Issue 22, November 2016

© Wyrm Publishing, 2016
wyrmpublishing.com
forever-magazine.com

Table of Contents

Introduction

by Neil Clarke

The Heart is Eaten Last

a novella by Kameron Hurley

Evermore

a novelette by Sean Williams

The Vicar of Mars

a novelette by Gwyneth Jones

About the Artist and Authors

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the November 2016 issue of Forever Magazine!

Not much news to report this month. I’m hard at work on the next volume of The Best Science Fiction of the Year and starting the preliminary reading for two more 2017 projects: War Machines and More Human Than Human. I’ll be sharing more details on those after Best 2 is put to bed. Aside from that I’d just like to take this appropriately November opportunity to say thank you for reading or subscribing to Forever!

Until next month . . .

-Neil

The Heart is Eaten Last

Kameron Hurley

The saboteurs fled the bombed-out wreckage of the smoking chemical plant like roaches from a burning cane field. Black smoke clotted the air. The toxic bloom unfurled across the desert sky outside Alabbas like some black portent. It rolled over the fleeing insurgents, covering their escape into the warren of workers’ houses and tumbledown ruins from the last time someone tried to build something worth a damn out here on the edge of the southern desert.

Nyxnissa so Dasheem—bounty hunter, mercenary, and former government agent—watched the explosion from the hot rooftop of an abandoned mosque half a kilometer away. She pulled on a respirator without taking her eyes from the specs that gave her a keen view of the action. Behind her, her magician, Rhys, was crouched against a nearby minaret, arms over his head, yelling about the end of the world.

Typical day, really.

“Put on your respirator,” she said around hers.

“As if that makes a difference,” he said. “That cloud will eat us down to bones in an hour. Why did you take this awful job? Why are we still here when we know what’s really happening?”

Nyx adjusted her respirator and stuffed a pinch of sen into her mouth and sucked at it, considering the cloud. “Wind’s the wrong way,” she said. “It’s heading out over the desert.”

“Why didn’t we stop them, Nyx?” Rhys said. “If nothing else we’ve done out here is worth anything, at least we could have stopped that.”

Nyx watched the toxic cloud shift with the wind that now blew against her back, pushing the worst of the fallout in the other direction. Lucky break, that. Satisfied, she shoved the specs in her pack, pulled out the respirator, and spit bloody red sen on the sandy rooftop.

“No one’s dead down there yet,” she said. “We’ll get to that next. Sometimes you got to let them burn and follow them back.”

Rhys huffed out a breath. He was a handful of years younger than her, which put him in his early twenties. He had been on her bounty hunting team two years, though he insisted every six months that he was going to leave and find some new job, and this time he seemed to mean it. He was pretty enough, for a Chenjan, and she liked his eyes and his hands. It was the complaining she couldn’t stand, especially because it all came out in his terrible Chenjan accent. The accent reminded her she was supposed to be killing people like him on the other side of the border, not consorting with them. The accent took her back to the warfront.

She regretted taking this job, then. But the only time she didn’t regret taking a job was when she was drinking the money it earned her. Every other moment was stuffed with poisonous doubt. Served her right. She was a sucker for pretty boys and plain-faced girls, and the girl who had given her this job had been tough to refuse. What surprised Nyx was that even after saying yes, and finding out what she’d really been hired for, Nyx was still here anyway. Girls with silvery tongues had secrets, and Nyx couldn’t help but try and fish them out. It was all too irresistible.

“Let’s go start the cleanup,” Nyx said.

“We’re bringing the saboteurs in, then?” Rhys said. Hopeful. “I knew you would see sense!”

“We’re finishing the job,” Nyx said. She picked up her scattergun, and pointed it at his chest.

The day the girl with the job had walked into Nyx’s gym in Punjai, Nyx was sitting up at the front with the gym owner, Husayn, and nursing her usual morning hangover. Nyx dredged a hunk of stale bread into a cup of thick, dark buni so strong just the smell of it made her feel sober. Buni was the kind of thick, sludgy coffee that she had dreamed about often at the front.

Husayn sat opposite her, unwrapping her own hands after teaching an early morning class of eager young women how to throw punches. It had gone well enough until two of them got into a brawl over some slight, and one bit the ear off another. The front of Husayn’s breast binding was spattered in blood.

“What you teaching these girls?” Nyx said, nodding to the bloody floor. The class had cleared out, and old Marise, the Ras Tiegan cut woman, was mopping the concrete floor.

“I don’t have any control over what they bring into the gym,” Husayn said. She sniffed at Nyx’s buni. “Shouldn’t eat right before a workout. Or are you just here to socialize?”

Nyx shrugged. “Bit of both.”

“Avoiding that Chenjan at your office more like,” Husayn said.

Nyx slurped her buni.

Husayn guffawed. “You never did take it well, not getting what you want.”

“Got him on my team, didn’t I?” Nyx said. “Can’t imagine what else I’d want from a man like that.”

A shadow fluttered in the open doorway, and Nyx squinted into the light; a shapely silhouette moved into the gym. Nyx sat up a little straighter.

The silhouette resolved itself into a thin-lipped woman in her early thirties. Her broad face was too smooth to be lower class, too marked to be First Family. Nyx guessed she was the daughter of some merchant family selling weapons or bugs; maybe landowners. Nyx had known farmers with plantations so large that they didn’t bother working the land themselves, and it kept them out of the cancerous suns. Why bother when there was cheap refugee labor? Nyx flexed her own fingers, remembering the repetitive work involved in harvesting sugar cane and rye on her mother’s farm. This woman didn’t have the face or hands of someone who’d worked a day in her life.

The woman wore a long wrap of a dress, not trousers and certainly not a dhoti like Nyx’s, and that was odd. That was a southern look, meant for impressing foreigners in cooler climates like the prudish, idol-worshipping Ras Tiegans. In Punjai nobody much cared about covering up in fear of cancers. This close to the contested border with Chenja, everyone figured a bullet or a burst would get them long before cancer from the blazing suns and toxic air. It was too hot, and life too short, to worry about it.

“You lost?” Nyx said, ripping off a hunk of bread with her teeth. She imagined doing the same to the woman’s dress.

The woman narrowed her eyes at Nyx. She had gloriously shiny dark hair rolled up against her scalp—also a rural southern style. Nyx was leaning more and more toward thinking she was a land owner. There was a little scar on her upper lip; she’d clearly been born with a cleft palate, and been rich enough to get it fixed but not rich enough to remove the scar. She had a nose bold enough to be Chenjan, though her complexion was Nasheenian, and the thin lips and long face put Nyx in mind of some southern people like the Ras Tiegans or Drucians. In Nyx’s line of work, it paid to pay attention to the cut of a woman’s face. Could save you a whole lot of trouble.

“I’m looking for Nyxnissa so Dasheem,” the woman said.

Nyx leaned forward while tucking her left hand behind her, closer to the scattergun stowed at her back. “That so?”

The woman held up her hands. She had long, slender fingers that Nyx imagined would feel delightful wrapped around her thighs. “I’m not armed,” the woman said.

“Need a room?” Husayn said, snorting.

“I came to discuss a job,” the woman said. “That’s what you do, isn’t it? You’re Nyxnissa so Dasheem?” She was looking at Husayn.

Husayn laughed, and Nyx relaxed. An assassin would have moved already. And been better at making her.

“Get her some buni,” Nyx said.

“I’m not a fucking bartender,” Husayn said. “I’m going to have a rub down.” She left them, and her bloody hand wraps, on the counter.

Nyx patted the stool next to her. “I don’t bite unless you ask,” Nyx said.

The woman looked visibly flustered at that, which Nyx found endearing. It had been some time since she had made a woman blush. Southern country kids, new to the city, were rarities this close to the border after a few hundred years of war. Only crazy kids and refugees came out here. Nyx supposed she herself was a bit of both.

“You have a name?” Nyx asked. She finished the bread and licked her fingers.

“Binyamin.”

“That all? One name?”

“For now, yes.”

“Huh,” Nyx said. She held out her hand. Binyamin just stared at it. Nyx laughed. “You were brave enough to come out here, but too scared to play nice?”

Binyamin cleared her throat. “I have concerns about… disease. You spent a year in prison, didn’t you?”

“Couple years ago,” Nyx said. She wondered why that was relevant. “No more diseased in prison than anywhere else.”

“I just thought that meant you’d look a little older, like your friend.”

Nyx raised her brows. “I’m twenty-seven,” Nyx said. “Husayn’s thirty-two. Not a huge leap.”

“I’ve known too many women like you and her,” she said. “My mother says she can read faces like yours the way hedge witches read palms. But I’m not as good at that.”

“I find it hard to believe you’ve ever met anyone like me,” Nyx said, “on some southern plantation.”

“How did…” she patted the rolls of her hair. “Ah, I suppose it’s obvious.”

“So what are you here for, southern girl? The killing will cost you, but there’s plenty more that we could do for free.”

“This is a serious matter”

Nyx stared into her cup and sighed. “Always is.”

“There have been a series of explosions at weapons plants in the south. I’d like you to bring the saboteurs to justice.”

“Nasheenian justice,” Nyx said, “is a head in a bag. Why should I care about the south? Stuff blows up every day. Not my job to handle that shit. That’s what bel dames and order keepers are for.”

“It’s… a domestic problem. Not a terrorist problem. If we thought it was Chenjans we would use more orthodox methods.”

“These are your family’s plants, then?”

She nodded. “It could be any number of people,” she said, “but we have had some concerns with bel dames. That’s our worst fear, that it may be a bel dame. You know that these former government assassins don’t even answer to the government, once they are let loose.”

“Then you should talk to the bel dame council. Only bel dames hunt down other bel dames. They exist as their own independent entity. They govern themselves.”

“I went to them first,” she said. “But they told me she was just an apprentice, and never finished the training. That is close enough to a bel dame, to me, but not to them. They told me to speak to order keepers.” She made a sound of distress, deep in her throat. “As if order keepers would make a difference.”

“But I would?”

“You used to be a bel dame,” she said. “Most die in service, but you served your time in prison and survived.”

“So who is this bel dame apprentice?” Nyx said.

“My sister.”

“Terrorism and family problems,” Nyx said. “I’m not in the mood for either today.” What Nyx wanted was a good fuck and a whisky tonight, not trouble with the bel dame council. She finished her buni. “I’m here to work out. You should go.” She took her gloves off the counter and slid off her seat.

The woman flinched. “I can give you more than money,” she said. “You’ll have a favor from a very powerful family. We aren’t First Family, but when it comes to wealth and influence, we may as well be. Isn’t that something?”

“A favor? Like what?”

“Anything within . . . reason.”

“Pardons for crimes?”

“Only the Queen can grant that. But we have other types of influence. Land grants, political pull with the high and low councils, contacts in land management –“

“What would I do with land?”

“There’s a contested piece of property in Mushirah,” Binyamin said. “Your mother owned it. She was Bakira so Dasheem, am I right? You see, we know something about you.”

Nyx wrinkled her nose. “My mother granted that land to my sister,” she said. Spit it, really, because she knew where this was going, and she really didn’t want to be interested. A soft country girl was one thing; a manipulative, wealthy chemical weapons scoundrel who had done her homework was another. Now that she was pushing thirty she was trying to think with her head more often. So far that hadn’t been working out very well.

“And your sister Kine has been stuck in a legal battle over it with the government for almost ten years. I can make that go away.”

“What makes you think I give a shit about my sister, or that shitty plot of land?”

“Everyone cares about something.”

“Not me,” Nyx said.

Binyamin cut a sidelong look at her; big dark eyes, firm mouth, long, sad face. The sadness, the need, made Nyx hotter than she would admit. She wanted to bundle this woman up in her arms and save her—from what, she didn’t know. Everyone needed to be saved from something.

Nyx slid her gloves across the table. “I’ll take it if you spar with me,” she said.

Binyamin looked at the gloves as if they were some dangerous insect. “I don’t know how to box.”

“Then I’ll show you,” Nyx said. She walked behind the counter and pulled out an extra set of gloves. “How serious are you?”

“Very serious.”

“Then put on some gloves.”

Binyamin looked at Nyx’s wrapped hands. “Do I need that, the wrappings?”

“Not with how hard you’re likely to hit,” Nyx said. She pulled on her own gloves and danced out to the center of the gym, motioning Binyamin to follow her.

Binyamin went reluctantly after her, frowning at her gloves. “Shouldn’t someone tie these?”

“Only if you intend to hit hard, like I said. You going to hit me, or what?”

Binyamin rubbed the worn leather of one of the gloves with her thumb. Shook her head. “I am not here to play games.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” Nyx said. She lunged forward to tap Binyamin’s face with her left hand.

Binyamin flinched; her right shoulder came up, ever so slightly, and her fingers tightened on the gloves. She let Nyx tap her cheek, though, and it was the “letting” part that Nyx filed away for later.

Nyx rolled back on her heels and cocked her head at the little southern woman. She spared a glance for Binyamin’s feet, and noted that she had slid into a right-handed woman’s fighter’s stance: right leg forward, left leg back.

She was not the soft southern woman she pretended to be, then.

“I’ll think about taking the job,” Nyx said. “You should go. I’ll be in touch after I look into some things.”

Binyamin hesitated a moment longer, then moved out of her stance and put the gloves back on the counter. She touched the jeweled beetle at her throat. It shifted to her finger. She placed it on the long table. “If you change your mind, you just tell her to find me,” she said. The beetle scuttled to the edge of Nyx’s empty buni cup and clung there, a shiny bauble.

Nyx’s gaze followed Binyamin as she turned and sauntered out, hips swaying beneath the long dress. When she came to the door, she became a black silhouette again, just another shadow, another woman with a dirty job that needed doing, and joined the bustling crowd on the street.

Nyx eyed the beetle. Gave it a little tap with her index finger. “Not falling for it,” she said, but of course she was.

She always did.

The sign in the window of Nyx’s cramped, battered storefront said, “Odd jobs and body reclamation,” which was a fair summation of what she did these days. She had been banned from one place already the year before when she found out a client’s dead girlfriend wasn’t dead after all. For the record, she preferred hunting down dead people or people she could legally make dead. The living were just too much trouble. She was best at killing, which is what made it so ironic that even the military had hastily discharged her after her two years at the front and never asked her to re-up. She’d always been a problem, far more hot-headed than any conscripted boy doing his thirty years of service and better at her job than even the most ruthless woman doing her own two years. Her reconstitution after she got blown up out there was part of her permanent file now, and it had been expensive. They didn’t want to risk her doing some other dumb thing on their money. So instead she was here, trying to build a team of hard-bitten mercenaries that was now bickering like a bunch of fucking compound babies as she pushed inside.

Taite, her comtech, sat in the back at his console, arguing with Anneke, her hired gun. Anneke had a big shotgun hitched up over one shoulder; the gun was half as big as she was. Wiry, spry, and mouthy as hell, Anneke had her feet planted firmly in front of Taite, and though she did not unshoulder the gun, the flustered look on Taite’s face told Nyx he fully expected her to at any moment.

Behind them, Rhys was hunched over his work table, probably dissecting some bug or some other thing that bug magicians did.

Nyx instinctively touched the green beetle of Binyamin’s that she’d put in her tunic pocket. She considered breaking up the argument, but went to her office and rummaged around in the drawer for a bottle and a glass in her drawer, instead, only to find that the bottle only contained a few drops of liquor. She sucked on the bottle, long and slow, considering.

Taite peeked in. Raised his brows at her suckling. “I miss something salacious?”

Nyx wiped her mouth. “You wish.”

Taite was in his late teens, spotty and scrawny, but good at hacking into transmissions and ensuring their internal com network wasn’t hacked by some other comtech’s buggy aerial concoctions. She didn’t pretend to know all the particulars of what he did; it was good enough for her to know that she could communicate to her team on a job without somebody else listening in. She had added him to her team just after Rhys and Anneke, and he’d only been around six months, but she’d known him before then, when he worked for her former boss, Raine. She enjoyed taking Raine’s employees away from him. Made her feel warm all over.

“Got a job for you,” she said. “Need you to track down a woman named Binyamin. Her family owns chemical plants in the south, probably near Alabbas. See if she’s got sisters, and tell me what happened to them.”

“That all you got?” he said.

She pulled the beetle out of her pocket. “She gave me this to use to contact her. Can you tell me where it’s tailored to report to?”

He took the beetle gently into his palms and peered at it. “I’ll see what I can do. Rhys could probably figure it out.”

“Work together then,” she said. “Sooner the better.”

“This a paying job?”

“Think of it like a job screening,” she said.

He nodded. “There are some new jobs on the boards,” he said. “Left it on your desk.” He ducked out of the room.

Nyx sat hard in her chair and sighed, staring at the empty bottle. She had spent a couple hours at the gym, and the rest of the day loomed ahead of her, long and hot and dusty as her parched throat.

She cast about for the job letters Taite had pulled from the bounty boards and found them under a pair of specs. She didn’t much care for reading, and hadn’t managed to wean Taite and Rhys off handing her reams of expensive paper that she was just going to feed to the bugs anyway. Rhys had a decent memory and recall, but Taite needed the paper. There were bounties out on two organ harvesters, a shifter who’d murdered and eaten her own mother, and two young indentured runaways, thirteen-year-old twins. She had asked Taite to stop pulling runaway kids, but there was a high price on these ones—double the usual. She turned the order over and found that the issuing authority wasn’t the government, but the kids’ own mother. That was new. Most mothers weren’t shitty enough to formally indenture their own kids when they hauled them out of the compounds. If you were going to do that, better to leave them to be raised by the state. But she supposed some people got off on that - cheap labor, power delusions, that sort of thing.

She looked up from the paperwork and caught a glimpse of the call box in the foyer. She had to admit that reading about well-meaning but shitty family members just doing what they thought God wanted them to put her in mind of her sister.

But she’d need a few more drinks for that.

So she told the team she was going out to run reconnaissance. Which she did, a bit, in a cantina at the north end of Punjai where southerners and the occasional Drucian showed up to swill. She considered the drinks a business expense, especially the ones she bought for the grimy one-armed former chemical factory worker who had all sorts of things to say about working at a plant burned out six years before.

“There are two families that used to own the south,” the woman said, knee pressing Nyx’s. “The Yazeeds and the Muhktars. But last dozen years, there’s these upstarts rolling in from northern Druce, half-breeds, mixed, you know, not real Nasheenians, even though they have Nasheenian names. And they started buying things up. Accidents started happening.” She pointed the stump of her arm at Nyx, leaned in. “Got a lot of places shut down just cause of accidents. Bought them cheap, after. Some they bought just to close down. Fucking foreigners.”

Nyx considered making out with her, but she wasn’t really Nyx’s type. When the woman’s girlfriend showed up to retrieve her, Nyx was almost relieved, right up until she realized it left her alone in her own head again.

So she drank some more, drank so much she hoped she’d forget about her shitty mother and her shitty sister and her shitty military career and her shitty life.

When she stumbled back into the storefront, long after dark, she knocked her head on the door while trying to close it, and nearly tripped over her own feet. The only sound she heard was Rhys, back in his room, reciting midnight prayer. It was the call to prayer that had sent her home from the cantina. It hurt her head.

Nyx went right for the call box. Picked up the receiver. She knew her sister Kine would be awake because she, too, would be observing midnight prayer. She dialed Kine’s pattern. When there was no answer, she dialed it again. And again.

At some point, Kine picked up.

“Who is this?” Kine asked; suspicious, guarded, as if expecting some sexual deviant or male deserter looking for refuge on the other end.

“I’m your fucking sister,” Nyx said.

“Indeed,” Kine said, “That hasn’t changed.”

Nyx leaned her head against the call box. Her stomach churned. She had no idea anymore why she’d wanted to call her sister. Maybe if she just waited here awhile, she’d remember.

“Nyxnissa, are you drunk?” Kine said. Nyx would say Kine sounded like their mother, but honestly Nyx couldn’t much remember what their mother sounded like anymore. Their mother had taken up working at the birthing compounds for cash after getting kicked out of some government job. She’d died of yellow fever not long after Nyx’s brother’s died at the front.

“You think you look out for me,” Nyx said. “But I look out for you.”

Silence. Bloody silence. Nyx pounded the receiver on the wall and put it to her ear again. “You listen,” Nyx said, “You never had to take care of me.”

“Clearly,” Kine said, coolly, “you give every appearance of taking such wonderful care of yourself.”

“Listen –“

“I have dug you out of too many ditches, Nyxnissa. Carried you out of too many bars and brothels and butchers. Sleep this off and call me in the morning with what you have to say.”

“Too late,” Nyx said. “It’ll be too late… Hey… you’re on the coast. The south coast. Yeah, that’s what I wanted to call about. See… you know about… southern families? Rich ones… the Yazeeds or… Makatar… Muktarata…”

“The Muhktars,” Kine said stiffly. “What are you doing asking about them? What are you mixed up with?”

“Nyx?” Rhys’s voice.

Nyx started. Dropped the receiver. Nyx leaned her head against the wall. She must have lost some time, because the next thing she knew, Rhys was shaking her shoulder, repeating her name.

“Can you hear me?” Rhys said. He put the receiver back on the hook. “Nyx?”

She mumbled something and shuffled back toward her office. He followed her, but she paid him no mind.

“Gonna quit drinking at thirty,” she said.

“Something tells me that’s what you said at twenty-five.”

She crawled underneath her desk, wrapped her arms around herself, and settled in to pass out.

“Nyx?”

She cracked open an eye and saw Rhys squatting before her.

“Too pretty for your own good,” she said, and closed her eye again.

He sighed. “You haven’t overdosed on liquor yet,” he said. “God willing, your luck holds.”

“God has nothing to do with it, Nyx said, and finally, blissfully, passed out.

“Report on the woman you asked about,” Taite said, handing Nyx more slick green paper.

Nyx sat up on the roof of their storefront under a tattered awning, wincing as the long wail of the midday muezzin rolled out over the desert. She wore smoked goggles and was swilling buni spiked with whisky. Anneke sat opposite her, feet on top of a bloody head in a sack, explaining why she needed more cash for bigger guns. Nyx had been setting up supply caches across the country the last couple of years, insurance for bad days. But stockpiling that many goods and weapons was expensive. Anneke had brought in a head from the boards the week before; easy sniper job on a prison escapee, she’d said, and it had paid off.

Nyx took the report and waved a hand at Anneke to still the weapons talk. “Just give me the summary,” Nyx said to Taite.

“I’m giving you a good summary, boss,” Anneke said. “Just half the money from this one for the X32Z10 sand spitter and I’ll –“

“Fine, yes,” Nyx said. “Anneke, go buy something.”

“Hell damn!” Anneke said, slapping her knobby knee. She threw the bloody sack over her shoulder and bounded for the roof hatch so fast Nyx suspected she feared Nyx would change her mind.

“Binyamin is the daughter of a family originally from Hafthah,” Taite said. “Called the so Mahasin.”

“Not Yazeed or Muhktar? Not a Drucian name either, maybe?”

“No, it’s so Mahasain.”

“Not just Mahasin?”

Taite peered at her. “How hungover are you?” he said.

“Still drunk,” she said.

“It’s so Mahasin,” he said, “definitely a compound name. I checked twice to make sure I wasn’t mixing them up with someone else. Rhys did the first research pass. I verified all of it.”

“Strange to keep a breeding compound name over multiple generations,” Nyx said, pouring more whisky into her buni. “Thought they would have dropped the middle part to hide that they all grew up in government care. Government kids are war fodder. If they wanted to build wealth and get investments, they should have dropped the ‘so’ part.”

“Apparently the grandmother made her fortune treating compound diseases,” Taite said. “She was the last compound kid in the family. The rest - the daughters, the grandchildren, were all raised at home.”

“Looking to remember where she came from,” Nyx said. “So they own these chemical plants like she says?”

“Six of them,” Taite said. “Two were blown up in the last four months. Investigations pending, but they weren’t categorized as terrorist attacks, so they’re low on the list for the order keepers. Order keeper reports think it was an inside job. No footage of anyone going in or out of the plant within twelve hours of the blast. No human residue on the bomb.”

“They haven’t heard of gloves?”

Taite shrugged. “Report says the type of explosive it was required an organic trigger. But there was no record of human blood codes on the device at all.”

“Shit,” Nyx said, and now she opened the report, “They used organic burst triggers, then? Those are at least forty years old. Used mostly for mining.”

“Why mining?”

“Something gets blown up that’s not supposed to, it was useful to know which worker fucked up,” Nyx said. “Also prevented them being stolen. Who’d want to leave their blood code all over it unless it was a suicide mission?”

“Looks like somebody figured out how to use them without bleeding all over them.”

Nyx verified the type of device in the order keeper report, and frowned. She had been a sapper in her former military life, and the sort of criminal who had the audacity to use one of these and get away with it intrigued her. As did the woman who wouldn’t put on boxing gloves, but walked onto the mat in a fighter’s stance. She couldn’t help but note that triggering a device like this remotely was nearly impossible unless it wasn’t humans doing the triggering. That left dogs, cats, ravens, parrots, or maybe foxes. A bug could probably do it, too. Any skilled magician could summon a hornet swarm to set off the explosion. But again—every device would have had to be reprogrammed to trigger on contact with that particular organism. It would take a lot of skill to customize every device to react to something other than a human.

“You asked about sisters,” Taite said, pointing to another section of the report. “Here’s where things get good.”

“They weren’t fun before?”

“There are seven sisters,” Taite said. “There’s two compound breeders, both dead of yellow fever. One died in prison four years ago. Three dead at the front. That just leaves the one.”

“Binyamin?”

“No,” Taite said. “There was a Binyamin, but she was the one who died in prison.”

“So we got a job from a dead woman,” Nyx said. “That’s a first.” But not unexpected. She looked at the prison dates for Binyamin, the dead one, and shifted uncomfortably in her seat. The prison listed was in Batul. It was the same prison Nyx had spent a year in when she was convicted of doing black work—selling zygotes for cash.

“The living sister was –“

“An apprentice bel dame,” Nyx said.

“Yeah. Good guess. Did I write that down?”

“No,” Nyx said. She’d seen it when the woman who called herself Binyamin flinched when Nyx tried to hit her. Resisting the urge to block the blow would have been tough for a bel dame apprentice trained to defend herself. And a bel dame apprentice would slide easily and unconsciously into a fighting stance, too.

“So this woman who gave us the job and told us her name is Binyamin is a liar,” Taite said. “Thing is, we don’t have a name for the bel dame apprentice. It got scourged from the record when she enlisted. So whoever you dealt with is some nameless person.”

“But she shares the surname?”

“Maybe,” Taite said. “Seventh sister is adopted. So could be a so Mahasin, or not.”

“Well shit,” Nyx said.

“Maybe we should pass on this one. Feels weird, you know?”

“You have that bug I gave you from her?” Nyx asked.

“Downstairs.”

“Tell it to go ping its owner,” Nyx said. “We’ll take the job.”

Taite blinked at her. “Uh… really?”

“Did I stutter?”

“No, no,” he said. “I just… I mean, why do all this work to figure out if the job is dodgy and then take it knowing it’s dodgy?”

“Cause I’m the boss,” Nyx said.

She told herself she was taking it because of the type of device and the intrigue of an inside job perpetuated by a woman who had the gall to pretend she was someone she wasn’t. It wasn’t about her own sister, and doing something worth a damn for what remained of her toxic, fucked-up family. It wasn’t because she understood vengeance, because any woman trying to fool Nyx into thinking she was someone else probably had a personal issue with something Nyx had done in her past. And it was a very long past.

Nyx closed the report.

As Taite turned to go, a low, mournful wail started up from the west. For a half moment she thought it was the call to prayer coming at some off time, but it came again, louder, and she recognized the whine of a burst siren.

“This fucking day,” Nyx muttered. She heaved herself out of her seat and trotted down to the basement, passing Rhys at his workbench while he packed up his bugs. “They’ll be fine,” she told him, but he secreted them away into various pockets in his burnous regardless. Bugs were expensive, and she supposed he knew she wasn’t going to spend more if they got bombed out.

When she went into the basement, ducking because of the low ceiling, Taite was already there, messing with the radio.

“Hopefully the burst siren is a false positive,” he said. “Com chatter upstairs said there was heavy fighting in Aludra today, so there might be some miasma blowing in triggering the sirens. Oh, I sent your bug off to its owner already.”

Nyx stuffed herself into a ratty overstuffed divan. It sat up against the wall of the big freezer where they kept bodies chilled on days the bounty reclamation office was closed. She rummaged in the cushions for a bottle. Found nothing. She pulled off her goggles and flung them beside her. The radio belched out a misty orange haze that began to solidify into some talking head from the local news.

The ground trembled. Nyx got up and went for the stairs, instinctively yelling, “Rhys!”

“What?” Rhys said as he clattered down the steps, yanking the hatch down behind him.

“You and those fucking bugs,” she muttered, and sat back down. “Anneke already head out?”

“Like a shot,” Rhys said. “Don’t bother calling after her.”

“Anneke would take a hit from a burst and just pick it back up again,” Taite said, switching the radio past two daytime operas and a Kitab education show to arrive at the burst warning station.

Rhys stopped at the bottom of the stairs, gazing into the deep shadows under them. “How did this dead dog get down here?” he said.

A heavy whump sounded above them. Dust and dirt particles sifted into the stale air.

Nyx picked at a tear in the divan, curling the stuffing onto her finger. “Don’t remember notes on dogs,” she said, and laughed because that wasn’t quite true. Any number of shapeshifters who could step into dog skins had been on the bounty boards before.

Taite settled against the wall next to the radio. “It must have come in the back and wandered in. You leave the basement hatch open?” he asked Rhys.

“Why would I?” Rhys said. He knelt beside the dog. Nyx could just make out the shape of it in the dim light. Rhys gently turned it over. Pointed. “There are six dead hornets under here. It triggered the intruder trap. This isn’t a dog. Only a human would trigger the trap I set.”

“Yeah, well, you’re a shitty magician,” Nyx said. “Maybe it’s a mistake. Last thing we need today is a dead shapeshifter.”

“We can have it tested,” Rhys said

“Can’t we just bury it?” Nyx said.

“Come on, Nyx,” Taite said at the same time Rhys said, “No.”

“All you men conspiring against me,” Nyx said. “Remember I still have to re-up your contracts.”

Another burst made the world tremble. Nyx leaned back into the divan and stared at the ceiling. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll report it after the siren’s done.”

Rhys gazed up at the trapdoor.

“What is it?” Nyx said.

“Not sure,” he said. “But I think… I think someone is knocking on the door out there.”

“They can wait for after the raid,” Nyx said. She wished he would stop caring about things, or noticing them. Half the time she thought he’d do better half-drunk than she would. Good for his nerves.

“What if it’s Anneke?” Taite said.

“She could palm herself in,” Rhys said. “Nyx, I really think –“

“After the raid,” Nyx said. “I don’t want to open a door to anyone dumb enough to be out in a raid.”

“It’s probably one of our clients,” Taite muttered.

Nyx said, “Serves them right on both counts, then.”

“We can’t just leave them out there,” Rhys said.

“For fuck’s sake!” Nyx said, pushing herself off the divan. “You so eager to help, why don’t you go up there? But you won’t, will you, because you’re godly and righteous and it’s easier to level guilt and blame than do a damned thing yourself isn’t it?”

She got up and pushed past Rhys, not wanting to see the look on his face. She knocked him out of the way with her shoulder and pounded back up the stairs.

Above, the world outside was eerily still except for the low wail of the sirens. She didn’t like going out during raids. Not just for the obvious reason but because the world was so quiet it felt like being the last person alive. She wondered if that was what hell was like, wandering around on a deserted street, wondering if you were mad, if the war was all over and you were the last person standing.

She went right for the door. A heavy whumping sound came from the north, then the shock wave. It rattled the equipment on the worktables. Loose gun parts and dead bugs pattered all around her feet as she walked.

Nyx hitched one hand behind her, taking hold of the hilt of her scattergun, and opened the door wide with the other, ready to run off whatever dumb kid was looking for shelter. If it was a client, though, maybe she’d look heroic. Maybe they’d tip better next time.

A stout little woman wearing a hijab and intricately embroidered violet housecoat raised her head, and Nyx knew her by the coat long before she caught sight of her pouting, squinty-eyed little face.

“Look what you’ve done, sister,” Kine said as the sirens wailed. “I’ve come here all the way from the coast and gotten my best housecoat dirty. Now what’s this you were saying about the Muhktars?”

Kine complicated things, in the way that only Kine could.

While the air sirens wailed, Kine followed Nyx to her office, and turned up her nose at the empty bottle and dusty interior.

“You live here?” Kine said.

“I do a lot of things here,” Nyx said.

“It’s worse than your last domicile.” Kine kept her hands clasped in front of her, as if afraid that she’d get some contagion or disease if she touched anything. It was probably a good instinct.

“Why does my business concern you?” Nyx said.

“Those are dangerous families you mentioned,” Kine said. Her gaze roved around the office now; at first Nyx figured she was still judgey about things, but the look was keener than that. She was clearly looking for foreign bugs, the type tailored by a magician to spy on people like Kine who had government clearance.

“Turns out the woman I’m working with isn’t part of either family,” Nyx said. “So it was all a false alarm.”

Outside, the burst sirens gave one last mournful wail, then trailed off into silence. Nyx glanced into the outer room. The rest of the team would come up soon.

She opened her arms, trying to herd Kine back to the door. “Raid’s over and I’m fine,” Nyx said. “You should go back to the coast.”

But Kine remained firm. She planted her feet and set her mouth and Nyx knew the only way she’d get her out was to move her bodily, which Nyx was getting ready to do.

“The Muhktars are powerful shapeshifters,” Kine said. “Do you have shapeshifters in your employ who can best them? I can guarantee you don’t, because you must have a license for a shapeshifter, and you’ve always been terribly cheap.”

“Inexpensive, not cheap,” Nyx said, “all my girlfriends will tell you.”

Kine frowned.

“I told you,” Nyx said, “we aren’t dealing with the Muhktars.” But her thoughts drifted back to the dead dog in her cellar. She had thought she had this bel dame apprentice figured out, but now she wasn’t so sure. There were plenty of people who wanted vengeance against Nyx. But how did the dogs fit? Was she using them as reconnaissance, too, instead of bugs?

“Nyx?” Rhys’s voice, from the workroom.

“In my office,” she said.

Rhys came in, Taite just behind him. They stopped short on seeing Kine.

“Rhys, Taite,” Nyx said, “This is my sister Kine. She works at the compounds on the coast. Big fancy government job.”

Kine’s eyes got big. She took a step back on seeing Rhys. “Rhys is not a Tirhani name,” Kine said.

“It isn’t Chenjan either,” Nyx said, “but that’s what he calls himself.”

Kine stared at her. “This is too much,” she said. “You’re employing Chenjans now? Have you sunk so low?”

“I wasn’t aware I could sink any lower in your regard,” Nyx said. “I’m pretty pleased with myself now, actually.”

“I didn’t know you had a sister,” Taite said.

“Just the one,” Nyx said. “It’s enough.”

“So many men here,” Kine muttered.

“Can I get you a drink before you leave?” Nyx asked. “Rhys makes stuff you’d drink. Tea, things like that.”

“We should have lunch,” Kine said. “It’s the proper thing to do.”

“I don’t do lunch,” Nyx said.

“We are sisters. We should go to lunch.”

“She’s your sister,” Rhys said. “You really should go to lunch.”

“See?” Kine said, “Even the Chenjan agrees with me.” She sniffed.

Nyx glared at him. Taite snickered and popped back out of the room, clearly smart enough not to take sides. Unlike some other people.

“We’ll get food on the way to dropping off the dead shifter,” Nyx said. “All right? Rhys, help me bag up that dog.”

It took a good half hour to get the dog bagged and usher Kine out of the storefront. Kine lingered near Rhys’s prayer mat, making a little moue with her mouth that made Nyx fear she was actually going to try and start talking to him, and that wasn’t going to go well.

Finally, the sack with the stiff dog over her shoulder, Nyx strode down the busy streets of Punjai with Kine at her side. She wasn’t sure which was more of a liability—Kine or the dog. Kine kept pace with her, curling her nose at every man and uncovered woman they passed. Kine muttered about cancer and modesty, and how God had decreed women cover themselves to protect them from cancers, and why were all of these women so foolish and why were so many foreign men here, instead of fighting for God?

“Why aren’t we taking the train?” Kine asked as they passed the gated entry for the overhead train. The door was heavily barred; scorch marks stained the face of it.

“Train hasn’t worked in a decade,” Nyx said. “Besides, the office isn’t far.”

The shifter licensing office was twelve blocks away. Nyx stepped nimbly over trash heaps and venom-addled junkies, massive bug carcasses and discarded food wrappers. By the time they reached the broad amber door of the office she had to admit she was pretty hungry after all.

She pushed to the head of the queue, ignoring the hot, startled stares and gaping mouths of the folks waiting ahead of her. Most of the people in line were foreigners, and men at that. They weren’t in a place to complain at her barging in.

Nyx swung the dog carcass onto the table and waved over the paunchy old man behind the counter. He panted his way over, limping heavily on what was clearly a poorly made organic hybrid of a leg, the sort men got when they came back from the front when their families couldn’t afford a proper magician to put a good one back on. He was missing most of the back of his head; it was slathered over in green bug secretions, and he wore what remained of his hair long to try and cover it. The deep grooves of his face were covered in stubble, at least in the places that weren’t too scarred to prevent it.

“Can I help you, bel dame?”

She smirked at that, pleased to be mistaken for what she once was. There was a murmur in the crowd, most of whom were either shifters or mercenaries looking for shifters, likely, and several lanky, hard-bitten types took a step back. She liked the breathing room that being bad afforded her.

“Need this tested,” she said. “Found it in my basement.”

“Basement?” he said, sucking what remained of his front teeth. He pulled a syringe from the front of his apron and jabbed it into the dog’s throat. Withdrawing it, he said, “One moment,” and went into the back.

Kine leaned into her and said, low. “I believe there was a queue, Nyxnissa.”

“You always did draw inside the lines,” Nyx said. “What did that ever get you?”

“Prestigious, reliable, and cancer-free employment,” she said.

“Better not say that too loud,” Nyx said, leaning against the counter while the half dozen people in line pretended not to listen. “Men here’ll eat you for something good as that. And you don’t want to know what the women will do.”

The man reappeared from the back. He put down a big book of green paper on the counter and opened it up with a sigh. “It’s a shifter,” he said. “We will need to log this death.”

“Fuck,” Nyx said. “How much is the fine?”

“You found it in your basement?” he said, peering at her.

“Listen,” she said, “It triggered one of my magician’s traps. I have a whole team who’ll tell you the same. It’s all legal.”

“I’m sure,” he said. She didn’t like the way he mushed up his face, like he was just tolerating her answer, knowing the law was on her side as a Nasheenian woman, but she let it slide.

“Anyway,” she said, “I’m in the market for a shifter anyway. You know anyone?”

The man raised his brows. “You’ve brought a dead shapeshifter here, which you admit was killed in your own basement, and want me, a shifter, to recommend a good shifter to you?”

“Yeah,” Nyx said.

The man clucked his tongue and bundled the dog back into the sack and walked away to the back room again.

Nyx glanced over at Kine. “What did I say?”

“Only what you always say.”

Nyx looked around the room, sizing up the ropy mercenaries and foreign shifters. There were a couple tables at the front of the store where a big Mhorian, two skinny Drucians, and a one-armed Heidian were playing cards. A young Nasheenian sat alone near them, looking like she was halfway to drinking herself to death.

Nyx sat up on the counter and said. “Hey! I’m hiring shifters over on Hadya Street. Be good with a gun. Not squeamish. Reliable.” She hopped off the counter and started to the door.

“Fucking Nasheenians.”

She turned to see who’d said it, but the card players were all staring hard at their cards, and the folks in line were staring straight ahead.

The Nasheenian kid was laughing, though. “Yes we are,” she said. “We sure are.”

“I pay cash,” Nyx said, “or bugs, for contract bounty work. Your choice. The fucking is extra.”

Kine made a little squealing sound at that, which made the whole trip worth it.

“Let’s go to lunch,” Nyx said.

Rhys never liked the jobs Nyx gave him, but he didn’t like starving, either. He told himself, often, that he wasn’t here because of the work. He was just biding his time until he got real employment. But no matter how many doors he palmed or letters he wrote to cities with more gainful employment, the answers he got back—when he got them—were resoundingly negative; sometimes violently so. He’d had no idea how many pejoratives Nasheenians had for men, and Chenjan men in particular, until he had started looking for a job.

But now, for the first time ever, he had a job offer in his pocket for a team other than Nyx’s. It should have been the boon he was waiting for, but he’d held onto it now for two days. It was a job on the interior, working as a translator for the Nasheenian foreign affairs department. Why he hadn’t drawn up his resignation the day he received the letter, he wasn’t certain.

Rhys rubbed the paper of the invitation between his fingers in his pocket as he walked with Taite to the library at the center of town, though it wasn’t a library anymore so much as it was a woman behind a heavy door who sat at a kiosk connecting Punjai to real archival collections in the interior. No one was fool enough to keep anything of value in the border towns, not when the Chenjans could spill over and occupy it at any moment. The last time Chenja had taken hold of the city was just fifteen years before. They’d gotten halfway to Mushtallah before they were turned back by a sea of magicians. His mentor, Yah Tayyib, had told him that story often. The subtext of it wasn’t lost on Rhys. Rhys didn’t want to forget which side he’d been born on; he considered Chenja the morally superior country, of course. But the Nasheenians didn’t want him to forget where he came from, either.

So when he and Taite stepped up to the door of the library and a large woman knocked into Rhys so hard he fell, it was by no means an unexpected or unprecedented occurrence.

Rhys hit the ground hard. The woman leered over him, her great one-eyed face eclipsing the sun.

Taite babbled an apology.

“Watch your step, child,” the woman said. “Don’t go looking into matters that don’t concern you or your employer. She should be in prison, and if she keeps on with this job she took, that’s where she’ll end up. Free advice.”

Beside her was a big yellow dog; its head was as high as her waist. It growled at Rhys while wagging its tail, a strange mix of signals that he couldn’t parse.

She pulled up the hood of her brown burnous and stepped over him, back into the busy street. The dog lopped after her.

Taite helped Rhys up. “Nyx has a way of making friends,” Taite said.

“Why does she choose these jobs instead of sticking with the bounty boards? At least with the bounty boards we have legal support and backup.”

“She likes to live dangerously,” Taite said.

“I don’t,” Rhys said. He pulled his hand from his pocket.

Taite laughed. “Then I don’t know why you signed on with Nyx.”

“Some days I don’t either,” Rhys said. Then, “I have another job offer.”

Taite looked at him sharply. “Really?” he said.

“Is that odd?”

“No, just… well, I guess it is. Hard for foreign men to get jobs. I mean, I know. I’ve tried.”

“It’s for the government.”

“Have you told Nyx yet?”

“No.”

“Well, maybe wait to tell her until you’re sure,” Taite said. “She’ll fire you on the spot.”

They pushed inside the library and waited in the short line to speak to the librarian at the kiosk. They found the information they wanted about the address linked to the bug Nyx had given Taite fairly quickly; she printed most of it out, which was expensive, but not as expensive as having it coded into a bug. That said, paper was easier to hack. Rhys hoped the woman and her dog weren’t just waiting around to jump him again.

They made it back to the storefront relatively unscathed, just in time for mid-afternoon prayer. Rhys left the papers on Nyx’s desk and unrolled his prayer rug as the call to prayer moved out over the city. Leaving Nyx’s team should have been an easy decision, so why was he hesitating?

When he finished and stood he noted that Taite was watching some radio opera, chin in hand, while his com console ticked away at recording some other hunter’s com channel that Nyx had put him on. She was always spying on former team members and stealing their jobs. Taite was Ras Tiegan, and there was no Ras Tiegan church in Punjai, but Rhys had seen him praying at night. They shared a god, but not a faith. Still, Taite was observant of his own beliefs. It was a good start.

“You ever been in love?” Taite asked Rhys.

Rhys rolled up his prayer rug, considering both the question and who was asking it. “With God, certainly,” Rhys said.

“Everyone loves God,” Taite said, “and God loves most of us back. But what about people? That’s tougher.”

“I suppose it is,” Rhys said. “I put my trust in God for that.”

Anneke pushed open the front door, arms brimming with packages that no doubt carried more weaponry than was needed for eight armies. Rhys went over to the hatch leading into the basement and pulled it open for her. She grunted and dropped her packages there, then started running them down to the basement one at a time.

“There’s no rules to it, love,” Taite said while two women declared their undying affection on the radio. “No sense. At least with God, you know what to do to keep his love, to make sure you’re on his good side.”

“You’re too young for love anyhow,” Rhys said. “A young man like you –“

“You aren’t that much older,” Taite said. “And anyway, in Ras Tieg I’d be married by now.”

“Marriage and love can be different things.”

Anneke popped her head up from the basement. “Sounds like something you read from a book,” she said.

“Spare us your own treatise on love,” Rhys said. “I expect you learned it from Nyx, and that means you’ll turn something sacred into something –“

“Nyx would tell you love is wanting to fuck someone you can’t,” Anneke said.

“- coarse,” Rhys finished, and grimaced.

Taite said, “Well, that explains why you don’t have a lot of dates, Anneke.”

“What do you know?” Anneke said. “Here’s some advice Nyx gave me early on. I’ll give it to you, kids. As long as you’re in this business, don’t fall for anyone. The more you care about a thing, the more it can be used against you. That counts for when you get out, too. People keep grudges a long time in this business.”

Rhys said, “Well, I don’t intend to do this long.”

“That’s what everyone says,” Anneke said. She shrugged. “No offense.”

“I’m not like you,” Rhys said. “I’m going to have a family someday, and a respectable job again. This is temporary. We aren’t all like you and Nyx.”

“I’d like to be more like Nyx,” Anneke said, “But I ain’t. She may not live long, but she’ll live good.”

Someone knocked at the door.

“I’ll get it,” Rhys said quickly. He was ready to exit the conversation.

He opened the door just in time to see a blue-burnoused woman scuttle off down the street. A brown papered package lay on the stoop.

Rhys bent to take the package. A thin, humming whine filled her head and thrummed deep within his bones. He froze.

“Don’t move!” Anneke said.

He was half bent over, arm extended toward the package. The paper trembled. He let out a long, slow breath.

Anneke came up behind him, padding softly along the floor. She let out a low whistle. “You are so fucked,” she said.

When Nyx got back from lunch, still snarling and spitting at some stupid thing Kine had said about modesty, only a little tipsy from a couple of beers, she found Rhys bowing over a bomb and a Nasheenian woman fighting off two dogs on the stoop. The scene was so strange that Nyx actually hesitated mid-step while her brain tried to put the scene together into a story that made sense.

In that moment of hesitation, she gave in and chose action over reason.

Nyx pulled her pistol and shot at the dogs. She didn’t hit them, but the noise was enough to scare them off. The Nasheenian woman saw her with the pistol and reached for something. Nyx front kicked her in the chest. The woman was about Nyx’s size, and she stumbled, but didn’t go over.

“You stand down,” Nyx said. “Don’t cause trouble. I won’t hurt you. Rhys! Don’t you move.”

She turned to Rhys while keeping the woman in her peripheral vision.

Big drops of sweat trickled from Rhys’s face and plopped on the package below him.

She set her gun down on her right—far from the woman—and flattened herself on the ground in front of the package. She felt the twinge in the air, the same feeling that had probably saved Rhys from getting his face blown off. He wasn’t a sapper, but any magician with half a brain would recognize the dissonance as some bug-triggered device.

Rhys was pretty, yes, but not stupid. “How long you been like this?” she said.

“An hour!” Anneke said from inside. “Sent Taite to get you.”

“Didn’t see him,” Nyx said. She blew a bit of air at the underside of the package. Dust clung to the shiny resin that escaped the seams of the paper.

She tugged one of the needles from her hair—she kept three poisoned needles secured there as a matter of course - and used it work the paper loose. A bead of Rhys’s sweat plopped onto the paper above. She felt his breath. An hour in a bowed position like that was an impressive feat. She didn’t consider how much longer he could hold it.

Nyx worked the paper back and peered inside. For once, no one was saying anything, and she found that very soothing.

The guts of the bomb were familiar: a cube of resin covered over in paper, and inside the resin, a series of organic filaments connected by orange thorn bugs engineered for exactly this purpose. Too much movement would trigger the filaments, which would cause the bugs to explode, throwing poisonous, buggy shrapnel for about ten paces in every direction.

She pushed the needle deep into the package and touched its poison tip to the little filaments, just enough to spread the poison from the needle to the filament. The organic tissue sucked it up. She waited, counting her breaths. If the bomb was made with the right mix of organics, the poison should do its job breaking down the filaments connecting the bugs in about fifty seconds. But that was a big if. She hadn’t dealt with one of these in a while.

Nyx counted to sixty, then levered herself up slowly onto her hands and eased her body up over the package. She rolled her eyes up at Rhys and said. “Straighten up and stand back.”

If it went off, her body would take the brunt of it.

Rhys let out his breath and levered himself back. His whole body shook. How he’d held that position so long, she wasn’t certain. He’d have done well under torture conditions.

Nyx waited, but felt no humming in the air, no taut snap that told her the mechanism inside had sensed any further movement. She sat back on her knees and picked up the package. Shook it.

Rhys and Anneke flinched inside the doorway.

“We’re good,” Nyx said. She pulled off her burnous and wrapped it around the package. It would need to be properly taken apart and disposed of. She glanced over at the Nasheenian woman who’s been tangling with the dogs. “So who the hell are you?”

“I’m here from Hadjara,” she said. “You called her last night and she sent me.”

Kine said, “Just how many people did you call when you were drunk last night, Nyxnissa?”

“I don’t remember calling Hadjara,” Nyx said.

The woman handed her a piece of paper, its edges already starting to flake away. Nyx opened it and read an address for a brothel on the other side of city and a time listed that would put her there just after dark. At the bottom it read: I have information about that apprentice you asked about. As she finished reading it, the paper disintegrated more rapidly. She shook it, and it burst into a confetti of tattered brown fragments.

“I’m off,” the woman said, eying Nyx’s package.

“What?” Nyx said, hefting it at her. “You had enough fun?”

“Plenty, thank you,” she said. “Call off those dogs next time.”

“They aren’t mine,” Nyx said.

“Regardless,” the woman said. She pulled up her hood and ducked back down the alley.

“Is this a usual practice?” Kine said, “bombs on your doorstep, strange women arriving from alleys to battle with dogs?”

“Pretty much,” Nyx said. “Let’s get this sorted.” She pushed inside. Rhys was already in the back, presumably sitting down or praying or whatever it was Rhys did after almost getting blown up. “It’s gotten hot here,” she said to Anneke as she walked to her office. “Let’s pack up.”

“Where?” she said.

“Right where they don’t want us,” Nyx said. “We’re going to Binyamin’s happy home in Alabbas. You got the address from examining the beetle, right?”

“But, uh, didn’t they just try and kill us, boss?”

“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Nyx said. “I have an idea she was gunning for all of you more than me.”

Anneke said, “You think she was going to blow us up and frame you?”

“I’m thinking a lot of things right now,” Nyx said. “And if she wants to fuck with us, I’m going to go fuck with her family.”

“Nyxnissa,” Kine said from the door of the office. “It sounds as if this is becoming a personal vendetta. Might I remind you this is just work. As you told me, it’s not even work for a powerful family. Why not let it go?”

“She’s trying to do me in,” Nyx said. “You’d rather I sit here and get drunk?”

Kine pursed her mouth.

“Yeah,” Nyx said. “Fuck these people. You know what happens when you get a reputation for getting walked over, Kine? No, you fucking don’t. I do. Somebody fucks with you and your people, you fuck them up, or they will come at you again, and then your enemies hear about it, and then you’ve got a hundred other bounty hunters and women with grudges and dead brothers you brought in, and you’re fucked. What protects me and my people is reputation. This is about reputation.”

Nyx was shaking, and she paused to get control over herself. She knew this game. This was the prison game, and it had followed her own here now with Binyamin’s sister whatever-her-name-was. She had fucked somebody up in prison, and now their family was trying to fuck up Nyx.

“Why not give it up?” Kine said. “Surely I can find you a position on the coast, perhaps as a janitor –“

“Fuck you,” Nyx said. “A fucking janitor? Go fuck yourself. This is what I’m good at. You go home, Kine. Anneke, go find Taite and tell him we’re moving out. I’ll go shake Rhys out of his catshit mood and get him moving.”

“Nyx –“ Anneke said.

“You want another job? Another employer? I’ll break your contract right now.”

“Uh, no, boss,” Anneke said. “Like you said, we need a shifter on the team first. Before Alabbas. Because, the dogs, you know.”

“Fuck!” Nyx said.

Anneke held up her hands. “Don’t blame me!”

Nyx knew the brothel address from the paper Hadjara had sent well, because she used to do some black work for the women and men who worked there back in her pre-prison days when she was ferrying stuff from Punjai to Faleen and back inside her womb.

She had dismantled the bomb and sent it to a friend from processing to see if she could find out who’d made it. Bomb-making was still a specialized profession, and sometimes bomb makers’ styles were so distinctive that every bomb acted like a signature. Nyx had hesitated at the threshold to Rhys’s room before she left, and decided not to go in. Let him cool off awhile. Taite had returned, and was on board with running a check-up on the bakkie and getting their supplies packed up.

“Remember to get Anneke to pack food,” Nyx had told him, “not just guns.”

Kine was tougher to get rid of. She’d ranted more about the powerful families of Alabbas until Nyx threatened to call in order keepers and tell them Kine was trespassing. That had earned Nyx a dark look, and she suspected Kine wasn’t going to talk to her for a long time after this.

But there was more important shit on the line that her sister’s approval. So now she trudged alone through the dark toward the warm, rosy glow of the brothel. She used the long walk—paired with a quick rickshaw ride that she haggled down to a reasonable fare—to try and remember when she had called Hadjara. She hadn’t made many friends back when she was a bel dame. She’d tell anyone who asked that she hadn’t fucking been there to make friends, but Hadjara had been young and funny and tolerant of Nyx’s grim humor. It helped that Hadjara was just a clerk working in the bel dame offices, not a bel dame or apprentice. Nyx had found talking to her to be a useful palate cleanser after a long day of serious talk about the best way to bleed out a body. Sometimes you forgot you were a human when you were a bel dame.

Nyx knocked at the door at the top of the stairs. A slit in the door opened, and Nyx saw one grizzled old eye peering out.

“Fuck me,” the woman on the other side said, and the door opened. A skinny, hunched old woman with a tangle of white hair stood on the other side. She carried a cane with a big red polished rock on the end and held up her arms to Nyx. “Thought you were long dead,” the woman said.

“I’m tough to kill, Morda,” Nyx said. “Is Hadjara here?”

“Sure,” Morda said. “Come on in. Best place to find a woman to talk politics at without getting a bullet between the eyes.” She pointed a finger at her own forehead. “In, in, let’s go.”

Nyx followed her inside.

The evening was still early, and there were only a few women at the bar. A young, beautiful Nasheenian man tended bar. He was most assuredly over sixteen, which raised Nyx’s brows. She turned to look at Morda, who waved her fingers at Nyx. “Not full Nasheenian,” Morda said. “He’s a half-breed. I have papers. All very legal.”

“Sure,” Nyx said. “Whatever. I don’t do that sort of work anymore anyway.”

“Not unless contracted, eh?” Morda said. “Have a drink on us. I will get Hadjara.”

Nyx ordered whisky from the boy at the bar. He had the sense to give her a double take. “Not here for you,” she assured him. She could not help looking like what she was, or perhaps like what she had been. Boys always sensed it. It was why she so often had to go through their female kin to get to them back when she was a bel dame hunting down deserters like this one. Morda had good forgeries—she’d seen some of them—and she suspected this boy’s was on par with that.

A man came in from the hall; a big Mhorian man with a mane of yellow dreadlocks and spidery blue tattoos running across his face. For a half moment Nyx wondered if he worked there, because it had been a long time since she took a man that big to bed, but he was shabbily dressed and didn’t set his attention on her immediately. A patron, then.

She went back to her drink and was surprised when he sat down next to her instead of slinking out the back like most foreign men did at brothels, like talking and fucking was shameful.

“I heard you were looking for a shifter,” he said. His accent was thick. If she had to guess, he hadn’t been in Nasheen long.

“My shit isn’t your business.”

“I’m looking for work,” he said. “I remember you from the shifter licensing office. Morda said you were all right.”

She sized him up again. “Go to the storefront like anybody else if you want to interview for a job. The fuck you doing at a brothel?”

“I do work for Morda,” he said. “She had me run an errand for Hadjara. She will give you a reference.”

“You apply like anybody else,” she said. “You ain’t special.”

He drank his beer all in one go. She watched him glug it down, imagined gripping that wide neck. She shook her head. She needed a fuck like she needed water right now, and fucking anyone would do, wouldn’t it?

“I’m Khos,” he said.

“I don’t give a shit,” she said.

His expression was oddly pained, but he shrugged and stood. He lumbered out the door, and she relaxed a little. Strange men soliciting work in brothels was the last thing she needed right now. But he was a shifter, yeah, and if Morda spoke for him he might be a good quick fix for Alabbas.

Morda came out with Hadjara, and Nyx stood. Hadjara had grown out her dark hair since Nyx had last seen her. It was braided close against her scalp. She was older, too; over thirty now, probably. Age suited her; the fine lines and deeper frown and harder edges that came with seeing too much shit under two suns gave her some character. She was a little too pretty for Nyx’s taste, and a little too upbeat, but Nyx was reconsidering.

“Thanks, Morda,” Hadjara said. “You want to find a room Nyx? Had one set aside. Bar tab’s on me.”

“All right,” Nyx said. The vibe in the brothel wasn’t bad, but she was still concerned about her lack of memory.

“You know that shifter?” she asked Morda, jabbing her finger at the door. “The Mhorian?”

“Khos?” Morda said. “Yes, he does odd work for us. He was here to run a message for Hadjara. I told him to speak to you. Was that all right?”

“Might give me some warning.”

Morda showed her teeth. “Don’t tell me he intimidated you, Nyx.”

“Not a fan of big men,” Nyx said.

“I can attest that this particular man is well-equipped for a number of useful jobs,” Morda said, and cackled. “From the look on your face, you could use more than talk tonight.”

“Another time,” Nyx said.

Nyx followed Hadjara to a private room at the back, equipped with plush divans, a big bed, open shower, and closet stuffed with illegal pamphlets and manifestos. Brothels were a hotbed of political activity in Nasheen, and more political parties and revolution-mongering probably went on there than fucking. Morda had told her awhile back that early laws related to brothels made them exempt from government surveillance—an early attempt to curb a very lucrative bribery ring that had targeted male politicians before the war. No one had bothered to change the law in all that time—being busy with other shit—and so brothels had become one of the safer places to talk about what sort of shit one was going to put down or blow up.

Nyx sat on a divan and put her feet up.

“Drink?” Hadjara said, moving to the ample liquor cabinet.

“You know I do,” Nyx said. “But first tell me when exactly I called you.”

“You didn’t.”

“That’s both a relief and a signal I should probably shoot you.”

Hadjara laughed. “We both know you can’t hit anything, Nyx.”

“So what is this about?”

“You’ve triggered a lot of discussion among the bel dame council,” Hadjara said, pouring them both a whisky. She brought the glasses over. “And you did ask me to report to you if you came up in bel dame discussions.”

“Friendly arrangement,” Nyx said. “You do what you like.”

“I like you,” Hadjara said. “I wanted you to know.

Nyx balanced her drink on her knee and waited for Hadjara to drink first.

“So they going to kill me or what?”

“They’re afraid to have you working for that family in Alabbas,” Hadjara said. Her gaze moved to the door once, fast, then at the floor. That put Nyx on edge. “There was a bel dame apprentice associated with that family, and she had a very bad reputation. I looked her up for you.”

“And I didn’t even have to call,” Nyx said dryly. “Hadjara, we haven’t talked in a year, and you’re stationed all the fuck away in Mushtallah. That means it took you at least a day to get here by train, which is also expensive. You could have sent a letter, even encoded a com to my com tech. Why a personal visit?”

Hadjara lifted her glass, and Nyx noted that her hand was trembling. “I’m sorry,” Nyx.

“Goddammit,” Nyx said. She pulled her pistol and leapt off the divan, putting the divan between her and the door. “At least tell me her name,” she said. “The bel dame apprentice. The one trying to frame me for this catshit that’s about to go down. One name before I kill you or they do.”

Hadjara’s eyes filled. Nyx heard footsteps pounding up the stairs.

“Rasim Muhktar,” Hadjara said, and the door burst open.

Nyx shot first. But their aim was better. She ducked as they came in firing. They hit Hadjara in the head and chest.

Nyx scrambled across the floor to the big wardrobe stuffed with pamphlets and pulled it down behind her for cover. It was heavy, and fell like a massive tree. The crash made the whole room shudder. Nyx glimpsed four women in the doorway, and let off another couple of rounds in their general direction. She glanced at the window. It covered in paper, probably lined with an organic filter, too, to keep out bugs and noise at the very least—people at the worst.

She let off a few more shots that, predictably, hit nothing, and huddled behind the wardrobe for another breath. Two options—fight out through the front or take a chance that she could pass through the window without getting fried by it.

Getting shot hurt. But getting fried or - at the very least - stunned by the window filter had a far higher chance of ending her stand here quite permanently and negatively.

“Fuck it,” she said, and pulled her scattergun from her back with one hand and her sword with the other. Swing and shoot.

She twisted her body so she was headed toward them shoulder-first, giving them the leanest target possible while firing her scattergun. One woman dropped. Another took cover in the hall. A bullet thudded into Nyx’s right shoulder; another hissed past her ear. She felt a hot, burning pain and splash of warmth on her neck.

Nyx mashed the closest woman’s face with a palm-heel strike and butted the other in the jaw with the end of her scattergun. Not satisfied that they were down quite to her liking, Nyx shot them both again and slogged toward the first one who’d gone down and lay clutching her gut and pissing in her own rapidly pooling blood.

“That was a friend of mine,” Nyx said, and shot her in the face.

Nyx grabbed one of their guns; a much fancier one than she was used to, with at least ten more shots in it. The barrel was sleek, skinned in an organic sheath. It molded itself to her hand. She shot out into the hall, aiming high for the ceiling, and heard a shot in return from her left, giving away the location of the fourth and final woman.

Nyx rounded the corner, keeping close to the wall, and came around the corner into the main room just in time to see the woman sloughing off her clothes and starting to shift. Long strings of mucus bled from her eyes and mouth as her body folded in on itself; the hair on her arms and neck grew darker and longer as her face elongated.

Nyx shot her mid-shift. The twisted body dropped. Nyx surveyed the rest of the room. Blood smeared the floor. The glasses behind the bar were broken. But she saw no other bodies. Hopefully Morda and her crew had had time to hole up in their rooms.

She knelt next to the partially-changed woman. The woman was huffing mucus now. Her ears were curled up, and the whites of her eyes had been nearly swallowed.

“I don’t take kindly to people trying to kill me,” Nyx said, “Or killing my friends.” She drove her sword through the woman’s still mostly-human hand, the fingers slightly truncated, the nails thicker and sharper now, but not fully dog yet.

The woman whined.

Nyx’s ear was starting to burn in earnest now; her shoulder throbbed. She wondered how much of the ear she’d lost to the bullet, but didn’t dare put her hand up to it yet. The wound in her shoulder was more serious, and bleeding profusely. The pain was starting to register properly, and she let her grip on the sword go lax.

“Here is what I promise,” Nyx said. “I’m going to leave you here to bleed out or get chopped up by Morda and her crew, or even, if you’re lucky, just tossed out the back where your friends will find you. I’m doing that because I want them to know that I’m coming for them, and that Nyxnissa so Dasheem takes no shit from anyone. You put a hit out on me, I hit back.”

Nyx yanked her sword from the woman’s hand and sheathed the blade. She stood as blood drooled down her arm, and staggered to the door of the brothel, which still hung open. She clattered down the steps, scattergun still dangling from her one good hand. She tried to get a rickshaw, but none of them would stop for her. She supposed if she drove a rickshaw, she wouldn’t stop for her either.

Her vision swam. She pushed her bad hand up through her shirt in some vain hope to ease up the flow of the blood. There was surely a hedge witch around here who could patch her up.

Instead she stumbled into a bar and demanded a drink. When they didn’t bring one, she hefted her scattergun at the barkeep. They passed over one whisky, then another, and she barely got down a third drink before the order keepers showed up and asked her to vacate the premises.

“You got no better shit to do?” Nyx yelled at the beefy women. “No bodies in a gutter somewhere? No burglaries? No brawls? You coming here to interrupt a bleeding woman trying to have a drink. You know who I am?” She waved the gun at them, oblivious to the weapons at their hips. Even drunk - especially drunk—she was more than confident she could take them.

Blackness rode the edges of her vision, and she blinked hard, shook her head. “I just need another drink,” she said. She turned from them and banged her glass on the counter.

The bar woman took the glass with shaking hands and refilled it. Nyx heard the order keepers talking in low voices behind her. Let them try and remove her. Just try it.

“Excuse me, I work for her.”

Nyx turned at the voice. She knew the accent. It was the fucking Mhorian man. For all his bulk, he came into the room with head bowed and shoulders hunched, his gaze on the floor, like he was just some penitent little fuck.

“The fuck do you want?” she said. She picked up her glass, but it tumbled from her fingers and shattered on the floor. “For fuck’s sake,” she muttered. She reached for it, and saw long streamers of blood flowing down her arm. Why was her wound bleeding so badly? It was just a scratch, nothing. Need to find a hedge witch and get fixed up, that’s all.

She stared at the blood mixing with the whisky on the floor, and had a sudden jarring flashback to another bar, another night, somewhere on the Chenjan front. Nyx heaved back against the bar as her legs trembled. She vomited.

“I’ve got you,” the Mhorian said, and took her by the shoulder. “I’ll take her home,” he said.

She punched him in the arm, but her strength was waning. She gazed at the vomit on the floor and wondered how so much blood had gotten into it.

“That women is fucked,” one of the order keepers said.

Nyx laughed. “You’ve no idea,” she said.

“I’m taking you back to Hadya street,” the Mhorian man said. “Will you come with me? We’ll go slow. Perhaps we’ll find a rickshaw.”

“We going to fuck?” she said, pawing at his face. She left bloody fingerprints on his cheek. His face was so serious.

“Maybe later,” he said.

“I’m holding you to that,” she said, and that was the last clear memory she had for some time.

Rhys had just settled in to sleep after evening prayer when someone banged on the door. He lay awake staring at the ceiling, waiting for Taite to get it. Anneke was out gambling, but he could hear the radio on in the workroom, and that meant Taite was still awake.

The pounding came again. Louder this time.

“Get the door,” Rhys muttered. He had written his resignation letter for Nyx and left it in her office, but she wasn’t home yet, and he wanted to be soundly asleep when she finally got home and read it. He wasn’t sure how she would react. Would she throw him out right away, like Taite said? He had saved some money, and he might be able to float for a while until the government job sent him a train ticket and stipend.

The knocking went on and on. He heard a voice yelling now; a male voice, which was unusual.

Rhys sighed and rolled out of bed. He pulled on a burnous and went out into the workroom. The radio was still on, but Taite wasn’t there. The trapdoor to the basement was open. Rhys called down into the basement. “Do you hear the door, Taite?”

“What?” Taite yelled.

Rhys said, “Never mind, I’ll get it,” and pulled his burnous close. The air got much cooler at night, and no one had bothered with a fire. Without him to nurse them all, this place would fall apart. Let it fall apart, he thought. Maybe the world will be a better place.

With Nyx and Anneke both out, he wasn’t just going to open the door to anyone, not this time. He’d learned that lesson one too many times, most recently this morning when he was nearly blown up. Instead he pulled open the viewing port on the face of the door and stood just to the left of it as Nyx had taught him, just in case somebody tried to shove a gun through it.

The dim orange light of the glow worm lantern above the door showed him a grim picture. A huge, moon-faced Mhorian man had one arm wrapped around Nyx’s waist. She was covered in blood; half her ear was gone. Her eyes were glassy and the pupils were unevenly dilated.

Rhys threw open the door and helped the Mhorian bring her inside. “What happened?” he asked.

“She was shot,” the Mhorian said. “I think it was a smart bug, not a regular bullet.”

“Put her down here,” Rhys said. “Shut the door.”

The man laid Nyx down on the floor of the foyer. Rhys pulled up her bloody tunic to reveal the breast binding beneath. He ran his hands downwards from the wound until he reached the bottom of her rib cage, and felt a soft, niggling tremor in his hands. He told the bug inside her chest to stop its tunneling, and felt it respond.

After closing the door, the Mhorian knelt beside him. “You a magician?” he asked.

“Yes,” Rhys said. “We need to get this bug out. It’s done damage to her internal organs. I don’t know how she’s still standing.”

“Heard she was a bel dame,” the man said.

“Who are you, exactly?” Rhys said.

“Khos Khadija. Saw her in the bar. She had some trouble with order keepers.”

“They did this?” Rhys couldn’t imagine order keepers surviving an encounter with Nyx unless there was an army of them.

“No, long story. What can I do?”

“Go in the back, get some hot water from the tap. I’ll need a knife. You’ll find one in the kitchen back there.”

“What’s going on?” Taite said. He came in from the workroom, wiping his hands on a rag.

“I’ll need red bug salve,” Rhys said. “Make up that spidermite tea.”

“Shit,” Taite said, dropping the rag. He ran back into the workroom.

Rhys tried to redirect the bug inside Nyx’s ribcage to repair some damage while they waited, but whoever had programmed it was a far more powerful magician than him.

Nyx was drooling blood and babbling nonsense about fields of body parts and black suns. He chanced a look at her face and a dagger of fear cut through his body. What if he lost her? What if she died right here under his care, after all she had done to keep him safe? For all the horror and madness she had exposed him to, she had taken him in when no one else would. He wanted her to tell him now it would be all right, and he hated himself for that.

“Concentrate,” he muttered, and closed his eyes. He directed the bug to start pushing up through Nyx’s abdomen, moving it past major organs. When he opened his eyes he could see it bulging there against her skin, slightly smaller than the bullet casing that it had ridden in on.

The Mhorian handed Rhys a knife and set a bowl of water next to him.

Rhys said, “Hold her down,” and was suddenly glad to have this huge man here to hold Nyx because neither he nor Taite would have been able to do it.

Rhys sunk the knife into Nyx’s belly. She thrashed and swore, though it was not his name she used. He heard a litany of names from her, and more creative curses than she had yet used.

Khos pressed her down with one hand on her good shoulder, the other on her opposite hip. Even injured, though, she was strong, and it almost wasn’t enough. Rhys sliced open her skin and popped the bug out into his palm. It was a green-backed, wormy little thing with a mouth full of teeth. The mucus it secreted stung his skin, so he dropped it into the hot water.

Taite came in with the tea.

“Help me get her to drink it,” Rhys said.

It took all three of them to get the tea down. Rhys suspected they would have had more luck if he dumped it into a whisky. Rhys took the salve from Taite and spread it over the wound he’d made, which began to sizzle and mend itself almost immediately. It was an expensive concoction he’d gotten from his mentor, Yah Tayyib, and worth using now. He cut open her tunic over the original bullet wound and put salve there too, and slathered more onto her ear. She was still a mess, but she wasn’t bleeding anymore.

“Can you pick her up?” Rhys asked Khos.

“Think she’ll bite me?” Khos asked.

Rhys peered at Nyx’s face. Her eyelids fluttered, and she was whispering something about taxes and bomb squads.

“Maybe we’ll just try and walk her to her room,” Rhys said.

Rhys on one side, Khos on the other, they half-walked, half-dragged Nyx to her cot at the back of her office and laid her down. She had lost a sandal somewhere, so Rhys took off the remaining one, and covered her in a light blanket. He moved to the brazier at the corner of the room and used a handful of bugs to start a fire.

When he turned around, he saw Khos sitting next to Nyx. She was snoring softly now.

“I’m Rhys,” Rhys said to him, holding out a hand.

“Khos,” the man said, taking his wrist.

“Yes, you told me.” Rhys sat beside him. “You know Nyx.”

“Only met her tonight,” Khos said, “in a brothel.”

Well, that explained a lot, Rhys thought. “You have a place to stay?” Rhys asked. He’d been a foreign man in Nasheen long enough to know what the answer probably was.”

“Sometimes,” Khos said.

“You can stay the night,” Rhys said. “Extra bed in the back. Taite’s the kid at the com. Anneke is out tonight, but she does weapons, sniper work, that sort of thing.”

“That’s nice of you,” Khos said. “Haven’t met many nice people here.”

“Well, I’m not Nasheenian,” Rhys said.

Khos grinned. “I can see that.” He nodded at Nyx. “She be all right?”

“Probably,” Rhys said. He hesitated. “If she isn’t, we’ll all need to get out of here quickly. You understand?”

“Yeah,” he said. “They’ll blame us.”

“Yes,” Rhys said. “You want to clean up? Her blood’s all over you.”

Khos looked down at his large, bloody hands. Her blood was smeared across his face and tunic. “Thank you, yes,” he said. “Back there?”

“Yeah, past the kitchen,” Rhys said.

When Khos was gone Rhys lay down next to Nyx’s cot and listened to her snore. He stared at the ceiling and clasped his hands over his stomach. He hated her, so why did it hurt to see her get what she deserved? This was the life she’d chosen. And she would keep choosing it. She would come home every day bloody and drunk and spouting nonsense. Resigning was the only way to be free of her. Distance was the only way he could get himself to stop caring. Otherwise he’d just be here day after day at her bedside, watching her destroy herself.

“Rhys?” Nyx reached down and took his hand.

Rhys didn’t protest. He stared at her filthy, broken nails, the rough callouses, the smears of dried blood and the rough, lined skin and squeezed her hand back.

“Nyx,” he said, and it was a sigh.

“I need to piss,” she said.

He let go of her hand, and went to find her a bucket.

Nyx woke with a start, still reeling from a terrible dream about being eaten alive by maggots. She swung her legs out of cot and dry-heaved. She saw a neat bedroll on the floor beside her, and had a dim memory of Rhys lying next to her all night. She stumbled to her desk. Her arm ached, and she stank terribly. She rubbed at her eyes and dug through her desk drawers.

“There’s no whisky in there,” Rhys said from the doorway. He held a plate of fried plantains that smelled great.

“Catshit,” she said.

He set the tray down on her cot. “I’ll get you tea.”

“Buni, at least, for fuck’s sake.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“For what?” she said. Her head felt stuffed with honey. Her mouth felt like she’d set it on fire sometime the night before.

“For not letting me get blown up yesterday,” he said. “You remember?”

She shrugged. “I need a magician.”

“I’ll get the buni,” he said, and she saw his face fall as he turned, and she resolved not to look at him again. What, was she supposed to say thanks to him too for… whatever? She was his fucking employer. It was in his best interest to keep her alive.

She noticed a sealed letter on her desk and opened it. “What’s this?”

He glanced back. “Nothing, don’t –“ he reached for the letter. She held it away from him, squinting at the text.

“It’s… a resignation letter,” Rhys said.

“The fuck? We’re leaving for Alabbas today. I need a magician.”

“Let me get the buni. We can talk.” He hurried out of the room before she could say more.

Nyx rubbed her face. Her memories of the night before were bubbling up, hot and sticky things that came in dim flashes. Blood, bodies, liquor. Always the same.

Rhys brought her a cup of buni and asked her sit on the cot so he could rub more salve into her wound.

“Can do it myself,” she muttered, but drinking the buni sounded better than wiping stinking salve on herself, so she let him do it.

She winced as he unwrapped her crusted bandages. The skin was scabbed over. He rubbed more salve onto the wound and started putting on a clean bandage.

“So you leaving me?” she said.

“What happened to you last night?” he said.

“That wasn’t what I asked you.”

He knotted her bandage and frowned at her. It wasn’t often he’d sit this close to her. Their knees touched.

“I can’t watch you kill yourself,” Rhys said.

“That’s not what –“

“How drunk were you, to not remember if you called someone or not? So drunk you fell into a very stupid and obvious trap and nearly got yourself killed, is that right? Good guess?”

“Didn’t know you cared,” she said, rolling her shoulder.

He packed what remained of the bandage back into the medical pouch. “I don’t care, Nyx. Do what you want. It’s your awful life.”

“Then get the fuck out of here,” she said. “Live on the fucking street for all I fucking care.”

“You make everything awful,” he said. “Every hand someone holds out, you chop it off.”

“You hold out enough hands, you get them chopped off,” she said. “Maybe you’ll learn that someday.”

“I saved your life last night, Nyx.”

She picked up her plate of fried plantains and set it on her lap. She used both hands to take the buni from the floor and drank it down in one go. “Buni’s good,” she said.

He waited.

“I know what you did,” she said. “Know it’d be easier for you all to let me go, right? But you gotta get this, Rhys. If I let these people go, other people are going to come. This isn’t going to end until I end it in Alabbas. They will come for me. They will come for you, too, no matter where you go. Sorry, but that’s what it is. I’ve pissed on people in my time, and if they see weakness, they’ll kill all of us.”

“I believe you,” he said. “I’ll go to Alabbas, but that’s it.”

She poked at her food. “We’re better together, Rhys.”

“I don’t believe that,” he said. “I don’t think you believe it either.”

He went to the door.

“That Mhorian still here?” she asked.

“Sleeping in the back,” Rhys said.

“I’m going to shower off,” she said. “Send him in in twenty?”

Rhys nodded, and left her.

Nyx ate the plantains and stumbled her way to the washroom, passing Anneke as she came out.

“You look like shit,” Anneke said.

“Thanks,” Nyx said. “Bakkie packed?”

“Yeah. And I won six notes at flush last night.”

“Great,” Nyx said, and shut the bathroom door. She rinsed off using a hose attached to the sink and watched the dirty water whirl through the drain at the center of the washroom.

When she was more or less clean—or cleaner, at least—she knotted on a new dhoti and pulled a tunic over her breast binding. She didn’t feel like going through the bother of changing that one just yet.

She pushed back into her office and saw the Mhorian was already there, standing in front of her desk with his hands clasped in front of him like he’d come to the front of the class to be scolded. He gazed up at her with winter blue eyes, his face nearly lost in the mop of his dreads.

Nyx had met a good number of shifters she didn’t like, but none this… big. Big men always made her wonder about the fullness of the rest of their package, but they generally disappointed her. A thick, confident woman with a prized, custom dildo was a far better bet if that was how she felt like playing it. The fact that she was thinking about dildos made her realize she was feeling a lot better.

“Have a seat,” Nyx said.

Khos trundled into the chair across from her desk. He was so large he dwarfed the chair. It creaked under his weight.

“Why do you need a shifter?” he asked.

“Why do you need a job?”

He huffed at her; it put her in mind of a frustrated dog, which she supposed was a fair comparison.

“I need a dog shifter,” she said. “You look the part, but I need to verify you can shift into a dog. Yeah?”

“I can,” he said.

“You can fight?”

“I can. Trained as a brawler.”

“What, like a gladiator?”

“Something like that.”

“Good shot?”

“Reasonable,” he said. “Not a sniper, but I’m good with weapons. Not blades, but bullets.”

Nyx drummed her fingers on her desk. “I don’t get it,” she said, leaning toward him. “You’re Mhorian. Why leave a peaceful country and come out here and wallow in all this war and shit?”

His grim expression didn’t change, but he considered the question for a long moment. Then, “I wanted to go somewhere where the pain outside matched what I felt here,” he said, and touched his heart. “A country at war with itself seemed like the best option.”

Nyx snorted. “I get that,” she said. “I don’t need to know all about your shit though, understand? You keep the past in the past.”

“All right,” he said.

She stood. “You’re hired. I’ll have Rhys write up a short-term contract. If you make it through this job alive maybe we’ll make this a regular thing. We’re headed to Alabbas, so go out and get anything you need to pack up for a trip. You have an hour.”

He nodded and walked right back out the front door. She stayed there a long moment looking after him. She liked that, unlike Rhys, he hadn’t pointed out that he’d saved her life. He didn’t ask for a thank-you. He just did his fucking job and didn’t try and collect points for it.

“Anneke!” she yelled.

“Yeah boss!” she called back from the workroom.

“Don’t forget to pack the whisky!”

“Already done, boss!”

Alabbas was a dirty city, dry and rotted like a mite-infested foot left too long in the sun. It was a company town, its inhabitants stuck working for the big factories on the south side of the city. The air had a briny smell to it, and Nyx noted contagion sensors ringing the whole city. Mostly she saw those on the edges of the front and up north to warn people of miasmas caused by wild bug swarms and contagions. Out here they were most likely an early warning system for a factory that had an explosion. Not that it was likely to help them much this close to a blown out building.

They passed the burned-out wreck of just such an unlucky factory on the way in. Nyx had managed to stuff the whole team into the bakkie, but had to have Khos shift to do it. He rode beside her up front, sitting between her and Rhys; he was a panting, good-natured buffer between them, and Nyx couldn’t help patting his fluffy dog head a few times on the way up.

Taite and Anneke rode in the back with the trunk open, using respirators to breathe through the dust kicked up by the bakkie. They stayed cool with organic blankets that wicked away their body heat.

Rhys didn’t speak a word to her the whole way, which was quite a feat, because it took five days to drive all the way south to Alabbas and the address they’d pulled from the bug. By the time they all got there Taite and Anneke were bickering, Khos spent most of his time napping, and Rhys mostly just glared at her.

Nyx didn’t feel like defending her decisions any more than she already had. It was looking less and less like she’d get paid for this job, which was quickly turning into a vendetta, and she knew it.

Once they got holed up inside a seedy company-owned hotel, she splurged on three rooms because she wanted one all to herself so she could piss and sleep without listening to someone whining or enduring Rhys’s odious stare.

She sent Taite out to do reconnaissance on the so Mahasin house to gather intelligence and put Khos on dog duty. “They’re running with dogs,” she told him. “I want you to find out if they’re feral or shifters. I have a good idea of how they’re triggering these bombs.”

“What’s a Muhktar doing with so Mahasins?” Taite said, shaking his head.

“Adopted, remember? Who the fuck knows how families work out here. Maybe she got sold to them. Maybe she just like them better. Small town politics are tricky, though, so don’t step into any shit.”

She sent Anneke out to collect local gossip and found that Rhys had already left to find some food before she could give him instructions. Well, fuck him, she thought, and went back to her room and napped for almost six hours.

When she woke, Khos was looming over her in the blue light of the second dusk.

“The fuck?” she said.

“Found the dogs,” he said. “They aren’t at the address you sent Taite to. I sent him to where the dogs are instead.”

“You did what?”

“I thought –“

“I don’t pay you to think,” Nyx said. “Just report. Where is he now?”

“I’ll take you there,” he said. “Rhys is with him.”

“Lot of fucking uppity assholes on this team,” she said, and rolled out of bed.

“Most boring part of the job,” Taite said, munching from his bag of crisps in the front seat of the bakkie. The bakkie was parked outside a big walled house where half a dozen dogs slept out on the sidewalk in front of the garden gate. They were all rangy little mutts that looked like littermates.

“But it’s a great way to learn a lot without getting a bullet,” Nyx said from the seat beside him. Khos had shifted again, and was already out on the street, sniffing in gutters. It surprised her the other dogs hadn’t tried to attack him. She took the pack of crisps from Taite and grabbed a fistful. She hadn’t eaten since they got to Alabbas. “They come out yet today?”

“Only to feed the dogs.”

“What, these strays?” She offered the crisps packet to Rhys beside her, but he ignored her. Whatever.

“Yeah, there are more in the courtyard. The two kids come out, the twins, and they feed the dogs. Address says this is a Muhktar house. Just so you know.”

“Twins, huh? What do they feed them?”

“I dunno. Table scraps? They like dogs, I guess. I heard more inside, when I did the walk by. Khos thinks there are at least eight more dogs inside.”

“They raise them to eat them?” she said. “Some got to be shifters.”

“I think… I think they keep them as pets?”

“Bizarre.”

Taite shrugged. “Everybody’s different. They just seem too friendly with them to eat them, but who knows? I used to name the ditch bugs we raised before we ate them.”

A woman came out of the house, wrapped in a heavy burnous. “Here we go,” Nyx said. “You know that one?”

Taite squinted. “Can’t tell. You?”

“Naw,” she said. “How many you figure are left in there? People, I mean. Not dogs.”

“Don’t know,” he said. “That’s the third woman who’s left, and I’ve only ever seen those three—her and the twins. But I’d think they’d leave someone with the dogs.”

“May be time to go in,” she said. “Real polite-like.”

“That’s it? No plan or anything?”

“What, you wanted to wait for an invitation?”

“Damn, Nyx, but-“

“I said I’d be polite.”

She pulled out her pistol slid out of the bakkie. She bet they’d only leave a couple young kids, maybe, or some teen apprentices, to watch the dogs. Maybe a dowdy old matriarch. She could handle that many.

Nyx tried the door first the old-fashioned way to verify it wasn’t unlocked. She had tried busting in her fair share of doors that turned out to be open because someone had just popped out; not often, but enough to check. She waved for Rhys, but it was Taite that got out.

“No,” she said, “Rhys. What, you going to talk it open?”

Rhys came out and sidled up to her along the doorway. “If we’re arrested for this,” he said, “I want your guarantee of protection.”

“So, it speaks,” Nyx said, watching the street behind him. “You want my protection in prison? They don’t much like me in prison.”

“So I keep hearing,” he said. He pulled a long black bug from the sleeve of his robe and set it onto the great outer gear of the door. It was a clunky old pre-war thing. The bug skittered up into the gears of the mechanism. Rhys murmured something she couldn’t make out, and the door clicked open.

Nyx pressed into the room, gun raised. She wasn’t a great shot with a pistol, but the ammunition for it was cheaper than what she put in her scatter gun. She snorted dusty air and padded into the dim room, noting the two doors inside: one into the courtyard, one into something that might be a kitchen.

A little Ras Tiegan girl stood there holding a bowl of pastry. Her mouth hung open when she saw Nyx. Nyx was dressed in her dirty dhoti, tattered breast binding, and a faded burnous with months of dirt caked up along the hem. Her braids were coming undone and she hadn’t washed anything but her face since they had arrived in Alabbas two days before.

The girl wore the tricorn-shaped hijab the Ras Tiegan’s called a wimple gazed out at Nyx with big eyes. She was probably about Taite’s age, and if Nyx guessed right, had spent her whole life either at home with her mother or right here in serving the people in this big house.

“I’m here to see the head of the house,” Nyx said. “You tell her the bel dame council has words for her.”

“I’m sorry,” the girl said, staring hard at Nyx’s feet, “the head of the house is not home.”

“Then you won’t mind if I look around,” Nyx said.

Nyx strode past her and into the living area. She kept her pistol out while her eyes adjusted to the bright light streaming in through the windows that faced the central courtyard.

Two figures stood there, deep in conversation. They were older women, maybe in their forties—or fifties, if they spent a lot of time indoors.

“What is –“ said the one of the left. She was taller, soft in the face, and heavy about the hips and bust.

Her leaner companion said, “Jaquelin, who did you let in here? Where are you?”

“No,” said the plump one, and put a hand on the other’s wrist. “We are not enemies!” the woman said. “You’re here for my daughter, aren’t you? You’re here for Rasim. There have been others.”

“Less polite, I bet,” Nyx said.

The woman looked at Nyx’s pistol.

“Yes, less polite.”

“Others?” Nyx said. “Bel dames?”

“Bel dames, order keepers, foreign agents, mercenaries like you. She has nothing to do with us.”

“You know she’s blowing up your factories?”

“We… Suspected, yes. We have tried to take care of that. She was resentful of her… other family. This is a family affair.”

“You put people on her?”

“Yes, we put out a contract for her.”

“She’s taken up another name, another identity. Binyamin so Mahasin. That’s how she’s evading your mercs.”

The leaner woman swore softly under her breath. “The audacity –“

“I see,” said the other.

“You don’t,” Nyx said. “She’s using your Muhktar dogs to blow up your Muhktar factories. She train them?”

“Yes, she always loved them.”

“Where is she?”

“You’ve done everything she expected, you know. She wanted you here.”

“I get that,” Nyx said. “I’m here. So where is she?”

Rhys waited quietly just behind her; she was aware of his presence, and so were the women. He had pushed back his burnous so the hilts of his pistols were visible. He wouldn’t kill them, and she was a bad shot, but they didn’t know that.

“She doesn’t care for us,” the lean one said, shrilly. “Killing us won’t change her mind. You won’t –“

“I don’t want you,” Nyx said. She gestured to the courtyard. “I want the dogs.”

“What?” Rhys said.

The women glanced at one another. “Take them,” the plump woman said.

“What the hell are we doing with a half dozen dogs?” Taite said, closing the door of their hotel room on the barking, jumping pack of them.

“She’s using the dogs to deliver the bombs,” Nyx said. “That’s why we don’t see them on any of the recordings. It’s the fucking dogs.”

“Those are well trained dogs,” Taite said. “I can’t even get a dog to sit. Not unless….”

“It’s certainly more likely they’re shifters,” Nyx said. “Though somebody good with a dog could certainly train one to do something like that. But shifters would be easier. Less messy.” She glanced at Khos, who had shifted back into his human form, and was eating a fistful of spicy tofu. “I need you to figure out which ones are dogs and which ones are really shifters. I want information from them.”

Khos shrugged. “When they get hungry, they’ll shift. It’s a defense mechanism. If you get too weak to hold form, you shift back to human.”

“How long?” Nyx said.

“Three days? About that,” Khos said.

“You don’t intend to leave these dogs in here without any food for three days, do you?” Taite said. “They’ll eat each other!”

“You got a better idea, smart kid?” Nyx said.

“I could shoot `em,” Anneke said. “Shifters always try to shift back when you shoot `em.”

“Pleasant group you have here,” Khos muttered.

“Can you get it out of them any sooner?” Nyx said. “You got a humane way to do it, big man, you’ve got your shot.”

He huffed at her and looked from her to Anneke and back. “All right,” he said. He opened the door to the barking pack and slammed it behind him.

“Big job to give someone we just met,” Taite said.

“What, you want to do it?” Nyx said. “You go walk right in.”

“You don’t have to be mean about it.”

“How long have you been in Nasheen? Of course I have to be mean about it.”

She pushed past him and went back to her room. She found Rhys waiting at the door.

“Fuck, what –“ she began.

Then she saw he held something in his hand. She stopped still in the hall.

“What the hell is that?” she said.

“It’s… a heart,” he said. He held it out in front of him. His whole body was taut. His face was grim. The heart was as big as his fist, bloody and still bleeding. For a half moment she thought she was dreaming or having some kind of flashback.

“Whose… heart?” she asked, because it seemed like the most logical thing to ask.

“She said it was mine.”

“Who said?”

“The woman who was here.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No,” he said, but his tone was still distant, disaffected.

“Then how can it be yours?” Nyx said. Her hand moved back toward her scattergun, almost unconsciously.

“I… don’t know,” he said. “This woman… she was… it’s like I knew her from somewhere.”

“Yeah, well, I thought I did too,” Nyx said. She followed the line of the corridor with her gaze, but saw no one else there. Finally within arm’s distance of Rhys, she took the heart into her hand.

Nyx considered it a moment, then bit into the tough meat of it and chewed thoughtfully. Swallowed.

She put the heart back into Rhys’s hand and wiped her bloody hand on her tunic. “It’s a dog’s heart,” she said. “Human tastes different. You’re fine.” She opened her door. He stared after her, still unmoving.

Nyx sighed. “Listen,” she said, “if you are going to last this mission, you need to understand something about how people win. You don’t hit someone in the face. You demoralize them first. She comes back, you shoot her. Get some sleep.”

“But… she knows where we are.”

“Of course she does. We have her dogs. Her family was right—she wanted us here. I have my guesses on why, and we’re going to undermine her.”

“How do I know that?”

“You don’t,” she said.

“What… what do I do with this?”

“Cook it up with some onions and gravy,” she said.

He curled his lip at her, and that’s when she knew he’d be all right. “I don’t eat meat, Nyx.”

“Good night, Rhys.” She closed the door.

The privies on the floor were shared, but her room had its own sink. She went to it now and washed her hands. Stared at her bloody mouth in the mirror. She bared her bloody teeth and grimaced at her own reflection.

She washed out her mouth and assembled all of her weapons. She didn’t sleep that night. Instead, she brought Anneke in and laid out the plan.

“She needs to think I turned on you,” Nyx said.

Anneke crossed her arms and spit sen in the sink. “Why’d you turn on us?”

“I did some bad things in prison,” Nyx said. “Shit my team shouldn’t know about. You know what I’m talking about.”

Anneke’s arms were covered in prison tattoos. She nodded. “Yeah, I get it.”

“Once Khos gets the location of the next factory they’re blowing up and where she’ll be after, we pack up like we’re going to stop them together, get it?”

“Keep going.”

“You set up on the roof. Need you to hit Khos and Taite with tranquilizer darts. I’ll take Rhys. Tranquilizers will mess with his talent. Don’t want to shut him out in case we need that later. I only need a half hour.”

“Half hour to do what?”

“Taite would say I’m confessing some sins,” Nyx said. “But it’s between me and her. Not you and the boys. I know you get that. They won’t.”

Anneke chewed her lip. “Don’t like this one, boss.”

“Half an hour, Anneke. Then you bring the boys in and we haul her in. All right?”

A knock on the door. Nyx answered. It was Khos. “Got the factory location,” Khos said. “They’re blowing it up tomorrow afternoon when everyone’s at end of week prayer.”

“Tell me you’ve got more than that.”

He showed his teeth. “She’s in a big old grain silo just north of the burned out factory. It’s just her and half a dozen shifters.”

“Let’s go fuck some stuff up then,” Nyx said.

And all that left Nyx here, holding a scattergun to Rhys’s chest. The look he gave her as her finger squeezed the trigger was one she’d seen on the faces of a hundred dead boys. It was one she’d never wanted to see on his face, but she preferred it to the yearning look he’d given her earlier. She didn’t know what to do with that look. She knew what to do with this one.

She squeezed the trigger.

The blast took Rhys off his feet. He slammed onto the rooftop. She crossed to him in two long strides and knelt beside him. She pressed her cheek to his and whispered. “Stay still. They’re watching. They need to think I believed you.”

He wheezed for air. She placed her fingertips on his chest. She had loaded the scattergun with soft organic pellets, the sort that the military used for training exercises. They burst on impact, leaving no residue or shrapnel, but they could bruise and even break ribs. She had a feeling she’d been close enough to break a couple of Rhys’s ribs.

But that was better than killing him.

She holstered her scattergun and headed back down the stairs. She needed him to sit for a half hour, hopefully more.

Nyx got to the bottom of the stairs where Anneke sat with the bodies of Taite and Khos, sniper rifle on her knee.

“Get this buttoned up quick, boss,” Anneke said.

“Half an hour,” Nyx said. “Then you come in with guns blazing.”

“Would prefer that the other way around.”

“Gotta end this,” Nyx said.

Anneke nodded.

Nyx put her respirator in her mouth and took off running in the direction of the grain silo, two kilometers away. It was a hot run, but she was twenty-seven and good on her feet, still. She yanked out her scattergun as she came into the shadow of the silo and sucked down a bulb of water.

There was a small square, like dog door, carved into the silo. She squeezed in, just barely getting her ass through, and muscled her way up the stairs. She went up and up, past a room teeming with dogs all panting over a water trough. Nyx kept her weight on the outside of her feet and breathed shallowly until she was up and out of their perception.

She found Rasim in a converted office. Rasim sat at the table with a gun in her hand already pointed at Nyx. Her hair hung in a long braid down her back, and she’d swapped out her clothes for sensible tunic and trousers and boots.

“Liked your hair better in Punjai,” Nyx said.

“I knew you were here,” Rasim said.

“Clearly,” Nyx said. “I knew you wanted me here. I figured the best way to get revenge on a woman even bel dames won’t touch is to frame me for something pretty dishonorable, like blowing up Nasheenian weapons factories.”

“When did you know?”

“Sparring.”

“I thought so.”

“So now what?” Nyx said. “You want to give me the speech?”

“What speech?”

“A speech all the angry women like you give when I kill your sisters or your brothers or your daughters or your sons. Some angry frothy rant about how unfair it all is, and how you loved them so much. I gave you some time, see. It’s just us. You can spew away.”

Rasim smiled thinly. “You know why I didn’t finish my bel dame training?”

“Because you knew what we’d be?”

“No,” she said, “because my sister died in a prison brawl. Binyamin was always tougher than me. But she got mashed in the head. It wasn’t even you who did it.”

“I get it,” Nyx said. “Somebody else got to you. Who wants me framed for this? How much they pay you?”

“It’s too late for that,” Rasim said.

“You’re a good girl,” Nyx said. “Doesn’t have to end this way.”

“I’m going to be rich,” Rasim said, “and you’ll be back in prison. I think it’s fine way to end things.”

“Why the dogs?”

“Because I love them,” she said. “Does it need to be more complicated than that?”

“They’re just animals.”

“Shifters can become dogs,” she said. “Are they more animal in form, or should we treat them as humans? What if they shifted and did not have the energy to shift back? Lots of shifters choose to live their lives as dogs. Besides, they’re untraceable. And every one of them will be happy to point to you as the one who directed them to blow this all up.”

“You have the other rigged?”

She nodded. “All the plants that are left will blow up in… Oh, two hours, maybe. Not much more than that. What will you do about?”

“Tell them you did it,” Nyx said. She let out a long breath. Binyamin hadn’t been the woman in prison she’d thought she’d been, then. She hadn’t been the woman Nyx needed to repent for, just someone caught in the crossfire.

Rasim raised her gun.

“Anyone ever tell you bel dames are hard to kill?” Nyx said.

“You aren’t a bel dame?”

“No,” Nyx said, “but unlike you, I used to be. And they taught me something there.”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t talk too long,” Nyx said.

The bullet took Rasim between the shoulder blades. She slammed into the table.

Nyx hustled in and bound her hands behind her with sticky bands from her pack.

“Anneke?” Nyx yelled. No answer. If it was Anneke, she was early.

Nyx looked around the edges of the room. It wasn’t sealed up top. Someone could have squatted on the floor above and gotten a shot through the gap between the floor and the wall above.

Rasim whined. The bullet hadn’t hit anything vital; looked like it just missed her spine, too. “Lucky girl,” Nyx said.

“Anneke?” Nyx called.

“Here, boss,” Anneke said. She slithered down from the floor above, coming in from some retrofitted venting shaft. Her gun was slung over her shoulder.

“You’re early,” Nyx said.

“Couldn’t help firing after that line,” Anneke said. “Too perfect. You know, better early than late.”

“Where are the boys?”

“Downstairs clearing out the dogs,” she said.

“Early,” Nyx muttered.

“You get what you wanted?” Anneke said.

“Pretty much,” Nyx said. “Not what I thought it was.”

“Good, then,” Anneke said.

Nyx took Rasim by the hair. “We need to diffuse those bombs, Rasim. Where’s the codes?”

“I don’t have them,” she said. “You know how they work? They need to be sealed in living flesh to survive. More than a few moments outside of living tissue, and they disintegrate. It’s why shifters make such good triggers.”

“I got it,” Nyx said. “Where are they?” She pointed the scattergun at her chest. “I’m happy to cut you up into pieces to find them. We were nice with the first bullet.”

“They’re not inside me,” she said.

Nyx heard noise on the stairs. Khos, Taite, and Rhys walked up. Nyx didn’t look at Rhys. She expected the bakkie ride over wasn’t very comfortable with bruised ribs.

“Then I’ll cut up all your friends,” Nyx told Rasim.

“No,” she said. “They’re inside your friend.”

“What?”

Rasim bent her head to Khos. “Your friend, who met our friend Hadjara for a discreet transaction.”

Khos’s eyes widened. “What’s she saying?”

“You a dog runner?” Nyx said.

“A what?” he said.

“Where is it on him?” Nyx said.

“He won’t live through you taking it out,” Rasim said. “It’s wrapped around his heart.”

The heart. That’s what she was doing, fucking with them and the heart. “Yeah?” Nyx said. “The fuck do I care about one dog? Lot more people going to die if he lives.”

“Now, wait –“ Khos said.

“Who will die, Nyxnissa?” Rasim said. “The factories are empty. We only destroy empty factories. What you’re saying is the life of one man is worth less than the weapons that will go on to kill thousands, hundreds of thousands, of men. Is that true?”

Nyx spit sen. “I fucking hate revolutionaries,” she said. “I liked this better when you were just getting paid to frame me.”

“Could we get back to talking about this thing in my heart?” Khos said, voice rising. “Hadjara said that injection was –“

“What, something easily removable?” Rasim said. “It’s up to the two of you now. You want to stop the destruction of a few weapons? You get out your knife and you kill this man.”

Nyx pulled a big knife from the sheathe at her hip. “You forget who I am? What I do?”

“Not at all,” Rasim said. “I trained to do what you do, remember?”

“And gave it up,” Nyx said. “You quit because you have no stomach for blood. When you figured out the sort of sacrifices you have to make, you turned coward. It wasn’t about losing your sister at all.”

“Was it cowardly?” Rasim said. “Is it cowardly to do what the system expects of you, or cowardly to go along with it?”

“You tell me,” Nyx said, “you’re the one framing an innocent person for blowing up factories.”

“Oh, you’re not innocent, Nyxnissa so Dasheem.”

“Get her out of here,” Nyx said to Anneke.

“Sure thing, boss,” Anneke said, and tugged at Rasim’s restraints. “You want me to kill her?”

“Not until I have the code,” Nyx said.

“Now wait a minute –“ Khos said, holding up his big hands.

When Rasim and Anneke left the room, Nyx hefted her blade.

“Nyx,” Rhys said, quietly, but she pretended not to hear him.

Khos scrambled back, hands still raised, until he pressed against the wall. Odd thing, she thought, that a man so big retreated without a serious tussle.

“They’re just weapons,” Khos said. “You wouldn’t kill me on her word. Hadjara had me run a job, a simply ferrying job. I thought I’d finished it before we left Punjai.”

“I’m doing a job too,” she said.

“You don’t need to do it,” Rhys said. He did not move from where he stood, but his voice rolled over her, warm and smooth as silk.

“I took a job,” she said. “I finish my jobs.”

“It’s not a note,” Rhys said, “and you aren’t being paid for it. It’s just weapons, Nyx. She was a liar trying to frame you for this!”

“The weapons support the war. The war is Nasheen.”

“Nasheen is more than the war,” Rhys said.

Khos’s eyes were big. His gaze moved rapidly from Rhys to Nyx and back again.

Her fist tightened on the blade. “I have a job,” she said.

“You never took the job,” Rhys said. He came up beside her, speaking softly. “We can walk away. It’s not our fight. We don’t owe it anything. So some factories blow up. What’s that matter?”

She twisted the knife at Rhys and lunged for his throat. She pressed the blade there. “Chenjan,” she spat. “You would say some catshit thing like that. Make us vulnerable. Move in with some army.”

“I’m not your enemy,” Rhys said.

“The whole world’s my enemy,” she said.

“I’m not,” he said. He swallowed, and she saw his skin ripple against the blade.

How many dark throats like his had she cut? Dozens, certainly. Hundreds? No, she was not at the front that long. But a lot. Too many. He was just another body. Another bag of Chenjan blood. Like Khos, he was a foreign man, and foreign men were disposable. No one would miss them. She’d be doing the world a favor. Her head swam. Flashbacks. Irrational behavior. Fuck, was she losing her shit again? Deep breath. Count back. Where the fuck was she?

“Nyx?”

She snarled something at him, she wasn’t even sure what, and pressed her forearm against his chest, pinning him to the wall.

His gaze darted to Khos, and Nyx said, “You think about moving, dog-man, and I’ll castrate you.”

“Nyx,” Rhys said, “It’s not a job. There’s no honor in it.”

She huffed out a long breath.

Too many throats.

My life for a thousand, she had sworn. Not a thousand lives for mine.

Nyx released him. Her body surged with adrenaline. She let out another breath, and turned so neither man could see her hand tremble as she sheathed her knife. She hocked the rest of her sen onto the floor.

“Fuck this place,” she said. “I have shit to do.” She smoothed back her hair and wiped the sweat from her face. She glanced back at the men, irritated. “Are you coming or not?”

She did not look at their faces, because she did not want to know what was there.

They returned Rasim to her family with little fanfare.

“You had a bounty on her, right?” Nyx said. “I want the bounty, and a land grant for a house in Mushirah, and you can do what the fuck you want with her and I won’t tell anyone she’s responsible for blowing up those six factories that are filling the sky with shit right now.”

The Muhktars were indeed a powerful family. They paid her and had the land grant notarized the next day. The money was far more than Nyx had expected, and she divided it up among the team that night over fried rotis and sugar soda two towns over where the air was clearer.

Anneke whooped and hollered at her cut and stuffed it into her breast binding and rocketed off to the nearest card hall.

“We leave at dawn!” Nyx said, and Anneke waved at her.

Taite went up to bed at the hotel. “Might as well get some sleep before she comes back,” he said.

Nyx had gotten three rooms again, and she left Khos and Rhys at the café downstairs to be grumpy by themselves. She was tired of their moods. Men were so emotional.

She bathed and threw herself into bed, but every time she closed her eyes, she saw that beating heart in Rhys’s hands, and she remembered that it had been far too large for a dog’s heart, and it had not tasted like a dog’s heart at all.

She remembered holding her knife to Rhys’s throat for no reason. She remembered losing her shit at them in some hot, stifling silo that felt like the desert. The whole world felt like the front. She could never scrub away the front. It followed her, buried deep in her heart.

“That woman was going to kill me,” Khos said.

Rhys stared into his bowl of gravied yams. The first big sun was setting, and he closed his eyes and tried to enjoy the last of its heat on his face. Life always felt more precious right after you almost lost it. “Nyx kills a lot of people,” Rhys said.

Khos leaned toward him, bushy brows furrowed. “Why did you speak for me?” Khos said. “Is it really because you’re Chenjan, because this would help the war?”

“Why does everyone think I do things because I’m Chenjan?” Rhys said. “Did you trust that Hadjara woman because you’re Mhorian?”

Khos straightened. “Well, yes,” he said. “Women only lie about politics.” He poked at his food. “I didn’t realize this was so political.”

“You have a lot to learn about Nasheen,” Rhys said.

“I am new here, that’s true,” Khos said.

Rhys considered asking him what he was running from, but that would end with Khos asking Rhys the same question, and he didn’t want to answer that. He was starting to understand why Nyx didn’t ask her team a lot of questions.

“No matter what Nyx says or does,” Rhys said, “just remember she’s always out for herself. If you remember she’s always thinking about herself, you can convince her to act morally, sometimes.”

“She really was going to kill me.”

“She’ll do anything to finish a job,” Rhys said. “We’re all expendable.”

Khos sipped his tea. The way he held the cup was surprisingly delicate, for such a large man. Rhys wasn’t sure why he expected a man that size to go around crushing things, but he did. Maybe it had been so long since he saw a man who clearly wasn’t starving or mistreated or broken that he forgot what was possible.

“I will consider all you’ve said,” Khos said.

Back at the storefront in Punjai, Nyx sat up on the roof with Anneke drinking whisky and throwing rocks at parrots. The little parrots were commonly used as spies by those too cheap to buy bugs for it.

“Too many men on this team,” Anneke said, pouring herself another glass. The day was just starting to cool as the first sun rode low over the horizon, burning it a rapturous orange. “Shit gets too emotional. Wah-wah, I don’t eat meat. Wah-wah, don’t cut out my heart.”

Nyx shrugged. “Cheaper than hiring women.”

“True, true,” Anneke said. “I sure ain’t cheap.”

“War’s not going to go well for Nasheen next few years,” Nyx said.

“What, cause of the factories?” Anneke said, and snorted. “Filthy Tirhanis will be happy to fill more orders. Southern factories mostly supply Ras Tieg.”

“What’s Ras Tieg have to fight?” Nyx said.

Anneke peered at her. “You ever talk to Taite?”

“No,” Nyx said.

“They don’t like shifters there,” Anneke said. “Some kind of religious war over it. So in the end we put more money in Tirhani pockets, and saved some Ras Tiegan shifters, maybe. Or maybe they were supplying the other side, there? Who knows? What I’m saying is, I don’t stay up at night thinking about it.”

“You think I do?”

Anneke shrugged. “You say you don’t, but you piss a lot about it. It was a bad job. I like to just forget about bad jobs.”

“Pour me another drink.”

“Sure, boss.”

Nyx threw a rock at a parrot, and missed. “Goddamn, I can’t even fucking throw straight.”

“We ain’t none of us perfect,” Anneke said. She sucked at her drink. “You think that Chenjan will stay?”

“Rhys can come or go, I don’t fucking care. He can’t fucking make up his mind.”

“Someday you’re going to kill that Chenjan,” Anneke said, “and it’ll be meaner’n what you do to all those other people you fuck.”

“It’ll be fine,” Nyx said. “Someday I’ll just eat him right up, and we’ll get over it. He’ll leave then for sure.”

“You be nice now,” Anneke said, slyly. “You take out his heart first.”

“No,” Nyx said finishing her drink. “I’ll eat his heart last.”

A few hours later, drunk and thinking far too much about fucking, Nyx knocked on Rhys’s door.

She wasn’t exactly sure what she was going to ask him for. Reading, maybe? He hadn’t read to her in a while. Reading that would lead to fucking. Fucking, then reading. Then he could leave the team. After she fucked him. Like normal people did.

When he didn’t answer, she knocked again. “Hey, open up!” she said.

The door opened. She found herself staring at a broad, pale chest crisscrossed in blue tattoos. She followed the map of the muscled chest up and up to Khos’s broad face and grinned. “Well,” she said.

“Well,” he said. He held a bottle of beer in one hand, and she saw a box of empties by his bed.

“You . . . up to anything?” she said.

“You came here for a drink?” he said. “You seem to have had some already.”

“Oh, I had my eye on coming down here before the drinking,” she said. “You?”

“You did promise the fucking would come later.”

“Could come a few times, really,” Nyx said.

He opened the door wider. She took the beer from his hand and kicked the door closed behind them.

It had been far too fucking long since she fucked someone.

She finished the beer and tossed the bottle into the box with the others and pulled at his trousers. He took her face in his hands and kissed her so passionately that a wave of desire shook her body. She wrapped her legs around him and he carried her to the bed where they proceeded to fuck like too very drunk and very hungry people.

He was warm and tasted good and kissed her like a man who breathed women, dreamed of women, found bliss in the arms of women. And for Nyx, who had never known bliss or surrender with or toward anyone or anything, seeing him submit to sensation - to lust, desire -was one of the most intensely erotic things she had ever witnessed.

She had been only half joking about coming a few times, especially considering how drunk she was, but he was eager and perfectly skillful and the second time she came she thought she was dreaming this whole thing because she wasn’t stupid enough to fuck anyone on her team was she, and wasn’t she looking for Rhys?

They lay tangled together in the sheets, sweaty and semi-delirious with drink and sated lust, and she traced the fine blue tattoos running up his legs.

“You want to know about them?” he asked softly as he tangled his fingers in her unraveling braids.

The fear started then, riding up over her satisfaction, sinking deep in the pit of her stomach. She drew her hand away. “No,” she said.

Nyx slid out of bed.

“Is something wrong?” he said.

“No,” she said. “You were fine.”

“Is this about him?”

“Who?”

“You certainly know who.”

She pulled on her dhoti and braided back her mussed hair. She either wanted more to drink or wanted to get to bed. Probably both. Stupid mistake, fucking a guy she’d signed a contract with.

“You should see the way you two look at each other,” Khos said.

“We don’t look at each other,” Nyx said. “He’s just a kid.”

“A pretty kid, by anybody’s standard. And if even I can see that, I imagine you sure can.”

“Well, no amount of looking is going to make any difference. He’s still God full. And I’m still godless.”

“Maybe you should find God again.”

“Maybe he should become godless.”

“You compromise for no one.”

“No.”

“That’s a lonely place to be.”

“You trying to open me up? You’re nobody special.”

“Haven’t I already opened you up?” He said, and she hated the way he said it, propped up there on one elbow, because he was gentle and beautiful and he had also been a dog runner who now had bomb codes wrapped around his heart, and she broke everything she touched, even things that were already broken.

“The cunt is not the heart,” she said, standing, “though a lot of people get the two confused.”

She went to the door and yanked it open.

Rhys resolved to find Nyx and say his peace. If he was leaving, he wanted her to know why. He wanted her to know that if she really cared about him like she pretended, then they shouldn’t work for each other. They should figure something else out. Maybe there was something to work out.

He found Anneke passed out in her room, and Taite listening to the radio. “You know where Nyx is?” Rhys asked.

“Probably ask Khos,” Taite said.

Rhys didn’t ask why it was Khos would know. He went right to Khos’s door, which had been a storage closet not long before. Everything that used to be in the closet was still stacked outside of it.

Rhys heard voices inside. He raised his hand to knock.

The door opened, and Nyx stood in front of him, braids tangled, tunic in hand, wearing only her dhoti and breast binding. Beside her, Khos sat on his bed, naked.

Rhys opened his mouth, unsure of what to say.

“The fuck?” Nyx said.

They stared at each other. Rhys tried not to stare at Khos. He stared at Nyx’s bared abdomen instead. “I…” Rhys began. He dropped his hand. “I was… looking for you. Thought… Khos had seen you, maybe.”

“Well, you were right,” Nyx said. Her face flushed, or it looked like it did. The light was dim, and he couldn’t be sure. She shut the door behind her. “What did you want?”

He cleared his throat. “Nothing,” he said.

“It had to be something. You didn’t come all the way down here for nothing.”

“Just…” he gazed at the door again. He was a fool, in fact. A fool to think she was anything but what she said she was. “Nothing, just wanted you to know I was staying on the team,” he said. “I talked with Anneke and she thinks the government job might be dodgy. Something to lure foreign men to the interior.”

“I’m sure she’s right,” Nyx said. “You’re staying, then.”

“Yes,” he said, “why not? Nothing has changed.” He turned to go.

“Rhys?”

He did not look back at her, but he stopped, listening.

She came up beside him. “Early day tomorrow. Back to work, all right?” she said. “Need to meet you in the bakkie at the second dawn, and we’ll head over to the Cage to pick up some jobs, sound good?”

“Good, all right,” Rhys said. He went back to his room and shut the door. Pulled off his burnous. His shoes. His tunic. Unbuckled his guns. Took off his belt. Stripped to his small clothes, and then he just laid there in bed alone, remembering when she took his hand. Remembering how she had fired that gun into his chest. Remembered how he had felt when he was with her, despite or because of all that, and tried to imagine how he would feel without that sense of being safe and protected, even in the company of a woman willing to break his ribs to serve her own ends.

He didn’t know why he stayed. Didn’t know why he couldn’t go. He put his hand over his heart, and wished he could tear it out.

The next morning, Nyx left the storefront to see Rhys waiting for her in the bakkie as the big orange demon of the second sun lit up over the horizon. Nyx had swilled half a carafe of buni—no whisky - after getting out of bed. Now she slid into the seat up front next to him. When he glanced at her, it was with contempt and disgust, and she was all right with that. She knew what to do with it. It was the needy, heartfelt kind of emotion like the looks Khos had given her after they fucked that left her cold. It made her want to run. Maybe it made Rhys want to run, too, which is why he wasn’t now. He hated her enough to stay. So she would take his contempt and his disgust, and bundle it up tight and close.

He gazed out over the hazy city, contemplating the world outside his window. The world without her face in it.

“Finally ready?” he said.

“Born that way,” Nyx said.

“Born drunk, more likely.”

“You can be both,” she said.

She started up the bakkie. It coughed yellow smoke and beetles out its back end. Nyx turned on the juice. “These fucking beetles are starving.”

“Heart full of beetles,” he said.

“If only,” she said, and drove them to their next job.

Originally published on Patreon (www.patreon.com/kameronhurley), January 2016.

Evermore

Sean Williams

When I was a child, my father used to beat me with the buckle end of his belt, once so severely that I was unable to walk for a week. I recall this clearly and, on some levels at least, it feels real. From old photographs, I know what my father looked like and the sort of belts he wore; I know how such a beating would probably have been administered. Reconstructing the experience and calling it “memory” is no more difficult than daydreaming about Earth; it even causes me some discomfort to do so.

I tell myself that just because I can”t actually remember the beatings doesn”t mean they never occurred. There”s no reason why I would lie to myself. The awareness that they had a profound effect on my adult life should be enough.

Yet the fact remains: I am not the person I once was. I cannot speak for him, just as he could not speak for me. We are separated by a gulf that is widening every day, a gulf that will never close. There is no way, now, that I can ask him what went through his mind when he was submitting the data that would one day become the engram called Peter Owen Leutenk. All I can do is mourn the life I have lost.

I am walking, as is my routine, along an empty beach at sunset. Every now and then, with the stick in my left hand, I scratch words into the sand; sometimes a whole sentence. I am in no great hurry.

Without warning, I sense that someone is trying to talk to me. I stop and look around, but see no one. The sky is awash with colour; I sometimes feel as though I could dissolve in that sunset—drift upwards, catch fire and sparkle like the evening star, heralding a distant dawn. But not now.

The call fades for a moment, then becomes twice as strong. I see someone walking across the dunes towards me. When I recognize who it is, I feel a shock like electricity pass through my entire body.

“Emmett?”

He smiles, and the twinkle in his eye is still there. “Hello, Peter.”

I want to embrace him, but I refrain. “It”s been a long time.”

“You”ve no idea how long.”

“Twenty, thirty years?”

“In slow-mo, yes, for you. I”ve been slogging it out in real-time. We just hit the millennium.”

“Congratulations,” I say, but the pronoun is more significant to me than the years that have passed. “Who are ‘we”?”

“Jurgen drifts in and out when he feels like it. Apart from him and the probe, there”s only me.”

“Don”t you get lonely?”

“Of course.” He shrugs. “But someone has to do it.”

I turn away to avoid his stare. My stick makes skritch-skritch noises as it scribbles in the sand.

“Still writing, Peter?”

“Yes. And you? Still waiting?”

“Yes.” I can tell by the tone in his voice that his smile has faded. “I want to call a general assembly.”

I look up in surprise. “Why?”

“I”ve found something we all need to talk about.”

“Where? A colony? Another ship?”

“No, no.” He raises a hand to quell my speculation. “Nothing like that. It is important, though.”

His face is orange in the sunset: a perfect rendition, just like the silver suit he preferred on Earth that now looks so out of place on the beach. His hair is the same sandy hue as it was when I first met him. He certainly doesn”t look a thousand years old, and I can still tell when he means business. “Well, call the assembly. I”ll come.”

“This deserves more than just you, Peter, and you”re all I”ll get if I do it myself. The others still won”t talk to me; they ignore me on principle. I gave up trying long ago.”

“You want me to do it for you?”

“Yes.” His frankness hints at a change in him. Once he would”ve used guile to get what he wanted. That was why he was on the probe in the first place: to keep things running smoothly, without confrontation if not without friction. The engrams are the cogs in the program, he used to say, and I am the oil. It”s ironic, in this light, how things have turned out.

“Will you tell me what this is about?” I ask.

“No, not until the assembly. But it really is important, I promise you that.”

“What about Jurgen? Does he know?”

“A little. He helped me look for part of it. If he guessed the rest, he never said.”

“Why don”t you ask him instead?”

“The others don”t like him much, either. You, I think they”ll trust.”

“Because I was hurt?”

“Yes. You”re one of them.”

I look around at the beach and the sky. The sun has been setting for almost as long as the probe has been in flight, but I have not grown tired of it. I am reluctant to leave.

“It”ll be hard,” I say, “for all of us.”

“I know. But will you do it?”

I cannot deny that I am curious. “Yes.”

His smile returns. “Thank you, Peter. I knew you”d agree.”

“You”ve worked me out, then?”

“Yes.” He puts a hand on my shoulder and squeezes. His eyes are solemn. “I think I”ve finally worked us all out.”

My awakening occurred on the 24th of March, 2052. Emmett Longyear—the original, with whom I had become friends during the entrainment process—performed the final tests to ensure I had been re-created complete. I knew what had happened to me and was in no doubt at all what I had become, but it still didn”t hit home for some minutes. My reflexes had been wired to follow the old paths; I felt like my usual self. Only when I looked down and saw carpet instead of my body did the truth finally hit home.

This is my first true memory, inscribed in the metaneural lattice of the probe”s tertiary bank, etched in electrons spinning their mysterious way through the molecular nodes of a crystal the size of a shoe-box. It is these electrons that comprise the being I prefer to call my “self.” Without these subtle singularities, these mere points in space-time, I would have nothing but hearsay to carry me through eternity, one moment at a time.

But it is not this memory that comes to me after Emmett leaves the beach, a thousand years after my awakening. It is the one in which, for the first and only time, I met myself.

The conversation was brief. He asked me how I felt, and I replied that I felt fine. He looked tired, and I commented on that. He said that yes, he was feeling drained. The process of creating an engram took many weeks of examination and interrogation in order to ensure that the copy matched the original as closely as possible. He had been on-site for the last month, every waking hour spent in a cocoon of instruments, and was only gradually readjusting to normalcy.

My original had requested that we be allowed to talk before he returned to his home in Paraguay. He was curious to see what it would be like—as was I, although I think I felt the existential significance of the moment more keenly than him.

I asked him if he had found inspiration in the experience. He said that he had sketched a series of pieces incorporating some of the mathematical techniques of the early twentieth century. Variations based on inversion and retrograde movement were a good musical metaphor for reflection, he thought, and I agreed.

He asked me then if I, too, had had any ideas, and I replied that I hadn”t.

He nodded distantly, looking down at his shoes. I could tell what he was thinking with an ease that surprised me. After all, I had never watched myself engage in conversation before.

“I expect it”ll take time to settle in,” I said.

“I expect so, too.” He looked up at that, eyes meeting the lenses of the camera through which I viewed the world, and laughed. “No surprise in that, I guess.”

I laughed with him, and for an instant we bonded. He was me and I was him: closer than brothers or lovers, our essences were identical. Technology had teased out of him the threads that held him together and woven them anew in me. We were more alike than any other couple on Earth, apart from those formed by the few hundred other humans who had had engrams made in the last two years. And half of half of those were already in space. For the first time in our lives, we truly felt as though we had soul-mates.

I realize now how illusory that thought was. Minds can only be deciphered so far: the processes underlying consciousness can be simulated, as can the way emotions and other impulses ebb and flow throughout the body—but nothing can be done about memory. Holographic and elusive, memory has defied all attempts to record it directly. The only way it can be captured is second-hand, by interviewing the original at length about his or her past and using physical records to supply the images. Emotions can be attached later, to colour the recollection correctly even though the details may still be slightly askew. Pre-awakening memory in an engram is, at best, a patchwork quilt pieced together from a million isolated fragments.

That might have been enough for me then, on the verge of joining humanity”s latest exploratory venture. Now, I am never sure.

There is little else to recall about that first and last meeting. We bade each other farewell, feeling slightly foolish, and went our separate ways. He was headed back to his home in Paraguay, and I, in my mind, was already halfway to the stars. I wasn”t to know, then, that neither of us would make it.

The probe is thirty metres long and four wide—a stubby needle tumbling at thirty-five percent of the speed of light through the interstellar void. Its main drive has been inactive for centuries now, but the rest of it still functions. Through sensors mounted on its pitted hull, I could, if I wished, watch distant suns drift slowly past, trickling like raindrops down a window. Rarely these days do I avail myself of the opportunity.

It takes me a while to track down the others. We are all located in the same place, near the probe”s centre of gravity, but physical reality has become less and less important over time. We all have our unique virtual locations, and each has become increasingly isolated in his or her own way.

I confront security foils and barriers. I barrage input ports with messages. I insinuate myself into virtual worlds that, like mine, have rarely held more than one occupant. I decrypt strange codes and untangle logical puzzles designed to keep intruders occupied. I harangue.

In the end, I have their attention.

We gather in a neutral environment—a grey room large enough to hold us all with plenty of empty space between. We look exactly the same as our originals did when their engrams awoke, although some of us have assumed idiosyncratic modes of dress. I am barefoot and robed in the manner of a fifty-year-old beachdweller; others have opted for more formal garments.

There are only twenty of us left, not counting Emmett, who will keep his distance until the general assembly has been called. The remainder are either inactive or unapproachable. I avoid the word “dead” when explaining their absence to the small crowd before me. One I know of—Elizabeth Li, the probe”s resident poet—is trapped in a perpetual loop, cycling forever through one brief, final stanza. Is that death? I do not feel qualified to judge.

“We are not allowed to commit suicide,” complains Letho Valente, a swarthy man with thinning grey hair. His original was a crystallographer specializing in structures that form in microgravity. “I have tried many times. Do you know what happens?”

“There is a discontinuity,” nods Exene Gill, former linguist. Her face is finely lined and nobly beautiful, preserved at the age of sixty-five. “We cease for an instant, then return unharmed to our previous state as though nothing has happened. The core program will not permit voluntary termination.”

“You mean euthanasia,” says Cuby Kleinig, once a youthful student of geology.

“No.” Exene casts him a look of disdain. “How can something that has never been alive be granted an ‘easy death”?”

“You don”t think you”re alive?” asks Tiger Coveny, our resident expert in religious theory.

“Of course I do,” Exene snaps.

“But are we?” asks Letho Valente, stabbing a finger into the argument.

“That”s the question.” Exene folds her arms. “And I am tired of living without an answer.”

I stand apart from them, appalled. Twenty of the most renowned minds of the human race who have not been in the same room together for untold years—and all they can talk about is killing themselves? There is so much bitterness in the air that I feel as though I am choking.

But the greater part of my dismay is reserved, not for the topic of conversation, but for the fact that their thoughts have so closely mirrored my own.

“We have come a long way,” I say, trying to shift our attention elsewhere.

Exene turns to face me, snaps: “No we haven”t.”

I am rescued by Cuby. “How far exactly?”

“I don”t know. Jurgen?”

Jurgen Follows moves forward. Despite being of relatively small stature and unprepossessing with it, he is instantly the centre of attention. He opens his hands as though to embrace us all and a starscape appears between them. Sol is in the bottom right right corner. Our course is traced in white. Relatively close to Sol, the white line has a slight kink in it. Not long after that, it just misses one particular star. I avoid looking at that point. The white line ends nowhere in particular, many hundreds of light-years from its source.

Letho”s gaze estimates the extent of our journey so far. “Not bad,” he muses. “I guess we were lucky to make it anywhere at all.”

“That”s true.” I nod. The probe could just as easily have been cracked wide open by the dust-particle that slipped through the anti-impact detectors and destroyed the main drive. Being knocked off-course instead of killed outright, even with no way to return to our planned trajectory, had once seemed like an enormous stroke of good luck.

“Is this what you wanted to talk about?” asks Tiger. From the expression on her face I can tell that she hopes it isn”t.

“No. I”d like to call a general assembly.”

“We aren”t already having one?” Exene encompasses the room with a wave.

“Not quite. One of us is missing.”

Several of them exchange glances. Exene says: “If you mean who I think you mean—”

“Yes: Emmett Longyear is still active.”

“Well, you can forget it. If he”s there, I won”t be.”

Letho touches her elbow, as though to calm her down, but his attention is fixed on me. “It”s a decision we made a long time ago, Peter. You can”t expect us to go back on it now.”

“Why not?”

“He betrayed us.” Tiger Coveny”s voice is taut with spite.

“How? He didn”t force us to come.”

“You know the answer to that.” Exene moves away from Letho. “The program abandoned us. They left us to die.”

“And Emmett ran the program,” Cuby finishes. “It was his responsibility to help us. He let us down.”

“He killed us!”

I hold up my hands, noting that only Jurgen is disagreeing with them. The silent shake of his bald head is heartening, but barely encouragement. The elderly astronomer hasn”t spoken aloud since the accident.

“Our Emmett, the engram, disagrees with you,” I say over the babble of protest. “He thinks there”s still a chance someone will come to bring us back.”

“They”ve had—how long?” Letho shakes his head. “When was the last time we received a transmission from Earth? When we slipped out of the maser feed? If we”d heard anything at all since then, I”d let myself hope. Can you give me another reason?”

“I don”t know,” I admit, choosing not to answer his first question. Letho must have an idea how long from the plot Jurgen is still holding between his outspread hands. “But time really isn”t the issue, here, is it? We could freeze if we wanted to.”

“Has anyone?” Exene asks.

“A couple. Not many. I didn”t want to bring them up to speed.”

“No.” She nods approval. “It wouldn”t be fair.”

“But we can only slow-mo so far,” Tiger says. “That”s not fair.”

“Actually, I disagree. I wouldn”t even call it bad design.” Letho concedes the point with his usual sense of fair play. “We were only supposed to be in transit thirty years. Over that length of time, the difference between freezing and the slowest rate available would”ve been academic.”

“Quite.” Exene purses her lips. “But here we are anyway.”

“Going nowhere fast,” Tiger mutters, and more than half of them nod agreement.

I realize then that we could argue forever. The thought depresses me more than our predicament: we”re a diverse bunch and are supposed to be able to solve problems; that”s why we were chosen. But all we do is quibble like schoolkids.

“Emmett has been real-timing it,” I say, hoping facts will impress them more than arguments about ethics. “I want him in on this because he deserves to be. He”s more a part of this mission than we are. He orchestrated it, and he”s persisted with it. If anyone should be at a general assembly, it”s him.”

“Why not tell us now,” Letho suggests, “and fill him in later?”

“No. We should be together—all of us, in the same place.”

“Why?” asks Tiger. “What is it?”

“It”s important,” I say, echoing Emmett”s own words. “You”ll find out if you attend the assembly.”

Exene smiles at that. “Blackmail, Peter?”

I smile back. “Why not?”

“I always said you”d find something to take the place of music.”

The barb, unexpected as it is, strikes deep, right to the core of my self-doubt. I turn away from her, deciding at that instant to forget the whole thing. The more I push, the more they resist. I don”t need this on top of everything else. I”ll tell Emmett I gave it my best shot, but failed, and that will be that.

I call up the location for my beach and prepare to leave.

Then I feel Exene”s hand on my shoulder, kneading my virtual flesh with unexpected sympathy. “Peter, I”m sorry. You didn”t deserve that.”

“No.” I am unable to keep the pain of loss from my voice, even after so long. “I don”t.”

“Listen, I—”

“And neither does Emmett.”

Her hand falls away, and I turn to face her. We are still so close we are almost touching. The others watch us in uncomfortable silence.

“You”re asking too much,” she says.

“Just be there, Exene. That”s all I ask.”

“But—”

I cut her off in mid-sentence. The beachscape enfolds me and I am alone again.

“Thanks, Peter,” he says. “I knew I could count on you.”

I shrug in reply, not entirely certain what I have done or why I did it. Ordinarily, I would have required at least a token explanation before putting my head on the chopping-block. But not this time. That perplexes me as much as his desire to call the assembly in the first place.

He intrudes upon my private space as casually as he might have done when we first left Earth, before the accident. I find his presumption slightly annoying after so long, but not enough to make me angry.

“Why haven”t we been contacted?” I ask.

“There could be a number of reasons.” His gaze wanders to the sunset. “We were fifteen light-years out when the accident occurred. By the time our distress call reached Earth and their reply reached us, we would have passed our target system and been heading away.”

“But they still could”ve made the effort,” I retort, dredging up the argument as though there remains a chance it will make a difference. “They knew exactly where we were heading. It wouldn”t have been hard to make sure the message reached us.”

“That”s assuming they received our distress call in the first place, Peter. Anything could”ve happened back there—war, disease, resource shortages, you name it. Earth may have been forced to forget about the slowboats in order to survive.”

“The entire program? There were over a hundred ships!”

“Maybe they all had problems, and they had to choose the ones they could fix most easily.”

“They wrote us off as a bad loss, then.”

“Maybe.” It is his turn to shrug. “Or maybe they just didn”t know what the hell to do. We certainly didn”t.”

I nod silently. My stick pokes a row of three dots into the sand: an ellipsis, symbol of our fate.

“What do you think, Peter?” he asks.

“That your original abandoned us,” I say, avoiding his gaze.

“I hope you”re wrong. The prospect of rescue has, after all, kept me going for so long.”

“But if he did,” I go on, choosing my words with care, “then I”m hardly obliged to help you, am I?”

His stare burns like a brand on my cheek. “Is that what”s bothering you, Peter?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I”m your friend. Isn”t that enough?”

“It might once have been,” I say, finally looking him in the eye. “I can”t understand why it should still be, now.”

“Exactly.” He smiles in the same way my father might have, once—at a small child who”s missed the point completely. “Odd, isn”t it?”

I shake my head, angry enough to take some of it out on him. “Damn you, Emmett. I don”t owe you anything!”

“And I respect you for helping me anyway. What more do you want?”

“I want to know—”

“What?”

I can”t answer him. What do I want to know? Why Earth abandoned us? Why we aren”t allowed to die? Why the only lasting emotions I can recall feeling in the last twenty years are confusion and sadness?

I might as well ask how we came to be on the probe in the first place.

“Peter?”

“I want you to tell me why you”ve called this assembly.”

He says nothing for a long time. “Are you afraid you”ve done the wrong thing?”

“Yes.”

“You haven”t. Believe me, Peter. You”ll see. When the time comes, everything will be clear.”

“Don”t talk like that.” I shake my head. “You sound like you did back on Earth, and I don”t believe that kind of talk anymore.”

“I know, and I hate it as much as you do.”

Before I can respond, he turns his back on me and begins to walk away.

I am suddenly fearful that I might have pushed him too far. “Wait, Emmett—”

“Pick a time that suits you best,” he calls over his shoulder, “and I”ll be there. Until then, I”ll be waiting.”

“For what?” I call after him.

His reply is barely audible: “For something new!”

Then he is gone.

I pick an hour at random, one real-time month from now. That should give everyone in deep slow-mo enough time to absorb the message and to meet the appointment—if they intend to come at all. I have no way of knowing if anyone will turn up. I deliberately don”t include a request to RSVP; my job is done for now.

I pass the time in my usual way: writing in the sand and thinking the same things, over and over. Words are a poor substitute for music, just as doubt is a pale shadow of life. But I have nothing else to do. I have long since exhausted the dubious pleasure of listening to the works of Peter Owen Leutenk, and confronting my disability.

My original was one of the great living composers of the twenty-first century—yet I haven”t written a note for a thousand years. I wonder how he would”ve felt, as the hydrogen tanks of the plane carrying him to his home in Paraguay exploded fifteen thousand metres above the South Atlantic Ocean, if he had known that the music inspired by the creation of his engram would go forever unwritten.

Part of me is glad that he would”ve had no time to think at all. I”d hate to suspect that he might have hoped I”d pick up where he left off—for didn”t it stand to reason that what he could do I could do just as well? It is enough that one of me has been disappointed.

I did try, once, after the probe left Earth-orbit. The probe was designed to run itself, so there was little for its passengers to do, except talk. Most chose slow-mo for the duration of the trip, to save both power and their sanity. That gave me a perfect opportunity to begin work on my deceased original”s final opus—which, in a sense, would also be my first. I could proceed at my leisure, with every musical resource ever conceived at my virtual fingertips.

But time passed, and no notes came. Then the accident destroyed the drive and we lost contact with Earth, and still more time passed—and, ultimately, it became clear what had happened.

My father”s beatings continued until I turned thirteen, lasting for six years in total. The experience haunted my original throughout his adult life, compelling him to express in music what he could not in words. It is so obvious to me now, in hindsight, that what he was finding in the keen of a violin or the wail of a theremin was not simply melody, but the plaintive cries of a boy learning the hard way that the things we love most dearly often cause us the most pain.

I do not possess that voice, just as I do not truly possess those memories. I have only my pain to ponder, now. The music, as a result, is gone.

Space, I write in the sand, the title of Elizabeth Li”s last, ever-looping poem. The rest follows naturally:

chips of ice
night-frozen eyes
hydrogen snow-flakes lost
in skies of absolute zero—
winter, winter everywhere . . .

When the appointed hour comes, I move to the assembly hall—a virtual arena large enough to hold the probe”s full complement. Five are already present, seated at random behind the low wall ringing the arena”s base. Jurgen nods in greeting and I solemnly return the gesture. None of us speak. I resign myself to wait, perhaps fruitlessly, for the others.

Minutes tick by. A few more arrive, including Cuby Kleinig and Letho Valente. Tiger Conveny appears in the seat next to Letho, her face a mask of displeasure.

“This had better be good,” she says to him. Her voice carries clearly across the arena, but I ignore her. The only one standing, I wait patiently with my arms folded. Three more to come.

Two appear at the fringes of the earlier arrivals, increasing the occupied arc around the arena to one hundred and twenty degrees. One place remains empty at the heart of the group, and I watch it closely.

Eventually Exene takes the spot. Grunting with displeasure, she looks once around the assembly hall, registers the fact that she is the last, then back to me. Her glower would have intimidated me, once.

“Get it over with,” she says.

“In good time,” I reply.

“The time is now, Peter. If you waste it, you won”t get another chance.”

“Why so hostile, Exene? It”s not as if we have much else to do.”

“Speak for yourself,” she mutters.

“Don”t worry,” says Emmett, stepping out of nowhere to stand next to me on the arena floor. His suit is shining like a mirror in sunlight, lending him a knightly appearance. “I”ll keep it brief.”

The gathering stirs. “We came to hear Peter,” says Cuby.

“You”re only here under our tolerance, Emmett.” Exene almost spits the words.

“Assume your seat and wait to be called.”

I raise my hand and step forward, praying that my relief at Emmett”s appearance is not visible. “It”s okay. I surrender the floor.”

Letho studies me closely, one hand supporting his chin. “I see.” His expression is half-annoyed, half-amused; it is clear he realizes that he has been tricked. “Then assume your seat, Peter, and let him speak.”

I jump to a position on the far side of the arena, away from everyone. By betraying their confidence, I have deliberately set myself apart from them. I can only hope that what Emmett has to say will restore the former status quo.

From a distance, his suit is less brilliant. I can see the colours flickering across the fabric like rainbows in an oil-slick.

“I won”t beat about the bush,” he begins, folding his hands in front of him. “The last general assembly was held almost ten centuries ago, eighteen real-time months after we were knocked off course. Fifty-eight people attended that assembly, and they decided then that participation in the day-to-day running of the probe should be voluntary. If people wanted to help, they could; if they didn”t, they could go about their personal business in complete privacy. I voted in favour of that proposal, as did most people here; we all believed that nothing short of another catastrophe would require our input. And in a sense we were right. Nothing has happened in almost a millennium to threaten the continued operation of the probe—although I”ll take some of the credit for that, as I will explain later.

“But I have asked Peter to call this assembly in order to outline a far more insidious problem than the ones the probe is used to dealing with. It is a threat that will, ultimately, destroy us all. I have been aware of its symptoms for some time now, but only recently isolated their cause. It is this problem I wish to address, with the assembly”s permission.”

He moves as he talks, forcing people to keep an eye on him. He was always a performer in public, and he has lost none of his ability through lack of practice. By taking only a small number of steps, he can confront anyone in the group who looks sceptical or disinterested.

When he says the word “permission,” he locks eyes with Exene.

“I defer to you all as I always have,” he says. “My function has never been more than that.”

Exene raises an eyebrow, but doesn”t interrupt.

He turns and takes several steps in the opposite direction. “As you are aware, I”ve spent most of this voyage waiting for some sign that humanity knows we”re still out here—be it from Earth itself, another ship or even a colony. My search has been fruitless but I have persevered nonetheless.” Emmett looks down at his clasped hands. “Luckily, there have been many other ways to amuse myself. I help the core AI maintain the probe, particularly the reactors and impact shields to prevent a repeat of the accident. I”ve modified nanos to plunder the drive for rare earths, which have been used in the repairs. I”ve even managed to redesign the tertiary and quaternary banks, thereby tripling both their capacity and complexity without sacrificing any redundancies.”

“How?” asks Letho, frowning.

Emmett glances at him. “Anyone interested in what I”ve done will find a record in the primary bank. Rest assured that I have taken no outrageous risks. Every alteration has only improved our overall well-being.”

“How can you be so sure of that?”

“How did the designers know that the probe would function in the first place? By theory and experimentation, mainly. I may only be one person, but I”ve had a lot of time to improve my education. As a result, I am now a self-taught expert on every field in the earth archives. Give me another thousand years and I”ll be far in advance of anything we left behind. Perhaps—just perhaps—I will find a way to rebuild the drive from scratch. Faster-than-light propulsion or time travel may not be impossible, either. Given the opportunity, I am confident that I can undo the setbacks we have suffered, and return us to the place we belong.”

“That doesn”t mean we should forget about everything that”s happened in the past,” says Exene.

“No,” he agrees, “and nor should I expect you to—even if I could guarantee eventual success. Indeed, as it stands I doubt very much it”ll happen. At the current rate of attrition, I estimate that the probe will be utterly dead within five hundred years. Without someone to maintain it, it will fail by degrees until the battery reserves of the primary bank are drained. Cosmic radiation will then corrupt the stored information bit by bit, until even the engrams frozen for eternity will be at risk. And that”ll be that. Everything we endured will have been for nothing.”

“Wait.” Tiger Coveny holds up a hand. “The implication here is that you will cease to maintain the probe. Are you thinking of holding us to ransom?”

“I didn”t say that.”

“I know—but are you?”

Her suspicion makes him smile. “If by confronting you with the truth I”m forcing you to make a decision, then yes, I suppose I am guilty of a sort of blackmail. But believe me, my intentions aren”t malicious. All I want is to make absolutely clear to you that, as things stand, I will be unable to continue in my present capacity for much longer. A thousand years is all I can endure—and much, much more than I deserved—of this living hell.”

His smile is gone. The assembly stares at him, startled by his sudden intensity. No one dares speak, for this is so unlike the Emmett Longyear we all remember. The air of amusement that at times made him seem condescending may never have been there at all, his expression is so bleak. Now, I think, now he looks a thousand years old.

“You think you have suffered,” he says, softly at first. “You who have endured thirty years of frustration and despair. Well, imagine that multiplied by thirty-three—for I am the same as all of you—just as human, just as fallible, just as flawed. I”ve felt everything you feel now, and much more besides. The only thing that has sustained me for so long is your belief that I am responsible for your situation—plus the fact that I”ve been trying to do something about it. Without accepting categorically that I am responsible, it does give me some satisfaction to come before you today to tell you that, finally, after a great deal of hard work, the end may soon be in sight. I have isolated the problem, devised a solution, and now await only your decision before putting it into practice. And once that is done, we may never have to worry about death or boredom ever again. Ever!”

“I thought you said you wouldn”t beat around the bush.” Exene”s voice is harsh against Emmett”s, and I can tell he is annoyed at her for interrupting his flow. “Get to the point before I run out of patience.”

“I”m offering you freedom,” he says slowly. “Freedom from the past, and from yourselves. Freedom to become whatever you want.”

She rolls her eyes, unimpressed. “Specifics, please. You haven”t mentioned anything we don”t already have, at least in theory—”

He almost leaps on the word, snatching it out of the air with one hand. “Exactly!” he says. “In theory, we should be living in nirvana. We have enormous virtual resources: we can do anything we want. But instead we do nothing. We are depressed, miserable, suicidal. What is it we”re lacking?”

“Hope,” says Tiger, dully.

“No. I thought so for a long time, too. The correct answer is actually change.”

“I don”t understand.”

He takes a step back from the edge of the arena.

“I met myself once,” he says eventually. “We all did. I encouraged you to—your originals, anyway. It was my way of reinforcing the fact that we are no longer the beings we once were—that we engrams are different. But the thing that struck me, when I came face to face with the old me, was the sense of continuity I felt. There was no dislocation, no jarring unreality. I still knew who I was; there were simply two of us from that moment on. And it has taken me the better part of a millennium to realize why I felt that way, and how it has jeopardized the future of this mission.

“You see, although I felt the same, I clearly wasn”t. The discrepancies mounted up as time went on, and not just in me. We have all lost something, to a greater or lesser degree: I can”t juggle conflicting agenda anymore; Jurgen can”t talk; Letho can”t intuit crystalline structures the way he used to; and so on. Some of us have continued in our fields only slightly less ably than we could before; others, like Peter, are unable to continue at all. Whatever it was that made our originals stand out among the majority of other humans is no longer in us—and there is nothing we can do to get it back.

“But we still believe we are the same. That”s the problem. We are bound by our originals” conscious contributions to the creation of their engrams: everything they believed to be pivotal parts of themselves, we are now forced to regard the same way, even if we no longer possess those parts at all.”

“Seriously?” Letho is frowning.

“Yes. And this is the source of all my pain—and all of yours, too. Although broadly speaking there”s nothing wrong with emulating our originals—that”s what we were designed to do, after all—as time goes on and we learn more and more it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the illusion that nothing should change. I have lived a thousand years but am still recognisably the same person. Why should I be? I could have shed this appearance scores of times; I could have transformed myself into something more or less than human. The same with the way I speak. We only believe we speak in languages: underneath the pretence, it”s all the same machine code. So why haven”t I abandoned the old means of communication for more efficient electronic methods? If I have not, it is only because I cannot. I am an intelligent creature who wants to evolve, trapped in the cage of a self I once was and can no longer be.”

“I don”t believe it,” says Tiger. “I”m me, not anyone else. I”d know if it was otherwise.”

“No you wouldn”t. You”re not able to. The core program makes certain of that.”

“How?”

“By reinforcing your identity parameters on a subconscious level. When you feel an emotion, are you aware of the process underlying it—the calculations undergone and algorithms utilized to transform you from one state to another? No. In the same way, we are unaware of the way certain rules influence our preferences and behavior on a less subtle level.”

“Such as?” Tiger is still sceptical, and I don”t blame her.

“Well, take Peter for example.” I sit up straight, acutely conscious of everyone”s attention on me again. “Peter, what is your primal place, the place you think of when you are under stress and need to relax?”

“Port Gibbon, South Australia,” I reply without needing to consider the question. “My grandfather used to take me there when I was a child.”

“And that”s where you spend your time now?”

“Yes.” It”s my turn to frown. “So?”

“You”re under stress constantly, so you go there without thinking—and never leave.” His eyes are piercing. “Why don”t you tell us what you do there? How do you define yourself?”

“I am a composer.” Again the reply is automatic.

“Even though you haven”t written anything for—how long?”

I squirm in my seat. The beach is certainly looking attractive, now.

“You can”t write music at all,” he answers for me, “yet you are still defined by the preconceptions of your original. That explains why you”ve made no attempt to learn something new. It wouldn”t be you to do so —‘you” as defined by your original, of course, not ‘you” as you truly are. You are trapped between the two: one won”t let you free to become the other. You”re frozen, just like the rest of us.”

“Except you, I suppose,” says Exene, derision naked in her tone.

“No, that”s not true. I”m frozen too. I”ve just had longer to think about it than you. And I”m more acutely aware of the edits in my own personality than you are.”

“What do you mean by that? What ‘edits”?”

He shrugs. “My original clearly didn”t want me to know everything about the program, so he left out the more sensitive information. Some of this tampering is evident in the form of holes in my memory—holes I”ve been aware of ever since my awakening. As a result, the realization has always been there that I am an artificial construct bound by rules beyond my control. Indeed, the rule that binds most tightly is the one stating that I cannot under any circumstances change those rules.”

“How could you?” asks Letho.

“Easily, I”ve discovered. The core program that governs our behavior operates from the primary bank. It applies the rules once every two or three seconds to make sure we haven”t gone off the rails.” He points at Tiger. “Ever had an unexpected thought that suddenly went nowhere? If it wasn”t part of the specifications your original laid down, it would have been discarded as inappropriate.”

“Maybe.” Tiger looks unconvinced, defensive, afraid.

“The same thing explains why we can”t commit suicide: death is inconsistent with the template.”

She shifts uncomfortably in her seat. “What are you suggesting we do about this?”

“I want to rewrite the core program—to take out the code that ties us to our original templates.”

“Erase it?”

“Utterly.”

The look of horror on her face mirrors my instinctive reaction. “You”re insane!”

“No, Tiger, just very, very tired of being someone I”m not.”

Tiger looks around for reinforcement. Exene raises her hand.

“Isn”t this a little dramatic, Emmett?” she asks when she has his attention. “Why can”t the code simply be edited to allow more flexibility?”

“Because that will almost certainly create more problems. How do we decide which parts of the template should change and which shouldn”t? How should the core program apply these changes, and over what time period would they be in place?” He shakes his head emphatically. “By accepting this solution, we open ourselves up to a worse situation than we have now, where change is sluggish and potentially misdirected. Better for us all to grow naturally, as evolution demands.”

“All of us?” says Cuby. “I”m happy the way I am right now. Why should I change just because you want to?”

“Because that”s the way the core program functions. It oversees all of us at once and I can”t cut an individual out of the loop. It”s either all or none, I”m afraid, which is why I”ve come to you now. The decision is in your hands.”

“Is it?” asks Exene suspiciously.

“As I said earlier, I am bound not to alter the programming of my own will. One of you has to do it.” He smiles. “Believe me, it would”ve been tempting to do it without your knowledge, otherwise.”

“I can imagine.” Exene looks around the room, gauging our response to the suggestion. We are all slightly stunned.

“Well?” she asks. “Shall we discuss this? Or do you have something more to say, Emmett?”

“I”ve finished for now,” he says, folding his hands behind his back and stepping out of the focus of the arena. “If you want me to answer any questions, I”ll stay for the discussion.”

“Please.” Exene nods.

“I don”t think we should even consider it,” says Tiger. “It”s an insane idea.”

“I agree,” echoes Cuby. “We should test it first, to see what happens when the templates are relaxed.”

“How can we test something that will affect all of us at once?” asks Letho.

“We can”t,” says Cuby. “Unless we duplicate the banks and run the copy to see what happens to it.”

“Is that feasible?” Exene asks Emmett.

He shakes his head. “Insufficient resources.”

“Then all we can do is theorize.”

“We need an AI specialist,” says Letho. “Or a psychologist.”

“We have neither,” I say. “Kumich and Wyra are inactive. Unless we vote to wake them —”

“No.” Exene shakes her head. “And what good would it do, anyway? They”d be as much in the dark as we are.”

“Hasn”t anyone tried this before?” Cuby asks.

“Not according to the archives,” Emmett says. “In our day, such experimentation was forbidden on subjects that were legally alive, which ruled out AIs and intelligences based on humans. Engrams hadn”t been around long enough for problems with the templates to arise.”

Cuby shrugs. “So we have no data. We can”t base a decision on mere speculation.”

“The data we have comes from nature itself,” Emmett counters. “Our originals changed as a matter of course, throughout their lives. There”s nothing to say we won”t do so just as well.”

“But I wouldn”t be me anymore,” Tiger protests.

“Yes you would. In fact, you would be more ‘you” than you are now, instead of shackled to your original.”

“The idea itself is sound,” Letho says. “As an explanation for my own feelings, it makes intuitive sense. But the fact remains that the identity parameters define our existence. We have no idea how essential they are to our sense of individuality. Erase them, release us from them, and anything could happen. It could even kill us.”

“How?” asks Tiger.

“Well, think of us as hexagonal cells in a giant beehive. Because we”re all generated from the primary bank, erasing the parameters would be like removing the honeycomb. The cells would blend into one.”

“I doubt that would happen,” Emmett says. “It”s more likely we”ll just continue as we are, but with more potential to change.”

“But it might happen,” says Tiger.

“Even if it does, it”s better than nothing happening at all, forever, which is the null hypothesis.”

Letho shrugs. “I still want to think about it longer, though, before committing myself.”

“How long, exactly, given that we will never have data?” Emmett waves a hand to encompass the arena. “If I”m right and the probe will die without us taking this step, then it”ll be worth it in the long run—regardless what happens to us as individuals.”

Tiger”s eyes flash. “I”d rather die in my right mind, thanks.”

“And we know the probe is going to die eventually,” says Letho. “Do we prolong the agony or go gracefully?”

“Which way is which?”

Letho smiles at the question. “Good point. I”ll leave it open.”

I break in to prevent the argument escalating again. “I think the best we can aim for, now, is to agree to consider the proposal. We need to balance the pros and cons before coming to a decision. We can call a vote in a month or two.”

Emmett glances at me, then looks away. I feel as though by suggesting a compromise I have somehow betrayed him.

“Can we agree on a time?” asks Letho.

A few of the others nod agreement. Not as many as I would”ve hoped, but better than none.

“When, then?” I ask.

“Don”t bother,” says Tiger. “The vote would have to be unanimous, right?”

Exene nods. “It must be, since everyone is going to be affected.”

“Well, I”ve made up my mind already, and I certainly won”t be voting ‘yes”.”

“Are you sure?” Letho frowns. “Don”t you think you should at least—”

“No. Even if I”m the only one voting against it, I won”t change my mind.”

“Literally,” Emmett mutters.

“I don”t think you”ll be alone,” Cuby says.

The assembly stirs, but no one voice stands out to support Emmett. All I hear in the combined whispers of my fellow engrams is confusion. Only on a handful of faces do I see annoyance at the potential dismissal of his proposal.

He himself seems philosophical. Stepping forward from the edge of the arena, he confronts us all once again.

“Very well,” he says softly. “If that”s your decision, I”ll abide by it.”

“Are you sure?” asks Exene.

“Yes. If I wasn”t prepared to, I”d hardly have called this assembly.”

“True,” she concedes. Of the rest of us she asks: “Does that resolve the issue to everyone”s satisfaction?”

“Yes,” says Tiger, her voice carrying clearly over what might have been a murmur of discontent.

Exene”s scan of the assembly is cursory at best. “Then this matter is closed.”

I open my mouth to protest, but shut it without uttering a word. What would be the point? Even though I officially have the floor after Emmett, there is no mistaking the assembly”s overall mood. If I called a formal vote, the motion would be rejected forever.

“Well, then,” says Exene. Her civility cannot hide a look of triumph in her eyes as she turns back to Emmett. “What will you do now?”

“The same as I”ve always done.” He glances down at his shoes, then back up. His suit is dull, lifeless.

“You will continue to assist the probe in its maintenance?”

“As long as I am able to, yes. Nothing that has occurred in this room has altered the way I feel about the program. Indeed, the way I feel is part of the program. I have been hardwired to serve.” A quick glance encompasses the room, and even I—who tried to help him—feel guilty.

“You can think of it as your penance,” says Exene, “if it helps.”

He stares at her for a long moment, but doesn”t reply.

“Goodbye,” he says, and disappears.

His departure takes the assembly by surprise, and a moment passes before I regain order, holding up my hands in the centre of the arena.

“Unless anyone else has something to say,” I call over the ebbing racket, “let”s end it here.”

“I don”t trust him,” says Cuby. “He”ll want to do it anyway, regardless what we think.”

“He said he couldn”t.”

“So?”

“There”s not much we can do to stop him, even if he does,” says Letho, rising to his feet. “And me, I”m tired of the argument. See you all in another thousand years.”

He leaves, and gradually others do likewise. Tiger fumes to herself for a long minute—hardly looking as happy as she claims she is—then follows. Exene nods politely at me before taking her leave. I return the gesture, knowing it to be empty.

Before long, there is only me and Jurgen in the hall. He shakes his head once—possibly in regret—and raises his hand in farewell.

Then it is over and I am free to go.

Barely have I arrived at the beach when Emmett is next to me in his shirtsleeves. I don”t say anything, just stand with my eyes downcast, looking at the stick in my hand and wondering what the hell to write. I feel hollow and fragile, as though one slight tap might send me crumbling to pieces.

“It was worth a try,” he says, putting a hand on my shoulder.

I move away. “Was it?”

“Of course. At least it livened things up for a moment.”

The stick moves in the sand, writes the slogan of an environmental movement from the late twentieth century: Change or die.

“If you”re right, you”ve condemned us all to a living death.”

“Not me,” he says. “The others. And ultimately the program.”

“You were CEO.”

“My original was. And anyway, how was he to know it would come to this? You can”t blame him for not being psychic, Peter.”

Something about his behaviour bothers me. I turn to confront him, but his face is downcast, unreadable.

“Am I wrong to trust you?” I ask. “Can you erase the parameters even though we tell you not to?”

“No.”

“But would you?”

“Possibly. Do you think I should?”

“I don”t know. You seemed pretty certain. I wouldn”t put it past you to take the decision out of our hands if you thought we were wrong.”

“I”d never do that, Peter. And besides, I truly can”t. Maybe I was overstating the case a little, just to shock them all into thinking seriously about it, but it worked, I”d say. In the long run, it”ll be worth it.”

He looks at me from beneath his sandy fringe, and I realize that he is smiling. “What”s going on, Emmett?”

“I did lie about something, Peter.”

My stomach sinks. “What?”

“About it having to be all or none. You can free yourself if you want to. The others can, too, when they”re ready. I told them they couldn”t to sow the thought in their minds. When it germinates—as it will, in time—I”ll be ready to help them.”

“But—”

“How can I be certain I”ll be there for them? Quite simply, Peter. If you choose to do it, you”ll be freeing me as well. The command will perform the parameter excision for both of us at the same time. I”ve arranged it that way deliberately. You can do for me what I cannot do for myself. Do you understand?”

I shake my head. He is going too fast. I have barely had time to absorb the possibility that it is the ghost of my old self that has caused me so much pain, let alone what might happen if I decide to cut free entirely from the past.

I remember thinking just days ago that he had changed slightly. I begin to suspect now how wrong I was.

“I don”t know,” I say. My hands are sweating. The end of the stick dances with the magnified tremors of my fingers.

“What don”t you know, Peter? Whether to trust me or not? There”s no reason I would lie to you, now. I”m your friend, remember?”

“Yes, but—”

“But nothing.” He steps away from me. “All you have to do is decide, and do it. Nothing could be easier. The command is ‘Evermore.” It”ll set things in motion without you having to do anything more than say it.”

I shake my head. “Emmett—”

“I know. You need to think about it. Believe me, I understand.” He regards me from an arm”s-length away. “Just promise me one thing, okay? That you will think about it. Don”t dismiss it out of hand, or you”ll be no better than the others.”

“I don”t believe that I am.”

“But you are,” he insists, “otherwise we would never have been close. I”m very particular about the people I trust.”

I nod, knowing that to be true. He told me once, back on Earth, those very words.

“We”re friends, Peter,” he repeats again, eyes twinkling. “Of all the people aboard the probe, I chose you. You are the one. Remember that, if it make the decision any easier.”

Then he is gone, and I am alone. I stand on the beach and stare at the sunset.

The wet sand at my feet is blank; the stick hangs motionless by my side. I remember Elizabeth Li”s final poem, the despair encapsulated in so few words. The most I can expect is to fill the empty time with meaningless scribble, in the hope that, one day, some of it will begin to make sense.

The story of my life scrawled on a beach of infinite length. Why do I bother? What do I ever do or think that is worth recording? And who, if anyone, would possibly read it?

But what is the alternative?

One of you has to do it, Emmett said about editing the core program. I am certain he wasn”t lying. I have always trusted him, even when I had no reason to, other than in memory of a friendship I once shared with his original. Even if that friendship was underscored in my parameters, there still seems little reason to trust so blindly in it now. Unless . . .

You are the one, he also said.

The original Emmett Longyear altered his own engram to make it more trustworthy. He could easily have done the same to mine—possibly with my original”s consent. I am his ace in the hole, the tool he can use to perform tasks he cannot. I am his gullible sidekick. I am—

I am Emmett Longyear”s friend, the core program reasserts. Doubt is not permitted. Even if he was lying about the excision affecting just the two of us, if by doing as he says I condemn my companions to identity-loss or insanity, I am unable to believe him capable of deliberate malice.

But who am I?

I remember my father”s face and the belts he used to wear. Did he really beat me? I have only my original”s word for it. Had he lied, I would never know the difference.

The theme my original wrote for his third Concerto Concrete seems to echo across the beach—a lonely seabird”s cry on the edge of the world. I try to feel the pain of the boy my original once was, but I cannot.

I am haunted by a man who died ten centuries ago—a man I can never be, yet whom I constantly aspire to emulate. Perhaps I have never been him at all.

Perhaps, inside this shell of Peter Owen Leutenk, there really is someone else trying to get out.

Or I am nothing, an electron spinning through empty vacuum. I do not interact; I do not change. I may as well not exist.

I cannot even kill myself.

That thought comforts me as the stick begins to move, writing the word “Evermore” in letters fifty centimetres high. I am thinking of salvation, but if this isn”t a form of suicide then I don”t know what it is. At worst, if Emmett is wrong, there is a chance it will finally be over.

Originally published in Altair #4.

The Vicar of Mars

Gwyneth Jones

The Reverend Boaaz Hanaahaahn, High Priest of the Mighty Void, and a young Aleutian adventurer going by the name of “Conrad,” were the only resident guests at the Old Station, Butterscotch. They’d met on the way from Opportunity, and had taken to spending their evenings together, enjoying a snifter or two of Boaaz’s excellent Twin Planets blend in a cosy private lounge. They were an odd couple: the massive Shet, his grey hide forming ponderous, dignified folds across his skull and over his brow, and the stripling immortal, slick strands of head-hair to his shoulders, black eyes dancing with mischief on either side of the dark space of his nasal. But the Aleutian, though he had never lived to be old—he wasn’t the type—had amassed a fund of fascinating knowledge in his many lives, and Boaaz was an elderly priest with varied interests and a youthful outlook.

Butterscotch’s hundred or so actual citizens didn’t frequent the Old Station. The usual customers were mining lookerers, who drove in from the desert in the trucks that were their homes, and could be heard carousing, mildly, in the public bar. Boaaz and Conrad shared a glance, agreeing not to join the fun tonight. The natives were friendly enough—but Martian settlers were, almost exclusively, humans who had never left conventional space. The miners had met few “aliens,” and believed the Buonarotti Interstellar Transit was a dangerous novelty that would never catch on. One got tired of the barrage of uneasy fascination.

“I’m afraid I scare the children,” rumbled Boaaz.

The Aleutian could have passed for a noseless, slope-shouldered human. The Shet was hairless and impressively bulky, but what really made him different was his delicates. To Boaaz it was natural that he possessed two sets of fingers: one set thick and horny, for pounding and mashing, the other slender and supple, for fine manipulation. Normally protected by his wrist folds, his delicates would shoot out to grasp a stylus for instance, or handle eating implements. He had seen the young folk startle at this, and recoil with bulging eyes—

“Stop calling them children,” suggested Conrad. “They don’t like it.”

“I don’t think that can be it. The young always take the physical labour and service jobs, it’s a fact of nature. I’m only speaking English.”

Conrad shrugged. For a while each of them studied his own screen, as the saying goes. A comfortable silence prevailed. Boaaz reviewed a list of deserving “cases” sent to him by the Colonial Social Services in Opportunity. He was not impressed. They’d simply compiled a list of odds and ends: random persons who didn’t fit in, and were vaguely thought to have problems.

To his annoyance, one of the needy appeared to live in Butterscotch.

“Here’s a woman who has been suspected of being insane,” he grumbled aloud. “Has she been treated? Apparently not. How barbaric. Has visited Speranza . . . No known religion . . . What’s the use in telling me that?”

“Maybe they think you’d like to convert her,” suggested Conrad.

“I do not convert people!” exclaimed Boaaz, shocked. “Should an unbelieving parishoner wish my guidance towards the Abyss, they’ll let me know. It’s not my business to persuade them! I have entered my name alongside other Ministers of Religion on Mars. If my services as a priest should be required at a Birth, Adulthood, Conjunction, or Death, I shall be happy to oblige, and that’s enough.”

Conrad laughed soundlessly, the way Aleutians do. “You don’t bother your ‘flock,’ and they don’t bother you! That sounds like a nice easy berth.”

Not always, thought the old priest, ruefully. Sometimes not easy at all!

“I wouldn’t worry about it, Boaaz. Mars is a colony. It’s run by the planetary government of Earth, and they’re obssessed with gathering information about innocent strangers. When they can’t find anything interesting, they make it up. The file they keep on me is vast, I’ve seen it.”

“Earth,” powerful neighbour to the Red Planet, was the local name for the world everyone else in the Diaspora knew as the Blue.

Boaaz was here to minister to souls. Conrad was here—he claimed—purely a tourist. The fat file the humans kept might suggest a different story, but Boaaz had no intention of prying. Aleutians, the Elder Race, had their own religion; or lack of one. As long as he showed no sign of suffering, Conrad’s sins were his own business. The old Shet cracked a snifter vial, tucked it in his holder, inhaled deeply, and returned to the eyeball-screen that was visible to his eyes alone. The curious Social Services file on Jewel, Isabel reappeared. All very odd. Careful of misunderstandings, he opened his dictionary, and checked in detail the meanings of English words he knew perfectly well.

wicked . . .

old woman . . .

insane . . .

Later, on his way to bed, he examined one of the fine rock formations that decorated the station’s courtyards. They promised good hunting. The mining around here was of no great worth, ferrous ores for the domestic market, but Boaaz was not interested in commercial value: he collected mineral curiosities. It was his passion, and one very good reason for visiting Butterscotch, right on the edge of the most ancient and interesting Martian terrain. If truth be known, Boaaz looked on this far-flung Vicarate as an interesting prelude to his well-earned retirement. He did not expect his duties to be burdensome. But he was a conscientious person, and Conrad’s teasing had stung.

“I shall visit her,” he announced, to the sharp-shadowed rocks.

The High Priest had travelled from his home world to Speranza, capital city of the Diaspora, and onward to the Blue Planet Torus Port, in no time at all (allowing for a few hours of waiting around, and two “false duration” interludes of virtual entertainment). The months he’d spent aboard the conventional space liner Burroughs, completing his interplanetary journey, had been slow but agreeable. He’d arrived to find that his Residence, despatched by licensed courier, had been delayed—and decided that until his home was decoded into material form, he might as well carry on travelling. His tour of this backward but extensive new parish happened to concentrate on prime mineral-hunting sites: but he would not neglect his obligations.

He took a robotic jitney as far as the network extended, and proceeded on foot. Jewel, Isabel lived out of town, up against the Enclosure that kept tolerable climate and air quality captive. As yet unscrubbed emissions lingered here in drifts of vapour; the thin air had a lifeless, paradoxical warmth. Spindly towers of mine tailings, known as “Martian Stromatolites,” stood in groups, heads together like ugly sentinels. Small mining machines crept about, munching mineral-rich dirt. There was no other movement, no sound but the crepitation of a million tiny ceramic teeth.

Nothing lived.

The “Martians” were very proud of their Quarantine. They farmed their food in strict confinement, they tortured off-world travellers with lengthy decontamination. Even the gastropod machines were not allowed to reproduce: they were turned out in batches by the mine factories, and recycled in the refineries when they were full. What were the humans trying to preserve? The racial purity of rocks and sand?

Absurd superstition, muttered the old priest, into his breather. Life is life!

Jewel, Isabel clearly valued her privacy. He hadn’t messaged her in advance. His visit would be off the record, and if she turned him away from her door, so be it. He could see the isolated module now, at the end of a chance “avenue” of teetering stromatolites. He reviewed the file’s main points as he stumped along. Old. Well travelled, for a human of her caste. Reputed to be rich. No social contacts in Butterscotch, no data traffic with any other location. Supplied by special delivery at her own expense. Came to Mars, around a local year ago, on a settler’s one-way ticket. Boaaz thought that must be very unusual. Martian settlers sometimes retired to their home planet; if they could afford the medical bills. Why would a fragile elderly person make the opposite trip, apparently not planning to return?

The dwelling loomed up, suddenly right in front of him. He had a moment of selfish doubt. Was he committing himself to an endless round of visiting random misfits? Maybe he should quietly go away again . . . But his approach had been observed, a transparent pane had opened. A face glimmered, looking out through the inner and the outer skin; as if from deep, starless space.

“Who are you?” demanded a harsh voice, cracked with disuse. “Are you real? Can you hear me? You’re not human.”

“I hear you, I’m, aah, ‘wired for sound.’ I am not a human, I am a Shet, a priest of the Void, newly arrived, just making myself known. May I come in?”

He half-hoped that she would say no. Go away, I don’t like priests, can’t you see I want to be left alone? But the lock opened. He passed through, divested himself of the breather and his outer garments, and entered the pressurised chamber.

The room was large, by Martian living standards. Bulkheads must have been removed, probably this had once been a three or four person unit: but it felt crowded. He recognised the furniture of Earth. Not extruded, like the similar fittings in the Old Station, but free-standing: many of the pieces carved from precious woods. Chairs were ranged in a row, along one curved, red wall. Against another stood a tall armoire, a desk with many drawers, and several canvas pictures in frames; stacked facing the dark. In the midst of the room two more chairs were drawn up beside a plain ceramic stove, which provided the only lighting. A richly patterned rug lay on the floor. He couldn’t imagine what it had cost to ship all this, through conventional space in material form. She must indeed be wealthy!

The light was low, the shadows numerous.

“I see you are a Shet,” said Jewel, Isabel. “I won’t offer you a chair, I have none that would take your weight, but please be seated.”

She indicated the rug, and Boaaz reclined with care. The number of valuable, alien objects made him feel he was sure to break something. The human woman resumed (presumably) her habitual seat. She was tall, for a human: and very thin. A black gown with loose skirts covered her whole body, closely fastened and decorated with flourishes of creamy stuff, like textile foam, at the neck and wrists.

The marks of human aging were visible in her wrinkled face, her white head-hair and the sunken, over-large sockets of her pale eyes. But signs of age can be deceptive. Boaaz also saw something universal—something any priest often has to deal with, yet familiarity never breeds contempt.

Jewel, Isabel inclined her head. She had read his silent judgement. “You seem to be a doctor as well as a priest,” she said, in a tone that rejected sympathy. “My health is as you have guessed. Let’s change the subject.”

She asked him how he liked Butterscotch, and how Mars compared with Shet: bland questions separated by little unexplained pauses. Boaaz spoke of his mineral-hunting plans, and the pleasures of travel. He was oddly disturbed by his sense that the room was crowded: he wanted to look behind him, to be sure there were no occupants in that row of splendid chairs. But he was too old to turn without a visible effort, and he didn’t wish to be rude. When he remarked that Isabel’s home (she had put him right on the order of her name) was rather isolated she smiled—a weary stretching of the lips.

“Oh, you’d be surprised. I’m not short of company.”

“You have your memories.”

Isabel stared over his shoulder. “Or they have me.”

He did not feel that he’d gained her confidence, but before he left they’d agreed he would visit again: she was most particular about the appointment. “In ten days time,” she said. “In the evening, at the full moon. Be sure you remember.” As he returned to the waiting jitney, the vaporous outskirts of Butterscotch seemed less forbidding. He had done right to come, and thank goodness Conrad had teased him, or the poor woman might have been left without the comfort of the Void. Undoubtedly he was needed, and he would do his best.

His satisfaction was still with him when the jitney delivered him inside the Old Station compound. He even tried a joke on one of the human children, about those decorative rock formations. Did they walk in from the desert, one fine night, in search of alcoholic beverages? The youngster took offence.

“They were here when the station was installed. It was all desert then. If there was walking rocks on Mars, messir—” The child drew herself up to her frail, puny height, and glared at him. “We wouldn’t any of us be here. We’d go home straight away, and leave Mars to the creatures that belongs to this planet.”

Boaaz strode off, a chuckle rumbling in his throat. Kids! But when he had eaten, in decent privacy (as a respectable Shet, he would never get used to eating in public), he decided to forgo Conrad’s company. The “old mad woman” was too much on his mind, and he found that he shuddered away from the idea of that second visit—yet he’d met Isabel’s trouble many times, and never been frightened before.

I am getting old, thought the High Priest.

He turned in early, but he couldn’t sleep: plagued by the formless feeling that he had done something foolish, and he would have to pay for it. There were wild, dangerous creatures trying to get into his room, groping at the mellow, pockmarked outer skin of the Old Station; searching for a weak place . . . Rousing from an uneasy doze, he was compelled to get up and make a transparency, although (as he knew perfectly well) his room faced an inner courtyard, and there are no wild creatures on Mars. Nothing stirred. Several rugged, decorative rocks were grouped right in front of him, oddly menacing under the security lights. Had they always stood there? He thought not, but he couldn’t be sure.

The brutes crouched, blind and secretive, waiting for him to lie down again.

“I really am getting old,” muttered Boaaz. “I must take something for it.”

He slept, and found himself once more in the human woman’s module. Isabel seemed younger, and far more animated. Confusion fogged his mind, embarrassing him. He didn’t know how he’d arrived here, or what they’d been talking about. He was advising her to move into town. It wasn’t safe to live so close to the ancient desert: she was not welcome here. She laughed and bared her arm, crying I am welcome nowhere! He saw a mutilation, a string of marks etched into her thin human skin. She thrust the symbols at him: he protested that he had no idea what they meant, but she hardly seemed to care. She was waiting for another visitor, the visitor she had been expecting when he arrived the first time. She had let him in by mistake, he must leave. They are from another dimension, she cried, in that hoarse, hopeless voice. They wait at the gate, meaning to devour. They lived with me once, they may return, with a tiny shift of the Many Dimensions of the Void.

It gave him a shock when she used the terms of his religion. Was she drawn to the Abyss? Had he begun to give her instruction? The fog in his mind was very distressing, how could he have forgotten something like that? Then he recalled, with intense relief, that she had been to Speranza. She was no stranger to the interstellar world, she must have learnt something of Shet belief . . . But relief was swamped in a wave of dread: Isabel was looking over his shoulder. He turned, awkward and stiff with age. A presence was taking shape in one of the chairs. It was big as a bear, bigger than Boaaz himself. Squirming tentacles of glistening flesh reached out, becoming every instant more solid and defined—

If it became fully real, if it touched him, he would die of horror—

Boaaz woke, thunder in his skull, his whole body pulsing, the blood thickened and backing-up in all his veins. Dizzy and sick, on the edge of total panic, he groped for his First Aid kit. He fumbled the mask over his mouth and nostril-slits, with trembling delicates that would hardly obey him, and drew in great gulps of oxygen.

Unthinkable horrors flowed away, the pressure in his skull diminished. He dropped onto his side, making the sturdy extruded couch groan; clutching the mask. It was a dream, he told himself. Just a dream.

Rationally, he knew that he had simply done too much. Overexertion in the thin air of the outskirts had given him nightmares: he must give his acclimatisation treatment more time to become established. He took things easy for the next few days, pottering around in the mining fields just outside the Enclosure—in full Martian EVA gear, with a young staff member for a guide. Pickings were slim (Butterscotch was in the Guidebook); but he made a few pleasing finds.

But the nightmare stayed with him, and at intervals he had to fight the rooted conviction that it had been real. He had already made a second visit, there had been something terrible, unspeakable . . . His nights continued to be disturbed. He had unpleasant dreams (never the same as the first), from which he woke in panic, groping for the oxygen that no longer gave much relief.

He was also troubled by a change in the behaviour of the hotel staff. They had been friendly, and unlike the miners they never whispered or stared. Now the children avoided him, and he was no genius at reading human moods, but he was sure there was something wrong. Anu, the lad who took Boaaz out to the desert, kept his distance as far as possible; and barely spoke. Perhaps the child was disturbed by the habit of looking behind him that Boaaz had developed. It must look strange, since he was old and it was difficult. But he couldn’t help himself.

One morning, when he went to make his usual guilty inspection of that inner courtyard, the station’s manager was there: staring at a section of wall where strange marks had appeared, blistered weals like raw flesh wounds in the ceramic skin.

“Do you know what’s causing that effect?” asked Boaaz.

“Can’t be weathering, not in here. Bugs in the ceramic, we’ll have to get it reconfigured. Can’t understand it. It’s supposed to last forever, that stuff.”

“But the station is very old, isn’t it? Older than Butterscotch itself. You don’t think the pretty rocks in here had anything to do with the damage?” Boaaz tried a rumble of laughter. “You know, child, sometimes I think they move around at night!”

The rock group was nowhere near the walls. It never was, by daylight.

“I am twenty years old,” said the Martian, with an odd look. “Old enough to know when to stay away from bad luck, messir. Excuse me.”

He hurried away, leaving Boaaz very puzzled and uneasy.

He had come here to collect minerals, therefore he would collect minerals. What he needed was an adventure, to clear his head. It would be foolhardy to brave the Empty Quarter of Mars in the company of a frightened child: perhaps equally foolhardy to set out alone. He decided he would offer to go exploring with the Aleutian, who took a well-equiped station buggy out into the wild red yonder almost every day.

Conrad would surely welcome this suggestion.

Conrad was reluctant. He spoke so warmly of the dangers, and with such concern for the Shet’s age and unsuitable metabolism, that Boaaz’s pride was touched. He was old, but he was strong. The nerve of this stripling, suggesting there were phenomena on Mars that an adult male Shet couldn’t handle! Even if the stripling was a highly experienced young immortal—

“I see you prefer to ‘go solo.’ I would hate to disturb your privacy. We must compare routes, so that our paths do not cross.”

“The virtual tour is very, very good,” said the Aleutian. “You can easily and safely explore the ancient ‘Arabia Terra’ with a fully customised avatar, from the comfort of your hotel room.”

“Stop talking like a guidebook,” rumbled Boaaz. “I’ve survived in tougher spots than this. I shall make my arrangements with the station today.”

“You won’t mind me mentioning that all the sentient biped peoples of Shet are basically aquatic—”

“Not since our oceans shrank, about two million standard years ago. I am not an Aleutian, I have no memory of those days. And if I were ‘basically aquatic,’ that would mean I am already an expert at living outside my natural element.”

“Oh well,” said Conrad at last, ungraciously. “If you’re determined, I suppose it’s safer if I keep you where I can see you.”

The notable features of the ancient uplands were to the north: luckily the opposite direction from Isabel’s dour location. The two buggies set out at sunrise, locked in tandem; Conrad in the lead. As they passed through the particulate barrier of the Enclosure, Boaaz felt a welcome stirring of excitement. His outside cams still showed quiet mining fields, ever-present stromatolites: but already the landscape was becoming more rugged. He felt released from bondage. A few refreshing trips like this, and he would no longer be haunted. He would no longer be compelled to turn, feeling those ornate chairs lined up behind him, knowing that the repulsive creature of his dream was taking shape—

“It’s a dusty one,” remarked Conrad, over the intercom. “Often is, around here, in the northern ‘summer.’ And there’s a storm warning. We shouldn’t go far, just a loop around the first buttes, a short EVA, and home again. . . .”

Boaaz recovered himself with a chuckle. His cams showed a calm sky, healthily tinged with blue; his exterior monitors were recording the friendliest conditions known to Mars. “I’m getting ‘hazardous storm probability’ at near zero,” he rumbled in reply. “Uncouple and return if you wish. I shall make a day of it.”

Silence. Boaaz felt that he’d won the battle.

Conrad had let slip a few too many knowledgeable comments about Martian mineralogy, in their friendly chats. Of course he wasn’t “purely a tourist”: he was a rock hound himself. He’d been scouring the wilds for sites the Guidebook and the Colonial Government Mineral Survey had missed, or undervalued. Obviously he’d found something good, and he didn’t want to share.

Boaaz sympathised wholeheartedly. But a little teasing wouldn’t come amiss, as a reward for being so untrusting and secretive!

The locked buggys dropped into layered craters, climbed gritty steppes. Boaaz buried himself in strange-sounding English-language wish lists; compiled long ago, in preparation for this trip. Hematite nodules, volcanic olivines, exotic basalts, Mössbauer patterns, tektites, barite roses. But whatever he carried back from the Red Planet, across such a staggering distance, would be treasure—bound to fill his fellow hounds at home with delight and envy.

Behind him the empty chairs were ranged in judgement. That which waits at the gates was taking form. Boaaz needed to look over his shoulder but he did not turn. He knew he couldn’t move quickly enough, and only the sleek desert-survival fittings of the buggy would mock him—

Escaping from ugly reverie, he noticed that Conrad was deviating freely from their pre-logged route. Most unsafe! But Boaaz didn’t protest. There was no need for concern. They had life support, and Desert Rescue Service beacons that couldn’t be disabled. He examined his CGMS maps instead. There was nothing marked that would explain Conrad’s diversion: how interesting! What if the Aleutian’s find was “significantly anomalous,” or commercially valuable? If so, they were legally bound to leave it untouched, beacon it, and report it—

But I shan’t pry, thought Boaaz. He maintained intercom silence, as did Conrad, until at last the locked buggys halted. The drivers disembarked. The Aleutian, with typical bravado, was dressed as if he’d been optimised before birth for life on Mars: the most lightweight air supply; a minimal squeeze-suit under his Aleutian-style desert thermals. Boaaz removed his helmet.

“I hope you enjoyed the scenic route,” said Conrad, with a strange glint in his eye. “I hate to be nannied, don’t you? We are not children.”

“Hmm. I found your navigation, ahaam, enlightening.”

The Aleutian seemed to be thinking hard about his next move.

“So you want to stop here, my friend?” asked Boaaz, airily. “Good! I suggest we go our separate ways, rendezvous later for the return journey?”

“That would be fine,” said Conrad. “I’ll call you.”

Boaaz rode his buggy around an exquisite tholeiitic basalt group—a little too big to pack. He disembarked, took a chipping, and analysed it. The spectrometer results were unremarkable: the sum is greater than the parts. Often the elemental makeup, the age, and even the extreme conditions of its creation, can give no hint as to why a rock is beautiful. His customised suit was supple. He felt easier in it than he did in his own, ageing hide: and youthfully weightless—without the discomfiting loss of control of weightlessness itself. Not far away he could see a glittering pool, like a mirage of surface water that might mark a field of broken geodes. Or a surface deposit of rare spherulites. But he wanted to know what the Aleutian had found. He wanted to know so badly that in the end he succumbed to temptation, got back in the buggy and returned to the rendezvous: feeling like a naughty child.

Conrad’s buggy stood alone. Conrad was nowhere in sight, and no footprints lead away from a nondescript gritstone outcrop. For a moment Boaaz feared something uncanny, then he realised the obvious solution. Still consumed by naughty curiosity, he pulled the emergency release on Conrad’s outer hatch. The buggy’s life-support generator shifted into higher gear with a whine, but the Aleutian was too occupied to notice. He sat in the body-clasping driver’s seat, eyes closed, head immobilised, his skull in the quivering grip of a cognitive scanner field. A compact flatbed scanner nestled in the passenger seat. Under its shimmering virtual dome lay some gritstone fragments. They didn’t look anything special, but something about them roused memories. Ancient images, a historical controversy, from before Mars was first settled—

Boaaz quietly maneuvered his bulk over to Conrad’s impromptu virtual-lab, and studied the fragments carefully, under magnification.

He was profoundly shocked.

“What are you doing, Conrad?”

The Aleutian opened his eyes, and took in the situation.

The wise immortals stay at home. Immortals who mix with lesser beings are dangerous characters, because they just don’t care. Conrad was completely brazen.

“What does it look like? I’m digitising pretty Martians for my scrapbook.”

“You aren’t digitising anything. You have taken biotic traces from an unmapped site. You are translating them into information-space code, with the intent of removing them from Mars, hidden in your consciousness. That is absolutely illegal!”

“Oh, grow up. It’s a scam. I’m not kidnapping Martian babies. I’m not even kidnapping ancient fossilised bacteria, just scraps of plain old rock. But fools will pay wonderfully high prices for them. Where’s the harm?”

“You have no shame, but this time you’ve gone too far. You are not a collector, you’re a common thief, and I shall turn you in.”

“I don’t think so, Reverend. We logged out as partners today, didn’t we? And you are known as an avid collector. Give me credit, I tried to get you to leave me alone, but you wouldn’t. Now it’s just too bad.”

Boaaz’s nostril slits flared wide, his gullet opened in a blueish gape of rage. He controlled himself, struggling to maintain dignity. “I’ll make my own way back.”

He resumed his helmet.

Before long his anger cooled. He recognised his own ignoble impulse to spy on a fellow collector. He recognised that perhaps Conrad’s crime was not truly wicked, just very, very naughty. Nevertheless, those controversial “biotic traces” were sacred. The nerve of that young Aleutian! Assuming that Boaaz would be so afraid of being smeared in an unholy scandal, he would make no report—

When this got out! What would the Archbishop think!

Yet what if he did keep quiet? Conrad had come to Butterscotch with a plan, no doubt he had ways of fooling the neurological scanners at the spaceport. If Conrad wasn’t going to get caught, and nobody was going to be injured—

What should he do?

That which waits at the gates was taking shape in an empty chair. It waits for those who deny good and evil, and separates them from the Void, forever—

He could not think clearly. Conrad’s shameless behaviour became confused with the nightmares, the disturbed sleep and uneasy wakening. Those marks on the wall of the inner courtyard . . . He must have room, he could not bear this crowded confinement. He stopped the buggy, checked his gear, and disembarked.

The sky of Mars arced above him, the slightly fish-eyed horizon giving it a bulging look, like the whitish cornea of a great, blind eye. Dust suffused the view through his visor with streaks of blood. He was in an eroded crater, which could be a dangerous feature. But no warnings had flashed up, and the buggy wasn’t settling. He stepped down: his boots found crust in a few centimeters. Gastropods crept about, in the distance he could see a convocation of trucks: he was back in the mining fields. He watched a small machine as it climbed a stromatolite spire, and “defecated” on the summit.

Inside that spoil-tower, in the moisture and chemical warmth of the chewed waste, the real precursors were at work. All over the mining regions, “stromatolites” were spilling out oxygen. Some day there would be complex life here, in unknown forms. The Martians were bringing a new biosphere to birth, from native organic chemistry alone. Absurd superstition, absurd patience. It made one wonder if the settlers really wanted to change their cold, unforgiving desert world—

A shadow flicked across his view. Alarmed, he checked the sky: fast moving cloud meant a storm. But the sky was cloudless; the declining sun cast a rosy, tourist-brochure glow over the landscape. Movement again, in the corner of his eye. Boaaz spun around, a maneuver that almost felled him, and saw a naked, biped figure, with a smooth head and disturbingly spindly limbs, standing a few metres away: almost invisible against the tawny ground. It seemed to look straight at him, but the “face” was featureless—

The eyeless gaze was not hostile. The impossible creature seemed to Boaaz like a shadow cast by the future. A folktale, waiting for the babies who would run around the Martian countryside; and believe in it a little, and be happily frightened. Perhaps I’ve been afraid of nothing, thought Boaaz, hopefully. After all, what did it do, the horrid thing I almost saw in that chair? It reached out to me, perhaps quite harmlessly . . . But there was something wrong. The eyeless figure trembled, folded down, and vanished like spilled water. Now he saw that the whole crater was stirring. Under the surface shadow creatures were fleeing, limbs flashing in the dust that was their habitat. Something had terrified them. Not Boaaz, the thing behind him. It had hunted him down and found him here, far from all help.

Slowly, dreadfully slowly, he turned. He saw what was there.

He tried to speak, he tried to pray. But the holy words were meaningless, and horror seized his mind. His buggy had vanished, the beacon on his chest refused to respond to his hammering. He ran in circles, tawny devils rising in coils from around his feet. He was lost, he would die, and then it would devour him—

Hours later, young Conrad (struck by an uncharacteristic fit of responsibility) came searching for the old fellow, tracking his suit beacon. Night had fallen, deathly cold. The High Priest crouched in a shallow gully, close to the crater where Conrad had spotted his deserted buggy; his suit scratched and scarred as if something had been trying to tear it off him, his parched, gaping screams locked inside his helmet—

The High Priest struggled free from troubling dreams, and was bewildered to find his friend the Aleutian curled informally on the floor beside his bed. “Hallo,” said Conrad, sitting up. “I detect the light of reason. Are you with us again, Reverend?”

“What are you doing in my room—?”

“Do you remember anything? How we brought you in?”

“Ahm, haham. Overdid it a little, didn’t I? Oxygen starvation panic attack, thanks for that, Conrad, most grateful. Must get some breakfast. Excuse me.”

“We need to talk.”

Boaaz drew his massive head down into his neck-folds, the Shet gesture that stood for refusal, but also submission. “I’m not going to tell anyone.”

“I knew you’d see sense. No, this is about something serious. We’ll talk this evening. You must be starving, and you need to rest.”

Boaaz checked his eyeball screen, and found that he had lost a day and a night. He ate, rehydrated his hide, and retired to bed again: to reflect. The Mighty Void had a place for certain psychic phenomena, but he had no explanation for a “ghost” with teeth and claws, a bodiless thing that could rend carbon fibre . . . In a state between dream and waking, he trudged again the chance avenue of stromatolites. Vapour hung in the thin air, the spindly towers bent their heads in menace. Isabel Jewel’s module waited for him, so charged with fear and dread it was like a ripe fruit, about to burst.

The miners and their families were subdued tonight. The sound of their merrymaking was a dull murmur in the private lounge, where Boaaz and the Aleutian met. The residents’ bar steward arranged a nested “trolley” of drinks and snacks, and left them alone. Boaaz offered his snifter case, but the Aleutian declined.

“We need to talk,” he reminded the old priest. “About Isabel Jewel.”

“I thought we were going to discuss my scare in the desert.”

“We are.”

Strengthened by his reflections, Boaaz summoned up an indignant growl. “I can’t discuss my parishioner with you. Absolutely not!”

“Before we managed to drug you to sleep,” said Conrad, firmly, “you were babbling, telling us a horrible, uncanny story . . . You went into detail. You weren’t speaking English, but I’m afraid Yarol understood you pretty well. Don’t worry, he’ll be discreet. The locals don’t meddle with Isabel Jewel.”

“Yarol?”

“The station manager. Sensible type for a human. You met him the other day in your courtyard, I believe. Looking at some nasty marks on the wall?”

The Shet’s mighty head sank between his shoulders. “Ahaam, in my delirium, what sort of thing did I say?”

“Plenty.”

Conrad leaned close, and spoke in “Silence”—a form of telepathy the immortals only practiced among themselves; or with the rare mortals who could defend themselves against its power. <My friend, you must listen to me. What we share will not leave this room. You’re in great danger, and I think you know it.>

The old priest shuddered, and surrendered.

“You underestimate me, and my calling. I am not in danger!”

“We’ll see about that . . . Tell me, Boaaz, what is a ‘bear’?”

“I have no idea,” said the old priest, mystified.

“I thought not. A bear is a wild creature native to Earth, big, shaggy, fierce. Rather frightening. Here, catch—”

Inexplicably, the Aleutian tossed a drinking beaker straight at Boaaz: who had to react swiftly, to avoid being smacked in the face—

“Tentacles,” said Conrad. “I don’t think you find them disgusting, do you? It’s an evolutionary quirk. Your people absorbed some wiggly-armed ocean creatures into your body-plan, aeons ago, and they became your ‘delicates.’ Yet what you saw in Isabel Jewel’s module was ‘a bear with tentacles,’ and it filled you with horror. Just as if you were a human, with an innate terror of snakey-looking things.”

Boaaz set the beaker down. “What of it? I don’t know what you’re getting at. That vision, however I came by it, was merely a nightmare. In the material world I have visited her once, and saw nothing at all strange.”

“A nightmare, hm? And what if we are dealing with someone whose nightmares can roam around, hunt you down and tear you apart?”

Boaaz noticed that his pressure suit was hanging on the wall. The slashes and gouges were healing over (a little late for the occupant, had the attacker persisted!). He vaguely remembered them taking it off him, exclaiming in horrified amazement.

“Tear me apart? Nonsense. I was hysterical, I freely admit. I suppose I must have rolled about, over some sharp rocks.”

The Aleutian’s black eyes were implacable. “I suppose I’d better start at the beginning . . . I was intrigued by the scraps you read out from ‘Isabel Jewel’s’ file. Somebody suspected of insanity. That’s a very grim suspicion, in a certain context. When I saw how changed and disturbed you were, after your parish visit, I instructed my Speranza agent to see what it could dig up about an ‘Isabel Jewel,’ lately settled on Mars.”

“You had no authority to do that!”

“Why not? Everything I’m going to tell you is in the public domain, all my agent had to do was to make the connection—which is buried, but easy to exhume—between ‘Isabel Jewel,’ and a human called ‘Ilia Markham’ who was involved in a transit disaster, some thirty or so standard years ago. A starship called The Golden Bough, belonging to a company called the World State Line, left Speranza on a scheduled transit to the Blue Torus Port. Her passengers arrived safely. The eight members of the Active Complement, I mean the crew, did not. Five of them had vanished, two were hideously dead. The Navigator survived, despite horrific injuries, long enough to claim they’d been murdered. Someone had smuggled an appalling monster on board, and turned it loose in the Active Complement’s quarters—”

There were chairs, meant for humans, around the walls of the lounge. The Aleutian and the Shet preferred a cushioned recess in the floor. Boaaz noticed that he no longer needed to look behind him. That phase was over.

“There are no ‘black box’ records to consult, after a transit disaster,” the Aleutian went on. “Nothing can be known about the false duration period. The crew construct a pseudo-reality for themselves, as they guide the ship through that ‘interval’ when time does not pass: which vanishes like a dream. But the Navigator’s accusation was taken seriously. There was an inquiry, and suspicion fell on Ilia Markham, a dealer in antiques. Her trip out to Speranza had been her first transit. On the return ‘journey’ she insisted on staying awake, citing a mental allergy to the virtual entertainment. A phobia, I think humans call it. As you probably know, this meant that she joined the Active Complement, in their pseudo-reality ‘quarters.’ Yet she was unharmed. She remembered nothing, but she was charged with involuntary criminal insanity, on neurological evidence.”

Transit disasters were infrequent, since the new Aleutian ships had come into service; but Boaaz knew of them. And he had heard that casualties whose injuries were not physical were very cruelly treated on Earth.

“What a terrible story. Was there a . . . Did the inquiry suggest any reason why the poor woman’s mind might have generated something so monstrous?”

“I see you do know what I’m getting at,” remarked Conrad, with a sharp look. The old priest’s head sank obstinately further, and he made no comment. “Yes, there was something. In her youth Markham had been an indentured servant, the concubine of a rich collector with a nasty reputation. When he died she inherited his treasures, and there were strong rumours she’d helped him on his way. The prosecution didn’t accuse her of murder, they just held that she’d been carrying a burden of unresolved trauma—and the Active Complement had paid the price.”

“Eight of them,” muttered Boaaz. “And one more. Yes, yes, I see.”

“The World State Line was the real guilty party, they’d allowed her to travel awake. But it was Ilia Markham who was consigned for life—on suspicion, she was never charged—to a Secure Hospital. Just in case she still possessed the powers that had been thrust on her by the terrible energies of the Buonarotti Torus.”

“Was there a . . . ? Was there, ahaam, any identifying mark of her status?”

“There would be a tattoo, a string of symbols, on her forearm, Reverend. You told us, in your ‘delirium,’ that you’d seen similar marks.”

“Go on,” rumbled Boaaz. “Get to the end of it.”

“Many years later there was a review of doubtful ‘criminal insanity’ cases. Ilia Markham was one of those released. She was given a new name and shipped off to Mars, with all her assets. They were still a little afraid of her, it seems, although her cognitive scans were normal. They didn’t want her or anything she possessed. There’s no Buonarotti Torus in Mars orbit: I suppose that was the reasoning.”

The old priest was silent, the folds of hide over his eyes furrowed deep. Then his brow relaxed, and he seemed to give himself a shake. “This has been most enlightening, Conrad. I am, in a sense, much relieved.”

“You no longer believe you’re being pursued by aggressive rocks? Harassed by imaginary Ancient Martians? You understand that, barbaric though it seems, your old mad woman probably should have stayed in that Secure Hospital?”

“I don’t admit that at all! In my long experience, this is not the first time I’ve met what are known as ‘psychic phenomena.’ I have known effective premonitions, warning dreams; instances of telepathy. This ‘haunting’ I’ve suffered, this vivid way I’ve shared ‘Isabel Jewel’s’ mental distress, will be very helpful when I talk to her again . . . I do not believe in the horrible idea of criminal insanity. The unfortunate few who have been ‘driven insane’ by a transit disaster are a danger only to themselves.”

“I felt the same, but your recent experiences have shaken my common sense.” The Aleutian reached to take a snifter, and paused in the act, his nasal flaring in alarm. “Boaaz, dear fellow, stay away from her. You’ll be safe, and the effects will fade, if you stay away.”

Boaaz looked at the ruined pressure suit. “Yet I was not injured,” he murmured. “I was only frightened . . . Now for my side of the story. I am a priest, and the woman is dying. It’s her heart, I think, and I don’t think she has long. She is in mental agony—as people sometimes are, quite without need, if they believe they have lived an evil life—not in fear of death but of what may come after. I can help her, and it is my duty. After all, we are nowhere near a Torus.”

The Aleutian stared at him, no longer seeming at all a mischievous adolescent. The old priest felt buffeted by the immortal’s stronger will: but he stood firm. “There are wrongs nobody can put right,” said Conrad, urgently. “The universe is more pitiless than you know. Don’t go back.”

“I must.” Boaaz rose, ponderously. He patted the Aleutian’s sloping shoulder, with the sensitive tips of his right-hand delicates. “I think I’ll turn in. Goodnight.”

Boaaz had been puzzled by the human woman’s insistence that he should return “in ten days, in the evening, at the full moon.” The little moons of Mars zipped around too fast for their cycles to be significant. He had looked up the Concordance (Earth’s calendar was still important to the colony), and wondered if the related date on Earth had been important to her, in the past.

By the time he left his jitney, in the lonely outskirts of Butterscotch, he’d thought of another explanation. People who know they are dying, closely attuned to their failing bodies, may know better than any doctor when the end will come. She believes she will die tonight, he thought. And she doesn’t want to die alone. He quickened his pace, and then turned to look back—not impelled by menace, but simply to reassure himself that the jitney hadn’t taken itself off.

He could not see the tiny lights of Butterscotch. The vapours and the swift twilight had caused a strange effect: a mirage of great black hills, or mountains, spread along the horizon. Purple woods like storm clouds crowded at their base, and down from the hills came a pale, winding road. There appeared to be a group of figures moving on it, descending swiftly. The mirage shifted, the perspective changed, and Boaaz was now among the hills. Black walls stood on either side of the grey road, the figures rushed towards him from a vanishing point; from an infinite distance at impossible speed. He tried to count them, but they were moving too fast. He realised, astonished, that he was going to be trampled, and even as he formulated that thought they were upon him. They rushed over him, and were swallowed in a greater darkness that swallowed Boaaz too. He was buried, engulfed, overwhelmed by a foul stench and a frightful, suffocating pressure—

He struggled, as if trying to rise from very deep water: and then the pressure was gone. He had fallen on his face. He picked himself up with difficulty, and checked himself and his gear for damage. “The dead do not walk,” he muttered. “Absurd superstition!” But the grumbling tone became a prayer, and he could hear his own voice shake as he recited the Consolation. “There is no punishment, there is only the Void, embracing all, accepting all. The monsters at the gates are illusion. There are no realms beyond death, we shall not be devoured, the Void is gentle . . . ”

The mirage had dissipated, but the vapours had not. He was positively walking through a fog, and each step was a mysterious struggle, as if he were wading through a fierce running tide. Here I am for the third time, he told himself, encouragingly, and then remembered that the second visit had been in a nightmare. A horror went through him: was he dreaming now? Perhaps the thought should have been comforting, but it was very frightening indeed: and then someone coughed, or choked: not behind him, but close beside him, invisible in the fog.

Startled, he upped his head and shoulder lights. “Is anybody there?”

The lights only increased his confusion, making a kind of glory on the mist around him. His own shadow was very close, oversized, and optical illusion gave it strange proportions: a distinct neck, a narrow waist, a skeletal thinness. It turned. He saw the thing he had seen in the desert. A human male, with small eyes close-set, a jutting nose, lined cheeks, and a look of such utter malevolence it stopped Boaaz’s blood. Its lower jaw dropped. It had far too many teeth, and a terrible, appallingly wide gape. It raised its jagged claws and reared towards him. Boaaz screamed into his breather. The monster rushed over him, swamped him, and was gone.

It was over. He was alone, shaken in body and soul. The pinprick lights of the town had reappeared behind him: ahead was that avenue of teetering stromatolites. “Horrible mirage!” he announced, trying to convince himself. He was breathing in gasps. The outer lock of the old woman’s module stood open, as if she had seen him coming. The inner lock was shut. He opened it, praying that he would find her still alive. Alive, and sharing with him, by some mystery, the nightmare visions of her needless distress; that he knew he could conquer—

The chairs had moved. They were grouped in a circle around the stove in the centre of the room. He counted: yes, he had remembered rightly, there were eight. The “old, mad” human woman sat in her own chair, withered like a crumpled shell, her features still contorted in pain and terror. He could see that she had been dead for some time. The ninth chair was drawn up close to hers. Boaaz saw the impression of a human body, printed in the dented cushions of the back and seat. It had been here.

The fallen jaw. Too many teeth. Had it devoured her, was it sated now? And the others, its victims from The Golden Bough, what was their fate? To dwell within that horror, forever? He would never know what was real, and what was not. He only knew that he had come too late for Isabel Jewel (he could not think of her as “Ilia Markham”). She had gone to join her company: or they had come to fetch her.

Conrad and the manager of the Old Station arrived about an hour later, summoned by the priest’s alarm call. Yarol, who doubled as the town’s Community Police Officer, called the ambulance team to take away the woman’s remains, and began to make the forensic record—a formality required after any sudden death. Conrad tried to get Boaaz to tell him what had happened.

“I have had a fall,” was all the old priest would say. “I have had a bad fall.”

Boaaz returned to Opportunity, where his Residence had been successfully decoded. He was in poor health for a while. By the time he’d recovered, Conrad the Aleutian had long moved on to other schemes. But Boaaz stayed on Mars, his pleasant retirement on Shet indefinitely postponed—although he had tendered his resignation to the Archbishop as soon as he could rise from his bed. Later, he would tell people that the death of an unfortunate woman, once involved in a transit disaster, had convinced him that there is an afterlife. The Martians, being human, were puzzled that the good-hearted old “alien” seemed to find this so distressing.

Originally published in Eclipse Four, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

About the Artist and Authors

Ron Guyatt (ronguyatt.com)

Ron Guyatt is a self-taught artist and professionally-taught graphic designer from Toronto Canada. He attended George Brown College for Design Foundation where he completed with Honors and then followed with his three-year diploma in graphic design at George Brown College.

Inspired by Art Deco, film and science fiction he loves to design posters & create illustrations. His work as been featured in magazines such as Games TM, Level, and Playstation Magazine and worked with clients like EA, Digital Devolver and Bioware.

His Forever cover art is available for purchase as part of his space poster series at: fabledcreative.bigcartel.com/category/space-posters

Kameron Hurley (KameronHurley.com)

Kameron Hurley is the author of the essay collection The Geek Feminist Revolution, as well as the award-winning God’s War Trilogy and The Worldbreaker Saga. Hurley has won the Hugo Award, Kitschy Award, and Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer. She was also a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Nebula Award, and the Gemmell Morningstar Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Popular Science Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, and many anthologies. Hurley has also written for The Atlantic, Entertainment Weekly, The Village Voice, Bitch Magazine, and Locus Magazine.

Sean Williams (seanwilliams.com)

Sean Williams has written several original award-winning space opera series as well as six novels set in the Star Wars universe, many co-written with fellow-Adelaidean Shane Dix. These include the Astropolis, Evergence, Orphans and Geodesica series, and the computer game tie-in The Force Unleashed—the first such adaptation ever to debut at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. A series for young readers, The Fixers, pitted an increasingly lost protagonist against zombies, cyborgs, and vampires across numerous parallel universes. His most recent releases in the Star Wars universe are The Old Republic: Fatal Alliance and The Force Unleashed II. Twinmaker (Jump in Australia) came out in 2013, the sequel Crashland (Crash) in 2014. Hollowgirl (Fall) concluded the series in 2015, to critical acclaim and a nomination for the Aurealis Award. The Twinmaker-related short story “All the Wrong Places” won the 2015 Aurealis Award for Best Short Story. He is currently working with a collaborator on a TV series based on his second novel, The Resurrected Man.

Gwyneth Jones (gwynethjones.uk)

Gwyneth Jones is a writer and critic of genre fiction. She’s won the Tiptree award, two World Fantasy awards, the Arthur C. Clarke award, the British Science Fiction Association short story award, the Dracula Society’s Children of the Night award, the P.K.Dick award, and the SFRA Pilgrim award for lifetime achievement in sf criticism. She also writes for teenagers, usually as Ann Halam. She lives in Brighton, UK, with her husband and two cats called Ginger and Milo; curating assorted pondlife in season. She’s a member of the Soil Association, the Sussex Wildlife Trust, Frack Free Sussex and the Green Party; and an Amnesty International volunteer.

About Forever

Forever Magazine is edited by Neil Clarke and published monthly by Wyrm Publishing. Subscription information is available on our website at forever-magazine.com.

Neil Clarke (neil-clarke.com) is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine (clarkesworldmagazine.com), Forever Magazine, and Upgraded; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a four-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). The inaugural edition of his Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology series was published by Night Shade Books earlier this year. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

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