Editorial, July 2013
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue thirty-eight of Lightspeed!

Last month we failed to make note of it, but our June issue was actually our third anniversary issue! So happy birthday to us. But given it’s been three years now, we thought it was about time to do another reader survey. If you’d like to participate, we’d very much appreciate it, and to thank you for taking the time, one lucky (i.e., randomly selected) participant will win a free one-year subscription to Lightspeed. To fill out the survey (which should just take 10-15 minutes), please go to: lightspeedmagazine.com/survey. The survey ends July 31, 2013.

In other news, we’ve got a special bonus for you this month: In addition to all of the usual Lightspeed goodness, at the end of this issue, we’re presenting a bonus story from the pages of our sister-magazine, Nightmare. So once you’re done reading the issue proper, please also check out the bonus story—and if you enjoy it, please consider subscribing to Nightmare!

The voting period for this year’s Hugo Awards closes on July 31, so there’s still time to participate in the process. The 2013 Hugo Awards will be presented in San Antonio, TX during LoneStarCon 3, the 71st World Science Fiction Convention (Aug. 29-Sep. 2). Anyone who has a full membership of LoneStarCon 3 may vote, and if you don’t plan to attend LoneStarCon 3, you can still vote by purchasing a supporting membership. The online ballot is available at lonestarcon3.org/hugo-awards if you’re ready to cast your vote for your favorite nominated works from last year.

Lightspeed has the following horses in this race:

Best Editor (Short Form): John Joseph Adams

Best Semiprozine: Lightspeed Magazine

Best Fan Artist: Galen Dara

Of course we hope you’ll vote for us, but no matter who you vote for, just vote!

With our announcements out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month:

We have original science fiction by Benjamin R. Lambert (“Division of Labor”) and Carlie St. George (“This Villain You Must Create”) and SF reprints by Margo Lanagan (“Mulberry Boys”) and Ryan North (“Cancer”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Adam-Troy Castro (“The Boy and the Box”) and Laura Friis (“Ushakiran”), along with fantasy reprints by Sophia McDougall (“Golden Apple”) and Ursula K. Le Guin (“The Stars Below”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with bestselling authors Hugh Howey and Austin Grossman.

For our ebook readers, we also have the novella “The Wide, Carnivorous Sky” by John Langan and an excerpt of the new Shannara novel Witch Wraith by Terry Brooks.

Our issue this month is sponsored by our friends at 47North. This month, look for Interrupt by Jeff Carlson (of which you can read an excerpt in our ebook edition this month) and Romulus Buckle and the City of the Founders by Richard Ellis Preston, Jr. You can find more from 47North at www.apub.com.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And remember, there are several ways you can sign up to be notified of new Lightspeed content:

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Before I go, just a reminder that our custom-built ebookstore I told you about recently is now up and running. So if you’d like to purchase an ebook issue, or if you’d like to subscribe directly from us, please visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in both epub and mobi format.

And don’t worry—all of our other purchasing options are still available, of course; this is just one more way you can buy the magazine or subscribe. You can, for instance, still subscribe via Amazon.com or from our friends at Weightless Books. Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe to learn more about all of our subscription options.

Well, that’s all there is to report this month. Thanks for reading!

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Lightspeed, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Oz Reimagined, Epic: Legends of Fantasy, Other Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. He is a six-time finalist for the Hugo Award and four-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. He is also the editor of Nightmare Magazine and is the co-host of Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

The Wide, Carnivorous Sky
John Langan

I

9:13pm

From the other side of the campfire, Lee said, “So it’s a vampire.”

“I did not say vampire,” Davis said. “Did you hear me say vampire?”

It was exactly the kind of thing Lee would say, the gross generalization that obscured more than it clarified. Not for the first time since they’d set out up the mountain, Davis wondered at their decision to include Lee in their plans.

Lee held up his right hand, index finger extended. “It has the fangs.”

“A mouthful of them.”

Lee raised his middle finger. “It turns into a bat.”

“No—its wings are like a bat’s.”

“Does it walk around with them?”

“They—it extrudes them from its arms and sides.”

“‘Extrudes’?” Lee said.

Han chimed in: “College.”

Not this shit again, Davis thought. He rolled his eyes to the sky, dark blue studded by early stars. Although the sun’s last light had drained from the air, his stomach clenched. He dropped his gaze to the fire.

The lieutenant spoke. “He means the thing extends them out of its body.”

“Oh,” Lee said. “Sounds like it turns into a bat to me.”

“Uh-huh,” Han said.

“Whatever,” Davis said. “It doesn’t—”

Lee extended his ring finger and spoke over him. “It sleeps in a coffin.”

“Not a coffin—”

“I know, a flying coffin.”

“It isn’t—it’s in low-Earth orbit, like a satellite.”

“What was it you said it looked like?” the lieutenant asked. “A cocoon?”

“A chrysalis,” Davis said.

“Same thing,” the lieutenant said.

“More or less,” Davis said, unwilling to insist on the distinction because, even a year and three-quarters removed from Iraq, the lieutenant was still the lieutenant and you did not argue the small shit with him.

“Coffin, cocoon, chrysalis,” Lee said, “it has to be in it before sunset or it’s in trouble.”

“Wait,” Han said. “Sunset.”

“Yes,” Davis began.

“The principle’s the same,” the lieutenant said. “There’s a place it has to be and a time it has to be there by.”

“Thank you, sir,” Lee said. He raised his pinky. “And, it drinks blood.”

“Yeah,” Davis said, “it does.”

“Lots,” Han said.

“Yeah,” the lieutenant said.

For a moment, the only sounds were the fire popping and, somewhere out in the woods, an owl prolonging its question. Davis thought of Fallujah.

“Okay,” Lee said, “how do we kill it?”

II

2004

There had been rumors, stories, legends of the things you might see in combat. Talk to any of the older guys, the ones who’d done tours in Vietnam, and you heard about a jungle in which you might meet the ghosts of Chinese invaders from five centuries before; or serve beside a grunt whose heart had been shot out a week earlier but who wouldn’t die; or find yourself stalked by what you thought was a tiger but had a tail like a snake and a woman’s voice. The guys who’d been part of the first war in Iraq—“The good one,” a sailor Davis knew called it—told their own tales about the desert, about coming across a raised tomb, its black stone worn free of markings, and listening to someone laughing inside it all the time it took you to walk around it; about the dark shapes you might see stalking through a sandstorm, their arms and legs a child’s stick-figures; about the sergeant who swore his reflection had been killed so that, when he looked in a mirror now, a corpse stared back at him. Even the soldiers who’d returned from Afghanistan talked about vast forms they’d seen hunched at the crests of mountains; the street in Kabul that usually ended in a blank wall, except when it didn’t; the pale shapes you might glimpse darting into the mouth of the cave you were about to search. A lot of what you heard was bullshit, of course, the plot of a familiar movie or TV show adapted to a new location and cast of characters, and a lot of it started off sounding as if it were headed somewhere interesting then ran out of gas halfway through. But there were some stories about which, even if he couldn’t quite credit their having happened, some quality in the teller’s voice, or phrasing, caused him to suspend judgment.

During the course of his Associate’s Degree, Davis had taken a number of courses in psychology—preparation for a possible career as a psychologist—and in one of these, he had learned that, after several hours of uninterrupted combat (he couldn’t remember how many, had never been any good with numbers), you would hallucinate. You couldn’t help it; it was your brain’s response to continuous unbearable stress. He supposed that at least some of the stories he’d listened to in barracks and bars might owe themselves to such cause, although he was unwilling to categorize them all as symptoms. This was not due to any overriding belief in either organized religion or disorganized superstition; it derived more from principle, specifically, a conclusion that an open mind was the best way to meet what continually impressed him as an enormous world packed full of many things.

By Fallujah, Davis had had no experiences of the strange, the bizarre, no stories to compare with those he’d accumulated over the course of basic and his deployment. He hadn’t been thinking about that much as they took up their positions south of the city; all of his available attention had been directed at the coming engagement. Davis had walked patrol, had felt the crawl of the skin at the back of your neck as you made your way down streets crowded with men and women who’d been happy enough to see Saddam pulled down from his pedestal but had long since lost their patience with those who’d operated the crane. He’d ridden in convoys, his head light, his heart throbbing at the base of his throat as they passed potential danger after potential danger, a metal can on the right shoulder, what might be a shell on the left, and while they’d done their best to reinforce their Hummers with whatever junk they could scavenge, Davis was acutely aware that it wasn’t enough, a consequence of galloping across the Kuwaiti desert with The Army You Had. Davis had stood checkpoint, his mouth dry as he sighted his M-16 on an approaching car that appeared full of women in black burkas who weren’t responding to the signs to slow down, and he’d wondered if they were suicide bombers, or just afraid, and how much closer he could allow them before squeezing the trigger. However much danger he’d imagined himself in, inevitably, he’d arrived after the sniper had opened fire and fled, or passed the exact spot an IED would erupt two hours later, or been on the verge of aiming for the car’s engine when it screeched to a halt. It wasn’t that Davis hadn’t discharged his weapon; he’d served support for several nighttime raids on suspected insurgent strongholds, and he’d sent his own bullets in pursuit of the tracers that scored the darkness. But support wasn’t the same thing as kicking in doors, trying to kill the guy down the hall who was trying to kill you. It was not the same as being part of the Anvil.

That was how the lieutenant had described their role. “Our friends in the United States Marine Corps are going to play the Hammer,” he had said the day before. “They will sweep into Fallujah from east and west and they will drive what hostiles they do not kill outright south, where we will be waiting to act as the Anvil. The poet Goethe said that you must be either hammer or anvil. We will be both, and we are going to crush the hostiles between us.”

After the lieutenant’s presentation, Han had said, “Great—so the jarheads have all the fun,” with what Davis judged a passable imitation of regret, a false sentiment fairly widely held. Davis had been sure, however, the certainty a ball of lead weighting his gut, that this time was going to be different. Part of it was that the lieutenant had known one of the contractors who’d been killed, incinerated, and strung up at the Saddam Bridge last April. Davis wasn’t clear exactly how the men had been acquainted, or how well, but the lieutenant had made no secret of his displeasure at not being part of the first effort to (re)take the city in the weeks following the men’s deaths. He had been—you couldn’t say happy, exactly, at the failure of that campaign—but he was eager for what was shaping up to be a larger-scale operation. Though seven months gone, the deaths and dishonorings of his acquaintances had left the lieutenant an appetite for this mission. Enough to cause him to disobey his orders and charge into Fallujah’s southern section? Davis didn’t think so, but there was a reason the man still held the rank of lieutenant when his classmates and colleagues were well into their Captaincies.

The other reason for Davis’s conviction that, this time, something was on its way to him was a simple matter of odds. It wasn’t possible—it was not possible that you could rack up this much good luck and not have a shitload of the bad bearing down on you like a SCUD on an anthill. A former altar boy, he was surprised at the variety of prayers he remembered—not just the Our Father and the Hail Mary, but the Apostles’ Creed, the Memorare, and the Hail, Holy Queen. As he disembarked the Bradley and ran for the shelter of a desert-colored house, the sky an enormous, pale blue dome above him, Davis mumbled his way through his prayers with a fervency that would have pleased his mother and father no end. But even as his lips shaped the words, he had the strong sense that this was out of God’s hands, under the control of one of those medieval demigoddesses, Dame Fortune or something.

Later, recovering first in Germany, then at Walter Reed, Davis had thought that walking patrol, riding convoy, standing checkpoint, he must have been saved from something truly awful each and every time, for the balance to be this steep.

III

10:01pm

“I take it stakes are out,” the lieutenant said.

“Sir,” Lee said, “I unloaded half a clip easy into that sonovabitch, and I was as close to him as I am to you.”

“Closer,” Han said.

“The point is, he took a half-step backwards—maybe—before he tore my weapon out of my hands and fractured my skull with it.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” the lieutenant said. “I figure it has to be . . . what? Did you get your hands on some kind of major ordnance, Davis? An RPG? A Stinger? I’ll love you like a son—hell, I’ll adopt you as my own if you tell me you have a case of Stingers concealed under a bush somewhere. Those’ll give the fucker a welcome he won’t soon forget.”

“Fucking-A,” Han said.

“Nah,” Lee said. “A crate of Willy Pete oughta just about do it. Serve his ass crispy-fried!”

Davis shook his head. “No Stingers and no white phosphorous. Fire isn’t going to do us any good.”

“How come?” Lee said.

“Yeah,” Han said.

“If I’m right about this thing spending its nights in low-Earth orbit—in its ‘coffin’—and then leaving that refuge to descend into the atmosphere so it can hunt, its skin has to be able to withstand considerable extremes of temperature.”

“Like the Space Shuttle,” the lieutenant said. “Huh. For all intents and purposes, it’s fireproof.”

“Oh,” Lee said.

“Given that it spends some of its time in the upper atmosphere, as well as actual outer space, I’m guessing substantial cold wouldn’t have much effect, either.”

“We can’t shoot it, can’t burn it, can’t freeze it,” Lee said. “Tell me why we’re here, again?” He waved at the trees fringing the clearing. “Aside from the scenery, of course.”

“Pipe down,” the lieutenant said.

“When we shot at it,” Davis said, “I’m betting half our fire missed it.” He held up his hand to the beginning of Lee’s protest. “That’s no reflection on anyone. The thing was fast, cheetah-taking-down-a-gazelle fast. Not to mention, it’s so Goddamned thin . . . Anyway, of the shots that connected with it, most of them were flesh wounds.” He raised his hand to Lee, again. “Those who connected with it,” a nod to Lee, “were so close their fire passed clean through it.”

“Which is what I was saying,” Lee said.

“There’s a lot of crazy shit floating around space,” Davis said, “little particles of sand, rock, ice, metal. Some of them get to moving pretty fast. If you’re doing repairs to the Space Station and one of those things hits you, it could ruin your whole day. Anything that’s going to survive up there is going to have to be able to deal with something that can punch a hole right through you.”

“It’s got a self-sealing mechanism,” the lieutenant said. “When Lee fired into it, its body treated the bullets as so many dust-particles.”

“And closed right up,” Davis said. “Like some kind of super-clotting-factor. Maybe that’s what it uses the blood for.”

“You’re saying it’s bulletproof, too?” Lee said.

“Shit,” Han said.

“Not—more like, bullet-resistant.”

“Think of it as a mutant healing ability,” the lieutenant said, “like Wolverine.”

“Oh,” Han said.

“Those claws it has,” Lee said, “I guess Wolverine isn’t too far off the mark.”

“No,” Han said. “Sabertooth.”

“What?” Lee said. “The fuck’re you going on about?”

“Sabertooth’s claws.” Han held up his right hand, fingers splayed. He curled his fingers into a fist. “Wolverine’s claws.”

“Man has a point,” the lieutenant said.

“Whatever,” Lee said.

“Here’s the thing,” Davis said, “it’s bullet-resistant, but it can still feel pain. Think about how it reacted when Lee shot it. It didn’t tear his throat open: it took the instrument that had hurt it and used that to hurt Lee. You see what I’m saying?”

“Kind of,” Lee said.

“Think about what drove it off,” Davis said. “Remember?”

“Of course,” the lieutenant said. He nodded at Han. “It was Han sticking his bayonet in the thing’s side.”

For which it crushed his skull, Davis could not stop himself from thinking. He added his nod to the lieutenant’s. “Yes he did.”

“How is that different from shooting it?” Lee said.

“Your bullets went in one side and out the other,” Davis said. “Han’s bayonet stuck there. The thing’s healing ability could deal with an in-and-out wound no problem; something like this, though: I think it panicked.”

“Panicked?” Lee said. “It didn’t look like it was panicking to me.”

“Then why did it take off right away?” Davis said.

“It was full; it heard more backup on the way; it had an appointment in fucking Samara. How the fuck should I know?”

“What’s your theory?” the lieutenant said.

“The type of injury Han gave it would be very bad if you’re in a vacuum. Something opening you up like that and leaving you exposed . . .”

“You could vent some or even all of the blood you worked so hard to collect,” the lieutenant said. “You’d want to get out of a situation like that with all due haste.”

“Even if your healing factor could seal the wound’s perimeter,” Davis said, “there’s still this piece of steel in you that has to come out and, when it does, will reopen the injury.”

“Costing you still more blood,” the lieutenant said.

“Most of the time,” Davis said, “I mean, like, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a million, the thing would identify any such threats long before they came that close. You saw its ears, its eyes.”

“Black on black,” Lee said. “Or, no—black over black, like the corneas had some kind of heavy tint and what was underneath was all pupil.”

“Han got lucky,” Davis said. “The space we were in really wasn’t that big. There was a lot of movement, a lot of noise—”

“Not to mention,” Lee said, “all the shooting and screaming.”

“The right set of circumstances,” the lieutenant said.

“Saved our asses,” Lee said, reaching over to pound Han’s shoulder. Han ducked to the side, grinning his hideous smile.

“If I can cut to the chase,” the lieutenant said. “You’re saying we need to find a way to open up this fucker and keep him open so that we can wreak merry havoc on his insides.”

Davis nodded. “To cut to the chase, yes, exactly.”

“How do you propose we do this?”

“With these.” Davis reached into the duffel bag to his left and withdrew what appeared to be a three-foot piece of white wood, tapered to a point sharp enough to prick your eye looking at it. He passed the first one to the lieutenant, brought out one for Lee and one for Han.

“A baseball bat?” Lee said, gripping near the point and swinging his like a Louisville Slugger. “We gonna club it to death?”

Neither Davis nor the lieutenant replied; they were busy watching Han, who’d located the grips at the other end of his and was jabbing it, first underhand, then overhand.

“The people you meet working at Home Depot,” Davis said. “They’re made out of an industrial resin, inch-for-inch, stronger than steel. Each one has a high-explosive core.”

“Whoa,” Lee said, setting his on the ground with exaggerated care.

“The detonators are linked to this,” Davis said, fishing a cell phone from his shirt pocket. “Turn it on.” Pointing to the lieutenant, Han, Lee, and himself, he counted, “One-two-three-four. Send. That’s it.”

“I was mistaken,” the lieutenant said. “It appears we will be using stakes, after all.”

IV

2004

At Landstuhl, briefly, and then at Walter Reed, at length, an impressive array of doctors, nurses, chaplains, and other soldiers whose job it was encouraged Davis to discuss Fallujah. He was reasonably sure that, while under the influence of one of the meds that kept his body at a safe distance, he had let slip some detail, maybe more. How else to account for the change in his nurse’s demeanor? Likely, she judged he was a psych case, a diagnosis he half-inclined to accept. Even when the lieutenant forced his way into Davis’s room, banging around in the wheelchair he claimed he could use well enough, Goddamnit, Davis was reluctant to speak of anything except the conditions of the other survivors. Of whom he had been shocked—truly shocked, profoundly shocked, almost more so than by what had torn through them—to learn there were only two, Lee and Han, Manfred bled out on the way to be evac’d, everyone else long gone by the time the reinforcements had stormed into the courtyard. According to the lieutenant, Han was clinging to life by a thread so fine you couldn’t see it. He’d lost his helmet in the fracas, and the bones in his skull had been crushed like an eggshell. Davis, who had witnessed that crushing, nodded. Lee had suffered his own head trauma, although, compared to Han’s, it wasn’t anything a steel plate couldn’t fix. The real problem with Lee was that, if he wasn’t flooded with some heavy-duty happy pills, he went fetal, thumb in his mouth, the works.

“What about you?” the lieutenant said, indicating the armature of casts, wires, weights, and counterweights that kept Davis suspended like some overly ambitious kid’s science project.

“Believe it or not, sir,” Davis said, “it really is worse than it looks. My pack and my helmet absorbed most of the impact. Still left me with a broken back, scapula, and ribs—but my spinal cord’s basically intact. Not that it doesn’t hurt like a motherfucker, sir. Yourself?”

“The taxpayers of the United States of America have seen fit to gift me with a new right leg, since I so carelessly misplaced the original.” He knocked on his pajama leg, which gave a hollow, plastic sound.

“Sir, I am so sorry—”

“Shut it,” the lieutenant said. “It’s a paper cut.” Using his left foot, he rolled himself back to the door, which he eased almost shut. Through the gap, he surveilled the hallway outside long enough for Davis to start counting, One Mississippi, Two Mississippi, then wheeled himself to Davis’s head. He leaned close and said, “Davis.”

“Sir?”

“Let’s leave out the rank thing for five minutes, okay? Can we do that?”

“Sir—yes, yes we can.”

“Because ever since the docs have reduced my drugs to the point I could string one sentence after another, I’ve been having these memories—dreams—I don’t know what the fuck to call them. Nightmares. And I can’t decide if I’m losing it, or if this is why Lee needs a palmful of M&Ms to leave his bed. So I need you to talk to me straight, no bullshit, no telling the officer what you think he wants to hear. I would genuinely fucking appreciate it if we could do that.”

Davis looked away when he saw the lieutenant’s eyes shimmering. Keeping his own focused on the ceiling, he said, “It came out of the sky. That’s where it went, after Han stuck it, so I figure it must have dropped out of there, too. It explains why, one minute we’re across the courtyard from a bunch of hostiles, the next, that thing’s standing between us.”

“Did you see it take off?”

“I did. After it had stepped on Han’s head, it spread its arms—it kind of staggered back from Han, caught itself, then opened its arms and these huge wings snapped open. They were like a bat’s, skin stretched over bone—they appeared so fast I’m not sure, but they shot out of its body. It tilted its head, jumped up, high, ten feet easy, flapped the wings, which raised it another ten feet, and turned—the way a swimmer turns in the water, you know? Another flap, two, and it was gone.”

“Huh.”

Davis glanced at the lieutenant, whose face was smooth, his eyes gazing across some interior distance. He said, “Do you—”

“Back up,” the lieutenant said. “The ten of us are in the courtyard. How big’s the place?”

“I’m not very good with—”

“At a guess.”

“Twenty-five feet wide, maybe fifty long. With all of those jars in the way—what were they?”

“Planters.”

“Three-foot-tall stone planters?”

“For trees. They were full of dirt. Haven’t you ever seen those little decorative trees inside office buildings?”

“Oh. All right. What I was going to say was, with the row of planters at either end, the place might have been larger.”

“Noted. How tall were the walls?”

“Taller than any of us—eight feet, easy. They were thick, too, a foot and a half, two feet.” Davis said, “It really was a good spot to attack from. Open fire from the walls, then drop behind them when they can’t maintain that position. The tall buildings are behind it, and we don’t hold any of them, so they don’t have to worry about anyone firing down on them. I’m guessing they figured we didn’t know where we were well enough to call in any artillery on them. No, if we want them, we have to run a hundred feet of open space to a doorway that’s an easy trap. They’ve got the planters for cover near and far, not to mention the doorway in the opposite wall as an exit.”

“Agreed.”

“To be honest, now that we’re talking about it, I can’t imagine how we made it into the place without losing anyone. By all rights, they should have tagged a couple of us crossing from our position to theirs. And that doorway: They should have massacred us.”

“We were lucky. When we returned fire, they must have panicked. Could be they didn’t see all of us behind the wall, thought they were ambushing three or four targets, instead of ten. Charging them may have given the impression there were even more of us. It took them until they were across the courtyard to get a grip and regroup.”

“By which time we were at the doorway.”

“So it was Lee all the way on the left—”

“With Han beside him.”

“Right, and Bay and Remsnyder. Then you and Petit—”

“No—it was me and Lugo, then Petit, then you.”

“Yes, yes. Manfred was to my right, and Weymouth was all the way on the other end.”

“I’m not sure how many—”

“Six. There may have been a seventh in the opposite doorway, but he wasn’t around very long. Either he went down, or he decided to season his valor with a little discretion.”

“It was loud—everybody firing in a confined space. I had powder all over me from their shots hitting the wall behind us. I want to say we traded bullets for about five minutes, but it was what? Half that?”

“Less. A minute.”

“And . . .”

“Our guest arrived.”

“At first—at first it was like, I couldn’t figure out what I was seeing. I’m trying to line up the guy who’s directly across from me—all I need is for him to stick up his head again—and all of a sudden, there’s a shadow in the way. That was my first thought: It’s a shadow. Only, who’s casting it? And why is it hanging in the air like that? And why is it fucking eight feet tall?”

“None of us understood what was in front of us. I thought it was a woman in a burka, someone I’d missed when we’d entered the courtyard. As you say, though, you don’t meet a lot of eight-foot-tall women, in or out of Iraq.”

“Next thing . . . no, that isn’t what happened.”

“What?”

“I was going to say the thing—the Shadow—was in among the hostiles, which is true, it went for them first, but before it did, there was a moment . . .”

“You saw something—something else.”

“Yeah,” Davis said. “This pain shot straight through my head. We’re talking instant migraine, so intense I practically puked. That wasn’t all: this chill . . . I was freezing, colder than I’ve ever been, like you read about in polar expeditions. I couldn’t—the courtyard—”

“What?”

“The courtyard wasn’t—I was somewhere high, like, a hundred miles high, so far up I could see the curve of the Earth below me. Clouds, continents, the ocean: what you see in the pictures they take from orbit. Stars, space, all around me. Directly, overhead, a little farther away than you are from me, there was this thing. I don’t know what the fuck it was. Big—long, maybe long as a house. It bulged in the middle, tapered at the ends. The surface was dark, shiny—does that make any sense? The thing was covered in—it looked like some kind of lacquer. Maybe it was made out of the lacquer.

“Anyway, one moment, my head’s about to crack open, my teeth are chattering and my skin’s blue, and I’m in outer space. The next, all of that’s gone, I’m back in the courtyard, and the Shadow—the thing is ripping the hostiles to shreds.”

“And then,” the lieutenant said, “it was our turn.”

V

November 11, 2004, 11:13am

In the six hundred twenty-five days since that afternoon in the hospital, how many times had Davis recited the order of events in the courtyard, whether with the lieutenant, or with Lee once his meds had been stabilized, or with Han once he’d regained the ability to speak (though not especially well)? At some point a couple of months on, he’d realized he’d been keeping count—That’s the thirty-eighth time; that’s the forty-third—and then, a couple of months after that, he’d realized that he’d lost track. The narrative of their encounter with what Davis continued to think of as the Shadow had become daily catechism, to be reviewed morning, noon, and night, and whenever else he happened to think of it.

None of them had even tried to run, which there were times Davis judged a sign of courage, and times he deemed an index of their collective shock at the speed and ferocity of the thing’s assault on the insurgents. Heads, arms, legs were separated from bodies as if by a pair of razor blades, and wherever a wound opened red, there was the thing’s splintered maw, drinking the blood like a kid stooping to a water fountain. The smells of blood, piss, and shit mixed with those of gunpowder and hot metal. While Davis knew they had been the next course on the Shadow’s menu, he found it difficult not to wonder how the situation might have played out had Lee—followed immediately by Lugo and Weymouth—not opened up on the thing. Of course, the instant that narrow head with its spotlight eyes, its scarlet mouth, turned in their direction, everyone else’s guns erupted, and the scene concluded the way it had to. But if Lee had been able to restrain himself . . .

Lugo was first to die. In a single leap, the Shadow closed the distance between them and drove one of its sharpened hands into his throat, venting his carotid over Davis, whom it caught with its other hand and flung into one of the side walls with such force his spine and ribs lit up like the Fourth of July. As he was dropping onto his back, turtling on his pack, the thing was raising its head from Lugo’s neck, spearing Petit through his armor and hauling him towards it. Remsnyder ran at it from behind; the thing’s hand lashed out and struck his head from his shoulders. It was done with Petit in time to catch Remsnyder’s body on the fall and jam its mouth onto the bubbling neck. It had shoved Petit’s body against the lieutenant, whose feet tangled with Petit’s and sent the pair of them down. This put him out of the way of Manfred and Weymouth, who screamed for everyone to get clear and fired full automatic. Impossible as it seemed, they missed, and for their troubles, the Shadow lopped Manfred’s right arm off at the elbow and opened Weymouth like a Christmas present. From the ground, the lieutenant shot at it; the thing sliced through his weapon and the leg underneath it. Now Bay, Han, and Lee tried full auto, which brought the thing to Bay, whose face it bit off. It swatted Han to the ground, but Lee somehow ducked the swipe it aimed at him and tagged it at close range. The Shadow threw Bay’s body across the courtyard, yanked Lee’s rifle from his hands, and swung it against his head like a ballplayer aiming for the stands. He crumpled, the thing reaching out for him, and Han leapt up, his bayonet ridiculously small in his hand. He drove it into the thing’s side—what would be the floating ribs on a man—to the hilt. The Shadow, whose only sound thus far had been its feeding, opened its jaws and shrieked, a high scream more like the cry of a bat, or a hawk, than anything human. It caught Han with an elbow to the temple that tumbled him to the dirt, set its foot on his head, and pressed down. Han’s scream competed with the sound of his skull cracking in multiple spots. Davis was certain the thing meant to grind Han’s head to paste, but it staggered off him, one claw reaching for the weapon buried in its skin. Blood so dark it was purple was oozing around the hilt. The Shadow spread its arms, its wings cracked open, and it was gone, fled into the blue sky that Davis would spend the next quarter-hour staring at, as the lieutenant called for help and tried to tourniquet first his leg, then Manfred’s arm.

Davis had stared at the sky before—who has not?—but, helpless on his back, his spine a length of molten steel, his ears full of Manfred whimpering that he was gonna die, oh sweet Jesus, he was gonna fucking die, the lieutenant talking over him, insisting no he wasn’t, he was gonna be fine, it was just a little paper cut, the washed blue bowl overhead seemed less sheltering canopy and more endless depth, a gullet over which he had the sickening sensation of dangling. As Manfred’s cries diminished and the lieutenant told—ordered him to stay with him, Davis flailed his arms at the ground to either side of him in an effort to grip onto an anchor, something that would keep him from hurtling into that blue abyss.

The weeks and months to come would bring the inevitable nightmares, the majority of them the Shadow’s attack replayed at half-, full-, or double-speed, with a gruesome fate for himself edited in. Sometimes repeating the events on his own or with a combination of the others led to a less-disturbed sleep; sometimes it did not. There was one dream, though, that no amount of discussion could help, and that was the one in which Davis was plummeting through the sky, lost in an appetite that would never be sated.

VI

12:26am

Once he was done setting the next log on the fire, Davis leaned back and said, “I figure it’s some kind of stun effect.”

“How so?” Lee said.

“The thing lands in between two groups of heavily armed men: It has to do something to even the odds. It hits us with a psychic blast, shorts out our brains so that we’re easier prey.”

“Didn’t seem to do much to Lee,” the lieutenant said.

“No brain!” Han shouted.

“Ha-fucking-ha,” Lee said.

“Maybe there were too many of us,” Davis said. “Maybe it miscalculated. Maybe Lee’s a mutant and this is his special gift. Had the thing zigged instead of zagged, gone for us instead of the insurgents, I don’t think any of us would be sitting here, regardless of our super powers.”

“Speak for yourself,” Lee said.

“For a theory,” the lieutenant said, “it’s not bad. But there’s a sizable hole in it. You,” he pointed at Davis, “saw the thing’s coffin or whatever. Lee,” a nod to him, “was privy to a bat’s-eye view of the thing’s approach to one of its hunts in—did we ever decide if it was Laos or Cambodia?”

“No sir,” Lee said. “It looked an awful lot like some of the scenery from the first Tomb Raider movie, which I’m pretty sure was filmed in Cambodia, but I’m not positive.”

“You didn’t see Angelina Jolie running around?” Davis said.

“If only,” Lee said.

“So with Lee, we’re in Southeast Asia,” the lieutenant said, “with or without the lovely Ms. Jolie. From what Han’s been able to tell me, he was standing on the moon or someplace very similar to it. I don’t believe he could see the Earth from where he was, but I’m not enough of an astronomer to know what that means.

“As for myself, I had a confused glimpse of the thing tearing its way through the interior of an airplane—what I’m reasonably certain was a B-17, probably during the Second World War.

“You see what I mean? None of us witnessed the same scene—none of us witnessed the same time, which you would imagine we would have if we’d been subject to a deliberate attack. You would expect the thing to hit us all with the same image. It’s more efficient.”

“Maybe that isn’t how this works,” Davis said. “Suppose what it does is more like a cluster bomb, a host of memories it packs around a psychic charge? If each of us thinks he’s someplace different from everybody else, doesn’t that maximize confusion, create optimal conditions for an attack?”

The lieutenant frowned. Lee said, “What’s your theory, sir?”

“I don’t have one,” the lieutenant said. “Regardless of its intent, the thing got in our heads.”

“And stayed there,” Lee said.

“Stuck,” Han said, tapping his right temple.

“Yes,” the lieutenant said. “Whatever their precise function, our exposure to the thing’s memories appears to have established a link between us and it.”

Davis said, “Which is what’s going to bring it right here.”

VII

2004-2005

When Davis was on board the plane to Germany, he could permit himself to hope that he was, however temporarily, out of immediate danger of death—not from the injury to his back, which, though painful in the extreme, he had known from the start would not claim his life, but from the reappearance of the Shadow. Until their backup arrived in a hurry of bootsteps and rattle of armor, he had been waiting for the sky to vomit the figure it had swallowed minutes (moments?) prior, for his blood to leap into the thing’s jagged mouth. The mature course of action had seemed to prepare for his imminent end, which he had attempted, only to find the effort beyond him. Whenever word of some acquaintance’s failure to return from the latest patrol had prompted Davis to picture his final seconds, he had envisioned his face growing calm, even peaceful, his lips shaping the syllables of a heartfelt Act of Contrition. However, between the channel of fire that had replaced his spine and the vertiginous sensation that he might plunge into the sky—not to mention, the lieutenant’s continuing monologue to Manfred, the pungence of gunpowder mixed with the bloody reek of meat, the low moans coming from Han—Davis was unable to concentrate. Rather than any gesture of reconciliation towards the God with Whom he had not been concerned since his discovery of what lay beneath his prom date’s panties junior year, Davis’s attention had been snarled in the sound of the Shadow’s claws puncturing Lugo’s neck, the fountain of Weymouth’s blood over its arm and chest, the wet slap of his entrails hitting the ground, the stretch of the thing’s mouth as it released its scream. Despite his back, which had drawn his vocal chords taut, once the reinforcements had arrived and a red-faced medic peppered him with questions while performing a quick assessment of him, Davis had strained to warn them of their danger. But all his insistence that they had to watch the sky had brought him was a sedative that pulled him into a vague, gray place.

Nor had his time at the Battalion Aid Station, then some larger facility (Camp Victory? with whatever they gave him, most of the details a variety of medical staff poured into his ears sluiced right back out again) caused him to feel any more secure. As the gray place loosened its hold on him and he stared up at the canvas roof of the BAS, Davis had wanted to demand what the fuck everyone was thinking. Didn’t they know the Shadow could slice through this material like it was cling film? Didn’t they understand it was waiting to descend on them right now, this very fucking minute? It would rip them to shreds; it would drink their fucking blood. At the presence of a corpsman beside him, he’d realized he was shouting—or as close to shouting as his voice could manage—but he’d been unable to restrain himself, which had led to calming banalities and more vague grayness. He had returned to something like consciousness inside a larger space in the CSH, where the sight of the nearest wall trembling from the wind had drawn his stomach tight and sped a fresh round of protests from his mouth. When he struggled up out of the shot that outburst occasioned, Davis had found himself in a dim cavern whose curving sides rang with the din of enormous engines. His momentary impression that he was dead and this some unexpected, bare-bones afterlife was replaced by the recognition that he was on a transport out of Iraq—who knew to where? It didn’t matter. A flood of tears had rolled from his eyes as the dread coiling his guts had, if not fled, at least calmed.

At Landstuhl, in a solidly built hospital with drab but sturdy walls and a firm ceiling, Davis was calmer. (As long as he did not dwell on the way the Shadow’s claws had split Petit’s armor, sliced the lieutenant’s rifle in two.) That, and the surgeries required to relieve the pressure on his spine left him, to quote a song he’d never liked that much, comfortably numb.

Not until he was back in America, though, reclining in the late-medieval luxury of Walter Reed, the width of an ocean and a continent separating him from Fallujah, did Davis feel anything like a sense of security. Even after his first round of conversations with the lieutenant had offered him the dubious reassurance that, if he were delusional, he was in good company, a cold comfort made chillier still by Lee, his meds approaching the proper levels, corroborating their narrative, Davis found it less difficult than he would have anticipated to persuade himself that Remsnyder’s head leaping from his body on a jet of blood was seven thousand miles away. And while his pulse still quickened whenever his vision strayed to the rectangle of sky framed by the room’s lone window, he could almost pretend that this was a different sky. After all, hadn’t that been the subtext of all the stories he’d heard from other vets about earlier wars? Weird shit happened, yes—sometimes, very bad weird shit happened—but it took place over there, In Country, in another place where things didn’t work the same way they did in the good old U.S. of A. If you could keep that in mind, Davis judged, front-and-center in your consciousness, you might be able to live with the impossible.

Everything went—you couldn’t call it swimmingly—it went, anyway, until Davis began his rehabilitation, which consisted of: a) learning how to walk again and b) strength training for his newly (re)educated legs. Of course, he had been in pain after the initial injury—though shock and fear had kept the hurt from overwhelming him—and his nerves had flared throughout his hospital stay—especially following his surgery—though a pharmacopeia had damped those sensations down to smoldering. Rehab was different. Rehab was a long, low-ceilinged room that smelled of sweat and industrial antiseptic, one end of which grazed a small herd of the kind of exercise machines you saw faded celebrities hawking on late-night TV, the center of which held a trio of parallel bars set too low, and the near end of which was home to a series of overlapping blue mats whose extensive cracks suggested an aerial view of a river basin. Rehab was slow stretches on the mats, then gripping onto the parallel bars while you tried to coax your right leg into moving forward; once you could lurch along the bars and back, rehab was time on one of the exercise machines, flat on your back, your legs bent, your feet pressed against a pair of pedals connected to a series of weights you raised by extending your legs. Rehab was about confronting pain, inviting it in, asking it to sit down and have a beer so the two of you could talk for a while. Rehab was not leaning on the heavy-duty opiates and their synthetic friends; it was remaining content with the over-the-counter options and ice-packs. It was the promise of a walk outside—an enticement that made Davis’s palms sweat and his mouth go dry.

When the surgeon had told Davis the operation had been a success, there appeared to be no permanent damage to his spinal cord, Davis had imagined himself, freed of his cast and its coterie of pulleys and counterweights, sitting up on his own and strolling out the front door. Actually, he’d been running in his fantasy. The reality, he quickly discovered, was that merely raising himself to a sitting position was an enterprise far more involved than he ever had appreciated, as was a range of action so automatic it existed below his being able to admit he’d never given it much thought. He supposed the therapists here were as good as you were going to find, but that didn’t make the routines they subjected him to—he subjected himself to—any easier or less painful.

It was during one of these sessions, his back feeling as if it had been scraped raw and the exposed tissue generously salted, that Davis had his first inkling that Fallujah was not a self-contained narrative, a short, grisly tale; rather, it was the opening chapter of a novel, one of those eight-hundred-page, Stephen King specials. Lucy, Davis’s primary therapist, had him on what he had christened the Rack. His target was twenty leg presses; in a fit of bravado, he had promised her thirty. No doubt, Davis had known instances of greater pain, but those had been spikes on the graph. Though set at a lower level, this hurt was constant, and while Lucy had assured him that he would become used to it, so far, he hadn’t. The pain glared like the sun flaring off a window; it flooded his mind white, made focusing on anything else impossible. That Lucy was encouraging him, he knew from the tone of her voice, but he could not distinguish individual words. Already, his vision was blurred from the sweat streaming out of him, so when the blur fractured, became a kaleidoscope-jumble of color and geometry, he thought little of it, and raised his fingers to clear his eyes.

According to Lucy, Davis removed his hand from his face, paused, then fell off the machine on his right side, trembling and jerking. For what she called his seizure’s duration, which she clocked at three minutes, fifteen seconds, Davis uttered no sound except for a gulping noise that made his therapist fear he was about to swallow his tongue.

To the lieutenant, then to Lee and eventually Han, Davis would compare what he saw when the rehab room went far away to a wide-screen movie, one of those panoramic deals that was supposed to impart the sensation of flying over the Rockies, or holding on for dear life as a roller coaster whipped up and down its course. A surplus of detail crowded his vision. He was in the middle of a sandy street bordered by short buildings whose walls appeared to consist of sheets of long, dried grass framed with slender sticks. A dozen, two dozen women and children dressed in pastel robes and turbans ran frantically from one side of the street to the other as men wearing dark brown shirts and pants aimed Kalashnikovs at them. Some of the men were riding brown and white horses; some were stalking the street; some were emerging from alleys between the buildings, several of whose walls were releasing thick smoke. Davis estimated ten men. The sounds—it was as if the soundtrack to this film had been set to record the slightest vibration of air, which it played back at twice the normal level. Screams raked his eardrums. Sandals scraped the ground. Guns cracked; bullets thudded into skin. Horses whickered. Fire snapped. An immense thirst, worse than any he had known, possessed him. His throat was not dry; it was arid, as if it—as if he were composed of dust from which the last eyedropper of moisture had long been squeezed.

One of the men—not the nearest, who was walking the opposite direction from Davis’s position, but the next closest, whose horse had shied from the flames sprouting from a grass wall and so turned its rider in Davis’s direction—caught sight of Davis, his face contracting in confusion at what he saw. The man, who might have been in his early twenties, started to raise his rifle, and everything sped up, the movie fast-forwarded. There was—his vision wavered, and the man’s gun dipped, his eyes widening. Davis was next to him—he had half-scaled the horse and speared the hollow of the man’s throat with his right hand, whose fingers, he saw, were twice as long as they had been, tapered to a set of blades. He felt the man’s tissue part, the ends of his fingers (talons?) scrape bone. Blood washed over his palm, his wrist, and the sensation jolted him. His talons flicked to the left, and the man’s head tipped back like a tree falling away from its base. Blood misted the air, and before he realized what was happening, his mouth was clamped to the wound, full of hot, copper liquid. The taste was rain falling in the desert; in three mighty gulps, he had emptied the corpse and was springing over its fellows, into the midst of the brightly robed women and children.

The immediate result of Davis’s three-minute hallucination was the suspension of his physical therapy and an MRI of his brain. Asked by Lucy what he recalled of the experience, Davis had shaken his head and answered, “Nothing.” It was the same response he gave to the new doctor who stopped into his room a week later and, without identifying himself as a psychiatrist, told Davis he was interested in the nightmares that had brought him screaming out of sleep six of the last seven nights. This was a rather substantial change in his nightly routine; taken together with his recent seizure, it seemed like cause for concern. Perhaps Davis could relate what he remembered of his nightmares?

How to tell this doctor that closing his eyes—an act he resisted for as long as he could each night—brought him to that yellow-brown street; the lime, saffron, and orange cloth stretching as mothers hauled their children behind them; the dull muzzles of the Kalashnikovs coughing fire? How to describe the sensations that still lived in his skin, his muscles: the tearing of skin for his too-long fingers; the bounce of a heart in his hand the instant before he tore it from its setting; the eggshell crunch of bone between his jaws? Most of all, how to convey to this doctor, this shrink, who was either an unskilled actor or not trying very hard, the concentrate of pleasure that was the rush of blood into his mouth, down his throat, the satisfaction of his terrific thirst so momentary it made the thirst that much worse? Although Davis had repeated his earlier disavowal and maintained it in the face of the doctor’s extended—and, to be fair, sympathetic—questions until the man left, a week’s worth of poor sleep made the wisdom of his decision appear less a foregone conclusion. What he had seen—what he had been part of the other week was too similar to the vision he’d had in the courtyard not to be related; the question was, how? Were Davis to summarize his personal horror ride to the psychiatrist—he would have to tell him about Fallujah first, of course—might the doctor have more success at understanding the connections between his driver’s-seat views of the Shadow’s activities?

Sure, Davis thought, right after he’s had you fitted for your straightjacket. The ironic thing was, how often had he argued the benefits of the Army’s psychiatric care with Lugo? It had been their running gag. Lugo would return from reading his e-mail with news of some guy stateside who’d lost it, shot his wife, himself, which would prompt Davis to say that it was a shame the guy hadn’t gotten help before it came to that. Help, Lugo would say, from who? The Army? Man, you must be joking. The Army don’t want nothing to do with no grunt can’t keep his shit together. No, no, Davis would say, sure, they still had a ways to go, but the Army was changing. The kinds of combat-induced pathologies it used to pretend didn’t exist were much more likely to be treated early and effectively. (If Lee and Han were present, and/or Remsnyder, they’d ooh and aah over Davis’s vocabulary.) Oh yeah, Lugo would reply, if they don’t discharge your ass right outta here, they’ll stick you at some bullshit post where you won’t hurt anyone. No, no, Davis would say, that was a rumor. Oh yeah, Lugo would say, like the rumor about the guys who went to the doctor for help with their PTSD and were told they were suffering from a fucking pre-existing condition, so it wasn’t the Army’s problem? No, no, Davis would say, that was a few bad guys. Oh yeah, Lugo would say.

Before he and the lieutenant—who had been abducted by a platoon of siblings, their spouses, and their kids for ten days in Florida—discussed the matter, Davis passed his nightly struggles to stay awake wondering if the psychiatric ward was the worst place he might wind up. His only images of such places came from films like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Awakenings, and K-PAX, but based on those examples, he could expect to spend his days robed and slippered, possibly medicated, free to read what he wanted except during individual and group therapy sessions. If it wasn’t quite the career as a psychologist he’d envisioned, he’d at least be in some kind of proximity to the mental health field. Sure, it would be a scam, but didn’t the taxpayers of the U.S. of A. owe him recompense for shipping him to a place where the Shadow could just drop in and shred his life? The windows would be barred or meshed, the doors reinforced—you could almost fool yourself such a location would be safe.

However, with his second episode, it became clear that safe was one of those words that had been bayoneted, its meaning spilled on the floor. Davis had been approved to resume therapy with Lucy, who had been honestly happy to see him again. It was late in the day; what with the complete breakdown in his sleeping patterns, he wasn’t in optimal condition for another go-around on the Rack, but after so much time stuck in his head, terrified at what was in there with him, the prospect of a vigorous workout was something he was actually looking forward to. As before, gentle stretching preceded the main event, which Lucy told Davis he didn’t have to do but for which he had cavalierly assured her he was, if not completely able, at least ready and willing. With the second push of his feet against the pedals, pain ignited up his back, and his lack of sleep did not aid in his tolerating it. Each subsequent retraction and extension of his legs ratcheted the hurt up one more degree, until he was lying on a bed of fire.

This time

VIII

2:15am

“my vision didn’t blur—it cracked, as if my knees levering up and down were an image on a TV screen and something smacked the glass. Everything spiderwebbed and fell away. What replaced it was movement—I was moving up, my arms beating down; there was this feeling that they were bigger, much bigger, that when I swept them down, they were gathering the air and piling it beneath them. I looked below me, and there were bodies—parts of bodies, organs—all over the place. There was less blood than there should have been. Seeing them scattered across the ground—it was like having a bird’s-eye view of some kind of bizarre design. Most of them were men, twenties and thirties; although there were two women and a couple, three kids. Almost everybody was wearing jeans and workboots, sweatshirts, baseball caps, except for a pair of guys dressed in khaki and I’m pretty sure cowboy hats.”

“What the fuck?” Lee said.

“Cowboys,” Han said.

“Texas Border Patrol,” the lieutenant said.

“So those other people were like, illegal immigrants?” Lee said.

The lieutenant nodded.

Davis said, “I’ve never been to Texas, but the spot looked like what you see on TV. Sandy, full of rocks, some scrub brush and short trees. There was a muddy stream—you might call it a river, I guess, if that was what you were used to—in the near distance, and a group of hills further off. The sun was perched on top of the hills, setting, and that red ball made me beat my arms again and again, shrinking the scene below, raising me higher into the sky. There was—I felt full—more than full, gorged, but thirsty, still thirsty, that same, overpowering dryness I’d experienced the previous . . . time. The thirst was so strong, so compelling, I was a little surprised when I kept climbing. My flight was connected to the sun balanced on that hill, a kind of—not panic, exactly: It was more like urgency. I was moving, now. The air was thinning; my arms stretched even larger to scoop enough of it to keep me moving. The temperature had dropped—was dropping, plunging down. Something happened—my mouth was already closed, but it was as if it sealed somehow. Same thing with my nostrils; I mean, they closed themselves off. My eyes misted, then cleared. I pumped my arms harder than I had before. This time, I didn’t lose speed; I kept moving forward.

“Ahead, I saw the thing I’d seen in the courtyard—a huge shape, big as a house. Pointed at the ends, fat in the middle. Dark—maybe dark purple, maybe not—and shiny. The moment it came into view, this surge of . . . I don’t know what to call it. Honestly, I want to say it was a cross between the way you feel when you put your bag down on your old bed and, ‘Mommy,’ that little kid feeling, except that neither of those is completely right. My arms were condensing, growing substantial. I was heading towards the middle. As I drew closer, its surface rippled, like water moving out from where a stone strikes it. At the center of the ripple, a kind of pucker opened into the thing. That was my destination.”

“And?” Lee said.

“Lucy emptied her Gatorade on me and brought me out of it.”

“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Lee said.

“Afraid not,” Davis said.

“How long was this one?” the lieutenant asked.

“Almost five minutes.”

“It took her that long to toss her Gatorade on you?” Lee said.

“There was some kind of commotion at the same time, a couple of guys got into a fight. She tried to find help; when she couldn’t, she doused me.”

Lee shook his head.

“And you have since confirmed the existence of this object,” the lieutenant said.

“Yes, sir,” Davis said. “It took some doing. The thing’s damned near impossible to see, and while no one would come out and say so to me, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t show up on radar, either. The couple of pictures we got were more dumb luck than anything.”

“‘We’?” Lee said.

“I—”

The lieutenant said, “I put Mr. Davis in touch with a friend of mine in Intelligence.”

“Oh,” Lee said. “Wait—shit: You mean the CIA’s involved?”

“Relax,” Davis said.

“Because I swear to God,” Lee said, “those stupid motherfuckers would fuck up getting toast out of the toaster and blame us for their burned fingers.”

“It’s under control,” the lieutenant said. “This is our party. No one else has been invited.”

“Doesn’t mean they won’t show up,” Lee said. “Stupid assholes with their fucking sunglasses and their, ‘We’re so scary.’ Oooh.” He turned his head and spat.

Davis stole a look at the sky. Stars were winking out and in as something passed in front of them. His heart jumped, his hand was on his stake before he identified the shape as some kind of bird. The lieutenant had noticed his movement; his hand over his stake, he said, “Everything all right, Davis?”

“Fine,” Davis said. “Bird.”

“What?” Lee said.

“Bird,” Han said.

“Oh,” Lee said. “So. I have a question.”

“Go ahead,” the lieutenant said.

“The whole daylight thing,” Lee said, “the having to be back in its coffin before sunset—what’s up with that?”

“It does seem . . . atypical, doesn’t it?” the lieutenant said. “Vampires are traditionally creatures of the night.”

“Actually, sir,” Lee said, “that’s not exactly true. The original Dracula—you know, in the book—he could go out in daylight; he just lost his powers.”

“Lee,” the lieutenant said, “you are a font of information. Is this what our monster is trying to avoid?”

“I don’t know,” Lee said. “Could be.”

“I don’t think so,” Davis said. “It’s not as if daylight makes its teeth any sharper.”

“Then what is it?” Lee said.

“Beats me,” Davis said. “Don’t we need daylight to make Vitamin D? Maybe it’s the same, uses the sun to manufacture some kind of vital substance.”

“Not bad,” the lieutenant said.

“For something you pulled out of your ass,” Lee said.

“Hey—you asked,” Davis said.

“Perhaps it’s time for some review,” the lieutenant said. “Can we agree on that? Good.

“We have this thing—this vampire,” holding up a hand to Davis, “that spends its nights in an orbiting coffin. At dawn or thereabouts, it departs said refuge in search of blood, which it apparently obtains from a single source.”

“Us,” Han said.

“Us,” the lieutenant said. “It glides down into the atmosphere on the lookout for likely victims—of likely groups of victims, since it prefers to feed on large numbers of people at the same time. Possibly, it burns through its food quickly.”

“It’s always thirsty,” Davis said. “No matter how much it drinks, it’s never enough.”

“Yeah,” Lee said, “I felt it, too.”

“So did we all,” the lieutenant said. “It looks to satisfy its thirst at locations where its actions will draw little to no attention. These include remote areas such as the U.S.-Mexico border, the Sahara and Gobi, and the Andes. It also likes conflict zones, whether Iraq, Darfur, or the Congo. How it locates these sites is unknown. We estimate that it visits between four and seven of them per day. That we have been able to determine, there does not appear to be an underlying pattern to its selection of either target areas or individuals within those areas. The vampire’s exact level of intelligence is another unknown. It possesses considerable abilities as a predator, not least of them its speed, reaction time, and strength. Nor should we forget its teeth and,” a rap of the artificial leg, “claws.”

“Not to mention that mind thing,” Lee said.

“Yes,” the lieutenant said. “Whether by accident or design, the vampire’s appearance is accompanied by a telepathic jolt that momentarily disorients its intended victims, rendering them easier prey. For those who survive the meeting,” a nod at them, “a link remains that may be activated by persistent, pronounced stress, whether physical or mental. The result of this activation is a period of clairvoyance, during which the lucky individual rides along for the vampire’s current activities. Whether the vampire usually has equal access to our perceptions during this time is unclear; our combined accounts suggest it does not.

“However, there are exceptions.”

IX

2005

“I know how we can kill it,” Davis said. “At least, I think I do—how we can get it to come to a place where we can kill it.”

Lee put his Big Mac on his tray and looked out the restaurant window. The lieutenant paused in the act of dipping his fries into a tub of barbecue sauce. Han continued chewing his McNugget but nodded twice.

“The other day—two days ago, Wednesday—I got to it.”

“What do you mean?” the lieutenant said.

“It was coming in for a landing, and I made it mess up.”

“Bullshit,” Lee said. He did not shift his gaze from the window. His face was flushed.

“How?” the lieutenant said.

“I was having a bad day, worse than the usual bad day. Things at Home Depot—the manager’s okay, but the assistant manager’s a raging asshole. Anyway, I decided a workout might help. I’d bought these Kung Fu DVDs—”

“Kung Fu,” the lieutenant said.

Davis shrugged. “Seemed more interesting than running a treadmill.”

Through a mouthful of McNugget, Han said, “Bruce Lee.”

“Yeah,” Davis said. “I put the first disc on. To start with, everything’s fine. I’m taking it easy, staying well below the danger level. My back’s starting to ache, the way it always does, but that’s okay, I can live with it. As long as I keep the situation in low gear, I can continue with my tiger style.”

“Did it help?” the lieutenant asked.

“My worse-than-bad day? Not really. But it was something to do, you know?”

The lieutenant nodded. Lee stared at the traffic edging up the road in front of the McDonald’s. Han bit another McNugget.

“This time, there was no warning. My back’s feeling like someone’s stitching it with a hot needle, then I’m dropping out of heavy cloud cover. Below, a squat hill pushes up from dense jungle. A group of men are sitting around the top of the hill. They’re wearing fatigues, carrying Kalashnikovs. I think I’m somewhere in South America: maybe these guys are FARQ; maybe they’re some of Chavez’s boys.

“I’ve been through the drill enough to know what’s on the way: a ringside seat for blood and carnage. It’s reached the point, when one of these incidents overtakes me, I don’t freak out. The emotion that grips me is dread, sickness at what’s coming. But this happens so fast, there isn’t time for any of that. Instead, anger—the anger that usually shows up a couple of hours later, when I’m still trying to get the taste of blood out of my mouth, still trying to convince myself that I’m not the one who’s so thirsty—for once, that anger arrives on time and loaded for bear. It’s like the fire that’s crackling on my back finds its way into my veins and ignites me.

“What’s funny is, the anger makes my connection to the thing even more intense. The wind is pressing my face, rushing over my arms—my wings—I’m aware of currents in the air, places where it’s thicker, thinner, and I twitch my nerves to adjust for it. There’s one guy standing off from the rest, closer to the treeline, though not so much I—the thing won’t be able to take him. I can practically see the route to him, a steep dive with a sharp turn at the very end that’ll let the thing knife through him. He’s sporting a bush hat, which he’s pushed back on his head. His shirt’s open, t-shirt dark with sweat. He’s holding his weapon self-consciously, trying to look like a badass, and it’s this, more than the smoothness of his skin, the couple of whiskers on his chin, that makes it clear he isn’t even eighteen. It—I—we jackknife into the dive, and thirsty, Christ, thirsty isn’t the word: This is dryness that reaches right through to your fucking soul. I’ve never understood what makes the thing tick—what drives it—so well.

“At the same time, the anger’s still there. The closer we draw to the kid, the hotter it burns. We’ve reached the bottom of the dive and pulled up; we’re streaking over the underbrush. The kid’s completely oblivious to the fact that his bloody dismemberment is fifty feet away and closing fast. I’m so close to the thing, I can feel the way its fangs push against one another as they jut from its mouth. We’re on top of the kid; the thing’s preparing to retract its wings, slice him open, and drive its face into him. The kid is dead; he’s dead and he just doesn’t know it, yet.

“Only, it’s like—I’m like—I don’t even think, No, or, Stop, or Pull up. It’s more . . . I push; I shove against the thing I’m inside and its arms move. Its fucking arms jerk up as if someone’s passed a current through them. Someone has—I have. I’m the current. The motion throws off the thing’s strike, sends it wide. It flails at the kid as it flies past him, but he’s out of reach. I can sense—the thing’s completely confused. There’s a clump of bushes straight ahead—wham.”

The lieutenant had adopted his best you’d-better-not-be-bullshitting-me stare. He said, “I take it that severed the connection.”

Davis shook his head. “No, sir. You would expect that—it’s what would have happened in the past—but this time, it was like, I was so close to the thing, it was going to take something more to shake me loose.”

“And?” the lieutenant said.

Lee shoved his tray back, toppling his super-sized Dr. Pepper, whose lid popped off, splashing a wave of soda and ice cubes across the table. While Davis and the lieutenant grabbed napkins, Lee stood and said, “What the fuck, Davis?”

“What?” Davis said.

“I said, ‘What the fuck, asshole,’” Lee said. Several diners at nearby tables turned their heads toward him.

“Inside voices,” the lieutenant said. “Sit down.”

“I don’t think so,” Lee said. “I don’t have to listen to this shit.” With that, he stalked away from the table, through the men and women swiftly returning their attentions to the meals in front of them, and out the side door.

“What the fuck?” Davis said, dropping his wad of soggy napkins on Lee’s tray.

“That seems to be the question of the moment,” the lieutenant said.

“Sir—”

“Our friend and fellow is not having the best of months,” the lieutenant said. “In fact, he is not having the best of years. You remember the snafus with his disability checks.”

“I thought that was taken care of.”

“It was, but it was accompanied by the departure of Lee’s wife and their two-year-old. Compared to what he was, Lee is vastly improved. In terms of the nuances of his emotional health, however, he has miles to go. The shit with his disability did not help; nor did spending all day home with a toddler who didn’t recognize his father.”

“He didn’t—”

“No, but I gather it was a close thing. A generous percentage of the wedding flatware paid the price for Lee’s inability to manage himself. In short order, the situation became too much for Shari, who called her father to come for her and Douglas.”

“Bitch,” Han said.

“Since then,” the lieutenant said, “Lee’s situation has not improved. A visit to the local bar for a night of drinking alone ended with him in the drunk tank. Shari’s been talking separation, possibly divorce, and while Lee tends to be a bit paranoid about the matter, there may be someone else involved, an old boyfriend. Those members of Lee’s family who’ve visited him, called him, he has rebuffed in a fairly direct way. To top it all off, he’s been subject to the same, intermittent feast of blood as the rest of us.”

“Oh,” Davis said. “I had no—Lee doesn’t talk to me—”

“Never mind. Finish your story.”

“It’s not a story.”

“Sorry. Poor choice of words. Go on, please.”

“All right,” Davis said. “Okay. You have to understand, I was as surprised by all of this as—well, as anyone. I couldn’t believe I’d affected the thing. If it hadn’t been so real, so like all the other times, I would have thought I was hallucinating, on some kind of wish-fulfillment trip. As it was, there I was as the thing picked itself up from the jungle floor. The anger—my anger—I guess it was still there, but . . . on hold.

“The second the thing was upright, someone shouted and the air was hot with bullets. Most of them shredded leaves, chipped bark, but a few of them tagged the thing’s arm, its shoulder. Something was wrong—mixing in with its confusion, there was another emotion, something down the block from fear. I wasn’t doing anything: I was still stunned by what I’d made happen. The thing jumped, and someone—maybe a couple of guys—tracked it, headed it off, hit it in I can’t tell you how many places—it felt as if the thing had been punched a dozen times at once. It spun off course, slapped a tree, and went down, snapping branches on its way.

“Now it was pissed. Even before it picked itself up, the place it landed was being subject to intensive defoliation. A shot tore its ear. Its anger—if what I felt was fire, this was lava, thicker, slower-moving, hotter. It retreated, scuttled half a dozen trees deeper into the jungle. Whoever those guys were, they were professionals. They advanced on the spot where the thing fell and, when they saw it wasn’t there anymore, they didn’t rush in after it. Instead, they fell back to a defensive posture while one of them put in a call—for air support, I’m guessing.

“The thing was angry and hurt and the thirst—” Davis shook his head. He sipped his Coke. “What came next—I’m not sure I can describe it. There was this surge in my head—not the thing’s head, this was my brain I’m talking about—and the thing was looking out of my eyes.”

“It turned the tables on you,” the lieutenant said.

“Not exactly,” Davis said. “I continued watching the soldiers maybe seventy-five feet in front of me, but I was . . . aware of the thing staring at the DVD still playing on the TV. It was as if the scene was on a screen just out of view.” He shook his head. “I’m not describing it right.

“Anyway, that was when the connection broke.”

Davis watched the lieutenant evade an immediate response by taking a generous bite of his Double Quarter-Pounder with Cheese and chewing it with great care. Han swallowed and said, “Soldiers.”

“What?”

“Soldiers,” Han said.

Through his mouthful of burger, the lieutenant said, “He wants to know what happened to the soldiers. Right?”

Han nodded.

“Beats the shit out of me,” Davis said. “Maybe their air support showed up and bombed the fucker to hell. Maybe they evac’d out of there.”

“But that isn’t what you think,” the lieutenant said. “You think it got them.”

“Yes sir,” Davis said. “The minute it was free of me, I think it had those poor bastards for lunch.”

“It seems a bit much to hope otherwise, doesn’t it?”

“Yes sir, it does.”

When the lieutenant opted for another bite of his sandwich, Davis said, “Well?”

The lieutenant answered by lifting his eyebrows. Han switched from McNuggets to fries.

“As I see it,” Davis began. He stopped, paused, started again. “We know that the thing fucked with us in Fallujah, linked up with us. So far, this situation has only worked to our disadvantage: Whenever one of us is in sufficient discomfort, the connection activates and dumps us behind the thing’s eyes for somewhere in the vicinity of three to five minutes. With all due respect to Lee, this has not been beneficial to anyone’s mental health.

“But what if—suppose we could duplicate what happened to me? Not just once, but over and over—even if only for ten or fifteen seconds at a time—interfere with whatever it’s doing, seriously fuck with it.”

“Then what?” the lieutenant said. “We’re a thorn in its side. So?”

“Sir,” Davis said, “those soldiers hit it. Okay, yes, their fire wasn’t any more effective than ours was, but I’m willing to bet their percentages were significantly higher. That’s what me being on board in an—enhanced way did to the thing. We wouldn’t be a thorn—we’d be the Goddamned bayonet Han jammed in its ribs.

“Not that we should wait for someone else to take it down. I’m proposing something more ambitious.”

“All right.”

“If we can disrupt the thing’s routine—especially if we cut into its feeding—it won’t take very long for it to want to find us. Assuming the second part of my experience—the thing has a look through our eyes—if that happens again, we can arrange it so that we let it know where we’re going to be. We pick a location with a clearing where the thing can land and surrounding tree cover where we can wait to ambush it. Before any of us goes to ruin the thing’s day, he puts pictures, maps, satellite photos of the spot on display, so that when the thing’s staring out of his eyes, that’s what it sees. If the same images keep showing up in front of it, it should get the point.”

The lieutenant took the rest of his meal to reply. Han offered no comment. When the lieutenant had settled into his chair after tilting his tray into the garbage and stacking it on top of the can, he said, “I don’t know, Davis. There are an awful lot more ifs than I prefer to hear in a plan. If we can access the thing the same way you did; if that wasn’t a fluke. If the thing does the reverse-vision stuff; if it understands what we’re showing it. If we can find a way to kill it.” He shook his head.

“Granted,” Davis said, “there’s a lot we’d have to figure out, not least how to put it down and keep it down. I have some ideas about that, but nothing developed. It would be nice if we could control our connection to the thing, too. I’m wondering if what activates the jump is some chemical our bodies are releasing when we’re under stress—maybe adrenaline. If we had access to a supply of adrenaline, we could experiment with doses—”

“You’re really serious about this.”

“What’s the alternative?” Davis said. “Lee isn’t the only one whose life is fucked, is he? How many more operations are you scheduled for, Han? Four? Five?”

“Four,” Han said.

“And how’re things in the meantime?”

Han did not answer.

“What about you, sir?” Davis said. “Oh sure, your wife and kids stuck around, but how do they act after you’ve had one of your fits, or spells, or whatever the fuck you call them? Do they rush right up to give Daddy a hug, or do they keep away from you, in case you might do something even worse? Weren’t you coaching your son’s soccer team? How’s that working out for you? I bet it’s a lot of fun every time the ref makes a lousy call.”

“Enough, Davis.”

“It isn’t as if I’m in any better shape. I have to make sure I remember to swallow a couple of tranquilizers before I go to work so I don’t collapse in the middle of trying to help some customer load his fertilizer into his car. Okay, Rochelle had dumped me while I was away, but let me tell you how the dating scene is for a vet who’s prone to seizures should things get a little too exciting. As for returning to college, earning my BS—maybe if I could have stopped worrying about how Goddamned exposed I was walking from building to building, I could’ve focused on some of what the professors were saying and not fucking had to withdraw.

“This isn’t the magic bullet,” Davis said. “It isn’t going to make all the bad things go away. It’s . . . it is what it fucking is.”

“All right,” the lieutenant said. “I’m listening. Han—you listening?”

“Listening,” Han said.

X

4:11am

“So where do you think it came from?” Lee said.

“What do you mean?” Davis said. “We know where it comes from.”

“No,” Lee said, “I mean, before.”

“Its secret origin,” the lieutenant said.

“Yeah,” Lee said.

“How should I know?” Davis said.

“You’re the man with the plan,” Lee said. “Mr. Idea.”

The lieutenant said, “I take it you have a theory, Lee.”

Lee glanced at the heap of coals that had been the fire. “Nah, not really.”

“That sounds like a yes to me,” the lieutenant said.

“Yeah,” Han said.

“Come on,” Davis said. “What do you think?”

“Well,” Lee said, then broke off, laughing. “No, no.”

“Talk!” Davis said.

“You tell us your theory,” the lieutenant said, “I’ll tell you mine.”

“Okay, okay,” Lee said, laughing. “All right. The way I see it, this vampire is like, the advance for an invasion. It flies around in its pod, looking for suitable planets, and when it finds one, it parks itself above the surface, calls its buddies, and waits for them to arrive.”

“Not bad,” the lieutenant said.

“Hang on,” Davis said. “What does it do for blood while it’s Boldly Going Where No Vampire Has Gone Before?”

“I don’t know,” Lee said. “Maybe it has some stored in its coffin.”

“That’s an awful lot of blood,” Davis said.

“Even in MRE form,” the lieutenant said.

“Maybe it has something in the coffin that makes blood for it.”

“Then why would it leave to go hunting?” Davis said.

“It’s in suspended animation,” Lee said. “That’s it. It doesn’t wake up till it’s arrived at a habitable planet.”

“How does it know it’s located one?” Davis said.

“Obviously,” the lieutenant said, “the coffin’s equipped with some sophisticated tech.”

“Thank you, sir,” Lee said.

“Not at all,” the lieutenant said.

“I don’t know,” Davis said.

“What do you know?” Lee said.

“I told you—”

“Be real,” Lee said. “You’re telling me you haven’t given five minutes to wondering how the vampire got to where it is?”

“I—”

“Yeah,” Han said.

“I’m more concerned with the thing’s future than I am with its past,” Davis said, “but yes, I have wondered about where it came from. There’s a lot of science I don’t know, but I’m not sure about an alien being able to survive on human blood—about an alien needing human blood. It could be, I guess; it just seems a bit of a stretch.”

“You’re saying it came from here,” the lieutenant said.

“That’s bullshit,” Lee said.

“Why shouldn’t it?” Davis said. “There’s been life on Earth for something like three point seven billion years. Are you telling me this couldn’t have developed?”

“Your logic’s shaky,” the lieutenant said. “Just because something hasn’t been disproved doesn’t mean it’s true.”

“All I’m saying is, we don’t know everything that’s ever been alive on the planet.”

“Point taken,” the lieutenant said, “but this thing lives above—well above the surface of the planet. How do you explain that?”

“Some kind of escape pod,” Davis said. “I mean, you guys know about the asteroid, right? The one that’s supposed to have wiped out the dinosaurs? Suppose this guy and his friends—suppose their city was directly in this asteroid’s path? Maybe our thing was the only one who made it to the rockets on time? Or maybe it built this itself.”

“Like Superman,” Lee said, “only, he’s a vampire, and he doesn’t leave Krypton, he just floats around it so he can snack on the other survivors.”

“Sun,” Han said.

“What?” Lee said.

“Yellow sun,” Han said.

Davis said, “He means Superman needs a yellow sun for his powers. Krypton had a red sun, so he wouldn’t have been able to do much snacking.”

“Yeah, well, we have a yellow sun,” Lee said, “so what’s the problem?”

“Never mind.”

“Or maybe you’ve figured out the real reason the dinosaurs went extinct,” Lee said. “Vampires got them all.”

“That’s clever,” Davis said. “You’re very clever, Lee.”

“What about you, sir?” Lee said.

“Me?” the lieutenant said. “I’m afraid the scenario I’ve invented is much more lurid than either of yours. I incline to the view that the vampire is here as a punishment.”

“For what?” Davis said.

“I haven’t the faintest clue,” the lieutenant said. “What kind of crime does a monster commit? Maybe it stole someone else’s victims. Maybe it killed another vampire. Whatever it did, it was placed in that coffin and sent out into space. Whether its fellows intended us as its final destination, or planned for it to drift endlessly, I can’t say. But I wonder if its blood-drinking—that craving—might not be part of its punishment.”

“How?” Lee said.

“Say the vampire’s used to feeding on a substance like blood, only better, more nutritious, more satisfying. Part of the reason for sending it here is that all that will be available to it is this poor substitute that leaves it perpetually thirsty. Not only does it have to cross significant distances, expose itself to potential harm to feed, the best it can do will never be good enough.”

“That,” Lee said, “is fucked up.”

“There’s a reason they made me an officer,” the lieutenant said. He turned to Han. “What about you, Han? Any thoughts concerning the nature of our imminent guest?”

“Devil,” Han said.

“Ah,” the lieutenant said.

“Which?” Lee asked. “A devil, or the Devil?”

Han shrugged.

XI

2005-2006

To start with, the lieutenant called once a week, on a Saturday night. Davis could not help reflecting on what this said about the state of the man’s life, his marriage, that he spent the peak hours of his weekend in a long-distance conversation with a former subordinate—as well as the commentary their calls offered on his own state of affairs, that not only was he always in his apartment for the lieutenant’s call, but that starting late Thursday, up to a day earlier if his week was especially shitty, he looked forward to it.

There was a rhythm, almost a ritual, to each call. The lieutenant asked Davis how he’d been; he answered, “Fine, sir,” and offered a précis of the last seven days at Home Depot, which tended to consist of a summary of his assistant manager’s most egregious offences. If he’d steered clear of Adams, he might list the titles of whatever movies he’d rented, along with one- or two-sentence reviews of each. Occasionally, he would narrate his latest failed date, recasting stilted frustration as comic misadventure. At the conclusion of his recitation, Davis would swat the lieutenant’s question back to him. The lieutenant would answer, “Can’t complain,” and follow with a distillation of his week that focused on his dissatisfaction with his position at Stillwater, a defense contractor who had promised him a career as exciting as the one he’d left but delivered little more than lunches, dinners, and cocktail parties at which the lieutenant was trotted out, he said, so everyone could admire his Goddamned plastic leg and congratulate his employers on hiring him. At least the money was decent, and Barbara enjoyed the opportunity to dress up and go out to nicer places than he’d ever been able to afford. The lieutenant did not speak about his children; although if asked, he would say that they were hanging in there. From time to time, he shared news of Lee, whom he called on Sunday and whose situation never seemed to improve that much, and Han, whose sister he e-mailed every Monday and who reported that her brother was making progress with his injuries; in fact, Han was starting to e-mail the lieutenant, himself.

This portion of their conversation, which Davis thought of as the Prelude, over, the real reason for the call—what Davis thought of as the SITREP—ensued. The lieutenant, whose sentences hitherto had been loose, lazy, tightened his syntax as he quizzed Davis about the status of the Plan. In response, Davis kept his replies short, to the point. Have we settled on a location? the lieutenant would ask. Yes sir, Davis would say, Thompson’s Grove. That was the spot in the Catskills, the lieutenant would say, south slope of Winger Mountain, about a half mile east of the principle trail to the summit. Exactly, sir, Davis would say. Research indicates the mountain itself is among the least visited in the Catskill Preserve, and Thompson’s Grove about the most obscure spot on it. The location is sufficiently removed from civilian populations not to place them in immediate jeopardy, yet still readily accessible by us. Good, good, the lieutenant would say. I’ll notify Lee and Han.

The SITREP finished, Davis and the lieutenant would move to Coming Attractions: review their priorities for the week ahead, wish one another well, and hang up. As the months slid by and the Plan’s more elaborate elements came into play—especially once Davis commenced his experiments dosing himself with adrenaline—the lieutenant began adding the odd Wednesday night to his call schedule. After Davis had determined the proper amount for inducing a look through the Shadow’s eyes—and after he’d succeeded in affecting the thing a second time, causing it to release its hold on a man Davis was reasonably sure was a Somali pirate—the Wednesday exchanges became part of their routine. Certainly, they helped Davis and the lieutenant to coordinate their experiences interrupting the Shadow’s routine with the reports coming in from Lee and Han, which arrived with increasing frequency once Lee and Han had found their adrenaline doses and were mastering the trick of interfering with the Shadow. However, in the moment immediately preceding their setting their respective phones down, Davis would be struck by the impression that the lieutenant and he were on the verge of saying something else, something more—he couldn’t say what, exactly, only that it would be significant in a way—in a different way from their usual conversation. It was how he’d felt in the days leading up to Fallujah, as if, with such momentous events roiling on the horizon, he should be speaking about important matters, meaningful things.

Twice, they came close to such an exchange. The first time followed a discussion of the armaments the lieutenant had purchased at a recent gun show across the border in Pennsylvania. “God love the NRA,” he’d said and listed the four Glock 21SF’s, sixteen extra clips, ten boxes of .45 ammunition, four AR-15’s, sixteen extra high-capacity magazines for them, thirty boxes of 223 Remington ammo, and four USGI M7 bayonets.

“Jesus, sir,” Davis had said when the lieutenant was done. “That’s a shitload of ordnance.”

“I stopped at the grenade launcher,” the lieutenant said. “It seemed excessive.”

“You do remember how much effect our guns had on the thing the last time . . .”

“Think of this as a supplement to the Plan. Even with one of us on board, once the thing shows up, it’s going to be a threat. We know it’s easier to hit when someone’s messing with its controls, so let’s exploit that. The more we can tag it, the more we can slow it down, improve our chances of using your secret weapon on it.”

“Fair enough.”

“Good. I’m glad you agree.”

Davis was opening his mouth to suggest possible positions the four of them might take around the clearing when the lieutenant said, “Davis.”

“Sir?”

“Would you say you’ve had a good life? Scratch that—would you say you’ve had a satisfactory life?”

“I . . . I don’t know. I guess so.”

“I’ve been thinking about my father these past few days. It’s the anniversary of his death, twenty-one years ago this Monday. He came here from Mexico City when he was sixteen, worked as a fruit picker for a couple of years, then fell into a job at a diner. He started busing tables, talked his way into the kitchen, and became the principle cook for the night shift. That was how he met my mother: She was a waitress there. She was from Mexico, too, although the country—apparently, she thought my old man was some kind of city-slicker, not to be trusted by a virtuous girl. I guess she was right, because my older brother was born seven months after their wedding. But I came along two years after that, so I don’t think that was the only reason for them tying the knot.

“He died when I was five, my father. An embolism burst in his brain. He was at work, just getting into the swing of things. The coroner said he was dead before he reached the floor. He was twenty-seven. What I wonder is, when he looked at his life, at everything he’d done, was it what he wanted? Even if it was different, was it enough?

“How many people do you suppose exit this world satisfied with what they’ve managed to accomplish in it, Davis? How many of our fellows slipped their mortal coils content with what their eighteen or twenty-one or twenty-seven years had meant?”

“There was the Mission,” Davis said. “Ask them in public, and they’d laugh, offer some smartass remark, but talk to them one-on-one, and they’d tell you they believed in what we were doing, even if things could get pretty fucked-up. I’m not sure if that would’ve been enough for Lugo, or Manfred—for anyone—but it would’ve counted for something.”

“True,” the lieutenant said. “The question is, will something do?”

“I guess it has to.”

Their second such conversation came two weeks before the weekend the four of them were scheduled to travel to Upstate New York. They were reviewing the final draft of the Plan, which Davis thought must be something like the Plan version 22.0—although little had changed in the way of the principles since they’d finalized them a month earlier. Ten minutes before dawn, they would take up their positions in the trees around the clearing. If north was twelve o’clock, then Lee and Han would be at twelve—necessary because Han would be injecting himself at t-minus one minute and would require protection—the lieutenant would take two, and Davis three. The woods were reasonably thick: If they positioned themselves about ten feet in, then the Shadow would be unable to come in on top of them. If it wanted them, it would have to land, shift to foot, and that would be the cue for the three of them aiming their AR-15’s to fire. In the meantime, Han would have snuck on board the Shadow and be preparing to jam it. As soon as he saw the opportunity, he would do his utmost to take the thing’s legs out from under it, a maneuver he had been rehearsing for several weeks and become reasonably proficient at. The average time Han guesstimated he’d been able to knock the Shadow’s legs out was fifteen seconds, though he had reached the vicinity of thirty once. This would be their window: The instant the thing’s legs crumpled, two of them had to be up and on it, probably Davis and Lee since the lieutenant wasn’t placing any bets on his sprinter’s start. One of them would draw the Shadow’s notice, the other hit it with the secret weapon. If for any reason the first attacker failed, the second could engage if he saw the opportunity; otherwise, he would have to return to the woods, because Han’s hold on the thing would be wearing off. Once the lieutenant observed this, he would inject himself and they would begin round two. Round two was the same as round one except for the presumed lack of one man, just as round three counted on two of them being gone. Round four, the lieutenant said, was him eating a bullet. By that point, there might not be anything he could do to stop the ugly son of a bitch drinking his blood, but that didn’t mean he had to stay around for the event.

Davis knew they would recite the Plan again on Saturday, and then next Wednesday, and then the Saturday after that, and then the Wednesday two weeks from now. At the Quality Inn in Kingston, they would recite the Plan, and again as they drove into the Catskills, and yet again as they hiked up Winger Mountain. “Preparation” the lieutenant had said in Iraq, “is what ensures you will fuck up only eighty percent of what you are trying to do.” If the exact numbers sounded overly optimistic to Davis, he agreed with the general sentiment.

Without preamble, the lieutenant said, “You know, Davis, when my older brother was twenty-four, he left his girlfriend for a married Russian émigré six years his senior—whom he had met, ironically enough, through his ex, who had been tutoring Margarita, her husband, Sergei, and their four-year-old, Stasu, in English.”

“No sir,” Davis said, “I’m pretty sure you never told me this.”

“You have to understand,” the lieutenant went on, “until this point, my brother, Alberto, had led a reasonably sedate and unimpressive life. Prior to this, the most daring thing he’d done was go out with Alexandra, the tutor, who was Jewish, which made our very Catholic mother very nervous. Yet here he was, packing his clothes and his books, emptying his meager bank account, and driving out of town with Margarita in the passenger’s seat and Stasu in the back with all the stuff they couldn’t squeeze in the trunk. They headed west, first to St. Louis for a couple of months, next to New Mexico for three years, and finally to Portland—actually, it’s just outside Portland, but I can never remember the name of the town.

“She was a veterinarian, Margarita. With Alberto’s help, she succeeded in having her credentials transferred over here. Has her own practice, these days, treats horses, cows, farm animals. Alberto helps her; he’s her assistant and office manager. Sergei gave them custody of Stasu; they have two more kids, girls, Helena and Catherine. Beautiful kids, my nieces.

“You have any brothers or sisters, Davis?”

“A younger brother, sir. He wants to be a priest.”

“Really?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Isn’t that funny.”

XII

5:53am

Lying on the ground he’d swept clear of rocks and branches, his rifle propped on a small log, the sky a red bowl overhead, Davis experienced a moment of complete and utter doubt. Not only did the course of action on which they had set out appear wildly implausible, but everything from the courtyard in Fallujah on acquired the sheen of the unreal, the delusional. An eight-foot-tall space vampire? Visions of soaring through the sky, of savaging scores of men, women, and children around the globe? Injecting himself with adrenaline, for Christ’s sake? What was any of this but the world’s biggest symptom, a massive phantasy his mind had conjured to escape a reality it couldn’t bear? What had happened—what scene was the Shadow substituting for? Had they in fact found a trap in the courtyard, an IED that had shredded them in its fiery teeth? Was he lying in a hospital bed somewhere, his body ruined, his mind hopelessly crippled?

When the Shadow was standing in the clearing, swinging its narrow head from side to side, Davis felt something like relief. If this dark thing and its depravities were a hallucination, he could be true to it. The Shadow parted its fangs as if tasting the dawn. Davis tensed, prepared to find himself someplace else, subject to a clip from the thing’s history, but the worst he felt was a sudden buzzing in his skull that reminded him of nothing so much as the old fuse box in his parents’ basement. He adjusted his rifle and squeezed the trigger.

The air rang with gunfire. Davis thought his first burst caught the thing in the belly: He saw it step back, though that might have been due to either Lee or the lieutenant, who had fired along with him. Almost too fast to follow, the Shadow jumped, a black scribble against the sky, but someone anticipated its leap and aimed ahead of it. At least one of the bullets connected; Davis saw the Shadow’s right eye pucker. Stick-arms jerking, it fell at the edge of the treeline, ten feet in front of him. He shot at its head, its shoulders. Geysers of dirt marked his misses. The Shadow threw itself backwards, but collapsed where it landed.

“NOW!” the lieutenant screamed.

Davis grabbed for his stake with his left hand as he dropped the rifle from his right. Almost before his fingers had closed on the weapon, he was on his feet and rushing into the clearing. To the right, Lee burst out of the trees, his stake held overhead in both hands, his mouth open in a bellow. In front of them, the Shadow was thrashing from side to side like the world’s largest insect pinned through the middle. Its claws scythed grass, bushes. Davis saw that its right eye had indeed been hit, and partially collapsed. Lee was not slowing his charge. Davis sprinted to reach the Shadow at the same time.

Although the thing’s legs were motionless, its claws were fast as ever. As Davis came abreast of it, jabbing at its head, its arm snapped in his direction. Pain razored up his left arm. Blood spattered the grass, the Shadow’s head jerked towards him, and the momentary distraction this offered was, perhaps, what allowed Lee to tumble into a forward roll that dropped him under the Shadow’s other claw and up again to drive his stake down into the base of its throat. Reaching for the cell phone in his shirt pocket, Davis backpedaled. The thing’s maw gaped as Lee held on to shove the weapon as far as it would go. The Shadow twisted and thrust its claws into Lee’s collarbone and ribs. His eyes bulged and he released the stake. Davis had the cell phone in his hand. The Shadow tore its claw from Lee’s chest and ripped him open. Davis pressed the three and hit SEND.

In the woods, there was a white flash and the CRUMP of explosives detonating. A cloud of debris rushed between the trunks. The Shadow jolted as if a bolt of lightning had speared it.

“SHIT!” the lieutenant was screaming. “SHIT!”

The Shadow was on its feet, Lee dangling from its left claw like a child’s bedraggled plaything. Davis backpedaled. With its right claw, the Shadow reached for the stake jutting from its throat. Davis pressed the two and SEND.

He was knocked from his feet by the force of the blast, which shoved the air from his lungs and pushed sight and sound away from him. He was aware of the ground pressing against his back, a fine rain of particles pattering his skin, but his body was contracted around his chest, which could not bring in any air. Suffocating, he was suffocating. He tried to move his hands, his feet, but his extremities did not appear to be receiving his brain’s instructions. Perhaps his hand-crafted bomb had accomplished what the Shadow could not.

What he could feel of the world was bleeding away.

XIII

2006

Although Lee wanted to wait for sunset, if not total darkness, a preference Davis shared, the lieutenant insisted they shoulder their packs and start the trail up Winger Mountain while the sun would be broadcasting its light for another couple of hours. At the expressions on Lee and Davis’s faces, he said, “Relax. The thing sweeps the Grove first thing in the morning. It’s long gone, off feeding someplace.”

The trail was not unpleasant. Had they been so inclined, its lower reaches were wide enough that they could have walked them two abreast. (They opted for single file, Lee taking point, Han next, the lieutenant third, and Davis bringing up the rear. It spread the targets out.) The ground was matted with the leaves of the trees that flanked the trail and stationed the gradual slopes to either side. (While he had never been any good at keeping the names of such things straight, Davis had an idea the trees were a mix of maple and oak, the occasional white one a birch.) With their crowns full of leaves, the trees almost obscured the sky’s blue emptiness. (All the same, Davis didn’t look up any more than he could help.)

They reached the path to Thompson’s Grove sooner than Davis had anticipated. A piece of wood weathered gray and nailed to a tree chest-high pointed right, to a narrower route that appeared overgrown a hundred yards or so in the distance. Lee withdrew the machete he had sheathed on his belt and struck the sign once, twice, until it flew off the tree into the forest.

“Hey,” Davis said, “that’s vandalism.”

“Sue me,” Lee said.

Once they were well into the greenery, the mosquitoes, which had ventured only the occasional scout so long as they kept to the trail, descended in clouds. “Damnit!” the lieutenant said, slapping his cheek. “I used bug spray.”

“Probably tastes like dessert topping to them, sir,” Lee called. “Although, damn! at this rate, there won’t be any blood left in us for Count Dracula.”

Thompson’s Grove was an irregular circle, forty feet across. Grass stood thigh-high. A few bushes punctuated the terrain. Davis could feel the sky hungry above them. Lee and Han walked the perimeter while he and the lieutenant stayed near the trees. All of their rifles were out. Lee and Han declared the area secure, but the four of them waited until the sun was finally down to clear the center of the Grove and build their fire.

Lee had been, Davis supposed the word was off, since they’d met in Kingston that morning. His eyes shone in his face, whose flesh seemed drawn around the bones. When Davis embraced him in the lobby of the Quality Inn, it had been like putting his arms around one of the support cables on a suspension bridge, something bracing an enormous weight. It might be the prospect of their upcoming encounter, although Davis suspected there was more to it. The lieutenant’s most recent report had been that Lee was continuing to struggle: Shari had won custody of Douglas, with whom Lee was permitted supervised visits every other Saturday. He’d enrolled at his local community college, but stopped attending classes after the first week. The lieutenant wasn’t sure he’d go so far as to call Lee an alcoholic, but there was no doubt the man liked his beer a good deal more than was healthy. After the wood was gathered and stacked, the fire kindled, the sandwiches Davis had prepared distributed, Lee cleared his throat and said, “I know the lieutenant has an order he wants us to follow, but there’s something I need to know about.”

“All right,” the lieutenant said through a mouthful of turkey on rye, “ask away.”

“It’s the connection we have to the thing,” Lee said. “Okay, so: We’ve got a direct line into its central nervous system. The right amount of adrenaline, and we can hijack it. Problem is, the link works both ways. At least, we know that, when the thing’s angry, it can look out of our eyes. What if it can do more? What if it can do to us what we’ve done to it, take us over?”

“There’s been no evidence of that,” Davis said. “Don’t you think, if it could do that, it would have by now?”

“Not necessarily,” Lee said.

“Oh? Why not?”

“Why would it need to? We’re trying to get its attention; it doesn’t need to do anything to get ours.”

“It’s an unknown,” the lieutenant said. “It’s conceivable the thing could assume control of whoever’s hooked up to it and try to use him for support. I have to say, though, that even if it could possess one of us, I have a hard time imagining it doing so while the rest of us are trying to shorten its lifespan. To tell you the truth, should we succeed in killing it, I’d be more worried about it using the connection as a means of escape.”

“Escape?” Davis said.

Lee said, “The lieutenant means it leaves its body behind for one of ours.”

“Could it do that?”

“I don’t know,” the lieutenant said, “I only mention it as a worst-case scenario. Our ability to share its perceptions, to affect its actions, seems to suggest some degree of congruity between the thing and us. On the other hand, it is a considerable leap from there to its being able to inhabit us.”

“Maybe that’s how it makes more of itself,” Lee said. “One dies, one’s born.”

“Phoenix,” Han said.

“This is all pretty speculative,” Davis said.

“Yes it is,” the lieutenant said. “Should the thing seize any of us, however, it will have been speculation well-spent.”

“What do you propose, then, sir?” Davis said.

“Assuming any of us survives the morning,” the lieutenant said, “we will have to proceed with great caution.” He held up his pistol.

XIV

6:42am

Davis opened his eyes to a hole in the sky. Round, black—for a moment, he had the impression the Earth had gained a strange new satellite, or that some unimaginable catastrophe had blown an opening in the atmosphere, and then his vision adjusted and he realized that he was looking up into the barrel of the lieutenant’s Glock. The man himself half-crouched beside Davis, his eyes narrowed. His lips moved, and Davis struggled to pick his words out of the white noise ringing in his ears.

“Davis,” he said. “You there?”

“Yeah,” Davis said. Something was burning; a charcoal reek stung his nostrils. His mouth tasted like ashes. He pushed himself up on his elbows. “Is it—”

“Whoa,” the lieutenant said, holding his free hand up like a traffic cop. “Take it easy, soldier. That was some blast.”

“Did we—”

“We did.”

“Yeah?”

“We blew it to Kingdom Come,” the lieutenant said. “No doubt, there are pieces of it scattered here and there, but the majority of it is so much dust.”

“Lee—”

“You saw what the thing did to him—although, stupid motherfucker, it serves him right, grabbing the wrong Goddamned stake. Of all the stupid fucking . . .”

Davis swallowed. “Han?”

The lieutenant shook his head.

Davis lay back. “Fuck.”

“Never mind,” the lieutenant said. His pistol had not moved. “Shit happens. The question before us now is, did it work? Are we well and truly rid of that thing, that fucking blood-drinking monster, or are we fooling ourselves? What do you say, Davis?”

“I . . .” His throat was dry. “Lee grabbed the wrong one?”

“He did.”

“How is that possible?”

“I don’t know,” the lieutenant said. “I do not fucking know.”

“I specifically gave each of us—”

“I know; I watched you. In the excitement of the moment, Lee and Han must have mixed them up.”

“Mixed . . .” Davis raised his hands to his forehead. Behind the lieutenant, the sky was a blue chasm.

“Or could be, the confusion was deliberate.”

“What?”

“Maybe they switched stakes on purpose.”

“No.”

“I don’t think so, either, but we all know it wasn’t much of a life for Han.”

“That doesn’t mean—”

“It doesn’t.”

“Jesus.” Davis sat up.

The lieutenant steadied his gun. “So?”

“I take it you’re fine.”

“As far as I’ve been able to determine, yes.”

“Could the thing have had something to do with it?”

“The mix-up?”

“Made Han switch the stakes or something?”

“That presumes it knew what they were, which supposes it had been spying on us through Han’s eyes for not a few hours, which assumes it comprehended us—our language, our technology—in excess of prior evidence.”

“Yeah,” Davis said. “Still.”

“It was an accident,” the lieutenant said. “Let it go.”

“What makes you so sure you’re all right?”

“I’ve had no indications to the contrary. I appear in control of my own thoughts and actions. I’m aware of no alien presence crowding my mind. While I am thirsty, I have no desire to quench that thirst from one of your arteries.”

“Would you be, though? Aware of the thing hiding in you?”

The lieutenant shrugged. “Possibly not. You’re taking a long time to answer my question; you know that.”

“I don’t know how I am,” Davis said. “No, I can’t feel the thing either, and no, I don’t want to drink your blood. Is that enough?”

“Davis,” the lieutenant said, “I will do this. You need to understand that. You are as close to me as anyone, these days, and I will shoot you in the head if I deem it necessary. If I believed the thing were in me, I would turn this gun on myself without a second thought. Am I making myself clear? Let me know it’s over, or let me finish it.”

The lieutenant’s face was flushed. “All right,” Davis said. He closed his eyes. “All right.” He took a deep breath. Another.

When he opened his eyes, he said, “It’s gone.”

“You’re positive.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You cannot be lying to me.”

“I know. I’m not.”

The end of the pistol wavered, and for a moment, Davis was certain that the lieutenant was unconvinced, that he was going to squeeze the trigger, anyway. He wondered if he’d see the muzzle flash.

Then the pistol lowered and the lieutenant said, “Good man.” He holstered the gun and extended his hand. “Come on. There’s a lot we have to do.”

Davis caught the lieutenant’s hand and hauled himself to his feet. Behind the lieutenant, he saw the charred place that had been the Shadow, Lee’s torn and blackened form to one side of it. Further back, smoke continued to drift out of the spot in the trees where Han had lain. The lieutenant turned and started walking towards the trees. He did not ask, and Davis did not tell him, what he had seen with his eyes closed. He wasn’t sure how he could have said that the image behind his eyelids was the same as the image in front of them: the unending sky, blue, ravenous.

For Fiona, and with thanks to John Joseph Adams

© 2009 by John Langan.

Originally published in By Blood We Live, edited by John Joseph Adams.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

John Langan’s latest collection of stories, Technicolor and Other Revelations, is forthcoming from Hippocampus Press. He is the author of a novel, House of Windows (Night Shade 2009), and a collection, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (Prime 2008). His short fiction has appeared in several of John Joseph Adams’s anthologies, including Wastelands, The Living Dead, and By Blood We Live. He’s also published stories in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and in other anthologies including Ellen Datlow's Poe, Supernatural Noir, and Blood and Other Cravings, and Jack Dann and Nick Gevers' Ghosts by Gaslight. With Paul Tremblay, he co-edited the anthology, Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (Prime 2011). He teaches courses in creative writing and gothic fiction at SUNY New Paltz, and lives in upstate New York with his family.

NOVEL EXCERPT:
Interrupt
Jeff Carlson

Chapter 3

Northern California

“We may be in trouble,” Marcus Wolsinger said as he shut the door to the control room. Dust and flies were anathema to their electronics, but Marcus closed the door harder than necessary in frustration.

Most of his staff had yet to return to their desks. They’d been up for thirty-six hours straight before last night. Marcus was exhausted, too. Nevertheless, he’d woken early to call the East Coast and Colorado. His mind hadn’t allowed him to rest. He wanted to get back to work. He needed his staff.

Steve Church was only person in the shoebox-shaped room, a small, prefabricated structure. The walls were aluminum and glass. The furniture consisted of six cheap desks and eight good chairs, although each desk held its own computer and expensive flat screen displays.

“I told everyone to be here,” Marcus said.

Steve looked up from his Mac. Even with the A/C cranked to a frosty 68 degrees, Steve was bleary-eyed, and Marcus wondered if his friend had slept at all.

“I just got off the phone with SWPC,” Marcus said. “They think I’m crazy.”

“They’re right,” Steve said.

“Nothing’s wrong with our software.”

“There must be.”

Marcus shook his head uneasily. “Two observatories confirmed our data. It’s the satellites that can’t hear it. And if we move past the idea that we’re getting false reads, we may be in trouble.”

Marcus and Steve were senior astronomers with the Hoffman Square Kilometer Field, a radio telescope array in the mountains north of San Francisco. Marcus was black. Steve was white. Otherwise, Marcus felt like they might have been brothers. Both of them were in their mid-forties, although they dressed like kids in T-shirts and jeans. Steve had a crop of beard stubble he’d let go for two days. Marcus wore a “Beam Me Up” pin given to him by Steve’s wife, harking back to a time when they’d been as fresh as the crew of Star Trek. Now both men had potbellies (Marcus more so than Steve) and receding hairlines (Steve more so than Marcus), and yet their relaxed appearance could not mask the intensity he felt.

He took the computer beside Steve. He began to type, then, half-consciously, he paused to survey the desktop.

Marcus had a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder. He was notorious for rearranging the junk on any desk into neat geometries—keyboard, mouse pad, sticky notes, pens. He shaved when Steve did not. He changed his socks when Steve did not. His ex ridiculed him for being an anal robot, but that he’d brought order to her life was precisely why Janet had been attracted to him in the beginning.

He aligned three pens and a binder with a cold, stale cup of coffee. Then he rattled on his keyboard, opening the files he’d developed since sunrise.

Outside their control room’s broad windows, the brown California hills were a stovetop warming in the sun. None of the worn, dirty peaks of the Coast Range lifted higher than 5,000 feet, and the landscape consisted of weeds, brush, and scattered oak and pine trees. Their array was more commanding. The terrain was dotted with thousands of white six-meter dishes identical to those used for commercial television. The Hoffman Square Kilometer Field and another like it in Australia were the cutting-edge in radio astronomy with more channels and capabilities than anything else on the planet.

Marcus pointed at his files. “The signal creep is subtle, but it’s there,” he said. “I think the sun is experiencing a rise in microflares.”

Steve answered with tired irritation. “We expected a lot of background chatter when we built the array. What if the software is creating patterns that don’t exist?”

“Our system’s one hundred percent. The programmers and I ran a dozen integration checks.”

“It would be better if those guys were here.”

Marcus shrugged. Their lead programmers lived in Silicon Valley. They’d consulted with him online despite his connection failing twice. The net had been spotty all morning. Marcus had asked them to drive to the array, but was met with excuses. No one wanted to stay in the mountains. Their programs often ran for weeks, so the site staff were a few post-doctoral kids in their twenties. Marcus and Steve had only made the trip up from the San Francisco Bay Area because they’d discovered more junk noise than usual in their data during the past week.

The noise was escalating. Marcus found that disturbing.

“Look.” He opened a series of waterfall plots on his computer. Each plot—a square graph—was a cascade of color-coded lines, a snapshot image of the broad spectrum of electromagnetic radiation analyzed by the array. “There’s an irregular but upward trend,” he said. “The electrostatic bursts in Earth’s magnetic field have hit one plateau after another.”

“Why isn’t SWPC forecasting a solar storm?” Steve asked.

“They’re still gathering reports from the satellites.”

“The sats would record the flares.”

Marcus shook his head. The Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado, was where the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration monitored solar activity, but Marcus had grown accustomed to the role of the devil’s advocate. He could be ruthless about proving his ideas. “These are microflares,” he said.

“I’m not convinced.”

“We’re seeing something new. Something deeper than surface activity.”

Most of Marcus’s self-respect stemmed from his career, which had begun with the SETI Project before he was asked to join ES2, an innovative new venture to explore the reaches of space. Unfortunately, a lot of people belittled the Extra-Solar Earth Search Program and everything associated with it. Science fiction had made sure of that. The public thought aliens were a joke. They expected bloodthirsty monsters. Steve’s caution was understandable. He wanted to make sure they didn’t embarrass ES2, whereas Marcus was more willing to trust his intuition.

“If we could go further back, the trend would be obvious,” Marcus said. “It’s easy to extrapolate the data.”

“So everything you’ve said is just a hunch?”

“No.”

One of the challenges in radio astronomy was the sheer volume of incoming noise. The universe was unimaginably vast, although Marcus sometimes felt as if he could grasp a complete model of its ancient, busy clockwork in his head.

Every day, tracking one hundred million frequencies in a tiny portion of the sky, the Hoffman Square Kilometer Field listened to 800,000,000,000,000 bits of data. Their computers discarded 99.999%. They didn’t have the capacity to store so much information, much less analyze it. No one did. For the time being, the engineers who’d designed the array had leapt far ahead of the processing power of any computer. It was like asking a blind old man to sort through the voices in a jam-packed football stadium.

“I know this isn’t how you wanted the array to make its first big splash,” Marcus said. “Me neither. But even if the microflares stop, this could be an important discovery. And if the flares don’t stop . . .”

Earth’s sun was a remarkably mild G-class yellow star. Life had flourished on their planet because of the sun’s benevolence, although the most tranquil star was still a star, a ball of hydrogen gas so massive it was collapsing under its own weight.

As the sun burned, it crumpled and pulsed. Beneath its erratic surface violence, it maintained a slower, deeper cycle from stormy to simmering and back again, a cycle from solar maximum to solar minimum. The process took roughly eleven years—but eleven years ago, everyone had been astonished. The solar maximum hadn’t happened. Instead, they’d born witness to the calmest period in recorded history.

Given the abnormally long minimum, experts predicted the oncoming max could be severe. During a solar max, the sun was more likely to produce sunspots. From these spots came solar flares. Some were bursts of X-rays and radio noise. More lethal were coronal mass ejections, clouds of charged particles much larger than Earth. Fortunately, most CMEs spun off away from their planet. Others brushed by or collided head-on, overloading electrical grids and telecommunications systems. In 2009, the crash of Air France 447 was thought to have been caused by a disturbance in Earth’s magnetic field above South America, killing two hundred passengers and crew.

Marcus gestured for Steve to take his place at the computer. “I’m sending our files to SWPC,” he said. “If you want to correct anything, now’s your chance.”

“Okay, okay.” Steve rolled his eyes, defeated.

Marcus scooted back in his chair. Steve slid over. He began studying the plots in detail while Marcus reexamined the data himself, searching for errors. There were none.

As he worked, Steve changed the subject. “How’s it going with Roell?”

Marcus’s son had been visiting for his summer trade-off between Marcus and Janet, so he’d come to the array with his father. But their relationship was . . . complicated.

“He’s mad at me,” Marcus said. “I should have left him at home.”

“Sometimes you want to strangle ’em.” Steve had two children himself, although they were younger than Roell, aged thirteen and eleven. “Try not to be too hard on him or yourself,” Steve said. “I read somewhere teenage minds are different than ours. I mean physically different. Their frontal lobes haven’t developed. They’re more impulsive.”

Marcus nodded.

At seventeen, Roell was interested in two things, girls and balls, which sounded like a bad joke, but it was an honest assessment of his son, who lived for basketball and football. Marcus couldn’t help feeling exasperated. That he hadn’t been more involved with Roell’s school activities or Boy Scouts was a constant regret. The distance between them was Marcus’s fault, even if Roell was usually with his mother.

“Christ,” Steve said, reacting to the computer screen.

Marcus felt his insides flip flop. “You think I’m right.”

Steve hesitated. He gazed at Marcus with a troubled expression. “I’m going to call my family,” he said. “Then let’s wake everyone up and get them back at the computers. We need to figure out what the hell’s going on.”

Minutes later, Marcus hurried through the station’s hallway. The building consisted of two prefabs joined in a “T.” The control room and a small lounge formed the extremities. The hallway led down the spine of the “T” with four compact offices and storage closets. Marcus had arranged two cots in one office, expecting Roell to bunk with him until Roell asked to move. A ranch-house stood near the station, but Marcus and Steve hadn’t wanted to impose on the site staff by evicting anyone from a real bed.

The office Roell had chosen stank of athletic shoes. He kept the window shut and his Air Jordans off, yet it wasn’t necessarily a bad smell when Marcus knocked on the door and leaned in. The room smelled like a healthy young animal.

Roell sat in his sleeping bag with his iPhone, his lean body folded around the gadget as his thumb worked at its screen. In the dim room, with the blinds drawn, the phone illuminated Roell’s face like a spotlight. That must have been part of the appeal. Marcus had seen enough of his son’s texts to know his conversations amounted to What up and Nuthin. Nevertheless, texting seemed to fulfill the boy’s need for attention.

“Come to the control room with me,” Marcus said.

“I want to go home. To Mom’s.”

“You like computers,” Marcus said. “We’re networking with some of the greatest technology in astrophysics. IBEX. Hubble. Let me show you.”

“Have you seen what’s happening in the real world? The Chinese are bracketing our guys.”

“Right.”

Most of the news lately had been focused on the Marines, who’d returned to Vietnamese soil after forty years, this time in support of the communist government. Vietnam, Korea, and Japan were all potential flashpoints in America’s stand-off with China, but Marcus wished Roell wasn’t so attracted to the drama. The boy’s fascination was strange. He played at being involved in gangsta rap, imitating those self-centered posers, and yet Roell was equally excited by the new, loud, patriotic tone sweeping the country. Was that because the soldiers had body armor and guns? Or did he enjoy the primal feeling of us-against-them?

The media had created fan clubs for the war, which wasn’t a war, although it made great material for TV, blogs, Twitter, and Facebook. Facebook! The relentless updates were motivated by ad revenue and subscription rates, which Roell was too naïve to realize despite wanting to be so streetwise.

More important, Roell’s dyslexia didn’t slow him on the net. The boy’s ability to bang through his favorite sites and half-coherent text messages were proof to Marcus that he should apply himself harder in school, but they’d butted heads on the topic too many times, so Marcus tried again.

“Something’s happening with our sun that we can’t explain,” he said. “If our data’s correct, the solar wind is accelerating—”

“Nobody cares, Dad.”

“They should. If the sun—”

“Check it out.” Roell held up his phone to display a photo of a plucky U.S. sailor gazing at an ocean. “Our guys are in trouble, and all you care about is outer space.”

Marcus stopped himself from barking a response. When he was younger, Roell had loved Star Wars and Bionicles. He’d read the books with his father, watched the movies, and papered his bulletin board with drawings of Jango Fett and Lego robots.

“I’m not trying to scare you,” Marcus said, trying to scare him, “but the sun shouldn’t radiate like this unless it’s pre-nova. Do you understand what I’m talking about? The sun gives off a lot more than visible light. Among other things, it emits an outgassing of charged particles called the solar wind.”

“Uh huh.”

“Here’s the spooky part. The surface of the sun averages ten thousand degrees Fahrenheit—but above it, the corona runs as hot as five million. That’s like a light bulb making the air around it hotter than the glass. It violates the second law of thermodynamics. The sun’s gravity is so extreme, it should pull the solar wind back into itself, but the corona superheats the wind beyond the point where gravity can hold it.”

Marcus didn’t add that no one fully comprehended how. Science also couldn’t explain why the solar wind hit its topmost speeds. One model proposed co-rotating regions within the solar wind where expanding rings of charged particles smashed into each other, creating shock waves as fast as twenty-five hundred kilometers per second.

Even in normal “weather,” the levels of ionizing radiation striking Earth could rise or fall by a factor of thousands. What would happen if the sun’s magnetic field was entering a phase in which it relaxed or stiffened? Either phenomenon would allow larger, more frequent blasts of charged particles to escape . . .

“Come with me,” Marcus implored his son. “At the very least, you can get your messages, okay?”

Cell transmissions weren’t permitted in the area. The array was so sensitive, it registered the tiny electrical pulse generated by starting a car. Roell was free to access his social networks on their computers, which used landlines, but Marcus had insisted Roell turn off the wireless functions on his iPhone.

“Fine.” The boy pulled himself from the sleeping bag.

Marcus pretended not to watch as he dressed. Jeans. Sports jersey. He was a great-looking kid. They’d done that right. Roell had Janet’s cheekbones, which gave him a regal look despite the loose jersey, as if he was too good for any clothes.

He had deep black skin unlike his father’s. Marcus had three white ancestors in his family. They were Roell’s ancestors, too, but no one would ever guess. The difference was another unspoken source of tension between them. Skin color was important among Roell’s classmates and on the street.

The street was where Roell had learned his slouch. Walking through the hall, he scuffed his ninety-dollar basketball shoes on the cheap carpet. ES2’s money had gone into the array. Roell grunted in disapproval at the cramped lounge with its faded couch, but he lingered in front of three Coke and snack machines rigged to dispense their goods for free. Janet had allowed him to develop a craving for sugar-and-caffeine loaded with chemicals that would rot his bones.

“Take two,” Marcus said generously.

Roell was caught off guard. He’d expected an argument. Instead, he grinned and selected two cans of Mountain Dew.

Marcus led him into the control room, where Steve had been joined by the post-doctoral astronomers who worked on site. All four of them were gathered around one computer, murmuring together. To Marcus, their nervous energy was palpable.

“S’up,” Roell asked Kym Vang, a round Laotian girl in her twenties.

Marcus intervened before Roell could embarrass them further. He sat at another computer and Roell took the chair beside him. “We’re sharing our feeds with Space Command,” Marcus said. “Last night I talked with an Air Force general.”

“That’d be a cool job,” Roell said, allowing the faintest glimpse of the wide-eyed little boy Marcus remembered. He bumped Marcus’s leg with his knee, leaving Marcus pleased by the casual contact. Those few seconds were a victory. It was progress. Roell might be poking fun, but he was also proud of his awkward old genius dad.

One of ES2’s primary investors was AFSPC, the United States Air Force Space Command. AFSPC and NORAD were interested in phased array technology for tracking foreign satellites. Military involvement was off-putting to some of their other supporters, like academics, but they needed the funding and gleaned new expertise from the arrangement.

To Roell, this meant Marcus was working with the most awesome of the awesome—the guys with missiles and laser beams.

“What are they saying?” Roell asked.

“Nothing yet. No one knows how to classify some of the activity we’re recording. Gamma radiation is up, X-rays, ultraviolet.”

“Nobody’s ever seen anything like this?”

“It depends who you ask,” Marcus said, downplaying his concern. “When I was your age, everyone would have said G-class stars were quiet and stable. Then twenty years ago, they found nine that regularly produce superflares.”

“Like how big?”

“Like as much as a hundred million times larger than the worst flares we’ve seen, which is good.”

“What would happen?”

“It won’t. If superflares had occurred in our solar system, we’d see flood plains on Jupiter’s moons, places where the ice melted and refroze again.”

Marcus didn’t add that much closer to the sun, Earth’s atmosphere would have been ripped away. No one believed there was life more complex than microbes on the planets orbiting S Fornacis or Groombridge 1830, two of the main sequence yellow stars known to produce superflares. Something had gone wrong inside those stars—something Marcus was afraid was occurring to a lesser degree within Earth’s sun—yet he pretended he wasn’t worried.

“This is just a particularly bad solar max. It will alter a lot of our assumptions, but let me tell you a secret. We don’t know as much as we like to think we do.”

“That’s for sure,” Roell said, never missing an opportunity to assert himself.

Marcus smiled ruefully. People had been counting flares and sunspots since Galileo’s first observation of one in 1745. Since then, twenty-eight cycles from solar max to solar min had been well-documented, and yet their oldest records barely established a pattern over three centuries.

Three centuries were a blink in the lifespan of a sun. Increases in the velocity and particle density of the solar wind might be normal occurrences.

“Right now our array is working double-time,” Marcus said. “We’re listening to the sun, too. There’s no way to avoid it. But if we can confirm the same activity in other G-class stars, we’ll have a better idea what to expect. Tweaking our software to listen to their solar winds was easy. It’s combing through each signature for microflares that takes an hour or two.”

“This is all you see?” Roell asked, pointing at the waterfall plots on the computer.

“Yes. That’s a star system called Xi Ursae Majoris. It’s not a good candidate, but it’s in the sky right now, and we’re being thorough.”

Xi was twenty-seven light-years away, so everything they heard was twenty-seven years old, which was how long it took electromagnetic radiation to travel so far. In many ways, astronomers were like archeologists, always reaching into the past. For Marcus, that was the appeal, the patience required, the concentration and skill.

The wait was too much for Roell. He drummed his fingers on the desk, no doubt recreating some popular new song. The noise was a distraction, but Marcus said nothing until he noticed a disapproving glance from Kym.

“Roell, stop,” he said.

“What?”

“The banging. Stop.”

Across the room, Steve said, “Marcus?” His voice held a note of surprise.

We’ve got a hit! Marcus thought. He couldn’t help flashing Roell a look of triumph before he turned to Steve—but his friend was pointing at the window. Fat dust tails had lifted from the dirt road leading to the array.

A car drove into the field. Another followed it. The array had no gate or security features. The cost of running several kilometers of fence around the dishes had seemed excessive, not to mention contradictory to the open, public stance of the ES2 Program.

“I didn’t think anyone else was coming,” Kym said.

“No,” Marcus said.

“They’re moving too fast.”

Anyone associated with ES2 would have slowed to fifteen miles per hour. The few roads inside the array were asphalted, but twenty dishes stood along the entrance. ES2 employees knew better than to throw rocks from their tires. Nor did they get company cars. Both vehicles were new white Chevy sedans. Either the new arrivals were driving rental cars or they’d come from someplace with a motor pool.

It’s not a news team, Marcus thought. There’s no broadcast van.

“Let’s see who it is,” Roell said.

“Stay here,” Marcus said, earning a scowl from the boy. He looked at Kym. “We’re feeding our data streams to the net, right?”

“Of course.”

Marcus left his computer and pushed through the door of the control room into the lounge. Outside, he heard the cars pull up to the building. Their doors opened and banged shut as he exited into sunlight.

Five men and a woman had poured from the vehicles. Two of the men wore Army uniforms. The others were dressed in business suits. Marcus had never seen any of them before, but the woman greeted him by name. “Mr. Wolsinger,” she said. “I’m Rebecca Drayer with the NSA.”

Chapter 4

South China Sea

Lieutenant Commander Drew Haldane stepped onto a dark catwalk on the towering edge of the USS America, a new Ford-class super carrier. His watch read 00:06.

She’s late, Drew thought.

Ship’s time was synched with Hanoi, fourteen hours ahead of San Diego. It was the middle of the night on this side of the world. The America was blacked out. So were the rest of the ships in the strike group. Few stars sparkled through the cloud cover, and yet Drew couldn’t ignore the huge drop from the 03 Level, no less than six stories above the waves.

The ocean clashed with the ponderous movements of the ship. The America was larger than many skyscrapers if those buildings were laid sideways, displacing 100,000 metric tons of water. Drew felt the conflict between the ocean and the America in the swirling updrafts of cold salt air against the hull. Damp wind brushed his hair.

He was thirty-three, hard and fit. The young woman who joined him was twenty-five. Her hourglass physique looked neat and crisp in her uniform as she ducked the storage canisters bolted overhead. This sponson—a narrow, open catwalk beneath the flight deck—was crowded with gear. The sponson was also exposed to the weather, which made it unpopular with the crew and an ideal place to meet.

Lieutenant Junior Grade Julie Christensen stepped close to Drew, starlight gleaming in her brown hair. She smelled like clean laundry, a good, fresh, feminine smell.

But this wasn’t a romantic interlude.

“The satellites are up and down, sir,” she whispered. “We’re getting a lot of static. That’s why you went red. Most of the conventional systems pulled through, but special ops were the first to go.”

“That’s scary as hell.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How much of the solar activity is real?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry, sir.”

Sunspots routinely disrupted global communications, but military satellites were far more expensive than civilian equipment and hardened against solar flares. Drew wasn’t buying it. As far as he was concerned, the sunspots reported by the Armed Forces weather service were a rusty lie to minimize any appearance of weakness.

He said, “Did the Chinese launch anything new?”

“No, sir.”

That means they already have a pulse weapon in orbit, he thought. What if they were targeting U.S. frequencies specifically? The best estimates he’d heard put the U.S. military at least a decade ahead of China with narrowband transmissions. China shouldn’t know about ROMEO at all.

Could they have hit the right frequencies by accident?

Drew didn’t look at Christensen as he considered his options. They weren’t supposed to be friends, and their meeting was outside normal protocol. He was an aviator. She was a communications officer on the flag bridge.

If they were caught, it might blow their cover. Tonight was their first encounter in person. Drew had read her file back in the States, nothing more. The two of them had no relationship except that when his sat phone went dark, dropping its link, Christensen was his fail-safe to reestablish contact with the Pentagon.

Nevertheless, Drew was a warrior and an athlete, extra attuned to his body and his surroundings. That he felt attracted to this bright young woman was predictable—but from the way she stood too near, her gaze flickering from his eyes to his mouth, he thought she felt it, too. They were paired in a unique way. Aside from himself and Christensen, Drew had been told only one other ROMEO agent was aboard the America, which meant the three of them were alone on this foreign sea. They needed to protect each other.

“We were picking up a lot of interference today,” he said. “New stuff. I think the Chinese have a ground-based weapon, plus whatever they’ve got in orbit.”

He had a flash drive and handed it to Christensen down low against her hip. Her gaze connected with his as their fingers touched.

“You can send this for me?” he asked. She would need to be careful when she uploaded his data through the ship’s normal transmissions.

She nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“We’ll need to meet again.”

“I can get away whenever you want me,” she said.

Good, Drew thought. With her neck-length brown hair and freckled nose, Christensen was achingly cute. Her eyes were enormous hazel pools in the dark. Drew glanced away, although beyond the catwalk was utter darkness. He didn’t need to see the strike group to know the ships were there, like a floating city.

Within the America, the Harry S. Truman, and the carriers’ support craft, hundreds of men and women reached in every direction through radar, sonar, and other sensors, creating an electronic umbrella around the fleet.

The umbrella had been compromised. The Chinese attack on U.S. satellites was more than a prelude to war. It was the first shot. And if China could selectively hit the U.S. intelligence agencies’ encrypted communications net, they must also have the capacity to paralyze the strike group in a wink.

What else can I do? Drew thought.

He’d been sent to Vietnam to act as additional eyes watching for new weapons tech in the battlefield: bio, nano, cyber, pulse.

The race for EMPs had become a top priority. Electromagnetic pulses were an unstoppable method of crippling technology-dependent militaries. Every circuit and computer chip was a weak point. Most of their systems were hardened, though not EMP-proof.

Both sides could generate an electromagnetic pulse with a nuke, but missile launches were impossible to hide. Even if one side managed to outwit the other, nuclear attacks would create untold amounts of fallout, most likely enough to poison both sides of the world. Clean EMP weapons like high-powered microwaves or loop antenna devices were the answer.

“I—” Drew said.

He heard boot steps on the deck.

Christensen pressed herself against him, stretching up to cover his mouth with her own. She startled Drew. Then he wrapped his arms around her.

She was pretending they were lovers. Drew wasn’t above making the most of the situation. He ran his hand down her side into the curve of her waist as they kissed. She didn’t fight him. He thought she was smiling.

Sexual relationships were forbidden. Four thousand men and women couldn’t be locked together without some mischief, so fraternization between two sailors might be overlooked on land, in port. Good order and discipline were the rule at sea—but smooching was a lesser crime than espionage.

The boots steps walked closer, then stopped. “Hey, break it up,” said another man, a Chief Petty Officer making rounds. He passed a red-lensed flashlight over their torsos, yet deliberately avoided their faces. He didn’t want to see who they were.

Drew turned to the CPO as Christensen slipped away. “Sorry,” Drew said.

The CPO looked at Drew’s flight suit, a green one-piece made of fire resistant Nomex. Pilots never wore anything else. The suit identified Drew as one of the elite groups aboard the ship, and, while the CPO wouldn’t report them, he might gossip.

Christensen was gone. The CPO had done the gentlemanly thing.

“Appreciate it,” Drew said. Then he ducked inside through one open hatch and another, moving into the dry, recycled air of the ship.

The steel corridors were empty. Christensen hadn’t waited. Drew headed aft because she would have gone forward. Then a man rounded a corner behind him and four more appeared in the direction he was walking. Had they seen her?

Drew was due to launch. He’d follow up with Christensen later. The Wardroom was also on the 03 Level, and he beelined for it, making a hole for the other sailors with the ease of habit. They turned their shoulders and passed without touching. Their footsteps were light on the white-tiled deck.

The voices behind him were also quiet, although Navy personnel learned to work and sleep through anything. The catapults and thundering jets on the flight deck could be heard throughout the ship. Even so, the best sailors tried not to disturb each other.

Drew’s guilt felt like a brand. He and Christensen were Navy in every way, loyal and competent, and yet they’d deceived the good people around them.

If the other crew members were the ship’s blood, he was a white blood cell. They had the same purpose, but he was fundamentally different. These were men and women who would die for each other. They were a team.

I should warn them.

Unfortunately, he had his orders. Christensen probably outranked him, too. She wore j.g. insignia, but she was the one on the bridge. ROMEO would want her to call the shots even if she said “sir” to Drew.

She kissed me. Why? We could have been holding hands or hugging when that dude came along.

But she kissed me.

Feeling harried and distracted—and glad—Drew entered the Wardroom’s familiar noise. Despite its low ceiling, the Wardroom was a wide space with faux wood paneling, real linen, silverware, and dozens of aviators and crew. On an HDTV tuned to ESPN Classic, the Chargers and Steelers slugged it out.

“There he is! That’s the guy!”

The brash voice of Lieutenant Ted Beugeleisen caught Drew before he reached the buffet. This is the last thing I need, he thought, but he allowed himself to be waved over.

“You love me, you love him,” Beugeleisen declared. Sharing his table were two female helicopter pilots. One was brunette, the other sandy-blond. She wore a ring, which hadn’t stopped Beugeleisen from chatting her up. It never did.

“Bugle” was Drew’s friend and partner, again on multiple levels. Drew flew a two-man EA-18G. Bugle was his electronic warfare officer and a ROMEO agent, a tall, happy guy who considered himself catnip with the ladies. In reality, Bugle was a six-foot-three horse-faced dork. Drew had difficulty imagining a less likely prospect for a secret agent.

“Did you know this maniac saved four people from a deck fire?” Bugle asked the women.

“How’s mid rats tonight?” Drew said. Going on one in the morning, they were served midnight rations left over from dinner, but Bugle was not to be deterred.

“It’s true,” Bugle said. “You’re looking at him. A few years ago we had a fire on the Lincoln when some idiot was sneaking cigarettes by the fuel hoses.”

Drew left their table to grab a tray, two hamburgers, and a scoop of canned pineapple. He wished he was more like Bugle, fuzz in the brain, peaceful at heart, although he realized some of his disquiet was purely physiological.

The America and the Truman split every twenty-four hours into two “fly days” of thirteen hours each, creating some overlap at midnight and at noon. Drew’s launch cycle was the second. He expected to fly from two a.m. to four a.m., but it was tough to eat when his belly thought it should be asleep and even tougher to sleep when his body thought it should be in the sun. Three weeks ago, Drew had been stationed in Guantanamo. Five weeks ago, he’d been in Seoul. His biorhythms were more out of whack than those of the crew members who’d already been with the America in San Diego.

Could that explain the tick of anxiety in his head? Despite everything he’d said to Christensen, he had no evidence of a Chinese attack.

“This cowboy ran into the fire four times!” Bugle said as Drew returned with his tray.

Christensen. Drew recalled the warmth of her body as he sat down and dug into his chow. If she was like him, she was lonely. ROMEO training meant less downtime, less dating, less family, less everything.

He admired her dedication. Twenty-five years old and a ROMEO agent . . . What had caused her to give up any semblance of a normal life? Were her motives like his own? Drew hadn’t gotten over his sister’s death—maybe he never would—but personal scars weren’t the main reason people chose to serve.

“Every time he comes back with someone else!” Bugle said. “We’ve got two jets on fire and smoke as thick as water, but he keeps going back in.”

“No way,” the brunette said.

“Bugle makes it sound good,” Drew said. “The smoke wasn’t as thick as water.”

“It was like the Amazon!” Bugle insisted.

Drew laughed. He’s an idiot, but he’s my idiot, he thought. Bugle’s blabbermouth style was the perfect disguise. The two of them had been last minute additions to the crew, yet they’d made fast friends across the ship with Bugle taking the lead on the social scene.

ROMEO was a clandestine division of the Defense Intelligence Agency, a hand-picked group trained to blend with standard forces. Bugle claimed that was why they were codenamed after the greatest secret lover of all time. ROMEO wasn’t an acronym. Bugle said they were supposed to get intimate with their shipmates. Drew believed there were similar groups called ALPHA, BRAVO, and so on.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We need to fly.”

“We’ll see you later!” Bugle said. Both women chuckled at the eagerness in his face.

For Drew, the waiting was the hardest part, waiting and wondering if he could rely on anyone else. Once he’d quit accepting things at face value, life had grown complicated in a hurry. Maybe they were all spies.

As he and Bugle bussed their trays, six men rose from other tables. Would he know if any of them were Central Intelligence or National Security operatives?

A pilot named Giles jostled Bugle’s arm, faking the tough guy. “Watch it, fuck face,” Giles said, and Bugle responded brightly with, “No thanks!”

Everyone handled the anticipation differently. Giles and Bugle fed off each other’s noise. Other men turned inward, like Drew.

The eight of them crossed the ship into the PR Shop, an oversized storage locker lined with naked pipe and conduit. Giles cranked the boombox as they suited up. Drew tried to let the rapid-fire guitars erase his mind. It was better to be loud—better to be amped.

Christensen will have new orders once we’re back, he thought. If we make it back. China has decent aircraft, and a lot of ’em. It won’t be like pounding the shit out of Iraq. If a pulse weapon burns our planes . . .

Drew grabbed his flight helmet and filed into the Ready Room, where the Squadron Duty Officer handed over a weight chit. Drew scrawled his name before selecting a 9mm Beretta and two spare clips from the table.

“Next time I want a bazooka,” Bugle said.

“You are a bazooka,” Drew said, a rare crack for him, and Bugle laughed and punched his shoulder.

Every day Bugle wanted something different: a machine gun; a flame thrower; a fast horse. Clowning let him shrug off the superstition that they might need their side arms.

A pistol was ludicrous compared to the missiles carried by an EA-18G, more so given the 20mm Vulcan cannon and five thousand pounds of ordnance on a normal F/A-18 fighter. No man would need his Beretta unless he was shot down in enemy territory, which was why they were also handed blood chits—waterproof sheets printed with the American flag and, in the spidery symbols of Vietnamese, Simple Mandarin, Complex Mandarin, and Cantonese, a short phrase which translated as If you help me, my government will repay you.

Four of their eight guys were spares. The America would launch two 18Gs piloted by Drew and Giles for their mission, launch a fighter escort in case either of the first two planes developed problems, then either recover the fighter or farm him out to another cycle. The fourth two-man team was an on-deck spare. Combat operations were predicated on the assumption of casualties, and yet as Drew led their group from the Ready Room, he found clarity at last.

They ascended behind the tower that held the flag bridge. In the dim shine of the sodium lights, Drew traded fist jabs with Giles and Wade as they walked to their jets.

“Rock ’em,” Giles said.

“Beautiful night,” Bugle added, and Drew nodded, breathing the sweet stink of jet fuel. He wasn’t aware that he was grinning.

The ROMEO shrinks said Drew’s self-assessment was too simple, but he thought he knew himself. He was the older brother of a girl raised by a single dad, an uneducated joe who’d worked fifty-hour weeks to make time-and-a-half in a paper plant in St. Paul, Minnesota. Their father was a good man. He’d destroyed his hands and his back to provide for them. Drew had tried to be the dad, too, cooking and folding laundry, watching over Brigit’s homework, her boyfriends, and her ambitions to play soccer and piano.

The Navy had become his surrogate family, although the ROMEO profilers were right. His loyalty was more than the desire for a home. Drew felt more than he wanted to, remembered more than he wanted to, and years ago he’d hoped the Navy might be a way to toughen up and prove himself.

Now he was lying to his friends for all the right reasons. It was crucial to prevent intercepts and to preserve the status of shadow forces like ROMEO. If not for his double role, he wouldn’t have learned about the threat of a pulse weapon—but because of ROMEO, he was forced to withhold his information.

That felt like betrayal.

He hated it.

[End Excerpt]

Copyright © 2013 by Jeff Carlson.

Excerpted from Interrupt by Jeff Carlson.

Excerpted by permission of 47North.

All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Jeff Carlson is the international bestselling author of Plague Year and The Frozen Sky. To date, his work has been translated into fifteen languages worldwide. Readers can find free fiction, videos, contests, and more on his web site at jverse.com.

NOVEL EXCERPT:
The Dark Legacy of Shannara: Witch Wraith
Terry Brooks

1

Railing Ohmsford stood alone at the bow of the Quickening and looked out at the starlit darkness. They were anchored for the night, the airship nestled in a copse of fir and hemlock, the sway of the ship in the soft breezes barely noticeable. It was well after midnight, and he should have been sleeping with the others. But sleep did not come easily these days, and when it did come it was haunted and left him wracked with a deep sense of unease. Better to stay awake where he could try to do something to control his thoughts, as dark as they were. Better to face his demons standing up, prepared to fight them off and hold them at bay.

He could not banish them, of course. He could not send them back to the empty places where they sometimes went, though increasingly less so these days.

Not that it mattered. He knew their faces. He knew their names. Fear: that he might not be able to find Grianne Ohmsford and bring her back to face the Straken Lord because she was dead. Or because she was alive but could not be persuaded to leave the sanctuary in which she had placed herself, unwilling to risk a confrontation of the sort he was proposing. Or simply because she was Grianne and she had never been predictable.

Doubt: that he was doing the right thing in making this journey into the back of beyond because of a hope that had so little chance of succeeding. He should have been seeking his brother in the Forbidding, hunting for him there and bringing him out again in spite of the odds. Time was running out with every passing hour, and his brother was alone and had no one to help him and no way of knowing if help would ever come. Redden depended on him, and it must seem to his brother as if Railing had abandoned him.

Shame: that he was deceiving his companions on this quest, that he was keeping information from them that might dissuade them from continuing. The King of the Silver River had warned him that nothing would happen as he imagined, that there would be results he had not foreseen. The Faerie creature had told him he should turn back and travel instead into the Forbidding—the one place he knew he could never enter, so great was his terror at the prospect.

He felt himself to be a coward and a deceiver. He was consumed by his doubts and his shame, and it was growing increasingly difficult not to reveal this to the others. He tried to keep it hidden, masked by his false words and acts, but it was eating at him. Destroying him.

He left the vessel’s bow and walked back toward the stern, moving quietly, trying not to disturb the sleepers. Some were on deck, wrapped in blankets; some were below, rolled into hammocks. All slept save two of the Rover crew, who kept watch fore and aft. He saw the one at the stern and turned aside before he reached the man to take up a position near the starboard railing. Small creaks sounded as ropes and lines pulled taut and released again, and snores rose out of the shadows. He liked this quiet time, this confluence of shadows and sleep. Everything was at peace.

He wished he could be so.

It had only been two days now since they had set out from the Rainbow Lake, even though it felt more like twenty. They had debated among themselves that morning, on waking, as to the best route for their journey. The Charnals were unknown country to all but Skint. Even Farshawn and his Rovers had not come this way before. Railing and Mirai had traveled the Borderlands while conveying spare parts and salvage to customers, but had not gone farther north.

Railing favored coming up from the Rainbow Lake, following the corridor that snaked between the Wolfsktaag and the Dragon’s Teeth to the Upper Anar, and then continuing on through Jannisson Pass east of the Skull Kingdom and its dangers and straight along the western edge of the Charnals to the Northland city of Anatcherae—much the same route his grandfather Penderrin had taken while searching for the tanequil all those years ago. From Anatcherae, once resupplied, they could continue on to their destination.

But Skint had thought differently.

What they needed most, he declared, was a guide, someone who was familiar with the Charnals and could help them find the ruins of Stridegate, where it was said the tanequil might be found. There were few who could do that, and he was not one. In point of fact, he knew of only one man who could help them with this, one whose loyalty and knowledge they could depend upon. And even he would need persuading.

His name was Challa Nand, and he made his home in the Eastland town of Rampling Steep. But finding him would require that the company fly Quickening east of the Charnals and through the Upper Anar. It would necessitate abandoning the western approach to Stridegate and finding one that came in from the east. Challa could show them, if they were able to persuade him to their cause.

Railing knew he could rely on the ring given to him by the King of the Silver River to show them the way, but using it would mean either telling them about his meeting with the Faerie creature or lying about where he had gotten the ring. The ring could always be a backup if the need arose; the better choice was to keep it a secret for now.

So he agreed to Skint’s proposal, and the others went along, all of them keenly aware that they were in unfamiliar territory and needed to reduce the risks they would encounter.

Now here they were, on their way to Rampling Steep, anchored at the northern edge of Darklin Reach not far from where the Rabb River branched east into the Upper Anar. If he listened closely, Railing could hear the murmur of the river’s waters as they churned their way out of the mountains on their journey west to the plains and from there to the Mermidon. It was a distance of hundreds of miles, and it made him wonder if anyone had ever followed the river all the way from end to end. He supposed Gnome or Dwarf trappers and traders might have done so at some point, but he doubted that any had ever made a record of it.

“What are you doing?”

Mirai Leah was standing next to him. He hadn’t heard her come up, hadn’t realized she was there. He shrugged. “Can’t sleep.”

“Standing out here isn’t going to help. You need to get some rest. Are you all right?”

He gave her a quick glance. Her hair was rumpled, and she was yawning. “You look like the one who ought to be sleeping.”

“I would be if I weren’t worried about you. What’s bothering you, Railing?”

He could have given her a whole raft of answers, starting with how he felt about her and what it would mean to him if he caused her harm. But all he said was, “Nothing. I just couldn’t sleep.”

She draped an arm over his shoulders. Her touch made him shiver. “How long have we known each other?”

“Seems like forever. Since we were pretty small, anyway. I still remember when your parents brought you for your first visit. They came to see Mother. I didn’t like you then. You were kind of bossy.”

“Not much has changed. I’m still kind of bossy. So when I ask you what’s bothering you, it’s because I know something is. So what’s up?” He brushed his red hair back and faced her.

“Leaving Redden is eating at me. I can’t stand it that I’m not going after him.”

“Then why aren’t you?”

“Because I think this is the better choice.”

“Because you believe Grianne Ohmsford is alive and will come to Redden’s aid?” She studied him a moment. “We’ve already discussed this, and I don’t think that’s what’s troubling you at all. I think there’s something else, something you are keeping to yourself. Redden’s not here to confide in, so maybe you ought to try telling me.”

Here was his opportunity. She had called him out on what she clearly recognized, and he could unburden himself by telling her about his meeting with the King of the Silver River. He could admit what he was doing, how he was manipulating them. But that was something he would never do. He didn’t want her judging him. He wanted her to love him unconditionally and fully. He always had.

He fingered the ring, tucked deep in his pants pocket. “I need to go back to sleep. I’m sorry I woke you.” He started to walk away, and then he stopped and turned around. “I want you to know that I’m doing the best I can. If anything happens to Redden because of me, I don’t think I could stand it. I need you to believe that. I need you to support me and to . . .”

He trailed off. He couldn’t make himself speak the words: Love me. “Good night.”

“I will always support you, Railing,” she called after him.

Without looking back, he gave her a wave and disappeared back down the hatchway into the hold of the airship.

He had thought he might sleep then, weary and heartsick. But after a short, unsettling nap he was awake again, wide-eyed and restless. Moreover, there was a tugging sensation that brought him out of his blanket and back up the ladder to the deck, where he stood peering out from the ship’s railing and over the darkened countryside.

Something was out there. Something he must find.

He couldn’t explain how he knew this, but the feeling was so compelling that he did not stop to question it. He needed to find out what it was. Ignoring it for even another moment was impossible.

He walked over to the sentry at the bow and told him he was going for a walk, but that he would be careful. The Rover clearly understood it would be a mistake to question the leader of their company, though he offered to accompany him. But Railing refused.

Once off the vessel and out in the night alone, Railing gave himself over to his strange compulsion, following his instincts. He felt oddly unthreatened. It might have been because of what he had survived in the Fangs—the days of attacks by the Goblins and the constant use of his wishsong magic to throw back the hordes in the debilitating struggle to stay alive. He had proved something to himself in those terrible days when others had died all around him. He had found, through his magic, a source of strength and resilience that he had not known he possessed. He had demonstrated to himself that he could be stronger than he had believed. Before, the wishsong had never been more than a means of ramping up the excitement on each new adventure, or of pushing ever harder against the limits that common sense told him not to exceed. But what he took away from the Fangs was something different. It was a belief that his magic provided him a shield and sword he could use to protect both himself and those close to him. It was a belief that fostered confidence.

So he proceeded through the night’s shadows without fear. He did not hesitate in his search for what was calling to him or consider turning back. His mind was made up. The voice reminded him of his summoning by the King of the Silver River two nights earlier, and he wanted to know why that was. While it was different—different enough that he was certain it was something else entirely—it shared a kinship that intrigued him.

Railing.

His name, spoken clearly. Spoken by a voice he could not mistake because he had known it all his life.

It was Redden who called to him.

He brushed aside his shock and pushed ahead at a quicker pace, listening for more. Everything was still again, the voice gone as quickly as it had come. Yet the pull on him persisted. He pushed through woods and soon no longer knew in which direction he was going—or even from which he had come. He was proceeding blindly, responding to the lure with a heedless disregard for his own safety, and he finally began to wonder if he was in danger and did not recognize it.

Railing.

Again, his brother’s voice.

Now he slowed, no longer willing to rush ahead, worried that he had overstepped himself. He was lost at the very edge of Darklin Reach, which was not only strange but dangerous country. He was moving away from the Rabb; he knew this because he could no longer hear its rush. The silence was deep and pervasive, and only the cries of night birds broke its hush.

Ahead, just visible through the trees, a silvery glimmer caught his eye.

He wove his way through the woods and stepped out at the edge of a small lake. Fog lay eerily across its rippling surface. The waters lapped the shoreline and chopped about its windswept center in small bursts of spray. Though he tried, the boy could not make out what lay on the other side. The trees ringed the lake like a palisade, trunks dark and thick and seemingly impenetrable ten feet from where he stood. In the distance, through the gaps, he could spy the peaks of mountains.

Railing.

“I’m here, Redden,” he shouted back, feeling foolish for speaking aloud to a voice that was only in his head.

Laughter greeted his response, filling the air in long raucous peals that shattered the silence and spun out around the lake in waves. Railing took a step back, unsure of what was happening, knowing only that it wasn’t his brother he was hearing but something else entirely. The laughter was unsettling, inhuman. The boy would have bolted if not for the continuous tugging from inside his body, which held him rooted in place.

Then, from somewhere out in the middle of the lake, a dark shape began to form, sliding across the surface of the water as it came toward him.

Raaaiilingg.

His brother’s voice again, but it had a whining, pleading quality that it had never before possessed. He shuddered at the sound, unnerved by the neediness of its tone. But he stayed where he was, waiting on the thing that crested the lake’s surface and drew ever closer. He did not feel the fear that might otherwise have driven him into the woods. What he felt instead was a deep, inexplicable revulsion.

When the dark shape reached him, it was fully formed. It stood upon the waters and looked down on him.

“Brother.” Redden Ohmsford addressed him in a hollow, empty voice.

Railing was dumbstruck and could not respond.

“Did you think that if you did not come for me, I could not in my turn find a way to come to you? Did you abandon me with the expectation that I would simply vanish from your life and leave you in peace? Leave you to court Mirai alone? Did you believe that, even in death, I would not find a way to rejoin you?”

Railing fought back against a rising tide of despair. “You are not my brother. My brother isn’t dead. I would know it if he were!” He swallowed hard. “What are you? A shade? A changeling?”

The creature before him shimmered and began to transform again. “Perhaps I am you.”

And just like that Railing was looking at his mirror image—every detail recognizable, every line and feature in place.

“Why did you call to me? What do you want?”

“Oh, it isn’t what I want. It’s what you want.”

“That’s not true. This is all coming from you. And you are not me!”

“Well, then, descendant of Valemen and Druids, who am I?”

Railing racked his brain for an explanation, for a memory, for any hint of who or what this thing was. But he could not seem to think straight looking at a duplicate of himself.

“I have known your kin, and your ancestors great and small. I have spoken to some over the years. I spoke to Brin Ohmsford when she went in search of the Ildatch. And to Walker Boh when he went after the Black Elfstone.” The laughter returned, whispery and prodding. “Does that not tell you who I am?”

It did. Abruptly, Railing found the answer—both from his memories of his family’s history and from the stories told him by his father and repeated endlessly by his brother and himself.

“You are the Grimpond. You are a shade confined to this world, chained to this plane of existence.”

“An immortal creature who knows secrets that no one else does. A creature that possesses the ability to see the future. A being that might be of assistance to someone like you.”

Railing knew that the Grimpond was a spiteful prisoner of this world, trapped here for reasons that no one knew, hateful of all the Races, treacherous and inconstant. Whatever words it spoke—even though it did know things hidden from others—were not to be trusted.

“I thought you dwelled farther back in Darklin Reach, somewhere north of Hearthstone.” It was coming back to him now, the whole of what he knew of this shade. “How do you come to be here?”

The shade rippled and changed again, and now it was his mother who confronted him, her face stern and unforgiving. “You were told not to let anything happen to your brother, and yet you did. What sort of brother does that make you, Railing? What sort of son?”

Railing ignored the insults and folded his arms defensively. “I’m wasting my time here. If you have something to tell me, just say it. Otherwise, I am returning to my bed.”

“And you think you will sleep well knowing what you have done? How you have betrayed and manipulated those who depend on you? How you hide a gift from a Faerie creature because you are afraid to reveal your possession of it? How you have become a thing much worse than what you think me to be? Oh, I seriously doubt that you will sleep well at all!”

Railing fought back against his rising anger and deliberately kept his hands at his sides and out of his pockets. “Since you seem to know me so well, you must also know that nothing you can tell me will make a difference in how I feel about myself or my brother or my friends!”

“Nothing?” A meaningful pause. “Really?” Railing took a deep breath.

“What, then?”

“You are such a disappointment to me, Railing! Such a waste of possibilities.” His mother’s voice, cold and scolding. Then the shade rippled once more and suddenly it was a faceless being, cloaked and hooded. “It is I who shall go to bed and leave you to your fate.”

“You can know nothing of fate!” Railing’s hands were clenched into fists. “Only of secrets. You are a master of trickery and deceit. My fate is in my hands.”

The Grimpond went silent then, hovering like the fog from which it had emerged, the substance of it beginning to fragment and vanish. “If you are so convinced of that, go on your way. I am done with you. I would give you help, but you spurn me. You mistrust me, yet you refuse to see that I might have knowledge you lack. Knowledge you desire, Railing Ohmsford. Knowledge you crave.”

Railing stepped back, shaking his head slowly. “No, you would trick me with your words and your pretenses. You seek to play games with me. You did this with others in my family. The histories tell us so. You were never less than deceitful, and I will not become your latest victim.”

The Grimpond came back together again abruptly. “Why not hear my words and judge for yourself? Can mere words do so much harm that even to listen would undo you? Are you so frightened of me?”

The night closed down around the boy as he pondered a response. What should he say? Should he admit his fears and be done with it? Should he deny being afraid and demand that the other give him what he was promising? Should he walk away? The silence lengthened, and the Grimpond waited.

“I want you to do what you think you should,” Railing said eventually. “If you have something to say, I will listen. If not, I will leave.” The Grimpond chuckled softly and shimmered once more. But this time it did not change form and did not give a quick retort. Instead, it seemed to consider.

“Hear me, then,” it said finally. “I summoned you to see what you were made of, that much is true. Had you been weaker, I might have tried to teach you a lesson. But now I will simply tell you what it is I know that you do not. You have come in search of Grianne Ohmsford. You would know her fate, and if there is a chance that she might be brought back to face the Straken Lord.”

He paused, and the boy waited patiently.

“She lives, Railing Ohmsford. She lives, and she can be what you need. She can do what you expect. If you wish that of her, you should continue on with the knowledge that what you seek is possible. Yet you should be careful what you ask for—an old phrase, but a good one to remember, because all is not as it seems. There are threads that might cause the whole to unravel, like the threads of the ring you carry in your pocket.”

Railing felt a surge of excitement. His efforts would not be wasted. His chances of finding Grianne and bringing her back to face the Straken Lord—and save his brother and possibly the Four Lands—were real. He understood what the Grimpond was telling him about things not working out as he hoped, but he had known that from the first. And any chance at all was the best he could hope for.

“Is this the truth?” he asked the shade. “Are you lying in any way?”

“Not a word of what you’ve heard is a lie, but your expectations may turn my words to falsehood. This is not my doing. Remember that. Keep the memory of what I have told you clear in your mind.”

“I will.”

The Grimpond shimmered and began to recede. “Enough of this. I came to say those words and I have said them. What happens now is up to you. I will watch your progress and record your reactions to everything that happens. It will be most entertaining for me.”

The boy watched the shade trail away like a shadow lost with the light’s passing—there one moment and gone the next. It was still visible as it reached the fog and passed through. Then it melted away in a scattering of tiny particles and was gone.

[End Excerpt]

Copyright © 2013 by Terry Brooks.

Excerpted from Witch Wraith by Terry Brooks.

Excerpted by permission of Del Rey, a division of Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Terry Brooks is the bestselling author of the genre-defining novel The Sword of Shannara and the other 20+ books in the Shannara sequence, as well as the Magic Kingdom of Landover series.

Interview: Hugh Howey
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Hugh Howey is a self-described “bum,” who for the past twenty years has bounced from job to job—computer repair, roofing, yacht captain, bookstore clerk. In his spare time he wrote science fiction, and after growing impatient with the long waits and uncertain rewards of traditional publishing, he began self-publishing his work on Amazon.com. Just a few years later, his post-apocalyptic novel Wool, typed out in a storage room during his lunch breaks at the bookstore, was earning him over $100,000 a month on Amazon, had secured him a six-figure book deal from Simon & Schuster, and had been optioned for film by Ridley Scott, director of Blade Runner and Alien.

This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the hosts discuss various geeky topics.

You started self-publishing these ebooks on Amazon.com just a few years ago; could you tell us, at that point, how long had you been writing for, and had you ever tried working with a traditional publisher?

I started writing in 2009, and I had just started sending out my very first manuscript to friends and family, and my idea was to polish it up and maybe serialize it on a blog or something, just give it away, and I had enough people tell me I should explore publishing this because they liked it better than stuff they were reading out of the bookstore. So I kind of got peer-pressured into going that route and ended up with a small press and everything went well, but I guess what I saw was, the way that they were publishing it, all these tools were available to me, so I thought, “I can do this.” So when the contract came in for the second book, I decided to self-publish instead, and I’ve been doing that ever since.

And what made you ultimately decide that self-publishing was right for you? Did you know other people who were doing it or?

No, I didn’t, and I had no aspirations of making it as a full-time writer, to be honest. Self-publishing, for me, was a way of getting published and the other way took years of querying, trying to land an agent, trying to get a publishing contract, a year from the publishing contract to actual publication, so it was never about making money or trying to get into bookstores; for me, it was all about writing stories and trying to distribute them. The self-publishing tools, like print-on-demand and epublishing, just made it possible to give myself a wide reach with zero up-front cost and no time wasted.

I heard you say that before Wool came out, you had sort of laid out on an Internet message board what your plan was for what you hoped would happen with it.

Well, it wasn’t so much what I thought would happen with me. I geek out over publishing in general; I was working in a bookstore, and I just love watching the changes in that industry, and what I was postulating was that, in the future, people wouldn’t worry about getting agents, or querying, or writing pitches, or proposals, or things like that, they would simply go directly to the reader and establish a relationship there, and once their demand hit a certain level, agents and publishers would come to them. It was something I thought would happen to other people. It’s bizarre that, within a few months of posting that, it started happening to me. But at the time I was laughed out of the forums, they said I was crazy, the agents didn’t have time to browse bestseller lists, but some of the agents who piped in are now doing exactly that, so change has happened so fast that what seemed ridiculous within a year has now become standard.

What sort of websites were those that you were hanging out on and posting messages on?

I will say one of the better places I found on the Internet for aspiring writers now—and I think traditionally published authors can learn a lot by hanging out there—is the Writers’ Cafe on Kindle Boards, and that’s where Amanda Hocking used to hang out there, David Dalglish, some of the pioneers of self-publishing. They share what works and what doesn’t, what they’re writing, what promotions work, how to price their work, all the questions you could come up with, it’s all in these forums, it’s really impressive.

Okay, let’s talk about Wool. Could you just walk us through how you came up with that idea and how it developed into the omnibus?

I had the idea for a longer novel, but I was writing several novels a year, and I didn’t have time to get to this one story, and it was really consuming me, so I decided to write it as a shorter piece, and it ended up being about twelve and a half thousand words. The idea was a world where people live underground in this silo, and their only view of the outside world is this single screen. The idea came to me from moving from a career as a yacht captain, and travelling widely and seeing the world and living in it, to being domesticated by my lovely wife, living in one place and relying on TV, the Internet, and newspapers to know what the world was like, and it was terrifying to see how different the picture was painted because of the filters. The only thing that really makes it to the news is bad news typically, and so I came up with the idea of this world where the only thing you know about the outside world is this screen that filters that view, and what do you trust, what does it do to the people living inside the Silo? Do they become terrified to explore, what does it do to their sense of hope? That, to me, is the character in the story more than the Silo in that first short story, that wallscreen. And then from there, the demand for more caused me to serialize and write the rest of the series, which is what’s been combined into a single novel now.

How did the demand actually first start to come about? Did people just email you directly, or did they post messages in reviews on Amazon, and that’s where you determined that, “Oh!, people really love this, and I need to write more of it?”

That’s exactly it, they did both of those. I was getting emails from all over the world. The reviews were very personal; from the very beginning, people would write a review as if they were writing it directly to me. You know, they would say, “Great book, where’s the rest of it, and if you’re reading this, please keep writing more.” And so I would even comment on the review and say, “All right, I’m working on it,” and then I basically dropped what I was writing, my next novel, and went back to this world and wrote another short piece, and I figured they enjoyed it the first time, something you could finish in an hour, and I published the second story and started on the third, and wrapped it up in these five entries, and together they formed like a five hundred and fifty page novel. But yeah, it was real fun getting the feedback during that process.

So is it fair to say that you started the first one just intending that to be a standalone, and then parts two, three, four, and five, you sort of plotted out the whole thing, and then wrote them, or did you kind of come up with the ideas one at a time?

I wrote the first one as a standalone, and there was going to be no more—anyone who has read the work can kind of see how that was the case—but starting with the second one, I plotted out what now is even the works I’m working on now; I had to come up with the backstory and the eventual fate of these characters. I’ve got it plotted out to the end of Dust, which is the end of the saga, and then I’ll move onto something else.

Currently there’s the Wool omnibus, and then what else comes after that?

Okay, so in the end, it will be three collected novels: the first is Wool, which is the omnibus edition of Wool, and then the second is Shift, and the third is Dust, and so, like, Random House in the UK is publishing this as a trilogy, and they already contracted that and got the artwork and the pre-order pages, and Shift will be out next month, or in April, and Dust will be out by the end of the year.

Actually, speaking of artwork I saw you got this amazing fan artwork for Wool.

Jasper Schreurs did that. He lives in the Netherlands, and he is a master Dutch-trained artist, and he, like, designed the currency for Fiji, of all things, and does ad campaigns for Fortune 500 companies. And he sent me two pieces, just out of nowhere, that piece and the cover for the first Molly Fyde story. And I’ve now commissioned him to do more cover art. I’m redoing the Molly Fyde books with his cover art on them. Guy’s amazing.

All right, let’s talk about the setting of the Silo. Could you just talk about what sort of research you did, or did you consult with anyone in coming up with the mechanics of that place?

No, I thought I was making this all up. What’s interesting is I’ve seen people who are converting old Atlas missile silos into—I mean, they look exactly like the way I envision it and describe the Silo: the micro-living quarters and mechanical spaces on the bottom, and hydroponic gardens. So it’s, I guess, an idea that’s been independently converged on by several people, but in my story the Silo’s much deeper. It’s one hundred and forty-four levels, and it’s very delineated by class and by professions: at the bottom, you have the mechanics, and in the middle, you kind of have the middle class, the merchants and the farmers; up top you have more of the white collar jobs and the administrative personnel. Like most good dystopia, there’s a lot of satire and commentary on the human condition there.

One of the technical details that really struck me was that when people are sent out from the Silo, the chamber fills with argon gas, and I was just wondering, how did you come up with that detail? I thought that was really cool.

It was the idea of having a pressurized compartment so that the outside air was kept outside, and I thought that a noble gas or something that wouldn’t—something that was readily available but wasn’t a reactant, would be intelligent. Had I known when I wrote that, that like a half a million people would read it, I probably would have done more research, but a lot of it’s just common sense, I guess. There’s probably physicists reading some of this and cringing, a certain subset will take umbrage with some things that are not commonly understood, like someone wires a pump up underwater, which I’ve done before, it’s completely possible, so . . .

While I was reading this, I was thinking to myself that this is a guy who knows a lot about mechanical things and a lot about computers. Could you just talk about what sort of personal experiences you drew on to create the Silo?

I’ve been a bum. It really helps to have, like, twenty professions behind you, I believe, to be a writer. My first career out of high school was as a computer repair technician, and it was in the mid-nineties when people were just getting online, and AOL discs were everywhere, and Windows 95 was coming out, and from there, my next big career was as a yacht captain, and you become a jack-of-all-trades when you operate big boats. I mean, these were hundred-foot-plus motor yachts with several decks and levels and smaller boats inside of them and pumps and engine rooms, and you have to be an electrician and a mechanic and a carpenter and know how to lay out fiberglass and do all kinds of things. Growing up on a farm, my dad was a small grain farmer, and we were always fixing things there. I just think all those experiences helped.

And so you had grain silos in the backyard, right?

We grew up with these big grain silos we used to climb around inside and on top of. I don’t know if having those there influenced me or not, but they’re definitely part of my childhood.

Were there any books in particular that were an influence on Wool?

I don’t know about books that influenced Wool. I think someone pointed out to me some of the similarities are, like, really glaring in hindsight, but at the time I wasn’t thinking about them, but when I was in talks with one TV production company, they were like, “Are you a fan of the Fallout games?” and I thought, “Oh, god, yeah . . . I’m surprised I didn’t call it the Vault instead of the Silo.” But I played the original two Fallout games when I was young, and I didn’t get into the first person shooter variety that have come out more recently, but I guess that was really popular when the Wool books started getting popular. So a lot of people saw that as an influence. I would say, book-wise, 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, those sorts of stories influenced me in seeing science fiction as a form of satire.

Did you ever read a book called This Time of Darkness by H.M. Hoover, by any chance?

I have not.

Okay, that was the one that it reminded me the most of. It’s about these people, and they’re in kind of like a multilevel structure, and they believe that the whole world outside is completely irradiated or something, and they don’t even know that they’re underground, and it turns out at the end that they’re underground and for the people on the surface everything’s fine, and they don’t even know that these people were living underground.

That’s great. You know, what’s amazing is how rare an original idea is. I’ve got several other stories, and some of the harshest reviews are people accusing me of ripping off stuff that I’ve never read or seen or heard of. I think non-writers don’t understand how the idea is the easiest part of writing. Everyone has ideas. The hard part is sitting down and spending the hour after hour, day after day, to turn it into a book. I actually don’t like reading in the genres that I write in, because if I encounter anything that’s similar to something that I’m working on then I can no longer work on it; I have to do something different.

I was actually going to bring up the Fallout series, because I also saw that parallel as well. To me, it was interesting because I thought it felt fresh even though it was a familiar idea, and I think that’s the trick that you’re saying non-writers don’t understand—making that thing feel fresh even when it’s something that we’ve seen before.

Yeah, people living underground. I mean, 12 Monkeys—that has a very similar kind of setting: people underground, the world’s gone to hell. That is such a common theme. I saw someone else compared it to City of Ember. I haven’t even seen this movie, and I’ve got someone all over my case for ripping off something I’ve never seen before. People living underground is such an old concept, I just think if anyone thinks that’s what the story’s about, people living underground, then I did a horrible job telling the story because that’s the most boring and easy part of this story. That’s why I support fan fiction; I think people writing stories in my world—my world’s the easy part. I mean you can write a story in the world we live in, or you know, the time of Alexander the Great; that doesn’t give you a story, it just gives you a setting.

Let’s talk about the fan fiction. Am I understanding it right, that you’re actually encouraging people to write and sell fan fiction that they write set in your world?

Yeah, is that a bad idea?

All the older writers we talk to seem to think that you’re in danger of somehow losing your rights to the story if you do that, but I don’t know.

If I lose my rights to the story, that means we can all write in that world, right? I mean, I can’t imagine what bad could come of this. I plan on writing three novels in this world, and then that’s it, I’m going to move on to other stuff, and I encourage anyone [to write in it]. I think it’s just unbelievable flattery that anyone would want to write in a world that you made up, and I think creative endeavors, if they can be supported by paying customers, that’s just absolutely brilliant. I just got an email from someone today who wrote poetry inspired by Wool, and enough people bought his ninety-nine cent book of poems to fill up his car with gas this week and what that meant to him, and it brings tears to my eyes to think that there’s another artist out there who’s earning something by bringing other people happiness. That’s just incredible.

I want that to be the case—I really would like to encourage more fan fiction for everything—but older fantasy and science fiction writers always cite this one case. I don’t know the details, but somehow Marion Zimmer Bradley had encouraged fan writers, and then one of them had showed the book to her; then, when she wrote a book that was kind of similar to one of these fan things, the fan sued her for stealing her idea, and it was a whole big mess. It’s like stuff like that.

There’s so many good things you can do, and letting the chance of a bad thing happening to you stop you from doing good things is just not how I want to act. I think living in fear . . . it’s kind of what Wool is about, it’s about whether or not you should live like that or live completely naïve, the way I live. I would rather be naïve and get burned than live with the idea that we have to have a Leviathan locking everything down.

Okay, so when did you first get the hint that Wool was going to turn into this big phenomenon, and what are just some of the big milestones that stick out in your mind?

God, I feel like I’m still not processing that this is becoming—I mean, I still feel like, in a lot of ways, it’s still an unknown thing, it’s still underground, and that it’s going to stay that way. I’m having a really difficult time coming to grips with how many people have seen or heard of this or read it. Some of the big milestones to me were when agents started getting in touch just over about a year ago and when publishers started making offers, and seeing my name in Publishers Weekly or a story on me in Entertainment Weekly, and then the Ridley Scott deal was a big milestone, just hearing that he was interested, and then signing a deal with him and Steve Zaillian. And the Random House and UK publishing deal, and seeing the book in bookstores in London, and then the Simon & Schuster release here in the US, so, I don’t know, we’re up to like twenty-six foreign countries have picked this up, and the fact that someone like John Joseph Adams is interested in anything I’ve written for one of his anthologies, I geek out over all of this stuff. Seems like every week there’s some kind of weird milestone.

Speaking of the Ridley Scott movie deal: Do you know how likely it is that they’re actually going to make a movie? I know a lot of things get optioned, and it’s great, but then nothing ever happens. Have you had anything back to how likely it is that this is actually going to happen?

I went into this telling everyone, “Look, there’s never going to be a movie, they just option the book, and that’s what happens to books,” and then they never—look at what happened to Ender’s Game. It’s one of my favorite books of all time, and it spent decades in development hell, and it’s just now [finally] coming out. For so long I’d been telling everyone there’s no chance, but the producers and the executives at Fox are leading me to believe otherwise. So I would say right now the chances are about fifty-fifty, which is huge, I think, for film. It’s about as good as the odds ever get.

So, looking back, what are some of the advantages and disadvantages of starting out as a self-published author, do you think?

Advantages: God, this podcast’s probably not long enough [to list them all], but the biggest advantage is the patience. When you hit release, your book does not have to do well the first week like it does with a traditional book, where you’ve got a limited window, it’s only on the shelf for a few months, and you’re not going to see sales ten years from now, you really have to blow it out early on. With self-publishing, it could be ten years before your books take off, so you don’t have to be impatient with the book doing well, and you also can spend more time writing. I think there’s this misconception that self-published authors have to do all this extra work. I’ve never been busier than when I started signing traditional contracts, and publishers have all these media demands, and I’m flying around and signing contracts and talking to agents and doing book tours. When you self-publish, you don’t spend time querying and doing all those other things, you get the book as perfect as you can, make it available, and you work on the next thing. Another advantage: You don’t have any non-compete clause. You can publish in whatever genres you want, as often as you want, at whatever length you want. You make a lot more money—the royalty difference is huge—and there are tens of thousands of writers out there paying a bill or making a full living off their writing, and I would say that number used to be in the hundreds of people living off their fiction alone, so the number of writers who are earning is just blowing up.

So the disadvantage? I don’t know if I can think of any. I mean, you’re not going to get your book in bookstores, but very few authors are making a living from selling books in bookstores anyway. Most of them are spine out and only there for a short period of time. So, I don’t know that that’s a huge thing you’re giving up.

When you say that there are tens of thousands of independent authors making a living, where is that figure coming from? Do you know that from Amazon or where is that reported?

I know that from Amazon. I’m trying to get them to release the numbers, but I spent time with the people at Amazon who go over these things, you know. I’ve had dinner with the heads of KDP [Kindle Direct Publishing] and CreateSpace, and I think I’ve met most of the management there except for Jeff Bezos, so this is the thing that I’m trying to get them to really highlight, because they love highlighting, and I think they do a good job of this: They highlight the outliers like myself, and how many of their bestsellers of 2012 were self-published, which I think was like a quarter of them. But to me the story, what I think is more fascinating, is how many people are making two hundred dollars a month self-publishing, and when I pose that question, I can get some vague numbers from them. They know the actual numbers, they’re just trying to figure out how to reveal that story best.

How do you think readers actually find self-published authors? Do you have any ideas how people actually found Wool, and how it got to the public consciousness like it did? Obviously, once you get some success, word-of-mouth can sort of spread, but it always kind of puzzled me how, in the sea of everything that’s available on Amazon, how you even find something like that.

One of the ways is all indie authors become indie readers, and you interact with each other, and you say, “Hey, check out my work,” and when you find something great, you end up telling all your friends about it, and they trust you because you’re a writer. So a lot of it is discovered there, and I meet more and more readers now—I interact with thousands of readers on my Facebook page—who say they only read indie authors now because of the price of entry and the joy of discovery. It’s like listening to indie rock bands. For people who don’t read that way, they can’t conceive that there are people who read like that. It’s like the people who only listen to Top 40 music can’t conceive of someone going into a record store, back when they had them, and grabbing a CD off the shelf that they’ve never heard of just because the name of the band and the names of the songs, and some jacket copy and some art, like, who in the world would ever buy an album like that? But I used to buy albums like that, and I used to love when I actually found a good one, and I would tell all my friends, like about Blind Melon, this crazy band that I discovered on my own and saw them when there were ten people in the audience, and when they blow up, it’s like, that’s such a great feeling, and there are, I don’t know, hundreds of thousands of readers out there that were just downloading free books, ninety-nine cent books, reading a few pages at a time. If they don’t like it, they read the next one, they’re not out that much money. When they find a great one, they read it all the way through, and they tell ten other people about it, and that’s how this is happening. Wool took off by word-of-mouth alone, there was no marketing or promotion behind it at all until it was selling a thousand copies a month.

Can you say who are some of the other indie authors that have blown up or that you think will blow up soon?

It’s hard to predict who will blow up soon. The ones who have blown up, a lot of them are romance and the new young adult authors like Colleen Hoover and Bella Andre. Matthew Mather is a guy who I think deserves to be read. David Adams is another guy that I really like. I think Annie Bellet is going to win a Hugo and a Nebula at some point in her career. I’ve promoted a lot of people on my website. When I discover a great piece of indie work, and some of the fan fiction writers who are now working on other stuff, like W.J. Davies who wrote The Runner—a piece of Wool fan fiction—he’s working on this novel, and I can tell you from reading his fan fiction, I’m preordering his novel; the guy can write. So, yeah, I find a lot of this stuff, these things, from hanging out in writing forums, and from having people send me sample chapters, and if they can capture me in the first sentence or two, then I’ll read the rest of what they send me, and then I’ll want to read more.

After all your indie success, you eventually did get an agent and started signing book deals with traditional publishers. Why did you finally decide to make that transition?

Initially we weren’t going to sign any deals here in the US. I was never going to give away my digital rights because that’s really where the money is, and as soon as publishers get a hold of ebook rights, one of the first things they do is they jack up ebook prices to protect the print rights, and I always thought that was unfair to readers to do that and bad for the product as well. So we started signing foreign contracts, and then that’s why the Random House UK deal was really exciting because that was the first foreign deal that was going to be in my language. I get to be part of the editorial process, so it was like having a real publisher, but I wasn’t competing with myself because that wasn’t a big market for me. The reason I signed with Simon & Schuster is they finally came to me with a print-only deal that we heard would be an impossibility, but then within eight months of turning down other offers, they finally came to us with what was a pretty ground-breaking deal. So I still consider myself a self-published author, but someone’s just printing the physical copy of what I’ve already done in ebook form. And all my other books that I’ve released since then, I’ve gone straight to self-publishing. No part of me wants to query or wait for a publisher to do anything. I’m just going straight to the reader, and if a publisher wants to do something with that work afterward, I’ll listen to what they have to say, but I don’t want the validation of going with a traditional publisher. To me, my position is stronger being an indie author than it would be to think of myself as a traditionally published author.

Okay, so you and John actually met at WorldCon in Chicago last year. Could you just talk a bit about how you guys ran into each other and what sorts of things you talked about?

Yeah, John got in touch before WorldCon, I believe, and we talked about me writing something for Lightspeed, or for one of his anthologies, and I told him what a huge fan of Wastelands I was. We geeked out over . . . well, I guess we had a little mutual admiration society forming there, and so we definitely said we’ve got to meet up while we’re both at WorldCon. And while we’re there, we decide to go to lunch; John and his wife and I went to this great little sandwich place, and we spent a couple of hours in person talking and getting to know one another—talking about science fiction and what we’re reading and all this other stuff. And it wasn’t until we walked all the way back to the hotel, and [our conversation went something like this]:

“So you’re on the west coast now; where else have you lived?”

“Florida.”

“Oh, that’s crazy, that’s where I live right now. Where did you grow up?”

“Fort Pierce.”

“No way! That’s where my wife grew up. What school did you go to?”

“Lincoln Park.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s where she went, what year?”

“Class of ’94.”

“My wife’s Amber Lyda.”

And I’m like, “Holy crap, I totally remember her!” I knew exactly who you were talking about, and given that I hadn’t kept in touch with my high school classmates, it wasn’t likely that I would have actually have known who you were talking about. But, yeah, it was funny because Amber and I had a bunch of our classes together from seventh through tenth grade or something. (Then I actually dropped out of high school so I didn’t actually graduate there, but in grades seven through ten we were in a lot of classes together.)

Yeah, I dropped out of college, and meanwhile Amber went on and got a doctorate so, shows the kind of people she hangs out with, I guess.

Before we met up for lunch, we actually had a panel the day before, but we didn’t really get to talk before or after the panel, we just talked to each other and to the audience on the panel. But the panel was on the difference between dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, and actually it was really exciting that that room was totally full—it was jam-packed with people, and a lot of young people too, so that was really encouraging.

I had several people, later, tell me that that was their favorite panel of the whole WorldCon, and there were people sitting in the aisle, and standing at the back and crowding around the door, it was very exciting.

You just got back from a big book tour. Do you have any funny stories from that trip?

Yeah, gosh, too many funny stories! Boy, it was amazing, it started off in Austin at South by Southwest, and I got to spend some time with Ernie Cline there, the author of Ready Player One, who drives a DeLorean, which is as cool as that sounds. I actually got to ride in Ernie Cline’s DeLorean, and go to lunch with him, and then the next night we went out to a movie, and we kept thinking it was going to go further, but we never reached first base together. But I’ll never forget the two nights we had. [laughter]

Also, in Austin, I was there when the Wall Street Journal article came out about me, it was the entire front page and the whole second page inside the Friday arts section. I happened to have one in my hand when I was waiting in line for lunch, and I saw David Carr of the New York Times standing there, and it’s occurred to me that David hasn’t, well, not just David, but really no one has written on what we talked about earlier: the fact that self-publishing is becoming a way for authors to make a living writing—not just for outliers like myself, but for the midlist self-published authors. So I went up to David Carr and said, “Hey, I’m a huge fan of your work,” I mean, I don’t know if I mentioned this to him, but I get home delivery of the New York Times, I read it every day, and I love it, and I told him “I’m a huge fan of your work. I really think you guys should be covering this,” and I handed him a copy of his competition, and he’s probably a pretty flat-demeanored guy anyway, but it didn’t make him . . . he wasn’t thrilled to be handed a copy of the Wall Street Journal, but yeah, he was busy talking to other people and didn’t, I don’t think he ended up reading the article. But I thought that was funny to see two of my heroes and then realize later that I probably, I don’t know, it’s probably not the smart thing to do to go hand him a copy of the Wall Street Journal.

Speaking of Ernest Cline’s DeLorean, we’ve seen it described as a Back-to-the-Future-modded DeLorean. Did you notice any Back to the Future modifications on it?

Oh yeah, he had a flux capacitor and had a hoverboard and a little Lexan stand so that it looked like it was hovering when you put it on the ground. It also had some Ghostbusters stuff; the trunk was full of ghost traps and ecto-beams. And he had a red light across the grill like KITT from Knight Rider. So, yeah, it was really cool. He’s the real deal. He is the guy from Ready Player One.

Any progress on convincing him to drop Patrick Rothfuss as his best friend and declare you his best friend instead?

No, there’s no chance in hell. Patrick Rothfuss is just so much cooler than I am. Oh, another cool thing that happened at WorldCon: I go to my reading, which is in this small room, and the room was packed, and I thought, “No one’s heard of me, why is this room full?” Well, Patrick Rothfuss was speaking in that room afterward, but it was too small for him. The people who put on WorldCon must not have known who he was. They didn’t know that this guy is, you know, the next George R.R. Martin, the next Tolkien, so they didn’t prepare adequately. And they had him talking after me in this tiny room, so all these people came an hour early to get seats, and they were going to, you know, suffer through my reading. So when he showed up—by then the hallway was packed, and we had to leave to go to another room—he led us like a piper leading rats, and we all followed dutifully and crammed into this room that’s four times as big but we still couldn’t get everyone in. And boy, he was the most engaging, charismatic speaker I’ve ever seen. So I think Ernie has done very well to land Patrick Rothfuss as his best friend. I’m happy being, like, his third or fourth best friend, if I can even claim that.

So, what did you read at WorldCon?

I read The Walk Up Nameless Ridge, which is, I think, only available as a Kindle Single. I wrote it in a day and I think it’s one of my stronger pieces. I submitted it to that program just to see if they’d reject it. This is the first thing that I really ever submitted to anyone to see if it would win inclusion in something like that. The advantage [to publishing with Kindle Singles] was it’s a double royalty rate for a ninety-nine cent work, and I thought, “I’ve got nothing to lose.” I think it’s one of my better pieces.

So you have an original apocalyptic story called “Deep Blood Kettle” in the April issue of Lightspeed. You want to just briefly tell our listeners about that one?

That’s another one that came to me, and a lot of it is similar to The Walk Up Nameless Ridge. I got up to write something else that day, and ended up writing what was initially called “The Cliff.” This was back in November or December, and the fiscal cliff was the big thing in the news, so I wrote a piece that features humanity in this quandary: They can choose one of two things, and they need to choose in order to save themselves; it’s the tension of whether or not they’ll make the right choice [that drives the story]. I drew on growing up as the son of a farmer; that’s the main character in the story. I thought it was really cool of [John] to express interest in it. Otherwise, I would have just put it up on my website or something and called it “The Cliff.” But I think it works better as something that isn’t grounded in that one instant of current events. I think it speaks to a broader truth and I like the title better now. But the best part of that was working with someone of your stature as an editor. Making it a better work was a lot of fun.

All right, cool. So why don’t you tell us, besides Wool, what other works do you have that people should go check out?

I have a young adult science fiction saga, the Molly Fyde series, that I think is not too shabby. Halfway Home is a very popular work [of mine], and that one’s being shopped around for a possible film deal now.

What’s the premise of that one?

Halfway Home is like Lord of the Flies meets Alien. It’s a colony ship where the people are sent as embryos, and they’re grown in vats, but in this one case, something goes wrong, and most of the colonists die in this huge fire, and the rest escape and they’re only half-formed, so they’re fifteen years old instead of thirty and they only have half their training, so chaos ensues, and they have a hard time getting along and figuring out how to survive on this alien world. My best fan mail comes from people who’ve read that work and appreciate the fact that I just made the character gay without the story being about being gay. Also, my only hate mail really comes from people who think it’s not fair of me not to warn them going in that the character’s going to be gay, which I think is so sad that that’s something someone would want to be warned away from. [I do warn everyone away from] I, Zombie because it’s a very bleak and disgusting story, but it might be my most autobiographical, and the one that’s the dearest to me, but it’s not for everybody.

What’s it about?

It’s a zombie story told from the perspective of the zombies, and in this telling of it, they retain all of their memories, they know exactly what they’re doing, they have their personality intact, but they can’t stop themselves from being zombies, so they’re watching themselves eat strangers, family, friends, and there’s nothing they can do. They’re in a locked-in state. I think to me it’s a more interesting zombie because there’s all these parallels, each chapter tells the story of a character who has a trait that’s very human, like a drug addiction, or repeated abuse to certain family members, and there’s things that you watch yourself do, you wish you could stop, but you can’t, but you do it over and over again, and there are parallels drawn between what they’re doing as zombies and what they remember doing as humans, and so it can be a very dispiriting book to read. I’ll warn them like on the product page that this is not a zombie book, this is something different, because if you get this thinking it’s going to be people running around with shotguns blowing the heads off of zombies and how cool that is, it’s not that kind of book; the horror of it is something deeper and more sinister. There are scenes in there that I won’t describe on the podcast, but when I just did this book tour, I had people come up to me and go okay, so this scene with the mom and her daughter in the tree and then they’ll just stand back from me and shake their heads and put their hands up and their eyes will get wide, and that’s like all they have to say and we just know the scene they’re talking about and there’s just a handful of those that have had an impact on people.

So you’re just going to leave it to people’s imaginations that, you know, there’s a mom and a daughter in a tree, and you just have to imagine what might happen?

So again that’s not the worst scene in the book, I mean, there’s other stuff, I don’t even want to allude to what goes on.

Well, maybe you should consider reading those scenes live at events and see if you can get people to pass out like Chuck Palahniuk does.

I did! No, that’s how this whole book came about. All I had was chapters, and I thought, “I’m never publishing this.” And I went to a live reading in Charleston, and someone convinced me to read. They’d seen one of these chapters on my website, and they said, “Read I, Zombie,” so I read these three or four chapters, and the video went up on YouTube, and I just got a flood of people saying, “You need to finish this, you need to publish it.” And, yeah, but while I was reading it, someone was sitting there eating chicken wings, and I was like, “I don’t know how you can do that.” There’s actually a chapter about someone eating chicken wings, someone trying to become a vegetarian in college and what that was like, now they’re a zombie eating people, so I’m reading that, and someone’s just sitting there just licking their fingers, and digging into a basket of wings.

Is there anything that you’re working on now, anything coming up in the future that people should keep an eye out for?

Ah, yeah, I mean, I’m just going to keep writing, doing my thing. I keep promising to write a romance novel and that’ll happen here soon. Yeah, I’m just enjoying the process of putting out stories and having people besides my mom read them. It’s pretty cool.

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is hosted by:

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Lightspeed, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Oz Reimagined, Epic, Other Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. He is a six-time finalist for the Hugo Award and a four-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Forthcoming anthologies include Wastelands 2, Dead Man’s Hand, and Robot Uprisings. He is also the co-host of Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

David Barr Kirtley has published fiction in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, Lightspeed, Intergalactic Medicine Show, On Spec, and Cicada, and in anthologies such as New Voices in Science Fiction, Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and The Dragon Done It. Recently he’s contributed stories to several of John Joseph Adams’s anthologies, including The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, and The Way of the Wizard. He’s attended numerous writing workshops, including Clarion, Odyssey, Viable Paradise, James Gunn’s Center for the Study of Science Fiction, and Orson Scott Card’s Writers Bootcamp, and he holds an MFA in screenwriting and fiction from the University of Southern California. He also teaches regularly at Alpha, a Pittsburgh-area science fiction workshop for young writers. He lives in New York.

Interview: Austin Grossman
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Austin Grossman’s first novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible, was nominated for the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, and his writing has appeared in Granta, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. He is a video game design consultant for Arkane Studios, and he has written and designed for a number of critically acclaimed games, including Dishonored, Ultima Underworld II, System Shock, Trespasser, and Deus Ex. His second novel, You, came out from Mulholland Books earlier this year, and his short fiction has also appeared in John’s anthologies Under the Moons of Mars and The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination.

This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the hosts discuss various geeky topics.

To start with, how did you first get interested in game design?

My parents, for reasons I have never understood, bought a really early computer. They bought a Sinclair ZX81, which came with Basic hardwired in, and so the kids in my family learned Basic and for some reason the thing that it occurred to me to do was try to mess around with weird graphic patterns and to try to make games with it. Then, when we graduated to the Apple IIe, some early games that were distributed, like Lode Runner, came with the level editors included, so I messed around with it, and I have to admit that I didn’t really play any games after I left high school. I went through four years of college without messing around with that stuff at all, and then I ended up going back to it because I didn’t know what to do after I graduated, and I applied to some jobs in publishing in a kind of aimless way, and I didn’t get any, and then I was looking through the Boston Globe—by which I mean, a physical periodical printed on paper—and I was looking in the classified section and there was an ad for a video game design job. It was sort of irresistible. I didn’t really think or have the idea in my head that it was a job until I saw it in a newspaper.

Well, in the book, Russell gets hired despite having no particular qualifications. Was it really that easy to get a job in gaming back in ’97, or was that a little dramatic license?

It was a little dramatic license. For me, it was ’92, when the industry was more of a hobbyist niche enterprise. The short answer is, apparently it was.

Do you think that’s still possible today? That you could be a 28-year-old English major and get hired as a game designer?

Not without some special circumstances, no. It’s hugely more competitive now. You could certainly major in English. I don’t know any game developers that have a major bias toward hiring people that come out of the undergraduate game design programs. Majoring in English is not at all a strike against you, because part of what game designers do is tell stories, but you would have to have a little more going on for you. You’d have to have some programming competence, you’d want to have some prototype games or game concepts, you’d have to have a really good vocabulary for analyzing why games are fun, how game mechanics work and why they have the effect on the player experience that they do. I mean, you have to have your game design swagger going to get that job. But, it was a different deal in the ’90’s. I actually believe that it was.

In the novel, the main characters, when they were in high school, they all went to this programming summer camp. Did you ever go to anything like that, or was that based on anything?

No, I never went to computer camp. I found on the internet an amazing brochure for a computer camp in 1983 and I downloaded the brochure and it’s incredible. The photographs are incredible, of the dorky campers having a good time with their computers. Anyway, I just fantasized about what it would be like to be at a computer camp.

I think Richard Garriott went to a computer camp like that, which was when he was christened Lord British.

I didn’t know that. A lot of my friends went, and yet I did not.

Your bio describes you as a game design consultant. What exactly do you do?

Most of what I end up doing is writing for games rather than game design. A lot of the time, there isn’t enough work as a writer for a company to retain a full-time writer. Maybe you’re coming in late in the project and they just need some dialogue written or they’ve fallen behind schedule and they just need to get more person hours in there. Maybe it’s early in the design process and they’re trying to figure out how to build a story around their kind of signature game mechanic. It happens differently with different projects.

Are you working on site when you do that or do you work remotely? You work for Arcane Studios, and they’re based in Austin, but you live in California?

Yes. I insist on spending a couple of weeks on site throughout the course of the job. There is kind of no substitute for the group-mind-think that happens on site. These games that are designed off site, sort of by telephone, they don’t have that same aesthetic coherence.

I was looking at the list of games that you’ve worked on and a really high percentage are very well known, very well respected franchises. You’ve got Ultima, System Shock, Deus Ex, Thief, Tomb Raider, and Dishonored. Was that just good luck that you ended up working on all these great games or did you have some career strategy?

[Laughs] Career strategy. That would have been something to think about. No, that’s good luck. Most of that good luck comes from having gone to work at a place called Looking Glass Technologies back in Cambridge in the mid-’90s. That was a studio that was founded in something like ’91 or so and built around one of the first working, real-time 3D engines. At the same time that the guys were doing that, the id guys were doing Castle Wolfenstein—

This is Ultima Underworld?

Yeah. Those were the guys that put the ad in the paper. They were a bunch of super smart guys who were super passionate about games. They were kind of my founding education in what the medium was about and they were guys that stuck around, worked on amazing games, and then either left the company or, when the company broke up, they moved to other companies and were still willing to hire me. This was luck. I got in right at the start knowing the right people.

Isn’t it possible that these games were all awesome because you worked on them? You’re the singular thing that they all share.

No, that’s kind of Occam’s razor. Actually, no, let’s go with that. I like that. I like that a lot. I should have let off for that one.

Your new novel, You, is set primarily in 1997. Is there something special about that era in gaming that made you want to focus on that?

That is a really good question. I spent the early stages of the writing process kind of dithering about the setting. Part of me said to myself, “OK, this is stupid. If you don’t set it in 2012, no one is going to care.” When you go to ’97 it’s hard to think of games that are relevant. There’s no Halo, there’s no Half-Life, there’s nothing. So I kicked around different moments in time and I thought to myself, okay, you have to pick one and you have to be specific and you have to look at what that year is about. So yes, I picked ’97. I picked it for a bunch of reasons. It’s just the moment when we’re starting to get the Quake engine. The big technological change that’s starting to happen is 3D accelerator cards. What makes the graphics cards important is now you’re starting to support bigger and bigger levels of detail, higher resolution textures, more and more polygons on screen, which means that production values are going up, which means you need more artists and 3D modelers to make your world look correct, which makes the production process more cumbersome, which means it’s much more team-based and collaborative. You can’t do it with five people anymore. You start to need fifteen people or fifty people. It’s when it started to seem just possible that games and movies could kind of merge so that everybody wanted to do it but nobody knew how to do it. As graphics technology gets better, one thing you can definitely see is the loss of a signature graphic design style associated with video games. If you want to put up an icon to signify video games you put up a Space Invader, you put up a Pac-Man, you put up an 8-bit pixel art thing and people know what you’re talking about. When video games started to get to be able to pretend to look like movies, they started to look like crappy movies instead of their own distinctive quality, right? That sense of flat, shaded polygons as a distinctive look, or wire framed, or pixel art . . . within those technical limitations they did cool aesthetic stuff, right, but once you started to be able to animate crappy-looking people on airplanes, they just did crappy-looking people on airplanes. They looked like crappy movies with a lot of lens flare and bloom on them. That’s a little sad. It’s something that we’re coming out the other side of with the indie games movement.

Which parts of the book are based the most on your own experiences and which did you take the most dramatic license with?

Well, clearly, later in the book there is this big dramatic crisis that would have to be fiction, although it would be cool if it were not fiction, but honestly I tried to stick as much as possible to the nuts and bolts of game development, of the real kind of rituals of it, the morning meetings, the different phases of projects, the different problems that you have when you’re designing a level. I cut and pasted that stuff into the novel and I thought that was kind of important to do. Video games are a huge, incredibly popular, exciting, world-transforming medium. It’s odd how little attention is paid to how they are made. A lot of gamers don’t really understand how they are made, or the day-to-day of it, or the frustration of it, or the odd little problem solving that goes into it.

Just speaking of frustration, there was one section that really struck me where it’s just going through all the different ways the player could break the game just by doing some annoying thing that they’re not intended to. It kind of reminded me of when I was a Dungeon Master, playing Dungeons and Dragons in high school, and I would make this incredibly complicated story and stuff and then I would start out the story and say, “OK, you meet this peasant woman,” and the players would be like, “Tell her we want to see her panties,” and I’m like, “No, you can’t do that, dammit!” And that’s when I decided that I was going to go into fiction because then I wouldn’t have to deal with stuff like that.

Well, there’s two ways to look at that. On one side, it’s incredibly frustrating. I mean, the trial by fire is when you make a level and you get someone to play test that level and the only true way to play test that level properly is to let them play through it without intervening, and it sounds simple but it’s incredibly difficult. You can watch someone bumble around your level for twenty minutes looking for this one obvious door or ladder that you put in, and you think to yourself, “OK, I’ll just tell him where the ladder is because no one else is going to have this problem,” right? That’s what you tell yourself. Unless your friends physically restrain you, you will tell them, and then you will set that level with a ladder that no one can find. The other side of it, though, is that players will try to do the wrong thing. Players will know what you want them to do a lot of the time and they will simply not do it out of what feels like sheer perversity, but I think there’s an actual reason for it, which is that players want to own their own story. The most thrilling thing, if you are a video game player, is to live the story that’s only your story or the story that you chose, even if it means mucking up the rest of the game. Basically, they are Lucifer in Paradise Lost. They simply rebel against the universe’s architect for the sheer thrill of the feeling of having free will. I think that’s the profound truth about game design that needs to be understood and worked with rather than rigorously stamped out, because the impulse as a game designer, as an interactive storyteller, is to go into siege warfare and to reinforce your story so rigorously that no one can possibly do anything but follow the story that you set up in the world, and that is the kind of success that also kind of kills the medium in a way, or kills what’s so distinct about the medium.

One thing that really struck me, reading this, was that Russell seems to have this dream job, but he’s very unsure about if this is the right thing to do. He’s like, “Should I have gone to law school? Am I a dork for doing this job?” How common are those sorts of feelings in the industry do you think?

I think that there are a couple of different answers. One is that it was less cool, it was less of a dream job in the ’90s than it is now, when people recognize it more as a career. There are days when you can’t escape the feeling that other people in the world are doctors and other people in the world are architects who are at least building things in reality, and then there are other times when you are in the industry and you think to yourself, “I am architecting a medium that no one has ever experienced before, and I’m exploring an area of feeling and storytelling that has literally never happened in this way before,” and when you go to give a lecture or teach a class on game design at a college and you look at how passionate the people are who show up to that and they care about it and they’ve played every game and you think, “Oh, god, I am plugged into the most important thing that I could possibly be doing right now.” The truth is simply both ways. You have one kind of day and then you have another kind of day, and that’s probably true in a lot of jobs.

I really liked the line where Russell is looking at these business guys who share their office building and he thinks to himself, “I make dragons. What the hell do you make?”

That’s the feeling a lot of the time and you try to capture that feeling and there are days when you can’t, but there are days, there are definitely a lot of days when you can and it’s completely awesome.

Michael Moorcock’s magic sword, Mournblade, plays a major role in the book. Have you gotten any feedback from Moorcock about that?

No, I haven’t. Why haven’t I? I guess I think of him like Melville, as like, in the clouds somewhere as an iconic American author who does not—

He’s actually British.

Or British author. I don’t know anything about Michael Moorcock. It’s hard for me to think of him as a real person, because how could a real person invent Elric. That is not something that a real person could do. It just slips my mind that that could actually be a real person.

In Episode 48, we interviewed your twin brother, Lev Grossman, and the way that your book deconstructs fantasy games is similar in some ways to the way that his novel, The Magicians, deconstructs fantasy novels. I was wondering if you see any parallels between the two books and do you two bounce ideas off each other or anything like that?

I thought this question was going to go to Codex, but I guess it didn’t.

I haven’t read Codex yet so I’m not sure what happens. Is that a better example?

It deals directly with video games and there’s a mystery and a lot of video game sequences and so forth. To answer the second part, yes, we do talk about ideas in early stages. There is a recognizable breaking point when I get so desperate and stuck, or I just despise what I’m working on so much that I cannot stand it, or that it starts to feel worse than sending it to him and so I send it to him. I have to go through a certain amount of agony before I do that, but it is invariably helpful. We exchange manuscripts; we do all of that. I have a small number of outside readers, but he is always the first one that I go to. It’s generally like I’m doing something weird and I can’t figure out where it’s going and so it’s like, “Can you see where I’m going with this? Because I can no longer see where I’m going with this.” Or like, “This seemed like such a great, smart idea, but now it seems like I’ve done the worst thing in the world. Just look at it,” you know? As to why we do the work we do, I don’t know. I think we do slightly different things which is actually good news. I think that if our work had too much in common it would be weird and harder to do. Although, obviously yes, we do take the material of genre and mess around with it a good deal.

It’s very metafictional, or sort of self-aware about genre conventions. Do you think that maybe comes from, well, Lev told us that writing a fantasy novel was almost an act of rebellion for him because your parents disapproved of fantasy. Do you think that some aspect of thinking a lot about the value of fantasy and what it means to people comes out of that?

I think it’s complex. I mean, the first novel of any length that I ever read was read to me, to the both of us, by our father, which was The Hobbit, so it’s not as if they tried to wall us off from fantasy. It’s a difficult question because it’s such a basic question. Why the hell are we doing what we’re doing with writing? I mean, you call it metafictional. I don’t really think of it in really intellectual terms. When I sat down to write Soon I Will Be Invincible, my first novel about superhero characters, I did it because, honestly, emotionally, I couldn’t find a way to talk that felt satisfying and I knew I had this attachment to superhero comics and superhero storytelling, and I felt it very deeply and I felt that, by and large, the stories that had been told with superheroes and superhero comics felt incomplete to me. It felt like there was some voice or some emotional truth that was being glossed over, or I felt like there was a way of speaking through it that was going to be satisfying, that was going to let me speak the terrible truth that I needed to speak. So, honestly, I didn’t come to it thinking to myself, “Ha-ha! Genre fiction. I will mess with you,” you know, because I’m so smart. I certainly didn’t come to it that way. Although, from the outside, it looks as if I did.

There are certain authors who sort of dabble in fantasy where you kind of get the feeling that they’re posers and they don’t actually love the stuff or know that much about it, and that’s unquestionably not the case here. This book is full of just the most obscure fantasy references of anything I’ve ever read. It’s very clear that you love the genre and know it inside and out.

Yeah, Lev and I are both long steeped in that stuff. I don’t like to play the authenticity game, but you know when somebody is being arch about a subject and they don’t really love it or they don’t really know it well enough to have the right to be arch about it. You can tell when someone’s doing that and it’s irritating. I don’t think we have that problem. When people talk about The Magicians as a satire fantasy, I think that’s kind of incorrect. It’s easy to make fun of genre fiction. That’s not what The Magicians did, that’s not what Soon I Will Be Invincible did, right? They played with it and they messed with it and they speak through it because they love it. Because they think it’s the greatest thing ever, and honestly, The Magicians is a great fantasy book. It’s not a takedown of fantasy, that’s ridiculous.

I guess when I say that You is metafictional, I’m thinking of the way that the characters, the four kind of archetypal RPG characters—was it Lorac and Brennen, those guys?—they’re not just fantasy characters, but they’re fantasy characters that we’re meant to think about as the way that fantasy characters are presented in games and in fiction.

Yeah, absolutely, and You is much more directly metafictional. It analyses the medium as it works with it. That’s completely true and it seems to be unavoidable when writing about game development, and coming to write about video games was a very different experience than coming to write about comic books, I have to say. It ended up getting more analytical and more self-conscious for various reasons. I think partly because it’s about a young artist kind of coming to understand the medium he’s working in, and partly because video games are such an odd medium that we’re still working out the basics of that we end up having to talk through a bunch of the problems. Part of it, I think, a lot of the worry was that I wasn’t sure what audience was going to come to and pick up You, right? Is it going to be the people who know the medium backwards and forwards, or is it going to be the people who read genre novels and sort of know about gaming but need some of it explained to them? We will discover that later this month.

I’m the sort of person that would read it, but it does seem like you’ve made a real effort to explain things to people who aren’t into gaming. Russell is kind of an innocent abroad, in a way that people have to explain to him what E3 is and what a level editor is and so the reader is explained these things as well.

Yeah, that was tricky. The book is written for two audiences and it has to negotiate that path. People who read the work in progress were by and large people who didn’t play many video games, and I tried to keep it that way just to make sure I wasn’t walling out people who didn’t know about video games. One of the things that I look forward to learning when the book is released is kind of how many people knew this stuff and how many people didn’t. How mainstream are video games? That’s kind of a basic question that no one seems to have a good handle on.

One conflict in the novel is between the programmer character, Lisa, who hates stories and games, and the English major character, Russell, who wants stories. Where do you come down in that debate?

Honestly, by and large, I am an anti-narrativist. I am a ludocist or a ludologist, that is to say, I push toward simulation-driven, dynamic systems rather than designer-authored stories. By and large, I gave Lisa the part of speaking things mostly that I believe, although, the other day, I was at PAX recently and I was on this panel about narrative design, and I was ranting about how stories need to be driven by players and player experience rather than designer experience, but then, a week later I picked up an incredible indie game called Thirty Flights of Loving which is, it costs like five bucks on Steam, and it’s completely linear and it’s completely designed and authored. It’s the most incredible narrative game I’ve played through in years and years and it just kind of made me realize that I should shut up because I don’t know anything.

In the opening chapter, the protagonist, Russell, goes for a job interview in a video game company and one of the questions he’s asked is, “What is your ultimate game?” How would you answer that question?

There are a number of answers to that question. One answer is, if I had a good answer, I would not have written the novel because the novel was a kind of book-length attempt to come to grips with that question. Another answer is the kind of metagame or anthology game that is enacted in the progress of the book, which is to say the book kind of recapitulates the history of video and computer games, more computer games since ’83, but it has that thing where all the games in it are backwards compatible so you can keep migrating your saved game from your primitive ASCII, rogue-like dungeon game to your 3D galaxy simulation. I want the game that does that. I want the game that walks me through all the genres in the history of gaming and yet plays them as a single sequential evolving simulation. Honestly, the real answer is that’s the question that keeps us designing games and developing more games; it keeps pushing the medium forward that you’re pushing that question. You know that next year’s games are going to make this year’s games completely pathetic and that never stops. It’s an asymptotic process where the medium continues to evolve. So, I don’t know if I could answer it, but I would have to answer it again the following year.

So has the title You caused a lot of confusion? I can just imagine a lot of conversations where you say, “I’m doing an event for You tomorrow,” and someone says, “For me? How nice?” and then you say, “No, no, not for you, for my book.”

The whole thing is a Spinal Tap deleted scene and it has been from day one, and it’s so fucking horrible and I offered to change the title, and Michael Pietsch said, “It’s a good title. Keep it.” Michael Pietsch edited The Pale King and is a genius so I said, “Yes, sir.” I like the title. The title is kind of in your face and it’s very sort of intrinsically part of the medium that it’s talking about, so I kind of love it. I love it and it has that sort of enduring kind of exciting charge to me that is always throwing itself back on the reader. It always has this question to it, which is, “It’s not me, it’s you so, who are you?” At the same time it’s a horrible pain. It’s why I added the subtitle just because I was so sick of it. I have not yet found a reliable, elegant way around it. I have yet to do any kind of interview or significant conversation about the book that does not contain some kind of mistake or jokey attempt to diffuse the weird confusion of it. Yes, this is the rest of my life. I’ve done this to myself. It’s never going to stop.

You have a book called Soon I Will Be Invincible and then You. Is it safe to say that the next book will involve the word “we” or “me” or “us” or something?

Oh, I didn’t think about that. I don’t know. I already know the title to my next book, so I can answer that by saying that it does not contain any pronouns.

But you can’t tell us what the actual title is, though?

The title of the next book is called Crooked. It is the secret story of Richard Nixon.

Does it have any superhero or fantasy elements or anything or is it a realistic novel?

It does, and I will not even say any more than that. It has a genre component, but I’m going to leave that a mystery for now.

I’m a huge fan of the Ultima series and we mentioned that you worked on Ultima Underworld II. Have you been following Ultima Forever and Shroud of the Avatar stuff and what’s your take on that?

I haven’t enough, I have to say. I think Richard Garriott is a really interesting kind of disruptive intelligence. I think Ultima Online was a very interesting experiment. I think he’s bound to do something interesting, but I have not actually read up on what he’s doing with Shroud, but I’m kind of glad that he’s getting back into it. He has a tendency to change the landscape and that is a good thing.

I guess I should explain to people that Richard Garriott’s Ultima IP was sold to Electronic Arts and so Ultima Forever, they’re making a game called Ultima Forever and he’s making a game called Shroud of the Avatar, both of which are basically Ultima games except that he can’t use their IP and they can’t use his IP, which is his character of Lord British. It’s just a weird—we see a lot of this with people like Ron Gilbert and a lot of these Kickstarters, like the guys who made the SpaceQuest games, where the actual creators end up twenty years later wanting to make a new game in their franchise, and they can’t because they don’t own the IP, but no one else is really using it and it’s just kind of an unfortunate situation.

Yeah, it’s interesting. Walt Disney lost control of the IP of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, which caused him to create Mickey Mouse. He left his job, and he left the rights to his first character there, and Oswald, if you look at him, you know that he looks like a rabbit, but like a slightly less evolved version of Mickey Mouse. Yeah, it’s a weird situation, but people are smart and generally pushing things forward, like Garriott. Like this, they’re going to cope and come up with something cool with it and sometimes it helps to be cut off from your IP. You can’t help but think that Garriott was a little bit imprisoned by the Ultima IP, don’t you think?

Well, I don’t—

I’m editorializing.

That’s what the show is for, but at least personally, there was a real life enriching quality to go back to the same world installment after installment and see how things had changed and remember these places that I had visited when I was twelve years old and see them still alive. I always imagined I would be showing my kids, taking my kids to Britannia and taking them to those places in Ultima 25 or something and it’s just sad, to me it’s sad that the franchise has just kind of—

Yeah, I have two things. One is, the guys at EA cannot be so incredibly inept as to not, at some point, plan to make a deal with Garriott. How would you not do that, you know? If you owned that IP. How much is that IP worth with Richard Garriott versus without Richard Garriott? Surely someone can do that math. The second thing loops a little bit back to You, because that’s the process that I was writing about in You, the novel, where the same areas of the world get recreated and as time passes you see through the lens of different game display technologies. When you brought that up, it reminded me of the feeling you get when you revisit a place, but you see it more realistically than you’ve ever seen it in a game because in earlier iterations in the franchise, you just saw little letters or pixels and now you’re seeing it in 3D. It’s a really interesting moment and experience and it’s a unique experience. It’s unique to the medium. It’s unique to our cohorts experience of the medium, right, when we’ve lived through a time when technology changes so fast. Part of why I wrote the book is that there are so many odd experiences that never get narrated, that haven’t been given names, and that’s exactly one of them.

Before we run out of time, we do want to talk to you about your first novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible. So what are some of your most memorable experiences surrounding the publication of that book?

There was the big experience of working on the film, which is sort of in development and is kicking around a little bit. There was the experience of seeing the concept art for the film and seeing all the characters drawn, which I also got when we did the UK edition and the comic artist, Bryan Hitch, who is incredibly fucking great, drew all the characters for the UK edition. There was the experience when Dr. Horrible came out, right, Soon I Will Be Invincible was summer 2007 and then Dr. Horrible came out in summer 2008, and I thought to myself, “Aw, crap, man. He had the same idea except this guy is Joss Whedon.” But I had to admit, I loved Dr. Horrible. I have to admit that it’s really, really good. There was the bizarre experience that, in one of my earliest Hollywood meetings they were like, “Okay, who should play Dr. Impossible, do you think?” and I didn’t realize they were just being polite to me, but I said, “Neil Patrick Harris,” but I said that before Dr. Horrible, I just thought to myself, Neil Patrick Harris: Super villain. Fuck yeah. They didn’t care. But I’m so proud of having called that and actually, just a few weeks ago, someone said to me, “You know, I think maybe I know someone who knows someone who knows Neil Patrick Harris and they could give him your book,” and I actually sent him an inscribed copy that may or may not get actually passed to him with this narrative attached to it. But my other story, and then I’ll shut up. These are all Dr. Horrible stories. I went to ComicCon in summer 2008 and I was like, still feeling the burn, a little bit, of Dr. Horrible, and feeling like this thing was getting a lot of attention and I had done something similar, but I really liked it, so I went to the cast viewing sing-along of Dr. Horrible and I’m sitting in this line, and if you’ve ever been to ComicCon, this is one of the hour-long waits, right? It’s night, it’s showing at like 9 at night, so the convention center is dark, everyone is sitting in this line, like, on the floor in this convention center and it’s kind of empty. Somebody comes walking down the line, because it’s a convention center, you can see them, like, half a mile away. They’re approaching and they come and they stop in front of me and they hold out a copy of Soon I’ll Be Invincible and said, “Could you sign this?” and suddenly all of my resentment of Dr. Horrible fell away. I thought to myself, man, we all like stuff, you know, and some people actually read this book and like it. It was like enough to be recognized by one person even though I was in this crowd of people recognizing this other thing, it was enough that one person noticed it and it meant enough that they could figure out who I was. It was kind of awesome.

Was the reaction pretty positive? Did it surprise you at all, what people thought about it? Did people see in it things that you were just like, “Wow, I never even considered that.”

I don’t know what to say. This was my first novel. The fact that it was published at all was just an ongoing shock from which I have not recovered. I wrote it when I was in grad school, I wrote it as a private goof-around project just to kind of write the weirdest dumbest thing I could.

You said something like, “I wanted to ruin the workshop I was in.”

Yeah, I was at Berkeley in the doctoral program there, and they didn’t have an MFA but they did have some fiction workshops. Yeah, I wanted to lower the tone. Here I was studying 19th century literature. I wanted to goof around and I also wanted to be stupid. I wanted to annoy people. It was much less of a thing to write about comic books in prose back then because this was 2001. This was before even Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude. The comic book novel wasn’t a thing at the time, so it seemed that much stupider to be doing it. I totally wrote it to irritate people. I wrote it to irritate people who were still trying to write Anne Beattie stories or Raymond Carver stories. I mean, I came of age as a fiction writer in the ’80s and ’90s, when it was all minimalism and it was all very slow, tiny moments in somebody’s kitchen. I wanted to blow the lid off of that. I wanted color, I wanted action, I wanted energy, I wanted the supernatural, I wanted, you know, I wanted all that great stuff that genre brings in. So, yes, it was kind of a fuck you to the fiction tradition that I had been brought up to revere. At the time, it was the time to write something so great and so stupid that the world could not handle it. That’s what I was hoping to do.

Have you ever seen or heard about anyone cosplaying any characters from the book?

Man, you know, I really wish that I could say that I had. I honestly do. I was at VeraCon and the guest of honor was Brandon Sanderson and everybody was cosplaying as his characters and I was like, “Aw.” So, that has become a life goal. At PAX this year, I hung out with people who were cosplaying from Dishonored so at least that was something, but yeah. It has yet to happen. Unless you count my own private exercises.

I think that to get people to cosplay your characters, you have to have one character that is just a really easy costume to do. Like, he wears a yellow t-shirt and carries a garbage can lid or something and then people are like, “Well, I didn’t have time to do a real costume but this will be easy.”

I could have done something simpler and more distinctive. That’s a first novelist’s mistake, if you will: You don’t think through. Also, to some degree, I was creating people as types, I think, and I gave them a kind of generality. That said, I’m sitting on the amazing concept art for the Soon I’ll Be Invincible film and if that stuff ever got out, that would be the tone.

You said it’s in development. Is it in development hell? Can we look forward to it? What’s the status of that?

It does feel like hell; I don’t know if there’s a technical term for it. I’ve written the screenplay, I’m going to tell you very little because there is a lot that I’m not allowed to tell you, but basically we want to find the right director. The market for superhero films is still around, and if anything, the audience is more sophisticated and the scarcity of original ideas, given the reboots that we’re seeing, is more and more glaringly apparent. Obviously, they did Megamind and they did Despicable Me, not that I mind that they did those things, they should do Soon I Will Be Invincible. It would be such an awesome film. It’s an awesome character. It’s hard to do when you’re not pushing Marvel or DC IP. I think people who want to make that film want to know that it has that preexisting market. But I still think it’ll be an awesome idea. The script came out really well, the first version of which was done, really, by Dan Weiss, now famous for Game of Thrones. He is one of the sort of show runners, and then I did my own draft. Anyway, that’s where that sits, but my agent and I have sworn a blood oath that before we die there will be a film. You can look forward to that.

Speaking of that book, you also wrote a story for the anthology The Mad Scientists Guide to World Domination, which was called, “Professor Incognito Apologizes: An Itemized List.” You want to just briefly just mention what it’s about?

Oh, yes. The Mad Scientists Guide to World Domination is a really good anthology. I have to say, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to revisit the subject of a mad scientist. I thought to myself, Maybe I’ve said to what I had to say, but it turned out to be really interesting. It’s a mad scientist who has a girlfriend, and the problem of having a girlfriend and being a secret mad scientist at the same time just generates its own interesting plot developments. It turned out to be incredibly fun, and I think that’s probably the story that makes me think that there will be a Soon I Will Be Invincible sequel down the road because I thought to myself, I’m actually really not done with this voice and this premise.

Do you consider that story to take place in the same world as Soon I Will Be Invincible or is it just sort of similar but not the same world?

The world of Soon I Will Be Invincible is a capacious place, I have to say. You know what I should have done is I should have done a real call out to sort of solidify that. As it is, I can’t really call it canon, but I should have just done one character cameo, just as a throwaway, that set it in that universe. That would have been smart. Next time.

We mentioned earlier that you really know your stuff when it comes to fantasy and science fiction. Do you think you might ever write just a straight-out epic fantasy or a space opera?

That’s a good question. You is a novel that spans genres because the game company has a fantasy franchise and it has an espionage franchise and a space opera franchise. It was my chance to kind of tour through those genres and I have to say yes. I don’t know which I will do first. I don’t know that I could do what you call straight, because I don’t know that I do anything that you’d call straight, but god, I’m so invested in those genres and sooner or later I’m going to come to the moment where it’s like, “OK, I have to find out what’s in this for me.” So the answer has got to be yes, so, yes.

We usually wrap things up by asking what upcoming projects people have. You mentioned Crooked—and that’s a spy novel or something?

I would say it’s a spy novel with genre elements in which Richard Nixon is the principle character. It’s a Cold War novel from the point of view of Richard Nixon and it has some genre twists in it that I’m not going to go into right now. Of course, You is coming out April 16th, or April 25th in the UK, and it’s going to be cool. I’m so looking forward to the 16th and we’ll be doing events and probably some online events and, god, people who are interested in games in any way should check it out. I, honestly, I’ve had my moments when I did not have confidence in it, but now I think it’s interesting enough that people should get it. Crooked is probably going to come out next year. I’m working on, of course, the Dishonored franchise, the game franchise, and our downloadable story arc is also coming out April 16th. So, I have a bunch of stuff going on.

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is hosted by:

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Lightspeed (and its sister magazine, Nightmare), is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Oz Reimagined, Epic: Legends of Fantasy, Other Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. He is a six-time finalist for the Hugo Award and four-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

David Barr Kirtley has published fiction in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, Lightspeed, Intergalactic Medicine Show, On Spec, and Cicada, and in anthologies such as New Voices in Science Fiction, Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and The Dragon Done It. Recently he’s contributed stories to several of John Joseph Adams’s anthologies, including The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, and The Way of the Wizard. He’s attended numerous writing workshops, including Clarion, Odyssey, Viable Paradise, James Gunn’s Center for the Study of Science Fiction, and Orson Scott Card’s Writers Bootcamp, and he holds an MFA in screenwriting and fiction from the University of Southern California. He also teaches regularly at Alpha, a Pittsburgh-area science fiction workshop for young writers. He lives in New York.

Artist Gallery: Jarreau Wimberly

Artist Spotlight: Jarreau Wimberly
Galen Dara

Jarreau Wimberly is a freelance artist who studied Illustration at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. He started his career working for game companies such as Fantasy Flight Games, Wizards of the Coast, and Blizzard, focusing on role-playing, board, and collectable card games. The majority of this work is in the fantasy and science fiction genres (A Game of Thrones, Magic: The Gathering, World of Warcraft). Some of his other notable projects include producing the package art for the 25th anniversary G.I. Joe toys, and illustration work used in the promotion of the second Hulk film.

Currently Jarreau Wimberly is the artist for Seven %, a comic book published by Red5 comics.

Our cover art this month is your concept painting for Seven %, a comic you worked on with Luke Keith and Jeremy Feist. I picked up a copy and was captivated by this gritty look at the future of humanity, complete with a bloody intergalactic civil war and synthetic symbiots bonded to brains to enhance human potential. You’ve said of this comic, “This book has become the perfect example of everything I love about science fiction and cyberpunk.” How did Seven % come about? What was the process of creating the story and the visuals, coming up with these characters and their technology and the landscape they are struggling in?

Well Seven % was originally conceived by Luke Keith. Luke has an incredible mind for science fiction. He and Jeremy Fiest created the big ideas of Seven %, doing extensive research and just devoting the time and energy needed to craft a world as large and expansive as this one. They built this universe and filled it with lush, interesting characters. Once this groundwork was laid, I came on board to breathe life into this dense tapestry of science fiction craziness. This project was just the perfect opportunity to really explore all of the aspects of science fiction that I love the most: designing this future world filled with underground cities, massive space stations, insanely high tech weaponry, telekinesis, brain augmentation, and not to mention the intense action sequences. This was like hitting the artistic jackpot for me. And our process was a very collaborative one. Sometimes the concept art would slowly evolve into something that neither I nor Luke and Jeremy originally envisioned, but somehow it would spark a new idea that would push the story and art into unique and exciting territory. This relationship between artist and writers was truly the backbone of Seven %.

Along with Seven %, you have worked on several other comics, done packaging art for G.I. Joe, created concept art for The Hulk movie, have several Magic: The Gathering cards to your name, and I understand that The History Channel used several of your Thor pieces in one of their episodes of Ancient Aliens. To what do you attribute your love of science fiction and fantasy? What sort of TV shows, movies, games, toys, etc. did you grow up on? Did you know from an early age that you would be creating monsters, futuristic technology, and heroes?

I have been a colossal science fiction fan from before I even knew science fiction had a name. Some of my earliest memories as a child are going to the movies to see the first Predator film. I watched Total Recall, Back to the Future, Robotech, Voltron and tons of other movies and animes almost religiously, especially Terminator 2, Akira, and Ghost in the Shell. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve seen those three movies growing up. It was obsessive. But it wasn’t until my senior year of high school and the release of The Matrix that I really knew that this was what I was going to be doing with my life.

How did you get to where you are now in your art career? Are there experiences or individuals who helped shape your work and the direction you have taken? Who are some of your art heroes?

I would not be a professional artist today if it wasn’t for my high school art teachers. They really held my hand and showed me that it was possible for me to work in the industry that produced so many things I loved. Also, going to art school afterward really helped to expose me to more artist and techniques, things I would have never come across if I was purely self-taught. But when it comes to personal artistic influences and heroes, that list shifts dramatically every few years, but there are a handful of artist that have really shaped how I see the world and the way I want to interpret it. Guys like Phil Hale, Ridley Scott, Alex Toth, Justin Sweet, Marko Djurdjević, John Singer Sargent, Frank Frazetta. These are the artists that I’ve loved and studied since day one. The more recent list is filled with artists like Saskia Gutekunst, Tokiya Sakuba, Takayama Toshiaki, Kekai Kotaki, Lesean Thomas, Yutaka Nakamura, Norio Matsumoto, Kazuto Nakazawa . . . and I could go on and on.

Your Twitter feed is a treasure trove of awesomeness: pop culture, comics, movies, stuff you are working on, stuff other people are working on. What are your thoughts on using social media as a visual artist, and what role does it play in your work as well as just your daily life?

The best part of social media for me is just being able to interact with other artists that I admire. Most guys I only see maybe once or twice a year while doing comic conventions. Twitter and Facebook have really opened things up a lot. And also it’s a great way to geek out and gush over whatever new book or movie I’m enjoying at the time.

What are you working on now?

I’m currently doing a few painting for the Star Wars card game. It’s been so satisfying being able to finally play in the Star Wars universe and I got the chance to paint my first X-Wing.

Galen Dara likes to sit in the dark with her sketchbook, but sometimes she emerges to illustrate for books and magazines, dabble in comics, and hatch wild collaborations with friends and associates. Galen has done art for Edge Publishing, Dagan Books, Apex, Scapezine, Tales to Terrify, Peculiar Pages, Sunstone, and the LovecraftZine. She is on the staff of BookLifeNow, blogs for the Inkpunks, and writes the Art Nerd column at the Functional Nerds. When Galen is not online you can find her on the edge of the Sonoran Desert, climbing mountains or hanging out with a loving assortment of human and animal companions. Follow her on Twitter @galendara.

Golden Apple
Sophia McDougall

“Mother, give me the sun.”

Ghosts, Henrik Ibsen

The process of transforming sunlight into a solid object had been complete about a month when we broke into the lab and stole as much as we could carry.

Carrying it was an issue, actually—obviously we were fairly sure it wouldn’t weigh much. But what do you carry sunlight in? Some sort of vacuum flask seemed appropriate. We didn’t want the sunlight to leak, or get contaminated. But would it die, somehow, if we shut it up in the dark?

In the end we used Tupperware and a rucksack.

For what it’s worth: We wouldn’t have stolen the solidified light if we’d had any other options or had not been at the very end of our rope. We would have paid for it if we could. We’ve become quite good at raising money, even while never having close to enough: We’ve raised almost two hundred thousand over the last few years for projects that had seemed saner but hadn’t done us any good in the end. We were up against the clock. We knew we weren’t thinking very clearly but we didn’t care, we knew we might be messing up (though not how badly) and we didn’t care about that either; in fact, by this point, we didn’t even really care about each other, despite the fact we were barely having full conversations with anyone else.

It’s quite liberating. The not caring.

It was a long drive to the lab but Jan and I had nothing to talk about in the car. We’d agreed beforehand that if it came to it, we’d both deny she knew anything about it; if at all possible we’d see to it I’d go to prison so there’d be someone to look after Daisy. I had no particular feelings about this other than mild guilt that my end of the bargain seemed easier.

Jan had bought us convincing replica guns, and by then it wasn’t so much that we objected to real ones as that we didn’t know how to get them and were afraid of getting caught before we could get hold of the sunlight. I am glad about that, now, we didn’t have real guns; things might have gone worse; people in our state of mind shouldn’t have guns. Not that we felt bad. In fact, I felt better than I had for years, and I say we weren’t thinking clearly but it felt clear, like all the horror and exhaustion and rage was washing out of me at last, and I was filling up with light, with light, with light.

To be doing something, you know?

To feel like it was going to be over?

It was a clear night, but it had been raining for days before, and as we broke clear of the trees and began our sprint across the field, the ground was like crude oil underfoot. I slipped right over once and Jan gave me a hand up in the kind of perfectly synchronised, perfectly impersonal way one assassin might help another. Didn’t look at my face, or at anything but the low white building ahead.

It shone worryingly bright; the moon was full, and that rhyme I used to sing Daisy came into my head: Girls and boys come out to play, the moon is shining as bright as day, and while I was giving Jan a leg-up over the wall, part of my brain got a little lost in how it’s really all sunlight, hurling through space, bouncing off cold stone, raining down on the wet grass, sunlight trapped for years and at last released in the lamps above the laboratory’s little car park, and it was sunlight powering my muscles to lift Jan and then myself, sunlight squeezing and releasing our lungs and hearts.

I’d been thinking so much about light recently, you see.

Jan spoke for the first time in hours: “We’re leaving footprints,” she whispered. “We’re going to track this mud all over the floors. They’ll be able to get a lot of information from that.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said.

Jan only paused for a second. “No,” she agreed, “it doesn’t.”

“We’ll dump the shoes later,” I said, but she was already tramping on ahead through the mud, and didn’t answer, and I knew she wasn’t even thinking about it any more.

We weren’t particularly sophisticated about it. We just bashed in a window and of course alarms started screaming. We’d known that would happen but I couldn’t help getting a little jumpy, and this is why I say it’s just as well our guns weren’t real, because a security guard found us not long after that. And while Jan was aiming her fake pistol at him and shouting, I had trouble not breaking down in giggles because it was so easy, and I kept expecting it to be harder; I kept thinking he’d realise the guns weren’t real and we weren’t actually breaking into the lab and handcuffing a man to a chair, we weren’t the sort of people who do things like that.

Jan didn’t seem to have any trouble keeping a straight face though, as far as you could tell through the balaclava; she pressed her gun against the man’s temple and he shook, he was so scared of tiny Jan and used-up, middle-aged me, and I stopped finding it funny and thought good, he should be. And I stopped thinking we weren’t the sort of people who would do this; we were, and that was fine, perfect. “Where’s the light?” I barked in his ear. “You know what we want; where’s the light?”

So he told us, and where the key safe was, and he wasn’t lying about it (why should he? Why risk his life to protect an experiment?), so we stuffed a gag in his mouth and ran through the dark corridors, up a flight of stairs to the right room. Couldn’t get the keys to work for ages, metal turning slippery in our shaking hands with sweat. Opened the door.

There in the dark was the sunlight.

Jan had been the one to do most of the research; I think the scientists wanted the solid light for some kind of new fuel, (which was what we wanted it for too, of course) but I don’t know. They’d coaxed it into being on microscopic lattices under funnels of mirrors, I remember that. It was about persuading photons to act like electrons, to repel each other.

Maybe it was actually a weapon? Maybe all this would’ve happened anyway.

Each globe of light was gold and white and perfect, like a tiny sun or a huge pearl. Each about the size of my two fists they hung suspended within columns of glass, held in place, I think, by magnetic fields. I pulled open the port at the top of the nearest tube and the light sank slowly to the bottom like a wax in a lava-lamp. It quivered and warped a bit as it settled down, already a little ruined, but still there.

“Quick, get it out,” said Jan, voice jagged with desperation. I reached down into the tube and grasped the light.

What did it feel like? Spongy, slippery, without being wet; hot but not burning through my glove. Bits of it fizzed away as I touched it, escaped into little streaks of almost-normal light in the air, and we got worried it would dissipate completely, so we set to grabbing the light out of the tubes and loading it into our Tupperware.

We didn’t take it all but we did take most of it.

“I am sorry about this,” said Jan almost gently to the guard back in the office we’d broken into. “We had to.”

When we got home we didn’t so much as take off our coats, just ripped off the balaclavas and ran straight up the stairs. We didn’t like to charge into the room in the middle of the night, normally we tiptoed around it, but we were too scared to wait until morning, in case the police came before then or in case the sunlight wouldn’t last that long, before we’d tried.

We didn’t turn on the lights. The captured sunlight lit the room enough. And yet you could barely see there was anyone lying in the bed. The duvets piled over her erased all trace of her body, as surely as clay. Just the little skull on the pillow, raw within the taut casing of skin, the tangle of limp, dry hair. As always, I held my breath until I could see the faint, faint movement of hers.

Sometimes I’d look at Daisy and all the ready-made words they use for dead girls would nearly choke me. Bubbly. Special. Princess. Awful, awful words, that get you the exact opposite of what they’re begging the walled-off world for: please don’t just think of a corpse, please don’t think of this one photograph, please think of a person.

She never used to feel the cold at all. She used to like to stay outside as long as it was light and was baffled by the idea she ought to have anything on her arms. When she was seven she showed a slightly worrying interest in wounds and dead animals, but grew out of it. She was good at algebra. She could run fast but was hopeless at any sport involving catching or throwing. When she was eleven she found it essential to know her own exact favourite colour, considering that an answer as imprecise as “blue” showed a lack of spirit and self-knowledge. She collected colour cards from a paint shop, studied them solemnly for days, and informed us at last that the chosen shade was Majorelle Blue. She began to lecture us on environmentalism but she never remembered to turn off the bathroom light. At fourteen she was still planning to live in a house with every room painted Majorelle blue, with a wooden bed painted lemon yellow. That same year she redesigned her own signature into an artfully elaborate logo for when she was famous. When she was fifteen her best friend gave her a silver necklace shaped like a daisy chain and Daisy never took it off if she could help it (it couldn’t have been cheap, that necklace, but that was the year Daisy’s illness became something more than an inconvenience). She made frequent mention of a redheaded boy in the year ahead of her while denying she liked him. She had, in my view as I had in hers, appalling taste in music.

She’d celebrated her sixteenth birthday in the bed she now lay in, weakly puffing out a single candle we’d stuck into a bar of cinnamon scented soap, cake being out of the question. The last week before we stole the light, she’d barely opened her eyes.

Jan dodged around the IV stand and sat down on the bed. Daisy moaned quietly and turned her head away from the light. Jan got one arm under her head and propped her up—she wasn’t hard to lift. The blankets slipped down her corrugated chest, resting on her tender, slightly swollen stomach, and releasing a drift of her sweet ammonia scent.

I opened the first tub and handed it to Jan. The light scoured the poor remnants of Daisy’s face, the red chapped skin around her lips and nostrils, the flint-edged shadows under cheekbones and eyebrows. Within the pitiless caverns of her skull, her eyes winced open.

“Daisy,” I said.

I got round to the other side of the bed, and picked up my daughter’s hand. It felt like a little pile of kindling in mine. Her skin was papery-dry and cold, always so cold.

“Daisy,” whispered Jan, “open your mouth, there’s a good girl.”

Daisy blinked up at us emptily. Her forehead creased a little in pain, and her eyes sank closed again. I knew her bones hurt constantly, the bed was never soft enough to cushion them from their own small weight. But she didn’t protest.

Obediently, she parted her lips and Jan slipped the first sliver of sunlight inside.

I suppose, if I could, I’d have to change what I’ve done. It’s useless to say that now, and doubly so because I can’t really imagine doing it differently. I know we did wrong, and I should feel worse about it, but I can’t do anything about that.

But I do feel guilty when I think of her swallowing the light. We should have told her what we were doing. We should have asked. She wouldn’t, before, have been so docile, so vacantly trusting. She would have wanted to know what on earth we were putting in her mouth.

The first word she ever said was “no.”

The sunlight shone scarlet through her lips and cheeks, illuminating the lacework of veins like bare trees against a sunset. Her throat glowed a softer rose as the sunlight slid down, fading to a faint ember gleaming through the wall of her chest, then vanishing.

Jan stroked her hair and crooned to her and reached for the next morsel of light.

The police came at dawn three days later. They leaned on the doorbell rather than knocking the door in, which I suppose we should have been grateful for, and piled into our kitchen in what seemed to us unreasonably large numbers. They looked faintly awkward, full of energy for pushing people around and turning over furniture, but not quite sure if that was allowed.

“Jan didn’t have anything to do with it,” I said, stupidly.

“It was some other five-foot-two female in possession of a firearm, was it?” asked the Inspector sourly. “Listen, you can both make it easier on yourselves by telling us what you’ve done with that light.”

There wasn’t any left. We’d fed Daisy all of it. We didn’t say anything.

“I know you’ve got a sick daughter,” said the Inspector, “so I’d like to do this nicely. It’d be nice if you’d get dressed and come down to the station without making a lot of fuss.”

“I can’t,” said Jan. “Someone’s got to look after our daughter.”

“You can ring a neighbour from the station.”

“No, no, they won’t know what to do, what if she gets worse while I’m gone . . .”

One of the policewomen looked past me at something and caught a breath; the others followed her gaze and everyone went quiet. Daisy, soundless on bare, emaciated feet, had come down the stairs into the kitchen doorway. I felt a spasm of ridiculous rage. They had the nerve to wince at the sight of her, they dared to think she looked bad now? She was walking, she wasn’t in pain.

Daisy beamed at everyone. “It’s all right,” she said. “I don’t need looking after.”

Her skin was warm to the touch when I hugged her goodbye. Her eyes shone.

I left her blithely making the police officers a cup of tea.

“She couldn’t absorb anything from food,” I told them. I found it wasn’t at all hard to explain; it was as if I’d been rehearsing for ages. Distantly, I imagined Jan in some other interview room, saying the same words, in perfect unison. “It’s a very extreme and very intractable form of Coeliac; at least, that’s the closest anyone’s been able to get to a name for it. Whatever it is, she’s the youngest case, the worst case. At first it was just . . . she couldn’t have bread. If she did, she’d be sick for ages. Fine. We cut everything out. We were so careful. But it didn’t work. The villi—the little things like hairs in your gut—hers are all wrecked. There was nothing we could feed her that didn’t make it worse. She was losing her sight. She was starving to death, in front of us. The most basic thing you’re supposed to do for your child, feed them, and we couldn’t.”

“You’re in a horrible situation,” said the inspector. “But you’re going to have to explain how that led to armed robbery. You’re not disputing it did, at this point, I take it?”

“I’m very sorry about the security guard. Please tell him we’re sorry we frightened him. But what would you do if it was your daughter?”

They boggled at me and sucked their teeth. “But your idea was to feed her this stuff?”

“Yes.”

“But for God’s sake, Mr. Whitton, you had no way of knowing it wasn’t toxic.”

“She was dying. She was in pain. There was nothing else, surely you can understand that—nothing else we could even try. We couldn’t bear not even trying.”

They both pulled faces. The sergeant said: “Your daughter can’t . . . photosynthesise.”

“She’s better.” Tears spilled suddenly down my cheeks; I didn’t try to stop them. “You saw her. She’s so much better, you didn’t see how bad she was before. The difference—you wouldn’t believe it.”

“Do you know how we got the idea?” I said, “Jan came downstairs and said ‘Oh God, I can see through her.’ She’d been getting Daisy out of bed and the light was pouring in through the window across her foot, and her foot was glowing, like a lamp. The light was in her blood. And we thought, all the energy in food comes from sunlight, so, maybe if it would stay . . .”

I could hear the anguish in my own voice. It was all completely real of course—but we were also very good at working sympathy by now, from all that fundraising. When desperation is the only resource, you make the most of it.

It didn’t get us out of being charged or having to spend a night in the cells. It did get me a cup of tea and a phone-call.

It rang for a long time and I began to panic the way I hadn’t when they’d told me how serious replica firearms offences were.

Then at last she answered. “Daisy—Daisy, how are you feeling?”

There was an odd little pause before she answered, not as if she was hesitating but as if the call was. “I’m fine, Dad.” God, her voice was so strong, so normal, so cheerful.

“It looks like we’re stuck in here overnight, love, but we’ll get it sorted out tomorrow. I promise it’ll be all right.”

“I know,” she said, airily. “I’ve already told Mum.”

“What have you been doing?”

“Standing,” said Daisy.

“Standing?” I was briefly baffled but, when I thought about it, delighted. “It’s so good to have you on your feet.”

“I’ve been standing in the garden,” said Daisy.

Our tragic situation and haunted articulacy served us well with the judge and we were bailed the next afternoon. The lawyer thought we’d probably get off pretty lightly so long as we could keep it up and didn’t get into any more trouble.

I didn’t really know how to think about any of this. We weren’t used to thinking in the future tense.

We drove home without speaking, nothing to say to each other, no need for it. It was taking everything I had not to go over the speed limit, in any case.

The house was unlit and felt so quiet as we entered that my heart cramped again in terror.

Jan called up the stairs, “Daisy?”

Then we saw that there was a light on in the house after all; a dim, amber-pink glow, like a child’s night-light, or a Jack-o’-Lantern.

Daisy was standing in the living room. She was still wearing the nightdress we’d last seen her in. For a moment I began to be angry—what the hell was Emma from next door thinking, leaving her alone, not even getting her dressed?

Beside me, Jan gasped.

The light was coming from under Daisy’s skin. Light padded the cruel spaces between her ribs, limned the bones of her limbs, glowed softly from between her vertebrae.

She was looking out of the window. She was so still she might have been there for hours. She didn’t, for several long seconds, seem to notice we were there. Then she looked at us. The light was a faint warm shimmer in the sparse flesh of her cheeks, the hollows of her throat. She smiled.

The light was noticeably brighter by the time we got her to hospital. Her fingers were like filaments. Her skull was a hot coal.

One of the physicists from the lab we’d robbed came to see what we’d done. Jan glowered defensively at her as if she was somehow the one to wrong us. The woman was too fascinated by Daisy to notice. She didn’t have, or didn’t feel the need to exercise, the capacity for masking astonishment that the doctors had. She clapped a hand to her mouth at the sight of our daughter and whispered “God.”

Daisy didn’t mind. Daisy, who used to whine heartily about being poked and prodded by doctors, who always used to look away when they stuck her with needles, didn’t so much as wince as they drew vial after vial of glowing blood; just sat and smiled gently into space as if she didn’t feel it.

Or stood and smiled, rather. She’d sit down when asked to, but with an air of faint puzzlement, and when left alone she’d quietly rise again like a helium balloon that had been briefly held down. She’d stand, motionless, silent unless spoken to. (Sometimes unless spoken to several times.) Sometimes she’d raise a hand in front of her face and stare at it, enraptured.

Blood tests were about all that was even possible. The light inside her blinded x-rays, MRIs, endoscopes.

“The light seems to be treating her cellular structure as a lattice,” said the scientist from the institute, somehow almost reverent and a little sour at the same time. “It goes without saying this wasn’t an anticipated effect.”

All of which only served to confirm what you could see with your eyes; Daisy’s flesh was turning into solidified light.

“But can you stop it?” Jan asked, breathless.

Daisy looked away from the square of blue sky outside the window for the first time in an hour. She asked, “Why would you want to stop it?”

We agreed to leave her in hospital overnight. We drove home; not speaking, and it occurred to me that for once I didn’t know what Jan was thinking.

The hospital rang at three in the morning in an apologetic panic. Daisy was gone. She’d had to be coaxed back into bed several times after being found standing motionless at the foot of her bed. Then when the nurses’ backs were turned, she’d wandered out.

“For God’s sake, how hard can she be to find?” I demanded, terrified at the thought of our horribly frail sixteen-year-old wandering the streets in nothing but a hospital gown. “She glows.”

But it wasn’t until eight in the morning that the police did find her; Daisy had walked out of the fields onto a motorway eighteen miles from the hospital. She had caused a car crash in which thankfully no one was seriously hurt.

The police wrapped her in blankets, which Daisy unobtrusively pushed off, and drove her back to us.

“What on earth were you thinking?” Jan shouted at her. “Don’t you know how worried we were?”

Daisy stood serene as architecture.

“Say something, for Christ’s sake! The nerve of it, just standing there!”

“I didn’t need to be there,” said Daisy. “I’m not ill any more.”

“Where were you going, Daisy?” I asked.

Daisy smiled, the brightness of it self-contained and private. “Home.”

But she’d been walking east and we lived in the opposite direction.

The light began to exude from our daughter’s skin, leaking like sweat from her pores. When she was at home she left smudged fingerprints glowing on walls and banisters. Light soaked from her skin into her bedclothes and wouldn’t wash out.

There were even streaks of light in the toilet bowl, for God’s sake.

Her hair fell out. She didn’t care. The light poured from her naked scalp.

She stopped wearing clothes. You could see her body through them anyway and she never felt cold.

(Jan found the daisy-chain necklace, stained with light, discarded in a corner.)

It was no longer possible to see her expression. She didn’t—of course—cast any shadow.

It was the brightest day of the summer so far. Daisy was, as she said she had been that first day, standing in the garden. Between her and the sun I could barely see a thing. The concrete tiles blazed white. Squinting, I could make out that Daisy’s arms were still raised above her head; she’d been holding them like that for impossibly long, utterly still, without even a tremor.

“What are you doing?” I asked, but she didn’t seem to notice I’d spoken.

I rubbed my eyes and tried to look at her again.

Her face was upturned, her lips parted in that secret rapture. Her eyes open.

“Daisy!” I grabbed for her. “You’ll blind yourself—!” I tried to clap my hand over her eyes, but her skin was so hot I let go.

“I’m not blind,” said Daisy, dreamily. “I can see everything.”

I went back into the house. Black spots danced in front of my eyes, after all that light.

I heard screaming. Jan, yelling my name, and Daisy—

“No. No, you can’t. No!” Daisy sounded—almost—like her old self in a tantrum, screaming, stamping, slamming doors. Though actually, the one who was acting like that was Jan, who as I ran into the room was in the act of elbowing Daisy out of the way so as to slam the French doors shut, before trying to wrestle her onto the sofa and contain her in the duvet from her bed.

“Close the curtains!” she roared at me.

“What?”

“Close them!”

I did. I knew, really, what she was thinking, felt the same surge of furious hope that perhaps it would work.

Daisy wailed.

“The more you’re out in the light the more you change!” Jan shouted. ”What’s going to happen when there’s nothing left of you but light? You need darkness.”

“You can’t!”

“Help me get her upstairs,” said Jan grimly. “We’ll have to fit shutters on the window.”

“You can’t,” sobbed Daisy, although it wasn’t exactly sobbing, I don’t think she could cry by now. “I’ll get out! You know I’ll always get out!”

I looked at her, her face invisible in the light, her body glowing dangerously through the duvet.

I thought of the mud she tracked through the house when she was ten, twelve; the diaries she bought and didn’t write in, how small she looked when she first caught a bus by herself.

I didn’t let go of her but I loosened my hold a bit. “Daisy” I asked. “Would you go back to the way you were before—not when you were ill, of course, but before that?”

“I can’t.”

“But if you could?”

Daisy stopped struggling and didn’t answer for a while. But I don’t think she was hesitating, so much as trying to remember what “before” even meant.

“No,” she said in the end, as I knew she would.

I closed my eyes. But I could still see her shining through my eyelids.

“What’s it like?” I asked. “It doesn’t hurt?”

Daisy relaxed, softening like white-hot metal or molten glass. “No,” she said. “No, it’s wonderful. I can see where the light comes from. I can see where it goes. I can feel everything inside it, inside me. Colours.”

“Can you?” I said, hearing my voice tear around the words. “Majorelle Blue?”

“Majorelle Blue,” agreed Daisy, no longer sounding anguished; no longer sounding like a girl. The light pouring out of her. “A lemon-yellow bed. Majorelle blue . . .”

“Right then,” I said. And I let her go. Jan tried to hang onto her but I held her back.

“Leave her alone,” I said.

Daisy got up. She crossed the room. Parted the living room curtains. The sun poured in through the windows and melded with hers until it was impossible not to look away.

Then she wasn’t there, and there was nothing but sunlight in the garden.

It was midsummer’s day.

Jan searched for her for hours, days. Called the police. Called me a murderer, pushed me away. Ran into Daisy’s room and sobbed on her bed.

I sat in the living room and stared at Daisy’s silhouette, imprinted on the glass she’d walked through in solid light.

The phone rang and rang today. It might have been the lawyers, the police. The court case—I keep forgetting about it; it doesn’t seem very important. Nor did answering the phone. Though we’ll have to decide, at some point, what we’re going to do. If any kind of damage-limitation is even possible.

If this is even a matter of damage.

Today Jan came downstairs and found me on the sofa where I’ve been sleeping (though lately, I’m feeling less need for sleep). I’ve been leaving the curtains open; she shut them.

“Alan,” she said, and held out her hands.

The light was still a soft, dawn-like tint to her wrists, climbing up under her sleeves and rising from under her collar into her cheeks.

I laughed, because there seemed nothing else to do, and showed her mine.

I noticed the light in the flesh of my fingertips first, then found it was everywhere; lining the contours of my body, glimmering around blood vessels of my throat. It’s still dim enough that the bathroom light will cancel it out.

We should have thought of it. We should have seen that of course, exposure to all that light she shed around the place would do exactly the same to us as it did to her. And all the people who touched her at the hospital, and that we’ve touched since . . .

Maybe it’s preventable. Maybe it takes more of it than that. It might be limited to us.

“Well, now what’ll we do?” said Jan, almost sheepishly. Whether because the light’s already getting into my eyes and brain, because of the soft glow of her skin or because of something else, it seemed I could see the details of her face more clearly than I had for a long time.

“Come here,” I said, and pulled her into my arms. The familiar warmth of her was still all hers, not the heat of the light.

We kissed. We hadn’t done that it in I don’t know long. It hadn’t seemed necessary, but now it did.

“Tell me your favourite colour,” I said.

© 2013 by Sophia McDougall.

Originally published in Pandemonium: The Lowest Heaven, edited by Anne C. Perry & Jared Shurin.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Sophia McDougall was supposed to be an Oxford English literature academic before running away in 2002 to write fiction. She is the author of the bestselling Romanitas trilogy (published by Orion/Gollancz and twice shortlisted for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History), set in a contemporary world where the Roman Empire never fell. Her short stories have been published by Jurassic Fiction, Solaris, and NewCon. Her first novel for children, Mars Evacuees, will be published by Egmont and Harper Collins US in 2014. She also creates digital art and mentors aspiring writers.

The Boy and the Box
Adam-Troy Castro

The boy looked like any other boy his age, except that, thanks to him, there had been for some time now no other boys his age, or of any other age. The elimination of all others had transformed him into the entirety of a subset that had once numbered billions. He was now the platonic ideal of his type, not just a boy, but the boy.

As the last of his kind currently existing in what he had allowed to remain of the world, he had soft downy skin, a pug nose, a fan of freckles across both cheeks, and hazel eyes that went well with lips arrested in a permanent affronted pout. He hadn’t had any means of washing up since he’d made everything go away, so he smelled unclean and wore permanent smudges on his palms and face. His once-short sandy hair now formed a rat’s nest . . . though that was a meaningless statement as well, as rats were one of the things he’d gotten rid of and there was no longer any need for their nests.

The boy had not only put all the people away in his box, but also all the animals, and all the trees, and all the buildings, and all the surface detail that made the world, even at its most unbearable, interesting to look at. Had the boy needed water, he would have died of thirst. Had he needed food, he would have starved. Had the temperature been anything but neutral, he would have frozen or sweltered. But he’d put away all these concerns as well. He was self-contained, invulnerable, immortal, and free.

He had been wandering around doing nothing for longer than we have the capacity to measure when he got tired of looking at a horizon that offered nothing but a single unbroken flat line and paused in his endless wandering to take out some toys.

First he pulled a favorite squat rock, now the rock, out of the box and placed it on the ground, in order to sit on it. It was a comfortable rock, the best of a number he’d tested and approved for squatting purposes. He rested his weight on it and found it just as superlative as it had been during his previous indulgences and regarded the box the same way any boy would have regarded any familiar but important possession.

There was nothing special about the box. It was not some cosmic vault, glowing with portent, surrounded by a crackle of blinding energy. It was just a jewelry box, lined with soft blue velvet and embossed with the trademark of a well-known retail establishment that, like the ring it had once contained and the store that had once sold it, were now safely stored inside. In the world now stored away, the gift had been removed to be placed on a woman’s finger, and the box seized in delight by the toddler the boy then was. He’d loved the soft texture of that crushed velvet, and the way a line drawn on that fabric with a fingertip caught the light differently from the unmarked material around it. He had taken a deep childish pleasure in the popping noise the lid made when shut, which he’d imagined to be a lot like the snapping of some hungry monster’s jaws. Sometimes, even now, he opened the box and ignored all the panicked cacophony of billions so he could hear that snap again on shutting it . . . but this was not the diversion he wanted right now, not the kind of game he wanted to play.

The boy did not find it difficult to reach into a space that should have been too small to admit his entire hand, let alone his full arm up to the shoulder. Nor was it any strain to pull out a grown man who should have been far too large to pass through the opening or too heavy for the boy to lift. The boy didn’t worry about it. He just did.

The grown man the boy had selected tumbled out, rolling as if tossed onto the hard-baked surface that was now the universe’s only landscape. He pulled himself to his hands and knees and wept, heaving as if denied air for so long that he now found its weight hard to stomach. After long minutes, he peered up and faced the boy, cowering as was only appropriate for him to do, before a creature of such infinite power and limited empathy.

“You can get up if you want,” the boy said.

The man remained on his knees longer than he should have after that instruction but found the strength to rise, though he didn’t draw any closer to the boy than he had to. He was a stoop-shouldered, pale figure with a high forehead, crooked nose, and weak chin, wearing a blue button-down shirt that had come undone from his khaki pants; and even as he stood he didn’t look at the boy, instead facing some neutral spot between his tasseled brown loafers.

The boy asked, “What’s your name?”

The man resisted answering, but after a few seconds said, “Lyle Danton.”

“I didn’t ask you for your last name. I don’t need to know your last name. Last names are stupid.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That doesn’t help now,” the boy said. “You still wasted my time with it. I think I’m going to make it go away so you won’t bother me with it again. What’s your name now?”

“Lyle . . .” the man began, his voice rising as if to tag something else on the end. Nothing arrived. “Lyle.”

“Lyle,” the boy repeated, as if weighing it on his tongue. “No. Come to think of it, I think that’s a stupid name, too.”

“I’m sorry?”

“It sounds too much like liar.”

“No,” said the man, who winced upon realizing who he’d just corrected. “It’s Lyle. Lyle. With another L.”

“It’s a stupid name, Lyle. You can’t use it anymore. What’s your name now?”

The man whose name had been Lyle opened his mouth, then closed it again, lost for answers. “I d-don’t think I have one.”

“You’ll need one if we’re going to have a conversation. I think I’ll call you Stupid-Face. What did you do in the world, Stupid-Face?”

“I was . . . a lawyer,” said Stupid-Face. He blinked multiple times and then, very quickly, said, “It’s, it’s dark in there. I can hear my wife and my kids screaming. I can’t get to them, but I can hear them screaming. You . . . put everybody in there, didn’t you? You’re not God, you’re just a kid. How did you put the whole world . . . ?”

The boy shushed him. “I’ll get back to you, Stupid-Face.”

Back Stupid-Face went, into the box.

The boy rummaged around a little more, and pulled out a woman. She was in her late fifties and had the look some women have, or more accurately once had, as if they reached a point in life where they gave up on youthful beauty and satisfied themselves with being presentable. The boy didn’t know that the official word for this had been matronly, but had observed the principle in a number of maternal aunts. This one was dressed in a gray knee-length skirt, a white silk blouse with a ridiculous bow at the collar, and a gray jacket. Her lipstick was too red for her complexion. She didn’t fall to her knees as quickly as Stupid-Face had, but instead swayed, dizzy at the sudden return of sound and light and space.

“Tell me how much you love me,” the boy said.

The woman blinked, her eyes resisting comprehension. “What?”

“I’ll save you for later,” said the boy.

Back she went into the box.

The boy sat, his knee supporting his elbow and his knuckles supporting his chin, contemplating the box as he flipped it over and over in his hand. The bridge of his nose wrinkled. He reached into the box again and this time pulled out a very big man in an orange prison jumpsuit. The big man had a shaved head, a handlebar moustache, and a swastika tattoo on his neck. His arms bulged like great stones under his sleeves. Another tattoo, a snake’s head that may have been some other color once but was now faded to a dull purple, emerged from his right sleeve and sat displayed on the back of his hand, spitting a forked tongue. He didn’t fall to his knees as Stupid-Face had, but instead tumbled onto his back, butt-crawling as far away from the boy as he could before his initial panic failed him and he stopped moving, his eyes black dots floating in wide white circles.

The boy asked him, “What’s your name?”

“F-foley.”

“Say it without stuttering.”

It took several false starts. “Foley.”

“You just pissed yourself, Foley.”

The big man’s eyes widened a sliver further as he registered this terrible truth.

“It’s okay,” the boy said. “I think it’s funny. Are you evil?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“It’s a simple question, and you don’t have to lie to me. I need somebody evil for a job. Are you evil?”

Foley’s expression relaxed a little, and became something else: crafty and knowing. “Will it keep me out of that box?”

“Yes.”

“Then, yeah, I’m bad.”

“How bad are you, exactly?”

“I’ve killed a couple of fuckers in my time. Did one piece of shit with an iron pipe, first his hole and then his face. Did another with my fists. Left a third piece of shit so messed up he’s been lying around on his back for ten years, broken below the neck and shitting through a tube. Not even brain-dead, neither. Awake so he knows every day what I done to him. I ain’t one of those sick serial killing shits who does that kind of thing for fun, but I got no trouble taking care of business if business got to be done. Some people got it coming. You need somebody for that kind of work, someone who won’t talk back or argue, someone who won’t forget who’s in charge now, I’m your guy a hundred percent. I’ll make you proud.”

The boy spent several seconds absorbing this before offering a slight nod and pointing toward a spot on the horizon, chosen at random. He said, “All right, Foley. Walk in that direction until I look like a dot in the distance. Then sit down and keep an eye on me. When I wave, run back and kill the man I’m with.”

The big man nodded, because when one was trapped with an omnipotent being it was always best to be offered an opportunity to prove one’s worth. He got up and ambled off into the distance, shaking his leg a little to wring his pants as dry as the circumstances allowed him.

The boy waited for Foley to travel the prescribed distance and sit on the cold featureless earth. It was clear that the big man would sit there for hours or days or years, had such things still existed, and not move until summoned. All things being equal, it would not be much of an improvement over the environment in the box. It would only be lighter, more peaceful, and less crowded. That struck the boy as all the incentive he needed to trouble himself with offering.

Next step. He pulled Stupid-Face from the box.

Stupid-Face shrieked and fell back to his knees, tears rolling down his face in waves. “Oh, please. Don’t put me in there again. I promise, I won’t ask any more questions. Just let me stay out here, I beg you.”

“You were right, before,” the boy said. “I am just a kid. I don’t think I’m a freak or a mutant or any of those other things from the movies. I’m not even particularly smart. At least, I wasn’t ever all that good in school. I was just sitting around one day, thinking, when I suddenly figured out how to do something nobody ever knew how to do before. I was just lucky to be the first one to ever have the idea. But really, it was easy. Even you could have done it. You can ask me a question now, if you want.”

Stupid-Face cast about in a mind close to bursting, and after three or four visible false starts, managed, “B-but even if you could . . . why would you . . . ?”

The boy picked his nose. “I didn’t like my Dad.”

“What?”

“Don’t get me wrong. He didn’t beat me or anything like that. He wasn’t a bully or a drunk or a perv. He was just, you know, a guy like you, going to his job in the morning and coming home to his family at night. I’ll give him credit for trying to be a good Dad, for making sure we were fed and stuff, and for spending time with us when he could, but every once in a while it was hard to look at him and not know that when he got tired from trying all the time, he looked at me and my Mom and my two sisters and my dog and kind of wished we weren’t there, because life would have been so much easier for him if we weren’t. When I figured out how to do what I could do, I first made him forget all of us and then put him in the box. Then I did my sisters and my Mom, because I liked them even less. It wasn’t hard.”

Stupid-Face fell to all fours, and shook his head, addressing the dirt because it was solid and beneath him and no less reasonable or empathetic than the boy before him. His shoulders trembled, and he too released urine, the way the big man in the orange jumpsuit had. He muttered, “Oh God, Oh God . . .”

“Now I have a question for you. Were you a good man?”

“What?”

“I’m gonna get really bored if you just keep saying what whenever I ask you anything. If you bore me there’s no point in not just putting you back in the box. So that was the last time I want to hear the word what from you. In fact, just to be sure you don’t say it by accident, I’m gonna make you forget it right now.” The boy shifted the box. “There. You can’t say that word ever again. That’s not too bad, because it’s only one word, but if you keep wasting my time I’m gonna also make you forget and and the and is, and that’s gonna make it really hard for you to say anything at all. So you might as well answer me. Were you a good man?”

Stupid-Face’s mouth moved, providing a moment of silence where he normally would have uttered another what to underline his lack of understanding. It was as if the one key word removed from him had shifted everything that remained, and placed them on unfamiliar shelves, requiring vast internal adjustments until he was able to provide a response. “I think so.”

“But were you really?” the boy asked. “I could have asked the same question of my Dad, and he would have said the same thing, even though he was like most people, just doing what he was taught to do, without ever understanding why. I don’t think he was ever really good or evil, because he was never really asked to do anything but what he was. At least, he was no hero. So I ask you again. Were you a good man?”

Stupid-Face’s mouth continued to work silently, as his mind churned through any number of possible responses and rejected every single one for being attached to too many possible causes for offense. “I’m sorry. I don’t know.”

The boy’s shoulders fell in disappointment. “That’s what I thought.”

He stood up and waved at the distant dot on the horizon, which stirred from its chosen spot and began to grow in size.

Stupid-Face followed his gaze and noticed the other distant figure for the first time. His eyes clouded with dread. His jaw fell, and chewed air for long seconds as the right words were pulled from their shelves. “Who’s that?”

“That,” the boy said, “is an evil man.”

The hulking figure in the orange jumpsuit approached in no special hurry, his clenched fists hanging from arms like coiled springs. His eyebrows were knit over slitted eyes, and his mouth was a lipless grimace. Together they made the kind of expression that drew a straight line between the impulse to murder and the target of that impulse, a straight line that ended in the same spot where Stupid-Face began.

There was no way for Stupid-Face to interpret the still-distant figure’s approach as anything but what it was. He said, “No,” and whirled toward the boy, hoping for mercy, but finding nothing in those placid features but detached curiosity. He rose, stumbled, and said, “No,” again, but mere denial of his circumstances accomplished nothing at all, and so he said, “You can’t, I’m no fighter, look at the size of him,” but that made no difference either. He spun in a circle, searching for havens in a world that no longer had any shelters or bolt-holes or doors to close or trees to climb or authorities to summon, that in fact had nothing at all but the killer coming for him and the boy who could summon more killers any time he wanted. He took a couple of steps back, but then stopped, paralyzed by the awareness that he could run a thousand miles if he wanted and never step outside the reach of what was coming for him. At long last, the only remaining reaction available to him burst from him in a cry so primal that it cracked in his throat. “I loved my children, you little shit!”

Foley arrived just in time for Stupid-Face to throw a wild punch at his jaw. It would be nice to report now that the fury of a good man, or at least a not very bad one, fighting for his life and the lives of his children, lent so much power to his swing that it struck the killer down and forever redeemed the world for all innocent men like himself. But Stupid-Face had never been a fighter, not since childhood, and the man in the orange jumpsuit had something broken in him that allowed him to hurt other people as easily as he could breathe. Stupid-Face’s wild punch landed on the bad man’s jaw, to no real effect, and the blow Foley threw in return knocked Stupid-Face flat on his back, to beg and plead as the bad man loomed near, filling his sky.

There was no moment, in the seven minutes the murder required, when the man who had lived as Lyle but was fated to die as Stupid-Face stood even a passing chance of turning the tide of battle. He was half conscious and breathing through a smashed nose after only three, battered past the point of brain damage after only four, and likely already dead after five. A professional assassin might have done a cleaner job of it. But Foley was no professional assassin, merely a gifted and enthusiastic amateur.

After seven minutes, the boy said, “Okay. You can stop now.”

Foley stood and watched, his knuckles dripping, while the boy put the corpse back into the box.

“That’s it?” the big man asked. “I done good?”

“I didn’t ask you to do good. But you did what I asked. Thank you.”

“So, umm. What happens now?”

“What do you want to happen now?”

“I sure as shit don’t want to go back in that box, I know that. If you’re the only game in town I’d just as soon work for you. Be your, like, angel of death or whatever. Maybe get myself a little crew, a bitch or two, if you eventually decide that’s okay. Better than nothing.”

“Angel of Death?”

“That don’t have to be my title if you don’t want it to be. Up to you, man. I just figured, you know, if I’m taking the big job, you might as well call it what it is.”

The boy considered all this. “I don’t know if I’ll get you a crew or any bitches, but I’ll think about it. In the meantime, yeah, why not. You can be my angel of death. Go wait where you waited last time, and don’t bother me unless I wave you over again.”

The boy watched Foley amble off, the increasing distance transforming him from big man to smaller man to tiny receding figure to motionless seated speck.

As of this moment, the boy didn’t think he’d ever call have reason to call Foley over again. The man had completely fulfilled all the purpose the boy had in mind for him. But promises were promises. Foley would never go back in the box. Nor would he ever flee any further, for fear of losing what he had, or approach any closer, for fear of incurring the boy’s wrath. He would just remain in place, in that spot with nothing worth looking at or doing, as aware of the passage of time as any man.

The boy took out a puppy, small and big-eyed and pleased beyond whatever reason it had to be away from the cold darkness of the box. He played with it for a few minutes. It was a very young puppy and soon it grew tired enough to fall asleep with its chin on his foot. This bored the boy. He picked the puppy up by the scruff of the neck and asked, “That’s all you can do?” It yawned. He dropped it back in the box.

In short order he pulled out, played with, and tired of: a paddleball, a yo-yo, a snow-globe, and a wailing infant, whose senses of sight and hearing he removed at a whim just before he dropped the screaming thing back in the box.

Then he pulled out the same matronly woman from before. She’d been weeping since her last emergence, and she spent the next few minutes on her hands and knees, regressed to some first language the boy failed to recognize. The funny talk amused him at first, and gave him reason to leave her be, but it then began to pall, as it had nothing to do with him and failed to surprise him after the initial novelty of the unfamiliar combination of consonants and vowels.

He made the foreign tongue go away in mid-sentence—prompting a sudden shriek of loss from the figure prostrated on the ground—and waited for her to work up enough nerve to look at him again.

He repeated his past demand. “Tell me how much you love me.”

“What?”

He sighed. “I really don’t like that word. From now on, I’m going to take it away from people before I ask them any questions. There. It’s gone. Try to say it now.”

She choked on empty breath.

“Now tell me how much you love me.”

She cringed for a moment, but then something very interesting—something the boy had not seen before—happened to her face. It sloughed off all the fear and all the hopelessness and all her concern over what the boy was going to do to her, and replaced it with something built of iron. She used the back of her hand to brush the tears from eyes that had banished fear by recognizing that she had nothing left to lose, and said, “No.”

“You have to. Look around you. There’s pretty much nothing, anywhere, not as far as the eyes can see. You could walk away if you wanted to but you’d find nothing out there, and I could bring you back any time I wanted. There’s just the two of us. Tell me how much you love me.”

“Nothing could love you.”

He shook his head. “I’m a boy. I’m a boy who lived in a four-bedroom house in a nice neighborhood with lawns and trees. I was loved then, I think, even if my Mom and Dad weren’t very good at it. I need somebody to love me. Tell me how much you love me.”

The woman spat on the ground. “No.”

“You don’t have to mean it. You just have to say it like you mean it. You have to say it in as many ways as you can think of saying it, and not stop until I tell you to stop.”

“No. You’re an evil little shit.”

The boy tilted his head, and chewed on this at length, like it was a flavor he didn’t recognize. “But this is the part that doesn’t make sense to me. How come you’re the one who gets to say what’s good and what’s evil? I’m the one who took you out of the box and I’m the one who can put you back. I’m in charge. I’m the only one who matters. I should be the one who gets to decide.”

“Go to hell.”

He said, “There is no such place. I haven’t built it yet.”

The woman was about to curse him again, this time with words so passionate and so blistering that they might have given even the boy pause. They fled when he removed her ability to speak, leaving her before him, a silent figure whose loathing of everything he stood for continuing to rage behind eyes that conceded her abject helplessness but refused to surrender to it.

There was no doubt in the boy’s mind that had he permitted her to place her hands around his throat, she would have continued to force strength into her fingers long hours after all life had left him. It was a beautiful hatred, the kind that was only possible when its owner had been robbed of everything else. In a way, it was downright glorious and the boy spent long minutes admiring it, the way he would have regarded a jewel that sparkled from every facet.

“I have an angel of death,” he said, at long last. “I could bring him over here and make him beat you until you agreed to say you loved me. But that wouldn’t be you, loving me. That would just be you not wanting to be beaten. You could say you loved me forever and I’d still see that look in your eyes. That wouldn’t be satisfying at all.

“But I get to decide what’s good and what’s evil, now. So I’ll just say that from now on, it’s good to love me and evil to feel any other way. If you don’t tell me how much you love me until I get tired of hearing it, you’ll be a bad person who deserves to have bad things happen to you. Whenever you stop, you’ll be more ashamed of yourself than you’ve ever been and you won’t want to live with yourself. The only way to feel better, for even a little while, will be to go back to telling me you love me. As long as you do that, you can stay. But if you have any bad thoughts, you go back in the box. I think that’s fair, and since I decide what’s right here from now on, it is fair. I don’t ever want you to think, even for a moment, that I’ve been less than generous. Okay?”

The woman’s eyes went glazed, tears of pure joy forming at the corners. “Yes.”

“You can start now.”

And of course, as instructed, she began to tell him how much she loved him. She dwelled on her love for him. She exulted in it, and labored at it, rattling off metaphors of astonishing poetic beauty that didn’t even begin to capture the infinite depths of her adoration for him, the perfect kind boy who deserved all her love because he had in his uncanny generosity given her the commandment to love. She grew so fervent that before long her praise blossomed into song.

He listened, found satisfaction in it for a little while, and then frowned as he realized that it was still not even close to enough.

It was the worst of all sins in his own personal universe, in that it was boring.

Of course, she was only one woman. He supposed that he could take other people from the box if he wanted to; lining them up in rows, if he had to; forming armies of them, if he needed to; directing their praises until they all spoke in a unified voice millions or billions strong, shaking the empty ground with the force of their single-minded adoration. He could have them cry out for him, at a volume that could shake loose the very sky. But what kind of being would even want such a thing, forever? What kind of creature could not only demand that, but take pleasure in the same hollow compliments sung in the same voices, for as long as it took time itself to grow cold?

His own vision blurred, as he realized that he was not now personally capable of being such a thing. He could not be such a thing without first jettisoning every part of himself that knew the love to be both forced and false. He supposed he could easily put those things away in the box . . . but what was the point then? He’d be as empty, then, as she was.

So instead he opened the box and stepped in, descending only knee-deep before he became aware that the woman had stopped in mid-sentence, her adoring eyes registering only that he was engaged in some fresh activity, and waiting to discern what it was so she could proceed with telling him how deeply she approved.

He couldn’t pretend he cared enough to restore everything he’d taken from her, or to bring her down into the darkness with him. Instead, he said, “You might as well go back to what you’re doing and assume I can still hear you.”

She beamed with fresh ecstasy and returned to declaring her love.

He descended the rest of the way into the box, pausing just before he vanished completely, to bring the box itself into the box with him. It contracted to a point and then disappeared, all access to it eliminated.

This, of course, did not stop the singing.

© 2013 by Adam-Troy Castro.

Adam-Troy Castro is best known in science fiction circles for his Philip K. Dick Award winning novel, Emissaries From the Dead, which stars his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort. His short fiction has been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stoker Awards, and two Hugos. The first volume of a middle-grade fantasy series, Gustav Gloom and the People Taker, was published by Grosset and Dunlap in August 2012; the second and third volumes, Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault, and Gustav Gloom and the Four Terrors, will both appear in 2013. Adam lives in Florida with his wife Judi and a rotating collection of insane cats that includes Uma Furman, Meow Farrow, and Harley Quinn.

Ushakiran
Laura Friis

The earliest movements she knows are not her mother’s movements but the sea rocking her mother, who lies unconscious on the ship’s deck, rescued. In that way, the sea can be said to be her mother.

She is born under the morning star, and so is named Ushakiran. The surgeon delivers her into a world of storms and blood, of darkness and creaking wood, of a blanket wrapped close around her, cold arms that cannot hold her.

She is fed on goat’s milk and honey by the surgeon, Jathe. She spends the first days of her life strapped to his chest while he works. She should not live, but she does.

“When are you going to find that brat a home?” the Captain asks him every time they make port, and Jathe knows he should foster her somewhere; he knows, but he cannot.

“Soon,” he says, and he thinks of wet-nurses and fevers, of tongue-blister, of drunkards and starving men, dirt, famine. He brings the baby back to the ship, every time.

He has never married, never had a home since he was a boy. His life has been spent on the kelp routes, seeking out the raw fuel of a magic that builds cities and fights wars on land, that has never given him a single thing. He would have married Ushakiran’s mother if she had lived, just because she had nobody else.

He knows that the baby’s odds of living to become a child are slim. She is never out of his sight. When the Currents fail, and the food runs out, he stands over her with a knife, watching the door for men who may remember that a child is meat, sweet and tender.

The Captain stops asking him when the baby will be sent away. Ushakiran learns to walk, or rather to take two steps and fall; she learns to laugh. She has dark eyes like her mother did, brown skin, and she grows two pearly-white teeth that show when she tries to talk. The sailors who have been on the ship since her birth begin to say that she is their good luck. They fear her crying, which they say brings storms. No one is to make her cry. Newcomers are warned.

Her toys are a doll sewn from old sailcloth, a top bought her by a sailor now dead, the feathers of circling birds, and knives.

Jathe teaches her how to use the knives. She can help him, he says. She learns to bandage and clean, cauterise and cut.

She is growing into a girl, six years old now and bright as morning, and he fears for her. He teaches her how to cut, quick and clean.

When she is seven, two new recruits take her down to the hold when Jathe is distracted by a fever case. Nobody notices until they hear her scream. The day is bright, warm, but Jathe’s chest goes cold. His hands are cold. He throws down whatever it is he is holding and runs.

A dozen men are there before him and Ushakiran is unharmed, seems untouched, but she will only say that they scared her. She is crying. Jathe has them take the recruits on deck and tie them down. He has no right to give such orders, but nobody has seen him like this before; he is the surgeon, quiet and calm, and now his eyes are stone and his hands are fists; they obey him by instinct. On deck, the Captain meets Jathe’s eyes, shrugs, and looks on.

Jathe has one of the boys fetch his knives and give them to Ushakiran.

“Like I taught you,” he says. She shakes her head.

He speaks to her quietly. “The world is a cruel place,” he says. “Your mother learned that. Mine, too, a long time ago. Here.”

He takes her hand to guide it, the way his mother guided his when she was teaching him to draw, forty years ago, and he helps her make the first cut. The man chokes. Her hand shakes, but she pulls it away to make the next cut alone.

The next time it happens, he tells her to take the man’s eye first. This time the man is from Balera and speaks little of any known tongue; maybe he has a daughter or little sister at home, the Captain says, and just wanted to talk to the child, but Jathe will not take a chance. Word is spreading about the child living on the Day’s Eye; word is spreading that if you touch her they will tie you down and let her cut you; word is spreading that she likes seeing the blood.

Newcomers have already heard her name.

Nobody ever remembers, later, who decided she should not go ashore. At first it does not arise because she is too young. Jathe goes ashore rarely, and when he does he leaves her with Davin, the first mate, who has children of his own. Whenever she asks if she can come ashore with him he finds a reason why not—heat, sickness, rain, unrest. One day, when she is eight, he is going out into Kingsport for supplies and she steps toward the boat to go with him. One of the sailors puts an arm out to stop her, says, “She can’t leave. She’s our good luck.”

Jathe looks at her. Since she was a toddler he has been telling her stories of the cities on land, of markets and palaces and everything in between. Her eyes are round, hopeful. He thinks of all the faces and reaching arms of a busy port, the snakes, the biting dogs; his eyes cannot be everywhere.

“You’re our luck,” he says. “Don’t you want to keep us safe? How can you be our luck if you leave?”

Her eyes fill with tears but she nods. He gets into the boat and walks around Kingsport all day feeling as if he has poisoned her. He makes up his mind that when she asks again he will take her ashore. But she never does, and secretly he is relieved.

Ushakiran loves to run. Every day, at sunrise, noon, and sunset, up and down the length of the ship. Her friend Davin says he could tell the time by her dashes, if he could not by the sun. From the stern to the bow, jumping over hatches and pails, over the concave of the ship’s drum, swerving outwards to go along the rail and in again to the companionway, sun on her skin, the ship’s timber under her bare feet. She dreams that one day she will reach the bow at such speed that she will launch herself from it and fly.

Her other favourite thing to do is to lean over the rail and watch the Currents that pull the ships around the Unfathomable Sea, and from which they dredge the kelp that they sell to magicians to power their magic. Sometimes if she screws her eyes up hard enough she believes she can see a Leviathan, one of the great monsters that are said to swim far, far down below and to create the Currents with their swimming and their own magic, but she knows that really she has never seen one. Sometimes she lies in the concave of the drum, where the kelp is collected, and puts her ear to the wood, and listens, and pretends that she hears the magic sing. She knows she does not. But when she rises to go about her day again she is sometimes dizzy, unsteady on her feet, and everything is brighter, sharper.

Faces come and go on the Day’s Eye. Sailors die, they jump ship, and new ones take the places of the old. Some—Davin, the Captain, and Jathe—are family, others, like Beor the young ship’s cook, are friends; the rest are fluid. When Ushakiran is thirteen a woman is recruited, a scarred and heavy woman; her name is Haf, and she is stronger than most of the men. Her husband, Korvall, is recruited too, but he is small and older and people often forget he is nearby.

“Who are they?” Beor asks her, the first time he sees them. He has come out to the drum to bring Ushakiran one of the cakes he has made. When she was littler and used to hang round the galley, getting under his feet and begging for food, he would bribe her to go away. Three lengths of the ship meant a spoonful of the honey she loved, five meant berries, ten, cake or extra bread. The habit has stuck.

“Just people,” she says, when she has licked the last of the cake from her teeth.

“Nobody’s just people.”

He is watching them. Ushakiran looks too. She sees a woman in dun-colour, wearing a string of wooden beads, a man with a beard, losing his hair: nothing of interest.

“They look like Arkislanders,” Beor says, leaning against the drum. “I went to Arkisland once; the trees are so thick you can hardly move, and the bears there are pure white. Like snow.”

“Oh,” Ushakiran says, but she is not thinking about Arkisland, she is looking at Beor, his tanned face lined by the weather, and wondering if there is more cake. He shakes his head.

“Don’t you ever wonder about the islands?” he says, “Or the cities, any of it?”

She shakes her head, with perfect truth. She stopped thinking about the outside world when she was eight years old. He shakes his head again, reaches out as if to ruffle her hair and stops, and then goes back to his galley.

“You should bind your breasts,” Haf tells Ushakiran one day. Ushakiran blinks at her.

“I’ve seen you running,” Haf says. “You wobble. You can bet the men see it. Bind them down, it’s easier.”

She shows Ushakiran how, and Ushakiran knows she should be grateful, but she knows she is growing, now, and she hates Haf for it, because Haf told her.

She notices Haf watching her, often. Most often when she is at the rail, Leviathan-watching, or curled up in the concave of the drum, imagining the power beneath.

“Where do you come from, girl?” Haf asks her one day, and Ushakiran, reluctantly, tells what little of her story she knows. Haf puts her head on one side, considering.

“Have you ever seen a Leviathan?” she asks.

“Nobody has,” Ushakiran says.

“How do you know that?”

Ushakiran shrugs.

“What about kelp? Have you ever eaten any? Touched it?”

Ushakiran shifts slightly away from Haf, uneasy.

“It wouldn’t do anything. It’s just for magicians.”

“So it is,” Haf says. Korvall comes past then, and Haf nods to Ushakiran and walks away with him.

The mutiny begins quietly, as such things do. Haf plants whispers in ears, and they grow. She tells the right people that spoils on the Day’s Eye are divided unfairly, that the surgeon is mad to keep a murdering witch-girl on board and the Captain is mad to let him, that she and Korvall could run things better. She has done this before. She says that men should not have to live in fear for desiring a woman who is dangled before their noses. She says that the men Ushakiran has killed are owed justice. She sees the girl go on as always, running her laps of the ship, smiling at the men, knowing nothing: a child. The harvest of Haf’s words is an indignation that grows like a rising wave. The Captain senses it as, after years at sea, he senses a change in the weather, but he only gives out more bread and spirits and lashings. Greed and fear rule everything out on the ocean; he has used them before, and he thinks they will serve him again. He is old.

There are too many ships on the arms of the Currents these days. They dredge the kelp thin and the Currents fail more often, leaving the ships becalmed for days at a time until the Leviathan far beneath do whatever they do to replenish the kelp, and start the Current flowing again. The gleanings are smaller, too, and the drum, which would once have been heavy with kelp and rich with power, only hums a little, now. There is less profit to go around. None of this is the Captain’s fault and Haf cannot change any of it anyway, but it is easy to convince angry men that a change, any change, will improve their lot.

She waits for her moment.

The Halverling Current fails. The Day’s Eye is becalmed, with no Current to carry her forward, and no wind either to bridge the gap to the next Current. There is sickness on the ship and Jathe works through a scorching day and a black night and half the next day to save three of the youngest sailors, who are half and a third of his age, who should not die while he lives. He staggers out onto the deck, into a baking noonday, with the reek of death on him. He is growing old, he thinks. Everything is so hot and bright. The side of his face seems to slip away from the bone, and he staggers against the rail. That is when he sees Ushakiran on the companionway, talking to a young man, a sailor whose face he should know, but he does not. He hardly seems to know the ship any more either—it is a blur, as is the sky, around the only thing he sees: Ushakiran, the hands reaching towards her. Wrongness surges up in his chest, suffocating him. In an instant he is back in that moment of her childhood, long ago, hearing her scream, and he is cold, cold.

He tries to run, but all he can manage is a lurch, somewhere between running and falling. He cannons into the young man and gropes for his throat, but never finds it. His opponent shoves him against the rail and hits him, once, twice. He hears screaming. He feels the pounding of running feet in the boards of the ship underneath him. Everything goes black for an instant, and when his vision clears he sees Beor, the ship’s cook, his friend, dead on the ground, and his first ridiculous impulse is relief, that he recognises the man finally, that he is not losing his mind after all. Then he sees Ushakiran standing over Beor, her blade dripping with blood, and he sees the men running towards her, bearing down on her like a wave.

They drag her away and then they come for Jathe. Before he dies, he hears, with an odd, faraway clarity, his old friend the Captain telling him that children cannot be kept like eggs, they will break out. That was many years ago and yet the words sound new to Jathe, as if he is hearing them for the first time.

They murder the captain in his bed. The blood of the surgeon, who has tended them for years, who has shown them the closest thing to kindness that anyone knows on board ship, is spilled all over the deck. Yet it is no worse, Haf tells them, than the murder of Beor, a young man who had committed no worse crime than offering dried berries to a girl he saw as a sister. It’s touch and go, but by a stroke of luck—and she deserves some luck, for once—the Current surges back into life and begins to drag the ship forward just as she fears they are slipping away from her. The great dredgers start their work again, spooling kelp into the drum, and life steals back into the ship, the low hum of power in every dip and rise of the bow, in every board of the timber. Haf believes the sailors sense that, without knowing it, and it reassures them.

Her own magic is not strong. However much kelp she eats or smokes or absorbs she will never be a powerful magician, but she knows one or two things. She knows the right stories to tell, and she knows trees. From the first shoot splitting a seed deep in the rich soil of her home island, to the polished beads around her neck, to the boards of a coffin or a ship. She knows enough to rid herself of Ushakiran. The sailors are afraid to kill the girl, afraid to keep her alive.

“She’s our luck,” one of them argues, and “She’s a killer,” another. They bicker back and forth until Haf whistles for silence and snatches up one of the spears they keep for fishing in the shallows on land. She strides up onto the kelp-drum, down into the hollow of it. They are all watching her now. She raises the spear and brings it down, hard, and with a crack and a splinter the drum ruptures, and the kelp comes spilling out. She scoops up a handful of it and throws her head back, eats the kelp slowly, sloppily, feels the warmth of the power filling her body. Not enough power, never enough, but enough for now.

No one makes a sound. She jumps out of the concave and goes to where two of the sailors hold Ushakiran, whose eyes are wide, not with fear, but with awe. She takes the girl’s face in her hands and closes her eyes. She thinks of the wood of the ship, sun-soaked, rain-beaten, wind-scoured, wood seasoned by age and hard use, trodden by the feet of these men and this girl, floating for years on the Unfathomable Sea. She feels soft skin harden under her palms, and when she opens her eyes there before her is Ushakiran in wood, honey-coloured and smooth-grained, eyes looking at something far away, one hand raised slightly in appeal. The perfect figurehead.

“But our luck,” one of the sailors protests, feebly.

“If she was lucky before, she is lucky now,” Haf says. She has them mount Ushakiran on the bow of the ship, staring out over the bowsprit, over the endless water.

Ushakiran is blind.

A wooden thing cannot see, and it should not hear either. It should be dead. She should be dead and gone, and yet here she is. She has plenty of time to think about why this is.

She has what she always wanted. She flies over the bow of the ship, in the wind and the spray, as fast as the ship is fast. It isn’t like she imagined.

She cannot see, but she hears with great acuity. She cannot really die on the Day’s Eye, she decides, because she has always been part of it. She has never left it since she was born. She lived on the ship as a flesh-and-blood girl and now that she is wooden she feels as a ship feels, because she is joined to the ship.

She feels Haf, wherever Haf walks, as a low vibration of power.

She feels feet on the boards, chairs scraped, shoulders leaning against walls, waves crashing against the side of her, fish as little irritations, barnacles as a constant, gentle torment. She feels the faded warmth of Jathe’s blood stained into the deck and if she could weep, she would.

She feels the kelp in the drum the way she used sometimes to feel her heartbeat, only stronger, much stronger.

As time goes by, she begins to feel other things. Whales, calling each other in the sea. Storms approaching. The presences of other ships, disturbances in the Current.

She begins to sleep. To sleep as wood is so pleasant, is to fall into an easy, honey-coloured dream, to glow in the sun, to rock with the motion of the waves through the wind and under the rain. She is falling insensate, degree by slow degree, when a new sound wakes her.

They are on the cusp of the Peret and Halverling Currents, and the men are raising sail to traverse between the one and the other, when she first hears it. At first she cannot place it for the life of her. Such a deep sound, so far down in the sea, and yet so huge it seems to shake the world. Leviathans. They are real, and she can hear them.

For days she listens, and that is enough to keep her awake—trying to make out what they are saying to each other, if they are saying anything. Even that, though, palls, and by the time they are three days out along the Peret Current she has lost interest and is slipping away. Until she hears a single word.

“. . . luck.”

It is Korvall talking, as he climbs between decks.

“They all believe that—” he says, and then he moves away from the wall, and she can’t hear him any more. Outside the wardroom he brushes the wall again, and he is saying “Reach Current. But maybe—” he walks out to the middle of the deck and she loses him again. A minute later he walks back and leans against the rail, but all she hears is “weevils,” and something about cabbage, and she gathers he is talking about his dinner.

She stops listening to the Leviathans, and starts listening, with all her concentration, to what is going on within the ship. She hears so much, and yet so little of value. “The old Captain,” one sailor says, cheek against the wall—he is tired, perhaps. “Mother,” another says, leaning over the rail to look down at the waves whilst he talks, and “never,” says the man he talks to, before he straightens and turns away. A morass of whispers becomes a lullaby; this time she will not fight it, she decides, she will let the Day’s Eye take her, and then, from the tide of sounds, emerges one complete, perfect sentence.

“If they want a child, let them have a child,” Korvall says. Ushakiran shivers; the ship shivers.

“I turned their luck into wood,” Haf says, “I made it last forever.”

She cannot work out where they are, that she can hear them so perfectly.

“I saw, love. It was magnificent.”

He kisses her. Ushakiran feels the touch for both of them—

Korvall’s lips on Haf’s and Haf’s on Korvall’s. No one ever kissed her in her life of flesh, and now she is kissed for the first time, by these two.

“We’ll go along Reach,” Korvall says, and he is kissing her again, in between words, “land on one of the Four Islands, find a child, and if they decide she’s not lucky they’ll probably find something else to do with her.”

No, Ushakiran thinks, and the ship dips forward, and the sails snap though there is no wind. She feels Haf absent-mindedly stroking the wood of the ship and wishes she could kill them both—and then she realises where they are. At the base of the drum, where it curves into the hold, and the kelp inside the drum is catching their words and conducting them perfectly upwards, through the timber, to Ushakiran.

“Their child had power,” Haf says. “This one won’t. They’ll know.”

“Sailors don’t know anything,” Korvall says, but Ushakiran is not listening to them any more, she is wondering. The child that had power. The child. Her.

A tremor runs through the Day’s Eye. Men fall against the walls, onto the floor. A bottle smashes in the wardroom. Somewhere a bag of holystone crashes to the ground and splits, scatters.

The sails catch and billow in the dead calm. The bow plunges down into the water. Ushakiran hears muffled and distorted cries, shouted orders, and Haf’s last, clear, whispered question, “What is that?”

The drum splits with a thunder-crash and the kelp rushes out. It soaks into the wood, into Ushakiran, and, absorbed, it lights her like tinder. There is sight, now, there is sound too—screaming, and the roar of a fire that is not true fire but power going up like fuel. It is night, but the sea around Ushakiran glows green-gold. There are no shadows. She feels lives blinking out all along the wood of her, like little candles snuffed—Davin, dragged under the waves, Korvall, crushed under the broken drum, Haf, thrashing in the water until the cold turns her still. The men are jumping off the rail, into the water, anything to get away from the unholy pyre that, as they swim frantically away from it, upends and drives downwards, into the black water.

The water swallows Ushakiran, goes through her as if it were her blood. Through the veins of her decks and rooms, drowning the men still trapped there and washing the stains of dead men’s blood away. Before the waters close above her she lets out a cry that is no human sound, not made by lips, nor throat, nor lungs, and there comes, from worlds away below the sea, an answering call.

© 2013 by Laura Friis.

Laura Friis comes from West Yorkshire and currently lives in Vancouver. She likes to write at night and sleep during the day but has also been known to scratch out a living in jobs such as bookseller and stablehand. Among her favourite things are coffee, vegan food, and long walks. She is a graduate of the 2012 Clarion West Writers’ Workshop, where she wrote this story to the sound of fireworks on the Fourth of July.

The Stars Below
Ursula K. Le Guin

The wooden house and outbuildings caught fire fast, blazed up, burned down, but the dome, built of lathe and plaster above a drum of brick, would not burn. What they did at last was heap up the wreckage of the telescopes, the instruments, the books and charts and drawings, in the middle of the floor under the dome, pour oil on the heap, and set fire to that. The flames spread to the wooden beams of the big telescope frame and to the clockwork mechanisms. Villagers watching from the foot of the hill saw the dome, whitish against the green evening sky, shudder and turn, first in one direction then in the other, while a black and yellow smoke full of sparks gushed from the oblong slit: an ugly and uncanny thing to see.

It was getting dark, stars were showing in the east. Orders were shouted. The soldiers came down the road in single file, dark men in dark harness, silent.

The villagers at the foot of the hill stayed on after the soldiers had gone. In a life without change or breadth, a fire is as good as a festival. They did not climb the hill, and as the night grew full dark they drew closer together. After a while they began to go back to their villages. Some looked back over their shoulders at the hill, where nothing moved. The stars turned slowly behind the black beehive of the dome, but it did not turn to follow them.

About an hour before daybreak a man rode up the steep zigzag, dismounted by the ruins of the workshops, and approached the dome on foot. The door had been smashed in. Through it, a reddish haze of light was visible, very dim, coming from a massive support-beam that had fallen and had smoldered all night inward to its core. A hanging, sour smoke thickened the air inside the dome. A tall figure moved there and its shadow moved with it, cast upward on the murk. Sometimes it stooped, or stopped, then blundered slowly on.

The man at the door said: “Guennar! Master Guennar!”

The man in the dome stopped still, looking towards the door. He had just picked up something from the mess of wreckage and half-burnt stuff on the floor. He put this object mechanically into his coat pocket, still peering at the door. He came towards it. His eyes were red and swollen almost shut, he breathed harshly in gasps, his hair and clothes were scorched and smeared with black ash.

“Where were you?”

The man in the dome pointed vaguely at the ground.

“There’s a cellar? That’s where you were during the fire? By God! Gone to ground! I knew it, I knew you’d be here.” Bord laughed, a little crazily, taking Guennar’s arm. “Come on. Come out of there, for the love of God. There’s light in the east already.”
The astronomer came reluctantly, looking not at the grey east but back up at the slit in the dome, where a few stars burned clear. Bord pulled him outside, made him mount the horse, and then, bridle in hand, set off down the hill leading the horse at a fast walk.

The astronomer held the pommel with one hand. The other hand, which had been burned across the palm and fingers when he picked up a metal fragment still red-hot under its coat of cinders, he kept pressed against his thigh. He was not conscious of doing so, or of the pain. Sometimes his senses told him, “I am on horseback,” or, “It’s getting lighter,” but these fragmentary messages made no sense to him. He shivered with cold as the dawn wind rose, rattling the dark woods by which the two men and the horse now passed in a deep lane overhung by teasel and briar; but the woods, the wind, the whitening sky, the cold were all remote from his mind, in which there was nothing but a darkness shot with the reek and heat of burning.

Bord made him dismount. There was sunlight around them now, lying long on rocks above a river valley. There was a dark place, and Bord urged him and pulled him into the dark place. It was not hot and close there but cold and silent. As soon as Bord let him stop he sank down, for his knees would not bear; and he felt the cold rock against his seared and throbbing hands.

“Gone to earth, by God!” said Bord, looking about at the veined walls, marked with the scars of miners’ picks, in the light of his lanterned candle. “I’ll be back; after dark, maybe. Don’t come out. Don’t go farther in. This is an old adit, they haven’t worked this end of the mine for years. May be slips and pitfalls in these old tunnels. Don’t come out! Lie low. When the hounds are gone, we’ll run you across the border.”

Bord turned and went back up the adit in darkness. When the sound of his steps had long since died away, the astronomer lifted his head and looked around him at the dark walls and the little burning candle. Presently he blew it out. There came upon him the earth-smelling darkness, silent and complete. He saw green shapes, ocherous blots drifting on the black; these faded slowly. The dull, chill black was balm to his inflamed and aching eyes, and to his mind.

If he thought, sitting there in the dark, his thoughts found no words. He was feverish from exhaustion and smoke inhalation and a few slight burns, and in an abnormal condition of mind; but perhaps his mind’s workings, though lucid and serene, had never been normal. It is not normal for a man to spend twenty years grinding lenses, building telescopes, peering at stars, making calculations, lists, maps and charts of things which no one knows or cares about, things which cannot be reached, or touched, or held. And now all he had spent his life on was gone, burned. What was left of him might as well be, as it was, buried.

But it did not occur to him, this idea of being buried. All he was keenly aware of was a great burden of anger and grief, a burden he was unfit to carry. It was crushing his mind, crushing out reason. And the darkness here seemed to relieve that pressure. He was accustomed to the dark, he had lived at night. The weight here was only rock, only earth. No granite is so hard as hatred and no clay so cold as cruelty. The earth’s black innocence enfolded him. He lay down within it, trembling a little with pain and with relief from pain, and slept.

Light waked him. Count Bord was there, lighting the candle with flint and steel. Bord’s face was vivid in the light: the high color and blue eyes of a keen huntsman, a red mouth, sensual and obstinate. “They’re on the scent,” he was saying. “They know you got away.”

“Why . . .” said the astronomer. His voice was weak; his throat, like his eyes, was still smoke-inflamed. “Why are they after me?”

“Why? Do you still need telling? To burn you alive, man! For heresy!” Bord’s blue eyes glared through the steadying glow of the candle.

“But it’s gone, burned, all I did.”

“Aye, the earth’s stopped, all right, but where’s their fox? They want their fox! But damned if I’ll let them get you.”

The astronomer’s eyes, light and wide-set, met his and held. “Why?”

“You think I’m a fool,” Bord said with a grin that was not a smile, a wolf’s grin, the grin of the hunted and the hunter. “And I am one. I was a fool to warn you. You never listened. I was a fool to listen to you. But I liked to listen to you. I liked to hear you talk about the stars and the courses of the planets and the ends of time. Who else ever talked to me of anything but seed corn and cow dung? Do you see? And I don’t like soldiers and strangers, and trials and burnings. Your truth, their truth, what do I know about the truth? Am I a master? Do I know the courses of the stars? Maybe you do. Maybe they do. All I know is you have sat at my table and talked to me. Am I to watch you burn? God’s fire, they say; but you said the stars are the fires of God. Why do you ask me that, ‘Why?’ Why do you ask a fool’s question of a fool?”

“I am sorry,” the astronomer said.

“What do you know about men?” the count said. “You thought they’d let you be. And you thought I’d let you burn.” He looked at Guennar through the candlelight, grinning like a driven wolf, but in his blue eyes there was a glint of real amusement. “We who live down on the earth, you see, not up among the stars . . .”

He had brought a tinderbox and three tallow candles, a bottle of water, a ball of peas-pudding, a sack of bread. He left soon, warning the astronomer again not to venture out of the mine.

When Guennar woke again a strangeness in his situation troubled him, not one which would have worried most people hiding in ahole to save their skins, but most distressing to him: he did not know the time.

It was not clocks he missed, the sweet banging of the church bells in the villages calling to morning and evening prayer, the delicate and willing accuracy of the timepieces he used in his observatory and on whose refinement so many of his discoveries had depended; it was not the clocks he missed, but the great clock.

Not seeing the sky, one cannot know the turning of the earth. All the processes of time, the sun’s bright arch and the moon’s phases, the planet’s dance, the wheeling of the constellations around the pole star, the vaster wheeling of the seasons of the stars, all these were lost, the warp on which his life was woven.

Here there was no time.

“O my God,” Guennar the astronomer prayed in the darkness underground, “how can it offend you to be praised? All I ever saw in my telescopes was one spark of your glory, one least fragment of the order of your creation. You could not be jealous of that, my Lord! And there were few enough who believed me, even so. Was it my arrogance in daring to describe your works? But how could I help it, Lord, when you let me seethe endless fields of stars? Could I see and be silent? O my God, do not punish me any more, let me rebuild the smaller telescope. I will not speak, I will not publish, if it troubles your holy Church. I will not say anything more about the orbits of the planets or the nature of the stars. I will not speak, Lord, only let me see!”

“What the devil, be quiet, Master Guennar. I could hear you halfway up the tunnel,” said Bord, and the astronomer opened his eyes to the dazzle of Bord’s lantern. “They’ve called the full hunt up for you. Now you’re a necromancer. They swear they saw you sleeping in your house when they came, and they barred the doors; but there’s no bones in the ashes.”

“I was asleep,” Guennar said, covering his eyes. “They came, the soldiers . . . I should have listened to you. I went into the passage under the dome. I left a passage there so I could go back to the hearth on cold nights, when it’s cold my fingers get too stiff, I have to go warm my hands sometimes.” He spread out his blistered, blackened hands and looked at them vaguely. “Then I heard them overhead . . .”

“Here’s some more food. What the devil, haven’t you eaten?”

“Has it been long?”

“A night and a day. It’s night now. Raining. Listen, Master: There’s two of the black hounds living at my house now. Emissaries of the Council, what the devil, I had to offer hospitality. This is my county, they’re here, I’m the count. It makes it hard for me to come. And I don’t want to send any of my people here. What if the priests asked them, ‘Do you know where he is? Will you answer to God you don’t know where he is?’ It’s best they don’t know. I’ll come when I can. You’re all right here? You’ll stay here? I’ll get you out of here and over the border when they’ve cleared away. They’re like flies now. Don’t talk aloud like that. They might look into these old tunnels. You should go farther in. I will come back. Stay with God, Master.”

“Go with God, count.”

He saw the color of Bord’s blue eyes, the leap of shadows up the rough-hewn roof as he took up the lantern and turned away. Light and color died as Bord, at the turning, put out the lantern. Guennar heard him stumble and swear as he groped his way.

Presently Guennar lighted one of his candles and ate and drank a little, eating the staler bread first, and breaking off a piece of the crusted lump of peas-pudding. This time Bord had brought him three loaves and some salt meat, two more candles and a second skin bottle of water, and a heavy duffle cloak. Guennar had not felt cold. He was wearing the coat he always wore on cold nights in the observatory and very often slept in, when he came stumbling to bed at dawn. It was a good sheepskin, filthy from his rummagings in the wreckage in the dome and scorched at the sleeve-ends, but it was as warm as ever, and was like his own skin to him. He sat inside it eating, gazing out through the sphere of frail yellow candlelight to the darkness of the tunnel beyond. Bord’s words, “You should go farther in,” were in his mind. When he was done eating he bundled up the provisions in the cloak, took up the bundle in one hand and the lighted candle in the other, and set off down the side-tunnel and then the adit, down and inward.

After a few hundred paces he came to a major cross-tunnel, off which ran many short leads and some large rooms or stopes. He turned left, and presently passed a big stope in three levels. He entered it. The farthest level was only about five feet under the roof, which was still well timbered with posts and beams. In a corner of the backmost level, behind an angle of quartz intrusion which the miners had left jutting out as a supporting buttress, he made his new camp, setting out the food, water, tinderbox, and candles where they would come under his hand easily in the dark, and laying the cloak as a mattress on the floor, which was of a rubbly, hard clay. Then he put out the candle, already burned down by a quarter of its length, and lay down in the dark.

After his third return to that first side-tunnel, finding no sign that Bord had come there, he went back to his camp and studied his provisions. There were still two loaves of bread, half a bottle of water, and the salt meat, which he had not yet touched; and four candles. He guessed that it might have been six days since Bord had come, but it might have been three, or eight. He was thirsty, but dared not drink, so long as he had no other supply.

He set off to find water.

At first he counted his paces. After a hundred and twenty he saw that the timbering of the tunnel was askew, and there were places where the rubble fill had broken through, half filling the passage. He came to a winze, a vertical shaft, easy to scramble down by what remained of the wooden ladder, but after it, in the lower level, he forgot to count his steps. Once he passed a broken pick handle; farther on he saw a miner’s discarded headband, a stump of candle still stuck in the forehead socket. He dropped this into the pocket of his coat and went on.

The monotony of the walls of hewn stone and planking dulled his mind. He walked on like one who will walk forever. Darkness followed him and went ahead of him.

His candle burning short spilled a stream of hot tallow on his fingers, hurting him. He dropped the candle, and it went out.

He groped for it in the sudden dark, sickened by the reek of its smoke, lifting his head to avoid that stink of burning. Before him, straight before him, far away, he saw the stars.

Tiny, bright, remote, caught in a narrow opening like the slot in the observatory dome: an oblong full of stars in blackness.

He got up, forgetting about the candle, and began to run towards the stars.

They moved, dancing, like the stars in the telescope field when the clockwork mechanism shuddered or when his eyes were very tired. They danced, and brightened.

He came among them, and they spoke to him.

The flames cast queer shadows on the blackened faces and brought queer lights out of the bright, living eyes.

“Here, then, who’s that? Hanno?”

“What were you doing up that old drift, mate?”

“Hey, who is that?”

“Who the devil, stop him—”

“Hey, mate! Hold on!”

He ran blind into the dark, back the way he had come. The lights followed him and he chased his own faint, huge shadow down the tunnel. When the shadow was swallowed by the old dark and the old silence came again he still stumbled on, stooping and groping so that he was oftenest on all fours or on his feet and one hand. At last he dropped down and lay huddled against the wall, his chest full of fire.

Silence, dark.

He found the candle end in the tin holder in his pocket, lighted it with the flint and steel, and by its glow found the vertical shaft not fifty feet from where he had stopped. He made his way back up to his camp. There he slept; woke and ate, and drank the last of his water; meant to get up and go seeking water again; fell asleep, or into a doze or daze, in which he dreamed of a voice speaking to him.

“There you are. All right. Don’t startle. I’ll do you no harm. I said it wasn’t no knocker. Who ever heard of a knocker as tall as a man? Or who ever seen one, for that matter. They’re what you don’t see, mates, I said. And what we did see was a man, count on it. So what’s he doing in the mine, said they, and what if he’s a ghost, one of the lads that was caught when the house of water broke in the old south adit, maybe, come walking? Well then, I said, I’ll go see that. I never seen a ghost yet, for all I heard of them. I don’t care to see what’s not meant to be seen, like the knocker folk, but what harm to see Temon’s face again, or old Trip, haven’t I seen ’em in dreams, just the same, in the ends, working away with their faces sweating same as life? Why not? So I come along. But you’re no ghost, nor miner. A deserter you might be, or a thief. Or are you out of your wits, is that it, poor man? Don’t fear. Hide if you like. What’s it to me? There’s room down here for you and me. Why are you hiding from the light of the sun?”

“The soldiers . . .”

“I thought so.”

When the old man nodded, the candle bound to his forehead set light leaping over the roof of the stope. He squatted about ten feet from Guennar, his hands hanging between his knees. A bunch of candles and his pick, a short-handled, finely shaped tool, hung from his belt. His face and body, beneath the restless star of the candle, were rough shadows, earth-colored.

“Let me stay here.”

“Stay and welcome! Do I own the mine? Where did you come in, eh, the old drift above the river? That was luck to find that, and luck you turned this way in the crosscut, and didn’t go east instead. Eastward this level goes on to the caves. There’s great caves there; did you know it? Nobody knows but the miners. They opened up the caves before I was born, following the old lode that lay along here sunward. I seen the caves once, my dad took me, you should see this once, he says. See the world underneath the world. A room there was no end to. A cavern as deep as the sky, and a black stream falling into it, falling and falling till the light of the candle failed and couldn’t follow it, and still the water was falling on down into the pit. The sound of it came up like a whisper without an end, out of the dark. And on beyond that there’s other caves, and below. No end to them, maybe. Who knows? Cave under cave, and glittering with the barren crystal. It’s all barren stone, there. And all worked out, here, years ago. It’s a safe enough hole you chose, mate, if you hadn’t come stumbling in on us. What was you after? Food? A human face?”

“Water.”

“No lack of that. Come on, I’ll show you. Beneath here in the lower level there’s all too many springs. You turned the wrong direction. I used to work down there, with the damned cold water up to my knees, before the vein ran out. A long time ago. Come on.”

The old miner left him in his camp, after showing him where the spring rose and warning him not to follow down the watercourse, for the timbering would be rotted and a step or sound might bring the earth down. Down there all the timbers were covered with a deep glittering white fur, saltpeter perhaps, or a fungus: it was very strange, above the oily water. When he was alone again Guennar thought he had dreamed that white tunnel full of black water, and the visit of the miner. When he saw a flicker of light far down the tunnel, he crouched behind the quartz buttress with a great wedge of granite in his hand: for all his fear and anger and grief had come down to one thing here in the darkness, a determination that no man would lay hand on him. A blind determination, blunt and heavy as a broken stone, heavy in his soul.

It was only the old man coming, with a hunk of dry cheese for him.

He sat with the astronomer, and talked. Guennar ate up the cheese, for he had no food left, and listened to the old man talk. As he listened the weight seemed to lift a little, he seemed to see a little farther in the dark.

“You’re no common soldier,” the miner said, and he replied, “No, I was a student once,” but no more, because he dared not tell the miner who he was. The old man knew all the events of the region; he spoke of the burning of the Round House on the hill, and of Count Bord. “He went off to the city with them, with these black-gowns, to be tried, they do say, to come before their council. Tried for what? What did he ever do but hunt boar and deer and foxen? Is it the council of the foxen trying him? What’s it all about, this snooping and soldiering and burning and trying? Better leave honest folk alone. The count was honest, as far as the rich can be, a fair landlord. But you can’t trust them, none of such folk. Only down here. You can trust the men who go down into the mine. What else has a man got down here but his own hands and his mates’ hands? What’s between him and death, when there’s a fall in the level or a winze closes and he’s in the blind end, but their hands, and their shovels, and their will to dig him out? There’d be no silver up there in the sun if there wasn’t trust between us down here in the dark. Down here you can count on your mates. And nobody comes but them. Can you see the owner in his lace, or the soldiers, coming down the ladders, coming down and down the great shaft into the dark? Not them! They’re brave at tramping on the grass, but what good’s a sword and shouting in the dark? I’d like to see ’em come down here . . .”

The next time he came another man was with him, and they brought an oil lamp and a clay jar of oil, as well as more cheese, bread, and some apples. “It was Hanno thought of the lamp,” the old man said. “A hempen wick it is, if she goes out blow sharp and she’ll likely catch up again. Here’s a dozen candles, too. Young Per swiped the lot from the doler, up on the grass.”

“They all know I’m here?”

“We do,” the miner said briefly. “They don’t.”

Some time after this, Guennar returned along the lower, west-leading level he had followed before, till he saw the miners’ candles dance like stars; and he came into the stope where they were working. They shared their meal with him. They showed him the ways of the mine, and the pumps, and the great shaft where the ladders were and the hanging pulleys with their buckets; he sheered off from that, for the wind that came sucking down the great shaft smelled to him of burning. They took him back and let him work with them. They treated him as a guest, as a child. They had adopted him. He was their secret.

There is not much good spending twelve hours a day in a black hole in the ground all your life long if there’s nothing there, no secret, no treasure, nothing hidden.

There was the silver, to be sure. But where ten crews of fifteen had used to work these levels and there had been no end to the groan and clatter and crash of the loaded buckets going up on the screaming winch and the empties banging down to meet the trammers running with their heavy carts, now one crew of eight men worked: men over forty, old men, who had no skill but mining. There was still some silver there in the hard granite, in little veins among the gangue. Sometimes they would lengthen an end by one foot in two weeks.

“It was a great mine,” they said with pride.

They showed the astronomer how to set a gad and swing the sledge, how to go at granite with the finely balanced and sharp-pointed pick, how to sort and “cob,” what to look for, the rare bright branchings of the pure metal, the crumbling rich rock of the ore. He helped them daily. He was in the stope waiting for them when they came, and spelled one or another on and off all day with the shovel work, or sharpening tools, or running the ore-cart down its grooved plank to the great shaft, or working in the ends. There they would not let him work long; pride and habit forbade it. “Here, leave off chopping at that like a woodcutter. Look: This way, see?” But then another would ask him, “Give me a blow here, lad, see, on the gad, that’s it.”

They fed him from their own coarse meager meals.

In the night, alone in the hollow earth, when they had climbed the long ladders up “to grass” as they said, he lay and thought of them, their faces, their voices, their heavy, scarred, earth-stained hands, old men’s hands with thick nails blackened by bruising rock and steel; those hands, intelligent and vulnerable, which had opened up the earth and found the shining silver in the solid rock. The silver they never held, never kept, never spent. The silver that was not theirs.

“If you found a new vein, a new lode, what would you do?”

“Open her, and tell the masters.”

“Why tell the masters?”

“Why, man! We gets paid for what we brings up! D’you think we does this damned work for love?”

“Yes.”

They all laughed at him, loud, jeering laughter, innocent. The living eyes shone in their faces blackened with dust and sweat.

“Ah, if we could find a new lode! The wife would keep a pig like we had once, and by God I’d swim in beer! But if there’s silver they’d have found it; that’s why they pushed the workings so far east. But it’s barren there, and worked out here, that’s the short and long of it.”

Time stretched behind him and ahead of him like the dark drifts and crosscuts of the mine, all present at once, wherever he with his small candle might be among them. When he was alone now the astronomer often wandered in the tunnels and the old stopes, knowing the dangerous places, the deep levels full of water, adept at shaky ladders and tight places, intrigued by the play of his candle on the rock walls and faces, the glitter of mica that seemed to come from deep inside the stone. Why did it sometimes shine out that way? as if the candle found something far within the shining broken surface, something that winked in answer and occulted, as if it had slipped behind a cloud or an unseen planet’s disc.

“There are stars in the earth,” he thought. “If one knew how to see them.”

Awkward with the pick, he was clever with machinery; they admired his skill, and brought him tools. He repaired pumps and windlasses; he fixed up a lamp on a chain for “young Per” working in a long narrow dead end, with a reflector made from a tin candleholder beaten out into a curved sheet and polished with fine rock-dust and the sheepskin lining of his coat. “It’s a marvel,” Per said. “Like daylight. Only, being behind me, it don’t go out when the air gets bad, and tell me I should be backing out for a breath.”

For a man can go on working in a narrow end for some time after his candle has gone out for lack of oxygen.

“You should have a bellows rigged there.”

“What, like I was a forge?”

“Why not?”

“Do ye ever go up to the grass, nights?” asked Hanno, looking wistfully at Guennar. Hanno was a melancholy, thoughtful, softhearted fellow. “Just to look about you?”

Guennar did not answer. He went off to help Bran with a timbering job; the miners did all the work that had once been done by crews of timberers, trammers, sorters, and so on.

“He’s deathly afraid to leave the mine,” Per said, low.

“Just to see the stars and get a breath of the wind,” Hanno said, as if he was still speaking to Guennar.

One night the astronomer emptied out his pockets and looked at the stuff that had been in them since the night of the burning of the observatory: things he had picked up in those hours which he now could not remember, those hours when he had groped and stumbled in the smoldering wreckage, seeking . . . seeking what he had lost . . . He no longer thought of what he had lost. It was sealed off in his mind by a thick scar, a burn-scar. For a long time this scar in his mind kept him from understanding the nature of the objects now ranged before him on the dusty stone floor of the mine: a wad of papers scorched all along one side; a round piece of glass or crystal; a metal tube; a beautifully worked wooden cogwheel; a bit of twisted blackened copper etched with fine lines; and so on, bits, wrecks, scraps. He put the papers back into his pocket, without trying to separate the brittle half-fused leaves and make out the fine script. He continued to look at and occasionally to pick up and examine the other things, especially the piece of glass.

This he knew to be the eyepiece of his ten-inch telescope. He had ground the lens himself. When he picked it up he handled it delicately, by the edges, lest the acid of his skin etch the glass. Finally he began to polish it clean, using a wisp of fine lambswool from his coat. When it was clear, he held it up and looked at and through it at all angles. His face was calm and intent, his light wide-set eyes steady.

Tilted in his fingers, the telescope lens reflected the lamp flame in one bright tiny point near the edge and seemingly beneath the curve of the face, as if the lens had kept a star in it from the many hundred nights it had been turned toward the sky.

He wrapped it carefully in the wisp of wool and made a place for it in the rock niche with his tinderbox. Then he took up the other things one by one.

During the next weeks the miners saw their fugitive less often while they worked. He was off a great deal by himself: Exploring the deserted eastern regions of the mine, he said, when they asked him what he did.

“What for?”

“Prospecting,” he said with the brief, wincing smile that gave him a very crazy look.

“Oh, lad, what do you know about that? She’s all barren there. The silver’s gone; and they found no eastern lode. You might be finding a bit of poor ore or a vein of tinstone, but nothing worth the digging.”

“How do you know what’s in the earth, in the rock under your feet, Per?”

“I know the signs, lad. Who should know better?”

“But if the signs are hidden?”

“Then the silver’s hidden.”

“Yet you know it is there, if you knew where to dig, if you could see into the rock. And what else is there? You find the metal, because you seek it, and dig for it. But what else might you find, deeper than the mine, if you sought, if you knew where to dig?”

“Rock,” said Per. “Rock, and rock, and rock.”

“And then?”

“And then? Hellfire, for all I know. Why else does it get hotter as the shafts go deeper? That’s what they say. Getting nearer hell.”

“No,” the astronomer said, clear and firm. “No. There is no hell beneath the rocks.”

“What is there, then, underneath it all?”

“The stars.”

“Ah,” said the miner, floored. He scratched his rough, tallow-clotted hair, and laughed. “There’s a poser,” he said, and stared at Guennar with pity and admiration. He knew Guennar was mad, but the size of his madness was a new thing to him, and admirable. “Will you find ’em then, the stars?”

“If I learn how to look,” Guennar said, so calmly that Per had no response but to heft his shovel and get back to loading the cart.

One morning when the miners came down they found Guennar still sleeping, rolled up in the battered cloak Count Bord had given him, and by him a strange object, a contraption made of silver tubing, tin struts and wires beaten from old headlamp-sockets, a frame of pick handles carefully carved and fitted, cogged wheels, a bit of twinkling glass. It was elusive, makeshift, delicate, crazy, intricate.

“What the devil’s that?”

They stood about and stared at the thing, the lights of their headlamps centering on it, a yellow beam sometimes flickering over the sleeping man as one or another glanced at him.

“He made it, sure.”

“Sure enough.”

“What for?”

“Don’t touch it.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

Roused by their voices, the astronomer sat up. The yellow beams of the candles brought his face out white against the dark. He rubbed his eyes and greeted them.

“What would that be, lad?”

He looked troubled or confused when he saw the object of their curiosity. He put a hand on it protectively, yet he looked at it himself without seeming to recognize it for a while. At last he said, frowning and speaking in a whisper, “It’s a telescope.”

“What’s that?”

“A device that makes distant things clear to the eye.”

“How come?” one of the miners asked, baffled. The astronomer answered him with growing assurance. “By virtue of certain properties of light and lenses. The eye is a delicate instrument, but it is blind to half the universe—far more than half. The night sky is black, we say: between the stars is void and darkness. But turn the telescope-eye on that space between the stars, and lo, the stars! Stars too faint and far for the eye alone to see, rank behind rank, glory beyond glory, out to the uttermost boundaries of the universe. Beyond all imagination, in the outer darkness, there is light: a great glory of sunlight. I have seen it. I have seen it, night after night, and mapped the stars, the beacons of God on the shores of darkness. And here too there is light! There is no place bereft of the light, the comfort and radiance of the creator spirit. There is no place that is outcast, outlawed, forsaken. There is no place left dark. Where the eyes of God have seen, there light is. We must go farther, we must look farther! There is light if we will see it. Not with eyes alone, but with the skill of the hands and the knowledge of the mind and the heart’s faith is the unseen revealed, and the hidden made plain. And all the dark earth shines like a sleeping star.”

He spoke with that authority which the miners knew belonged by rights to the priests, to the great words priests spoke in the echoing churches. It did not belong here, in the hole where they grubbed their living, in the words of a crazy fugitive. Later on, one talking to another, they shook their heads, or tapped them. Per said, “The madness is growing in him,” and Hanno said, “Poor soul, poor soul!” Yet there was not one of them who did not, also, believe what the astronomer had told them.

“Show me,” said old Bran, finding Guennar alone in a deep eastern drift, busy with his intricate device. It was Bran who had first followed Guennar, and brought him food, and led him back to the others.

The astronomer willingly stood aside and showed Bran how to hold the device pointing downward at the tunnel floor, and how to aim and focus it, and tried to describe its function and what Bran might see: all hesitantly, since he was not used to explaining to the ignorant, but without impatience when Bran did not understand.

“I don’t see nothing but the ground,” the old man said after a long and solemn observation with the instrument. “And the little dust and pebbles on it.”

“The lamp blinds your eyes, perhaps,” the astronomer said with humility. “It is better to look without light. I can do it because I have done it for so long. It is all practice—like placing the gads, which you always do right, and I always do wrong.”

“Aye. Maybe. Tell me what you see—” Bran hesitated. He had not long ago realized who Guennar must be. Knowing him to be a heretic made no difference, but knowing him to be a learned man made it hard to call him “mate” or “lad.” And yet here, and after all this time, he could not call him Master. There were times when, for all his mildness, the fugitive spoke with great words, gripping one’s soul, times when it would have been easy to call him Master. But it would have frightened him.

The astronomer put his hand on the frame of his mechanism and replied in a soft voice, “There are . . . constellations.”

“What’s that, constellations?”

The astronomer looked at Bran as if from a great way off, and said presently, “The Wain, the Scorpion, the Sickle by the Milky Way in summer, those are constellations. Patterns of stars, gatherings of stars, parenthoods, semblances . . .”

“And you see those here, with this?”

Still looking at him through the weak lamplight with clear brooding eyes, the astronomer nodded, and did not speak, but pointed downward, at the rock on which they stood, the hewn floor of the mine.

“What are they like?” Bran’s voice was hushed.

“I have only glimpsed them. Only for a moment. I have not learned the skill; it is a somewhat different skill . . . But they are there, Bran.”

Often now he was not in the stope where they worked, when they came to work, and did not join them even for their meal, though they always left him a share of food. He knew the ways of the mine now better than any of them, even Bran, not only the “living” mine but the “dead” one, the abandoned workings and exploratory tunnels that ran eastward, ever deeper, towards the caves. There he was most often; and they did not follow him.

When he did appear amongst them and they talked with him, they were more timid with him, and did not laugh.

One night as they were all going back with the last cartload to the main shaft, he came to meet them, stepping suddenly out of a crosscut to their right. As always he wore his ragged sheepskin coat, black with the clay and dirt of the tunnels. His fair hair had gone grey. His eyes were clear. “Bran,” he said, “come, I can show you now.”

“Show me what?”

“The stars. The stars beneath the rock. There’s a great constellation in the stope on the old fourth level, where the white granite cuts down through the black.”

“I know the place.”

“It’s there: underfoot, by that wall of white rock. A great shining and assembly of stars. Their radiance beats up through the darkness. They are like the faces of dancers, the eyes of angels. Come and see them, Bran!”

The miners stood there, Per and Hanno with backs braced to hold the cart from rolling: stooped men with tired, dirty faces and big hands bent and hardened by the grip of shovel and pick and sledge. They were embarrassed, compassionate, impatient.

“We’re just quitting. Off home to supper. Tomorrow,” Bran said.

The astronomer looked from one face to another and said nothing.

Hanno said in his hoarse gentle voice, “Come up with us, for this once, lad. It’s dark night out, and likely raining; it’s November now; no soul will see you if you come and sit at my hearth, for once, and eat hot food, and sleep beneath a roof and not under the heavy earth all by yourself alone!”

Guennar stepped back. It was as if a light went out, as his face went into shadow. “No,” he said. “They will burn out my eyes.”

“Leave him be,” said Per, and set the heavy ore-cart moving towards the shaft.

“Look where I told you,” Guennar said to Bran. “The mine is not dead. Look with your own eyes.”

“Aye. I’ll come with you and see. Good night!”

“Good night,” said the astronomer, and turned back to the side-tunnel as they went on. He carried no lamp or candle; they saw him one moment, darkness the next.

In the morning he was not there to meet them. He did not come.

Bran and Hanno sought him, idly at first, then for one whole day. They went as far down as they dared, and came at last to the entrance of the caves, and entered, calling sometimes, though in the great caverns even they, miners all their lives, dared not call aloud because of the terror of the endless echoes in the dark.

“He has gone down,” Bran said. “Down farther. That’s what he said. Go farther, you must go farther, to find the light.”

“There is no light,” Hanno whispered. “There was never light here. Not since the world’s creation.”

But Bran was an obstinate old man, with a literal and credulous mind; and Per listened to him. One day the two went to the place the astronomer had spoken of, where a great vein of hard light granite that cut down through the darker rock had been left untouched, fifty years ago, as barren stone. They re-timbered the roof of the old stope where the supports had weakened, and began to dig, not into the white rock but down, beside it; the astronomer had left a mark there, a kind of chart or symbol drawn with candle-black on the stone floor. They came on silver ore a foot down, beneath the shell of quartz; and under that—all eight of them working now—the striking picks laid bare the raw silver, the veins and branches and knots and nodes shining among broken crystals in the shattered rock, like stars and gatherings of stars, depth below depth without end, the light.

© 1974 by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Originally published in Orbit 14, edited by Damon Knight.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Ursula K. Le Guin is the author of innumerable SF and fantasy classics, such as The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, The Dispossessed, and A Wizard of Earthsea (and the others in the Earthsea Cycle). She has been named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, and is the winner of five Hugos, six Nebulas, two World Fantasy Awards, and twenty Locus Awards. She’s also a winner of the Newbery Medal, The National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, and was named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress.

Division of Labor
Benjamin Roy Lambert

No one said anything, but Sull could tell they were all a little jealous when he lost his arms and legs. The arms went first, the left one during a bath and the right one a few days later, while he was being fed. Then both legs went at once, which was rare, and Sull was proud of it. He was sitting in a marketing meeting with Glenda and Farook when suddenly his legs quivered and then turned into a slightly viscous liquid that ran out of his trousers like toothpaste from a tube. The liquid ran down the drain under the table with a soft slurping sound.

Renny thought of Sull’s smug face while he was doing his pull-ups and squats and planks. Sull’s smug face when they wheeled him into the office the next morning in a new suit that bundled up his hips and torso like wrapping paper, just his little bald head peeping out at the top. “Think how much I’ll be able to get done,” Sull had said, winking through his little gold-rimmed glasses, “without having to worry about grabbing things and walking places, or what to do with my hands while I talk.”

The whole business—not just Sull but the whole business—bothered Renny so much he was seeing a therapist. The therapist was just a head connected to an arm by a thin strip of tissue (the head asked questions, the arm took notes), but he had a good rank on the Value Index. “What is it about . . . efficiency that bothers you so much?” he’d asked during their first session.

“That’s their word, not mine. Some of it I think it comes from my mother. She was a history teacher.” The therapist let the corners of his mouth twitch down, slightly. Renny paused for a moment and cleared his throat. “A history teacher, an athlete, a musician . . . I could go on. That’s not the point though. The point is I grew up with a certain awareness of history, and how people used to live. You know there used to be a quality called being well-rounded. It was a compliment for someone who knew how to do many different things, not just one thing.”

“Many different things,” said the therapist, “but not very well.”

And of course, what do you know, when Renny went up against Sull for the next promotion, it was Sull who won out. “Don’t take it so hard,” said Jesse at Sull’s promotion party, “you never stood a chance.” She leaned closer. She had a bony face and tiny, attractive eyes. “I’ve been thinking,” she whispered, “about giving up math.”

“Math?” murmured Renny, not really listening. He was staring at the dimly lit ceiling of the bar.

“Not all of it, I’ve just stopped doing my higher function review sessions every day. It’s exhausting, you finish work and then you have to go do quadratic equations. If I skip them I have more energy, and plus they keep increasing the tax on biomatter, so the less I cost the company . . . I haven’t done my reviews in more than a month now, and my contribution-to-cost ratio is going up.”

Renny’s eyes had come down from the ceiling and focused on her. “How does it feel?” he asked.

Jesse shrugged and sipped on her drink. “You notice it more than you think you will. I mean, I don’t do complex math problems here in marketing, but for example, the other day I had to do an analysis on how often we wanted to run the green cherry banner ad on the Valex. I could feel myself reaching for something that wasn’t there. You know, like when you haven’t noticed you’ve reached the top of the stairs.” A sudden gout of clear liquid flowed down from her left nostril and onto the collar of her shirt. “Damn,” she said softly.

“Is that how it drains?” asked Renny.

The next day he came to work early, went into his office, and locked the door. He was Senior Manager, Mid-Atlantic Marketing, for Cherry Bomb International, distributor of fine cherries. Cherries of all colors, flavors, textures, and nutritive values. A giant poster of their all-time bestseller, the Silver Ghost, had been tacked to the rear wall, next to a small window that looked out on nothing. Renny kept the lights off and opened a drawer. He put his hand in and groped around until he found his feeling board. He ran his fingers over it and it woke up. The flat surface became elaborately ridged. “Three circles interlocking enclosed by a square,” said Renny.

“Co-rrect,” groaned the feeling board’s ancient vocal circuits. Renny would have bought a new one, but he couldn’t afford it. The best models couldn’t be had for any price: You had to have connections. After he was done with the feeling board he turned on the lights and spent a half-hour reading a quarterly journal of analytic philosophy, then another half-hour reading in German. He looked up when he heard a knock on the door.

A slender young man with all of his parts was standing on the other side of the office’s glass wall. The man waved tentatively and Renny shoved his book under a stack of papers, as if it was one of those dirty magazines showing giant penises sticking themselves into giant vaginas. Renny got up and opened the door a crack. “Can I help you?”

“I’m Platt. I work one floor up, in Strategy. Look, I know this might sound strange, but I’m an admirer of yours. I also come to work early, and sometimes when I’m down here getting a coffee—your machine makes better coffee than ours—I see you doing your exercises. You really put a lot of effort into it.”

Renny nodded slowly. “Thank you, I guess. I’m not trying to show off here or anything, just taking care of business. I didn’t notice anyone else here.”

Platt gave a funny smile that was too wide. He was wearing a diamond choker that lit up when he smiled. “There are a few of us who come early. I think it’s pretty common, you know, for people who want to stay in shape.”

Renny didn’t answer. He’d spent a lot of time thinking how stupid the majority of people were, and on the few occasions he met someone who agreed with him it made him feel uneasy. “Well, thanks for saying hello,” he said, and began to back away into his office.

“One thing I wanted to mention,” said Platt, leaning forward.

“Yes?”

“We have a kind of club, for people who work in the building and who want to stay whole. Called the Dawn Brigade. We meet every middle-week-day, right around, you know, dawn, on the roof. It’d be great if you could come by.”

Renny said something polite and closed the office door. He didn’t go that week, or the week after. When he told his therapist the man said, “It could be a good decision not to go, Renny. Sometimes, being around people who share our obsessions only makes those obsessions stronger, and harder to control.”

Renny thought of Sull’s smug face while he ran laps around his apartment, and while he copied drawings out of an old art book, and while he looked at his rank on the Valex and saw it was down another ten places.

At dawn the roof was cold and windswept. Renny saw a group of young people huddled by the side of a giant AC unit and walked over to them. Only Platt was like Renny, still with all his parts. The rest all had the usual little things missing here and there: a finger, an eye, or something else below the skin or in the skull. Renny was surprised to see Jesse there too. “I was panicking at how big an effect losing my advanced math was having,” she told him, “so I tried to go back to doing my reviews, but I couldn’t. You know how some people say that if you lose something you can get it back sometimes, but it didn’t work for me, at least. There’s just an empty hole in my head where that stuff used to be.” She laughed as if she was gathering herself together. “Now my new resolution is to keep as much as myself as I can for as long as I can.”

Platt called the meeting to order and introduced Renny. “To start us off today, I was thinking—as someone who’s been doing this a lot longer than any of us, maybe you could share some tips.”

Renny stared at them. “Well,” he began, “one thing I do is, I always keep a little metal disk in my pocket—you can get something like this at a hardware store—and when I have a few minutes to spare I do tricks with it using my hands and fingers, like this, see?” He showed them. “And every night before I go to bed I make sure to memorize a string of a hundred random numbers. Then I test myself in the morning.”

“What do you do,” said a short man with dyed teeth, “about the soft skills, like empathy?”

Renny nodded. “Those are hard. Novels can be good, or going to bars and making yourself listen to strangers—you know, imagine yourself living their lives, and that kind of thing.”

After the meeting, Jesse came up to him and asked if she could run with him sometimes. Her own apartment was too small to run in, and she didn’t want to try to do it outside and get a charge for inefficient activity. Soon she was coming over every evening after work. Renny also began to see more of Platt. Now, most mornings, the younger man would stop by his office, bringing a mug of coffee for Renny and chatting for a few minutes before heading back upstairs. Renny didn’t enjoy these visits, but he felt his ground for objecting was so weak that he couldn’t bring himself to avoid them.

“If I’m not putting too fine a point on it,” he told the therapist, “he thinks he’s better than me. He thinks I’m a nice guy and all, and he admires me for keeping in shape. But to him, if I had any balls I’d be out on the front lines, protesting the Biomatter Act or something. Firebombing clinics. Hell if I know.”

The therapist tapped on his desk with his pen, which meant he wanted you to think he was thinking. “So for this man Platt,” he said finally, “there can be no separation between the personal and the political?” The head smiled. “Maybe what you find distasteful is just your old nemesis, efficiency, presenting itself to you in another form. After all, if you think you have found the correct way to live, which is more efficient, from the perspective of utility: perfecting yourself or perfecting society?”

When Renny got home Jesse was waiting for him, and they ran their small laps together, barefoot to keep the neighbors from complaining. Afterwards Renny did his strength routine while Jesse sat at his desk and checked the Valex. Sometimes it worried him that she liked to rest after running, instead of working out with him. He didn’t want her to lose the strength in her core muscles, like the young people you sometimes saw creeping down the street, curled up like worms over their walkers. When he thought about her like that he felt tender. “Who’s got the first rank in marketing?” he asked, holding a plank.

“It’s still that Korean guy, Jee-sun Choi. Lately all my tagged categories are pretty static. Quela Allred is still best in personal charm, Drexel Phrase is still best in strength, Marne Smith is still best in engineering.”

Renny let his plank go and lay down on the floor, catching his breath. A drone drifted in the window, sniffed for biomatter to collect, and drifted back out. “It would be interesting,” said Renny finally, “if there was one big rank, in everything. Just, where does everyone rank in every category, averaged together.”

Jesse gave him a measuring look. “I don’t think I’d like that,” she said. “It’s enough of a pisser knowing how bad you are at one particular thing.”

A week later they would have slept together, but Jesse had lost the ability in her twenties, she told him. Renny tried to do what he imagined a gentle, sensitive person would do. Later he said, “I want to take you to meet my mother.”

That first-day-not-working they walked uptown to a small private clinic. This was where a good portion of Renny’s salary went. A doctor who was two giant hands and a head with a swollen cranium guided them down the hall to a wooden door with a small window set into it. Through the window they could see a cozy, sunlit room; a small bed stood against the wall and a head was lying there, attached to a feeding bag. It had no mouth and only slits for a nose, and no ears. Small swirls of salt-and-pepper hair swept out from under a snug pink bonnet, and beneath them were two thin eyebrows and two large, blue eyes. A pair of mechanical hands was holding a book up for the eyes to see. As Renny and Jesse watched, the eyes blinked once, and with a loud whir the hands deftly flipped the page.

Shortly afterwards Renny had his last conversation with Platt. Platt’s visits had been getting less frequent, but he still stopped by Renny’s office in the morning once a week or so. “Did you see the top news story on the Valex?” he asked.

“No,” said Renny, “tell me about it.”

Platt leaned against the wall. “A massive exposé on misappropriation of the biomatter,” he said. “Three members of the Ruling Body were caught on tape with clones of themselves.”

Renny shrugged. “Maybe they’ll get recycled, but then whoever replaces them will be just as corrupt, and nothing will change.”

Platt sighed and flopped into a chair. “If everyone has that attitude, then nothing can really change,” he said. “They tell us that for maximum efficiency all biomatter must go where it’s needed most. So what’s so efficient about duplicating some leech on the Ruling Body?” He looked around. “How long have you been in this office?” he asked.

“About five, six years.”

Platt nodded. “Five or six years without a promotion. How many times have they passed you over?”

“A few.”

Platt ran a hand through his hair. “See, that’s the problem. I bet the guys who got promoted over you were all missing something.”

Renny nodded, thinking of Sull, fat and wormy like a grub.

“The problem is, the only people who get ahead now are the people missing arms and mouths, people who can’t see color, or taste anything anymore. That’s who our heroes are these days.”

Later, lying in bed next to Jesse, trying to feel her stomach muscles for soft spots without her noticing, Renny told her about how upset Platt had seemed. She turned toward him. “Do you know about his family?”

“What about them?”

“They’re rich, is all. Everything that’s so hard for us, he has help with. He’s got private tutors to make sure he reads books in foreign languages. He even has a machine that runs electricity through his muscles while he sleeps, to keep them fit. He’s an interesting guy, but I think he’s got a complex.”

He closed his eyes. “I’ve been thinking a lot about how he takes all of these issues so personally. Maybe I used to be that way, and I just got ground down. Do you think I’m avoiding some kind of duty?”

She shook her head. “No.”

A few days later Renny came back from lunch to find police tape blocking the entrance to the office. He went to a café, and saw footage from the office security camera playing on the Valex. It was a breaking news story, the first ranking news story of the hour. A group of workers were shown, standing near each other, probably gossiping. Text underneath them read: “Cherry Bomb International Internal Footage.” At the edge of the screen a man appeared moving quickly, awkwardly holding his jacket shut. He stumbled, caught his balance, and just as the other workers were turning toward him, he threw something: a large plastic bundle. It struck a woman in the chest and burst, splashing thick fluid all over her and the surrounding workers. Text flashed: “Man attacks co-workers with raw biomatter.” In the footage a man was lying in the center of a pool of fluid, trying to stand up as it sensed him and seeped into him. Tendons stood out on his neck. From the stump where his left arm used to be a new arm was growing, flapping and writhing. Platt was standing over the man, screaming at him. A voice spoke over the footage “Shown here is the man police have identified as the perpetrator, Frederick Platt. Witnesses report that that he was yelling ‘Why are you struggling? Why are you screaming? Don’t you want to be whole?’” The footage cut to a reporter.

Renny left the café without drinking his coffee. The police picked him up at his apartment that night.

They brought Jesse in the next day. At first she was left alone in her cell, if you could call it a cell. It was more a like a well-furnished studio apartment, with a comfortable bed, a bookshelf, and a small breakfast table. There was no clock to keep track of time, so she had no idea how long she had been waiting when two men, dressed in powder blue policing jumpsuits, let themselves in. Each was carrying a folding chair, and they opened them and sat down without speaking. Each had a face with only a single feature. The first had enormous drooping ears that looked like runnels of candle wax going down the sides of his head. The other had giant bulging eyes. She told them exactly what she knew and how she knew it. There was no point in holding back—either she was innocent or she was guilty, depending on how they wanted to frame it. The man with the bulging eyes asked the questions, and the man with the drooping ears took notes. After each question Ears would pass his notes to Eyes, who would read them and nod before asking the next item on the list.

Then there was another long period of solitude. Jesse began to feel anxious. It was hard to stay active in the small comfortable room. It might have been easier in a spartan cell.

The next person who visited her looked just as whole as Renny. He was slender and elegant, with a head of closed-cropped black hair and a crooked, flattened nose that whistled when he breathed in. Jesse had never seen anyone with a deformity before, and she couldn’t help staring, taking in the way the small changes to the lines of his nose affected the expression and feel of his face.

“Have you heard what your boyfriend is up to?” the man asked.

“You mean Renny? No,” said Jesse. “I don’t get any news in here.”

The man pulled a rolled up screen out of his pocket and flattened it out on the table. It was showing the Valex news rankings. Number four was Renny. He was on strike. “Oh no,” whispered Jesse. The video showed Renny sitting in complete stillness at the center of a cell that looked like hers. He must have been sitting like that for days, because parts of his hands and legs were missing. Jesse shook her head. “He’s so stupid.”

The man shrugged. “I don’t agree. Most action is waste. Just like all that running you two were doing. Yes, I read your statement. Do you know that running like that you burn off enough calories to feed a young child for a day? And for what? Just vanity. At least with no action, most of the biomatter eventually gets recycled.”

She went and sat on the soft bed. “You look pretty fucking fit,” she said.

The man began bouncing on the balls of his feet and shadowboxing. “I have to be,” he said, “in case I need to fight bad guys.”

He came back later. This time Renny was the first ranked news story, and she could see fluid running off of him like sweat on a hot day. Big parts of him weren’t falling off at once. He was just shrinking. He was collapsing into himself like rotten ice. Jesse looked at his eyes and tried to judge how much of his brain was left. Did he even know why he was doing what he was doing anymore? But the will remained. “Why don’t you release him? Release us?” Jesse asked the man.

“We were going to release both of you. Then he started this nonsense. We don’t think you knew anything about what Platt was going to do. You’re just someone with wrong-headed beliefs.”

“Can’t you at least stop them from filming him?”

The man made a pained expression. “Look at this jail cell,” he said. “If we are a security state, and I’m not saying we’re not, we’re definitely one on the down slope.”

Jesse held back from crying. When the man left she did her push-ups, squats, and planks. She made a model of the room in her head and practiced rotating it. She didn’t have willpower like Renny. But she was strong, too. He could only think in extremes. That was also a kind of brokenness.

Finally the time came for her to be let go. The man came back and led her through a twisting series of hallways. “I guess this means Renny is finished,” she said.

The man nodded and smiled. “He’s sent his matter back to help someone who can make better use of it.”

When they reached the door leading outside Jesse stopped and looked him up and down. “Don’t you worry that you’re holding yourself back, looking like that? Aren’t you worried about your next promotion?”

The man smiled. “No,” he said, “the rules work differently past a certain point.” Then he guided her through the door, which locked behind her with a dry click.

Outside it was cold and crisp. Jesse found herself standing on the sidewalk of an empty city street. The only other figure was a well-dressed man, walking slowly toward her. His hand clasped a gold-headed cane. When he passed her a single eye looked up at her wetly from the junction of his arm and his leg.

© 2013 by Benjamin Roy Lambert.

Benjamin Roy Lambert was born in Washington, DC. At present he lives in Johannesburg with his wife and newborn son. A Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Mali), he has spent the majority of his career working on issues of business and development in emerging economies. He holds Master’s degrees in business and in public administration from Harvard University. “Division of Labor” is his first published story.

Mulberry Boys
Margo Lanagan

So night comes on. I make my own fire, because why would I want to sit at Phillips’s, next to that pinned-down mulberry?

Pan-flaps, can you make pan-flaps? Phillips plopped down a bag of fine town flour and gave me a look that said, Bet you can’t. And I’m certainly too important to make them. So pan-flaps I make in his little pan, and some of them I put hot meat-slice on, and some cheese, and some jam, and that will fill us, for a bit. There’s been no time to hunt today, just as Ma said, while she packed and packed all sorts of these treats into a sack for me—to impress Phillips, perhaps, more than to show me favour, although that too. She doesn’t mind me being chosen to track and hunt with the fellow, now that I’m past the age where he can choose me for the other thing.

We are stuck out here the night, us and our catch. If I were alone I would go back; I can feel and smell my way, if no stars and moon will show me. But once we spread this mulberry wide on the ground and fixed him, and Phillips lit his fire and started his fiddling and feeding him leaves, I knew we were to camp. I did not ask; I dislike his sneering manner of replying to me. I only waited and saw.

He’s boiled the water I brought up from the torrent, and filled it with clanking, shining things—little tools, it looks like, as far as I can see out of the corner of my eye. I would not gratify him with looking directly. I stare into my own fire, the forest blank black beyond it and only fire-lit smoke above, no sky though the clouds were clearing last I looked. I get out my flask and have a pull of fire-bug, to settle my discontentments. It’s been a long day and a weird, and I wish I was home, instead of out here with a half-man, and the boss of us all watching my every step.

“Here, boy,” he says. He calls me boy the way you call a dog. He doesn’t even look up at me to say it.

I cross from my fire to his. I don’t like to look at those creatures, mulberries, so I fix instead on Phillips, his shining hair-waves and his sharp nose, the floret of silk in his pocket that I know is a green-blue bright as a stout-pigeon’s throat, but now is just a different orange in the fire’s glow. His white, weak hands, long-fingered, big-knuckled—oh, they give me a shudder, just as bad as a mulberry would.

“Do you know what a loblolly boy is?”

He knows I don’t. I hate him and his words. “Some kind of insulting thing, no doubt,” I say.

“No, no!” He looks up surprised from examining the brace, which is pulled tight to the mulberry’s puffed-up belly, just below the navel, when it should dangle on an end of silk. “It’s a perfectly legitimate thing. Boy on a ship, usually. Works for the surgeon.”

And what is a surgeon? I am not going to ask him. I stare down at him, wanting another pull from my flask.

“Never mind,” he says crossly. “Sit.” And he waves where; right by the mulberry, opposite himself.

Must I? I have already chased the creature five ways wild today; I’ve already treed him and climbed that tree and lowered him on a rope. I’m sick of the sight of him, his round stary face, his froggy body, his feeble conversation, trying to be friendly.

But I sit. I wonder sometimes if I’m weak-minded, that even one person makes such a difference to me, what I see, what I do. When I come to the forest alone, I can see the forest clear, and feel it, and everything in it. If I bring Tray or Connar, it becomes the ongoing game of us as big men in this world—with the real men left behind in the village, so they don’t show us up. When I come with Frida Birch it is all about the inside of her mysterious mind, what she can be thinking, what has she noticed that I haven’t about some person, some question she has that would never occur to me. It’s as if I cannot hold to my own self, to my own forest, if another person is with me.

“Feed him some more,” says Phillips, and points to the sack beside me. “As many as he can take. We might avoid a breakage yet if we can stuff enough into him.”

I untie the sack, and put aside the first layer, dark leaves that have been keeping the lower, paler ones moist. I roll a leaf-pill—the neater I make it, the less I risk being bitten, or having to touch lip or tongue. I wave it under his nose, touch it to his lips, and he opens and takes it in, good mulberry.

Phillips does this and that. Between us the mulberry’s stomach grumbles and tinkles with the foreign food he’s kept down. Between leaf-rollings, I have another pull. “God, the smell of that!” says Phillips, and spares a hand from his preparations to wave it away from his face.

“It’s good,” I say. “It’s the best. It’s Nat Culloden’s.”

“How old are you anyway?” He cannot read it off me. Perhaps he deals only with other men—I know people like that, impatient of the young. Does he have children? I’d hate to be his son.

“Coming up fifteen,” I say.

He mutters something. I can’t hear, but I’m sure it is not flattering to me.

Now there’s some bustle about him. He pulls on a pair of very thin-stretching gloves, paler even than his skin; now his hands are even more loathsome. “Right,” he says. “You will hold him down when I tell you. That is your job.”

“He’s down.” Look at the spread cross of him; he couldn’t be any flatter.

“You will hold him still,” says Phillips. “For the work. When I say.”

He pulls the brace gently; the skein comes forth as it should, but—“Hold him,” says Phillips, and I hook one leg over the mulberry’s thigh and spread a hand on his chest. He makes a kind of warning moan. Phillips pulls on, slowly and steadily like a mother. “Hold him,” as the moaning rises, buzzes under my hand. “Christ above, if he makes this much of a fuss now.”

He pulls and pulls, but in a little while no more silk will come. He winds what he has on a spindle and clamps it, tests the skein once more. “No? Well. Now I will cut. Boy, I have nothing for his pain.” He looks at me as if I forgot to bring it. “And I need him utterly still, so as not to cut the silk or his innards. Here.” He hands me a smooth white stick, of some kind of bone. “Put that crosswise between his teeth, give him something to bite on.”

I do so; the teeth are all clagged with leaf-scraps, black in this light. Mulberries’ faces are the worst thing about them, little round old-children’s faces, neither man nor woman. And everything they are thinking shows clear as water, and this one is afraid; he doesn’t know what’s happening, what’s about to be done to him. Well, I’m no wiser. I turn back to Phillips.

“Now get a good weight on him, both ends.”

Gingerly I arrange myself. He may be neither man nor woman, but still the creature is naked, and clammy as a frog in the night air.

“Come on,” says Phillips. He’s holding his white hands up, as if the mulberry is too hot to touch. “You’re plenty big enough. Spread yourself out there, above and below. You will need to press here, too, with your hand.” He points, and points again. “And this foot will have some work to do on this far leg. Whatever is loose will fight against what I’m doing, understand?”

So he says, to a boy who’s wrestled tree-snakes so long that his father near fainted to see them, who has jumped a shot stag and ridden it and killed it riding. Those are different, though; those are wild, they have some dignity. What’s to be gained subduing a mulberry, that is gelded and a fool already? Where’s the challenge in that, and the pride upon having done it?

“Shouldn’t you be down there?” I nod legs-wards.

“Whatever for, boy?”

“This is to let the food out, no?”

“It is to let the food out, yes.” He cannot speak without making me lesser.

“Well, down there is where food comes out, yours and mine.”

“Pity sake, boy, I am not undoing all that. I will take it out through his silk-hole, is the plan.”

Now I am curled around the belly, with nowhere else to look but at Phillips’s doings. All his tools and preparations are beyond him, next to the fire; from over there he magics up a paper packet. He tears it open, pulls from it a small wet cloth or paper, and paints the belly with that; the smell nips at my nostrils. Then he brings out a bright, light-as-a-feather-looking knife, the blade glinting at the end of a long handle.

“Be ready,” he says.

He holds the silk aside, and sinks the blade into the flesh beside it. The mulberry-boy turns to rock underneath me; he spits out the stick, and howls to the very treetops.

Mulberry boys we call them. I don’t know why, for some begin as girls, and they are neither one nor the other once they come out of Phillips’s hut by the creek. They all look the same, as chickens look all the same, or goats. Nonsense, says Alia the goat woman, I know my girls each one, by name and nature and her pretty face. And I guess the mothers, who tend the mulberries, might know them apart. This one is John Barn, or once was called that; none of them truly have names once they’ve been taken.

Once a year I notice them, when Phillips comes to choose the new ones and to make them useful, from the boys among us who are not yet sprouted towards men, and the girls just beginning to change shape. The rest of the year, the mulberries live in their box, and the leaves go in, and the silk comes out on its spindles, and that is all there is to it.

They grow restless when he comes. Simple as they are, they recognise him. They can smell their balls in his pocket, says James Pombo, and we hush him, but something like that is true; they remember.

Some have struggled or wandered before, and these are tied to chairs in the box, but you have to watch the others. Though they have not much equipment for it, they have a lot of time to think, and because their life is much the same each day and month and year, they see the pattern and the holes in it through which they might wangle their way.

Why the John Barn one should take it into his head after all these years, I don’t know. He was always mulberry, ever since I knew to know, always just one of the milling amiables in that warm box.

Oh, I remember him, says Pa. Little straw-haired runabout like all them Barns. Always up a tree. Climbed the top of Great Grandpa when he couldn’t have been—what, more than three years, Ma? Because his sister Gale did it, and she told him he was too little. That’ll send a boy up a tree.

Last year when I was about to sprout, it was the first year Phillips came instead of his father. When he walked in among us we were most uneasy at the size of him, for he is delicately made, hardly taller than a mulberry himself, and similar shaped to them except in lacking a paunch. Apart from the shrinkage, though, you would think him the same man as his father. He wore the same fine clothes, as neat on him as if sewn to his body directly, and the fabrics so fine you can hardly see their weave. He had the same wavy hair, but brown instead of silver, and a beard, though not a proper one, trimmed almost back to his chin.

The mothers were all behind us and some of the fathers too, putting their children forward. He barely looked at me, I remember, but moved straight on to the Thaw children; there are lots of them and they are very much of the mulberry type already, without you sewing a stitch on them. I remember being insulted. The man had not bothered with me; how could he know I was not what he wanted, from that quick glance? But also I was ashamed to be so obviously useless, so wrong for his purposes—because whatever those purposes were, he was from the town, and he was powerfuller in his slenderness and his city clothes than was any bulky man among us, and everyone was afraid of him. I wanted a man like that to recognize me as of consequence, and he had not.

But then Ma put her arm over my shoulder and clamped me to her, my back against her front. We both watched Phillips among the Thaws, turning them about, dividing some of them off for closer inspection. The chosen ones—Hinny and Dull Toomy, it was, that time, those twins—stood well apart, Pa Toomy next to them arms folded and face closed. They looked from one of us to another, not quite sure whether to arrange their faces proudly, or to cry.

Because it is the end of things, if you get chosen. It is the end of your line, of course—all your equipment for making children is taken off you and you are sewn up below. But it is also the end of any food but the leaves—fresh in the spring and summer, sometimes in an oiled mash through autumn if you are still awake then. And it is the end of play, because you become stupid; you forget the rules of all the games, and how to converse in any but a very simple way, observing about the weather and not much more. You just stay in your box, eating your leaves and having your stuff drawn off you, which we sell, through Phillips, in the town.

It is no kind of life, and I was glad, then, that I had not been taken up for it. And Ma was glad too, breathing relieved above me as we watched him sort and discard and at length choose Arvie Thaw. I could feel Ma’s gladness in the back of my head, her heart knocking hard in her chest, even though all she had done was stand there and seem to accept whatever came.

While we tracked John Barn today, I was all taken up impressing Phillips. The forest and paths presented me trace after trace, message after message, to relay to the town-man, so’s he could see what a good tracker I was. I felt proud of myself for knowing, and scornful of him for not—yet I was afraid, too, that I would put a foot wrong, that he would somehow catch me out, that he would see something I had missed and make me a nobody again, and worthy of his impatience.

So John Barn himself was not much more to me than he’d always been; he was even somewhat less than other animals I hunted, for he had not even the wit to cut off the path at any point, and he left tracks and clues almost as if he wanted us to catch him, things he had chewed, and spat out or brought up from his stomach, little piles of findings—stones, leaves, seed-pods—wet-bright in the light rain. He might as well have lit beacon-fires after himself.

Climbing up to him in the tree, I could see his froggy paunch pouching out either side of the branch, and his skinny white legs around it, and then of course his terrible face watching me.

“Which one are you?” he said in that high, curious way they have. They can never remember a name.

“I am George,” I said, “of the Treadlaws.”

“Evening’s coming on, George,” he said, watching as I readied the rope. This was why I had been brought, besides for my tracking. Mulberries won’t flee or resist anyone smaller than themselves (unless he is Phillips, of course, all-over foreign), but send a grown man after them and they will throw themselves off a cliff or into a torrent, or climb past pursuing up a tree like this. It is something about the smell of a grown man sets them off, which is why men cannot go into the box for the silk, but only mothers.

I busied myself with the practicalities, binding Barn and lowering him to Phillips, which was no small operation, so I distracted myself from my revulsion that way. And then, when I climbed down, Phillips took up all the air in the clearing and in my mind with his presence and purposefulness, which I occupied myself sulking at. Then when I had to press the creature down, to lie with him, lie on him, everything in me was squirming away from the touch but Phillips’s will was on me like an iron, pinning me as fast as we’d pinned the mulberry, and I was too angry and unhappy at being made as helpless as John Barn, to think how he himself might be finding it, crushed by the weight of me.

But when he stiffened and howled, it was as if I had been asleep to John Barn and he woke me, as if he had been motionless disguised in the forest’s dappled shadows, but then my eye had picked out his frame, distinct and live and sensible in there, never to be unseen again. All that he had said, that we had dismissed as so much noise, came back to me: I don’t like that man, George. Yes, tie me tight, for I will struggle when you put me near him. It’s getting dark. It hurts me to stretch flat like this. My stomach hurts. An apple and a radish, I have kept both down. I stole them through a window; there was meat there too; meat was what I mostly wanted. But I could not reach it. Oh, it hurts, George. I had done as Phillips did, and not met the mulberry’s eye and not answered, doing about him what I needed to do, but now all his mutterings sprang out at me as having been said by a person, a person like me and like Phillips; there were three of us here, not two and a creature, not two and a snared rabbit, or a shot and struggling deer.

And the howl was not animal noise but voice, with person and feeling behind it. It went through me the way the pain had gone through John Barn, freezing me as Phillips’s blade in his belly froze him, so that I was locked down there under the realising, with all my skin a-crawl.

I stare at Phillips’s hands, working within their false skins. The fire beyond him lights his work and throws the shadows across the gleaming-painted hill-round of Barn’s belly. Phillips cuts him like a cloth or like a cake, with just such swiftness and intent; he does not even do as you do when hunting, and speak to the creature you have snared or caught and are killing, and explain why it must die. The wound runs, and he catches the runnings with his wad of flock and cloth, absentmindedly and out of a long-practiced skill. He bends close and examines what his cutting has revealed to him, in the cleft, in the deeps, of the belly of John Barn.

“Good,” he says—to himself, not to me or Barn. “Perfect.”

He puts his knife in there, and what he does in there is done in me as well, I feel so strongly the tremor it makes, the fear it plays up out of Barn’s frame, plucking him, rubbing him, like a fiddle-string. His breath, behind me, halts and hops with the fear.

Phillips pierces something with a pop. Barn yelps, surprised. Phillips sits straighter, and waves his hand over the wound as he waved away the smell of my grog before. I catch a waft of shit-smell and then it’s gone, floated up warm away.

He goes to his instruments. “That’s probably the worst of it, for the moment,” he says to them. “You can sit up if you like. Stay by, though; you never know when he’ll panic.”

I sit up slowly, a different boy from the one who lay down. I half-expect my own insides to come pouring out of me. John Barn’s belly gapes open, the wound dark and glistening, filling with blood. Beyond it, his flesh slopes away smooth as a wooden doll between his weakling thighs, which tremble and tremble.

Phillips returns to the wound, another little tool in his hand—I don’t know what it is, only that it’s not made for cutting. I put my hand on Barn’s chest, trying to move as smoothly and bloodlessly as Phillips.

“George, what has he done to me?” John Barn makes to look down himself.

Quick as light, I put my hand to his sweated brow, and press his head to the ground. “He’s getting that food out,” I say. “If it stays in there, it’ll fester and kill you. He’s helping you.”

“Feed him some more,” says Phillips, and bends to his work. “Keep on that.”

So I lie, propped up on one elbow, rolling mulberry pills and feeding them to Barn. He chews, dutifully; he weeps, tears running back over his ears into his thin hair. He swallows the mulberry mush down his child-neck. Hush, I nearly say to him, but Phillips is there, so I only think it, and attend to the feeding, rolling the leaves, putting them one by one into Barn’s obedient mouth.

I can’t help but be aware, though, of what the man is doing there, down at the wound. For one thing, besides the two fires it is the only visible activity, the only movement besides my own. For another, for all that the sight of those blood-tipped white hands going about their work repels me, their skill and care, and the life they seem to have of their own, are something to see. It’s like watching Pa make damselfly flies in the firelight in the winter, each finger independently knowing where to be and go, and the face above all eyes and no expression, the mind taken up with this small complication.

The apple and the radish, all chewed and reduced and cooked smelly by John Barn’s body’s heat, are caught in the snarled silk. Phillips must draw them, with the skein, slowly lump by lump from Barn’s innards, up into the firelight where they dangle and shine like some unpleasant necklace. Sprawled beside John Barn, in his breathing and his bracing himself I feel the size of every bead of that necklace large and small, before I see it drawn up into the firelight on the shining strands. Phillips frowns above, fire-fuzz at his eyebrow, a long streak of orange light down his nose, his closed lips holding all his thoughts, all his knowledge, in his head—and any feelings he might have about this task. Is he pleased? Is he revolted? Angry? There is no way to tell.

“Do you have something for their pain, then,” I say, “when you make them into mulberries?”

“Oh yes,” he says to the skein, “they are fully anaesthetized then.” He hears my ignorance in my silence, or sees it in my stillness. “I put them to sleep.”

“Like a chicken,” I say, to show him that I know something.

“Not at all like that. With a chemical.”

All is quiet but for fire-crackle, and John Barn’s breath in his nose, and his teeth crushing the leaves.

“How do you learn that, about the chemicals, and mulberry-making? And mulberry-fixing, like this?”

“Long study,” says Phillips, peering into the depths to see how the skein is emerging. “Long observation at my father’s elbow. Careful practice under his tutelage. Years,” he finishes and looks at me, with something like a challenge, or perhaps already triumph.

“So could you unmake one?” I say, just to change that look on him.

“Could I? Why would I?”

I make myself ignore the contempt in that. “Supposing you had a reason.”

He draws out a slow length of silk, with only two small lumps in it. “Could I, now?” he says less scornfully. “I’ve never considered it. Let me think.” He examines the silk, both sides, several times. “I could perhaps restore their digestive functioning. The females’ reproductive system might re-establish its cycle, with a normal diet, though I cannot be sure. The males’, of course . . .” He shrugs. He has a little furnace in that hut of his by the creek. There he must burn whatever he cuts from the mulberries, and all his blood-soaked cloths and such. Once a year he goes in there with the chosen children, and all we know of what he does is the air wavering over the chimney. The men speak with strenuous cheer to each other; the mothers go about thin-lipped; the mothers of the chosen girls and boys close themselves up in their houses with their grief.

“But what about their . . . Can you undo their thinking, their talking, what you have done to that?”

“Ah, it is coming smoother now, look at that,” he says to himself. “What do you mean, boy, ‘undo’?” he says louder and more scornfully, as if I made up the word myself out of nothing, though I only repeated it from him.

I find I do not want to call John Barn a fool, not in his hearing as he struggles with his fear and his swallowing leaf after leaf, and with lying there belly open to the sky and Phillips’s attentions. “They . . . haven’t much to say for themselves,” I finally say. “Would they talk among us like ourselves, if you fed them right, and took them out of that box?”

“I don’t know what they would do.” He shrugs again. He goes on slowly drawing out silk, and I go on hating him.

“Probably not,” he says carelessly after a while. “All those years, you know, without social stimulus or education, would probably have impaired their development too greatly. But possibly they would regain something, from moving in society again.” He snorts. “Such society as you have here. And the diet, as you say. It might perk them up a bit.”

Silence again, the skein pulling out slowly, silently, smooth and clean white. Barn chews beside me, his breathing almost normal. Perhaps the talking soothes him.

“But then,” says Phillips to the skein, with a smile that I don’t like at all, “if you ‘undid’ them all, you would have no silk, would you? And without silk you would have no tea, or sugar, or tobacco, or wheat flour, or all the goods in tins and jars that I bring you. No cloth for the women, none of their threads and beads and such.”

Yes, plenty of people would be distressed at that. I am the wrong boy to threaten with such losses, for I hunt and forage; I like the old ways. I kept myself fed and healthy for a full four months, exploring up the glacier last spring—healthier than were most folk when I arrived home, with their toothaches and their coughs. But others, yes, they rely wholly on those stores that Phillips brings through the year. When he is due, and they have run short of tobacco, they go all grog and temper waiting, or hide at home until he should come. They will not hunt or snare with me and Tray and Pa and the others; take them a haunch of stewed rabbit, and if they will eat it at all they will sauce it well with complaints and wear a sulking face over every bite.

“And no food coming up, for all those extra mouths you’d have to feed,” says Phillips softly and still smiling, “that once were kept on mulberry leaves alone. Think of that.”

What was I imagining, all my talk of undoing? The man cannot make mulberries back into men, and if he could he would never teach someone like me, that he thought so stupid, and whose folk he despised. And even if he taught us, and worked alongside us in the unmaking, we would never get back the man John Barn was going to be when he was born John Barn, or any of the men and women that the others might have become.

“You were starving and in rags when my father found you,” says Phillips, sounding pleased. “Your people. You lived like animals.”

“We had some bad years, I heard.” And we are animals, I nearly add, and so are you. A bear meets you, you are just as much a meal to him as is a berry-bush or a fine fat salmon. What are you, if not animal?

But I have already lost this argument; he has already dismissed me. He draws on, as if I never spoke, as if he were alone. Good silk is coming out now; all the leaves we’ve been feeding into John Barn are coming out clean, white, strong-stranded; he is restored, apart from the great hole in him. Still I feed him, still he chews on, both of us playing our parts to fill Phillips’ hands with silk.

“Very well,” says Phillips, “I think we are done here. Time to close him up again.”

I’m relieved that he intends to. “Should I lie on him again?”

“In a little,” he says. “The inner parts are nerveless, and will not give him much pain. When I sew the dermal layers, perhaps.”

It is very much like watching someone wind a fly, the man-hands working such a small area and mysteriously, stitching inside the hole. The thread, which is black, and waxed, wags out in the light and then is drawn in to the task, then wags again, the man concentrating above. His fingers work exactly like a spider’s legs on its web, stepping delicately as he brings the curved needle out and takes it back in. I can feel from John Barn’s chest that there is not pain exactly, but there is sensation where there should not be, and the fear that comes from not understanding makes Phillips’s every movement alarming to him.

I didn’t quite believe that Phillips would restore John Barn and repair him. I lie across Barn again and watch the stitching-up of the outer skin. With each pull and drag of thread through flesh Barn exclaims in the dark behind me. “Oh. Oh, that is bad. Oh, that feels dreadful.” He jerks and cries out at every piercing by the needle.

“He’s nearly finished, John,” I say. “Maybe six stitches more.”

And Phillips works above, ignoring us, as unmoved as if he were sewing up a boot. A wave of his hair droops forward on his brow, and around his eyes is stained with tiredness. It feels as if he has kept us in this small cloud of firelight, helping him do his mad work, all the night. There is no danger of me sleeping; I am beyond exhaustion; Barn’s twitches wake me up brighter and brighter, and so does the fact that Phillips can ignore them so thoroughly, piercing and piercing the man. And though a few hours ago I would happily have left Barn to him, now I want to be awake and endure each stitch as well, even if there is no chance of the mulberry ever knowing or caring.

Then it is done. Phillips snips the thread with a pair of bright-gold scissors, inspects his work, draws a little silk out past all the layers of stitching. “Good, that’s good,” he says.

I lever myself up off Barn, lift my leg from his. “He’s done with you,” I tell him, and his eyes roll up into his head with relief, straight into sleep.

“We will leave him tied. We may as well,” says Phillips, casting his used tools into the pot on the fire. “We don’t want him running off again. Or getting infection in that wound.” He strips off his horrid gloves and throws them in the fire. They wince and shrivel and give off a few moments’ stink.

I feel as if I’m floating a little way off the ground; Phillips looks very small over there, his shining tools faraway. “There are others, then?” I say.

“Others?” He is coaxing his fire up to boil the tools again.

“‘Careful practice,’ you said, by your father’s side. Yet we never saw you here. So there are other folk like ours, with their mulberries, that you practiced on? In other places in the mountains, or in the town itself? I have never been there to know.”

“Oh,” he says, and right at me, his eyes bright at mine. “Yes,” he says. “Though there is a lot to be learned from . . . books, you know, and general anatomy and surgical practice.” He surveys the body before us, up and down. “But yes,” he says earnestly to me. “Many communities. Quite a widespread practice, and trade. Quite solidly established.”

I want to keep him talking like this, that he cares what he says to me. For the first time today he seems not to scorn me for what I am. I’m not as clear to him as John Barn has become to me, but I am more than I was this morning when he told Pa, I’ll take your boy, if you can spare him.

“Do you have a son, then,” I say, “that you are teaching in turn?”

“Ah,” he says, “not as yet. I’ve not been so blessed thus far as to achieve the state of matrimony.” He shows me his teeth, then sees that I don’t understand. Some of his old crossness comes back. “I have no wife. Therefore I have no children. That is the way it is done in the town, at least.”

“When you have a son, will you bring him here, to train him?” Even half-asleep I am enjoying this, having his attention, unsettling him. He looks as if he thought me a mulberry, and now is surprised to find that I can talk back and forth like any person.

“I dare say, I dare say.” He shakes his head. “Although I’m sure you understand, it is a great distance to come, much farther than other . . . communities. And a boy—their mothers are terribly attached to them, you know. My wife—my wife to be—might not consent to his travelling so far, from her. Until he is quite an age.”

He waits on my next word, and so do I, but after a time a yawn takes me instead, and when it is over he is up and crouched by his fire. “Yes, time we got some rest. Excellent work, boy. You’ve been most useful.” He seems quite a different man. Perhaps he is too tired to keep up his contempt of me? Certainly I am too tired to care very much. I climb to my feet and walk into the darkness, to relieve myself before sleep.

I wake, not with a start, but suddenly and completely, to the fire almost dead again and the forest all around me, aslant on the ridge. Dawn light is starting to creep up behind the trees, and stars are still snagged in the high branches, but here, close to me, masses of darkness go about their growing, roots fast in the ground around my head, thick trunks seeming to jostle each other, though nothing moves in the windless silence.

I am enormous myself, and wordless like the forest, yet full of burrows and niches and shadows where beasts lie curled—some newly gone to rest, others about to move out into the day—and birds roost with their breast-feathers fluffed over their claws. I am no fool, though that slip of a man with his tiny tools and his sneering took me for one. I see the story he spun me, and his earnest expectation that I would believe it. I see his whole plan and his father’s, laid out like paths through the woods, him and his town house and his tailor at one end there, us and our poor mulberries at the other, winding silk and waiting for him. A widespread trade? No, just this little pattern trodden through from below. Many communities? No, just us. Just me and my folk, and our children.

I sit up silently. I wait until the white cross of John Barn glimmers over there on the ground, until the smoke from my fire comes clear, a fine grey vine climbing the darkness without haste. I think through the different ways I can take; there are few enough of them, and all of them end in uncertainty, except for the first and simplest way that came to me as I slept—which is now, which is here, which is me. I spend a long time listening to folk in my head, but whenever I look to Barn, and think of holding him down, and his trembling, and his dutiful chewing of the leaves, they fall silent; they have nothing to say.

A red-throat tests its call against the morning silence. I get up and go to Barn, and take up the coil of leftover cord from beside him.

Phillips is on his side, curled around what is left of his fire. His hands are nicely placed for me. I slip the cord under them and pin his forearms down with my boot. As he wakes, grunts—“What are you at, boy?”—and begins to struggle, I loop and loop, and swiftly tie the cord. “How dare you! What do you think—”

“Up.” I stand back from him, all the forest behind me, and in me. We have no regard for this man’s thin voice, his tiny rage.

Staring, he pushes himself up with his bound hands, is on his knees, then staggers to his feet. He is equal the height of me, but slender, built for spider-work, while I am constructed to chop wood and haul water and bring down a running stag. I can do what I like with him.

“You are just a boy!” he says. “Have you no respect for your elders?”

“You are not my elders,” I say. I take his arm, and he tries to flinch away. “This way,” I say, and I make him go.

“Boy?” says John Barn from the ground. He has forgotten my name again.

“I’ll be back soon, John. Don’t you worry.”

And that is all the need I have of words. I force Phillips down towards the torrent path; he pours his words out, high-pitched, outraged, neat-cut as if he made them with that little knife of his. But I am forest vastness, and the birds in my branches have begun their morning’s shouting; I have no ears for him.

I push him down the narrow path; I don’t bully him or take any glee when he falls and complains, or scratches his face in the underbrush, but I drag him up and keep him going. The noise of the torrent grows towards us, becomes bigger than all but the closest, loudest birds. His words flow back at me, but they are only a kind of odd music now, carrying no meaning, only fear.

He rounds a bend and quickly turns, and is in my arms, banging my chest with his bound purple hands. “You will not! You will not!” I turn him around, and move him on with all my body and legs. The torrent shows between the trees—that’s what set him off, the water fighting white among the boulders.

Now he resists me with all that he has. His boots slip on the stones and he throws himself about. But there is simply not enough of him, and I am patient and determined; I pull him out of the brush again and again, and press him on. If he won’t walk, I’m happy for him to crawl. If he won’t crawl I’m prepared to push him along with my boot.

The path comes to a high lip over the water before cutting along and down to the flatter place where you can fill your pots, or splash your face. I bring him to the lip and push him straight off, glad to be rid of his flailing, embarrassed by his trying to fight me.

He disappears in the white. He comes up streaming, caught already by the flow, shouting at the cold. It tosses him about, gaping and kicking, for a few rocks, and then he turns to limp cloth, to rubbish, a dab of bright wet silk draggling across his chest. He slides up over a rock and drops the other side. He moves along, is carried away and down, over the little falls there, and across the pool, on his face and with blood running from his head, over again and on down.

I climb back up through the woods. It is very peaceful and straightforward to walk without him, out of the water-noise into the birdsong. The clearing when I reach it is quiet without him, pleased to be rid of his fussing and displeasure and only to stand about, head among the leaves while the two fires send up their smoke-tendrils and John Barn sleeps on.

I bend down and touch his shoulder. “Come, John,” I say, “Time to make for home. Do I need to bind you?”

He wakes. “You?” His eyes reflect my head, surrounded by branches on the sky.

“George. George Treadlaw, remember?”

He looks about as I untie his feet. “That man is gone,” he says. “Good. I don’t like that man.”

I reach across him to loosen his far hand. “Oh, George,” he says “You smell bad this morning. Perhaps you’d better bind me, and walk at a little distance. That’s a fearsome smell. It makes me want to run from you.”

I sniff at a pinch of my shirt. “I’m no worse than I was last night.”

“Yes, last night it started,” he says. “But I was tied down then and no trouble to you.”

I tether him to a tree-root and cook myself some pan-flaps.

“They smell nice,” he says, and eats another mulberry leaf, watching the pan.

“You must eat nothing but leaves today, John,” I tell him. “Anything foreign, you will die of it, for I can’t go into you like Phillips and fetch it out again.”

“You will have to watch me,” he says. “Everything is very pretty, and smells so adventurous.”

We set off home straight after. All day I lead him on a length of rope, letting him take his time. I am not impatient to get back. No one will be happy with me, that I lost Phillips. Oh, they will be angry, however much I say it was an accident, a slip of the man’s boot as he squatted by the torrent washing himself. No one will want to take the spindles down to the town, and find whoever he traded them to, and buy the goods he bought. I will have to do all that, because it was I who lost the man, and I will, though the idea scares me as much as it will scare them. No one will want to hunt again, in years to come as the mulberries die off and no new ones are made; no one will want to gather roots and berries, and make nut flour, just to keep us fed, for people are all spoilt with town goods, the ease of them and the strong tastes and their softness to the tooth. But what can they do, after all, but complain? Go down to the town yourselves, I’ll tell them. Take a mulberry with you and some spindles; tell what was done to us. Do you think they will start it again? No, they will come up here and examine everything and talk to us as fools; they might take away all our mulberries; they might take all of us away, and make us live down the town. And they will think we did worse than lose Phillips in the torrent; they will take me off to jail, maybe. I don’t know what will happen. I don’t know.

“It is a fine day, George of the Treadlaws,” John Barn says behind me. “I like to breathe, out here. I like to see the trees, and the sun, and the birds.”

He is following behind obedient, pale and careful, the stitches black in his paunch, the brace hanging off the silk-end. Step, step, step, he goes with his unaccustomed feet, on root and stone and ledge of earth, and he looks about when he can, at everything.

“You’re right, John.” I move on again so that he won’t catch up and be upset by the smell of me. “It’s a fine day for walking in the forest.”

© 2011 by Margo Lanagan.

Originally published in Blood and Other Cravings, edited by Ellen Datlow.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Margo Lanagan lives in Sydney, Australia. She is a four-time winner of the World Fantasy Award—in the short story, collection, novel, and novella categories—and her short stories and novels have won and been shortlisted for many other awards. Her latest collections are Cracklescape, part of the Twelve Planets series from Twelfth Planet Press, stories from which are nominated for the Ditmar and Aurealis Awards, and Yellowcake, a collection of mostly previously published stories. Her latest novel is The Brides of Rollrock Island, which was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal in the UK, and shortlisted for the inaugural Stella Prize and the Norma K Hemming Award in Australia.

Cancer
Ryan North

This certifies that HELEN FRANCES LAWRENCE, sex FEMALE

was born to JOHN DENISON LAWRENCE and VIRGINIA MATILDA LAWRENCE

on SATURDAY at SIX TEN PM, this EIGHTEENTH day of AUGUST, 1990

at the MONTFORT HOSPITAL in OTTAWA, ONTARIO

and will die of CANCER

Not everyone got tested at birth, and Tina hadn’t. Not getting tested had been her parents’ choice, but in university it had become her choice. She and Helen were hanging out in Helen’s dorm room, alone, lying side by side on her bed. It was the only comfortable place in the room.

“Has the CANCER prediction changed the way you live your life, Helen?” Tina asked.

“Has being a lesbian changed the way you live your life?” Helen asked.

“Has being a super-bitch changed the way you live yours?”

They kissed for a bit.

“I was joking about the super-bitch part,” said Tina.

Helen and Tina were at the mall near their house, because it was Tina’s thirtieth birthday, and she suddenly wanted to know. It was stupid not to, she’d decided. Helen had agreed to pay the $250 dollars for the prediction as a birthday present. Tina pulled the credit card out of the machine, passing it back to Helen with one hand as she stuck her finger in the machine with the other. A sample was taken, her blood was analyzed, and a print-out was produced. “AIRPLANE,” it said.

“Nice!” said Tina, excited. She showed her prediction to Helen. “Mine’s better! AIRPLANE’s way more better than CANCER.”

“You’ll probably just get hit on the head by an airplane,” said Helen, “and it’s not going to be nearly as cool as you think it is.”

“A toy airplane?” said Tina.

“Nope.” said Helen.

Tina laughed and noticed the display on the machine still read “INSERT FINGER.” “Hey,” she said, “It’s still gonna do a reading. Quick, put your finger in!” She grabbed Helen’s finger and pulled it toward the machine.

Helen shrugged. “You want a piece of paper with ‘CANCER’ on it, it’s yours.” She put her finger in, and a few seconds later, the machine spit out a piece of paper. Tina grabbed it.

A moment later she looked up, confused. “Sweetie,” she said, “this doesn’t say ‘CANCER.’ It says ‘SUICIDE.’”

“What?” said Helen, snatching the paper out of her hand and reading it herself. SUICIDE. She looked up at Tina, anger clouding her features.

“My parents told me I’d have cancer since forever, and it turns out SUICIDE is how I’m going to die?”

Tina took Helen’s hand in hers, trying to calm her down. “Sweetie, please, come on, maybe it’s—”

Helen cut her off. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “Why wouldn’t they tell me? I’m a grown woman, for God’s sake.”

She already had her phone out, dialing her parents. As it was ringing, she turned to Tina. “Before I do me, I’m gonna kill them,” she said.

Helen’s parents denied everything, and sincerely. Her father pulled out the birth certificate from the closet to prove it. Helen had never seen it before, but there, printed on the form, was the diagnosis: CANCER. The hospital had even attached the original prediction card with a staple.

“It must’ve been a mix-up at the hospital,” her father said, “some other girl’s blood got tested instead of yours. It’s happened before. You could sue.”

Helen brought the certificate home to show Tina. They were sitting on the edge of their bed, side-by-side. Tina turned the birth certificate and card over in her hands.

“Prediction cards haven’t really changed much since you were born,” said Tina.

“I’ve always avoided cancer,” said Helen. “I avoided smoking, I wore sunscreen, I limited red meat in my diet.” She sighed. “I really love red meat.”

“It doesn’t change anything,” said Tina. “Suicide doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll die early. Maybe it’s assisted suicide when you’re super old.”

Helen flopped backward onto the bed, staring at the ceiling. “Do you want to get some dinner?” she asked.

“It’s only two,” said Tina.

Twenty minutes later they were at a steakhouse.

Helen pointed at Tina with her fork, her mouth full of steak, medium rare. “Maybe I will sue,” she said, around the meat. It sounded like “Eaibe a ill oue”.

“Gross,” said Tina.

Helen and Tina found an attorney in the phone book, Jack Bradshaw, Attorney At Law. “I ONLY GET PAID WHEN YOU DO,” his ad said. He went with Helen to personally oversee her testing, and again: SUICIDE. Jack smiled at her. “Open and shut case,” he said.

“That’s the kind I like!” said Helen.

Six months later Helen was on the stand. Her birth certificate had matched the records the hospital had submitted to the government when she was born, so it was simply a matter of running Helen through the courtroom machine. She watched from the stand as Jack continued his prosecutorial patter, building up the test for the jury.

“My client, who has suffered irreparable damages to her life on account of the maliciously incorrect cancer prediction supplied to her upon birth, asks for very little. Thirty years of her life—thirty years!—have been spent fighting to avoid a particular death—a death, as I will prove to the court’s satisfaction, that wasn’t even in the cards. She asks only for compensation for those wasted years—those wasted chances—so that she might finally live what’s left of her life as was originally intended.”

In the audience, Tina rolled her eyes, but then caught herself and stared straight ahead.

Jack turned from the jury and looked at Helen. “Helen, if you would now insert your finger, we will prove that the reading supplied and recorded by the doctors and staff at Montfort Hospital was wrong. Whether these people were acting with deliberate malice or not is irrelevant. All that matters is the prediction, the real prediction. Helen, if you would.”

Helen stuck her finger in the machine; a piece of paper was produced. Jack read it, and though Helen knew where this was going, she still thought his feigned reaction of surprise seemed . . . sincere?

“Well, would you look at that,” Jack said. “Despite what Montfort Hospital would have you believe, my client will not die of cancer. As you can see, ladies and gentlemen, she will die—”

Jack he held up the card to the jury.

“—of DNA BREAKDOWN.”

Jack turned to Helen, making significant eye contact. “I submit this prediction card produced under the eyes of the court as Exhibit A, and the prosecution rests.”

There wasn’t much you could say to argue against a prediction done in a courtroom on the court’s machine. The defense used their time to focus mainly on the degree of their culpability. After only a few minutes of deliberation, the jury came back. Helen had won.

“I don’t know what you did, but you took a damn big risk doing it.” Jack shouted at them, a few blocks from the courthouse. He was furious; his entire face was red.

“I don’t know what happened,” Helen said, but Jack spoke over her. “A lesser attorney would’ve stumbled, would’ve cost you a hell of a lot of credibility.” He glared at her. “Why not just say you were going to die of DNA BREAKDOWN in the first place? Why fake ‘SUICIDE’”—he did air quotes around the word with his fingers—“for my benefit?”

“The other machines both said SUICIDE,” Tina said.

“The machines don’t give different answers,” snapped Jack, “and at this point I don’t care.” He turned back to Helen. “The hospital did mess up, and we won, but for God’s sake if you’re ever in a lawsuit again, don’t lie to your attorney.” He pushed his way past them and stormed off.

Tina and Helen stared at each other.

“What do we do now?” asked Helen. “I’m three million dollars richer.”

Tina shrugged, and after a moment, turned and saw Jack walking rapidly away from them.

“It didn’t say you were so rude in your ad!” she shouted.

The money had come in a lump sum, so Helen and Tina had spent the next six months on vacation, travelling the world, seeing places they’d both dreamed of visiting. There were a lot of rail trips and cruises in deference of Tina’s AIRPLANE prediction, but neither of them minded. “Everyone is classier on a train,” Tina said.

“That cruise ship will go well with my dress,” Helen said.

They were both trying to have a good time.

They’d use a machine whenever they found one that took cash and wasn’t too public. They’d used thirty-five machines so far. Tina’s prediction was always the same. Helen’s wasn’t. It was now the fourth day of their final cruise, a twelve-day journey taking them from Australia back to Canada. They’d found a machine on board, some distance from most of the popular and interesting parts of the ship. Tina put her cash and finger into the machine. “AIRPLANE” came out. Tina started feeding in the bills for Helen.

“You’re up,” she said.

Helen put her finger in. So far on their trip, Helen had received NECROSIS, LOSS OF VITAL FLUIDS, APOPTOSIS (“the natural death of cells”, Tina announced, reading from her phone), DNA BREAKDOWN, ATTACK, INFECTION, MURDER, ACID EXPLOSION, SUICIDE, and CANCER. She’d actually gotten CANCER far more often than anything else, which made her think it was blind luck that it hadn’t been that prediction that turned up in the courtroom.

Her prediction came out: CANCER.

Tina was already feeding more the bills into the machine. “Once more,” she said, “for real this time.” Helen stuck her finger in again, and again a slip of paper came out.

“DEVOURED BY NEIGHBOUR,” Helen read, surprised. It was a new one. She passed it to Tina, who read it.

“Do you think that means Mr. Ross?” said Tina.

When they were home, Tina plotted Helen’s results on a graph. The non-CANCER results they got didn’t show any trends, but CANCER itself definitely seemed to be showing up less and less often.

“What do you think that means?” asked Tina when she showed Helen her graph and data.

“I have no idea,” Helen said, in a small voice. “I have no idea what any of this means.”

Tina took Helen’s hand. “Maybe we really should go to the hospital,” she said.

They ended up going to the same hospital that they’d sued, the same hospital she’d been born in. Helen said it’d be easier that way. After waiting in the emergency room, the doctor at Montfort Hospital introduced himself as Doctor Peters, and said that he was extremely busy and that he didn’t believe in Helen’s story of multiple predictions. “Nobody gets different results from the machine,” he said.

“Try me,” Helen said.

The first result was CANCER. Tina thought that’d get a reaction, but Doctor Peters apparently had no idea of Helen’s history with the hospital, which was probably for the best. He ran a second test right away, and this time the result was “DNA BREAKDOWN.” Peters brought in another doctor and they ran the test again: ACID EXPLOSION. They wheeled in another machine and got CANCER, then NECROSIS, then CANCER, then CANCER again, then ATTACK. The doctors all huddled in a tight circle, talking quickly and quietly.

“Told you,” Helen said.

Later that evening, Doctor Peters sat at his computer and went through Helen’s blood report. When he took the sample he’d told Helen and Tina that he’d be looking very carefully at it for clues as to what might be happening. He’d said that nothing like this happening had ever been recorded. He’d said to Helen that at this juncture, she shouldn’t be taking any of her predictions too seriously just yet.

“That’s funny,” said Helen.

As he brought up the first image and saw Helen’s cellular walls, Peters blinked. It was obvious that Helen had lymphoma and it was bad: the irregular shapes of the cancerous cells were spread throughout her blood. This was very far along and likely spreading to other organs beyond the one it had started in. She’d be starting chemotherapy immediately. She was young. She could make it.

He sighed, flipping through the pages of the report, pausing on another image of the flattened cancer cells. Seeing she had cancer was simple. The question was, why was she getting multiple readings?

Cancer didn’t come close to explaining the odd readings from the machines. Plenty of people had cancer, and plenty of people died from it, and they all had just the one single prediction. What is it in this blood that’s so special? Helen’s predictions were inconsistent, but not random. They seemed to be coming from a small set of possible deaths, as if the machine was seeing more than one fate for her. She’s only going to die once, Peters thought. How do you reconcile cancer with being eaten by a neighbor? How does “attack” square with “suicide” and “DNA breakdown”? The only DNA breakdown he knew that could possibly be considered an attack was—

Doctor Peters suddenly leaned back from his computer and stared at the ceiling, shocked, his mind racing.

The only DNA breakdown that could be an attack was cellular death, induced by neighboring cells. What else do cells do? Cells die; cells commit suicide; infected or damaged cells are attacked and their useful elements absorbed by neighboring cells. Necrosis and apoptosis both could refer specifically to cellular death. Heck, even ACID EXPLOSION could refer to lysosome-mediated apoptosis and the acid hydrolase enzymes they contained. He stared at his computer, the image of Helen’s blood still on the screen. Everything fit. The machine wasn’t producing cause-of-death predictions for his patient, one Helen Frances Lawrence, born August 18, 1990.

It was predicting results for her cells.

Tina lay on top of Helen: a full-body hug. It was dark outside, and the lights in the room had been turned off.

“They’re eventually gonna notice I’m here and kick me out,” she whispered.

“This is the cancer ward,” Helen whispered back. “We get a pass. You’re staying right here with me.”

Tina gave Helen a squeeze. “Make sure there’s nothing wrong with you, okay? I don’t want my sweetie to leave me.” Tina’s voice quivered.

“Oh my God,” said Helen, “if you start to cry I’m going to push you off the bed. I’m serious. I will push you off the bed.”

“I’m not crying! I was just being sincere with someone who means a lot to me and who might have a serious disea—hey! Stop it!”

“You cry at TV commercials,” Helen said, pulling her back into a hug.

Early that morning, Doctor Peters met with his patient. He was rumpled, unshaven, and exhausted. He walked into Helen’s room, surprised to find Tina already there, sitting beside her. He glanced at the clock on the wall. Visiting hours already?

“Helen, I’d like to speak with you privately if I could,” he said.

“Anything you say to me you can say in front of her,” Helen said. Tina smiled. “Go for it,” she said.

He cleared his throat. “Helen, I examined your blood sample last night. There are abnormal cells in the bloodstream, and I’m sorry: It’s cancer. It’s already advanced quite a bit, and the cells have metastasized and are in your bloodstream. We’ll likely find some elsewhere too. I want to begin treatment immediately.”

Tina squeezed Helen’s hand. Helen squeezed back hard.

“That’s the bad news. The good news is, we have several treatment options available, and I know we can make a dent in it. This doesn’t have to be the cancer that kills you,” he said, not for the first time in his career.

Helen started to cry, involuntarily. She angrily wiped away a tear.

“Fuck cancer,” she said. “Who’s to say I don’t die from that douchebag in the other bed eating me first?”

“I—I have a theory on that too,” Doctor Peters said. “I tested this last night and it’s consistent. When I put a single blood cell of yours—a healthy one—in a suspension and run it through the machine, we get CANCER one hundred percent of the time. But when I test a cancerous cell, the predictions that come out are the others that we’ve been seeing. Helen, they’re all consistent with descriptions of cellular death. I don’t yet understand how, but I believe your cancer cells are getting their own death predictions.”

Helen looked at Tina, and then back at Doctor Peters.

“What,” she said, flatly.

The months went by as Helen’s treatment progressed. She had been allowed to stay at home, with Tina. Her hair had fallen out. She hadn’t gotten a wig.

Helen came in once a day for more tests with Doctor Peters. He’d modified the machine that he’d started to think of as “his” with a second IV. When the machine had done its analysis, the press of a button would return the entire blood sample to Helen’s bloodstream. His hope was that the cells tested in this way would reveal which treatment killed them in Helen’s body. That way they could jump to using that effective treatment right away, potentially saving months of tests.

So far, he’d had no luck: All the predictions were the same cellular deaths they’d been getting all along. But they still revealed quite a bit: a lack of predictions that mapped onto KILLED BY CHEMOTHERAPY told them that the treatments weren’t going to be immediately effective, which was the bad news. But there was also good news, because they also hadn’t had any predictions reading CIRCULATION FAILURE or STARVATION or anything else that could indicate cancer cells being killed by Helen’s own death.

“Blood cells live for about four months,” Doctor Peters told Helen and Tina. “We’ve still got time.”

Meanwhile, news had gotten out through the hospital staff, and then to the world at large, that a woman with multiple predictions was a patient. Helen had consented to one interview, done at the hospital. The interview as aired had been short, since Helen couldn’t really add much to the story beyond “cancer sucks, were you aware?” and Doctor Peters had handled the medical aspects of the explanation. After summarizing the discoveries made at Montfort, the reporter put the microphone to Helen.

“Do you have any idea why your experience is so different?” the reporter had asked.

“I don’t know why it’s just me,” Helen had said.

The camera lingered on her, so she gave it a thumbs up.

Helen’s recent surgery and chemotherapy regime had not been kind. Her last chemo cycle—the sixth—was over two weeks ago, but Helen was still in hospital, bedridden, weak, and tired. She’d had growths removed from her lymph nodes and bowels, and daily radiation targeted at the growth around her heart. Tina visited her almost every day, telling her stories about what their friends were up to when they weren’t there in the room with them. Her parents had visited five times. It was hard for everyone, and at Helen’s insistence, Tina was home today. “You still have to live your life,” she’d said. “Go, have fun. Eat something I can’t keep down. I insist.”

“Steak?” said Tina.

“No way, those belong to me,” said Helen.

Helen was alone and napping when Doctor Peters knocked on the door and wheeled his machine in. The knock was enough to wake her.

“Back for more, Nick?” Helen asked.

“Still looking for clues, yes,” said Doctor Peters, hooking her up to the machine’s IV. “Place your finger here, please, Helen.”

A few seconds later, the result was printed. As Doctor Peters read the slip of paper, his heart sank. It wasn’t CANCER, so it was a cellular-level prediction, the end-of-the-line for a single cell of Helen’s cancer. He stared at it for a long moment. “HOST DEATH,” it read.

Helen saw his reaction and asked for the paper, reading it quickly.

“Well, fuck everything about that,” said Helen, handing it back to her doctor.

Six weeks later, the “HOST DEATH” predictions had eclipsed all of Helen’s death predictions, with the exception of “CANCER.” It was going faster than they’d expected. Tina hadn’t seen Helen and Doctor Peters produce a non-CANCER or HOST DEATH prediction in days.

The cancerous cells in her body were not going to live for much longer, and everyone knew that meant Helen was not going to live for much longer either. There was no way to avoid it. Doctor Peters was still no closer to figuring out how to stop it, and given the numerous “HOST DEATH” predictions, they’d agreed to move Helen to the palliative care unit three floors up. There, the focus was no longer on curing the disease but on managing it, on making Helen as comfortable as possible for what little time she had left.

The end of the chemo and radiation treatments meant that even though Helen was dying, she felt better than she had in weeks, maybe months. Tina and Helen spent a lot of time talking, and a lot of time just sitting and not talking. They’d agreed to not start thinking that since there were only so many moments left, every moment had to be capital-s Special. That would be exhausting. This was nice.

Helen placed her finger into the machine and Doctor Peters took another reading. “You’re doing great, Helen,” he said.

“Nick,” Helen said, “if you’re waiting to cure me, now would be a good time.” Tina looked at her and smiled. A few seconds later, the machine printed out a piece of paper, and Tina read it, furrowing her brow. She held it up for Doctor Peters.

“‘DESTROYED IN LAB ACCIDENT’?” she said.

Doctor Peters quickly disassembled the machine and recovered the blood sample within. Inside that sample was a cell of Helen’s cancer that was going to die not from host death, but in the lab. This cell would survive her body—but how? The 120-day window of cell life didn’t give them much time. He put the blood sample into a sympathetic culture designed for maintaining cells. If I didn’t do that, he thought, would the cell have died from host death instead? Am I destined to knock this petri dish off a desk in a week and that’ll be that?

It didn’t matter. At this point he was willing to try anything.

Two days later it was clear that cellular division was taking place. All cancer was a mutation of a cell’s regular instructions, causing the growths and lumps normally symptomatic of the disease. But Helen’s cancer cells had mutated differently: Unlike normal human red blood cells, Helen’s reproduced in culture. They cloned themselves, and would clone themselves for as long as the necessary conditions for life were present.

“These cancer cells can be sustained indefinitely,” Doctor Peters said that afternoon while briefing his colleagues. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re looking at the first immortalized cell line descended from human DNA.” His audience had been amazed, and everyone wanted a sample to examine for themselves. At least one of those cells would be killed accidentally, but the rest—who could say? He’d already separated them into separate cultures, and, after his presentation, had received permission to move some to another nearby hospital, just to be safe. The precautions were necessary: For all intents and purposes, Helen’s cancer cells were a new form of single-cellular life.

The fact that her cells finally reproduced provided an explanation for why the machine was treating the cancer as something different from Helen—biologically, the cells were distinct, and they didn’t need Helen to survive. All they needed was the food they took from their environment, and whether that was Helen’s bloodstream or a petri dish didn’t really make a difference.

Doctor Peters met with Helen shortly after his presentation. Tina was there too, as always. He’d explained what he’d discovered about her cancer, about the cells that had developed inside her body. When he was finished, Helen was silent for a long moment.

“Hey, who’s got immortalized cells and wants a Coke?” said Helen, surprisingly upbeat. Doctor Peters looked at her, confused. Helen raised her hand.

“Me,” she said.

Three days later, Doctor Peters came to Helen and Tina with a question. Tina had been reading to her: Helen had spent a bad night, unable to sleep, and was feeling weaker than she was usually did.

“Helen, I may not be able to cure your cancer,” he said.

“Yep,” said Helen.

“But the predictions we’re getting from your cell cultures—may help us cure all cancers,” he said.

Helen blinked.

Doctor Peters had finally caught her without something to say.

“The predictions we got from your cells when they were in your body, Helen, were mainly predicated on how long you’d live. But in a culture, we don’t have that limitation, and the predictions we’re getting back are different. Tests on cell cultures we’ve cultivated have returned results like ‘LAB TEST’ or ‘EXPERIMENT,’ but one last night said ‘KILLED BY C29H32O13.’ That’s a chemotherapy drug, Helen. That’s the precise chemical formula for the etoposide phosphate, one of the drugs we’re already using in treatments. Clearly at some point in the near future that drug will be introduced to part of that culture, and it’ll be effective.”

“So you can verify drug effectiveness a little sooner?” asked Tina.

“It’s more than that. We can test treatments extremely efficiently, giving slight variants to different cultures and not having to gamble a human life in the process. We can produce new drugs by brute force alone, running experiments that would otherwise kill a human host. We could have thousands of researchers working in parallel, each cell a new experiment. And it’s not just cancer. We could infect some cultures with other diseases and use the same process to discover treatments targeting them as well. Your cells may well unlock a new age in medicine, allowing unprecedented progress to take place. But the cells are yours; they belong to you. We need your permission to develop them further.”

Helen and Tina stared at the doctor as he rushed through his speech.

“It’s a lot to take in,” said Doctor Peters.

“No, I get it,” said Helen, turning her head to look out the window. Outside, spring was turning into summer.

Helen felt Tina squeeze her hand.

She turned back to her doctor.

Twenty years later, Tina was in her living room, relaxing, reading in the Saturday morning sunlight. The magazine she’d bought had a feature on the cover. “The Miracle of Helen Lawrence’s Cells,” it said, with a science-fictiony illustration of a blood cell, all blue and orange with multiple tiny labels. It said that thanks to the great potential of Helen’s cells, strains were stored and used in labs the world over. It said that the achievements and advancements made through what scientists called the HeLa cell line included new treatments for a variety of cancers, fundamental research in gene mapping, along with many other scientific pursuits. It said that millions were alive today who had Helen’s cells to thank.

Tina smiled. It was a pretty good legacy, she had to admit.

Beside the article, there was a sidebar with more facts on the cell line. It said that the biomass of HeLa cell cultures propagated over the last twenty years would now exceed Helen’s actual weight several times over.

She looked over the magazine to her picture of Helen, resting on the mantle.

“Gross,” she told the picture.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Don’t freak out, but there are actually immortal cell lines in real life! In the 1970s, a line was established with cells taken from a 14-year-old boy with leukemia. And in the 1950s, the very first human immortal cell line was established with real-life HeLa cells, taken from the cervical cancer of one Henrietta Lacks, a 31-year-old woman living in Maryland. The researcher who took the cells, George Gey, never informed Henrietta—who died shortly thereafter—and also kept the existence of the cells a secret from her husband and children.

This is what’s known as a “dick move.”

Her family only found this out later, after decades of groundbreaking science and medicine, when other researchers hoping to learn more about the cell line contacted them with questions about their genetics. Craziest of all, the achievements credited in this story to my fictional HeLa cells can be attributed to Henrietta’s real-life cellular culture. But after a half-century of her body being used—and profited from—without her consent, it seemed inappropriate to use Henrietta’s name in my story, and further inappropriate not to credit her immortal cells as the inspiration for Helen’s ones here.

Henrietta’s grave finally got a headstone in 2010. It reads, in part, “In loving memory of a phenomenal woman, wife, and mother who touched the lives of many.”

© 2013 by Ryan North.

Originally published in This is How You Die, edited by Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo, and David Malki!.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Ryan North is the co-editor of Machine of Death, which became the #1 bestselling book on Amazon.com the day it was released, which was really nice. Its sequel, This Is How You Die, is being released this July by Grand Central Publishing. He wrote To Be or Not To Be: That Is The Adventure which became the #1 most-funded publishing project on Kickstarter, which was also really nice. His ongoing projects include writing Dinosaur Comics and the Adventure Time comics. They're nice too. He lives in Toronto, Canada with his wife Jenn and his dog Noam Chompsky. They're the nicest of all.

This Villain You Must Create
Carlie St. George

Granite killed Mr. Malevolence on a Tuesday. In his defense, Mr. Malevolence was trying to destroy the entire world at the time. Defeating him was nothing new for Granite, either—they were archenemies and had been for almost twenty years now. Saving the world was a very old dance, a box step that Granite could do backwards and blindfolded.

Tuesday was different. The difference was this: Mr. Malevolence had built his newest doom device deep in the heart of a dark forest, and when Granite threw him aside to keep the device from activating, Mr. Malevolence flew headfirst into a tree. His neck broke in four places.

Nobody was very upset about this, save a nearby squirrel, startled away by the too-loud crunching of bone. Even Granite could hardly muster up any serious amount of remorse. He went home, became Adam Acker again, kissed his girlfriend, petted his dog, returned to work at the credit union, and waited for Mr. Malevolence to improbably rise from the dead.

But the resurrection never came.

A year later, Adam had lost his girlfriend, his dog, and his job. He had also lost his most recent bout with insomnia and drank coffee by the gallon to keep himself alert. On Tuesdays, he drank particularly stale coffee with no creamer. It was usually leftover from whatever support group met before his.

Adam had found the advertisement on Craigslist three months ago: Superheroes Grieving a Nemesis for the Greater Los Angeles Area. He did not attend these meetings as Adam, of course, but as Granite, Palm Springs’s patron superhero.

Granite’s armor was gray. His mask was gray. His cape was not gray because he didn’t have a cape—he couldn’t fly. Amidst the other, more colorful superheroes, he looked like a statue, like Michelangelo’s David awkwardly placed in a Skittles commercial.

There was only one person who stood out more than he did: a newcomer dressed in a sleeveless, vinyl jumpsuit with a matching black half-mask. The jumpsuit was common enough, but black vinyl without even a splash of color smacked strongly of supervillain. Or else dominatrix, but if that was her game then she was definitely sitting in the wrong support group.

Granite was on his fourth cup of stale coffee when the newcomer walked up to the stage. Her name, she said, was Lady Obsidian. Started out evil, he figured. Probably reformed.

As it turned out, he was half-right.

“You’re a supervillain!” Captain Justice said, outraged. He jumped up from his chair, and others jumped with him. Captain Justice wasn’t the founder of the group, but many considered him the leader anyway, possibly because he had the squarest jaw. Not everyone followed his lead, but even those who remained sitting leaned back in their chairs, as if villainy might be contagious.

Granite leaned forward, his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands.

“My nemesis was Huracán,” Lady Obsidian said, completely ignoring Captain Justice and his shaking fists. “He died six months ago. He didn’t escape from my lava pit.” She shook her head. “He always escaped from the lava pit.”

Granite nodded. He always escaped the death traps too, just like Mr. Malevolence always broke out of maximum-security prisons. Certain things were supposed to happen. There were supposed to be rules.

Then again, if this Huracán couldn’t even escape from a simple lava pit, he clearly hadn’t been much of a superhero. How awful it must have been—Granite couldn’t imagine being condemned to forever battle such a worthless amateur; although, clearly, Lady Obsidian’s arch-rivalry had fallen well short of forever. Maybe Huracán’s death had been for the best.

Ruby Hawk cleared her throat. “It’s not that I’m unsympathetic,” she said unsympathetically. “But aren’t there support groups like this for your people?”

“You misunderstand me,” Lady Obsidian said. “I’m not interested in grieving. I’m interested in recruiting.”

The superheroes stared at her blankly.

Lady Obsidian sighed. “Listen, I’m a villain without a hero. You’re heroes without a villain. Surely I could come to some sort of arrangement with one of you?”

There was a brief, stunned silence. Then the room exploded into flying coffee cups and rage.

“You can’t just replace your nemesis,” Captain Justice said. “He’s not a—a flat tire or something!”

Reluctantly, Granite agreed with him. You could recruit an enemy, perhaps—like lovers, there were always more fish in the sea, and certainly any number of those fish might be interested in killing you—but a nemesis was much, much more than someone who simply wanted you dead.

Then again, a nemesis was supposed to be a lot more than someone who broke his neck on a tree trunk, too.

The mood in the room shifted: Captain Justice started talking about duty and heroics, and Lady Obsidian wisely departed before the superheroes could come together and storm the stage. Granite waited until the meeting was adjourned before he made his way over to the box of donuts. There were a lot to choose from—the donuts were actually worse than the coffee.

Lady Obsidian had left a stack of red business cards just beside the napkins. Her name was typed neatly across the front, along with a phone number and an email address. Granite picked up one of the cards and turned it over. There were six words printed on the back: THE WORLD WILL END IN FIRE.

“Frost,” he snorted. “Typical.”

He pocketed the card anyway.

(Also a donut. Because, stale or not, Granite had a weakness for maple.)

Adam didn’t immediately lose everything after Mr. Malevolence died. That happened six months later, and it happened because of the dreams. The dreams led to the insomnia, and the insomnia led to missing work, and missing work led to getting fired, and getting fired led to getting dumped. The dreams didn’t have anything to do with his dog, though. His dog got hit by a truck. It might have made for a good country song, but no one wrote country songs about men who wore spandex.

The dreams went like this: Adam was in the middle of a ballroom, and superheroes danced all around him, waltzing with their arch-foes. He was the only one not dressed in uniform; instead, his suit was black with a red rose pinned to the breast pocket. Only one other person wore the same rose.

Mr. Malevolence looked different without his goatee and glasses. Adam only recognized him by how his head hung awkwardly, almost sideways, from his neck.

“Coming?” Mr. Malevolence asked. Adam took his hand, and they spun around the floor together, somehow dancing without either playing lead.

But then he could no longer hear the music. The too-loud crunching of bone drowned it out, and Mr. Malevolence fell to pieces right through Adam’s hands. Adam tried to put him back together, but the flesh turned to blood and the bone turned to ash. The other dancers spun straight through it, sweeping red and white all across the floor.

Adam stood and tried to dance alone, but the blood—suddenly tacky and cold—glued his feet fast to the ground, and he screamed and screamed and screamed.

He woke from these dreams crying. His ex-girlfriend, Elise, had been horrified by this and assumed he was dreaming of his dead parents, or, at the very least, dead children. Elise wasn’t terribly bright. She congratulated him on killing Mr. Malevolence, said she was tired of being kidnapped. She had even baked a cake.

The cake was gray and tasted terrible. Adam pretended to enjoy it, shoveling it in his mouth to avoid telling her to be quiet. What was so awful about being a hostage? He protected her from any real harm. All she had to do was sit there.

He had loved Elise, of course, but Adam couldn’t say he missed her boohooing.

After he came home from the meeting, Adam set Lady Obsidian’s business card down on the coffee table and proceeded to stare at it for the next three days.

He stared at it while eating his donut. He stared at it while working out. He stared at it while making telemarketing calls and contemplating ways he could kill himself.

Finally, when he could stare at it no longer, he went into his bedroom to stare at the box instead.

The box was small and black and only held one item. Adam did not open the box. Instead, he reached out two fingers and stroked the lid, gently, as if he were soothing a nervous bunny.

“Something needs to give,” Adam told it quietly. “I need to make a change.”

He slid the box back under his bed, turned on his laptop, and began a new email.

Dear Lady Obsidian:

I was at the support meeting three days ago, and I am interested in your proposal. My nemesis died last year, and I’m tired of fighting petty criminals with no sense of panache. My ability is super-strength. I have saved the world on seventeen separate occasions. Attached is a resume for your consideration. Please contact me as soon as possible.

Sincerely,

Granite

PS: “Fire and Ice” is an uninspired poem, cited primarily in self-indulgent fanfiction. If you insist on using Robert Frost to punch up your business cards, please at least consider superior work like “Out, Out.”

The next morning, Adam had a new message in his inbox:

Dear Literary Snob,

Your resume is quite impressive. I must admit that I am newer to the business and have only worked at the national level, but I can assure you that I am no amateur.

I am the result of a lab experiment gone wrong, and my body has three separate forms: flesh, magma, and obsidian. In magma form, I can shoot lava from my palms. In obsidian form, my whole body is stone and invulnerable to harm.

Do you know Bartleby’s Coffee downtown? I’d like to meet you face-to-face, presuming you can hold off on any poetry diatribes long enough for us to get some work done.

Kisses,

Lady Obsidian

PS: “Out, Out” is cool, but it doesn’t exactly scream villainy, does it? And Frost is awesome. “Nothing Gold Can Stay” is my favorite, and yes, I’ve written Outsiders fanfiction. Ha!

Dear Lady Obsidian,

I know Bartleby’s. Shall we say Thursday, five or six p.m.?

Sincerely,

Granite

PS: I am going to pretend your last post-script never happened because I still want to respect you.

Mr. Stick Up His Ass,

6 would be great. See you then.

-L.O.

PS: That’s fine. I’m still trying to pretend you have a sense of humor.

PPS: Don’t forget a disguise!

Any superhero worth his salt had at least four different civilian disguises. Adam had thirteen standbys, but this was something of a special occasion. It took three different thrift stores and a costume shop to put together Professor Nathan Goodfellow. He looked just like an English professor ought to: wrinkled pants, tweed jacket, thick glasses, and an Einstein wig. His old age makeup was not particularly convincing, but it at least concealed the contours of his face.

Adam wanted to pin a red rose to his jacket, but decided, reluctantly, that Goodfellow wouldn’t wear one.

Lady Obsidian was already there when he arrived. Despite the red wig and large, dark sunglasses, Adam recognized her immediately. It would be hard not to: she was wearing dark jeans and a black T-shirt that said “ROBERT FROST IS MY HOMEBOY.”

There was a rose on the table. He tried not to stare at it.

Adam ordered a large coffee, black, and sipped it as he walked over to her. Lady Obsidian grinned as he sat down. “So you do have a sense of humor,” she said.

“Occasionally,” Adam said. He took another sip of his coffee and realized he had no idea what else to say. It was like being on a blind date, but worse. “With Mr. Malevolence,” he started . . . but that was probably rude, talking about your dead nemesis with your potential living one.

Lady Obsidian just laughed. “Let me guess,” she said. “He killed your parents.”

Adam smiled ruefully. His story was so traditional it was practically vintage. “I never wanted to be a superhero,” he admitted. “Not even when my powers manifested. I just wanted to be a cowboy. But when a supervillain murders your parents . . .”

“Tell me about it. I wanted to be a pop star.”

He could not imagine her as a pop star. “What happened?”

“I was kidnapped by a secret branch of the government who decided that my test scores made me a good candidate for their experiment in radical gene therapy.”

Adam nodded. He wondered if Huracán was another test subject. “Which branch of the government was it?”

“Why? Are you going to punish them?”

“Maybe.” He had dealt with government agencies before, and if he even suspected that they were responsible for child abductions in Palm Springs—

But Lady Obsidian shook her head. “That’s sweet,” she said. “Really, but there’s no need. They’re all gone now.”

She smiled at him over her cup.

Adam leaned forward. “What did it feel like?” he asked quietly. “Killing them all, getting revenge?”

She took a sip and considered. “A lot like this hot chocolate,” she finally decided. “Warm and sweet. Why? How did it taste when you killed your Mr. Malevolence?”

She probably expected him to say bitter, but it hadn’t tasted bitter at all. It hadn’t tasted sweet, either. “Wrong. Like ordering a steak sandwich and getting a fish one instead.”

“Why do you think it felt like that?”

“Because maybe . . . maybe . . .”

He finished his coffee instead of the thought. “Listen,” he said. “I want this to work; I do. But we’re probably kidding ourselves here. It’s not supposed to be like this.”

“No,” Lady Obsidian said. “It’s not. They weren’t supposed to die without us, and we shouldn’t be here without them. But they did, and we are, and I am ready to move on.”

“But—”

“Listen.” Lady Obsidian tilted her head. “‘We must continue our course with the rest and learn to think ourselves fortunate whilst one remains who the spoiler has not seized.’”

Adam frowned. “Did you just . . . quote Frankenstein at me?”

“Yes, and you actually recognized the quote. We’re the same, you and I. Admittedly, you’re a bit pretentious—”

“It’s not pretentious if your opinions are accurate.”

“Like I was saying. But that’s okay. Heroes should be smug, condescending bastards. You’ll give speeches about doing the right thing, and I’ll tempt you to the dark side by hurting the ones you love. Doesn’t that sound wonderful?”

It did. God, it did.

“We’re the same,” Lady Obsidian said again. “You have no idea how refreshing it is to say that and actually mean it.”

Adam laughed despite himself. He drummed his fingers against the empty cup.

“Pop star, huh?” he asked. “Can you even sing?”

“No,” Lady Obsidian said. “But why would that stop me?”

For the first time in months, the dream changed.

The dance was strange, hurried. Mr. Malevolence was leading, and when Adam pulled back, he saw that his partner’s rose was missing. He got on his hands and knees, frantically searching, until he saw it dangling from Lady Obsidian’s wrist.

She was standing across the room, holding a Venetian mask close to her face. He only made it a few steps before something sharp sliced up his spine, and then Mr. Malevolence was picking him up and awkwardly dragging him around the room. “She can’t cut in,” Mr. Malevolence said. “This dance belongs to me.”

But Adam couldn’t belong to him because he kept slipping in his own blood trying to keep up.

Adam woke up slow and found his fingers already reaching for the business card. He looked at it for a while and then pulled the little black box out from under his bed. He set it in his lap. He opened it. Inside was a pair of broken glasses.

Adam carefully slid them on his face. The black frames were so mangled that they barely hooked over his ears. The glass in the right lens was completely gone, the glass in the left cracked from the force of impact. It was incredibly hard to focus. Mr. Malevolence’s eyesight had been terrible.

Adam walked to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. He thought he might see something significant, but he just looked like a crazy person.

These couldn’t be the glasses of his nemesis because his nemesis wasn’t dead because his nemesis wasn’t Mr. Malevolence. Why had they become archenemies in the first place—simply because the man had murdered Adam’s parents? They had nothing in common, and yet they still weren’t opposites. Mr. Malevolence didn’t have abilities. He was just a mad scientist with an abnormally high kill count. He certainly couldn’t quote Mary Shelley—Adam wasn’t convinced the dead doctor had even liked to read.

Granite versus Mr. Malevolence? It made no sense at all.

But Granite versus Lady Obsidian . . . super-strength versus invulnerability . . . how could he have been so blind? Why hadn’t he seen it before?

Adam couldn’t toss the glasses in the garbage. Nemesis or not, Mr. Malevolence had been dear to him, the first stage in a journey to finding his lesser half. Instead, Adam took the glasses off and placed them back inside the box. Then he slid the box back under his bed and sat down at his computer.

Dear Lady Obsidian,

Perhaps we should try staging a couple of fights in order to get into the rhythm of things. I know an abandoned warehouse in the desert that would be quite suitable. Does Saturday morning sound good?

Sincerely,

Granite

G-

Sat at 8. Sounds good. Send directions.

-L.O.

PS: “I no doubt deserve my enemies, but I don’t believe I deserve my friends.”

On Saturday, Adam brushed his teeth, put on his uniform, and became Granite. He arrived five minutes early, but Lady Obsidian still beat him. He considered saying “hello” and instead said, “Walt Whitman.”

She grinned. “I’ll give you something harder next time.”

Granite and Lady Obsidian met at the warehouse twice a week for eight weeks, testing out their battle chemistry and planning the scope of their first narrative arc. Granite was itching for the big stuff—the world in peril, nuclear bombs—but he knew they had to start small. They drew up a basic outline: Lady Obsidian would commit six small-scale crimes, all leading up to one master plan that would threaten everyone in Palm Springs.

Granite didn’t know the details, of course. He would have to figure it out for himself and attempt to stop her, or else they were simply actors indulging in a stage play.

Their first sparring match was decent, and Granite felt confident they would improve with practice. But even he had no idea how rapidly they would evolve. By the end of the second week, they transcended from a mess of sweaty arms and legs to something else entirely, something unified, cohesive, beautiful.

Granite’s body was black and blue in places he hadn’t known it was possible to bruise, but it was all worth it. He hadn’t felt this alive in years. He was almost a little sad, when they decided they were ready to begin fighting for real. Looking forward to sparring sessions had gotten him through the mindless days of telemarketing calls and post office runs.

He couldn’t end it like this. They needed to celebrate their graduation.

“Do you want to get lunch or something?”

“Sure,” Lady Obsidian said. “Let me just grab a disguise.”

Lady Obsidian dressed as a clown. He dressed as a mime, and followed her to the park, where they walked around, playing literary charades and eating hot dogs together.

It was hard not to think of the wasted years before they had found each other. Adam wished he had the power to change their pasts. He wished she had been the one to kill his parents.

They stopped at a bench to feed the birds. “This is nice,” Lady Obsidian said softly.

Adam couldn’t help but agree.

He honked her nose. She laughed.

The first few crimes were bank robberies. Granite saved the hostages from an onslaught of lava, but she always got away with the cash. He did catch her at a research center once, but this ended up being a part of her plan. She escaped custody three hours later with rare diamonds lifted from the evidence locker.

It was a good sign.

The research center also began a change in her M.O., and Granite was grateful for the shift. Bank jobs were boring. Research centers, though—that would lead him to her ultimate goal. Whatever weapon she was building, it clearly had something to do with geology. He wondered if it would create a volcano. Volcanoes were tough. You couldn’t defuse a volcano.

He chased her around the city, and she tried to kill him twice. Their battles verged on epic, and the press started paying attention. In between the kicks and punches and witty repartee, Granite and Lady Obsidian whispered book titles to one another. To Kill a Mockingbird, he murmured when he broke her left arm. She was in too much pain for a witty comeback, but she managed to nearly melt his face off before escaping in a stolen dive-bomber.

Adam went to bed that night, the smell of singed hair lulling him to sleep, and dreamt once more of the ballroom. This time, he made it to Lady Obsidian and danced until they were the only ones left in the room. Then she leaned close and spoke in his ear. “How much do you really remember about your parents?”

He opened his mouth, and she shoved a dagger through it. He heard his teeth crack and crumble apart. She kissed him through a mouthful of blood and whispered, “You saw what I wanted you to see. Mr. Malevolence was a pawn.”

Adam woke then, fingers in his mouth, trying to catch pieces of broken teeth in his palm. He didn’t move for a long time, not even to withdraw his hand.

Could it be true? His dreams had never been prophetic, but hadn’t he known, somewhere deep down, that Mr. Malevolence was not his nemesis? He had simply wanted to believe it—maybe this, too, was merely something he had deluded himself into thinking. Of course, it seemed unlikely that Lady Obsidian could have been responsible—she’d have been a child at the time—but who knew when she’d been experimented upon? She could have been vicious from the start.

Lady Obsidian had never given any indication she even knew who his parents were, but she might merely have been biding her time. Villains liked to do that. They had a good sense of structure.

She was building to a climax, and with closing chapters came revelations.

Adam couldn’t wait to hear them. He was ready for their first last dance.

“It’s too late,” Lady Obsidian said. “I’ve rigged up hundreds of these devices. As soon as I push this button, a river of lava will erupt from beneath the city and drown every man, woman, and child.”

Granite was a little disappointed. He had hoped for an actual volcano.

Lady Obsidian’s secret headquarters turned out to be their training warehouse in the desert, a sentimental choice that Granite wanted to chide her for—but just couldn’t. He took a step toward her, eyeing the long, black fingernail hovering over the red button. “You don’t have to do this. Those people didn’t hurt you. They’re innocent.”

There were no cameras around, but some things had to be said, even if no one was watching. There were supposed to be rules—life meant nothing without them.

Lady Obsidian laughed. “No one’s innocent,” she said. “You should know that better than most.”

She lowered her finger. Granite lunged for the remote.

Lady Obsidian became obsidian just as their bodies collided. The controller flew out of her hand, bouncing and skittering to a stop, but she barely took a step backwards, while the force of the impact had him on hands and knees. She kicked him under the chin, soccer-style, and he landed hard on his back, only barely managing to roll away before she brought her stone fists down on his skull.

He leapt up and charged, his fists a gray blur, but she easily absorbed each blow as if he was hitting her in the face with a feather pillow. His knuckles seemed to shatter and pop underneath the skin and blood dripped down his fingers to pool on the floor, but still he kept hitting because he had to, because good always triumphed in the end.

Lady Obsidian’s left hook caught him on the temple, and he stumbled backwards, falling to the ground and bouncing his head against a wooden crate. By the time he got to his feet, Lady Obsidian was almost at the controller. He lunged for her again, this time catching her by the left arm and gripping so hard that anyone else’s bone would have exploded into white confetti. She barely seemed to react, still turned away, reaching for the remote with her other hand. Her fingers skirted just over the button that would spell the demise of Palm Springs.

Granite twisted Lady Obsidian’s arm back as hard as he could.

And the sound . . . it was not the crunching of bone, but a snapping, impossibly loud, a tree breaking in half. Lady Obsidian stopped pulling away to turn back and look.

The stone arm had torn clear from her shoulder. It was still in Granite’s hand.

Lady Obsidian’s lips parted, but the rest of her face stayed still. She didn’t seem to recognize the arm as a thing that belonged to her. Granite watched the black stone drain from her skin, leaving her face bone white. Blood spurted twice from the hole where her arm had been and then flooded down her side. “But,” Lady Obsidian said, and then slowly slumped to the floor.

Granite stared at the arm in his hand, now milk flesh with long, delicate fingers. He gently set it aside and lay down on the floor beside Lady Obsidian. Her mouth was still slightly open. She rolled her eyes to look at him, sluggishly blinking once, twice. Then she was still.

He stared at her for a long time, only inches from her face. Her blood pooled across the floor, seeped through his costume, cooled against his skin. He didn’t shy away from it. Eventually, he lifted his fingers and gently cupped her face.

“‘My mother was dead,’” Granite said, “‘but we still had duties which we ought to perform. We must continue our course.’ Frankenstein. You know the rest.”

He kissed her on the forehead. It was unpleasantly cold.

Granite buried her body in the desert, a few miles away from the warehouse. Killing a supervillain wasn’t exactly a crime, but ripping a woman’s arm off never looked good, no matter what she had been planning to do to the city. Better no one ever know about her death or their arrangement.

Granite went home, took off his uniform, and became Adam Acker again. He washed the blood off his skin and brushed his teeth and flossed. There was an episode of Jeopardy waiting for him, but he wasn’t up to watching it yet. Instead, he went to his computer, deleted Lady Obsidian’s emails, and stared at her red business card.

“We weren’t wrong,” he told it. “Not entirely, anyway. We were just wrong for each other. That has to be it.”

Granite and Lady Obsidian, they had been too similar. Both young, both booklovers . . . they would have made better allies than enemies. His real nemesis would be his polar opposite, the dark to his light, the yin to his yang.

Adam didn’t know what the opposite of granite was, but it was out there somewhere, waiting for him.

He went into his bedroom, pulled out the little, black box, and slid Lady Obsidian’s business card inside. Mr. Malevolence’s broken glasses took up a lot of space. Adam hoped finding his true nemesis wouldn’t take too long.

Otherwise, he’d need a bigger box.

© 2013 by Carlie St. George.

Carlie St. George is a 2012 Clarion West graduate. Her flash fiction, “Expiration Date,” was made into a One-Minute Weird Tale for Weird Tales. She lives in Sonoma County, where she is unfortunately, if somewhat predictably, surrounded by wine enthusiasts. When she’s not writing fiction, she’s working on ridiculously long, snarky movie reviews and other geek-related posts at her blog mygeekblasphemy.com.

Author Spotlight: John Langan
Moshe Siegel

Your novella, “The Wide, Carnivorous Sky,” first appeared in the horror anthology By Blood We Live (edited by Lightspeed’s own John Joseph Adams), followed by anthology reprints in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2010 and Vampires: The Recent Undead; yet, despite being born of horror, this story is a natural fit among Lightspeed’s fantasy and science fiction fare. Was this genre-hopping your intent, or were the F/SF elements incidental to the tale you wanted to write?

Well, I view horror as a pretty big tent, under whose eaves a great variety of narrative elements jostle. In terms of the threats and remedies you encounter in a typical horror story, the genre tends to draw on fantasy (indeed, in Danse Macabre, Stephen King places horror as a subgenre of fantasy). That said, there are plenty of horror stories that are rooted in elements associated with science fiction, from Frankenstein on down to Michael Shea’s brilliant “The Autopsy.” For all its arbitrary wackiness, there is something about the figure of the vampire that seems to call up a peculiarly scientific, or at least, quasi-scientific response; it’s part of what makes Dracula so fascinating a book. As I was writing the story, it made sense to me that the soldiers would try to understand the thing that had attacked them, and that they would try to devise the best plan they could to defeat it. They have faith in their ability to do so, to use their brains and their technology against it—which is a very science-fictional viewpoint, I suppose. But I also wanted the monster to be in some ways beyond their ability to explain; I wanted there to be things about its biology—especially, its thirst for blood—that wouldn’t make sense. To that extent, I think the story probably sits askew from what I think of as traditional science fiction.

In an interview with John Joseph Adams (for his abovementioned vampire anthology), you mentioned that an Iraq war veteran’s recounting influenced the writing of “The Wide, Carnivorous Sky.” What do you think is the role of fiction—of genre fiction, specifically—in processing such painful topics as war and human suffering? Do you turn to fiction for fantastical escape, or to better understand your fellow humans, or some combination of both?

I turn to fiction for entertainment. However, I’m going to cheat a little, in choosing this word, by invoking Michael Chabon’s use of it in the first essay in his volume, Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands. The essay is titled, “Trickster in a Suit of Lights: Thoughts on the Modern Short Story,” and in it, Chabon makes the case that entertainment is the short story (and the short story writer’s) principle and even sacred duty. He does so by appealing to the word’s etymology, which is rooted in the idea of separate things mutually supporting one another, of a kind of exchange of strength(s). You start reading a work of fiction, and you become entangled in it. It becomes entangled in you. Something happens that both leads you away from and down into yourself. (I suppose a more sophisticated critic would talk about the process as one by which the text serves as a site for the reader to generate her/his own meaning(s) out of the nexus of her/his subjectivity.) The result is what I think Henry James was talking about when he said to H.G. Wells that it’s art which makes life. It’s that interaction, that entangling, which ultimately allows us to engage our lives—including, and maybe especially, the painful parts—more fully. I suppose I could have cut to the chase by choosing the third of your options, except that I would have to add, as I see things, it’s always that way.

The fictional elements of this story do a remarkable job of adding to the horrors of war, rather than overshadowing (and potentially diminishing) the already-horrific experience of solders in combat. I felt the psychic weight borne by these characters as they struggled with post-traumatic stress from not one, but two conflicts; what, if any, research did you undertake to so accurately (from my civilian perspective, at least) describe the thoughts and emotions of combat veterans?

I read whatever I could find about the second battle of Fallujah, and the circumstances leading up to it. Like everyone else, I’ve seen a great deal on the evening news these past years, as well as on documentary programs like PBS’s Frontline. When I was younger, I read a great deal of literature related to the Vietnam war, from James Webb’s naturalistic exercises to Tim O’Brien’s more postmodern efforts, and that experience gave me an impression of war as a theater of blood, chaos, and absurdity that seemed borne out by what I was watching happen on the news. As much as anything, I tried to imagine what my own responses would be to such events, and to render them accurately.

Davis and the others can only speculate on the nature and origin of the Shadow, an ambiguity that adds to the tension and surrealism of their experiences. Without asking you to divulge trade secrets, do you know what the Shadow is, where it came from? Do you as an author flesh out your mysteries behind the scenes, or do you speculate along with the rest of us?

When I first began reading horror fiction in a serious way, one of the things I loved most about such things as Stephen King’s first Dark Tower novels and much of Clive Barker’s early fiction was the feeling they gave you of there being a vast, strange universe lurking behind the stories you were reading. It’s an effect I strive for in my own work, and if I think I’ve succeeded in pulling it off, then that feels especially rewarding. But that doesn’t answer your question about this creature, does it? I can tell you that it’s very, very old, so ancient a thing that it probably can’t recall exactly how it became what it is. All it knows is its thirst, the terrible dryness that turns its mouth to sand and makes its throat feel as if it’s closing.

You are on the Board of Directors for the Shirley Jackson Awards and were one of its founding jurors; as of this publication, the next Awards ceremony is only weeks away at Readercon 24! Can you speak with us about your experience with the Awards, your current duties, and what sort of fiction is considered for the honor?

I’m pleased to have been one of the founders of the award, to have served on the jury for its first three years, and to continue to serve as one of its administrators. The award’s remit is simple: to recognize the best in what might broadly be called dark fiction, a category which includes traditional horror fiction, but which also embraces psychological suspense, noir, and whatever other narratives walk the darker side of the literary street. While I was a juror, this meant a tremendous amount of reading, motivated in part by my obsessive anxiety that there was going to be some worthy work of fiction I was going to overlook. Sadly, I’m sure there was. My takeaway from my work as a juror was that there is a tremendous amount of brilliant work being done at the darker end of the literary spectrum right now; indeed, anyone interested in sampling its range could do worse than read through the lists of nominees. These days, though I still recommend works to the current jurors, I have more to do with trying to make sure the award has the funding it needs to continue.

Do you have any projects upcoming or in the works you would like to share with us?

My second collection, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies, is now available from Hippocampus Press. Recently, I’ve been very pleased to have stories in Simon Strantzas’s Shadows Edge anthology and Eric Guignard’s After Death anthology. I’ll have new stories in Joe Pulver’s Thomas Ligotti tribute anthology, The Grimscribe’s Puppets (which should be out soon), and Ellen Datlow’s Lovecraft’s Monsters (which should be out early in 2014). I’m hoping to have my second novel done this summer, and to be shopping my next collection of short fiction around early in the fall.

Moshe Siegel interviews at Lightspeed, freelance edits hither and yon, and is in hot pursuit of an MS in Publishing at Pace University. His overladen bookshelf and smug e-reader glare at each other across his home office in upstate New York, and he isn’t quite sure what to think about it all. Follow tweets of varying relevance @moshesiegel.

Author Spotlight: Sophia McDougall
Amber Barkley

There are no apples in the story, yet it’s titled “Golden Apple.” Why did you choose that title?

It seemed a beautiful image of sunlight made solid, of the fact that food is sunlight. At the beginning of the story, Alan reflects that the light of the sun is still present, even in the darkness, in the energy that’s fuelling his and Jan’s bodies as they break into the lab. In a way, he’s already made of light.

There are a lot of golden apples in mythology and fairy tales. And I think I had a few silver apples and crystal apples in the back of my mind as well. The golden apples of the Hesperides, for example, the golden apple that led to the Trojan War. Golden apples keep the Norse gods immortal. There are Yeats’ “Golden Apples of the Sun”—I know I should reference Ray Bradbury here, but the fact is I didn’t know about his collection, or if I did, I had forgotten it. In fairy stories, it’s a common motif that someone is sick and their relatives must go in search of something to cure them; that something is often a golden apple. C. S. Lewis uses that idea in The Magician’s Nephew, with a silver apple that could heal Digory’s dying mother, but which he has to resist stealing, and of course Eve’s apple is somewhere in the background of that. And there’s a Russian story about a girl who asks her father for a transparent apple, which isn’t edible, but in it you can see the world.

So, “Golden Apple” because golden apples are often objects of quests and thefts; they can cure illness or even make you something beyond human, but they also cause a lot of conflict trouble.

In the beginning of the story, Jan and Alan break into a research lab and steal solid sunlight to heal their daughter. What do you think of the moral dilemma this presents?

I’m afraid I have to refuse to answer this—there certainly is a moral dilemma, but I don’t want to steer the reader to a particular view of it.

Where did the inspiration for solid sunlight come from? What does that light mean to you, particularly as the family turns to light?

It’s rare that I can answer this question with such ease: It came to me in a dream. When Jared Shurin approached me to be part of the anthology and explained that each author would take inspiration from a different body of the solar system, I naturally thought I would annex the sun before anyone else did. Surely, I thought, any author with any self-respect can do something with the sun. Then I found myself close to the deadline with no decent ideas at all—I was thinking of Pharaohs, sun cults, Antarctic explorers, all good things that I couldn’t find anything to do with.

Then I went to sleep, and I dreamed that I was still anxiously looking for ideas, and that I was reading a short story by George R. R. Martin. In this story, sunlight had been made into a solid substance. People were doing various things with it, including eating it. “This is good,” I thought, “surely I can riff off this somehow. It’s just a shame the central idea is George R. R. Martin’s, and not mine.” And then I woke up and found that it was my idea after all.

It could be just a rather nice way to die, it could be something else, it could be a nice way to die AND something else.

Why did you choose to give Daisy coeliac disease, rather than some other illness?

It’s important to the story that she be starving; I wanted the mechanism by which the parents hope the light will heal her to feel very simple—the girl needs energy to live; sunlight is the source of virtually all energy on earth. At first I thought of the illness being the last stages of anorexia. But I’ve written about mental illness before and decided in the end I didn’t want to this time. While anorexia is a very complex disorder and insofar as there is choice involved, it’s not a free, unconstrained choice, still any desire on her part not to recover would disguise the change in her after eating the light. Post-light Daisy is happy with what she’s becoming, even though it isn’t very human—that could have been a manifestation of her anorexia, if I’d gone that way, rather than an effect of the light itself. The ambiguity could probably be done interestingly at greater length, but I get a little sick of “is it mental illness, is it real” dilemmas in SFF, and I think it would have cut out other forms of complexity: How do you respond to someone’s desires and decisions, if they’re made after you altered them without their consent? And what if that decision, in turn, wasn’t wholly free either?

So, if it is was a physical illness, it had to be something that made it impossible for her to absorb sustenance from food, which led towards imagining a very extreme form of coeliac, or at least, a condition that has something in common with celiac. (What Daisy has, as Alan mentions, is not normal celiac; the closest thing to it is called “refractory sprue” and you don’t get it at Daisy’s age.)

Why is Daisy’s favorite color Majorelle blue? What is the significance of color in the story?

I wanted to give a sense of her having been a very specific person, though at the beginning of the story that person is no longer really around. (Partly in order to comment on the strange and gendered tropes that crop up in the way we talk about dead or dying young women). Her having a very specific favourite colour seemed a good key to that. It’s a very intense blue from Morocco, it would remain vivid even in very bright sunlight. Beyond that, the significance of colour is another thing I’ll have to leave to the reader.

Amber Barkley is a recent graduate of Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She was born in Idaho and grew up in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Her favorite animals are cats and horses, and she considers it a great injustice that she is allergic to both—though that doesn’t stop her from being around them whenever she has the chance. Amber writes high fantasy with a dark twist, and is currently working on her first novel.

Author Spotlight: Adam Troy-Castro
Robyn Lupo

How did “The Boy and the Box” start for you?

I could say, but that would be telling.

What, you need a more helpful answer? Okay; it springs from certain questions that have always bothered me: Namely, why an omnipotent being would want to be praised all the time, how profoundly empty that experience had to be, how omnipotence would almost certainly go along with sadism. The story puts these questions on the head of a boy instead of a deity, but let us be honest: Most definitions of a supreme being describe a very lonely and petulant creature whose only entertainment is watching an ant farm and occasionally poking it with a stick.

The Boy’s power extends from putting everything in his box, to potentially building Hell himself. Why does he use his power in such a reductive way? Do you think he had the potential to use his gift for good?

I think the boy is like the rest of us: trying to comprehend that which cannot be comprehended. He’s just a faster learner. I dunno whether he could have been benevolent, but chances are that would not have produced an interesting story.

Why do you think The Boy was interested in whether Lyle/Stupid-Face was a good man?

He needed a self-described good man to pit against his self-described evil one, for the fight that he hoped would provide him with a few seconds of entertainment. Alas, he picked a less-than-satisfactory champion and it really wasn’t much fun. It’s like playing Desktop Tower Defense. The gameplay is pretty much always the same.

You’re an award-winning author of short stories. Do you have any hints for the uninitiated?

Writers are best off eschewing gimmick stories of the sort where so-and-so turns out to be (gasp!) A VAMPIRE! It’s much better to begin with something in life that angers you, or entrances you, or frustrates you, or even simply amuses you, and figure out a way for a story that bring it into sharp relief. A vampire might well figure in that illustration. But if you start from life, then even a fantastic treatment will echo the human heart, and not other stories.

Robyn Lupo has been known to frequent southwestern Ontario with her graduate student husband and elderly dog. She writes, reads, and plays video games. She is personal assistant to three cats.

Author Spotlight: Laura Friis
Jude Griffin

The latter part of your story brought alive memories of the Liveship Traders trilogy, though the ending, of course, went in an entirely different direction. Was Robin Hobbs’s work one of the seeds of inspirations for “Ushakiran”?

Not consciously—the story was inspired by a picture of a ship I found and carried around with me for ages. I often use pictures for prompts, and I always knew I wanted to write about this ship because it just looked so alive and spectacular in the picture, with its sails and flags blowing in the wind and people rushing about on deck. That impression of movement and the idea of life infusing an inanimate thing is maybe what made me want to write about a person who becomes one with a ship. It was originally the story of a baby girl, adopted by a ship’s crew as their luck, who lived out her life on the ship and slowly melted away into it, becoming intangible, a kind of ghost. I don’t remember at what point I decided to have her become the figurehead instead, but, of course as soon as I thought of it, I was aware that I was in Liveship Traders territory. It’s a different approach—the liveships are creatures of wood who are remarkable because they are sentient and can communicate, they resemble humans but aren’t human, and, for me, that’s what makes them so interesting and magical—they’re ships come to life. Ushakiran is a human who becomes trapped in a ship and, eventually, identical with it. I’m sure there was some unconscious inspiration though; I read the Liveship Tradersbooks at a formative age.

Why does she hear the answering cry of the Leviathan at the end?

That’s for the reader to decide. I personally like to think she becomes one of them—that is, that ship and girl together make a creature which is neither but something entirely new, and somehow akin to the Leviathans. So it could be a cry of welcome—but maybe they are scenting prey, or warning her off, or afraid of her. There’re multiple possibilities.

You had some amazing authors reviewing and giving you input on “Ushakiran”: did any of their input surprise you?

This story was written at Clarion West last year and I was lucky enough to get feedback on it from both George R.R. Martin and Kelly Link so, yes, pretty amazing! Plus, of course, I had the reactions of my seventeen equally amazing classmates. I don’t normally talk about stories I’m writing, but in this case I got very stuck in the middle, so I did, and people had some very cool ideas. One of my classmates, Henry Lien, thought up the idea of Ushakiran hearing what was going on around her through vibrations in the wood of the ship, which helped move the plot along a lot.

I don’t think I got any feedback that surprised me exactly. I got lots of conflicting opinions, as you would expect, on things like length, tense, point of view, and how much information to give or withhold in the story. I didn’t revise any of my stories until a few months after the workshop, just to give all those different voices time to settle in my brain. When I did come back to it, I found it immensely helpful and reassuring to have all this guidance from people whose opinions I respected, but that also meant some tough choices.

What was the most difficult choice you had to make during the revision of this story?

Probably the number of viewpoint characters—some people felt there shouldn’t be so many and I was a little uneasy about that myself, but I liked it that way for this story, and enough other people liked it that in the end I decided to keep it that way. Also a few people felt I should make it longer and tell more about the world of the ship and Ushakiran’s life. My short stories are usually pretty short and I was worried I would mess up the pacing if I added things, but in the end I realised there did need to be at least a couple more scenes, just for clarity, so I agonised over it for a bit and then wrote them.

Is the world of Currents and kelp and magic and Leviathans one you’ll return to?

Possibly. I often do as much worldbuilding for a short story as I would for a novel, but in this case I was improvising wildly, and only got the ideas for kelp and Leviathans as I was writing them down—so this world is a bit of a mystery to me and I find it intriguing. This particular narrative feels complete to me and I don’t think I would want to write any more about the characters on the Day’s Eye (though I do wonder about Jathe’s early life. That has to be one of the most delicious things about writing stories—knowing where a character ends up, and wondering how they got there.) I hadn’t thought I would write in that world again, but I’ve had a couple of people now, when I was moaning about having nothing to write about, say that there’s scope for a whole novel there. So maybe I will.

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, photographer, and an expert in learning and knowledge management. She has trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo, was a volunteer EMT and firefighter, accompanied journalists into combat in Central America, lived in a haunted village in Thailand, ran an international amphibian monitoring network, volunteers with the National Park Service habitat restoration program on the Boston Harbor Islands, reads slush for Nightmare and Lightspeed Magazine, and is working on a novel that might be science fiction, might be fantasy. She cannot parallel park, lies about how far she runs in the morning, and still has her Gloria Vanderbilt jeans from high school. Folded. In a box.

Author Spotlight: Ursula K. LeGuin
Jude Griffin

In your introduction to “The Stars Below,” you talk about the evolution of the story from being about science to being about art, and then finally to being about the mind. What then do you think the story says about the mind?

The introduction in the 1975 edition was written in 1975, and the story was written two years before that. About forty years ago. I read that introduction, now, and to some extent I read the story, almost as if somebody else wrote them—because I am and am not the person who wrote them. Eighty-three ain’t forty-three. (I imagine if some of you were asked to think who you were forty years ago, you’d come up with an egg? Or may even only a possibility?) So, anyhow, I don’t entirely agree with the person who wrote my introduction. I think the story really is about science—the tragedy of dogmatic/fundamentalist religions making science into their enemy, when if they would only see it, all the discoveries of science only give their god a greater universe to rule.

I don’t think the story says much about the mind. It offers a metaphor: mind as mine. The dangers, the treasures, the limitless depths.

You talked about how, as the story evolved, “symbols you thought were simple equivalences, signs, come alive and take on meanings you did not intend and cannot explain.” Can you talk a little bit more about where this happened in the story?

It always happens in any story that’s any good. But no, I can’t say exactly where it happens, because the happening is the story.

Save for the passing mention of someone’s wife, the story is striking in that it is entirely populated by male or ungendered characters (e.g., “the villagers”). What was it about the story that you felt needed such a strongly filtered viewpoint?

SNRRRK!

My child, your Elder will now tell you of a time long, long before you were born, an age of darkness, in which our People of the Sci-fi had no women. Among the People were only men. The men did all things well and bravely. They went where no man had gone before.

But women they knew not, except as depicted upon the covers of their magazines, having large breasts and screaming.

Yet it was even as they feared: Actual women crept among them, hidden by initials and false names, and also there were certain men of the People, such as the Great Sturgeon, and the Cordwainer, and little by little these brought a new knowledge unto the Scifi: There are two genders!

In 1973, that was still news, and bad news, to a lot of the SF market. Believe me, it wasn’t me that felt the story “needed such a strongly filtered viewpoint.”

But consider, also, that I wanted the story set in 16th-century Europe, for the science-religion clash: and in 16th-century Europe what was the chance of a woman being either an astronomer or a silver miner?

Guennar is a man whose study of the stars is, for him, a study of his god’s handiwork. Why did you choose to make Guennar a religious man devoted to scientific study who nonetheless sees the burning of his home and observatory as punishment from his god?

Because he was a 16th-century European. I don’t like wishful-thinking fiction that puts people with completely modern ideas into a past age (where they prance around showing people how wrong and stupid they are).

Also, I wanted him to be able to talk about seeing the endless stars his telescope revealed to him as shining with God’s glory. He’s saying the more you know the more there is to praise. Science enlarges the universe—why should that diminish God?

As well as I can understand, that’s the way Galileo saw it.

Guennar prays to his god to let him continue his study of the stars: “I will not speak, Lord, only let me see!” He then later reconstructs a telescope and uses it to discover “the stars below.” Was his prayer answered?

Or did he just go a little crazier?

Or . . . ?

The story is the question, not an answer.

Why was it important to show that Guennar really could find hidden silver with his telescope before he disappeared, rather than leaving it as him saying he could see the “stars beneath the rock” and the miners at once observing his growing madness but believing in the truth of what he was saying?

I don't know that it was “important,” but it's a kind of fulfillment. Just to send him staggering off into the caves seems a weak ending. His “discovery,” however he made it, gives the whole story shape and balance. It also gives a hope that the old miners will be able to have some pigs and beer again.

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, photographer, and an expert in learning and knowledge management. She has trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo, was a volunteer EMT and firefighter, accompanied journalists into combat in Central America, lived in a haunted village in Thailand, ran an international amphibian monitoring network, volunteers with the National Park Service habitat restoration program on the Boston Harbor Islands, reads slush for Nightmare and Lightspeed Magazines, and is working on a novel that might be science fiction, might be fantasy. She cannot parallel park, lies about how far she runs in the morning, and still has her Gloria Vanderbilt jeans from high school. Folded. In a box.

Author Spotlight: Benjamin Roy Lambert
Earnie Sotirokos

In “Division of Labor,” your characters literally “use it or you lose it.” Where did the idea for this story come from?

The idea came in the most literal form possible, which is that I was working very hard at a desk job and felt my physical condition deteriorating. So I just extrapolated from that.

If you had to focus on one part of yourself and let everything else melt away, what would you choose to preserve?

I would say ears, as I find hearing to be the sense that is most independent from everyday life in terms of giving satisfaction, and presumably if I were reduced to a single organ, everyday life would be a thing of the past.

Renny’s unmoving protest reminded me of Buddhist monks who’ve used self-immolation to get their point across. Did this imagery play into how you constructed that scene?

I can’t say that this imagery was on the surface of my mind when I wrote this scene, but it must have been somewhere in the back of my head, because now that you mention it the parallels are quite strong.

Given the way we currently live our lives, do you think ultra-specialization is unavoidable?

I think that ultra-specialization will continue to be the trend until advances in AI/robotics begin to surpass all human abilities, at which point we will all be generalists again because there will be no point in devoting your life to a single narrow occupation (like writing!) just to be half as good as a machine. I’d also note that the benefits of specialization may outweigh the costs. My short story is a dystopia, but that may only be because it doesn’t show all of the benefits of specialization. Similarly, we never find out in “1984” what the exact benefits of living in Oceania are, and if it might not after all be preferable to the available alternatives.

What can we expect from you in the future?

Hard to say. Writing is a tough thing to do for me. This is my first published story, so my ambition for now is to have a second published story.

Earnie Sotirokos grew up in a household where Star Trek: The Next Generation marathons were only interrupted for baseball and football games. When he’s not writing copy for radio or reading slush, he enjoys penning fiction based on those influences. Follow him on Twitter @sotirokos.

Author Spotlight: Margo Lanagan
Earnie Sotirokos

“Mulberry Boys” explores what might happen if people could be transformed into a cash crop. How did you come up with the idea to apply plant physiology to human beings?

It’s more insect physiology than plant; the mulberry boys are made into a kind of silkworm. Except that the silk isn’t from their cocoons, it’s produced in their digestive tract when they’re fed a diet of mulberry leaves. It’s highly scientific, of course. I can’t really remember what sparked this story off, besides, years ago, having kept silkworms and being impressed by the flightless wobbling feebleness of the moths when they hatched. But stories often start that way for me, by my transferring weird behaviour or processes in the animal world to humans. A single David Attenborough documentary contains several collections’ worth of ideas.

As a society, we struggle to break exploitative cycles like this all the time. Was the theme of this story aimed at a specific part of how we do business?

No, it was all about the silk production process, about how people would organise themselves around this madman’s enterprise. I don’t tend to think very consciously in terms of theme when I’m writing; I’m usually getting the characters to move interestingly through the setting in pursuit of the climactic moment, and any moral point comes through without my hammering it. I suppose it could be said to be about the vulnerability of unworldly communities to commercially minded shysters. Or about different shades of greed.

Could one murdered silk trader really end the injustice going on in George’s village?

Possibly. Phillips is a lone operator, and very secretive. And as our narrator establishes, he doesn’t have a succession plan. Certainly the boy believes that he’s bringing an end to the practice, which is what matters. He doesn’t believe that anyone else will come in from the outside world to carry it on, and he thinks his own people will be too timid to go down to the township and traffic in silk.

Did you ever come back to this universe to take a look at life outside the village?

No, it was a pretty closed system, that story. Although with these questions you’re asking, I’m beginning to wonder what the rest of their world looked like, I have to say.

What can we expect from you in the future?

I’m in the process of clearing the decks of contracted stories. I think I need to take a deep breath and write a few stories that are not on demand and not to deadline. I’ve had a few years of taking on a lot of short-story commitments, and I need to just write a few stories that arise naturally, that insist on being written for their own sake. I have no idea what they will be.

Earnie Sotirokos grew up in a household where Star Trek: The Next Generation marathons were only interrupted for baseball and football games. When he’s not writing copy for radio or reading slush, he enjoys penning fiction based on those influences. Follow him on Twitter @sotirokos.

Author Spotlight: Ryan North
Christie Yant

Your story “Cancer” was written in the theme of the anthology that you co-edited, Machine of Death, in which all of the stories center on a machine that can tell a person how they will die. Where did the idea for the Machine of Death come from, and is the theme of knowing the manner of your own death one that you’ve explored before?

The idea for the “Machine of Death” actually came from a Dinosaur Comic installment I wrote back in 2005! My co-editors, Matt Bennardo and David Malki, really liked the idea and we solicited stories for an anthology. A few years later the first Machine of Death book came out, became Amazon.com’s #1 bestselling book that day, and we started working on the sequel, This Is How You Die.

The theme of knowing your own death isn’t one I’d explored before (excepting my story for the first Machine of Death book, where it was used as a way to send information back in time) (spoiler alert) but I find it fascinating. Knowing how but not when, and knowing that “how” could easily only make sense after you’ve died (yay, ironic interpretations of words): that’s awesome. What’s most interesting about the book is, unexpectedly, how the stories aren’t mostly morbid and sad. “Cancer” is (hopefully) a funny story, and there’re lots more that approach it in the same way. It was interesting to see how the idea of the Machine was explored by different authors: We’ve even got a choose-your-own-adventure style story in the new book. It’s way more fun than it is depressing! Honest.

This was a deeply moving story. Cancer has touched nearly everyone in some way. Can you tell us what the inspiration was behind the story?

Aw, thank you! My mother-in-law Jayne passed from cancer a few months before I started writing the story, and shortly after I’d finished it, my wife Jenn was herself diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Cancer, man. Luckily Jenn’s treatment has proceeded well and we’re in a good place. When it came to writing the story, it did (selfishly) help that I already had intimate knowledge of what it was like inside a hospital, what it was like in the cancer ward, things like that. Sure, there’re moments of sorrow there and times when things are rough, but it’s not that way all the time. If you’re lucky, a lot of it is just hanging out with your loved ones. You play cards. You tell jokes. You gossip about your friends. You can’t be 100% sad 100% of the time.

But the real inspiration for the story was Henrietta Lacks: Her story is so incredible (in both senses of the word) and the world of difference between what her cells have accomplished and the callous way she was treated by the medical professional around her is a huge contrast. The idea of immortal cell lines (and Helen’s name) come from her story.

I couldn’t help but love your characters, Helen and Tina. Their interaction was so sweet and genuine. Helen’s character in particular really spoke to me, as someone more comfortable with gallows humor than grief. Your “day job” is in humor writing, as the creator of Dinosaur Comics. Do humor and tragedy usually coincide for you? What’s the relationship there—is it strictly “if we don’t laugh, we’ll cry,” or is there something more to it?

Thanks! Obviously there’s a connection between humour and tragedy (that old “comedy = tragedy + time” equation) but I think there’s more to it than that. Helen reacts to bad news the same way I do: by cracking a joke. Jokes relieve stress and put people at ease, and I can tell you from hard-earned experience that this is great if you’re surrounded by people who react in the same way. It’s . . . not so great if you’re not.

Helen was actually inspired a lot by my friend Joey Comeau (like me, he writes a comic, his is called A Softer World). Joey is hilarious, and when Jenn and I got married he gave me a card that read, “Congratulations on this, the occasion of your first marriage.” It was great. If it was from anyone else it’d be awful, but coming from Joey it was amazing. For writing Helen, I just tried to think of what Joey would do. For writing Tina, that was all me. This is a writing cheat, and it only works if you have awesome friends.

I don’t actually think making a joking around bad news is a “if we don’t laugh we’ll cry” thing: I think it’s more of a “this is insane, can we all acknowledge how this is insane?” sort of thing! Helen’s not cracking wise to prevent herself from crying, she’s cracking wise because things are absurd and she’s thought of the perfect way to express it. Some funny people will tell jokes at times when others won’t, but I’m pretty sure most of them are thinking them. Helen’s just more willing than most to say what she’s thinking.

And it’s a powerful thing too: not letting something terrible change who you are, but staying strong in the face of that. I think that’s great, and I think it’s part of what not completely losing your mind to grief around bad news is.

When I first read your story, I was expecting to ask all kinds of questions about the HeLa line, but your end note was so fantastic I’m not sure what else to ask. Is there anything else that you think we should know about Henrietta Lack, or HeLa?

Honestly, her story is amazing and there’re (now) several good books written about it. If this story got you at all interested in her, I’d recommend checking some of them out.

The most recent twist in the story was earlier this year, when scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory sequenced the HeLa cell genome and put it online—in effect, publishing Henrietta’s DNA publicly—without talking to anyone in her family first. And this DNA would let you conclude things like “here are some genetic diseases that members of her family members are more likely to suffer from.” This time people got outraged a lot sooner and the paper was revised so the full details of the genome aren’t public anymore. But the intersection between science and privacy, ethics and personality morality—it’s a complicated one. I expect we’ll see more cases like this in the future.

You seem to be making art everywhere I turn right now. In addition to writing Dinosaur Comics, editing Machine of Death, and writing short stories, you’re now also the writer for the Adventure Time comic. What can your fans look forward to next?

Hey, thanks! It has been a busy time. Besides Dinosaur Comics, This Is How You Die, and Adventure Time, I’ve written To Be or Not To Be: That Is The Adventure, which is a choose-your-own-path version of Hamlet. We did a Kickstarter for the book and it ended up being the most-funded publishing project in Kickstarter history! You can check that out at www.hamletbook.com. I’m really excited for this book: You can play as Hamlet, Ophelia, or Hamlet’s Dad—but if you choose him you die on the first page and then play as a ghost investigating your own murder. It’ll be fun!

Christie Yant has published fiction in the magazines Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Crossed Genres, Daily Science Fiction, Fireside, Shimmer, has been featured on io9 and Wired.com, and has been included in the anthologies The Way of the Wizard, Armored, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2011 Edition. In the past, she has served as a book reviewer for Audible.com, and she occasionally narrates for StarShipSofa and blogs at Inkpunks.com, a website for aspiring and newly-pro writers. She lives in a former Temperance colony on the central coast of California, where she sometimes gets to watch rocket launches with her husband and her two amazing daughters. Learn more at inkhaven.net.

Author Spotlight: Carlie St. George
Amber Barkley

What inspired “This Villain You Must Create”? Why did you choose to write about a superhero?

Years ago, in one of my creative writing classes, another student asked what the plural of “nemesis” was, and it sparked this big debate, not just about the correct word, but if you could ever have more than one nemesis and if a word like nemesis should even have a plural form.

So I start thinking about superheroes, naturally, because I’m a geek, and that’s kind of what I do, and I start wondering if a superhero could just decide to replace his nemesis if he ever actually succeeded in killing him. It was more of a quirky romantic story in my original conception, actually, and much more optimistic. As I started writing it, that . . . changed.

Granite and Lady Obsidian relate to each other through references to classic literature (Robert Frost, Frankenstein, Walt Whitman . . .). Why books as opposed to another form of art, and why those particular works?

I suspect Granite and Lady Obsidian are both readers because I’m a reader, honestly. Well-read protagonists are probably even more common than writer protagonists. But it’s a trope that served me well, I think, because tropes are so important to Granite in this story. He lives by them. They’re his foundations. Although I’m a little disappointed in myself that I didn’t quote any Shakespeare. Everyone knows the best (Klingon) villains quote Shakespeare.

As far as which literary works I picked—honestly, there was a hefty dose of Google-fu happening there, certainly with Walt Whitman. I did intentionally have some fun at Robert Frost’s expense, admittedly, because certain poems of his really do pop up a lot in fanfiction. The quote from Frankenstein, though, I just love it—sometimes, I feel like we don’t talk enough about that part of recovery, how life just doesn’t stop for grief, how life doesn’t care who’s died because things still need to be done. Since this is, to some extent, a story about trying to move on after a loss, it seemed fitting.

The superheroes without nemeses have a support group to combat their depression. Why is the balance between superhero and supervillain necessary? Why do they need each other so much?

I think it comes down to a sense of purpose. We all want there to be a reason we’re here, and destiny’s just more fulfilling when specific people are involved. Say you’re a superhero. You’re like, “I’m here to stop evil.” So, you fight evil for a while, and that’s great, but then there’s this one bad guy who keeps on coming, who—for whatever reason—only you can stop. It’s your mission now, to stop this villain, because no one else can do it. He’s why you’re here. But if he just disappears one day, just dies . . . what’s your mission? Sure, there are other bad guys to stop, but other heroes can take those guys down. Why are you here? What are you contributing?

And villains, well, villains want love too, right? Or at least a good chess partner. Any respectable supervillain should know how to play chess. If they lose their favorite partner . . . why bother playing? It’s not really the game you’re trying to beat, after all. It’s your opponent.

Adam has frequent dreams about Mr. Malevolence and, later, Lady Obsidian. Why are they always at a ball, and what is the significance of the roses?

I can’t lie about this: I love writing dream sequences. I know people who hate reading them, but I can’t resist: Dream sequences are basically the music videos of prose fiction. And nightmares are just the best.

As to why they’re always at a ball . . . well, it made for an easy analogy, nemeses as dance partners, synchronized and perfectly suited to one another. Also, quite honestly, I just liked the imagery. Masquerade balls are awesome. I desperately want to go to one someday. I mostly chose the roses for imagery, too. I liked the idea that each set of nemeses had matching flowers, like corsages and boutonnieres, something that signified they belonged to one another. And red roses are just classic.

Does each superhero really have an ideal nemesis, or is Adam’s search futile? What does this say about his life, or life in general?

I kind of doubt that there is this one, ideal nemesis, but even if I’m wrong about that, I think Adam’s search is futile because by the end, he’s kind of turned the corner from “lost” to “functionally delusional.” He wants his nemesis so badly that he’s just going to keep convincing himself that he’s found her. Until someone irreparably breaks that illusion for him—and then he’ll just do it all over again. He needs it too much.

That being said, I don’t think we’re all Adam. I’m not quite that cynical. Not yet, anyway.

Amber Barkley is a recent graduate of Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She was born in Idaho and grew up in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Her favorite animals are cats and horses, and she considers it a great injustice that she is allergic to both—though that doesn’t stop her from being around them whenever she has the chance. Amber writes high fantasy with a dark twist, and is currently working on her first novel.

Coming Attractions

Coming up in August, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original fantasy by Ken Liu (“The Litigation Master and the Monkey King”) and Cory Skerry (“Breathless in the Deep”), along with fantasy reprints by Marc Laidlaw (“Catamounts”) and Angela Slatter (“Brisneyland by Night”).

Plus, we have original science fiction by Yoon Ha Lee (“The Knight of Chains, the Deuce of Stars”) and Sean Williams (“Face Value”) and SF reprints by Alastair Reynolds (“At Budokan”) and Nancy Kress (“End Game”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with Alaya Dawn Johnson and bestselling YA author Rick Yancey.

For our ebook readers, we also have the novella “The Gorgon in the Cupboard” by Patricia McKillip and an excerpt of Blood of Tyrants, the penultimate volume in the acclaimed Temeraire series by bestselling author Naomi Novik.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

Looking ahead, past next month, we’ve got a veritable plethora of stories forthcoming. Check out the slate of original stories we’ve got coming up over the next couple of issues: D. Thomas Minton (“The Schrödinger War”), Seanan McGuire (“Homecoming”), Matthew Hughes (“Sleeper”), Marc Laidlaw (“Bellweather”), Ken Liu (“Ghost Days”), Dylan Otto Krider (“The Five Deaths of Marvin Dimitri”), Charlie Jane Anders (“Small Dead Creatures”), Will McIntosh (“Dry Bite”), Sean Williams (“Death and the Hobbyist”), Kelly Barnhill (“The Insect and the Astronomer”), Beth Revis (“The Turing Test”), Siobhan Carroll (“The Correspondence Between the Governess and the Attic”), Hao Jingfang (“Invisible Planets,” translated by Ken Liu), Anaea Lay (“Salamander Patterns”), Adam-Troy Castro (“The Thing About Shapes to Come”), and Gregory Benford (“Leaving Night”).

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed. Thanks for reading!

If you enjoyed this issue, you might also enjoy Nightmare Magazine (www.nightmare-magazine.com), also edited by Lightspeed editor John Joseph Adams. On the next page, you will find the complete text of one of the stories from the current issue of Nightmare. Enjoy with our compliments—and, if you do, please consider subscribing! 

Bonus Story from Nightmare Magazine

And Yet, Her Eyes
Brit Mandelo

I.

December 2010

Sasha came back from Kandahar in pieces, a sack of broken glass in the shape of a woman. She knew her edges stuck out at hard, invisible angles, waiting for an unwary hand to snag and recoil, so she kept her eyes closed through the flight to Chicago, immersed in civilian travel-murmur but not part of it; when the flight attendant offered to help her with her bags after landing, she said no thank you. She read his nod as relieved, the quick turn from her on his heel more so—thought about making a remark, I don’t bite and it isn’t contagious, but didn’t.

This was the way things were going to be from here ‘til forever.

Then folks were standing, bustling for their carry-ons and banging elbows into each other. Sasha levered herself out of the small seat, breath held against the tight ache in her guts, and eased her own pack from the overhead to follow the mass exit. The persistent flow of travelers swept her along the jet bridge to the airport, kept her from dragging her feet as the distance between then and now closed. Four months and as many hospitals, long enough that the tan had leeched from her skin and the residual grit had washed out of her hair—or, she’d lost it when they’d shaved her to do tests at the German layover. Four months like a nightmare; four months like a mirage.

“Sasha,” a voice called as she exited the terminal into baggage claim, but the first thing she saw was the dazzlingly strange expanse of wide, white, winter sky outside the window. Only second did she see Liz, who was standing to her right with one hand raised halfway to her mouth. The light haloed her, slouching in jeans and a high-buttoned black trench coat, pale hair a nimbus of tangles. She might have lost weight; difficult to tell.

“Hon,” Sasha replied, loosening her grip on her pack.

“Oh, shit,” Liz said.

The foot of space between them closed like a slamming door as Liz lurched forward and wrapped soft arms around her neck, sagging into her. She grunted, knees giving slightly, and Liz cursed again before letting go.

“I forgot, I’m sorry. Let me take your bag,” she said. “Fucking—good to see you.”

That was all she managed before her voice cracked and she put that fluttering hand over her eyes. Sasha heaved a low, long breath and shifted her pack, setting it on the ground. Liz trembled, quiet tears, and Sasha put a tentative hand on her arm.

“I’m home,” Sasha said.

“I know.”

“It’ll be like I never left,” she continued.

Liz shook her head and patted Sasha’s hand. Her gaze flicked up, skated over what Sasha already knew was there, what she felt tugging whenever she spoke: the twist of red, young scar tissue mapping up the side of her face from jaw to cheekbone, leading to the divot nicked into her left ear. “I wish you’d just told them to go fuck themselves, and let me visit.”

“I couldn’t be sure I was going to be discharged,” she said, posture straightening. “What could I do, ask for transportation and travel orders for my partner?”

“Yes,” Liz said.

Sasha tucked her chilly hands in her pockets, reopening the gap between their bodies. The sleepless, fevered nights she’d spent at Walter Reid, waiting for them to promise her she could transfer back to active duty, looped in her mind’s eye.

“Well, it certainly doesn’t matter any more,” she said. Her lover’s lips narrowed in response. “Let’s go home.”

Liz rubbed the heel of her hand over her eyes, one after the other, smearing away tears though the bruise-purple discoloration below them remained. “Okay,” she said.

Sasha ducked her head and followed as Liz tugged the pack onto her own strong shoulders to lead the way through the afternoon-busy airport. Her shadow trailed behind, dogging Sasha’s steps, and she kept her eyes on it rather than her partner’s uncombed hair.

She’d read the same books that Liz had—on wounded warriors, on trauma, on homecoming—but there hadn’t been words to encompass what she wanted to say about the burning in her bones, lodged under her skin like a piece of shrapnel that no doctor could cut out. She slipped her hand out of her pocket and flexed it. Ligament and bone rippled, spidery, under pale scar-flecked flesh. She shuddered and hid it away again. In daylight, she suspected she’d just snapped under the pressure.

But if she had come back in pieces, she feared something else might have slipped into the cracks.

Sasha crossed her legs at the ankles and laced her fingers between her knees. The doctor smiled, glasses on the end of her nose in danger of slipping free, and put her notepad aside. The bands of ragged scar tissue on Sasha’s abdomen ached with tension. Silence spread between them like ripples smoothing on the surface of water, hiding all manner of devils beneath.

“I know that it’s difficult to start talking to someone new, after the rapid changes you’ve been going through with your transfer,” the woman began.

“With my discharge,” Sasha corrected.

The doctor tilted her head in acknowledgment. “But you’re home, and you’re a veteran now. How’s your significant other taking it?”

“Liz?” Sasha frowned. They’d had every meal together for the past three days, stayed in each others’ shadows, shared showers, re-learned each others’ bodies with nominal success. But in the dark, while Liz slept, Sasha had seen the gleam of her own bones through her skin, had stuffed her face into her pillow to stop seeing, stop the invaded, horrified shaking that chased on the heels of the visions. “It’s fine.”

“Has she said anything about your—”

“The scars?” she cut in. The doctor nodded. “No. She touches them. She cried over them. She hasn’t said anything, though.”

“Do you want to talk to her about what happened?” she asked.

“I will when she’s ready. I’m fine. I’ve had time to get used to it.”

The other woman leaned forward in her chair. “You have not. You’ve been bounced from hospital to hospital, isolated from your unit, and swept up into this homecoming. I don’t want you to think you need to put on a brave face for me. I have your previous therapist’s notes; you did transfer them. You were having severe flashbacks.”

Sasha winced. “May I add that I was sedated for quite a lot of that?”

“Of course,” the doctor said. “That doesn’t mean what you said wasn’t true.”

“Look, I’m home, I can walk—I got lucky. I have all my limbs, okay? I feel pretty good about that. I was going to retire early anyway, now I got out earlier. I’ll readjust. If I have trouble, I’ll let you know. I’m still me.”

The doctor stared at her for another long moment. Behind the woman’s friendly façade, Sasha saw a flash of steel—no surprise, in a VA-recommended therapist. Sasha looked away first, face warming, and inspected a dun-and-blue painting of a desert oasis hanging on the far wall. It clashed with the yellow-cream wall paper. I’m still me, all me and only me.

“All right,” the doctor said finally. “I will note that repression can be catastrophic to a woman at your stage of recovery, as I’m sure you already know. So, weekly appointments, on Wednesdays?”

“Sure,” she agreed. The therapy was paid for, and Liz would feel better if she went.

“Then let’s talk about what you want to return to. What it was like between you and your partner prior to your deployment?” the therapist asked, picking up her notepad.

“Damn.” Sasha laughed, flattening her palms on her thighs. “You don’t joke around.”

“No,” the doctor said.

So they spoke, and Sasha spilled out safe memories like golden threads.

II.

May 2008

Liz’s eyes were stunning, lined in kohl-black pencil, their edges shaded delicately with purple glitter. Her fingertips traced circles on the damp rim of her wineglass. Sasha watched, the din of the restaurant fading to a dull roar as Liz’s blunt, handsome hands hypnotized her. The plane ticket for her return from leave was tucked in a travel folder on their table at home; from there, to Afghanistan.

“Our last night,” Liz murmured.

“I’ll be back before you know it,” Sasha said.

Liz gripped the glass to take a sip of the last lingering wine. “If you come back. If the next thing I see of you isn’t your ghost.”

“Christ,” Sasha said. She nudged Liz’s foot under the table. “Don’t say that. I’m going to be fine. I’m good at what I do. I’ll be done with my tour soon enough, and then we’ll take a secret vacation.”

“And then there’s that,” Liz said. “I won’t even be able to really talk to you while you’re gone.”

Sasha sighed. “It is what it is, hon. You can call, you can email, we just have to be careful.”

“Fuck those guys,” she spat.

Sasha had to grin—in that fancy dress and delicate makeup, her Liz still couldn’t keep her mouth clean. “Let’s get out of here,” she said and tossed her napkin to the table.

At home, after an interminable drive, the air sparked between them. A stumble through the darkened hallway to the bedroom ended with Sasha’s hands under Liz’s silk dress, yanking it up around her hips. If it tore, Sasha would buy a new one. Liz muttered obscenities in her ear as they pressed up against the doorframe, working a hand between them to undo her shirt buttons. Sasha squeezed her thighs and bit her neck; Liz ripped a button off in frustration.

“Fuck,” Sasha growled. She hefted Liz with her hands, lifted with her back the way she knew not to do, and Liz squealed as her feet left the floor. Heels dug into her butt while Liz clung to her shoulders and she strode into the bedroom.

“Big strong fucking marine,” Liz gasped out, all red-faced delight and smeared makeup.

“Big strong fucking woman,” Sasha corrected.

“Yes, ma’am,” she replied as Sasha dropped her on the bed.

Later, Sasha put her hand on the rise and fall of her lover’s ribs. “Do you really think I’d haunt you?”

“I hope you would,” Liz whispered.

“I don’t believe in ghosts. Nothing like that.”

The quiet fell again.

If I die, I’m just dead, Sasha thought.

III.

January 2011

“Can you get the sauerkraut open?” Liz called from the kitchen.

“Sure!” Sasha replied.

She sat the three pound weight on the floor next to her foot and rotated her wrist until it popped. Without the PT, her left shoulder would stiffen and the nerve damage would render her arm useless, but her joints didn’t always appreciate it. She swung a leg over the work-out bench, made her way to help Liz with dinner. It was just reubens, but real food remained a treat after so long on hospital fare. She rounded the corner to the kitchen and appreciated the sight of a brilliant sunset through the glass door to the backyard. Pink and gray clouds scuttled across the sky.

“That’s lovely,” she said.

“Mm-hmm,” Liz murmured, arranging sandwiches on a baking sheet.

Sasha rubbed her partner’s side through the starched white dress shirt she wore to the office, then slipped past her warm body to the counter and the offending jar of pickled cabbage. She braced her elbow and twisted the cap of the jar, but it was stuck.

“Damn, that’s on there,” she said.

Again, she pushed with the bulk of her torso, straining her shoulder. She bared her teeth. Her arm quaked. She clenched her hand and bent low over the jar, stomach protesting the sudden flex.

“Honey,” Liz said.

Sasha bit the inside of her cheek and thumped her head against the high cabinets. Her hand slipped from the jar and she breathed, one-two-one-two-one-two. Arrows of shock-sharp pain flew from shoulder joint to fingertips and her stomach gave a twinge. Liz eased the jar away. Sasha heard the cap pop a moment later. She stood with eyes closed, the cool wood of the cabinet pressed to her forehead to ward off the burning in her sinuses.

The night she’d told the doctor about—when she had been a big strong fucking marine—was not going to happen again. Not if the best she could do was a three-pound weight. No lifting a whole woman, not if you couldn’t open a goddamn jar of sauerkraut.

“Food’ll be ready in about fifteen,” Liz said quietly.

“Yeah, okay,” Sasha said. Her voice was a croak. Why’d you ask me at all, if you could do it? she wanted to yell.

She left the room to the sound of Liz’s measured, quaking breaths—trying to hide that she was crying. Sasha couldn’t make herself look. Instead, she went to the bathroom, kicked the door shut behind her, and gripped the cold porcelain sink. She stared into her own eyes from inches away, took in the stunning scarlet weft of the scar lining her face as well.

The sun set a moment later. She knew, because a faint luminescence glittered to life across cheekbones and chin, eye sockets and fingers. The heat in her bones, like a touch of amphetamine, stopped the shaking in her arm. The thing in her, the passenger she’d brought back stuffed into her scars and riding her skeleton, woke with the night.

“Nothing has changed,” she informed her reflection. “I am in control.”

It seemed to lift an eyebrow.

She slapped the light-switch, plunging herself into blackness for a precious moment before her eyes adjusted to the dull, eerie glow coming from beneath her skin. Real as concrete, real as the lingering hurt that lived in her gut and shoulder. She flipped the switch on again, and no amount of warmth in her bones could stop the tremor in her hand.

Blue-white light filled her eyes as Sasha woke gasping, thrashing in an unforgiving grip with hands clawing out, heels dug into the mattress. She pitched sideways, scrambled out of the strangling sheets, swept the night-table over on its side with a crash and followed it out of the bed to the floor. Her head smacked the base-board and her knee—bare—crunched down on glass.

“Shit, fuck,” Liz shouted above her.

Sasha’s hand, clutching the leg of the bedside table, glowed wild and alien like a biology-class dummy cloaked in translucent plastic flesh. She heaved a breath and screamed it out, a raw howl, kicking away the last of the sheets—or Liz pulled them free; regardless, they were gone. The yowl dissolved into a wet, chest-wrenching sob. She curled around her belly, holding herself. Revulsion stuck her eyes closed.

“Get it out of me,” she cried, flinging her arm up to the bed. She made a fist. “Get it out, I don’t want it, take it—”

“Should I call your doctor?” Liz asked, frantic.

Sasha laughed, a hoarse bray, and curled up tighter. Her betrayed, betraying body quaked, nose running, her sobs followed by hacking coughs and cramping abdominal muscles. Liz waited.

“Do you see it?” Sasha asked instead when she could wrangle an unspent breath.

Liz grunted, neither agreement nor disagreement. Then her voice rose, shaken, “There are more things in heaven and earth—”

“Don’t you quote fucking Hamlet at me!”

“You’re not yourself,” she began.

“Fucking right I’m not myself, look at me.” She rolled to her knees. Pain cut through the nausea and displacement—she was in her bedroom, not in a ravine surrounded by blue-white glow with a knife in her belly—but she kept moving through it and stood. “I’m not me. I’m not me,” she said, shaking into tears again and collapsing forward onto the bed on her hands. Her bleeding knee smeared against the side of the mattress.

“I don’t know what to do,” Liz whispered.

“Just go,” Sasha said.

“No—”

“Please,” she said, catching her breath one more time. Her face throbbed with her pulse as if swollen. “I had a flashback. I’m going to be fine. But I want to deal with it.”

“The book said I should never leave you like this,” Liz said.

“I’m telling you what I need.” Sasha lifted her head, saw her lover’s face in the dark by her own light, wondered what Liz saw in turn. Judging by her flinch—the flinch she’d been expecting the first time Liz touched her ruined shoulder, her belly, her face; the flinch that had never come—she knew the invasion for true. She saw. “At least I’m not crazy.”

Liz let out a short, choked laugh.

“Give me a day, Liz. I can’t stand you looking at me right now,” she said.

“Fuck you,” Liz replied with no heart in it.

Sasha shook her head and staggered from the broken glass and overturned table. “I’m going to wash up. Can you stay with your sister?”

“I’ll be gone when you get out of the bathroom,” Liz said.

Sasha locked herself in the small, white-tiled room and sat on the side of the tub. The fluorescent light cut her skeleton-glare to nothing. If only the doctor had any idea of all the shit she was keeping at bay behind a creaking, cracking dam. It had been easy enough to hold herself together during the hospital rounds, but Liz’s patience and love and honesty were impossible to face with prevarication. The pretense of being real again, being in control again, sloughed away under her calm stare.

The front door slammed. Sasha dabbed at her lacerated kneecap with toilet paper. One of the places she’d been free of scars—maybe not any longer. She hadn’t really expected Liz to leave, but she hadn’t been lying, either: she could take no more. No more of her rebellious eldritch body, no more of her lover’s unintentionally castigating sympathy. It was down to her, now, the lie given to all her delusions. Her and the corpse of the sure, certain self that had fallen apart under a feral moon thousands of miles away, her and her haunted bones.

IV.

August 2010

The moon was yellow and monstrously huge overhead, baleful—too bright for safety. Sasha kept her eyes on the truck in front of her and her peripheral vision on the sides of the road. Her convoy jounced along rutted terrain with a muted animal roar. Mountains kissed the black sky in the distance, discernible only by their lack of star-speckles. The troops in her transport were far more silent than usual, as if the glare of the hunter’s moon had sealed their lips shut. The hair rose on the nape of Sasha’s neck. There was a fine line between superstition and intuition.

“Hey, Peak—” she murmured.

The explosion tore her words from her along with her breath, a sudden cacophony and then the body-slam of the rolling, tumbling transport going down a small hill. Her ears rang and her body heaved as she came to a stop with dirt under her palms outside the truck. Her left arm collapsed unceremoniously, dumping her face-first and disoriented into the dust.

There was gunfire. The moonlight showed her chaos when she lifted her head; three trucks destroyed of their five, a melee of enemy combatants firing in close quarters and swarming from behind a craggy rock in the near distance. Out of the corner of her eye she saw metal and turned her neck—vomited. The horror of it was greater than the agony she couldn’t yet feel. A thin but still far too generous spike of metal had punched through her upper shoulder, her own gore painting it in the sickly light. Another explosion; the truck she’d been thrown from, judging by the trajectory, aflame.

By the nightmare-light she saw the man as he came for her, fumbled for her gun—pinned underneath her body—one-handed while he hurried toward her. She realized too late how distant she was from her fellows and the fighting. He grabbed her by the left arm and wrenched her onto her side, eyes flashing in the refracted flicker of the fire. His free hand snagged her gun and ripped it away, threw it into the scrub. She bared her teeth and yelled through a grimace when he began to drag her from the flames and the conflict, to a certain death on camera at a later date.

This is not how I fucking go, she thought.

Sasha Brooks was a marine, and she knew her business.

Kicking her heels into the rocky dirt, she shoved her body weight into his legs, forcing him to wrench her wounded arm further—nausea again as she felt the metal twist inside—and then made an injudicious grab up the line of his thigh. His yelp gratified her when she got a handful and dug nails in as hard as she could. He dropped her arm but she hung on like a limpet, then rolled onto her stomach and propelled herself forward with a mighty leap to bull her head into his middle.

They fell. She screamed as the rocks slid and they went down a ravine hidden in the dark. The metal in her flesh ripped loose a further inch and she could not even make a sound to encompass the feeling. She landed on top of the soldier and punched her free hand up under his jaw, clawed for a grip. Her fingertips dug into the meat of his neck. Light flared, dazzling her night-ready eyes. Her grip slipped. She blinked and saw his bones, a young man’s bones, the fine lines of jaw and cheek, lit blue. He had no scruff; his face under the glow was almost a child’s. Sasha gasped for breath, staring into his eyes as he stared into hers.

Then the knife flashed up between them, faster than she could rear back, sliding smoothly across her cheek and catching on her ear. She knocked his arm sideways with her deadened limb, thought he had missed until her blood splattered his child’s face in a wave. She glimpsed his hand holding the knife. It, too, was lit up like a deep-sea fish, incongruous and ghostly.

Shock, she thought. Move fast.

He spoke something to her before she bore her whole weight onto the hand around his throat. His legs kicked; his torso heaved. She locked her ankles around his, rocks tumbling down from the edge of the ravine to pelt them both. Her breath rang in her ears. He struggled and died beneath her fingers, which had begun to shake. She leaned up to brace harder.

The hooked blade went in vicious and smooth.

Her mouth opened. She felt the wind on her tongue, hot and dry. Her hand was its own alien thing now; it refused to let go. His eyelids fluttered. The glow of his bones flared, flashed like fireworks. His weakening hand dragged the knife in her gut sideways, spilling parts of her that were not meant to touch air. Finally he went limp as she lay on him, cold with fear and oncoming shock, but she did not let go.

“I’m taking you with me,” she managed. She could not save herself, all personal mythology destroyed with her failing body, but this she could do.

The light fluttered, peeled out of his flesh like a white butterfly. She blinked, blinked again, vision blurred. The glow wrapped tendrils around her wrist and sank into her clinging fingers. It felt like a kiss, warm damp lips caressing her from the inside out. The current slithered soothing and welcome over her aching, battered body. The horror melted away.

Above, a voice cried out, “There’s a light here—I found her!”

She was still staring into the young man’s eyes—this young man with his protected bones, his heavenly skeleton, who she had never known and who had never known her, who had murdered her, who she had murdered—when the scout tumbled down into the ravine and didn’t curse, just let out a weak breath. The gentle glow emanating from her body guttered.

His radio, next: “It’s bad.” Fingers hot on her throat. “But she’s fucking alive. Medic, get a medic.”

V.

January 2011

Sasha tossed the stained wad of toilet paper in the half-full trashcan and stared at her knee, which was sluggishly oozing blood and lymph. The sting was mild, negligible. She stood and unlocked the bathroom door, slipping out into the mausoleum-silent house. Her bare feet padded with dull thuds across the hardwood floor to the bedroom. Liz had left the lamp on her side of the bed lit. On Sasha’s side, the table lay in shambles. Her water bottle had rolled halfway under the bed and the glass from the broken lamp was scattered across the gleaming wood. With careful feet she swept forward to the edge of the disaster zone and bent low to open the sideways drawer of the desk. Her pistol fell naturally into her hand. She checked the magazine and the safety.

The gun was a solid comfort as she walked with chin held high through the dark hall. The bathroom mirror framed the set of her jaw, the glaring wound marring her face, and the knot of tissue where the shrapnel had punctured her shoulder. Her tank-top bared most of it. She laid the gun on the edge of the sink, barrel pointed toward the mirror. Her heel edged back to close the door.

“So I’m not me,” she said to her reflection.

Once more, she palmed the dimmer-switch to off. The enclosed space filled with shadows, as if from a child’s nightlight—tranquil colors cast on the walls. She stared into the mirror and spun the pistol to face her body against a skin-crawling resistance in the back of her mind, the ingrained muscle memory of safety. Her litany of horrors: mutilated stomach and shoulder, nerve damage, jobless disabled veteran, a drain on her lover, facial scarring, never passing for normal again, future a blank and all plans destroyed, dead in a ditch in Afghanistan but rescued and, despite it all, haunted.

“I didn’t save myself,” she whispered. The thing had saved her, cast light for the scout to see by, warmed her shock-cold limbs, kept her heart beating.

She put her palm over the gun and stroked a steady finger across the familiar curve of the trigger-guard, daring to dip briefly inside. Her heart pounded, blood thudding in her ears, her cheeks, the base of her tongue. The silver metal of the gun and its black embossing both caught her inner light, reflected it like fire. She looked up into the mirror once more. Despite the twist in her guts, the instantaneous recoil that swept cold hands down her spine and tried to wrench her away, she watched the shimmer flow across her bones. For the first time she traced it, the ripples and iridescent eddies. Tension in her muscles built and compounded, wound to spring, but she stood stock steady and kept staring—into her own eyes this time, not a dead boy’s. She did not look away, long past when her knees locked and her feet began to take a chill from the tile. The mirror-woman, fractured woman, stared in return, demanded witness.

Sasha lifted a hand heavy with the weight of her survival lashed to it and put it against the mirror, touched her other self’s palm made of hard glass. The ghost-light gave her enough to see one vital, true thing by: her eyes. There was Liz, who would return in the morning, and this. From the shifted topography of her face, through the alien luminescence of her bones, a part of Sasha remained, glared out with fierceness as familiar as the rest was not. The gun was a true weight in her hand to replace the phantom as she picked it up and tapped the mirror in clinking salute, as if the turning could be so simple. And yet—wondrous strange; and therefore as a stranger give it welcome—perhaps it was.

© 2013 by Brit Mandelo.

Brit Mandelo is a writer, critic, and editor whose primary fields of interest are speculative fiction and queer literature, especially when the two coincide. She is the senior fiction editor for Strange Horizons Magazine and has two books out, Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction and We Wuz Pushed: On Joanna Russ and Radical Truth-telling. Her other work—fiction, nonfiction, poetry; she wears a lot of hats—has been featured in magazines such as Stone Telling, Clarkesworld, Apex, and Ideomancer. She also writes regularly for Tor.com and has several long-running column series there, including Queering SFF, a mix of criticism, editorials, and reviews on QUILTBAG speculative fiction. She is a Louisville native and lives there with her partner in an apartment that doesn’t have room for all the books.