until the door was left open, the nun relented.

“You could have died standing in there. You’re lucky I found you. Some of those books have an appetite, and you have less tactus to spare than the rest.” The nun paused as if contemplating a punishment. “Off to bed with you. If I ever catch you in that room again, I swear by the Ember I’ll string you up over Vermicula’s tomb for the next blood offering.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Korinna gathered her slate and a few of her papers before leaving. She’d have to punch out the rest of her essay in bed before falling asleep.

Copyright © 2024 by Meredith Mooring. Excerpted from Redsight by Meredith Mooring. Published by permission of Solaris Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Meredith Mooring is an employment discrimination attorney from North Carolina and a graduate of The Seeing Eye guide dog school. In her spare time she serves on the board of directors for a non-profit that pairs guide dogs with blind children.

A Sneak Preview of 2024 Books

Aigner Loren Wilson | 787 words

By the time this reaches you, we will be a few months into 2024. Over the course of 2023, I reviewed 12 different books from across the speculative fiction genre. Books to haunt you, books to make you dream, and books that feel all too real. Hopefully over the past year, one of the reviews helped you find a book you loved. If you haven’t read any of my reviews from the past year, you can check them out at lightspeedmagazine.com/authors/aigner-loren-wilson and find your next favorite read.

I wanted to give a little bit of a sneak peek at some 2024 titles I’m excited about reading and reviewing.

Ours
Philip B. Williams
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9780593654828
Viking, February 2024, 592 pgs

Williams’ novel is probably going to be one of the first new books I read in 2024. Ours is a novel about American slavery and imaging a history where magic can help free those enslaved. Black surrealism that grapples with Black history is always a hard yes for me.

Moon of the Turning Leaves
Waubgeshig Rice
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9780358673255
William Morrow, February 2024, 320 pgs

In Moon of the Turning Leaves, Waubgeshig Rice returns to the world of his novel Moon of the Crusted Snow. I have not read the former, but the latter has been advertised as a standalone sequel following a new community within the same post-apocalyptic world. What draws my attention to Rice’s work is the same thing that catches my eye about Williams’ novel: the topic of an isolated group of BIPOC people surviving together in community despite the world burning around them.

The Eyes Are the Best Part
Monika Kim
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781645661238
Erewhon Books, June 2024, 288 pgs

I first heard of The Eyes Are the Best Part on r/PubTips, a sub-Reddit community for writers to share query letters and get critiques. Monika Kim shared the first 300 words and the query of the book about a year or so ago, and my interest was extremely piqued. Then I saw it again in Publisher’s Marketplace only a short time later and knew that I just had to read the finished novel. The Eyes Are the Best Part has some great body horror vibes and a familial darkness that I tend to go crazy for.

The Stars Too Fondly
Emily Hamilton
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9780063320819
Harper Voyager, June 2024, 336 pgs

Lesbians in space: need I say more? Emily Hamilton’s The Stars Too Fondly is advertised as a science fantasy rom-com, which is where I got hooked. I don’t tend to read a lot of romance novels but a bit of love among the stars does the soul good.

The Melancholy of Untold History
Minsoo Kang
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9780063337503
William Morrow, July 2024, 240 pgs

Minsoo Kang’s debut showcasing a 3,000-year history of a place through a speculative lens has whet my new appetite for historical speculative fiction titles. It’s something I blame Tananarive Due and Shelley Parker-Chan for. They’ve crafted well-researched, captivating tales in ways that have converted me. The small excerpts and pages from Kang’s title promises an unusual and exciting novel.

The Butcher of the Forest
Premee Mohamed
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9781250881786
Tor.com, February 2024, 160 pgs

I’m a Premee Mohamed fan through and through, making each new release something to look forward to. The Butcher of the Forest gives me dark secondary world fantasy vibes with a bit of a mystery. The forest world calls to the trail runner in me, and I can’t wait to see what creatures and strange happenings Mohamed’s crafted.

With 2024 fully upon us, I am knuckle-deep in one of these books. 2023 brought a lot of great reads, and it also brought my first award nomination as a critic or someone who writes words about other words. I don’t know if 2024 will bring the same recognition, but I know I want to bring something new or more to my reviews.

Not quite sure what that is yet. But I’m excited to find out. Hope you continue to follow me as I read and shout about books I think people should care about.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aigner Loren Wilson is a queer Black writer of speculative fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and games. She serves as a senior fiction editor at Strange Horizons and has guest-edited issues of Fireside Fiction and Apparition Literary Magazine. Her work has appeared in FIYAH, Anathema, Arsenika, and other publications. When she’s not writing or editing for others, she’s learning, hiking, or loving on her fur babies—both human and animal. To check out her books, games, bread bakes, and other writings visit her website (aignerlwilson.com).

Book Review: Captive: New Short Fiction From Africa (Rachel Zadok and Helen Moffett, editors)

Arley Sorg | 1584 words

Captive: New Short Fiction From Africa
Rachel Zadok & Helen Moffett, eds.
Paperback
ISBN: 9781946395948
Catalyst Press & Short Story Day Africa, April 2024, 453 pgs

Back in the May 2022 issue of Lightspeed, I reviewed a book called Disruption, which brought wonderful fiction by African authors to audiences in the US and beyond. Catalyst Press and Short Story Day Africa have done it again, offering readers another marvelous anthology, called Captive. This is literary fiction at its best, with over 400 pages stuffed with important themes, entertaining motifs, and heart-wrenching events. The book is separated into three sections: “Claustrophobia & Inescapable Obsessions,” “Metamorphosis, Cycles and Identity,” and “Self-Awareness, Illusion, Delusion and Deception.” Eleven remarkably gifted authors provide a story for each section, for total of forty-four incredible tales¹. I’ll highlight a few pieces as examples, but sometimes it’s hard to pick “stand-out” stories when so many of them are top tier.

Salma Yusuf opens the book with “If the Honey Is Sweet, Why Does the Bee Sting?” A young woman faces a conundrum when she and her husband realize that they are no longer happy in their marriage. One of the more imposing questions at hand is whether they should stay together for the sake of their daughter. The husband goes away for school and not long after announces that he plans to take a second wife, which throws the protagonist, Swafiya, into an existential crisis. She must face the possibility of a lifetime of misery, of continuing to serve as wife and mother, which is the tradition, and which is also what her relatives want her to do. Then . . . she encounters one of the seven daughters of the sea. Literary flair and stark honesty give this piece life, from the striking imagery at the outset to the startling revelations throughout, all leading up to Swafiya’s encounter with the fantastic. This is a masterful meditation on gender, sacrifice, identity, and happiness. The essential question of whether we should fulfill the roles the people around us want us to fulfill may be relatable to many, but the sharp sense of the protagonist’s specific situation comes through brilliantly.

“Vanishing” by Kabubu Mutua is completely engrossing, right from the start. The narrative feels like it’s constantly shifting, and in lesser hands, stylistically, this kind of structure or energy might throw a reader from a story—but Mutua’s hands are by no means lesser. The author pulls in gossip, the influence of family, emotions, religion, tradition, and so much more to build a tale that feels slightly hectic but also kind of magical to read. It all starts when Rabeka flees her wedding, which scandalizes the folks in town. But this is just the beginning, and even the nature of scandal is interrogated through Mutua’s sly storytelling. The piece is packed with nuance and subtext, which rewards a close reread. Among the broader thematic strokes, in my read, is the way that things are not always what they seem. Dig deeper, pay attention, and I believe you’ll find powerful themes on desire, gender, expectations, and even autonomy. I devoured this story and enjoyed it immensely.

Zanta Nkumane’s “Sometimes You Make Me Smile” is, simply put, extraordinary. It’s a brooding meditation on the dissatisfactions and pains of life, grounded in plausible characters and situations. Beautiful lines counterbalance the grimness, the almost noir vibe. Shifting perspectives and times give the author flexibility to build a story with both intrigue and feeling. The piece opens with a dead body and a detective but is more about human relationships, desire, and perhaps even inadvertent or unacknowledged self-destruction. The dead body at the outset can be seen as a symbol of the violence we enact on each other and ourselves.

“Good Things Come” by Josephine Sokan begins with an evocative and visual paragraph, enticing the reader with vivid writing, promising more to come. Sokan uses the senses to completely absorb the reader in the story. Sokan also paints an interesting character in quick strokes: an individual at odds with those around them, in ways that many will find somewhat relatable while also riveting; in this case, being at odds is perhaps more extreme than most. The storytelling feels like a stream of consciousness piece at first, but the shifts and pieces are compelling, glittering with observations, and there is still an underlying sense of a direction, all of which lures the reader to continue. Besides this, each piece is interesting on its own, each moment and thought worth contemplation. Before long, things start to take clearer shape, and Sokan leads you by the hand right into shock and heartbreak. One of the stronger themes that comes through for me is the way that people who think or behave a little differently from the so-called “norm” are (mis)treated and categorized, including attempts to “correct” rather than to understand or meet halfway. Well-intentioned parents are mixed into this idea, who would try to force hexagonal pegs into round holes; or perhaps pretend that their children are round in the same ways as all the other round children, rather than seeing and nurturing their specific kind of roundness. Sokan also makes clever use of irony, enabled by giving us a narrative from a different perspective, while simultaneously, in a more subtle way, examining the unbearable weight of expectations. Underscoring it all is a profound loneliness and a need for some kind of connection, for a sense of love, leading to sharp, penetrating tragedy.

Parents and children are central to many of the stories in this book, and not all the stories have some kind of speculative or fantastique element. “Section 47” by Sola Njoku begins with Wonu as a child being homeschooled by what many of us would consider an aggressive and perhaps even abusive mother (depending on how we were raised and our own cultural contexts). She is fixated on seeing specific results, which instills in Wonu a deep, life-long emotional hurt. As with so many entries in this book, Njoku’s writing is effective; evocative. The prose and the situation work together to create an immediately engaging narrative. Wonu as an adult, despite her past, delivers to her own child some measure of the anger and impatience she experienced, as he likewise struggles to learn at the pace she wants. But it’s also not as simple as that: Wonu has learned about the inequities of education for Black kids, especially for children of Nigerian immigrants, and feels she must push Mayowa, she must give him any possible advantage before he matriculates into a system designed to disadvantage him. This awareness is exacerbated by the treatment she received at the hands of hospital staff, just after Mayowa was born: rough-handed nurses who seemed to see her as a chore, medical personnel who acted as if she were ignorant and perhaps even unworthy. And this is just the beginning of what is, ultimately, an experiential examination of the panic and dread that can be a big part of the lives of parents of color who submit their kids to a predominantly white culture. The effect of the culture clash is exemplified by the fact that after he starts school, her son soon begins to pronounce his own name incorrectly, because it is the way teachers and “peers” pronounce it. Then, Njoku injects even more momentum into the story, drenching the reader in anxiety and tension. We see the struggles of a woman who is constantly looked down upon, the variety of unceasing racist interactions, and we feel, intimately, the ever-present threat and pressure of her life. And then, when you can barely breathe, when you think, can things get any worse: the white folks at Mayowa’s school start asking him if his mother hurts him. This story interrogates the ease with which many of us center our own perspectives and worldviews, assuming we own the “Truth;” readers may even end up reflecting on their responses to the beginnings of the story. Y’all . . .this is a heartbreaking, unrelenting, and powerful story, one which is too real in its horror.

If you are into thought-provoking, high-quality fiction, you will really enjoy Captive. Zadok and Moffett have gathered some seriously skilled, insightful authors. Those authors have poured unflinching and intense visions into these pages. The journeys awaiting you are profound.

¹. At the time of this writing (Dec 30, 2023) these are the numbers from the advanced copy I was given by the publisher. The publisher’s one-sheet (an informational page publishers send to certain parties) and the publisher site, however, lists twelve authors—one of these authors does not appear in my copy. It could be that the details of the final version are not yet resolved, which is not uncommon in publishing; it could also be that one of the authors dropped out, and that the site and one-sheet were not updated, which is, likewise, not uncommon in publishing.

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: The Year of the Locust by Terry Hayes

Chris Kluwe | 820 words

The Year of the Locust
Terry Hayes
Hardcover
ISBN: 9781668055786
Atria Books, February 2024, 784 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review! This month we’re exploring a twisty, tense spy thriller that takes its time getting to some unexpected places in The Year of the Locust, by Terry Hayes.

The Year of the Locust is told mainly from the perspective of CIA super spy Ridley Walker, one of the elite few Denied Area Access agents sent into the most dangerous situations on the planet, and right from the start does an excellent job of making Walker both personable as well as believable as a character. Tasked with rescuing an important source from deep within the chaotic borderlands of Afghanistan, Walker becomes involved in a globe-spanning chain of events that had me eagerly flipping the pages to find out what was going to happen next.

First off, I want to warn you—while I greatly enjoyed The Year of the Locust (otherwise I wouldn’t be recommending it), it reminded me a lot of Cryptonomicon (by Neal Stephenson), which, for those who have read that particular book, means you know indicates two things—there is going to be a wealth of highly obscure, carefully researched information, and that there are going to be a lot of pages. Thankfully, Hayes doesn’t go quite as deep into the rabbit holes on his information dives as Stephenson tends to, which for me kept the book extremely fast-paced while still providing a wealth of interesting real-life events that helped flesh out the story. Don’t get me wrong, this book is a hefty tome which will probably take you some time to finish, but it never felt like a slog to get through, and Hayes does an excellent job breaking up his chapters into digestible chunks that move the story along quite neatly.

That being said, I also want to say that I really enjoyed the level of care that Hayes put into the worldbuilding of The Year of the Locust. The CIA is presented as a complex, multi-faceted organization, and Hayes thankfully doesn’t allow his description to devolve into hagiography. Walker, as a spy, is fully aware of both the good the secret world can do, as well as the many times where that secrecy has been subverted towards darker ends, and Hayes drops in plenty of examples of the latter to balance out Walker’s penchant for the former. There are more than a few thorny ethical dilemmas that take place in The Year of the Locust, but Hayes does a good job avoiding simplistic jingoism as the answer to life’s problems.

(I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a trigger warning here for those uncomfortable with scenes of graphic violence and torture, because there are some of those in this book. They’re handled well and never felt gratuitous, but be warned.)

The other thing I also really liked about The Year of the Locust is that it is a remarkably progressive book in a style of story that doesn’t usually tend that way. Ridley Walker, while a highly competent super spy, is no iron-jawed Hollywood action clone quipping off one-liners after mowing down the bad guys, but instead is a multi-faceted person dealing with the mental health aftereffects of his actions and desperately worried he’s out of his depth in situations that seem intractable. Still, at his core, Walker remains a good person trying to do the right thing, which really kept me invested in how his tale was going to end. Furthermore, Hayes does a wonderful job including little touches in both dialogue and worldbuilding that show this isn’t just a spy thriller concerned with catching the bad guy, but a study of how the world is changing and how it might keep changing in the future—one that recognizes the past, but is not necessarily compelled to repeat it.

Overall, there are a lot of other nice things I want to say about The Year of the Locust that I simply don’t have space to do so here, but I hope that you’ll give it a shot despite the initial imposingness of its length. It’s exciting, it’s thoughtful, and it takes some twists and turns that are wildly unexpected, but which all add up to an excellent read.

Read if: you’re a fan of Bond and Bourne but could do without the martinis; you know how many people can keep a secret; you’d punch the hell out of baby Hitler.

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: P H Lee

Laurel Amberdine | 737 words

How did “A Sojourn in the Fifth City” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

In the broadest sense, this story is a version of the science-fantasy novel that I started writing when I was fourteen years old, wrote and rewrote many times over high school and early college, but never managed to turn into a satisfactory narrative or reach my planned ending. It was typical of adolescent novels, I think, in that I kept adding on complex setting and thematic elements and didn’t have a strong grasp on characterization, plot, or voice.

It was the story that I learned to write from. I got stuck many times, and every time my approach was to try to rewrite it and re-imagine it from the beginning, adding more complexity to confusion to the text every time. Eventually, the whole project collapsed under its own weight and I moved on (after a period of frustration, depression, tears—all the usual consequences of abandoning a decade of creative work).

A few years ago, it occurred to me that I could go back to the setting and the narrative and write only the ending I had planned and never reached, that all of that setting complexity could be tucked into the side and I could focus on the core emotional landscape of an apprentice at the end of her pilgrimage. When I was a teenager, I didn’t have the focus or skill to pare the story down that far, but now I did.

So I tried to write it, initially in the context of a online “writing contest” (not for money, just a group of people writing to deadline together). I got, I don’t know, about a third of the way in and stalled out. Then I got some well-intentioned but ill-conceived feedback and that kind of killed my desire to work on it. So I left it behind, as I leave a lot of my work, as a half-finished text file in a corner of my hard drive.

About a year after that, Kelly Link asked Twitter to write her a ghost story for her birthday, and I immediately thought of this story (despite it not having any ghosts per se), which of course had been rattling around in the back of my head the whole time. I sat down to finish it and got about halfway (or so) before I stalled out again. This time, the stall wasn’t because of feedback. It was purely internal—I didn’t have the skill necessary to keep the narrative engaging all the way to the end with only one character.

A year and change after that failed attempt, I was at the very end of the Clarion West workshop. Because of scheduling reasons, I ended up with nine days at the end of the workshop where I wasn’t required to write anything other than feedback for my classmates. At least for me, the sort of intensive work environment in this kind of workshop leaves me unable to do much but keep writing, and I was at a peak of my writing ability, so I decided to go back to the half-finished draft and finish it up. Luckily, I now had skills learned from the workshop and also from a novel I had just finished with a very strong character voice, so this time the attempt actually “took” and I was able to finish the story.

In a very real way, this is a story that took me almost my entire life to write. Sometimes the only thing to do is recognize that you’re not up to finishing a story now, and set it aside to wait until you’re a better writer in the future.

Where are you in this story?

Dead, hopefully. It’s set very far into the future.

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

I’m working a novel in the setting of the Great Sweet Sea stories. I have another novel (the one mentioned above, a science fiction love story) on submission. Really, it’s just raining novels over here. I hope at some point to be able to share them with you all.

A list of my published fiction can be found at my website: p-h-lee.com.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

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

Author Spotlight: Everdeen Mason

Laurel Amberdine | 465 words

How did this story originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

The original inspo stems from a drunken debate about what makes Scarlett Johanson so appealing to casting directors for science fiction movies of a certain type, and how she must feel about it. What would it be like to be idealized for a form you didn’t choose? Why do we allow so much science fiction to frame women as technology to be used without challenge? I thought about my own comfort and enjoyment of fan service-y tropes but also my own frustration about how I’m treated in my life. And of course, Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives is a forever inspiration to me but felt particularly apt in writing this story.

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

My writing process is very chaotic, like my brain. So, I write wherever and whenever the mood and opportunity strikes. I’ve written half a novel on my phone during commutes, poetry in gmail drafts and scenes on the back of old puzzle proofs. I do have a nice office I work out of, but it’s not the only place. The main things I need are: something to write with or on, music, fun stuff to look at when I need to not look at my screen, a cold beverage, a warm beverage, and a treat after.

What led you into writing genre fiction?

It doesn’t really feel like a choice. These are the narrative frames that I was raised on. I also like the ways genre fiction abstracts real issues in a way that makes them clearer and puts characters in such circumstances that you can explore such a wide range of experiences. And honestly, it’s just the most fun. I barely want to be in reality as it is.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I often go through phases with types of books, but lately I’ve been going back and forth between spicy romances (mostly fantasy) and horror, which I think makes sense given my work. Writers who inspire me: Richard Calder, Ruth Ozeki, Sierra Simone, and Ottessa Moshfegh.

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

I am an extremely extroverted and social person, so I am always out or hosting parties. This year I started hosting karaoke at a friend’s restaurant once a month and that has been such a joy. I’ve also been learning how to sew, which has been really fun. When I inevitably crash from over socializing, I watch anime, read, or play video or phone games.

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: Wen-yi Lee

Laurel Amberdine | 830 words

How did this story originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

At some point in 2022, I binged the entirety of Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series back to back (at least, those that were published at that point). That series is such a comfort series now. But it also got me thinking a lot about examining and subverting the portal fantasy genre, and the ways in which the narrative device of the portal world could be used to engage with wider themes. Wayward Children has a lot of resonance with queerness in particular, I think (I also read it on the back of the pandemic and the grief of losing a world you thought was yours definitely resonated there too)—but I started thinking about portal fantasy as diaspora. If you think about it, the character is tossed into this alien land with alien customs in which they suddenly find themselves quite alone. If you put aside the sense of wonder and chosen-one-ness, there’s a lot of scope for thinking about displacement and assimilation.

If I was going to be in conversation with the genre, I wanted to riff on the most canonical and absurdist example of that genre. I love Wonderland because it’s so whimsical and yet actually has some pretty dark stuff in it, and obviously it’s also so canonical that it makes it easy to use as the stage for genre discussion because people will get your references, although I’ve put my own spin on it. I think the absurdity of the setting in this story juxtaposed with the violence and the serious emotional arc made it a lot more impactful than it would have been otherwise. Violence packaged in absurdity can somehow be really striking (me, weeping over the hallway fight from Everything Everywhere All At Once).

It was also fun to subvert the portal fantasy trope with that diasporic lens and think about how a kid who’s grown up in Wonderland would find Wonderland normal, and find their “human world,” which they don’t remember, the actual fantasy land. This story was written for my first workshop at Clarion West in 2022, and I think either P. Djèlí Clark (the week’s instructor) or one of my classmates commented on the fact that the Beyond that Creed comes from, as revealed, isn’t Earth, but is also a fantasy world. I don’t think that was a deliberate choice, just something that came out and felt right, but I like the fact that the story’s not anchored in our context while also hopefully being very relevant.

And then I thought it was such an interesting positioning that these interlopers who enter the portal world usually end up heroes or royals. (There’s potentially an interesting other angle there about using the trope to interrogate coloniality. Although Carroll’s Alice actually isn’t any kind of hero, which I find interesting. It’s more a series of misadventures.) I wanted to cross the Chosen One trope with the immigrant position and see what complications could be drawn from that. Ultimately, I wanted to explore what happens when a character who’s risen to his position by being the sole representative of this fantastical place and legacy meets someone else from that same world, and how it might go wrong.

Where are you in this story?

This story is a lot about being a storyteller, obviously, and I was exploring a lot of prickly thoughts that have drifted through my mind at some point as I increasingly start to think about my own work being packaged for consumption, who I’m writing stories for, and why and how I tell them. Creed obviously does some not very good things, but I hope the story doesn’t come across as ungenerous. It’s an incredibly complicated positioning and I hope that thorniness and sympathy come through.

Is there anything you want to make sure readers noticed?

All the Wonderland references—to both Carroll and Swift. (Kidding—but I do have fun squeezing in easter eggs whenever I do retelling-type things, so I hope spotting them brings people an equal amount of enjoyment.)

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

My debut novel, The Dark We Know, is out August 13, 2024! It’s a crossover YA horror about an art student who returns to her haunted hometown and reunites with her last surviving childhood best friend to finally confront the evil that killed their other friends two years ago. And I’m currently working on my adult book, which is a historical fantasy set in postcolonial Singapore’s Chinese secret societies—hopefully, I’ll be able to share more about that soon (or will have by the time this interview is out!)

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: Phoebe Barton

Laurel Amberdine | 562 words

How did “Now I Know In Part” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

Back in 2018 a call for submissions went out for the anthology Rosalind’s Siblings, and this story was not only written for it, it was accepted by it! However, that particular iteration of the anthology collapsed, and news of its resuscitation didn’t reach me until a week or so after Lightspeed bought it—making this the only story I’ve ever been paid for twice as an original, which I thought was pretty neat. The specific inspiration was Kurzgesagt’s “Wormholes Explained—Breaking Spacetime” video from 2018, which again shows how long it’s taken this tale to see the light of day.

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

As I recall, it took me a couple of months to write the story. That’s not unusual when it comes to me and stories. Sometimes the pressure-cooker environment of a submissions deadline getting closer and closer is the critical element in vaulting over whatever aspect has me penned in. One significant sticking point was where I had to stop to figure out enough of what warp drives did when turned on to present a valid threat to Va’s life at the end—with something like that, I couldn’t cheap out and invent something out of technobabble. It can be surprisingly hard to find exotic ways for humans to die.

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

I write from the same home office I use for my day job, though critically not from the same desk, because there has to be some separation. As I write this I have four typewriters within arm’s reach and two more close at hand. They’re useful machines for outlining or untangling ideas by talking to myself on the page, but beyond all that there’s something comforting about having them there. Those arm’s-length machines range in vintage from 1948 to 1978, and they keep me grounded; a lot of words have already been written, sure, but there are so many words yet to be written.

Do you have any advice for other writers?

Three points come to mind. First, figure out where it hurts; where is that splinter of an idea? What can you do with it and what questions does that raise? Second, deal with it; extract the metaphorical splinter and use it as a quill to write your story with metaphorical blood. Third, be weird; this is the best advantage we hold over the large language models.

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

One recent place you can find my stuff is Rosalind’s Siblings, the original home for this story, radly edited by Bogi Takács and published by Atthis Arts. I also have stories out in the January/February 2024 issues of Analog Science Fiction & Fact and F&SF, which makes this a pretty active winter for me. Beyond that, I’m in the weeds with a stalled novel project and mostly trying to escape from a long-term creative crevice.

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, March 2023

The Editors | 227 words

Coming up in March, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Shingai Njeri Kagunda (“Let the Star Explode”) and Adam-Troy Castro (“The Three Thousand, Four Hundred Twenty-Third Law of Robotics”). We also have two terrific flash pieces: “An Incomplete Body Has No Answers” from Angela Liu and “Islands of Stability” by Marissa Lingen.

Plus, we have original fantasy by Alex Irvine (“Kopki and the Fish”) and Sharang Biswas (“Season of Weddings”). We also have a flash story (“Fragments of a Symbiotic Life”) from Will McMahon, and another (“Only Some of True Love’s Miracles”) from P H Lee.

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: Endria Isa Richardson, Deborah L. Davitt, Oyedotun Damilola Muees, Caroline M. Yoachim, and Dominique Dickey.

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.