Table of Contents

Introduction

by Neil Clarke

Murder Born

by Robert Reed

Under the Eaves

by Lavie Tidhar

Jubilee

by Karl Schroeder

About the Artist and Authors

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to our July 2021 issue!

I’m hidden away in basement on this late June morning, avoiding the heat outside. I don’t have a good excuse to be outside anyway, with several projects currently piled on my desk. No new medical procedures in June, but that was my own doing. My youngest son graduated from high school this month and we wanted to be able to celebrate without putting ourselves back in quarantine. The next procedure is sometime in July, which explains why to the to-do pile is higher than normal. Advance planning so I do have things hanging over me while I deal with all this. Can’t complain though. It’s my fifteenth anniversary of being an editor and publisher this month. Clarkesworld started in July 2006, but most people consider our first issue (in October of that year) to be the true anniversary. Allows me to celebrate TWICE, so I don’t really mind.

Until next time,

-Neil

Murder Born

Robert Reed

Three men occupy a circle of harsh white light. The youngest sits in front, a Fender Stratocaster in his hands, his lap. The brown hair and beard are just beginning to grow out. Soulful eyes and a wry little mouth point at the camera. His happiness is guarded, skeptical. By contrast, the men standing behind him are simply and enthusiastically thrilled. A striking resemblance links those three faces, but time has been a juggernaut for the standing men, leaving them puffy and gray. By contrast, the sitting man is a vibrant forty, lost for a time and nobody knows where but back again and full of life again. The sons have retrieved their dead father and they can’t stop smiling, while the man with the guitar stares at the lens, warily amused by everything he sees.

I flew Delhi to Tokyo and then home. Lauren began calling while I was over the Pacific, leaving messages that moved rapidly from anger to raving terror. By the time I made LAX, she was a mess. I listened to the last message first; our daughter went missing yesterday. I called Kaylee right away, figuring she was having a fight her mother—an old story. But she didn’t answer me and hadn’t left any messages or texts, nothing since before I was in Japan, and that seemed like a sterling reason to panic.

Calling Lauren, I learned that the police were thick in the mix.

“Where’s Elijah?” I asked.

“Oh, they have him.”

“Who has him?”

“The detectives.” As if I should know that already. “They’re interrogating the little shit now.”

Elijah was a seventeen year-old problem put on earth to test boundaries and ruin nights for parents. I didn’t much like the kid, but I couldn’t share Lauren’s scorching mistrust. The boy was with the police, which meant he didn’t run away with my daughter. I felt as if I’d found good news, which Lauren sensed and squashed immediately.

“They’re looking for her and for the van, Shawn.”

The van was a third-hand clunker; I despised that hunk of rust. Stupid as hell, I said, “Well, she can’t drive it.”

Our daughter was only fifteen.

“Are you listening to me?” Lauren asked.

I thought I was listening.

“They had a fight last night. Elijah says. He says he left her and the van sitting in that turnoff west of Sweetgrass, then he walked home.”

“Helluva walk,” I said.

“It took him all night, he claims. Except nobody knows where the van is, or Kaylee. Her friends haven’t heard from her. And you haven’t either, right?”

The temptation to lie was still vigorous, eight years after our marriage was finished. But truth ruled. “I haven’t heard anything, no.”

“I’m scared, Shawn.”

So was I.

“How soon can you get home?”

Not soon enough. That’s how I felt then, and nothing has happened since to change that grim impression.

The background is bright unfocused green. Sunshine pours from overhead, from God. The subject wears a nun’s habit, the white coif clean and bright against the pretty African face. Her sober, downcast expression conveys what might be deep spirituality, or it might be shyness brought on by the camera, but it could well be one of those innocent looks that mean nothing. Whatever the truth, the watchful eye is obliged to follow her gaze. The nun is shoeless. Bare black feet stand on red dirt. Several machetes and one stubby ax are scattered across the jungle floor—tired old tools with nicked edges and rope-covered handles. But the blades have been cleaned until they glow, not a fleck of rust or dust or blood anywhere on their murderous bodies. And the left foot is up on its toes, trying not to be cut for what would be the first time.

By Denver I was certain everything was fine. A good giddy feeling found me, and I was so convinced and so unwilling to risk spoiling the elation that I held out a full minute before calling Lauren.

Her husband answered. “Hello, Shawn.”

“Mitch?”

“Lauren’s talking to the officers again. Are you home?”

Not even close. I had an hour to wait for my commuter flight, and then another hour in the air. I was going to try to find an earlier flight, but I was still hundreds of miles short of the goal.

“We’ll call if there’s news,” Mitch promised.

“Thanks.”

I searched the available flights, which numbered two and mine was first. But at least I left on time, nothing but good weather ahead of me. Seated near the front, elbow propped on the arm rest and my hand holding my chin, I must have looked bad. The girl in the uniform took an interest. She asked if I felt all right, and I said something about jet lag. Then she returned to tell me that we met once. Two years ago, I talked to her college class about careers in photography. But my encouragement didn’t take, and now she was doing “this stuff,” which gave her the expertise to offer a few words of advice about jet lag before wandering off to do more stuff.

Despite FAA rules, I called Lauren while the plane was airborne.

We didn’t crash.

“The sandpits north of Sweetgrass,” she said. No hellos, just those words pushing through a fair amount of road noise.

“What about them?” I asked.

“Somebody found something. The sheriff and State Patrol are there now.”

“I’m landing in a minute.”

“Which lake is Boomer Pit?” she asked.

“It’s on the west side of the river. No cabins, no houses. Maybe four miles from town.”

She shouted my directions to Mitch. Then returning to me, she admitted, “I don’t know what this means. But they may have found the van.”

Grown men who run through airports should expect to be noticed, particularly when they’re carrying a bag that might only look like a camera bag. But there weren’t any more outbound flights, and if I was a terrorist, then at least I was carrying my bomb off the premises. Nobody stopped me on the way to long-term parking, and because they would be quick and empty, I took the back roads, keeping my speed just under eighty.

Sweetgrass stands twenty miles east of the airport—a little river town that never was quiet or peaceful, but is unusually pretty, at least for this part of the world. I grew up there, graduating from its one high school, and my parents would never willingly live anywhere else. Turning at the tallest structure in town, the grain elevator, I ended up on the riverbed road. Gravel rattled behind me. Spinning lights marked my destination. Standing beside a deputy’s cruiser was a sorry old fellow who waved me through. As if I was expected. Then just to make things more difficult, my Prius got stuck in soft sand, and I ended up running over the final manmade dune, dropping into a scene full of headlights and spotlights and stern male voices barking orders.

The white van had been pulled from the water. Someone had opened the back doors, and a roving light showed me that the vehicle was empty. That seemed like wonderful news. But then I heard a woman’s cries and found Mitch holding my ex-wife. Lauren’s pretty face was hidden, but Mitch looked older and even grayer than usual. Spotting me, he gestured with his head before turning away completely, and I followed that trajectory, staring at a motionless colorless and astonishingly small shape that couldn’t be human—stripped of clothes and littered with knife wounds that culminated with a single long slash that had nearly severed my daughter’s head.

The boy looks proud and happy, standing beside his van, an agreeable girl under his skinny arm. A tattooed eagle full of strength and fire rides that arm. He is seventeen but looks younger. What will never be a beard rides the unremarkable chin. Say what you will about Elijah, the boy has a nice smile. The world is a wonderful place when you have a girl and a van and an eagle on your arm, and the only obstacle between you and your glorious future is a crazy father who tells some stupid-ass joke, tricking you into smiling for his damned camera.

Kaylee was eighteen months dead when the trial began.

There were good smart and inevitable reasons for the delays. The prosecutor’s office was aiming for first-degree murder and a lethal injection, which meant that every shred of useful evidence had to be teased from a landslide of data that didn’t help. And the defense attorney was the very best that a single mother of three could afford, which meant psyche evaluations and suppression motions and any other useless dance that might, just might, prolong his client’s reckoning.

I barely recognized the defendant. Two inches and forty pounds had been added to the willowy frame, the ratty black hair cut and whiskers sliced off with razors. Elijah was filling a suit freshly pulled from the rack at JC Penny. His mother probably tied the soft blue tie that so nicely rode his neck. At least that’s the way it played in my head. Jail food and jail living had transformed Elijah. Tough and unhappy, and in some deep fashion absolutely indifferent to whatever was happening to him, he was a lot more impressive than the boy that I remembered, and much easier to hate.

I brought my parents for the trial’s first day, but hard seats and an afternoon filled with wound analyses quenched their need for vengeance.

The second day was devoted to sober, well-dressed police officers discussing interviews with the defendant and other critical witnesses.

Lauren had launched the search for our daughter. The police spoke to her before visiting Elijah’s house. There they found the defendant looking as if he just got out of the shower. Elijah said that he was very, very tired. He said that he just got home. News that his girlfriend was missing brought no visible impact. But after several moments of reflection, he asked the officers, “How would I the hell know where she is?”

That’s when Elijah’s mother arrived, fresh from a night at her boyfriend’s apartment. She asked what was happening and then instructed her son to be honest. She told the officers that her son was always honest. More routine questions led to the defendant’s admission that there was a fight last night. “But I didn’t hit her,” Elijah said. Nobody had accused him of battery. “I never hit girls,” he said, looking at his mother. One officer asked where and when he last saw Kaylee, and Elijah claimed that she was sitting in the van at the rest area, and it was ten or ten-thirty. Or eleven-something, he wasn’t paying attention. Then without any more prodding, the defendant added, “She was all tears but alive.” Which seemed like another odd admission: Nobody had mentioned the possibility of death.

Later in the day, the defendant and his mother were brought downtown for a second, much longer interview with two detectives. The detectives played with the details of last night. Once again, Elijah claimed to have walked straight home. But one detective pointed out that he must be very slow, if it took him all night to cover fifteen miles at a normal walking pace.

“I didn’t walk the highway,” the boy claimed. “I used the gravel roads. Yeah, and I got lost a couple times too.”

And why did he use the county roads?

“I didn’t want Kaylee seeing me.”

Why not?

“She might have done something stupid,” Elijah said.

What would have been stupid?

Elijah said nothing.

Then one detective suggested that the girl might have been angry with him. Maybe Elijah was afraid that she would try to run him down.

“She wouldn’t have, ever,” Elijah said. Then he sat up tall, saying, “No, I was afraid she’d feel sorry for me. She’d pull over and then I’d climb in, and we’d start the fight all over again.”

At that moment, Elijah’s mother decided to help.

“That Kaylee has a temper,” she told the detectives. “That’s one little girl you don’t want to turn your back on.”

And now I hated the killer’s mom.

On the third morning, the defense attorney did what he could to dismantle the police account. But the professionals told a compelling story that was practiced and poised. They didn’t find a second suspect because there weren’t any candidates. They didn’t find blood splatters because the boy disposed of his clothes and washed his body. The detectives didn’t think it was unusual that an adolescent male without any criminal record might stab his girlfriend to death, and dumping her body and the murder scene into a stretch of deep water was the most reasonable thing in the world. And while they never found the murder weapon, they reminded the jury that there was more than twenty miles of ground lay between the sandpit and home, and awful knives could hide anywhere.

That was the day, the trial’s third, that doomed Elijah.

Afternoon brought the star witness. I hadn’t seen Gus Castor in years, but time hadn’t visibly changed the man. He was still a leathery old river rat, strong in the shoulders and forearms, that trademark shuffling gait carrying him up the aisle. His usual expression was more grimace than smile, but he always seemed like a happy man. I smelled tobacco when he passed. I didn’t smell whiskey, but this was a special day. He noticed me and gave me what looked like a knowing nod, and then he finished the journey to the witness chair, lifting a giant’s hand as he pledged to tell us the truth.

The prosecutor asked for his name.

His voice was even rougher than I remembered.

“My name is Donald ‘Gus’ Castor.”

The prosecutor wanted an address and life story.

“I live above Sweetgrass,” said Gus. “My cabin’s ten minutes north if you let the current do your work. I guide fishermen and hunters, goose and duck hunters mostly. And I trap in the winter. But mostly I just hunt for myself and fish to eat, and I know that river better than most, and this is quite an honor to be here today. Thank you.”

At that point, he threw a tooth-impoverished smile at the jury.

Decent souls melted a little ways. This was the pure, undiluted Gus at work.

With an all-business voice, the prosecutor asked about an evening that came and went a year-and-a-half ago.

“I was on the river,” Gus said.

“What were you doing on the river?”

“I was putting out a net.”

“Is net fishing allowed?” the prosecutor asked.

“Not now and not then,” Gus said. Then laughing, he added, “It’s what you might call poaching. Me? I think of it as supplying food for hungry bellies.”

Some in the courtroom laughed, and then recalling the circumstances, everybody shut up.

The prosecutor started tugging out details.

Gus confessed to quite a lot. He explained how there was a market for wild catfish and even carp, and sometimes there would be a bass or a few sauger in the catch. He said that the new game warden was giving everybody hell, which was why he was being careful that night. That’s why he was wearing night goggles.

“Where did you get the goggles?” asked the prosecutor.

“My boy used to be in the Army,” said Gus. “Jeremy’s overseas now, working for one of those private security firms. That’s how I get the best of everything. From my son.”

An excellent pair of goggles was put into evidence, and then the prosecutor wanted to know more about the game warden.

Gus said, “He’s just a kid, but he seems halfway bright. And if he knew what he was doing, he might drive up to Boomer pit, park on one of the high dunes and scope the river with half a moon shining.”

“So you were searching for the game warden?”

“Just like he was hunting for me. Yes, sir.”

“And what did you see parked beside the sandpit?”

“An old white van,” Gus said. “It was on the far bank, in the open, up where the sand was pitched steep. I didn’t need night goggles to see it. That’s how big and bright it looked.”

“Did you see any people?”

“Not right away, sir. No.”

“What did you do next?”

“I went down to the river to check my net and have a little beer. Oh, and check my stuff on eBay.” Then he turned to the jury, adding, “I’m a high-tech river rat. Just so you folks know.”

He laughed, and the jury laughed without shame.

The prosecutor asked what happened next.

“Yeah, I heard this sound. Like a scream, like what a rabbit makes when she’s grabbed up by a coyote. But it was louder and even worse, which is something. Rabbits have this god-awful scream.”

“What did you do?”

“Went up the bank to look.”

“And what did you see?”

“A boy,” Gus said. “The boy climbed out the back end of that van and walked down to the sandpit, got low and splashed his face ten or twenty times. Then he peeled off his shirt and his trousers and underwear and pulled different clothes from behind the driver’s seat. I watched him get dressed. Then he stuffed the first clothes in a grocery sack and threw them and a big knife off to the side.”

“And then?”

“He popped the clutch and put the van in neutral, and as it started rolling, he jumped free and watched it hit the water,” Gus said. “The van floated for a half minute, maybe. Then it sank. And I watched the kid all that time, using my goggles. He looked young to me. Some kind of tattoo was on his arm; I couldn’t tell what. But the face was pretty clear from where I was lying.”

“Do you see that face in this courtroom?” the prosecutor asked.

“Mostly,” Gus said.

Surprised, the prosecutor asked warily, “What do you mean, ‘mostly’?”

“He’s grown up since that night,” the old man said. Then one big hand lifted, and even though everybody knew where he was going to point, it was amazing how much tension kept churning inside that one overcrowded room.

The girl knows what her father expects. She stands under the boy’s arm and the eagle, smiling on command. The dirty white van is behind her, the remnants of a plumber’s name and phone number past her right ear. Lighting and composition could be better. But this is what the photographer deserves, ambushing two unwilling subjects as they escape from his townhouse. She is small and blonde like her mother, with her paternal grandmother’s strong features and stubborn nature. She wears jeans and flip-flops and a boy’s rude t-shirt and that perfect smile, unconscious but still fetching. Her father is leaving for Asia. Interesting lands and fascinating people need to be captured by his lens. He won’t see his daughter again. Twenty days from tonight, she dies inside that van, and this is the final photograph that her father will take of his most patient, most suffering subject.

An upscale sports bar was within walking distance of the courthouse, and Mitch had rented the party room, graciously inviting me to sit with his family and friends. The host picked up the tab for everything but hard liquor. I appreciated the old man’s charity. Lauren’s temper was his responsibility, and even more dangerous, her moments of elation. After that third day, my ex was ready to dance on a barroom table.

“This is going to put him on death row,” she said.

I was ignoring my curly fries. Mitch was nibbling at a Caesar’s salad. Seven years of marriage came into play. Without sounding sanctimonious, Mitch told his wife, “I think you’re probably right, dear.”

She looked at me. “Gus,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Thank you, Gus,” she called out.

Mitch watched me. Then with a careful voice, he said, “You know the man, don’t you?”

“Pretty well. He and my dad ran on the river together, back when they were kids.”

“And you know Gus’ son,” Lauren said.

“We were in the same class. But Jeremy and I weren’t close. Not like our fathers.”

“Well, thank you for the wonderful goggles, Jeremy!”

People were righteously pleased, but most of the room preferred to stare at me.

Mitch was a man who knew the value of grooming and poise. He took a deep breath, not quite wringing the worry out of his handsome features. “Well, this was obviously a good day,” he managed.

Lauren started drumming on the table. Hard.

“John, Jackson,” Mitch said. “Go to the bar and bring back enough for a celebration. Four pitchers should do the trick, don’t you think?”

His grown sons weren’t the most energetic fellows, but the promise of booze launched them.

“I don’t want beer,” Lauren said.

“Well how about a margarita, dear?”

“Perfect,” she said.

“You sit, I’ll get,” Mitch said. Then he looked at me, using a careful tone when he said, “You might want to order your own. My treat.”

I warily went with him.

The bar was busy for mid-week. Patrons ate fried vegetables and fried meat, watching walls filled with televisions. Basketball was the dominate sport, but one raucous group was living and dying with some NHL game.

“I’ve heard rumors about our witness,” Mitch said, touching my forearm.

Mitch wasn’t the touching sort.

“You mean Gus,” I said.

“Yes.”

Insurance was a local industry, and Mitch was one of its titans. He was also a skilled golfer and an expert at making small talk at country club parties. When he had a rumor, it almost certainly came from the top.

“Three weeks after the murder, Gus came forward,” he said. “Three weeks. Of course the police asked why it took him so long. The old fellow claimed that he didn’t want to be involved and was afraid to get a poaching charge. But the granddaughter of an old friend was dead, and so there he was.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I can’t reveal my source,” Mitch said.

“I don’t want to know it.”

“But the police assume that he was hiding something worse than nets.”

Possibilities popped into my head. Guns and dead whooping cranes. Or bigger guns, maybe.

“Do you know specifics?” I asked.

“No.”

“Does Elijah’s lawyer suspect any of this?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

Mitch nodded, watching my eyes. “The authorities didn’t have the forensics to convict, so they made a conscious effort not to ruin the only witness. And besides, this is the defense council’s first murder case. The man means well, but he doesn’t know his business.”

I crossed my arms and then let them drop again.

“I hope you don’t share any of this,” he said.

“I won’t.”

“Particularly with Lauren,” he said.

I couldn’t have agreed more vigorously.

Mitch drifted off to the bar. I didn’t feel like moving, so I stayed where I was, defending that little patch of floor. I could have stayed there forever. My thoughts were jangled and stupid, and in the end, utterly useless. But that’s what I was doing when the tenor of the room changed, slowly at first and then rapidly. A bartender sprinted past, changing channels. Then someone behind me shouted, “Volume. Turn up the damned volume!”

Games vanished. News feeds replaced balls and pucks, and even the hockey fans didn’t complain for long. A pale, profoundly bald man was standing before cameras and lights. The words “Baghdad” and “Live” were stuck in the corners. The bald man was smiling. He wanted to say something, and every reporter in the room wanted him to speak. But there were too many questions and too many high emotions, and another man felt obligated to step forward, shouting with Arab accent, ordering the room to please allow the honored guest to have his say.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” the bald man began.

I recognized the voice.

“No, I don’t know what happened to me,” he said.

In Baghdad, nervous mutterings fell back into silence.

Then the man said, “I’m sorry. But I don’t know where I was. I remember being on the ground, on my stomach, with a gun at my head. Then I was on the same ground but naked. Naked and there wasn’t any gun. And the man holding me prisoner was gone. And it was evening instead of afternoon, cool instead of hot, and I stood up and right away started to shiver.”

A barmaid was watching the closest television.

I joined her, and she asked me, “Do you know what’s going on?”

To my considerable surprise, I did know.

“His name is Foster,” I said. “He was an AP photographer. About ten years ago, he was shot and killed in Iraq . . . ”

Yet the television kept insisting these were live images.

“I don’t know where I was when I was dead,” said the big hearty voice that I couldn’t forget. “But all things considered, I feel pretty good.”

The bushy eyebrows were a distinctive trait, but for some reason they haven’t returned. The man sits on a stool in what is obviously a photographer’s studio. He wears khaki shorts and sandals but no shirt. The old scar from bypass surgery makes a bold statement on his chest. Despite doctors’ warnings, the man is smoking again. He holds the cigar clamped in his teeth, furiously blowing smoke into the lights. A dense mat of new brown hair covers his scalp and tiny slivers of red show where the razor cut his chin just minutes ago. He was making himself ready for this portrait. Always the photographer, he claims that the cuts were intentional, giving his face the necessary mortality. But there is no such monster as Death. That is what Simon Foster shows the world. There might be other realms and other realities, unmapped and mysterious, but the firm and eternal grip of Nothingness has been expelled, and probably forever.

Lauren was crying and crying.

She hadn’t been this happy in years, if ever.

Court was out. The jury had been sent home for the weekend. I was at Lauren’s house, at Mitch’s house, eating delivery pizza while watching another freshly minted documentary about the Elysium Chamber. Gordon Tran was the investor, the sparkplug—a Texan billionaire who saw a problem and found the means to fix it. People were far too compassionate with the murderers of the world, Gordon maintained. Capital punishment was the reasonable response to cruel, soulless men. He claimed that he wasn’t a cruel man. Indeed, Gordon seemed affable and warm, rationally discussing the nature of evil and the concerns of soft-hearted souls who couldn’t put down a psychopath with the same tools used on a dying poodle.

That’s why Gordon found himself a pair of bright fellows—tech-savants netted from the wilds of Seattle. And that’s why he spent two hundred million of his own dollars in the development and testing of what was the most famous machine in the world.

Lauren pulled her knees to her face, giggling and weeping in equal measure.

Now the tech-boys got to talk. Minimal edits gave the piece a natural feel, but the camera pulled in too close, proving the boy on the left still had pimples. He explained how the Elysium Chamber was designed to take an object, living or otherwise, and obliterate it as quickly and efficiently as physics allowed. Nobody wanted to divulge details. Several hefty patents were riding on their ingenuity. But the boys admitted to borrowing techniques from experimental fusion reactors and high-energy cyclotrons. A clean means to end life was the goal, avoiding pain and the associated guilt that comes with inflicting suffering. Then the pimple boy admitted that they went into this business really only hoping to find a better means to generate power.

“Except the reactions aren’t as rich as we hoped,” he confessed. “The Elysium isn’t going to replace coal or windmills, not any time soon.”

Lauren grinned at me.

“What?” I asked.

“Are you happy?”

What was I? “Cautious,” I said. “I’m not letting myself get crazy.”

“That’s so like you,” she said, laughing at the doubter.

Several months ago, Gordon and his boys started searching for the means to test their machine. But even nations who routinely executed criminals were shy about experimental electric chairs. China and Russia refused. Saudi Arabia and various African nations refused. Even Texas took a pass. But officials in Iraq were willing to help—a suitcase full of cash helping sway opinions, I assumed. A condemned prisoner was selected. Captured last year and convicted just days ago, he was an exceptionally bad man—a known terrorist who had personally murdered dozens of civilians, including one AP photographer named Simon Foster.

The world’s only operational Elysium Chamber was a bulky contraption full of capacitors and fancy machines hovering just above absolute zero. It was flown to Baghdad last week, and after some last-minute negotiations, the prisoner was led inside a closet-sized space and told to remain motionless. But that final instruction was unnecessary. The man felt nothing but the typical self-important emotions of a psychopath facing execution. And this was a very bad man. The inventors and Gordon insisted on repeating that point. “The worst of the worst.” There was no noise inside the Elysium. The only light was a pale blue glow from a tiny overhead vent. One moment, the killer was there, and then he simply ceased to be. An exceptionally busy picosecond shattered every long molecule in his body, and electrons were stripped free, and the composition of his mind and thoughts was so thoroughly randomized that it was as if the man had never been.

Foster was murdered in the hills above Mosul. He discovered himself naked and alone on the slope where he died, and he nearly died a second time of exposure before a Kurdish patrol stumbled across him.  Twenty-three men and two women were reborn, but Foster was the face known in the West. Sadly eighteen of the others were killed by the spring chill or the kinds of mishaps that are inevitable when young soldiers see naked men approaching out of the darkness.

Gordon Tran and his cohorts were sorry for those losses, but how could any sane mind anticipate this kind of event?

“All right,” the interviewer said. “The world wants to know and deserves to know: What is the explanation for all this?”

Without hesitation, the Texan said, “It is God’s gracious heart at work.”

“It has to be,” my ex-wife whispered, grabbing up her husband’s hand.

But the tech-boys wouldn’t let the Supreme Deity into their machine. “We built an accidental time machine,” one of them proposed. “End a murder’s life that quickly, that perfectly, and the souls that he killed are instantly teleported back into the living world.”

The pimple boy glanced at his partner while shaking his head.

“You don’t agree,” the interviewer pressed.

“I’m avoiding hard, fast opinions,” said that lucky genius. “But there is an interesting middle ground here. I think. Intelligent, sophisticated forces might be at work in the universe. They’re gods or aliens, or both. My guess? They’re very advanced aliens. And like all conscious beings, they value some things more than other things, and preserving human souls might just be an activity that powerful good entities would wish to do.”

“Preserve them how?” the interviewer pressed.

“Well, maybe like photographs,” the pimple boy replied. “But these are photographs accurate to the nearest atom and kept in some very safe place. All we need are the proper tools to retrieve them.”

For me, that was the riveting beautiful perfect moment.

I grabbed up my ex’s other hand, sick from happiness when I told her, “You’re right. I know you’re right. We’re going to get our little girl back.”

The house stands behind a weathered For Sale sign. The yard is weedy, the front storm door is missing, and particle board covers the living room window. Three children and their mother sit on the curb. Five-year-old boys smile at their world, identical faces looking like eggs painted with happy eyes and happy mouths. Mom is as skinny as the day she died. The smooth scalp and prominent cheekbones lend her the appearance of a vigorous cancer patient, and while she isn’t as happy as her sons, she does seem relieved by circumstances that she couldn’t have predicted. Her twelve-year-old daughter is the worrisome subject. Looking over her shoulder, the girl glances at a house nobody wants to buy. In profile, she appears nervous and sorry and scared. Most of the awful things in the family happened to her. At her feet is the framed portrait of a smiling man who resembles the twins but not the girl. That man was executed three days ago. Three days ago, the victims came back to life. With her right foot, the girl has stamped on the portrait, leaving her stepfather smiling his way through a tangle of bright lines.

The defense was brief and dispirited and wrapped around ploys. They didn’t dare bring up the angry, inarticulate boy, but Elijah’s mother was brought on the stand, weeping while describing her family’s hard lives. Then she tried to offer up a new, previously unknown suspect: Kaylee was alive when her son left her, but he also claimed that someone was hiding in the trees beside the turnoff. He didn’t actually see anyone, but he heard sounds and didn’t think it was a deer, it had to be human . . . and at that point the prosecutor had enough with this second-hand nonsense. His objections were allowed, and pieces of her testimony were excluded.

Four hours of deliberation resulted in a first-degree murder verdict. A few spectators were despondent. Mom and various relatives sobbed as the deputies took away the convicted man. But the room was dominated by happy people acting like good sports. We didn’t cheer.  We didn’t congratulate the prosecuting attorney or shout out our thanks to the jury. Smiles and little nods of appreciation were enough, and then our group paraded across the street to the party room already stocked with chicken wings and broccoli florets and several species of beer. My plan was to test a few beers, but the press ambushed us. One lady reporter mentioned that the governor was calling an emergency session of lawmakers, directing them to rewrite the laws concerning the definition of murder and the method of capital punishment. She asked for my biased opinion. It was good news, I allowed, but I was too superstitious to gloat. The world had one working Elysium and only a handful more were in production. I smiled, and sounding like a politician, I made noise about hoping for smart fair laws that would leave society in a better place.

The reporter had brought along a photographer who didn’t look old enough to buy. After taking too many pictures of me, he confessed that he would love nothing more than to do my job.

Offering the usual clichés about patience and perseverance, I continued my quest for beer.

But there was a problem: My parents had joined me for the final day. Dad pulled me aside, warning that my poor mother was tired, tired, tired. The woman looked ready for a long happy party, but that wasn’t the point. Dad was the exhausted one, and I drove them home. We listened to radio all the way. The local news began with Kaylee, which was a fine moment, and then the announcer mentioned that our little state held more than a hundred prisoners convicted of first and second-degree murder, some of their crimes decades old.

The air was thick with implications.

“Coming back after all that time,” Dad complained. “Everybody you know dead, and the world strange. Talk about taking the tough road.”

I delivered two old people to their room at the Manor. Then I drove to the Super G, buying my first six-pack from that venerable establishment in nearly twenty years. The Sweetgrass city park was down by the river with its sandbars and driftwood and geese, and I drank and walked the shoreline while the sun set behind me. I was happy. But it was the kind of joy where I had to keep reminding myself that I felt this way, and I had to play with the happiness, testing it with my thoughts as if I didn’t quite trust it.

Sweetgrass Creek was running hard that evening, its water hitting the river and then spinning. Two different colors of mud tried hard not to mix, and some child’s ball had gotten free and floated out on the whirlpool—a bright blue ball with yellow specks, buoyant as a dream. I watched that ball dance on the spinning water. It never took the same path twice yet managed to avoid heading out onto the big water. This seemed very lovely and even magical to me, and after five minutes, I went back to my car for more beer and a camera.

My phone had been off since morning. I saw it on the car seat and made the mistake of sitting down, reengaging with the world. Dozens of people had left kind words and clumsy congratulations. I opened a beer and drank half of it while listening to messages, and then I saw the time and turned on the local news, waiting to hear my daughter’s name again. Except the script had changed. Shortly after leaving the courtroom, Elijah had either stumbled or purposefully thrown his forehead against a table corner. He was recovering now; the danger was past. But following new protocols involving prisoners even suspected of murder, Elijah was being placed on a 24-hour suicide watch.

I finished my beer and opened a third and then grabbed the camera and went down to the stream’s mouth. But the blue and yellow ball had made its escape. I couldn’t see any sign of it out on the evening water.

Suddenly, I was nothing but sad.

My phone was still on, tucked inside my pocket. It rang and I didn’t look, and after another minute or two, it rang again.

The caller let me see his name.

Gordon Tran.

The eye can’t count the faces and feel certain about the number. Perhaps fifty Brazilians stand together, no room to spare. They were dead for eleven months, killed in a club fire set by a man who had issues involving a certain girl. By chance, the girl survived the blaze. Alone, she sits on the ground before the others, the flesh on her pretty face incinerated by the fantastic heat.

Her companions are not scarred. The injuries that played a role in your killing are always excluded from your rebirth. There is logic to the rule, but why old chicken pox pits have to come back with you is a mystery. And why should you be able to keep your fingernails and teeth but not your hair? And how can the body be conjured from nothing, but not a good winter coat that might keep you from dying from exposure?

These fifty people are wearing very short hair and good clothes, each dressed for a night of rum and dance.

The burnt girl can’t grow hair anymore. But her lovely body wears a fine little dress that act as powerful counterpoints to that mangled, wasted face.

One of my photographs was riding the lobby wall. The matting wasn’t the best and the proportions were wrong for the allotted space, but this was no mood piece intended for a corporate headquarters. My mood was what mattered here. I stood in the middle of the lobby, shamelessly admiring that young woman standing before a tall iron gate, some quirk of light causing her face and her nun’s habit to merge with a multitude of shadows. There was magic here, but the shot was all luck, no genius. That’s what made it so intriguing for me. I could have taken ten thousand more photographs of the woman and never reproduce that smiling mouth or those rich, soulful eyes. And then to lump tragedy on beauty, six weeks before the image was published, the nun was raped and cut to pieces by young men wielding machetes.

I stared, and the receptionist made one quiet call.

An assistant appeared at my side, saying, “Whenever you’re ready, sir.”

He and I walked into the back, and for the third time in my life, I shook a billionaire’s hand.

“Call me Gordon,” he said.

“I’m Shawn.”

The assistant was dismissed. My host was a handsome intense and rather short fellow with black hair and a tendency to put on weight. Playing against stereotypes, he was younger than a Texan tycoon should be, and his father was Vietnamese. There wasn’t any cowboy hat in view, but he had the boots and the accent and a tailored jacket thrown over an extra chair, allowing him to roll up his silk sleeves. Gordon struck a pose beside a tall window, and I got ready for an assault of country charm. But he surprised me, skipping past the pleasant noise about my flight and how thankful he was for my time. Looking out the office window, he said, “I have always been curious. What did you think of the nun?”

“Honestly, we barely spoke.”

“Yet the portrait made the cover,” he said.

“She wasn’t part of any plan,” I said. “I saw her and asked for her time, and she gave me two minutes.”

Gordon nodded. “You know, her killers are in prison now.”

I didn’t know that.

“They were arrested last week. The world doesn’t realize it yet, but I do business in that part of the world. I have friends. They tell me that one of the men feared for his soul, so he confessed and turned in the others, and there’s going to be a trial and at least four executions. My intention is to fly the Elysium into that country, at no charge, just to help cure that one enormous evil.”

I didn’t know how to respond.

Gordon stared through glass. “I think you should take her photograph. Once she comes back.”

Walking to the window, I heard myself admit, “I’d like to do that.”

“And I’ll pay you,” he said.

Grass worthy of a golf course led down to intricate gardens and a rock-lined lake. But neither of us was interested in the view.

“In fact,” Gordon said, “I want to hire you, Shawn. I want you for a special project. Because I admire your work and always have.”

Flattery makes the face warm.

“And because of the specifics of your life just now,” he added.

“Kaylee,” I said.

“Your legislators did a fine job with that bill. There won’t be any serious legal challenges. Your state can start the executions this summer, if you can just find one working Elysium.”

I looked at his eyes. “What’s my project?”

“A catalog of the reborn,” Gordon said. “I don’t know specifics yet. It’s hard to imagine this being a spectacular success on living room tables. But an official book from people close to the miracle . . . well, I think there’s a need, and I can’t imagine anyone that I’d rather have working on it than you.”

“Well,” I said. “Thank you.”

“You’ll have total control over your subjects, of course, and a considerable expense account too.”

I nodded, letting his thunderbolt work its way through me.

Gordon patted me on the back, as if we were old pals. “And of course you’ll have to include Kaylee in this project.”

“Absolutely,” I said, fighting tears. “And you’re right. Nobody would be better for this job than me.”

Her face hides in shadow, making the body more real as a consequence. Sunshine flows across a long lovely woman. She sits on cushions and wears nothing. The breasts seem too large for such a thin frame, nipples swollen and dark. There is no pubic hair, and the legs stretch on and on, feet vanishing inside a second pool of darkness. The left hand rests on the swollen belly. The baby that has been waiting ten years to be born, and the reborn mother waits for the next hard kick.

The stroke came during a heated game of pitch. My father won his bid, and then cards and sun tea and his limp body were suddenly spilling across the floor. I was at home when Mom called. The future widow was camping in the waiting room at the Med Center, knitting socks and watching the news. I asked how Dad was. “Stable,” she said, sounding like any doctor, self-assured yet devoid of real information.

I sat beside her. Inflation was the news of the moment.

“Where do you go next?” she asked.

“Nowhere, if he stays sick.”

She put the sock down. “Don’t worry about us, Shawn.”

“Brazil,” I said.

“You’ve been there before.”

“The Amazon, last time.”

That deserved a little laugh. “I never imagined you’d become the world traveler,” she said. “As a boy, you seemed happiest when you were home.”

I nodded in agreement.

She returned to her knitting, and after a tangle of commercials, we got into the latest Elysium news: Five Russian heavy-lift aircraft had been fitted with the world’s only working chambers, and the armada was crossing the globe, dropping into civilized cities and infamous hellholes where prisoners were queued up and ready to be executed.

Mom didn’t seem to be listening. But after counting stitches, she looked at me. “So what is a murderous act?”

I wasn’t sure what to say.

“Oh, I understand the obvious cases,” she continued. “But I’m talking about everything else.”

“Combat doesn’t seem to count,” I said.

“And I think I understand that,” she said. “Soldiers try to kill each other. Where murder is the stealing of a defenseless life.”

Iraq was providing a rich stream of data. An insurgent shoots ten soldiers in a firefight, and the next morning he chops the head off one prisoner. When the insurgent walks into the Elysium, only one person returns. How can you murder someone who is actively trying to kill you? But what if a second insurgent lobs a mortar round into a crowded schoolhouse? Put him into the Elysium, and sometimes the school children are reborn. But the innocent are just as likely to remain dead—because it was blind killing at a distance, maybe, or maybe because of the corrosive effects of being inside the war zone. Or the killer’s mind is the essential key, his perceptions and his attendant guilt playing into these cosmic legalities.

“It doesn’t matter now,” said Mom. “But just last week, your father and I were discussing these questions.”

“Why doesn’t it matter now?”

She smiled slightly. “My parents lived into their late nineties.”

I nodded.

“But you never knew your paternal grandparents.”

Dad felt lucky to make seventy.

“So your father and I were talking,” she repeated. “What if he contracted some incurable cancer?”

“You’re thinking what?” I began.

“A murderous act,” she said, shaking her head. “But we’re not talking about cancer now. And I doubt that doctors in twenty years would be able to repair the damage inside your father’s head, even if he happened to come back from the dead.”

The man is bald and ancient and probably strong despite his age. He has a wrestler’s shoulders and a wrestler’s wary stance. At one hundred and two, this is the last living guard from the Polish camps, and there is no time to waste. Maybe the prisoner is a bull, but someday an artery will burst or a mild infection will claim his soul. Perhaps that’s why the Israeli soldier grabs the old man by an elbow while the other hand points the way. A gray plain stretches on before them, ending with a mammoth plane surrounded by power cables and auxiliary generators.

“Run,” says the soldier’s free hand. “There is no time, run . . . !”

“We were lucky,” Lauren said.

I thought I understood. There was a script and I made the usual agreeable noises.

But then she said, “No, I mean his suicide attempt. That was a real blessing.”

I have never liked the word “blessing.”

“Are you there, Shawn?”

I was sitting in the Pinkberry at LAX, gathering myself for the long next flight. “I’m here, sure.”

“I’ve been thinking about this,” she said. “Obviously, Elijah failed to kill himself. Or maybe it was an accident, taking that fall. But nobody wants any other accidents. He’s on full-watch status, around the clock, drug-enforced and someone always in the room.”

The last month was rife with scares and disasters. Jailhouse hangings were always in the news, and that fire outside Kiev just incinerated thirteen proven murderers. As a result, more prisoners were being wrapped in soft restraints, cameras and eyes making sure that the treasures were kept safe.

“And here’s another reason we’re blessed,” Lauren said. “If he’s a suicide risk, we might get pushed into the first group.”

In six weeks, Elysium #2 was going to be flown into town, sitting at the airport for three days and two nights.

“Mitch says we’re in the top thirty.”

And I finally saw where this conversation was headed.

“How many executions can be done in one day?”

“Six to nine,” I said. “The synchronization needs to be recalibrated after every use, because if something is wrong—”

“Don’t even think that,” Lauren said.

Both of us were thinking about nothing else.

“Anyway,” she said. “I’m doing whatever I can to get us moved up the list.”

Old murderers and men with multiple victims were at the top while people sitting in prison for manslaughter could rest easy for the time being, carrying souls killed in barroom brawls and traffic accidents gone ugly.

Lauren described her pleas to the governor, trying to push our case past the triple homicides and such.

I didn’t say anything, waiting.

“Your new friend,” she said. “Gordon.”

“You want me to talk to him,” I said.

“The man has pull.”

“Not as much as you’d think.” But I was already formulating how to pose my request.

Silence bothered Lauren. “Where are you going today?”

“Cambodia.”

She hesitated. Then with a small careful voice, she said, “I can’t even imagine how wonderful that’s going to be.”

The camera is too distant to show faces or the details of any single body. What impresses is the wash of bare flesh, pale brown and lovely. Hundreds of bodies stand where they died, close as lovers. One man and his machine gun managed this slaughter. That man died moments ago, and aid workers now stand at the margins of the clearing, shouting instructions and encouragement. There is no noise in the photograph, no motion. What impresses the eye is the sheer quantity of flesh that has arisen from no definite place, profligate and eternal.

The reborn were entitled to act lost, particularly those gone for decades. But quick and dirty studies couldn’t find any medical conditions. Psychiatric files and personality inventories showed them to be the same people as before. Cognitive skills held steady. Physically, they were precise duplicates of their old selves. Fifty years of nonexistence didn’t change a person. But those perfectly reproduced minds had to absorb quite a lot, often including memories of their own deaths, and what held the most influence was the master to us all: Character.

The young woman died in 1969, in Michigan. A teenage boy living three blocks from her house dreamed of sex with a pretty corpse, and slipping into her kitchen while she bringing in groceries, he struck her from behind with a ball-peen hammer. She never saw him. She didn’t feel pain, and the boy was never a suspect. But ages later, in Oregon, one old sexual predator with stage IV lung cancer was turned to nothingness.

Millie was dead, and then she woke as she died, on her feet, wondering where her eggs and canned peas were hiding. She was standing in the same kitchen as before, surrounded by new appliances and granite countertops and a young couple eating Fruit Loops while reading the news on their iPhones.

Three people screamed.

One of them was quicker to adapt. Millie put on a robe supplied by the panicky wife, and sitting at the new table, she picked up one of the phones, asking questions about the world and her place. She seemed interested and amused. The couple was sure that she wasn’t paying close attention to their answers. Yet Millie absorbed everything and came to terms with the basics, and on her second attempt she managed to call her old phone number, apologizing to a gruff man on the other end of the line.

The woman I met was eight weeks back to life and thriving. She had her own iPhone and a secondhand MacBook, and she was learning to blog and already had made hundreds of good friends on Facebook. At first, money was a problem. Her family was dead, and there were no social programs aimed at the reborn. But pretty women in her situation commanded interest from the world. Millie picked the more personal, less sexual job: She was a modern oracle. Strangers paid to sit with her in coffee shops and public parks, telling their life stories when they weren’t listening to her practical, decidedly unmystical advice about a wide range of topics.

A few of the reborn told big stories about heaven and angels. Not Millie. She didn’t channel dead people’s thoughts or claim any special vantage point on the universe. Her preferred method was to sit, patiently absorbing everything, and it didn’t take long for me to realize how good she was at her job.

“I know about you, about your circumstances,” she said.

My plan for the day was to photograph half a dozen reborn faces, and then move on. She happened to be my first.

“I Googled you,” Millie said, a measured smile showing. “Ten days to go, if the schedule holds.”

“It will,” I promised myself.

She lived in a tiny studio apartment. A big aquarium filled with cheap happy goldfish divided the room in half, and my plan was to shoot through the glass, Millie sitting on the other side, artfully out of focus.

“Would it bother you?”

“Would what bother me?” I asked, fiddling with the lights.

“Can we talk about your daughter?”

“There’s no reason why not.”

In her late twenties, the woman had smooth pale brown skin, her features embracing two races. I didn’t mention it, but she seemed perfectly suited for our modern, mixed-heritage world.

“I read the articles.”

“Which articles?”

“About Kaylee and the trial, and most everything I could find about you. I thought I should know the man who wanted to photograph me.”

I stopped working and began watching her.

Millie was wearing new clothes and fake jewelry, long thin hands turning her beloved phone. Horrible as it seemed, I could see why some young pud-pulling jerk would want this woman. She had a special kind of prettiness, sharp and happy and effortless.

“Do you think it’ll work?”

“The Elysium?”

She didn’t react, watching me.

“The technology’s solid, even if we don’t understand how it works,” I said. “And they haven’t had equipment failures in weeks. Operators know what they’re doing now, and they don’t screw up.”

She waited, feeding me a perfect dose of silence. And then this quirky counselor sighed and said, “I thought so.”

“What do you think?”

“You have concerns.”

“Did I say that?”

She said, “Doubts.”

I didn’t talk.

With just her eyes, she told me that she was worried about me, or maybe she was afraid for my dead daughter. Or maybe Millie didn’t know anything, throwing out a worrisome expression that might put more money in her jar. That’s what I was hoping when she turned away, smiling while speaking quietly to the fish.

“Yeah, maybe we’re both wrong,” she said with a charitable voice. “There’s always that hope to fall back on.”

Blurring slips of gold wrap around her face, while glass and water and more glass diminish her. Photographer and camera have conspired to achieve an artful lack of focus, and the result is at least as rich as hoped for, and it is utterly wrong. The image is a lie. Nothing about the subject is ethereal. The soul behind that face is substantial, bony and bloody, and the pretentious image does nothing but feed the sentimental wishes of other souls who are just as bony and just as bloody as she is, but fervently, hopelessly wish they could be otherwise.

“I don’t anticipate trouble, but this is a field without experts,” the man warned us. “The Elysium might be a miracle, but the machine is rooted in the real world, subject to demands and limitations. You might not agree with every decision we make or every action that we don’t take. But our choices are based on what we believe will help your loved ones in the only way that matters, which is in the long run. So please, whatever happens, please bear with us.”

The third day of executions was beginning. The airport’s least-used gate had been dedicated to us—several dozen relatives sitting in the minimally padded chairs, at five in the morning, paying strict attention to a silver-haired FBI agent who had given this same speech for several months straight.

“My first priority is the health and wellbeing of the reborn,” he said. “You’ve been given our schedule. Our schedule is built around the demands of manpower and the locations of the murders. An execution involving multiple homicides at uncertain locations will be a lot more complicated than single deaths inside a known room. Part of what I do is to utilize our law enforcement resources to their limit, but no farther. And no schedule is immune to revision. For example, yesterday’s forecast called for thunderstorms in the afternoon and evening, and that’s why I flipped the order of executions. People who died outdoors were given priority, and no, those rains didn’t materialize, but we had one chance to do this right, and I’m mostly happy about yesterday. Right up until the end.

“About last night: One of the quantum-pulse timers needed to be replaced. This happens now and again, and we have safeguards. Don’t worry. But the repair forced us to push one execution back to this morning. That’s why the Campbell family is with us again, and I thank them for their patience. Rest assured, ladies, once our routine maintenance is finished, your folks will be our first priority.”

Two plump and pretty middle-aged sisters sat at the back of the lounge, smiling gamely despite the shared exhaustion. In a parade of sordid, pointless deaths, their case stood out: Twenty-five years ago, a coke addict and his underage girlfriend invaded the family farm, looking for cash and car keys. Presumably the girls would have died too, but they had stayed the night at a neighbor’s house—a spur-of-the-moment decision that never stopped defining their lives.

Our FBI agent continued. “Every convicted prisoner is safe and secure. Rest assured.  But if a murderer starts to show signs of cardiac trouble or some other life-threatening emergency, I won’t hesitate. I’ll yank one killer from the Elysium and replace him with that sick man. I have that authority, and believe me I’m not waiting for second opinions from a more optimistic physician.”

“We don’t have to worry about that,” Lauren whispered.

Elijah was young and strong, she meant.

“The weather looks excellent,” the agent said. “And we don’t have equipment failures on back-to-back days. So I think there’s a good possibility that every execution will be managed in a timely fashion.”

Smiles cut loose. I studied strangers, sharing the joy. Lauren took a deep breath, glancing at her silenced phone. Mitch had told every woman in his office not to come to work today. “His ladies” were scattered across the county, ready to start combing back roads and woodlots that the police and sheriff’s departments would ignore on the first pass.

The agent paused, but he wasn’t finished. His first concern was dusting the desk beside him with a careful finger. Then he said, “I am not a religious man. I don’t intend to ever be. But I can’t express how much I enjoy the work that I’m allowed to do every day. There are challenges and disappointments, and yes, some tragedies. But we are learning valuable lessons as this process evolves, and thank you for your patience and your understanding, and in my nonreligious fashion, I wish each of you the best of every blessing.”

Kaylee is a round face inside the hospital blanket. The flash from the camera annihilates shadows while the unnaturally blue eyes gaze up at a round piece of glass and metal that means nothing to her. Once that first photograph is finished, she will cry cry cry. Twenty minutes old, and miserable, and is this how her entire life is going to be?

There were no significant delays, but we were last on the list, and little delays and other conspiracies pushed us deeper into the evening.

At lunch, Lauren promised, “We’re going to be jumped ahead of the others.”

I said nothing.

My reticence angered her. “They won’t want Kaylee returning in the dark,” she claimed.  “With the sun down, with her being pretty and female . . . ”

“Enough of that,” I said.

The airport’s lone restaurant was our headquarters. The staff knew who we were, but this was the third day of hopeful families and friends occupying their chairs. We weren’t special to them, and I was glad for that. A back booth and watching the occasional plane suited my mood. We couldn’t see the big Russian freighter parked at the north end of the terminal, and sometimes I could almost forget where I was, imagining myself waiting for a flight that would carry me away.

The afternoon coffee was especially miserable. Lauren went to the bathroom, and my mother phoned.

“Did you hear about the Campbells?”

“No.”

“They didn’t come back,” she said. “That man didn’t kill their parents.”

I felt suddenly cold.

“I knew Bernice. And I met Hank once or twice. They lived near Hartsburg, in this beautiful old house.”

“So the girlfriend did it,” I said sadly.

“And I remember when she was paroled,” Mom continued. “God, I used to feel sorry for that child. Fifteen years old when it happened, and she seemed like such a victim. I was glad she got out of jail. But nobody knew she was carrying those two souls with her.”

Lauren reappeared, talking to Mitch for the fiftieth time today.

“I just thought you’d want to know,” Mom said, and she hung up.

Lauren sat and said, “Bye,” to Mitch. Then she noticed me. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing about us,” I said.

She accepted that easily enough. And once again, she said, “I have this feeling. We’ll get bumped up at least one slot, maybe two.”

“Hope so.”

Hope means nothing, and I have zero faith in prayer. But Lauren’s conviction seemed to hold sway over the universe. We were eating dinner in our usual booth. Mitch and his youngest son had come to share the anticipation. Alone with me, Lauren was usually careful with her enthusiasms. But a husband deserves honest daydreams. She promised Mitch that life was going to be different when Kaylee was back. Lauren was going let her daughter redecorate her bedroom however she wanted, or maybe she could take one end of the basement and they would give her a budget and let her go wild. And they’d buy the horse that she wanted two years ago, and of course there’d be a new car when she turned sixteen. Everything was possible, except for fighting, Lauren swearing that she wasn’t going to battle with the girl, not for a very long time.

“Yeah, two days maybe,” joked Jackson.

And Lauren was in such a spectacular mood that she didn’t snarl. She even managed to laugh off the implication, changing topics.

“It isn’t fair,” she said.

Nobody dared ask, “What isn’t fair?” We knew.

“They know where the woman died,” she said, discussing the murder waiting ahead of us. “Inside her own house, and the vacant lot is still there.”

Three men silently contemplated their barely edible meals.

“It’s going to be dark soon,” Lauren said.

“We’ve got time,” I said.

I couldn’t ruin her euphoria, but there was a hard edge to her stare.

Mitch said, “Darling.”

He was better with that word than I ever was.

“You asked me,” he said. “When this began, you ordered me to keep you where you needed to be.”

She looked out at our runway. “I’m fine.”

I was thinking about the Campbell family and those fat lucky sisters, and in another moment I was dreaming of a long flight to the South Pole.

Then our FBI agent appeared. I assumed that he was here for the pot roast, but our county sheriff was tagging along, and after a brief conference with phones and each other, they headed for us.

“I wish we could give you more of a heads-up,” the agent said, sounding miserably sorry about something.

Everybody in the booth braced for disaster.

“But the prisoner next in line is talking,” he said. “He claims that he killed half a dozen old ladies over the years. In Kansas City and Tulsa, and we don’t know what’s true. But we don’t want to execute until we have the right people in place, and we’re ready to use the Elysium right now.”

“Now,” I echoed.

The expert act was fraying at the edges. With a sheepish little smile, he said to me and to Lauren, “We are going to do this as soon as we can, folks. So please, we need you to drop what you’re doing here and come with us.”

The baby is small and a little too thin perhaps but he seems happy, cradled in the arms of that young mother who holds him for the first time. The view is from behind and above. The mother’s face is invisible, but not her belly. A great horizontal gouge has been cut into her flesh, revealing a pearly belt of fat between the world and her womb, and there is an awful lot of blood, and the baby hasn’t been cleaned off perfectly. But he is a beautiful mess and his mother might be smiling or weeping, or she could be grimacing in terror. There is no way to know. Without a face, she is every mother who has suddenly and irrevocably been given custody over another life.

The big Russian machine sat on the tarmac, its nose riding on hinges, lifting high to expose the black interior of the plane’s enormous body. Our shuttle bus was unavailable, carting away the witnesses to the delayed execution. A thousand miles of concrete needed to be crossed on foot. Lauren wasn’t running. I wasn’t running. But there was hurry in our gaits, matched by the FBI agent and sheriff and then several subordinates who needed orders or advice or maybe just encouragement. I wasn’t listening to the conversations, but I noticed the spent, frazzled faces. These grueling long days were just about finished. In our group, only Lauren looked rested.  Focused and coldly happy, she thought to call up one of Mitch’s people, telling her, “Walk the long windbreak south of the turnoff. Do that first, if she doesn’t show at the gravel pit.”

The State Patrol was responsible for the lake. Kaylee didn’t drown, but divers were standing ready, just in case she had died while the van slid out onto the water.

Lauren stopped talking, listening to a crackling voice.

“Ma’am,” said the sheriff. “That needs to be turned off, ma’am.  Please.”

“Just a minute,” she told him, one finger lifted high. Then she told her phone, “No, this is best. This is perfect. We don’t know where she’ll be, but I know exactly where that shit is going to die.”

Everybody heard her. Nobody reacted. The professionals must have heard worse, but suddenly the sheriff needed to check with his search teams, and he peeled away. The FBI people stopped at the little village of trailers standing on the tarmac. Pulling out his phone, the gray-haired agent used a marksman’s aim, pointing us toward the plane. “Go on, I’ll catch up,” he said. “I want to see how it’s going in KC.”

Lauren shut down her phone, and after showing me a small wink, she said, “Really, it couldn’t be a nicer evening.”

The air was dry and warm, but not miserable like late August can be. I couldn’t help but see that as a sign. And our new timetable was another grand omen. After so much anticipation and worry, our rushing felt like a gift. Suddenly I was a religious man, splendidly cocooned in God’s love; and then an airport van pulled up in front of the giant aircraft, and down stepped a stout, spent woman.

Public executions could be ugly, undignified. Our state reached that consensus more than a century ago. But every legal death needed its witnesses, if only to make sure that nothing too sordid happened. A condemned man was entitled to two witnesses of his choosing. Elijah’s mother was one, and she looked ready to keel over. Then his lawyer stepped down, an arm dropping on her shoulder while he dipped his head, offering a handful of inadequate words.

The press corps had sent three bodies, none allowed to work. The reporters hurried past Elijah’s people and up the steel ramp into the plane, and then I heard the mother’s crying over the last hundred feet of open runway.

Lauren muttered a hard word.

Using my long legs, I put distance between myself and everybody. A plain bedraggled lady on her best day, Elijah’s mother was a shambles in the middle of a pain that would never vanish. Moaning into the attorney’s chest, the thick body was sweating hard enough to soak her best clothes, and I felt sorry for her and even sorrier for her companion. He and I traded looks, each wanting this ordeal over. Then he gave Lauren one hateful glare, and I contemplated the benefits of taking a good swing at him.

Attacking the ramp at a near-run, I climbed into the cavernous interior. The reporters weren’t working, and I wasn’t either. My cameras were stowed in the car parked in a VIP slot. I blinked in the relative darkness. Then somebody called me, “Sir,” while a hand ushered me forward.

“Here, sir,” a different voice said.

There was no sign of the Elysium. A temporary wall and tall green curtain divided the fuselage into sections, and the witnesses were allowed to sit on folding chairs that needed to be straightened. I claimed the first chair in the front row. Lauren passed me and claimed the center chair, and then she made a point of not looking my way.

I got up and moved one chair over and sat again.

In the spirit of compromise, she moved one chair to her left. And now the dead girl’s parents were together.

Witnesses and officials arrived in the next few moments. Only the mother and attorney were missing, but there were murmurs from behind—indistinct words that might have been commands, might have been begging. Either way, she filled up that big space when she came onboard, controlling her sobs for a few moments at a time, that enforced silence ending with wrenching, pitiful sounds that made me think the most uncharitable thoughts.

I wanted to shout for quiet.

Not Lauren. She was serene and glacial, and the only sound she made was that little gasp let loose when the ugly green curtain was suddenly pulled open.

I had seen every Elysium, including this particular chamber. A great egg-shaped machine, #2 was white and slick on the outside and even whiter inside. I once asked the inventors if the egg shape was intentional. One boy responded with a long, jargon-lathered story about torus patterns and the demands of superconducting currents. But I was talking about symbols. Was the egg meant to signify rebirth, maybe? And that genius of geniuses, on the eve of a Nobel in physics, said to me, “Oh, right. Huh. I never thought of that before.”

The giant egg was open.

Inside the Elysium were air and reflected light and nothing else.

A prison official came in from behind the chamber, accompanied by a squad of technicians with important little jobs that always waited for the last moment. The technicians worked and signed forms and vanished again, and then the official waved in two guards and a prisoner wearing new orange coveralls and various chains.

Elijah looked like a stranger. His hair was Marine Corp short. Bed rest and other precautions had left the young man atrophied, muscle turning into the sloppiest fat. He looked middle-aged, bald and worn down. There was a strong resemblance to his mother, right down to the pain in his doughy face.

The crying woman stood behind me, and I looked back long enough to see officials glancing at each other, deciding to do nothing.

Our FBI friend had returned. Standing to one side, he gave his watch a meaningful glance, and the attorney coaxed his sobbing client back down onto her chair.

Between us and the Elysium was a plastic wall perforated with countless holes and strung with microphones, allowing voices to carry.

The FBI agent stepped forward, motioning to the ranking prison official.

The official was a bloodless creature, and in that realm of stark emotions and chaos, he acted like the only sane player. A quick word to the boy’s ear was all that was needed, and it was all that he gave, and Elijah stepped forward, finding the breath to deliver whatever final words that kind of boy could manage.

“I’m not lost, Mom,” he said. “Remember that. I’m always going to be somewhere else, even if we don’t know the place.” He named his little sisters, offering words of advice about keeping them out of trouble. Then he fell silent, and we thought he was finished. I watched him back into the official’s pale still hands. But no, he suddenly noticed Lauren and me sitting in front, and he came forward again, wetting his lips once and then a second time before looking mostly at me.

“It was a dumb joke you told, getting me to laugh for that picture,” he said.

Nobody else had a clue what he was talking about.

Then he was laughing, telling me, “I’ve got a big joke for you too. Want to hear it?”

Nobody spoke, nobody moved.

And then Elijah stepped back, whispering, “Done.”

Guards removed the restraints. The boy turned and took one short step toward the Elysium, and a weakened leg bent too much and nearly dropped him. But he conjured the strength to put himself inside, and I thought I heard machinery humming as the precise hatch closed down to the nothing. Why I expected drama, I don’t know. There should have been some delay, some grand silence full of reflection. But the hatch was down and there wasn’t even the clichéd flickering of lights, and then with the smoothness found in dreams the hatch lifted once again. Whatever had been inside was gone, vented out into the August air. The operation felt like the third trick in a magician’s show—a sleight-of-hand that was professional but not spectacular, laying the groundwork for the bigger, more impressive wonders to come.

Lauren jumped to her feet, unashamed to grab my arm and tug.

Hurrying was unseemly, but I didn’t hesitate. We were outside with a lot of sun in the sky, good omens everywhere. The shuttle bus took us straight to my car. Lauren called Mitch, and he reported that “she didn’t come back” at the lake, but we didn’t expect that to happen, did we?

Just to be certain, Lauren called a friend with the State Patrol, getting a slightly more official word from her.

I drove, and Lauren used her phone while it charged.

I drove the planned route until the sun was down. Then I drove back roads and little rutted trails alongside fields of corn and beans, and we stopped on important hilltops in the night and yelled and panned the world with spotlights, bothering raccoons with our mayhem. I put two hundred and ten miles on the car, and twice my good friend in Texas called to inquire about my daughter.

Then it was two in the morning. Gordon was safe in bed, and his people started calling on his behalf, asking what kind of help we needed.

At six in the morning, I was standing on the crest of the county’s tallest bluff, watching a Blackhawk helicopter sweep low over the trees below us. Venus was a bright cold spark on the eastern sky, and the world was filled with wrenching disappointments, but I was still willing to hope, some gambler’s voice promising that the next two minutes would answer every wish, even when it was obvious that nothing good would come on this miserable day.

He sits with legs crossed, lady-like. Clothes and attitude prove that the young man is ferociously gay, and nothing will change that. The newspaper account of his murder is framed and propped up beside him. “Gay Rights Advocate Beaten to Death with Bat,” the headline reads. Twenty-three years have passed. He has lovely white teeth and a smooth scalp barely showing the new hair. The skull in his lap has broken teeth and one gaping hole on top. He seems rather fond of that skull, one hand caught lightly stroking the weathered brown bone.

I had a thirteen-year-old neighbor boy on retainer. Every week, he attacked my weeds with the family mower. Sitting on the back steps, I was admiring a patch of mutilated Russian thistles. My hired hand had shoved the mower back and forth, scattering plant guts and spikes and those peculiarly alien flowers, purple and gruesome. Purple and lovely. I was thinking about images. I was calculating angles and light. Then Gordon repeated what he had said several times before. “I’m so sorry. For you and your entire family, this must be awful.”

“Nothing but awful,” I said.

He took a deep, painful breath. There were other people and different problems that he would have preferred to deal with, but it was important to tell me, “If there’s anything that I can do to help.”

“Thank you.”

“I have resources.”

“Except there’s no place left to search,” I said. “Unless Elijah drove far away and killed here and then brought the body back here again. But that doesn’t make sense. Or she’s back but somebody else found her first—some crazy son of a bitch—and that’s the possibility that I won’t let through the door.”

Gordon remained quiet.

“Her mom and stepdad are riding the river on an airboat,” I said, my voice breaking. “Hoping for a bare footprint on a sandbar, I guess.”

Silence.

I sighed and asked, “Did it work?”

“Did what work?”

“The Elysium. Were there any malfunctions?”

“No.”

“And you’d know that for sure?”

I heard him shifting the phone against his face. “I’m going to check again. But every report shows a nominal cycle.”

“And if it wasn’t?”

“That will show up, yes.”

Looking at the purple flower, I said, “Maybe I should. Take you up on that offer of help, I mean.”

“Please do.”

I listed a possibilities.

Gordon listened carefully, asking me to repeat a few points. Then he told me, “You have every right to remain hopeful.”

“Oh, I’ve got hope,” I said. “But now I’ve got two dead kids, not just one. And that’s taking some getting used to.”

The kit is pulled open, its contents spilled across the concrete driveway. Designed for the reborn, the gym bag was jammed with appropriate clothes, including light shoes and sunscreen and a wide-brimmed hat. Because the dead return with empty stomachs, the kit includes an apple and a ripe pear and various cookies compliments of the Girl Scouts of America. And because only the person returns, not her internal flora and fauna, she has a large serving of probiotic yogurt set inside a chilled pouch.

Still inside the bag, waiting at the bottom, is a ratty chunk of cloth and stuffing, glassy eyes and bedraggled ears. Despite a thousand decrees to be treated like an adult, the dead girl couldn’t sleep through the night without her Snuggles. And nestled beside that honorable decent and harmless man is a pair of belated birthday cards, congratulating Kaylee on reaching the sixteen and seventeen-year landmarks—sharp pieces of irony added by her father while her mother wasn’t watching.

Giant cottonwoods used to be guard the turnoff, but some official decided they were too close to the highway—a hazard worth sheering down. I pulled off the little state highway and parked beside the newer of two picnic tables, and carrying my old Nikon, I started working with my eyes. It was dusk, cool and damp after a long rain. I didn’t expect clues. The state forensic team found nothing, and that was nearly two years ago. I walked this ground twice right after Kaylee died, and once again after the trial, finding nothing. Souls were real, substantial and enduring; that was one of the Elysium’s lessons. But our souls acted more like books than people—objects bound up for protection and set on some invisible shelf. Even in my most desperate state, I couldn’t feel my daughter floating beside me, never heard her essence calling up to me. There was nothing in this little rest area but a dusty white gravel parking lot and a pair of picnic tables and stumps left behind by trees older than any man.

I shot the picnic table and a lost Subway wrapper.

Then I threw the wrapper away and shot the steel drum marked TRASH.

There was a ditch between the parking lot and an abandoned rail line. The rail line was grown over with young trees and brush and more brush. I climbed into the ditch, discovering mud. I shot the trees and shot the fresh boot prints filling with runoff, and I was getting some awful shots of the setting sun and passable images of the sumac changing when a little car pulled off the highway, parking as far from me as possible.

With the camera, I pulled in details. The SWEETGRASS HAWKS decal proved these were locals, and the overpowering bass of the stereo implied young ears. I climbed out of the ditch, ready to drive away, except I found myself walking towards the strange car, feeling the incoherent elation that sometimes comes before a very good shot.

Cameras can work like guns. Show the lens to a face, and the soul behind it grows nervous and unnaturally thoughtful.

The car windows were up. A girl was sitting at the wheel. She seemed appalled by my sudden appearance, while her boyfriend—a big cherubic fellow—was eager to laugh at some part of this.

I wasn’t sure what I was doing but a parental smile seemed appropriate. Producing a business card, I placed it against the glass, letting her read my name aloud to the lumpy boy before I bent down low.

“You look familiar,” I told her, shouting over the rumbling stereo. “Is your mother Wanda Kane?”

The window dropped. “She’s my aunt. Aunt Wanda.”

“She had a kid sister,” I started.

“That’s my mom. Jean Ray Tanner.”

“Jean married a Tanner?”

The girl nodded.

“I went to school with Jim Tanner.”

“That’s my dad,” she said. Then what she read on the card finally connected with her brain. “Hey, you’re that photographer.”

The celebrity had returned home.

“I’ve heard about you,” the boy said happily, killing the music. Then he recalled something else and looked over his shoulder. “Is this the place?”

“What place?” she asked.

“You know,” he said impatiently. “Where that girl was killed.”

“Here?”  She squirmed.

“Or nearby,” he said.

And with considerable gravity, she said, “Oh,” and looked at me, perplexed and unbearably sorry.

I concentrated on the boy. “Are you from Sweetgrass?”

“We moved here when I was little,” he said.

That boy was never little.

His girlfriend had a question, and she couldn’t stop herself from asking it. “Is this where your daughter came back?”

Her boyfriend knew better, turning sumac-red.

And she got flustered.  “What? I thought she was back again.”

I told her, “No.”

With a cool, firm voice, I said, “They executed the wrong person.”

In their lives, these kids had ever stared at anybody as hard as they stared at me.

“Anyway,” I said, putting my weight on my best knee. “So you guys know everybody in town, I bet.”

They nodded together.

“I’m going to ask you something. Tell me what first comes into your mind. Okay?”  I studied the girl, who was small and very pretty. “Who is the scariest man in Sweetgrass?”

The Tutsi sits in the foreground, sits where he died. There is no happier person in the world, says the radiant grin. But he isn’t the true subject of the photograph. Only his shoulders and slick head are visible. On the slope behind him stand several cages assembled on site for this occasion, and in another few minutes they will be emptied and dismantled. Five souls sit behind bars. None have hair. The happy man would look tiny beside any of them. Squatting in the nearest cage is a great old gentleman weighing a few twigs short of 500 pounds. The silverback markings will have to grow back. The flesh is paler than the missing fur, but the huge face is undeniably simian. His expression is a less easy to read than the man’s, but there is pleasure in the eyes, and caution, and perhaps a measure of anger. A man much like the smiling man killed him and his ladies. And perhaps the gorilla is imagining what he would do, if only these steel bars were taken away.

“I want to tell you something,” she said.

“All right.”

“But not yet.”

The aquarium lights were on; the rest of the studio apartment was dark. She got out of the sofa sleeper and walked into the bathroom. I watched her leave and watched the fish, and then she emerged from the bathroom, and I watched her again.

“Do you know why men invented cameras?” she asked.

“Tell me.”

“So they could carry pictures of their naked girlfriends and wives.”

She laughed at my gender, and I laughed with her. “Is that what you wanted to tell me?”

“Nope.” Millie crawled in beside me. Her phone made chirping noises every time Facebook updated. Three chirps, and she said, “You aren’t talking about her.”

“I haven’t been,” I agreed.

“Kaylee,” she said.

Yeah.

Millie rolled onto her stomach. “Last week. You mentioned that you’d been talking to some kids.”

“I’m doing research.”

“’Fishing for names,’ you called it.”

I nodded.

“What are your police doing?”

“The investigation is reopened. But there weren’t many leads to begin with, and for now, authorities are pushing hardest at the Campbell case. Those people are still dead, and they have a viable suspect.”

“How many kids did you talk to?”

“Eight girls, a few boyfriends.”

“And what did you do with the names?”

I looked everywhere but at Millie’s face. “Gordon. He offered help, and so I’m having his people check on the names. I want to know everything I can before anything begins.”

“And what happens when it happens?”

That was a funny way to phrase it. The most serious subject in the world, and I started to laugh.

She said, “Shawn.”

“What?”

“You act as if I’m this hippie chick cast out from the 60s.”

“But you are.”

“Yeah, well . . . I never was much of a peacenik. And if you want the gruesome truth, I’ve become a substantial believer in revenge.”

“Okay.”

“Are you planning to beat confessions out of anyone?”

“I don’t think I could.”

“Let me,” she said.

I stared at the shadowed face.

She broke into a big laugh. “I’m kidding.”

“Good.”

“But I could help you.”

“Help how?”

“Nobody knows me in Sugargrass.”

“Sweetgrass.”

“I could go around town, asking questions,” she said.

I was wishing that we could drop the subject.

We laid there for another little while.

“I can help you,” she said again.

“I told you. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

And she said, “Well then. Maybe that’s another place where I can do you some good, Shawn.”

The young woman was tied down and raped repeatedly over several days, then her assailant suffocated her with a pillow. That was thirty-three years ago, and she has been back for four months. She happens to be Swedish. Her killer’s life was spared because the Swedes are decent noble people. Decency and nobility now require executions, and she returned to the living without her hair and without bacteria in her gut, but wearing the same freckles and fingerprints, and inside her was a bit of living human tissue that enjoys the same immortality afforded to red blood cells and fertile eggs. The rapist’s semen met her egg. Nobody realized this. Then she discovered the pregnancy, in vitro tests proving that the dead man has a son coming. And this is why there is no name attached to the photograph, and why the woman wears a black wig that hides her unknown face.

There were fancier cabins, but most of them were closed for the season. The cabin that I remembered faced the river, not the lake. It was low and plain and fundamentally strong, painted dark red one day and ten years later touched up with the ugliest brown in the world. At least three satellite dishes pointed at the sky, and the south-facing roof was covered with mismatched solar panels. My father used to tell me that in his class at school, there were exactly three kids with working brains.  One brain belonged to him, of course. The second brain was my mother’s.  And the final genius bought up an entire lake with money made from selling coyote pelts, and then Gus sold the lots to various idiots who had more cash than common sense.

Gus had kept the best lot for himself. Occupying the highest ground, his home never suffered when floods came. I parked at the gate and walked past the “Be Expected or Be Shot” sign. It was the first week in October; an early frost had pushed us into autumn. But it was a warm afternoon—warm enough that a random red-headed boy could wear shorts and walk the sandbars out on the river.

I watched the boy as I walked, and I watched the cabin windows, suffering a wicked case of nerves.

The front door was open but the storm door was shut. I looked for a bell. Gus didn’t believe in bells. I knocked on the storm and shouted his name, then invested a full minute listening to the silence inside. Then I walked across what passed for the front yard, examining an armada of river boats, several of which looked like they might actually float if someone bothered to push them onto the open water.

The red-headed boy was farther away, walking a precise circle on the whitest, flattest piece of sand.

I started pulling him in with the camera.

“I was in the shitter,” Gus said.

I hadn’t heard anything, and then he was beside me. Like a cat, the man was. Like an old arthritic nicotine-infused cat. He had me in his sights, and I hit him with five seconds of silence. Then he nodded, running his tongue along the lip that was holding his chew, and he said, “Hell, Shawn. I’m goddamn sorry about your daughter.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Did they tell you?”

“Did who tell me?”

“The State Patrol. The sheriff. They’ve been back here, asking questions all over again.”

“I figured they would be,” I said.

“Well, this makes me sick too.” That craggy, nearly toothless face watched only me. “I thought I had it right.  I really did.”

“Everybody did their best,” I said.

Gus nodded, waiting.

“I haven’t admitted this to anyone,” I said, dropping my eyes. “But I had doubts about Elijah. The kid was a lot of things but not a killer, and it kicks the shit out of me all over again. But feelings aren’t evidence. So I let the police and the courts do what they wanted, and maybe that’s why I deserve some piece of the guilt.”

Saying nothing seemed like the best decision, and Gus did that with a sympathetic nod and clear, unblinking eyes.

“Anyway,” I said.

“I wish I could help,” he said.

I swung the camera and strap behind me, pulling out my phone. “I’m working for Gordon Tran now.”

“I heard something about that,” he said. “Congratulations.”

It was deeply peculiar, hearing the word “congratulations” from someone like Gus.

“Anyway,” I said. “Gordon offered to help me and help Kaylee. Which means a lot, since he has money and some very big connections too.”

Again, Gus used silence and the watchful gaze.

“I had him compile a list,” I said. “People with histories, people with tendencies. In and around Sweetgrass, and in the city too.”

“That would be a lot of names,” he said.

“And it was, until I carved off everybody who didn’t look like Elijah. Now I’ve got three characters with a passing resemblance to the boy.”

“You’re thinking it’s one of them.”

“Well, maybe,” I said.

The old guy shrugged. “Stands to reason, I guess.”

“Here.” I held up my phone, letting him see the image. “Do you recognize the face?”

Gus stared at the little screen. “Don’t know the boy, sorry.”

I mentioned the name. “He moved to Sweetgrass six months before Kaylee was murdered,” I said. “And he has a record of hurting women, with time served on two different charges.”

“Let me see him again.”

“Sure.”

Gus studied the image. Then he said, “God. It might be.”

“There is a resemblance,” I said.

“And in the night, across the water like that.”

“With those fancy night goggles.”

“Well, I’ll warn you about something.” He handed back the phone. “The sheriff had me on a couple matters. Nothing real big and nothing was charged, so there wasn’t any plea bargain. But when I said I was pretty sure who I saw drowning that van, they told me that ‘pretty sure’ wasn’t good enough. They had the little shit ready to confess, if I could just claim to be cold sober sure about what I had seen.”

“Except Elijah didn’t confess,” I said.

“For good reasons, I seems.” Gus paused, looking at the river. “Have you told anybody else about this fellow?”

“Not yet.”

“So what are you going to do, Shawn?”

“I’m taking a leave of absence from work, to keep my soul from killing itself. For now, I want to learn what I can around town.”

“Okay.”

“That and stay close to my father.”

“Yeah, I heard he wasn’t doing great.”

“Oh, he’s holding steady for now, mostly.”

The old man looked at me, nothing but sympathetic. “I remember your dad bringing you here. Just after you caught the camera bug, you wanted to photograph wildlife, and he hired me for a day to show you around.”

“This time of year, wasn’t it?”

“Maybe so.”

“I’ve still got that hawk.”

He smiled, remembering the moment.

“Jeremy went with us,” I said.

“His mother needed a sitter, I guess.”

“Is your boy overseas now?”

“Not anymore. He’s retired from that mercenary work.” Gus shrugged. “He inherited his mom’s place in town.”

“Maybe I’ll see Jeremy.”

“He’d love seeing you, I know.”

I turned to leave. The boy was still walking the same circle on the sand, and for no reason but curiosity, I asked, “Who is he?”

“My grandson,” Gus said.

“So what’s he doing?” I asked.

Gus shook his head and spat juice at the ground beside us, and he said, “With that child, I really, really don’t know.”

He sits alone with portraits of his dead brothers. Enough time has passed to produce a respectable head of hair, cut in a style appropriate for today. He wears a good suit but nothing too fine—the uniform of a politician ready to meet Wall Street executives or parishioners in a Harlem church. There is quite a lot of talk about him running for his old Senate seat. Many possible avenues are open to him. Yet the man sitting for the photograph seems immune to ceaseless ambition. In his lap rests an authoritative history of the last fifty years—a thick book that has never been opened, and for all intents and purposes has never been noticed—while in his hand rests a head that has lived more history than could be believed.

I saw her at the far end of the pasta aisle. Noticing her first, I was able to make a graceful retreat. Nobody needed to be embarrassed or uncomfortable. Paring down my grocery list, I threw two frozen lasagnas into the cart before steering toward the express lane.

I was loading the belt when someone rolled in behind me. A smoker’s hack warned me, but I looked anyway. What were the odds? Elijah’s mother was focused on the tabloids. She looked older and she looked younger. Her hair was growing out gray, but her weight was down and maybe she was sleeping through the night. Turning away, I concentrated on paying and throwing my purchases into sacks. For no good reason, I was certain that I had escaped, and then the cashier asked, “Ma’am, what’s wrong?”

A second voice said, “Shawn.”

I couldn’t tell if she was surprised to see me. But her tone surprised me—overlapping emotions playing out beneath a remarkably steady voice.

For the first time in my life, I said, “Hello, Gloria.”

The cashier decided nothing was wrong. She swiped the customer’s groceries, and Gloria watched me dropping sacks into my cart. Into the calm, I threw out a cliché. “All the best.”

And again, she said, “Shawn.”

Drop a camera in my hands, and I am fearless. But not then, not trapped in those agonizing, banal circumstances.

“Wait a minute, Shawn.” Joining me on the open floor, she seemed ready to grab my hand. Nerves twisted inside both of us, and I made the obvious assumptions about grief and blame, hers and ours both. But then she steered our conversation in an entirely unexpected direction.

“You take pictures of the rebirths, don’t you?”

“I have been.”

“I’ve heard that you know Mr. Tran fairly well. Is that right?”

A nod seemed good enough.

“Maybe you know the answer then,” she continued. “Who flips the switch on the Elysium Chamber?”

“Pardon?”

“Because there has to be an executioner. Am I right?”

“Each state hires a person, yes.”

“Ma’am,” the cashier called out. “You need to pay, ma’am.”

But Gloria wasn’t wasting this moment. She touched me, her cool hand gripping my forearm, and she asked, “Is there any way to find out who killed my son?”

“His identity is kept secret,” I said thankfully.

Once again, with a disapproving voice, the cashier said, “Ma’am.”

“Why do you want to know?” I asked.

Gloria hesitated, just for a moment. Then with the odd sick yet almost joyful smile, she said, “Murder is murder. And what if an executioner someday, for some good reason, ended up inside an Elysium?”

A swift camera is prepositioned, connected to banks of strobe lights that throw their glare at the piece of floor where a man once died. This is the machinery that can catch a bullet slicing through a playing card. This is precision applied to impossibly tiny moments. Three miles away, an Elysium is turning a criminal into nothingness, and the strobe lights fire and fire and fire, the camera absorbing thousands of precise images of an old oak floor and nothing else—

He looked like Elijah, not just in the face and build but also in the way that he moved, with a twisting careless gait that revealed an absence of grace. I sat in my car at the end of the block, watching him walking away from his car. The man lived alone in the basement of a triplex, entering through the side door. Maybe he looked my way, but not so that I noticed. Then he was gone and a woman appeared from the house beside me, coming across her grass to see what I was about.

I rolled down the passenger window.

She looked at me and at the two cameras on the seat. Scared enough to be brave, she asked, “Do you know how much you’re freaking my kids out, sitting out here like this?”

“I don’t want anybody scared,” I said.

“I know who you are,” she said, making that sound like a threat. “But I don’t see why you care about us.”

“I don’t,” I said.

“What are you here?”

“I’m sorry. I’ll go away.”

“Would you, please?”

My quarry had vanished. I drove past his house and went to the Manor, stopping in for a quick visit with my parents. Dad had his own quarters now, needing more help than any loving wife could deliver. I saw Dad and then tracked down Mom after yoga, and noticing the time, I offered some excuse, escaping to the Sidecar Bar in the shadow of the old grain elevator.

My boy showed ten minutes later, which was his usual time.

Raising hackles or spreading terror weren’t my goals. I had a couple favorite booths near the front, and he always sat in back with the pool tables, sharing the air with the same three or four buddies. The buddies were aware of me, and sometimes they studied me, discussing what I might mean. But the object of my devotion acted oblivious to my existence, which might or might not be a sign of guilt.

My boy played pool and drank, and I ate some dinner, nursing my one beer until the waitress looked pissed. So I bought a second beer and gave her ten dollars for nothing, watching my boy miss an easy shot and laugh it off, looking everywhere but at me.

“Seat taken?”

I still knew the voice. “Jeremy,” I was thinking before looking up. “How are things, Jeremy?”

“Things are spectacular,” he said, dropping onto the hard wooden bench across from me. He was a bigger version of his father, powerful shoulders filling up the gray sweatshirt. But the face was more like his mother, who I saw a thousand times in my life and barely remembered now—a stern handsome face topped with red and gray hair.

“Heard you were in town,” he said.

“Seeing my parents,” I said.

He cranked his neck, looking around the room. “Yeah, where are your folks? I’d like to pay my respects.”

I didn’t react.

He laughed for both of us. That laugh used to be his finest feature—a pleasant warm joyous sound that could last for hours, or so it seemed. But that part of Jeremy had changed. The retired soldier fell silent, staring at my face until I looked back at him. Then he threw his gaze out the window, idly watching a pickup roll past.

“Talk to your dad?” I asked.

“Now and again.”

“I did too,” I said.

“He mentioned that. You came to see him. A couple weeks ago, I guess.”

I didn’t say anything.

My silence was worth another try at laughing. This attempt went longer and made me unhappy. I couldn’t explain why, but I felt gray and sorry now.

“Yeah, my dad screwed up.”

“Happens.”

“I don’t know why that fucking defense attorney didn’t test his eyes. You know, they aren’t what they used to be. The guy’s been in the sun all his life, making cataracts. And those damn goggles don’t work miracles.”

“Everybody knew the kid was guilty,” I said.

Jeremy nodded. “Yeah, there’s that.”

“Anyway,” I said.

He watched for traffic.

“Remember the hawk?” I asked.

“What hawk?”

“I came out to your dad’s place one day. With my dad and my new camera, and the four of us went out on a little safari. I got a great shot of a redtail sitting on a dead branch.”

“How old were we?”

“I was thirteen.”

Jeremy said nothing.

“And I took pictures of you,” I said.

The laugh exploded, and he asked, “Why the hell why?”

“Don’t know. Your face interested me, I guess.”

He kept laughing.

I shrugged. “The pictures are somewhere. That’s the advantage of a film camera—you stick ten thousand negatives into a file drawer, and thirty years later, they’re still there, waiting patiently for you.”

He shifted against the wood.

“Maybe I should dig them out. Send you some prints.”

“No need,” Jeremy said.

“No trouble,” I said.

“Well if you want. Thanks.”

Then my loyal waitress arrived, asking my buddy, “And what would you like to order?”

“Get a beer,” I advised. “I’ll even buy.”

“Tempting,” he said.

My waitress gave me a hopeful wink.

But then Jeremy told her, “No, sorry. I just remembered something that has to be done.”

“Later,” I told him.

“Guaranteed,” he said, pulling himself free of the booth.

“How about you?” she asked me.

“Not quite yet.”

Jeremy was out the door, walking down the block and gone.

I waved my girl back. “Does that fellow ever come in here?”

“I’ve seen him around town. But not in here, no.”

I gave her another ten, wanting to spoil her. Then I went to my car and dug into a big fireproof box that I kept under lock and key. There were several files, each marked with different initials. The biggest file held records pilfered from the US Army. I knew them by heart, but sitting behind the wheel, I read them all over again, wondering when my hands started to shake and hoping the son of a bitch never noticed.

The oak floor is empty, and empty, and empty, but the image stolen from the next instant shows a man’s living face, composed and unblemished, with a closed mouth but the green eyes already open.

The face emerged too swiftly to ever be halfway real.

He is never halfway nothing.

“Thanks for coming,” Mitch said.

We were standing at his front door. The man wanted my hand, and I made some agreeable sounds while we shook. Then our hands dropped, and when he didn’t speak, I said, “You mentioned something about helping.”

“Well, I hope you can.”

“What’s wrong?”

Again, he kept quiet, looking at me over the tops of his glasses.

“I thought she was on medication,” I said.

“This isn’t the depression. This is something else.”

I waited.

“She wants to find the killer.” Mitch sighed. “And of course we all want that. Of course, of course.”

“What did Lauren do?”

“My youngest.”

“Jackson?”

“There’s no evidence. Not a bit.” The old man needed a breath, wiping his mouth with his hand. “But Lauren claims that when Kaylee was abandoned, she called her step-brother for help. Then my son drove out to find her, and that’s when he kidnapped her, probably to rape her, but things went from wrong to awful and he cut her up to make it look like a crazy serial murder.”

“Where did this come from?” I asked.

“She claims that her stepson always had feelings for Kaylee.”

I couldn’t react, except for remembering countless little impressions that made it seem less than impossible. But from idle maybes to murder?

“There’s no record of the cell phone call, by the way. But Lauren has explanations. For everything, she has a story.”

“Shit,” I said.

“She is not depressed,” Mitch repeated. “The woman’s paranoid and furious, and ugly about everything and everyone.”

“Okay.”

“I’d really like you to talk to her, Shawn. Reason with her, if you can.”

“I plan to.”

And on that note, he walked out the door, aiming for the Mercedes.

“Where are you going?”

“I’ve been living at the lake house,” he said wearily. “She was in the master bedroom, the last I saw her.”

But Lauren wasn’t there. I found her in Kaylee’s room, sitting on the edge of the bed, nothing on but a reading light that served no function but to show an austere, eerily serene face. I expected red eyes and a pile of spent tissues, but the woman had no time to waste on tears. She looked at me for no purpose but to read my emotions, and turning her thoughts inward, she said, “You look like hell, Shawn. Are you sleeping?”

“Four hours a night.”

Her feet stretched out to touch the floor. I sat beside her, and she moved grudgingly, putting another six inches between us. Then with a special tone, she said, “It probably was a mistake, accusing Jackson.”

I wanted to speak, to find a perfect combination of words and tone that would make this mess more bearable. But my heart slipped in a different direction. “So who are you going to accuse next?”

“I haven’t decided.”

We sat some more, and then I got up.

“Did Mitch call you, or did you just happen by?”

“Does it matter?”

She looked at me and then looked down. “You know what scares me most, Shawn.  Worse than anything? This was a random event. Someone nameless monster did this horrible thing. Maybe he was Australian tourist. Now he’s back home and arrested, and he’s being tried today for a different murder, and in another two months, in the middle of our winter, he’s going to be executed. That’s what makes me sick. Somewhere in the world this awful man is going to die with his secret, and our girl is going to find herself naked in the snow and nobody is there to help.”

I thought I had reached the point where I couldn’t feel any worse, and then that happened. There’s always something worse waiting.

“Help me look,” she said.

“I’m not the police,” I said.

“Those goddamn clowns. They couldn’t get it right the first time, when there was evidence.”

True enough. But I had never been this angry with Lauren, not even in our most miserable night while married, which was why I decided to fling the very worst at her.

“Maybe they don’t all come back,” I said.

She stared at me, summoning the courage to ask, “What do you mean?”

“Maybe every soul gets the choice. And a few of them are happier wherever they are, and they don’t want to be alive again.”

I didn’t believe that.

And I doubt if Lauren bought it either. But that didn’t stop her from screaming, pulling her knees to her mouth and curling up on a mattress cover that was washed every two weeks, the same as always.

This is the better, truer picture: Millie sits in the backyard with the last shreds of thistle and crabgrass. She has an iPad and a beer and a fine easy smile, and she enjoys my old plastic Adirondack chair while the autumn sun plays across her brown face. One hand is fiddling with the angle of the screen, fighting the glare. She wears clothes suitable for no occasion—rundown ragged second-hand clothes that nobody would wear for any task except sitting in her boyfriend’s backyard with his beer and her electronics. She smiles. She probably senses the camera, but nothing about her is posed or self-conscious. Give her a shout, and she might throw out a good smile or a fetching wink. That would make a better picture. There is no composition to this scene, nothing that a chimp armed with a digital camera couldn’t achieve one hundred times out of a hundred. But that’s the point.  This is life, graceless and badly organized and thoroughly indifferent to everything but the instant just before and the instant that still hasn’t quite been.

I came into the townhouse and put my bags where they wanted to rest, and I put myself where I could catch some rest. A full day in Sweetgrass ended with my side trip to Lauren’s. I felt entitled to sit for a while. Then I tipped back my head, calling out, “Millie.”

Her visit began last week. She drove fourteen hours, half that time spent talking to me on the phone, and then she arrived and we stopped talking until the next day. This was an experiment, and at least on my part, the experiment began with strong reservations. But nobody seemed especially disappointed with the results. I took her out to the Manor to meet my parents. Two nights later, I brought Mom to town for dinner, and the girls ended up at my kitchen table, calculating that one of them was seven months older than the other. I let Millie keep her Miata in the garage, and she’d already met all of my neighbors, including people I didn’t know. She even had several clients—locals who knew her blog and thought she might help them with the dead in their lives. A new life was accreting around us, and nobody was fighting it. But for the time being, Millie was my guest and under no obligation to answer my shout, much less be waiting when I crawled home from a painful visit with my ex-wife.

I sat in the dark for another few minutes.

No Millie sounds.

I checked the garage. Her car was gone, implying a client or a shopping jaunt. Sometimes there was a note on the kitchen table or the refrigerator. Neither was true tonight. I tried calling her but got pushed to her voicemail right away. She was probably with a client, I decided, feelings of nervousness coming to me, but no impending doom. I began an aimless search for worthy leftovers, and with the questionable lasagna heated to a blistering temperature, I took my meal into the basement, down where I kept my professional life—a semi-modern studio full of camera equipment and computers, file cabinets and two darkrooms, digital as well as old-school.

The lock box was set on the big worktable, which wasn’t where it belonged. I had two bites of noodles and cheese, burning my tongue as a consequence. We had gone over this mess several times, and I wasn’t worried about Millie, except then I realized that the box had been left unlocked, which was sloppy, and I was suddenly filled with a bracing dose of anger.

Millie was many fine things, but she wasn’t an organized soul.

Some of the files were barely touched, probably opened and closed and then set aside. Four men’s records were out of order, including police reports about the pool-playing youngster in the triplex. But Jeremy’s file was a shambles. Millie must have set every piece of paper on the tabletop, files and credit reports, personal clutter and a string of printouts marking unsolved murders within a hundred miles of his roving residencies. Sometimes she circled my notes, sometimes she added her own. This was no easy project, pulling order back into the mess, and I realized that her entire day had been invested in piecing together the man’s life and timeline.

I tried her phone again.

Again, I was piped into voicemail.

She was still helping her client. I told myself. With purpose, I started to reorganize the records, and then I shut and locked the lid and walked the box back to its shelf, and looking at the table again, I saw the note she left tucked out of sight. She knew me. I would move the box before I went anywhere. The bigger assumption was that I could read that sloppy script:

“I doubt it’s your old buddy, but I want to check things out. Fish for impressions, see what I can see, but not tell anybody too much.

“Don’t worry, darling. I’ll be careful.

“Or I’ll screw up, and you’ll have to bring me back from the dead again.

“Ha-ha.

“Love

“Millie”

The boy wears shorts and muddy boots and a blood-speckled t-shirt. Behind him is a cooler and canvas sack. One hand holds a small hunting knife, blood and feathers clinging to the blade. Two more knives ride the belt—a Bowie knife for cleaning bear carcasses and a short machete, always ready for sudden eruptions of jungle.

Thirteen year-old males are like this. Nothing about the scene is alarming. The red-haired boy smiles at the camera, his expression pleasant, open, almost sweet. What unsettles is what happens after the camera is put away: The boy is supposed to be cleaning game. Pulling the last goose from the sack, he discovers that the bird is still alive, one wing broken but those black eyes staring at its captors. The knife-boy will wink at his companion, an occasional friend. “Watch me carve the goose,” he says. Then he uses the bright tip of the hunting knife, working the blade into one part of the miserable body after another. Then his father knocks him to the ground, shouting at him, “Why are you doing that, you don’t do that, not to some creature that’s suffering . . . !”

This is an uncomfortable, memorable moment. But more alarming is Jeremy’s reaction: A steady fearless giggle that is so odd and so unembarrassed that the other boy recoils when he thinks of that moment thirty years later.

I had a plan. I would call the sheriff’s office or the State Patrol while driving out to Sweetgrass. A few reasonable sentences delivered with a worried, rational voice would launch the search for a young woman and her out-of-state Miata. Except I wasn’t sure what to tell authorities and what they might believe. Conjecture and fear didn’t make evidence. Coincidences and long-ago impressions didn’t mean a killer. I rehearsed my speech until I sounded crazy even to myself, and by then I was past the city limits, racing time on the highway.

Deciding not to call made me feel a little better. I relaxed and managed to drive slower while thinking hard about what I would say to Millie when I finally found her. Then I tried her phone and got the voicemail, which made me scared and angry once again. I edged near ninety, and the car shook, and I pulled over on the shoulder half a mile short of the turnoff where my daughter’s life was ruined. Before leaving the house, I had pulled out the page full of important Jeremy Castor numbers: Address and license plates, insurance accounts and two listed cell phones. The first number was disconnected, I discovered, which made the second call easier. He wouldn’t be there.

Jeremy picked up. “Yeah?”

“Did you kill her?” I asked.

Both of us were surprised. We reacted with silence, extended and gray, and then one throat got cleared and he said, “Shawn.”

He said, “What are you talking about?”

I pulled back out onto the road. “Did you kill her?”

“Kaylee,” he said. “You’re talking about Kaylee.”

I slid past the turnoff. “Did you?”

“No.” Then he said it again, louder. “No.”

A roadside sign promised Sweetgrass in five miles, and I hit a pace that would surely win me a high speed chase. Not that spinning red lights was my plan, but the prospect had its appeal.

“What are you thinking, Shawn?”

“I found an old photograph,” I said. “You’re torturing some goose with this fucking big knife.”

“Okay,” he said.

I didn’t talk.

“You think that means something,” he said.

“Are you alone?”

He said, “Yeah.”

“What’d you do tonight?”

He didn’t answer.

I avoided Millie. I didn’t want her added to the mess.

“About the goose,” he said.  “Kids do shit.”

“People do shit.”

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Where are you?”

“Is this a game, Shawn?”

Maybe it was.

“Because I like games. Except I need the rules first.”

Flat and slow, I said, “You killed Kaylee.”

“I didn’t.”

“And other girls too.”

Nothing.

“Young and small and pretty. Afghan girls were murdered. And that German teenager. Then you got bounced around as a hired gun, all those places and I don’t know how many petite sweet girls were sliced up.”

“Shawn,” he said.

Houses were clustered near the highway, and I touched the brakes.

“People die everywhere, for all sorts of reasons,” he said, “and I was stationed in big busy places full of dying people. These are coincidences. Flukes. But even if I was what you think I am . . . and goddammit, I’m not . . . there isn’t a hunter who wants to hunt his own backyard.”

His reasoning was cold and pragmatic, and it was solid.

Suddenly I had nothing.

“So what are you going to do, Shawn? You going to tell the cops your story? Because maybe you should. You should. I don’t want the bother, believe me, but if this shuts you up, good.”

I was finally under the speed limit.

“Are you there?” he asked.

“Your own backyard,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“The Campbells,” I said.

Jeremy didn’t talk, and then he did.

He asked, “Who are the Campbells?”

“A farm couple. Police thought they had the man. They said he shot the Campbells to steal their truck. But I remember the case, the trial. The defendant claimed that he never went inside the house, and his girlfriend didn’t either. He didn’t know anything about murders. He found the keys on the dash, in plain view, and the suspects drove two hundred miles before getting caught.”

“I don’t remember this,” Jeremy said.

“We were in high school. Hartsburg is twelve, fourteen miles away, and it was huge news that summer, and you should remember. Nice people the same age as my folks, and they had two daughters, fifteen months apart, pretty and little and very sad in those photographs that got run in the paper.”

“This is stupid,” he said.

Until a minute ago, I didn’t imagine this possibility. And now it was the deepest, most compelling belief in my life.

“Idiotic,” he said.

“Except every hunter starts in his backyard,” I said. “And that’s what you did, Jeremy. You assumed the girls would be home, and maybe shooting the parents was always planned. Or maybe you thought you’d climb through a window and gag the girls and tie them down, and nobody would suspect a thing. But the girls got lucky. They were gone for the night, and a couple car thieves got all the bad luck in the world.”

Jeremy was quiet.

“The police still have evidence,” I said. “Forensics files are being torn into right now, using the latest and best. Because the state is trying to pin that girlfriend with a double homicide, making something good come out of their old mistakes. But what if somebody offers a new name, pointing them at a person with new blood and hair and fingerprints? Is that something you want aired, just to shut me up?”

“Okay,” he said. “What do you want, Shawn?”

“Is she still alive?”

There was a pause. “Is who alive?”

“Millie.”

“Millie?  Yeah, for the moment, yeah.”

“I want Millie. Alive.”

“No police.”

“Fine.”

I heard him moving the phone against his face. “Where are you?”

“Passing the grain elevator.”

“All right,” he said. “Drive to the city park, where the creek comes in. Be alone, and I’ll bring you Millie.”

I didn’t answer immediately.

“Hey, and Shawn. Just so you know, I didn’t kill your daughter.”

“How soon?” I asked.

And he said, “Now’s as good of a time as any.”

The situation is formal, posed. Celebrating twenty years of marriage, the couple is dressed for dinner. Invisible daughters and friends have ordered them to stand in front of the house. Nice clothes make them uncomfortable, and the sun is a problem. They squint and smile painfully, and neither person looks happy. But the saving details are his left hand and her right. The hands cling to one another with a natural, unconscious ease. This is marriage. Here stands a partnership ready to suffer any misery, well-intended or not. “Smile for the camera,” someone has probably shouted, but the real joy is captured in the rough fingers and palm of a farmer desperately cradling the soft pale hand of his bride.

I dialed 911 and told the operator where I was and that a man was trying to kill me. “Please, please hurry,” I said.

I hung up as I pulled into the park.

Nobody else was visible.

I turned off my headlights and stopped on the parking lot where I could see the river, dark and a little rough under the stars and the reflected glow of distant lamps. Leaving my window halfway down, I turned off the engine, making the world darker and louder. I listened for a second car, for any engine. Nothing. Water was moving over sand, which is one of the finest sounds in nature, and another ninety seconds passed without incident.

My phone rang.

I expected an operator checking up on the crime victim.

It wasn’t.

“Hello?” I managed.

“Where are you?” Millie asked.

“Waiting for you,” I said.

“Well, you’re not at home.”

“Are you?”

“I got here ten minutes ago.”

“I thought you were in Sweetgrass,” I said, using a complaining tone, as if this was bad news.

“You found my note,” she said, victorious.

“Did you meet with Jeremy?”

“He wasn’t home, and I couldn’t figure out how to cross paths with him. You know, and keep things looking natural.”

I said, “Shit.”

“So I talked to a couple of his neighbors. Then I went to his father’s house, thinking maybe the soldier was there. But it was just Gus. So I told him that I was a rich woman and wanted to buy up some riverfront ground, and he thought it was fun to string me along for better than an hour.“

“You’re all right,” I said.

“I’m fine.”

“I thought you weren’t.”

“I told you in the note. I was going to be careful.”

I sighed once, and again.

She said, “Shawn.”

Then I saw something out on the river, some shape that was different and wrong, and I remembered back to that kid’s ball floating on the eddy, and all at once I was thinking that this meant something and I didn’t know what but maybe I should do something quick . . .

The condemned man stands before a brand new Elysium. A mass murderer with nearly ninety souls riding his shoulders, he shows the cumulative effects of enforced bed rest, looking shrunken and pale with his red hair turned nearly white. Yet he also looks satisfied and even a little smug, staring at the photographer, smiling at the world, daring everyone to find the fear in this infamous face.

The photographer took this assignment for many good reasons—irony and justice and the paycheck as well as the bankable notoriety. And to a lesser degree, Simon Foster came here because he knows one of the killer’s victims, and he can be absolutely certain that the dead man will buy him a beer when he returns to the realm where all things are temporary.

First thoughts should be important.

My first thought was that the asphalt was hot and scratchy, and my bare butt and back weren’t happy with their circumstances.

I started to sit up.

A man said, “Easy, sir. Easy.”

Then Millie said my name.

There was no clean, clear point when I knew what had happened. I had been dead and now I wasn’t dead and I understood that before I took my first breath. I went into death being tired and scared, but glad for Millie, and that’s how I was feeling now. My first breath came before I was sitting up. It was night and warmer than before. A circular curtain was hanging around me. Millie said, “It’s me,” while another man made noise about someone doing some critical chore, and then a stranger’s hand dropped on my shoulder, from behind, followed by his voice saying, “Don’t worry, sir. You are safe.”

Nobody is safe; why didn’t people accept that?

“Give him the robe,” the first man barked.

Then Millie slipped past the curtain, dropping to her knees in front of me. A bathrobe appeared from my left. I ignored it. I touched the top of my head, enjoying the perfectly slick scalp. Then wanting my feet under me, I began to stand up, and she offered a cautious hand.

I ignored that too.

“He shot me,” I guessed.

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“In the forehead.”

“Well,” I muttered. “That was kind of him.”

Clothes appeared—a summer wardrobe culled from my own closet. I recognized the slacks. I never liked them.

Two people came at me with yogurt and degrees in psychology. One man said my name twice, and when I looked at him, he said, “You know what’s happening. You understand.”

I knew something was wrong, but I couldn’t tell what.

Millie was next to me, holding a pair of shorts. “Cover up first,” she said. “Then ask.”

I pulled them on, and she dropped my favorite sandals on the asphalt, and while shoving my feet into the familiar leather, I said, “Kaylee.”

“We haven’t heard,” she said.

Several other voices repeated her non-news.

“Lauren?”

“At the sandpit, waiting.”

It was a warm night, but I was chilled. I kicked through the clothes pile, looking for a worthy shirt.

“Look at me,” Millie said.

I thought I had been. But this time I studied her face, fighting the glare of temporary lights standing around the parking lot.  A multitude of little details played toward one conclusion, but coming back to life was much, much easier than coming to terms with time.

Another familiar voice called to me.

Gordon Tran had come through the curtain. Time had been worse on his face than on Millie’s.

I asked him, “How long?”

I turned to her and said, “This isn’t next summer.”

The psychologists tried to soothe the patient, but Millie ignored them.  “No, this isn’t,” she said.

Shit.

Then she helped drag the shirt over my head, and when I couldn’t see anything, she pushed her mouth into my ear, saying, “Five years, nine months.”

I said, “Shit.”

I asked, “Why?”

“Jeremy ran.” Millie brought my face into the open, and with a simple calm voice told me, “He always had escape plans. He disguised himself and got to Canada under an assumed identity, and then he was found and nearly caught again. But the Mounties might have killed him. That’s why they let him slip free, and he returned to the US for another three years.”

I wanted to fall down but didn’t. “So who caught him?”

“Jeremy turned himself in. He said that he was tired of running.”

“Six years,” I said.

Millie stood close, waiting.

Once more, I said, “Kaylee.”

A man was talking into his hand, Secret Service style. “No news yet, sir. But they are searching.”

With two fingers, Millie touched my mouth.

“What?”

“Jeremy never helped anybody,” she said. “He never gave details about people killed or where to look. But he was adamant. To the end, he said that he wasn’t responsible for Kaylee’s death.”

A leader gave orders somewhere in the crowd. Down came one long portion of the curtain, and more strangers pushed close, wanting to help me toward some important, still invisible destination.

“My father,” I said.

“He died five years ago, Shawn.”

I grabbed up her left hand, and a perfectly reasonable, perfectly awful possibility offered itself to me.

Reading my eyes, she said, “No ring. And no boyfriend either.”

I tried to laugh. “You were waiting for me, I guess.”

“We can talk about that,” she said, her bittersweet smile implying much.

I said, “Mom.”

“Shawn,” she said, in that certain way.

I said, “But she was supposed to make ninety.”

Millie walked with me. Everybody else parted before us, revealing a gazebo made from fabric and carbon poles. A man of some notoriety was expected, and somebody who knew a few things about the guest had put his favorite beer on ice, and set between healthy servings of yogurt was a slab of lasagna and a piece of apple pie.

Two favorite cameras were waiting inside their bags.

I sat in an empty chair.

The air was filled with the rattle of helicopters sweeping over the countryside.

Again, “Kaylee?”

Different people said, “No news.”

Then a voice from far away shouted, “The Campbells are back!”

An older, quieter Gordon sat across from me.

Millie sat on my left and watched while I ate nothing. I picked up a beer and looked it over and then set back into the ice. “How’s Lauren?”

“Divorced.”

“Mitch?”

“Remarried, with a girl on the way.”

I looked straight ahead.  “How are you, Gordon?”

The Texan drawl said, “Just great.” But the Vietnamese face seemed less than sure about those two bold words.

“Elysiums,” I said.

He dropped his gaze, just for a moment.

Millie touched my knee, bringing my attention back to her. “There’ve been a lot of changes. Every country has them. Every state has them. But there were too many mistakes in the early going, and we’re a lot more careful about using them now.”

“Any new technology,” Gordon began.

“Complications,” she said. Then she bent close, saying, “Murder-suicides. Mercy killings. You can imagine.”

Better than I ever thought possible.

“Anyway,” Gordon said. “I’m glad you’re back again, Shawn. I needed to be here. I wanted to tell you before anyone else. Your photographs are very popular, huge sellers, and not just because your name and situation are in the news.”

I felt like having the apple pie now.

I was concentrating on my third bite when one of the helicopters dropped low, landing in the darkness down by the river. I assumed some kind of official visitor. I never dreamed that I would see Kaylee running up through the crowd, but then I glanced up and saw that small frame hurrying and how people scattered around her. The elation was pure, not a trace of doubt ruining that trick of light and hope; and then Kaylee turned into a woman who looked much, much older than her years.

Lauren got down low to study at my face.

“Hey,” I said.

“We’re searching,” she told me. “Come help me look.”

“I’m comfortable here,” I said.

She jumped up, apparently ready to slap me.

Millie grabbed up both of my hands. My strong sense was that the two women had acquired a history, most of it ugly.

“What if it wasn’t Jeremy?” I asked.

Lauren fought with tears and any residual weakness. Looking off into the sky, she said, “Then we’ll find the right person.”

“What if we don’t know for sure?”

“We find out.”

I didn’t understand.

Lauren noticed Gordon, and then she knelt down a second time. As if nobody else was present, she told me, “There are Elysiums overseas. You buy their use.”

“Buy their use?” I still didn’t understand.

“For special situations,” she said.

Gordon chose that moment to stand and walk away.

Millie tugged at my hands. But she spoke to Lauren, using a rancid voice that I had never heard from her before.

“You need to get out of here, lady,” she said.

Millie said, “Your soul is so close to dead.”

A bare footprint on bare sand. Young, with a high arch, and so fresh that the eye can see where the damp grains are still clinging together, piled up by the roll and push of the heel and the ball.

Here stood one of the great mysteries of life.

Gus.

But at least the man had grown older, proving that time had meaning even to that sack of nicotine and bones. Only two boats were riding the shoreline and neither looked like an old man’s toy. A red-haired teenager was sitting on the bank, reading from some kind of tablet. If he noticed me, he didn’t let on. I considered walked down to see his face, and then thankfully, I turned to Gus, saying, “I know.”

The ancient eyes weren’t clear anymore, and they were scared.

“His dad was showing him how,” I said. “For some reason Jeremy decided that was the night to introduce his kid to what a knife and patience and no sense of remorse can accomplish. So he found a girl, a girl he didn’t know, and that’s where it started.”

Gus tried to talk and then couldn’t.

I began to tell him something else that he already knew.

Then the old man interrupted, saying, “Jeremy got crazy whenever he drank. Always did. And I don’t know what else went into that night’s business . . . but yeah, basically, that’s the way it was explained to me.”

“Did you actually see the van?” My voice thick and slow.

“I was running my nets, like I testified,” he said. “But the van was already sunk when I got there. Someone was crying, and I left the river and found my grandson on the sand, and Jeremy, and Kaylee was long dead. About that, Shawn, you’ve got to believe me.”

“And you testified.”

“For every reason you can think of, yeah.”

“Protecting your family,” I started.

“That kid was the reason,” he said.

I didn’t talk.

“About Jeremy . . . well, I knew he had troubles. Maybe there was a girl or two, here and there. But I never imagined people would be popping back to life on four continents. How could you imagine that about your own?”

“The killing cut,” I said.

Gus took a tiny step back.

“Across the throat, to put Kaylee out of her misery,” I said.

“He was seven, Shawn. Seven years-old. And he felt sorry enough about the girl to end the suffering.”

“And what did his drunken father do about that?”

“Hit him. Some.”

I looked down at the reading boy, older than seven by a long ways. “Just tell me. Is he a good boy?”

“He’s a kid, so not always. No.”

“He lives here now?”

“Until I die. Then there’s an aunt and a trust fund, and nobody can say anything for certain after that.”

I watched the back of the boy’s head.

With a quiet, careful voice, Gus asked, “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to walk back down the road and get into my girlfriend’s car, and then we’ll drive away. That’s about all I can handle for now.”

He watched me, wanting to believe.

“But you need to talk to him. You need to warn him. I’ll be watching, and if he ever stumbles, I’ll come back for him.”

“Fair,” Gus said.

I had no idea what was fair. “And you need to tell him this for me: He can live any good life. It’s all up to him. But when he’s old and spent, he needs to find an Elysium and tell people the truth. I don’t care if its two hundred years from now and he’s dying up on Mars. He needs to become nothing, and my daughter gets her chance.”

We were both crying.

“Is that fair enough?” I asked.

“More than,” Gus allowed.

“For Kaylee, I mean.” I genuinely wanted the man’s advice. “Dropping her into some distant future, nobody around that she knows, much less loves. Is that too much to demand from a fifteen-year-old kid?”

“Everything is tough,” Gus said, shrugging. “Being nothing is what’s easy, and in the end, who really wants to be that way?”

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, February 2012.

Under the Eaves

Lavie Tidhar

“Meet me tomorrow?” she said.

“Under the eaves.” He looked from side to side, too quickly. She took a step back. “Tomorrow night.” They were whispering. She gathered courage like cloth. Stepped up to him. Put her hand on his chest. His heart was beating fast, she could feel it through the metal. His smell was of machine oil and sweat.

“Go,” he said. “You must—” the words died, unsaid. His heart was like a chick in her hand, so scared and helpless. She was suddenly aware of power. It excited her. To have power over someone else, like this.

His finger on her cheek, trailing. It was hot, metallic. She shivered. What if someone saw?

“I have to go,” he said.

His hand left her. He pulled away and it rent her. “Tomorrow,” she whispered. He said, “Under the eaves,” and left, with quick steps, out of the shadow of the warehouse, in the direction of the sea.

She watched him go and then she, too, slipped away, into the night.

In early morning, the solitary shrine to St. Cohen of the Others, on the corner of Levinsky, sat solitary and abandoned beside the green. Road cleaners crawled along the roads, sucking up dirt, spraying water and scrubbing, a low hum of gratitude filling the air as they gloried in this greatest of tasks, the momentary holding back of entropy.

By the shrine a solitary figure knelt. Miriam Jones, Mama Jones of Mama Jones’ shebeen around the corner, lighting a candle, laying down an offering, a broken electronics circuit as of an ancient television remote control, obsolete and useless.

“Guard us from the Blight and from the Worm, and from the attention of Others,” Mama Jones whispered, “and give us the courage to make our own path in the world, St. Cohen.”

The shrine did not reply. But then, Mama Jones did not expect it to, either.

She straightened up, slowly. It was becoming more difficult, with the knees. She still had her own kneecaps. She still had most of her original parts. It wasn’t anything to be proud of, but it wasn’t anything to be ashamed of, either. She stood there, taking in the morning air, the joyous hum of the road cleaning machines, the imagined whistle of aircraft high above, RLVs coming down from orbit, gliding down like parachuting spiders to land on the roof of Central Station.

It was a cool fresh morning. The heat of summer did not yet lie heavy on the ground, choking the very air. She walked away from the shrine and stepped on the green, and it felt good to feel grass under her feet. She remembered the green when she was young, with the others like her, Somali and Sudanese refugees who found themselves in this strange country, having crossed desert and borders, seeking a semblance of peace, only to find themselves unwanted and isolated here, in this enclave of the Jews. She remembered her father waking every morning, and walking to the green and sitting there, with the others, the air of quiet desperation making them immobile. Waiting. Waiting for a man to come in a pickup truck and offer them a labourer’s job, waiting for the UN agency bus—or, helplessly, for the Israeli police’s special Oz Agency to come and check their papers, with a view towards arrest or deportation . . .

Oz meant “strength” in Hebrew.

But the real strength wasn’t in intimidating helpless people, who had nowhere else to turn. It was in surviving, the way her parents had, the way she had—learning Hebrew, working, making a small, quiet life as past turned to present and present to future, until one day there was only her, still living here, in Central Station.

Now the green was quiet, only a lone robotnik sitting with his back to a tree, asleep or awake she couldn’t tell. She turned, and saw Isobel passing by on her bicycle, heading towards the Salameh Road. Already traffic was growing on the roads, the sweepers, with little murmurs of disappointment, moving on. Small cars moved along the road, their solar panels spread like wings. There were solar panels everywhere, on rooftops and the sides of buildings, everyone trying to snatch away some free power in this sunniest of places. Tel Aviv. She knew there were sun farms beyond the city, vast tracts of land where panels stretched across the horizon, sucking in hungrily the sun’s rays, converting them into energy that was then fed into central charging stations across the city. She liked the sight of them, and fashion-wise it was all the rage, Mama Jones’ own outfit had tiny solar panels sewn into it, and her wide-brimmed hat caught the sun, wasting nothing—it looked very stylish.

Where was Isobel going? She had known the girl since she’d been born, the daughter of Mama Jones’ friend and neighbour, Irina Chow, herself the product of a Russian Jewish immigrant who had fallen in love with a Chinese-Filipina woman, one of the many who came seeking work, years before, and stayed. Irina herself was Mama Jones’ age, which is to say, she was too old. But the girl was young. Irina had frozen her eggs a long time ago, waiting for security, and when she had Isobel it was the local womb labs that housed her during the nine long months of hatching. Irina was a pastry chef of some renown but had also her wild side: she sometimes hosted Others. It made Mama Jones uncomfortable, she was old fashioned, the idea of body-surfing, like Joining, repelled her. But Irina was her friend.

Where was Isobel going? Perhaps she should mention it to the girl’s mother, she thought. Then she remembered being young herself, and shook her head, and smiled. When had the young ever listened to the old?

She left the green and crossed the road. It was time to open the shebeen, prepare the sheesha pipes, mix the drinks. There will be customers soon. There always were, in Central Station.

Isobel cycled along the Salameh Road, her bicycle like a butterfly, wings open, sucking up sun, murmuring to her in a happy sleepy voice, nodal connection mixed in with the broadcast of a hundred thousand other voices, channels, music, languages, the high-bandwidth indecipherable toktok of Others, weather reports, confessionals, off-world broadcasts time-lagged from Lunar Port and Tong Yun and the Belt, Isobel randomly tuning in and out of that deep and endless stream of what they called the Conversation.

The sounds and sights washed over her: deep space images from a lone spider crashing into a frozen rock in the Oort Cloud, burrowing in to begin converting the asteroid into copies of itself; a re-run episode of the Martian soap Chains of Assembly; a Congolese station broadcasting Nuevo Kwasa-Kwasa music; from North Tel Aviv, a talk show on Torah studies, heated; from the side of the street, sudden and alarming, a repeated ping—Please help. Please donate. Will work for spare parts.

She slowed down. By the side of the road, on the Arab side, stood a robotnik. It was in bad shape—large patches of rust, a missing eye, one leg dangling uselessly—the robotnik’s still-human single eye looked at her, but whether in mute appeal, or indifference, she couldn’t tell. It was broadcasting on a wide band, mechanically, helplessly—on a blanket on the ground by its side there was a small pile of spare parts, a near-empty gasoline can—solar didn’t do much for robotniks.

No, she couldn’t stop. She mustn’t. It made her apprehensive. She cycled away but kept looking back, passers-by ignoring the robotnik like it wasn’t there, the sun rising fast, it was going to be another hot day. She pinged him back, a small donation, more for her own ease than for him. Robotniks, the lost soldiers of the lost wars of the Jews—mechanized and sent to fight and then, later, when the wars ended, abandoned as they were, left to fend for themselves on the streets, begging for the parts that kept them alive . . .

She knew many of them had emigrated off-world, gone to Tong Yun, on Mars. Others were based in Jerusalem, the Russian Compound made theirs by long occupation. Beggars. You never paid much attention to them.

And they were old. Some of them have fought in wars that didn’t even have names, any more.

She cycled away, down Salameh, approaching Jaffa proper—

Security protocols handshaking, negotiating, her ident tag scanned and confirmed as she made the transition from Central Station to Jaffa City—

And approved, and she passed through and cycled to the clock tower, ancient and refurbished, built in honour of the Ottoman Sultan back when the Turks were running things.

The sea before her, the Old City on the left, on top of Jaffa Hill rising above the harbour, a fortress of stone and metal. Around the clock tower coffee shops, the smell of cherry tobacco rising from sheesha pipes, the smell of roasting shawarma, lamb and cumin, and coffee ground with roasted cardamoms. She loved the smell of Jaffa.

To the north, Tel Aviv. East was the Central Station, the huge towering space port where once a megalithic bus station had been. To the south Jaffa, the returning Arabs after the wars had made it their own again, now it rose into the skies, towers of metal and glass amidst which the narrow alleyways still ran. Cycling along the sea wall she saw fishermen standing mutely, as they always had, their lines running into the sea. She cycled past old weathered stone, a Coptic church, past arches set into the stone and into the harbour, where small craft, then as now, bobbed on the water and the air smelled of brine and tar. She parked the bike against a wall and it folded onto itself with a little murmur of content, folding its wings. She climbed the stone steps into the old city, searching for the door amidst the narrow twisting alleyways. In the sky to the south-east modern Jaffa towered, casting its shadow, and the air felt cooler here. She found the door, hesitated, pinged.

“Come in.”

The voice spoke directly into her node. The door opened for her. She went inside.

“You seek comfort?”

Cool and dark. A stone room. Candles burning, the smell of wax.

“I want to know.”

She laughed at her. An old woman with a golden thumb.

An Other, Joined to human flesh.

St. Cohen of the Others, save us from digital entities and their alien ways . . .

That laugh again. “Do not be afraid.”

“I’m not.”

The old woman opened her mouth. Old, in this age of unage. The voice that came out was different. Isobel shivered. The Other, speaking.

“You want to know,” it said, “about machines.”

She whispered, “Yes.”

“You know all that you need to know. What you seek is . . . reassurance.”

She looked at the golden thumb. It was a rare Other who chose to Join with flesh . . . “Can you feel?” she said.

‘Feel?’ the Other moved behind the woman’s eyes. “With a body I feel. Hormones and nerves are feelings. You feel.”

“And he?”

The body of the old woman laughed, and it was a human laugh, the Other faded. “You ask if he is capable of feeling? If he is capable of—”

“Love,” Isobel whispered.

The room was Conversation-silent, the only traffic running at extreme loads she couldn’t follow. Toktok. Toktok blong Narawan.

The old woman said, “Love.” Flatly.

“Yes,” Isobel said, gathering courage.

“Is it not enough,” the woman said, “that you do?”

Isobel was silent. The woman smiled, not unkindly. Silence settled on the room in a thick layer, like dust. Time had been locked up in that room.

“I don’t know,” Isobel said, at last.

The old woman nodded, and when next she spoke it was the Other speaking through her, making Isobel flinch. “Child,” it said. “Life, like a binary tree, is full of hard choices.”

“What does that mean? What does that even mean?”

“It means,” said the old woman, with finality, and the door, at her silent command, opened, letting beams of light into the room, illuminating grains of dust, “that only you can make that choice. There are no certainties.”

Isobel cycled back, along the sea wall. Jaffa into Tel Aviv, Arabic changing to Hebrew—beyond, on the sea, solar kites flew, humans with fragile wings racing each other, Ikarus-like, above the waves. She did not know another country.

Tonight, she thought. Under the eaves.

It was only when she turned, away from sun and sea, and began to cycle east, towards the towering edifice of Central Station, that it occurred to her—she had already made her decision. Even before she went to seek the old oracle’s help, she had made the choice.

Tonight, she thought, and her heart like a solar kite fluttered in anticipation, waiting to be set free.

Central station rose out of the maze of old streets, winding roads, shops and apartment blocks and parking lots once abundant with cars powered by internal combustion engines. It was a marvel of engineering, a disaster of design, Futurist and Modernist, Gothic and Moorish, Martian and Baroque.

Others had designed it, but humans had embellished it, each competing to put their own contrasting signatures on the giant space port. It rose into the sky. High above, Reusable Launch Vehicles, old and new, came to land or took off to orbiting stations, and stratospheric planes came and went to Krung Thep and New York and Ulaan-Bataar, Sydney II and Mexico City, passengers coming and going, up and down the giant elevators, past levels full of shops and restaurants, an entire city in and of itself, before departing at ground level, some to Jaffa, some to Tel Aviv, the two cities always warily watching each other . . .

Mama Jones watched it, watched the passengers streaming out, she watched it wondering what it would be like to leave everything behind, to go into the station, to rise high, so high that one passed through clouds—what it would be like to simply leave, to somewhere, anywhere else.

But it passed. It always did. She watched the eaves of the station, those edges where the human architects went all out, even though they had a practical purpose, too, they provided shelter from the rain and caught the water, which were recycled inside the building—rain was precious, and not to be wasted.

Nothing should be wasted, she thought, looking up. The shop was being looked after, she had taken a few moments to take the short walk, to stretch her legs. She noticed the girl, Isobel, cycling past. Back from wherever she went. Pinged her a greeting, but the girl didn’t stop. Youth. Nothing should be wasted, Mama Jones thought, before turning away. Not even love. Most of all, love.

“How is your father?”

Boris Chong looked up at her. He was sitting at a table by the bar, sipping a Martian Sunset. It was a new drink to Miriam. Boris had taught it to her . . .

It was still strange to her that he was back.

“He’s . . . ” Boris struggled to find the words. “Coping,” he said at last. She nodded.

“Miriam—”

She could almost not remember a time she had been Miriam. For so long she had been Mama Jones. But Boris brought it back to her, the name, a part of her youth. Tall and gangly, a mixture of Russian Jews and Chinese labourers, a child of Central Station just as she was. But he had left, had gone up the elevators and into space, to Tong Yun on Mars, and even beyond . . .

Only he was back, now, and she still found it strange. Their bodies had become strangers to each other. And he had an aug, an alien thing bred out of long-dead microscopic Martian life-forms, a thing that was now a part of him, a parasite growth on Boris’ neck, inflating and deflating with the beats of Boris’ heart . . .

She touched it, tentatively, and Boris smiled. She made herself do it, it was a part of him now, she needed to get used to it. It felt warm, the surface rough, not like Boris’ own skin. She knew her touch translated as pleasure in both the aug and Boris’ mind.

“What?” she said.

“I missed you today.”

She couldn’t help it. She smiled. Banality, she thought. We are made so happy by banalities.

We are made happy by not being alone, and by having someone who cares for us.

She went around the counter. Surveyed her small domain. Chairs and tables, the tentacle-junkie in the corner in his tub, smoking a sheesha pipe, looking sleepy and relaxed. The ancient bead curtain instead of a door. A couple of workers from the station sipping arak, mixing it with water, the drink in the glass turning opaque, the colour of milk.

Mama Jones’ Shebeen.

She felt a surge of contentment, and it made the room’s edges seem softer.

Over the course of the day the sun rose behind the space port and traced an arc across it until it landed at last in the sea. Isobel worked inside Central Station and didn’t see the sun at all.

The Level Three concourse offered a mixture of food courts, drone battle-zones, game-worlds, Louis Wu emporiums, nakamals, smokes bars, truflesh and virtual prostitution establishments, and a faith bazaar.

Isobel had heard the greatest faith bazaar was in Tong Yun City, on Mars. The one they had on Level Three here was a low key affair—a Church of Robot mission house, a Gorean temple, an Elronite Centre For The Advancement of Humankind, a mosque, a synagogue, a Catholic church, an Armenian church, an Ogko shrine, a Theravada Buddhist temple, and a Baha’i temple.

On her way to work Isobel went to church. She had been raised Catholic, her mother’s family, themselves Chinese immigrants to the Philippines, having adopted that religion in another era, another time. Yet she could find no comfort in the hushed quietude of the spacious church, the smell of the candles, the dim light and the painted glass and the sorrowful look of the crucified Jesus.

The church forbids it, she thought, suddenly horrified. The quiet of the church seemed oppressive, the air too still. It was as if every item in the room was looking at her, was aware of her. She turned on her heels.

Outside, not looking, she almost bumped into Brother Patch-It.

“Girl, you’re shaking,’ R. Patch-It said, compassion in his voice. Like most followers of the Church of Robot, once he’d taken on the robe—so to speak—he had shed his former ident tag and taken on a new one. Usually they were synonyms of “fix.” She knew R. Patch-It slightly; he had been a fixture of Central Station (both space port and neighbourhood) her entire life, and the part time moyel for the Jewish residents in the event of the birth of a baby boy.

“I’m fine, really,” Isobel said. The robot looked at her from his expressionless face. “Robot” was male in Hebrew, a gendered language. And most robots had been fashioned without genitalia or breasts, making them appear vaguely male. They had been a mistake, of sort. No one had produced robots for a very long time. They were a missing link, an awkward evolutionary step between human and Other.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” the robot said. “Perhaps cake? Sugar helps human distress, I am told.” Somehow R. Patch-It managed to look abashed.

“I’m fine, really,” Isobel said again. Then, on an impulse: “Do you believe that . . . can robots . . . I mean to say—”

She faltered. The robot regarded her with his old, expressionless face. A rust scar ran down one cheek, from his left eye to the corner of his mouth. “You can ask me anything,” the robot said, gently. Isobel wondered what dead human’s voice had been used to synthesise the robot’s own.

“Do robots feel love?” she said.

The robot’s mouth moved. Perhaps it was meant as a smile. “We feel nothing but love,” the robot said.

“How can that be? How can you . . . how can you feel?” She was almost shouting. But this was Third Level, no one paid any attention.

“We’re anthropomorphised,” R. Patch-It said, gently. “We were fashioned human, given physicality, senses. It is the tin man’s burden.” His voice was sad. “Do you know that poem?”

“No,” Isobel said. Then, “What about . . . what about Others?”

The robot shook his head. “Who can tell,” he said. “For us, it is unimaginable, to exist as a pure digital entity, to not know physicality. And yet, at the same time, we seek to escape our physical existence, to achieve heaven, knowing it does not exist, that it must be built, the world fixed and patched . . . but what is it really that you ask me, Isobel daughter of Irina?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered, and she realised her face was wet. “The church—” her head inching, slightly, at the Catholic church behind them. The robot nodded, as if it understood.

“Youth feels so strongly,” the robot said. His voice was gentle. “Don’t be afraid, Isobel. Allow yourself to love.”

“I don’t know,” Isobel said. “I don’t know.”

“Wait—”

But she had turned away from Brother Patch-It. Blinking back the tears—she didn’t know where they came from—she walked away, she was late for work.

Tonight, she thought. Tonight, under the eaves. She wiped away the tears.

With dusk a welcome coolness settled over Central Station. In Mama Jones’ shebeen candles were lit and, across the road, the No-Name Nakamal was preparing the evening’s kava, and the strong, earthy smell of it—the roots peeled and chopped, the flesh minced and mixed with water, squeezed repeatedly to release its very essence, the kavalactones in the plant—the smell filled the paved street that was the very heart of the neighbourhood.

On the green, robotniks huddled together around a makeshift fire in an upturned drum. Flames reflected in their faces, metal and human mixed artlessly, the still-living debris of long-gone wars. They spoke amidst themselves in that curious Battle Yiddish that had been imprinted on them by some well-meaning army developer—a hushed and secret language no one spoke any more, ensuring their communications would be secure, like the Navajo Code Talkers in the second world war.

On top of Central Station graceful RLVs landed or took off, and on the roofs of the neighbourhood solar panels like flowers began to fold, and residents took to the roofs, those day-time sun-traps, to drink beer or kava or arak, to watch the world below, to smoke a sheesha pipe and take stock of the day, to watch the sun set in the sea or tend their rooftop gardens.

Inside Central Station the passengers dined and drank and played and worked and waited—Lunar traders, Martian Chinese on an Earth holiday package tour, Jews from the asteroid-kibbutzim in the Belt, the hurly burly of a humanity for whom Earth was no longer enough and yet was the centre of the universe, around which all planets and moons and habitats rotated, an Aristotelian model of the world superseding its one-time victor, Copernicus. On Level Three Isobel was embedded inside her work pod, existing simultaneously, like a Schrödinger’s Cat, in physical space and the equally real virtuality of the Guilds of Ashkelon universe, where—

She was the Isobel Chow, Captain of the Nine Tailed Cat, a starship thousands of years old, upgraded and refashioned with each universal cycle, a salvage operation she, Isobel, was captain and commander of, hunting for precious games-world artefacts to sell on the Exchange—

Orbiting Black Betty, a Guilds of Ahskelon universal singularity, where a dead alien race had left behind enigmatic ruins, floating in space in broken rocks, airless asteroids of a once-great galactic empire—

Success there translating to food and water and rent here—

But what is here, what is there—

Isobel Schrödingering, in the real and the virtual—or in the GoA and in what they call Universe-1—and she was working.

Night fell over Central Station. Lights came alive around the neighbourhood then, floating spheres casting a festive glow. Night was when Central Station came alive . . .

Florists packing for the day in the wide sprawling market, and the boy Kranki playing by himself, stems on the ground and wilting dark Lunar roses, hydroponics grown, and none came too close to him, the boy was strange, he had nakaimas.

Asteroid pidgin around him as he played, making stems rise and dance before him, black rose heads opening and closing in a silent, graceless dance before the boy. The boy had nakaimas, he had the black magic, he had the quantum curse. Conversation flowing around him, traders closing for the day or opening for the night, the market changing faces, never shutting, people sleeping under their stands or having dinner, and from the food stalls the smells of frying fish, and chili in vinegar, of soy and garlic frying, of cumin and turmeric and the fine purple powder of sumac, so called because it looks like a blush. The boy played, as boys would. The flowers danced, mutely.

—Yu stap go wea? Where are you going?

—Mi stap go bak long haos. I am going home.

—Yu no save stap smoltaem, dring smolsmol bia? Won’t you stop for a small beer?

Laughter. Then—Si, mi save stap smoltaem.

Yes, I could stop for a little while.

Music playing, on numerous feeds and live, too—a young kathoey on an old acoustic guitar, singing, while down the road a tentacle junkie was beating time on multiple drums, adding distortions in real-time and broadcasting, a small voice weaving itself into the complex unending pattern of the Conversation.

—Mi lafem yu!

—Awo, yu drong!

Laughter, I love you—You’re drunk!—a kiss, the two men walk away together, holding hands –

—Wan dei bae mi go long spes, bae mi go lukluk olbaot long ol star.

—Yu kranki we!

One day I will go to space, I will go look around all the planets—

You’re crazy!

Laughter, and someone dropping in from virtuality, blinking sleepy eyes, readjusting, someone turns a fish over on the grill, someone yawns, someone smiles, a fight breaks out, lovers meet, the moon on the horizon rises, the shadows of the moving spiders flicker on the surface of the moon.

Under the eaves. Under the eaves. Where it’s always dry where it’s always dark, under the eaves.

There, under the eaves of Central Station, around the great edifice, was a buffer zone, a separator between space port and neighbourhood. You could buy anything at Central Station and what you couldn’t buy you could get there, in the shadows.

Isobel had finished work, she had come back to Universe-1, had left behind captainhood and ship and crew, climbed out of the pod, and on her feet, the sound of her blood in her ears, and when she touched her wrist she felt the blood pulsing there, too, the heart wants what the heart wants, reminding us that we are human, and frail, and weak.

Through a service tunnel she went, between floors, and came out on the north-east corner of the port, facing the Kibbutz Galuyot road and the old interchange.

It was quiet there, and dark, few shops, a Kingdom of Pork and a book binder and warehouses left from days gone by, now turned into sound-proofed clubs and gene clinics and synth emporiums. She waited in the shadow of the port, hugging the walls, they felt warm, the station always felt alive, on heat, the station like a heart, beating. She waited, her node scanning for intruders, for digital signatures and heat, for motion—Isobel was a Central Station girl, she could take care of herself, she had a heat knife, she was cautious but not afraid of the shadows.

She waited, waited for him to come.

“You waited.”

She pressed against him. He was warm, she didn’t know where the metal of him finished and the organic of him began.

He said, “You came,” and there was wonder in the words.

“I had to. I had to see you again.”

“I was afraid.” His voice was not above a whisper. His hand on her cheek, she turned her head, kissed it, tasting rust like blood.

“We are beggars,” he said. “My kind. We are broken machines.”

She looked at him, this old abandoned soldier. She knew he had died, that he had been remade, a human mind cyborged onto an alien body, sent out to fight, and to die, again and again. That now he lived on scraps, depending on the charity of others . . .

Robotnik. That old word, meaning worker. But said like a curse.

She looked into his eyes. His eyes were almost human.

“I don’t remember,” he said. “I don’t remember who I was, before.”

“But you are . . . you are still . . . you are!” she said, as though finding truth, suddenly, and she laughed, she was giddy with laughter and happiness and he leaned and he kissed her, gently at first and then harder, their shared need melding them, Joining them almost like a human is bonded to an Other.

In his strange obsolete Battle Yiddish he said, “Ich lieba dich.”

In asteroid pidgin she replied.

—Mi lafem yu.

His finger on her cheek, hot, metallic, his smell of machine oil and gasoline and human sweat. She held him close, there against the wall of Central Station, in the shadows, as a plane high overhead, adorned in light, came in to land from some other and faraway place.

Originally published in Robots: The Recent A. I., edited by Rich Horton and Sean Wallace.

Jubilee

Karl Schroeder

Three muttering men stood on the path, not five meters below where Lauren and her companion crouched. It would do no good to tell Malak that she’d been to the wedding of the eldest of the three, or that she had brought candles to the houses of another the week he was born. Their rifles were unslung, their voices low. She knew why they were here.

Malak wasn’t watching them, but instead gazed longingly at the near end of a rope bridge that started about fifty meters ahead. The newly cleared path to it wound up the side of a hundred-meter-tall bedrock tower. Thick rain forest coated most of the karst spires in this region; their bases were lost in mist, which transformed them into a crowd of green-hooded giants standing on cloud. The fat domed pillar at the far end of the bridge had sheer vertical sides, making this the only approach. All these men had to do was camp out at the bridge’s near end to make it impossible for Lauren and Malak to complete their mission.

Lauren eased back behind the bushes, pulling Malak down gently beside her. “Patience,” she murmured. “If they can’t catch us alone, they’ll have to let us get through when other travelers arrive. If this letter doesn’t get delivered, it’s as much a disaster for them as for us.” She tapped the waterproof courier’s pouch slung at her waist.

“It’s huge,” said Malak, and Lauren realized he hadn’t been looking at the bridge at all, but at the lockstep fortress it led to. He was only seventeen, he’d only ever seen sleepers’ fortresses in picture books. This one’s outlines were veiled by the clouds that drifted among the pillar-landscape. It took up nearly the entire top of the miniature plateau it rested on.

She decided not to point out the even bigger fortress that was just visible seven kilometers to the south. He really should be thinking about those men.

But she heard singing, and presently a group of laborers appeared around the curve of the path. At their left was a sheer vertical rock face, to their right an equally sheer drop-off, but half of them were horsing around while the other half sang. They were carrying planks and other supplies, their powered exoskeletons squeaking and protesting against the weight.

Lauren checked out the three men. They were gone—stepped off the path, or hiding in the bushes, it made no difference. “Time to go,” she hissed at Malak, and without waiting for him she began climbing down.

One of the newcomers arched an eyebrow when she plunked onto the road in front of him. “You’re an unlikely bandit,” he said. “What were you doing up there?”

Lauren adjusted her waistband with dignity. “Would you rather I did it in the road?”

He laughed. “Never mind!” She heard Malak hit the path and, as she turned, made out three sullen bearded faces watching her from the underbrush. Lauren resisted an urge to stick her tongue out at them. Better not push it.

“You’re headed for the fortress?” she asked the laborer, who had a hundred or so kilos of plank laid across his machine-augmented shoulders.

“Where else would we be going?”

“Can we walk with you?”

“If you don’t mind foul language, bad manners, body odor and the occasional fistfight,” he said with a grin.

“It’s okay.” She sent Malak a sidelong look. “I’m used to boys.”

She could feel the eyes of their three purusers on her back as she set out across the swinging bridge, and that prickle warred with the vertiginous fear of crossing a seemingly bottomless chasm with nothing but knotted ropes under her feet. By the time she’d reached the other side the bridge had won, and she collapsed panting for a moment while Malak skipped off the end and the laborers approached deliberately and deadpan. Clearly they did this every day.

Lauren straightened and dusted herself off, staring them down. Then she took Malak’s shoulder and turned to confront the fortress.

“You’ve been here before,” said Malak. She nodded.

“Thirty-one years ago for me, one night for the people sleeping in there. I was a little older than you. I practically danced across the bridge that time. And it all went smoothly that time.”

“What’re they like?”

“Seriously?” She barked a laugh as they started walking. “How many times have we talked about this?”

“Yes, but . . . ” He rolled his shoulders and splayed out his hands which, like his feet, were too big for him at his age. “None of this has been like anybody said it would be. I mean . . . look at that.”

Work gangs had been clearing its flanks for months, but the fortress was still half-choked by vines. The traditional plaza in front of the giant building was brush-free, and they’d redone the paths that led around its sides. These, she remembered, led to the landing pads and other spaces the sleepers would need when they awoke in two days. There was even a little village, built on exactly the same plan, and even painted the same colors as the one she’d visited three decades ago. Yet the fortress towered over it all, black, windowless and bleak, as if immune to any cosmetics they might dress it up with. Its stone corners were rounded with erosion, to the point where any given surface looked like natural stone. It was only when you took in the whole that you realized it was a building, and even then, an eerie battle was thenceforth waged between the parts of the mind that recognized objects as being artificial and those that identified them as natural. The fortress trembled between those categories, indecisively alien.

“Just you wait,” she said, remembering last time. “In three days this’ll be the liveliest part of the country.”

“There!” Malak pointed, and only then did Lauren see who was waiting for them. Society master Tamlaine appeared to be alone. The Society was marshaling its resources, she’d heard, another way of saying it had hit hard times. On her first delivery, the master had been waiting with three decoy couriers, two official scribes and three hired guards.

It didn’t matter; Tamlaine was grinning his relief. “That’s them, right, Master Lauren?” asked Malak.

“Yes,” she said. “Go.” He ran—or rather staggered—forward, and his knees actually began to buckle just steps from Tamlaine. He’d been far more scared, Lauren suddenly realized, than he’d let on.

Her own steps were steady as she reached the master and shook his hand. “Sir.”

“You look good, courier,” said Tamlaine, and Lauren smiled. She was just as ready to collapse as Malak, but they weren’t home free yet. She wasn’t about to let her guard down until the gates to the fortress opened in two days’ time, and her letter was finally delivered.

“It was Niles and Powen,” she affirmed that evening as they sat by the fire. “They’re pure Westerfenn on their father’s side. Of course they’d think they have a claim. The other man I didn’t know, but it’s a big family.”

“But why do they even bother?” With two mulled ciders in him, Malak was half-asleep in a big wing chair. “The Westerfenns haven’t been couriers for two hundred years.”

“Yes, but son,” said Tamlaine, “they were the couriers for six hundred before that. Do you wonder that they feel they have a claim?”

“As far as some people are concerned, courier means Westerfenn,” agreed Lauren. “We’re the upstarts. Interlopers.”

“But who cares what we think?” Malak was still puzzled. “All that matters is that the Authors decided to switch to us.”

Tamlaine sent Malak a slightly pitying smile. “Do you really think the Authors care who delivers their letters? Do you think they even know?”

Malak sat up, offended. “They see us once a month!”

“But that’s thirty years for the courier. Sometimes it’s been the same person twice, and they didn’t notice until it was pointed out to them. For his part, I know that Chinen de Conestoga doesn’t care as long as his letters get through.”

“How can you say that!”

“Well, for one thing, he’s barely a year older than you are. Malak, tell me this: Do you know the name of the girl who sells you bread in the mornings?”

He opened his mouth, closed it, and sank sullenly into his chair.

Malak didn’t succeed in falling asleep, though; moments later, he sat up, blinking. “What’s that?”

It had been so faint Lauren hadn’t noticed the faint rumbling until now. Remembering it was something of a shock. Of course it would come, she should have expected it. Yet with so much else going on . . . She stood, still not hearing Malak’s increasingly worried questions, and moved as if in a trance to the doorway.

She’d been sixteen, carrying the message bag herself on the way across the bridge. The Westerfenns of that generation hadn’t made any fuss. Of course, her uncle Despolino would be the one to actually deliver the letter; still, she’d felt a huge sense of importance and responsibility. They’d set up camp in the evening, with the fortress a vast black silhouette against a silver sky. After, they’d entered the village and as she reluctantly prepared to hand the pouch to her uncle, this same vibration had filled the sky. Amazing that she could have forgotten!

Makeshift stages had been set up along the road to the fortress’s main gates. These would be taken down before the doors opened. For the next day, various groups would perform stories and allegories from the histories of the locksteps. The first time she’d been here she’d begged to watch them, but Uncle had been all business. Malak didn’t seem to care.

She walked to the end of the row of stages and, when Malak appeared at her side, pointed upward. “Look. It’s landing.”

The orbital transport was all glittery surfaces, chrome and glass and plastic like an insect. The roar came from its engines as it delicately hovered above the fortress. Its long landing legs rose and fell and angled fussily, as if groping for a solid surface. As they watched, the thunder rolling over them in waves, it settled behind the fortress. Moments later the sound cut out—and Malak started running.

“Travelers!” he shouted happily. Lauren set off after him at a jog. Laughing and shaking his head, Tamlaine followed them both at a more dignified saunter.

By the time they reached the landing field, the transport had opened its hatches and a gang of bots was unloading blocky shipping containers from its belly. If Malak had expected live humans at this point he was disappointed; if there were passengers on this flight they were frozen as solid as the rest of the cargo. The bots bounced the crates onto rolling pallets and took them through a heavily guarded set of metal gates into the fortress.

Malak watched it all avidly. “Yesterday—their yesterday—they fell asleep on another world. They’ll wake on this one,” he said. “I wonder where they’ve been?”

Lauren shrugged. “Join the lockstep, and find out.” She knew he’d never do that; in order to stay inside when they sealed the doors again, you only had to ask—but doing that meant giving up everyone you knew here. Parents, children, friends, family, profession: all would be left behind. Lauren had never once considered doing that, and she knew Malak wouldn’t either. It was too drastic a step.

They watched the unloading until it was full night and the crickets were chorusing. When Tamlaine began to walk back, Lauren turned to follow and saw that the little stages along the road were lit. “Malak! Look at this.”

He was reluctant until he saw the players, then he raced ahead. Lauren and Tamlaine laughed together, remembering their youths as they followed.

The biggest stage was lavishly decorated and lit. Devotees of the Lord of Time were staging a highly stylized, half ritual performance of the Revelation of Tobias. The actor playing Tobias McGonigal was masked and so heavily swaddled in costume that you couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. The three couriers watched for a while as McGonigal tried to convince his mother (in mime) that the galaxy would be theirs if they accepted the gift of cold sleep. When she rejected him, a quick set change put Tobias on his legendary ship, and then he began an interminable oratorio about his first and final entry into cold sleep. After it had dragged on for fifteen minutes, Lauren took Malak’s shoulder and steered him onward.

There were plays about the founding of the locksteps on this world, plays about distant and legendary Earth. There were stories of kings who took refuge in the locksteps and after thirty years returned, a day older, as beggars to behold the ruin of their kingdoms. There were romances. There were murder mysteries. And there was—

“Hey!” Malak stopped dead, and Lauren almost tripped over him. “That’s Powen, isn’t it?”

It was indeed, and Niles was beside him. They were standing on a modest stage near the end of the row, along with a girl and a boy dressed in lockstep fashions. Right now the girl was writing furiously at a little desk, and Niles hovered behind her, speaking to the audience.

“One month together! One jubilee, and the two locksteps will not meet again for nine centuries! Three hundred sixty months for her lockstep, three hundred seventy-two for his, their times will diverge and converge over a millennium. To those whose lives follow the rhythm of the fortresses, a mere two and a half years will pass before their rhythms synchronize again. But a boy and a girl who have met and fallen in love—well, they will feel the centuries as much as we!”

“They’re telling the story!” Malak hissed. “The story of the Authors!”

Lauren shrugged, though she was uncomfortable. “They have a perfect right to do it.”

It wasn’t one of the great tales, but it was well-enough known. Of the several locksteps on this planet, there were two so mutually hostile that they hibernated on different frequencies. The frequency of the first was 360 months asleep to one month awake. The other’s was 372 to one. As out of phase as they were, they still couldn’t completely avoid each other. Every 960 years they came into phase and both were open during the same month. The last time this Jubilee had happened, a girl from the first lockstep had met a boy from the second, and they had fallen in love.

There were popular books on the subject, and Malak had seen the secret ones, too, the Commentaries, that filled the Society’s library. He shouldn’t be surprised.

The girl onstage was now holding a golden letter up to the one thin spotlight. “Oh, to whom can I entrust my words of love?” she quavered. “For when it leaves my hands, thirty-one years shall pass before my lover’s touch shall it awake. Who might dedicate themselves to its preservation, and to bear the fragile wings of my ardor to my heart’s desire?”

Tamlaine leaned close. “Not one of the better ones. They could at least have done Gisbon’s version. It’s in rhyming couplets.”

Now Niles was kneeling before her, hand outstretched. “And who are you, sir knight?” sighed the girl.

“I am Atamandius Westerfenn, and I dedicate my life to the transmission of your message.”

Despite the crass propaganda of it all, Lauren felt her fingers curl protectively around the pouch hanging at her waist. Malak was muttering about self-serving Westerfenns, and Tamlaine simply stood there watching with his arms crossed. Disgusted, Lauren was about to leave when there was a discreet cough behind her. She turned.

“Lauren Arthen, I believe?” It was the third of the men who’d been following them. Lauren glanced around—two onstage, one here; were there more?

He seemed to sense her anxiety, and bowed slightly, shaking his head. “There’s just me. And I would never hurt you.”

Malak and Tamlaine were busy watching the clumsy play. Lauren took a step back into the shadows with the man. “I am armed,” she lied. “You were waiting with those two to ambush us this morning.”

“And they would have, too,” he agreed, “if I hadn’t intervened. Which I would have.”

“And why would you do that?”

Now he grimaced, shrugged. There was a suggestion of Westerfenn to his face, which was long and high browed. He seemed more a scholar than a courier. “I was hoping you’d remember me,” he said, very quietly.

She looked at him more closely. Where would she have remembered a Westerfenn from? He was about her age, which would mean, if he was a courier . . . “Kiel?”

Now he grinned. “You do remember! We spent a few days together, after the Authoress gave you . . . that.” He nodded at the pouch at her side.

“A lunch or two. A walk, if I remember,” she said. That was all it could reasonably have been. Their families, their societies and histories would all have been against it. Both had known at the time, and hadn’t spoken of it. They’d never even touched, but Lauren had sometimes thought about the might-have-beens in the ensuing years. Remembering, she looked down.

Kiel Westerfenn sent an impatient look at the stage. “Forget about those two congenital thugs, they’re just looking to regain lost glories because they have no ideas of their own. Even this play . . . they’re trying to win over the crowd because they still have a half-baked plan to take the letter from you. When I heard they were going to try to intercept your delivery I . . . well, I invited myself along. I’m sorry if they scared you this morning. But I won’t let them stand in your way.”

“Well . . . thank you!”

He bowed fully this time. “I respect your mission, even if they do not.” With that, he stepped into further shadow, and vanished among the crowd.

Lauren turned back to watch the insipid play, but she didn’t hear anything that the actors said, and despite the darkness of the night, she felt herself blinking as though a bright light had just shone in her eyes.

Two days later, at dawn, the massive gates grated open, and Lockstep 372/1 came into Jubilee with realtime. On seventy thousand planets and on countless comets, asteroids, and colony cylinders, morning came to trillions of people.

When Lauren was little she’d imagined it as a revelation: numberless eyes opening in rapture after thirty years in the underworld. Yet for those in the locksteps, she had learned, it was just another morning. Last night—or so it seemed to them—they’d gone to sleep under their blankets as on any evening. The hibernation technologies that wound them down into nearly perfect stasis were unobtrusive—hidden, usually, in the bases of their beds. They slept, they woke, and many of them simply didn’t care that thirty years had passed in the outer world.

Here they came now, the ones who did care. The new population of the refurbished village surrounding the fortress was waiting as the first yawning traders from the lockstep emerged. They seemed relaxed, casual even; they did this once a month, after all. Lauren watched the waiting craftsmen and journalists try to temper their own excitement to match. Act normal—the locksteppers expected it.

Lauren stood back a bit with Malak and Tamlaine. She was conscious of the presence of others, mostly people who knew the story of the Authors and had come to watch the delivery.

The Westerfenns were here too, but Lauren was no longer worried about them. Yesterday, Kiel had found her as she walked in the marketplace, and handed her a small cloth-wrapped object.

“A first step, maybe,” he’d said. “I heard the Society library was missing a few volumes.” She unfolded the cloth and found she was holding a very old leather-bound book. She looked at the spine. “Commentaries, volume seventy-four? You’re right! We don’t have this. But how—”

Kiel had shrugged. “A little larceny on my part. It’s not like we need it. We’re not the couriers anymore.”

Each letter the Authors exchanged had been carefully opened and read, and scholars and philosophers had debated its contents for decades, sometimes centuries. All except Authoress Letter 13, of course, which the couriers at the time had for some reason failed to open. In the Society’s library, an entire bookshelf was devoted to speculations about what that letter had said.

Bots, heavily laden vehicles and people were now crowding through the open gates. Behind them, the long rectangular tunnel leading into the fortress was lit with the sorts of electric utility lights Lauren had seen in photos and ancient movies. At the same time, distant rumblings signaled the opening of the fortress’s rooftop doors. The fortress unfolded almost like a flower, and as it did, antennae rose and dozens of flying machines big and small shot up and away. The fortress would be connecting with its fellows across the planet, forming for one month a complete, dynamic, and overwhelmingly potent civilization. During Jubilee, 372/1 owned the world; it was the world.

“Where is he?” Malak was shifting from foot to foot.

“He’ll be here. Chinen isn’t going to miss a delivery from his love.”

They had met in Jubilee, Chinen de Conestoga of 372 and Margaret Pierce of 360. They were the same age—roughly 6,000 years, or sixteen by their own reckoning. After jubilee they had promised to write. The first courier had set out from Margaret’s home thirty years later, and it was easy: just one year later, her letter was delivered. Chinen’s reply had waited 29 years. As the pattern of exchanges settled in, their couriers learned to wait according to the shifting frequencies of the locksteps: one year then 29, two years then 28, three then 27. Eventually the phase shifted and now, as jubilee approached again, it was Margaret’s letter that had waited 28 years. Chinen’s newest would be delivered in just two. Sixty-two years from now, they would finally meet again.

“There he is,” said Tamlaine. He sounded more excited than she’d expected, and it seemed to unlock a thrill of anticipation in her as well . . . After decades of imagining what this moment would be like, of course it was nothing like she’d pictured. Chinen de Conestoga was no radiant god emerging from Heaven; he was just a boy being jostled by the crowd as he looked around. His face seemed pinched, anxious even. And someone else was with him, an older man with his hand on Chinen’s shoulder.

Lauren saw this, but she didn’t register it. Years of mental rehearsal made her step forward, wave, and say, “Chinen de Conestoga! Over here!”

He looked, his eyes widened, and for just a second she saw him making a frantic gesture, as though warding her off. Then his face fell as the man whose hand lay so heavily on his shoulder swept by.

The man stalked up to Lauren, and suddenly she recognized him. His portraits were not prominent in the Society headquarters, because he was considered a minor actor in the millennial drama of the lovers. He was Chinen’s father.

“You!” He stabbed an accusing finger at Lauren. “Are you a part of this fiasco?”

She found herself blinking, unable to speak. Chinen stepped between them. “It’s not their fault,” he said. “Please, Father—”

The elder de Conestoga held out his hand to Lauren, snapping his fingers impatiently. “You, are you hiding something from some sort of three sixty trash? Speak up!”

Lauren still couldn’t speak. It wasn’t just the rudeness; most locksteppers treated realtimers with great respect, if with condescension now and then. But—360 trash? The Authoress?

“I’m so sorry,” Chinen was saying to her, and Tamlaine was here now, too, gabbling something indignantly at the Author’s father, who ignored the Society elder and continued to glare at Lauren.

Numbly, she raised the courier’s bag and fumbled it open. She began to bring out the letter, but he reached in impatiently and snatched it from her hand. Lauren gasped.

“You told me it was just a Jubilee thing, and now I hear you’ve been exchanging letters with her?” Brandishing the letter, he rounded on his son. “There will be no more of this nonsense!” he cried. “It stops now!” And as he said now he tore the letter in half. He kept tearing until he had a handful of shreds that he flung to the ground.

As the object of 28 years of devoted care fluttered into the mud, blackness rushed at Lauren from all quarters. The mud came up and smacked her in the face.

Lauren sat in her bed at the inn, a mug of mulled wine in her hands, and watched Malak pace and swear. Tamlaine sat in the room’s one chair. Neither he nor Lauren had said a word since she awoke from her faint. Malak was making up for it.

“No letter! How can there be no letter? It’s nearly Jubilee! They exchange two more and then meet again. And I’ll be there to see it—the end. How can a story go for a thousand years and have no end? It has to end, and the Society has to be there!”

Tamlaine shook his head. “It could have ended at any time,” he murmured. Malak stopped and stared at him in obvious disbelief. Tamlaine sighed.

“They’re just young lovers, Malak. They haven’t seen each other in almost two years. Any one of their letters could have been the last one. They could have tired of it at any time.”

“But, but that’s—” Malak made a flinging gesture as he turned away. “They’re the Authors! And we’re helping them tell the Story!”

Lauren took a pensive sip of the wine. Tamlaine was right, of course. Nearly every volume in the Society library contained a chapter or two of doubts, based on tone, a casual word, or even just the handwriting in the most recent letter. “Why do you think we’ve been letting the Authoress read the Commentaries? She was doubting his sincerity, and Chinen’s a little clumsy with his wording sometimes. Your great-grandmother told her about the Commentaries, the clarifications and interpretations of his letters, and all the wisdom and advice people had been writing to her for centuries, which she’d never seen. She’s read it. She knows he’s sincere. But that doesn’t mean anything. She could have met somebody new at any time. She could have lost interest . . . ”

“No. It can’t end like this. What are we going to do? What am I going to do? A courier without a letter? Nobody’ll take that seriously. Nobody’s going to support us. Just think of that. Where’s the Society’s money going to come from if there’s no letters?”

Tamlaine shrugged. “There will be no Society . . . if it’s true that there are no more letters.” He sighed heavily. “I’ll have to draft a letter home. Of course, now that the fortress is open we could just use their wireless and I could speak to them instantly. But I don’t like doing things that way. We take our time for a reason. We’re not locksteppers.”

“Wait, wait.” Malak was frantic. “It’s not too late, what are you saying? The Author’s father’s forbidden it, but what does that mean? We’ll just have to contact Chinen in secret. He wants to know what Margaret said! And Lauren, you’ve got her letter memorized, don’t you? We all do.”

Tamlaine looked uncomfortable. “Margaret doesn’t mind that we open the letters. But Chinen does. He made that clear early on. If he finds out that we’ve been reading Margaret’s words—”

Lauren laughed bitterly. “What’s he going to do about it now? Stop using us?”

Her words hung there. The three couriers looked at one another, until finally Tamlaine nodded.

“I’ll hold off telling the Society for now,” he said. “We’ll find an opportunity. Chinen’s bound to come outside at some point. His father can’t follow him everywhere. We’ll approach him then. If Chinen can’t read Margaret’s words, then we’ll recite them to him.”

It was a sound plan, but it was three weeks before the opening came. By that time Tamlaine had drafted and redrafted his letter to the Society about ten times, and Malak was beside himself with anxiety and anger. He kept threatening to just march up to Chinen’s home and demand to see him. In week two he got into a fight with Niles, and it was clear afterward that the Westerfenns suspected something.

Lauren did domestic work, the sorts of things she’d done every day her whole life. She cooked, cleaned her clothes, mended, shopped in the market. All the while, though, she felt a faint sense of difference, of disconnection from it all. For the first time in many years, she felt the absence of someone else’s hands in the washtub with hers; the lack of a second opinion when she hefted the potatoes at the vegetable stall. It wasn’t that somebody else should be there with her; it was more that she’d suddenly remembered that someone could have been. Disquiet filled her.

Finally one morning Chinen came to the fortress gates and stared about for a while, then went back inside. Lauren followed and found him in one of the brightly lit arcades deep within. The open roof of the fortress let sunlight down through layers of crisscrossing buildings, all piled together like a child’s building blocks and festooned with greenery and flowers. The arcade where Chinen loitered was a balconied space overhung with freshly transplanted willow trees. Chinen stood under one, pensively examining it.

“Not the same tree,” he said as Lauren approached. “If you look closely. This is where we met, courier. Her family was visiting. Can you believe that? They were mostly shunned, but here they were. I told her I thought it was awful how we were treating them.”

“I memorized the letter,” Lauren blurted.

Chinen hissed in anger, started to say something—and then his shoulders slumped. “I suppose keeping our privacy was too much to ask. You’ve read them all?”

Reluctantly, she nodded.

“Then I guess you know us better than we know ourselves.”

“You’re just a boy and a girl who’re in love,” she said. That was simple to say—and yet the Society had revolved around them for centuries. Libraries had been written about them and their love. They had become, unexpectedly, something far bigger than they knew.

She couldn’t tell him that. “Shall I recite her words?” He nodded.

It was the strangest moment of her life. The words she spoke now were simple, but she’d lived with them for 28 years, and with this recitation, they were done. Delivered, and gone from her. She wouldn’t have been surprised if she woke tomorrow and couldn’t remember them at all.

Chinen faced out over the treetops and slanting shafts of sunlight, framed by glass and near and distant vistas of lockstep life. When she was finished he stood there silently for a long time, then murmured, “They’re better than we are.”

“Sir?”

“I’m no ‘sir.’ I’m just a kid, remember?” She ducked her head, knowing it but still unable to react to him that way. Chinen laughed bitterly. “They’d have me. They’d have me as their son. Yet my father forbids me to contact them at all. He told me he’s setting buzz-cams after me during the Jubilee. He’s going to record everything I do, everywhere I go. Margaret and I . . . he’ll never let us meet.”

“I . . . I’m sorry.” There was another long, awkward silence. Finally Lauren knew she would have to ask right now, or she’d lose her courage forever: “Will you write a reply?”

He shook his head. “No. No, what’s the point?”

Later, arguments would crowd Lauren’s mind, all the things she should have said, of course. For now her mind was a blank, her mouth dry with shock.

Chinen turned to her, at last looking her in the eye. “Thanks for delivering the letter. You know I can’t pay you . . . ”

That threw her. “We’ve never asked for money!”

He winced. “I know, I know . . . It’s just . . . It all ended so uselessly, didn’t it?” He sighed, then bowed. “Thanks. Goodbye.”

He left her standing there. Lauren felt like an abandoned tool, unnoticed by the people walking by. Then she blinked at a sudden feeling of pressure . . . intensity. She turned, and in the jumble of faces on the plaza behind her, saw Niles’s face for just an instant. Then he was gone.

Tamlaine and Malak reacted just as she’d imagined they would. The older man, having seen much in his life, sat with his head down for a while, then raised it to the sunlight and laughed. “Well,” he said. “That shows up all our pretensions, doesn’t it?”

They were sitting on a bench in front of the inn, and being in public was the only thing that seemed to be keeping Malak from screaming. He shifted from foot to foot, pulling at his hair and sputtering. “They can’t! They just can’t!”

“It was Chinen’s decision to make,” said Tamlaine. “Never ours. All we ever committed to was delivery of the letters. Anything more than that . . . well, we made up.”

“I didn’t make up the honors! The privilege of being a courier! It’s . . . it’s all I ever wanted! And now he’s taken it? What am I going to do?”

Tamlaine sent him a reproachful look. “Delivery takes only a few minutes of a courier’s life, Malak. You’ll do exactly what you would have done otherwise. Work, get married, be a good citizen . . . ”

“But without the stipend! You had it,” he accused Lauren. “You’ve had no worries for thirty years. But what about me?”

Lauren opened her mouth to tell him that this wasn’t about him at all, but she couldn’t say that. It was; and yet, it wasn’t Chinen’s fault, because he didn’t even know the Society existed.

Swearing and kicking at the dirt, Malak stalked away. “Niles saw,” Lauren said to Tamlaine after he was out of earshot. “I suppose it’ll be all over the place in no time.”

“Still.” He frowned, thinking. “The Society has existed for centuries. We’d always expected it would disband when the lovers finally met again. There’re plans for that, a whole schedule, I think. People have considered how to retire the last courier. It’s not going to be arbitrary.”

“But . . . Malak never had a chance to become a courier.” I’m the last. What a terrible thought!

“He would have been.” Tamlaine stood up and stretched. “Ah, we’ll think of something. But I should go. If the news is going to spread, I need to be the one the Society hears it from. I’m going to pack. I’ll leave in the morning.”

She saw little more of Tamlaine that day, and nothing of Malak, who was sulking somewhere in the fortress. Lauren visited the market, took a nap in her room at the inn, and, in the end, found herself wandering along the crumbled foundations of the fortress. Lockstep bots were replacing some of the cyclopean stones with new granite, and she was watching this process when she heard a tentative cough from behind her.

It was Kiel. He stood near the edge of the plateau, framed by crooked trees and a vista of forested peaks. He might have been watching her for a few minutes, and if so, had he had that slightly worried look on his face the whole time?

“Hello,” she said dully.

“Is it true?” he asked. “There will be no letter?”

She shrugged. “Doesn’t mean Margaret won’t want to send one. We’ve two years to wait for that.”

“Will you be there?”

Lauren gnawed at her calloused thumb, staring out over the forested landscape. The Society’s backers were likely to pull their funds if they thought that the millennial epic of Margaret and Chinen had ended in silence. Tamlaine’s optimism aside, the Society had not been expecting this turn of events. She might not be able to afford to visit Margaret’s fortress when it woke in two years. “I suppose a Westerfenn will be there,” she said bitterly. “Your cousins must be delighted at the prospect.”

“Actually, they’re furious. They think it’s all over.”

“They’re probably right.”

He was staring at her in a way she couldn’t interpret. “It really has never occurred to you that this might be a good thing?”

“What?! Why? I— I suppose for you it is. No more humiliation at seeing us make the deliveries!”

“No, that’s not what I—”

“Is that what you came here to do? Gloat? Well, go ahead, there’s nothing I can do about it. Bring Niles and Powen next time, we’ll set up the stage and you can parade me around for the whole town to see!”

“Wait, Lauren, I didn’t mean—” But she’d had enough of him, and ran, ignoring his plaintive words.

Tamlaine was gone in the morning, and Malak was making himself scarce, which was just as well. Lauren didn’t want to talk to anybody. She had money enough to stay until the lockstep’s doors closed again, and to get home. Theoretically her stipend would transform into a pension now that Malak was officially the courier. Whether that was really what would happen was anybody’s guess; she trusted Tamlaine to argue vigorously on her behalf. After all, this wasn’t her fault.

The day before the lockstep was to close, however, she woke to banging on her door. She opened it a crack and saw policemen in the hall. “What’s going on?”

“Ma’am, are you an associate of a Tamlaine de Lotness? We’re told you were seen in his company.”

She flung the door wide. “What’s happened to Tamlaine?”

They showed her.

It was up to her to make a final identification of the body. He’d been found at the bottom of the spire on the other side of the rope bridge, having fallen from the roadway. The body was quite battered, but what upset Lauren was the pinched look on his face. He looked disappointed, and it was that, and not the terrible battering the rocks had done to him, that she knew would haunt her.

It wasn’t impossible for the death to have been accidental. Tamlaine was getting on in years, and the path was treacherous in places. Lauren didn’t believe that for a second, and the first thing she said when she saw the body was “Westerfenn!”

Kiel and his cousins were nowhere to be found, but that by itself wasn’t suspicious; things were winding down in the temporary village, with people leaving in small and large parties every few hours. The Westerfenns had no reason to be here now, any more than Lauren herself did. It wasn’t impossible that they’d simply left, and maybe they had, and maybe they’d run into Tamlaine on the road purely by chance. Malak, when she finally found him and told him, shook his head.

“They must have followed him,” he said. “They were waiting for us at the bridge, remember? If they were willing to kill us and take the letter, they’d hardly hesitate to throw one old man over a cliff.”

The authorities promised to hunt for the cousins, but Lauren just wanted to move on. “We’ll wait for the lockstep to close,” she told Malak. “What’s an extra day at this point. And then we’ll go to the Society headquarters ourselves, and tell them the whole story.”

They cremated Tamlaine. People who knew the story of the couriers came to the funeral, but realtimers and locksteppers generally kept their affairs separate. There was talk about whether Chinen should be invited, but in the end the consensus was not to further disturb the Author’s family. No one tried to approach him, either to tell him about the death or to invite him to the funeral.

Lauren understood; still, as the orange flames from the pyre rose in the night, she found herself staring resentfully at the lockstep fortress that bulked behind it. The place was all lit up, with visitors still coming and going. Somewhere inside, Chinen de Conestoga was eating, or reading, or perhaps chasing some new girl. He would never know who Tamlaine had been; that he was dead; that he had dedicated his entire life to the delivery of Chinen’s letters.

Malak was offended, and told her so as they browsed the market for travel provisions on the last day. “We gave everything to those two! And for what? In the end, we didn’t even get a nod out of them.”

Lauren could picture herself, at Malak’s age, posturing and pouting exactly the same way. “It was never really about them,” she said, “the couriers, the Society, none of it.”

He stared at her. “Then why? Why help them, if not for the glory of it?”

Lauren laughed. “What glory. They’re two young people who might be in love. There was never any glory. That was the point.”

Still he stared. With a sigh, Lauren tried one last time: “The Society existed to celebrate that very insignificance. Chinen and Margaret, they’re nobody—but so are we all. In elevating them to epic status, the Society elevated every ordinary person. We celebrated all love, no matter how ordinary or fleeting, by celebrating theirs.”

Malak shook his head. “There’s yams over there.” He stalked away. Lauren watched him go, hands on her hips.

“Courier!”

She turned. Chinen de Conestoga stood a few feet away—or was it him? Yes—it was just that he was dressed in local garb, tough traveling clothes like hers and Malak’s. He had a pack slung over his shoulder. “Great, you’re still here!” He strode up and shook her hand—or really, in his enthusiasm, her whole arm.

“What are you doing here?” She looked around; nobody was watching. “The fortress will be shutting up in a few hours. And we’re leaving. The market’s closing—”

“I’m going with you!”

And he just stood there, grinning widely, while she tried to catch up. “Wait, you—” He was dressed like a realtimer. “You’re coming with . . . You’re running away from home?”

“If I stay, I won’t come of age before next Jubilee. If I leave, I’ll be an adult before Father can catch up to me.” He grinned again. “And I’ll be of age by the time Margaret’s lockstep wakes.”

Two years . . . it was true. Lauren looked him over, her mind a blank; then suddenly she laughed. “You’ll make a rather outsized letter.”

Serious now, he said, “I’ll do whatever work you need. I don’t intend to be a burden.”

But you’re the Author! Yet he wasn’t, not anymore. Oh, how is the Society going to take this one? The shock was going to kill the old men in the library, but then, Tamlaine’s message would have been enough to do that. The investors—those few romantic and wealthy souls whose support of the Society was a kind of sacrifice to love—might rebel and pull all their funding. Or they might take Chinen’s decision as the ultimate romantic gesture, and double their support. Who could tell? Lauren found herself almost dizzy with the possibilities.

“Come on then,” she heard herself say. “Before your father finds out.”

They were on the bridge when the fortress doors closed. It was late evening, and sunset burnished the side of the vast building. Lauren fancied she could hear the solid thud of the iron shields falling; the rooftop panels were already shut. There was no hurry now; people would take whatever time they needed to wrap up their business in the temporary town before heading home with the goods and wealth they’d acquired during this brief trading season.

Several stars were out. As Lauren stepped onto solid ground at the far end of the bridge, she glanced up, not at the stars but at the blank silver-blue between them. It was within that invisible space that most of the lockstep worlds could be found–tens of thousands of frozen, nomad planets for every star in the galaxy. Someone embarking from this fortress tonight might take decades to reach another of those distant worlds, yet only a single night would pass for them, since they were hibernating. Meanwhile, their destinations were in hibernation too; all the worlds in a lockstep coordinated their wake and sleep cycles. A traveler to such a world could spend a month there and then return, to find that only a month—in lockstep time—had passed here. In this way, the locksteps maintained an illusion of proximity for a far-flung culture of thousands of worlds.

The price of living in a lockstep was that you gave up on realtime. Chinen’s father would go to sleep tonight and not awake for thirty-one years. Lauren would probably be dead by the time he awoke; she would never hear the end of this story. If Chinen wasn’t accepted into Margaret’s lockstep during its Jubilee in two years, he would grow old and die while his father slept.

He didn’t seem particularly worried; on the contrary, there was a spring in his step and he was looking about alertly as they descended the spiral path to the misty rain forest. “What’s two years, if we can be together?” was all he’d said when Malak had confronted him about his decision. Malak had shut up after that, and now plodded along in uncharacteristic silence, his eyes searching the horizon as if looking for some reassurance there.

They slept that night under the stars—or at least, Lauren and Malak slept. She awoke at one point to the total silence of a windless forest; when she turned her head she saw, illuminated by thin starlight, Chinen lying on his back, as perfectly still as the forest boughs, and staring at the sky.

In the morning they ate a quiet breakfast, then descended from the cloud forest through tunnels of green carved through the forest floor. The far descendants of Earth’s cicadas roared and hummed in the mazelike depths; above, the sunlit green was so bright it was nearly yellow.

About midmorning Chinen suddenly laughed and stopped. “Where are we going, anyway?” he asked.

Lauren had to smile, though Malak shot her a look that said he didn’t know either. “Not home,” she said. “Not my home, or Malak’s yet. Since our master died we have to check in at the headquarters of our Society. You might as well come along.”

He shrugged. “Sure. Maybe I could get a job there.”

Malak sputtered in confusion, but Lauren was getting used to this kind of shock. She thought about all that Chinen didn’t know about his place in her world; it was going to be a long, hard conversation.

“Sorry about your friend, by the way. We all heard the news. What’s your Society do? Are you craftsmen?”

Well, here it was. Lauren thought for a while. “Chinen,” she said eventually, “do you believe in love?”

He laughed and spread his arms wide. “Look at me! I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Well, then, do you believe that people need to believe in love? Even when they don’t have it?”

“Sure.”

“Then, would you support a society that used symbols—a great tale, let’s say—to inspire people to believe in love?”

Chinen grinned and nodded; cicadas sang a descant from the trees around him.

“All right,” said Lauren. “Then let me tell you about a great love story, and about the Society that was formed to shelter and nurture it . . . ”

They were exhausted that night, and not just because none of them had walked like this for a while. Malak had found a little dell near a spring, and Lauren could hear it quietly talking to itself as she lay down to sleep. It had been an emotional day for Chinen, who’d swung between outrage, awe, bemusement and a dozen other states as they talked. Malak had simply plodded, a gray shamble apparently immune to the cut-and-thrust of Lauren’s history.

Now Chinen knew it all. He knew that Lauren had sacrificed having a normal life to spend her days preparing for one simple journey, as Courier. He knew that entire lives had been lived for the sake of his and Margaret’s love; that duels had been fought; that great feuds had festered, operas been written and myriad books printed. Now, with all that filling his head, he lay down and fell instantly asleep.

Lauren wasn’t far behind him, and the distracted murmurs of the spring were the perfect lullaby; she drifted off with a curious sense of fulfillment.

A hand clamped over her mouth.

Lauren bucked against the unforgiving ground as her eyes flew open and she reached past the hand to scrabble at shoulders, a face—

“Don’t move!” someone hissed. Off to her left, some kind of struggle was flattening the grass. Two silhouettes rolled together and she saw the flash of a blade under starlight. Then she realized whose hand was over her mouth. It was Kiel Westerfenn’s.

Ignoring her scratches and attempts to knee him, he dragged her under the shadows of an ancient tree whose many roots made their own convoluted landscape. She tried to bite him, and he hissed, “Look, he’ll find us if you don’t stop it! And I’m not young enough or strong enough anymore to say I could take him in a fight.”

Him? She saw one of the black figures force the other down, and the knife rose. Lauren elbowed Kiel in the face and sprawled forward across a root. “Malak! No!”

He turned, snarling. “Shit! Where’d you go?” Chinen wasn’t moving, so Malak got to his feet and held the knife up against the stars. “Don’t move! Don’t you dare move, or I’ll spit your precious Author like a spring hare! Come out of there. Now!”

Kiel let go of her. Lauren rose to her feet and stumbled out into the meager starlight. “What are you doing, Malak?”

“Taking back my future.” His chest was heaving with the effort of the fight. He took a few deep breaths, then kicked Chinen’s prone shape. “There’s going to be a letter. He’s going to write it, and I’m going to deliver it to Margaret. Then I’ll be the courier for the next twenty-eight years! With the privileges, the pension, and I’ll be somebody. All I wanted was to hold my head up the way you hold up yours. Then kids’ll look up to me the way I used to look up to you.”

Lauren’s trembling fingers pressed against her nose, which was bleeding from the pressure of Kiel’s hand. The stickiness bewildered her, but as she stared at the black pooling in her palm, the meaning of what Malak had just said overcame her. “You killed Tamlaine.”

“Of course. He was going to tell the Society! Then it would have all been over for me.”

“Oh, Malak.”

“Don’t you sound so disappointed! Just—just don’t! You got to be courier! You’ve had it all. What was I going to—”

Kiel tackled him from the side.

Lauren screamed, watching them roll across the stony, root-thrust ground. She almost tripped over Chinen and suddenly realized what she should be doing. She knelt and felt his throat. There was a pulse.

“Chinen, Chinen you have to get up. We have to go.” He moaned and tried to sit up. “Have to go, have to go now—”

Kiel cried out and she turned to see him staggering into the darkness. “Ha!” Malak turned; she saw the dark sockets of his eyes, saw him dismiss her as a threat and move on to Chinen, who was getting to his feet.

Malak stepped up to Chinen, blade raised, and it was no trick at all for Lauren to raise the rock she’d grabbed and bring it down on the back of the head. He fell instantly and silently.

Lauren looked at the rock in her hand, puzzled at the simplicity of it. Then Chinen shook his head and put a hand on her shoulder to steady himself. “Nicely done,” he said.

“Kiel!” She dropped the rock and went to look for him. He was near the spring, doubled up and coughing. “Oh no! Kiel, it’ll be all right! Just lie down, don’t move around so much, we’ll get help—”

“I’m all right. Oooh, forget that. But I’ll be all right, he didn’t hit any mainlines.” Kiel sat down, rather suddenly, next to the mindless bubbling water, and guided her hand to a wet patch on his flank. “See? Hurts like Hell, but it’s not deep. At least I don’t think so . . . ” He went on talking, making inferences, judging how far the blade had gone in and how much blood he’d lost. When Chinen arrived he and Lauren made some bandages and tied them tightly around Kiel, and then Chinen put pressure on the wound.

Eventually Kiel said, “Malak?”

“Tied him up,” said the Author. “Not that he’s going anywhere. Lauren hit him pretty hard.” There was an admiring tone in his voice, but Lauren felt sick. She sat with her head down for a while, and nobody spoke. Then she looked up at Kiel.

“What are you doing here?”

“You’re welcome,” he said with weak laugh. “I was following you. —Me, not us. I ditched my cousins yesterday. They’d have done you harm if they’d found you.”

“But why? I mean why follow us?”

He tried to shrug. “I was suspicious. Tamlaine’s death . . . I knew we didn’t do it. So who did that leave? I couldn’t be sure, and I knew you’d never trust me. So I decided to just watch over you for a couple days, until you got to heavier trafficked roads. Glad I did.” Exhausted now, he lay back; he was starting to shiver.

Chinen grunted. “I’ll get the fire going.” He got up and began rummaging around for kindling.

Lauren sat bent over while Chinen clattered and cursed in the underbrush. Eventually she said, “You wanted to make sure the Author was safe.”

“Not the Author.” Kiel coughed. “The message.”

There was another long silence. Then Lauren said, “It was just dinner, you know. Once or twice, I can’t even remember.”

“You’ve read the letters. Do you think he and Margaret did any more?”

She looked over at Chinen, who was jamming sticks into the coals with a determined look on his bruised face.

“I suppose not,” she said.

Then she lay down next to Kiel, whom she had not seen in many long years, and they talked.

Originally published in Tor.com, February 26, 2014.

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

Robert Reed

Robert Reed is the author of nearly three hundred published stories, plus more than a dozen novels. He is best known for his Great Ship stories, including The Memory of Sky. And for the novella, “A Billion Eves,” which won the Hugo Award in 2007. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska with his wife and daughter.

Lavie Tidhar

Lavie Tidhar is the author of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize winning and Premio Roma nominee A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), the World Fantasy Award winning Osama (2011) and of the Campbell Award winning and Locus and Clarke Award nominated Central Station (2016). His book is The Best of World SF. He is the author of many novels, novellas and short stories.

Karl Schroeder

Award-winning author Karl Schroeder has published eleven novels, most recently his augmented-reality-larping-alternative-economics-blockchain-AI thriller Stealing Worlds. Karl grew up on the Canadian prairies—he’s from the same southern Manitoba Mennonite community as A.E. Van Vogt (though his politics are totally different). After moving to Toronto in 1986 helped found the now-legendary Cecil Street writer’s workshop, whose other notable past members include Cory Doctorow and Peter Watts. In 2011 Karl was granted a Master’s in Strategic Foresight and Innovation; in addition to writing SF, he now works as a Research Fellow for Human Futures Studio. Karl lives in Toronto with his wife and daughter.

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; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and an eight-time Hugo Award Finalist for Best Editor (short form). His anthologies include Upgraded, Galactic Empires, More Human Than Human, The Final Frontier, Not One of Us, The Eagle has Landed, and the Best Science Fiction of the Year series. His most recent anthology, The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 5, was published by Night Shade Books in October. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two sons.

Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.