CONTENTS

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

PROSE

VADE RETRO SATANA

Maurice Broaddus // 4965 words

Not even Macia’s thick armor can protect her from her own conscience. A story of redemption, self-determination, and discovering what faith truly means.

TALKING TO CANCER

Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali // 5326 words

Layla has the power to save or end a person’s life with a few words. In this story, we learn the true limits of power and responsibility.

THE HARD SHELL

Russell Nichols // 4184 words

The story of a hard boiled detective, a chick, and town steeped in lies. You think you know the truth behind the rhymes, but the truth is you don’t know Jack from Jill.

THE BEEKEEPER’S GARDEN

Christopher Caldwell // 4568

In this dreamy tale, a young woman is trapped in a strange house with a strange woman and no memory of her past. She must brave her captor’s garden and learn its secrets if she is to make her escape.

HOME IS WHERE MY MOTHER’S HEART IS BURIED

Wole Talabi // 5432 words

Arin wants to go home to Earth, and Tinu wants to let go of her Earthborn memories. In this story, we explore the true meaning of family and belonging.

WE LAUGH IN ITS FACE

Barbara L.W. Myers // 2720 words

What good is forever if you have no one to spend it with? In this story, we explore the true cost of life eternal.

GRAVEROBBING NEGRESS SEEKS EMPLOYMENT

Eden Royce // 3995 words

Wanted: one negress to find a certain lost cargo. Welcome to a Charleston of the past filled with a very necessary magic.

EXTRAS

INDIE SPOTLIGHT

COAL

Constance Burris

THANKS

July 2017

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

Welcome to issue three of FIYAH Literary Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction.

As always, we’d like to thank all of our returning readers, and extend a hearty welcome to those of you who are joining us for the first time.

Our theme for this issue is a very conceptual one: Sundown Towns. Sundown Towns are just one tool from white America’s disenfranchisement toolbox. Sundown Towns were towns with curfews that applied to black people--essentially, Black visitors had to exit the town before the sun set, or else they would face the wrath of the town’s white citizens. Authors were charged with submitting stories that discussed this painful history, but we also asked for stories that examined concepts of belonging, of community, and of place. We didn’t know what kinds of submission to expect from a theme like this...but we can safely say that the stories contained in this issue defy all of our expectations.

This issue’s cover captures both the brilliance and power of the Black struggle for acceptance in a hostile world, our defiance that allows us to stare down the sun. Danny Lore’s witty tale “The Last Exorcist” examines politics, identity, and power through the lens of a young, but weary warrior. In “Toward the Sun,” Sydnee Thompson takes us to a planet where two outcasts decide to take their chances with their planet’s unforgiving atmosphere in their search for peace. Jennifer Marie Brissett’s “The Breeze In The Boughs” is a parody that tells us the story of Squirrel’s adventures with his new neighbors, while taking a long look at community, belonging, and compassion. And finally, Xen’s “Cracks” is a haunting story of a world very similar to ours that is on the brink of being swallowed by darkness. Asad, one of this world’s guardians, sees something in that darkness that shakes him to his core.

Also in this issue, we are introducing poetry! We have some evocative, thrilling verse for you: Mame Bougouma Diene’s “Sandscript,” Uche Ogbuji’s “Remote Witness,” and Rodney Wilder’s “I Will Come to You; I Will Remove Your Lampstand from Its Place.”

In this issue’s Indie Spotlight, we are talking to veteran writer Carole McDonnell, author of Wind Follower and The Constant Tower.

Thank you for continuing to support FIYAH. We hope that you enjoy the issue.

Executive Editors: Justina Ireland + Troy L. Wiggins

Poetry Editor: Brandon O’Brien

Acquiring Editors: Brent Lambert + DaVaun Sanders

Layout: LeKesha Lewis

Cover Artwork by Geneva Benton

All material in FIYAH is copyrighted to the original authors and may not be reproduced without permission.

THE LAST EXORCIST

By Danny Lore // 4679 words

Author’s Note: This piece was commissioned and then declined by a prominent magazine. The only information that has been altered/omitted are locations, as those have been deemed a national security risk. Re-post and share at will.

Naheem is our last great exorcist.

When you point this fact out to him, he barely blinks. It is a title he accepts, not with humility or even resignation, but with frustration. “We should have dozens like me out there on the streets,” he argues, “hundreds. It’s why we’re in this mess.”

When Naheem gets worked up, he gestures emphatically, fingers twitching with every word. He tends towards lecturing, and his topic of choice is the accessibility of exorcism in a post-possession America. He is unimpressed by those who say that the art is too complex, too archaic to pass on to the common man. On the contrary, he believes that becoming an exorcist is a task both necessary and easy, if we are to survive as a people. “If only we were less scared” has always been Naheem’s argument, the lesson he’s blasted at us, from his YouTube channel all the way to the footsteps of Congress.

“My dude,” Naheem tells me with a shrug, “Why you think I made those videos in the first place? ’Cause I thought ya’ll couldn’t save yourselves?”

Naheem tells me this at a Greyhound stop. He’s got his backpack at his feet, filled with supplies. His sweatshirt has the graphic of a black fist prominently centered, and his jeans have splatters of what I later discover is yellow spray paint. He arrived two hours earlier than we’d agreed upon, in order to avoid federal agents on his way through demon-territory.

In less than forty-eight hours, our government will likely pass legislation making Naheem’s battle against hell on Earth illegal.

∙ ∙ ∙

The first time I met Naheem was when he fought the take-down of “A Desperate Guide to Exorcisms.” The YouTube video was an instant hit in nightmarish times, even crashing the video site one night due to simultaneous views. At the time, Naheem was a name and a skill set, little more. Over his face was a red ski mask, clearly bought for the video. He covered the logo on his sweatshirt with black masking tape, to conceal the name of the Ivy League university he was filming from. When he stepped back, revealing a large white sheet draped near his bed, he was wearing red Converse. As videos continued to be posted, he became a series of ski-masks—red, navy blue, black, gray, green—the static of voice distortion, and a half-dozen bed sheet backgrounds, all in order to protect his identity.

Naheem never masked his goals in similar mystery. “Y’all need to protect yourselves,” said the first video. “Every time a demonic contract gets signed those fuckers get more powerful. They’re killing us, they’re possessing our neighbors. Wiping out humanity while wearing our skin. So right here?” Naheem jabbed at his desk with his index finger forcefully. “I’m gonna teach you how to fuck over the devil.”

Naheem’s words were damning—for some that word is meant literally. Still, even during the well-televised Seance Hearings, Naheem declared he regretted none of it. Every profanity-laden message was repeated, passionately, as they aired across the globe.

His was an uphill battle against Residences—those who chose to be possessed—and Helltowns. Entire neighborhoods fled demonic attacks. White communities, scared of black neighbors and brown coworkers, went beyond the individual demonic deals, sealing off entire towns. Seals meant black people were forced from their homes come sunset, lest infernal monsters rose to hunt them. Looking back, none of us should have been surprised at the spike in both possessions and Helltowns. Dr. Rene Jacobs of NYU’s African-American Studies department wrote on the phenomenon: ‘This power is seductive to the weak...[who] want to believe they have power, but are so scared of it being taken away nothing can satisfy. If whiteness alone cannot save you from the existence of blackness, what next but descending into hell seeking new weaponry?’

This interview is not the first time I encountered Naheem. The first time, he stood at the steps of Congress after the Seance hearings ready for the next battle. He’d made a stop before meeting the press, trading his suit and tie for a pair of faded black Dockers and a Northface. By this point, he no longer hid behind the anonymity of ski masks. His rounded cheeks and dark eyes had been made for warmth, but in front of cameras there was steely resolve and impassioned devotion to a losing cause.

Naheem took questions like a PR vet. Every sentence was a soundbite, often accompanied by sharp, dismissive snorts about the hearings. When compared to the threat of demons destroying our homes and soul, there was no legal entity threatening enough to silence Naheem.

I only asked one question that day. “When does this crusade stop?”

I’d been assigned to cover Naheem about halfway through his rise to infamy. Somewhere down the line, he went from a young man with a yanked YouTube channel to a contender for the cover of Time Magazine. The Seance Hearings were aired in their entirety on CNN, co-opting every other potential news story. Pundits around the clock—some human, some Residences, some with forked tongues and Armani suits—questioned his methods. Was it fair for him to lash out at demons, they asked. Was he worse than the demons he exorcised? Was he selfish?

CNN, MSNBC, and Fox both instituted a three minute delay to bleep out Naheem’s responses. Most other networks didn’t. If you have yet to watch Naheem’s appearance CNN alongside Dr. Chad Overton, the noted demonologist, you are missing the origins of one of the most scathing memes of all time.

I called his efforts a crusade—at the time, I’d dismissed Naheem’s mission. The possessed were people who had made a choice, and none of us were ’truly’ suffering anymore than we had before. Helltowns had only just begun to spread; in my naiveté I believed they would be dismantled. I convinced myself that was why I’d phrased my question the way I did.

Much, much later, I recalled how often I’d heard that word, crusade, uttered in reference to exorcists. I parroted language promoted by editors and journalists who made deals in order to get bylines. Like many of my colleagues at the time, I did my job poorly.

Naheem took the question more seriously than I did, perhaps because he actually understood the importance of it. “Exorcists were always in the trenches, even before y’all noticed the war. Our crusade ends when demons stop invading our bodies, our homes. When black people don’t have infernally-mandated curfews keeping us out of towns and cities we’ve called home for generations. Weren’t you listening? Did I stutter?”

The swell of reporters’ voices crescendoed again, until Naheem’s lawyer—fully human, a novelty nowadays, but a devoted and brilliant novelty—dragged him away. Afterwards, another swell began, this one from Naheem’s fans and detractors. Hatred spewed in alternating human and infernal tongues, all of which rolled off of Naheem like holy water.

As I write this, more than 52% of the seats in both US House and Senate are filled by Residences, all of whom traded their bodily autonomy for political and financial gain. There are more Helltowns than ever before, and there are even reports of parents making contracts for their children.

Trying to save humanity is a dangerous proposition nowadays, but Naheem is less concerned about the risks than one might think.

∙ ∙ ∙

Naheem gets a rental car. It’s a red sedan, and it’s only then that I realize he’s wearing those red Converse, the same ones that he wore in the first of his videos. They’ve acquired some embellishments—ornate curlicues and bubble letters have turned them into a custom job. At first, I make faulty assumption that the markers are arcane; NM86 is scrawled on the outside of the left sneaker. It’s purely aesthetic.

The two of us stop in at a diner right outside of [Redacted]. The waiter and waitress both recognize him, and let us take a booth in the back to start our conversation. Unsurprisingly, there aren’t many white faces to be found here. Trinkets of various faiths hang above the windows, offering symbolic protection if little else. While there are no laws saying this type of window-dressing is illegal—freedom of religion is still, nominally, intact—there is a tension in the air as everyone knows outlawing faith is also coming down the pipeline.

Still, the message was clear about the kind of establishment this was. Naheem orders a plate of food. This close, you can’t help but seek out the wear and tear of his mission on his face. He’s relatively young, having just crossed thirty, and if I didn’t know that I’d likely place him younger. That’s especially true once his food comes out; he eats like a teenager, stuffing his mouth and talking around his meal. He keeps checking his phone. I asked who he was speaking with, and he explains he’s trying to line up an actual exorcism for me to watch.

“This one don’t work out,” he said, “There’s a dozen more in this area alone. Wild the kind of requests I get if I say I’m rolling up.”

I ask him to elaborate over his heaping pile of steak and eggs.

“Most of them are bullshit,” he starts. “Nah, that’s not fair. It’s fifty-fifty, but the breakdown is insane.”

And we are smack in the middle of the next lesson: Identifying A Target For Exorcism 101. He tells it in percentages:

If 50% of requests are fake, 90% of that are prank calls. 5% are Residences trying to set Naheem up to get jumped. The remaining 5% are Residences trying to screw over their rivals.

If 50% of his calls, emails, and DMs are real, 30% of those are loved ones trying to save someone they know. Their sister, in a relationship with a demon Residence, using her to say: Hey, I’m cool, I love humans, see? Trust my contracts, they won’t hurt humans, they won’t be muscled out of their own world. Or, say, a college-bound woman named Bryce Delacorte who became a Residence in order to get into an Ivy League graduate program.

“She never asked for anything past that,” Naheem points out as he recounts the story. “Demon lets all the brothers and sisters pass her academically—it ain’t hard. Bryce made another deal to get better grades, agrees to recruit others into becoming Residences. First her roommate, than classmates, then teachers. Almost got the board of directors to sign deals turning her school into a Helltown. So I got called in, her mother begging me,” Naheem’s imitation of a rich Connecticut accent is tinged with venom: ‘Please, Naheem, you have just got to save my baby, you must.’” He shook his head and dropped the voice. “Bryce fucking sued me and her mother. You ever heard something wild like that? Sued us for tryna save her soul. It’s why I hate cases like that.”

Miss Delacorte later attempted to claim it was her parents who arranged her contract. She also claimed to have grown up in a Helltown—her hometown was a Helltown, but the contract was only completed after she’d moved away to her university. Several ex-friends say she felt slighted, overlooked by her first choice school in favor of black applicants. Even without her demonic partner, Bryce Delacorte couldn’t help but lie.

15% think they regret becoming Residences. In a moment of clarity, they beg for Naheem to rescue them. Naheem posts videos about these cases at 3am, looking rightfully as if he’s just lost a fight with the devil. When he gave up on ski masks, you’d see scrapes and bruising across his face, splatters of various fluids across his clothing. He never considered shielding his audience from his failures. “There’s no saving someone that don’t wanna be saved, and these Residences? They just don’t wanna be seen as the bad guys. They don’t wanna lose the contract, they don’t want the punishment that happens when their demon is yanked outta their body—so the second it gets hard, it hurts just a little bit, they start running back to evil. To the monster promising the easy ride, if they hold onto their hatred a little while longer.”

He pauses in both his math and his meal. “So 4% are the fuckers who really regret it. The ones who looked in the mirror one day, and realized they’re losing. They woke up and felt a demonic thrill of hurting one of my people, or they had to part ways with their lover come sundown, and they can’t handle it. So they reach out to me. Ask me to save their souls. I do it, of course, but you gotta wonder sometimes—these people chose that. They never understand why I don’t hug and kiss when I’m done. They act like the things leaving their mouth during the exorcism aren’t real, it was The Demon, not them...but, my dude, who let that shit in to begin with?”

I can’t help but observe he didn’t have much sympathy for any of them. I ask if this is exorcism fatigue, or if he’s always felt this way.

Naheem laughs. “I didn’t feel bad for these motherfuckers back when they were humans killing my people. You think I’m shedding tears cause they got monsters to commit their terrorism for them? I don’t do exorcisms for the willingly possessed—not anymore.”

The remaining 1% of possessions are those who didn’t sign contracts. Born in Helltowns, forcibly possessed by sneaky independent demons. Before the rise of Residences, Naheem tells me, they were the majority of an exorcist’s work. Now it is at most 1 out of every hundred cases, and that number may have been generous.

∙ ∙ ∙

After our meal, we go to Naheem’s motel room for a quick look at his supplies. The motel shares all the traits of most highway motels—that is to say, there is very little distinguishing about it. The blue gray rug, the pale bed covers, the decades-old television with the remote on a cord—all replicated in hundreds of highway motels. Even in a five star hotel, Naheem’s tools would have stolen the show.

Naheem’s videos have run through the toolkit numerous times. Blessed water from multiple religions. “I always carry offerings for multiple gods, spirits, and entities, just in case.” Handwritten collection of compulsions and prayers, covered in a mass of political and musical stickers. Xacto knife with a handle etched with arcane symbols. Jar of salt. Copic brand markers, MTN brand spray paint. Blackbook that’s equal parts tags from street artists around the world and diagrams for Naheem’s soon-to-be-illegal rituals.

He shows me all of these items with faux nonchalance. He wants to continue playing cool, the way he had in the diner, as if this is just another interview or blog video. Naheem is trembling with excitement, every gesture suffused with opening night jitters. If there was ever a performance to not screw up, Naheem had decided it was this one.

I ask him why he doesn’t just use the tools of his own faith, whatever it is (he’s never disclosed). The answer is obvious. “An exorcism isn’t about me,” he explains, letting me pick up the vials of labeled holy water, each decorated during spurts of boredom. “I know exorcism works. It’s about the demons and Residences—what god, what spirit, still scares them.”

“Has there ever been a Residence that wasn’t scared?”

“Nah,” Naheem answers after a moment. “Issue is whether they’re more scared of the compulsion or losing their power.” His cellphone rings, and he excuses himself to answer the call in the bathroom.

In his tools are pieces of the puzzle that forms Naheem’s personal life. Of all the stories, no story is more enthralling than the one in his blackbook. He’s a talented graffiti artist, under the name NahMean86. His style is big, bright colors, fat letters smashed together as if sharing a secret. There is none of his trademark grim determination, none of the obvious rage. Occasionally there are cartoon characters—black boys and girls participating in schoolyard games. One is a play off of hopscotch; the next, his letters are tangled up in a game of double dutch, bookended by pig-tailed girls trying to turn the ropes. Sometimes he switches up his color profile with blues, blacks, and silver and the children are able to play under a safe night sky.

If there is no joy in exorcism for Naheem, there is joy in these pages. On the page is hope—he sketches a world where nighttime play is possible. He pastes pictures of the pieces he’s done next to their sketches, but there aren’t many. Maybe there is another timeline where this is what Naheem is known for.

Before I can finish my investigation, Naheem comes out of the bathroom. “I got something you’re gonna wanna see. At sunset.” Exorcisms aren’t done at sunset. At least, they aren’t specifically done at sunset. I know now there’s something more to Naheem’s previous jitters, although what it is exactly hasn’t quite hit me.

For the first time since we met at the bus station, he’s smiling.

∙ ∙ ∙

Dr. Rene Jacobs discussed survival strategies for those who sought to refuse demonic influence. “In a world where whiteness is synonymous with the infernal, the automatic assumption is, to defeat it, blackness must become the divine. It must transcend and perfect itself to blot out the evil declaring war against it. To the contrary; we should not seek to become the impossible. Instead, we should rely on what our enemy has forgotten: our humanity. Our passion is not the passion of the divine, but the individual’s love for brothers and sisters. It is our ability to cling to hope and art and love when battered by fear and hate...there is a reason these deals were not made with us.”

Although he would not put it quite the same way as Dr. Jacobs—Naheem has gone on record as believing Jacobs’ work too academic to be put to any “real” use—it is clear this is Naheem’s approach to exorcism. His bedside manner may be flawed, his attitude occasionally rough around the edges, but he is not trying to be a divine leader. He isn’t the ineffectual leader Residences wish to reduce him to in their counter arguments.

He knows his time to work is limited, and so instead of seeking perfection, he will save as many of us as possible. I was not aware how strongly he believed this until we arrived at our destination.

∙ ∙ ∙

Naheem’s smile dropped when the news hit.

It was exactly 5:46pm EST, although we were miles away from Washington DC. Every radio station and television channel covered the announcement: The Demonic Protection Act had been passed.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit something about myself I usually avoid discussing in my articles—although, if I were to be honest, it is a fact that colors (no pun intended) most of my writing. My mother is white and made a deal to become a Residence when I was finishing up my higher education. For me, Helltowns are a nightmarish game of roulette. When the sun goes down, will I be able to walk the streets? Will this particular contract recognize the half of me it’s promised to protect, or will the shadows and brimstone rise up to protect the white community from me? I have seen ’protection’ circles around Helltowns glow and smoke underneath me, warming as I blurred the lines of the specific contracts in place.

This is also why I was so willing to call Naheem’s work a crusade—if I admitted to myself that it was important, it would mean another redefinition of my identity and birth, forcing me to choose a side—even if the contracts themselves were still baffled by my existence.

I have never been fond of roulette.

∙ ∙ ∙

The highway at the town limits of any Helltown are empty at sundown, even if the town’s monsters have chased away the non-white population.

Naheem stops the rental car right at the edge of the circles. We’re close enough to see the demonic letters glow. The smoke of them licks at Naheem’s sneakers threateningly. He is unconcerned as he grabs his backpack. I realize his backpack has been at nearly every exorcism the man has ever done. Large anime and political patches attempt to cover threadbare almost-holes; these are stitch-up jobs where something has sliced or clawed it apart.

I’ve reported on exorcisms in the past. I have watched videos of Naheem conducting them. They are intimate rituals, between Naheem and the possessed. When Naheem is lucky, someone helps him restrain the violently possessed—but he’s rarely lucky.

He’s not doing an exorcism on the highway—there is no one to perform a ritual on. There is us, there is the circle, and there are the shadowy figures rising, attempting to pull themselves from the circle in case Naheem steps too close. Perhaps you have never tempted fate and stood at a circle—perhaps you don’t trigger the contracts. The monsters summoned by our skin—no, by fear of our skin—shift rapidly. They are hulking beasts of sulfur; they are sharp and slender speedsters made of smoke and claw. They hiss as they form, as they stalk, as they brace themselves. They are intangible until they have figured out the best way to kill you, the shape that will hurt you the most.

I am in awe, and envious, of Naheem’s lack of fear.

He asks me to hold his phone for him, to record what he is doing live to his Twitch stream—the latest of half a dozen streams taken down and then resurrected. He crouches down outside the circle, placing his salt jar and three vials on the concrete. He holds his Xacto knife tightly.

Naheem faces the camera. “Welcome to the last episode of “A Desperate Guide to Exorcisms.” He’d never before mentioned shutting down his channel; my shock is the cause of the now famous ‘camera shake,’ in spite of rumors that it was Hell itself cheering. “You know me, but not where I come from. So I’m gonna tell you. And when I’m done? I’ve got one last lesson to teach.”

∙ ∙ ∙

Naheem, born Jamal Naheem Wallis, was born into a family of exorcists. His father was a teacher, and his mother ran a magical supply store. He was an only child, a fact he counts as a blessing, considering what happened when he went to college. By the time he’d turned nineteen, Helltowns were flourishing. There was nothing his family could do to stem the flood of possessions. The white people in his hometown, the ones who looked at his mother’s store as a novelty and his father’s teachings as a threat, banded together.

“That’s the thing with Helltowns the news ignores,” Naheem explained. “It’s not demons shutting us out. This process starts with blacks as scapegoats and sacrifices, and ends with white people signing blood contracts to keep us out. They think we’re to blame for their fears, nightmares, weaknesses. Possession isn’t a tool the demons use to corrupt; the demons are a tool white people use to kill us.”

As his family was forced from their homes, an arsonist—either mystical or human—burned his mother’s shop down, taking his father in the flames. His mother survived, and insisted her son go back to school. She didn’t want him to survive on his skills as an exorcist.

And so Naheem returned. But when he returned, his mind wasn’t focused on his Film major, but on how he could stop what happened to his family from happening to others. And so he started his channel. His first recorded exorcism, a possessed fellow student who’d accidentally opened a gateway in the school basement, was uploaded in April of his third year of college, although there were certainly several before that. And there were several more after, until a possessed student called the authorities on him and he was dragged from his dorm room mid-exorcism.

Naheem hoped that with every tutorial video, he could keep someone else’s family from having to burn. “But,” he said, “I couldn’t just keep doing an exorcism here, another there. That’s not enough anymore. I’ve got to give y’all the skills I’ve been promising since the beginning. I’ve gotta give you the weapons to end the war. So I came back home.”

∙ ∙ ∙

The video of what happened next is available here for those who want a step-by-step guide to taking down Helltowns. That was Naheem’s goal; that is not my goal in writing this. When this article was arranged, I wanted to capture the personality of the leader of a dying resistance, to immortalize his work before history swept it away.

My goal is not to give you a second to second transcript of what happened next. There are hundreds of those for you to choose from, many of which are accompanied by fascinating analysis. What’s important is all the things that might not be debated for months, and the things that happened when the camera stopped recording.

As Naheem told us during that final video, fighting the individual possessions and contracts was no longer enough. There’s no dismantling the hundreds, thousands of pacts until we do the very thing that white people have been terrified to do from the start: face our fears dead on. That’s what Naheem did when he broke the circle surrounding his hometown. Monstrous ghosts rose from the smoke to fight. Naheem continued his compulsions as if their thick-smoke limbs and claws didn’t touch him—didn’t knock him to the ground, didn’t shake the concrete underneath him, didn’t topple his vials of blessed water.

I watched him cut his hand, using his own blood and the blessings of many to make the monsters run. They reared up and bucked like horses do, their rage and fear tearing thunder and lighting from the sky. I want to be romantic and say that it didn’t touch Naheem, but I saw Naheem struck, over and over, until he could barely stand. Until the fist on his shirt was indistinguishable from the burnt fabric of the rest of his clothing. He shuddered, he collapsed, but he did not fall silent, not once.

Every possession, every séance, was a rehearsal for this very moment. To make sure that his voice did not waver, that when monsters of sulfur roared in his ears and he fell deaf, he did not lose his step. And eventually, each creature lost. First the monsters of the circle, and then the demons wailing in the town. And then the possessed.

We filmed until the nightmare of the ritual was over, until Naheem, now barely breathing, took a step across the circle. By then, there were dozens of white people making their way, angry and confused, towards the highway. I’m not sure if Naheem could even see them now—one long-limbed beast had clawed across one of Naheem’s eyes, and surely had blurred his vision.

I’m aware of the power of an angry mob. I’m well aware of the power of an angry white mob, whose power and protection had just been stripped away. There is a chance I am only alive because of my proximity to the rental car. I am ashamed to admit I don’t know whether Naheem made it to sunrise.

What I do know is this: After I stopped recording, I saw Jamal Naheem Wallis reach into his bag and grab a can of bright yellow spray paint and shake it.

I believe he meant to make art.

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT DANNY LORE

Danny Lore is a queer writer raised in Harlem and based out of the Bronx. They’ve worked in a comic and gaming shop pretty much since the beginning of time. If they aren’t writing supernatural characters in the hood, they’re playing an RPG, either tabletop or on a console. They live with their dope partner and the world’s best cat. Follow them on Twitter @weredawgz.

TOWARD THE SUN

By Sydnee Thompson // 6351 words

Julius knew the minute she walked by that she’d be trouble—he could see it in that slow, awkward shuffle, the way her dark-eyed gaze darted up and down the street, her wiry muscles tensed, ready to run at the slightest provocation. He almost wanted to jump out and say, “Boo,” but then he glimpsed the edge of the thick, plastic cuff around her right arm. She wore a black hoodie that engulfed her frame, but the cuff’s vivid glow demanded to be seen beyond the hem of her sleeve. Emerald green light—not violet, indigo, or yellow—splashed her brown skin. So…she was a Sun Shifter.

Julius frowned, watching her more closely now. He could handle thieves and vandals just fine, but skittish, desperate people were unpredictable. He definitely didn’t need her kind of trouble; he’d gotten into enough of his own as it was.

Since his shack was within sight of the outer wall, the presence of Sun Shifters, in itself, wasn’t a big deal. Even now, as he sat cross-legged in the dirt in front of his home, he watched members of the technical crew back away from the wall, slam the control panels closed, gather their supplies, and hurry home. Otherwise, the streets were empty, endless rows of identical, rust-colored shacks stretching as far as he could see on three sides of him. Meanwhile, this lone girl was wandering aimlessly back and forth, alone. Her workday was over, and she had mere hours before her hypnotic drugs kicked in, but she kept pacing back and forth down his block, casting stray glances his way when she didn’t think he was looking. Too bad. He was always looking.

“Aye, Julius.” A man emerged from a shack across the street and shuffled over, his windbreaker bulging from the package nestled between it and his chest. “My boys in the Styxs came through. Some more corn fresh off the truck.” His nostrils flared as the smell of moonshine wafted through the air toward him. “You ain’t been holdin’ out on me, have you?”

Julius tipped his head back and grinned. “Naw, Dre, I told you—I only taste test. You know I save the best shit for you.”

Dre grunted and tugged his zipper down, pulling out a lumpy hemp bag from under his jacket. “Whatever. I got the corn; you just get me my booze by the end of the week, and it’s all good.”

The cuff around Dre’s arm was green, too. His family lived in one of the settlements outside Meteora—the Styxs, as the locals called it—toiling in the hot sun all day to grow crops for shipment up here to the city. It earned them melanoma, but also extra drugs to fight it and a place here for their Sun Shifter child as a courier.

After the ozone layer had been blasted away decades ago, long before even Julius had been born, the wealthy elite built massive city-states as the land around them withered and scattered on the wind. But rich folk were helpless without worker bees. Make a resolution promising refuge for poor folk’s kids in exchange for a lifetime of dangerous fieldwork, though, and you got “Sun Shifters”: children who got to “shift” to living during the Moon Cycle to keep the city populations stable. Dre repaid the favor by swiping produce every chance he got during his runs between the city and the countryside.

Julius grabbed the bag and weighed it carefully in his hands. “Probably can get at least three good jars out of this.” He slid the bag behind his back and leaned against it. “I’ll take the first one for myself, if ya don’t mind. Production costs.”

The LED streetlights flickered above them, and Julius glanced up at the night sky. The shield created a grayish haze over Meteora, but if he squinted hard enough, he could just make out clusters of tiny stars he’d long forgotten the names for. Dre let out another grunt and shuffled back to his shack—apparently, that was an agreement.

“What you want, kid?” Julius finally called to the girl.

She stiffened and stopped in the middle of another rotation, turned toward him, and tugged down the hood that’d obscured her face. She had a complexion like cedar, and immaculate cornrows that ended in a high, bouncy puffball on the back of her head. Large freckles dusted her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. Somewhere in her early twenties, no doubt. Again: trouble. But her timid gaze made him hesitate to dismiss her outright.

She bit her lip, tossed one more glance over her shoulder, and then slinked closer to his shack. “I, uh. Your name Julius?” Her voice was soft, tentative, but with a hint of steel behind it. She wasn’t going to leave unless he gave her what she wanted…whatever that was.

His eyebrows shot up. “So they tell me. And you?”

She wrinkled her nose, eyeing the hemp sack behind him. “Maya.”

Julius stretched his neck and shoulders until he heard a pop, then slumped back against the door frame. “Mmm. I’m guessing you ain’t here for a drink, Maya. So what can I do for you?”

When he’d arched his back to stretch, his shirtsleeves had risen, revealing thin strips of dark brown skin on both wrists. Maya’s gaze was trained on his right hand now, and the thick gauze that covered it all the way up to his forearm. Ah-ha. So that’s why she was here. People in the outskirts didn’t have much respect for Enforcement officers, so he’d never really bothered to try and hide his “unshackled” status. But had she come here hoping for a big payoff by turning him in?

He waited patiently for her to accuse him—for her to open her mouth to scream or take off for the nearest Enforcement office. He had a butterfly knife resting against his hip for just such an occasion. But surely, if that’s what she’d been planning, she’d have the sense not to be so obvious about it?

“Well?” he taunted. She reminded him of his daughter—what she may have looked like, if he’d been allowed to raise her. He didn’t want to kill this girl, but he would.

She was still staring at his arm. “So it’s true,” she whispered. “You got it off.”

Julius folded his arms, slowly extending his fingers to grasp the hilt of the knife in his waistband.

The siren began to wail. Its long, high-pitched notes rose and fell like a heavy, desperate infant taking its first breaths. While Maya’s gaze darted around again, Julius tugged his knife free and held his thumb over the latch.

“The Moon Cycle is set to end in 0200 hours.” The robotic voice echoed from speakers hidden all over the complex. “Please return to your bunker and prepare for intermission.”

The streetlights flickered again—a warning. Get underground, or we’ll be cleaning up your corpse during the next Moon Cycle. The tech crew had been testing the shield just now, but it wouldn’t stay on for longer than a couple of hours at a time once the cycle ended, and anyone still topside would pay the price when the sun rose.

The girl just stood there, biting her lip as she swayed back and forth. The siren reached a high point, and Julius pushed to his feet. The knife was hidden from sight, buried in the crook of his arm.

Maya took another small step forward, and Julius released the latch. She shook her head and rubbed absentmindedly at her cuff as the siren bottomed out. She licked her lips. “I want you to take mine off, too.”

∙ ∙ ∙

Julius slammed the door behind him, making her flinch. She kept her chin tucked as she strode into the center of the small room and then turned to face him. To her left, worn hemp pillows surrounded a large trunk that doubled as a coffee table, and the motion-activated recessed lights flipped on, a poor replacement for the natural light they were missing out on in a glorified crate with tinted windows. A ratty blue blanket, covered in pilling, was draped over a rocking chair in the corner, providing the one pop of color in the drab brown room.

Julius reached behind him and pressed his palm against the panel beside the door, and the electronic locking system groaned to life. While it did its magic, he murmured, “Run that by me again?”

She cocked her head toward him, her eyebrows furrowed, so he repeated himself. “I want you to take my cuff off!” she responded, practically yelling.

“Why?”

She shrugged. “Same reason as you, I guess.”

Julius shook his head. “You don’t know shit, girl.”

Rolling her eyes, she scoffed and cocked her hip. “I know I’m sick of working my ass off fixing them panels, just so I can spend two-thirds of my life asleep.”

He snorted. “Trust me, you ain’t missing much.”

Wrinkling her nose again, she reached into the pocket of her hoodie and pulled out a tinted bottle full of large capsules. “These are radiation tablets.” She shook the bottle. “They fight off cell damage for up to three hours.”

His eyes went wide. “How di—”

“Sometimes the techs have to stay up past dawn and leave the shield to fix shit. When that happens, the Council overrides our cuffs and gives us one of these.” She grinned. “I been saving for months now.”

“You’re outta your goddamned mind!” he snapped. “Why the hell wouldn’t you take them?”

Sierra’s bright, chubby face flashed in his mind. He hadn’t seen her since she was an infant; his last memories of her were suffused with the smells of baby powder and breast milk, right before a redheaded woman bundled the baby up and carried her away. In the few minutes he’d been blessed to know her, his daughter had been fat, slimy, and full of piss and vinegar—now she was probably long dead, slowly roasted alive by the intense rays of the sun.

Maya narrowed her eyes. “I need to get outside the walls, and I plan on staying out there for a lot longer than three hours. ’Sides, I work fast.”

Julius brushed past her and bent down to open the hatch to his bunker. Without a word, he descended into the darkness, and Maya’s quick footsteps thudded right behind him. “There ain’t nothing outside for you, girl—didn’t you pay attention in school? Everything out there is dead or wishes it was.”

Small orange bulbs winked on as they walked past, until the two of them were standing in a 200-square-foot chamber with a small kitchenette, a toilet, and a cot. He pressed his hand to another panel, and a steel door slid down over the entrance, sealing them inside.

“If you help remove this thing, I’ll give you half of ’em.” She shook the bottle again.

Julius snorted. “There ain’t nothing outside for me.” He dismissed her with a wave of his hand. “I’mma pass.”

Maya’s hands fisted at her sides. “If you knew you weren’t gonna help me anyway, then why you let me in?”

Julius tossed Dre’s package on the counter and rummaged through his cabinets until he pulled out a mason jar full of moonshine. He screwed the jar open and took a generous swig. “Because you don’t seem very bright, and I don’t want to have yo dead body stinking up my yard in the evening.” He plopped down on his lumpy cot, using his free hand to tug the knife loose from his pants and set it beside him. His action didn’t escape Maya’s attention.

She held up her hands. “Look, I ain’t tryna start nothing. I’m not here to get you in trouble. All I want is for you to take this off for me, and I’ll never bother you again. You can sell the pills to someone else—I’m sure they’re worth, like, a shit ton.”

He frowned at her, taking another fortifying swig of moonshine. If Maya was bothered by his drinking, she hid it well—but she stretched her arms and shifted her body until she was leaning her back against the kitchenette counter, putting twice as much distance between the two of them. Good girl. “Taking that cuff off will probably kill you,” he warned.

She gave an indifferent-sounding grunt. “I was born with a hole in my spine, and then I almost died on the operating table.” She smirked, but the lightness of her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes. She started chewing on her lip again. “I’m more afraid of staying here than dying.”

Julius raised his eyebrows. “You still got family outside?” The unspoken follow-up to that question hung in the air between them: “Alive?”

She nodded slowly, averting her eyes. “I think so. I got a few cousins in here, but…they don’t like me much.” Her lips pursed. “They think I’m gonna turn out to be some kind of radioactive mutant and kill them.” Her gaze fell on the knife and she sneered. “I’m sure you can relate.”

Julius swept the knife behind his back and cleared his throat. Even though Sun Shifters received the best medical care, most Meteorans thought their genetic mutations predisposed them to violence. The UV radiation didn’t always lead to birth defects, and when it did they were usually manageable with treatment, but old prejudices were hard to shake. “For what it’s worth, my daughter was born during the Sun Cycle,” Julius muttered. “Haven’t seen her in…thirty years.”

“Wait, really? Don’t everyone in here just like, induce or something? So they’re always born at nighttime and they can stay here?”

He had to laugh at that. “That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. But babies don’t give a shit about your schedule. Sometimes they just come when they feel like it.”

She winced. “…Oh. Sorry.”

Silence fell over the room. He could still make out the faint wail of the siren from the world above, but Maya wasn’t budging—she was just standing there, glaring at him with those determined dark eyes, her chin tucked. Didn’t she care that she was wasting precious seconds, locked in a room with a drunk, armed, middle-aged man she didn’t even know?

“If you wanted to do some kind of twisted shit to me, you woulda done it already,” she said. “I know you think I’m outta my mind, but I’m desperate. Please.”

Piss and vinegar. Julius bit back a chuckle. “Let me see your cuff.”

She rolled up her sleeve and extended her arm. The plastic material encased it from her wrist to her elbow; the cuff was seamless save for a very small screw on the underside. The LED screen on the front read: “0130:02.”

He beckoned her closer, and when she ambled over, he gently ran the tip of his index finger along the edge of the cuff where it met her wrist. Tight fit. Cuffs made for the upper classes were more porous—hers made her skin warm and clammy to the touch.

“They dig them ports a lot deeper than they did back in the day,” he muttered. “It’s probably permanent.”

A flash of pain crossed her face. “Then how did you get yours out?”

“Not easily.” He pulled back his sleeve and showed his fingers, which he couldn’t fully straighten. “I don’t have full use of my right hand.”

She cringed. “Then…why do it?”

“I ain’t afraid of dying, either,” he said with a wry grin. “And it’s nice to finally be able to stay up later and get some reading done.”

Maya threw him a look before gazing around the room, checking every surface for the books she’d never find. “But you still won’t go outside? Not even to find your daughter?”

He’d thought about it more times than he could count. Even though lead walls surrounded Meteora on all sides, their main purpose was to produce the atmospheric shield during daylight hours. But for that, they didn’t have to be very high—they didn’t even have to be guarded. No one was foolish enough to venture outside, during the Moon Cycle or not.

But Julius was old and tired now. Ripping that cuff off was the last bit of defiance he’d had left in him.

This girl had a fire in her eyes, though. “So what are you running from, exactly?” he asked.

Maya’s jaw clenched. “I can’t go anywhere in this city without someone curling they lips or sucking their teeth at me…but I’m supposed to be ‘grateful’ because I coulda been living out in the Styxs instead. Nah, I just get to spend all my free time trying not to get electrocuted by those circuits, even though the damn shield don’t even work well enough to use the whole day.” She scuffed at the dirt floor with the toe of her sneaker. “Tch. Like it’s some big favor to be treated like an object instead of a person.”

He sighed and took another gulp of moonshine, his chest beginning to ache. Julius had damn near drunk himself to death more times than he could count out of guilt for letting that nurse take Sierra—meanwhile Maya had lived her whole life knowing she should’ve experienced the same fate.

The deciding factor for who lived in the city during the Moon Cycle and in the settlements during the Sun Cycle was arbitrary bullshit—determined by what time you were born. Everybody knew that. It was supposed to be a decent compromise: everyone needed food, so someone had to grow it, and every once in a while, the government would grant babies born to Sun Cycle parents sanctuary if officials could verify a night birth. No parent would reject the chance to do right by their children, and in an act of good faith, the Council even promised the system would work the same in reverse: Meteoran children born after sunrise got exiled.

But Meteorans had access to hospitals, inductions, and C-sections. For the most part, the element of luck still only applied in one direction.

Julius took another swig. For most.

“I’ve never met my parents,” Maya murmured. “Sometimes I catch myself looking in the mirror, wondering what parts of me are really gifts from them. Do they have the same wide, flat nose, the same tiny eyes that squeeze close when I smile too hard? I wish I knew who they were.” She sighed, and her back slumped back against the counter. “I just…I can’t understand…how you wouldn’t want to know who your people are.”

“Speaking as a parent, trust me, you don’t wanna know. YOU being here is the gift. That’s how your folks probably saw it.”

She shook her head. “Knowing I was the only one spared while the rest of my family is dying? While everyone here treat me like shit? That ain’t no gift.” She swallowed hard and met his gaze. “Don’t you think…your daughter would’ve felt the same way?”

He needed to be way more drunk to have this conversation. “It doesn’t matter. But if you really wanna do this, fine. On one condition.”

Maya’s eyebrows shot up, but she nodded her head stiffly, expecting the worse.

“If you find a woman about 30 named Sierra Whittaker…” He downed the rest of his moonshine and gasped as it burned its way down his throat. “Tell her her daddy loves her…and he’s sorry.”

After all this time, there’d be nothing left of her to find; he knew that. Maybe Maya did, too. But she nodded anyway.

“How much time you got left?” he asked her.

She glanced down at her wrist. “A little less than an hour and a half.”

“Then we’re gonna have to work fast.” He patted the cot. “Have a seat, lil’ lady.”

The bed gave a metallic groan as she sat facing him, her arm raised. Julius picked up his knife, unlatched it, and flipped it open—he allowed himself a small smile as Maya made a noise in the back of her throat, obviously impressed.

At birth, babies inside Meteora were fitted with a port in their right arm, with the cuff acting as a protective housing for it. Now that they couldn’t depend on the sun’s warmth to nurture them, they relied on a daily cocktail of supplements to keep them healthy. And right before the first traces of light reached the horizon at dawn, the cuffs were designed to inject a continuous dose of hypnotic drugs that would drop the wearers like rocks until the sun set again—to protect them. The shield helped, but it wasn’t foolproof.

None of that had been enough for his wife, though. Leila had had the most beautiful, midnight black skin he’d ever seen, and all the UV treatments they could afford were never enough. After they lost Sierra, she’d started to say their baby girl had taken the last of the world’s light with her. She stopped eating seafood. He started to drink.

“There’s a needle in the cuff that extends to deliver your medicine and supplements,” he said. “The trick is trying to get everything out without ripping a gaping hole in your arm.”

“Uh, wow. And I’m guessing you ain’t much of a doctor.”

Julius barked out a laugh. “Not much of a surgeon, no. But if you want to get outside them walls, baby girl, disfigurement is gonna be the least of your problems.”

“Touché.”

He rotated her hand so the screw was facing upward, then got to work on it with the tip of his knife.

“Won’t the Council know?”

“Probably, but they won’t care.” He paused. “No offense.”

She snorted. “You ain’t saying nothing I didn’t already know. I’m expendable.”

“But you’re alive.”

She let out a helpless little laugh. “That’s…not good enough for me anymore.”

He resisted the urge to ask. It was hard enough to concentrate while he was buzzed.

The minutes ticked by, until the screw slowly started to loosen. Thin cuts marred the matte plastic around it. They both let out a sigh of relief as Julius set aside the knife and eased the screw out of its hole. “Don’t move,” he ordered. “If that needle snaps off you’re gonna have a bad time.”

She grunted her agreement. “Can I still talk?”

“I guess.”

“I like to talk when I get nervous. It helps distract me.”

“Okay.”

“Do you have any other kids besides Sierra?” He threw her a look, and she grimaced. “Sorry.”

“Maybe try not to distract yourself by distracting me.”

“Sorry.”

Julius clamped her arm, palm facing up, between his thighs to keep it steady, and then began to pry the two parts of the casing apart. Maya let out a groan as the needle pulled, centimeter by excruciating centimeter, through her sensitive flesh. The cuff let out a soft, sustained beep of protest, but soon the needle was free, dark with her blood. Julius fumbled for an old rag crumpled beside the bed and pressed the wadded-up cloth against the injection point.

“Hold that there.”

“Wait…is that it? So I’m good now?”

Julius shook his head. “The port still gotta come out.”

She massaged her wrist, clenching and unclenching her fingers to force more blood back into her tissue. “Uh, can’t you just leave it in there? The cuff was what injected the drugs, right?”

“It also injected the shit that flushes your port, to keep it from getting clogged. It’s best to get rid of everything, unless you’d rather die of infection three months from now.”

She sunk her teeth into her bottom lip and nibbled at the skin until it was raw. “Fuck.”

“How bad you want out of here, Maya?”

She let out a shuddering sigh, her eyes sliding closed. The skin on her right arm was wrinkled and at least three shades lighter than the rest of her. Selfishly, he wanted her to change her mind and go back. Go back to getting by. Eventually, it would break her, shatter her, and each breath would feel like a noose. But she’d be alive.

“Do you have a plan?” he continued. “Do you even know where to start looking? Them tablets aren’t going to prevent sunburn or heat stroke, you know. You manage to steal an Apollo suit, too?”

She lifted her chin. “I was tryna bargain with this dude in R&D for an extra, but I…I can’t go anywhere near the city center right now.”

Julius frowned, goosebumps rising on his skin. She couldn’t go near the Central District? What the hell had he gotten himself into? “What happens if you get lost in the desert and can’t find your way back?”

“I’m not coming anywhere near here until I can find out how to save my family. Once I do…I’ll find my way back.”

She sounded so sure. It pissed him off.

“And when you do? Gonna bring your diseased mama back here and expect the Council to welcome her with open arms?” He gripped her left arm and leaned forward, letting his hot breath rush against her cheek. “This city don’t even want you, and you think they gonna help your mama?”

Maya’s eyes snapped open. It was like looking at the surface of the sun itself.

There was a very good reason why Julius had never bothered to watch the sun rise since he’d removed his cuff all those years ago. Even protected by the shield and his shack, he knew that the sun represented power, passion, and endurance—all the qualities he didn’t have.

Looking in Maya’s eyes now, he was reminded of Leila.

One last, shrill warning echoed through the air. It vibrated through the bunker walls until he could feel it in his bones. The Moon Cycle was over.

“Take the port out, Julius,” Maya whispered. The steel he’d detected earlier was razor sharp now. Not only was she not changing her mind, but he’d fallen in her estimation for even suggesting she should.

“I don’t care what it takes. I’m not leaving them behind.” She clenched her fist. “So do it.”

The guilt festered in his gut as he laid her across his narrow cot and knelt over her, his knife poised over her arm, but he’d been right—the port was supposed to be permanent. Tiny and sophisticated, the device wasn’t even visible from the outside, but when he ran his fingers lightly over the skin of her forearm, just below the pinprick scab that had formed from the needle, he could feel it. Maya had plump veins and a strong pulse. Julius thought back to the redheaded nurse, who’d cooed with pleasure as she kneaded the skin of Leila’s arm, testing the integrity of her cuff. “Wonderful veins,” she’d said. “Soon as I reprogram your OS, you’ll be out like a light. Next thing you know, you’ll be waking up with your sweet little baby in your arms.”

You could pry off your shackles, but you would always bear its scars.

“I’m sorry,” Julius said. He didn’t know to whom. “This is going to hurt.”

Maya swallowed. “I know.”

“I have gauze, and the moonshine might help with infection…but that’s all I can offer you.”

“That’s fine.”

She stared up at the ceiling, the dim orange bulbs reflected in her glistening eyes. She was done with talking, so he had no other incentive to stall. With a deep breath, he sliced a thin cut down the length of her arm. She hissed and squeezed her eyes shut, her body jerking once and then going stiff as a board, but her arm didn’t move. Blood oozed from the wound, and he dabbed at it carefully with another piece of ragged cloth. He could make out the edge of a dark blue device embedded in her flesh, but he had no idea how much deeper he’d have to cut to pry it out—or how to remove the catheter from her vein without damaging it. His vision swam as he struggled to keep his fingers steady and his voice confident.

“You said you need to talk, so talk,” he grunted.

Maya groaned. “If I were smart, I woulda asked you to do this after I was already asleep.”

“Wouldn’t have mattered. You would’ve woken up as soon as I took the needle out.”

She forced her eyes open and squinted at him. “How do you kno—ah, fuck—so much about this?”

“Been alive a long time.” He paused as he began to remove one of the catheter connectors from the port. “Plus my folks been a part of the Paean for a minute now.”

“Oh yeah? Then why are you so damn bad at this?”

“This ain’t exactly my field of expertise. You wanna get a cavity filled before you leave though, I’m your man.”

She cracked a smile at that. “How come they ain’t come after you? You’re not a Sun Shifter, but you’re not fulfilling your responsibilities, either. Paeans make good dough.”

A slow smirk stretched his lips. “What makes you think they didn’t? You think I live in a shack and take shits in my living room for minimalism’s sake?”

Julius removed the other connector and then rubbed a heaping helping of moonshine on his hands. With another steeling breath, he pried the disconnected port from her body and set it on the bedsheet. It dawned on him then that he didn’t have anything to stitch the wound with. Fuck.

“It’s hard to give a shit about some Elite fucker’s gingivitis when your whole family’s dead,” he explained.

Maya’s eyes widened. “You’re…I thought all your family was born during nighttime?”

“Everyone except Sierra.”

“Then…I don’t get it.”

He clenched his teeth. “Hold still. I’m gonna start pulling the catheter out.”

“Is…is it gonna hurt?”

“I’m not sure, to be honest.”

Her upper body jerked up from the cot. “What?”

“I was drunk off my ass when I did it,” he said with a shrug. “Thus the nerve damage.”

Maya hissed. “Oh for fuck’s sake—”

Julius gripped the end of the small tube between his thumb and index finger and slowly started to tug it out. Maya stiffened immediately, squeezing her eyes shut. “Okay?”

“Yeah…it’s just…I can feel it tugging, but…it’s just weird.”

He continued to inch the tube out, pausing whenever Maya shifted uncomfortably on the cot. “What will you do?” he asked. “When you’re out of here.”

“I guess head for the nearest settlement, start asking questions.”

“That’s it? Then what?”

She curled her lip in disgust. “The government makes everyone out there work in the fields, with no protection, and for what? Just so some of their babies will get taken in? I wanna try to get them to rethink their agreement. There’s room in Meteora for them. There’s help here for them. Hell, all this technology, and the Council can’t even spare some Apollo suits for the people growing most of their food?”

Julius grunted. “It’s a nice idea, but I doubt anyone here will go for it.”

“I have to try.”

“Hmm. But you should prolly take a couple days to recover first.”

“I don’t have time.”

He thought back to the image of her pacing back and forth in front of his shack. She’d been living in Meteora all her life…why the urgency to find her family now? Finally, it clicked. “You can’t go back to live with your cousins.”

She clenched her teeth. “No.”

“Should I even ask?”

“Not unless you want the Council knocking down your door.”

He fought back a chuckle. “Yeah, sure, ’cause they won’t care at all that I’m helping a fugitive escape.”

Swallowing, she met his gaze. “I…lied about the medicine. They do give it to us, but…I got way more than a couple months’ worth.” She took a deep breath. “My friend in R&D was helping me smuggle supplies out, but then he changed his mind and threatened to turn me in.” She tried to blink away the film of tears shining in her eyes. “So, I…I killed him.”

Julius gave a final tug, and the tube slipped free from her skin. He dabbed at the blood that had oozed to the surface and then pulled out his roll of gauze. Gently, he grasped her hand and wove the strips over the wound, over and over, until they created a protective barrier at least three layers deep. “All done.” Maya moved to sit up, but he pressed a hand to her stomach. “Relax, girl,” he murmured. “No one knows you’re here. You’re okay.”

She stroked her fingers lightly over the bandages, almost reverently, while her gaze lifted to the ceiling. “You should come.”

“Scared?”

She scowled at the pipes running above them, but then she glanced up at him meekly. “Maybe a little.”

He snorted. “I feel you. That’s exactly why I’m still here.”

They stared at each other. She had just admitted to murder, a crime that would surely mean execution. And no matter what he had told her earlier, as soon as the daylight patrols started and the body was found, it wouldn’t be long before they figured out who did it…and who helped her escape.

Julius glanced around his tiny quarters, taking in the peeling paint, water spots, and spider cracks in the countertops. The scent of mildew permeated the space, as it had ever since he’d zoned out during a root canal over ten years ago, dropped his tools on the tray, and walked out of his office. The relocation happened almost immediately, right on what should’ve been Sierra’s twentieth birthday.

Meteora hadn’t represented heaven for him in a long, long time.

“Fuck it,” he blurted. “Let’s go.”

∙ ∙ ∙

Julius peered around—the streets were empty, and a thin, orange line had appeared right at the horizon, leaching its color into the air above so that the sky faded into pale blue. He stared at the sight for an impossibly long time, until his tired and hungover brain finally made the connection: The sun was rising.

The sun he hadn’t seen except in old paintings and holograms. Fear curdled in his stomach like sour milk, but he reached into his pocket for the capsule, popped it into his mouth, and swallowed it dry.

“Okay?” Maya asked, watching him carefully. She clutched her right arm against her stomach. Sweat beaded her forehead.

“I’m fine. Respect your elders.”

She rolled her eyes, and they started walking toward the walls. The shield emitted a steady, low frequency hum that grew louder as they approached. Maya glanced back at him as she planted her first step in the gritty sand outside the city.

Julius craned his neck and looked around. Jagged, rocky paths led down into the valley where the Sun Cycle settlements awaited. Maya came to a stop at the edge of the peak and he took his place beside her.

“I’m always back underground before the sun actually shows up,” Maya whispered. “We should stand here and wait for it.”

Julius chuckled. “The same sun that’s going to poison us from the inside out?”

“You just took your capsule, right? So we’ll be okay for another thirty minutes or so.”

He opened his mouth to protest—they shouldn’t be wasting time when their protection was so finite and feeble—but the expression on her face gave him pause.

Maya tied her hoodie around her waist. A knapsack holding the rest of her contraband was slung over her shoulder. “You think they’re all dead, don’t you?”

He stiffened.

“That’s what you meant, isn’t it?” she said. “Sierra had to go live in the desert because labor took too long…your wife wouldn’t leave her. That’s why you’re here, alone.”

He scrubbed a hand over his face. “We could’ve had another baby. The complications were from high blood pressure, not anything genetic.”

She smirked. “Wasn’t enough to convince you to keep rocking that cuff, though.”

He didn’t answer.

“Was it worth it?” she asked.

He cocked his head. “Which part?”

“All of it.”

“Dunno,” he muttered, squinting at the horizon. He scratched at his beard. “Ask me again in thirty minutes.”

Maya let out a groan and plopped down in the dirt, her arms crossed over her knees. “What’s her name?” she murmured. “Your wife.”

“Leila.” The name felt foreign on his tongue—like a mouthful of marbles. He hadn’t allowed himself to speak it in so long. “Leila Ann.”

Maya nodded, wearing a small smile. “Pretty. I hope you find her.”

Did she? He didn’t. During his medical training, he’d been bombarded with images of what nonstop UV radiation of this caliber could do to a person—blindness, weeping sores that never healed, and of course, cancer. Death came slowly, but it always came, and many children conceived out there—even if their expectant parents barricaded themselves in the small, windowless shacks for the whole nine months—didn’t survive. Maya was lucky her birth defects had been treatable with just a couple of surgeries, but an additional thirty years of experience meant he couldn’t share her optimism.

A bright orange disc crested the distant hills. The air grew heavy with its warmth. If nothing else, Julius thought, at least he could finally die knowing what “sun-kissed” meant. It felt…good.

Sand dunes stretched out in every direction, with tufts of brown grass sprinkled every now and then. A lot of plant species had gone extinct, so the government had developed genetically modified crops that could withstand the radiation. Nothing fancy: potatoes, corn, some kinds of beans. Plus someone delivered non-perishables to the settlements occasionally. No one in Meteora wanted the Sun Cyclers to die from starvation, after all. They just…didn’t care so much about their longevity. They just didn’t want them here.

The place that was safe. The place he was leaving.

Gotta die sometime, he thought. Why not now?

Orange light spilled over the landscape. In the distance, he could make out a haphazard assortment of tiny tin and wood shacks, surrounded by fields of crops. Gray smoke sputtered from vents on several of the roofs.

Against his better judgment, he smiled.

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT SYDNEE THOMPSON

Sydnee Thompson is an editor who spends way too much of her time dodging potholes in metro Detroit. A lifelong reader and writer, she specializes in anti-heroes, sizzling chemistry, and near-future dystopias where the Black people, oddly enough, don’t die at the end. You can find her on Twitter @SydMT or at her website, shadesofsydnee.com.

THE BREEZE IN THE BOUGHS

By Jennifer Marie Brissett // 3219 words

Squirrel had been spending the afternoon scrambling about the front yard, hunting through the grass for fallen acorns dropped from the branches of the nearby tree, then filling his cheeks to bursting and running up the fence to the comfortable home that he shared with his grandfather. Up and down and up again he went, preparing for the winter to come, storing his findings neatly into their storage compartment within the trunk while Grandfather Squirrel busied himself baking loaves of his best acorn bread.

As the cool of dusk descended, hinting at the end of the day, Squirrel noticed a new neighbor moving about in the empty lot over which the bough of his tree hung. The building on that lot had been uninhabited by humans for quite some time, and yet this was the first sign that any small animal would choose to occupy it as the yard had grown wild and dense with inedible weeds.

Back and forth went Rat, opening new holes by the wooden cover of a missing window to the abandoned building’s basement so that it could move easily to and from the garbage containers of the building next door. A fat juicy creature, Rat seemed used to having his fill at suppertime, and so it was no wonder that the door he made needed to be large. Squirrel observed Rat for a long while. After he stored the last of his daily gatherings of acorns he decided to say hello. Rat responded to his greeting with a smirk, as if Squirrel had done a laughable thing, then returned to continue on with his business as if nothing had been said.

Feeling slighted—because he had been—Squirrel returned home a bit upset. He couldn’t understand how a simple greeting wouldn’t be returned, and what made his attempt at being friendly so amusing. He wondered if maybe he appeared funny, and checked if he had something silly sticking on his fur, which of course, he didn’t.

The scent of freshly baked acorn bread smelled glorious along the bough. Once he entered his home, Squirrel hurried to help himself to a slice, spreading on a healthy gob of blueberry jam. He then sat and ate his supper quietly at the table opposite his grandfather who was having his tea and reading a copy of Critter Times News, a monthly periodical for the small animals of the borough.

“Grandfather,” Squirrel said, and put down his bread, “did you know that a rat was moving in next door?”

“Hmm?” Grandfather said, still engrossed in an article.

“A rat,” Squirrel repeated. “A rat is moving in next door.”

“Oh,” Grandfather said. “Not surprising. It says right here that the new stadium the humans are building down the street is forcing many of the rats to scatter about to find new homes.”

“I see,” Squirrel said, and continued eating thoughtfully. Then he said, “I just met him, or tried to meet him, and he seems rather rude.”

“Yes, yes, rats often are,” Grandfather said, “Don’t you mind him. Rats usually have a high sense of themselves. You would think they didn’t know they have the most disgusting habits of all the small animals.”

“Do you think he’ll only stay a little while, and return to where he came from once the stadium is done?”

“It’s possible, I suppose,” Grandfather said. “There was a time when a rat wouldn’t be seen anywhere near an area like ours. Not good enough for them. They like the hustle and bustle of the street corners and gutters and such. Now they come to live among their lessers. Why, I would think they wouldn’t want to be here too long. Once the trend of being in such sleepy places is over, they’ll move on to someplace more exciting.”

“I hope so,” Squirrel said, and went back to eating his bread, quiet and reflective.

∙ ∙ ∙

Squirrel never attempted to speak to Rat again and remained on the fence as he passed, scurrying down to gather his acorns only when Rat was well out of sight. He felt put out to be altering his daily routine because of his new neighbor, but Squirrel decided that life would be more pleasant by avoiding the disagreeable creature.

As the days went by, Squirrel observed the industrious rat continuing to run back and forth preparing his new home, installing cable and internet connections, moving in furniture, and setting up the luxuries of an animal of expensive tastes. The way Rat carried on it seemed as if he assumed the whole area belonged to him. He moved rocks to his suiting and changed the positions of the flaps in the fence that Squirrel himself had created years ago. Squirrel also observed with distaste that after Rat rummaged through the human’s garbage for his meals he left bones and open soup cans and other such detritus lying about, leaving a mess for others to clean. To have their humble little yard, home to only a few small animals, treated so shabbily by someone who had only just arrived had Squirrel fuming.

Cat sitting on his windowsill and Squirrel down on the grass underneath found themselves chatting one the afternoon, as they were longtime friends and neighbors, when the subject of Rat came up. They both agreed that the yard felt less friendly now that he had arrived.

“It’s like he thinks he owns the whole yard,” Cat said.

“Yes, it’s true,” Squirrel replied. “And so unfriendly.”

“I even heard he was rude to Grackle and nearly pushed Pigeon aside to move past.”

“Never!” Squirrel said. “Oh, and that shouldn’t surprise me. He moves in and doesn’t take the time to get to know anyone, or learn how we like to do things. He just pushes things about to his liking with no consideration for anyone.”

“If only I could go outside,” Cat mewed mournfully, as his humans always kept him indoors. “I would show him a thing or two.”

“It’s just as well,” said Squirrel. “Animals like him are not really worth your time. Grandfather says Rat will learn the hard way when he finds he needs a neighbor for something.”

∙ ∙ ∙

The days grew ever shorter and the leaves on the trees turned orange and golden yellow then drifted slowly to the ground, covering the grass in blankets of crisp refuse. A nip of freeze touched the air and the fur on small animals thickened. Having completely filled his winter stores, Squirrel spent less and less time outside. He and Grandfather Squirrel occupied most of their days reading, listening to jazz, and writing poetry. The quiet broke only when one would recite of a line or two they thought well done, to the contentment or laughter of the other. In this, Squirrel and Grandfather remained a compatible pair and hardly at odds with the other. Life in the tree maintained its peaceful, charming existence all during the fall months—that is until the squeaks and squeals of Rat and his kind began.

No one realized that Rat had moved so many into his new domicile. It seemed as if they had usurped the neighborhood overnight. It was quite unheard of in this area for so many small animals to occupy such a tiny space. And at night they liked to come out and jump about, fat and full, screeching and dancing by the light of the moon, crashing in and out of the garbage cans, banging on the tin lids.

“What a terrible racket!” Grandfather said, holding his ears.

“Those rats,” Squirrel said. “The Maker forgive me, I can’t stand them.”

“The humans will quiet them.”

“You think so? How?”

“Who knows? But it won’t be pleasant, I’ll tell you.”

As the noise continued into the wee hours of the morning, Squirrel thought about how pleasant life used to be in the bygone days not long ago when his home felt kind and welcoming. And he wondered if life would ever return to the way it once was.

∙ ∙ ∙

With its usual ease, autumn soon gave way to winter’s chill and light clusters of crystalline snow drifted from the heavens like dove feathers. A hush of white covered the yard like a blanket and every sensible small animal remained tucked in their homes for a long, seasonal nap. Yet, on the shortest day of the year, all squirrel-kind celebrated a holiday. Many traveled far and wide to the home of their eldest relative to give good cheer, eat tasty foods, and introduce the newest and youngest members of the family. Squirrel and Grandfather busied themselves for days and days in preparation for the appearance of the aunts and uncles and sisters and brothers and nieces and nephews who should soon come bundled with cakes and pies and many kinds of savory dishes to the delight and satisfaction of everyone’s taste buds and stomachs. It could easily be said that this day on the squirrel calendar was the most anticipated of all the days of the year. It was a time of deep appreciation for the good fortune of living and family and friends.

When the squirrels arrived, jolly in thick coats against the cold, there was much hugging and patting on shoulders and “how are things goings on?” and “this one was born this past spring” and “that one in late fall.” The tree was jammed full with happy squirrels eating acorn cakes and acorn breads with blueberry jam, juicy and sweet ground nut pies, and mugs of mulled berry wine emptied and refilled to everyone’s contentment.

Once all were well-roasted, or one could say tipsy on happiness, the time of singing began—because, to be perfectly honest, to find oneself in the midst the chittering songs of squirrels one must be three sheets to the wind to enjoy it. And enjoy it they did, as they sang Winter’s Day songs muffled deep within the trunk of the tree until sleep slowly overtook them and snores replaced the cheer.

Bright and early the next day, the children received gifts of toys to their joy and excitement. Once the little ones were off to play in the lower rooms of the tree, serious subjects could be discussed among the adults and the topic of the rat encroachment came up. Rat’s arrival had been the talk of the area and even reached far enough to catch the ears of the squirrel relatives who were most concerned for the welfare of Squirrel and Grandfather.

“I don’t think it’s any way for you to live,” one aunt said.

“They have taken over this area and other areas as well,” an uncle said.

“They must make life so unpleasant for you,” a niece said.

“Once they move in, they push everyone out,” another said.

“You must take Rat in hand,” an elder sister said, sitting in a chair, round and stately. “You must make him understand how to live more properly.”

“Yes, you really really should, Grandfather.”

“And what if the humans begin to take action?”

“When the humans decide to do something, it will bring danger to all the small animals of the area.”

“Have they done anything so far?”

“They have done very little as of yet,” Squirrel said.

“Why, I say, that won’t last.”

“Well, we can’t do anything now,” Grandfather replied, looking stern and thoughtful, to the agreement of everyone, as it was commonly understood by all animals that movement or fuss or exertion of any kind during the winter months was not something anyone was expected to perform. “But come spring, we should take Rat in hand.”

“Yes, Grandfather,” Squirrel said, “I do believe we should.”

∙ ∙ ∙

By springtime, just as the squirrel relatives had predicted, the humans went to work on ridding themselves of Rat and his company. They dusted all the corners with a sour, metallic scented white powder and Squirrel made sure to walk along the top of the fence whenever he dared to venture outside. They even cut down the very fine irises that came up so beautifully purple and sweet once a year along the base of the fence, and mixed broken glass into the soil.

Often Squirrel could hear a human banging at the tins to scatter six or seven plump rats from the garbage. But honestly, nothing did anything to deter Rat and his kind as they were persistent rodents and would come back within minutes of the human walking away. The human put out small comfortable looking homes in convenient corners with bits of tasty smelling food inside that some of the youngster rats, unaware of the ways of the world, nibbled at to their demise. As horrible as Squirrel found Rat, his heart broke to see his little ones caught by such a cruel end.

Despite the efforts of the humans, the rats continued to flood the yard and the adjoining yards in greater and greater numbers. The once friendly pleasantness of the area ceased to exist with the scatterings of trash and other unsightly leavings of Rat and his people. It became so that many small animals simply moved away.

“The hour has come,” Grandfather declared one fine sunny morning.

“What hour?” Squirrel replied, feeling nervous at this sudden declaration.

“The hour of Rat,” Grandfather said. “I said come the springtime we should take him in hand, and I mean to do that this very morning.”

“Yes, Grandfather,” Squirrel said cheerily. “I’ll gather some our friends and neighbors and we’ll make Rat understand how to be a sensible animal.”

And so they did. It was quite a remarkable thing for Grandfather to leave the tree trunk as he had not traveled so far in many seasons. The taxing journey had Squirrel fretting the entire way as he carefully guided his elder down the safest path along the boughs of the tree to the fence then finally to the open yard. Although all felt the treat of Grandfather’s presence—as many had not seen him in person in quite some time—a dour cloud overcast the assemblage as he and Squirrel, Grackle, Pigeon, and Cat from his window perch gathered to address the very serious issue of Rat.

It was put upon Raccoon to encourage Rat to attend that gathering because of his size and slightly intimidating visage. And with all the pertinent parties present the intervention began with Grandfather taking the lead in addressing the situation given his elder status.

“Rat, it is time you heard some truth about yourself. Your behavior since your arrival is most intolerable and it really must stop. Your inconsiderate treatment of the small animals of the area is beyond decent standards of behavior. Your screeching and yowling until all hours of the night, the banging of the garbage tins, and leavings of refuse within the yard is quite insufferable. Can’t you see the danger your behavior could bring down upon us?” Grandfather said firmly to the serious nods of the animals present.

Squirrel noticed a glimmer in Rat’s eyes that hinted at bemusement, and he thought, This is no good. Rat doesn’t care about anything.

“So, do you agree to stop your rows and misbehaviors and scatterings of litter and whatnots?”

Rat, who had remained silent during the entire proceedings, stood on his hind legs and with an air of superiority said, “Shan’t.”

“What?” replied Grandfather.

“Shan’t,” Rat repeated. “I shall continue to be as I like where I like for as long as I like. Who are you to tell me how to live? I will come and go and do as I please. You people don’t own the yard. You, in fact, don’t own anything. I have moved in and you will simply have to adjust yourselves to the way I do things.” Then Rat turned his back and haughtily walked away to everyone’s consternation.

The yard became so morose that one afternoon Squirrel said to Grandfather, “Maybe we should move.”

“What? I’ve been here all my life. Generations of us Squirrels have lived in this very tree. And we’re comfortable here.”

“But Grandfather, I can barely collect acorns for us for sake of the poison. And so many of our friends are gone. All the small animals we used to like so much can’t stay here anymore because the rats have taken all the decent places to live.”

“Yes, I know, I know, that’s all true but maybe the humans will figure out something to make Rat leave.”

“Whatever they do seems to make our lives miserable, and barely fazes Rat. I tell you, Grandfather, I’m beginning to hate it here.”

“Well, I don’t want to go. This is our home.”

“Will you at least give it some thought? Home shouldn’t be someplace you have to fight to be happy in.”

And just as Squirrel uttered these words a loud crash could be heard coming from outside.

Humans had come dressed in the brightest of yellows with the name of the city imprinted on them in large block letters on their backs, and their faces covered in white masks. They descended like a hellion pack with long, sharp metal knives. These were not the humans who usually inhabited the area. These were officials from the government come to clear the abandoned yard, which had grown into a wild forest of thick green weeds that only Rat and his kin dared to tread. Squirrel and Grandfather stared down in horror as the chopping commenced. The humans cut and grabbed at the unsuspecting rat clan, some caught by their long tails to squeal in terror for help that could not come. The horrible sound caused Squirrel to slam closed their front door while Grandfather covered his ears in a vain attempt to block out the shrieks.

The melee went on for hours and hours while Grandfather and Squirrel huddled together in silence with eyes wide with dread. Then a smell came seeping through the cracks in the windows and around the door frame, so that the pair hurried to stuff exposed areas where the poison slipped through with strips of cloth. Still the chemical scent permeated, but fortunately while it choked the breath, it proved non-lethal, at least to them.

As the light of day grew dim, a menacing quiet filled the evening such that Grandfather and Squirrel spoke only in whispers if they spoke at all. They ate their supper in silence and went to bed early, both spending the night dreaming dark disturbing dreams.

The next morning as the sun rose in a haze of orange and pink, Squirrel dared to open the front door and to step outside onto the bough, followed tentatively by Grandfather. The land beneath them lay blackened and barren. The roots of the weeds had been pulled up, and the soil turned over. The dampness of the morning mixed with the poison to cast an eerie mist over the ground. And not a rat could be seen or heard anywhere.

Thus ended the occupation of Rat and his kin. The small animals of the area did not celebrate their demise, though. In fact, quite the opposite. The neighborhood remained sorrowful for a long time and only wished that Rat had been more willing to listen and share in a peaceful coexistence with all those who called this place home.

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT JENNIFER MARIE BRISSETT

Jennifer Marie Brissett is a British-Jamaican American who immigrated to the US when she was four and grew up in Cambridge, MA. For three and a half years, she owned and operated the Brooklyn indie bookstore Indigo Café & Books. She has a Bachelor’s in Interdisciplinary Engineering (Electrical Engineering with a concentration in Visual Art) from Boston University and a Master’s from the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Maine. She is on faculty at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop where she teaches Science Fiction & Fantasy Writing. Her short stories can be found in The Future Fire, Lightspeed Magazine, Terraform, Uncanny Magazine, Warrior Wisewoman 2, APB: Artists against Police Brutality and other publications. Her debut novel Elysium (Aqueduct Press) was a finalist for the Locus Award for Best First Novel, placed on the Honor List for the James Tiptree, Jr Award, and won the Philip K. Dick Special Citation. She currently is putting the final touches on her follow-up novel Eleusis (which is the second book in a planned trilogy.) She lives in NYC.

CRACKS

By Xen // 15173 words

1

Asad Gregory Johnson counted the beat of his heart in the closing of doors.

That was how he knew it was time to wake: when throughout Boston, one door after another after another slammed shut. Windows closed without so much as a single crack. Blinds shuttered with one last nervous glance. Runners pushed up against the bases of doorframes, stopping the gaps beneath. Vents snapped air-tight. Each day the sound swelled like rain, fleeing in advance of sunset in a wave across the city.

Asad sat up in bed, leaned against the headboard, and watched the sun sink across the horizon, a bloody egg yolk punctured and melting across the sky. He reminded himself, as he did each day, that he was one of a small few allowed to see this. One of the few who could look at the sunset with his window unshaded and his eyes wide open, and that should be privilege enough.

It wasn’t.

The other bed in the room was empty, the sheets carelessly smoothed. A battered, scarred Sox jacket was draped over the pillow, clean clothes and underwear laid out across the duvet. His brother was up already, but not gone yet. The patter-splat of the shower mixed with the hiss of a sizzling skillet, the smell of frying ham.

“Saad?” Gam called. Her voice creaked querulous as his mattress springs as he rolled over and buried his face in his threadbare pillow with a groan. “Ain’t no dawdlin’, boy. You know night comes on faster after equinox. I done taught you not to waste the dark.”

Asad said nothing.

But he wondered, as he had with many sunsets and many moonrises, what it would be like to lock himself away with the coming of the dark, and sleep through the night without a care in the world.

He let himself roll until he hit the edge of the bed, then fell and caught himself on his legs at the last second. As Asad’s feet hit the floor, Tarif knocked the bedroom door open and strutted in with a towel around his waist, his skin steaming dark as volcanic stone and the tight, close-cropped curls of his hair beaded with water droplets like dew on cobwebs. “Shower’s yours, baby bro,” he announced, decisive as calling a ringside hit; that was how Tarif did everything, in grand proclamations. Half the damn time he sounded like a club promoter in a Steve Harvey suit.

“Didn’t even use all the hot water this time.”

“You in some kinda hurry?”

Tarif grinned and thumped his broad barrel chest, then the smaller, rounder cask of his belly. “Just get moving. Haul your Black ass or I won’t leave you any breakfast, squeak.”

“Sure.” Asad pulled the closet open and dragged a clean t-shirt and jeans off their hangers—but stopped when Tarif curled a hand on his shoulder.

“Hey. You okay?”

Asad stilled, looking down. The denim draped over his arm was ratty and torn, the knees of even his newest jeans blown out, the seams down the sides worn down to stripes of fibrous thread threatening to rip at the slightest pull. He plucked at one loose scrap, then lifted his head and turned a smile over his shoulder. “Yeah. I’m fine.”

“You look tired.”

“I am.”

Tarif watched him with a knit to his brows, a furrow to his lips making the dip between his broad, smooth nose and upper lip sink into a little almond-shaped canyon. “It gets better, Saad. It really does.”

Asad laughed briefly. “Do it?”

“You ain’t old enough yet. When you finish school—”

“I’ll still be kept in the dark.” He turned to face his brother. “Not enough of us, Rifi. You know they’ll never let me go dayside. And even if they would, Gam would be ashamed of me.”

“Gam’s her own person. She gotta let you be your own person, too.”

“Can she, though?” Asad bit off. And when Tarif reached for him again, Asad knocked his brother’s hand away and backed up until the closet doorknob hit the small of his back. “No point in trying to have a life when that life could get swallowed up.”

Tarif stared at him, his eyes wide and liquid and strange. Asad stared back, and wondered for the millionth time if Tarif had chosen this—the darkness, the weight of it all—or if he’d been given no choice but to come back.

When all you knew was the dark, sometimes the light burned too much to stand.

Tarif looked away first. Looked away, and pulled his towel off to scrub his hair dry as he walked stark-ass naked across the room. He picked up his boxers from his bed.

“Happened again last night,” drifted over his shoulder, a subdued murmur. “Louisville.”

Asad sucked in a gasp. It lodged in his throat like swallowed gum. Last he’d heard, Louisville still had well over two hundred thousand people within the city limits. People who walked the day, and people who kept the night away; people like him, who stopped the dark from splitting open into cracks and canyons that could swallow the world up and seal it off without so much as a burp.

“Nobody talking about it,” Tarif continued. “Not on the news, anyway. Total blackout, like the whole place never existed. Only a few people got out—the dark ones—but no one knows what happened to them since then. If they’re being blamed.”

Asad’s heart thumped violently. He stared at his brother. “Where you hear that, if nobody talking?”

“…somewhere. Don’t you worry none for it.”

“Where’s somewhere? Rifi, what you been doing?”

“It’s just a thing.” Tarif hunched his shoulders and stepped into his boxers, then swiped his phone off the dresser and thumbed the screen. “Links you up to other people like us. Anonymous. Deletes the messages five minutes after. Ain’t nothing but underground chatter, but the news telling us less and less.”

“You can’t be fucking serious.”

Tarif hissed under his breath, glaring, clutching his phone harder. “We dying, Saad. I can fucking bet you. It’s not just the cracks. If a place goes dark, we go dark with it, even the survivors. People who don’t get out fast enough, run somewhere else, get snatched up and don’t nobody ever hear from them again. If them dayside folk won’t tell the truth, we gotta find other ways to say it.”

Asad leaned over and stole a glimpse at the screen, before Tarif jerked it away. What he’d seen didn’t tell him much: a simple black screen with rapid-scrolling letters, timestamps, strings of numbers instead of user names.

It told him enough.

It told him this was trouble.

“You don’t know who’s really on the other end,” he said. “What if the wrong people watching?”

“They can’t do nothing,” Tarif retorted sullenly. “We don’t give out locations or meet up. No identifying info. Nobody dime out nobody.”

“Except IP addresses, cellphone triangulation…”

“All that shit’s encrypted.”

“Okay. Sure. Who told you that? Santa Claus?” Asad dumped his clothing on his bed and pushed past his brother to the door. “I’m gonna shower. Delete it.”

“You don’t tell me what to do, baby brother,” Tarif snarled after him.

“You want Gam to kill us both?” Asad paused in the doorway, glancing back. “Delete it.”

“We ain’t doing nothing wrong.” Tarif turned his face away, glaring at the window, his mouth twisted up into a knot. “They need us. They don’t get to control us.”

“Yeah?” Asad laughed bitterly. “But they do.”

2

Breakfast was quiet, but then breakfast was always quiet. Felt like church sometimes, and maybe Asad was only imagining an old memory of bursting white flowers and ladies in hats like great netted boat sails and matching jackets and skirts, everybody in pale Easter colors that made their dark, dark skin only shine that much more. Maybe he’d seen it on TV, the choir clapping and the reverend up there swaying back and forth with his glasses gleaming and his thick bristly moustache and his purple sash draped over his black satiny robe, because Gam had never taken them to daytime church. Not that he could remember.

Daytime church was for praying. Nighttime folk was for fixing things, ’cause Gam always said weren’t no room for praying when there was time to do.

Still, when Tarif and Asad finished eating—still not looking at each other, still not speaking to each other—and pulled on their jackets, Asad in his threadbare Fresh Waffles hoodie, Gam stopped them at the door. She barely came up to his ribs; she used to fill up the world, but he’d hit a growth spurt a few years ago, and Tarif had always been big. She was a tiny thing between them; tiny, but not small. Gam could never be small, for all the wrinkles and the thinness of the bones poking through her wrists. All that power in her had compressed, over the years. Concentrated. And concentrated things just meant it took a lot less to knock you on your ass, 180-proof liquid fire and not a bit watered down.

That power brimmed in Gam’s hands, as she laid them atop Tarif and Asad’s heads. Her palms were dry and neither warm nor cold, as though they weren’t flesh at all but paper written with the secrets carried between them. They whispered, a crawling sensation against the skin of his brow, and his own palms tingled in echo.

“Come home,” Gam said, as she always did—Gam’s prayer, more powerful than begging and pleading and wailing to the sky could ever be, more powerful than Sunday church hats and clapping hands and gospel hymns. This was their church: her hand on their heads, her voice both whisper and resonant command. “You boys stay together, and you come home to me.”

“We will, Gam,” Asad promised, knowing damned well they might not come home at all.

Pointedly not looking at each other, tension bristling between them, Asad and Tarif clattered down the concrete steps of their narrow brick apartment building, feet scuffing over the faded remnants of children’s chalk drawings. Little things—yellow chalk suns with radiating spears of light, pale blue crescent moons, stick figures of mommy and daddy and the dog and cat and little girls’ and boys’ friends and enemies and make-believe stories. But Asad stopped on the bottom step, and studied a sigil chalked on the corner in white: an eye with a slit pupil and long cats-eye lashes, enclosed in a dashed circle. The dashes weren’t right, should be runework, but nobody knew the runes but him and people like him, the after-dark people. Daytime people didn’t have the eyes, but they understood.

And some little boy or girl in this building understood enough to ask Asad to watch over them tonight. A little boy or girl who had nightmares, maybe—bad dreams ’bout falling through the cracks, slipping away from all the people in those stick-figure pictures, the little pink chalk version of themselves washed out with the rain and never drawn back in.

Asad closed his eyes. His breaths had thorns, and he didn’t like it. This was why he’d never go dayside, even if he had the choice.

Even if he missed the sun on his face, baking into his flesh, searing and shining on black skin that had been made to drink the light into its glow.

Tarif touched his shoulder, his arm, a silent gesture that said, I know.

I know.

And just like that they weren’t fighting anymore. They drifted close to each other with their hands in their jacket pockets against the early evening chill, elbows bumping together as they stepped out into the night.

The street lights were out again, except one flickering at the end of the block where Floyd turned onto Callender Street. Turned all of Mattapan into shades of blue and gray with little touches of gold where the light seeped between buildings from Stratton across the way. Made the shadows thicker, alive, heavy enough that if Asad looked at them long enough they took on weight and started to crawl, oozing along the spidery chasms in jagged sidewalk that hadn’t been repaired since the last big split. He’d always thought people who fell through the cracks looked like that. They stopped being human, and turned into awful carbon-paper tatters. Even if he knew better; Gam had told him what happened, how bad it was. Like crossing the event horizon of a black hole, she’d said.

And people who fell through the cracks got torn to pieces, shredded by the gravitational forces holding two worlds both together and apart. Anything that came back out weren’t nothing he wanted to meet. Besides—things that came through? Nobody knew what they looked like.

Because they swallowed everything up, and didn’t leave a single eye left to see.

He tilted his head back, and looked up at the sky. His school books said in places where the city lights had gone, people could see the stars as more than one or two pinpricks here and there. His school books said, too, before the first big split there used to be cars in the streets with their tail lights red and glaring, and airplanes and helicopters up there with their running lights blinking, their engines roaring, instead of this dead, empty silence and starless wrongness lit only by a pallid infected moon, seeping its clear pale juices onto the edges of the clouds ringing its light.

“Think they’ll ever fix the street lights?” he asked.

“Nah. Keeping us in the dark means they don’t have to look at us.”

“Do they hate us that much?”

“Ain’t us they hate. It’s that we can walk where they can’t.” Tarif ginned and spread his arms. “Nothing like this. This quiet night, when the whole world’s made out of silver and blue velvet. They can’t never see this. They come out here, they die. But us?” He turned with his arms still flung out wide, spinning a slow full circle. “We own this. It don’t own us.”

Asad glanced around—at the broken heaps of concrete apartment tenements with their hollow eyes, so run-down it was hard to tell which were occupied and which were condemned. At the scrub pushing up through the sidewalks. At the barren desolation of a neighborhood with the abandoned look of a place no one wanted to live, even when they had no choice.

One block over, the brownstones started. Tall and sleek and gentrified, restored and polished and rented out at three times their original value. But right here, right now, on Floyd Street, wasn’t a single damned thing anyone wanted to own.

Just what they settled with.

“What the hell do we own?” he asked, and Tarif snorted.

“Nuh-uh. I’m not letting your fucking tired soggy ass bring me down tonight.” He elbowed Asad. “Let’s split up.”

Asad stopped, knees locking, and stared at his brother. “Gam said—”

“You’re seventeen. Don’t be a baby.”

The words came out in a sneer, but Tarif’s cheeks burned red, dark and deep, and he hunched his shoulders and kicked at the sidewalk, looking past Asad but never quite making eye contact. Asad sighed.

“You meeting that girl, huh. The one from down south.”

Tarif broke into a broad grin, all the stars missing from the night sky right there in his smile. “Her name’s Shawna,” he said, then laughed and rubbed the back of his neck. “What? Why you looking at me like that?”

“You goddamn well know why.”

“I got a weakness, okay?” Tarif ducked his head. “Girl thick.”

“Sure,” Asad said dryly. “You know this how people die in horror movies, right? Split up when we ain’t supposed to.”

“You scared?”

Asad said nothing. He wasn’t supposed to be afraid. He was supposed to keep the fear away for other people, which meant he couldn’t give in to the brittleness in his thigh-bones or the way his chest folded in like it would snap right in the middle faster than a greasy wishbone at Thanksgiving.

Tarif clapped both thick, heavy hands to his shoulders, weighing him down, grounding him with a touch and warm brown eyes he’d known his whole damn life, as constant and steady and right as Gam and her electric palms.

“Nothing gonna come through, baby brother,” Tarif said. “Nothing ever come through, ’cause we do our jobs. Because all the others do their jobs.”

“Louisville. You said it—last night, Louisville went dark.”

“Because they didn’t do their shit. Because it was too big for them. It’s not like that here. I won’t let it be. It’s gonna be all right. Promise.” Tarif squeezed his shoulders, his heat soaking through Asad’s jacket, his fingers pinching Asad’s collarbones in a way that always hurt but he’d never let go of in a thousand years. “I’m gonna help Shawna check her block, then come back and find you. Okay?”

“Okay.” Asad nodded, pressing his lips together and biting back the taste of ash and fear souring in the back of his mouth. “Be careful. Don’t fall through.”

Tarif stepped back, that broad grin back, blush so deep, and Asad wondered how it must feel, to be so deeply in love he would brave the dark, the unknown, the places where people fell through the cracks in the world and never came back.

“Nothing gonna happen to me, baby brother,” Tarif said, with his confidence that filled up his thick barrel chest like a keg that never ran dry. “We the superheroes in the dark, man. We the ones who hold the world together.”

Then he was turning away, already half-gone. Wasn’t hard to see Tarif was somewhere else, his thoughts on Shawna, on kisses, on thick lush thighs and the way girls had of changing the way the air of a room breathed, like it went down smoother because they were there. Tarif’s back grew smaller and farther away, words drifting over the night in laughing, light promise.

“One way or another, baby bro…we gotta pull through.”

3

It wasn’t the first time Asad had walked their block alone. Technically seven blocks; the Johnson family owned the world-ways down Floyd from the curve of Callender to Blue Hill, where Callender became Greenrock Street and Floyd became Donald Road and those streets became someone else’s responsibility. Asad and Tarif would start at the point where Floyd and Callender met, then follow the curve of Callender around until it ran parallel with Floyd again, stopping to peek in between, down the cross-street of Lucerne before moving on until they hit Blue Hill and circled back around.

They’d kick rocks as they walked and shout GOOOAAAL! when they snapped a hunk of asphalt into a sewer grate, then laugh and hush each other even though no one would be brave enough to open their windows and look outside. They had to be quiet, because they had to listen. Cracks didn’t always open outside, and if they caught that feeling, if they heard those cries of fear, they had to be ready to bolt in like the fire department, all shoulders and bluster, and break down doors and do what they came to do.

But tonight, Asad kicked rocks down Callender Street alone because Tarif had run off to chase a girl. Last time he’d run off to chase some boys who wanted to form a sundown baseball team, though it had fallen apart when their parents had caught wind and said if they had time to play ball, they had time to work runes. Before, Tarif had been thinking about going dayside, sleeping nights and waking up days to look for a job when not many dayside jobs needed the kind of skills nightsiders learned in school.

But Tarif still tried, while Asad watched and held his tongue because he wasn’t gonna be the jackass shitting on the weird hope Tarif held onto, a hope that made him the younger one though he had four years on Asad. Somehow, Asad always ended up playing the older brother. The voice of reason. No thick girl was gonna turn his head ’cause girls didn’t turn his head at all, and the odds of finding someone like him—someone with the eyes, someone who saw, someone who knew the runewords and closed the cracks and kept the nothing at bay—who was also someone like him?

Never gonna happen. Not today, not tomorrow.

So he did his duty, he did his homework, he followed the old ways, and he let Tarif be young and joyful for both of them, optimistic and hopeful and full of things Asad didn’t think he’d ever possessed.

That was the way things were. The way things had always been, and always would be.

So why did the silence tonight feel different?

He knew every corner of his blocks, and he traced every square of sidewalk, peering into the chips and crevices in the concrete to make sure they were just concrete, and not a rift taking advantage to fit itself into the ready-made shape. He climbed ladders that had become law since the first split—not having one installed was punishable by fines from city inspectors. Couldn’t risk it. Couldn’t risk that one rooftop passed over might be the one place a crack opened big enough to swallow the whole city.

He crept along rooftops, peered between apartment buildings and weathered brick-fronted houses, inspected beneath dumpsters, scaled street lamps, ran his fingers along awnings, tried not to flinch when motion-sensor lights on porches snapped on. He knew most of them—from the Norfolks’ blinding strobe spots to the dim little yellow light that always drew mosquitoes and moths to the Hernandez porch—and they knew him, knew the boy creeping silent around their houses weren’t trying nothing but to hold them all together.

Yet he still felt like a thief, if only because he didn’t want to be seen. He didn’t like the way daysiders looked at him, when they recognized what he was. Like they needed something from him.

Like he actually gave them hope.

Sometimes they peered at him through the blinds, but tonight brought no cautious, frightened eyes; nothing but the occasional sound caught through glass and brick and wood, close-held murmurs and television channels flicking and dinner plates clanking. He was alone, unseen, and maybe that was what had him so uneasy.

He wouldn’t mind being seen, for once. By someone. Tarif had Shawna, had his baseball team boys, but Asad was the quiet one, the responsible one, and even in school the other nightsiders never much looked at him when Tarif’s bright personality took up enough space for both of them.

“You getting yourself all messed in the head,” he muttered to himself. “You mad Tarif ain’t here, or you mad at the space he take up when he is here?”

No one and nothing answered. Not even the dog he heard rummaging in the trash as he drew up on Lucerne; not the wind wobbling the power lines until they made strange, warped, wailing sounds as they bounced and jostled. That wind hit hard for a September evening, and Asad pulled his hoodie up and hunched into it, zipping up the neck until it covered his mouth. Wind in September shouldn’t be like this. Wind like this came with summer storms, then left and didn’t come back until the winter snows.

The back of his neck prickled. What had Gam always said? If things ain’t right, things ain’t right. The wind was wrong. This whole night was wrong, and that was why Asad was really mad:

’Cause he was afraid he would find something, and he was never afraid when he walked the blocks alone. ’Cause Tarif never left him when things felt off, but he’d been too fucked in the head to even notice the air tasted like flat stale cola and wet quarters, and he’d left Asad to handle what was supposed to be both their shit when Asad shouldn’t be closing seals solo until he was eighteen, maybe twenty.

God damn it.

Just find it. Now that he’d stopped ignoring his screaming instincts, there was no mistaking: it was close. He didn’t think he’d passed it yet, but if he didn’t find it by the end of the sweep he’d circle back. Crawl under houses if he had to. Use the block key and go sniffing inside. If he followed the direction of the rising hairs on the backs of his arms, he’d at least be able to narrow it down to a few buildings before he had to go door to door, slipping inside and creeping unwanted among people’s lives, bringing fear into their homes until he told them it was safe, they were safe, they wouldn’t fall between tonight.

He palmed the skeleton key in his pocket, held it close until it printed hot against his palm and he smelled the tinny stink of brass soaking in the sweat of his skin. He kept his eyes keen with every step, listened for the tingle and pull that was as much sound as sensation, a buzz on the back of his scalp, that weird naked crawl like he’d just gotten his edges done and everything felt prickly and too cold. It wasn’t on Lucerne. He wasn’t being drawn there, and the scent was fainter, buried under dumpster rankness and a little gift that dog had left behind. Had to be close, if the dog had run. Strays didn’t run from one boy on the street, but they ran when something shifted in the polarity of the world, when their instincts told them a disaster was on the horizon and they had to seek high ground.

Maybe that was what made people like Asad, like Tarif, like Gam. They hadn’t lost their instinct. They’d long ago forgotten being animals and become men, the first men, the men who became all other men…but some men, some women, some humans didn’t lose what connected them to what they once were.

That connection drew him down Callender, right up on the Blue Hill crossways. He stood on the center median of the deserted street and listened to the howling silence: the lonely keen of the wind coiling serpentine between buildings, caressing the walls, begging to be let in. The trees planted along the median whispered, as if they could tell him what to do, how to do it. He toed out of his Adidas, pulled his socks off, and balled them up before stuffing them into his left sneaker. Feet bare and planted on the dirt, grass tickling between his toes, he closed his eyes and tried to shut everything out and just feel where that wrongness, that prickle, pulled stronger.

It was like standing in the ocean and feeling for the changes in current, where once you got out deep, deep enough to drown, the water had layers—some hotter and some colder, making them move past each other at different speeds. Tarif said it was like swimming through the pee-patch in the public pool, but pee in the pool didn’t make currents that pushed Asad one way, then the other, then the other again. He stood with his hands at his sides and his fingers spread like bracing them on a table, bracing to keep from coming unmoored when, eyes closed this way—shutting down one sense after the other until he no longer felt the cool itching grass or the ice-biting breeze or the scratchy threads of his hoodie, until he no longer smelled pavement still baking from the sun and stinking of used bubblegum and exhaust, until he no longer heard the trees’ curious whisperings—he could easily lose himself, in the black space behind his eyelids. He could easily become nothing, abandon all connection with the world as it was, while he cut himself free from his senses to feel the one place where an electric wound had been cut into the skin of reality.

The currents pushed him to and fro, swaying on his feet with a kind of dreamy vertigo. He stopped trying to keep his balance, stopped trying to focus on his body, and gave in to the draw, until he leaned over and over and over and almost fell. He caught himself as that lurch started in his gut and everything rushed wrong-ways, eyes snapping open and arms windmilling as he pivoted himself around and rocked forward onto the very tips of his toes until gravity righted itself and he knew up from down. He stood up straight, and looked.

He faced across Blue Hill Avenue, his body an arrow pointing across the street. Next to a three-story pastel blue house with white trim, with an empty lot’s space between, stood a long, low, rectangular building: two stories, a storefront painted over with a mural of Black folk dancing and playing music below, tape-marked rectangular windows up top, pale gray cement in the front, red brick in the back. Metal stairs ran up the side to the second floor. Both the wall and the second-floor wooden access door had been painted over with graffiti tags in shades of blue, the letters so fat and stylized it was impossible to tell, at this distance, what they meant to say.

Asad bit his lip. Over on that side of Blue Hill belonged to the Roberts, old Marsha and her cranky nephew Jonas with the gold stud in his nose, and they didn’t like people stepping in and doing their job. Technically the Johnson block cornered right there on the bus stop where, by day, people waited for the 28 and 29 and hoped this wouldn’t be the one day they got stranded when the buses ran late and took everyone back to the transit center to wait out the night behind shuttered windows and doors.

But he didn’t see Marsha and Jonas around. And the Roberts hadn’t been in Boston as long as the Johnsons anyway, and when shit hit the fan everyone from all around—the Roberts, the Gurneys over in Dorchester, the Ndiayes from Roxbury, everybody from everywhere—came to Gam to make the hard choices. And Asad was Gam’s grandson, and a crack had opened somewhere in or around that building, reaching for him like it had put out feelers and knew how hard to pull to make him twitch.

So he had to be like Gam, and make the hard decision to do something about it whether old Miss Marsha would like it or not.

Right?

He balled his fists up inside his pockets. The skeleton key bit into his knuckles. Gam trusted him with the skeleton key, not Tarif. The key that would open every door in Boston. She trusted Asad to have this key and not abuse it, not do stupid shit, not run around fucking everything up just because he was seventeen and he fucking could. So she’d trust him to do the right thing now, and the right thing was to cross out of his territory and take care of that fucking crack before it spread large enough to swallow something up.

He rolled his shoulders, again and again and again. He’d learned the trick at school, one of those things they taught the nightsiders and not the daysiders: how to loosen the body to be ready to run, to fight. It worked the tension out of the neck, stopped it from radiating up into a headache that would cloud his thoughts and his perceptions, calmed him with the familiar and the routine. One more time, he rolled and rolled and rolled, until his muscles were putty and his head went light and a soft burn sank in at the base of his skull and nape of his neck, pleasant and deep.

Then he pushed his feet back into his socks and shoes, stepped off the median into the street, and crossed Blue Hill into the vacant lot.

The moment he set shoe rubber to the pavement of the lot, a charge shot up through him, crawling up his legs and pulling in his groin and making his bladder go loose even as his ass clenched up.

“Damn,” he gasped, then let out a nervous laugh. “Damn.”

Fucking strong. He’d never been close to a crack so large he felt the charge of its edges before he even saw it, but he had to be careful. That much potential energy meant the crack might be unstable, its edges fluctuating and malleable, and lowering his guard for even a blink could leave him chewed up and spat back out in particles compacted denser than a neutron star.

He circled the building slowly, casing the entire lot first; the pull came from straight inside the shop, but he did his job and he did it right. He walked every inch of the lot, hissing now and then as another step surged those weird shocks up his legs and left his knees numb and his butt tight and tingling as if he’d been sitting on a hard chair for five straight days.

Nothing in the lot. Nothing when he circled the building, either, unless it was up high where he couldn’t see. He ran his fingers around and around the walls, tracing circles, feeling for anything that would sizzle through him like sticking his fingers in an electrical socket, pausing to follow the contours of the painting on the storefront, the rounded limbs and stylized shapes catching people in motion. People in life.

He wondered if this had been painted before the split as a promise of what could be, or after—as a memory of what never would be again.

No cracks outside, that he saw. No ladder on the building. Marsha had probably reported it, but he should say something to Gam. Asad fished a pair of folding miniature binoculars from his pocket, pressed them to his eyes, and circled the building one more time, scanning the high places. Nothing. He’d have to get up on the roof, climb from the staircase maybe, but first he’d check inside.

The skeleton key unlocked the storefront, and the faint jingle of a little brass bell dangling down over the door from a colored ribbon announced his entry. He caught it in his palm, stopped the clapper, then crept inside and locked the door behind him.

“Hello?” he called. In the silent, darkened shop, floating over the silhouetted racks, his voice sounded soft and scared, because he was soft and scared. That charge raised every hair on his body and prickled his scalp like a coming storm, and he was scared all he would find were the remnants of the people who should’ve been here, because he’d come too late.

No one answered. Probably home for the night, unless they lived upstairs. The silence in here was wrong, when the tension of a nearby rift felt so loud—like it should come with the crash of rending seas and clouding skies and shaking earth. Asad moved slowly through the racks: magazines and Little Debbie cakes, mini keychain lighters and frizzy ten-dollar sew-ins in plastic bags, lit faintly by standing fridges full of Coke and Sprite and Mountain Dew and box milk. The pale blue of the refrigerator lights glowed the same color as an open crack, and even though he knew he was being paranoid, Asad made himself lean in and check, probing around the cold misty insides with a trembling, outstretched hand, brushing up against nothing but the stinging heat of the rows of bulbs along the top.

He had to go slow. Had to be careful, letting himself into the cashier’s safety booth, searching around, his breaths filling his ears in dragging rasps loud as an astronaut on a spacewalk. He paused under the eye of the security camera, held up his skeleton key, and sketched the sign of the eye in the air with his fingertip. Just so the shop owner wouldn’t freak out, when they reviewed the security tapes in the morning.

Then he pocketed the key and moved on.

The back storeroom was next. With every room he checked, that crackling sensation grew fainter while his unease grew stronger, like the crack was baiting him with a game of hot and cold. Colder, it said as he rummaged among shelves and crates and boxes. Colder, colder…

Until he found the door in the back of the storeroom, and that charge shot from his feet right to his scalp, stinging in his nose worse than plucking a hair, burning in his eyes like a handful of grit, wet quarters and blood on his tongue.

Warmer, that jolt mocked. Getting warmer.

He tried the doorknob, then jerked back with a hiss. Hot—hot as if a fire raged on the other side, but he smelled no smoke. Only ozone, and the tang of his own terrified sweat.

He pulled the sleeve of his hoodie down over his hand, then tried again—gingerly, gingerly. The door swung open on darkened stairs. He fumbled for the light switch on the wall and flicked it on, illuminating narrow, stained stucco walls and pitted concrete steps covered in a fur coat of dirty fuzz. No one had been up here in a while.

“Hello?” he called anyway.

A voice responded.

His stomach lurched up, slammed into the bottoms of his lungs, punched the air out of them, and sank back down. He flattened his damp palms against his thighs, curled them, knotted up furrows in his jeans, made himself let go. Calm the fuck down. Might be someone living up here after all. But if there was, they weren’t answering; he couldn’t make out more than a low mumble. Sounded like singing, humming under their breath. He recognized that kind of hum—earbuds in, head down, busy. They didn’t even know he was here. Minding their own business, and he was fixing to bust in and fuck up their night.

Better than letting them get swallowed up.

He knocked on the walls as he climbed the steps, rapping firmly and raising his voice loud enough, he hoped, to be heard over headphones. “Hello?” he called again. “If you can hear me, don’t be scared.” It came out skeert. “Just doing inspections. Checking out a vibe.”

Still no answer; only that humming and bopping, voice oddly familiar.

“Promise I’ll be in and out, sure as shitting,” he tried, then winced. Gam would’ve popped the back of his head for cussing in front of ordinary citizens, when he had a job to do. But he was nervous as fuck. Every step brought him closer to fucking puking, the charge was so thick here. So thick even a daysider should’ve been able to feel it, the kind of premonition even the insensitive got, something warning them away. Why the hell hadn’t they booked it the fuck out of here?

“Sorry,” he said as he crested the stairs, and leaned around the wall to peek into the second floor. “I cuss when I get nervous, and I think maybe I need to get you gone ’cause I’m picking up some serious bad shit—”

He nearly fell back down the stairs.

The second floor had been bisected down the middle into day and night. The half closest to the stairs was shadow and night and stacked boxes, some taped up and scribbled with illegible Sharpie words, some pried open with old newspaper and random shit popping out, all of it covered in dust. The other half was lamplit, golden, filled with all the warmth in the world—a cozy living room full of plush furniture in beige linen draped over with colorful patterned throws, potted plants in the corners, wooden statues crouching on shelves and watching over the place, a shriveled leaf of cabbage nailed up over an open doorway leading into another hallway.

A boy sat on the couch, wearing a red hoodie with Fresh Waffles printed on the chest, earbuds in his ears, the cord trailing into his pockets. A skinny rawboned boy with that look of someone waiting for one more growth spurt to round out his sharp edges; a Black boy with a cut to his lids that made his eyes taper sly, pucker at the corners, angle up at the edges; a compact, self-contained boy with a point to his chin Asad had always hated because it made him look like he was sassing off even when he wasn’t. A boy Asad would know anywhere.

Because that boy was him.

Through a shimmering, crackling barrier like a wall of water transfused into rippling film, he was looking at his own fucking self.

His throat slammed shut. He couldn’t feel his body, but he knew he’d fallen because he was suddenly on eye level with a coffee table that cut off in the middle of a decorative bowl of polished stones, ending where it met the filmed barrier. That wasn’t a crack. It was a fucking hole, and Asad should be drawing the runes and screaming for Tarif and calling his Gam, but all he did was thud down on his butt and stare at himself like he was looking in a goddamned mirror.

Except in that mirror, he was no longer sunken-eyed and hollow. In that mirror, he no longer had the ashen undertone to his skin from never seeing the sun, his skin so rich and dark a brown he glowed, smooth and suede-soft. His other self’s knuckles weren’t white with dried, thickened skin. His other self’s cheeks weren’t concave caverns of exhaustion. His other self’s clothing was scuffed and torn from natural wear and tear, instead of years of growing into and growing out of and stretching them thin at the seams until they were ready to burst.

His other self looked alive, while Asad was his own ghost, haunting from an unseen otherworld.

He fumbled onto his hands and knees and reached toward the hole in reality, but stopped just short of touching it. Just short of making contact with the prickle and charge and pull of a vacuum on the other side, waiting to be filled.

No—the vacuum wasn’t on the other side. It was inside. Inside him. Empty. Lonely. Hungry. While this other Asad?

Looked like he’d never known a lonely, hungry day in his life.

Asad’s mouth filled with wetness, tasting of spit and snot, his nose thick and tacky on every gasping breath, and a hot wet burn came down in a blurry shield over his eyes. What the fuck had he done wrong? What the fuck was he being punished for, to be born on this side of the cracks? Was this purgatory, when he’d never even committed the original sins of a broken world and all his crimes were the small, private misdemeanors of a greedy and wanting soul?

He spilled out a rough sob, letting his hand fall. The other Asad didn’t respond, didn’t even notice, kept humming and bobbing his head along to whatever played through his earbuds. Those from the other side never saw through. The eyes only went one way, like some kind of fucking gift for people from the shadow-side, as if it could ever make up for everything that had gone so catastrophically awry.

He had to close it. He had to close the fucking crack and seal the worlds off from each other, because he couldn’t stand to look at this. To see himself, the self he should have been, content and glowing with serenity, bristling with something like eager anticipation. He had all of Asad’s little tics, when he was nervous and excited: knotting and unknotting the earbud cord between his fingers, smiling to himself for no reason and then forcibly schooling his face back to neutral calm, sitting all the way forward on the edge of his seat, so fucking familiar that for a heartbeat Asad was there, the springy couch cushion under his ass, and he imagined the room smelled like sandalwood and something comforting and sweet, like sugar cookies.

He trembled, and dragged himself to his feet; he had to spread his legs wide to stay upright, and braced his soles flat against the floor. With shaking hands, he brushed off the clumps of fuzzy dust sticking to the legs of his jeans, then spread his arms with his fingers splayed. His palms tingled, his fingertips buzzing. This was the tricky part, the scary part, when he was too small for a crack this big and he would have to draw off some of the energy charging its edges to power the runes. Shadow defined its boundaries—where bright light ended, and past the light spread the darkened room that fit his world. The hole was oblong, cutting a floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall diagonal with tapered top and bottom points, a ripped sword-slash in the curtain of reality. He touched the rippling air to one side of the tear, and sucked in a breath as concussive shocks slammed through him, electric fists beating at his chest and trying to crack his ribs.

The stairwell door opened at his back.

He whirled. Those pounding shocks stopped, leaving him gasping. No one there. The door was closed, just as he’d left it—but he’d heard it, echoing up from down the stairs, followed by steps drawing closer and closer. He still heard those steps, the sound muted and wrong, coming through cotton.

Coming through the rift.

The steps grew louder. An easy, casual stride, drawing so close he sensed their presence right in front of him, then passing through and leaving behind a chill, a strange impression of displacement. Then another boy stepped into view, in the room through the rift. He was tall, taller than Asad, with shoulders so broad and a waist and body so narrow he didn’t fit together quite right, but his grace and loping stride made it work. He wore braids down his back in black ropy tangles, and the lamplight made his deep brown skin glow like he’d rolled in gold dust and come up shining. He wore a shirt with the sleeves ripped off and paint splatters slashed across ripped black fabric, and carried a backpack over his shoulder.

A backpack he tossed on the couch as he crossed the room to the other Asad, gripped his hands, pulled him to his feet, and kissed him.

Asad’s heart tried to beat as he watched the other boy’s lips press against lips that were his own but weren’t; as he watched full thick plush mouths meld together with a sighing sweetness that said they’d done this again and again and it never got old, only familiar and breathless and perfect. His other self twined his arms around the tall, braided boy’s neck, and Asad shivered, his mouth pulsing in strange ways. He touched his lips, pressed down on them until they gave as they must be giving underneath the strange boy’s kiss, and felt something he’d never known before curling in the pit of his stomach and sinking its hooks into him from the inside.

The boys on the other side of the rift pulled apart with a faint sound, the dampness of a seal breaking, and Asad’s other self smiled—a smile made of lazy things and wonder and bright breathlessness.

“Avondre,” he said. “Hey. Thought you’d never get back.”

Avondre. Asad mouthed the name; it became a flower, blooming on his tongue.

Avondre laughed and settled his hands on the other Asad’s hips. He had a kind of slow drawl, not quite southern but still as if molasses had a sound, dripping and sugary. “Moms let you up here?”

“I sweet-talked my way through.”

“Bullshit. More like she too damn tired to argue with your shit.”

The other Asad leaned into Avondre, looking up at him with his eyes glittering with unvoiced laughter. “Think she knows by now, Von.”

“Knowing and being okay with us locked up here together ain’t the same thing.”

“We ain’t locked up together.” The other Asad brushed his lips to Avondre’s. “We just together. That’s all.”

Together.

Asad sucked in an awful, braying cry, drowning and choking on wet runny salt. Together. Life had fucking traded that, that being, that togetherness, for the eyes, for the sight, for a duty to set right something he’d never fucking set wrong in the first place, but now he knew the gift for what it was.

A goddamned curse.

A curse to have to sit here and watch this, and know it could never be his.

His other self and Avondre kissed once more, lingering, slow, as innocent as if they’d never touched original sin, never had to atone.

Asad scrambled to his feet, clambered away from the crack in the universe, and threw himself down the stairs on clumsy steps. Out into the night. Away from that.

Where he wouldn’t have to see the wordless thing he’d always craved given form, and locked worlds away.

Forever out of his reach.

4

He’d stopped sobbing by the time he hit the bus stop on the corner of Callender and Blue Hill, but what followed wasn’t much better: this hollow husked-out rawness, as if he’d been opened like a pumpkin and had all his good soft parts scooped out. He sank down on the bus stop bench and buried his face in his hands.

He’d left the crack. Left it open.

But he couldn’t go back there. Not right now.

Maybe not ever.

Twenty minutes later he was still there, staring at his feet, when Tarif came strolling up Callender, kicking pebbles and flapping his jacket with his hands in his pockets and whistling fit to whistle down Dixie. He had a shit-eating grin on, his mouth red like he’d been doing something, and Asad kind of wanted to hate him because everyone had someone, while Asad only got to watch.

But he scrubbed at his face and sniffled back hard, and tried not to look like he’d been crying for half an hour, curled over his thighs and pressing his face into his knees. Tarif came swinging in, a big black bird touching down for a landing, arms flapping, voice large and loud and brassy as joyous screeching music.

“You ain’t gonna believe my night,” Tarif said. “How’d it go, squeak? You finish the bl—” Then he stopped, his smile vanishing. He stared at Asad. “God damn. You look like shit. You okay?”

“No,” Asad answered without thinking, and immediately regretted it.

Tarif plunked down on the bench next to him. “Fuck. Something happen? You hurt?”

Not where you can see.

He stared down at his hands—at his old man’s hands, weathered and worn, and tried to remember he was only seventeen. Then he shook his head, swallowing back the bitterness sitting on his tongue like cough medicine.

“Nothing happened,” he said. “Nothing came through. I’m okay. Just…just saw some bad shit on the other side. That’s all.”

Tarif whistled through his teeth. “That fucking sucks. I once saw this dog get hit by a car, and I couldn’t stop it.”

“I remember. You cried for a week.”

“Man, I don’t cry.” Tarif hunched his shoulders, then snorted. “…yeah. I cried.” He bumped his elbow to Asad’s. “Was it something like that?”

“Yeah. Something like that.” But Asad said nothing else. It was his secret, his longing, his ache curled up in a little knotted kernel inside him. He scrubbed at his nose one more time, then stood. “I’ll be okay. We gonna be late for school. Block’s not done. We can check it on the way.”

He stepped off briskly, before Tarif could protest. And he put up with his brother’s babbling, his whispers about Shawna, Shawna as if worshipping with words and tonguing her name, as they cut down Blue Hill and circled back up Floyd, stopping to fetch their backpacks where they’d left them inside the foyer of the apartment building. The whole time Tarif didn’t notice that crackling, that pull, that surge. Maybe because it wasn’t meant for him. Maybe because it was meant for Asad, and only Asad.

It was his other life, his problem to fix, and he’d failed.

He’d come back after school. After homework, before sunup, when Gam and Tarif were in bed. He’d fix everything. He’d close the crack.

He would.

But he wondered if, when Boston was swallowed up, he’d even have a second left to realize, This was all my fault.

5

In school they learned about time as a function of gravity, about singularities, about how sometimes a rift was similar to a singularity and had the same effects on its local environment, on a smaller scale. Asad tried to pay attention, but couldn’t stop thinking about the crack. So big it could easily spread; they did that, once they fixed in place. They fed on themselves and opened wider and wider, greedily eating more and more of the world until they hit some break point and entire chunks of reality popped out of existence.

Soon. He’d fix it soon. Just a few hours. He didn’t have to hold out long. A little while longer, and he would shut the door on that liar’s hope. That liar’s hope that someone like Avondre would ever look at him with golden lamplight in his eyes and his lips a full sweet smile, just for Asad.

He was in the wrong world. The wrong universe. The wrong timeline.

Shadow-siders didn’t get to have things like that.

Gam was in love once, he thought. I wonder if Mom loved my Dad, ’fore having folks with the eyes got too weird and he took off.

During gym class he checked Twitter for Louisville, a quick general search across the entire network of accumulated tweets.

The search returned zero results, as if the city hadn’t even had a name, vanished as if it never existed at all.

6

School let out late. Too late, and the moment his sixth period teacher let them go, Asad shoved his books into his bag and hauled ass to the door, not even slowing down when Tarif shouted his name from across the quad as he emerged from the building where the college-level students took votech classes and university entrance prep courses.

“Hey! Hey, squeak, slow the fuck down! Where you going?”

“Home,” Asad said, and doubled his stride.

Tarif trailed him, huffing and panting and interrogating him with every step, but Asad kept his mouth mutinously shut. He couldn’t waste breath on talking. He had to move. He was tempted to skip home, but Tarif would follow, and Gam would want to know why, so he veered off on their street and clattered up the steps into their building.

He barely made it to their floor and to their door. Gam was waiting. Like she knew, Gam was waiting just past the door, watching them both with shrewd eyes. Asad kept his head down and brushed past her with a mumble—but she shot a hand out, barring the way. Asad drew up short, staring at his feet.

“Tarif,” Gam said firmly, “Go to your room.”

“But—”

“I said go to your room, boy.” Gam snapped Tarif a look fit to freeze lava and boil glaciers. “Me and your brother, we gonna have a sit-down.”

Asad flinched. Tarif stared at him with wide you-gonna-get-it-now eyes, then scurried past and disappeared into their room. Gam let her arm drop and studied Asad in that way she had, as if the eyes let her see not just the rifts, but all the broken places and lies and wrongdoings inside a boy. Then she folded her arms over her narrow, twig-boned chest and tossed her head toward the kitchen. “You come on, now.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Gam stalked into the kitchen. Asad shuffled after her; in his peripheral vision he caught her bony finger pointing, her pink and white lacquered press-on gleaming.

“You sit,” she commanded. “You sit and you tell me what happened.”

Asad dropped into the chair immediately. When Gam ordered, anyone with the sense God gave little green apples obeyed. Yet his tongue didn’t want to move; no use lying to Gam, and he was gonna have to tell her, but she’d be disappointed in him and he couldn’t stand that. Not when all he wanted, right now, was to bury his face in her plaid muslin apron and sob while she petted his head like she had when he was a little’un and didn’t have to carry all this weight.

“I saw…” His mouth was dry ash, words sticking to his tongue. “I saw me. The me through the cracks.”

She clucked her tongue. “And he had something you want, that it?”

He stared at her. “How did you…?”

“Because that’s how it goes. Ignorance makes life easier.” She let out a heavy sigh and levered herself into the chair opposite his. She might have shrunk with age, but she carried herself as if her bones were densest lead, her every motion a weighted thing of momentum and kinetics. “And if you ain’t seen something you wanted out there, you’d have done your duty instead of sittin’ here trembling. You didn’t close it, did you?”

Asad’s stomach rolled over hot with shame. He bowed his head again. “I’m sorry.”

“We all got moments of weakness. You marked it?”

“I touched it. It touched me. It’s good as marked.”

“Then I’ll go do it. You best get on to bed. I’ll close it.”

“Can’t you leave it?” He scrunched his hands against his thighs and squeezed his eyes shut. “Just until tomorrow night. Please. Let me watch for a little while. I—I’ll close it after.”

“Boy, I ain’t never raised my hand to you once. Don’t make me start.” She trailed off, swearing under her breath. “I will refuse and rebuke you if you forget what the goddamn hell we here for.”

“I’m sorry, I—”

“If the you on the other side got something you want, if he happy, you want to risk that happiness? Longer the cracks stay open near him, more likely he gonna fall through. Or something come through, split the worlds a little more. You leave that crack open, you put him in danger. Bet he got a grandma just like you. Brother. Maybe even still got parents. You don’t wanna take that away from him, or him away from them.”

Asad squirmed his shoulders. “No…no, I don’t.”

“Then we do what we gotta do. We close them ways. We don’t, sooner or later they gonna learn how to see, too. Mirror can’t go both ways.”

“Would it be so bad? They never hurt us.”

“They would.” She folded her hands. Her knuckles were massive, the knuckles of a man three times her size, but her finger-bones were thin and tiny as the bones left over after chicken dinner. “They might not mean to, but they would. See, people got wanting in their hearts. And it’s wanting that makes the dark. It’s wanting that made our time the way it is.” Her lips had gone loose in the way the old ones always did, soft half-full sacks without enough flesh inside them, and they pursed pillows around her words. “Maybe they see something they want over here. Maybe we see something we want over there. Maybe people get scared, and it becomes about take them before they take us, but no matter who do what it just gonna break both sides till ain’t nothing left.”

She paused, considered, then stood. Her slippers shuffled as she crossed to the sink and fished two glasses out of the dish rack, then turned the water on in the sink. She filled both glasses so full they nearly brimmed over, making curved tops barely held by a thin skin of surface tension. That skin quivered as she brought the glasses back to the table with her arthritic fingers, never quite spilling over.

“There gotta be a balance to all things, Saad,” she said. “Now I want you to listen. The books in your school, they only teach you a little of this. They don’t know nothing. They don’t know nothing but you don’t go out after dark, or you might slip through the cracks and fall away.” She set one glass down delicately. “We got a finite amount of matter and energy in the universe, and there gotta stay a finite amount. Just the right amount on both sides. Say their universe and our universe these two glasses, filled right up to the brim.” She tilted the glass in her hand. Surface tension broke, and the water spilled over, trickling down into the glass on the table. It splashed and overflowed, rivulets spilling down the sides, cutting lines in condensation, pooling across the table, but still she didn’t stop. “You pour water from the first glass into the second, the second gonna overflow. What overflows don’t go back in the first glass. It’s gonna fall out, get lost in between.”

“Is that what happened to Mom?” Asad stared at the trickle of water, caught by the tinkling sound. “She get lost in between?”

Gam cut him a stern look. “Your mother ain’t talk for a day like today, boy. You listen. I’m teaching.”

“Sorry, ma’am.”

Gam turned that penetrating witch-eye on him, then hmphed, set the half-empty glass down on the table, and dropped back into her seat. “So when you tip from one glass to the other, you got one glass full, but it done lost some of what belongs to it. And you got one glass that much closer to being empty. And what happens when a universe get empty, boy?”

“Entropy,” he recited dutifully from his lessons. “Everything dies that much faster.”

“Damn right it do. But see, that law of finite matter, that law of conservation, it’s got this idea of balance. So what’s gonna happen is some of what went into the second glass gonna come back to the first. Until they got the same amount of water in them. ’cause both universes gotta have an equal balance of matter and energy.” She tilted the full glass over the half-empty one, pouring carefully until both were roughly three-quarters full. “So maybe the first glass a little more full, but now the second one a little more empty, too. So now they both closer to dying; they just split that debt up in between.” She set the glass back down and left them both sitting there in those puddles of spilled water, of wasted energy. “You know the main difference between them and us?”

“No, ma’am.”

“They don’t have people like us. People who can see the cracks.” She tore a swath of paper towels off the roll on the table and thrust them at him. “So we not just protecting us. We protecting them. We do this to protect that goodness long before we do it for them daysiders’ wills and whims. Remember that, and don’t go wanting for what’s on the other side.”

Asad took the paper towels and, chagrined, bowed over the table to wipe up the puddles, soaking the paper towel in big wet spots. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Where was it?”

“Blue Hill. On the Roberts side. Right over. Second floor of the store with the painted front, no ladder.”

“That explains it, then. Marsha’s laid up with a bad hip, and that Jonas boy always been sloppy.” With a wheezing groan, Gam hefted to her feet again. “You go on an’ forget about it. Go to bed. I’ll close up.”

“But Gam, it’s almost morning—”

“I’m old. I ain’t slow.” She grinned fiercely, her yellowed teeth and high gums showing. “I got this. You fucked up tonight, Saad. Not gonna pretend you didn’t. You gotta learn to put yourself away when things like this happen, and do what you gotta do.” Her hand rested to the top of his head: her skin crinkly as crepe myrtle, the warmth of her living soul shining through to soak into him. “But I love you. I love you and it don’t take a third eye to see this hurts you. I ain’t gonna make you do a thing that hurts you, boy. So you stay here and let Gam take care of things for you. When I get back, you be good and do your homework, and then we can go to the night market. Got to cash that government check, and then I’ll make them Krispy treats. Good?”

“Yeah,” Asad said, and leaned into her touch, and told himself this love and this life were enough. “Good.”

7

When he went back the next night, ducking Tarif for half a second to sneak onto the Roberts side, the crack was gone.

He was gone, and Avondre with him.

Nothing remained but empty boxes, Gam’s mark chalked onto the wall, and the smell of old dust and ashes and burning bone.

8

The next sundown, he stole Tarif’s phone while his brother was in the shower.

Quick, furtive, he scrolled through his apps, looking for that chat room he’d told him about. He tabbed past Candy Crush and Bejeweled and some hentai thing he didn’t want to know about but couldn’t unsee, but nothing that said sundowners or nightsiders or any of the things they called themselves when the dayside world didn’t have an official name for them but them. The only thing he found that didn’t make sense, that could be a thing, was a black square icon with a string of numbers underneath, four sets separated by three periods. No name, nothing he could look up in the app store.

Those numbers looked like an IP address.

Asad scrambled for his backpack, tore a sheet of paper from his history notebook, and scribbled the numbers down. The water shut off in the bathroom; he crumpled the piece of paper, stuffed it in his pocket, dumped Tarif’s phone back on the nightstand, and skittered back to his side of the room. He needed to know something.

Something he could never ask Gam, or anyone who would call and curse his name for his blasphemy.

9

He didn’t try the IP address until he and Tarif had come back from that night’s rounds—kicking cans and kicking stones, but Asad kept drifting off and missing—and done their homework. Tarif made a mound in his bed, faint edges of daylight creeping around the blinds to make him shine gold and red, while he groaned and drowsily rubbed a belly full of Gam’s turkey drumsticks and peas. Wasn’t long until those groans turned to quiet whistling snores, and Asad leaned over to peer at him, then pulled his covers over his head to mask the glow of his own phone.

He opened the web browser and put the numbers in the address bar. It took a long time loading, like it was traveling a long long way to get from somewhere to him, and he was starting to think he was wrong and it wasn’t an IP at all. But then a page loaded: black, all black, with a beveled silver button.

INSTALL

Asad’s thumb hovered over the button. His heart beat hard, rough. What he was about to do wasn’t smart. He was inviting mess, and if Gam found out she’d kill him.

He closed his eyes and pressed the button.

He half thought his phone was gonna explode in his hand. But it only blipped, and he opened his eyes and watched the progress loader inch across the status bar, downloading 25%, 37%, 52%, 79%, 100%, and then it was done and installing and his screen went black except for a white blinking cursor.

ENTER>NAME?_

He bit the inside of his cheek. No way he’d use his real name, get pinched up by the daysiders for talking about things nobody was supposed to say, put away for saying words about the world that existed instead of the world the dayside pretended to be. He hesitated, then typed in S-A-Y-I-D and hit the Enter key.

USERNAME>ASSIGNED S3982

USERNAME>S3982 WELCOME

The message held for a hot second, then disappeared, replaced by a screen full of scrolling lines.

N3329: Ok but maybe not

D274: why not

D274: its not like they can tell

I8804: iz it really that hard to play dayside.

I8804: all you gotta do is play ignant.

K001 (Admin, God): Hold up

K001 (Admin, God): Wait

K001 (Admin, God): Who is S

Asad swallowed, his mouth dry. The whole chat had stopped. Even as he watched, the lines disappeared, first N3329, then D274, until nothing remained but that damning question:

Who is S

If he answered, he was in this. He pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth, breathing deep, and tapped his thumbs to the on-screen keyboard.

S3982: I’m new

S3982: My brother been here

I8804: dont tell us that.

I8804: no iding details.

I8804: i dont want to fucking know you even have a brother.

N3329: U don’t answer questions nobody asked

I8804: cause then if someone asks they can force us to answer.

S3982: Sorry

S3982: Sorry. I know better

S3982: I’m kinda nervous

D274: errybody nervous there first time

S3982: Yeah

S3982: Thought this was a bad idea

S3982: Still do

N3329: Then why u here

S3982: I want to know about Louisville

S3982: I want to know what happened

K001 (Admin, God): Look for yourself.

A photo flashed into the chat, breaking the lines of text. The chatter stopped, leaving only that picture standing silent and still and accusatory. Hard to see at first; at first it only looked black with a few traces of lighter shadow, like a piece of black construction paper crumpled into a ball, its corners catching the light. But slowly he picked out edges of terrain, the lines of roads, a few stubbornly clinging buildings, his eyes accustomed to finding details in the dark even when the dark was the blur of a night-locked snapshot taken at a distance. And he realized: the few buildings scattered around the outer edges of the photo cut off as if they’d been shorn, their insides exposed like dollhouses. The roads converged toward the center of the image and then disappeared into a blackness so thick it reflected nothing, as thick as the shadows he imagined on lonely nights. A blackness with substance.

A sea. A sea of the dark, so deep it couldn’t even be called a hole, swallowing everything into it.

The only way to find its edges was to find the light: a subtle crackling blue-white glow following the contours of the land, jagged at the edges as lightning, ringing the perimeter of that dark space. The edges of the crack. The edges of a hole in the universe, ripped open and swallowing an entire city into the void.

Asad’s throat clenched, knotting painfully.

Was this what happened when people got sloppy with wanting, and left the cracks open too long?

S3982: Where this from? Where you get this picture

K001 (Admin, God): Military surveillance drone

K001 (Admin, God): Fished it from the data feed before the drone went dark

K001 (Admin, God): Swallowed up

K001 (Admin, God): Fell through.

S3982: So this is real

K001 (Admin, God): Real as a hole in the head

S3982: Does it have a bottom?

K001 (Admin, God): Don’t know.

K001 (Admin, God): If the military’s gotten close again I haven’t seen it

K001 (Admin, God): But they upped their sniffers hardcore after this and it’s harder to get in

K001 (Admin, God): As soon as i crack the network encryption I get maybe 20 ms of data capture

K001 (Admin, God): and then it locks down

K001 (Admin, God): changes the algorithm.

N3329: Culd b other cities like Louisville

N3329: & we don’t even know

N3329: everyone just stops talking about them one day

N3329: And u don’t say a thing when ur people down there stop answering the phone

S3982: We didn’t hear any reports about Louisville being unstable where I’m from

I8804: not for me either but it happened.

D274: heard it wasn’t unstable

D274: heard it was fine

D274: and then errythin just went fuckin sideways and shit

D274: just overnight

D274: no time to fix it

D274: no time to run

No time to run.

Asad closed the chat window without answering, clutched his phone to his chest, and tried not to think about Boston swallowed into darkness, nothing but roads sheared off into nothing and Tarif and Gam gone.

Because Asad had wanted too much.

10

But he went back the next night.

He had the icon on his phone’s home screen now, like Tarif’s, but he hid it several side screens away so it wasn’t visible at first. He told himself it was in case someone got hold of his phone or glanced at it sidelong, but truth was he didn’t want the temptation.

But that question still ate at him, tearing him to bits. Like he was in goddamned mourning, and he wouldn’t stop grieving until he got some closure.

He tapped the black square, and let the darkness fill his screen.

D274: man fuuuuuuuck my bio teacher

D274: made me stay after today

N3329: Haha yeah but you probably dserved it

I8804: hey its s.

K001 (Admin, God): Hey S

S3982: Hey

K001 (Admin, God): You left kinda weird lst night

K001 (Admin, God): You okay?

S3982: Yeah

S3982: Just got a little freaked out

S3982: Got a question

K001 (Admin, God): Shoot.

S3982: You ever see yourself on the other side?

D274: don’t go lookin for yerself

S3982: I didn’t look

S3982: But I found me

N3329: don’t look again

S3982: Why?

N3329: my sister looked

N3329: and then she killed herself

Asad sucked in a sharp, hurting breath, his stomach tight.

S3982: I’m so sorry

D274: i think it makez the cracks wider

D274: can feel the other me sumtims

D274: like were connected

D274: maybe were all connected

I8804: maybe if we get too close to our other selves we make a crack.

I8804: a crack big enough to fit through.

Breaths wet in the back of his throat, Asad closed the app, clutching at his phone.

Then he uninstalled it, wiped the address from his browser history, and pressed his face into his pillow until the cool wet cotton stuck to his cheeks and he couldn’t breathe for the soaked cloth filming his mouth.

11

Another week passed before he saw himself again.

The raw, aching pain of it had faded somewhat. The loneliness. The loathing, when he looked in the mirror and saw not plump, smiling cheeks but haggard hollows above his jawline. He could deal. He was like the water in that glass, and water always found an equilibrium.

He’d read once in class that the human brain was wired for unhappiness. That unhappiness made humans try so hard to make bigger and better things; every time they found a peak that felt like happiness, the brain reset where happy was so happy became normal, and normal wasn’t enough. The goalposts always kept moving, because an unhappy person was a hungry person, and a hungry person fought to claw higher and higher just to be able to eat.

He thought sadness might be like that, too.

He thought sometimes you got so used to the sadness it became normal, and then not so bad at all.

He was kicking an old dented Pepsi can toward that corner bus stop at Blue Hill, going long for a gutter shot to beat Tarif and make a final goal, when they came on it. That prickling, and this time it came so sharp and full of static fire that Tarif and Asad stopped at the same time. That feeling, Gam had told them when she was first in the teaching, that’s what they mean when they say it’s like someone walked over your grave. It’s like you shiverin’ with the cold, but it’s all heat. All the heat at the heart of a star.

The crack split open right in the wall of the bus stop. Walk around the stop and it was empty except the stink of hobo piss and a crushed juice box some kid left on the bench. But look through the wall, look through the crack, look inside, and he was there.

Right fucking there.

Sitting with Avondre, hand in hand, leaning on each other and talking in low murmurs. Through the wavering-shimmer breach Asad couldn’t tell what they said, nothing but quiet distorted sounds, but it translated into a hard, trembling language of heartbreak, striking him with every word.

He stared, his hands clenching in his pockets. Tarif stood next to him, then leaned over, pressing the solid warmth of his arm against Asad’s, reminding him what was real.

“This what you saw, ain’t it,” Tarif said. “This why you cried when you thought I was asleep.”

Asad nodded, gulping in thick breaths. “Yeah.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It ain’t fair.”

“What ain’t?”

“Everything went right for them,” Asad whispered, as his other self leaned in and nuzzled Avondre’s shoulder. “They made all the right choices, and they got the good life. They get to be happy, and safe. But us…” His chest constricted. He wanted to look away, but couldn’t. “Too many wrong turns. I know we the ones who broke everything, but…”

“…but if we could just…turn back.” His brother’s voice cracked.

“Yeah. That. Do you think it’ll ever get better for us?”

“Maybe. Not in our lifetime, though. Just like the worlds didn’t first break in our lifetime. Universe don’t count in human lifespans.” Tarif nudged Asad’s arm until one hand fell from his hoodie’s pocket, and then Tarif’s thick, soft fingers curled in his, gripping tight and hot and steady. “It counts in the lifespans of stars.”

“It still ain’t fair.”

“You want his life?”

“Maybe not his life.” Asad lingered on Avondre’s laughing eyes, the way he kept his arm around the other Asad as if he wanted to protect him. “But I want one thing he has.”

Tarif sucked his tongue against his teeth, making a sympathetic sound. “No good looking at things that way. Everything’s different over there. The lines that led him to what he found only happened ’cause of different choices they all made in the past.” Tarif squeezed his fingers. “We so far off their path…it’s a damned miracle we even see ourselves in them at all.”

“…at least he’s happy.”

“Yeah. There’s that.” Tarif sighed, and his hand slipped free from Asad’s, leaving a chill where it had been. “We gotta seal it up, Saad.”

His heart dropped down to his knees, threatened to fall out and slip through the cracks in the sidewalk. “But—”

“We gotta. I’m sorry.”

Asad told himself he wouldn’t cry again, but that wetness was in his nose, making it hard to breathe. “Can I…can I have one more look?”

“Sure.”

“Alone.”

Tarif gave him a long, thoughtful look. “Don’t do anything stupid, baby brother.”

“I won’t,” he promised.

But when Tarif disappeared around the corner, giving him one last moment, one last look, one last chance when the odds were nil of this crack ever opening at this right place, at this right time…

Asad pressed his palm to the bus kiosk over Avondre’s cheek, and imagined he could soak in the radiant warmth of his skin.

12

Another night. Another walk around the block. Another long evening in class, and when he sketched Avondre’s face in the margins of his notebook, he tried to capture the shape of his lips with every precise scratch of the pencil’s tip.

And when Tarif ran off to be with Shawna again, Asad managed to smile for his brother while Asad walked their blocks alone.

Yet he wasn’t alone, tonight. Tonight, new shadows drifted out from once-empty apartment buildings, and turned their faces up to the moon. They haunted the streets like ghosts, people Asad didn’t know but recognized like family. The nightkin knew each other, and this moment, this ritual of moonlight and the whispering black, was communion, rooting them into the earth of a new place, a new city.

Asad wondered what city had gone dark now, and left these drifters washed up ashore.

At the corner of Blue Hill, he sank down on the bus bench and watched the dark ones stroll past, taking in their new streets with their new eyes, now and then nodding to him in passing with something too close to deference for his comfort, even if this was his post and his place and that honor was rightfully his.

He still didn’t know how to feel. And he was relieved to recognize, among the drifters, a familiar shuffling gait: Miss Marsha Roberts, with her big gray church curls and little pillbox hat and an old housecoat that was half dress, half disco-era upholstery. She was made of the same stuff as Gam; every family had one, bowed and stoop-shouldered matriarchs who smelled of sweet pecan pralines but turned into steel when you tried to make their sugared edges crumble.

She had her cane, with its four-pronged rubberized tip, and she limped and leaned and rolled toward him until he stood and took her elbow and eased her to a seat.

“Miss Marsha,” he murmured.

She hooted and sighed and grinned; her two front teeth were missing, and her words whistled through the gap. “See you mindin’ your manners and staying on your side now, eh?”

He bowed his head. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be apologizing for doing what’s necessary.” She sat with her knees spread wide, her tan diabetic socks rolled at the top. Her freckled brown face shone in the moonlight as she watched the streets. “Crowded out here tonight.”

“Who are they?”

“New folk. Refugees. More’ve ’em coming up now.” She leaned back against the kiosk. “Hear Tuscaloosa gone dark. All dark.”

Asad sat down next to her. She had that warmth like Gam, too, thin skin made of burning paper. “What happened?”

“People got scared. Left. Not enough to hold it together, so the cracks stayed open.” She clapped her hands on her knees. “Saw it happen once myself in Biloxi, back where your Gam came from. They’d run people like you and me out, after dark. Call ’em sundown towns. No negroes allowed in the city limits.” Her laugh was a cough both merry and cynical, a knowing thing rattling in her throat like tin cans. “Learned the foolishness in that real fast, after a few of them pretty white women they so hot to protect fell through into the dark places. Suddenly we all that stands between them and the dark. Suddenly they got time for us. They call us welfare queens and lazy gov’ment freeloaders, but they quick to pay that due when the world turn strange and they get scared.”

Why? Asad wondered. Why did it fall on us to clean up a mess they made?

Why we gotta fix they trouble?

But all he asked was, “Why us?” Then, “Why we the only ones who see it?”

“It ain’t all of us. Not by a long shot.” She turned her strange-colored eyes on him. Cataracts had turned them odd and rough and milky, brown clouded through with blue. “It’s those of us who still got hope left. Who still got something good in us. That something good can feel what’s right, feel what’s on the other side. Like it’s reaching for it.”

“You think I still got hope in me?”

Miss Marsha smiled, and poked him with her bony elbow. “Boy,” she said, “you too young not to.”

13

He couldn’t help himself. He came back to the bus stop, night after night, searching. Waiting for that prickle that should be warning, but to him only meant a breathless promise, something to hold on to, something to long for.

He wanted to cross the street, to step onto Roberts land, but Tarif caught his hand and held him back and shook his head.

“They got pains too, you know,” Tarif said. “They got pains and hardships and losses. It ain’t a perfect life. No such thing as a perfect life.”

“Maybe not,” Asad answered, and turned away from the building with its painted-on pictures of something sweeter, something brighter. “But they got different rules.”

“Rules still rules.”

“Yeah, but you ever wonder what it’s like when the rules actually fair?”

“I try not to,” Tarif murmured, and pulled Asad away. “Wondering that makes it hard to live with the rules we got.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t,” Asad said, staring up at his brother, pleading. “Maybe we shouldn’t live with the rules we got, Rifi.”

But his brother said nothing at all.

14

School was more crowded, now, mostly in the younger classes. Spent less time learning, more time talking about zoning, figuring out what to do with the new ones, how to train the babies. Some talked of sending them dayside. Giving them a different life, letting them leave the darkling world.

Nobody said a thing about giving Boston’s first ones some relief, letting them walk away.

“What’s ours is ours,” Gam said. “And ours it’ll stay.”

What was his felt like his alone, tonight, as Asad kicked his soles against the sidewalk until they made rasping sounds to fill the silence of the night. Tarif was gone again, sneaking off with Shawna, and Asad thought Gam might know but that boy was a damn fool in love, and nobody was gonna steal his joy. If Gam didn’t trust Asad to do things alone, she’d have said something. But she let him go, let him handle things.

It was something, that he had Gam’s trust.

But still he lingered on the corner of Blue Hill and Callender, looking at the building where a hole had opened in the world and shown him what might have, could have, should have been.

No sign of Miss Marsha, or her dumbfool son.

Asad looked to the left and then the right, saw no one, and crossed the street to climb those outside stairs, grip the edge of the roof, and hoist himself up.

He watched moonset from the rooftop, sitting on the edge and counting the stars as they winked out. Somewhere, in another universe, those same stars were winking out for the other Asad, and maybe Avondre was tucked in next to him, their limbs tangled up all smooth and brown and their sleeping breaths mingled. It wasn’t his…but it was someone’s, and he liked the slow way his blood moved when he thought about that world, that life, that belonged to someone who had his face.

Footfalls rattled on the stairs below, and he sighed. Tarif had found him. He closed his eyes, held that little bit of sparking rebellion against his chest, and waited for the scolding.

Those steps scuffed up behind him, then fell still. No scolding. Just quiet. He waited, and then a low, drawling voice spoke, gravel at the edges, molasses crumbled into sugar when it dried.

“Almost sunup,” someone said. Not Tarif. “Should be heading in, yeah? Or they do things different up here?”

Asad snapped his eyes open, staring across the Boston skyline. He’d only heard that voice in murmurs and in dreams. Couldn’t be. Couldn’t damned well be. He tried to talk but his words were sticks in his throat, and he barely rasped out, “Depends where down there is.”

“Tuscaloosa,” the other boy said. “And in Tuscaloosa, we go in before the sun comes up.”

“Why, though?” Something fierce burned in Asad’s chest, something ignited by that voice, and he was so fucking scared to look but he wanted to, needed to, but he held himself back because he couldn’t stand to lose his hope, his fire. “Just because they afraid of the night, why we gotta hide from the sun? That ain’t in the rulebook. Never was. I wanna watch the sun rise, and I’m gonna.”

“Reckon as I’ll watch it with you, then.”

The other boy sat down next to Asad, body heat and, in his peripheral vision, long thin legs in battered jeans covered with Magic Marker designs. Asad risked a glance, and that burn in his chest burst into a supernova.

High cheekbones. Long, twisting braids. Angular fingers, a strong jaw, broad shoulders and dark eyes and maybe he was a little thinner on this side, maybe a little more raw about the edges, maybe a jagged thin pink scar cut from the corner of his eye down to his neck, and maybe his skin didn’t shine with gold dust, but luminous bronze glowed underneath rich brown nonetheless.

And maybe he wasn’t the one Asad had seen, but he was just the right one for this place, this now, this quiet and aching need.

“Hi,” the other boy said, his thoughtful, heavy-lidded eyes scrunching at the corners with his smile. “I’m—”

“Avondre,” Asad breathed. “Von. I know.”

Avondre blinked, cocking his head. “How you know my name?”

“I just do.” And Asad smiled: a silly smile, a goofy smile, a smile so big it could seal every crack in the world and every crack in his heart. “Think I saw you at school. Wanna go for a burger after sunup?”

“Sure,” Avondre said, and smiled back—so shy, so wonderful, all brightness and softness. “Sure. I’d really like that. But I’d like it even more if you told me your name.”

“Can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

Asad grinned wider. “Because I’m a superhero, and we never tell anyone our real names.”

“I’ll find out.” Avondre laughed, eyes glittering slyly. “If you’re a superhero, I’m gonna be Lois Lane.”

Asad leaned closer. He didn’t know what he was doing, but he did, and every day should be like this, every night, with a smile on his lips and a wondering, a wishing, a hoping what if. “Lois was in love with Superman,” he mock-whispered, and Avondre smirked.

“Don’t get too big with yourself.”

Asad laughed. “Asad.” He offered his hand. “Saad. My family calls me Saad.”

Avondre slipped his hand into Asad’s. Squeezed, his palm dry and hot and smooth. A prickle sparked through Asad, a prickle like the sensation of a rift opening close by, yet it was within him. A crack opening inside him, spilling out all the awful, all the pain, until he was Pandora’s box with nothing left inside but the pure bright fire of hope.

Gam had warned him against wanting, against the sin of covetousness, of greed.

But she hadn’t said a damned thing about hope.

“Nice to meet you, Saad,” Avondre said.

“Yeah,” Asad replied, and didn’t let go of Avondre’s hand. “Yeah, it really is.”

ABOUT XEN

Xen is a New Orleans-born Southern boy without the Southern accent, currently residing somewhere in the metropolitan wilds of the American Midwest. He spends his days as a suit-and-tie corporate consultant and business writer, and his nights writing genre-bending science fiction and fantasy tinged with a touch of horror and flavored by the influences of his multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual background—when he’s not being tackled by two hyperactive cats. He wavers between calling himself bisexual and calling himself queer, but no matter what word he uses, he’s a staunch advocate of LGBTQIA representation and visibility in genre fiction. He is the author of the novels Shatterproof and From The Ashes.

SANDSCRIPT

By Mame Bougouma Diene

Faces dance on the moon,

My word’s a whisper on the winds of monsoon,

Tears in rainy June.

Yet it echoes through the caves and tombs,

Battles painted on the walls and decaying runes.

From hearts torn in the temple of doom,

Or Thalsadum,

To the blood on the walls of Ur,

Lost in translation in the songs of Moors,

My sword scripts through the pebbles and it scars the dunes,

But sand moves melodies and melancholy tunes,

So much dust in the wind will I see Kansas soon?

I could have aimed for the real world or road rules,

But that’s weakness in my thoughts in the growing gloom,

Of a candlelit shower in the anteroom.

From dragons and Marduk to Moghuls and Babur,

Empires rise and fall but the hearts the tool,

With lack of knowledge it might play the fool and wreck havoc,

Or smash mountains to maintain its cool.

Cuz when it rains in June sometimes the moon cries too,

As the sand shifts the dunes on the wind of monsoon.

ABOUT MAME BOUGOUMA DIENE

Mame Bougouma Diene is a Senegalese American humanitarian residing in Brooklyn, New York with a fondness for tattoos, progressive metal, policy analysis and is madly in love with Meghan Chadonic. He is the francophone/ US spokesperson for the African Speculative Fiction Society and can be read in AfroSFv2, You Left Your Biscuit Behind, Myriad Lands Volume II, This Book Ain’t Nuthin to Fuck Wit: A Wu Tang Tribute Anthology, Omenana, Brittlepaper, Galaxies Magazine (French), and Edilivres (French), with a couple of things in the oven.

REMOTE WITNESS

By Uche Ogbuji

He’d settled into stasis well before

The violet knife-edge in silver starlight

Incised the quarters, held dreamless through long

Cipher to project the target place and time

Through mesh of magnetar bombardment effect.

Cyborg prepared to strum the scene thus strung

On the journeyer’s mindframes warped in this alien realm.

All art is bark of a tree where it does not belong.

It was a historical research tour;

The crew fanned out across wartime Biafra;

His own heritage set the work in lifelong

Relevance. Time projection was mankind’s scheme

To perfect archives and chart for disasters,

But how would he absorb, through this iron lung

The breath of ancestors’ raw experience?

All art is bark of a tree where it does not belong.

He wakened in Kano, 1966;

He glided to that moment at the airport,

A travel terminus gone murderously wrong,

Freezing over one figure, familiar despite

The warp of terror; threatening to spoil

The mindlog, agony unexpectedly strong

At such remove, in scent of blood mist that hour.

All art is bark of a tree where it does not belong.

ABOUT UCHE OGBUJI

Úchèńnà Ogbújí, born in Calabar, Nigeria, lived in Egypt, England and elsewhere before settling near Boulder, Colorado. A computer engineer and entrepreneur by trade, his poetry chapbook, Ndewo, Colorado (Aldrich Press) is a Colorado Book Award Winner, and a Westword Award Winner (“Best Environmental Poetry”). His poems, published worldwide, fuse Igbo culture, European classicism, American Mountain West setting, and Hip-Hop. He co-hosts the Poetry Voice podcast, featured in the Best New African Poets anthology, and was shortlisted for Nigeria’s Eriata Oribhabor Poetry Prize.

I WILL COME TO YOU; I WILL REMOVE YOUR LAMPSTAND FROM ITS PLACE

By Rodney Wilder

Nah, child.

Those windows & streetlights seem a welcome

from between these trees but, remember the scriptures—

St. Akeem. They don’t brighten the night for us,

dusk thumbin’ our black

back to its roots & bayou bivouacs.

Back to where we can’t be no trouble for folk who

weigh walkin’ a trouble to die over,

& bein’ black & seen a

bruise on a whole host of things that

ain’t got nothin’ but skin-deep esteem

to hold ‘em down.

Nah, child.

Those homes don’t glow for us.

Not when from behind a welcome sign of

teardrops strung taut with their promises:

the cost—the heart-carving cost—of not

waftin’ the impossible tiptoe their

eggshell-havens require. Remember the scriptures—

St. Akuji. ‘cause it’s gettin’ hard to find someone who

hasn’t watched part of their story become

a punctuation sung to mask that fragile, that

hollow, that absence of song compelling

the seizure & stillness of ours.

& I’m fittin’ to go my whole life without you

addin’ me to their number. So, nah, child.

Those homes don’t glow for us.

& it ain’t right. It damn sure ain’t right.

That our limbs of the family tree were more worth

peelin’ into floorboards than

approaching in embraces. That the mirror-glass they

slid over their holiest pages shaped them a god who don’t

sculpt no ebons & olives into his children. That the dark

they reserve for us gave us our martyrs—

St. Lehana, St. Tamala, St. Siyanda—

gave us our holy wounds, these

craters & veins arrayin’ our bodies some

kind of solace, ember-red, & lightin’ this bayou a bereft

welcome of its own. No, child.

Those homes don’t glow for us.

But remember the scriptures.

Not wilson or bryant or any of the white behind

so much of our reliquary’d black,

but Nehushtan, the snake-bodied god

tossed from their midst along with us.

Remember him. Remember what he swore to those

lampstands caught twistin’ their candles into thorns.

Remember what he swore for the

broken finger-bones, the bullet holes and river-bloat

that found him out in this darkness. What part

we were promised to play

in the ashes demanded by justice. Because,

those homes don’t glow for us yet.

&, child,

that yet is all that matters, spelled

in the blood of our red & incensed constellations:

the bayou breathing a sunrise of its own

across those streets & short-lived timbers.

ABOUT RODNEY WILDER

Rodney Wilder is a biracial nerd who bellows death-metal verse in Throne of Awful Splendor. Previous work appears in Words Dance, FreezeRay, ALTARWORK, Tales of the Talisman, and his first collection of poetry, 2012’s Ars Golgothica. Currently writing his fandom-fueled follow-up, he likes nachos, analogizing things to Pokemon, and getting lost in Oregonian forests.

INDIE SPOTLIGHT

The road to publication is not easy for anyone and comes with a number of hurdles. For Black writers, these challenges are multiplied and because of institutional issues, the path seems almost impossible. But the resiliency of Black folks always finds a way and for many Black SFF writers that way was in the form of self-publishing. At FIYAH, we do not snub our noses at those writers who chose this path. We salute them because they have decided to embark on a journey by themselves that in traditional circumstances would involve a team. So we wish to acknowledge those Black indie SFF writers out there working hard and dropping a good product, by featuring them in this special section of some of our issues.

This issue’s feature is Carole McDonnell’s THE CONSTANT TOWER.

The first chapter lies in the pages that follow. Visit our website to read an interview with the author and support the work by purchasing it at the link below.

AVAILABLE ON AMAZON | BARNES & NOBLE | INTERVIEW

INDIE SPOTLIGHT

THE CONSTANT TOWER // Carole McDonnell

A king’s sickly son struggles with his destiny while his clan wars with an enemy clan with whom he identifies but an ancient myth exists which tells of a mythical Constant Tower that can change the world will prove his worth.

THE CONSTANT TOWER

By Carole McDonnell

The Beautiful One from my clan, is dead.

The day takes us.

If to forest, no rain.

If to desert, no sun.

For he was rain and sun,

A cloud bringing all my comfort.

In our Permanent Home, the gathered clans greet him.

‘His words were daggers, brave and swift,’ they sing.

‘His heart was kind and noble.

In the world of the living, distress.

But for us, joy.

The day turns,

His longhouse searches for him. But he is safe here in our home.

— Psal’s elegy on the death of his friend, Ephan.

Chapter 1. The Studier of Worlds

Now my prince, in my former rendition, I spoke of Ephan’s deeds. Then you asked me to tell the tale again, and this time to tell you Psal’s story. I will play my part. But you must play your part as well. For you it is given the task of forgetting all you have heard of the previous tale and to keep your heart and mind on Psal. Can you do this?

Inside the Nahas longhouse, see then: Psal. A boy of about fifteen. A prince too, like yourself, a studier of worlds for his clan. But primarily, a boy.

He had risen early before the moons waned and, as usual, was thinking of his sweetheart Princess Cassia, the daughter of Chief Tsbosso, his father’s great enemy. For six months, King Nahas had forbidden the marriage. Confused, longing for Cassia, Psal knew only this: he breathed easier and walked more joyfully when among the Peacock Clan, the clan to which the gentle, lovely Cassia belonged.

“How wonderfully the Peacock women use twigs to frame their faces!” he extolled. “And how elegant the decorated shells in their hair! They’re such simple and natural beauties. Don’t you think so? Unlike our women who use pretense and distance so our warriors will prize them! Aren’t the women of the Peacock clans charming in their naturalness?”

Ephan’s apricot-colored eyes peered at him through thick locks of white hair. “Bare breasts and tightly woven hemp skirts do have a natural effect. But she was very bold that sweetheart of yours, wasn’t she? For all that ‘simplicity’ of hers.”

“Cassia is a chief’s daughter. Tsbosso’s daughter! Why shouldn’t she be bold in letting me know she wanted me?” He spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. “She allowed me to kiss her the last time we met.”

“Yes, you told me. Several times.” Ephan picked up the gray parchments used to track towers. “But she didn’t allow you to lie with her, did she?”

“A chief’s daughter can’t just lie with anyone.”

“If this girl wants a lover whose features are like those of her own people, the Firstborn son of King Nahas is not just ‘anyone.’”

Footsteps light and soft—a woman’s—hurrying down the corridor momentarily pushed thoughts of his beloved away. They stopped outside the keening room. The intricately-embroidered curtained screen in the doorway was pushed aside. Psal looked up from his parchments, outside his daydream: Narena—the midwife of the longhouse—entered. She stood peering down at Ephan, her adopted son, and at Psal, the studiers of the royal longhouse.

“Betri’s time has come.” She pushed her thick, unkempt, graying hair from her face.

“Why tell us of this?” Psal asked her. “You’re the midwife.”

Even if Psal was only a studier, he was Firstborn of the clan; Narena should’ve showed him due respect, but she answered curtly. “The birthing’s difficult, and Chief Studier Dannal is asleep.” She looked from Psal to Ephan, then back to Psal again.

Dannal was not asleep, of course; the old studier’s listlessness and stained teeth were only two of the telltale signs that the Tomah pharma had enslaved him.

“Boys,” Narena said. “Hurry! Which one will it be?”

Ephan lifted the parchments—pale hands over paler hair—and waved Psal toward the door. “I’m tracking towers. This one’s mind is on love. Let him bring new life into the world.”

Bright morning; the moons fled. Psal clutched a newborn boy in the hollow of his left arm. The infant’s palate was cleft, the nose split in two.

With his right hand, Psal attempted to ward off Cyrt—a chief captain, his father’s close kinsman. A jagged scar on Cyrt’s right cheek proclaimed the warrior’s bravery in a past skirmish with a Peacock clan, but now such bravery vaunted itself against an innocent child. Cyrt turned to the others; some gesture unseen by Psal caused laughter to fill the longhouse. Dagger drawn, Cyrt wheeled about to look at Psal again. Smirking, he tossed the weapon from left hand to right. Back and forth, the blade flashed rhythmically, like oil lanterns flickering in the morning light.

Tears trailed down Psal’s cheek. Again, Cyrt’s relentless teasing. The ten years away from his clan studying with the Master of the Wintersea should have given him a thicker skin.

Nevertheless. He turned to his father. “King Nahas, Father. Queen Hinis, Mother. Allow the child to live.”

King Nahas stood near the hearth; his face ruddied and shamed by his son’s weakness. Near a window, Queen Hinis—regal and cold she was—threw Psal a scornful look. The boy sunk into himself. “Firstborn,” the queen asked, “will you grow teats and feed it?”

“I expect he will,” Cyrt said, and the Queen smiled.

His back against the wall, Psal clutched the child with both hands now. “The other clans, Great Queen. Such damaged little ones . . .they allow to live. Mother, this one will live. This one should live.”

He could give no valid reason for wanting the child to be spared. Certainly a vague hope of the child’s future usefulness was not enough to disdain the Wheel clan’s age-old edict. Male children born ill, damaged, or deformed were killed. Mercy generally did not triumph over the cruel tradition. Psal’s father—nature-blessed Nahas, chief of the Nahas longhouse, king of all the Wheel Clans—had mercifully allowed Psal to live.

Yet once again, Psal told himself, the error of that mercy is being shown to all.

Psal pushed past shame. “They will not think you weak, Father. Nahas, this child might prove valuable to our clan. As I have, Father. Am I not valuable, Father?” Tears clouded his sight as he waited for the king’s answer. “Am I not loved, Father?” He wiped his eyes with his forearm and pointed to his clubfoot, the mark of his ignominy. He lifted the twisted shriveled left leg, a thing he always hid. “I have lived, Nahas, and have proven myself. Am I not a competent studier, Father, deft in all tongues, skillful in all natural lore including tower science?”

The child in his arms gasped for air, a half-hearted fitful cry, hurting its own cause. Yet it must have desired life for it turned its head from Cyrt’s dagger and buried its face in Psal’s black studier’s tunic as it grasped his thumb.

The king spoke to Cyrt and not to his Firstborn, his voice impatient, but not—unlike Hinis—cold. “Cyrt, take the child.”

Darkness as Psal closed his eyes. Darkness as he pressed his back against the wall, wishing it would swallow both himself and the child. Light again when he lifted his eyelids and looked on Narena. Narena—she who eyed all damaged children with a shudder—glared at him in silent scorn, and Betri—the mother of the child—now clutched her empty belly, now asked, “Studier, can you not see the child is suffering?”

“Firstborn, you shame your father. Be more of a man.” Although gentle and playful toward healthy children, Cyrt never showed mercy to Damaged Ones. Only Ephan had somehow earned his begrudging respect. He spoke now to Ephan, who had hurried down from the rampart. “King’s Favorite, tell the Firstborn, this isn’t a battle he’ll win.”

“Cloud,” Psal begged Ephan. “Plead for me. Plead with your mother. Tell her you have lived, you have thrived these fifteen years.” He held his breath, hoping Ephan—King’s Favorite—would help his cause.

Ephan leaned forward, whispered in Psal’s right ear, “Well did our old master nickname you ‘Storm,’ for you blow both good and bad away. Look now, did they not grant you time to use soothing pharma to kill the child? More than that you did not ask. Little though that mercy was, you should have taken it. Now morning docks in this unexplored region, our studier tasks await us, and the child still lives. Let Cyrt take it outside.” Ephan held a warning finger before Cyrt’s face, spoke as if he, a studier, was a warrior’s equal. “But, Warrior, take care you kill the babe quickly and mercifully.” Ephan reached for the newborn, but Psal clutched it tighter.

“Let me send it from this world,” Psal pleaded. “I’ll use pharma to soothe it softly and swiftly into a painless death. Please, I will. I will.”

The hands of his fellow studier gently pulled the child from his own tightly clenched fingers; the newborn was turned over to Cyrt. Psal leaned against the wall, his arms empty. Once again, he lost the battle against traditional “good sense.”

The child’s cries faded as Cyrt carried it from the longhouse. Throughout the gathering room, women, children, warriors—even the other three studiers—stared at Psal. Psal took several deep breaths. He placed his empty hand on his left leg. What will the others see when they look at me? A petulant ghost dragging its lame leg away in defeat. He glanced at the hearth, then at the Residential Corridor to the left of the gathering room. No escape there. Other warriors had awakened and were walking toward the hearth. He looked in the opposite direction, the passageway known as the Chief’s Corridor. There, past the Chief Studier’s room with its glut of pharma, past the royal chambers, past the grain storerooms, the armories and the ice rooms with fermented meat, the solitude of the stables awaited him. There, on the farthest edge of the longhouse, he could chew himself into oblivion on Tomah bark. He could be bowed and cowed by sleep. In dreams, he could forget his ignominy.

Except, he reminded himself, a Tomah-wracked body was not a body a studier should have. And a Firstborn should not hide his grief in enslaving pharma. I am still Firstborn of the Wheel Clan. Even so, wouldn’t it be better to be cast into the fearsome night rather than live with this people?

He stood unmoving until all eyes but Ephan’s turned elsewhere. Then, rejecting Ephan’s outstretched hand, he followed his friend toward the Chief’s Corridor.

“Cloud,” he asked Ephan as the din of the gathering room faded. “Why am I not more accepting of my fate? As a Firstborn, I should be brave. As a studier, I should unflinchingly toss myself into the embrace of the unmaking night as if we were lovers. But here I am. Studier and Firstborn. Both and neither.”

Ephan drew a long breath. “Unfortunately, it is an uncommon predicament.”

Psal wiped his snotty nose and tear-wet face. “I know it. I know it. And here I stand, being so much and so little, stinking up Nahas’ longhouse.”

“A small stink, not a great one.” Ephan walked into one of the studiers’ rooms and waited for Psal to enter.

“Why must you joke? I’m telling you my heart.”

Ephan turned, smiled his broken smile. “You had me pondering smells that could stink up a three-hundred-chamber longhouse. I could not help but joke. But do not fear. Perhaps you will do great unsmelly things yet. Only, do not attempt to change things now. Wait until you’re a chief. Why battle alone? And so publicly?”

“I didn’t battle alone. The child was on my side!”

“How exasperating you are!”

Away from the hearth, Psal considered how his father had ignored him. He forced confidence into his voice. “Nahas, come here! We must speak! Now!”

In the dimly-lit corridor, several young girls on ladders were uncovering the shutters in the ceiling windows while others switched on the roof’s sun crystals or extinguished candles. Ephan, the girls, and three women carrying grain from the storage rooms all gave Psal warning looks. He challenged all with a Firstborn’s haughty frown and waited at the entrance of the king’s chamber for Nahas to approach.

When the king entered his royal quarters, he walked past Psal. “Firstborn,” he said with unconcealed impatience. “If you’re here to tell me of the new region, speak on. But if I am to be confounded and assaulted by one of your tantrums—”

“You did not honor me as Firstborn, Father.” Half-remembering the pose and attitude of some long-dead warrior, Psal tried to make his body—blasted like a weed in a heavy storm—imitate strength. “You should have.”

“Firstborn” —the king walked to an unshuttered window and leaned against it, his back to Psal— “I had hoped your training as a studier would change the propensities of your heart. But your anger against your own people is still too great.”

Psal crossed his arm. “If I hate my own people, then you should allow me to leave.”

“That old discussion again.” The king peered into the slowly-emerging terrain. “Firstborn, you’ve keened us into a thicket. Was there no better place for the longhouse to anchor?”

“The region is full of rocks, lakes, and thick forests, Nahas.” Aware that he was still standing in the doorway, Psal tentatively placed his right foot into his father’s room, then dragged the left one inside also. “The tower could find no sparser. . . No, Nahas, I will not allow you to leave the conversation unfinished.”

Nahas rubbed his forehead and turned from the window. He stared at Psal as if pondering the strange creature he had spawned. Then he looked outside again and pointed to a tall, looming structure outside. “It looks like an ancient temple. I suppose you and Ephan will want to explore the ruins. But first things first. Soil samples, and mapping. . .”

Psal bit his bottom lip. “Father, about Cassia—”

“You wanted the girl because she wanted you.” Nahas was not looking at him. “That was her greatest virtue. Not her only virtue, of course, but it was the virtue you most admired because you’re a boy who hungers for love. A king’s son should not be ruled by such heart hunger. Such emotions show a diseased mind, something far worse than a diseased body.”

“The Peacock clan does not disdain my ‘diseased’ body.” Psal grasped his father’s arm and yanked hard. “Or my diseased mind! Cassia does not. The Peacock clans honors all people, whatever their illnesses. They do not kill their—”

“Enough!” The king pulled his hand away, raised a clenched right fist.

Psal flinched. The dull ache in his hip pleaded for soothing pharma, but now his body betrayed him, trembling. He winced. Showing his pain shamed him, but either Nahas had not seen it or had mercifully decided to ignore it.

The king’s arms, freckled and tanned, relaxed. It gestured at the world beyond the window. His voice was soft again, patient. “The knowledge of keening is our wealth, Firstborn. Our tower science has helped us survive. We own much. Food, fertile regions, lakes, seashores. You believe a marriage between you and Cassia will end the skirmishes—at least with Tsbosso’s clan. But can you not understand? I cannot let a studier marry into the clan of our enemies. Would you not allow your wife to seduce away our secrets?”

“No, Father. I would not.”

“See, that is where we differ,” the king said. “Truly, I think that within ten days of marrying into their clan, you would betray us.”

“And why would I do that, Nahas?”

“To help Tsbosso defeat other Peacock Clan chiefs,” the king said. “Because you are too eager to please any who claim to love you, Firstborn. The Peacock Clans—strong as they are—are disorganized and always warring among themselves. Who can count the number of their chiefs? And Tsbosso, your friend, is the wiliest of them. Even now, the friendship between you and that scheming chief troubles me. When you have proven yourself capable of honoring our clan’s laws, I will consider allowing you to marry Tsbosso’s daughter. In the meantime, if you need a woman, visit the comfort women as Ephan and the others do. The conversation is ended.”

Psal looked about the king’s chamber to hide his hurt. His gaze fell on a red linen cap lying on his parents’ sleeping mat. Similar to the leather caps worn by Wheel Clan warriors and studiers, this cap was worn by chiefs’ sons on ceremonial occasions. It was unusual to have both a studier and a prince’s cap, but Psal’s own red cap rested on a shelf in the Firstborn’s Chamber, a room he rarely visited. He assessed his father: the close-cropped auburn hair, the muscular arms, the strong body. How grievous that one so nature-blessed should be so unlucky to bear a son with my cursed form. And yet. . . he allowed me to live.

“Nahas, if I find a girl from our clan who loves me in spite of my infirmity—or because she thinks I might someday become a chief—any marriage would be an unhappy one. Even if the girl loved me, she would tease me relentle—”

“Or you would think she teased.”

“Whatever the cause, we would not be happy. This is how these things go.”

“Is that how those things go?” The king walked from the window and placed his hand on his door. “Firstborn, sometimes you speak like an old man, sometimes like a little child, sometimes both. You are neither. Now, hurry. The dawn is breaking and you have much exploration to do.”

Stung by his father’s words, Psal blurted out. “Nahas, one day I will leave you, and with that leaving I will leave all that you value.”

“You speak your heart’s intentions too freely,” the king answered. “Should I trust you to keep our secrets, when you cannot keep your own?”

Psal didn’t answer.

“And one thing more, Firstborn. You may enter anytime, of course. You’re my son. And you are Firstborn. But think twice if you open my door only to challenge me.”

Head bowed, jaw tight, Psal limped from his father’s chamber past the keening room toward the studier room. In other clans, the position of studier of worlds was inherited or earned. Or it was cast like a mantle onto the shoulder of some intelligent child by communal vote, and that child would be taught all the lore, tongues, and beliefs of one of Odunao’s great clans. Not so the Wheel Clan. They chose damaged boys to be studiers. Such children were expected to be grateful. The Master of the Wintersea had taught his students that they were ghosts, and that being a ghost was an honorable thing: ‘A studier is dead while he lives,’ the old teacher had said. ‘Because, though damaged, he has been spared death, which others think was his rightful due. Thus, he is a ghost, an intermediary between all clans, a mediator between the living and the dead, the Creator and the created, the organic and the inorganic world. A citizen of all the tribes.’ We are not kings of the earth. We are its very dust.

He entered the studier room, where he found Ephan sorting through a basket of pharma jars.

Swiveling on his stool, Ephan settled two circular crystals held together with a little wire frame on his nose, then strapped a large dagger to his right thigh and placed a slingshot and several empty jars onto the cart. “That certainly ended well.”

Psal limped past him. “If you cannot console me, be quiet. Or speak of other matters.”

“This is a watery region. Emon plants should be abundant.” Emon, the Studier’s Herb. So called because studiers with painful illnesses, like Psal, often reeked of it.

“I suppose so,” Psal answered. Where was Cassia today? What was she doing?

He sat on a low, wheeled bed, made comfortable with cushions, that Ephan had designed and built for him. Grumbling, he rolled toward Ephan, who now stood beside the parchment-cluttered shelf. Ephan lifted a brown clay jar containing a sticky white balm that protected those afflicted with the Wheel Clan disease against the sun, and Psal tried to think of exploration, discoveries and soil samples—such things that delighted studiers and bored warriors. He found no joy except when he thought of Cassia.

Ephan opened two more clay jars containing pharma against the venom of reptiles and insects. He rubbing his hands with these ointments, then passed the jars to Psal.

Through the window, the new terrain grew more distinct. The unmaking night was over.

Psal touched his nose, so very like his father’s, a nose like a sloping mountainside. Unlike his father and the rest of the Wheel Clan, Psal was not pale-skinned. Nor was he dark like those from his mother’s Macaw clan. His skin was honey-colored, and long black hair circled his head in a tangle of loose curls. Not that his clan brothers cared about such matters, but it was another thing that differentiated Psal. Psal caught Ephan’s gaze and grimaced. He dropped his hand, then leaned on his right elbow, facing Ephan.

“Cloud,” he asked, glancing at his woven blanket. Would it hold all his meager belongings? “Would you think me weak if I escaped our clan and married Cassia?”

“I? I would think you cruel for leaving me behind to be punished by Nahas. Even if I was entirely ignorant of your flight, I would suffer greatly for your deceit.”

“But, your suffering aside, would you hate me? I would not like you to hate me.”

“I would still love you. Hunted man though you would be. Responsible for war though you would be. I suppose I would worry for you, but I would not worry long.”

“Why not?”

“Because, Wayward One, Nahas would drag you back to us. If you wish to be free, why not flee to your mother’s clan? Your uncle Chief Bukko is a good man, and you—a peace child—would be honored among them. And they would allow you to marry Cassia.”

Live with his mother’s mealy-mouthed clan? Psal’s stomach turned. “I’ve seen their studiers. Lazy, satisfied, smug. Exploration doesn’t interest them.”

“True, true. As the clan, so the studier—as they say.”

Ironic, considering the studiers of this clan. Psal could hear water nearby. The water spoke of stillness: probably a lake. He heard echoes also, with his studier’s hearing, and the wings of bats inside a cave. He groaned. “The walls of this longhouse are eating away our souls.”

“Walls have no teeth.” Ephan lifted his hands and let half the parchments rain down on Psal’s head. “And you don’t believe in souls. Nahas rebuked you privately just now. A mercy. And he gave you ten days to betray us. His confidence in you grows. There was a time he’d have given you a whole day. I, myself, am also prone to helping others, but I would hold out more than ten days.”

Psal picked up a stylus, wet with blue ink and threw it at Ephan who caught it, laughing. Ephan walked to the window, a wide smile brightened his face. If Psal hadn’t always insisted on getting a good night’s sleep, Ephan would’ve stayed up all night watching the regions melt into each other. From Psal’s youth he had felt as derelict as the Ruined Lost Cities, crumbling away like a rock beaten continually under a hammer, or like flowing waters wearing away a stone. He pushed away the sharp pain burning through his left hip and stood.

“Father spared me because my mother was grieving for a husband and he for a brother. Killing me would’ve been one more grief. When he found you, crawling naked and weak and damaged in the desert, that cunning one said, ‘these two ghosts will live and grow together. Then no one will consider me weak for saving my damaged son.’”

“Sounds like a thought that would come to Nahas.” Ephan walked to the tower stairwell. “We need Rangi too, and more Tomah for Dannal. Although. . .perhaps we should not let him have more of what enslaves him . . .”

Psal picked up the boots the women had made for him and stared glumly at the misshapen left foot. “Have you ever wondered what our lives would have been had we been born among the cliff-dwellers or among those who live in the caverns?”

“To live a life huddled in caves is not for you. Nor are you one to remain rooted forever. Cave dwellers are homebodies, always fearful lest the night catch them far from home. Those who live inside cliffs are no better.” He pointed through the window. “Nor can I see you living in huts or in tents, under poles and reindeer pelt. In a longhouse, your soul can roam free and you have a clan to protect you. What could be better? Look, look at this new region. Do you wish to know what I saw as I stood on the rampart?”

“I hardly care.”

“Ah, but you do! You do care!” Gaal’s voice.

Tall and stocky with the olive skin and deep-set dark green eyes of the Grassrope Clan, Gaal was the Chief Steward of all Wheel Clan lands. He pushed aside the curtained screen.

“Firstborn,” he said, entering, “Cyrt had almost begun to like you. . . well, not ‘like’ exactly. But—”

“If Cyrt is as he is, why are you his friend?”

“Firstborn, a warrior offered me his friendship. Should I—a steward—reject it?” Gaal tousled Psal’s hair..

Psal pulled away “You are not as friendless as you think. Your fighting and mediation skills are so excellent that all respect you and accord you benefits few stewards enjoyed.”

“True, Firstborn, but all are aware that my father —and not my mother—was of the Wheel Clan. It is a curse I must bear.” Gaal moved to the window and squeezed Ephan’s shoulder. “Cloud, tell me of this new region.”

Ephan grabbed two black leather caps from a basket and threw one to Psal. “There’s a lake,” he said. “But shrub and vines clutter the path to it. Best to walk. The horses couldn’t get through. And what do you think is below that clear blue water? An overwhelmed city from ancient times!”

Psal doubted Ephan saw all he claimed. Like all those with the Wheel Clan disease, Ephan’s eyes were weak. But Ephan’s keen sense of smell and sharp hearing were helpful in hiding his eyes’ weakness.

“But tell me,” Gaal said, “you saw no clan markings when you stood on the rampart?”

“None,” Ephan answered. “No other clan has claimed this lost region. And I heard no other clan tower in any nearby region.”

“Firstborn, are you still pouting?” Gaal glanced back at Psal. “Look now, the craftsmen and stewards have created such marvels for your convenience. The royal longhouse is unlike all others! Stools that are tables at one moment or steps and beds the next. Such love your father has for you! You wish to become a chief, do you not? Prove yourself mature. Then you shall not have to accept the place your damaged body assigned to you at birth.”

Assigned to him? Had he not accepted the fact that his perfectly-formed, nature-blessed younger brother Netophah would be king? Why should he have to prove himself to be a chief?

“How differently you speak when you’re complaining about the Wheel Clan women who refuse to marry you!”

Gaal flinched as if hit. Pricked by guilt, Psal watched the not-quite-warrior leave.

“The day has only begun and already I have been pummeled with rebukes and speeches,” he said after Gaal was gone.

“You steadfastly refused Gaal’s offer of friendship. And why insult him? He’s honorable enough. Separated from the warriors, we of the lesser castes—warriors, stewards, studiers, and farmers—often befriend each other. And steward though he is, Gaal is a better warrior than those with Wheel Clan fathers. You should—”

“Our chief steward is Father’s closest friend, Cloud. I have no intention of taking aid from the enemy’s camp.”

Ephan pulled the brim of his cap low over his face and threw a bow, several arrows, and about twenty small pouches into Psal’s studier’s sack. He gathered all the parchments and threw them on the council table. Then, lifting the intricately-carved walking staff which Chief Tsbosso, king of the largest Peacock Clan had given to the Studier-Firstborn, Ephan said, “I have no desire to chart endless towers today. Storm, let us venture forth and explore this world.”

All day the studiers surveyed, collected, and made notations. Deyn, Lan, Broqh, and Kwin—young warriors reared with them—remained at their side aiding them. As second moon climbed high in the sky, after Nahas’ warriors had hunted, the fires were set. When third moon began to rise, Psal and Ephan climbed to the tower to study the controlled blaze.

See then: Psal and Ephan. Silent, both peering through spyglasses. The double moonlight usually turned the night sky from pale indigo to dull gray. But now, the distant sky glowed like torches: red, white, yellow. Nearby, the smoke mocked the day, misting the forest with bright grays and dull blues. Around the longhouse, the fire flickered and crackled. From the northwest, the terrified howlings of wild cats, from the northeast, the hoof beats of stampeding animals, echoing in the sky the cawing of fleeing birds.

Trouble grew inside the longhouse; First Night had gone. Second Night was come. Psal’s young sisters had not yet returned. In the gloom, there was no glimpse of the lost girls’ yellow tunics.

“Cloud.” Psal noted the fatigued jitteriness of Ephan’s eyes. “Are you sure the count is right?”

“I am not blind.” Ephan climbed into the watchtower, the rounded spire of the tower. “I’ve told you already. Four hundred and eighty-six. All are inside except your sisters.” His tone calmed. “Psal, the fires are far away. The girls are wise enou—”

“Nine and six year-old girls are not wise, Cloud. Earlier, when you spoke to Father—”

“No, they haven’t crept in through any window or any of the lesser doors.”

Psal sighed, caught between anger and worry. What if the fire outpaces my sisters? What if the night outpaces them? Nahas will send warriors to search for them, but the advancing night! Even if we anchor the longhouse tonight in this region, the night... He leaned against the watchtower, then paced the rampart. He strained his ears. “Do you hear that?”

“The sound of a child crying. But it is not the voice of either of your sisters.”

Netophah, golden-haired, nature-blessed, raced up the tower stairs. He tugged at his brother’s arm. “Firstborn, Father says Lan is the fastest of us. Lan will search for our sisters. We can wait no longer.”

In the gathering room, Lan—fleet Lan, wild Lan—stood at the threshold of the longhouse’s main entrance. Twenty years old, well-favored, slender, black-haired Lan was the child of a studier. Psal’s friend, he had been allowed inside the studiers’ ghostly circle. Smoke billowed past him into the gathering room as all awaited the king’s command.

Chief Studier Dannal approached Lan. Aged, his body blighted by enslavement to Tomah and the Wheel Clan disease, he placed a hand covered with cancerous sores on Cyrt’s shoulder and spoke to Lan.

“Lan is swift, but—even if he finds them—how would the little ones fare, hungry and night-tossed without a studier’s help? Ephan’s knowledge will guide all the lost home.”

True. Lan knew more about towers than the other warriors, but he was not a studier. A studier could hear the barely audible songs of towers and regions, as well as the heartbeats of spoiled little girls lost in a blazing forest.

“I will return again with the king’s daughters safe at my side,” Ephan said, but Lan remained at the door.

Psal grasped Ephan’s hand. “I will accompany Cloud.”

Ephan glanced at Psal’s deformed leg. “You’ll delay—”

“I will not.”

Psal’s two young brothers at her side, Hinis hurried toward Ephan. Fear for her own daughter and for Netophah’s sister lined her face. She hastily removed the leather cloaken from Lan’s shoulder and placed it across Ephan’s. Folded and strapped to the shoulder, the cloaken—when unrolled—was large enough to cover three large warriors—or two slender studiers and two careless little girls—and would prevent the night from separating them. “Bring my daughters home,” she commanded.

Out the studiers ran, the longhouse fast-fading behind them, second night riding hard at their heels. Psal’s weak muscles complained; his left leg and thigh hurt. Emon pharma, powerful though it was, only dulled his pain. Now, as he ran into the smoke, his lungs screamed in. Yet, he had to run. Then, a cry so small only a studier could hear it. As one, both turned eastward.

Ephan ran fast, faster, toward the cry. Second night and fire swirled about him, dust and smoke hid him from Psal’s sight. Psal hobbled behind, cursing his wretched leg, strengthening his heart against anticipated grief. Then he heard the girls’ voices issuing from a smoky clearing beyond a fiery thicket. The flames crackled all around. Past the blaze and into the clearing, Ephan ran. Out he came again, the fire licking at his heels, the girls in his arms coughing.

“Give Ria to me,” Psal said. Tears and smoke burned his eyes.

Ephan pushed Psal’s arm away. “I can carry both.”

Not in this smoke! Not with this fire! Not with the unmaking night fast approaching. “Give her to me!”

Another cry sounded from within the fire. A baby’s wail.

“The newborn? Is it still alive? Cyrt promised mercy!”

Ephan grasped Psal’s hand. “Hurry! Away!”

Psal shook off Ephan’s hold, ran into clearing. The child lay gasping amidst the brush. Psal lifted his dagger, held it high above the child’s struggling chest. He could not strike. Out he came again, the blaze nearer. “Ephan! Please! Be merciful! Kill it for me.”

Ephan’s mouth dropped open.

“You should have killed it when you found it!” Psal shouted.

“The fire rages!” Ephan yelled.

“Where is your mercy? Like Cyrt, you would allow it to burn in this fire!”

Ephan placed Tanti on the ground. Hasting, silent, he raced back to the infant, knife drawn. A moment passed. Ria leaped onto Psal’s back. The child’s wailing stopped. Ephan scrambled from the smoke, wiped his bloodied dagger against his tunic and returned it to its sheath. Immediately, Tanti climbed into Ephan’s arms.

Suddenly, strength and power flowed through Psal’s damaged body. How fast he ran—and without pain! As if the wind bore him along. How fleet his feet! As if tower music pulled them in its wake. Like arrows shot forth from a bow, they flew from that forest, the darkening smoke pursuing.

At the longhouse, Psal’s youngest brother greeted him. “I watched from the rampart, Firstborn! How fast you ran!”

“As fast as any other.” The next to the youngest shouted, leaping as children do.

“Faster! If I had not seen it, I would not have believed it!”

Psal, too, could not believe it. He laughed, blushed when his father smiled. His mother smiled also. A smile not wide enough to remove the memory of her disdain, yet this rare tiny thing lifted Psal’s heart.

He set his sister on her feet. “I should’ve let the Voca find you,” he shouted. “They keen for abandoned towers and lost little girls like you!” He pointed through a window to the rising moons. “Did you not hear Lan’s horn?” The girls glanced at each other — guilt and relief on their faces. Fear as well. His heart softened, his voice too. “I teased.”

His sister threw her arms around his shoulder, kissed his neck. “We didn’t want the child to die alone.”

Tanti burst into tears. Her he did not tease. Because she was Netophah’s sister. Because she was a little thing who could not bear being teased. He only squeezed her shoulder gently.

Cyrt sat near the hearth, eating of a wild boar caught earlier. Psal limped toward him.

“Why was the child made to linger?” He shoved Cyrt. “Even the animals and the fire did not wish to harm the child.” He turned to the others. “Only you, members of its own clan. . .” He caught his mother’s gaze, closed his mouth. Whatever glory gained by finding his sisters, he had now lost again.

ABOUT CAROLE MCDONNELL

Carole McDonnell has spent most of her years surrounded by things literary. Her writings appear in various anthologies including “So Long Been Dreaming: Post-colonialism in science fiction,” edited by Nalo Hopkinson and published by Arsenal Pulp Press; Fantastic Visions III” anthology published by Fantasist Enterprises; “Jigsaw Nation” published by Spyre publications, “Griots: A Sword and Soul anthology,” edited by Milton Davis and Charles Saunders, “Life Spices from Seasoned Sistahs: writings by mature women of color,” “Fantastic Stories of the Imagination” edited by Warren Lapine and published by Wilder Publications. Her novels Wind Follower and The Constant Tower were published by Wildside Books. Her other works include My Life as an Onion, The Charcoal Bride, Black Girls Have Always Loved Cowboys, Who Gave Sleep And Who Has Taken It Away?, A Town For Timothy, and The Daughters of Men. Her Bible studies include: A Fool’s Journey Through Proverbs, Blogging the Psalms, Scapegoats and Sacred Cows of Bible Study, and Seeds of Bible Study: How NOT to Study the Bible. Her collection of short stories, Spirit Fruit: Collected Speculative Fiction, is available on kindle. She lives with her husband, son, and pets in New York, and teaches English as a Second Language to refugees and migrants or can be found dancing English Country Dances.

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