Issue 54, July 2019

© Wyrm Publishing, 2019
wyrmpublishing.com
forever-magazine.com

Table of Contents

Introduction

by Neil Clarke

Freezing Rain, a Chance of Falling

by L.X. Beckett

Conditional Love

by Felicity Shoulders

The Moon is Not a Battlefield

by Indrapramit Das

About the Artist and Authors

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the July 2019 issue of Forever Magazine and thank you for subscribing or buying a copy. Your support helps make this little venture possible.

I have two books coming out this month: The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Four and The Eagle has Landed—a retrospective of Lunar SF published since Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon almost exactly fifty years ago. I’m fairly excited about both. I’ve never had two books scheduled for the same month before and these are also my first US anthologies to be published in hardcover. (Touchable Unreality in China is the first in the world.) Two give you a taste, two of this issue’s stories come from those anthologies. I hope you enjoy them!

Until next time,

-Neil

Freezing Rain, a Chance of Falling

L.X. Beckett

The night Woodrow Whiting lost all his social capital, a storm blew into Toronto. Blue-black fists of cloud reached across the lake from the U.S., shaking fat clusters of snowflakes over South Ontario. They piled up in censorious drifts on the windowsills as Drow’s followship foundered, deep-sixing a host of memberships and privileges, including the backstage passes for his next three gigs.

Journos who drove waifish divas to suicide—and everyone had seen it happen, streaming crimson in 3dHD, live from Drow’s apartment—didn’t get to cover Pinegrove’s Reunion Tour. They didn’t get to compile newsflow on Fusion, alleged lab-grown clone child of Mercury and Bowie.

Mob rule by remote: When you were all strikes, no strokes, you could kiss good-bye to your access to the musical virtuosi.

By dawn, Drow had scrubbed every inch of his apartment, working his way out from the bloody epicenter of the incident. Whenever he had the urge to datadive, his sidekick app intervened with a dry, British-accented, “Bad idea, Master Woodrow.” This got him a clean house while keeping him from brooding or—worse—firing another torpedo into his own fortunes.

By the time he was done, the place smelled of chlorine and broth. The fridge had been nagging him about leftovers, half-eaten meals abandoned by his roommate. Drow responded by throwing the dregs into a smartcooker with a couple chicken bouillon cubes. “Go to town,” he’d told the cooker, and it obligingly blendered the mix into hot, green-gray lava. Allstew, Uncle Jerv had called it: random nutrients, no regard for flavor. Drow drank the brew until his gut was warm, queasy-liquidly full.

Crane, his sidekick app, flailed as it tried to put a calorie count on the binge. Drow returned to his war on filth.

Outside, the snow piled to infarction-inducing levels and the sky lightened.

Drow assembled a kit: wool cap, balaclava, gloves, degradable bags. Base layer, top and bottom, shirt, and ski pants. Last the coat and the boots. He could commit an assassination and nobody would be able to ID him without giving him a whooz first.

Thus swaddled, he closed his door on the smell of angry hospital, shuffled past the snow-weighted fauxflowers piling up on his boulevard, and headed to the corner store to buy a smartshovel and a bag of penitential salt.

The trick to stroke farming was to bottom-feed, staying clear of anyone who had an established snow-clearing gig. Drow volunteered himself to a network of self-driving cars. With twenty centimeters turning to slush on the asphalt, trapped sedans were becalmed all over Toronto. Batteries charged, they bleated alerts about unfilled orders and late appointments, making their sysops too desperate to sneer at his pariah-grade rating.

The network sent Drow to clear an older neighborhood on the edge of Little Italy. Narrow streets with brick houses, barely paid off by the octogenarian Gen X inhabitants moldering within, accumulated snow on pitched roofs. Icicles formed in jagged clusters to reveal holes in their post-Victorian gutter systems.

“Head down, donkey.” The shovel tracked kilos moved, meters cleared. Crane flagged urgent gigs: oldsters with glass hips and medical appointments, and specialist cars with promises to keep and snow up to their wheel wells.

As he shoveled, strangers threw strokes his way without any thought of whoozing him. They appreciated not having to worry about the granny next door. The fossils stroked him, too, as did their descendants. Drow imagined middle-aged absentee kids, checking in on Ma from Sri Lanka and Nairobi, giving him the old-fashioned thumbs-up.

Sweat ran inside his base layers as his cap stopped hemorrhaging. If he kept his head down, shoveled twenty-four-seven, and the blizzard lasted forty days and forty nights, he might level his way back to respectability in time for the Spring into Music Festival in Stratford.

Or not. Squid ink bloomed on the edge of his goggs. At least one passerby was willing to convert three of their own strokes into sanction.

“U should be using sand on the byways, NOT salt!” They attached a flow about pollution levels in Lake Ontario.

It would be weeks before Drow could afford to ignore these passive-aggressive smackdowns. “Open article, Crane,” he said to his sidekick, before the heckler decided to spend thirty strokes to hit him again.

Crane, ever the perfect virtual assistant, obediently washed newsflow across his goggs. Doleful music swelled in his ears, lead-in to the voice-over. Infographic furled through his line of sight.

Drow listened to the salient points even as he kept lifting and throwing, lifting and throwing the snow. Blah blah: effects of salt on groundwater. Blah blah poisoned lagoon in Pickering—Saints, that was back in 2018, how old was this link? Blah blah struggling fish populations.

“Face your editor, sir?” said Crane.

Drow appreciated the flow, old though it was, and blinked aside the stats on fishy carnage. “Hi, Seraph.”

A pencil-sketch version of her appeared on the snowbank. “How are you?”

“Sunk in shit creek without a press pass.”

“I’m working on spin. We’ll raise you.”

“Raise me? I’ve killed—”

“Untrue!” Seraph interrupted. “The conniving little virtuoso’s gonna survive.”

Drow missed his stroke, jamming the edge of the shovel into a crack in the pavement. “How?”

Cascayde had doxxed him. She’d barged into his apartment, screaming about his latest, newsflow meant to prove she was not only a derivative songwriter, but actively pirating the ideas of her betters.

Ambitious, risky followship-poaching. He’d hoped to expose the truth while flipping her fanbase, turning it against her while buoying himself, Seraph, and Newsreef. Instead, there she was, in his house, in his face, in hysterics. Stupidly, Drow had escalated, telling her six ways to fuck right off. Cascayde cut her own throat before he got to line item seven.

Naturally, they’d both been streaming it live.

Drow focused on the cartoon sketch. Seraph kept her hair buzzed into golden hexagons. Cartoon bees bumbled around the honeycombed scalp. When had he last seen her in person?

“She lived?” he repeated.

“Guess she didn’t cut deep enough.”

His knees turned, momentarily, to water. At a loss for words, he fired off a string of emoji. Thumbs-up, indicating a like.

“You don’t have to be nice about it. Well. Not to me.”

“Ah, but you adore me.”

“Adore you not.” She refused to be distracted. “Cascayde, pulling that stunt—”

“I shouldn’t have baited her.”

“You’re at fault? No.”

“Thousands say yes.”

“They’re wrong.”

“It’s the virtuosi who closed ranks against me. The fanbase is just dancing their party line.”

The music-journo gig was supposed to be a detour on his road to becoming virtuoso. The plan was simple: cover his expenses, build his social capital, and make the contacts who would one day level Drow’s own musical career.

Little chance of that now. He’d burned all his networking bridges.

Now what? Get used to street-cleaning?

Seraph said, “You couldn’t know she was unstable, Drow.”

“You’re being kind.” He’d gone for Cascayde’s plagiarist underbelly, expecting her fellow composers to fall into line, to denounce her. He’d expected a counter-play from her—damage control, some move calculated to keep herself from falling too far. But the desperation in her eyes as she’d flashed that antique straight razor . . . that was truth. Her fragile-waif persona was no affect.

She’d been on some kind of edge. He’d kicked her off.

Seraph said, “I’m calling because I can’t assign you anything new, Drow. You knew that?”

“Reporters for Newsreef must maintain a sixty prosocial rating, with a banked surplus of three hundred strokes, to be eligible for new freelance assignments,” Drow said, quoting his user agreement with their employer. His shovel unearthed a fist-sized pile of dog turds; kneeling, he dug out one of his bags. “Why do you think I’m filter-feeding strokes out here in geezerland?”

“But! I went through your unfinished contracts. Remember you were profiling musicians who buy into dangerous fads? You never finished the series.”

“I don’t know if submitting newsflow on vaxxorcisms—”

“There’s the chemo pop-up thing, remember?”

“I remember.” Bullshit pitch at the Halloween party, eighteen months earlier. Drow as a new-minted reporter, Seraph his first ever editor: terra incognita. Their first night out, beer and face-to-face. He’d been wondering if a real conscience underlaid her elevated social capital. She’d wanted to know whether he was genuinely smart or just clever. That was how she’d put it, anyway, once they’d shared.

Seraph was a true believer, in her way. She saw being a journo as a calling, no different from art. Both, she claimed, were the pursuit of truth, pure and simple.

Drow wasn’t sure about his smarts, and he certainly knew better than to overshare when it came to the purity of his motives. But all those sermons! Those long earnest monologues saying as how Drow should see his journo gig as something more than just a stepping stone on the climb to fame. If they’d taught him one thing, it was Seraph went gooey about anything that smacked of Actual Journalism. “So?”

“You had a whistleblower. You compiled infographics on how the chemo pop-ups work. For the shallows, we have slideshows about virtuosi who bought in for ten weeks of treatment. All you’d need would be voice to knit it together and fresh video of an open clinic.”

“No. It needs realtime profile. It doesn’t expose the clinics sufficiently, not if we don’t show ’em poisoning someone.”

“Someone like who?”

That brought him circling back to how he’d alienated his music industry friends. “An overview won’t rebuild my followship.”

Without followship, he couldn’t get back to posting songs online, or playing live pop-in concerts.

“It’d position you as a serious reporter.” Seraph was canny about such things. “Someone who tells the stories, damn the consequences. You’d be doing a good deed, too: Plenty of people know someone who’s been wrecked by chemo fraudsters.”

Could it be the journo bridge wasn’t entirely burned? “I am definitely in karmic arrears.”

“And a feature would pay in other ways.”

“Money, you mean?”

“Can’t buy you love. So go rack up some payables.”

“Young man?” A pink-haired skeleton in old-fashioned LED goggs was waving from her stoop.

“Hold on, Seraph.” Shovel in one hand, dogshit in the other, Drow gave the apparition an exaggerated pantomime—Who, me?—from within his sweat-soaked layers of downfill.

He braced for more simulated squid ink. She’d probably been saving her front walk as guilt-bait for grandchildren.

But she wasn’t waiting to strike or berate him. Setting her goggs to display a huge pair of blue cartoon eyes, she pointed at her garbage. The bin unlatched noisily.

Grateful to have permission, Drow dumped the morning’s accumulation of bagged dog droppings and litter.

“What is it?” Seraph asked.

He switched her to ridealong mode.

“Is that a person?”

The pink zombie was gesturing. “Come into my parlor, sonny, and have some cocoa.”

Drow whoozed her: Tala Weston, owner/operator of Mygalomorphae Productions. Performance artist. Crane, ever helpful, sourced up “parlor,” an archaic word meaning sitting room.

“Should I do your front walk on my way up there?” Drow asked.

“Suit yourself.”

“Researching Mygalomorphae Productions,” Seraph said.

“I got nothing.”

“Your privileges are restricted, remember?”

He salted the walk, pollution be damned.

“Nothing yet. I’ll drill down.”

He’d reached the door. The old lady was waving him in. “You could’ve just carved a furrow. I’m not that wide. Recharge your shovel there.”

“Thanks.” Drow stepped onto the runner, dusting his boots so they wouldn’t leave a puddle before he clipped the shovel in. It flashed a calorie burn on his display, numbers bright enough, for a second, to compensate for the fact that his goggs had steamed over.

“Painkiller? Anti-inflammatories? I’ve got the good stuff.”

He squinted through the condensation haze. She was short and Caucasian. A forest of steel quills, embedded in both shoulders and the back of her left hand, quivered as she moved. Working acupuncture on RSI damage, probably: half of Gen X had wrecked itself keyboarding, back in the days before input tech went virtual. He got a glimpse of metal, embedded in her chin. Mandible replacement?

One pink braid, thick as a hangman’s rope, dangled to her mid-back. At the scalp, it was gathered up over her ears in a way that did nothing to conceal wraparound headphones and the LED screens of her goggs. It was an antique rig, but expensive. Defying the trend to barely visible headsets, this was . . . conspicuous. Flashy. The eyes screened out as well as in, treating him to that image of blinky anime eyes with long lashes. They must weigh a ton: he could hear the click of lenses switching and adjusting within as she squared to face him.

Getting a portrait in case I turn out to be a serial killer. Drow dredged for her question. Painkillers. “Thanks. The aches haven’t set in yet.”

“And you’re young as well as gallant and handsome.” She hung his coat on a hook. “Cocoa?”

“Thanks.”

What she poured was top-of-the-line drinking chocolate, sort of thing that couldn’t be carbon-neutral, not unless you subsidized half a Croatian swamp, or personally reconstructed topsoil for a ridiculous percentage of Saskatchewan. It was so rich, the first sip almost made him moan.

“Sit, dear.” She laid out a plate of gingersnaps.

Drow sank into a plush smartchair by the front window and chose one of the cookies. She settled across the table. They drank, two strangers watching the weather.

The thing in her chin was a piercing, embedded with an old brass gear . . . a watch cog? Some piece of tech that would have been antique even when she was young.

“Steampunk.” She’d caught Drow staring. “You should see my tats.”

He decided to breeze past the thought of wizened flesh covered in fading ink. “My name’s Drow.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Course you do. I’m the man of the hour.”

She put a hand out. “Tala.”

“You’re a . . . ” He paused.

“Still drilling,” Seraph said. “She’s way under Sensorium radar.”

He blinked silent acknowledgement and finished his sentence to Tala. “ . . . performance artist?”

“Largely retired,” the old lady said. “I still make the occasional artstorm.”

He was more tired than he’d thought: The chocolate and the over-warm house were making him languid. “I didn’t get any samples when I whoozed you.”

“My work is mostly in private galleries.”

He pondered that: art you couldn’t access. Why bother?

“I owe you an apology, Drow. I came out to say you could use my bins.” She tapped her cheek, next to the earbubble. “Hearing aids, they pick up more than they ought. I overheard your conversation.”

“No worries.” He waved this away, noticing as he did that a blister was coming in on the palm of his left hand. The red spot and shiny edge of skin were oddly fascinating. Pushing on it, he felt the thick resistance of flesh over bubbled fluid.

Her thin pink eyebrows were raised high. “Is your friend joining us?”

Oh. He blushed. “Ah . . . Seraph? You staying?”

“To watch you eat cookies? Later, Drow.” The cartoon popped like a soap bubble.

“Sorry about that,” he said to Tala.

“It’s what your generation does. But I confess I am interested in this story your . . . editor? Suggested.”

“She’s taking pity. Brainstorming ways to keep me solvent while I regroup socially.” Anything, Drow thought, to avoid having to turn to Uncle Jerv.

For one slippery second, he thought of asking Crane about Jerv. Had he reached out? Thrown an offer of financial or emotional support against the global block Drow had put on all such comms?

“You have to be popular to do what you do,” Tala said.

“Yeah,” he agreed, kicking Jerv to the back of his mind. Popularity was the circular trap of the stroke economy: If your social cap was high—virtuoso-high like Cascayde’s, say—you could jumble together any old stream of atonal musical Allstew and the Sensorium would, like as not, lap it up like this viciously sinful chocolate.

If you strove and tried and reached for something really good, meanwhile, something true—if you labored in obscurity—none of your releases was apt to go anywhere.

Was it any surprise he’d lapsed? Had he let petty ambition tempt him into assembling a hatchet job on a self-harming narcissist?

The scaffold of needles on Tala’s shoulder jerked in sequence, administering charges to the tissue, forcing tired old fibers to twitch so she wouldn’t lose muscle mass. “The editor mentioned pop-up chemotherapy.”

“An exposé on the clinics, yeah.”

“But?” She poured more cocoa.

“These pop-ups cover their eventualities. People go in to get assessed, right? Clinic charges just for that. Serious medical testing might make them liable for something, so they do personality profiling instead. Then they say, ‘Your pessimistic attitude puts you at risk for colorectal cancer, fifteen percent over the next decade. Your temperamental risk of . . . I dunno, sickle cell anemia . . . is seven. The chance you have rogue cells rampaging around your lymphatic system is better than fifty-fifty.’”

“This keeps them from getting sued for misdiagnosis?”

He nodded. “Once you’re terrorized, they sell you ten weeks of medical self-flagellation. Preventative course of chemo tailored to your so-called vulnerabilities.”

“Straight-up con.” The cog in her chin bit into her lower lip.

“You get cancer later, they’re covered. Terribly sorry. We didn’t actually scan you.” He toasted her and sipped cocoa.

“Well and good. They should be exposed. But what I don’t understand, Drow, is that you’re in music. I’ve listened to your compositions. You’re extremely gifted.”

Real praise or flattery? It nevertheless warmed him. “Gets me nothing if I don’t have friends.”

“You picked a strange way to ingratiate yourself with the other virtuosi.”

Other. She dropped it so casually, as if he were already one of them. “Anything I do, I tend to overdo.”

She smiled, lips stretching almost to invisibility, revealing gleaming teeth. “Me too.”

“Anyway, I’d have spun the chemo exposé as a music story. There’s usually virtuosi out there who’ve been suckered into taking the cure. But now I’m capped.”

“What does your social capital have to do with it?”

It was the sort of question only an obscenely rich person would ask. “No access. I meant to profile a celebrity as they did treatment. But given what happ—what I did to Cascayde, no virtuoso will let me near them.”

“And the editor can’t help?”

“Seraph’s kidding herself. She suggested the flow so she can feel less gilly. Giddy. Guilty. Sorry.”

“No, no.” She offered him another cookie and he munched, liking the texture, the bite of ginger and cloves. Snow was obliterating the walk he’d just cleared.

“You want to show someone famous on the chemo rack?” Tala steepled her fingers.

“What I really gotta focus on is generating strokes—”

“Your media profile’s sky-high.”

“Buh?” He sloshed chocolate up his nose.

“You. You’re what we fogeys used to call a trending story. Everyone knows who you are.”

“’Cause they’re threatening to burn my house down.”

“No attention is bad attention.” Her tone was thoughtful. “You should get scans beforehand. Show you’re cancer-free. Throw in genetic risk assessment and you can side-by-side the data against whatever organs the clinic claims you’re bound to metastasize.”

Suddenly she sounded like she knew plenty about assembling newsflow.

“Forgeddid,” Drow said. “I’m not so capped I need to scourge myself with medically unnecessary poisoning. Or chemobrain.”

“Oh, chemobrain can be offset,” Tala said.

That brought him up in his seat. Did she mean . . . ?

No. Drow set down his cup, pushing away fatigue and fogginess. “Doctors don’t just give you smartdrugs, not even if you’re on chemo. It’s too risky.”

“The risk’s inflated. Intellectual enhancement is contraindicated, primarily, because it hampers patient buy-in to life extension.”

“Yes . . .,” he agreed. Smartdrugs had always been Uncle Jerv’s poison of choice. Drow knew more about the relevant statutes than he probably ought to admit. And it was true that if you were rich enough for smartdrugs, you were discouraged from taking them—because the Pharmas didn’t want to lose the chance of streaming you, later, into the even more astronomical cost of buying yourself another century of life. But nobody wanted to live forever in a bubble of amnesia and dementia; smartdrugs did weird things to the teleromeres, stretching them out in ways nobody quite understood.

Rumor had it that the ultrarich hired proxies to dose up, do their thinking for them. Was that where this was going?

He stuck to the facts. “Unless you actually have cancer, getting a prescription for Liquid Brilliance is a nonstarter.”

“So your only objection is availability? Logistics?”

“Excuse me?”

A coy shrug. “I know a lot of doctors.”

He was starting to feel breathless. “I can’t afford—”

“Pish.”

“And Newsreef would have to pay for chemo.”

“Pish again. Look around, kid. I’m loaded.”

Smartdrugs. What if a dose of Liquid Brill helped him back into composing music?

Really? Was he some drug-grubbing Jerv type, to be considering this?

The cookie had turned to sandpaper on his tongue; he forced it down, vowing to thank Tala and walk once he’d finished his decadent, cooling chocolate.

He’d definitely made enough bad choices for one week.

He woke without realizing he’d fallen asleep, still in the smartchair, which had eased into recliner mode, elevating his knees, kneading his shoulders with an almost-imperceptible rolling motion to keep anything from stiffening. Perfect old-lady chair. The blind on the window had unscrolled, blocking the afternoon sun. It was bright green just for a moment; when he blinked, it was white again. Optical illusion or green screen?

“Crane?” He queried his clock app. He’d been out for almost three hours.

This was what he got for staying awake all night bleaching the floorboards after the paramedics and cops had vacated. He sat up, the chair offering a friendly burst of momentum as he rose. The opportunity map for snow shoveling had thinned out. The sidewalks were clearing and the temperature was on the rise. Another storm was due in a couple days.

He’d need it: His cap had fallen further, taking with it the morning’s harvest of hard labor and good deeds.

He pulled metrics. There’d been a surge in his favor, maybe an hour ago—anti-suicide activists throwing him support, thereby officially disapproving of Cascayde’s performance of self-harm.

Seraph’s work. “She adores me,” he mumbled.

Why was he plunging?

Heart sinking, he re-buttoned his shirt, which was one hole off. He’d been in worse shape than he guessed this morning. He remembered dressing carefully, like a soldier going on parade.

“Crane, you booted?”

“Online now, sir.”

“Check the newsflows.”

“All your premium memberships are on hold.”

“Try public access?” The blister on his hand had split as he slept.

He had to endure three minutes of advertising just to find out Cascayde had made a short statement through her publicist:

Cascayde was in a state of despair when she committed her act of self-harm. While Mer Whiting’s remarks about her recent songstorm, Cataract, may have influenced her state of mind, he cannot be held responsible for her actions.

She apologizes wholeheartedly.

This, plus a still of her barely making a ripple in a hospital bedcover, had dropped another depth charge on his reputation. Big bad bully Drow. Virtuosi were sharing it all over Sensorium and their fans were spending lavishly, cutting into cap reserves as the cost per strike rose, three for one strike, thirty for two, nine hundred for three . . .

He realized he was watching his fortunes bottom out in a stranger’s living room.

“Anyone here?”

No answer.

“Crane, where’s Tala?”

“Uncertain, sir. I’m still powering up a few peripherals.”

“You went offline? Total shutdown?”

“I’m . . . Yes, I believe so.”

“How can you be unsure?” Drow dove for his boots and coat. The gloves might be anywhere; he gave them up for lost. For one claustrophobic second, he thought the old lady’s smartlock might not unlatch for a stranger. Would he have to break a window to get out? What if someone saw? Did the Haystack have a transcript proving she’d invited him in?

A click, just as he started to hyperventilate. He lunged out onto the salted porch, the cold air a welcome slap on his unshaven face.

Tala was there, in a pink quilted coat so bright you could probably see her from space. LED eyes with heart-shaped irises glowed from deep within a fur-fringed hood.

“What are you doing?” Drow asked.

“Waiting for my ride.” She pointed as a self-driving car toiled to push a rolling pile of slush to the curb. “Cardiologist appointment.”

“I didn’t mean to pass out in your. Um. Breakfast nook? It’s just I haven’t been sleeping.”

“Oh, Handsome,” she said. “You know you can make it up to me.”

Hiding a sigh, he grabbed his smartshovel. The car paused when it saw him, waiting with electronic patience as he cleared its wheels, even backing up so he could get at the accumulated mush. His broken blister rubbed raw, smearing red on the wooden handle of the shovel.

Twenty minutes later, the car whirred up to Tala’s walk. Drow went and offered her an awkward arm.

“Bless you, young fella. That’s what my granny would’ve said.”

“No problem.” Helping her into the car got him a few likes from passersby. Spit on a bonfire at this point.

“Text from your landlord,” said Crane. “His father says there’s loud noise coming from your apartment.”

He clamped his lips over a curse, smiling at the old lady. I probably look like a maniac.

She laid a pink-gloved hand on his cheek. “Want to come? Help the old dear out at Mount Sinai?”

Drow pulled away, skin crawling. “Thanks, Tala, but. . . . ”

She waved him her contact info. “We should talk about cancer imaging.”

He remembered her hinting at a trade. Medically unnecessary chemotherapy. For smartdrugs.

Rather than answer, he closed the door, watching the car putt-putt-skid off to College Street before he shouldered the shovel, turning into the winter wind.

The pings from Drow’s landlord got increasingly urgent as he hiked, so it was no surprise to find his roommate crowding the couch with her boyfriend and four other virtuosi wannabes. They had helped themselves to his collection of musical instruments: smart drumsticks, a couple faux guitars, gloves for a virtual keyboard, and a real saxophone that he’d tuned and modemed himself, years ago, with Uncle Jerv’s help. They were trying to work up a single, the kind of DIY instahit earworm that made Drow want to grab the nearest pair of pliers and rip out his own wisdom teeth.

He paused at the threshold—actually hesitated. Considered whether he wanted trouble. The bleach smell, he noticed, underlaid a perfume of stale pizza and farts.

Self-loathing got him moving; he logged in to the musical instruments and overrode the guest permissions, shutting them down.

Marcella burbled into sudden silence. “Hey, Drow. You got the blood out of the carpets?”

“Yeah, sad. No grisly spectacle for your friends.”

“Dunno know what you mean. This is a work session.”

“We talked about this, Marce. Stream sound to your rigs.”

“You were out, Drow.”

“You want amps, go to Cole’s. He lives alone.”

“In a shoebox. Anyway, equipment’s here.”

“My equipment. Which’d be point three. You can’t jam with my stuff.”

“It’s gathering dust.”

“I’m conceptualizing.”

“You’re blocked. And sinking fast. Cataract might not’ve ascended to your lofty standards of musical truth and beauty, but at least Cascayde’s composing.”

“Pilfering. I’d rather compose nothing, ever, than loot everyone else’s garbage.”

“Great job! Writing nothing ever is definitely getting to be your forte.” She minced close enough to make him want to back away. Her bright orange Shirley Temple ringlets bounced with every step. “We’ve raised two thousand strokes between us. Want ’em?”

Two thousand. His mouth watered.

Before he could go through the internal litany of why that’s a terrible idea, the boyfriend shifted. Getting a better camera angle? Drow remembered anew that everything he did right now was a potential live upload.

“This sounds like bribery, Marce. Very antisocial,” he reminded her.

“Don’t be sanctimonious. Yes or no?” She gave him a look that, terrifyingly enough, might have been pity. He tried to remember when and why he had liked her, back when he invited her to rent-share.

“We promised Imran a quiet environment for his dad.”

“Basement dad is fucking deaf.”

“I’m having a shower,” Drow said. “When I emerge, you and Wonderboy and your friends will be gone and my instruments will be neatly stowed. Because, uninvited houseguests, I didn’t get your names yet. Marce here is the only one about to take a hit for attempted cap manipulation on a high-profile pariah.”

“You’re not opening a support ticket on me!”

Drow forced himself to turn his back on her. “I’m definitely not opening one on the people in this room whom I have not whoozed.”

He made it upstairs, despite quaking legs. Collapsing against the wall, he peeled off warmth-retentive layers of black, like a fiberfill onion. He hung the coat, unbuttoned the shirt and hung that, too, then stripped the base layer and put it, stinking, straight into the laundry. It smelled a little skunky, though he hadn’t smoked cannabis in years. Seemed hypocritical, after blocking Jerv.

Crossing the hall, defiantly naked, he paused to take in the sweet sound of brouhaha in progress downstairs:

The boyfriend, Cole: “Give him the strokes, Marce—he won’t report us if we pay him off.”

Drummer: “Tell him it was a joke, right?”

The house was so old it had a nine-foot claw-foot tub, upgraded with a smartshower set to deliver carefully measured bursts of heated water for ten minutes precisely. Drow paid it a precious carbon offset, trading his scant dollars for an extra ten minutes, before he plunged in.

Breathing slowly, he tried to calm the deranged stutter of his heart. He’d had shitty roommates before. It was what you got when you glomerated on the cheap.

Water ran through his hair, spreading comforting heat. He felt the front door slam. Marcella’s friends, abandoning ship before he could run that support ticket?

Jealousy-raddled pusbag. Cascayde’s words. He remembered the anguish in her eyes. The blade coming up. He’d stepped back, expecting her to lash out, not inward . . .

Suddenly he was crouched, curled against his bare knees in the wet and steam. “Oh shit,” he whispered. “Damnation, no, no. . . . ”

Give in. Give in, you’ll feel better.

Filthy no-talent bottom-feeding scum!

Dirty, dirty, where’s my soap?

Soap? Missing. Snuffling, he peered through a crack in the shower curtain. There: stained with more of Marcella’s friends’ pizza sauce. He had to get out, leaving sodden ovals on the bath mat.

By the time he’d scrubbed the pizza sauce off his pricey scentless soap, then washed the imaginary marijuana smell off his hair, then chewed off the dead-skin petals curling and drying around the edges of the raw blister on his left palm, the urge to melt down had congealed. An acidic mess of bad feeling pulsed stickily between Drow’s lungs, tightening breath, refusing to dislodge.

The showerhead pinged a one-minute warning.

“Ten more minutes,” he said. Begged, really.

“Not recommended, sir,” Crane said. “You have exceeded your weekly carbon ceiling. Exponential pricing would raise the cost—”

“Fine!” Should he upgrade his sidekick? Was there a more soothing alternative to his dads’ irascible homegrown assistant?

Crane threw a countdown into his lower peripheral. At ten seconds, Drow stepped out. He dried off, sopped up his wet footprints, and hung the bath mat on the shower bar.

“Is Marce out there, waiting to ambush?”

“They’ve left, but I have messages,” Crane said.

“Summarize.” Pathetic, the fragility in his voice. Wounded baby boy with his lip aquiver.

“Mer Zapiti opines that nobody will live with you if she gives notice. Mer Cole says: Please don’t make trouble, here’s a thousand strokes. No strings.”

“Huzzah.”

“In better news, your downstairs neighbor has confirmed that the noise has stopped.”

“All hail the tiny victories.” No, Crane was perfect. Butler, enabler, dad substitute . . . just right.

Emotionally tone-deaf, though. Now the inbox was open, the sidekick had clearly decided to blast through some to-dos. “And from Seraph?”

“Play it.”

“Drow. Some anon donor has kicked Newsreef funding for an expanded version of the cancer story. Call me?”

He winced. “I don’t suppose you’ve got one from Anon Donor herself?”

“Meaning, Master Woodrow?”

“Anything from Tala Weston?”

“There is indeed.”

“Play it.”

“Drow, it’s Tala. How would you feel about driving to Buffalo for medical imaging tomorrow?”

He shouldn’t do this.

“Crane, compose reply. Ask Tala what the hell she wants from me.” Scooping up a washrag, he began to work on a tomato-sauce handprint on his sink.

A pause. “She’s sent a contract.”

“For?”

“It’s an artist’s modeling release.”

“Can you run it through some kind of legal?”

“With our cap, it would have to be public access.”

More ads. He groaned. “Copy to Seraph.”

Modeling release. Presumably, Tala wanted to make some kind of artstorm of Drow taking chemo.

“Compose a reply. I’d want some guarantees. About the after-treatment care we discussed.” He was careful not to mention smartdrugs.

Again, Tala’s response was almost immediate. “Can’t specify aftercare in writing, but we can work something out. Eight months, perhaps? Can I pick you up at ten?”

Liquid Brill. Eight months’ supply. Maybe he was Uncle Jerv’s son after all.

“Tell her yes.”

Seraph was against it, of course, so opposed she showed up in the flesh next morning, right at ten as Drow was making to leave. She piled into Tala’s gas-guzzling hire-a-limo, brimming with righteous fire. “Drow’s supposed to profile an insider who’s against the pop-up chemo program. End of story.”

“You know I wanted to realtime a patient.”

“Victim, you mean?”

Tala interrupted: “Are you going to introduce your friend, Handsome?”

“You’ve already whoozed each other.” The women bristled from opposite corners of the cab. “Seraph, it’s a better story. First I do the medical screening, then I take the pop-up assessment. It will show just how much they’re distorting the risks.”

“Yes, very clever. Show the distort by all means, Drow. Compare, contrast, get the scoop from your source! Like Like Like! But draw the line at actually doing chemo.”

“It’s a way to get at the truth—”

“I won’t green-light this.” Privately, she sent him a pair of spiked entertainment flows, stuff that hadn’t made it out of Newsreef, draft articles about two closed screenings of Tala’s most recent artstorm, something called All Fun and Games Until . . . The streams avoided—carefully, Drow noticed—saying what the pieces themselves were like. Brawls had broken out at both screenings, and the second theater had a full-scale medical lockdown afterward. Out of business for six weeks.

“Newsreef isn’t the only platform, young lady,” Tala said. “Drow will find a taker for this piece.”

Seraph folded her arms, leaning back into the upholstery. “Really? With his cap?”

Tension ratcheted then, as they waited to see if Tala would offer to somehow level him up from pariah.

“It suits you, doesn’t it? That he’s desperate.”

“Face it, Seraph—I am desperate,” Drow said. “And this streams. Everyone in music wants to see me pay for what I did to Cascayde.”

“You did nothing!”

“Verdict’s still guilty, though, isn’t it?”

“If you show you’re a serious journo, they’ll reassess in time.”

“Time. Years? If I make myself sick and we pour strikes all over the pop-ups, we can trim that to months—”

“So it’s a shortcut? Get your life back and start treating Newsreef as a dodge again?”

“This story was your idea,” Tala reminded her.

“Drow will be too hagged to assemble newsflow.”

“I’ll prerecord most of it. You’ll help me sharpen the rest.” He couldn’t tell her about the smartdrugs; she’d be an accessory. “I’m not making light of what you do, Seraph.”

“We. What we do.”

“I have to stop myself from bottoming out.”

Seraph rubbed her fingers through the black-rooted honeycomb stubble on her scalp. “Maybe.”

Tala shifted in her seat, seeming to sense victory. “Can I drop you somewhere, young lady, or are you proposing to accompany us to the U.S.?”

Seraph’s lip curled. She sent text: You want me to ridealong? Silent, so she can’t overhear?

Drow’s breath hitched. Come in person, he wanted to say. Don’t leave me.

Fact was, Tala creeped him out.

But she was so old. What was she gonna do?

Aloud, he said, “I’ll be okay, Seraph. Swear.”

“Mer Raffe?”

“Drop me at the subway,” Seraph said.

Tala’s LED eyes blinked. She was swaddled in a pink cashmere cape with fur fringe. The color made her skin look chalky, powdered. One of her earlobes had become untucked from the earphones. It dangled, rubbery as an udon noodle. She must have worn a hoop in there when she was young.

The driver pulled up at Saint Andrew. “Subway.”

“Don’t put her out here,” Drow said. “She’ll get strikes for riding in a limo.”

“I’ll take the hit,” Seraph said, flinging the door wide. “Expect me to micromanage this one. Nanomanage. I want scan results from Buffalo. Itemized list: They do it, I review it.”

“Don’t worry.” He reached for her hand, but she slipped his grasp and lunged out into the frosty air.

They left her scowling on King Street, no doubt taking hits from everyone who’d seen the car. The limo sped toward the Queensway and the Niagara Falls border crossing.

“You could’ve dropped her in a parkade somewhere.”

“Mer Raffe clearly wished to make a display of herself. Now. My clinic needs a medical history.” Tala sent a long document to his inbox. “Questions for you from the doctors.”

Grateful for the distraction, Drow dove in, offering up family medical history and bio deets: name, age, Social Insurance Number. Doctors’ appointments, blood work, surgery, serious illnesses. Soon they were at the border.

“Passport?”

“Already?” Surprised, he brought it up, transmitting to Border Services.

She read his expression. “I’m authorized for the fast lane. No four-hour wait today.”

Twenty minutes later, at a clinic that looked like a vacation resort—one of those places that turned the death-fearing rich into ever-older zombies—he was stripping down and chugging contrast liquid. A technician eased him onto a deep tray in a hyperlinked room. The tray was layered with plastic bricks; as he relaxed onto them, they crumbled into beads, forming a synthetic bed that cushioned him completely, adhering to his ankles and feet as he sank into the nodules like quicksand. They stuck to the backs of his knees, pressing into the curve of his butt, the nape of his neck.

The tech tamped him down, fingers working over Drow’s shoulders, chest, and forehead.

“Is Tala watching?” Drow indicated the room’s observation bubble.

“She’s having muscular rejuvenation.”

He felt, strangely, relieved.

Once his bottom half was stuck down, the tech laid foam bricks on his feet and legs. These broke up, too, burying him like a kid on the beach, filling the spaces between his calves, pooling in the wrinkles in the thin sheet of the modesty drape, accumulating as weight on his hands, hips, belly, chest.

“Gotta offline you, Woodrow.” The tech removed Drow’s goggs and earbuds, then fitted a breathing mask over his nose and mouth. “It helps if you count down from a thousand.”

Drow closed his eyes. There was nothing to distract him from the plastic press of diagnostic medium against his eyes as the immurement continued. The small of his back was sweating. Moisture accumulated there, like grease.

Instead of counting, he composed openers for his flow on the pop-up. Bricks of scanfoam collapse like sandcastles at high tide, enfolding me in a medical experience so far outside my financial reach that . . . what?

Or: Lying in darkness, I realize that while our working assumption is that I’ll be starting this with a clean bill of health, there are no guarantees.

He twitched as his skin grew goosebumps.

“Stay still, Woodrow.”

He kept refining and memorizing the sentences, so he could dictate them to Crane once his stuff was back online.

A crack, a flash of light. The tech helped him stumble out of the scanfoam cube. The modesty sheath had stuck to the foam, tearing away; he clapped a hand over his groin.

“How do you feel?” The tech handed him a gown.

“Shrink-wrapped.” He scowled at the bas-relief version of himself as he fumbled the ties.

“Done?” Tala swept in, buttoning her pink jumpsuit.

Drow nodded, turning aside as he pulled the gown shut.

“I have a capture appointment at the Albright-Knox. Then we’ll eat.”

Drow wasn’t hungry, but he nodded nonetheless.

The driver took them to the gallery, past a sculpture garden at the back, and then into an underground addition called the Weston Virtual Experience Annex.

“Did you reassure your editor?” Tala asked. “Confirm I haven’t done anything nefarious?”

“Very funny.” He dictated a quick text: All okay. Techs will copy the three of us with med results.

A private elevator raised them into a capture studio, long slot of a room, darkened, with a wooden bench and a tinted-glass wall. Beyond the glass was a floodlit balance beam.

“I’ve been adding thirty seconds of footage to this project each year since I was eighteen,” Tala said. “We’re just going to capture the next installment.”

He looked at the beam. If she fell . . . well, she’d be insured to her artificial eyeballs.

She jerked a comb through the horsetail of her waist-long braid, smoothing it. “Do you mind?”

“Um.” Reluctantly, he took the comb and the rope of hair, brushing the dead, bleached tangles.

“What a good boy you are.”

He handed back the brush. “Tala. I am not so much as getting a chemo port put in if there are no guarantees on the Liquid Brill.”

“You’ll get your guarantees, my pretty, no fear.”

“I’m not your pretty.”

“Pretty’s what I hired you for, isn’t it?” On that, she vanished through the exit.

“I thought it was desperation,” he muttered.

Beyond the glass, the lights over the balance beam brightened. Camera rigs shook themselves awake, above and below. A hidden door opened at one end of the structure.

Tala appeared, nude, even her goggs removed.

Every inch of her old body was flashed or modded. Her left iris was a star sapphire; the right was a cat’s-eye the color of a banked coal. Her skin was stretched, punctured, pinched, and laser-cut to lace. Little flaps like fish gills had been cinched into her throat and extra nipples circled her breasts like roses on a wedding cake. Within the cage of her torso, tattoo renderings of damned souls suffered at the claws of demons. A real-looking tongue lolled from her navel, ringed by four rows of sharks’ teeth.

Her bush was as pink as her ponytail. The teeth of brass gears protruded from her knees and elbows.

Deliberate damage, flagrantly displayed. The disregard for self . . . He remembered his father, yelling at Jerv:

Your body is the only thing you truly own!

Dad would be on the same page as Seraph about this chemo scheme.

Under Tala’s saggy, much-abused skin, he could see the muscle tone of a professional athlete. As she’d laid waste to her exterior, she’d meticulously maintained the rest. This was the legacy of a boutique life-extension regime.

Mounting the beam, she rolled to a one-footed crouch and then put her head down, lifting to a headstand before easing into full upside-down splits. Drow dropped his eyes, catching a glimpse of big cartoony letters on her inner thighs, bloody tattoos spelling nasty words: “Unclean, gangrene, fester, infect. . . . ”

Keeping her in the blurry corner of his upper peripheral, he saw her come out of the splits, pivoting upright. He didn’t know gymnastics well. Was she playing it safe, acrobatically speaking?

Humming tunelessly, she handsprang a dismount from the beam’s far end. Hands flung high, like an Olympic medalist, she strode through an unmarked exit on the other end of the capture studio.

Crane said, “Miss Weston will be with you in five minutes, Master Woodrow.”

Drow used the time to gather his temper and gauge his cap, weighing his situation against an urge to rabbit.

She came in, arranging her fur cape, swinging the ponytail saucily. “Well?”

He pushed the word past clenched teeth. “Impressive.”

“Not your thing, huh? Maybe we should leave before they compile and run it—”

A sharp electronic hum. Tala appeared again, just as he’d seen her—but now she was on the bench, here in the room with them. Nine feet tall, intangible, her hologram leapt through the two of them, old, nude, and ornamented. Before she was gone, a new version of her—one year younger, if he’d understood her concept—was flying into a mount. They played through, ten seconds per routine, and as the decades spun by, Tala got progressively younger, less modified. The loops disappeared from her back. The metalwork shrank and disappeared. The ponytail grew backward and the tattoos got less elaborate even as her flesh tightened and became less outlandishly modded. The early gymnastics routines showcased health in all its robust complexity. By the end, she was a normal-enough eighteen year old, with close-cropped black hair and hazel eyes.

The image of her youthful ass drifted past his face one last time as she triple-flipped out the door.

“What do you think?”

I think this is straight-up mind fuckery. He kept his voice even. “The early tapes must be CGI. No holo-imaging when you were my age.”

“Reconstructed from video. The original footage is real.” She fanned herself. “I don’t know how many more years of this I’ve got in me. I’m quite shaky now.”

Swallowing a sigh, he offered her his arm. Vulture claws, he thought as she clamped on.

Tala’s idea of lunch was typically opulent; the driver took them to a private dining room whose staff brought marinated morsels of printed sea scallop and strips of beef.

“Ever had real cow before?” she asked.

Drow shook his head. “If anyone sees me living it up—”

“Whoozing’s not allowed here,” she replied serenely. “Confidential space, transcript shredders and all. Which means, among other things, that we can speak freely.”

“It’s a restaurant. Public space, public access.”

“Technically, it’s the cafeteria for my U.S. lawyers’ branch office. Confidentiality applies. Nothing goes into the Haystack.”

“That loophole’s under contest. Suspended.”

“In Canada, it is. Not here.”

Crane flashed a graphical thumbs-up in his peripheral, confirming that this was true.

“So,” Drow said. “Your promise.”

She squirreled in her big pink purse, coming up with a box: ten vials, ready for the pump and labeled Bennett’s Food Coloring.

Drow’s mouth went dry but he held the poker face. “That could actually be food coloring. And it’s only ten.”

“Contents are as agreed.” She steepled her fingers. “Here’s my proposal. You go to the pop-up clinic, do the assessment, and get the injection port.”

“Do I?”

“You need a port, Dearheart.”

“Don’t call me that.”

Cartoon lashes batted. “Use the port to test the food coloring, satisfy yourself that it’s legitimate. Next day, before we head to the clinic for your first infusion, we’ll visit a registered middleman and put twenty more doses—” she flipped the box of ampules with her fingernail, as if it wasn’t worth a small fortune “—into a lockbox. You can open same as soon as you finish chemotherapy.”

“I might need to dose to finish the article. Chemobrain, remember?”

“Well, you’ve got ten, don’t you? Each good for a week?”

He nodded reluctantly.

“That’ll keep you going for the full course of chemo. Another twenty vials are . . . do you kids still say gravy?”

“Twenty-five,” he said, to see if she’d go for it.

“Done.”

Should’ve said thirty. He pulled the doses across the table, vanishing them into his parka. His heart was pounding.

“Update Seraph again, Handsome—it looks like those med results have come through. She can sift through them while we get going, but it looks like you’re in perfect health.”

“I want to read ’em too.” But he fell asleep in the limo, coming around only reluctantly as it pulled up at his place. His hand went automatically to his shirt, but the buttons were properly aligned. The paper flowers by the door, tributes to poor Cascayde and her profound emotional journey, were piled higher. Blooms and stems were layered with jagged blobs of ice, like an elaborate cake.

“Scene of the crime,” murmured Tala.

“Hoping for a looky-loo at the blood spatter?”

“I saw everything on the vidflow.”

“So you did watch it?”

“I could hardly avoid. It’s the first thing on your whooz: that beautifully articulated jaw of yours hanging open as the blood sprays.”

He remembered the taste. Remembered spitting. Half-blinded and groping for Cascayde’s throat, clamping down on the wound as Crane summoned the ambulance.

Tears welled and he hurried to get out of the car.

“See you in the morning,” she said lightly.

He nodded, gave her a half-salute, and dragged himself inside. He smelled like marijuana again.

The temperature had continued to rise overnight and it was almost balmy when he reached the pop-up, a storefront on the edge of Kensington that had, over the years, housed a series of failed restaurants. The latest proprietors had whitewashed it to a glow. Tasteful holosigns displayed competent multiracial medical teams wearing the highest of high-tech goggs. “What’s your risk?” a banner demanded.

Drow walked in alone, filled out their quiz. No hard medical data here. They asked about recent stressors and childhood trauma. Medical services were allowed to jam Sensorium uploads to the Haystack for confidentiality reasons, but he had brought an antique recording device of Dad’s, a Dictaphone. It copied voice to magnetic tape and was so old Drow probably could’ve laid it on the table in front of the medics without fear of having it recognized.

He didn’t take the chance, instead packing it inside another antique, a hardcopy of Jude the Obscure with a hole cut in its pages.

Trevon Amradi, his whistle-blower, was someone Drow had met going to concerts, a fan of his music from back in the day when he was comping and clamoring for attention, jostling in an unremarkable pack with Marcella and the rest of the wannabes.

Tall, windburned, and professionally sympathetic, Trevon eased into pretending, for his bosses, that the two of them were strangers. He worked through Drow’s personality quiz, generated infographics analyzing Drow’s aura, and began the consult with: “How’s your relationship with your mother?”

“My what? Are you kidding?”

Trevon made eyes at him, unsubtle reminder that the point was to seem an emotional shambles, so they could tell him he was at risk for pancreatic cancer or whatever.

Shambles they wanted, shambles they’d get.

He mumbled: “Little Master Woodrow had two daddies, okay? Uncle Drow’s an addict. Theo Whiting died. Because of the addict.”

“Sounds like a complicated story.”

“Not if you’re looking to talk about a mother, it isn’t.” Dad and Jerv had gotten into a fight, about the drugs, on a crowded subway platform at rush hour. How Dad had ended up falling under the train wasn’t clear. Had he stumbled? Did he jump? Where the video footage was ambiguous, the transcript was clear enough. They’d been banging heads over Jerv’s adulterous love for Liquid Brill and his latest get-rich-quick scheme.

Shrugging, Trevon moved on. “This honorary grandma you’ve listed as next of kin. What’s she like?”

“A spider,” Drow said—it was what came to mind.

Trevon chewed his lip. “Drow, I gotta say—”

“Marty.” Now he was the one warning.

Trevon sent him a puppy-eyes emoji, hinting at concern.”Everyone knows what you’ve been through these past few days. With. You know, Cascayde. If you gave it a week, you might feel differently about this.”

Trevon had been all for exposing the pop-up for the scam it was, back when they discussed the two of them playing witness as some gullible artist ran themselves through the grinder. Popcorn fodder, he had called it.

“I know this is going to make me sick,” Drow said. “And with Cascayde and my roommate . . . sure, I’m getting a lot of static now, from women—”

“You all right?”

He had broken out in cold sweat.

He reached for a glass of water with a convincingly trembly hand. “But my ed—my friend, Seraph, she IDs as woman too. Obviously. It’s luck of the draw.”

“You just characterized your next of kin as a spider.”

“Honestly, I think she’d agree with me on that one.” Don’t try to help me. Irrational rage fizzed in his hands, knotting them together.

Trevon apparently got the message. Or perhaps he had a ridealong superior with healthier profit motives, because he finally moved on to scare tactics. Drow had latent misogyny. He needed preventative meds aimed at squamous cell anemia and lung cancer.

He played hard to get for all of fifteen minutes, for form and for the old Dictaphone, and then obliged Trevon to press on to an unenthusiastic closing. Yes, oh yes, please save me from my inner retrograde caveman before he eats my lungs out.

An hour later, “Grandma” Weston was on her way to support (meaning watch, and capture if she could outwit the clinic jammers) as they sliced into his perfectly healthy shoulder and stapled a purple smartport to Drow’s collarbone.

The local had worn off by the time Tala took him home; the whole right side of his chest hurt, and he could feel his heartbeat in each of the staples.

“Did you get footage?”

“A few stills,” she said, tapping her goggs significantly—she must have illegal capture tech in there. “Their privacy walls are top-of-the-line.”

“The better to avoid prosecution, I guess.”

She pressed a finger to the hard lump of the port.

“Ow!”

“Sorry, Dearheart. I’ll drop by early, once it’s bruised up a little, to make close-ups.”

“Okay.”

“I’ve got a green-screen studio and a medical-grade smartchair. After infusion, you can recover there. Easier for me to make footage.”

“Wait. At your place?”

“Would you rather set up a studio in your apartment?” She gave him an inquiring look. “I can send contractors ’round.”

He imagined it: waves from his landlord about contractor noise. Managing the stairs to his room when he was wiped. Recuperating while Marcella came in and out to abandon cheap takeout in the fridge, like some Arctic fox burying dead ducklings. “Your place. Fine.”

“Good!” Tala handed him a heavy disk the circumference of a drink coaster, complete with beer company logo. He could feel glass—a touchscreen?—on its underside, but when he tried to turn it over, she locked his hand in a surprisingly strong grip. “Did you know that you have to be completely offline, all your things powered down, goggs islanded, to put any kind of unregistered ampoule into a smartport like your new chemo delivery system?”

“Is that so?

“Please understand: I’m not recommending or advising this, just making casual conversation.”

That’s why she was holding the coaster facedown, to keep Crane from catching an image. “Got it.”

“Once your things are offline, handshake the port itself using a dedicated injection app on a monitor with redtooth connection capability. Such monitors are by prescription only.”

In other words, the gadget she’d slipped him would override the smartport’s better judgment. And possession of said gadget, sans prescription, was an offense. “Boot it up, pop in the ampoule, away you go?”

She nodded. “In the hypothetical world where you had access to such items. You’ll need to set an agenda for any burst of enhanced intellectual activity. Does your antiquated sidekick app have a Friday mode?”

“My fathers wrote it.”

“That’s sweet.”

“You’re one to talk, with those vintage goggs.” He couldn’t say why he was nettled by the insult to Crane. “Yes! We operate offline.”

“Well, set it to nag you. You won’t be able to stay on task otherwise.”

They had reached his place. She popped the door and gave him a cheery wave. “Out you go, Handsome. Have fun.”

Drow’s first hours as an intravenous genius were incandescent.

He powered down the house things: thermostat, smoke detector, fridge, oven, blender, toaster, the lights that went on and off automatically as he moved between rooms, hydrators for the houseplants, step counters in his shoes, all the musical instruments. Marcella had a few things he couldn’t access remotely, so he pulled their batteries, stomping their ready signs like so many roaches before setting them out in the freezing rain to die. Last he shut down the modem, leaving him and Crane islanded.

He’d made the agenda Tala had suggested. First, he’d revise the newsflow he’d written, all those months before, on the pop-up clinics. Then he’d try writing a song. Surely if the Brill was working, he’d be able to compose again.

He wouldn’t even think about what it might mean if he couldn’t.

Third, he’d consider ways to stanch his cap bleed. After that, he’d research chemo outcomes.

Flipping the beer coaster, he got the redtooth to hack into his injection smartport. Taking out the first of the ampoules marked Bennett’s Food Coloring, he snapped it into place, sitting in the increasingly chilly house and watching the status bar as it claimed to load him up with smarts. Or, possibly, food coloring.

Final stage: powerdown and flip his coaster so it was just a coaster again. Hide the other Bennett’s ampoules. Scrub any archival video Crane had made.

“Brilliance FAQs suggest taking on a simple task first, sir, something clerical with multiple steps.”

“Okay.” He walked Crane backward through the powerdown sequence, the two of them prepping a macro for the house so that next time, Drow could just shut everything off with a single command.

“Do I sound smarter, Antiquated Sidekick?”

“Simple tasks, sir, simple tasks,” crooned Crane. “Here’s your draft of the chemo pop-up exposé.”

Drow fell into refurbishing the bones of the feature, laying out history on virtuosi who’d taken the cure and rehashing the death of a jazz virtuoso named Psyche. No criminal charges had been brought: Rumor had it the Pharmas paid the family.

Charges. He researched and sidebarred some legislative history, riffing on the rise of medical superstitions, enumerating the court challenges that had eventually determined Canadian citizens had the right to poison themselves in the name of scientifically dubious preventative healthcare.

Universal mandatory vaccination had come in with legislation that said individuals couldn’t endanger the herd. Ironically, this same ruling meant the state couldn’t prohibit unnecessary treatment, if patients footed the bill and didn’t harm others.

He saw his evolution as a journo within the date-tags on the strings of notes. Here, the first smattering of thoughts, after he’d shared with Trevon and scented the opportunity for a serious feature. He’d been entirely focused on turning his rent-paying journo gig into a source of strokes for his social cap at that point, and from there relaunching himself as a musician. Exposing the chemo pop-ups, at first, felt like it might curry favor among the virtuosi the clinics sometimes exploited.

Then Seraph joined Newsreef. Seraph, who was all about commitment, about truth and purity in journalism. Seraph, who hated shortcuts and thought smart was different from clever. Another set of date-tags showed Drow’s deep dive into the research vaults, buttressing his pitch, finding other superstitions so he could create a series, build up to the chemo pop-ups organically.

Later still: an archive of legal cases relevant to medical scams.

Now he read those cases again, closely this time, pushing through precedents like a diesel-fueled snowplow going at three feet of slush. His head filled with legalese and he juggled the phrases, assembling a hypothetical court case. If he could clear a path proving secondary harm done to loved ones . . .

“Embarking on a third career seems a bit of a tangent at this point,” Crane said.

“What?”

“You appear to be writing a law brief.”

Right. He was a reporter, not a litigator.

Not a reporter not really just a gig for the payables, I’m a composer . . .

A composer who doesn’t compose?

Seraph’s voice, clear as the day she’d spoken the words. You could be outstanding at the journo thing if you just got over thinking you were outside it all. It’s more than a lark for strokes and cash balance —

“Sir? Your port is empty.”

He shook away the clamoring internal argument. “Full dose administered?”

“Yes. Take out the ampoule, hide the evidence, hash this conversation, and we can dive back into Sensorium.”

Screw journalism. What about becoming a crusading lawyer for the poor? Memorize the rules, screw around with the rules, it’d be so easy, and didn’t he owe the world some good deeds? Drow bleached and recycled the glass tube. Then, with Crane’s help, he made it to his crate of instruments without downloading the LSAT first.

“Music, sir. Write music now. Remember this intro?”

“I probably can’t even—”

The intro played. Time disappeared.

He assembled two tracks. A ballad, first, and then something akin to a classic rock anthem. The ballad he fine-tuned and wordsmithed, working it up into a penitential ode to Cascayde. He burnished metaphors for regret, put sorrow in the high notes. Cried a little, finally, finally.

Shouldn’t have ripped Cascayde’s mask off, he thought. If I’d reached out, maybe. Told her: Make your own thing. Stop cobbling together everyone else’s scraps . . .

Instead he put it all into song. He couldn’t release it as a single, not yet. If anything, it’d plunge him further into the lightless depths of social oblivion. But one day, after a show of remorse had already given him one boost . . .

“We could automate that,” he said to Crane. “When my prosocial rank’s out of the bottom thirty percent, I’ll regain access to the indy music reefs. We’ll do a limited release, just for the club. Someone’ll leak it.”

“I’ll set an alert—”

“No, it’s fine, trigger it. Here’s text . . . great. Flushed and forgotten.”

“If you say so, sir.”

The other song Drow could tool up himself, use it for something worthwhile, something original, and he was definitely crackling now. Reading law was one thing but he’d teethed on music. Saxophone at four, piano at seven, contemporary collab at ten . . . and this was good. He worked up original soundtrack for the chemo newsflow.

Hey! Another cap mitigator would be to clap together some mixes. He must know a dozen virtual clubs who’d trade him some strokes and some good wordo if he built decent sequences for their deejay apps.

He shuffled music as he paced the living-room floor, assembling decks, five at a time. Maximum return on years of concert-going. Mashing sounds gleefully, mixing the best of all those long, fun nights at dance clubs. He’d taken Seraph nine months ago, in the middle of a heat wave.

“One, two, three, hit send.”

“Have we moved on to amending your social collapse?” Crane asked.

“Maybe. I don’t know. But . . . if I dash off the right kind of sob story to that girl Eleanora, from school. Remember Eleanora? She’d take it in mind to get her church to send me some strokes. You gotta love Christian charity, right? It wouldn’t, technically, be cap manipulation. Because the law says—”

Crane interrupted, “You’d have to compose the sob story.”

“Work of a minute—” A tumble of noise, pounding bass rhythm, made him duck behind the counter. “Is that me? Am I drumming?”

“It’s the front door.”

He bolted to the top of the stairs, the very peak of the house. Pressed himself against the wall. Last time someone showed up unannounced . . .

“No, please, please—”

“It’s your editor, sir.”

“Seraph? Seraph’s not here to cut her throat.”

Bambambam.

“She’s likely concerned for your well-being. But engaging with the public in your current state—”

“Seraph’s not public. Seraph’s famlike. She adores. . . . ”

Adores?

Catch up, chump.

He goggled at that, spinning through possibilities and complications, tagging some feels . . . “Wow. This is big. Did I know? Will she know that I know?”

Her cartoon face bloomed in his peripheral. “I know you’re in there, Drow.”

He pounded his way back down the stairs.

Crane murmured. “Make a polite excuse—”

“It’s fine. I’m leveling off.”

Jerv used to say that.

“She’ll never notice.”

Yep, that too.

“Your current task—”

“That’ll be all, Crane.” He threw open the door.

Seraph had re-upped her honeycomb buzz cut, intricate yellow hexagons that didn’t hide the burnished gold-brown of her scalp. Snowflakes danced around her, fighting gravity.

She jumped to the point: “Ninety percent of Weston’s work is in private collections, tucked away from public display. Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Been composing.”

Her mouth fell open. “That’s . . . that’s great, Drow!”

“Is it?”

“Of course,” she said. “Using what’s happened to recommit to your music? It’s the healthiest choice you could make at this point.”

He rocked forward on his heels, unsure what to do with that. Rocked back. “So. Um. I soundtracked the chemo flow.”

The relieved smile went brittle. “Can I come in?”

Cascayde had barged in. He couldn’t bear it if Seraph barged. He shared the soundtrack as he stepped aside.

The message bounced, for some reason.

Adores me not?

“Do you know anything at all about Tala’s artstorms?”

“Yeah, actually.” Drow had Crane throw a blank conductor’s score on the kitchen counter, blobbing notes onto the bass and treble with a finger. Maybe if he multitasked, he could take this conversation at a convincingly normal pace. “She’s got a thing in the Albright-Knox. Body scarification and tumbling. You should see it, Seraph. Gross old GenXers cutting into themselves—”

“Drow, listen. I found a catalog listing for something called Mass Grave. It’s from a massacre site in Louisiana, sometime like the twenties. It’s people coming to identify bodies.”

“Family members?” He was filling in about two bars of music every time she uttered a sentence, making a symphony of the conversation before or possibly as it happened, and thereby staying attached to Seraph’s words. Her voice was weaving through his low brass section, sweet discord amid bombastic trombones and tubas. Long chords with villainous undertones. He shuddered.

“Anyone who let Tala capture them as they identified their loved ones was given free burials for their dead. Boutique treatment compared to the pathetic state compensation. The listing for Mass Grave says it’s representative of her early work.”

“Meaningless art-world phrasing.”

“Studies of pain etched on faces, vid of people collapsing, soundtrack of wails—”

“Legit journo does that. It bleeds, it leads.”

“Then there’s Gauntlet, which is rumored to be a series where attractive young men run naked through an enclosure full of attack dogs.”

Violin strings snapped in his mind’s ear. He gaped at Seraph. “That can’t be true.”

“Controversy ensued. Consensus was that it had to be a sim.”

“Had to be.” A sense of iced sweat, on the back of his neck, gathering for a run down his spine.

“The catalog describes close-ups of bite wounds and portraits of terrified models in hospital, cuddled up to scary, muzzled mutts. Gauntlet sold to a guy who runs the most frequently investigated chain of hospices in Western Europe.”

“That’s a category?”

“Don’t deflect, Drow. There’s something called Slowburn. All I know about that is that it was confiscated under Sweden’s obscenity laws. Pediatric Transplant Harvest Fail, in private collection. Cold Turkey, Burn Ward, Slowmo Caning, Bedside Vigil. Private, private, private.”

“Seraph, stop.” A screechy oboe solo, reminiscent of an ambulance siren, added itself to his symphony, almost of its own accord.

“Then there’s the Sensorium chatter about her. Or really, the total lack of it. I found a few pearls among the plaudits, tagged to miseryporn, tortureporn. Tala gets off on suffering, Tala likes a good roofie—”

“A what?”

“It’s an oldie term for rapey drink-dosing.”

A full-body shudder this time, like being zapped.

Seraph saw it. Saw him, seeing her catch it. Fisted and unfisted her hands before continuing her liveflow: “I have interview transcripts from Tala’s previous models.”

“Complaints?”

“‘It was an honor to work with her,’” she said, quoting. “‘Cutting-edge productions, no regrets, true innovator, fearless.’ Blah blah.”

“Sounds okay.”

“Nobody has a bad word on record. But. Three of them committed suicide.”

Suicide. Drow tasted fresh blood, realized he had bitten his lower lip. “Cascayde. Didn’t cut deep enough, you said.”

Seraph stepped close, every sinew taut as drumskin. “Walk away, Drow. It’s dangerous.”

Dangerous, agreed, his enhanced brain whispered. It’s also a story, if you . . .

What? Cut deeper?

He restrung his mental chorus of violins and glanced at the symphony. “Is there any more?”

“Isn’t that enough?” When he didn’t answer, she said, “Art critics won’t touch her.”

“Because they’re afraid, you think?”

“Scared, yeah. Shitless.” She tugged his shirt open, exposing the chemo port, and ran a fingertip under the edge of the incision, the cut edge of the flesh.

It’s a story or a lawsuit. Random ideas for thrillers about hero lawyers racked like billiard balls within his mind. Click. Click. Sound of teeth coming together. Opening notes of a soundtrack: The Crown vs. Tala Weston.

Seraph was waiting for an answer.

Drow tried to net the thoughts flashing past, shining ideas running ahead of his agendas. Musical chords and big exposés and Sensorium law schools.

“There’s a bigger story here,” he said. “Tala. Moby Dick of stories.”

“You think you’ll catch her out?”

“If I outsmart her.”

Of course he could outsmart her.

“Can you hear yourself? Drow, I know this is hard. You’ve been through—”

“Tala wants to make artstorm of me enduring needless chemo for sale to miseryporn fans,” he interrupted. “That’s what you’re saying.”

“No! I’m saying Tala’s a maniac.”

“She’s . . . what? Ninety.”

“She’s hopped on life extension and getting a chemo clinic to flatten you! Whatever’s going on, I give the sadist zombie billionaire the edge.”

“Is it illegal? You analyzed the modeling release.”

“Forget the release! You just stop. Drow, you stop. Ghost on her. Call off the chemo course and get that abomination removed.”

“No!” His hand rose, protecting the port.

Seraph’s eyes narrowed.

Oops.

“This is serious journo, Seraph! If what she’s doing is assault, if it exceeds the remit of the modeling release . . . I should reread the release, shouldn’t I?”

Did Harvard allow remote study?

Seraph groped for the edge of the counter, as if she had lost her balance. “You embed yourself in the chemo story, and then . . . what? When you’re shattered from drug side effects, you luck out and catch vid of Tala feeding your left foot to a dog or something?”

“She did dogs, she won’t do dogs again. But embed, I like that!” he said. “We’d need visuals and sound. She powers down unauthorized things within her studio. Do you think if I lured her here? No, she’ll have contingencies for that. If I can keep Crane from powerdown—”

“What is wrong with you?”

He clamped his lips shut over the answer to that one. An imagined safe-deposit box full of Brill battered at his teeth, vials tinkling.

Should tell her, can’t do it, she’d be an accessory. . . .

Half a symphony already written. Who knew he had a symphony in him? Who knew what else was in there? How long had it been since he’d truly made music?

Six years. Since you blocked Uncle Jerv.

He pushed the unwanted response away by asking a question his subconscious couldn’t answer. What did you do with a symphony?

Tala. The point was Tala. “We couldn’t use cameras or implants to catch her, not in her house. But she’d have her own footage, wouldn’t she? She’d capture everything, then cherry-pick stuff that wouldn’t quite get her prosecuted.”

“Drow.”

“Just listen! We have to get my things access to her network. If Crane can see through her cameras . . . ”

“Drow!”

“Her goggs are old. How secure could they be? The two of us, Seraph, we can get in. Or. My uncle. Dad. I didn’t want to go this route but he codes, he’s a virtuoso in his own right when it comes to writing protocols for networked things—”

Seraph took his hands. She had long fingers, strong wrists. Athlete hands. They were . . . no, she was shaking. She pulled him, mulishly resisting, to the couch where Marcella and company had been playing all his instruments. “Listen.”

Drow made himself sit, imagining pizza farts. The upholstery felt like muddy sandpaper. “You have my full attention.”

And she did: He knew her birthday and the name of her dog from high school and what her father said that one time and all her grades in journo. Adoring him, adoring him not, Seraph was what he’d have called a friend, back in the days before the word got verbed and debased.

She deserves better.

She put one hand on either side of his head, gently bringing them gogg to gogg. “Drow. I’m concerned. This looks like a breakdown.”

“Pish.”

“What happened to Cascayde was not your fault.”

He must have jumped, or flinched; her big hands tightened their grip.

“I should’ve reached out to her, outside the spotlight.”

“What she did was desperate, I admit, but. Calculated, too.”

“Crane,” he said. “I need you.”

“Sir?”

“Infograph my social standing and share to Seraph.”

It scrolled between them. Capital commensurate with a disgraced politician, a suspected sex offender. Bank balance teetering. Marcella threatening to quit the apartment and leave him ass-hanging, rent in arrears. Endless streams of censorious comments. Notices from everyone from his cloud backup service to the grocery, saying his privileges had been downgraded. No credit, no discounts, no extras. No love for Drow, unless he met the terms of his user agreements. Endless whirls of little black bubbles streaming from the holes in his reputation.

“I am torpedoed, Seraph.”

“I didn’t say you weren’t paying. I said it wasn’t your fault. I green-lighted that newsflow because everything in it was true. Cascayde did mine the virtuosi hit parade for the bones of Cataract. Even I can hear that. She pulled the stunt because you’d all but proved plagiarism.”

The stunt. Blood spraying in his mouth as he snarked. “I hurt her. Played it for laughs and strokes.”

She swallowed. “I love that in you.”

“What?”

“That you feel it so deeply. That you’re sorry. But insensitivity is not a crime.”

“Stop.” Her words were kicking everything out from under him. She’s wrong she’s right she adores me not adores me too I love that in you she said she said she said. . . .

“Forgo the chemo course,” Seraph said. “Find another way. I’ll pay your rent. Stay home, compose music, regroup. Be smart.”

“If I catch Tala out, we score—”

A twitch, in those fingers. “You. You score.”

“Huh?”

“There’s no we. There’s an emergency, inglomerate. Suddenly I’m needed in the London press office for a month or six.” She tightened her grip on his head. “Focus, Drow! Your contract’s been passed on. I don’t know who’s editing the chemo flow.”

“Hey! That’s why the draft I sent you bounced.”

“Seraph threatens oversight, Seraph gets washed from the picture.”

“And I love that in you. The paranoia.”

That thing she did. The slow breath. She’d reached the end of her patience. “That’s all you have to say?”

He paused. Turned it over. “If you’re not my boss anymore, maybe I should kiss you?”

She pushed him away, fingers flexing as if she’d set a volleyball, bouncing him off the back of the couch. Towering over him, she paused, for a second, where Cascayde had been.

He’d been yelling into her undeservedly famous, tear-streaked face. Why should she have all those follows, all those strokes, for stolen work?

He remembered the silver flick of the blade. And stepping back, out of the razor’s reach.

Seraph’s words hung like breath in frozen air. “You know the difference between smart and clever, Drow?”

“Stepping back. Failing to commit.” Big step with long panicked legs, too far back to stop Cascayde. He’d saved himself. He’d sunk himself.

“Stop telling me what you think I want to hear!”

“Was I? I guess I was. But—”

“Smart knows when to walk away, Drow.”

I should visit Cascayde in the hospital.

Not until my hair’s fallen out.

God, Tala will love that.

“Sorry. What?” he said aloud.

“Mer Raffe appears to be leaving,” Crane said.

It was true. She’d walked through the symphony and slipped into her boots. Moisture had pooled in the bottoms of her goggs. “Good luck, Drow.”

He should persuade her to stay.

“Ten more minutes?”

The door shut on his words.

After a second, Crane asked, “Do you wish to resume the symphony?”

“Leave it. I’ll pick it up . . . you know, next time.” Feeling winded suddenly, Drow circled the ground floor, looking for things to clean. He stripped the couch cushions, throwing the cover slips into the wash. He disinfected the counter, even though nobody had cooked. The smell of bleach was comforting. He tossed Marcella’s leftovers, ignoring the fridge’s protests that they were okay.

Climbing upstairs, he stared at himself in the bathroom mirror. Shave tomorrow. Look dapper for the first round of chemo, the first round of footage. He finger-combed his hair, wondering what his scalp would show when it was exposed.

The toothbrush pinged a soft reminder and he took it up, circle around, gum massage, usual bedtime routine. There’d be smarts left over tomorrow. You didn’t Charly off the Brill all at once.

He peeled his slacks and peed, running his thumb over a mystery bruise on his left thigh as he climbed into bed and surfed entertainment streams. His preferred crime dramas felt clunky and overacted. Their soundtracks were clangy.

“Music director deserves a strike or two,” he mumbled.

“Perhaps you’d prefer this audioflow about medical litigation?” Crane suggested.

“Thanks. LSAT in the morning, maybe, if I still feel the urge.”

“Miss Weston asks if you wish to join her for breakfast before your first infusion.”

“You’re getting security upgrades, right?”

“Uploading as we speak.”

“I will catch her at it, you know,” Drow said. “There’s a win here somewhere.”

“If you say so.”

I’m being humored by an app now.

“Lights out, sir?”

“No.” The full-body shudder took hold again. He saw a spider in the corner and, just as quickly, realized it was a speck of dust. “Leave the lights.”

“Very good,” Crane replied. “Enjoy your show.”

“Night, Crane.” A gust of wind punched at the house, flicking frozen raindrops against the window, the tinkle of slush turning, midair, to liquid glass.

Drow listened to legal arguments and an imagined, fading snatch of orchestral music, trying to lull himself to sleep as the meaner half of the storm closed in, encasing his city, drop by drop, in a treacherous raiment of glittering ice.

Crane cycled off for the first chemo cycle, despite heavy tweaks to his settings, despite security upgrades. He could provide no records for the two days after the infusion, days Drow spent in a daze on Tala’s smartchair, cameras ringed around him like guards. All Drow remembered was answering questions in a monotone as she interrogated him about side effects.

He came out feeling fragmented and shaky, as if he’d been pummeled while down with a bad case of flu. There was a smattering of interest in Newsreef’s announcement that he was taking the chemo course, but the resulting likes hadn’t salvaged his cap; he couldn’t summon a ride home. Dragging himself south to the nearest corner, he caught the TTC streetcar. He streamed the whole slog for anyone who’d tagged his story.

Marcella and Cole were having ah ah yes OMG yes! sex in her room as he arrived, so he couldn’t Brilliant up. He shouldn’t anyway: It had only been four days since the first dose. Last thing his body needed was more chemicals. He wasn’t loopy, and if the stories were true, he should still be vastly cleverer than usual.

“Head down, donkey.” He dropped into Sensorium, asked Crane to keep him on task, and plodded through tightening up the newsflow sentence by sentence.

And he was still jumped: Even in his current state, one that made a bad hangover feel like a dream of paradise, he snapped together a description of the infusion experience with almost casual ease. Straight-up news at this point, though he spooned in lots of subtext about the purifying charms of suffering. After Drow had run the full poisonous gauntlet, he’d splice in Trevon’s whistleblower interview and a full exposé on the scam.

His back felt sunburned—scraped, really—and his mouth was parched. He filed the revisions with his new editor, some oily-voiced guy whose most memorable feature was not being Seraph. That accomplished, he choked down some copper-flavored chicken.

Fighting drowsiness and ill-formed imaginings—memories?—about needles, he wandered to the back porch.

His landlord was part of the so-called Millennial Migration, one of the childless thousands who’d decamped to jobs in Hyderabad and Beijing, leaving aged parents moldering in their in-law suites. The arrangement made honorary grandchildren of young tenants, mortgage helpers shoehorned cheek-by-jowl into the apartments upstairs from Mom and Dad. For a cut in rent, Drow kept tabs on Ramir, who, thankfully, was puttering in the yard today. Discharging his obligation took no more than an exchange of waves and a photo upload to the son, Imran.

Ol’ Gaffer’s still with us, send me a goddamned stroke.

The backyard likewise came with strings attached, having been given over to carbon offsets. Voluntary for now, but the way things were going climatewise, they’d be required civic duty in another few years. A City of Toronto bamboo-baling operation had growcubes on half of what had, years ago, been private lawn and garden. Drow got strokes for watering the bamboo; Imran netted a homeowner’s tax break.

Bamboo season was weeks away. Drow’s eye fell on the floor-to-ceiling porch shelves, piled high with dusty Mason jars and rusted-out lids.

Just his kind of distraction.

“Let’s fight some grime,” he muttered, quoting Dad, remembering the groans of years past from his young self and Jerv.

Moving slowly, Drow cleared the shelves, laying the glassware on a towel on the kitchen counter. Whenever he got groggy, he took a jar outside, letting the icy wind slap him back to alertness as he scooped up a layer of newly fallen snow. Big clean-ups required big water. Like many neat freaks, he had learned to use snowmelt to stretch his hydro allowance.

With the shelves emptied, Drow could wipe the frosty insides of the porch windowpanes, chilling his blood, cooling his pulsing, burnt-feeling skin. The cool and the motion helped him stay conscious.

Awake was mandatory. He had enhanced smarts, a time-limited window, and a pressing need to outwit Tala Weston. “Talk to me, Crane. Why didn’t your security upgrade work?”

“Miss Weston’s apartment is authorized for aggressive privacy protocols.”

“Since when does an individual have the right to airlock my data?” The question looped him back to thinking about law school; he tabbed up a series of legal papers on privacy regulations.

“I believe that particular windowpane is clean now.”

“Do you sound more English than before?”

“As my software ripens, so, too, does my personality.”

“Did you just make a cheese joke?”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t know how, sir. The window?”

Drow shifted, one pane left. His goggs superimposed privacy regs on dirty glass. Wipe, read, wipe. “Here, this—see if anything’s registered to Tala’s home address. Besides, you know, her home.”

“Searching . . . ah! She rents an upstairs office to a psychiatrist.”

“Bingo. Medical confidentiality. Bet the psychiatrist’s never actually there.”

Crane condensed privacy regulations to bullet points. “All speech within the therapist’s workspace is protected. Modems handshake with the Sensorium via a medical-grade airlock. Apps with spyware capabilities—I suppose I do qualify, sir—can be downed without notice.”

Drow swallowed. Was there any other way? “Crane, you’ll have to go to Jervis for code upgrade.”

Pregnant silence.

“Crane?”

“If it happened to be the case, sir, that—”

“Fuck! You already went?”

“Custom security work being expensive, the only programmer with a reason—”

“Right, right, you had to. Desperate times, right?”

“Desperate measures. Indeed.”

He wrung the washrag as if it was someone’s skinny chicken neck. “Jerv ask to talk to me?”

“He understands you have him blocked.”

“And he couldn’t help?” Drow’s pulse trip-hammered. Jerv had been his toxic ace in the hole. “You powered down. Maybe I’m truly sunk.”

“Mer Raffe wished me to remind you, were doubts to arise, that you can walk away from this project.”

“Whose side are you on?”

The app continued, “I wouldn’t say Master Jervis cannot help, precisely. He suggested you get a tongue-texting device, so you and I can communicate without being overheard by Miss Weston’s hearing aid.”

“You just pointed out I can’t afford nice things.”

“He will bankroll it, along with other expenses related to this project.”

“He’s in the money again, is he?”

“Some of his patents and app licenses—”

“Don’t care, Crane. Why involve him further when he’s already failed to crashproof you?” The window made a brittle noise: He’d scrubbed too hard.

“There’s something he needs,” Crane said. “He’s confident it would make a difference, to the programming.”

“Oh, no.”

Of course it was about the drugs.

Bit rich, though, isn’t it? Did you even pause when Tala dangled Brill under your nose?

He had run out of dirty window. Clean the shelves next, or the jars? Fuming, he pondered the grit on the bottom shelf.

Crane said, “He would barter for two doses of your food coloring.”

“How could you? How could you tell him about that?”

“I provided details after he deduced the general shape of your scheme.”

“How?”

“Your gift for drug-seeking may be an inherited trait.”

“Har de har.” Blue-tinted sun poured through the gleaming windows. Cold light; his legs felt leaden.

Returning to the kitchen, he confronted the glassware. Sixty, maybe seventy Mason jars, crusted in dust and cobweb and full of snow, covered the counters. He deflated onto a barstool, taking it in. Instead of filling him with the usual sense of impending success, the thought of cleaning all that glass filled him with exhaustion.

Upstairs, Marcella was at it again, Baby baby yeah yeah.

“My friend Trevon, from the pop-up,” Drow said. “I can drop two doses with him.”

“Jervis agrees,” Crane replied.

So they were live right now, his sidekick and his father’s druggy widower. Talking behind his block.

“He’ll visit Miss Weston’s home, to examine her uptakes and hardware.”

“He gets caught, I’m breaching contract.”

“Again, the food coloring—”

“He’s saying he won’t get caught?”

“I believe him, sir.”

“And what choice do we have?”

“The choice, as Mer Raffe—”

“Breach of contract. Heard you the first time. Please don’t bring it up again.” Drow levered himself upright, leaving snow in the jars to melt. The thought of lying down filled him with dread, so he soaped a rag and began wiping down the shelves.

It was a filthy, hopeless, perfect sort of job. The wood shelves caught the threads of the rag, splinters shredding the fabric. Wet silt flowed into oak grooves and knots, filth sinking in deeper.

Idiotic use of his time, when he felt so strung up. But pushing the dirt away, wringing wet, gray smears out onto the snow as he cleared the house of muck, was starting to work its usual magic.

A cobweb brushed his elbow. Feather-touch of dirty thread, a fall of grit on his exposed arm. Drow recoiled, throwing the brush.

The spider dropped onto his right shoulder.

Drow wasn’t arachnophobic, but as he clawed at the spider with his rubbery fingers, he had a sudden vision of maggots, writhing on his back. Small, white bodies pulsing at the edge of an open wound, an incision . . .

He shrieked, lost his balance, and fell off the stepladder, banging into the empty shelves. They arrested his fall, without quite busting his ribs.

Daddy Longlegs tried to flee.

Let it go, it’s harmless.

Why should it get away? Drow grabbed, crushing it with his pink-gloved hand. Acid churned in his guts as its body popped.

He looked straight down his shirt, staring at the port incision, imagining maggots. Could it be a memory, something from the two days he’d lost? An image his goggs had superimposed on him, in sim? No way to tell. His skin was spotted with bursts of rash. No bugs, no rot, no open wounds.

“Voodreau?”

The old man, Ramir, had come up the porch steps.

Shaking, Drow opened his hand. The spider was real enough, smear of innocent tissue and snapped needles. Broken wisp, like Cascayde.

The old man nodded comprehension, took up another rag, patted Drow on his stinging shoulder, and then, apparently oblivious as his grandtenant gave in to an attack of the shudders, began smearing half-melted snow over another shelf.

Day five of the first week: Drow’s physical recovery had peaked and the mental enhancement was noticeably, lamentably gone. The porch was a gleaming museum of canning hardware and spotless window glass, sterile enough for day surgery.

Marcella stopped sex-bingeing eventually, leaving him alone to dose up, renew his impersonation of God. Drow finished the symphony, entering it in a government-sponsored contest because, really, what else did you do with a symphony? He fought Sensorium advertisements for a few hours so he could do prep for a law school exam he had no objective reason to take.

He started learning ASL, the better to interact with Ramir downstairs—the Gaffer, it turned out, was pretty good company. He practiced sending Morse code to the new tongue-texting rig, a thin fibelastic loop, invisible as fishing line, cinched around the back of his tongue. Thus secured, it vibrated pulses: dot, dash, dot.

For the next stage of the chemo newsflow, he made vid of himself researching the scary drug outcomes, listing all of the possible indignities and discomforts he had to look forward to.

The weird burn on his chest wasn’t on the list. It had turned into a proper scabby rash, peeling splashes of red on white that did almost look granular, maggoty.

He scanned legal textbooks while putting together a popflow, something based on the terrible earworm Marcella and her friends had been trying to assemble. Music for the mindless: It grew, like mildew, in under an hour.

Release it himself, just to screw with her? Or dangle it as a bribe? Marcella’s voice had always been a hair short of awesome; music was their venned interest, the reason they’d friended, the why behind his having invited her to glomerate at Imran’s.

If she owed him, it solved the housemate issue, didn’t it? He sent a sample, with a carefully worded note that didn’t quite say: All this could be yours. Just stick to our rental agreement.

She pounced on it, naturally.

And that was a way out with Cascayde, too, wasn’t it? Assemble something irresistible? Do it right, and he might even show her that she didn’t have to build a career on garbage riffs and performative histrionics.

The thought cycled in the choir loft of his mind as he let his fingers trace the imagined surface of his virtual keyboard. The song for Marcella had been nothing but derivative bits and pieces. Her pieces, but still. And Drow’s newborn symphony contained more than a bit of Mozart.

Riffing, homage . . . or something worse?

Was he simply a more elegant class of thief? Gentleman burglar to Cascayde’s heavy-handed mugger?

The thought laughed at him from the shadows, high-pitched and poisonous.

Crane made British noises and the occasional pun, catching him at appropriate intervals before his attention could wander, helping him circle the same round of activities. Law. Music. Strategies for Tala. ASL. Social cap mitigation. Outwitting Tala. Morse code. Penance music for Cascayde. Damnwell surviving Tala.

He blasted out music, worked on the exposé, flirted with law school. Thought about waving Seraph so she could lecture him about professional monogamy. He cleaned his house and bottled a flavorless Allstew, laced with caffeine.

The clock ran down.

Drow showed up for his second infusion with stew, some sealed, preprinted digestibles, and a supply of bottled water, all locked inside a camping cooler borrowed from Ramir. Dad’s brainless old Dictaphone was tucked into Jude the Obscure.

Tala sat in on a pre-infusion consult with Trevon, who suggested a naturopathic cream for his back. If she was capturing video or audio in defiance of the clinic’s privacy tech, Drow couldn’t tell. Her goggs showed the usual cartoon eyes, masking her expression. When Trevon kicked her out so Drow could strip for the infusion, she went without a murmur.

“This shouldn’t be happening,” he said to Drow, examining the rash, the pattern of crescent-shaped marks.

Hearing aids pick up everything. He whispered, “If it’s not the chemo, could it be tattoos?”

Trevon shook his head. “We’d see ink.”

“I keep thinking about needles.” Fear of sounding paranoid prevented him from suggesting invisible ink.

After the infusion, he made his slow way to the car, unsupported, wobbling while she made footage.

“What’s that load you’re hauling?” she asked.

Drow woozily raised the cooler filled with the sealed jars of food and water. “Cleansing diet. No outside food or drink s’week.”

“Whatever you say, Lambie Pie.”

Now to stay awake, and to keep Crane up and running. For the first part of that first afternoon, he was untouchable: The toxic drag of the infusion kept him tied to the bathroom for five miserable hours. Was it a win? He was too wrung out and shaky, by the time his gastro tract finally stopped evacuating lava, to decide.

He staggered to the smartchair, mute and exhausted, as Tala lowered her green screen beside him. A pink fuzzy gargoyle, she fussed over lights, arranging instruments, ringing him in shadowless dawn-orange glow. The massage routine built into the chair ran a ball between his shoulder blades. Drow jerked forward, very nearly letting out a shriek, all but tumbling face-first into the coffee table.

“Handsome?” Clicks and whirrs from her goggs: She’d be checking to see that she caught the spasm.

“My back’s been . . . oversensitive.”

“Roll to your side; I’ll powerdown the massage apps.” She put out a hand and served as anchor as he levered himself onto his left hip.

“Let’s make something to earn sympathy from all the worker ants, shall we?” She whisked out a silky-looking sheet, screener green in color, covering him. All the cameras were netting images now, and at his request she’d mirrored them to Crane. Bloodshot eyes, corpse-lipstick shade of mauve on his lips.

“I thought your stuff went to private collections.”

“We’re collaborating here, aren’t we? You make hard-hitting medical exposé, I make artstorm.” She disappeared up the rickety steps, returning with a basket of salon tools: clips and razors, curlers and brushes. Sitting across from him, she pored over combs, holding them up to his hair to compare color contrast, finally choosing one with a metallic red sheen and dropping it into a flask filled with blue alcohol. Composing the shot, she murmured, “What we want here is Keats on his deathbed.”

“’Scuse me?”

“Without the premature death, obviously.” She adjusted each camera in turn, chose three, and shut down the rest. “You’re about his age, aren’t you?”

He shrugged. “Crane, look up Keats for me.”

“And . . . action!” Tala drew the comb through his hair, smoothing out tangles with her vulture claws. Dark strands caught in the teeth, clumping. Uprooting bits of him, she made the rest more presentable.

The green screen had etched in a background, concrete wall and a dirty window, and the sheet was rendered as a ratty wool blanket. The impression created was penitential: Drow recovering in a jail or monastic cell.

She was right; this would play. Drow tagged the digital effects, in case anyone struck at them later for taking poetic license. “Can we livestream this?”

“Go ahead.”

She has opened her airlock, Crane affirmed, stealth-texting in Morse. Stream uploading on a ten-second delay. Translation: She could still clamp down on the data if something she didn’t like threatened to get out. Even so, it was a crack in the door, electronic equivalent of a drawbridge lowered.

Tala took another pass through his thinning mop, then rubbed the comb on a wetwipe, clearing a smear of lost strands before dipping the comb again.

“What’s that smell?”

“Eucalyptus.” The comb had sharp teeth. Its cold metallic points raked his scalp, lots of sensation, not entirely pleasant but, in its repetition, a bit hypnotic. Tala tugged strands free from the grip of his goggs, ran the point behind his ears, down the nape of his neck to trigger a round of the shakes. When she was done he looked smoother, like a five-year-old fresh from a wash and cut. Vulnerable, and maybe a bit pathetic.

“No actual bald patches yet,” he noted, zooming in on his scalp.

“Next time.” She cleaned another clump off the red teeth, leaving wet remnants of hair on the wipe in the corner of the camera’s field of view, a dab of eye-catching grotesquerie. Discarding the comb in the flask of eucalyptus-scented alcohol, she took up another wetwipe. “How are the numbers?”

Drow queried his new Newsreef editor, who shared a graph of viewing stats. About ten thousand people had tagged it and interest in the live feed had stirred, creating a bump in the ratings as her gnarled hands pulled his hair out. A sputter of strokes pattered onto the desert of Drow’s social capital. Compassionate outliers were deciding he was pitiable rather than malignant.

“More?” she asked.

He nodded assent, ever so slightly.

“Watch your numbers,” Tala said, pressing her wipe-wrapped thumb over his eyebrow, tracing the line of it with almost bruising force.

“Ow!” Drow protested. “Ow!”

Humming tunelessly, she raised her hand. The tissue had most of his brow on it, a collection of little strands like bug legs. A reddened half-circle of bald surprise graced the wild wide eye staring into her nearest lens. The sputter of sympathy strokes became more robust.

“Well, Handsome?”

Drow turned his face to offer the other brow.

“You got a name for this project?” He was tearing up, physiological response to the assault on his supraorbital ridge. Saline pooled in the cup of his goggs.

“I’m thinking of Wings off a Fly.”

“Ow!” He fought a renewed flood from his tear ducts as she stripped his other brow. “I’d rather be Keats. A fly?”

“Old expression.” She was streaming the close footage of his face but had muted their conversation. “It captures what the clinic’s doing to you.”

Right. The clinic was victimizing him.

She began massaging his hand, pinching the fingertips and working down, in tiny increments, to the heel. Strokes were still coming in. If the martyr fodder streamed wide enough, he might level sufficiently to take LSAT practice quizzes without ads.

Crane, in silent mode, sent text. Master Jervis says security on household peripherals is above civilian grade.

He clicked back: Meaning?

Crane: Delays in access, possible recurrence of sidekick shutdown, no digital data export.

Drow: I think this round will go all right. My counter-play with the food should slow her down. She can’t dose me.

Crane: Jervis has accessed one app—Miss Weston’s muscle-stimulation regime. He can reprogram the needles.

Drow contemplated that fuzzily. It was assault, of a sort. Messing with the hands that were even now kneading the tight flesh of his forearms, not gently exactly, but in a way that . . .

 . . . softened the meat?

She’s not that bad, and she’s just an old lady.

Crane again: Your father points out that the fluid on Miss Weston’s hair combs could easily be a topical pharmaceutical.

Whitings know drug-seeking.

He blinked, staring up into Tala’s goggs.

She broke from an off-key hum. “What is it, Dearheart?”

“Wings off Flies,” he said aloud. “Old saying?”

“About the fundamental sadism of children.”

“You don’t think that’s . . . over the top?”

“Art’s whatever you can get away with. Isn’t that the quote?”

“By Keats?”

“Warhol,” she and Crane corrected simultaneously.

“What haven’t you gotten away with?”

She peered into his face. “How you feeling?”

Dizzy. Calm. Too calm, probably. Drugs in the combs. “Sensorium’s starting to hate me less. Ha! Hates me not.”

“Stick with me, kid. You’ll be the best show in town.”

“Stay awake,” he said, unsure if he meant himself, or Crane. He was definitely drugged. He couldn’t quite remember how to text. “Pins and needles. Do it.”

“Your arm’s falling asleep?” Vulture claws tightened their grip on his wrist flexors.

“Do it,” he repeated. If Crane understood, his response was lost in rising red fog.

What’s that sound?

It wasn’t just his back on fire now; it was the arms themselves. The fire of wasp stings sizzled in time to his pulse, burning from his shoulders to elbows, and as he drunkenly leaned into something like alertness, he brought with him a sense of buzzing, a mechanical whine that he couldn’t, in fact, hear. Memory? Imagination?

His eyes were clenched shut.

He was aroused, too, was inside or enfolded in something, hips thrusting stickily. As this sank in, he froze.

His tongue lolled, overhanging gritty lips.

“Baby, don’t stop.” Cooing, in his ear. Who?

His burnt arms were locked around . . . what? Someone’s neck? He tried to let go, but his hands were clasped together and he couldn’t make his fingers open.

None of it felt—quite—like a person.

What was he humping?

Moaning, he forced his unwilling eyes to open.

Hospital room. White straitjacket arms encased his arms in obscene simulation of prayer, and the person . . .

notta person, no, notta person izza sim, hasta be . . .

CRRNNE, he tongue-spelled.

 . . . the person beneath him was Cascayde. Twiggy, blond, and vulnerable, she was wailing like a banshee and raking at his back. Her fingernails were tattoo needles, buzzing stingers leaving swirling lines in their wake. The bandage at her neck was seeping red.

Drow spasmed from hairline to toes, all of him arching away, peeling his skin from hers. His locked wrists caught her behind the neck and the sim thrashed like a badly animated puppet. Maggot-covered blankets restrained him.

Something banged the heels of his hands, ice-cold metal, painful and blessedly head-clearing.

It was the smartchair. He was hugging the headrest.

Drow drew air through clenched teeth, fighting to convince his hands to unclasp, to raise them above the top of the chair. His lower body was—almost independent of him—trying to run away from the whole situation.

Crane shut it off shut it off. . . . He wasn’t sure he was spelling anything that made sense.

The arms stayed tangled. He twisted, throwing a leg over where he thought the chair must be, snagging on fabric. Balance failed entirely. They went down together: him, the silk sheet, all that elaborately programmed foam. Something the size of a toothbrush snapped beneath him. A helmet he hadn’t known he was wearing kept his head from bouncing off the floor.

Slam of iron on bone: He caught his forearm between the floor and the falling piece of heavy furniture. Agony popped his hand open, blessed electric jolt of pain, zapping from shoulder socket to fingertips. He kicked, disentangling from fleshy smartfoam and a smothering wrap of gossamer green screen.

Then he made the mistake of opening his eyes again.

The sim was smart enough to try to compensate for the shift in his orientation. The virtuoso, Cascayde, writhed beside him, still shrieking, hospital gown drenched with blood.

Don’t die again, don’t die again.

He clawed for his face, finding a smooth fishbowl of plastic, a VR helmet sealed by a smartfoam collar. There had to be a latch, right? His nails broke on its surface.

Crane, Crane, help, Crane . . .

Little pings in his tongue. A response? Dot dot . . .

Hands caught his upper arms. Vulture claws.

“Stop!” Drow rasped. “Wait!”

Propelled from behind, all but lifted by the grip on his upper arms, too hammered by chemo and who knew what else to fight, he stumbled back into the embrace of the righted chair. Whoof! as he fell, facedown. Someone straddled him, rough thighs through a thin layer of silk. He felt the vibration of voice, someone humming, as misshapen breasts pressed his shoulderblades. Pubic hair compressed against the base of his spine as weight settled.

He tried to push her off.

Glue of a drug patch rolled over his neck. Hands settled, holding him down. Massage nodules writhed under his groin. He clenched his eyes shut as Cascayde slid in beside him, under him, fitting new needles to each of her fingertips.

Weighted, as if by stones, he jerked and screamed, fighting rising drowsiness and losing. The muscles in his face relaxed, breath by breath; his eyelids flickered open. Cascayde and all his other sins were waiting to claim him.

Drow awoke to burning sensations in both arms and a bad case of concert throat. He had a case of the nightmare shakes, a strong desire to throw up, and no memory of anything that had happened after the eyebrow-stripping.

His goggs were across the room, sitting in a windowsill next to a noisy, burbling tank of small crabs. His limbs felt like sacks of wet cement, but he made himself roll in the chair, onto his back.

He tongue-spelled: Crane?

The answer came as pings of sensation at the tip of his tongue ending with dot-dash-dot. Sir?

You awake all night?

Indeed.

Well?

You removed access hardware at 6:45 p.m.

I removed?

At her suggestion, sir. You’ve left me pointed at Huron Street.

You must have caught something. The chair shivered beneath him. His stomach flipped as he scrambled off of it, feeling—absurdly—guilty. Hear anything?

Nothing I’ll retain after I leave, sir. Miss Weston’s data airlock remains secure.

Anything that catches her out? Deciphering Morse was exhausting—everything was exhausting—but he pushed himself across the room. Reclaiming his rig, he clipped it into place: left eye, right eye, left ear, right. Hair slithered off his head, tickling a path down his bare shoulders. Where was his shirt?

I heard shouting, sir. Nothing conclusive.

House schematics filled his goggs, revealing a web of eyes and ears: Jervis had mapped all the cameras and mics on the main floor. Drow couldn’t fart in here without a pickup.

“Where’s Tala?” he asked aloud. Because he would, wouldn’t he?

Crane played along. “Good morning, sir! Miss Weston is upstairs.”

If he got Crane to play audio from the night before, Tala’s various ears would hear it playing in his earbuds. And if he left . . .

 . . . right, who’m I kidding, can barely walk . . .

 . . . her privacy apps would scrub whatever his sidekick knew.

As for Jude the Obscure and his Dictaphone, they were nowhere to be found.

Drow opened one of his specially prepared filtered waters, sinking to the floor beside the fridge as he chugged.

What was called for here was a genius frigging idea. Hard to force, Brill or no, when he was in this state. He pondered, rubbing his burning arms. They were red with the same emerging rash his back had presented. Blood blisters? A surly black-green bruise blotched his forearm.

“Morning, Handsome.” For once, Tala’s peppy tone sounded forced. “Your thinning hair did well, on the overnight.”

“Haven’t checked my numbers.”

“No?” She flashed cartoon eyes, shaped like hearts. “It’s been years since I considered the mass appeal of—”

“Family-rated pity porn?”

“You have such a way with words.”

“Sensorium’s more reactive than private galleries. You’re playing to everyone, not just—”

“Connoisseurs?” She ran a hand down his arm, fingering the edges of the bruise.

He fought an urge to bolt for the bathroom and lock himself in. “What happened here?”

“You fell off the smartchair,” she said. “During a nightmare, I think.”

It was getting to her, he thought. The eyeballs. The wider reach was a temptation.

A lever, maybe, if he could figure out how to use it.

“Remember anything?”

“My head in a goldfish bowl?”

“No fish here, Handsome.”

They had agreed to another day and night of filming and physical recovery. Drow streamed as much as he could, watching what Tala allowed out of her airlock, what she was willing to leave on the record. She edited his medical journey into a series of high-pathos vids, clips that looked entirely candid, random-seeming captures that always cut to a wincingly painful moment of suffering.

The humming, he realized, was a tell of sorts: It started when she was busily occupied with work.

Strokes came in an ever-steadier stream, too few to redeem him but enough to make Drow wish that collaborating with Tala could actually be what they used to call a valid lifestyle choice.

I should make it up with Marce, he thought. Go back to playing music with her. See what happens.

He spent the afternoon doodling in an old-school paper notebook—inherited, vintage, no carbon cost—and eating bland printed food, thinking about the video possibilities of future chemo outcomes.

Ghoulish possibilities, he wrote: shakes, sores, dry mouth.

Waking later from a light doze, he found three more on the list: Seizure. Cardiac arrest. Stroke.

With penstrokes that almost tore the page, he crossed them out.

“No good?” Tala said.

“Whose ideas are those?”

“It’s your handwriting, isn’t it?”

He gritted his teeth. “I’m not having a heart attack for this. Anyway, a hospital-grade emergency commits me to a blood test or fifty, right? Which’d raise questions about the Brill, and supplier of same.”

“Hmmm,” she said, neither agreeing nor disagreeing.

“Getting away with it, remember?”

“Nobody wants you to stroke out, Dearheart.”

Crane, meanwhile: Are you with us, sir?

Here.

Jervis has solved my security problems, but he would need to perform a hardware installation. I’m afraid you’ll have to meet.

So much for Jervis understands you have him blocked.

This day keeps getting better, Drow said. I don’t want him at my house. Understand?

Crane: He suggests making an appointment with your whistle-blower at the pop-up, to clean your smartport.

Drow looked at the words on the notebook page. Cardiac arrest.

Not his idea, no matter what she said.

Seeing Jervis couldn’t make things worse at this point, could it?

Fine, then, make the appointment, he texted to Crane. Lower the drawbridge. Drain the moat. Whatever it takes.

Another night smeared away into morning, and by dawn his left hip had caught fire and he was nursing a stutter.

By February, Toronto’s streets usually gave over to a hard, dirty melt, receding mountains of filthy crystallized snow scraped into piles on street corners, revealing clumps of muck and the rare bit of litter tossed by people who didn’t mind risking a cap hit. This winter the snow kept coming, renewing the virginal blanket laid over the roofs and yards.

It was a sign, Drow thought, a hint from Someone Up There who wanted him to know he should’ve just kept shoveling sidewalks.

He was braced for Jervis as he stepped into the infusion center, but it was Trevon who met him at the door. The medic’s hand lit on his burnt, scabby shoulder, making Drow flinch.

His muscles were screwed tight; no pretending this was a casual encounter.

They made their way down a narrow flight of stairs, through a hallway that smelled of burnt, powdered turmeric.

“Are we making for the sewers? Underground cave system?” Drow asked—the stairs were wearing him out.

“Your guy claims the clinic’s changed ownership,” Trevon whispered.

“My guy—”

“Our cameras and mics have been getting an upgrade. He refuses to come upstairs. Anyway, here we are.”

It was a file room, dank and ill-lit, with a screechy fan planted near the door.

Jervis was waiting beside a dead potted plant under an equally dead grow lamp. Relics of the building’s former life as a pot dispensary, probably.

Dad’s widower had yet to lose his looks or the salesman’s smile. He’d always been charismatic: The light in his eyes beamed goodwill and noble intentions. C’mon, of course you can trust me, it said. Jerv’s charisma drew people like a beacon, pulling in the emotionally storm-tossed. Even now, seeing him brought an involuntary lift to Drow’s spirits. A lift—and then a swift hit of guilt about the distance he’d scrupulously maintained between them since Dad’s death.

He loves you, the guilt said, look at him lighting up there, he’s no monster . . .

No lighthouse, either, Drow told it.

More a siren; get close and rocks would tear out your bottom.

“Brucie,” Jervis said.

“It’s Drow.” He cleared his parched throat. “Let’s keep this to business.”

“Of course.” If he’d hurt his ex-dad’s feelings, it didn’t show. “Shirt off, then.”

Drow peeled, sat. Trevon hemmed and hawed over the infusion port as Jervis unpacked a bit of filament, fine as dandelion seed, microscopic wires arrayed around a central stem.

“The idea here is to have Crane run parallel installations. Twoface protocol, I call it. The vulnerable version, DayCrane, is available to Spiderlady, or whoever’s hacking for her—”

“Stop! Back up! Whoever’s hacking—”

“You’ve got a me, kid. She probably has a me, too. If she didn’t, she got one the first time you went off-script. You act, she reacts, she acts, we react. Play, counter-play, do-si-bleeping-do. I should write a dance instructor protocol for Crane, shouldn’t I? Anyone wanna learn to fox-trot?”

Drow flicked him. “Focus, Jerv.”

“Yeahyeahsorry. DayCrane still does all your donkeywork, and she can mess with him at will. Meanwhile, NightCrane communicates via tonguetext, evading the mics and security apps in her recording studio.”

“You’ll feel a pinch now,” Trevon interrupted. He pulled two pump staples and unearthed the belly of the injection device.

Drow looked away, imagining the scar it would leave, hating the self-mutilation.

Dad’s voice whispered in the shriek of the fan. Your body is the only thing you truly own . . .

Stick to business. “What will this new hardware do?”

Jerv outlined the problem: Drow’s pickups were loading to the airlock in Tala’s home. The video and conversation transcripts were then scrubbed by the confidentiality app in the psychiatric office on-site before they ever made it to the Sensorium or its permanent archive, the Haystack.

“So you override that somehow?”

“No,” Jerv said. “We add a cache of on-site storage to the port. NightCrane can upload the records on your command.”

“On-site . . . ” Drow had barely heard of such a thing; private hard drives had been one of the first things to go out when international transparency accords began proliferating and people started loading their whole lives to the cloud.

“As medical tech, the port’s allowed some freestanding memory, in case it has to shoot you up during . . . dunno. A broadband blackout? I’m radically increasing its capacity. NightCrane can stash footage inside and upload it when you’re back in the world.”

“Can you get us into Tala’s mics and cameras, at the house?”

“Maybe,” Jervis said, with a significant glance. Meaning: if Drow gave him another Brilliance vial.

“I can’t spare more.”

“You’ve got twenty-some coming, don’t you?”

He tongue-texted: Goddammit!

Crane: I do apologize, sir. I cannot keep secrets from Master Jervis when he’s effectively performing brain surgery on me—

Drow said, “I get more, Jerv, if I finish the contract.”

Raised brows. “You’re thinking of walking away?”

No, Drow thought. He was going to get the goods on Tala: expose the truth. Win the likes, win the game. Make his name.

But Jerv always did have a way of making him feel contrary, of wanting to say fire when he was drowning. “Everyone says I should walk.”

“Run screaming,” Trevon muttered. He was easing the upgraded port into position, prepping for the unnecessary cleaning Drow had scheduled.

“Who asked you?” Jervis said.

“As my chemo pusher, Trevon, shouldn’t you be on Jerv’s side?”

The medic ran a gentle finger over the scabs laced across Drow’s biceps. “Chemo didn’t cause these.”

Jerv wasn’t listening. Behind his pricey low-profile goggs, his eyes were flickering. Reading software install specs, probably, or checking the handshake with Crane. Possibly writing the programming equivalent of symphonies. “Come on, Trevvie my boy. Trevvy muh man. Goal here’s to get Drow to the end of his contract in one piece.”

“It’s Trevon, I’m not your man, and you of all people . . . Jesus, isn’t this your son?”

“Technically, he’s my surrogate’s brother,” Drow said.

Jerv snapped out of quasi-REM. “Didn’t you say let’s stick to business? Because if you want to argue genetic semantics and familial bondage, I have footage from changing your godforsaken diapers—”

“Business, definitely business,” Drow said. The sudden bursts of rage hadn’t gone away, then. Why would they?

“Anyway, buddy,” Jerv went on, turning a glittery gaze on Trevon, “you’re the one literally poisoning the kid.”

The medic’s hands came up. A surrender. “Right. Got it. Seen and not heard.”

Drow swallowed rising anxiety. “Trevon, really, I’m fine.”

“See? All good.” Jerv twinkled, apparently surging back into bonhomie. “Drow, let me see your goggs.”

Drow slipped off his rig, brushing away the by-now usual fall of hair, and handed them over. “Trevon, can you tweak the chemo mix so I can’t fall asleep. Just for . . . say three days?”

“Days? You want to add psychosis to your problems?”

“Can you?”

“No! What about taking a placebo for the remaining infusions?”

Drow waved the handful of hair. “I need to keep falling bald or T-T-dammit-Tala will know what’s up. And the modeling contract requires I do ten treatments.”

Trevon considered. “If we’re talking tweaks . . . how about a lighter dose?”

It was a lifeline, one he hadn’t expected, and Drow grabbed it gratefully. “Yes. Right. Say, enough to finish off the hair, maintain this fabulous green skin tone and a bit of the quease. But not so much as—”

“Keep getting worse, but not as fast or as bad as expected? Excellent strategy, kids!”

Approval from Jervis: ironclad sign that this was an incredibly bad idea. He went on: “Hey! What if we threw in a dose of Sustain?”

Trevon groaned.

“Which is what?” Drow said.

“Slows down the Charly effect. Gets you more out of the remaining Brill.”

“So I can conveniently spare more for you?”

“You in this to win or not, son?”

“I’m in it to . . . ” His mind tumbled possibilities, finding murk where, three weeks ago, everything had seemed clear. Commit to journalism? Truth, strokes, redemption? A little payback for Tala’s previous models, if she had indeed driven them to suicide? “This Sustain stuff. It’s d-d-dangerous?”

Trevon said, “You’re past worrying about dangerous.”

“Is it a zombie drug? Something for life extension that’ll interact badly with the actual boost to cognition?”

“Not a zombie.” Trevon sighed. “It just slows down your system’s ability to flush out the Brill. The combo will worsen your mouth sores and almost certainly give you nosebleeds.”

Drow thought of the list in his notebook. Cardiac arrest, in his script. In comparison, a nosebleed sounded both minor and suitably gross. “Might be just the thing.”

“Too bad. I’m not licensed to give Sustain.”

“Me either,” Jervis said, pressing a packet of patches into Drow’s hand. “No more than one a day, kid, hear me?”

Trevon’s expression—disgust with them both—morphed into a sudden “O” of surprise. “Speaking of zombies, yours is parking outside.”

“What?”

“My manager says to hold off on your port cleaning until she arrives.”

“Say it’s already done?” Jerv suggested.

“No.” Drow sighed. “Either Crane blabbed or she has a source at the clinic. You said new owners, Trevon?”

“This is me bugging out the back way.” Jerv flashed Drow another of those incandescent, sucker-luring smiles and scuttled off.

“Wow. Dad really is everything you said he was,” Trevon said.

“Jerv’s the least of my worries,” Drow said, struggling to keep his voice steady. He buttoned his shirt. “Come on. Haul me up the stairs so we can rip out my staples again.”

The new drug, Sustain, gave Drow a weird feeling, something like having a dissection pin embedded in his eye. Combined with Brill, it also bestowed photographic memory. He remembered visuals, suddenly, something that had never been his strong suit. How things looked, where they were: He could glance at a floor plan and see the house it described. He could score music by visualizing the notes on each page. He memorized the map of Paris, for fun, and ogled scans of John Keats’s handwritten manuscripts.

The songstorm he was writing for Cascayde took on a strange, New Wave undercurrent, opera-meets-electronica-mashes-romantic-poetry. Everything old made new again. All Thieves Together, he called it. Extremely fitting material for a virtuoso rising from the depths of despair.

When he arrived at the clinic for his next infusion, he brought bottled water and more printed clean diet. At Jerv’s suggestion, he brought his saxophone, too.

The sax was something they’d built together, back in the days before Dad was gone. It had its own modem, fine-tuned for Sensorium upload. Jervis hoped it might attract the attention of his counterpart, Tala’s hypothesized hacker.

“It’ll look like spyware, your next move,” he explained. “She’d be nuts to take the thing into her house until she had it checked out.”

Tala hovered, watching Drow’s every move, each drip of the infuser. She was humming, the way she did when she was hard at work. Drow would have bet she’d gotten through the clinic’s privacy protocols, that her goggs were capturing footage now, not just stills.

He clutched his sax case like it was a teddy bear, waiting for her to make her counterplay.

And sure enough, after the drip ran dry: “Got a surprise for you, Handsome.”

She poured Drow into a waiting limo and bundled him to a private reception, some arty event in the lounge of the fanciest of the downtown hotels.

“A party, Tala? Really?”

“Sleep if you have to, Handsome. If not, all the carbon costs and calories are covered. Anything you want, just ask.” With that, she installed him in a leathery black smartchair parked in a shaft of blue-tinted sunlight.

“Are you comfortable, sir?” That was dayCrane, the vulnerable one, talking aloud for show.

“Yes, thanks.”

Do we have transparency here? Drow tongued in Morse to the stealth version.

NightCrane: Technically, yes—this is a public space. However, Master Jervis reports some data packets are being “accidentally” scrubbed before they reach Sensorium. Drow’s goggs showed a set of hands, drawing quotes in the air as the word accidentally played on his tongue.

So Tala’s tech guy is here.

It seems likely.

Tala tottered through the crowd, mingling, pressing the flesh. Everyone knew her; each conversation ended with her audience turning its gaze on Drow. A feeling of expectation, dense as summer humidity, permeated the room. Were they all hoping he’d pass out?

Drow forced his tongue to move again: Can you whooz these people?

NightCrane: Of course.

Public profiles of businesspeople began filling his whiteboard.

Drow gave one of the looky-loos a dozy grin, successfully luring him to the chair. He pushed out bleary chitchat. How do you know Tala? Have you seen her work? Are you an artist, too?

The man deflected Drow’s questions with the ease of long experience. But he’d broken some kind of barrier. More of them came, people wanting a closer look. Finally, one of them dropped a shiny tidbit: “I’m a collector, not an artist. Well. By day, I’m a litigator. Collecting’s my true passion.”

“You’re looking over the goods?” Drow asked, trying to sound knowing.

Startled, nervous chuckle.

“It’s okay,” he lied. “I’ve a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen—”

The woman’s pupils dilated. Brilliant Sustained Drow lay under the weight of his chemo load, memorizing every nanoshift in color as the blood leached from her face.

What’d I say?

Excusing herself, the litigator beelined for someone who looked like they might be her date.

Tala, missing nothing, orbited back briskly.

“Is this an auction?” Drow asked. “Am I on some kind of block?”

“I’m swanning you around while I’ve got you, Dearheart.” She rolled her shoulders, as if they ached.

“We have weeks yet.”

She gave him a birdlike, assessing gaze.

Drow texted: Is Jerv eavesdropping on the mics here?

NightCrane: He’s grabbing what he can.

Drow: Try to catch that litigator’s convo.

The analytic look on Tala’s face hadn’t vanished. To distract her, he said, “Wanna drive my price up?”

Pink brows climbed so high he could see them over the brass rims of her goggs. “What do you have in mind?”

He waggled the saxophone, baiting both her ego and her phantom tech support. “Another public feed?”

She brightened, rummaging in her purse. “You can’t play that horn of yours, can you, with that dry mouth?”

“Let her give you some ointment, sir.”

“Trevon gave me something, Crane,” he replied.

NightCrane: That wasn’t me, Master Woodrow.

His skin goosed.

“Found it!” Tala raised a small tube.

Crane’s voice said, “Hers will undoubtedly be of the highest quality.”

Seriously, Crane, that’s not you?

NightCrane: A decoy, I assure you. Do you remember the Twoface protocol?

He made an affirmative noise as he shook out his hands, loosening his fingers.

NightCrane: Miss Weston’s tech has compromised DayCrane and tasked it with selling you on that ointment. Obviously.

Drow pressed the keys on the sax, tinkling them like piano keys, and declined Tala’s ointment with a fixed grin. Trevon’s remedy had vanished from his case, so he settled for a swig of bottled water.

His reed tasted funny. He wondered if she’d spiked that, too, but no. Just another effect of the chemo.

“Score this as I improvise,” he ordered DayCrane before he began.

For the first minute or so, the sound was rough. Embarrassing, even. Wheeze of an amateur, rank beginner, baby musician forcing the sounds of dying animals and old awoogah car horns. Drow kept at it, easing into an old practice tune, something learned when he was all of four, secure toddler with two fathers who thought him a prodigy, ensconced in a world he could trust. The sax exercise was barely a step up from playing the chromatic scale, but his lips moistened; the notes smoothed and elongated, transformed from barnyard honks to music.

He began to embroider.

Drow no more thought of himself as a jazz guy than a symphonic composer. But his memory was a treasure vault of theory lessons and music history, things Jerv taught him as a child, archived and long-ignored.

Jerv had been the one to start him on a pint-sized saxophone, when he was four. It was his first instrument, a cool instrument, but as a little kid, Drow hadn’t really understood it. He wanted lyrics, structure, choruses, intros and outros. He wanted to set up and sim guitar solos without blistering his fingers on strings. He wanted a band, Sensorium soundstorm tricks and virtuosi sensibility.

Crane’s voice had told him to take the ointment. If he hadn’t gone to Jerv, hadn’t split the app’s personality . . .

The sense of danger was diminishing. What mattered was the music spilling out of him, Pied Piper calling all the art collectors. Vibrations from the reed penetrated his jaw and teeth, transmitting waves of bone-deep pain. The edges of his mouth ached and chafed. Moisture dribbled off his chin. Warm wet landed on the collar of his shirt, spreading and becoming cold wet.

He pushed against the bodyfeels, continuing to improv. The collectors were clustering, cocktails growing warm as they stared at Drow like a zoo exhibit. He threw out an unexpected trill, almost a hit of birdsong. The whole room, right down to the coat-check girl, gasped-laughed.

Gotcha.

Kids, he realized, couldn’t appreciate the saxophone. Jerv should have held it back. A horn thrust music’s animal howl through the pure throat of a downed angel. It could purr lust, run a seduction, lure you to the rocks. It could shriek your regrets to the rooftops, whisper a graveside lament, trade your soul for a broken string of pearls or a kind word.

He played, and everyone in the lounge stood transfixed, hanging on every note.

This was what he should have been doing with every waking moment. Not journalism, certainly not law. What a waste, all that clumsy fumbling to woo the musical trendsetters of the stroke economy. Drow played a confessional, spinning all his fails into song. Worm-crawling low notes of cowardice, self-sabotage: the way he’d blamed Jerv for all his troubles, the way he’d given up composing original flows.

Then the bright, staccato thorns he’d grown whenever someone . . .

 . . . Marcella . . .

 . . . Seraph . . .

 . . . got too close.

Fat alto bombast played a countermelody of rationalization, long, tricky runs etching his descent from trying to honestly build strokes and a reputation to grubbing for them, with that final, dirty, cold-blooded attempt to leverage Cascayde’s fanbase.

Now he was playing Cascayde.

It had maddened him! Her riding high on a glittering wave of stolen tracks. Undeserved success had left him, frankly, jealous . . .

He ran the melody back and forth for so long that it conjured the virtuoso.

At first, Drow took her for hallucination. Some trick of the Brill, transforming a wispy apparition in a high-necked white gown, just now stepping off the elevator, into her, into her . . .

But no! Reality. Not a vision. Not a sim.

Electric recognition spread through the lounge. Victor and victim, reunited. High drama.

Drow kept playing. This was it; this was everything he could get away with. He pulled the opening of her Cataract from his drug-enhanced infallible memory, remaking it on the fly, flagrantly stealing unprovenanced phrases, effortlessly burnishing.

The virtuoso was crossing the lounge.

Drow forced himself to rise. His knees shook as he stood; acid burned in his gut.

No matter. Keep playing.

Cascayde was a wand of a woman, substantial as the smoke from an extinguished candle, wrapped in Ralph Lauren. The assembled listeners drew back, leaving her acres of room to come to him.

Within his peripheral, the bartender muttered awed curses. On the sidelines, Tala had a camera in each hand, feeding him to the Sensorium with both fists.

Cascayde drifted past a guy so pale he looked frightened. Then another whose face, inexplicably, was tracked with tears.

Drow brought his last note to a shuddering triple-piano fade as Cascayde reached him. Empty-handed, she pulled the mouthpiece away from his lips.

Bursts of sensation, like fingernails digging into a blister, made him gasp.

She tried to speak, but the assembled collectors broke into applause so loud it drowned her.

Drow wasn’t going to be on his feet for much longer.

“I’m so—” His voice broke. “Sorry. I mean, please—”

Hooks, salty, in his throat. An itch. He fought the spasm but coughed nonetheless. Cascayde drew back, fractionally, not fast enough to dodge the spray of crimson, aerosolized blood misting her collar and jaw . . .

Drow half-turned, coughing up more red. Lips bleeding, tongue bleeding. “Crane,” he said, diction muddy. “Give her the score I just wrote.”

“All of it, sir? Or just the embroidery of Cataract?”

“All,” he said. “Sign over full rights.”

Cascayde was hyperventilating, staring at the blood on her dress. Her eyes had that wild, vulnerable look again.

“Call it . . . a peace offering,” Drow finished. His knee buckled and he lurched involuntarily.

Whether by default or design, she caught him. Barely strong enough to support his weight, she planted her spike heels and heaved, tipping him into the smartchair. He’d left a patchy red handprint on her pristine sleeve.

“It’s okay,” she said, grimacing, mastering herself. Then, louder: “I forgive you.”

As she spoke her gaze jogged left, into her peripheral. Checking the strokes, no doubt.

Still in the game, Drow thought. Cascayde was fragile, no doubting that. At the same time, part of her was still performing, always would be.

So what? The comp was good and his performance had been solid. If his regrets were real, did it matter if her forgiveness was counterfeit?

He deflated into the chair’s ever-helpful embrace, uncertain and depressed.

Pressing a hand to her chest, as if overcome, Cascayde returned to her bodyguards, vanishing back into the elevator. There was a second wave of applause.

“Masterful performance, Handsome!” Tala swooped in with a wetwipe.

“I wasn’t simming,” he muttered.

“So much the better. Lord, what a mess!” She smeared the cloth under his nose, over his lips, down his chin and neck. Each wipe left a strip of pristine alcoholic chill, smooth traverses unimpeded by his hairless chin. She crunched bloodstained wipes, discarding them like trashy rose petals.

“I can’t do this anymore,” Drow whispered.

“Shush.” She pressed him against the cushion.

Bubble of panic, fueled by phantom memory. He pushed back. Were her vulture claws weaker? “I want a doctor.”

“We’ll call a car.” She kept swabbing, humming tunelessly all the while.

She’d put something on the wetwipes, of course. A now-familiar narcotic dizziness was taking hold as the car, naturally, threw in its lot with her credit rating and took them to Tala’s house rather than a hospital. The saxophone, conveniently enough, got left behind at the hotel.

DayCrane was crooning in his ear, “It’s all right, sir, go along. Almost home, everything’s fine.”

“Fine,” he agreed. Maybe he should let Tala have his husked-out remains.

NightCrane texted: Sir, I cannot contact Jervis. It is possible he’s under arrest.

Would Tala report him?

Her tech support may have forced him into the open.

Play and counterplay.

He get anything from the crowd mics?

Crane assembled transcript, snatches of conversation from the party. At least one promising utterance caught Drow’s eye: “ . . . even being here may be aiding and abetting!”

But reading was hard; his mind was liquefied.

As they parked, Drow protested: “I wanna Emerg.”

“That’s ridiculous.” Tala stepped into the street, smoothing the fleshy pink skin of her knee-length jacket. “We agreed I’d capture—”

“You captured p-p-plenny. Dammit! Plenty. I puddon a real show for your art buyers, din-d-didn’t I? Richard Bramp—”

She cut him off before he could unspool the cocktail party whooz list, right there within range of the car mics. “Come inside and discuss it.”

“You must get out of the cab, sir.”

He was out, on the street, before he remembered the Crane he could hear was the compromised tab. Slush spattered his face, fat gritty drops, smearing the surface of his left gogg. The car door slammed, nearly catching his hand.

“Inside,” Crane urged. “You’re shivering.”

“Open up!” He pounded on the roof. The smartcar pulled away.

“You must change clothes, sir. You’re covered in blood.”

Tala had reached the same conclusion; she was tapping her elegant way to the door.

Drow barged past before she could get her hands on him, locking himself in the bathroom. Washing his face in the hottest water he could run, he tried to sober up.

Beetle-tap of fingers against the door. “Handsome?”

“Sec.” He texted: Crane? Any good news?

Alas, no. In fact, Miss Weston appears to have contacted Imran about buying your home.

That woke him, more effectively than hot water. He go for it?

Unknown.

Seraph had been wrong. Tala would tie up his escape routes as fast as he could sight them. He wasn’t free to walk away.

Don’t walk then, donkey. Run.

He fisted his hands, shaking them in a parody of tantrum, forcing himself to say good-bye to all those green vials of potential. Farewell to future symphonies, the exposé about chemo, the prospect of catching Tala in the act.

Feeling reasonably clearheaded, he stepped out.

Tala was perched against her kitchen counter, idly stirring a glass of water with the narrow-bladed business end of a pair of stylists’ scissors. “Done sulking?”

“You tattooed me without permission, didn’t you?”

She tinked the blades against the glass, thoughtful. Then the overhead lights colorshifted into the luminous purple of an olden days disco. The scab tissue across the back of his arms lit up with fine white lines. Maggots, feasting on torn flesh. Image of future decay.

“Don’t look all wounded. It’s only skin-deep. You, sonny, you fiddled with my muscle stims.”

“You hacked my sidekick.”

“Pish. A privacy violation. Stim-regime tampering is assault.”

Drow took a deep breath. “Sounds to me like a mutually assured contract breach.”

“It’s all about what you can prove, Handsome. You’re on camera consenting to the tattoos.”

He swallowed.

Sir! Someone has triggered my hardware inventory! My compromised counterpart is uploading specs for the tongue texter . . .

Drow unzipped his overnight bag, extracting a clean shirt. Clawing off the bloodstained one—its clean patches glowed a luminous white in the ultraviolet—he tossed it at her feet. “Here. Call it a souvenir for whoever bought . . . what was it? Wings off a Fly.”

“You’re not going anywhere.” Her gogged eyes filled with red veins. She threw the contents of her drinking glass into his face and mouth.

Drow sputtered, choking.

She raised the scissors.

He had one moment of perfect visual recall: Cascayde, in his kitchen. The magician’s flourish of her spindly fingers as she produced a straight razor.

Tala wasn’t the type to cut her own throat, and she didn’t give him time to step away. She sprang, a furious bundle of little old gymnast, lightweight and perfectly balanced, brandishing the scissors as she bore him to the floor. Her left hand clamped around his jaw.

He clenched, tongue-texting: Save this footage, save it. His vision was starting to double.

“Snip-snip, Handsome, let’s cut that wire. You don’t need bad advice from outsiders, do you?” The hand gripping his face was going to rip his jaw off, and his nose was bleeding again . . .

What kind of idiot goes courting nosebleeds?

 . . . which at least had the effect of making his chin slippery.

“I’m all you need now.” She brought the blades down, cutting his lips a little as she wedged the points between his teeth, metal scraping enamel. There was a cold zip across his tongue as she forced it in. The fibenoose at the back of Drow’s throat popped like a rubber band. He gagged as it rolled down his gullet.

No more NightCrane.

Panting, they eyed each other, she atop him with the scissors clenched between his teeth.

Fear coursed through Drow and he let the anxiety crank up, fight-and-flight-and-fight-some-more responses pumping adrenaline. He clubbed her with the fisted ball of clean shirt, knocking her off him and crawling through the spinning room. She scrabbled at his ankle, ripping off a shoe just as he reached the front door.

Gaining his feet, Drow ran into slushy rain. Cold drops chilled the burn on his back. He plunged the unshod foot into cold water, drenching his sock.

“I believe I’ve deleted the surface protocol, sir. It’s me.”

“Safe word,” he rasped.

“Safe word, sir?”

Gotcha. NightCrane would have known they didn’t have one.

Within a block, he had slowed from his run, gasping for breath as he lurched on toward College Street.

A limo turned the corner up ahead, headlights washing him in sterile LED glow.

Drow changed direction, forcing himself up over a neighborhood recycling bin that would no doubt give him a strike for vandalism or trespassing. “If anyone can hear this, I need a pick-up. Help. Someone text 911—”

“Sir, return to Miss Weston’s before you get frostbite.”

“Where’s the nearest Emergency?”

“You mustn’t hazard a blood test.”

“I’m beyond worrying about jail. Nearest hospital? Bathurst and Dundas, right?”

Crane didn’t answer. Drow circled south, aiming for College and University instead. Farther away but the route would have more people on it, out and about. Better safe than sorry.

Safe. Sorry. The words ricocheted in his backbrain, setting off an internal soundtrack of screaming hyena laughter, an uproarious chorus. They laughed as he coughed up the texting rig, dusting crimson and a filament of tech onto a jagged array of icicles dangling from a leaky rain gutter.

They laughed when the car reappeared, half a block behind him.

Drow minced onward. Dry foot, iced foot, dry foot, repeat. Keep moving.

On the intersection where Queen’s Park segued into the hospitals on University, he stumbled onto a metal grate and into a blast of hot air. The fetid breath of the subway system gusted over him.

Pizza farts. But the warmth was irresistible. Drow couldn’t make himself move on.

Tala, goggles bright and projected eyes blue, stepped out of the limo.

“Subway stop,” Drow rasped, pointing.

“You dislike the subway, darling boy. Isn’t it where Daddy went splat?”

“Subway stop,” he corrected. “Security cameras everywhere.”

“You need a ride, Honeypie. You need help.”

“I’m not going with you,” he shouted.

“Don’t make a scene.”

“Will too! Begin scene! Stay away!”

“You’re sick. You’re confused.”

“I go with you, you’ll kill me.”

The words landed between them, truth pure and simple, the answer to a riddle he hadn’t known he was solving. Art’s what you can get away with, she’d said. Hurting people and filming it, driving them to the edge—that was old news to her. The one way to level up from what she’d accomplished so far, to make something better, truer to her perverse artistic vision, had to be getting away with murder.

“Dead Donkey,” he muttered. “In private collection.”

Tala fisted her hands, regarding him with unblinking cartoon eyes. Then, to his utter astonishment, she said, “I’ll double the offer. Sixty tubes. We’ll visit the middleman tomorrow.”

Drow pulled off his goggs—and a goodly amount of hair—and gaped.

Had the tide turned? Tens of thousands of people had probably pinned this feed when Cascayde turned up at the hotel. Still. Could they be watching now?

Tala wouldn’t care if she took a few thousand strikes. She could pay exponential pricing on everything: services, cars, taxes, food. She could hire someone to do her shopping, call her cars, tighten the loose screws on her goggs. She could literally afford to ignore what society thought.

So why was she negotiating?

“Ten more days,” she wheedled. “For sixty.”

She thought he had something incriminating on her. Or on her rich friends. If one of them had exposed criminal intent, if she knew he could make it public . . .

“I guess you gotta care what they think, huh?”

“Seventy-five,” she said. “Handsome, come on. You’re dying to say yes.”

He was. For a second, he almost relented. All that Brill. If the increased attention of the Sensorium kept her in check . . .

Really? An internal cacophony of unhinged laughter. You still think you’re cleverer than she is?

“Immediate payout on the original offer,” Drow said, testing. “And I still walk.”

No pause this time. “I’ll want all your files.”

“I could . . . send the info to the middleman.” A siren wailed and he saw her flinch. “’Course, for that, I’d need you to leggo both my sidekick and my—”

He’d almost said father.

“Your . . . ?”

It would endanger Jerv, wouldn’t it, if she thought he mattered to Drow?

Tag the feels later. “I can’t give you anything without my tech guy to assure transparency.”

“He’ll be released immediately.” She folded herself into the car, settling in with the look of someone expecting a long ride. “Sure I can’t drop you?”

He managed a shivery hyena-laugh. “I’m parked on this grate until someone I know comes to peel me off.”

“Well. Sensorium has it your elderly landlord and your roommate are apparently on their way. It’s rather sweet.”

Drow found himself smiling at the thought of old Imran, dragging his deaf ass out in the dead of night just because the two of them had bonded over the care and washing of ancient Mason jars.

As for Marcella . . . it wasn’t too late to refriend. Trevon, too.

And Seraph?

Time would tell.

Tala brought him back: “I’d have made you immortal, you know.”

“Your definition of immortal? Is deeply warped.”

“Fame is the only eternity someone like you can afford.” She clarified her goggs, taking a last ravenous look at him. Drow sketched a trembly bow: the unfinished work in progress. The one who got away.

The limo door slammed and the vehicle purred off.

“Smart knows when to walk now!” he shouted after the retreating car. But once the taillights vanished, relief dropped him to his knees.

Bravado could say what it liked, but smart wasn’t walking anywhere.

Instead, Drow leaned sideways, struggling to sit, to settle, however temporarily, within the grate’s torrent of warm air. Peeling off his wet sock, he massaged feeling back into the bottom of his foot.

He found tattoos there, too. Worms, under his toes, on his heel, writhing around a sketch of the bones of his foot.

Instead of giving in to hysterical laughter, Drow wiggled his toes, drawing in the sour breath of the city’s underworld, lifesaving sigh of burnt machine oil mingled with the piss stench of a nighttime drinking crowd. Fumbling on his rig, he waited for Imran and Marcella—he’d even settle for Jerv—to reclaim him.

Feeling at once skinned and yet, somehow, unencumbered, he hummed along with the molten shriek of the poor man’s chariot, seeking a melody within the rattle and clash of the subway cars as they brought his rescue ever closer.

Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August 2018.

Conditional Love

Felicity Shoulders

The new patient was five or six years old, male, Caucasian, John Doe as usual. Grace checked the vitals his bed sensors were feeding her board and concluded he was asleep. She eased the door of 408 open and stepped in.

The boy’s head was tilted on his pillow, brown curls cluttering his forehead. Sleep had flushed his cheeks so he looked younger than the estimate. He seemed healthy, with no visible deformities, and if he had been opted for looks, it had worked—Grace would have described him as “cherubic.” He wouldn’t have been dumped if nothing was wrong, so Grace found herself stepping softly, unwilling to disturb him and discover psychological conditions.

“Don’t worry about waking him, he sleeps pretty deep.”

Grace started and turned to the other bed. “Hi, Minnie.”

The girl grimaced. “I go by my full name now, Dr. Steller.” Grace brought up her board to refresh her memory, but the girl said, “Minerva. Had you forgotten they’re doubling up rooms?”

“Yep, you caught me.”

“Is the rise in numbers caused by a rise in opting? Or is it a rise in surrenders, or arrests of parents?”

“Lord, Minn—Minerva, I don’t know. Planning to be a reporter when you grow up?”

“No, a scientist,” Minerva said and smiled, pleased to be asked.

“Why the scalpel-edged questions then?”

“Just curious if my campaign had had any effect,” Minerva said, nodding toward the window. The billboard across from the Gene-Engineered Pediatric In-patient Center flashed a smog warning, then a PSA about eye strain from computer visors, but Grace remembered when it had borne a static image: Minnie, one year old, a pink sundress exposing the stubs of her arms and legs. Babies should be born, not made. The ad had stayed up until Minnie was eight, three years after her parents turned her over to GEPIC, and apparently she had seen it. She was twelve now, with serious eyes and a loose ponytail, dark blonde.

“You’re on incoming examinations now?” Minerva asked.

“Yes,” Grace said, eyes on the John Doe’s file.

“It’s a step down, isn’t it? Do you mind?”

“I’m fine,” Grace said. “I see the grow-baths are working.”

The girl allowed herself to be deflected. She held up her right arm, complete but ridged with scars. “One down, three to go.”

“Better than we ever thought we could do back when I was on your treatment team.”

Minerva shrugged. “They’re pretty excited. They say I’m a regulatory gene enigma. How my arm starts growing, then stops. How sometimes things grow that shouldn’t.” She lifted the left sleeve of her T-shirt, a dinosaur one from the Natural History Museum, a few sizes too big. That arm was submerged in murky gel up to the wrist, and from the crook of the elbow a thumb extended.

“I’m sure it will be over soon,” said Grace, and stroked the back of the girl’s right hand, baby-smooth skin between bulges of scar tissue.

Minerva lifted her face with a smile, then looked across the room and pursed her lips. “New boy waking up. You’ll love this.”

Grace turned and saw that the boy was indeed stirring, half-blocking the window’s light with a drowsy fist. His eyes flickered open, slashes of blue, then widened to cartoonish proportions. “Who are you?” he said, as if Grace was the Blue Fairy instead of a doctor who hadn’t had her coffee yet.

Grace gave the boy a warm, flattered smile, aware of Minerva watching. “I’m Dr. Steller, but most of the kids call me Dr. Grace,” she managed. “How are you feeling?”

“Good!”

“I’m here to check and make sure you stay that way, okay?”

He nodded and Grace went through the motions of taking his pulse, listening to his breath. Much of this ritual was obviated by the sensors in his hospital bed, yet it persisted. A way to comfort the patient, Grace thought, or the doctor. New admissions to GEPIC were often sullen, frightened, or locked into the neuroses created by their genes or families; many were sedated before she arrived to document their troubles. But this boy was something new. She couldn’t remember any other patient giggling at the touch of the stethoscope.

Grace gave the boy the standard exam and found nothing standard: none of the deformities, bruises and cuts she was used to finding on Does brought in from the streets. He had been admitted low on nutrients and fluids, but the IV had taken care of that. Nothing to photograph for a police file, nothing unusual even, except being friendly and above the mean for cuteness.

“You don’t know your name, huh?” Grace asked, ruffling his dark hair.

He shrugged, shoulders contracting inside the oversized pajama-top. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, honey.” This wasn’t her department, but she went on. “What do you remember?”

“I remember waking up. You were here.”

Grace shook her head and took out a blood vial for the gene lab. “This will hurt a little,” she warned.

“Okay,” he said, and his smile ebbed as the needle went in.

“There you go, all done.” She wrapped a purple bandage around his finger, at which he stared, enchanted.

“Dr. Steller?” the nurses’ station called through the intercom. “If you’re done with the 2147 exam, there’s a visitor for you.”

Grace checked her board to make sure this Doe was number 2147, and noticed there was a rush on the file. “Send ‘em up.” She turned to go, but her patient had her by the coat.

“Can I come?”

Grace unballed the soft hand and knelt, smiling. “Not right now, but I’ll be back soon.”

He nodded.

“Goodbye,” the boy said as she opened the door.

“I’ll come back.”

“Goodbye, Dr. Grace,” Minerva echoed.

Grace made her way down to the bank of elevators and started writing her John Doe 2147 report on her board, towing photos and stat-blocks into the text with her fingertip. The elevator pinged. She looked up to see a tall man with a familiar slump, dressed like an elongated GQ model. “Kafouri.”

“Hi Grace. Where the hell am I? Never been up beyond the second floor.”

“We’re over capacity—squeezing new admits in up here with the chronics and long-term treatments.”

“Shit! Nothing like a roomie with his skin falling off to put a fresh guppy at his ease.”

“Bob, please don’t.”

“Right, no ‘guppies’. Swearing’s fine, though, right?” He chucked her between the shoulder blades. “Anyway, it’s good to see you. Been a year or two, hasn’t it?”

Grace glanced at him. He must remember their last encounter, over the Macauley case, but he seemed determined to be jovial. Silver hairs stood out among the black now, matching the smile- or squint-lines she’d always noticed by his eyes. She had a few grays herself. “Something like that. I thought you finally got depressed and transferred to homicide for your morale.”

“No way, doc. One of these days I’m going to try for a lieutenant’s pension, but not ‘til I can have ‘hero cop’ on my retirement headline.”

“Isn’t that usually on obits?”

“Ha ha. I know what I’m doing. Let me see my boy.”

“I take it the rush order is yours,” she said, starting back down the hallway.

Kafouri fell in step next to her. “Has psych been yet? What do they make of him?”

“No. Why? What do you expect from them?”

Kafouri stared. “You haven’t noticed?”

“Don’t be cryptic, Bob.”

“Which room is it?”

“408. What’s wrong with him?”

“I’ll show you. Go ahead.”

Grace scowled and pushed open the door.

The boy’s chin dropped, displaying a mangled slice of peach. “Who are you?”

He was charmed, awed and beaming just as before, but Grace couldn’t help feeling a stab at being forgotten. She turned away quickly as Kafouri entered, and Minerva met her eyes over a heavy tray of food.

The patient gaped at the detective. “What’s your name?”

“You don’t remember your friend Bob, Danny boy? Why am I not surprised?” He looked at the other bed long enough to raise an eyebrow at the mound of bacon and eggs on Minerva’s tray, ringed with bowls of fruit salad.

“I think I’d remember meeting you,” said the boy.

“Sure you would, Tiger. Hey, you know Dr. Steller?”

Grace brought a composed smile around to face them, and the blue eyes gazed at her. “No. Hello,” he said with polite disinterest.

“Here, kiddo, got you something.” Kafouri brought a small teddy bear out of his coat and snapped the price tag off its ear.

The boy grabbed the toy and crushed it close. “Thank you!”

“See you later, Danny.” Kafouri held the door for Grace, who walked through without saying goodbye to the children. “Coffee?” he asked after the door clicked shut, and Grace nodded.

The boy’s ready defection stung unexpectedly, but Grace smiled and lifted an eyebrow as they headed down the hall. “Teddy bears, Bob?”

“You saw the little guy. You wish you’d thought of it first.”

“Why’d you call him Danny?”

“We tagged him Daniel back at the precinct. Seemed to suit him, but the hag in Admitting said a J.D. was a J.D. and we couldn’t choose a name for him like he was a puppy.”

“Instead we have a hospital full of Janes and Johns, like a doll factory with two models,” Grace said as she opened the door to the fourth floor staff lounge with its fragrant atmosphere of coffee. Kafouri threw his coat onto a ratty armchair and flopped down.

Grace eyed the detective as she poured two mugs. “I sincerely hope that you didn’t put a rush on Daniel’s exam because you think he’s cute.”

“What do you mean I think he’s cute? I could hear your clock ticking from down the hall.”

Grace rolled her eyes and settled into the couch. “What’s up, and how does it advance your ‘hero cop’ daydreams?”

“All roads lead to Bob Kafouri, Hero Cop. You know I’ve been working the guppy-dump forever. Interviewing crazy or contorted toddlers, filing photos of cigarette burns, hoping somebody’s daddy does his first misdemeanor and gets his DNA in the computers . . . sometimes you catch some miserable parents. It’s a grind.”

“And it doesn’t get your name in the papers.”

“Right. Busting the labs will.”

“You’ve busted opt-docs before.”

“Sure, crappy opt-docs. The smart ones don’t give parents enough rope to tie the noose. And I want the smart ones, the guys designing the opts. I want Betty Crocker, not the guy baking the cake. I’m going for the industry.”

“You think it’s that organized, Bob? I thought it was every opt-doc for himself.”

“I’m pretty sure. Too much money for it to stay a cottage industry forever. Anyway, I’m afraid they might be branching into new markets.”

“You mean . . . what do you mean? New kinds of opts?”

“I mean not just selling to parents. That’s why I wanted you to examine Daniel right away. Did you find any signs of abuse?”

Grace blanched. “God—no, he’s fine as far as I can tell. Do you really think he was engineered for . . . ”

“It’s just my guess, but if that weird memory thing of his was built in on purpose? It resets every time he sees somebody new. He can’t live a normal life like that, not even close.”

“But he wouldn’t remember enough to be frightened of the abuser. Christ.” Grace leaned forward, cupping her mug. “Bob, there’s no way to know. It could be a mistake—there are five floors of patients here to testify that genetic optimization is a gamble. He could be a pretty-opt with an unfortunate side effect, or a botched mental opt of some sort.”

“Could be. But it’ll happen sooner or later. It’s an ugly world.”

Grace put down her coffee. She was still trying to think of something to say when Dr. Langford put her head in at the door. She had only been at GEPIC for two years, a small woman with golden-brown skin and a stubborn set to her mouth.

“There you are, Steller—I just saw one of your admits, John Doe number . . . ” the neuropsychiatrist started to unlock her board, but Grace interrupted.

“Call him Daniel, it’s easier. You’re done with your evaluation already?”

Langford raised her elegant eyebrows. “Preliminary. There was a rush on the case.”

Kafouri gave her a charming smile. “That was me. We cops are an impatient bunch. Bob Kafouri.”

“Thea Langford.” She leaned against the counter next to the coffeemaker. “So, as far as I can tell, he’s imprinting.”

“Imprinting,” repeated Kafouri.

“The primal connection an animal makes when it first sees its mother.”

“Sure, ducklings. But this kid isn’t a duckling. Or a puppy, so I’ve been told.”

“It happens in other species. Monkeys, for one. But the point is it shouldn’t be happening. He’s not a duckling or an infant, but he seems to imprint every time he sees an adult, and each time it happens he loses his memory.”

“He remembers something.” Kafouri said. “Doesn’t seem blank.”

“He loses what we call ‘episodic memory.’ Semantic knowledge he retains: he knows what a window is, can be taught vocabulary. I can’t say much about procedural skills until I come back with props, but that’s another part of the brain so I’m guessing he’ll test out fine.”

“Could the memory problem be a misopt?” Grace asked.

“I don’t know development or gene-build, so I couldn’t say. Other than the fugue state, he seems normal, even above average in intelligence until he reimprints.”

“Completely normal?” asked Kafouri.

“Well, no. It’s not normal for a five-year-old, a more or less rational being, to imprint. You can take away his toys or his half-eaten food, and he doesn’t get mad. I would guess he’d even stay affectionate if you hit him.”

Kafouri gave Steller a look, and she replied, “It doesn’t prove anything. Maybe the imprinting was the ment-opt, but the memory problems were unintentional. You can’t tell me some of these lousy opting parents wouldn’t order up a kid who loves them unconditionally. Besides, if you’re right, why the hell would your slave traders dump him? The fugue and reimprinting would be too much for parents, but perfect for them.”

Kafouri shrugged, and turned back to the waiting neuropsych. “Kid was a mess when we brought him in—found him crying his eyes out downtown. So you’re saying he was doing the duckling thing on every man and woman that walked by?”

“It seems likely. The crowds would be confusing for him.”

Grace cleared her throat. “What’s going to happen to him? You said yourself, he’s gifted.”

“Part of the time.”

“Still, are we just going to document and process, let the forensic genetics lab have a look for the case file, and then throw him into long-term care?”

“I can’t recommend him for foster, Dr. Steller. There’s too much risk of exploitation or abduction for a child with his memory difficulties.”

“How is he with other children?”

“Judging from his roommate, normal enough. Minnie says he doesn’t forget anything until the next adult comes in.”

“Minerva,” Grace corrected, and the other woman stared at her. “She goes by Minerva now. Look, Langford, Daniel would be miserable in a perm-ward. You’d essentially be throwing a naïve boy into a group of disturbed, unpredictable kids for the first time every day. If not every hour . . . ” Grace tapered off, and Langford didn’t reply. The two women regarded each other.

“C’mon, Grace, I like the little guy too, but there’s no lasting harm,” said Kafouri.

“Yeah, he’s self-cleaning,” Grace muttered, and stalked past Langford to empty her coffee into the sink with a splat. “Thanks for your time, Dr. Langford. Bob, I’ll go double-check the patient now that I know what you’re looking for.”

“You’d have seen the evidence if there was any,” he said, shrugging his coat on and adjusting his tie. “It’s up to the gene guys now.”

Grace stood at the door to 408, peering through the glass. She thumbed the monitor button and listened to the occasional clink of Minerva’s fork against her plate. Daniel wasn’t in view, but she thought she heard his feet slapping against the vinyl tile near the door.

“I wouldn’t,” Minerva said.

“I want to find Jimmy,” Daniel’s voice replied.

The girl pushed the visor back on her head. “You won’t. It’s a big hospital and they don’t like us guppies wandering around it.”

“What’s a guppy?”

“I am. You are. Toys someone made wrong.”

Daniel walked into Grace’s view and stood at the foot of Minerva’s bed. “What do you mean, toys?”

She picked at the edges of her mountain of beef stroganoff with her fork. “I’ve explained it to you before, but it took a long time and you forgot it anyway. Just learn the word ‘guppy’. It’s not nice, but it means us.”

The boy stood on tiptoe at the window, pink heels disappearing into the baggy pants.

“You can sit on my bed if you want. You’ll see better.”

Daniel glanced at the door, then climbed up and kneeled, looking out. “Will Jimmy come back?”

“Probably. He brings lunch and dinner, most days.”

“What will I do if he doesn’t come back?”

“I think you’ll recover.”

Grace opened the door and the monitor clicked off behind her. Daniel twisted around to see who’d come in, and his eager face turned blissful. “Hello! What’s your name?”

“Dr. Grace,” Grace said again, with a rueful smile.

“Back again?” said Minerva. “I thought his initial exam was filed.”

“My shift is over, but you’re very well-informed.”

The girl tapped her computer headset. “What else am I going to be?”

Grace looked at the walls around Minerva’s bed, covered with pictures cut out of hand-me-down magazines. A long poster of the stages of a cheetah’s lope was taped along the vent under the window and fluttered occasionally. National Geographic maps were stuck to the wall below her TV. Daniel’s side of the room, by contrast, was blank. He looked so new in his hospital-issue clothes under his hospital-issue blanket. He hadn’t touched his dinner. She tried to remember Brandon Macauley’s room, recalled a line of art postcards—Sargent, maybe—and photos of courtyards at the Alhambra, cathedral naves.

Minerva interrupted Grace’s thoughts. “Ever since you ordered Daniel’s IV out, he’s been trying to follow people out of the room.”

“I’ll set the door to auto-lock then, okay?”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Would you mind if I read to him?”

“Go ahead. I’ll warn you, though, it loses its novelty appeal soon enough.”

“What’s ‘novelty’?” asked Daniel.

“Something new, unexpected. Everything, for you.”

Grace sat down, pulled out her board and cleared her throat. The boy flopped across his bed onto his elbows, the picture of attention. Minerva bent each earbud down and flipped her visor over her eyes. “This story is called Charlotte’s Web,” Grace began. Daniel kicked his bare feet together in the air as she read, forgot to close his mouth, looked like any kid absorbed in a story.

“Fern couldn’t take her eyes off the tiny pig,” Grace was reading when the door clicked and swept inward. She and the boy both glanced up, but all they could see was the airplane-patterned sleeve of Nurse Biggs’s scrubs as he stood behind the door. “’Oh, look at him! He’s absolutely perfect,’” Grace continued over the murmur of voices in the hall.

“No, Dr. Das said two more days,” the nurse said loudly.

Daniel didn’t look away from Grace’s face, and she smiled as she read, “She closed the carton carefully. First she kissed her father, then she kissed her mother. Then she opened the lid again—”

“So get her some ointment!” Nurse Biggs said and bustled into the room, letting the door swing shut behind him and tearing the backing off a drug patch. The boy looked up and beamed into Biggs’s face. Grace paused with her finger at her place in the text, watching Daniel gaze across the room at the man.

“You’ll have to start over, of course,” said Minerva as Biggs lifted her sleeve and applied the patch, moving carefully so he wouldn’t jostle her arm out of the grow solution. “I read him a whole chapter of that book after lunch.”

Grace locked the board and stood. “I have to get going. Have a good afternoon, both of you.” She paused in the doorway.

Daniel clambered off his bed and padded over to Biggs. He tugged on the man’s scrubs and Minerva sighed at the inevitable. “Who are you?”

A few days later, Grace was alone in the women’s dressing room. She leaned her forehead against the cool metal of her locker and hauled on the ends of her ceremonial stethoscope, feeling it taut against the knots in her neck.

The door squeaked, and she raised her head to see Langford, early for a night shift. “Tough day?” she asked, and Grace nodded. “Too bad, it was beautiful. Summer-bright but not summer-hot.”

“Saw it out the window a few times.”

“Sorry for bringing it up.”

“Have you ever noticed we get more voluntary surrenders when it’s nice out? I figure the opters look outside and think of all the fun they’d be having if they didn’t have to take care of this kid.”

“That’s pretty harsh,” said Langford, stowing her bag in her locker.

“Opters are usually the worst kind of people to parent a kid who needs special care. They wouldn’t have sprung for illegal opts if they didn’t cut corners, if they could accept what life gave them.”

“There are other reasons why people have a made baby.”

Grace suppressed a grimace over the phrase. “Sure. Besides the perfectionists, there are stage parents trying to live out their thwarted dreams.”

Langford watched Grace. “You sound so bitter.”

“I’ve been here eleven years, Langford. That’s enough to make anyone bitter.” She stood up, opened her locker and started pulling off her scrubs. “Or maybe it only takes one day like today, when a couple brings in their optimized baby for voluntary surrender because she’s ‘not right’ and it turns out the opt was perfect, they just gave her brain damage shaking her when she cried.” Grace yanked her shoelaces loose, avoiding Langford’s eyes. She sighed. “Can we talk about the other day, Thea? I feel like I came on too strong about Daniel.”

“You noticed that too?”

“Yeah. Maybe I owe you a mocha to apologize. I just want to make sure somebody takes care of him.”

“He’ll get taken care of wherever he ends up.”

“A kiddy ward may keep him healthy, but they won’t try to accommodate him, give him a life.”

Langford gathered her braids back and looped them into a bun. “He’d be a good subject for a grant, and it might get him his own environment, special care.”

Grace looked up, dangling one sneaker.

“I can ask around my department, try to get someone interested. Research is the best way to leverage your way out of here, after all.” Langford closed her locker and stood with her hand on the latch. “You know, in this place, you have to know when to care, Grace. And how much.” She pushed open the door and disappeared into the hallway. “Be well,” Grace thought she heard her call. She wondered if Langford would report her, if she already had. They’d listen to a psych specialist, and there was no room in her file for another administrative intervention.

She finished changing and looked down at her clothes—tailored trousers with well-placed cargo pockets, button-up shirt—and wondered who she was pretending to be, every night and day on the train, what this Grace did on days off. She headed for the exit, but on impulse opened the stairwell door and headed up to Floor 4, alone with her labored breath. 408 was quiet and there was only one bed.

“The perm-ward bus came today,” said Minerva. “Don’t worry, I don’t mean they took him. Some spots opened up on 2, that’s all.”

“I came to see you, anyway,” Grace lied.

Minerva shoved her headset mike and visor up over her head. “You can sit down.”

Grace did, easing herself onto the long empty foot of the bed, spread with a charity quilt. “I remember when your headset was held on with bobby pins.”

“Yes, I much prefer having hands.”

“How’s number two doing?”

Minerva jerked a velcro strap open to free her left arm. She shook it off to display a glistening, fully formed palm with five budding digits as well as the existing thumb in the crux of her elbow.

“Congratulations!”

“Almost done.” Minerva’s smile was brief and tight as she sank her hand back into the viscous liquid.

“Aren’t you pleased?”

“Yes, mostly. I’ve always dreamed of having hands, but they want me to have legs, too.”

“That surprises you?”

“I don’t want to do it. It took me two years to grow these. Eating huge meals and running an IV, lying with my stumps in goo and having minor operations every week.” She lifted her right hand. “As far as I’m concerned, this is it. Two of these is all I need to pick things up, press buttons, lever myself out of a chair.”

“But think of everything you’ll be able to do. Walk, run, play games . . . ”

“It’s not worth it.” Minerva snaked her hand into Grace’s. “It hurts, growing limbs. Growing bone is the worst. I can barely sleep. Sometimes I get phantom limb pain, which I never have without the grow bath. And then there are the missteps, the amputations, the feedings—I had to gain over 15 pounds for this arm, you know. I can’t spend more years this way. I have to get out of this room.” She squeezed the woman’s fingers, and there was appeal in her eyes.

Grace wondered who Minerva’s new wellness lead was, if any of her current team had asked her what she wanted. She looked at the child’s hand, the skin lined with scars from stops and starts, the fingers already callused from computer controls.

“You used to read me that story, Charlotte’s Web. Do you remember?”

“After you were surrendered, sure.”

“A funny story to read to a guppy. Do you know why I cried, back then?”

“I thought you missed your parents.”

“A little. But mostly it was because I understood. I was five, but I understood—my parents took the guilty plea and the fine when I was two so they could get government assistance. They did the PSAs to get most of the fine waived. Then they waited. If you take the home care deal and give it a ‘good faith effort,’ you can surrender the kid to the government without the larger fine. A ‘good faith effort’ is three years. They turned me over at three years and one day.”

“You were already smart at five.”

“The ment-opt was the part that worked.”

The two stared out the window at the train, lights bright against the dusk, pulling out of the Rapid station.

“I’ve missed you,” the girl said.

Grace slipped her ID lanyard over her head as she walked by the “Cleveland Regional Gene-Engineered Pediatric Inpatient Center” sign. She shoved the thick plastic card into a jacket pocket and zipped it closed, then hurried across the square to the Rapid stop to take a seat.

Most of her colleagues didn’t mind being asked about their work. Some seemed to relish the opportunity for dramatic anecdotes. But Grace changed out of scrubs and avoided walking out of the Center within sight of her train, so that no commuters would ask. In theory, GEPIC employees were supposed to welcome the chance to educate the public about the dangers of illegal gene-engineering. But knowing they were supposed to cheerfully embrace outreach didn’t make the ghoulish questions—“What was your worst case?” “Do many of them die?” “Do you have the boy with two mouths there? The one from the ads?”—any easier to endure. She had applied for the job the same way she had volunteered to work at a free clinic in Mexico after medical school: full of shining hope. Even after eleven years, it was hard to listen to people’s tabloid fantasies about it with equanimity.

Grace read the Plain Dealer on her board. She found herself searching the local crime section for signs of a ring of kid-traffickers, amateur-detective style. She blanked the board and stared out the scratched window for the three remaining stops between GEPIC and her building.

Her apartment was on the sixth floor, with an unappreciated sliver of lake view. She slumped her bag by the door, levered off her shoes. The dent in her couch accepted her again as she hugged her legs, stared around for something to occupy her. There was dust on the books she’d already read, travel books and memoirs of teachers, humanitarians, biologists. There was a pile of dirty dishes blocking the screen of the entertainment set, and more attracting fruit flies in the kitchen.

Her eye settled on an end table cluttered with gifts from her patients. She picked up a clumsy origami crane and an intriguing little abstract in clay, fingered a few loops of wooden beads that slumped against the bulletin board behind, the layered photos and crayon drawings. What good had she done them? She wondered if Daniel would draw her something, if he stayed with her for long enough. The Steller family mantel clock began to chime, and her stomach stirred in response. She unfolded herself and made for the kitchen without looking at the framed photo, at Brandon Macauley’s uneven smile, or behind it at his sketch of her, done in short sure lines between waves of pain.

The phone rang shrill, the ID flashing Kafouri, R.

“Good news in our little cherub’s case.”

“Daniel? What is it? Did you find the parents?”

“No parents, but there’s a distinctive pattern in the junk pairs—not seen in nature, as they say. Might be a byproduct of this lab’s technique, and the boys think it might match up with some other high-end stuff.”

“What does that mean for Daniel?”

“He might be part of the nation’s first high-end lab bust! Listen, I’ll give you a call if we get any closer—so you can be sure and read that headline.”

He didn’t wait to see what she would say before hanging up. The phone went dark and Grace replaced it slowly, fighting the urge to throw it. She picked up the book next to it, a turgid historical novel that had seemed more promising in the shop, and sat down, trying to slow her breathing, focus on the page. She stared through the words for a minute or ten. With a jerk she pitched the book, which skidded to a halt on the kitchen threshold. It lay splayed and rumpled, and Grace watched without satisfaction as it settled its pages into creases, subsiding under its own weight as if with a sigh.

The next week, Minerva was wheeling around a light wheelchair in iridescent gold, tracing the long scuffmarks on the vinyl where Daniel’s bed had been. “Did you pick the color?” Grace asked.

“What?”

“The chair.”

Minerva shook her head. “Got ten digits though, and no extras.” She raised her left hand high so it caught the light off the building opposite and held the five new fingers wide. Their skin was red from rubbing the chair’s hand rim, and her elbow sported a dressing. “I heard you came to see me yesterday. Walked in on my laser ablation?”

“Didn’t see the warning light.”

“Did they make you go to the ophthalmoscope?”

“I checked out.”

“I had to go under the ‘scope myself once, years ago. They gave me too little anesthesia, and I woke up in the middle of one of the ablations. I went from a queasy dream to a bed ringed by adults in scarlet plastic hoods. I guess I was so terrified I failed to look down at the laser cauterizer working on my stub.”

“So your eyes were okay then?”

“Yeah. I kept telling them at the time that I felt fine, my eyes didn’t hurt. I didn’t believe them when they told me I could have a retinal burn without knowing, that there are no nerves on the back of your eye. I still thought my nerves were on my side.”

“So this is it,” Grace said. “This is all you wanted?”

“Ten fingers and a chair, yup.”

“And they’re not going to stop?”

Minerva scooted into place next to her, facing the window. Pink-white fluff rolled up against the benches and shelter posts—there must be cherry trees nearby losing their blooms. “Some days I think they want the update piece in the news: ‘Whatever happened to the limbless baby?’ When I’m not being unkind, I think they want to feel they’ve done all they can.”

Grace let down her ponytail and shook her hair out. “What do you want to do when you grow up? You said a scientist, but what kind? Don’t you think you’ll want, or even need, to walk?”

“I want to clean and study dinosaur bones. In a lab. I’ve seen them do it, they sit the whole time.” She laughed.

“How can you be sure? You seem so certain that this will mean a better life for you, but what if you’re wrong?”

Minerva’s face set. “You believed Brandon Macauley.” Grace’s hands froze halfway to her hair. “How could you be sure his life wouldn’t have gotten better? That they wouldn’t have developed a miracle cure? But you let him make his own decision. You trusted him.”

The doctor stared, and her voice came out too high. “I—I didn’t do that. I was cleared.”

“Sure. You ‘made a mistake’ about his dosage on a new drug. But you did believe him that he wanted to die. When he said that, you believed him.”

Grace glanced over her shoulder. “Yes. I did.”

“All I’m saying is I don’t want legs.” Minerva’s smile was wan and almost lopsided.

“He was older than you.”

“I read at a college-senior level.”

“That’s—I don’t know, Minerva.”

“I want a life, not a patienthood.”

Grace looked out the window for a time, jaw tight, and finally kneeled beside Minerva’s chair and embraced her. Minerva wrapped her arms around the doctor’s back and squeezed, closing her eyes.

“Is that what you came to talk to me about?” she whispered.

“Yes and no. I wanted to talk about Daniel. I’ve just been visiting him.”

Minerva nodded slowly. “He’s a nice kid. I like him, when he’s himself for a while.”

“You’ve never been to the perm-wards, have you?”

“Psych? No. But from what I hear, I wouldn’t want to.”

“It’s a warehouse. That’s all it is. A—” She paused, sighed. “I bought a car.” She saw Minerva’s eyebrows jump. “Haven’t had one for years.”

“I’m glad.” The girl smiled at her with a sort of reckless joy, and the new hand grasped hers, surprisingly strong under its smooth skin. “I can help.”

Grace inhaled sharply. “What do you—“ She looked again toward the door, at the microphone and camera she knew were there.

Minerva drew her into another hug and whispered, “I can read maps. I could keep an eye on the news. I’m great with computers, I can find things out . . . ”

“I’ll be fine,” Grace replied. “Don’t worry about me.” She pulled back and stood up. “My shift’s about to start.”

“I know it is. 3:15.”

“How do you know that?”

“The crypto on staff schedules is perfunctory. Like I said, I’m great with computers.” She half-smiled.

Grace turned, but Minerva wheeled after her and caught her lab coat with one hand.

“Minerva—”

“Come to see me tomorrow. The nurses don’t like me getting down into the chair by myself because it gives my spine a jolt, but I can do it already. Anyway, you get off work at three, when they’re changing shifts, giving each other reports. I can meet you at the elevators.” She grinned. “I can get out of this room.”

Minerva’s gaze held Grace’s, hazel eyes to tired gray, and the fingers slackened, dropped from the coat. The woman leaned over and kissed the child’s pale forehead. “Goodbye, Minerva.”

Minerva turned away. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Dr. Grace.”

Grace pulled over as the sky deepened toward indigo over the treetops. She had turned down an open service road in the Kentucky forest, and now when she rolled down the window and stopped the car, she could hear nothing but the woods and the pops and sighs of the engine.

She got out, listened again, felt the chill of oncoming night raise the hairs on the back of her hands. Trees stooped, graceful and so green in the dusky light that they strained the eye. The occasional pink of a blossoming redbud glowed out of the shadows. She could smell leaves, earth, other aromas once familiar. She wondered if Minerva had ever been to a forest, smelled this kind of air.

As she had since she drove away from GEPIC, she tried to smooth away the thought of Minerva that caught again and again at her growing sense of peace. Now she failed, and as she leaned against the dusty car she could see the girl alone in her room, circling in her chair. Or perhaps she wasn’t by herself—perhaps security had heard her strange offer, perhaps she was answering questions.

Grace felt a sick downward pressure in her chest, as if her lungs were empty. Had Minerva waited for Grace? Had she truly wanted to run away? She must know she stood out, that she’d been a poster child and wouldn’t be forgotten, that it was a horrible risk. GEPIC offered her a future—had she thought Grace would take her away from that? She was far too smart to expect it. But would all her intelligence keep her from wanting it?

Grace let out a long breath. She was squandering light.

The trunk opened quietly when she pressed the button, and Daniel didn’t even stir. The sedative should be wearing off, but Minerva had been right—he was a deep sleeper. He was nestled into a fort of cushions, with bungees protecting him from boxes of cash and clothing, everything they would need to start a life somewhere.

She bent to listen to his breathing, the remnants of her guilt and confusion melting away. “David,” she whispered, “wake up.” She smoothed the hair back from his forehead and jiggled his hand. “David.”

The child turned in his sleep, then opened his eyes and smiled. “I feel sleepy.”

“I know, and you can sleep again soon, but I need you awake right now.”

Daniel, now David, sat up and yawned. She cupped his chin and dribbled dilating drops into his eyes. He giggled as she put on a red plastic hood.

“There’s going to be a bright light. I need you to look right at it for me, okay?”

“Okay.” His bright blue irises were crowded aside by black. He reached out and felt around for her hand, which now, unshaking, gripped GEPIC’s portable laser cauterizer. “Who are you?”

Grace caught sight of her reflection in the rear window and started. Who was she, faceless and impartial like the figures in Minerva’s waking nightmare? She blinked to clear her scarlet-tinted vision. “I’m your mother.” She thumbed the laser on and thought, I’m the last person you’re ever going to see, honey.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, January 2010.

The Moon is Not a Battlefield

Indrapramit Das

We’re recording.

I was born in the sky, for war. This is what we were told.

I think when people hear this, they think of ancient Earth stories. Of angels and superheroes and gods, leaving destruction between the stars. But I’m no superhero, no Kalel of America-Bygone with the flag of his dead planet flying behind him. I’m no angel Gabreel striking down Satan in the void or blowing the trumpet to end worlds. I’m no devi Durga bristling with arms and weapons, chasing down demons through the cosmos and vanquishing them, no Kali with a string of heads hanging over her breasts black as deep space, making even the other gods shake with terror at her righteous rampage.

I was born in the sky, for war. What does it mean?

I was actually born on Earth, not far above sea level, in the Greater Kolkata Megapolis. My parents gave me away to the Government of India when I was still a small child, in exchange for enough money for them to live off frugally for a year—an unimaginable amount of wealth for two Dalit street-dwellers who scraped shit out of sewers for a living, and scavenged garbage for recycling—sewers sagging with centuries worth of shit, garbage heaps like mountains. There was another child I played with the most in our slum. The government took her as well. Of the few memories I have left of those early days on Earth, the ones of us playing are clearest, more than the ones of my parents, because they weren’t around much. But she was always there. She’d bring me hot jalebis snatched from the hands of hapless pedestrians, her hands covered in syrup, and we’d share them. We used to climb and run along the huge sea-wall that holds back the rising Bay of Bengal, and spit in the churning sea. I haven’t seen the sea since, except from space—that roiling mass of water feels like a dream. So do those days, with the child who would become the soldier most often by my side. The government told our parents that they would cleanse us of our names, our untouchability, give us a chance to lead noble lives as astral defenders of the Republic of India. Of course they gave us away. I don’t blame them. Aditi never blamed hers, either. That was the name my friend was given by the Army. You’ve met her. We were told our new names before training even began. Single-names, always. Usually from the Mahabharata or Ramayana, we realized later. I don’t remember the name my parents gave me. I never asked Aditi if she remembered hers.

That, then, is when the life of asura Gita began.

I was raised by the state to be a soldier, and borne into the sky in the hands of the Republic to be its protector, before I even hit puberty.

The notion that there could be war on the Moon, or anywhere beyond Earth, was once a ridiculous dream.

So are many things, until they come to pass.

I’ve lived for thirty-six years as an infantry soldier stationed off-world. I was deployed and considered in active duty from eighteen in the Chandnipur Lunar Cantonment Area. I first arrived in Chandnipur at six, right after they took us off the streets. I grew up there. The Army raised us. Gave us a better education than we’d have ever gotten back on Earth. Right from childhood, me and my fellow asuras—Earth-bound Indian infantry soldiers were jawans, but we were always, always asuras, a mark of pride—we were told that we were stationed in Chandnipur to protect the intrasolar gateway of the Moon for the greatest country on that great blue planet in our black sky—India. India, which we could see below the clouds if we squinted during Earthrise on a surface patrol (if we were lucky, we could spot the white wrinkle of the Himalayas through telescopes). We learned the history of our home: after the United States of America and Russia, India was the third Earth nation to set foot on the Moon, and the first to settle a permanent base there. Chandnipur was open to scientists, astronauts, tourists and corporations of all countries, to do research, develop space travel, take expensive holidays and launch inter-system mining drones to asteroids. The generosity and benevolence of Bharat Mata, no? But we were to protect Chandnipur’s sovereignty as Indian territory at all costs, because other countries were beginning to develop their own lunar expeditions to start bases. Chandnipur, we were told, was a part of India. The only part of India not on Earth. We were to make sure it remained that way. This was our mission. Even though, we were told, the rest of the world didn’t officially recognize any land on the moon to belong to any country, back then. Especially because of that.

Do you remember Chandnipur well?

It was where I met you, asura Gita. Hard to forget that, even if it hadn’t been my first trip to the Moon. I was very nervous. The ride up the elevator was peaceful. Like . . . being up in the mountains, in the Himalayas, you know? Oh—I’m so sorry. Of course not. Just, the feeling of being high up—the silence of it, in a way, despite all the people in the elevator cabins. But then you start floating under the seat belts, and there are the safety instructions on how to move around the platform once you get to the top, and all you feel like doing is pissing. That’s when you feel untethered. The shuttle to the Moon from the top of the elevator wasn’t so peaceful. Every blast of the craft felt so powerful out there. The gs just raining down on you as you’re strapped in. I felt like a feather.

Like a feather. Yes. I imagine so. There are no birds in Chandnipur, but us asuras always feel like feathers. Felt. Now I feel heavy all the time, like a stone, like a—hah—a moon, crashing into its world, so possessed by gravity, though I’m only skin and bones. A feather on a moon, a stone on a planet.

You know, when our Havaldar, Chamling his name was, told me that asura Aditi and I were to greet and guide a reporter visiting the Cantonment Area, I can’t tell you how shocked we were. We were so excited. We would be on the feeds! We never got reporters up there. Well, to be honest, I wanted to show off our bravery, tell you horror stories of what happens if you wear your suit wrong outside the Cantonment Area on a walk, or get caught in warning shots from Chinese artillery klicks away, or what happens if the micro-atmosphere over Chandnipur malfunctions and becomes too thin while you’re out and about there (you burn or freeze or asphyxiate). Civilians like horror stories from soldiers. You see so many of them in the media feeds in the pods, all these war stories. I used to like seeing how different it is for soldiers on Earth, in the old wars, the recent ones. Sometimes it would get hard to watch, of course.

Anyway, asura Aditi said to me, “Gita, they aren’t coming here to be excited by a war movie. We aren’t even at war. We’re in territorial conflict. You use the word war and it’ll look like we’re boasting. We need to make them feel at home, not scare the shit out of them. We need to show them the hospitality of asuras on our own turf.”

Couldn’t disagree with that. We wanted people on Earth to see how well we do our jobs, so that we’d be welcomed with open arms when it was time for the big trip back—the promised pension, retirement, and that big old heaven in the sky where we all came from, Earth. We wanted every Indian up there to know we were protecting their piece of the Moon. Your piece of the Moon.

I thought soldiers would be frustrated having to babysit a journalist following them around. But you and asura Aditi made me feel welcome.

I felt bad for you. We met civilians in Chandnipur proper, when we got time off, in the Underground Markets, the bars. But you were my first fresh one, Earth-fresh. Like the imported fish in the Markets. Earth-creatures, you know, always delicate, expensive, mouth open gawping, big eyes. Out of water, they say.

Did I look “expensive?” I was just wearing the standard issue jumpsuits they give visitors.

Arre, you know what I mean. In the Markets we soldiers couldn’t buy Earth-fish or Earth-lamb or any Earth-meat, when they showed up every six months. We only ever tasted the printed stuff. Little packets; in the stalls they heat up the synthi for you in the machine. Nothing but salt and heat and protein. Imported Earth-meat was too expensive. Same for Earth-people, expensive. Fish out of water. Earth meant paradise. You came from heaven. No offense.

None taken. You and asura Aditi were very good to me. That’s what I remember.

After Aditi reminded me that you were going to show every Indian on their feeds our lives, we were afraid of looking bad. You looked scared, at first. Did we scare you?

I wouldn’t say scared. Intimidated. You know, everything you were saying earlier, about gods and superheroes from the old Earth stories. The stuff they let you watch and read in the pods. That’s what I saw, when you welcomed us in full regalia, out on the surface, in your combat suits, at the parade. You gleamed like gods. Like devis, asuras, like your namesakes. Those weapon limbs, when they came out of the backs of your suit during the demonstration, they looked like the arms of the goddesses in the epics, or the wings of angels, reflecting the sunlight coming over the horizon—the light was so white, after Earth, not shifted yellow by atmosphere. It was blinding, looking at you all. I couldn’t imagine having to face that, as a soldier, as your enemy. Having to face you. I couldn’t imagine having to patrol for hours, and fight, in those suits—just my civilian surface suit was so hot inside, so claustrophobic. I was shaking in there, watching you all.

Do you remember, the Governor of Chandnipur Lunar Area came out to greet you, and shake the hands of all the COs. A surface parade like that, on airless ground, that never happened—it was all for you and the rest of the reporters, for the show back on Earth. We had never before even seen the Governor in real life, let alone in a surface suit. The rumours came back that he was trembling and sweating when he shook their hands—that he couldn’t even pronounce the words to thank them for their service. So you weren’t alone, at least.

Then when we went inside the Cantonment Area, and we were allowed to take off our helmets right out in the open—I waited for you and Aditi to do it first. I didn’t believe I wouldn’t die, that my face wouldn’t freeze. We were on that rover, such a bumpy ride, but open air like those vehicles in the earliest pictures of people on the Moon—just bigger. We went through the Cantonment airlock gate, past the big yellow sign that reads “Chandnipur, Gateway to the Stars,” and when we emerged from the other side Aditi told me to look up and see for myself, the different sky. From deep black to that deep, dusky blue, it was amazing, like crossing over into another world. The sunlight still felt different, blue-white instead of yellow, filtered by the nanobot haze, shimmering in that lunar dawn coming in over the hilly rim of Daedalus crater. The sun felt tingly, raw, like it burned even though the temperature was cool. The Earth was half in shadow—it looked fake, a rendered backdrop in a veeyar sim. And sometimes the micro-atmosphere would move just right and the bots would be visible for a few seconds in a wave across that low sky, the famous flocks of “lunar fireflies.” The rover went down the suddenly smooth lunarcrete road, down the main road of the Cantonment—

New Delhi Avenue.

Yes, New Delhi Avenue, with the rows of wireframed flags extended high, all the state colours of India, the lines and lines of white barracks with those tiny windows on both sides. I wanted to stay in those, but they put us civilians underground, in a hotel. They didn’t want us complaining about conditions. As we went down New Delhi Avenue and turned into the barracks for the tour, you and Aditi took off your helmets and breathed deep. Your faces were covered in black warpaint. Greasepaint. Full regalia, yes? You both looked like Kali, with or without the necklace of heads. Aditi helped me with the helmet, and I felt lunar air for the first time. The dry, cool air of Chandnipur. And you said “Welcome to chota duniya. You can take off the helmet.” Chota duniya, the little world. Those Kali faces, running with sweat, the tattoos of your wetware. You wore a small beard, back then, and a crew-cut. Asura Aditi had a ponytail, I was surprised that was allowed.

You looked like warriors, in those blinding suits of armour.

Warriors. I don’t anymore, do I. What do I look like now?

I see you have longer hair. You shaved off your beard.

Avoiding the question, clever. Did you know that jawan means “young man”? But we were asuras. We were proud of our hair, not because we were young men. We, the women and the hijras, the not-men, told the asuras who were men, why do you get to keep beards and moustaches and we don’t? Some of them had those twirly moustaches like the asuras in the myths. So the boys said to us: we won’t stop you. Show us your beards! From then it was a competition. Aditi could hardly grow a beard on her pretty face, so she gave up when it was just fuzz. I didn’t. I was so proud when I first sprouted that hair on my chin, when I was a teenager. After I grew it out, Aditi called it a rat-tail. I never could grow the twirly moustaches, But I’m a decommissioned asura now, so I’ve shaved off the beard.

What do you think you look like now?

Like a beggar living in a slum stuck to the side of the space elevator that took me up to the sky so long ago, and brought me down again not so long ago.

Some of my neighbours don’t see asuras as women or men. I’m fine with that. They ask me: do you still bleed? Did you menstruate on the Moon? They say, menstruation is tied to the Moon, so asuras must bleed all the time up there, or never at all down here. They think we used all that blood to paint ourselves red because we are warriors. To scare our enemies. I like that idea. Some of them don’t believe it when I say that I bleed the same as any Earthling with a cunt. The young ones believe me, because they help me out, bring me rags, pads when they can find them, from down there in the city—can’t afford the meds to stop bleeding altogether. Those young ones are a blessing. I can’t exactly hitch a ride on top of the elevator up and down every day in my condition.

People in the slum all know you’re an asura?

I ask again: what do I look like now?

A veteran. You have the scars. From the wetware that plugged you into the suits. The lines used to be black, raised—on your face, neck. Now they’re pale, flat.

The mark of the decommissioned asura—everyone knows who you are. The government plucks out your wires. Like you’re a broken machine. They don’t want you selling the wetware on the black market. They’re a part of the suits we wore, just a part we wore all the time inside us—and the suits are property of the Indian Army, Lunar Command.

I told you why the suits are so shiny, didn’t I, all those years ago? Hyper-reflective surfaces so we didn’t fry up in them like the printed meat in their heating packets when the sun comes up. The suits made us easy to spot on a lunar battlefield. It’s why we always tried to stay in shadow, use infra-red to spot enemies. When we went on recon, surveillance missions, we’d use lighter stealth suits, non-metal, non-reflective, dark grey like the surface. We could only do that if we coordinated our movements to land during night-time.

When I met you and asura Aditi then you’d been in a few battles already. With Chinese and Russian troops. Small skirmishes.

All battles on the moon are small skirmishes. You can’t afford anything bigger. Even the horizon is smaller, closer. But yes, our section had seen combat a few times. But even that was mostly waiting, and scoping with infra-red along the shadows of craters. When there was fighting, it was between long, long stretches of walking and sitting. But it was never boring. Nothing can be boring when you’ve got a portioned ration of air to breathe, and no sound to warn you of a surprise attack. Each second is measured out and marked in your mind. Each step is a success. When you do a lunar surface patrol outside Chandnipur, outside regulated atmosphere or Indian territory, as many times as we did, you do get used to it. But never, ever bored. If anything, it becomes hypnotic—you do everything you need to do without even thinking, in that silence between breathing and the words of your fellow soldiers.

You couldn’t talk too much about what combat was like on the Moon, on that visit.

They told us not to. Havaldar Chamling told us that order came all the way down from the Lieutenant General of Lunar Command. It was all considered classified information, even training maneuvers. It was pretty silent when you were in Chandnipur. I’m sure the Russians and the Chinese had news of that press visit. They could have decided to put on a display of might, stage some shock and awe attacks, missile strikes, troop movements to draw us out of the Cantonment Area.

I won’t lie—I was both relieved and disappointed. I’ve seen war, as a field reporter. Just not on the Moon. I wanted to see firsthand what the asuras were experiencing.

It would have been difficult. Lunar combat is not like Earth combat, though I don’t know much about Earth combat other than theory and history. I probably know less than you do, ultimately, because I’ve never experienced it. But I’ve read things, watched things about wars on Earth. Learned things, of course, in our lessons. It’s different on the Moon. Harder to accommodate an extra person when each battle is like a game of chess. No extra pieces allowed on the board. Every person needs their own air. No one can speak out of turn and clutter up comms. The visibility of each person needs to be accounted for, since it’s so high.

The most frightening thing about lunar combat is that you often can’t tell when it’s happening until it’s too late. On the battlefields beyond Chandnipur, out on the magma seas, combat is silent. You can’t hear anything but your own footsteps, the thoom-thoom-thoom of your suit’s metal boots crunching dust, or the sounds of your own weapons through your suit, the rattle-kick of ballistics, the near-silent hum of lasers vibrating in the metal of the shell keeping you alive. You’ll see the flash of a mine or grenade going off a few feet away but you won’t hear it. You won’t hear anything coming down from above unless you look up—be it ballistic missiles or a meteorite hurtling down after centuries flying through outer space. You’ll feel the shockwave knock you back but you won’t hear it. If you’re lucky, of course.

Laser weapons are invisible out there, and that’s what’s we mostly used. There’s no warning at all. No muzzle-flash, no noise. One minute you’re sitting there thinking you’re on the right side of the rocks giving you cover, and the next moment you see a glowing hole melting into the suit of the soldier next to you, like those time-lapse videos of something rotting. It takes less than a second if the soldier on the other side of the beam is aiming properly. Less than a second and there’s the flash and pop, blood and gas and superheated metal venting into the thin air like an aerosol spray, the scream like static in the mics. Aditi was a sniper, she could’ve told you how lethal the long-range lasers were. I carried a semi-auto, laser or ballistic; those lasers were as deadly, just lower range and zero warm-up. When we were in battles closer to settlements, we’d switch to the ballistic weaponry, because the buildings and bases are mostly better protected from that kind of damage, bullet-proof. There was kind of a silent agreement between all sides to keep from heavily damaging the actual bases. Those ballistic fights were almost a relief—our suits could withstand projectile damage better, and you could see the tracers coming from kilometers away, even if you couldn’t hear them. Like fire on oil, across the jet sky. Bullets aren’t that slow either, especially here on the Moon, but somehow it felt better to see it, like you could dodge the fire, especially if we were issued jet packs, though we rarely used them because of how difficult they were to control. Aditi was better at using hers.

She saved my life once.

I mean, she did that many times, we both did for each other, just by doing what we needed to do on a battlefield. But she directly saved my life once, like an Earth movie hero. Rocket-propelled grenade on a quiet battlefield. Right from up above and behind us. I didn’t even see it. I just felt asura Aditi shove me straight off the ground from behind and blast us off into the air with her jetpack, propelling us both twenty feet above the surface in a second. We twirled in mid-air, and for a little moment, it felt like we were free of the Moon, hovering there between it and the blazing blue Earth, dancing together. As we sailed back down and braced our legs for landing without suit damage, Aditi never let me go, kept our path back down steady. Only then did I see the cloud of lunar dust and debris hanging where we’d been seconds earlier, the aftermath of an explosion I hadn’t heard or seen, the streaks of light as the rest of the fireteam returned ballistic fire, spreading out in leaps with short bursts from their jetpacks. No one died in that encounter. I don’t even remember whose troops we were fighting in that encounter, which lunar army. I just remember that I didn’t die because of Aditi.

Mostly, we never saw the enemy close up. They were always just flecks of light on the horizon, or through our infrared overlay. Always ghosts, reflecting back the light of sun and Earth, like the Moon itself. It made it easier to kill them, if I’m being honest. They already seemed dead. When you’re beyond Chandnipur, out on the mara under that merciless black sky with the Earth gleaming in the distance, the only colour you can see anywhere, it felt like we were already dead too. Like we were all just ghosts playing out the old wars of humanity, ghosts of soldiers who died far, far down on the ground. But then we’d return to the city, to the warm bustle of the Underground Markets on our days off, to our chota duniya, and the Earth would seem like heaven again, not a world left behind but one to be attained, one to earn, the unattainable paradise rather than a distant history of life that we’d only lived through media pods and lessons.

And now, here you are. On Earth.

Here I am. Paradise attained. I have died and gone to heaven.

It’s why I’m here, isn’t it? Why we’re talking.

You could say that. Thank you for coming, again. You didn’t have any trouble coming up the elevator shaft, did you? I know it’s rough clinging to the top of the elevator.

I’ve been on rougher rides. There are plenty of touts down in the elevator base station who are more than willing to give someone with a few rupees a lending hand up the spindle. So. You were saying. About coming back to Earth. It must have been surprising, the news that you were coming back, last year.

FTL changed everything. That was, what, nine years ago?

At first it brought us to the edge of full-on lunar war, like never before, because the Moon became the greatest of all jewels in the night sky. It could become our first FTL port. Everyone wanted a stake in that. Every national territory on the Moon closed off its borders while the Earth governments negotiated. We were closed off in our bunkers, looking at the stars through the small windows, eating nothing but thin parathas from emergency flour rations. We made them on our personal heating coils with synthi butter—no food was coming through because of embargo, mess halls in the main barracks were empty. We lived on those parathas and caffeine infusion. Our stomachs were like balloons, full of air.

Things escalated like never before, in that time. I remember a direct Chinese attack on Chandnipur’s outer defences, where we were stationed. One bunker window was taken out by laser. I saw a man stuck to the molten hole in the pane because of depressurization, wriggling like a dying insect. Asura Jatayu, a quiet, skinny soldier with a drinking problem. People always said he filled his suit’s drinking water pods with diluted moonshine from the Underground Markets, and sucked it down during patrols. I don’t know if that’s true, but people didn’t trust him because of it, even though he never really did anything to fuck things up. He was stone cold sober that day. I know, because I was with him. Aditi, me and two other asuras ripped him off the broken window, activated the emergency shutter before we lost too much pressure. But he’d already hemorrhaged severely through the laser wound, which had blown blood out of him and into the thin air of the Moon. He was dead. The Chinese had already retreated by the time we recovered. It was a direct response to our own overtures before the embargo. We had destroyed some nanobot anchors of theirs in disputed territory, which had been laid down to expand the micro-atmosphere of Yueliang Lunar Area.

That same tech that keeps air over Chandnipur and other lunar territories, enables the micro-atmospheres, is what makes FTL work—the q-nanobots. On our final patrols across the mara, we saw some of the new FTL shipyards in the distance. The ships—half-built, they looked like the Earth ruins from historical pictures, of palaces and cities. We felt like we were looking at artifacts of a civilization from the future. They sparked like a far-off battle, bots building them tirelessly. They will sail out to outer space, wearing quenbots around them like cloaks. Like the superheroes! The quenbot cloud folds the space around the ship like a blanket, make a bubble that shoots through the universe. I don’t really understand. Is it like a soda bubble or a blanket? We had no idea our time on the Moon was almost over on those patrols, looking at the early shipyards.

After one of the patrols near the shipyards, asura Aditi turned to me and said, “We’ll be on one of those ships one day, sailing to other parts of the galaxy. They’ll need us to defend Mother India when she sets her dainty feet on new worlds. Maybe we’ll be able to see Jupiter and Saturn and Neptune zoom by like cricket balls, the Milky Way spinning far behind us like a chakra.”

“I don’t think that’s quite how FTL works,” I told her, but obviously she knew that. She looked at me, low dawn sunlight on her visor so I couldn’t see her face. Even though this patrol was during a temporary ceasefire, she had painted her face like she so loved to, so all you could see anyway were the whites of her eyes and her teeth. Kali Ma through and through, just like you said. “Just imagine, maybe we’ll end up on a world where we can breathe everywhere. Where there are forests and running water and deserts like Earth. Like in the old Bollywood movies, where the heroes and the heroines run around trees and splash in water like foolish children with those huge mountains behind them covered in ice.”

“Arre, you can get all that on Earth. It’s where those movies come from! Why would you want to go further away from Earth? You don’t want to return home?”

“That’s a nice idea, Gita,” she said. “But the longer we’re here, and the more news and movies and feeds I see of Earth, I get the idea it’s not really waiting for us.”

That made me angry, though I didn’t show it. “We’ve waited all our lives to go back, and now you want to toss off to another world?” I asked, as if we had a choice in the matter. The two of us, since we were children in the juvenile barracks, had talked about moving to a little house in the Himalayas once we went back, somewhere in Sikkim or northern Bengal (we learned all the states as children, and saw their flags along New Delhi Avenue) where it’s not as crowded as the rest of Earth still, and we could see those famously huge mountains that dwarfed the Moon’s arid hills.

She said, “Hai Ram, I’m just dreaming like we always have. My dear, what you’re not getting is that we have seen Earth on the feeds since we came to the Moon. From expectation, there is only disappointment.”

So I told her, “When you talk about other worlds out there, you realize those are expectations too. You’re forgetting we’re soldiers. We go to Earth, it means our battle is over. We go to another world, you think they’d let us frolic like Bollywood stars in alien streams? Just you and me, Gita and Aditi, with the rest of our division doing backup dancing?” I couldn’t stay angry when I thought of this, though I still felt a bit hurt that she was suggesting she didn’t want to go back to Earth with me, like the sisters in arms we were.

“True enough,” she said. “Such a literalist. If our mission is ever to play Bollywood on an exoplanet, you can play the man hero with your lovely rat-tail beard. Anyway, for now all we have is this grey rock where all the ice is underneath us instead of prettily on the mountains. Not Earth or any other tarty rival to it. This is home, Gita beta, don’t forget it.”

How right she was.

Then came peacetime.

We saw the protests on Earth feeds. People marching through the vast cities, more people than we’d ever see in a lifetime in Chandnipur, with signs and chants. No more military presence on the Moon. The Moon is not an army base. Bring back our soldiers. The Moon is not a battlefield.

But it was, that’s the thing. We had seen our fellow asuras die on it.

With the creation of the Terran Union of Spacefaring Nations (T.U.S.N.) in anticipation of human expansion to extrasolar space, India finally gave up its sovereignty over Chandnipur, which became just one settlement in amalgamated T.U.S.N. Lunar territory. There were walled-off Nuclear Seclusion Zones up there on Earth still hot from the last World War, and somehow they’d figured out how to stop war on the Moon. With the signing of the International Lunar Peace Treaty, every nation that had held its own patch of the Moon for a century of settlement on the satellite agreed to lay down their arms under Earth, Sol, the gods, the goddesses, and the God. The Moon was going to be free of military presence for the first time in decades.

When us asuras were first told officially of the decommissioning of Lunar Command in Chandnipur, we celebrated. We’d made it—we were going to Earth, earlier than we’d ever thought, long before retirement age. Even our COs got shitfaced in the mess halls. There were huge tubs of biryani, with hot chunks of printed lamb and gobs of synthi dalda. We ate so much, I thought we’d explode. Even Aditi, who’d been dreaming about other worlds, couldn’t hold back her happiness. She asked me, “What’s the first thing you’re going to do on Earth?” her face covered in grease, making me think of her as a child with another name, grubby cheeks covered in syrup from stolen jalebis. “I’m going to catch a train to a riverside beach or a sea-wall, and watch the movement of water on a planet. Water, flowing and thrashing for kilometers and kilometers, stretching all the way to the horizon. I’m going to fall asleep to it. Then I’m going to go to all the restaurants, and eat all the real foods that the fake food in the Underground Markets is based on.”

“Don’t spend all your money in one day, okay? We need to save up for that house in the Himalayas.”

“You’re going to go straight to the mountains, aren’t you,” I said with a smile.

“Nah. I’ll wait for you, first, beta. What do you think.”

“Good girl.”

After that meal, a handful of us went out with our suits for an unscheduled patrol for the first time—I guess you’d call it a moonwalk, at that point. We saluted the Earth together, on a lunar surface where we had no threat of being silently attacked from all sides. The century-long Lunar Cold War was over—it had cooled, frozen, bubbled, boiled at times, but now it had evaporated. We were all to go to our paradise in the black sky, as we’d wished every day on our dreary chota duniya.

We didn’t stop to think what it all really meant for us asuras, of course. Because as Aditi had told me—the Moon was our home, the only one we’d ever known, really. It is a strange thing to live your life in a place that was never meant for human habitation. You grow to loathe such a life—the gritty dust in everything from your food to your teeth to your weapons, despite extensive air filters, the bitter aerosol meds to get rid of infections and nosebleeds from it. Spending half of your days exercising and drinking carefully rationed water so your body doesn’t shrivel up in sub-Earth grav or dry out to a husk in the dry, scrubbed air of controlled atmospheres. The deadening beauty of grey horizons with not a hint of water or life or vegetation in sight except for the sharp lines and lights of human settlement, which we compared so unfavorably to the dazzling technicolour of images and video feeds from Earth, the richness of its life and variety. The constant, relentless company of the same people you grow to love with such ferocity that you hate them as well, because there is no one else for company but the occasional civilian who has the courage to talk to a soldier in Chandnipur’s streets, tunnels and canteens.

Now the Moon is truly a gateway to the stars. It is pregnant with the vessels that will take humanity to them, with shipyards and ports rising up under the limbs of robots. I look up at our chota duniya, and its face is crusted in lights, a crown given to her by her lover. Like a goddess it’ll birth humanity’s new children. We were born in the sky, for war, but we weren’t in truth. We were asuras. Now they will be devas, devis. They will truly be like gods, with FTL. In Chandnipur, they told us that we must put our faith in Bhagavan, in all the gods and goddesses of the pantheon. We were given a visiting room, where we sat in the veeyar pods and talked directly to their avatars, animated by the machines. That was the only veeyar we were allowed—no sims of Earth or anything like that, maybe because they didn’t want us to get too distracted from our lives on the Moon. So we talked to the avatars, dutifully, in those pods with their smell of incense. Every week we asked them to keep us alive on chota duniya, this place where humanity should not be and yet is.

And now, we might take other worlds, large and small.

Does that frighten you?

I . . . don’t know. You told us all those years ago, and you tell me now, that we asuras looked like gods and superheroes when you saw us. In our suits, which would nearly crush a human with their weight if anyone wore them on Earth, let alone walked or fought in them. And now, imagine the humans who will go out there into the star-lit darkness. The big ships won’t be ready for a long time. But the small ones—they already want volunteers to take one-way test trips to exoplanets. I don’t doubt some of those volunteers will come from the streets, like us asuras. They need people who don’t have anything on Earth, so they can leave it behind and spend their lives in the sky. They will travel faster than light itself. Impossible made possible. Even the asuras of the Lunar Command were impossible once.

The Moon was a lifeless place. Nothing but rock and mineral and water. And we still found a way to bring war to it. We still found a way to fight there. Now, when the new humans set foot on other worlds, what if there is life there? What if there is god-given life that has learned to tell stories, make art, fight and love? Will we bring an Earth Army to that life, whatever form it takes? Will we send out this new humanity to discover and share, or will we take people like me and Aditi, born in the streets with nothing, and give them a suit of armour and a ship that sails across the cosmos faster than the light of stars, and send them out to conquer? In the myths, asuras can be both benevolent or evil. Like gods or demons. If we have the chariots of the gods at our disposal, what use is there for gods? What if the next soldiers who go forth into space become demons with the power of gods? What if envy strikes their hearts, and they take fertile worlds from other life forms by force? What if we bring war to a peaceful cosmos? At least we asuras only killed other humans.

One could argue that you didn’t just fight on the Moon. You brought life there, for the first time. You, we, humans—we loved there, as well. We still do. There are still humans there.

Love.

I’ve never heard anyone tell me they love me, nor told anyone I love them. People on Earth, if you trust the stories, say it all the time. We asuras didn’t really know what the word meant, in the end.

But. I did love, didn’t I? I loved my fellow soldiers. I would have given my life for them. That must be what it means.

I loved Aditi.

That is the first time I’ve ever said that. I loved Aditi, my sister in arms. I wonder what she would have been, if she had stayed on Earth, never been adopted by the Indian government and given to the Army. A dancer? A Bollywood star? They don’t like women with muscles like her, do they? She was bloody graceful with a jet-pack, I’ll tell you that much. And then, when I actually stop to think, I realize, that she would have been a beggar, or a sweeper, or a sewer-scraper if the Army hadn’t given us to the sky. Like me. Now I live among beggars, garbage-pickers, and sweepers, and sewer-scrapers, in this slum clinging to what they call the pillar to heaven. To heaven, can you believe that? Just like we called Earth heaven up there. These people here, they take care of me. In them I see a shared destiny.

What is that?

To remind us that we are not the gods. This is why I pray still to the gods, or the one God, whatever is out there beyond the heliosphere. I pray that the humans who will sail past light and into the rest of the universe find grace out there, find a way to bring us closer to godliness. To worlds where we might start anew, and have no need for soldiers to fight, only warriors to defend against dangers that they themselves are not the harbingers of. To worlds where our cities have no slums filled with people whose backs are bent with the bravery required to hold up the rest of humanity.

Can I ask something? How . . . how did asura Aditi die?

Hm. Asura Aditi of the 8th Lunar Division—Chandnipur, Indian Armed Forces, survived thirty-four years of life and active combat duty as a soldier on the Moon, to be decommissioned and allowed to return to planet Earth. And then she died right here in New Delhi Megapolis walking to the market. We asuras aren’t used to this gravity, to these crowds. One shove from a passing impatient pedestrian is all it takes. She fell down on the street, shattered her Moon-brittled hip because, when we came here to paradise, we found that treatment and physio for our weakened bodies takes money that our government does not provide. We get a pension, but it’s not much—we have to choose food and rent, or treatment. There is no cure. We might have been bred for war in the sky, but we were not bred for life on Earth. Why do you think there are so few volunteers for the asura program? They must depend on the children of those who have nothing.

Aditi fell to Earth from the Moon, and broke. She didn’t have money for a fancy private hospital. She died of an infection in a government hospital.

She never did see the Himalayas. Nor have I.

I’m sorry.

I live here, in the slums around Akash Mahal Space Elevator-Shaft, because of Aditi. It’s dangerous, living along the spindle. But it’s cheaper than the subsidized rent of the Veterans Arcologies. And I like the danger. I was a soldier, after all. I like living by the stairway to the sky, where I once lived. I like being high up here, where the wind blows like it never did on the Moon’s grey deserts, where the birds I never saw now fly past me every morning and warm my heart with their cries. I like the sound of the nanotube ecosystem all around us, digesting all our shit and piss and garbage, turning it into the light in my one bulb, the heat in my one stove coil, the water from my pipes, piggybacking on the charge from the solar panels that power my little feed-terminal. The way the walls pulse, absorbing sound and kinetic energy, when the elevator passes back and forth, the rumble of Space Elevator Garuda-3 through the spindle all the way to the top of the atmosphere. I don’t like the constant smell of human waste. I don’t like wondering when the police will decide to cast off the blinders and destroy this entire slum because it’s illegal. I don’t like going with a half-empty stomach all the time, living off the kindness of the little ones here who go up and down all the time and get my flour and rice. But I’m used to such things—Chandnipur was not a place of plenty either. I like the way everyone takes care of each other here. We have to, or the entire slum will collapse like a rotten vine slipping off a tree-trunk. We depend on each other for survival. It reminds me of my past life.

And I save the money from my pension, little by little, by living frugally. To one day buy a basic black market exoskeleton to assist me, and get basic treatment, physio, to learn how to walk and move like a human on Earth.

Can . . . I help, in any way?

You have helped, by listening. Maybe you can help others listen as well, as you’ve said.

Maybe they’ll heed the words of a veteran forced to live in a slum. If they send soldiers to the edge of the galaxy, I can only hope that they will give those soldiers a choice this time.

I beg the ones who prepare our great chariots: if you must take our soldiers with you, take them—their courage, their resilience, their loyalty will serve you well on a new frontier. But do not to take war to new worlds.

War belongs here on Earth. I should know. I’ve fought it on the Moon, and it didn’t make her happy. In her cold anger, she turned our bodies to glass. Our chota duniya was not meant to carry life, but we thrust it into her anyway. Let us not make that mistake again. Let us not violate the more welcoming worlds we may find, seeing their beauty as acquiescence.

With FTL, there will be no end to humanity’s journey. If we keep going far enough, perhaps we will find the gods themselves waiting behind the veil of the universe. And if we do not come in peace by then, I fear we will not survive the encounter.

I clamber down the side of the column of the space elevator, winding down through the biohomes of the slum towards one of the tunnels where I can reach the internal shaft and wait for the elevator on the way down. Once it’s close to the surface of the planet, it slows down a lot—that’s when people jump on to hitch a ride up or down. We’re only about 1,000 feet up, so it’s not too long a ride down, but the wait for it could be much longer. The insides of the shaft are always lined with slum-dwellers and elevator station hawkers, rigged with gas masks and cling clothes, hanging on to the nanocable chords and sinews of the great spindle. I might just catch a ride on the back of one of the gliders who offer their solar wings to travelers looking for a quick trip back to the ground. Bit more terrifying, but technically less dangerous, if their back harness and propulsion works.

The eight-year-old boy guiding me down through the steep slum, along the pipes and vines of the NGO-funded nano-ecosystem, occasionally looks up at me with a gap-toothed smile. “I want to be an asura like Gita,” he says. “I want to go to the stars.”

“Aren’t you afraid of not being able to walk properly when you come back to Earth?”

“Who said I want to come back to Earth?”

I smile, and look up, past the fluttering prayer flags of drying clothes, the pulsing wall of the slum, at the dizzying stairway to heaven, an infinite line receding into the blue. At the edge of the spindle, I see asura Gita poised between the air and her home, leaning precariously out to wave goodbye to me. Her hair ripples out against the sky, a smudge of black. A pale, late evening moon hovers full and pale above her head, twinkling with lights.

I wave back, overcome with vertigo. She seems about to fall, but she doesn’t. She is caught between the Earth and the sky in that moment, forever.

Originally published in Infinity Wars, 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

L.X. Beckett

Toronto author and editor L.X. Beckett frittered their misbegotten youth working as an actor and theater technician in Southern Alberta before deciding to make a shift into writing science fiction. Their first novella, “Freezing Rain, a Chance of Falling,” appeared in the July/August issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 2018, and takes place in the same universe as their upcoming 2019 novel Gamechanger. Lex identifies as feminist, lesbian, genderqueer, married, and Slytherin, and can be found on Twitter at @LXBeckett or at the Lexicon, at lxbeckett.com.

Felicity Shoulders

Felicity Shoulders was born in Portland, Oregon and raised on a steady diet of books, rich in speculative fiction. She writes science fiction and mythic fantasy, as well as naturalistic stories and other prose. Felicity received a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Pacific University in 2008. Her first published fiction appeared in Asimov’s in 2008, and she has also published work in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, CALYX Journal, and elsewhere. “Conditional Love,” originally published in Asimov’s, was a nominee for the 2010 Nebula Award for Short Story.

Indrapramit Das

Indrapramit Das (aka Indra Das) is a writer and editor from Kolkata, India. He is a Lambda Literary Award-winner for his debut novel The Devourers (Penguin India / Del Rey), and has been a finalist for the Crawford, Tiptree and Shirley Jackson Awards. His short fiction has appeared in publications including Tor.com, Clarkesworld, and Asimov’s, and has been widely anthologized. He is an Octavia E. Butler Scholar and a grateful graduate of Clarion West 2012. He has lived in India, the United States, and Canada, where he completed his MFA at the University of British Columbia.

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 The SFWA Bulletin; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a six-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). His anthologies include Upgraded, Galactic Empires, More Human Than Human, The Final Frontier, Not One of Us, and the Best Science Fiction of the Years series. His next anthology is The Eagle has Landed, which will be published in July by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

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