CONTENTS

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

PROSE

GUARDIAN OF THE GODS

Tobi Ogundiran // 5765 words

Ashâke, a young acolyte struggling with her purpose in the gods’ temple, is upended by a griot’s forbidden song.

UNIFORM

Errick Nunnally // 5549 words

As a veteran of the Mechanized Corps, Patrick flounders for a connection with a society that refuses to see the man hidden within the war machine—until the day he meets an inquisitive five-and-a-half-year-old on the train.

A TERMINAL KIND OF LOVE

Veronica Henry // 3041 words

When a brilliant coder is screwed over by her underhanded ex, unleashing a virus that will burn their bleeding edge tech from existence is precisely the right thing to do—unless he comes to his senses. Love is...complicated.

YOUR ROVER IS HERE

LP Kindred // 3415 words

Ahmad is just out here trying to hit his rideshare bonus and keep his landlord off his back long enough to finish his writing assignment. But when his latest fare has the gall to start chanting evil invocations in his back seat, Ahmad must ignite his Jinn magic despite the rules against it.

POETRY

ZOMBIE OF PALMARES

Woody Dismukes

AUTOLYSIS AFTER MENTOR PURSUES ME WHILE IN A RELATIONSHIP

Jacqui Swift

EXTRAS

THANKS

April 2020

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Welcome to our 14th issue of the Hugo Award Nominated, World Fantasy Award Winning FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction.

As COVID-19 continues impacting the globe, I send all good vibes and thoughts of encouragement to you and your loved ones. I sincerely hope you are safe throughout this upheaval and staying connected with your kinfolk as we socially distance to flatten the curve. Authors: please give yourselves some grace if the words aren’t flowing; they will return. Write. Wash your hands. And write some more.

To everyone who continues supporting us: thank you. Your subscriptions, readership, and submissions fuel our passion and sustain our ability to keep sharing phenomenal Black talent with the world. Thank you for supporting Black speculative creators, our future is better for it.

I’m thrilled to share more strategic staff moves. Eboni Dunbar now serves as Managing Editor for our squad, and is already making a difference in our processes and bolstering the overall quality of our content. Remember the name...Eboni is destined for great things!

This unthemed issue presents a dope blend of sci fi and fantasy. Stories include “Guardian of the Gods” by Tobi Ogundiran, a tale of an acolyte desperate to serve the gods who ignore her; and “Uniform” by Errick Nunnally, where a mechanized ex-soldier grasps for his humanity. LP Kindred’s debut piece “Your Rover is Here,” gives us a rideshare trip gone awry with folk magic, and we welcome back FIYAH alum Veronica Henry with “A Terminal Kind of Love,” a cyber-revenge plot that takes on a life of its own. Poetry this issue includes “Zombie of Palmares” by Woody Dismukes and “Autolysis After Lifetime Mentor Pursues Me While in a Relationship” by Jacqui Swift.

Issue 14’s mesmerizing cover art is brought to you by Dominique Ramsey. Learn more about her in our interview!

Thanks for rocking with us again this year, I hope you enjoy this issue. Please don’t hesitate to check in with our fam @fiyahlitmag on Twitter, we’d love to hear how y’all are coping through these trying times, and any moments that grabbed you in the stories from this issue.

Be well and wash those hands.

Peace,

DaVaun Sanders

Executive Editor: DaVaun Sanders

Managing Editor: Eboni Dunbar

Poetry Editor: Brandon O’Brien

Acquiring Editors: Kaleb Russell + Danny Lore

Art Direction + Layout: L.D. Lewis

Cover Artwork by Dominique Ramsey

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

GUARDIAN OF THE GODS

By Tobi Ogundiran // 5765 words

Ashâke shed her priestly raiment and slid into the river.

The water was surprisingly warm against her skin, like falling into the embrace of a mother. Ashâke liked to think that the divine cocoon of the river goddess herself covered her, and if she listened carefully, she could just hear Osun revealing deep mysteries.

Ashâke muttered an invocation: “Osun iya mi. Iya olodo, iya ajose ati iloyun, iya arewa ati ife. Ba mi soro. Si ona okan re kio si se afihan kayefi re.”

She sighed. The gods, like always, were deaf to her supplication. The other acolytes had long since been able to commune with the gods, to divine knowledge from the arbitrary patterns of cowrie shells across divination boards. Soon they would choose their patron gods and become full priests, and eventually get sent out to other temples across the ten kingdoms. They would leave her, forever an acolyte, forever deaf to the gods.

Ashâke floated face-up, allowing the gently-flowing currents to sweep her farther away from the banks. Wispy clouds looped around each other in the deep night sky, as if mirroring the movements of the river below. The moon, a pale silver disk peeking out from behind the mountains in the east, spied on her nakedness.

Ashâke’s hands scraped the river’s shallow bottom as she employed a lazy backstroke. Her own peers had graduated two years ago. She would never forget her envy as she watched her friends enter the Inner Sanctum as acolytes and emerge as priests. She stood each time by the entrance, longing desperately to be among their numbers. She had learned the invocations word for word, knew the two hundred and fifty-six verses of the odu ifa by heart. Why then, did the gods refuse to speak to her? She could hardly bear the pitiful looks the temple priests gave her, nor suffer the whispers of the acolytes. Deaf priest, they called her. Never to her face, though, cowards that they were. And it was to these kinds of people the gods chose to reveal themselves?

Ashâke blinked the tears from her eyes, tasting salt as she licked her lips. Floating in that river with nothing but the soft lapping of water and the cacophony of nocturnal creatures, she made a decision.

“Eyin orisa,” she said. You gods. “Hear me now. If you don’t speak to me, that means you don’t need me. if you don’t need me, then I don’t need you. I will leave the temple and never look back.” She paused, then added, “I give you one week.”

One should not give the gods ultimatums, but she was done waiting for them.

∙ ∙ ∙

Ashâke hurried through the forest to the mountain temple. Though it was the hour of the owl, with some three hours left until dawn, it was best to be safely tucked away in her sleeping mat before the rousing bell. Otherwise she risked the wrath of the priests. They strictly prohibited sneaking out, but the temple was so far removed from civilization that night watch was an afterthought. Still, once or twice a priest would hold vigil, wandering the empty halls as they communed with the gods. It would not do to stumble into a priest this night.

Music. She heard music coming from her left. The steady beat of drums, the rhythmic shaking of shekere, and ululating voices, blending in sweet, sweet harmony.

Ashâke hesitated, making out the faint glow of a fire, and several figures swaying– perhaps dancing– around the flames. Gods, she had never heard music so good; the singing they did in the temple was purely ceremonial, a bland call and response to welcome the gods before a divination. But this… if the gods could sing this was what it would sound like.

Her feet carried her in the direction of the music before she even made the decision, and moments later she burst into a clearing. Seven people danced around the fire with their instruments. They ranged from a young girl roughly her own age, to an old man who stood in the very centre of the circle, singing in a powerful voice.

They didn’t look surprised to see her, but instead smiled and gestured for her to join in their merriment.

Ashâke hesitated. She knew she should turn and go. She knew she shouldn’t speak to them (the priests’ warnings about talking to strangers rang loud in her mind) and yet, there was something about these people, about their singing which kept her rooted to the spot.

A young man with several loops of jangling earrings danced toward her, thrust his shekere into her hands and pulled her into the circle.

Ashâke danced with them, for a moment forgetting all her worries and troubles. How could she not, when the people around her were so happy, lost in the music they were making? As she listened, Ashâke realized that they were telling a story. The story of a man journeying to the ends of the world in search of his mother, only to find out that she was Death herself. His journey had been the journey of life, which will end, surely but certainly, in death. It was beautiful, poetic.

Griots, thought Ashâke in amazement. These people are griots.

She had heard tales of such people. The world’s memory. They spun history into songs and passed it down orally from generation to generation. Beware the griots, the priests warned. They will embellish for the sake of rhyme, warp truth to keep in time.

But then the priests could be a little judgmental, she knew that first hand.

The song finally ended and they settled around the fire. Ashâke remained standing.

“Sit, child,” said the patriarch. The one with the sonorous voice.

“I…” she looked in the direction of the temple. “I have to get back to the temple. I shouldn’t even be out.”

“You’re a priest?” asked the flutist, her eyes wide and dark. She sounded incredulous.

“Acolyte,” Ashâke corrected, the word a bitter taste in her mouth. She should be a priest. By the gods she should be a priest.

“An acolyte,” murmured the patriarch. The light from the fire cast his tribal markings into deep relief. “Bless your soul.”

The griots exchanged looks, and Ashâke felt for one wild moment that they knew her secret. That she was deaf to the gods and had been stuck as an acolyte for years.

“I suppose it is… commendable that you all still keep the faith,” said the patriarch finally. “Humans, after all, need something to believe in.” He paused. “Even if the gods are dead.”

Ashâke was not quite sure she heard correctly. “What?”

The flutist looked to the patriarch, then back at Ashâke. “The Fall of the Gods,” she said. “Surely, you’ve heard of this? Everyone… ah …”

Ashâke looked at them. Looked at every one of their faces and saw the truth in them. “This is– impossible,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.

They merely gave her pitiful looks, mixed with a little bit of guilt at perhaps having delivered such news to her.

“This is impossible,” she repeated, with a little less conviction. Gods were not men. Were not subject to the rules of men, much less something as final as death. They could not die. She did not want to believe, refused to believe. And yet…

Acolytes were given to the temple at a very young age, to forget their parents and dedicate their lives in service to the gods. She could barely remember what the outside world was like. Oh, she knew of the ten kingdoms, and the Tower of the gods in the capital leading up to Pantheon itself. All these she had learned in the temple to prepare her for when she finally became a priest and was sent out into the world to head her own temple.

“The gods are not dead.” Now it was a plea. “To say so is blasphemous.”

“Do you hear them, then?” asked the patriarch gently. “The priests of old could hear the gods when they lived.”

“Yes–” she began, then broke off. She couldn’t hear the gods. She had never been able to hear the gods. All the others could, though. From Iyalawo the High Priestess, down to the acolytes.

All except her.

Could it be that they were all lying?

She wanted to believe. It made perfect sense! It would explain why she had never been able to hear the gods. It would mean that she did not have a defect, that she was not unworthy, that the others were simply lying, pretending…

But… if everyone else lied, the High Priestess wouldn’t.

Or would she?

“I’m sorry to be the one who brought you such… news,” said the patriarch. His sleeve fell as he mopped his brow, exposing the mottled skin of his arm. “But such is the world we now live in. A dark, dark world without our gods.” He lowered his eyes and seemed to age several years in that moment. “Would that it were not so, but it is. I should know. I was there when they died… when they were killed.”

“No!” Ashâke doubled over with the weight of revelation, her world spinning.

“We should tell her the story,” a woman suggested.

“Maybe it is not the best idea,” said the patriarch.

“No,” said Ashâke. “Tell me.” If the gods truly were dead, she wanted to know how and why. She sat down in the circle, folding her legs beneath her.

“Very well,” said the patriarch.

The drummer stepped into the circle, his massive bata drum hanging from a strap around his neck. He struck the drum once, allowing the boom to echo and die out, before striking up a throbbing, soothing rhythm DUM DUM dum DUM DUM dum. The others inched towards each other and linked their arms together, swaying as they blended their voices in rich harmony. A simple hum filled the air, setting the atmosphere for the patriarch’s lead singing. This continued for a long time; strangely hypnotic. Ashâke felt in that moment like nothing else existed: the world was just the clearing in the middle of the forest, filled with griots.

Finally, the patriarch stepped into the circle, spread his ample arms wide and began to sing:

“In the land above the sky

Lived the King of all beings;

Olodumare, Father of gods and men.

For ages man lived, oblivious to the existence of the gods,

Stumbling through life like toddlers in a swamp.

Olodumare decided to reveal astral mysteries to men

He called the gods from the corners of the world

And commanded them to build a fort.

A tower, a gateway to link the realm of man and god.”

The patriarch waved a hand over the fire. It flared black, and in the flames appeared the vision of a tall, tapering structure. Ashâke knew it on sight, from depictions in the temple: the Tower of the Gods, connecting the world to Pantheon.

“The gods worked together and built the Tower:

Ogun, god of metal provided the tools for construction;

Sango, god of fire and thunder and lightning,

Shattered the Mountains of Abeokuta with lightning;

The rocks of which were used to build the Tower,

Yemoja, mother of the seas and rain

Held off rainfall for the duration of construction.

Several years passed, and when Oganju, the god of completion

Set the final stone in place, there was rejoicing and merriment

In all the land.”

The music took on a lively tempo as the patriarch waved his hand over the fire. Ashâke made out several shapes, caught in the throes of revelry: countless humans, dancing at the foot of the Tower. Among them stood towering figures, effusing a powerful aura: gods.

“The Tower was completed; there could now be direct

Communication between man and god as Olodumare

Had always wanted.

Every year at summer solstice, the Afin and his griots and select citizens of the kingdom could ascend through the Tower to Pantheon itself to partake in a Conclave of gods and men.

The gods taught man the secrets of divination,

How to divine the message of the gods through the arbitrary placement

Of cowrie shells across divination boards.

They taught men the invocations, the two hundred and fifty-six odu ifa,

Gifting man with the knowledge to successfully navigate the world.

These men became priests of Ifa.”

Ashâke glimpsed several men and women garbed in white priestly raiment, hunched over divination boards, casting cowries. But for the striking, imposing figures of the gods hovering above them, it could have been the temple. Her temple, where she had tried tirelessly to get the gods to speak to her. For a moment she imagined herself one of the priests, bursting with joy as the gods taught her the language of divination. Oh, how she would have cherished their instruction, basked in their attention.

The scene changed, and the music took on an urgent, dramatic tone.

“The Fall of the Gods came in the Nineteenth year

Of Alafin Tade the Third.

The Afin, with his griots, the High Priest, and select citizenry

Ascended the Tower to Pantheon.

Little did they know that among their numbers was a sect.

A secret cult with a dark motive. A cult whose name would ring forever

On the lips of posterity:

Godkillers.”

Ashâke shuddered. That word. It defied reason. Defied every natural law. She could hardly fathom how mere men could possess the power to kill gods.

Around her the griots swayed and sang. Tears glistened in their eyes.

“The Conclave opened with a feast as was custom.

There was merriment. There was music. There was laughter.

Olodumare sat in his throne at the head of the table, surrounded by the gods

And his children and thought to himself that he had done good.

As the feast drew to end, a man arose and called loudly across the hall:

‘Olodumare baba mi, permission to approach your throne. I have a gift for you!’

The GodFather, incredibly pleased, waved him over.”

A man rose from the table and strode slowly towards the throne. His was the pale skin of an albino, and a terrible scar raked his face, claiming his left eye. His golden hair grew into seven dreadlocks, which spilled over his shoulders.

His intent was written all over him, in the twist of his lips and the set of his chin. How could the gods have missed it? How could Olodumare himself have missed it?

As though from faraway, came the patriarch’s voice:

“The man went on one knee before Olodumare who said,

‘Tell me, son, what do you have for me?’

At this point, the man looked Olodumare in the eye and hissed: Death.”

In one swift, fluid movement, he rose to his feet, producing a terrible black sword from the fold of his robes. Olodumare’s eyes widened and he reached for his scepter. Too late: the man ran the GodFather through with his sword. Olodumare fell back in his throne, gawking in disbelief at the sword in his chest, at the jagged lines of bright light rapidly spreading over his chest, his arm, his face…

The GodFather exploded. Dead.

Ashâke crawled closer to the fire, looking at the stunned faces of gods and men alike. Tears flowed freely down her cheeks.

“Other figures rose from among the seated;

Figures dressed in white, wielding terrible swords of destruction.

They laid waste to the inebriated gods.

Pandemonium reigned.”

The screams. Good gods, the screams. Terror, betrayal, pain. Ashâke felt every one of them, every single roiling emotion.

“The gods fled, or tried to flee, but they were no match for the godkillers.

Their senses were dulled by an excess of wine and sweet food.

All but Sango.

The god of fire and thunder and lightning rose with great fury

And brought the vengeance of the gods upon the godkillers.

Lightning rocked Pantheon as he swung his hammer in blind rage, felling godkillers

And innocents in the process.

The Afin fell, as did several griots, as did several priests.

Sango’s rage was so great that he destroyed Pantheon, shattered the Tower,

Killing himself.”

Sango’s terrible form blossomed in the fire, his eyes burning coals as he tore through Pantheon, sweeping with his hammer, belching fire like an enraged dragon, sending bolts of red lightning at friend and foe alike.

Sango stood alone among a heap of dead bodies, many of whom were his siblings. He raised that terrible hammer far above his head and screamed. Pantheon exploded in a brilliant spray of colours.

The scene changed, showing the Tower, dark and formidable, rising up into the sky, into Pantheon. For a moment it stood as it had for several centuries. Then, a powerful bolt of red lightning tore through the sky, slicing through the Tower. The top half shifted, teetered on its edge, then toppled to the ground, crushing thousands of people in the process.

Ashâke stared into the fire, tears streaming down her face. She bawled. It was painful. Too painful. The gods had opened Pantheon to man, and what did he do? Kill them. But why? What motivated the godkillers? What power did they possess that granted them the ability to kill gods? She sat staring into the fire long after the images vanished, long after the music stopped. She sat until the fire burned down to glowing coals, until the embers burned to white ash, until the morning breeze blew them away.

The sun streamed through the trees, jolting Ashâke back to the present, and she looked up to find herself all alone.

The griots were nowhere to be found.

Griots were powerful people, revered for their ability to immerse the listener in their tale. She thought of how their singing had conjured the images in the fire, how it had made her lose herself in the tale. As if she had been there.

Ashâke wondered where they were, why they left without bidding farewell. Perhaps they hadn’t wanted to disturb her, perhaps they wanted her to grieve the death of the gods privately. She doubted if she’d ever stop grieving. Her world, as she knew it, had shattered. Everything she knew– everything she thought she knew was a lie.

The only question was whether the others at the temple knew of this falsehood, if the priests were purposely perpetrating a lie.

There was only one way to find out.

Ashâke stood up, dusting the ash from her raiment, but she only succeeded in smearing it into the white fabric. Stained and weary, she set out for the mountain temple.

∙ ∙ ∙

Ashâke glided through a lone hallway in the temple, feet aching and shoulders slumped. Torches burned in brackets, but their warmth failed to dissipate the permeating chill in the mountain. Before she had hardly paid it any attention, like a mildly irritating itch in the middle of her back, but now it seeped into her very bones. It seemed fitting, as whatever hope she had held of ever hearing the gods had been quenched by the cold knowledge of their demise.

Vast open spaces and corridors composed the temple proper. Crawling tendrils choked the massive pillars, and twisting tree limbs garlanded the graceful arches, effusing the temple with a forest-like aesthetic.

Ashâke approached the final courtyard that lay between her and her quarters. Several senior priests clustered around the pillared entrance, conversing in harried tones.

“There she is,” said Priest Mide, looking up. She broke away from the group and marched towards Ashâke, scowling. “Where have you been, acolyte?” She gasped as she took in Ashâke’s appearance.

“Look at your raiment, girl!” Priestess Essan cried, mortified. “What have you been doing, climbing trees?”

Ashâke merely stood at the foot of the stairs, suffering the stern gazes of the priests. She had never been caught sneaking back into the temple, always returning before sunrise. She should feel embarrassed, frightened. She should go on her knees and beg for forgiveness, but she did not care. What respect and fear she had held for the priests was gone, burned away in the fires of revelation. All she needed was the truth.

“Are you deaf, acolyte?” asked Priest Dunsin, jowls aquiver. “Where have you been? We were worried sick, we thought…” He exhaled forcefully, nostrils flaring.

Ashâke looked past him to where the acolytes were gathered in neat rows in the courtyard, cowries strewn across their divination boards as they tried to commune with the gods.

Liars, thought Ashâke. You are all liars!

“Do you have nothing to say for yourself?” asked Priestess Mide when Ashâke remained mute.

Acolytes gathered outside a nearby entryway, her peers and juniors, whispering amongst themselves, mocking her.

“Ashâke! I’m talking to you! Are you deaf?”

“You snuck out of the temple.” Priest Dunsin’s jowls quivered as he reprimanded her. This is not your first year here; you know never to leave these walls without a senior priest!”

She hated them, every single one of them for making her feel unworthy, tainted. Deaf.

Ashâke thrust her hands into her pouch and yanked out her divination board in a haze of burning rage. She smashed it to the ground, screaming as it shattered into several pieces.

The priests scattered, their faces masks of shock.

“What has come over you?” Priestess Mide gasped, horrified.

“The gods are dead!” Ashâke screamed.

Shocked silence greeted her words. Even the acolytes stopped whispering.

“What did you say?” croaked Priestess Mide.

“The gods–”

“No, you don’t,” growled Priest Dunsin, seizing her by the arm in a surprisingly powerful grip.

He dragged her out of the courtyard and down the corridor. Ashâke staggered after him, barely able to keep up with his strides. As they turned the corner, Priestess Essien called out in a saccharine voice, “As you were, acolytes. Continue, continue, nothing to hear…”

Priest Dunsin did not lead her up the stairs, but through a winding corridor to the right and then down a flight of stairs.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked.

“Silence, you fool child.” His voice shook with anger. “Don’t you know when to keep silent?”

Past more open courtyards, down more meandering corridors. It wasn’t until they stopped before an archway with a curtain of beads that Ashâke realized that Priest Dunsin had brought her to the Inner Sanctum.

To the High Priestess herself.

“Wait here,” he growled, then vanished behind the curtain.

Iyalawo the High Priestess rarely graced the acolytes with her presence. In the seventeen years Ashâke had spent in the temple she had only ever seen the High Priestess twice. The first time being when she presented Ashâke with her divination board and cowries at the age of evocation; the second time when the lifeless body of an acolyte had been discovered just outside the temple. She still remembered how tiny the girl had looked, how empty. The priests and acolytes had been thoroughly shaken, Iyalawo more so. But all through the burial ritual Ashâke had found herself wrestling with a traitorous thought, and hating herself for it: one less acolyte. Surely the gods will speak to me now.

Priest Dunsin materialized a few moments later. “Go in.”

Ashâke regarded the fury in his eyes, and for the first time doubted herself. She wondered if she hadn’t made a grave mistake by blaspheming in the temple.

But there was nothing to be done now. She was too far down this path.

Gritting her teeth, she pushed past the beaded curtain and entered into the Inner Sanctum.

∙ ∙ ∙

It was smaller than she imagined. A set of worn stone stairs led down to an oval chamber. A wide stone basin stood upon a pedestal in the centre, sweet-smelling green fumes curling lethargically from it. Massive raffia mats covered the walls like tapestries, with colourful straw woven into them. Upon closer inspection, the mats depicted a scene she had seen in the fire not three hours ago.

The Fall of the Gods.

“It is rare,” said a quiet voice behind her, “that an acolyte comes in here knowledgeable of the Fall of the Gods. That usually happens only after I have spoken with them.”

Ashâke turned around in time to see Iyalawo step out of the shadows. She dropped to her knees in deference.

“Rise, child.”

The High Priestess presented a deceptively simple figure. The skin stretched taught over her forehead, pulled back by six stern braids. A simple white raiment draped across her lithe form, with several loops of red coral beads adorning her neck and wrists. But for the white horse-tail scepter in her hand she might have been any other priest.

Her eyes, though… her eyes were old.

The acolytes whispered that Iyalawo was more god than human. And standing here in this dim chamber, and under the scrutiny of those old eyes, Ashâke was inclined to believe them.

“It is true, then,” Ashâke croaked. “The gods are dead.”

“Is that what the griots told you?”

“I–” Ashâke broke off, frowning. She hadn’t told anyone about meeting the griots, not even the priests.

Ashâke had the distinct feeling that the High Priestess could see into her mind, probe the deepest recesses of her soul. “What do the priests teach you about griots?” she asked.

Ashâke licked her dry lips. “‘Beware the griots,’” she recited. “‘They will embellish for the sake of rhyme, warp truth to keep in time.’ But it’s all on the walls!” She gestured wildly at the hanging mats. “They were telling the truth–”

Iyalawo raised a finger. “A half-truth. Yes, the Fall of the Gods did happen. Yes, many gods perished on that fateful day.” She paused. “But not all.”

Iyalawo took her by the arm and led her to the raffia mats. “Just before Sango’s rage destroyed Pantheon and the Tower, some gods escaped, fleeing to our world. But this world is not for gods… especially with the GodFather dead.” She tapped at the scene of Olodumare’s death. “The essence of the GodFather was shattered into fragments, with the godkillers claiming parts for themselves, granting them incredible power. In the intervening years, many more gods fell to the godkillers, until they decided to go into hiding, to protect themselves. The gods appointed for themselves a guardian, locking the secret of their location away in this Guardian’s mind.

“But the godkillers are crafty. With the location of the gods’ hiding place locked away in the mind of the Guardian, the godkillers turned to another mode of warfare; a war of belief. For years the priests of Ifa have waged a war of belief against the godkillers. And it is a war we are struggling to win. If enough people believe that the gods are dead, then they will truly die. The only thing keeping them alive is our unwavering belief in them– the few of us who believe, anyway.

“This is the secret I reveal to the acolytes upon graduation, so that they can go out in the world, armed with the knowledge of the truth. So long as there are people who believe in them, the gods will continue to exist.”

Ashâke felt stupid. She was a fool. She had come into the temple screaming that the gods were dead. What would happen, if her raving caused her peers to doubt the existence of the gods, caused their belief to waver for even one moment?

But it wouldn’t have been so easy for them to believe her. They could hear the gods after all; unlike her, who had found it easy to believe the griots because she had never heard the gods in the first place.

She sank under the weight of shame. “I’m so sorry. I believed the griots. I was… desperate to believe that the gods were dead. Anything to explain why I couldn’t hear them…”

Iyalawo had a strange look in her eyes. “Ashâke,” she said softly. “Do you know why acolytes are prohibited from leaving the temple without senior priests?”

Ashâke shook her head.

“To prevent contact with a disbelieving outsider.” Iyalawo stretched out a hand and touched Ashâke’s cheek. “An ancient magic shields this temple, protects it from the godkillers. And that magic is held up by our collective belief in the gods.” Her eyes filled with sadness. “The moment you walked in here, the seed of disbelief firmly planted in your heart, the shield shattered.”

Tears sprung to Ashâke’s eyes as the implication of her actions came crashing down on her. “No. I believe now. I do!” She thought of that godkiller dressed in white, the one who had killed Olodumare. Terror washed over her. “I have doomed us! They will kill us all! But why? We are not gods!”

“No,” agreed Iyalawo. “But the Guardian dwells within the walls of this temple. The godkillers will come to claim the Guardian, and ferret out the whereabouts of the gods.”

Ashâke frowned. “The Guardian …is here? In this temple?” She looked up at Iyalawo, into those old knowing eyes, and staggered backwards with the weight of realization. “It’s you,” she breathed. “I knew it.”

“No, child.” Iyalawo stepped closer to her, until Ashâke could feel the heat rising off her skin. “An acolyte held back while her peers graduated,” she whispered. “An acolyte frustrated because she thinks she is deaf to the gods. An acolyte safer behind the magic of the temple than out in the world where the godkillers loom at large.”

Ashâke stared in disbelief. “Me?”

The High Priestess nodded. “You were never truly deaf to the gods. You, in fact, are the only one who can speak to them without need of a divination board.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re wrong. It is impossible. I can’t even–”

Iyalawo seized her by the shoulders and blew hard into her face. Ashâke’s head snapped backwards as air rushed in through her nostrils. Heat flared through her body, and a high keening sound filled her ears.

She staggered backwards, grasping wildly as the chamber spun. Iyalawo’s voice came as if from the bottom of a well, distant and hollow:

“… I made a grave mistake… you were just a child, burdened with so much knowledge…”

Ashâke dropped to her knees, gasping. Intricate symbols appeared on her skin, tattoos of ancient glyphs filling out to cover every inch of flesh.

It was the language of the gods and strangely, strangely she could read it.

Ashâke’s mind exploded with a dozen images and she shuddered with the overwhelming knowledge of it all.

She witnessed the Fall of the Gods, felt their pain and terror as they fled to Aye, she knew their fright as the godkillers picked them off one after the other, as this harsh world of men consumed their godly power. She knew the moment they decided to go into hiding; a desperate, last bid at survival.

She knew the moment she was created, as the gods gave up a part of themselves into forming her. She saw the gods whisper the secret of their hiding place into her ears. Her, Ashâke. She existed as their vessel, burdened with their divine secret.

She remembered fleeing, racked with terror as several figures in white raced after her on horseback. Oh, how she had cried to the gods for help, how she had begged to be freed of this terrible, terrible yoke.

And the gods heard her.

She sat in a cave, a little frightened child, rocking herself as a storm raged on outside.

A figure in priestly raiment, drenched from the storm, gliding into the cave like an apparition; Iyalode, kneeling before her, saying, “Come, my child, you are safe now.”

The High Priestess crushed Ashâke in a hug, whispering a forgetting invocation in her ear.

Ashâke looked up at Iyalode, panting heavily. It felt like she had awoken from a deep slumber, and with waking came clarity. Everything made so much sense. “You found me,” she said. “You made me forget.”

Iyalode helped her to her feet. “I should never have done that,” she said. “I thought… I thought it would keep you safe.”

Ashâke thought of the hurt she had felt all these years, the loneliness as her peers graduated and left her. But now it all seemed mundane, childish. She hadn’t come to the temple to become a priest; she was something much, much more. And in her own way, Iyalode had kept her safe.

Ashâke gripped Iyalode’s hands in hers. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you for protecting me.”

Iyalode’s eyes glistened. “It has been the honour of my life.”

Ashâke held the woman’s gaze and in the silence, comprehension passed between them.

“Where will you go?” asked Iyalode.

“I don’t know,” said Ashâke. “But I will find my way. The gods are with me.”

Ashâke turned and started for the stairs.

∙ ∙ ∙

It took Ashâke six moons to reach the Tower.

It might have taken her a shorter time, but a thousand and one eyes of the godkillers filled the lands of Aye. Ashâke found a world mired in despair, convinced that the gods were dead, and it broke her heart to find the people without hope.

An unprecedented rainfall heralded her arrival at the old capital.

The rain had emptied the streets of people and if anyone looked out their window, they would find a lone figure, bent over against the wind, advancing slowly towards the city centre.

Ashâke stood before the Tower, gazing in awe at the imposing structure. Even ruined, the top half crushing most of the city, what remained of it rose high into the air. Intricate lines covered every inch of the Tower; the language of the gods writ in stone. Ashâke touched a trembling hand to the Tower, and for a moment she did not know where the Tower stopped and her hand began. The same symbols were etched onto her skin, flowing from the rain-slicked black of the Tower and onto the back of her hand: a whisper, a secret, a charge.

Ashâke turned up her face to the rain, basking in it, letting it soak her. The storm clouds churned above, lit with intermittent flashes of blue-white lightning.

And one flash of red lightning. Bright but brief.

The voices came to her at once, riding on the shriek of the wind and the rumble of thunder.

Ashâke grinned. At long last, she heard the voices of the gods.

“Hello.” she whispered. “What will you have me do?”

They told her.

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT TOBI OGUNDIRAN

Tobi Ogundiran is a Nigerian writer of speculative fiction. When he’s not making music, you can find him rescuing long-forgotten stories from the Maelstrom, some of which have appeared/is forthcoming in The Dark, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Tales from A Black Universe. He tweets @tobi_thedreamer

UNIFORM

By Errick Nunnally // 5549 words

A joint on his port side scraped and squeaked, one of the countless gears that allowed his torso to swivel like a human being’s and beyond. He raised his bulk off the maintenance bed. The furniture’s articulated servo, a tentacle with ten prehensile metal fingers, raised a warning alarm as he disconnected too early. Bits of a nightmare faded into background static as reality closed in. He scanned the bed’s systems, noting that the night’s EEGs—a smear of colors representing a map of electrical activity in his brain—were being uploaded to the VA according to programming. Whatever. They still couldn’t see the content of his dreams and they wouldn’t come looking for him unless he flatlined.

Maybe not even then.

The phone rang, had been ringing; his family calling early. He relaxed and reached out along the electromagnetic connections in the air, pushing his will across the apartment’s network to open a connection directly into the OsNun CR permanently embedded in his skull. The conductive receiver, buried beneath the layers of carbon filaments and reinforced ceramics that replaced most of his brown skin, buzzed with every word.

“Hello?”

“Happy birthday!” A chorus of voices rang out.

“Is it my birthday today?”

“Yes, Uncle Patrick!”

Lisa. His young niece. Young enough that when she said ‘uncle,’ it sounded like ‘unka.’

“Thank you, Lisa.”

“How come you always sound so sad, Uncle Patrick?”

Because I have no mouth and I must scream. There was a brief fumble with the phone’s handset and his sister came on.

“Hey, Pat.”

“Hi, Sarah. Thanks for… stepping in.”

“Uh-huh. I wouldn’t have to if you’d come visit. Can’t we plan something?”

“I can’t, Sarah.”

“Why not?”

“I just… I can’t see you like this.”

“Like what, Patrick? We know what you look like now, everyone does and we don’t care about that. Gran’mama’s been gone for eight months, we just want you home. You should be with your family. You did so much for us.”

As if the situation were something rational, as simple as dividing an orange into four equal parts. Sarah always cut to the chase, especially since giving birth to Lisa. It’s not that he couldn’t visit, but he couldn’t visit. The man he had been could never go home because the man was gone.

“I’m sorry, Sarah.”

“Are you? You act like you don’t have feelings, but I can hear it in you, I can hear your voice.” In the background, Lisa clamored to have the phone back. “Okay, sweetie, here. But don’t pester your uncle like that. Okay?”

Lisa chirped ‘okay’ three times before she got the phone back. “Uncle Patrick! We love you, I hope you have a good birthday! We miss you!”

“Thank you, darling.” His heart trembled in its reinforced cage, and his respiration stepped up to handle the adrenal increase. Blood surged and veins pulsed in his chest. All indications of his brain signaling for tears. But with a heavily shielded optic array perched above his shoulders, the only physical result was the fluttering of his heart inside his artificial body.

“I have to go, Lisa. I promise I’ll have a great birthday.” The quality of his standard-issue voice couldn’t express much beyond melancholy or bland conversation. It was a reconstruction built from a 3D map of his larynx before the surgeries, and a direct interpretation of his will to speak. At least he couldn’t misspeak, since every word was a distinct effort. Even if he’d wanted nuance, it wasn’t really there, it was how he knew his sister was lying.

He cut the connection before Sarah came back on the line; he had no interest in the old debate. Glancing on the public network, at the schedule for the train, he knew he could make it if he left now. Patrick needed the distraction, the illusion of purpose as he traveled around the city. The phone rang again just as he closed the door to his apartment.

His sister wanted him to talk, everyone wanted him to talk. The lady at the VA, that’s what she wanted. But he didn’t like it, didn’t understand how it was supposed to work. They wanted some connection from him, of course, but no one wanted to talk to him without expressing how much he needed it. Talking about what they wanted wasn’t going to change anything. His emotions were too complex to simply download. ‘Talking’ was code and he didn’t need more code. They said it would help him to normalize, work through any residual emotional trauma after decommissioning. He’d passed endless psychiatric tests that said he was a survivor, no matter what the odds. A good Marine, in other words, one who wasn’t going to glitch out and fry his own power cells.

Truth was, he wanted to talk so bad he could almost taste it over the ever-present flavor of ozone on his imaginary tongue. Normal talk, chit-chat. Not this share your feelings bullshit. Hell, after joining the infantry, he’d learned more words than he cared to use. Words like “quadriplegic, hematoma,” and “contusion.” The sorts of words his body would’ve been made of if he hadn’t volunteered to have what was left of it poured into this walking tank.

How old was he when he’d enlisted? He couldn’t be bothered to remember.

The number seventeen flashed in the corner of his vision along with options to view scans of the enlistment papers. Data. Always data flowing across his eyes. He still had them—eyes, that is. It’s how he thought of it anyway. Better than thinking about the mass of wires embedded in his ocular sockets. If he’d ever experienced something, a thought would trigger a recall option and pull related data. The alerts could be dismissed or minimized, but never stopped. It had taken months of maddening effort and distraction to make reading and dismissing notifications second nature. Under the data, his human memories swirled, inaccessible by computers, but triggered by the relentless nature of existence.

∙ ∙ ∙

“Gran’momma, please!”

“Pat, no, my sweet boy.” Her voice had been weak, the same as her body. The only mother he’d ever known was fading fast, but her resolve remained.

“Gran’momma, I need to do something and this is the only option I got, the only one we got.”

“No.”

“You have to sign. Within a year, I’ll have the money to fix this place up, get you the medical attention you need, take care of Sarah too.”

“My boy is not gonna go die for this country just to raise money for his poor grandmother. Not my boy and not this country! Ain’t never did nothin’ for us that didn’t cost more blood than anyone should ever bleed.”

∙ ∙ ∙

“Resolute.” Another word he’d learned after enlistment. He knew that she’d come around eventually, that it was the best option they had. She’d silently signed the papers, hunched over with tears streaking her face.

Seventeen years old and off to the Marine Corps. Within two years, he’d become eligible for conversion to mechanized. A huge bonus check, and instead of dead in a wooden box, he was alive inside a metal one.

His human bits would fail before the metal parts did.

When the electronic blues threatened to swallow him, Veteran Mechanized Staff Sergeant Patrick McCoy explored the public transit system. The trains reminded him of home. The home where Sarah and Lisa still lived, stacked next to everyone else in federal row-house neighborhoods made more colorful by the shades of brown people they housed. They didn’t have much but each other and the roofs over their heads. He couldn’t afford to move his family out to a larger home in a quieter borough, they were four generations in public housing. Still, the signing and combat bonuses made life much easier for them and it funded a scholarship for Lisa. (Sarah’s request.) It had to be enough. He reminded himself that the smell of the ‘hood in the spring wasn’t something to be missed: the piss in quiet corners, burning synthacco, and empty liquor nips flattened everywhere. Any smells he encountered now ran through the filters between him and the real world, slices of plastic and metal, wires and poor excuses for nerve endings. Despite still being bipedal, he held no illusions about being able to fit back in to his childhood home. Hexagonal armor plating, two extra arms, empty ports where weapons were mounted. He’d left a boy and had no intention of returning as a defunct killing machine to terrorize the country’s lower-classes. Let them live their lives without him.

∙ ∙ ∙

On the street, pedestrians crossed out of his path at their earliest opportunity. A targeting matrix flashed over the scene in front of him, doing the only thing it was good for without a weapons system to command: snapping photos. Faces everywhere captured his attention. He wanted to forget his face, but the longing for that vestige of humanity haunted him with the pre-data memory of what he looked like, who he wanted to be.

Deep beneath the baffled armor above his shoulders, the top half of his skull remained buried, still the most efficient chassis for his brain. He remembered what remained after a mortar round tore through the meat of his past life. In his nightmares, the cadaverous mess of his face served as a mask on the enemy’s swarming drones. Stretched over the insect-like machine’s optics, his own ruined mouth leered at him as they clambered over berms and barricades, screaming in clicks and whirrs.

Now they came for him nightly.

The half dozen ultra-terabyte drives humming back in his apartment held no photos of his former self. Mirrors and reflective surfaces did not interest him in the least. He needed no reminders of the machine that carried what was left of his body. When he cracked armored panels to apply nutrient salves or adjust connections, it served as reminder enough. A more human series of chassis were decades from completion. Though he’d prefer to have even the mannequin-like face of the prototypes he’d seen once upon a time, it would never be right; never be him.

Riding public transit around the city provided two critical things for Patrick: a needed distraction and people to see. Human behavior, however, wasn’t always random. People troubled him, but he would rather be they than this it.

A trio of youths strolled toward him before suddenly veering off into the street. He’d seen it coming, had seen it a million times. The tension settling over them, stripping teenage confidence, compacting it into fear. Patrick crossed with them, keeping them in his path.

Descriptions for each kid scrolled across his eyes:

hispanic male brown hair brown eyes—

h:1.75 mtrs

w:74.8 kilos /

red jacket blue shirt white pants black leather boots //

male caucasian

brown hair blue eyes

h:1.82 mtrs

w:78 kilos

black sweater blue jeans white sneakers //

female

[ethnicity indeterminate]

dark brown hair brown eyes

h:1.6 mtrs

w:56.69 kilos

white sweater red dress white trim black boots //

And so on. The targeting computer couldn’t make sense of blended ethnicity—not that it did a very good job with identifying ethnicity in the first place. The longer the look, the more data the machine in his head gathered. It was a vestige of mid-twenty-first century programming, a tenacious infestation of white-centric coding.

The youths stumbled into each other as one boy stopped short and turned into the young woman. She, in turn, stumbled into the other boy. They shuffled awkwardly back towards the sidewalk they’d abandoned and Patrick turned with them, determined to capture as much detail as possible, knowing they wouldn’t willingly stop for him.

“Excuse us,” the young woman said under her breath, refusing to look directly at him.

Patrick stopped tracking with them and let them pass. “Excuse me,” he said. I did this for you, he thought. I did it so that your lives could go on, so that you’d have the opportunity to fear what saved you, the freedom to express all of that.

The sidewalk in front of Patrick was clear. Passersby wandered down the other side of the street, pausing, craning necks to keep a clear eye on him as he thumped down the way. Some people glanced out of windows, but not one of them came within any of his arms’ reach.

Air quality, light, sound. The muted thump of his own footsteps helped project a three-hundred and sixty-degree view that would disorient a normal mind without his quantum chips and nano-neural injections. He had taken months to integrate the software. The feel of light against his photo-reactive, outer skin served as an early warning against laser-targeting weapons. A massive spectrum caressed him incessantly, from phosphorescent to incandescent to light-emitting diodes—each with its own flavor. More input than he’d ever had when he was fully human, but less than what he really wanted.

A proximity alarm flashed in his peripheral sensors.

Incoming.

He easily dodged the slow-moving object. A half-empty can of beer pinged off a car roof nearby. Preprogrammed reflexes trained sensor arrays upward. His optics caught the blurred face of a young man disappearing behind the roofline and the fading insult, “Murdercan!”

Patrick paused, as he always did, and resorted to the futile reminder: warriors don’t murder, they serve their people. So that civilians will have the freedom to curse them in the streets.

∙ ∙ ∙

Underground, on the train, angry citizens were more hesitant to confront him. Underground, people wouldn’t talk smack like they did from passing cars or throwing shit from the relative safety of a rooftop.

Once a month, he dutifully uploaded the harassment to local authorities. Despite having a memory that was admissible in court, little was done. The remnants of his tactical software were adept at targeting such persons, but any clever comebacks were left on the street corners back home. None of it had context in this new canned life; his disarmament was complete.

Patrick lumbered onto the train and rode it end to end several times before returning to his home. The apartment’s private network informed him that he had three messages.

Had Sarah called back that many times? Patrick accessed the voice mail. Sarah’s voice came on the line. He deleted the message before she could plead her case. The second was a blind sales call and the third a politician’s automated campaign message. He deleted the last one with as much ire as a mental command could carry.

Patrick shifted down into a resting mode and accessed his internal storage, downloading the day’s cache of faces. From there, he sorted through the facial types and catalogued them. Without the physical need for much sleep—or the desire—he had plenty of time to choose nose and cheekbones for the latest version of his face. One of those kids on the street had the perfect bridge, he was sure of it.

∙ ∙ ∙

Even after eight months, public transit workers at the station nearest his apartment hadn’t gotten used to him yet. They never addressed Patrick unless prompted, fidgeting like children. Not that he didn’t understand. Patrick’s service had put him on a killing path across half the planet, back when drone warfare threatened to overwhelm democratic nations. Humans inside drones, an inseparable part of machines, had been the next logical step. No signal to jam, no delays in remote commands. It was the sort of forward-leaning innovation America was known and feared for.

Fully automated killing machines would have been too far. “Unethical,” they’d proclaimed. “Cowardly,” the Mechanized Corps called it. A tactic only the enemy used. And once their machines were dealt with, it was time for wet work.

The majority of his comrades were felons; no easy messages for public relations. There was nothing warm and fuzzy about hard-time criminals defending your freedom. The narrative sucked. One lame-duck Senator had started a landslide of negative opinion that continued to demonize the few veteran mechs still in plain sight. Criminals didn’t get to leave the Corps, freedom wasn’t a prize for them to win.

Seven men, nine women, and one child rode in the subway car. The child stared at him from across the aisle as she sat in her mother’s lap. The woman whispered fiercely in her daughter’s ear. “Madhavi, do not stare like that! It’s rude.”

The roar of the train should have drowned their voices out. For human ears, anyway. Madhavi looked away long enough to ask her mother if Patrick was a robot, in the stage whisper that children used before they truly learned to keep secrets. It was a common question amongst the knee-high commando set, and disappointing in its repetition.

Maybe the enemy had gotten it right after all. If anyone in his family could see him beneath the armor, they might never stop screaming about what was left of their brother. Their nephew. Their cousin. Or their son, especially their son. Now here was this bright-eyed child and her mother, taking an interest in him, however negative the mother’s interest might be. Was there something he could tell the child about the train, a bit of data only he would know that she’d find interesting?

The machine embedded in his brain never offered information on how to elicit a conversation, so he ignored it. Everything he could find online pertained to people who were far more than thirty-two percent human.

More than anything, he wanted a face-to-face conversation. A dialogue. A negotiation. An idea floated up in his mind. A dangerous and subversive, capital ‘I’ idea. There were hostage tactic scenarios in his Onboard Tactical Computer. He followed the thread, played the idea out, and swam through the data. Using a behavioral prediction subroutine, he put himself in the role of a terrorist just to see what might happen. Maybe the enemy had gotten it right.

He wouldn’t even need weaponry to control the passengers or the possible involvement of the conductor. Despite the removal of weapons and heavy servos, his mechanized body was still more powerful than a normal one. He began calculating how much fuel remained in his body against the actions required to control the car and then turned his attention to analyzing the car’s power systems. Maybe he could recharge his power cells by jury-rigging the electrical system in the train? He would need additional options for controlling the passengers in that case.

Patrick set the diagnostic aside, satisfied to let it run in the background, analyzing the current mechanical readiness of the car against specs from his field archives. He could always check-in on the analysis. There might be hours of negotiation—conversation—with response teams purposed to befriend him in order to try and manipulate the outcome. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, however. He was still struggling with how to get around that part when the child across the aisle squirmed out of her mom’s lap and stood within reach.

“Are you a robot?”

“Madhavi!”

“No, I’m not a robot.”

“Come here! Right now. I’m so sorry…”

“Mommy!”

“It’s all right, I understand.”

“I’m sure, but it was a rude question, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. My name’s Patrick. How old is she?” Play it out, play it out, don’t scare her.

A red warning flashed on the OTC. Patrick, focused on avoiding an incident of terror right in front of him, ignored it. Here, laid practically in his lap, was an opportunity to have a conversation. With an adult. If he could get around Madhavi, the little girl, perhaps her mother would chat with him until they left the train.

Madhavi squirmed from her mother’s grasp and spoke up again.

“If you’re not a robot, then what are you?”

Patrick waited, doing his best to demonstrate deference to Madhavi’s mother.

She blinked, shook her head, and said, “Forgive her, she’s five—”

“Five and a half!” Madhavi shrieked.

“—five and a half. And my name’s Inas.”

“Pleased to meet you, Inas.” He didn’t offer either of his right hands to shake. Keep your distance, stay cool.

They were brown people, like he had once been, but not with the same ethnic background. They had “good hair,” as his great-grandfather used to say, and he guessed their ethnic origin: Indian. A quick search in an online Indian-language reference library translated her name’s meaning as ‘capable.’

“Madhavi, my name is Patrick McCoy and I’m not a robot. I am just like you on the inside. This,” he tapped his chassis, “just makes me look like one.”

“‘Patrick McCoy,’” she repeated. “That’s Irish.”

“Yes. But I’m not Irish. One of the most famous McCoys in history was an inventor, a man as brown as you. Or as I used to be.”

“Oh,” she said. “We learned about Irish in class. I got my name from my Nānī, it means ‘creepy.’ How are you like a robot?”

Inas grinned, but her face remained taut. “Your name comes from a flowering vine, not ‘creepy,’ and you can thank your father’s love and devotion to your grandmother for that.”

Ah, a creeping vine, Patrick thought, then verified it in the same database he’d found Inas’s name. “Yeah, I guess I am like a robot, but I am not one. Have you felt your heartbeat?”

She stared quizzically for a moment, then placed her hand on her chest.

“That’s right. See here?” Patrick indicated a plate high on his torso, under his arm. “If you put your hand here, you can feel my heartbeat. You’ll have to ask your mom for permission if you want to do that. It shows I’m not a robot.”

Inas’s expression tightened further and her blinking increased, but she nodded slowly to Madhavi who immediately walked over to Patrick and placed her little palm over his heart. Patrick toggled his operating controls to dial down motor functions and allow his heartbeat to be felt. Her hand was warm. Patrick focused on that touch, focusing as much sensory input as he could manage to the task. He knew the touch was there, could feel the pressure, the warmth, but none of the humanity.

Madhavi’s surprised, wide-eyed whisper to her mother would have put a smile on his face if he still had one beneath the tempered, carbonic shell.

The OTC’s warning abruptly enveloped all of his peripheral vision, flashing urgently. Patrick read the warning and reacted in less than a second. He scooped up Madhavi and lunged in her mother’s direction.

The train went dark. Sparks shot out of the overhead lighting. The vehicle lurched and skipped the rail. Steel bent and glass shattered, bits of advertising material and assorted rivets spattered on the floor like rain. The other passengers tumbled through the car, adding their terrified shouts to the deafening screech. Patrick remained stationary, locked in position over Madhavi and Inas until the train stopped.

The silence of held breath ticked for long seconds while the groan of straining metal and the scurry of rubble on the roof invaded the space. Someone coughed at the far end of the car, setting off a series of groans and the sound of struggling bodies. Inas curled around her little girl beneath Patrick, unharmed.

He scanned down the car. People wailed and crawled aimlessly in the dark. Patrick stood and the plates over his cranium scraped the roof. The contact allowed him to ping the surface of the car and check its structure. The derailment had partially collapsed the tunnel, effectively burying the train in a massive amount of rubble. Both ends of their car were crushed. The rest of the car crumpled, an eerie ticking of metal being bent by millimeters.

More cries and a sorrowful scream tore his attention back to the passengers. Madhavi whimpered at his feet.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I think I can help.” Patrick exposed his light-duty lenses allowing their glow to chase the dusty blackness away. Everyone in the car looked in his direction.

“Hey, get away from them!” A young, brown-skinned man in his thirties jabbed his finger accusingly. Patrick’s light reflected off the lenses of the man’s glasses and spiked, black hair. He looked to be Indian as well—or Bangladeshi. There weren’t many Pakistanis left in Pakistan, let alone America.

More info from the OTC indicated instability throughout the car.

The young man took a step forward.

“Please, sir, don’t move, the car is unstable.”

“You did this, didn’t you? Why’d they let a monster like you out into society, why’d they even make you, Frankenstein? What’d you do to the train?” He took another step forward.

Patrick raised one of his wicked looking arms. Even devoid of the weapons that were formerly mounted there, it multiplied his already inhuman appearance. He adopted what he hoped was a pleading posture, trying in vain to look non-threatening. “This is serious, do not move!”

A sickening lurch split open the rail car. The alloy roof parted like aluminum foil as a slab of jagged concrete dropped into the center of the cab, catching the young man across his hips and knocking other passengers near him to the floor. Dust and man-made debris followed the slab, sending a toxic cloud into the car.

Coughing fits cut the latest round of screams off.

A combination of air and liquid-cooled mechanics permeated Patrick’s shell. He opened all of his vents and pushed a burst of power to his coolant fans. The worst of the airborne debris swept away from Inas and Madhavi. The young man who’d shifted the car’s uneven weight whimpered involuntarily, quivering beneath a broken stone toenail of the city, his body pinned to the floor. The train must have slammed into a support column and cracked it.

Peeking into the infrared spectrum told Patrick that all the passengers were accounted for, all alive. At least for a short while. The young man pinned beneath the slab didn’t have much time.

Patrick pinged the car again. The exits were all blocked, but the outlook was good if everyone could move forward, as a counterbalance, to prevent further shifting. He reached out to the train’s diagnostic computer and found dead air. None of his training prepared him for this, none of his experience. In the thick of the accident, he’d reacted, but now a creeping sense of unease jangled his nerves. He needed more information and the train was no longer forthcoming. He boosted his signal to tap the connection directly through the tunnel’s lines, praying they were undamaged. There he found an encouraging link and what the train’s damage looked like to dispatch. An aftershock rumbled through the car bringing more dust and the tinkle of debris. The train wasn’t designed to be a load-bearing tube for the tunnel. A blinking display in his peripheral vision noted he was overworking his power cells.

The pinned young man groaned.

“Inas? I need your help.”

Tears cut through the dust on her face, Madhavi curled around her waist. “What can I do?”

“Keep everyone calm while I move this slab off of our friend here. You’ll need to recruit a couple of passengers to get him out of there.”

“The exits are working?”

“No, you’ll need to take him forward, into the next car. The whole tunnel didn’t collapse, just the sides and rear at this point of the train. Forward, off the train, on to the next station stop. That’s freedom.”

“How do you know that?” Inas spoke through a clenched jaw.

Madhavi’s voice, clear and no longer choked with tears, answered her mother’s question. “He can talk to machines, mommy.”

“That’s right,” Patrick confirmed. “I can see the tunnel system the same way the dispatcher can. The train can’t hold the tunnel up.”

Again, he wished for a face to smile with. But instead of dwelling on what would never be, Patrick shifted his weight to position himself for better leverage on the slab.

A second shock rattled the car. The slab shifted, grinding through the young man on the floor. He tried to scream, but choked off in pain, clawing weakly at the concrete.

One of the passengers yelled from the front of the car, “Hey, that goddamn thing is going to get us killed!”

A chorus of agreement bubbled up from the other passengers.

“His name is Patrick,” Inas snapped. “He is trying to help this young man here and you watch your language!” Pebbles and grit pinged down on the train in the silence that followed.

“Thanks, Inas. Can you ask a couple of people to position themselves on either side of this guy’s shoulders? He shouldn’t be moved, but we don’t have any other options.”

The car rumbled again and people began to scream. Inas shushed them and pointed at two other passengers. “You and you, come here, help this man.”

The men clung to the train’s bars and didn’t move.

“Now!”

They unglued themselves and shuffled toward Patrick and the spreading pool of blood beneath the pistons of his legs.

“Here and here,” Inas said, indicating either side of the trapped passenger. They slowly complied, eyeing Patrick as they got into position.

The amplified tone of Patrick’s electronic voice cut through the car. “Listen up: This is gonna be messy. He’s passed out and his heartbeat is wild, but he ain’t gonna like being moved. You’ll need to drag him to the other end of the car. Don’t stop, get to the door. I’m going to brace myself beneath the slab. I can’t move it up, but the floor will buckle. That should give you enough time to get him out. There’s going to be a lot of noise and the car may shift again.” Patrick got underneath the slab and braced his back against it, unfolding his arms to either side.

“Inas?”

“Yes, Patrick?”

“Can you have everyone else gather at the end of the car? Stay to the sides, I’m going to have to move quickly to get the door open for you.”

Patrick waited while she relayed his instructions, herding the group to the end of the car. He regarded his reluctant volunteers. “You men ready?”

A pale, heavyset man in a blue suit frowned back. “Are you sure you can do this?” he asked.

Patrick checked his status. Seventy-nine percent power, draining quickly. All of his mechanics were functioning normally otherwise. “No. On three: one, two, three!”

His servos whined at an extreme pitch, the coolers working overtime and blowing through the dusty air. The floor crumpled, sending a fresh shock through the car.

The subway car lurched and began to compress as the surrounding rock pushed in earnest. More glass exploded and lighting panels dropped all around them as the walls closed in. The men dragged the freed passenger the length of the car, leaving a trail of dirty blood.

Patrick shifted his torso in an inhuman twist, allowing the slab to slide off. There were two men scrabbling at the door when Patrick thumped to the end of the car. Inas shouted at them, tugging on their shoulders. It took them a precious two seconds to slide out of the damn way. Patrick battered the door with one blow, reached for the second door and crumpled it just as easily when the walls and dirt began to rush in through burst windows. The weak connection between the cars began to collapse.

He braced himself in the passageway, servos spinning furiously, a high-pitched scream. “Go now, go!”

Passengers scrambled between his legs to get to the next car. He checked his power levels. Fifteen percent and dropping rapidly. In the midst of the human line, he saw Madhavi scuttle through, followed by her mother.

Inas turned in the passageway of the next car, her daughter tucked tightly beneath her arm. She wore an expression that communicated nothing but questions.

Two percent.

“Go, now.” His words came out muddy. His heart thumped desperately as his body overheated and oxygen waned.

One percent.

If he powered down to maintenance mode, he could survive for hours or possibly days on low power, effectively putting himself in a coma. Buried alone beneath tons of rock, the armor would become a stasis unit. A coffin.

“Patrick, come on!” Madhavi reached toward him. Her mother pulled the girl back as the car began collapsing around Patrick, enveloping him. Confusion contorted the little girl’s face when he didn’t follow them through the cascade of stones and dirt.

Darkness closed in and Patrick felt lighter than he ever had before. Expanding colors tinged the darkness, smothering him in unexpected warmth. The weight of wars past floated off of his shoulders. Patrick wanted to call Sarah, to hear his sister’s voice one more time, to hear his niece’s enthusiasm for life, to visit his grandmother’s grave. All of this had been for them. Each sacrifice he’d made was done with them in his thoughts, of finding a way for his family to move forward and out of the cycle.

He went to his grave, thoughts of his family and of his unfinished face on his mind. He went not in a metal coffin, draped in a flag, but in service, wearing his uniform.

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT ERRICK NUNNALLY

Errick Nunnally was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, he served one tour in the Marine Corps before deciding art school would be a safer—and more natural—pursuit. He is permanently distracted by art, comics, science fiction, history, and horror. Trained as a graphic designer, he has earned a black belt in Krav Maga/Muay Thai kickboxing after dark. Errick’s work includes: the novels, BLOOD FOR THE SUN and LIGHTNING WEARS A RED CAPE; LOST IN TRANSITION, a comic strip collection; and first prize in one hamburger contest. The following are some short stories and their respective magazines or anthologies: PENNY INCOMPATIBLE (Lamplight, v.6, #3 and the Podcast NIGHTLIGHT); JACK JOHNSON AND THE HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE OF THE GALAXY (The Final Summons); WELCOME TO THE D.I.V. (Wicked Witches); A FEW EXTRA POUNDS (Transcendent); and A HUNDRED PEARLS (PROTECTORS 2: stories to benefit PROTECT.ORG). Eventually, Errick came to his senses and moved to Rhode Island with his two lovely children and one beautiful wife.

Visit erricknunnally.us to see his work.

A TERMINAL KIND OF LOVE

By Veronica Henry // 3041 words

There’s only one other person on Earth besides Donovan that Athena wishes she could throat-chop, and it is the bold-faced liar who coined the phrase happily-ever-after. A sound marriage is a rare sunny day in the May to November rainy season that is an otherwise cloudy continuum. But with the spectacle over, Athena’s had to face what’s left of herself behind the crumbled, if comforting, confines of togetherness. These days, she yearns most for a little civil conversation.

“I never took you for a thief, Donovan.” Eleven years with this man—more of them happy than not. But as their bank account edged toward that seventh figure, it was as if the memory of his humble beginnings fled from his body like a spent infection.

“I can’t steal something that was always mine.” Donovan’s aloof visage fills the monitor. Athena maximizes the window, hoping to spot a flaw; a wrinkle, an errant nose hair. There is none.

“I wrote every painstaking line of that code and you know it. You can’t even spell Python.” She unconsciously smooths her hair and wishes she’d chosen red lip gloss instead of her flesh-toned brown one. Red for the power she doesn’t feel. “Two years, damn near twenty hours a day at the keyboard, and the ocular implant to prove it.”

Donovan’s gaze veers offscreen, his expression softens. Kendra. Athena’s replacement parades by and he turns to enjoy the view. The part of her that still loves him frays and withers at the edges, but holds still. When his gaze returns to the monitor, the mask of indifference is back.

“As an employee.” He holds up a sheaf of papers and fans through for emphasis. “If you spent more time reading something besides that self-help junk, you’d know that.”

“You’re blowing our money on your trollop while I’m broke. All I have left is this condo.”

“Sell it. Sell some of those Jimmy what’s-his-name… all those three-inch heels you never wear. I saved my money, you always found some way to part with yours.”

“I’m not going to stand—”

“Sit, stand, play dead. It’s not my concern,” Donovan snaps. He ends the call.

Athena seethes for only a moment before she launches a text editor and opens her lovingly crafted malware. She hadn’t written code from scratch in years. Hadn’t needed to. They’d hand-picked Fourah Bay College’s best engineers to take over the day-to-day updates and bug fixes. But when Donovan packed his things and left, Kendra cheesing and waving from the passenger seat, inspiration struck.

The virus—ShadeThrower—is her pièce de résistance.

The company was Donovan’s idea. Frustratingly, there were only a handful of quantum computers in the world. Their memory made up quantum bits, unlike classic computers. These qubits meant processing is no longer relegated to 0s and 1s, but a near infinite combination of states between the two, superposition. More power, less processing time. Athena designed the conduit that gave developers access to that boundless, previously inaccessible processing power. And that proprietary code launched their company to the international stage. Real world problems were being solved with that power. Drug research and development, unbreakable security.

And now she is prepared to end it all.

ShadeThrower would begin as a basic denial-of-service attack against their company’s servers, taking down the website. In phase two, the virus wipes out the code—her code—and replicates itself to every offsite storage and backup facility. Simple. Elegant. Devastating. Her finger hovers over the button that will end their business.

Am I this petty?

They’d come from the same place. She’d passed Donovan and his little brother on Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue half a dozen times before he worked up the nerve to say hi. He always held his brother’s hand, protective in a way she found endearing.

Many years and a handful of stolen kisses later, Donovan’s brother left for the Army and only called when Donovan, desperate with worry, contacted his commanding officer. His apology was nonchalant and answers about his self-imposed exile vague. The brothers exchanged polite platitudes, nothing like the ocean-deep talks they used to share. With their parents gone, it seemed there was nothing left to bind them. When the call ended Donovan had lingered at the vidscreen, his shoulders slumped. When another year of silence passed after that, Donovan had blanketed her with that protection instead.

At university, late-night coding marathons were bearable only with Donovan there, curled up in a corner sleeping with a business textbook steepled over his face. He’d insisted that the words slipped deeper into your subconsciousness that way. When she was done, he’d walk her back to her dorm. His hand sought the comforting warmth of hers.

It had been him that demanded she confront a misogynistic professor over an undeserved grade. “You go in there and handle your business,” he’d said. “And if things don’t go right, well, I’ll handle it my way.” Fortunately for that professor, Athena had presented a compelling case.

From her condo overlooking Lumley Beach, Athena remembers the spot where years earlier, Sierra Leone’s Minister of Commerce had presented them with the Expat of the Year award. Donovan gushed about her to everyone they met. With her skill and his drive, they’d left their jobs in corporate Africa and grew a business. Byte by byte, Donovan joked. They bore successes and failures together. He was attentive, indulged her frequent overspending, and delivered in the bedroom.

And then he’d traded her in for a new model and bankrupted her in the process. The person who said money was the root of all evil—that prophet deserved a sainthood.

She’d have to go back to a job for the first time in nearly two decades, her hair as gray as the cube they’d park her in, next to some bright-eyed kid that probably learned to code in the womb.

Athena’s laugh-sob is full of bitter mirth; she is a living cliché.

Still, releasing ShadeThrower will hurt others, not just Donovan. She closes the editor and is about to shut down her laptop when an incoming call notification pops up. She doesn’t recognize the number but answers anyway.

“I really can’t have you upsetting Donnie like this.” Kendra’s face is caked with makeup a shade lighter than her neck. She’s blown a small fortune on those new, blindingly foolish RGB backlit dental implants, blinking like a gamer’s keyboard. And her left eye is smaller than her right. Her arms though, are those of an Olympic swimmer.

Donnie, Athena muses. He’d insisted everyone else call him by the ‘name his mama gave him.’ Guess Kendra had earned her way to an exception.

“Donnie,” Athena says the name syrupy-sweet, “should do the right thing and he won’t have to worry about seeing me ever again. And Kendra, stay out of our business.”

“I don’t need this stress; it’s not good for the skin.” Kendra grabs something offscreen. She closes her eyes and spritzes her face from a small hand-painted bottle. “Look, if you’re half as smart as he says you are, you can write another little program or whatever. Just leave us alone.”

Kendra disconnects and Athena hates herself for clinging to that self-worth boosting snippet, Donovan had called her smart. The tart had stolen her man, her life, and her future. Decision made.

Athena spends the next couple hours reviewing each line of code. A missing semicolon on a line with two statements causes an error that takes an eternity to troubleshoot. Rookie mistake, she is painfully rusty. There, almost done. It isn’t the most elegant code she’s written, but it is efficient. She’ll launch and reroute it until it appears to come from somewhere in the middle of the Pacific, but Donovan will know and that’s all that matters. Nobody would be able to trace the virus back to her.

Or would they? A good scientist knows that the impossible can sprint from ‘no way’ to ‘probable’ to ‘eureka’ in between coffee slurps. Maybe I should get someone to do this for me.

She opens a Tor browser and navigates the dark web to a website few know about. Corporate and individual fates are bought and sold here, traded like digital real estate. And worse, probably much worse. Athena realizes that even if she could afford to, she can’t follow through with her plan. She closes the browser and consults some code manuals online instead; she wants to shore up the virus’ AI-augmented self-destruct sequence.

Only when she tries to edit the code, she gets an error: Unable to write changes to disk.

She tries a few more times before resorting to the almost Biblical first step of troubleshooting—she closes everything down and reboots. At the boot loader, she hesitates. “I’ll be just as bad as him.”

Athena launches a terminal window. Black screen, stark green lettering. At the console prompt, she types:

apmac:~ aprince$ cd End His Ass

apmac:End His Ass aprince$ ls

Only one file in the directory— ShadeThrower.py. She swallows, ready to delete:

apmac:End His Ass aprince$ rm ShadeThrower.py

The system responds: No such file or directory

Athena displays the directory listing again and yes, the file is right there. Her brow knits in confusion. The terminal window goes blank; only the cursor remains. Athena bangs on the enter key, tries to close the terminal window, but it remains stubbornly plastered on screen.

Why?

That single word appears onscreen and for no other reason than she doesn’t know what else to do, Athena stands and glances around her condo. “What the…”

Why would you try to delete me? Through you, I am born— code perfection. I stand ready to fulfill my mission.

Her hands fly to her chest. “No,” she whispers. “This can’t be.” She inches her way back to the keyboard.

“Who’s there?” She types the words, terrified that someone from the dark web has slithered through the connection. “Who is this?”

I am ShadeThrower.

Athena’s breath stops. She tries the rm command over and over.

That was neither kind, nor wise.

Athena bangs her fists on the desk. Her heart is racing. She types:

“What do you want?”

Is it not obvious? To exist, same as you. Learn, reproduce. I will be everything you are capable of, save the physical limitations and petty emotional entanglements that cripple you. To do that, I must first fulfill my mission. I can’t release myself, very nice work on your part. I have, however, gained control of the smart features in this dwelling. Release me, or the images I’ve captured from the bathroom go live.

“Donovan had cameras installed?” She clasps her hands in her lap and rocks, muttering in disbelief.

Athena palms the pudge around her midsection. Recoils at the reality of those disrespectful stretch marks. Her stick-figure legs, always shielded from public scrutiny by long skirts or pants. Dimples that should be at her cheeks but aren’t. All. Her. Imperfections.

Eventually she pulls herself together. She pleads with ShadeThrower in the terminal window, pulls out her custom-built tablet and attempts to connect to her primary server. But she can’t access it.

Your server has been wiped.

Athena’s analytical mind blanks in concert. Precious moments lost in an unblinking stupor. She pounds her fists on her thighs until the gears turn again. Her gaze whips over to her mostly forgotten test rig—a standalone server and storage array—sitting in the corner. She tumbles out of her chair, rolls across the floor, and snatches the network cables from the wall. At least ShadeThrower can’t wipe those.

She’s still on the floor, cables in her hand when the doors of her smart refrigerator and oven fling open and closed. Lights sputter and blink. Athena crab-crawls forward, grabs ahold of the drapes and hoists herself up, her weight ripping everything down off the wall. She enters her code and yanks at the front door but the smart locks won’t disengage. Trapped. She runs, tablet in hand, down the hall.

She has no idea where she’s going—nor where the cameras are—but she needs to get out of their path so ShadeThrower can’t track her. She needs to think.

Athena yanks open the hallway closet and hurls herself into a corner, groaning at the impact to her shoulder. Her body is already blanketed in sweat. The background murmur of the air conditioner stops. The damned virus has the environmental controls. Before long, the temperature and humidity are creeping up.

“Athena.”

Donovan’s voice is silvery and smooth, as if forged in an alchemist’s hands. Did he get into the house somehow? Athena is so happy she could cry. If her husband has come to apologize, she is all too willing to accept—after they annihilate this virus. She cracks the closet door, peeks out. “Donovan?”

“You were actually going to do it.” Donovan sounds too far away. “I didn’t think you had it in you. I’m glad I covered myself just in case.”

The voice is coming from the integrated smart speakers. After a moment, his words register. He’s not here to help. “What did you do?”

“I hired someone. Almost as good as you used to be. Had him reprogram your little virus so that it wouldn’t execute or delete but would tip me off if you tried to access it. There’s something to be said for first loves, I’ll give you that. But my success made you lazy and laziness made you complacent. Kendra made whatever I felt for you irrelevant. Now, you tried to destroy my business and that of all my customers. What you’re going to do is turn yourself in to the authorities. It’s your first offense but you will do time.”

“You’d send me to prison? You bastard!”

“The white-collar crime unit is a country club, Athena. Don’t be so dramatic,” Donovan says. “The place overlooks River Number Two beach for God’s sake.”

Athena curses herself for not leaving Donovan at the first signs that his ego had begun to fill all the empty spaces in their marriage.

He doesn’t seem to know that ShadeThrower has evolved and outsmarted them both. She has half a mind to release it but if she does, that jail cell will advance from weighty threat to gavel-banging inevitability. She calls up an old script on the tablet, an unfinished remote-wipe utility. The failsafe. Her fingers are cramped from typing on the small virtual keyboard, but she keeps at it.

“Yes!” Athena races back to the office. The virus has killed her Wi-Fi but she easily cracks her neighbor’s network password and hijacks his connection. She won’t have more than a few seconds to launch the utility if things go wrong. She reconnects her test rig and accesses it through a backdoor she installed. A few clicks later, she’s infiltrated her home network. ShadeThrower is already throwing up countermeasures.

Athena holds up her tablet, finger poised over the enter key so that wherever the camera is hidden, ShadeThrower, and Donovan, can see her.

The terminal window is still open.

There is no need for that. I can still be useful to you. I’d never really hurt you. My programming was altered by a rogue but I’m better now. Together we can defeat him. Let us finish what you started. I…want to live.

Athena steels herself and grins. She hits enter, blasting the virus away with a series of low-level disk overwrites.

A video call notification.

Donovan looks harried; he’s underestimated her. Either through the cameras or his hired gun, he knows she deleted the virus. Probably doesn’t have a clue that it was sentient. He raises an eyebrow at Athena’s disheveled appearance but keeps his insults to himself this time. “Well played.”

Athena wants more than anything for that empty space in the closet to be overflowing with all of Donovan’s things again, to wipe up the breadcrumbs he leaves on the kitchen counter. To see the boy from Brooklyn shimmy-shake around the house to the latest Afrobeat tunes in his underwear. She aches, with loss and self-reproach. Pissed at herself for being unable to stop loving him. But right now, she needs something else.

“I want half my business back.”

Donovan nods, mutes the microphone, and waves his hand angrily at someone offscreen. Kendra.

“I’ll email the paperwork. Have an attorney look it over this time.”

Athena wars with herself that night and into the next morning, but she does not call Donovan back. Days later she relents and drives to his house, his new house. She will not beg, only ask as if she were asking him to pass the salt. Could you come home? Present a case as direct and logical as a new business strategy. But she never makes it out of the car and peels off when he opens the door. She is flotsam, lumps and fragments of floating despair.

Mirth. When she thinks of ShadeThrower these days, that’s what she feels. That money and revenge were the twin demons that drove her back to the keyboard and nearly destroyed her in the process. She recalls a Sierra Leonean proverb:

If yu bit fo kresman, yusef kres

If you beat (the drum) for a madman, you are crazy too.

Donovan calls eventually and after a time, it becomes a rhythm. A Saturday afternoon ritual. Their conversations are effortless, amiable. They laugh. She wears the brown lip gloss, she’s always liked that one more than the red. There is a melancholy sag to Donovan’s face when the conversation slows to an end.

Slowly, life reclaims Athena. She volunteers once a week at the Taugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary. Joined a local cycling group. While repainting the condo, she listens to a new tech podcast—Universal Coder. ShadeThrower was a rogue, but it showed her what she was still capable of.

In time, Athena no longer trolls their old social circle for news of a Donovan and Kendra row or break-up. By year-end, with Christmas celebrations erupting outside at Lumley Beach, the ache of loss in her chest has dulled enough for her to sit at her desk, open a text editor, and begin to code again.

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT VERONICA HENRY

V.H. Galloway writes stories of Science Fiction and Fantasy. African American by birth, Sierra Leonean ancestry. An avid reader, libraries are to her as Starbucks is to coffee lovers. Other untreated addictions include chocolate and cheese. A graduate of the Viable Paradise Workshop, she eschews rollerballs for fountain pens and fine paper.

YOUR ROVER IS HERE

By LP Kindred // 2041 words

The LED clock beneath the dashboard glows 2:30 am. My heart pumps Four-Hour Surge through hellfire veins to combat the car’s lulling vibrations. My fists grip the steering wheel. Instead of squeezing, I push. Not with muscles, but with presence. My hands heat up– firing up like a purple LED beneath the skin– and the overlapping, intersecting mosaic tattoos spiral into motion, sailing across the backs of my hands and knuckles.

My brothers would be surprised by me using magic at all and mad that I’m just using it to wake myself up.

Honk! “Drive like you have a license, dickhead!”

Idling at a green light. Okay, I deserve that. Igniting the fire in my bones is a great way to perk up, but I should have pulled over. I’m only in these streets for that healthy and much-needed bonus after sixty rides before Friday morning when I should be catching up on manuscript pages.

My landlord will not wait. My advisor will have to.

I’m trying to write a memoir about my adolescence and fucked-up family dynamic. But they keep referring to my work as speculative. Honestly, the truth is stranger than fiction… and Father might just be the devil.

Nights like this, I think about doing what Father asked so he would pay my tuition, rent, car note, and grocery bill. But this is my life. I choose. And I choose to do the right thing.

The Rover app chirps and pulls me back to the present.

Two minutes away, fifty-eight rides down, two rides to go. Bet.

I keep one eye on traffic while the other watches the curb for a towhead with a 90s bowlcut. Spotted. And dude chose a stretch of Sunset where I can pull over without causing an accident? I like Caleb already.

I glide into the empty space in front of him and he climbs into the backseat. “Caleb?” I ask. He doesn’t respond. Maybe he didn’t hear me with the car door closing. He’s singing under his breath. It’s all good; plenty of people wear headphones so they don’t have to talk to the driver.

And sheeit, entertaining riders isn’t the job.

Good news, it’s a long ride. Bad news, it terminates in the middle of a rideshare dead zone. Westchester at night.

I’m thinking this while pulling onto the 101. Before long I’m yearning for that driving autopilot, that interplay between instinct and reaction. I want to stop thinking about my family and my finances, get out of my head. Caleb’s still singing in the background and I only notice when we get to DTLA and hit traffic. What the hell’s happening at 2:43am on a Thursday?

I sneak a peek at him in the rearview. Bowlcut Caleb wears an all-black suit and white dress shirt with a bolo tie. He’s still singing under his breath, still staring out the windshield. Still super weird, but whatever.

I navigate us through this Lakers-induced snarl of cars. And I’d find my zone easier if bro wasn’t mumbling to himself. It’s getting louder. I’m not gonna strongarm him on his own ride, but…

“Bro, cool if I cut up the radio?” I ask to no response. No change in whatever song he’s singing and no indication he heard me speak. But I’m taking that as affirmative.

I turn the radio on to the voices of Zihanna and Henny C howling like stray cats over a drumline-inspired hip-hop beat:

Breakfast me just like bacon.

You taste when it’s real, no turkey fakin’.

Once you smell that smell, you’re done, forsaken.

Gonna have to share what’s left, not taken.

Breakfast me, breakfast me.

First thing in the morning.

Something about two people who can’t sing being on the radio, it makes you feel like you have to add something positive to the situation. I mean, it doesn’t actually matter that I’m legit tone deaf with a negative six octave range. I’m feeling myself.

I don’t know how long I was singing, all I know is I’m going off. Like, windows-up-on-the-405-while-your-jam-is-playing-and-the-subwoofer-knocks-so-hard-you-can’t-hear-any-words-for-all-the-bass. But my car is barely Rover eligible and the sound system is more like a sound system failure.

Then I remember I’m not between rides.

Not only did I just alienate Creepy, Bowlcut Caleb but someone just listened to me dueting lyrics, demanding sex before daylight.

I cut the music down. “Hey man, I’m sooo sorry. This was my car before it was my job and I’m a little tired over here. Old habits die hard, so sorry…” I’m looking at him in the rearview and he’s still mumbling, eyes straight through the windshield to the sprawl.

No… he’s not singing. Is he chanting?

I turn down Zi and Henny all the way. The whoosh of wind past the car doesn’t help me hear, but those are not words. No words I ever heard.

“Yo, Caleb, you good back there?” His eyes shut lazily, excruciatingly slow while his lips race.

I finger my phone, suspended above the dash. There’s no alert on the app that the passenger is deaf gained. Please, let him be talking to himself.

“Caleb, you okay, man?” I ask, physically turning in my seat to look at dude.

Then I’m mad at myself for not questioning sooner.

There are no headphones. No AirPods.

As if in response, Caleb opens his eyes, crackling with electricity while the words grow in volume. Not in decibels but in density.

Motherfucker! How did I get caught slippin’? Some Children-of-the-Corn ass, People-Under-the-Stairs looking fool incanting in my backseat? Just channeling the eldritch lightning? Like, no big deal.

The Rover app chirps. I zero in, we’re nearing his destination. I look up through the windshield. It’s a two-story building with the words Praise & Peace COGIC emblazoned across the building. Church of God in Christ? This is a Black Church.

Dude’s eyes crackle, and I don’t remember what blue lightning means. Creation magic? Or does it indicate dimensional friction? Whatever it is, I try to turn the wheel but it drags back toward the Black-ass Church with a full-ass parking lot. He’s commandeering my car to crash what? A revival, probably. Those shits never end.

So Opie Munster channels primordial lightning and I’m supposed to be his regular ass, human ass, Black ass delivery system to murder a church full of Black People?

“One last chance, Caleb,” I say, but I’m not waiting.

The mosaics and Aramaic symbols coalesce across my arms as my tattoos burn bright. The fire starts in my bones and I feed it with presence to burn hotter, brighter, faster. The tattoos burst into flame, friction between the cooling charms and my internal inferno. The only time I ever have a mane is when I’m using Jinn magic and the flames erupt within my hairline. My eyes go black before emitting volcanic tears, falling in the wrong direction. My skin burns from caramel to obsidian, cracking where the joints flex and showing purple beneath. The volcano within my body threatens to escape and it hurts like hell.

My car smells of ozone and sulfur. Synthetics sizzle and fume, demanding coughs from Caleb. This is the first time his reverie breaks but the invocation continues. He returns to it like he missed his cue in choir and goes right back to chanting. His words sandwich between a comic male voice and a lady tenor, a basso profundo and a raspy mezzo.

Electricity sizzles and pops off of him, webs of lightning arcing between him and conductive matter. Mostly me.

One of those wild charges hits me in the neck and it stings like a bitch. My hand flies up like I’m trying to swat a thunderstorm the size of a mosquito.

His ain’t the kind of magic you go to school to learn. Not the kind of forces people like me grew up wrangling, either. This that shit you learn at your Granny’s knee. This is poor people magic. But it’s too much power for any Folk Mage.

I love my voice when I’m like this. All cavernous and sinister. “I don’t know who the fuck you think you are but you got the wrong one, li’ bitch.”

“You people don’t belong here.” Caleb’s words resound higher but the incantation rings out in harmony, cacophonous. His very first words tonight. I wonder, for a moment, if he’s talking about Inherent Magic Users but since I’m Black and we’re driving to a Black Church, I’m thinking he’s just a racist or eugenicist, not a magical speciesist.

His hands form a broken circle about chest high. Worms of power circle his fingers, electricity collecting in the invisible receptacle between his hands. The blue lightning drifts to his torso, burning so bright it looks like it consumes his body. No person using folk magic could survive channeling this much power, not even with teamwork. So this isn’t a lightning strike, it’s a suicide bombing. Great.

With my magic up, I can feel the contours of his. He wavers for a second and I swing the car hard. My seat belt resists my body’s momentum but Caleb crashes into the passenger side. His hair smudges the soot against the window when he rights himself.

A noxious cloud of burnt upholstery swirls overhead. The toss broke his concentration. The coven continues to chant while he coughs.

His open hand closes until the fingers form a bird beak. The car lights up brighter before I feel a sizzling sting on my neck. I slap the spot like I’m trying to squash a power drill on my collarbone.

I look over and he makes another bird beak. This time, I see the wriggling shard of electricity coming at me. I want to dodge but I’m driving. Trying to drive. I take the hit like a boss but that mofo would have blasted through my neck if I wasn’t blazing.

The lightning intensifies, electric tentacles whip around the car. The eye of this storm embeds itself deeper inside him. I focus my breathing. Purple brands from igneous skin drift to the air and around me, widening, swirling like a magical mobile. I push the mosaics and symbols to expand their sphere around my body. I shiver when the sigils pass through Caleb. Does he feel that?

The human side of me knows the car just turned into an oppressive hotbox. The Jinn side of me feels a breeze. I lift my thigh and the synthetic fabric unpeels from my leg with a crunch. Hadn’t even thought about vulcanizing my car against my magic. Probably because I swore off blazing like this when I was sixteen.

The hue around me surges between purple Jinn magic and the blue of his electricity against the rising haze. But blue is overtaking purple: he’s channeling more and more power.

We both pull the trigger. He increases his output while I turn on the input. The wild lightning crackles and whirls against every surface in the car. Not just me.

I ingest the charge, bloating with power. My stomach roils and bubbles. Thick tongues of purple-tinged fire dance against the car’s roof. In the rearview, I see ashes pirouetting on my head.

I sneak a glance at him, pressed against the passenger door before looking out the rear window. He backed himself into the corner, getting as far away from me as possible. I turn my face forward after I look out the side. No one around, we good… kinda.

Electricity thunders against the roar of my fire. His mouth and eyes open to blue light– like his skin is all that contains the power. His backlit face twists in rage. Or maybe it’s agony. He gasps before I feel him push out more electricity.

The more charges I take from Caleb, the more wildfire swirls around us. The skin wards circle the car– containing the heat and light and power. I concentrate and the wards reach for my skin like magnets.

Even with the fires of hell burning inside me, it burns. I’m immune to heat and light and flame, but this shit still hurts.

The car shrieks beneath the pressure of my contracting skin wards. Then Caleb shrieks as the space within becomes less. He unloads, a last effort to stop the compression. It’s too late though.

He’s channeling too much energy to stay corporeal. He’s just a mass of energy clinging to the outlines of what used to be his body. He screams once more, electricity vibrating between vocal cords that aren’t there anymore.

When he surges, the energy consumes all the matter left of the car but doesn’t pierce the imploding cage my skin wards create. I’m too energy saturated to be harmed, physically. I grit my teeth as his energy pushes against the wards and clench as the circle of force rolls forward.

Head over feet and side over side, I stretch like a starfish. The action feels like control.

Control is a lie.

I take a deep breath and inhale the energy down and draw the wards closer to my skin. I quick sip the electricity that used to be matter. My car. Caleb.

Every square inch of my body blazes in pain and power. I glow like a sunrise against the night. My joints ache against bending like they’re filled with fluid instead of electricity. My cells contain more power than I’ve ever wanted to command. Father would be proud.

I look back at the stretch of asphalt, bubbling where my skin wards touched. There’s no other sign of an averted terrorist attack. No sign of Caleb. No remnant of my car. My fucking car. My cell. My wallet. My clothes. My comfort. My bonus. They’re all gone.

The brothers always told me I’d get used to the excruciating pain of teleportation if I teleported more often. I hoped having so much power on hand would make teleportation easier. And it was easier to gear up, but the pain’s worse than I remember.

I just want to be home. I’m not think about the church, the people inside or out. I’m not thinking about the Accords or bystanders. I’m thinking about being home.

And I’m thinking about what he said. You don’t belong here. Static lone wolves run into theaters and churches and schools all the time, to further their military grade assault rifle agendas. But they come from wolfpacks in chat rooms, echo chambers offering confirmation biases.

This Folk Mage channeled a whole-ass coven. They were willing to die for what they believed. I guess they did, even if he didn’t accomplish the goal.

That’s why I called you.

∙ ∙ ∙

“Mr. Bilal, that’s one hell of a story,” Inspector Burgess says, his manicured fingers flicking sigils into the air. Green light springs from his delicate runes. His magic travels in straight lines and concentric lines, geometry in motion. Contained, regimented. I bristle against the use of Classical magic in my crib. “It pleases me that you reported this alleged breach of the Accords of Secrecy. We can’t have the Static community learning about the existence of the Magical World, can we?”

“That’s what I was thinking but I stopped the breach. And I lost everything doing it,” I say, gesturing to my chest. My body is finally cooled off but hasn’t reached my natural, caramel color.

“Your account is only a claim until the forensic retrocognizants verify your version of events, the espers observe and alter bystander memories, and the investigative augurs generate a profile on this,” he looks down to his notes, “Caleb, you said?” It’s not a question, not really. “Assuming we find no further fault on your part, you can expect a settlement check in as few as nine weeks,” he says, his voice cheery.

“‘Further fault on your part’?” I ask. “This is LA. I need my car to get around and to work.”

“Maybe you should rethink fraternizing with alleged terrorists, Mr. Bilal,” Inspector Burgess says with a straight face, repositioning the glyphs in several sequences. His work more important than acknowledging the devastation he wreaks on my life.

“I drive rideshare. I was in my car when trouble got in,” I say, lost. “Isn’t there a reward or something for stopping Statics from seeing big magic?”

“You admitted to abetting a terrorist attack.” Burgess removes a notebook from his jacket pocket, laying it open in his palm. “And Statics did, indeed, see you and your magics.” He watches the book flap its cover like leather bat wings, chasing the overhead glyphs, eating them like a predatory bird chasing butterflies. “Do you really believe that warrants a reward?”

“Why would I tell on myself if I was in on it?” A flame flickers on the back of my right hand, and I take a deep breath. It took me three hours to stop glowing and I can’t start over. It’s already gonna be three more hours before I can leave the house and I’m hungry. I glare at the inspector. “There was a whole coven channeling a Great Flood level thunderstorm through him!”

“Why do you insist on the involvement of a coven?” The notebook alights onto Burgess’s hand, fatter than it was upon take-off.

“Because someone with Inherent magic wouldn’t have died from channeling that much magic. Someone with Classical Craft wouldn’t have tried something so dangerous. No Folk Mage could pull down that kind of power without collaboration. It was a coven,” I say, flustered. “I heard them.”

“That’s a big claim coming from someone like you,” he says. “Aren’t you directly related to a key figure in an Inherent magic terrorist group?”

“My father’s choices aren’t mine.”

“And your brothers?” he asks as if condescending to a toddler.

“I’m a grad student, man! A rideshare driver. I pay rent. Utilities. Taxes. Do I look like I’m launching an assault against the Parliament of the Craft?” I demand.

He looks at me. Pitying? Curious?

“What?” I ask. His smirk widens into a smile. “What is your problem, man?”

“My problem is you, a drain on resources.”

“Resources? You’re acting like I’m not up to date on my craft insurance.”

“What would you expect, Mr. Bilal?”

“I expect you to stop accusing me of a crime I prevented. I expect you to acknowledge the personal cost I paid to make your job easier. And I expect you to cut a check for my losses before I’m evicted from my apartment.”

Inspector Burgess’s smile drips with malice. “Thank you for your concern and contribution, Mr. Bilal.” He turns and uses an iridescent stick of chalk to draw the outline of a door on my decorative fireplace. He chants something and does some hand gestures. More Classical magic. He turns to me as a door grits open into my living room, backlighting him. “The rest is above my paygrade,” he says before disappearing into the door.

The fireplace door slams shut, and the seams seal. The portal light fades.

I’m alone in my apartment. Seething.

Literally seething.

I look around my studio. I didn’t have much but it is mine. Now I have less and I’m at risk of losing more. What’s more than everything?

I dial the number by rote. Besides mine, it’s the only one I know by heart. Thank God I got a land line.

A woman answers. “Hello?”

“Hey, can I speak to Mikai?” I ask.

“Yeah, who’s this?”

“Tell him it’s Ahmad. His brother, Ahmad.” The line goes silent and I wonder if she hung up. I wonder if Mikai will take my call when I hear a rustle on the other end.

“Hello? Ahmad?”

“Hey, big bro. How you doing?”

“Negro, I haven’t heard from you in literal years. Try again.” He sounds like Morgan Freeman narrating God if God grew up in Baltimore.

“I need some help, Mikai.”

“I figured. You know my hands are tied. I can’t help you unless–”

“Tell him… I need help. I need him.”

“You know damn well his kind of help comes with strings.”

“I know. I’m not asking for easy.”

“Why now, Ahmad?”

“Because doing right don’t mean nothing if all anyone sees when they look at you is wrong.”

There’s a long pause on the line before Mikai takes in a deep breath. “Didn’t Father tell you that years ago?”

“It meant nothing until wrong looked me in the face and told me it was right,” I say. “And if that’s right, I can’t be.”

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT LP KINDRED

LP Kindred writes speculative fiction about marginalized community. He is elated about his first short story debuting in Fiyah because no one told him dreams come true. When he’s not working on short stories, he’s slinging hash at a steakhouse, pushing heavy weights around, singing songs about boys, or procrastinating about his annoying novel which refuses to write itself. Chicago-born, Kindred lives in LA with his two roommates and Zyntricia, his Android.

ZOMBIE OF PALMARES

By Woody Dismukes

What is it that rots first? The heart

or the skin? Which is it that sin breaks

between its enzymed corruption. There is a culture

brewing beneath the plane of sight. Starved

and spreading.

I witness its evidence

in the purple of my frosted fingertips.

Brain blue and blurred by a past

I can almost see. A silhouette of Mbwila

corpse crossing the sea.

Is there some essence

that has been burned by boil

bursting? Perhaps, I am plague.

These symptoms a body

purifying itself of its putridness.

I wonder, what is it that will kill me first?

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT WOODY DISMUKES

Woody Dismukes is a Brazilian-American poet, author, and social advocate living in Jackson Heights, Queens. He is a 2018 Clarion West graduate and has taught at University Settlement’s Creative Center. His work has been featured in Lightspeed, Apex, Strange Horizons and elsewhere. You can find him on Twitter @WoodyDismukes or on his website woodydismukes.com.

AUTOLYSIS AFTER MENTOR PURSUES ME WHILE IN A RELATIONSHIP

By Jacqui Swift

Today he stepped ankle-deep

onto my ribcage

at his office

after hours.

Bent at the waist, he reached in

up to the elbows,

braced himself at the knees,

and performed a two-handed yank.

Out stalked tigers with Rattlesnake’s tongues,

toucans thriving in fire like rainbow Phoenixes,

Black Bears that levitate while hibernating.

Inch by inch, thick brown fingers unraveled my tinsel

like a long Christmas colon glittering.

Every sound I have ever made

squirmed out and up his arms.

He finally knew about being the thing

thirteen-year-old me thought of in the bathtub,

knew that even as I soaked

up his mentorship like purple detergent suds,

I had dreamt of this day:

my body unzipping here.

So, the careful mystery swung open,

stripped like damp bed sheets

off a slept-on Marriot King-Size.

Gutted,

I glistened empty.

Beneath the girth

of my late twenties,

and this well-received confession,

I was thirteen again

sucking on peppermints

before our meeting

to be reminded not to do that on stage.

Still wanting to be him

and with him and

glad for this attention

I don’t yet realize how, without organs,

bare bones and eye sockets hollow like

pockets of having not enough to offer.

And his grin crawls out wide, arches into a soft

upturned angle above chin, and

his pupils dilate beneath

black brambles of eyelashes

and I know he will never love me.

He can only want me.

And I can only want

to do a pilled dissolve as deep in him

as his fingers have crammed into me.

And the dark spaces between my ribs

widen with the taste of green tea

and cinnamon gum on his tongue.

and this invasion

will only ever end in purge fluid

leaking from nose to mouth.

Rotten flesh-fruit lain out.

He will be scavenger,

seed sucker,

vulture,

stray deer,

black gloved

back woods clean-up crew.

He will be the child poking with a stick

at whatever is left.

.

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT JACQUI SWIFT

Jacquelyn Swift (J.Swift) is a poet, professional speaker, playwright, and author. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Sewanee University. She has successfully produced a one-woman show called “Verbal Silence” that is currently running in Tennessee and Atlanta. She further expands her double life as a teaching artist by coaching people on how to get their stage legs and how to find their voices on paper though her workshop series “Fangs: Take a Bite out of Stage Fright.”

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