TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 76, September 2016

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial, September 2016

SCIENCE FICTION

Power Couple (Or “Love Never Sleeps”)
Charlie Jane Anders

The Lives of Riley
Sean Williams

Ernesto
Alec Nevala-Lee

Unauthorized Access
An Owomoyela

FANTASY

See The Unseeable, Know The Unknowable
Maria Dahvana Headley

The Wilderness Within
Tim Pratt

Crocodile Tears
Jaymee Goh

What We Know About the Lost Families of —— House
Christopher Barzak

NOVELLA

Horn
Peter M. Ball

EXCERPTS

Everfair
Nisi Shawl

NONFICTION

Media Review: Sense8, Season 1
Sunil Patel

Book Reviews: September 2016
Amal El-Mohtar

Interview: Kameron Hurley
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Charlie Jane Anders

Maria Davana Headley

Sean Williams

Tim Pratt

Alec Nevala-Lee

Jaymee Goh

An Owomoyela

Christopher Barzak

Peter M. Ball

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2016 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Reiko Murakami

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial, September 2016

John Joseph Adams | 827 words

Welcome to issue seventy-six of Lightspeed!

We have original science fiction by Sean Williams (“The Lives of Riley”) and An Owomoyela (“Unauthorized Access”), along with SF reprints by Charlie Jane Anders (“Power Couple (Or ‘Love Never Sleeps’)”) and Alec Nevala-Lee (“Ernesto”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Maria Dahvana Headley (“See the Unseeable, Know the Unknowable”) and Jaymee Goh (“Crocodile Tears”), and fantasy reprints by Tim Pratt (“The Wilderness Within”) and Christopher Barzak (“What We Know About the Lost Families of —— House”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns.

For our ebook readers, we also have a reprint of the novella “Horn,” by Peter M. Ball and an excerpt from Nisi Shawl’s new novel, Everfair.

Hugo Award Results

As I write this, I’m just back from MidAmeriCon II, the 74th annual World Science Fiction Convention (a/k/a, Worldcon). The Hugos were presented on Saturday, August 20, and, alas, Lightspeed’s two contenders—me, in Best Editor (Short Form), and Brooke Bolander, in novelette (for “And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead”)—both lost, albeit to very deserving winners, and, in Brooke’s case, by only an incredibly small margin. The Best Novelette Hugo went to “Folding Beijing” by Hao Jingfang (from Uncanny Magazine), and Best Editor (Short Form) went to Ellen Datlow. Uncanny also won Best Semiprozine, which Lightspeed won the last two years; we are no longer eligible in that category, but the voting results show that a good number of people still tried to nominate us anyway.

Nightmare’s Alyssa Wong very narrowly lost the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer to The Martian author Andy Weir, and the extended nominations tally revealed that her Nebula Award-winning story “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” came extremely close to being nominated for the Hugo as well (in Best Short Story). Because of this near-miss, Alyssa did receive an Alfie Award from George R.R. Martin, at his second annual Alfie Awards, which were presented at his “Loser’s Party” at the majestic Midland Theater, a few blocks away from the convention center. (If you’re not sure what the Alfie Awards are, or why GRRM started handing them out, check out this io9 post if you want to learn what prompted it: bit.ly/alfie_awards.)

In any case, as they say, it’s always an honor to be nominated, and congratulations to all of the winners and the other nominees. If you’d like to see the full list of winners—and/or the extending nomination lists (so you can see what else nearly made the ballot)—visit thehugoawards.org.

Lightspeed Reader Survey Favorite Story Poll Results

While Brooke Bolander’s “And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead” did not take home the Hugo Award (or the Sturgeon Award, which was also announced during Worldcon), it did win the “Favorite Story Poll” we recently conducted, in the science fiction category—and by a substantial margin. “Madeleine” by Amal El-Mohtar was the runner-up. There was a tie for third place, with “The Universe Sung in Stars” by Kat Howard and “Rock, Paper, Scissors, Love, Death” by Caroline M. Yoachim receiving the same number of votes.

In the fantasy category, Catherynne M. Valente’s story, “The Lily and the Horn,” from the Queers Destroy Fantasy! special issue, was voted as the readers’ favorite. “Tea Time” by Rachel Swirsky came in second, narrowly edging out “And the Winners Shall Be Swept Out to Sea” by Maria Dahvana Headley (which, thus, came in third).

Congrats to all, and thanks again to all of you who participated in the Reader Survey and/or Favorite Story Poll!

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016

As you may recall, in addition to editing Lightspeed and Nightmare, I am also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, which launched last year. The first volume was guest edited by Joe Hill, and the 2016 volume (which comes out October 4) is guest edited by Karen Joy Fowler. The table of contents for the 2016 volume were recently announced over on io9, which includes two stories from Lightspeed (“Things You Can Buy for a Penny” by Will Kaufman and “Tea Time” by Rachel Swirsky), as well as many authors familiar to Lightspeed readers. Visit johnjosephadams.com/basff to see the full table of contents and/or to pre-order!

• • • •

That’s all we have to report this month. I hope you enjoy the issue, and thanks for reading!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Lightspeed, is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, a new SF/Fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, as well as the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, including The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent and forthcoming projects include: What the #@&% Is That?, Operation Arcana, Loosed Upon the World, Wastelands 2, Press Start to Play, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated ten times) and is a seven-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Nightmare Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

Power Couple (Or “Love Never Sleeps”)

Charlie Jane Anders | 3300 words

I never felt like a real college girl until I met John my senior year. He and I stayed up all night talking and then ran around campus chalking pastel hearts and portraits of Václav Havel on the cement walkways. A manic fox with wavy brown hair, he could come to rest suddenly and eye me with a playful stillness that made me ache. He managed to be both clever and smart, lean as well as dimpled. When he touched my hand and made an observation about the geometry of my fingers and the just-discovered significance of something I’d said a week earlier, lust tightened all the muscles from my stomach down to my knees.

By winter senior year, John and I were spending every night together and the rest of the world seemed both insignificant and enchanted, a Smurf village at our feet. He was my first love. Spring found us standing on an ancient stone bridge, arms around each other and bodies glued from sternum to ankle, watching algae bloom underwater. We breathed in sync. I leaned into John’s shoulder and inhaled slowly. The gathering warmth seemed to well up from the center of the Earth, instead of the returning sun.

A year later, we barely saw each other. We had gone from inseparable to schedule-challenged. I’d enrolled at UVA Med and John studied law at Princeton. We figured we’d spend every weekend together, then it became every other weekend, and finally it was Christmas and John became “hello stranger.”

Things came to a head when I visited John the spring after graduation. I had somehow let two months go by without inhaling the bramble scent of John’s neck. He seemed a long-lost best friend. But after the first rush of seeing John again, the visit flew by and we barely had a moment to talk. Our whole weekend together consisted of law study sessions, games of tennis, and parties where everyone talked about law and tennis.

I confronted John on Sunday afternoon. “Maybe we should see other people,” I said, dying for John to contradict me. His room had no furnishings, save for a bed and a desk with a framed picture of me, looking fizzy and blonde.

“I wish we’d met later in life,” John said. “When we’d done all the heavy lifting and career shit. But I do know the kind of connection we have is unique. We may never see anything like it again. We owe it to ourselves to keep it together.” He wept and so did I, and then we kissed and soon we were naked on the bed together crying and kissing and I missed my train back to UVA.

I took a triumphant, blessing warmth back to UVA with me, and felt its heat death over the next few days. I believed everything John had said, and yet it wasn’t enough. We went back to brief emails and occasional phone calls. Our relationship wasn’t on the back burner, it was in a meat locker miles from the kitchen.

That frozen feeling in the midst of spring prodded my imagination just as I walked past the cryonics lab where my friend Maisie worked, in a boxy red brick converted tobacco warehouse. Inside, I tried to see where workers had hefted bales and rolled cigarettes. Now it was all plasterboard walls and purring machines.

The next thing I knew, I had talked to Maisie for a few hours. Maisie showed me equipment and introduced me to her boss and coworkers. I had already learned in med school that you could slow the body’s functions to a standstill using a combination of intravenous drugs and industrial coolants. Maisie spouted phrases like “metabolic coma” and “molasses-slow polymerase.” An idea took shape.

I called John a few days later. “Just think about it. You said it would have been better if we’d met later in life. This way we can. We’ll be like no other couple, as extraordinary in our courtship as our connection. No, hear me out. It’ll be at least seven years before we can pay attention to each other. And during that time, we each have to be able to relocate to a random location, like the President at Defcon Five. We both work in fields designed for single-achiever families. Well, this is the answer!” I finished my pitch, breathless. I knew John could easily shoot down my fairy-godmother solution.

Instead he considered carefully. Of course, being a law student, he asked about the legalities. I explained the cryo lab wasn’t officially part of the university, it was a private company that benefited from the university’s talent pool. The FDA had approved stage three cryo trials about five years earlier, and maybe a hundred people around the country were in suspension now. We would have to sign a stack of release forms the thickness of a Gideon Bible.

“So you’re sure this new technique is safe? No side effects?” John asked, and I offered reassurance. “So I slide into this overgrown lipstick tube for seven years. You keep me sitting in your room around all through med school and residency, like some kind of statue. Then when you finish residency, we turn the tables. I go out and conquer the universe, while you turn into the world’s lowest-maintenance girlfriend. Right? Then fourteen years from now, we’re both just seven years older and fully qualified to live where we want and do our jobs. It’s an audacious plan. No doubt about that.”

“You mean you’ll think about it?”

“I mean it reminds me of why I fell in love with you in the first place, Willa. Nobody else could have come up with such sensible lunacy. Let me get back to you.”

We each talked to our friends and families. Everyone made fun of my plan, but I sensed a tinge of envy at how bold and romantic it was.

“If I say yes, how do I know you’ll awaken me?” John asked a few days later.

“Because I’ll miss your conversation,” I laughed. “You’ll be a boring stiff.”

John said okay. A month or so later, he ate his favorite meal (fish tacos) and we had boisterous sex. Then he put on a white suit and black tie and we drove to the medical school, where Maisie and her boss Dr. Abbye did some last-minute tests on John and then put him on a slab, which slid inside a great silver shell.

A few hours later, I had a new decoration for my apartment: a shiny chrome tube that stood against one wall, with a big window showing John’s face. John’s expression looked sardonic from some angles, mournful from others. He stood in the corner of my bedroom, casting a blue glow in the middle of the night. I got used to his presence there, only to have it startle me anew when I’d just gotten out of the shower or sat scratching myself in bed. I got used to explaining John to the lovers I brought home, but also to going to other people’s places instead. Once a month, I trimmed John’s beard and fingernails. When I went away on vacation, I got a friend to come in once a day and check on John, whose bio monitors never hinted at trouble. I compared him sometimes to the cadaver I dissected at school—inanimate but intimate. Except John had a world of potential the cadaver lacked.

As promised, I talked to John every day when I was around. I told him about my day, about my fears and minutiae—including things I never could have shared with an alert John. In the sleep-deprived miasma of residency, I lost track of when John was actually present. I saw him staring over my shoulder as I treated patients. I muttered to his specter in the break room where I bunked on call. His unweary watchfulness followed me everywhere. I sometimes forgot his name, after a thirty-six hour shift, but not his face.

Residency ended. I slept for a week and went to the beach for another week. I got a pedicure and read trashy novels. I caught up with old girlfriends. After a month the cryo lab started calling to ask when would I come in for John’s renaissance, to be followed a couple of weeks later by my entombment. I didn’t call back. Guilt started to jab at me.

“It’s not that I prefer him this way,” I confided to Maisie. “Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. I can’t remember the old John well enough any more. But once I wake John, I’ll have to take my turn. And now I’m not so sure I want to do that any more.” Maisie gently pointed out that John was a person who deserved to get on with his life, and in any case I could discuss the options with John once he could speak for himself.

I stared into John’s eyes as he came back to the world. I wanted his first sight to be my adoration. I did my hair and makeup, tried to look as much as the old Willa as possible. A smile developed on John’s face. Finally he said, “I need to pee.”

The doctors warned me John might be groggy or disoriented for a while. But an hour after he left that tube, he was focused. He sparked with energy. We went to dinner and he wolfed two entrées. “I had amazing dreams, full of flying shapes and voices,” he said. “They’re fading already, but I remember I had no body in them.” He fucked me three times that night, then got up and paced.

I’d forgotten how much fun John could be, like a mad scientist in the world’s biggest Radio Shack. He made me laugh and orgasm, and his scattered ideas kept me fascinated. It was only after a few hyperactive days that I started to worry.

“I feel fine.” His new beard twitched. “I’ve had plenty of rest. Now I want to have fun.” He went out clubbing, first with me, then without once it was clear I couldn’t keep up. He’d get home at three in the morning, sleep a few hours, then be up before me. I’d awaken to a mug of coffee held under my nose.

After a week, I worried a side effect of the freezing process had left John amped for good. If so, he figured it would wear off, but in any case he had another explanation. “We’re different ages now. I’m in my early twenties, you’re thirtyish. Those are different life stages. Remember how much you went out, how much wildness you burned off, when you were my age. That’s how I still am.”

I doubted I’d ever raced around as madly as John was doing. But it was clear we ran at different speeds. I started to avoid him.

Before I brought up the question of my freezing, I knew what John’s answer would be. I could do what I wanted, he couldn’t hold me to my side of the deal, but our relationship was over if I stayed awake. As we were now, we operated too differently to last together. “I can move anywhere now,” I pointed out. “I have much more flexibility. I can even work part time as a locum tenens, a substitute doctor.”

John gently said that wasn’t the point.

“I watched you sleep last night,” he told me. “You looked stunning. I imagine you haunting my rooms with loveliness. A flower always in bloom.”

Talking about it made me tired anyway. I felt half in suspension after a while, as the same arguments went around and around.

“I can’t believe you’re giving me an ultimatum,” I said.

“I can’t believe you’re trying to back out of our deal,” John said.

That’s as close as we got to fighting. We both had too much dignity to squall over something like this, or else we were both ashamed.

Finally, John seemed to realize he needed to woo me all over again. He slowed down. We drove to the beach and ate caviar naked with the waves foaming over our ankles. John looked into my eyes and pled the case for a love spanning decades. “We’ve come too far to give up, what we have is too precious.”

I sat in the bathtub and reminded herself that I had planned this role reversal, it wasn’t John turning the tables on me to be mean.

“I guess you’ll mellow out by the time I wake up,” I mused to John.

“I’ll be easy-going by then. And it goes by in no time. It feels now as though I barely closed my eyes.” He talked of awakening me with a kiss, like Sleeping Beauty.

John and I started to feel comfortable together again, once he slowed a little and I relaxed around him. I eased into our old rapport, trading jokes and kisses for hours. I remembered why we had wanted to do this in the first place. “You’re the love of my life,” I told John. “I never want to lose my faith that love defeats all obstacles, trumps all other cards.” We spent a whole day in bed, making love and talking about our future together.

Then we went back to the cryo lab together. I lay down on the sliding table and stared up at the nicotine-scarred ceiling.

“Hey.” John smiled down at me. I could tell he was fighting the urge to look around the room and focus on five things at once. He held one of my hands and Maisie held the other. (She didn’t work there anymore, but had come back for this.)

Then they let go of my hands as I rolled into the tube’s darkness and my mind filled with patterns. I remember a thousand years of stripes and plaids drifting past my eyes, an endless Abercrombie and Fitch catalog. John hadn’t prepared me for how boring it would be. My mind didn’t form a single complete thought during my time away from time. Instead I remember idea fragments and half-links of metonymic chains. I was used to living in my head most of the time, so it was like seeing my home burned down, fragments of possessions here and there.

John had promised the next clear image I saw would be his face looking down as I awoke. Instead I woke to Maisie, looking tired but not much older. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “John’s not here.”

I tried to form questions, but instead nonsense poured out.

“It’s only been three years or so,” Maisie said. “We lost touch with John and got worried. We went to his last known address and found an eviction notice on the door, spoiled food in the fridge . . . and you.”

Spoiled food. And me.

“I shudder to think what would have happened if his electricity had got cut off with you still in suspension,” Maisie added. “Catastrophic shutdown.”

Maisie daubed at my face with a tissue. I thought maybe they had applied some kind of fluid to my face to help the revival process. Then I realized I must be crying. I still felt as though everything was happening a long distance away.

“I’m sorry, maybe I should have waited to tell you the truth,” Maisie said. “But I knew you’d have questions when you woke and he wasn’t here.”

I nodded. I still felt unable to talk.

It took me a couple days before the world seemed the same place I remembered. Shadows kept startling me. Even after I felt more normal, I still feared things would dissolve or start to move too quickly or too slowly. I worried that everything was just an illusion. I wasn’t hyperactive like John had been, just terrified and unsteady.

I hunted John for a month, in between interviews for locum tenens positions. None of the law school buddies I’d met had kept up with him. His parents had an address that turned out to be a warehouse where John had slung car parts. Someone there had lived in a group house with John and a group of death rockers. Finally someone had heard John had moved to Maine.

It took a day to drive through dense woods, along single-lane highways lined by pumpkin stands and stores with names like The Brass Button. The roads frosted and snow spattered my windshield. It felt as though I were driving back into the frozen wasteland where John and I had spent so much of our young adulthood.

John’s new housemates seemed friendly and crunchy, not at all death rockerish, and they told me where to find the soap factory where John worked. I pictured John, still hyperactive, running five machines at once, possibly juggling at the same time. Instead, he stood in front of a conveyor belt, calmer than I’d ever seen him. His beard had spread out, but otherwise he looked the same. I watched him until his break.

“Remember those lavender and chamomile soaps you liked?” he asked me. “I make those. It’s much more socially beneficial than lawyering would have been.”

“Are you all right?” I asked. He led me across the street to a sandwich shop. It had the local newspaper and a menu with three choices.

He nodded. “I was a tad jumpy for a month after I defrosted. Then I returned to normal. If anything, everyone said I was more mature, considering I hadn’t aged.”

“Then why—”

“I dropped out of law school. I guess you knew.” He shrugged and ordered a bacon roll and cocoa. I got some cookies. “It wasn’t some weird side effect of the freezing process, though. I just wasn’t cut out for law, it turned out. You know, I was just out of college, I didn’t really know what I wanted to be. Still don’t know. I partly went to law school because everyone expected me to do something high-powered. Including you. Especially you.”

“I didn’t care what you did, I just wanted—”

“You liked me because I was smart, right? And I didn’t want to disappoint. Remember how we used to talk about our future, our careers, all the time? We were going to be a doctor and a lawyer.”

I stood. “I can’t believe you’re trying to blame me! I almost died because of you!”

“Georgie didn’t take care of you? I sublet my place to him, and he promised to—”

“You promised to look after me. Not your friend. You. Why the fuck didn’t you just wake me after you dropped out of law school?”

“I didn’t want to explain to you what a waste it’d all been. I kept thinking if I had seven years, I could make a success at something before I had to face you. Because I knew you’d give me that look—the look you’re giving me right now. You should see it.”

There wasn’t much to say after that. On the long drive south, I dreamed up possible endings to my love story. Like a car crash in a New Hampshire snowdrift. Or maybe an irony-laden moment in which I went back to Maisie and had myself refrozen until John made good or someone invented a cure for fatal stupidity. But I already knew that my life was just going to carry on, at more or less the same pace as everybody else’s, until it one day coasted to a complete stop.

©2006 by Charlie Jane Anders. Originally published in ParaSpheres: Extending Beyond the Spheres of Literary and Genre Fiction, edited by Rusty Morrison and Ken Keegan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All the Birds in the Sky from Tor Books. Her story Six Months Three Days won a Hugo Award. Her writing has appeared in Tor.com, Mother Jones, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Tin House, ZYZZYVA, The McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes, and elsewhere. She runs the long-running Writers With Drinks reading series in San Francisco and was the managing editor of io9.com. She won the Emperor Norton Award for “extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason.”

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

The Lives of Riley

Sean Williams | 1720 words

The sirens are growing louder. Riley doesn’t know how the peacekeepers found out—he was so careful, so sure he’d covered every trace of his existence, all of it—but that’s less important now than getting away. He cannot afford to make any more mistakes.

The night seems dark and empty as he leaves the warehouse through the back door, the sound of his hurried footsteps multiplied by more than echoes. Riley doesn’t need to conduct a headcount; he instinctively senses the presence of his other selves, knows that they are nearby and in their proper number. There are sixteen. That’s as far as he managed to get before this unexpected setback.

Riley is responsible. He is the one who came up with the plan and wrote the hack that turned his private d-mat booth into a personal duplicator. It was he who dreamed of being one but many, inerasable, safe from every danger.

That dream is still alive. If he can reach the reserve facility in Brooklyn, he can pick up where he left off. But if the peacekeepers catch him, they will erase him and the others without hesitation or remorse.

He owes it to his other selves to keep them alive, every one.

• • • •

Riley has rehearsed this moment many times, in reality and in his mind, the better to be ready for any eventuality. He knows the escape route as well as he knows the contours of his own face. As the sirens grow louder, he tells himself to breathe steadily and think clearly. There is no need to panic. If he is quick and sure, he will get out with all his selves intact.

But how did the PKs know? What gave him away?

The recent days were unexceptional, spent training in twos and threes, or sleeping, or on the acts of togetherness that make multiplicity meaningful. (Sex isn’t strong enough a word. Neither is love. What he has with his sixteen other selves is unique in the course of human history.) There was only that one moment when he needed to get out of the warehouse and feel the sun on his face. No one saw him, and even if they had, one guy standing in the sunlight wasn’t going to ring any alarm bells.

Riley leads the way down the lane to where the hatch is hidden under a fake shrub. It’s undisturbed. He keys in the combination and waves his other selves ahead of him, into deeper darkness.

• • • •

His other selves close behind him, their only sound the occasional soft splash where their feet encounter puddles, Riley sets a stiff pace. He pulls the hood of his jacket down, exposing his ears to the cold night air. He can no longer hear the sirens, which is not necessarily a good thing. There’s no way to tell from inside the tunnel if there will be PKs waiting for him at the other end.

He wishes he could use d-mat to whisk everyone instantly to safety. But that’s out of the question. The system would instantly detect multiple instances of the same genetic pattern and divert them all to Peacekeeper HQ, where they would be erased. Multiplicities are natural threats to singletons, who consider them dangerous, a threat to mundane life, which they are. He might as well turn himself and his other selves in right now if that was his plan.

No, they’ll just have to escape by old-fashioned means. Laneway, tunnel, a brief stretch of dangerously exposed street, and thence to the old subway line. He walked through the route a week ago, he knows it’s secure—so why does he feel so exposed? Isn’t this what he yearned for three days ago, in the privacy of his own mind?

That night up on the roof was thrilling. Air so fresh it brought tears to his eyes . . . and the stars! He’d forgotten their silvery touch.

Whatever went wrong, it’s going to be a long time before he dares poke his head up again.

• • • •

The street at the far end of the tunnel seems deserted. Riley waits with his other selves for a full minute to make absolutely sure. The sirens sound like a herd of terrifying creatures, wailing wrathfully just out of sight. Riley feels profoundly afraid.

He doesn’t have to express this anxiety in words. He and his sixteen other selves are connected. They don’t need anything so banal as language to convey feelings or intent. They are the same person, after all; their experiences and feelings are carefully curated in order to be, and to remain, one. Their unified nature binds them, makes them strong. That’s what makes multiplicity special.

Flashing lights appear at the end of the street: blue and red, swirling like the angry thoughts of a beehive.

Peacekeepers!

Riley hunkers down, feeling his other selves do exactly the same. They are one, and they are vulnerable. He must do everything in his power to keep them out of harm’s way. That’s what the warehouse had been for—close, restrictive, a prison in many ways, a prison from which he had sometimes yearned to escape, but safe.

Not safe enough, as it had turned out. Next time, he thinks—remembering the smell of flowers carried on a breeze through the warehouse air vent—next time he will be even more careful.

• • • •

If no one moves or makes a sound, Riley is pretty sure that they’ll go undetected. The PKs at the end of the road don’t seem to be actively searching this neighbourhood. They are just being cautious, which suggests they don’t know that Riley is on the run. Maybe they don’t even know the purpose of the warehouse. Their information is incomplete.

Or maybe the PKs know everything and are trying to provoke him into coming out into the open. That is the one thing multiplicities must never do—not until they are large enough to withstand any singleton threat. And he is a long way from that. Not at seventeen, or even seventeen hundred. Maybe seventeen million.

Riley tells himself to be patient, as he often does, although it is hard. The PKs will give up, in time, with luck, and then when the threat has passed he can press on to Brooklyn and the completion of his mission.

The lights continue to flash at the end of the street. PKs are walking from curb to curb, casting shadows that dance and sway. Are they coming closer? Are they going away? It is hard to tell.

Riley, wrapped up in the silence of his other selves, hardly dares to breathe.

When someone moves nearby, his heart almost bursts from his chest.

In horror, he watches as one of his other selves breaks cover and runs out into the open.

• • • •

Riley cannot believe his eyes. What is happening? How can this be possible? His sixteen other selves are copies of him, exactly him down to the last molecule. Why is this one behaving differently? Why is this one going rogue?

“Over here! They’re over here!”

• • • •

Riley cannot believe his ears. Why is his other self doing this? They are the same. That’s the whole point of their existence. Created the same and sharing all the same experiences so they won’t ever grow apart. Riley would never betray his other selves, so why would one of them betray him?

A terrible possibility stops his thoughts cold like a slap out of the dark. Maybe his other selves aren’t all copies of him. Maybe this one is a fake. An intruder. A singleton spy!

• • • •

The lights flash with increased intensity. Shadows sweep long down the street. The sirens grow louder, hungrier, as though the distant beasts have got their scent, and Riley’s heart begins to pound. His other selves—his real other selves—clutch him in terror, looking to him for a solution, a way out of this trap.

• • • •

Back into the tunnel, Riley thinks, before the PKs see, that’s the only way . . .

Then the traitor, the alien, standing framed in a forest of sudden spotlights, raises one hand and points at Riley in the shadows, calling the doom of the peacekeepers down upon them all.

• • • •

It’s a terrible thing to be exposed.

Riley should be fleeing for his life, but instead he hesitates. With the hood pulled forward, shadowing his face, he is caught by the stares of his sixteen other selves, who he has just condemned to death.

Why aren’t they running? Why aren’t they doing exactly the same thing as him?

His heart breaks. All his worst fears have now been realized.

Two days ago, he stood at the warehouse’s only window, watching the clouds gliding by overhead. Glancing down, he saw one of his other selves step outside into the open air and stretch his arms above his head. That other self didn’t see him. Neither did his other self see the PK drone gliding around the corner of the building, cameras swivelling.

Riley ducked out of sight, and for two days has hoped against hope that their identical images were not captured. He hoped in silence, for fear of causing a rift between his other selves. Then had come the sirens, and their fearful flight into the night.

Seventeen cannot possibly slip by the PKs, but one might. It’s a simple solution that has haunted him ever since they left the warehouse.

And now: the confirmation that he is the only one who sees it, and why.

The others will never understand how his secret changed him. How the fear changed him. It was the one thing they never shared. The rift that formed despite his best intentions is now a gaping gulf. The carefully curated multiplicity is broken.

Riley hears shouting from the end of the road. The PKs are coming. If he goes now, he can escape the slaughter. When he gets to Brooklyn he can start the plan all over—him, the original, making other selves who will be identical to him. And this time, he thinks, he will prevail.

They are not me, he tells himself. I owe them nothing.

Riley turns and runs, alone.

©2016 by Sean Williams.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sean Williams is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of over forty award-winning novels, one hundred short stories, and the odd odd poem. He lives in Adelaide, South Australia. His latest book is Hollowgirl, the third in the Twinmaker series.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

Ernesto

Alec Nevala-Lee | 6030 words

Interviewer: Who would you say are your literary forebears—those you have learned the most from?

Hemingway: Mark Twain, Flaubert . . . Chekhov . . . Van Gogh, Gauguin, San Juan de la Cruz . . .

—The Paris Review, 1958

A year after the war began, I found myself in Madrid, where I took a room at the Hotel Florida. In those lean months, breakfast usually consisted of little more than a few bits of dry bread from the night before, but one morning in the lobby, as I was nursing a cup of weak tea and some stale crusts, I noticed the smell of fresh coffee and fried ham drifting down from somewhere overhead.

I set my notes aside. Although I knew very well where the smells were coming from, I had a hunch it would mean trouble. In the end, though, I gathered up my things and took the elevator to the fourth floor. The two stories above had been shelled not long ago, and this was the highest level that was still occupied.

In his room, the door of which was open, Ernesto was seated by the window, a newspaper spread before him on the table. Looking around the cramped space, I took in the typewriter, the gramophone, and the cooking ring with its traces of breakfast. When my eyes reached the chair by the bed, I paused. Seated there, instead of the woman I had expected, was a friar in a cassock and glasses.

“Excuse me,” I said, taking a step backwards. “I didn’t know you had company—”

Ernesto set down his newspaper, eyeing me through the steel rims of his spectacles. He was in his thirties then, his hair and mustache still black, the prow of his chest barely restrained by its dressing gown.

“No, have coffee with us,” Ernesto said. “You might find this interesting. The padre and I were speaking of miracles. I believe we had just reached the subject of the stigmata—”

Going over to the windowsill to get a cup of coffee, I studied the visitor more closely. At that point, a year into the civil war, several thousand clergymen had already died at the hands of the Loyalists, so I was impressed by any man brave enough to wear a cassock in Madrid. Taking my cup, I sank into the chair by the electric heater. “What about the stigmata?”

“Your American friend is a skeptic of the modern school,” the friar said, speaking in surprisingly good English. “He is willing to embrace any evidence that supports his political beliefs, but not if it contradicts them, not even something so compelling as the five wounds of Christ—”

Ernesto lit a cigarette. “I’m only saying that no miracle is required. Even if we discount the possibility of fraud, the mind can do strange things to the body. What you call divine intervention might be nothing but hysteria.”

“But what if other factors are present?” the friar asked. “Consider the case that brings me here today. Yesterday, I arrived from Segovia, where I was asked to provide safe conduct for a woman who had been staying at our convent. Only four weeks ago, her body was racked with carcinoma. The doctors gave her, at most, a few months to live. Instead of resigning herself to death, she came to us, wanting nothing more than to pray to St. John—”

“St. John of the Cross,” Ernesto said for my benefit. “He is buried in Segovia.”

“—to pray for his intervention,” the friar said, continuing without a pause. “For days on end, she prostrated herself in his chapel, taking only a little food and water. After two weeks, she began to tremble. The marks of the holy nails appeared on her hands and feet. In time, the stigmata went away. And when the wounds faded, her cancer, too, was gone.”

“A good story,” Ernesto said. “But again, no miracle is required. Any doctor can tell you tales of spontaneous remission. Most of the time, the patient never really had cancer at all.”

“But I have spoken to her doctor myself. There is no medical explanation. She was dying, but has recovered completely. And—”

The friar paused, as if wondering if he should speak further, then lowered his voice. “And she is not the only one. We know of at least four other cases in Madrid alone. All were men and women who visited the tomb of St. John in the past year. All were dying of cancer. And after they prayed for the saint’s intervention, all were cured. What is this, then, if not a miracle?”

Ernesto shot me a glance. I could tell that he didn’t believe a word, but he only turned back politely to the friar. “You say that this woman is in Madrid. Would it be possible for me to see her?”

“I was hoping you would ask,” the friar said. “She lives nearby, off the Gran Via.”

“Good.” Ernesto rose, brushing the crumbs from his dressing down. “If you’d like to wait downstairs, I’ll join you in a minute.”

The friar bowed and left the room. As soon as he was gone, Ernesto went into the bathroom, leaving the door open so we could continue to talk. He had arrived in the city not long before, working for a syndicate as a war correspondent, and we had already become fast friends. “So what do you think?”

I finished my coffee and put the cup on the sill. “It’s hard to believe that such a shrine could go unreported for so long. Lourdes doesn’t have so many cures in a century. If it were real, we would have heard about it by now.”

“That isn’t necessarily true,” Ernesto said, reappearing in a fresh shirt, his hair wet. “It’s dangerous to believe in miracles these days. Too many Catholics have died already. No, what I find more interesting is the timing. You’ve heard the talk of a Segovia offensive?”

“Only a few rumors,” I said, watching as Ernesto went to the armoire in the corner. Segovia, which lay across the mountains to the north, had been taken by the Nationalists in the early days of the war. It was widely assumed that the Loyalists would soon try to recapture the town from the fascists.

Ernesto opened the armoire. “Well, this shrine is just outside Segovia. The town has already been bombed once. Churches have been burned to the ground. If I were this friar and wanted to save my monastery, I might try to convince our side that a miracle was taking place.”

Inside the armoire, I saw row after row of contraband chocolate bars, canned foods, whiskey. “But why did he come to you?”

“He must want me to write about it. Maybe he thinks I’ll influence opinion overseas, or hopes I’ll spread word to the Loyalist command. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been asked to do something like this.”

Ernesto took a can of bully beef and a tin of milk from the nearest shelf, then closed the armoire. “Come on. We’ll see this woman together. Maybe you’ll get a story out of it, too—”

Going downstairs, we found the friar waiting for us in the lobby. Outside, the ground was strewn with broken glass, and fresh craters had been left by last night’s bombardment. After walking for some time along the Gran Via, we found ourselves in an area that was relatively untouched by bombs. On the porch of the nearest house, in the shade of the overhang, sat a woman in black.

Removing our hats, we mounted the steps together. The woman watched us curiously. She looked to be in her late fifties, her features wrinkled and kind. The friar greeted her warmly, then introduced us, saying that we wanted to ask her some questions. Ernesto hung back, leaving the friar to do the talking, although his eyes studied the woman’s face with what struck me as a predatory attentiveness.

As the friar questioned her, the woman replied softly. Yes, the doctors had told her that she was going to die. Yes, she had gone to pray at the tomb of the blessed saint, even though it meant going into Nationalist territory. And, yes, she had felt the Holy Spirit take hold of her body, leaving its marks on her flesh.

At the friar’s urging, she showed us her hands. On the center of each palm, I saw a faint welt, no larger than a peseta piece. Each formed a neat circle, its edges cleanly demarcated. The welts had faded since their first appearance, she told us, but they still bothered her from time to time.

“You mentioned a doctor,” Ernesto said. “You’ve seen him since you got back?”

The woman glanced at the friar, who nodded. Yes, she said, she had seen the doctor, who had been amazed to find that her sickness was gone. Ernesto asked for the doctor’s name, then took out the tins of food, which the woman, after a show of protestation, was persuaded to accept.

After exchanging a few words with the friar, who remained at the house, we headed off. I turned to Ernesto. “So what do you think?”

“I think she’s telling the truth,” Ernesto said. “Or at least as much as she understands. In any case, I know her doctor. Maybe I’ll see him today. It’s probably nothing, but you never know.”

At the hotel, we parted ways. I spent the rest of the day writing up my dispatch, then cabled it to my paper. That night, when I went out for dinner at the Gran Via, the restaurant was already packed. Looking for a place to sit, I saw Ernesto at a table in the corner. He seemed tired, but signaled for me to come over.

“I can’t make head or tail of the damned thing,” Ernesto said. “The doctor confirmed it. Not only is this woman’s story true, but he’s seen three spontaneous remissions in the past six months, all patients with terminal cancer. They don’t always say where they’ve been, but it’s clear that they’ve all gone to Segovia.”

I picked at my plate of horsemeat with rice. “And he’s sure that the cancer is gone?”

Ernesto poured himself another glass of wine. “As sure as anyone can be. He’s got his hands full with the wounded, so he can’t track each patient’s progress. Except for this most recent case, he can’t testify to the stigmata. But he showed me the records himself. These are all patients who were given only a few months to live. Now they’re in the best of health.”

Pushing the plate aside, I reached for my wineglass. “So what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to Segovia. The padre needs a ride back anyway, so I’m driving up there tomorrow.” Raising his glass, he fixed me with those penetrating eyes. “I was hoping you might join me.”

I didn’t reply at once. Over the past year, I had taken my share of risks, but it was one thing to wind up in danger by accident, and quite another to drive on purpose into fascist territory.

I had already opened my mouth to decline when the bomb exploded. The sound began as a whine, like a plucked guitar string, then deepened into the roar of an approaching train. When the shell went off, it was very close by, and the entire restaurant trembled. The conversation died out for a second, then returned to its customary din. But we were all a little shaken.

It struck me then that one might die as easily in Madrid as anywhere else, and at least the front offered the prospect of movement and fresh air. “All right,” I said at last. “I’ll come.”

“Good,” Ernesto said, draining his glass with a gulp. “We’ll make an adventure of it.”

The next morning, before dawn, I found Ernesto waiting for me outside our hotel. Behind the wheel of his car sat Hipolito, the latest and most reliable of his drivers. After making a detour to pick up the friar, who slid beside me into the back seat, we headed out of the city.

It was a cold morning on the meseta, the wind bearing wave after wave of dust from the mountains. As the sun rose to our right, it gradually illuminated the landscape outside Madrid. Raw military roads had been cut across the plain, and at the edges of the paths, I saw abandoned equipment and holes from recent bombardments. In the distance, I could make out a line of troops, their cars and tanks covered with freshly cut branches, the soldiers like ants in their steel helmets.

Ahead of us ran a line of mountains, the foothills clad with pine forest. The higher we climbed, the closer the sound of artillery became. To ease the tension, Ernesto handed back a wineskin, its contents resinous but welcome. Warmed by the wine, the friar began to speak of the saint whose shrine we were going to see: “When St. John tried to reform the Carmelites, his superiors threw him into prison, in a room barely large enough for his body. He was taken out only to be lashed once a week, but one day, no one knows how, he miraculously escaped—”

Ernesto laughed. “Not much of a miracle. He arranged to remove the hinges from the door of his cell. Now that’s the kind of saint I can admire.” He looked out at the trees. “If John deserves sainthood, it’s because he understood the dark night of the soul. You can look for God all your life and find nothing in the end. And for a true believer, that nothingness is enough. Nada y nada y nada.”

We rounded a hairpin turn, bringing us into view of the northern plain. As we began our winding descent, the town of Segovia appeared in the distance, a few dark specks in a sea of orange. Overhead, we heard the sound of aircraft, and saw three monoplanes flying in a Nationalist patrol. We watched, uneasy, until the planes had gone, then continued on our way.

As we approached Segovia, my first impression was that of a long tongue of crumbling stone. It was an ancient village girded by a vast aqueduct, with gray fortifications surrounding the town itself. Instead of driving under the main arch, which would have brought us into the plaza, we skirted the walls to the monastery, which lay to the northwest.

We parked beneath a clump of trees a hundred yards from the entrance. Climbing out, Ernesto told Hipolito to stay with the car, then followed the friar up the road, which led past a stone wall. A footpath lined with pines brought us to the monastery. Leading us through the heavy doors, the friar pointed us toward the church, saying that he would join us in a moment.

He disappeared down the corridor. Taking off our hats, Ernesto and I passed into the church, moving along the aisle toward the altar. A door to the left led to the chapel, which we entered.

Inside, it was darker than I had expected, the windows piled high with sandbags, the only light coming from a few guttering candles. The atmosphere was warm and damp, with an odor of moist stone.

Beyond the altar rails stood the tomb of St. John of the Cross, a massive reliquary of marble and bronze. On the floor before the altar lay what appeared, at first, to be two heaps of rags. A second later, one of the heaps moved, and I realized that they were a pair of visitants lying in front of the tomb. Looking more closely, I saw that they were a man and woman, their ages unclear. Something in their silent prostration gave me the feeling that they had been here for hours, if not days.

Glancing over at Ernesto, I saw that he was looking around the chapel with the same intent air that I had observed before. When I followed his eyes, I noticed fresh cracks in the floor and walls, and recalled that this area had been bombed by the Loyalists in the early days of the war.

We stood there in silence, looking around the chapel’s dim interior. After a moment, the friar rejoined us. “We have a number of guests with us,” the friar said in a whisper, indicating the prone figures at the altar. “Another is staying upstairs. I have arranged for you to see him.”

Ernesto turned back to the reliquary. “What can you tell me about the tomb?”

“St. John of the Cross died in Ubeda, and his body was brought here soon afterward,” the friar said. “At first, he was interred below the floor. The tomb that you see here was installed ten years ago.”

Ernesto ran his gaze across the marble monument. “And how did St. John die?”

“A disease of the legs, I believe.” The friar headed for the door. “Come. I’ll bring you to our other guest.”

We followed him out of the chapel. Leaving the church, we ascended a flight of stone steps to a corridor lined with cells. The friar knocked softly at the nearest door, then pushed it open. Inside, a man was seated at the edge of a pallet, a rosary in his hands. As we entered, the visitant looked up, and I thought I saw something like holy fever in his eyes.

“God be with you, my son,” the friar said politely. “And how are you feeling?”

“Better,” the man said. As he looked between us with a mild, peering expression, the friar explained that the visitant had recently arrived from Burgos, having been diagnosed some time before with an incurable carcinoma.

In response to our request, the visitant extended his scrawny arms for us to examine. On the palms of his hands, which were trembling slightly, I observed the same markings that I had seen on the woman in Madrid.

Without being asked, the visitant raised the hem of his robe, allowing us to look at his feet. Here, too, were marks that might have been those of stigmata, although they seemed larger than the wounds that nails would have made. On his legs, I saw what looked like a number of welts or bruises. “The marks of the flail,” the friar said helpfully, “where Our Lord was beaten by the soldiers.”

“Of course,” Ernesto said. From his jacket pocket, he took a few sunflower seeds, which the visitant accepted gladly. As we filed out of the room, I saw that he had already turned back to his rosary.

Going downstairs, we left the monastery, heading back to where we had left the car. When we arrived, Hipolito was leaning against the hood, his arms folded. As we drew close enough to see him in the shade, the driver gestured with a nod of his head. “Watch out. We have a guest.”

I turned. Fifty yards away, leaning against the wall that encircled the monastery, there stood a slender figure in a beret and overcoat. He was watching us. Ernesto frowned, then spoke to the friar. “You know this man?”

“Yes,” the friar said, the color draining from his face. “He is one of the Falangists.”

“I was afraid of that.” Ernesto signaled to Hipolito. “Come on. Let’s leave this fascist bastard behind.”

As I got into the car, I glanced back at the figure by the wall, who had begun to watch us more openly. Ernesto climbed into the front seat, then glanced at the friar. “You’ll be all right on your own?”

“Yes, I’ll take care of it,” the friar said. “But you should go now. God be with you.”

“And also with you, padre,” Ernesto said. As we drove away from the monastery, a cloud of dust rose behind the car. Looking over my shoulder, I saw the friar approaching the man in the beret, who was tracking us with his eyes. Then we rounded the corner and lost sight of them both.

The drive back to the city was a long one. On our approach to Madrid, we passed within sight of a formation of reserve troops, perhaps the same ones we had seen on our way to Segovia. At some point in the past few hours, they had been bombarded. Bodies lay on the ground, no more than lumps in the dirt, with medical crews and burial squads moving among the fallen.

When we returned to the city, Hipolito dropped us off at the hotel. As we approached the entrance, the granite dust caking on our boots, Ernesto spoke at last. “The padre was braver than he looked. The fascists won’t be pleased that he met with us, even if it turns out to have been for nothing.”

We entered the hotel, passing between the two guards at the door. “So you still don’t believe in miracles?”

“I’m not sure,” Ernesto said, heading for the concierge’s desk. “Give me a few days.”

As it turned out, I didn’t talk to him again for the better part of a week. From time to time, I would see him in the lobby, a few books under one arm, or speaking to the medical officer of the Eleventh International Brigade, a German national with the eyes of a monk.

One evening, however, as I was returning to the hotel, I found a note from Ernesto waiting for me at the front desk, asking if I would be kind enough to meet him at Chicote’s. When I pushed through the revolving door that night, the bar was fairly quiet. Ernesto was seated at his favorite table, under a window piled with sandbags, drinking a gin and tonic.

Next to his glass, instead of the usual newspapers or political tracts, there was a stack of leather-bound books. Pulling up a chair, I saw that two were medical textbooks, one was a life of St. John of the Cross, and the last, unexpectedly, was an edition of the letters of Anton Chekhov.

“Don’t be so surprised,” Ernesto said, clearing a space for me to sit. “My father was a doctor, you know. I even drove an ambulance during the war. So I know a few things about how the body works.”

I ordered a whiskey. “But I assume your current interest was inspired by our trip.”

“I suppose you might say that,” Ernesto said. “In fact, I have solved the mystery.”

My incredulity must have shown on my face, for Ernesto laughed and assured me that he was perfectly serious. “First off, I hope you’ll agree to exclude the possibility of miracles. My own feelings side, the supernatural should be invoked only after all other possibilities have been excluded.”

“Agreed,” I said, taking a sip of the whiskey. “So how do you propose to begin?”

“With the facts. Take away the stigmata and the air of the supernatural, and what do we have? A case of spontaneous remission. So I consulted the literature on the subject. These recoveries do happen, if rarely. According to one source, they occur in fewer than one in a hundred thousand cases.”

Ernesto picked up a volume from the pile. “This is an account of the work of William Coley, a surgeon who made the first systematic study of spontaneous remission. As a young man, he was asked to consult on the case of a girl of seventeen, who complained of pain and swelling in her right hand. The biopsy revealed that she was suffering from a severe sarcoma. They amputated her arm below the elbow, but it was too late. A few months later, she died.”

He opened the book, gently turning over the leaves. “Another man might have moved on, but Coley was a gifted surgeon and still very young. He became obsessed with investigating cases of sarcoma, trying to discover how to treat such a terrible disease. During his research, he uncovered many instances of spontaneous remission. And he found that most of these cases had one thing in common.”

I sensed that he was intentionally milking the drama, but I was willing to play along. “What did he find?”

“He found cases, some dating back a century or more, of cancer patients who experienced spontaneous remission after surviving a serious infection. When the immune system rallies to fend off a bacterial invasion, it seems, it can eliminate cancer as well. The body has wonderful defenses, but it doesn’t always recognize cancer as a threat. An infection serves to mobilize the body against one enemy, while also taking care of a more insidious foe. Chekhov mentions this. He was a doctor, you know, and in one of his letters, he notes that when a patient develops erysipelas, a severe skin infection caused by streptococcus, the growth of tumors is also checked. So these observations go back a long time.”

He closed the book. “It’s even possible, if you’re so inclined, to draw an analogy to the present war. I’m not a communist. I have nothing against the church. But I want to destroy fascism. And the only way to do this is to align that struggle with the movements that want to do away with capitalists and clergymen. In the short term, it leads to atrocities on both sides. But we can’t stop fascism unless we connect the fight to an impulse that the people can understand.”

“We’re straying from the point, I think,” I said. “What about William Coley?”

“Well, after reviewing the literature, he began looking for instances of spontaneous remission that were closer to home. In particular, he heard about the case of a German immigrant who had been diagnosed with terminal sarcoma. Later, the patient came down with erysipelas, the kind of infection that Chekhov mentions, but eventually recovered. Coley went looking for this patient, knocking on tenement doors until he finally tracked him down. And what he found was that the patient was alive and free of cancer, apparently because of the infection he’d survived.”

I began to see where Ernesto was going. “So we’re talking about a cure for cancer.”

“Coley certainly seemed to think so. He began to investigate the possibility of deliberately infecting cancer patients to trigger their natural immune defenses. He even developed an antitumor vaccine, a brew of microbes, including erysipelas bacteria, that could be injected directly into the body. The results, not surprisingly, were mixed. Some patients recovered, but others died. After all, there’s always a chance that erysipelas itself might kill the patient. It can be a brutal disease. There’s one famous case, in particular, that might be relevant here—”

I found that I knew exactly what he was going to say. “St. John of the Cross.”

Ernesto nodded, pleased, as if I had passed a test. “I’ve looked into the details. St. John came down with a fever, then an inflammation of the leg. It ulcerated and spread to his lower back, where it killed him. His biographers agree it was erysipelas. But let’s file that fact away for now.”

Signaling to the waiter for another round, Ernesto picked up a handbook of infectious diseases. “So what are the symptoms of erysipelas? It begins as a fever with tremors. A red, swollen, hardened rash appears, usually on the extremities, particularly the hands, feet, and legs. The rashes tend to be raised, with sharply defined edges. In some cases, they take the form of elevated vesicles or blisters. Not unlike, shall we say, the marks of a nail—”

The waiter arrived with our drinks, although I barely noticed this. “So you think these cases of stigmata were really erysipelas?”

“It isn’t so hard to believe. Imagine that round, hardened welts appear on a supplicant’s hands and feet after a visit to the shrine. Someone else at the monastery takes them for stigmata. Then, as word gets around, later cases show the marks even more clearly. Why? Because everyone knows what stigmata are supposed to look like. The mind influences the size and location of the markings. The cycle feeds on itself. All it takes is a certain degree of credulity.”

“Hold on,” I said. “So you’re saying that these miracles are due to visitors to the shrine being infected by erysipelas. Their symptoms are mistaken for stigmata. Because the war has reduced their access to medical care, they don’t receive the usual diagnosis or treatment, but if they survive the infection on their own, it drives off their cancer. But are you really implying that they’ve been infected by the body of a saint who died over three centuries ago?”

“That’s something I found hard to accept, too,” Ernesto said. “But look at the circumstances. A reliquary is an ideal place for bacteria to grow. Staphylococcus, for instance, has been found thriving in newly opened tombs. And you’ve seen that chapel. Visitors lie on the floor for hours at a time. They’re near death, undernourished, vulnerable to infection, in a dark, damp place that has been recently disturbed by bombing. And any battlefield doctor can tell you that bombardment releases microbes that have been dormant in the landscape for a long time.”

I remembered Ernesto’s conversation with the doctor at the International Brigade. “Is that why you spoke to Dr. Heilbrun?”

“Yes. And he reminded me of a case I might otherwise have forgotten. I imagine that you’ve heard of it. A tomb was reopened after thousands of years. Soon after the excavation, a number of those involved died, including the man who financed the dig, which led to certain fantastic theories. Well, the tomb was that of Tutankhamen. The man was Lord Carnarvon. And he died of erysipelas.”

We fell silent. I became aware that I had drunk too much. “So what are you going to do about it?”

Ernesto contemplated his glass for a moment, then took a careful swig. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?” My head was throbbing, and I had trouble understanding what he meant. “What are you talking about?”

He did not respond right away. Around us, the bar had grown packed with journalists, soldiers, and girls, and when he spoke again, I had to listen carefully to hear him over the crowd:

“The Segovia offensive needs to take place,” Ernesto said slowly. “If we don’t recapture Segovia, Franco will push north until he reaches Bilbao, which will cut the Loyalists in half. If that happens, the war is lost. And if I write about this shrine, it will only complicate the situation.”

He looked into his glass, which was nearly empty. “That’s the strange thing, you see. The friar came to me because he thought word of a miracle might discourage the attack. He was wrong, of course. The last thing the Loyalists want is to give legitimacy to the church. But when you cast things in scientific terms—”

Ernesto paused. “That’s a different story. The socialists have made a fetish of science. They’ll want to look into it. Even to postpone the offensive until they have more information. And I can’t allow that to happen.”

“But what if you’re right?” I asked. “If the chapel contains a cure for cancer, are you willing to throw that away?”

“I’m willing to make the hard choice. Perhaps a handful of men and women will die without this cure. On the other hand, we have the future of a nation, even the world, to consider. You’ve seen the forces at play here. Sarcoma is nothing compared to the cancer of fascism. If you don’t believe me, imagine how Europe will look in a few years, if that cancer isn’t snuffed out now.”

I weighed this in silence. Deep down, I knew that there was nothing I could do. I was neither famous nor expert enough to make the case for the shrine on my own. And there was always the possibility that Ernesto was right.

“Well, hell,” I said at last. “If that’s what you’ve decided, I’m not going to stop you.”

Ernesto only finished his drink, without meeting my eyes. It was too loud to talk any further, so we paid the bill and left. Outside, the city was very quiet. We headed back to the Hotel Florida, moving in silence through the ruined streets, and parted ways at the elevator. I don’t think we even said goodbye.

• • • •

Ernesto left the city soon afterward. I stayed for another few months, writing and working on my own, long enough to see the failure of the Segovia offensive, which began three weeks after his departure. Even after it became clear that the assault had fallen short, it was difficult to understand how things had gone so wrong. After suffering more than a thousand casualties, the offensive faltered, then fell back. In the end, it succeeded in delaying the capture of Bilbao by less than two weeks.

After that, I only saw Ernesto once more. A year after the war ended, I wound up in Havana, where I learned that he was staying at an estate fifteen miles from the city. On an impulse, I gave him a call. Rather to my surprise, he agreed to see me that day, if I’d be willing to drive up to the house.

When I arrived at the estate, which the locals called the Finca Vigía, it was lunchtime. I rang the bell, and Martha let me inside. She looked as beautiful as always, a tall, elegant blonde, and she seemed glad to see me. Showing me into the study, she left us alone, saying that she would bring some refreshments.

Ernesto was seated at his desk, wearing a soft red robe. Beside the typewriter lay a heap of manuscript pages. I had heard that he was working on a novel inspired by the Segovia offensive, and asked if he had a title yet. He said he was thinking of calling it The Undiscovered Country.

Waving me into a seat, Ernesto leaned back in his chair. “Any news of the padre?”

“Yes,” I said, accepting a glass of scotch from Martha, who set down a tray of sandwiches and left the room. “He was shot by the Falangists a month after our visit. For all I know, it was because they saw him with us.”

“Damn them,” Ernesto said mildly. “But it’s hard to be sure about these things. What about the chapel?”

“As far as I can tell, the cures have ceased. Visitants kept coming, but after a while, there were no more recoveries. Nobody knows why. Although I hear that the monastery was disinfected from top to bottom after a typhus scare.”

Ernesto straightened the papers on his desk. “It isn’t surprising. Microbes change character quickly. Like men. So perhaps the factors that made the cure possible simply ceased to exist.”

He took a sip of his drink. “In any case, it’s for the best. The last thing we need is for Franco to lay claim to a shrine. You can imagine how he would treat it. It would become a fascist Lourdes. Proof that his regime had been blessed by heaven. Better for it to disappear altogether.”

We lapsed into a rather melancholy silence. After a moment, the alcohol spreading through my body prompted me to speak more philosophically than usual. Finishing my glass, I said, “You know, the Loyalist republic never would have lasted. A government that is utterly opposed to the church can’t survive for long. The need for faith runs too deep.” I paused. “Perhaps in time, if things had been different, the Loyalists would have realized this.”

Ernesto, in his red robe, looked out the window at the sea. On the surface of the water, the sun was beating down in a long white line.

“Yes,” Ernesto said at last, draining his glass of scotch. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

©2012 by Alec Nevala-Lee. Originally published in Analog Fiction and Fact. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alec Nevala-Lee is the author of the suspense novels The Icon Thief, City of Exiles, and Eternal Empire, all published by Penguin Books. He is currently at work on the nonfiction book Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, which will be released by Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 2018. His short fiction appears frequently in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, including his novelette “The Boneless One,” which was selected for The Year’s Best Science Fiction, 29th Annual Edition, edited by Gardner Dozois. He lives with his wife and daughter in Oak Park, Illinois, and blogs at www.nevalalee.com.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

Unauthorized Access

An Owomoyela | 10700 words

Prison 17 had been built long enough ago that it got next to no natural light—before all the studies that said that light was good for prison behavior and morale. And of course the rest of its district had been remodded in the past ten years, so the view from outside was a phalanx of solar panels over heat-reflecting paint, making a headache-inducing pattern of black and white. Prisons and hydroponics. That was about all that called this district home.

Which didn’t stop three dozen gawkers from gathering outside the prison gate.

Aedo had expected it, but it still caught her up short. She froze on the sidewalk and saw the flashes of ocular implants and handheld cameras; that was probably going to be the picture on the newsfeeds, above the fold.

She drew a hand back through her hair, impulsively.

A quick-and-dirty breakdown of the crowd by age and dress suggested that probably a quarter of them were for legitimate news streams. She didn’t recognize most of the ones in ratty shirts with the logo of the counterculture of the month. She met their eyes first, though: allies. Then she cleared her throat and made herself walk forward, holding up a hand like she was holding court.

“Thanks for being here,” she said. She’d practiced her statement in prison, with the sympathetic ears she’d just worked her way around to thinking of as friends, and fell back on that without thinking about how completely nil it’d sound as a soundbyte. “I have stuff to say on Government data, but right now I want dinner, a shower, and a nap. I’ll post a blog in the next few days, and if you want an interview, message me.”

Because everyone knew her message address. And of course the statement didn’t prevent the barrage of questions, but it let her deploy the strategy that got her through most of her childhood: she ducked her head, focused on a problem in the back of her mind, and pretended that no one was talking to her.

She’d had the foresight to call ahead and have an autocab waiting, and she ran the gauntlet and slipped in. Paid the extra for exclusive access so no one could slip into the seat beside her. She didn’t have much credit, but she’d planned her exodus to keep herself from getting overwhelmed.

She directed the taxi toward one of the hotels along the edge of Patterway District, which she’d vetted before being sentenced in the first place. Unless things had changed in the last eighteen months, it had a decent data line, and her limited credit should let her camp there for at least a week. If things had changed, well, she’d deal with that problem when it came for her.

For now, though, she just put her head back and listened to the autocab rolling along the road.

• • • •

The hotel room wasn’t much, but compared to a prison bunk, it was a wealth of space, privacy, time. Time to be alone with her thoughts.

And time to be alone with her hunger. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast that morning; lunch had been overridden by exit paperwork. She’d just become used to her meals happening without any consideration on her part.

These were things she’d have to un-get-used-to.

She tossed her stuff on the bed, and headed down to the hotel convenience shop.

Sometime when she hadn’t been paying attention, an unofficial passage to the undercity had opened up in Patterway District—which meant that the hotel was seeing a mixed clientele, which meant an odd array of convenience food in the shop. Instant noodles and dehydrated locust curry, tinned soups and mushroom vitamin bars. She was staring at the selection—decision fatigue already, and she’d barely been out of prison for an hour—when her datapad buzzed in her pocket.

Eighteen months without the thing, and it was still thoughtless, instinctive, to pull it out of her pocket and glance at the screen. She’d set it only to buzz for certain contact groups, and she blinked twice when she saw who was actually messaging her.

LogicalOR: waiting on that blog post o martyr for the cause

LogicalOR: haha seriously welcome back to civilization i just bought you a beer

And then a hand landed on her shoulder.

Aedo ducked, flipping her body around and backing into the shelf of locust curries. Her datapad came up like a taser, and the woman behind her held up both hands. She was late-middle-aged, in a business suit too good for this district but just about serviceable in the central business ones. And she held herself stiffly. Aedo wasn’t great at reading people, but she could recognize discomfort when she saw it; Patterway District must have meant slumming, for this woman.

“Sorry,” the woman said. “I suppose I should have known better.”

Aedo’s heart was lurching, and her shoulders had gone tense. For a moment she considered telling the woman that even if she hadn’t been in prison, she wouldn’t have appreciated that—wasn’t good with people, didn’t like contact with people, could still feel the ghost impression of the woman’s hand on her shoulder and it was making her skin crawl—but the words weren’t coming to her tongue, and it didn’t seem like the thing to say, anyway. “What?” was what came out.

“I should introduce myself,” the woman said, and extended a hand. Aedo tucked both of her hands under her arms, the datapad pressed against her ribs. After a moment, the woman let her hand drop. “I’m Valencia Cadares; I work in the Energy Division. I’d like to take you out to dinner.”

Oh, crap, Aedo thought.

Then she looked at the woman. Cadares wasn’t a name she recognized, and inviting a young hacker out to dinner seemed like an odd move for someone whose department had been screwed over by said hacker’s actions. Inside ally, maybe. Could be a bureaucrat trying to line up another leak, in which case Aedo would rather just point her at an anonymous server and call it good. “Why?”

Cadares hesitated. “Call it professional curiosity?”

“I’m not giving interviews,” Aedo said.

Cadares looked pained. “Please,” she said, then looked past Aedo, and glanced along the shelf of food. Gestured to the pemmican. “Unless vegetable shortening and protein powder is more appealing?”

Dammit. Aedo would have killed for a decent meal.

Or, if not killed, then rubbed elbows with someone from the Energy Division for a while. She eyed the woman, gauging the relative levels of danger and social awkwardness.

“You buying?”

• • • •

The place Cadares picked out was, unsurprisingly, in toward the central districts, where the buildings rose tall enough to segment the sky into a frustrated grid. Business-drone restaurant. In her T-shirt and jacket and pants with all their carpenter loops on it—loops which would never see use, because heck if she knew what she’d do with a hammer—Aedo was as obvious as a blinking light.

To her credit, Cadares seemed to notice the incongruity as soon as they walked in the door. But she set her shoulders, opened up the seat menu, and found them a booth near the back. Aedo kept her head down and followed Carades there.

Cadares sat first. Aedo slid into the booth opposite her and positioned herself to hide from as much of the restaurant as possible, her fingers making abortive little motions toward the datapad in her pocket. Eighteen months without the thing, and setting it aside for dinner seemed viscerally wrong, like she’d just gotten a sense back and had to numb it again. Of course, now she was sitting across from a woman whose generation still thought that bringing data to the dinner table was a breech of the social contract, or something.

Cadares was already turning her attention to the interactive tabletop. She selected a menu, swiped a few dishes on or off the offerings—accounting for cost, or ideological stance, or whatever—and sent the menu over to Aedo’s seat, where Aedo stared at it. The sheer overabundance of choice aside, this was the kind of food she didn’t normally eat. After a moment, she just poked the listing with the most ingredients she recognized.

“So,” Aedo said, and let the sound hang there.

Cadares made her decision, selecting a dish and a drink with two sharp jabs. “They always have such interesting selections here,” she said. “Apparently one of their menu consultants spent part of his life around the cooking stalls in the Undermarket.”

That was . . . interesting, in a useless way. “Um,” Aedo said. “Why am I here?”

Cadares paused. It was very un-politician of her. “I suppose I wanted to get to know you,” she said, and Aedo thought oh, shit, should I be thinking about stalkers? Her semi-fame had gotten her name out there, and to read some of the boards, that was all it took for people to decide that your life was theirs, for their entertainment and one-sided emotional attachment. But Cadares just went on, “you know, get to know the mind behind the infamy. Maybe ask why you distributed those files.”

“I’ve given this interview,” Aedo said. “Like, a hundred times.”

“Humor me?” Cadares said.

Aedo sighed. She’d released her statements, she’d explained herself again and again, but everyone seemed to think hearing it direct from her voicebox would be so much more real than hearing it from a news clip. She didn’t think so. They’d still get a canned answer, because making up a new one for everyone who asked was a colossal waste of time.

“Because there’s no reason not to know,” Aedo said. “Energy reports—this is how we light our homes, right? This is what runs the computers and phones we use. That’s how we talk to each other, and work, and how we traverse large buildings and take autocabs across the city. This is stuff we need to live our lives, so why shouldn’t we know about it? What’s the point of it being secret?”

“Is that really it, though?” Cadares asked. “You didn’t need a reason to do it, you needed a reason not to?”

Aedo didn’t answer that. If people wanted to paint her as some kid with poor impulse control and an antisocial streak, they’d do it no matter how she protested.

“I believed we were being lied to,” Aedo said. Back to the security of a canned answer. “And then I looked at the data and it looked a lot like we were being lied to, and I didn’t—I don’t understand how people don’t get angry when they see that.”

“Ennui and apathy,” Cadares offered.

Aedo shook her head.

Cadares fixed Aedo with a stare. “No?”

“That’s what they always say,” Aedo said. Thing was, she didn’t know anyone who didn’t care. A few people claimed not to care, but look hard enough, and you could find something that kicked them off like a virus. Most of them just didn’t think there was anything they could do about it.

Well, she’d found something she could do. And they’d unloaded both barrels at her. Done the worst a topheavy bureaucracy could do. That was enough to deter plenty of people, but hey, she’d survived, and it’s not like her job prospects were much worse now than they had been before.

But before she was forced to articulate it, their food arrived, courtesy a post-education kid who still hadn’t grown out of his lanky phase and looked like the branded restaurant suit he was wearing was what he’d be wearing for the rest of his life.

Whatever Aedo had ordered, it looked like soup when he set it in front of her. Big chunks of vegetable and some kind of starch product and some kind of meat, with the kind of striation that suggested it had actually come from the muscle of an animal.

Aedo sawed a chunk into a smaller chunk with the edge of her spoon, and tasted it. It had some kind of identifiable and not-unpleasant flavor, which put it head and shoulders above what she’d been eating lately.

“I think you could do some good work,” Cadares said. “You’re skilled and civic-minded. I’d like to offer you patronage.”

Part of Aedo’s soup went down her windpipe, and she slammed down on her breathing to keep herself from choking out and making a scene. Cadares looked alarmed.

“Are you all right?”

Aedo made a series of gestures to her throat and the soup, and tried to wave Cadares off, and hoped that it read as Don’t worry! Just fine! and not I am having spasms and need immediate help! She focused on breathing through her nose, made a few small coughs until the instinct to hack up a lung subsided, and squeaked out “Is that still a thing?”

“I,” Cadares said, but after a moment her expression changed. Less taken-aback and more amused, maybe. “I have an extra room. You could do with some help getting back on your feet, couldn’t you?”

Aedo nodded, then caught herself and shook her head, then realized that was technically a lie and swallowed and said “Wait, you want me to move in with you?”

“Would that be all right?” Cadares asked. “I mean, you could certainly move in and see how you felt about it, and if you wanted to move out later you could.”

After navigating a whole world of socially awkward shit, Aedo expected. But really, was moving in with a strange woman from the Energy Division any more of a bad idea than moving in with a strange woman from the net? She’d done that before.

“Uh,” she said. “Okay.”

She also made a mental note to tell some of her friends in Virtual Liberation, just in case. It would be her luck to get out of prison and end up with a stalker.

• • • •

Cadares seemed content to hail a cab and check her own messages while Aedo pulled out her data pad, keyed up the screen, and sank into the comforting rhythms of checking the newsfeeds, slinging a bit of code, playing a round of Commerce, and letting the outside world take care of its own business without input from her. She was expecting the trip to take a good bit of time.

Instead, it wasn’t long before the cab slid to a halt and announced their destination, and she turned to blink out of the window.

Oh.

Cadares worked on the Energy Division, so something in Aedo’s brain had slotted her in with the energy farms outlying the city. But no, she was administrative, which meant that she was in one of the suburbs of the government sector, in one of those building where every flat took up a floor.

Cadares had the seventeenth, which meant that she signed them into the elevator lobby and they rode up, the city dropping away or rising with them as they ascended. It might not have been the top of the tower, but the view—inside and out—was extraordinary.

Cadares tossed her bag into the corner of the entryway and logged Aedo in as a guest, having her press her hand to the biometric panel at the door and keying in a set of permissions for everything from the main door to the refrigerator and showers. Then she led her across a livingroom space larger than Aedo’s old flat, and to a bedroom which nearly matched her old flat in size. The bed was better quality, though. So was the desk. And the data port looked top of the line, and already had a wireless hub glowing cheerfully from it.

“Make yourself at home,” Cadares said. “The only thing I’ll ask is that you don’t have friends visit here. I understand you have a source of income, if you want to meet them out?”

“Uh,” Aedo said. “A bit, yeah.” Which mostly meant bug bounties in distributed software and some shared income from distributed development, but Cadares seemed like the kind of person who wouldn’t think that was real work. Just a bunch of socially-awkward kids typing at each other over the net.

Which, you know, it was a bunch of socially-awkward kids typing at each other over the net. But also socially-awkward adults, and unexpected media dynamos, and charismatic project managers, and people who thought far too deeply about software until they came up with a change in one block of code that cut processing time from three hours to thirty seconds. People like Cadares probably didn’t know how much they owed to the socially-awkward-kids group.

“Good,” Cadares said. “We need to talk later. I can’t right now—I have a meeting I can’t miss. But really, please do help yourself to anything unlocked.”

Anything unlocked. Like she needed to say it. Like Aedo was going to hack the wine fridge, or something. She nodded, and Cadares turned to go. It took a moment for Aedo to get her throat to make a sound.

“Hey,” Aedo said.

Cadares turned back.

“Um.” Aedo shifted, and fished for words. “Look, I have this daemon on one of the VL community servers, it’s been checking my newsworthiness—I mean, that dipped during the sentence, but it’s up again, and—I mean, I probably already have a bunch of bullshit requests for interviews, and they’re going to ask about how I’m getting back on my feet after my prison sentence, you know, human interest stuff, and—”

She trailed off. Typing her thoughts was so much easier; she had a chance to get all the information in the right order instead of just blurting it out and hoping the recipient could extract the meaning from all the noise. This had always been a problem. If she sat down and thought through the sentences, she wasn’t talking fast enough; if she talked fast enough, her words were a mess. She was so much more comfortable in text, where latency was fine.

At least Cadares seemed to know what she was getting at. Her expression cooled.

“For the next week or so,” she said, “I’d prefer if you kept my name out of it. You can refer to me as ‘a patron,’ but please don’t disseminate any identifying data. After the week, I’d say you can share whatever you want.”

“Okay,” Aedo said. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected—Cadares taking in a young activist for the social capital? Capital with whom?—but the answer didn’t inspire confidence.

“If you need anything, my message address is coded in the flat,” Cadares said. Professional warmth was back in her tone. “I’ll see you later.”

“Yeah,” Aedo said, and Cadares left.

Aedo stood exactly where she was as the lift doors closed, and she listened to the noise-damped shufffs as it carried Cadares downward. Then she let out a breath and made a cursory effort at familiarizing herself with the flat. The windows were equipped with dimmers, the lights had adjustable spectrums, the couch wasn’t a smart couch, but it would be large enough for a very satisfying dogpile if she was allowed to have friends over. The food in the fridge was mostly heatable boxed meals from restaurants, the only doors that wouldn’t open were a glass door to an office space and an opaque door to what was probably Cadares’ bedroom. Aedo retreated to her own bedroom, and checked the newsworthiness daemon. She was up two points, probably as the larger sites and aggregators caught onto the blog noise.

Aside from the daemon, the next interesting thing on the pad was 15,289 new messages—a number that blipped up to 15,292 while she watched it. She turned the message center off. She’d need another daemon to classify those: hate mail, automated advertisements, VL list nonsense, requests for interview, support mail, messages from friends, total crackpot mail. Probably 2% of it would be something she actually wanted to read, and that was a daunting number all its own.

She sighed, opened up her script environment, and got to work.

A minute in, and something popped up on the corner of her screen. Network connected, it read. This network has the following local public subscriptions: • Energy News Digest. • Energy Division Public Releases. • Energy Division Public Information Request Release Aggregate. Would you like to add these to your subscription manager?

She blinked, then selected yes on the first and third. The second was already in her manager, the first was one of the zines whose subscription had lapsed while she was doing time, and the third—

Well, tucked under a title that could only have come out of a bureaucracy, that was the aggregated text of every file the Energy Division had to release in accordance with a Information Request from the public. The sort of thing someone working in energy would have access to, but a member of the public would have to request piecemeal. And 99% of it was probably people asking if they could upgrade their flats or businesses to draw additional power from the grid, but there was probably 1% that was gold.

Which was, at the moment, just more noise, when she needed to polish her life down to some signal. She turned back to the script.

• • • •

Four hours later she pulled her head out of the script and blinked at the clock on the corner of her screen. Her hand found the bottle of water she’d fetched; now empty, again. She got up, stretched, grabbed the bottle, and headed out toward the kitchen.

And there—who know how long she’d been there—was Cadares sitting on the couch, some white drink on the table in front of her, pouring over her data pad.

Aedo considered just slinking past her, but she didn’t feel comfortable enough for the kind of easy cohabitation she could manage with roommates. She cleared her throat.

Cadares didn’t look up. Just waved a hand at one of the empty spots on the couch, so Aedo slunk there instead.

The room still had its strange, preternaturally put-together grandeur in the dark, though the window glass had dimmed to black so their indoor light wouldn’t attract gazes. It felt more than a little like being in a submerged building, or one up in orbit. Or like Aedo imagined those places would feel.

“How was your evening?” Cadares asked, eyes still locked on the screen.

The lack of eye contact was the most comfortable thing about the situation. Aedo wished she’d brought her own pad out, let it distract her from the smalltalk. “Okay.”

“Any interesting reading?” Cadares said.

Aedo tucked her arms in around herself, and neglected to mention that she hadn’t actually gotten around to reading any. “I noticed you made some feeds local-public. I mean, I expect since you live alone, and they default to restricted access . . .”

She trailed off, and Cadares finally sighed, and set her pad to sleep. “I expected you’d be interested in them, so I changed the access settings,” she said.

Aedo nodded, two, three times. Then cleared her throat.

“So, why am I here?”

Cadares arched an eyebrow.

“I mean, I leaked energy data,” she said. “And now you’re giving me a feed full of request-only info? And the thing about ‘a patron,’ I mean, historically—”

Cadares held up a hand. Aedo’s jaw snapped shut.

“I do want you to do something,” Cadares said. “I thought it would appeal to your sensibilities.”

The muscles across Aedo’s shoulders went stiff.

“I need to see energy distribution records for One East,” she said. “I can request them, but I have reason to think they’re being doctored. I need the originals.”

“Um,” Aedo said.

“You do have a history,” Cadares said, and finally put her data pad aside.

Aedo might have counted down from ten, might have done some kind of calming exercise, except that her brain felt like a kernel of panic.

After a moment, she asked, “Do you actually know what hackers do?”

Now Cadares looked like she’d been handed an input error.

But that was all right, because more words were already tumbling up at Aedo’s teeth. “You want data espionage,” she said. “I mean, there are people who go and find security and try to crack it for fun, but that’s not the def—I mean, I hack, but I don’t crack. I got the energy data ’cause—I mean, did you actually read any of the reports on my trial?”

“I didn’t understand all of them,” Cadares admitted.

Aedo slumped back into the couch.

It was a very nice couch. Some kind of synthetic upholstery that yielded but didn’t let her sink down, smooth to the touch but not slick or squeaky. She’d spent two and a half days camped out on a couch like this, once, in a marathon coding session to put together a repository for people to secure politically-sensitive data. But that couch had been third- or fourth-hand, stuffed into a room full of third- or fourth-hand furniture, and the company had been people who knew what they were doing.

“Okay,” Aedo said, and wondered if Cadares would get on her data pad for this. She could write out an explanation—hell, she could link one. But the last time she’d tried that, the response had been an irritated Just explain it to me; I don’t want to read all this stuff, and anyway not a lot of people really got how much more comfortable she was communicating through writing than through voice.

There was a reason most of her friends were in VL.

“Okay,” she said again, and pressed her fingers into her temples. At least she did have some experience explaining these things to the non-net-savvy. “Let’s pretend computer security is like a door lock, okay? It’s not, but it’s complicated, and you don’t need to know all the stuff about it anyway. When people who aren’t hackers talk about hackers, they think about people who can pick locks or break down doors, yeah? But when hackers talk about hackers, they mean people who . . . do stuff around the building.”

She winced. If that had communicated any useful information, she’d honestly be surprised.

“When all the news sites were saying I was a hacker, people kinda thought I broke down a door and found a filing cabinet inside and broke into it and ran off with the documents. But a lot of us can’t do that sort of thing; we’re all about making better filing cabinets or windows, or—okay.” Deep breaths. She could wrestle this all into a coherent metaphor. Maybe. “Basically, what happened was, someone invited me into a building. But the building shared a basement with a public building that Energy was renting to store their files. I was poking around in the basement ’cause, you know . . . I don’t know. Reasons.”

The fun of poking around somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be, a snickering curiosity about how bad these servers were, a blog post or a VL list message she was composing in her head about wow, guys, never run a site with these people, they don’t know how to separate user accounts.

When the Energy Division had dug into how this had happened, they’d found that the people who were in charge of server procurement were the same people in charge of wastebin liner procurement and data pad procurement, not the people in charge of server management and data security. The guys in charge had just gone with the company that was known for highest uptime and largest traffic and hadn’t known to look at the demographics of the people using them: non-technical sorts who wanted to throw something onto the net and weren’t high-enough profile to attract the attention that would make them regret the horrible security.

Well, the ED had been high-enough profile. And they’d regretted it.

“While I was hanging around the basement, I noticed all these elevators, and they all had different people’s names on them. Different building’s names, I guess. And, I mean, most of it was like ‘cooltricks74’ and ‘Gotta Watch Vids’, but then there was this ‘Energy Division Data Backup 034-00A’ one, and I had to check it out. So I used this security exploit that everyone knew about and I got into that building and I started looking at the file cabinets, because none of them were locked, and I found stuff that I thought people should know about. Like, what I did was basically someone found out that a bunch of pre-fab buildings all used the same key code, and they put up fliers around the city so that people could change theirs, and I saw a flier and remembered it, and the basement elevator used the same code. If the ED had used servers with that vulnerability patched, or even ones where I couldn’t access the root directory, I would never have found the documents. I wouldn’t have even tried.” She looked at Cadares. “You get that?”

Cadares was watching her, a slight frown on her face, and a directness of eye contact that made Aedo squirm. Then, though, she sighed and said, “Internal incompetence?”

“Yeah,” Aedo said.

“They needed a villain for the media.”

“ . . . yeah,” Aedo said. Mentally, she started gathering up her stuff. Hadn’t unpacked yet, that was good; she could probably get another room at the old hotel, and maybe Cadares would drop her off there. Even if she was useless for Cadares’ grand ambitions. It probably wouldn’t be too much to ask of her, would it? To save the ride fare?

But Cadares said, “You know people who can break down doors?”

Aedo thought of LogicalOR.

She was tempted to answer, no. This little exploit aside, she did her level best to stay away from that sort of thing. Plenty of crackers had the sort of ideology that roused rabble in Aedo’s defense when she got arrested, but her relationship with those people wasn’t one she wanted to invest time into improving.

No, she thought. She’d played this game once, and she’d lost, and until two minutes ago she thought she’d do it again with a smile, but she’d kinda wanted to have some time to decompress first. Hang out with her friends and program a swords-and-zombies game or something. Maybe go back to blogging about government responsibility and let that stand as her contribution to activism for a few months-slash-years. She could be a firebrand without being an idiot about it, right?

But the question rolled around in her until it hit the same little core of principle that got her into trouble the first time.

“You think they’re being doctored?” she said.

Cadares nodded. “I’m almost certain of it.”

Fuck.

“I can ask around,” Aedo said. “But I—you know—you do know this is illegal, right?”

The instant she said it, she regretted saying it. Cadares stood, gave her a dark look, and exited the room without a word.

Fuck, Aedo thought again, and looked around the room. She’d had ambitions about sleeping, someday. Now it’d be another four hours looking up tutorials on how to check a room for bugs.

• • • •

Virtual Liberation resisted any attempts to define itself or limit membership, which meant that it had a bunch of data accessibility theorists, hackers, hacktivists, crackers, schoolkids with an affinity for programming and an omnidirectional resentment of authority, subaltern game developers, program-library contributors, hobbyists, and random people who showed up because they had net access and were curious about these things and who disappeared after a week because none of it made any sense to them at all. It was chaos; a complete mess. But a beautiful kind of mess like a primordial sludge pool, from which complex life could develop.

Or something like that. Aedo was a hacker, not an evolutionary biologist.

After a few hours of sleep, a shower, and a nuked box meal, Aedo logged onto the main boards and set up a private chat, pinging a subgroup of people she trusted to join. Hey guys, want to talk to you all in confidence, she typed. The people she trusted were people who’d know that in confidence, coming from her, directed to them, through this medium, wasn’t a game. Any of you ever come up with a plan of action for whistleblowers?

There were a few moments of virtual silence, then waving ellipses showed up next to three or four nicks.

You could always count on someone to be online.

RHellion: Whats up?

Aedo let out her breath. The chat would archive from the beginning, so she could discuss things and not worry too much about having to catch people up later. The conversation would still be in the air.

Another reason virtual life was more convenient than the face-to-face kind.

Ayeball: Made contact with an energy activist at the ED, Aedo wrote. Wants help getting docs out of One East. Fraud stuff. Thinks data is being manipulated before release from inside the division.

A moment passed, and then the elipses started dancing again.

Asterhoidal: WOW ayeball take a vacation! you JUST got out!

GGXL: I was working on that plan of action with Petey but it stalled out at around

GGXL: okay n/m I think you need more than a plan of action there, buddy.

RHellion: Guessing she tried getting an audit kicked off?

Aedo tabbed over to her daemon and had it search the Energy Division Public Releases; an audit had to be reported publicly, and yeah, there it was. Nothing wrong, at least to the public eye. She copied the release into the chatroom, and LogicalOR popped up in the program’s online nicks list.

Aedo winced. Whoever the mind was behind the username, they seemed to like excoriating her in all VL’s discussions—when they weren’t buying her a beer in honor of a prison stay, anyway. To be fair, they excoriated everyone who didn’t take a militant approach to data democracy; they seemed to think the only strategy worth anything was getting into the government servers and causing as much mayhem as possible. Anyone else was clearly Not Serious Enough.

They might have dumped beer money into one of Aedo’s public tipjars, but Aedo fully expected to be dropped from their good graces as soon as the novelty of her prison stay wore off. She was kinda expecting them to hack her data pad just to show that they could.

That was the one annoying thing about LogicalOR: when it came to working the net, they did know their stuff. They even had skills which might be useful if, say, someone needed to crack the security on a government database.

Virtual Liberation might be a complete primordial sludgepool, but it was really good at finding strange bedfellows when you needed them.

A message popped up in the corner of her screen.

LogicalOR: so

LogicalOR: notice that your friend got sniped

. . . that probably wasn’t a good sign. She tabbed over and started to type.

Ayeball: What?

LogicalOR: you totally moved in with valencia cadares

LogicalOR: chasing some businesslady tail or some new leaks yeah (i approve)

LogicalOR: well

LogicalOR: she is in with the cops my friend and not in a buddy buddy way

The next message was a link to a news release.

Aedo clicked on it, and let the secure group chat chatter on without her. The new window bloomed up and covered all their words anyway, replacing them with:

TROUBLED ENERGY DIVISION LAUNCHES INTERNAL INVESTIGATION

Amid renewed scrutiny, ED detains seven employees with suspected ties to data terrorist groups

Aedo skipped the newsese; scrolled down, scanning until she found the words Valencia Cadares right there in paragraph three. A quick flurry of eye movement to find if there was anything about why they’d found her—material on her work computer, thank god, nothing there about surveillance in her home, just inadvisable net searches and a few illicit access attempts to parts of the network she didn’t have permissions for—and for the first time Aedo wished someone had approached her first with a stupid idea.

She tabbed back to the messenger, and got as far as hitting the W key when two more messages popped up.

LogicalOR: they are gunning for your kind my friend

LogicalOR: better watch out ;)

LogicalOR signed off.

Aedo sat there for a moment, staring at the signoff message in her chat. Let the words spike her adrenal glands; remind her that yeah, humans had been a prey species once, and wouldn’t it be a shame to let those old instincts sit unused.

You could freeze, you could flee, or you could fight.

The conversation in the other window had rambled to a pause—waiting on some point of clarification that she wasn’t going to focus on just now. She took a deep breath and returned her hands to the keys.

Ayeball: Uh, guys . . .

Ayeball: How would you feel about helping me do something fast? Like, maybe now?

Ayeball: And then maybe visiting me in prison again?

• • • •

The thing was, arresting Cadares wasn’t even subtle. They could wave all the trumped-up charges at her that they wanted, but as someone who actually worked for the Energy Division, and as someone who’d done the reasonable, official thing and sparked off an audit, there was an entire legal conversation that was supposed to be happening right now. Terms like reasonable suspicion should have been all over the news release; words like whistleblower protections.

Terms which got conveniently forgotten any time something like this came to a head.

Aedo didn’t understand why people didn’t get angry about that, either.

Cadares’ home office was locked with a passcode and biometrics, and maybe with a dedicated week and a lot of reading done on the blacklisted parts of the net, Aedo could have figured out how to bypass it. She could try guessing the password, too, but someone like Cadares would have a random password required at work, and probably would have just used the same thing at home. So Aedo went for the most effective option.

She went out to the livingroom, grabbed the coffee table, and slammed it against the latch until it gave way.

Cadares didn’t live off her datapad. She was one of those people who could leave it behind without feeling like she was forgetting a limb. It was there, sitting on her desk, plugged into the lectric outlet, and a quick swipe of Aedo’s thumb—and a quick polishing off of her thumbprint, after—showed the dashboard, open and unsecured.

Aedo grabbed it. Then she ran back to her bedroom and grabbed her bag, and stuffed Cadares’ datapad down into it.

Time to make an exit.

Walk, don’t run, she thought. If there had been a silent alarm on the door, she wasn’t going to flee the place looking like she’d just triggered an alarm. She paused to hold the door open for someone, then went out onto the street. Slipped onto the first autocab she saw, sat down, and tried to pretend she had a destination other than “away”.

Then she pulled out her own datapad—not Cadares’, not yet—and put a set of parameters into venue search. Beauty salon, keyword: whole image, demographics: some crossover between new professionals and late-grade students, price range: . . . she hesitated. If this all blew up in her face, and she couldn’t see how it wouldn’t, she’d be out of a place to stay and in desperate need of resources.

Then again, if this all blew up in her face, she’d probably have a warrant out for her arrest. And prison was free rent. She typed in as much money as she had, and ran the search.

First things first: she needed a makeover.

• • • •

One of the benefits of finding a place that catered to students in the late grades was that they all knew their academic stipends were going to run out, and there was a kind of universal financial panic that accompanied that. Low cost, middling quality, and high demand kept places like FASHION: Real World Incoming! open, and they didn’t blink too much at any misguided request Aedo could come up with.

Crop the hair short so it lay against her skull, pluck her eyebrows down to bored lines, shade the cheeks so the cheekbones appeared higher, emphasize the line of the upper lip and de-emphasize the lower, make her eyes appear larger, and the effect was that she looked like an intern who wasn’t quite sure what notes to hit to get “professional” instead of “young counterculture,” but was making a go at it.

And as an added bonus, if you changed the lines of contrast on your face, you could throw most facial-recognition programs for a loop. The high cheekbones, the dark upper lip—they made her computationally unrecognizable.

For more money than she’d wanted to spend, the folk at the salon had set her up with a set of interview clothes, all bland and neatly squared away. They made her skin itch with a sensation that was purely psychosomatic, but they were good camouflage. For her price, she couldn’t ask for better.

The energy building was out on the far outskirts of the business district, where the land and infrastructure both dropped away and let you see that the place had terrain, underneath the stacked buildings and elevated roadways and the lectric lines, the data lines, the lines allocated to whatever the hell security did with them. Stepping out of the next autocab into its shadow, it was like walking back up to a prison: one massive edifice gleaming in the midday light, and blotting out half the sky. All these governmental buildings looked the same to Aedo; a sequence of brainchildren from architects who tried for wild invention and ended up fitting neatly in an acceptable range of lines.

The psychosomatic skin-crawl came back in full force, but Aedo squared her shoulders, tried for an expression of bored indifference, and pressed Cadares’ data pad against the door. And got ready to run.

But there was no request for additional verification. No ever-so-convenient error that locked her out while a silent alarm sounded. Instead the door just slid open—because the data pad had the right accesses, so what did the system care about the person holding it?

Agencies like this, they talked security, but it was a perfunctory kind of talking. Politics had only just caught up to the idea that things like energy could be embarrassing to the state, and bureaucracy could take a long time to catch up to political exhortation. So that was one obstacle down.

Internal incompetence to the rescue, again.

Of course, now she was inside, and that was a whole new problem.

Cadares’ datapad should have all the permissions it needed to get Cadares herself into anything she needed to use. Aedo, though, didn’t know where that infrastructure was, and unauthorized access attempts were logged by default on most systems. No need for someone to know what they were doing to catch her at it. Asking a human person for directions wasn’t going to end well; rumors spread in places like these, and an intern no one had ever seen before asking about someone who’d just been arrested was even less subtle than Aedo was being now.

She kept her head down. Tried not to look like she was rubbernecking as she rubbernecked around until she spotted an information kiosk, and strolled up to it. Its screens showed various intra-organization tidbits: an upcoming company hike on the pedestrian paths around the solar farms, costs down three and a half percent due to switching to responsive lighting, the employee being recognized for his or her contributions to the Energy Division was someone decidedly not Cadares . . ..

A directory. Finally. Aedo hit the organize by name button with her knuckle, and there was Cadares, in the second column and the fifth floor.

Deeper into the belly of the beast. She just prayed there wasn’t a security checkpoint between the lobby and there.

. . . which of course there wasn’t. Just a lift with a camera, and she kept her head down, because of course everyone put their cameras in the ceiling even when you could buy ones small enough to hide behind a screwhole anywhere. Same reason people still worked at places like Abacus Lunch Delivery even when everyone searched for food by reputation instead of flipping through an alphabetized paper directory: culture was absolute shit at keeping up with technology. But she could complain about that on a day when it wasn’t working to her advantage. She got out on the fifth floor.

Cadares’ office responded to Cadares’ datapad, and so did her computer, and Aedo sat down and tried to look bored and put-upon like she was there to clean up the harddrive after one too many unwise downloads. She wasn’t actually sure that was something interns did at places like this; most of her exposure to office culture came through comedy vids and Virtual Liberation memes. But the screens lit up, and she was in, and then there was a lot more to pay attention to than whether or not she played the social role well.

Like a blinking icon in the corner of the screen.

One urgent message came up when she clicked on it. Half a page of official business header, and then the message began In light of recent security threats, all Energy Division employees are advised to take the following security measures:

• Generate a new password

• Use Secure Logoff on all accounts and devices when you leave your desk

• Restrict all work to approved Division computers and devices—never log into your Energy Division accounts on a personal or shared device

. . . and on like that. Aedo was about to close the window when her eyes skimmed down the notice on instinct, and caught something.

—expected to endure more security threats, both frivolous and serious, while data terrorist Aedo Liang’s release from prison is in the news cycle. Historically, short-term incarceration has not been an effective deterrent to hacker and terrorist groups. Therefore, it’s the position of this committee that all data espionage from or against a Government office be regarded as treason, and tried as such to the fullest extent prosecutable. We also recommend seeking special dispensation from Justice to try as many infractions as possible retroactively.

Aedo’s heartbeat spiked. She froze. Still sitting at the desk in Cadares’ office, still staring at the screen, still (hopefully, hopefully) camouflaged as well as she could be, but.

Treason.

Her name. Right there in the internal memo. Sure, they’d buried the lede, but—

Without thinking, she found a messenger program and hopped into the config. Aimed it toward one of the anonymizing proxies. Hoped the Energy Building used a net address blacklist and not a whitelist; hoped the connection wouldn’t be flagged. Then she forwarded the memo direct to LogicalOR.

They are gunning for your kind, my friend.

Deep breaths. Aedo risked a glance up, out into the hall where people went about their business without much thought for whether or not they had infiltrators in their midst. She had to wonder how many of them thought their jobs should be taken this seriously.

Treason.

Of course, that made this a whole new game. All the goals she’d had—get in, learn what you can, get out, get the word out—took a hard right into something much more active, because if they had zero tolerance on offer, it didn’t much matter if she’d broken in to take gloating selfies or if she planned on taking the whole network down with her. She might not be a computer cracker, but she had her own damn datapad with its own connection to the net and she had the best collection of computer resources in the world at her fingertips. Long live the Liberation.

If she was going to do one thing here, she was going to find out what the hell Cadares was after and what Energy District One East wanted so badly to hide. If she could do two, she was going to blast the whole thing wide, wide open.

And if she was very, very lucky, and got to do three? She would get out of here before they arrested her.

Again.

• • • •

She had to move quickly. Not just because if she waited too long, the adrenaline would catch up to her and make her a quivering mess.

Cadares had requested the energy distribution records for One East, and it was a simple matter to find the message in her email and open the attached data. Of course, Aedo could open it, and read it, but she didn’t know what she was looking for or how to make sense of it. As for whether or not it was being doctored, well, she didn’t know how Cadares had known—or suspected—and she definitely didn’t know what kind of tests you ran on energy reports to determine data sanity.

There was one good thing: the entire report looked machine-generated, not human-compiled and forwarded. Which meant that she could delve into the mail routing information and get the server it originated from, which meant a server that had access—in theory, at least—to the data she needed.

She was just copying that information into a new bot template when her own datapad warbled.

She cursed, then cursed herself silently for cursing out loud, and snatched it up to silence it. At least that still worked; it had been set to buzz or silent already, but whoever was trying to get her attention obviously didn’t care.

New messages from LogicalOR. Of course.

LogicalOR: remote gov gps backdoor

LogicalOR: in ALL the new opsys upgrades

LogicalOR: you IDIOT

She almost dropped the pad. She might have, if her response to panic these days hadn’t been to clutch her datapad tighter.

Maybe too little, too late, but she opened up the network config with a hotkey, hunted down and killed the GPS process, shuffled the encryptions, disconnected and reconnected and opened a log to see if there were any sniffers, any ping attempts, any data transfers that weren’t coming in over the approved chat lines. And yes: there. Could be nothing, could be automatic data monitoring on the government network, could be security, and she wasn’t interested in taking the risk.

She swiped the log aside and hit the voice call button in LogicalOR’s chat.

Fast as her typing was, it wasn’t as fast as voice. It was the one drawback.

She’d half-expected the call to go ignored—hell, she ignored her own calls unless the call was negotiated first—but LogicalOR must have been expecting this one, and picked up on the first ring. “Ja?”

Aedo startled at the voice. Sounded like a woman her age or a younger boy—or anyone, using a really good speech synthesizer. One without the rockiness and tonal skips of the commercial ones.

She didn’t have time to wonder. “What do I—”

“Grab the Keyhole worm,” LogicalOR said. “Leave it there. I’ll get the thing.”

“One East network,” Aedo said, and returned her attention to the computer to get its data address and read that off, too. The VL servers would have a Keyhole download—one with a new compression, a checksum that might not be blacklisted yet. And maybe in a minute or three she could get around to the shrieking in the back of her head—the one pointing out that she was installing a backdoor on a government computer and giving the code to an anarchist.

She was rapidly getting the feeling that she was burning every bridge in sight.

Not that it mattered; they’d been lit the moment she stepped outside the prison.

“You freaked?” LogicalOR asked. “Breathing hard there, kiddy.”

Aedo bit off a sharp retort. LogicalOR could mock. LogicalOR probably sat at a desk somewhere where nobody in the real world knew their virtual name and no one on the net knew who they were, and could go outside and walk past the neighbors and the security cameras and buy the latest and greatest computer components and take them home and not have their accounts monitored or the media picking at the story of their life. LogicalOR could damn well excuse Aedo for breathing hard.

“Need to get out,” she said.

LogicalOR huffed. Sounded amused. “Go Undercity,” they said, and Aedo’s heart skipped a beat.

“Never been.” She didn’t add that the thought of it terrified her.

“Panic much? It’s not that scary. I live there.”

That brought her up short, as her brain threw an input error. She hadn’t thought you could get data in the Undercity good enough to support the kinds of activities LogicalOR enjoyed. Then again, she’d never actually checked. And she definitely didn’t have time right now to grill LogicalOR on the data infrastructure of the Undercity.

“Patterway Dist entrance?” she asked.

“For you? NorEast Crossing. Meet you there.”

“Please don’t DC,” Aedo said. Ordinarily, she’d avoid having an audio line demanding her attention while she worked. But right now, if LogicalOR disconnected, she’d be back to being on her own, in the middle of a government building, facing down all her bad decisions. There were more of them than there were of her.

“Still here,” LogicalOR said. “Trauma counseling available upon request.” LogicalOR laughed.

Sure, it was an annoying kind of comfort, but there they were.

The Keyhole finished its download and began decompressing, and Aedo slid her chair back and killed her connections to the network.

“Need credit for an autocab,” Aedo said. She didn’t add, I blew it all on the makeover to get in here. She could call attention to her terrible planning-ahead skills, another time.

“I’ll transfer,” LogicalOR said. “Get yourself a pretty one.”

Aedo gathered up her datapad and Cadares’, and stood. “Okay,” she said. “Gotta go.”

“DCing now?”

Aedo closed her eyes for a moment. She didn’t want to kill this audio lifeline, but she knew better than to walk out with it open. Even if LogicalOR didn’t say something and draw attention to her, when they were reviewing the security footage after her great escape, they could still follow the transmission location. She wasn’t bouncing it at all.

“Yeah,” she said, and winced. “NorEast Crossing?”

“Be there with bells on,” LogicalOR said, and the line went dead.

Deep breaths.

She put her pad into lockdown; put everything on Cadares’ pad into lockdown except the local wireless it might need to open doors or sign her out. Then she went: down, back by the same path she’d come in on, every breath focused on looking like the same bored intern who had walked in here, every heartbeat shivering.

She made it down to the lobby with out a problem, but there, Crap, crap, crap, one of the bored uniforms was looking her way, pinched brow and drawn-out frown like he’d be a lot happier if nothing was going on, if no one was going to make his eight-to-five any more interesting than any other day of undifferentiated tedium. People didn’t go into bureaucrat-building security for the excitement, after all.

Too bad, Aedo had to think. She hadn’t gone into hacking for the excitement either. It had just come around and found her.

She turned away, not quite fast enough that she couldn’t see him getting up from his desk in the corner of her eye. “Excuse me, miss–”

Not excused. Not excused. She picked up her pace, then realized a second too late that that was the opposite of acting like she hadn’t heard him, then broke into a run.

“Miss!”

Too late. She shoved Cadares’ datapad into the sensor by the door, which checked her out and opened the door automatically. Then she was darting onto the sidewalk, running up along the street until she could find and tag an autocab to come get her.

The door of the Energy Division offices slid open again behind her and she took a corner, and then another one, and then slowed to a walk and looked for another turn to take just to be sure. At least here, once she was walking, she wasn’t drawing glances; no one really looked at each other on the sidewalks, which made her much happier, as a rule. She tagged a cab as she walked, but she didn’t stop walking: she was more worried about getting caught on the sidewalk waiting than about anything else.

NorEast Crossing.

She got in the cab that stopped by, and keyed a destination. Outside the window, the view devolved from office towers to office-worker flats to smatterings of generic commercial buildings to the bric-a-brac of neighborhoods which hadn’t yet been caught up in the big Standardization and Modernization pushes. Little bits of undercity here in the city proper. The autocab came to a stop and let her out in front of one of those doorways you could walk past and quietly edit out of your awareness—a blocked-off alleyway leading off into disrepaired territory, all but yelling out, Heya! Don’t want to get involved with this, here! And Aedo didn’t. She really, really didn’t.

Which meant that when the cab rolled away, she stood in front of the door, breathing in and out to the bottom of her lungs, just like she’d learned to in prison to keep the walls from clapping in on her or the sound of voices from drowning her. Here, it was nothing so straightforward or small as claustrophobia, demophobia. It was fear of an entire future: waking up tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, every day greeted by the question What do I do now?

Now, though, there was only one option.

She went down the narrow corridor—just a gap between buildings—to a place where the industrial ground had been breached, and an access ladder could be glimpsed through it. Then, securing her pad and Cadares’, hand over hand down into this district of the undercity, where halogen lights stood in for the sun, and where freedom—after a fashion—might await.

• • • •

The sky receded above her, blocked out by buildings and raised streets, and the shadows of the Undercity seemed to gather themselves up to sniff out the newcomer. Aedo hugged the datapads to her chest, taking in the sights.

The light of day only cut through to the ground here in patches and slices, carving vertical roads of dust motes through the air. The whole place looked makeshift—oh, there were permanent buildings, but old ones, built long before the algorithmically-perfected districts above had been built over them. And over time, they’d collected all sorts of unofficial additions, from new rooms to balconies to sheds to lectric and data links to masses of reinforcements like scar tissue as the original infrastructure failed. And the disorder was replicated on the street below: crates and boxes and dumpsters and trash, here and there, though less than Aedo had been expecting; ancient cracked pavement and walkways and alleyways at odd angles, and dark patches between buildings that might have been walkways or might not.

Not a lot of foot traffic here, she guessed. She thought she could hear people moving; could hear voices, though distant, and she didn’t see anyone until her thoughts were interrupted by a quiet snerk.

She spun around to see . . . someone, just now emerging from one of those dark patches between walls. Someone just a touch taller than her, of indeterminate age and sex, hair bleached white and frizzing despite what looked like a lot of effort to get it to hang flat, wearing a jacket and combat trousers with too many pockets bulking up their frame. They were watching her with what looked like incredulity. Then they whistled.

“You,” said LogicalOR, “look nothing like your press photos.”

Aedo was startled into a laugh. “Yeah,” she said, and then fished after something witty to say. It’d be easy to find one if she was sitting with her datapad out. “. . . um, hi.”

Her hand shifted on the datapads and LogicalOR’s gaze went straight to them, pale eyes looking even paler in the undercity dark.

“They can still track those,” LogicalOR said. “Not like there’s some magical shield that zaps a trace as soon as you get down here. Lemme root ’em for you.”

There was something viscerally wrong about handing over her datapad to someone else to muck about with. But Aedo didn’t much want to be caught and tried for treason, so she ignored the sick feeling at the pit of her stomach and handed both pads over.

LogicalOR snatched them up, then turned and walked to a nearby crate to sit down. Their eyes hadn’t left the pads, and Aedo had to blink twice—this whole environment felt like a mass of object disorder, somehow different to the disorder in any of the districts up above.

But maybe that was an illusion. Maybe it was just because she knew this was the undercity now, and all the rumors and clickbait and creepy on the net was clouding her judgment. LogicalOR’s familiarity with the place was probably no different than her easy familiarity with—

—well, with places she might or might not ever get to see again, now.

That realization settled on her stomach, and she went to sit down by LogicalOR. They’d turned over both datapads to read model and series numbers, and raised an eyebrow.

“The off-the-shelf is Cadares’,” Aedo said.

LogicalOR broke into a ferocious grin. “I like it,” they pronounced. “You go in for illegal access and come out plotting treason. Like, clearly the Upcity justice system has no effect on this one.”

“I didn’t come out plotting treason,” Aedo protested.

“Ja,” LogicalOR said, clearly unimpressed. “Like, this just kinda happens, you know.” They turned back to the datapad. “If you need a place to crash, I’ve got room. Long live the Liberation. Gotta have each others’ backs.”

Aedo closed her eyes, and counted her breaths. She did need a place to crash. The fact that this was her option was a damn sight better than not having one.

She’d just keep telling herself that.

“What do you do down here?”

LogicalOR laughed. “Maybe, you know, don’t fetishize the whole Upcity everything-at-your-fingertips thing. People do live down here.” They were quiet for a moment, and Aedo counted a few more breaths. “I do data,” they said. “Utilities. You could help.”

“Utilities?” Aedo asked.

“Yeah. You know. Data is life.” LogicalOR pulled a thin strip of datafilm out of one pocket—then fished out an adapter and plugged it into one datapad. A reboot, three keystrokes, and the screen went black—then went to a progress bar, non-system-standard and adorned with little dancing masks. “And your data is about to go poof. Wave bye-bye to your digital trail today.” Then, as if to cement it, LogicalOR actually did wave. “Bye-bye!”

It felt a bit like Aedo was vanishing, herself. “You have to explain all this,” she said.

“Ja, ja,” LogicalOR said. It was one of the principle rallying points of VL: right to data about you; right to know how your data was being stored and used. Or, in this case, systematically erased. “We will level you up. A+ celebrity cracker-hacker.”

The progress bar finished, and LogicalOR handed back the first pad. It was Aedo’s imagination—she had enough sense to know that—but it seemed lighter.

“Welcome to the underground,” LogicalOR said, and their grin promised an entire future Aedo would never have considered on her own. “We’ll take care of you here.”

©2016 by An Owomoyela.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

An (pronounce it “On”) Owomoyela is a neutrois author with a background in web development, linguistics, and weaving chain maille out of stainless steel fencing wire, whose fiction has appeared in a number of venues including Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Lightspeed, and a handful of Year’s Bests.  An’s interests range from pulsars and Cepheid variables to gender studies and nonstandard pronouns, with a plethora of stops in-between.  Se can be found online at an.owomoyela.net, and can be funded at patreon.com/an_owomoyela.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

See The Unseeable, Know The Unknowable

Maria Dahvana Headley | 4995 words

There are woods, and the woods are dark, though there are lights hung from the trees. Many of the lights no longer light up. Around the edge of the clearing, someone has strung a long chain of origami animals on barbed wire, some gilded paper and some newsprint, some pages torn out of books, some photographs, each animal snagged on its own spike. The animals have been rained on, and more than once. Not all of them are animals, not exactly. There are some shapes unknown here. The grass is trampled down in the center of the clearing, and there are muddy swathes deep enough to drown in.

We know things. We know that there are some things which possibly shouldn’t be written about any longer. Possibly shouldn’t be done any longer. The golden ages. They’ve been written, and better, performed, and better. A stranger, for example, comes to town and changes everything. Not a single stranger, but a troupe of strangers, spangled, striped, trapezed.

But we love a circus.

We know it’s old-fashioned, but we can’t resist it. That is the smell of greasepaint. We know it by now, though it still sings to us. We know how the roar of the crowd sounds. We know what the carnival refreshments taste like. We know the door that takes us to the sideshow. We’ve slept on the bed of nails, and maybe, though we won’t admit it, we’ve fucked the two-headed goatgirl. And, yes, we know the important lessons, too.

We know never to run away to join the circus. There are circus people in the real world, on the run from circuses, escaped and fled, trying to pretend they never flung themselves in to begin with. Sometimes people get away from the thing they wanted. People like that could tell you stories.

In the world down here, there’s a man with a belly full of flames who sometimes chokes on smoke; a tattooed lady with the universe, nebulas and black holes, comets and constellations, and all the words for light and dark that have thus far been invented, hidden up her sleeves. There’s a strong man pushing a pencil across a desk.

A sword swallower steps through a metal detector and raises his hands in preemptive apology for the blade he’s substituted for his spine. An acrobat climbs through a window and into a museum’s upstairs bathroom looking for something that will fix the ache inside him, an elephant charges a train calling for its mate. Circuses dissolve. Carnivals collapse. Things get broken.

We have always come here, when we’re in the area. Every seventy-six years or so, we visit, and the place has always forgotten us by the time we come again, but that doesn’t mean we have difficulty with our methods. We’ve been doing this for centuries, and we’re skilled.

At the end of the summer, here in this town at the edge of the woods, there’s a day on which broadsheets fly in the form of paper airplanes, landing on doorsteps, catching in trees. The townspeople open the flyers and consider the date of the show with some annoyance.

Inside one flyer, there’s an advertisement for a performance fifty years in the future. In the next, a performance fifty years in the past.

See the Unseeable, all the flyers read, and the townspeople grumble at the litter. The next batch are printed Know the Unknowable.

No one on Earth wants to know the unknowable anymore. There are plenty of things to know already. The world is too full and brains can only hold so much. Headlines flash across foreheads. Sometimes the guilt of information is too much to bear, and people hide inside their houses, burrowing under the covers, trying not to listen to the news. Whole countries are dying out there. The sky is falling. Some of the birds have stopped singing, and no one knows whether that’s been true for years, or has only just happened. There is too much noise, and it’s hard to tell who hasn’t been heard from in a while.

There is an ailment moving from continent to continent, these days, and its symptoms include spontaneous deafness and blindness, and finally, in its last stages, spontaneous and permanent silence, without even any satisfying last words. A person might ask for a refill of coffee, and that will be all. Some people try to expose themselves to the disease. The quiet calls to them.

In this town, no one has the disease yet, for which we are grateful. Everyone can hear the flyers flying. Occasionally, one of them makes a trill, and townspeople look up, frustrated, snatch the flyer from the air, and stomp on it, feeling assaulted by whimsy, or possibly spied upon by their government.

On each broadsheet there’s a simple drawing: a large black box in the center of a circle of trees. Maybe it isn’t a box. Maybe it’s a door. And maybe there is something, far off in the blackness inside it, something. But maybe not. Probably not. It’s a blotchy drawing, and unsatisfying. It seems to have been done by a child, not by any real artist. Fingerpaints on paper. Each one is hand drawn, not printed. Whoever did them doesn’t know much about much.

Nothing’s made of paper now. There are better things to write on. Paper melts in rain. Paper turns to ragged slushy nothing. Even folded paper animals eventually disintegrate.

But we like them.

Old-fashioned paper ticket stubs pour down one afternoon in a swift yellow storm. The Show Happened Before You Were Born, they are printed, and on the other side, The Show Will Start After You Are Dead.

It isn’t the children who pick them up. The children are busy, and things like this are beneath them. The town’s janitor uses a snowplow to gather the drifts and then to pile them at the edge of town. He sets them on fire with a single quick breath. Then he sits down in some satisfaction, and roasts a hotdog.

Nothing has come to the town that hasn’t always been there. This isn’t new. The janitor has seen weather like this before. It always passes, and if it doesn’t pass, there’s the end of the world to consider.

He has a menagerie of tin cans, and plenty of ammunition. He has some hounds. One day, he suspects he’ll need them, but he’s lived in proximity to the possible end for long enough that he’s used to it. If it gets him, it does. Everyone dies. He keeps things clean, and that’s his job. Clean doesn’t always mean things are safe. There might be lights on every corner, and there will still be shadows. There’s nothing the janitor can do about that, save setting the town on fire, and even then, light only lasts so long. He’s only one person here, cleaning up at the edge of the woods, and he works from nine at night till five in the morning. He’d been doing this job for centuries, in this part of the country, which is a notorious part of the country. Everybody knows it is. People live here anyway.

There is, as it happens, one stranger in town. The woman moved here recently, from a much larger city. She isn’t officially a resident, though she’s rented a tiny house near the place where the forest starts. She owns a gray cat named Susurrus, remnant of a relationship, and a small roll of money that won’t take her far.

She left her last place in the middle of the night, as the ambulances were coming, and there was no time to pack up more than the cat, who prowls now, joyful but for his bell, stalking the edge of the woods where the songbirds don’t sing.

The woman has used up the name she had before, and now she doesn’t have one. She opens the flyer stuck in her screen door, and finds her old name written across it in a filthy blot, as though by a thumb pressed in ink.

She crumples up the paper, tears it into tiny pieces, and then buries it in the back garden, but two hours later, she feels the need to dig it up and put it in the oven on broil, until it’s ashes. She realizes only after she’s burnt the broadsheet that she has looked at the drawing underneath her name. When she shuts her eyes that night, she can see the dark, smudgy rectangle at the center of the trees, and she can see something inside it, far off in the black, something moving. The date on her flyer, the only one like this, is neither in the past nor in the future.

She opens her eyes and pours herself a drink. It’s four in the morning. She pours herself another. It isn’t as though she’s going to this performance. She’ll get drunk instead, and maybe drinking will put her to sleep.

Outside the window, she can see that it’s started to snow. It’s summer, not winter. At last, she goes out in her underwear and discovers that the snow isn’t snow, but popcorn. She picks up a kernel. It’s cold and flat, muddied. Whoever made it doesn’t know much about popcorn. That, or it’s been falling a long time.

She hears a machine start up, and a moment later, the janitor drives by, pushing the popcorn ahead of him, a rolling wave, a dry tsunami.

“Strange weather,” she ventures, calling out to him from her steps, but if he hears her, he doesn’t have a reply. Maybe it isn’t strange at all. She doesn’t know. She’s new to town. She can’t tell how people speak to one another here. He hasn’t even looked at her, and here she is, standing outdoors, the better part of naked.

For the past week, since she arrived on foot from the bus station, she’s been either naked in her house, or wearing the same thing: a pair of torn up jeans that don’t belong to her, picked up from the floor of the last place, and a t-shirt covered in black and red blotches like some kind of accidental Rorschach. In her old life, she would never have gone outside like this, but this is her new life.

She puts on the jeans and t-shirt, scrapes her hair up into a ponytail and goes out barefoot into the drifts of popcorn. There are ashes smeared on her face from the burning of the flyer, but she doesn’t care about that either. She takes the bottle with her.

She can hear her cat’s bell and so she walks toward that, into the trees, where the storm abruptly stops. Now it’s dark and all there is to hear is the sound of the bell cheerfully jingling. Sometimes she wants to give up and let Susurrus catch birds, just to see if they sing as he kills them, if what she hears as singing are actually birds screaming. She wonders if their lack of song is a choice, if they, too, are tired of the noise. She wonders if birds ever get tired of Earth.

Her feet on the ground feel suddenly like the cat’s paws, and she looks down, strangely certain, expecting to be startled by something unholy. No. She’s half drunk, is all, and sleep deprived. There isn’t enough sleep lately. She’s due a rest. She’s here to sleep, and to dream, and to forget, and to be forgotten about. Faint hope, but it’s a place near the woods, and that’s been her plan. Screen door and little porch. She hasn’t even been into the trees yet. Somehow everything else takes up her time. She’s scrubbed the house three times already, trying to wash away the blood that isn’t there, and never has been. On her knees, she realized what she was doing, and she was bewildered. Her mind had been telling her a story about something that had never happened here.

She stood up, yes, and put the scrubbing brush back into the bucket, bucket into the closet, closet locked. All the closets have locks, each one with a key of its own. She has all the keys. She’s counted and tested them. There are no extra keys on the ring. The house is tiny, but she has eleven keys, enough that she can wear the ring as a bracelet. She has it on now as she walks deeper into the woods, and the little skeletons are cold against her wrist.

The bell isn’t as close as it was, and she isn’t really looking for the cat anyway. She leans against a tree and drinks from the bottle. She feels bad about the way she used her old name. It’s wrung out. She doesn’t want it back, even as she’s sorry for it. It belonged to a nicer person, a quiet person, a person who missed things when she looked at other people.

Then, suddenly, her name was everywhere, out of control, surging up in front of her as she drove, flashing across the bottoms of screens.

Someone calling her by name from out of the car radio, telling her to turn herself in.

Turn yourself inside out, she thought, in a fucked up singsong. Things had happened, and she’d lived through them.

For the past week, she’s taken to calling herself a less used name, the one that belonged to her sister before her sister died, falling into a well while in the process of poisoning someone’s water.

The motives of the dead are often unclear. Wren floated up with the fingers of one hand shoved through the handle of a jug of drain cleaner. Whatever mistake she made to cause herself to fall, the poison was on purpose. The neighbors died, and so did Wren, but Wren was born to die in the dark. It was a miracle she’d made it so long.

The second Wren, though, has thus far been a good enough person. A week in, and all she’s done wrong is steal a can of tomatoes from the store. She considers her credentials. Starting over shortens the list of sins. She’s innocent all over again, of crimes, of sorrows, of history, of stupidity.

The t-shirt feels stiff where the blotches are. She needs to steal something reasonable to wear. The only other thing she has is a short green dress, not appropriate for anything but the middle of the night and a dance floor. She found it in her purse along with her high heels, leftovers from the last night of her past, sprinting naked from the house, grabbing clothes from the floor as she went.

Sometimes she hates Earth.

She walks deeper into the dark, the jingling far away still. She feels an object touch her face, and she slaps it away. A bat or bird. It swings back, though, and hits her again, and this time, she sees that it isn’t alive.

It’s a paper animal on a string. A bear. She brings it close to her face and looks at it. Nothing to be afraid of. A tiny cut-out grizzly, rearing up on its haunches, hanging from a string.

There’s a dim light here, in this clearing, and she can see other paper creatures, with light bulbs strung between them. The clearing is large. She can see the lights on the other side, but only barely. She can tell there’s a breeze by the way the lights bounce. There’s a paper lion, and an elephant made of newsprint striped with old headlines. How long has this been here? The animals are the worse for the wear.

She follows the barbed wire around the outer edge, touching each animal in turn. Some of them she doesn’t recognize. There’s a horse with the body of a snake, and a couple of the animals are nothing more than crumpled balls of pointed folds, carefully done, but nothing she’s seen before.

There’s something made of an old photograph, folded and sliced into long arms, many of them, and jaws. She can’t quite see what the photograph was, but it seems to be a family portrait, the kind you’d get taken at a shopping mall. There are grins in it, and the unmistakable alligator emblem of a polo shirt.

The string of lights shakes as Wren ducks under it, not thinking about it. She’s always ducked under fences. Her childhood was rural. There’s nothing here, no beehives, no barbed wire to keep the bears out. She still has her bottle. She has another drink. The cat mews from somewhere quite close, and she looks around.

“Come on,” she says. “Come here,” but the cat refuses. It’s on the other side of the wire. She can see the animals moving where the cat bats at them.

There’s a strange noise, then, and a bright light goes on, from somewhere high above her. A helicopter, and here she is, in the open. This is a mistake made by her old self. The first Wren would never have made this kind of error.

There’s no place on Earth a person can be invisible forever, not anymore. Maybe there never has been. It’s only been a week, but a week is long enough for her face to be everywhere, projected onto buildings, blinking on in the middle of phone calls.

She crouches lower to the ground, her knees nearly touching the mud, and keeps her head down. She closes her eyes, wondering if it will be guns or ropes. She clenches the bottle in her hand in case they come down beside her and she has a chance. There is no chance with a chance like that. At least she’ll fight.

But there are no sounds of helicopter blades. There are no sounds at all, beyond those of the cat hitting the paper animals with his paws and chirruping when they return to him.

There is a feeling. A vibration, a hum, a whirr, and she opens her eyes, blinded by the light around her. Light and movement. Something’s spinning and she’s at the center of it. Something’s rising and she’s part of it. The cat hisses and spits outside the circle of light, and Wren lurches to her feet, feeling the sky shifting above her.

She hears a clicking, looks up and sees dark things against the brightness, but that is all. There’s nothing certain up there, nothing but sparks and flickers. The clearing is entirely bathed in white, but outside it, there’s night on all sides. She spins slowly, trying to see, but there’s nothing to be seen.

We are the ones above her.

We know better than to be visible, not at this point.

There’s a huffing sound, and a shrill whirring, metallic. There’s a sound like something stretching, another like the pages of an encyclopedia being ruffled. There’s a sound like something landing from a height, and trying to be quiet. There’s a sound like something cracking.

Wren wonders if she’s the one cracking.

She clutches the bottle more tightly. If she could leave the center of the light, she could break the bottle’s neck, and then it could be used, but she can’t move. There’s something about the edge of the spotlight. It’s not a clean circle any longer. There are things out there.

Wren can see shadows, cast inward toward her. Spiny shadows, antlers, horns, fur. Tails. Something lashing and coiled. She hears her cat again, yowling, and she clucks for him to come to her. Susurrus bolts out of the dark, running, fur on end, ears flattened.

The shadows move nearer. One of them leaps over another. Something rears up on its hind legs, and another something rolls and begins to unfold. The shadows are growing larger.

We have our ways of testing, our ways of seeing if someone is ready.

The circle is smaller now. There are things coming closer to her. The cat hoops its back and howls, and Wren catches the faint echo of tinny piano.

She can smell burning popcorn. She can hear a crowd, but the crowd isn’t even whispering. They’re just breathing in, breathing out as something tumbles down to her, shining, twisting, a metal bar suspended on thin chains.

In the space between the chains, in the rectangle outlined by the bar and the links, is darkness. She tries to look through it, to the other side of the circle, but there’s nothing. Now it’s on the ground just before her, the bar nearly under her bare toes.

She can hear the string of lights creaking. She can hear something growling. Oh, she is tired of Earth. Oh, she is tired of the things outside the light, the way they are always circling. This has not been an easy ever after, not since the beginning, and not since last week. Her life has always been larger in the rearview than it appears. There have always been terrible things in the blind spots.

When she turns her head, she sees eyes, flashing in the dark, but nothing else. There’s a heavy sigh from the silence. Somewhere far away, there’s a brass band, but it sounds like music from a television set, wrong slightly, missing notes. Her cat is wrapped around her ankles, tightly curled, hissing. She shivers, and laces her fingers through the chains to steady herself. She can smell her own skin now, the blood on her shirt, the way her hair reeks of cigarettes, and she can smell pipe smoke, too, and something brighter and stranger.

A shadow stretches from the edge of the remaining light, extending itself elegantly over her foot. Susurrus spits and claws and the shadow stretches again, extending its paw, unfurling, until it moves away from the edge of the circle entirely, and arrives before her, a bulk, a shape made of silhouette.

She can feel the crowd waiting. The air hums with a collective intake of breath as she kneels down before the shadow.

We rejoice. She is the one we’ve been calling to. She’s the one we dropped the fliers to find.

It opens its jaws, and she looks into its mouth. There’s nothing there, nothing but her head in the teeth of a shadow, but all around the clearing the trees quiver, and for a moment, she feels the invisible crowd, applauding her bravery. The shadow shakes itself and then leaps through the chains, into the dark suspended above the trapeze.

The cat purrs in greeting and follows it, and Wren jolts forward, shocked, reaching. She can’t see him anymore. His gray shape is gone, like that, not falling, but gone completely.

There’s a strip of black stretching up from her toes, and into the sky, and she stands on the edge of it and stares into it. Something is there, but it isn’t the cat. Something pale, a disc or orb. It’s far away.

She can’t tell what it is, nor how it moves, but it is better than anything she has found here. She blinks, and it’s gone, then returned, then gone again.

It is glad. It is entertained.

Wren can feel the invisible crowd leaning in, watching her. There’s a gasp, an intake, an unbreath, as she puts one foot onto the bar. The ring of keys on her wrist rattles against the metal links suspending the dark. She can feel their cold lips. Little skeletons, married to locks that have nothing to guard.

She thinks of her sister falling face first into oblivion, poison in her hands, ruined by one mistake piled onto too many others. She thinks of the first Wren as the trapeze begins to rise. The first Wren started wrong and got worse. The second Wren is better than the first. She’s sure she must be. She will keep going. Things have happened, but things happen to everyone.

This isn’t how she planned to run away, running up instead of out. This was not what she’d imagined. She is running away to join something. She is running away from the ground.

The trapeze begins to rise, suspended from the night.

The town, now, is visible below her, like something carved out of salt, the buildings covered in pale drifts of popcorn and ticket stubs, our circus flyers in the wind, drifting down like provisions over a warzone. The piano’s faint, playing from the trees and the earth, from the mud, and the shadow animals circle the clearing, doing their tricks in darkness.

The second Wren stretches her toes on the trapeze, and extends a foot into the air. She arches her spine and leans back, looking at the Earth from upside down. She can see the snow plow driven by the janitor, pushing another load of ticket stubs out of the streets and into the fire. She’s not frightened, no, not anymore, though she’s spent her life feeling frightened.

She is glad. She is entertained.

Wren clasps the chains hard in her hands, and dangles in the splits, upside down under the sky. She points her toes, and the trapeze spins as she dances in space, a woman hanging in thin air.

We know that everyone loves a circus. The smell of the greasepaint, we know the recipe. The rolls of tickets, printed in a small machine we purchased at auction. The two-headed goatgirl and the tattooed lady, the fire swallower, all persons we found lost and bewildered, persons looking up. Persons who’d grown exhausted of Earth.

We know that no one can resist popcorn, and so we pop it here. They used to come from miles around, baited by the show, tickets clutched in grubby fists. Families, and single men looking for the carnival strippers. Women used to arrive in groups, holding hands in the dark, fearful, but ready. Grandfathers with their grandchildren. There are fewer now than there were.

We are not a stranger coming to town. We were up here before the town was here.

The second Wren is on the trapeze, her clothing turns to a tutu and a glittering cape. All around her are hoops and balls made of fire, and through them the shadows put on a show.

We’ve been bringing new performers into our circus for a century. Sometimes one doesn’t work out. We lower the trapeze and leave those on the ground, in the center of a clearing that once glowed white with our tent lights. Sometimes they stagger back to town, trying to tell the rest of the people about what they saw when they went into the sky.

“Did you die?” people ask them, and they say they did, or that they saw something they can’t explain. It doesn’t matter which. Dying and returning to life never make most people believe in anything more than their own private glories. One can drop into a well or rise into the light.

It’s always the same, we make sure of that. White glow, a tunnel, a levitation. The sound of our piano and our popcorn machine, the barkers around the edge of the world. We bring performers up, and we treat them well, better than they’d be treated on the ground. All of them are on the run from something. All of them are lost and lonely.

On the trapeze, Wren remembers everything that’s ever happened, a shining rush of color and touch, warbling birds and dishwashers. A whisper of someone in a movie theater, the sound of an arrow leaving a bow and piercing an apple, a balloon popping.

Susurrus leaps out of the dark as she rises, into her arms, and the cat—we have always enjoyed cats—comes with our new performer, into the hold of our ship.

We’re not looking for the things people think we are. We’re searching for echoes, for light that has traveled a century, the pale ripplings of Charlie Chaplin, bouncing out and up to us, the songs we heard when we were tiny things traveling between far-flung destinations. We are looking for wonders, just as everyone else is looking for wonders. We are looking for the glory of flight.

On the trapeze, the girl and her cat spin, and as we watch, she glitters, she shines, she is our winged wonder, she is our newest act.

See the Unseeable, Wren whispers as she spins, Know the Unknowable.

She swings on the trapeze, and we see the wings we knew were always there. We watch the wonder of her running away to join us, and far below her, far below our vantage of bleachers and sawdust, of striped tent—we can make anything we wish seem true—we can see the janitor looking up.

He points at us as he drives the snowplow, pushing a mile of popcorn, and behind him our animals gallop, a string of horses with feathered headdresses, an elephant made of mist, a visitation from something that exists at the edge of the light.

As the janitor watches, pointing up for no one but himself, though perhaps there are others from this town watching this, too, the girl in our spotlight rises, and rises, a spinning performer in a tutu, hanging from nothing.

At last, she disappears.

Out of the gloom and into the dazzle, into the sawdust ring with her tremendous cat and her bare feet, with the air full of flowers as she takes her bow.

The janitor doesn’t see that part. The town doesn’t see it. But all over the woods, the ticket stubs blaze for a moment for all the people we’ve taken up.

Then we’re gone, a comet, a wonder, a hoax, and the piano fades and the brass band quiets, and our animals run trumpeting and nickering, roaring and singing, all in their formations, dancing across the dark face of the Earth.

©2016 by Maria Dahvana Headley. | Art © 2016 by Reiko Murakami.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maria Dahvana Headley is the author of the young adult sky ship fantasy Magonia, from HarperCollins, the novel Queen of Kings, the internationally bestselling memoir The Year of Yes, and The End of the Sentence, a novella co-written with Kat Howard, from Subterranean.

With Neil Gaiman, she’s The New York Times-bestselling co-editor of the anthology Unnatural Creatures. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Nebula and Shirley Jackson awards, and has recently appeared at Uncanny Magazine, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Clarkesworld, Shimmer, Apex, Subterranean Online, The Lowest Heaven, The Book of the Dead, and many more. It’s anthologized in Glitter & Mayhem, Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Fantasy & Science Fiction 2012 & 2013, Paula Guran’s 2013 The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, and Laird Barron’s The Year’s Best Weird Fiction.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

The Wilderness Within

Tim Pratt | 6170 words

I went to the window of my half-empty apartment that morning expecting to see the usual foggy San Francisco summer street, but instead, there was a volcano: looming over the city taller than the skyscrapers in the financial district, rising from the depths of Golden Gate Park, casting a long shadow to the west. The steep slopes, visible above the rooftops of my neighbors across the street, were gray and rocky, the peak jagged as a mouthful of broken teeth, and faint wisps of smoke rose from the top.

I dropped my coffee on the carpet. I screamed, frightening my cat, who was still anxious from all the recent upheavals in the household. I turned on the TV, prepared for newscasters babbling about unprecedented overnight geological upheavals and impending cataclysms, but found nothing of the sort. I spun through screenfuls of social media on my phone, but there was no hashtag volcano, no mention of earthquakes among my local friends. (Surely such a thing could only be the result of an earthquake? I’m depressingly ignorant about the movements of the Earth for someone who lives so near the Hayward and San Andreas faults.)

My plans to spend the morning at home tidying up the digital paperwork for my last marketing job, ramping up for my next one, and trying to figure out if I could afford to pay rent on the whole apartment by myself for another month were immediately abandoned. My hands were shaking too much to deal with buttons and zippers, so I pulled a pale blue sundress over my head and slipped on open-toed sandals before grabbing my purse and pelting down the stairs and out the front door of my apartment building.

I passed a few people on the street, but none of them were even looking at the volcano, as if the sudden appearance of a mountain on fire in our midst wasn’t worthy of attention. That made no sense at all. At the very least, people should have been posting selfies with the volcano in the background.

I’d never doubted my sanity before. I didn’t do drugs, except pot, and in my experience that doesn’t make you hallucinate volcanoes.

My neighborhood coffee shop (not the one that sells very expensive cinnamon toast, that one’s a few blocks away, closer to the ocean) was in its mid-morning lull, my favorite barista Andi sitting on a stool behind the counter reading something on their tablet while a couple of lit-hipsters gazed seriously at their laptop screens and a guy with messy black hair rested his forehead on the surface of a wooden table, apparently asleep.

Andi looked up, smiling around their lip-rings, and said, “Hey, how are you doing?”

I’d come into the shop immediately pre- or post-crying a couple of times in recent weeks, as things with Juliana went from bad to cataclysmic to dissolved, and Andi had broken the aloof barista code to offer comfort. I wasn’t thinking about my disaster of a personal life and the cascading financial problems of becoming a one-income-household at the moment, though; funny how the appearance of a volcano can lend you a little perspective.

The volcano didn’t seem to make any impact on Andi, though. Was I losing it? I’d thought I was over the worst of the post-break-up crazies, listening to The Smiths and sobbing in a ball on the carpet, breaking down when I found an old toothbrush and a red bra Juliana had left behind in her haste to vacate, sacrificing my circadian rhythms to lose myself in old beloved video games, flaking on my kendo classes, and just generally never leaving the house unless a friend insisted . . . but maybe hallucinating volcanoes was just step seven in some strange complicated grieving process.

I realized I was staring off into space, so I shook myself and dredged a smile from the depths. “Oh, yeah, I’m, well, you know.”

Andi was all sympathy. “I do. Flat white?”

I’d gotten addicted to drinking those during my year abroad in Australia, and though they didn’t make them quite right here, it was nice of them to try. “Uh, sure.” I decided to risk exploring the extent of my mental disfigurement. “So. Did you see the volcano?”

“Hmm?” Andi made steamed milk. “Why, is it extra smoky this morning or something?”

I stared. They were acting like the volcano was an established fact of the landscape. I couldn’t be that oblivious. If I have a weakness (at least one I’m willing to admit), it’s sometimes pretending to understand things I don’t—a reluctance to show ignorance, or to seem uncool, or to reveal I don’t get a joke. “I . . . don’t know. Does it ever feel weird to you, working so close to a volcano?”

Andi shrugged. “I don’t really think about it. It’s not like it’s super active or anything. I mean, every place you live tries to kill you somehow. If it’s not a volcano, it’s earthquakes or tornadoes or hurricanes or blizzards or monsoons or whatever.”

“I guess. It’s just—wow. I’m totally blanking on the name. What’s the volcano called?”

Andi stared down into the cup of foam and caffeine, then looked up at me, their eyes slightly glassy. “It’s, what, Mount St. Helens, right? Like your name?”

“No, that’s the one near Portland . . .”

They put the cup in front of me and swiped at the tablet the café had instead of a cash register, tallying me up. “Right, no, of course. It’s called, uh, Kamehameha.”

That was the name of a long-dead king of Hawai’i—not even a Hawai’ian volcano—but I didn’t argue, just said, “Oh, right, thanks,” and paid for my coffee. I managed to keep my hands steady enough to carry the cup out to a sidewalk table, with a view of the volcano towering over the buildings, but I didn’t trust myself to take a sip without spilling all over myself.

The messy-haired guy came out of the café, blinking in the morning light. He was maybe twenty-five—just a few years younger than me—and skater-boy lean, wearing black jeans and a plain black t-shirt that clung to his torso in a way I would have found worthy of close examination on another day. His face was beautiful, especially his long lovely eyelashes. He lifted his chin at me. “Heard you asking about the volcano in there.”

I just nodded.

“It’s called Mt. Kilroy.”

“I . . . oh?”

He gazed at the peak, visible above the buildings across the street, his expression serene. “Yep.”

“Thanks.”

“Sure thing. Your name’s Helen?”

“Helena, actually. Andi just shortens it.”

“That’s the barista? I couldn’t tell, is Andi a chick or a dude?”

My tone was pretty frosty. “Neither, I don’t think. Not everyone divides up that neatly. Their preferred pronoun is ‘they.’”

“Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it. Just . . . never been to San Francisco before. Haven’t run into that kind of thing much.” He offered a lopsided smile. “Anyway, nice to meet you.”

Social niceties seemed ridiculous in my new volcano-filled world, but something between habit and autopilot led me to say, “You, too. What’s your name?”

“I’m Kilroy.”

Before I could react to that, he started sauntering away.

I leapt up, leaving my coffee behind, and chased after him. He was walking like someone with no particular place to go and all the time in the world to get there, so it wasn’t hard to catch up. “Wait, Kilroy, like, the same as the volcano?”

He didn’t stop walking, but he didn’t seem bothered by me falling into step beside him. “Exactly like. Crazy coincidence, huh?” A sidelong glance. “You don’t remember the volcano, do you?”

“I . . . what do you mean?”

“Most people remember the volcano. Or think they do. Ask them, they’ll say it’s been there forever, no big deal. That’s always how it goes. But sometimes there are one or two people, never more than that, even in a city of hundreds of thousands, who remember there wasn’t a volcano there yesterday. I wish I could say they were always mad poets or schizophrenics or really good yoga teachers, but it seems totally random. Something seems to draw those people to me, or me to them, or both. I’ve met some interesting people that way. They aren’t usually as cute as you, though.”

“Do not flirt with me. This is not the flirting time. Will you stop walking and talk to me?”

He leaned against the wall of a bright yellow apartment building, and looked at me from beneath lowered lashes. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to kiss his punchable lips or punch his kissable face. “All I can say is, don’t worry about it. I’m only in town for a few days. When I go, the volcano will go with me, and everyone who remembers it today will forget it ever existed. No harm.”

“Kilroy. There is a volcano in my city. I am not going to be satisfied with ‘don’t pick at it and it will go away.’”

He nodded. “Okay. Tell you what. Take me someplace that makes good Bloody Marys and buy me whatever I want—spoiler, I want Bloody Marys—and I’ll tell you what I know.”

“Well . . . the Cliff House is only a couple of miles away, it’s got good drinks, but it’s kind of touristy—”

“I am, in fact, a tourist. Lead on, St. Helen.”

We could have walked there in half an hour, even cut through the park and gotten closer to the volcano, but I shuddered at the idea and opened up a rideshare app on my phone instead. Yes, disruptive tech companies and their overpaid entitled employers are destroying the fabric of the city and exploiting their underpaid drivers, but I am a parasitic consultant on those companies, my moral fiber is weak, taxis in San Francisco are a notorious pain in the ass, and being able to summon a ride at the push of a button is too convenient for my lax moral fiber to resist.

Within three minutes a gleaming silver Prius driven by a bored-looking guy with tribal tattoos on the backs of his hands showed up, and a few minutes after that we were deposited in front of the Cliff House.

“This is the place that burned down a bunch of times, yeah?” Kilroy looked over the frankly boring box of a building, with its potted palms out front. The view of the Pacific Ocean, just steps away, was spectacular enough that the building didn’t need to impress.

“Yeah. This is, like, the fifth version of the Cliff House. I think it only burned down once though. Another time a boat full of dynamite crashed into it.”

“Ha! No shit?”

“If a volcano erupted like a mile away and the building got buried in lava, maybe they’d build a sixth version.”

Kilroy sighed. “I told you, don’t worry about it. My mountain’s not going to erupt. I’m on top of that shit.”

Something about the building seemed strange, and after a second, I realized what it was. “There’s a shadow on this building. A shadow cast by a volcano.”

“True. I’m darkening their door. Now booze me up.”

We went inside, and the place was jammed, because people come to San Francisco in summer on vacation for some reason, maybe foolishly expecting sunshine, and tourists flock to places on the edge of the land, even when it’s not lunchtime yet. I wondered if there were tourists hiking the lower slopes of Mt. Kilroy today.

Despite the crowd, we managed to get two seats together at the bar, which was all Kilroy wanted. I was going to stick with ice water, but his Bloody Mary looked so inviting it made my stomach rumble, and I annoyed the bartender by asking for one of my own. There was a view of the ocean if I wanted it, which I liked. There was a volcano looming out of sight, which I didn’t.

Kilroy drank his first Bloody Mary down in seconds, then ordered another and sipped it. “All right. You want to know what I know. It’s not that much. There has always been a volcano near me, since I was a little kid, probably since I was born. If I get on a plane today, I will watch the volcano recede in the distance as I fly away, but when I land, it will be there, waiting, at my destination.”

I stirred the celery stalk in my glass. “But how? Doesn’t the volcano, like, crush everything when it appears?”

He put his hands flat on the bar, palms down, side by side. “It doesn’t seem to replace anything, or burst up through anything. It’s like the landscape just . . . slides apart to make room for it.” He moved his palms an inch apart by way of demonstration. “Things on either side get a tiny bit farther away. And, no, I don’t know how that works. I don’t even understand how the internet works, really, and I’m hazy on the internal combustion engine, so how am I supposed to understand a magical volcano?” He sighed. “I used to tell people like you, people who noticed the weirdness, that it was a gypsy curse. Just a joke, but I was traveling in Europe a while back and this Sinti girl explained what a shitty racist thing that was to say, gave me the whole history of her people and how they’re oppressed and all. So now I say . . . nothing.” Another sip. “I don’t know why the volcano follows me. I don’t know what it means, if it means anything. I didn’t even realize the volcano was about me until I was eleven years old, and my parents put me on a plane to Iowa to visit my grandparents, and when we landed, there was the volcano, as close to Gran’s house as it always had been to mine. I asked about it, and Gran said the volcano had always been there. I called my parents and asked if the volcano was still there by our house and they said ‘What volcano?’ I argued with them and they told me not to make up stories.” He shrugged. “It’s just always kind of been there in the background of my life. I started traveling around, to see if I could outrun the volcano, but any place I stopped for more than a day, it was there—even if I didn’t know I was going to stop, even if I got sick or my car broke down or the trains were delayed. The volcano knows.”

I whistled. “So when did you first meet someone else like me? Someone who remembered the, uh, pre-volcano situation?”

Now he smiled. “It was way back. A girl. Sorry, a woman. Pretty, but not as pretty as you—”

“Enough with that,” I murmured, and gestured for him to go on.

“I was down in the Caribbean, and I found her sitting on the beach, staring. She was a tourist from Idaho or someplace, on her honeymoon, she’d never even seen an ocean before, and then suddenly, poof, there’s a volcano, out of nowhere, poking up out of the ocean. She thought she was going to die, that it was the end of the world. Her husband was back in their hotel room sick with food poisoning or something, and she was all alone and freaking out, and nobody else even seemed to notice something was wrong. I talked her down, told her my story, like I’m telling you, except it’s not much of a story. We ended up making out on the beach, which cheered her up some. She would’ve done more than make out, but I felt weird because she was all married and everything, so I put on this super serious face and told her that we had to stop before I got too excited, because if I ever achieved orgasm, the volcano would erupt.”

I gasped out a laugh and covered my mouth.

He grinned. “Yeah, it was hard to keep a straight face.”

“So . . . that’s it? The volcano doesn’t mean anything?”

“If it does, it hasn’t told me about it. Sometimes a magical traveling volcano is just a magical traveling volcano.”

Huh. An inexplicable miracle of no particular use to anyone. That was disappointing, but I was growing accustomed to disappointment. “And there’s no special reason that woman from Idaho could see it, or the Sinti girl, or me, or anyone else?”

“Well . . .” He took a sip, licked tomato juice off his lip, and shrugged. “I will say that people who can see it are usually . . . troubled, somehow.”

I wanted to say that everyone was troubled, that nobody has a perfect charmed life, but I was certainly a lot more troubled in recent weeks than I had been pre-breakup-abandonment. “So mental instability could be a factor.”

“I don’t know about that. But sometimes I meet somebody who’s really hurting, they’ve got grief or heartbreak, and I take them on a walk with me up to the top of the volcano, and . . . it helps. They tell me they get a sense of peace, of well-being. Their pain goes away, anyway.”

I leaned back on my stool a bit and looked at him. Young, pretty, kind of smug . . . “You’re saying you’re like a spiritual guide?”

“I’m just a boy with a volcano. Some people find going up a smoking mountain a really spiritual experience. Maybe the people who see the volcano need the volcano. How about you? Do you need the volcano?”

I took a breath. “I don’t want to get into a whole thing. But, yeah. My girlfriend left me. I thought we were heading toward marriage, but she was heading somewhere else. I don’t even know if I can afford to stay in my place without her helping out with the rent, or even afford to stay in the city at all. I’ve been kind of a mess since she left. I even . . . I spent a night looking at this bottle of sleeping pills she left behind, thinking about just ending it all, and I flushed them down the toilet because I was afraid I’d get sad enough to go through with it sometime.”

It was Kilroy’s turn to lean back and look me over. “Wow. You’re into girl-girl, huh?”

Jesus. He didn’t sound lascivious, at least, but it wasn’t the response I’d expected after a confession of suicidal thoughts. “Kilroy. I am attracted to individuals, not gender expressions, that’s all. I’ve dated people who identified as men, and women, and neither. But, yes, my most serious relationship to date was with a woman.”

He nodded, but it was like he was bobbing his head to music I couldn’t hear. “Hey, it’s cool. I’m only into chicks myself, but whatever keeps you warm at night. I just didn’t get that vibe off you.” He shifted around on the stool, and something like uncertainty crossed his face. “Sorry, I know, you said some heavy shit just then, and I made it into like a sex thing. I just didn’t know how to respond to what you said, about the pills. I make dumb jokes, I say dumb stuff, sometimes, when I feel uncomfortable. I’m working on it. But. You want me to take you up the mountain? Seems like maybe you could use it.”

“The volcano really helps people?”

“Nobody has ever complained after I took them up there.”

I thought about it, and nodded. “Yeah. Okay.” I didn’t see how climbing an impossible volcano could help, but maybe it was time to embrace the mystery.

“Cool,” he said. “All I ask in return is you buy me a pack of American Spirits. Oh, and if you have any weed, we should get it. You haven’t smoked up until you’ve smoked up on a smoking mountain.”

• • • •

We went back to my place to get my pipe and my pot. The stuff you can buy with a medical card is stupidly good, and I’d actually been using it for medicinal purposes lately; weed was the only way I could get to sleep without having my dreams gnawed by all-night anxieties. I realized I hadn’t had anyone over to my apartment since Juliana left—even my friends who’d attempted to comfort me with booze and karaoke and food trucks had met me out in the world, because the idea of letting anyone into my broken nest had made me feel too vulnerable. Kilroy ignored my bookshelves and looked at the piles of video game boxes by the TV. “Sweet, gamer chicks are the best.” His approval about it, expressed in that way, made me feel weirdly slimy.

“Let me change into something more practical for hiking.” I went into the bedroom, thumbing the lock after me. I didn’t think he’d barge in while I was changing, but I was definitely aware there was a guy I didn’t know very well in my apartment, and I hadn’t experienced that since the one-night-stand hook-up days of my early twenties, when I’d been a lot less better at risk assessments.

I dropped my dress to the floor, then stood there in just my underwear, thinking. Huh. Kilroy was tactless and ignorant, but he seemed to mean well. He was certainly pretty. He was trying to help me, and asked nothing in return but drinks and cigarettes. Sex with a near-stranger was the one form of post-breakup self-destructive self-care I hadn’t tried, pretty much.

“Hey Kilroy!” I called through the door.

“Yeah?” he called back.

I cracked open the door and peeked through the gap. “That thing about the volcano erupting if you come was bullshit, right?”

He came down the hallway, grinning at me. “Yeah. Otherwise half the world would be buried in lava.”

I opened the door all the way. “Well. I guess there’s no harm, then.”

• • • •

I can’t say the Earth moved, and he demonstrated more enthusiasm than technique, but it was very nice to feel desired again, after feeling anything but for so long.

• • • •

Afterward, once we were dressed and sitting semi-awkwardly on my back steps while he smoked a cigarette, he said, “So, are you cured, or do you still want to go up the mountain?”

“Not to disparage the healing qualities of your dick, but yeah, I could still use some spiritual solace.”

“No problem. I take care of you body and soul. The whole package.”

I was dressed for hiking, in boots and jeans and a tank top with a long-sleeved flannel shirt worn open over it. I looked at Kilroy’s battered skater shoes doubtfully. “You don’t look like you’re dressed for mountain climbing.”

“Heh. Anybody else tries to go up the volcano, they can’t get more than halfway up the slope. But for me, or people with me, it sort of . . . opens a path. You’ll see.”

We headed for the front door. I used to hike with Juliana, and the idea of going with someone else felt strange. After a moment’s hesitation, I picked up my well-worn walking stick by the front door. Sure, it held a lot of memories, but fuck it, I was climbing a volcano. “Lead on, guru.”

“I’m your sexy Sherpa.”

We walked a few blocks, crossed Lincoln Way, and then we were in Golden Gate Park, one of my favorite places in the world: half-tame, half-wild, big enough that even after all these years I wasn’t sure I’d seen every bit of it. The volcano had situated itself between the golf course and the bison paddock, and we chatted amiably as we drew nearer the slopes. Kilroy seemed genuinely relaxed. I was just trying not to hyperventilate.

We reached the base of the volcano. The thing didn’t seem quite real, somehow: almost like a child’s drawing of a volcano rendered three-dimensional, or a papier-mâché science fair project scaled up. The mountain rose nearly straight up from the ground, but Kilroy walked partway around the base and then pointed: there was a path, spiraling upward, like someone had carved it. He led the way, and I followed his rising loop around the mountain, using my stick as necessary, but really, it was no steeper than climbing up some San Francisco streets, and the path was never narrower than sidewalk-width. I tried to stay away from the edge, and to not look down. I did glance behind me, once, and there was no path back there at all anymore, just scree and slope. I walked a bit closer to Kilroy after that.

We stopped halfway up to rest. “Gotta stop smoking,” he said, and then immediately lit a cigarette. I couldn’t tell if he was being intentionally or unintentionally funny. I took a drink of water and looked down at the park, then had a brief moment of vertigo and leaned back against the mountain wall and closed my eyes until it passed.

The rest of the climb took a while, but we finally reached the jagged peak. The smoke rose up in lazy tendrils from a crack in the rock. “Here we are,” Kilroy said. “Go ahead, take a peek into the heart of the mountain.” He gestured to the source of the smoke. I walked a little closer, stepping carefully over the rough ground, and gasped. There was an open vent, a ragged oblong about ten feet across and fifteen feet long. I didn’t dare get close enough to look down, but stepped back, afraid of losing my footing and plunging in.

“It’s crazy,” Kilroy said. “If you lean over and look down, you can actually see a pool of molten lava down there. It’s some real Mount Doom type shit.”

He sat on a rock, puffing my weed from my pipe, and I sat down on another rock nearby. “I’ll take your word for it. So . . . now what?”

Kilroy shrugged. “Just sit, you know. Take it all in. Wait for the serenity to come.”

I’d been into martial arts for a lot of years, and it’s hard to do that without at least brushing up against the idea of meditating, so I decided to try that. Sit, and clear my mind. But the view was too good to close my eyes, so instead I looked at the park and the city below. Everything there seemed too small. I turned my gaze to the ocean, which at least looked like the right size.

I waited. I breathed. I did not feel spiritual solace.

Kilroy said, “I wonder what yours would be.”

“My what?”

He took a puff, held it in, then exhaled. He didn’t offer me the pipe. “Your inner landscape. Mine’s a volcano. I think because I used to have this bad temper. Really bad.”

“Mine would probably be a toxic waste dumping ground.”

“Ha.” It wasn’t a laugh, just the word “Ha,” curiously mirthless. “I met this girl once, a long time ago, and she had a landscape she carried around with her, too. Except it wasn’t a volcano for her. She had a desert. An acre of sand dunes, with this pool of deep water in the middle, and a tree, like an oasis. I noticed it when I was in Paris, after the war, all this white sand right in the center of the city. Nobody else seemed to think it was weird, a desert just blocks from the Eiffel Tower. I explored, and found her, at the oasis. I don’t think she had too many visitors. We made love under the stars, under this one lonely palm tree. The next day, when I woke up, she was gone, and she’d taken the desert with her . . . but I had my very own volcano.”

I shook my head. “Wait. You said you’ve had the volcano since you were a kid.”

“Yeah. Lied about that. Among other things.” Revealing that fact didn’t seem to perturb him. “I did see the volcano rise up over my childhood home once, though. I went back to visit my parents, not long after I caught the volcano. We had a fight, a big ugly one, and I really lost my temper, started breaking shit, throwing things, screaming, and the volcano did erupt, at least partly—it spat out these burning rocks, anyways. A couple fell through the roof of my parent’s house, and burned the whole place down. Official records said it was a grease fire that got out of control. Heh.” He shook his head. “Sexually transmitted landscapes. Ain’t that something? Not everybody catches it, though. Just the people who can see my volcano, the way I saw that woman’s desert, they’re susceptible. Something inside of them just sort of . . . wakes up.”

I stood, twisting my hands on the walking stick, squeezing it hard. “Are you saying . . . what, I’m going to have a volcano now?”

He shook his head. “Nah. Won’t happen. Don’t worry about it. That woman I met in the desert, she was three hundred years old, she said. Whenever she started to age, she’d drink from the water of the oasis, and it would make her young again. When I caught the volcano from her, I thought, shit, where’s my fountain of youth? You can’t drink lava. I tried sleeping up here, but that didn’t make any difference. I was damn near forty before I finally figured it out, and you know, the first time was an accident. I was living in Alaska and I had my own private mountain, so I brought this girl up to show her the view of all the other mountains. We were pretty drunk and she lost her footing, fell in there.” He nodded toward the smoking vent. “I was pretty freaked out. But then the next morning I woke up and I was twenty again. Young again, and everything felt good. Still does. The world changes, St. Helen. Things that used to make sense stop making sense. Things that make you sick are suddenly just okay with everybody. It’s not easy, looking young, with an old soul. Trying to pass. It’s still better than getting all decrepit, though.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying.” But I was afraid I did.

He nodded, mouth downturned, sad. “First I tried drugging somebody, but you try dragging a dead weight up this mountain, even with the path opening up before you. Then I figured out it was easier just to talk people into coming up here. Mostly it’s gone pretty smoothly, over the years. That gypsy bitch—sorry, that Sinti bitch—had a knife I didn’t know about. She fought back and gave me a bad cut on the face. Probably would have scarred, but the next day, I was all young and smooth again.” He put my pipe down carefully on the rock. “Sorry it has to be this way. You dropping your panties for me, that was nice. I didn’t expect that, and it made me feel all fond toward you. That’s why I asked if you were sure you still wanted to come up here, or if maybe you just needed a man to fuck you properly. But you wanted to come, and here we are. I figure it’s like destiny. This volcano has always been waiting for you. You were looking at that bottle of sleeping pills, and you didn’t go that way, but that was only so you could be here, now. Your pain can still end. This way your death can help somebody—”

I swung my walking stick at his head, but he got his forearm up in time to block. The smug look on his face shifted into a look of pain, though, because I’d swung hard, with enough force for the vibration of the impact to run up the stick and my arm, all the way to my shoulder. He howled and stepped back, and I feinted at his head. The walking stick wasn’t much like the shinai practice swords I used in kendo class, but it was close enough for life-or-death, and when he tried to protect his head I dipped low and jabbed him hard in the solar plexus. He doubled over, I brought the stick down across the back of his head, and he fell in a heap.

I tried to run away. I really did. But the path that had opened so easily to lead us to the top of the mountain was gone, and there was nothing but rocks and sheer drop-offs on every side.

“Damn, girl,” Kilroy said. “Why you gotta be like that? This doesn’t have to go so hard.”

I wanted to cower as he got to his feet, but instead, I rushed him. He had no weapon, and he was dazed, but he was still bigger than me, and stronger, so I used the reach the stick gave me keep him from getting too close. I drove him back, almost to the edge of the vent.

He got angry. I could tell, because the mountain rumbled, and began to belch black smoke that burned my eyes. I couldn’t help it: I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, and he took advantage to grab my stick in both hands, trying to yank it out of my grip.

I didn’t even think. I just used his own force against him, and instead of trying to resist, I thrust the stick forward, into his chest. The force of his pull and my push both going in the same direction sent him tumbling backwards, and the stick was wrenched from my hands, tugged loose by his weight.

Kilroy was still holding my stick when he fell into the crack on top of the mountain and tumbled into the depths below, where he’d thrown who knows how many others. He screamed as he fell. He called me terrible things. But not for long.

I fell to my knees, gasping and shuddering, and I threw up: the vomit sizzled on the rocks, and I began to feel the stones heating up through my jeans. I was trapped on top of an erupting volcano, with no way down, and shit, maybe I was going to die, but at least I wasn’t going to die to help some asshole get young again, and there was a comfort in that.

Then the rumbling stopped, and the whole world lurched hard sideways, and there was a great rushing of air and space. I think I fainted.

When I came to, I was on my back in the middle of the Golden Gate golf course. The volcano was gone. I got woozily to my feet, and stumbled my way home.

• • • •

That night I took five showers, the drought be damned.

• • • •

The next morning, I went to my window, took a deep breath, and pushed the curtains aside.

There were no houses across the street anymore. Instead, there were tall trees: white trunks, majestic, standing among bright green underbrush. An aspen forest, with hundreds of towering trees made ghostly by morning fog.

I’d been feeling gritty, dirty, ashamed, filthy, regretful, insane. But the sight of the trees was like cool water poured on the coals inside my chest.

Maybe there was a stream in those woods I could drink from. Or just a particular tree, at the center, I could rest beneath, and become refreshed and restored. I felt sure there was no pit of fire, no dark cave, awaiting sacrifice in those woods. It was not a dark forest, but a light one. I am not perfect, far from it, but there is no furnace of death inside me.

I dressed, and went outside, and walked on my side of the street to the coffee shop, glancing occasionally at the trees just across the way.

Andi was manning the counter. They gave me their usual smile, and it occurred to me for the first time that I never saw them smile at anyone else quite that way. They said, “You doing okay? I was thinking about you. You seemed kind of . . . out of it, yesterday.”

“I was. I’m better today. The forest is so pretty this morning.”

They nodded. “It is, with the fog and all. I keep thinking I should take a walk in there some time. You know, I never have? Can you believe that? It’s right here, and I never have.”

“I haven’t either,” I said. “Maybe we can go together.”

©2015 by Tim Pratt. Originally published in Patreon.com/TimPratt. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tim Pratt is the author of over a dozen novels, most recently The Deep Woods and Heirs of Grace, and many short stories. His work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Year’s Best Fantasy, and other nice places. He’s a Hugo Award winner, and has been a finalist for World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Stoker, Mythopoeic, and Nebula Awards, among others. He lives in Berkeley CA and works as a senior editor at Locus, a trade magazine devoted to science fiction and fantasy publishing. He tweets, a lot, @timpratt, and his website is www.timpratt.org.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

Crocodile Tears

Jaymee Goh | 1910 words

Everything we crocodiles taste in the water has meaning. It tells us about the people who live here: who does the washing, who harvests the water crops, what they are growing in their fields and belukar. We even know littler details: who is pregnant, who is dying, what couple has been frolicking in the river, heedless of the risks we pose to them.

We do not often live near human villages; humans are delicious, but they also like to hunt us. We like the human towns even less, which taste of the lack of care they have for each other.

So when I went looking for Si Tenggang, I breathed the air shallowly and kept my mouth shut as I traversed the river that ran by the city he lived in. But one hears many things on the riverbanks, especially when one knows how to hide under the rushes.

“Si Tenggang is a powerful man,” I heard one woman say to her friend as they washed the day’s laundry. “He traveled overseas to the shores of Siam, and brought home gold enough to cover an ark as tribute to the Sultan.”

“Did he marry the Sultan’s daughter?” her friend asked.

“No, but he married a distant cousin, and eats at the Sultan’s palace every full moon.”

“Si Tenggang is a shrewd man,” a man drinking arak slurred to a group of drunk men, the alcohol irritating my nose. “He began with just one ship, and now has a whole fleet of them. Every venture of his turns a profit. He was the first to trade with the British, and helped the Sultan broker the deal for guns.”

“Have you ever fired a gun?” one of his friends asked.

“No, have you?”

“I have, and it sounds like thunder, and can kill a deer from two hundred paces.”

At this, I shrank back a little under the ledge on which they sat, where the soil still clung to the roots of the meranti tree they sat under.

Soon I found that Si Tenggang lived right by the river, and was wont to sit in a little wakaf built right over the riverbank, smoking tobacco from Persia by himself. Itinerant storytellers would audition for him then, for the chance of entertaining his growing family and many visiting royal relatives. I sat under his wakaf for several nights, listening to the storytellers, to determine how best to tell my story to him.

When I was ready, I waited until one evening when he was alone, and the household asleep, to come out. As I approached the steps of the wakaf, I rose and stood on two legs.

He was startled, but I said, “Ampun tuanku, my name is Senang, and I bring you stories, and news of your mother.”

His eyes widened a little, and he looked around to see if anyone was nearby. Then he sighed, “I hope the neighbours buried her.”

“I did,” I said.

“And how do you know my mother? You don’t look familiar to me, although you seem to be my age. Did you move to the village, and take my place? Ah, but they needed all the young men they could get, for their old ways.” He sounded halfway between regretful and amused.

“I have a story for you, tuan, if you’d like to hear it. I hear you like stories, and this one is from the village we came from.”

He brightened at the change of topic. “By all means,” he replied, settling down onto the floor cushions. He gestured for me to take the few more steps up onto his wakaf.

I told him this story:

“Many years ago, an old woman lost her only grandchild to the crocodiles that lived in the nearby river. She wept tears by the riverbank every day in mourning of her grandchild, who was her only family left, as her son had left to seek his fortune, leaving behind, unbeknownst, a pregnant lover who died in childbirth.

“One day, a crocodile swam up to her, and whispered, ‘Grandmother, our headman has a request of you. His grandchild has swallowed a large bone, and it is choking him. No one in the tribe can reach it, but your human hands could. I know you have little love for us, but could you help?’ So hearing, the old woman agreed, and she sat on the back of the messenger, who took her to the crook of the river where all the crocodiles watched over the young one.

“When she arrived, the crocodile headman greeted her, ‘Old woman, my own grandchild has swallowed a bone too large for his throat whilst eating. I will offer you what I can if you would help.’ The old woman asked, ‘Is it the bone of my grandchild that yours is choking on?’ And the crocodile replied, with a moment’s hesitation, yes. And the old woman asked, ‘If I do this for you, will you promise to leave this river forever?’ And the crocodile replied, with only a moment’s hesitation, yes.

“So the old woman bade the young one approach and open its jaws. She reached in and pulled out a gently curving rib caught in the youngster’s throat. The crocodiles thrashed the water with joy, and the headman said, ‘We will keep our promise. There are other rivers, and other prey. We shall never return here again, unless you require it. My messenger will bear you back safely, with all our thanks.’

“Thus was the river forever free of crocodiles after that.”

He looked at me, bemused, and said, “I have all the lore of my village, but I had never heard that story before.”

“It was after your time. Had you remained longer when you returned, had you chosen to once again take your place by your mother’s side and become part of the people you forsook, you would have heard it. It would have been unavoidable, for the river where this happened was the river that runs by the house you left behind.”

It was hard to resist moralizing, but his reaction was worth it. A sneer appeared on his lips then, and I saw his fist curl. “The hovel, you mean! The food we were never allowed to finish on our own without some men intruding on our meals! The dirt, the filth, the squalor! Why would I want to return to all that, when I have this?” He gestured to his house, a grand building in the distance beyond a copse of flowering saga trees.

“When I returned home,” he continued, spitting out the last word, “it was to a place of superstition and unbending time that refused to make way for progress. When I returned home, with my ship full of riches and my books full of knowledge, it was to elders who stared at me and said nothing, but I saw they judged me lacking. I! Who could countenance that the prodigy of a son would return home so scorned?”

He stood and wagged his finger threateningly at me. “And here I am now, rich beyond my dreams, and you expect me to have given all that up! No, not even for my beloved mother, even if it meant killing her.”

I did not move; my obligation held me in place. Besides, he did not know what I was. “You did. That day you returned.”

“What?” as if he had not heard.

“You walked past her as if she did not exist; you did not see her when you turned from the elders, too wrapped up at their rejection of your arrogance to see her open arms, her soft cries of joy that you had come home.”

His mouth, open from outrage, now shut. He narrowed his eyes at me.

“I wasn’t there,” I said, “but she told me afterward. I would have wept, but my kind don’t have tears.” When he said nothing, I continued, “Your name was on her lips the day she died.”

“Have you brought a curse from her? I don’t believe in curses, mind you,” he scoffed.

“She loved you too well to curse you.”

Was that a glint of conscience in his eye then? He was troubled a moment, as if he finally felt the guilt that a son who had abandoned his mother should feel. Or perhaps he just did not believe me.

“Get out,” he hissed through his teeth.

I did not move. “I have another story for you. I think you will like this one better.”

“Fine, another fairytale, and then you leave!”

I nodded, and began:

“This is how the story of the old woman really ends.

“After her faithless son returned, she took the long slow walk, aided by fellow villagers bringing her the happy news, to the village center where he was conferring with the headman.

“He was now tall and fair, and wore rich clothes. He held his trousers up when he walked, as if he could not bear to soil the hem, and every so often waved his fan, as if his nose was too delicate for the common smells of cows and donkeys, of paddy fields and grass.

“As she held her arms out to him, he walked past her, not seeing her, back to the men who bore his carriage from the capital where he lived. It appears he did not even think to visit his poor old mother, alone and waiting so long for his return.

“She wept at the riverbank when no one was near, and continued to live the end of her days the best she could. Surely you remember she wove baskets.”

His eyes narrowed.

“We tasted her tears as they traveled to where we now live, two rivers away. We knew the salt immediately, recognized it from when we had first taken her grandchild.

“I asked my grandfather for permission to leave the tribe, and swam up the two rivers to where we had once lived years ago. I followed the trail of her tears, and met her on the riverbank.

“She scolded me gently, saying she had not called for us. I was not called, I said, but I wished to know her misery.

“When she told me, I said to her, ‘Grandmother, let me take the place of the grandchild I ate and the son who has abandoned you. It is the least I can do for your mercy.’

“And so I stayed with her until the end of her days. When she died, I bore the news to the village, and helped bury her.

“And now I am here.”

I saw the blood drain from his face, and I smiled a little.

“Si Tenggang, do you recognize your sin? Though we crocodiles are reputed to be faithless, we, too, know the Prophet’s hadiths.”

He began to shout, but I knocked him over, falling onto my natural four legs. I heard him call for his mother as my jaws clamped down on his head.

• • • •

A man came to the Prophet and said, “O Messenger of God! Who among the people is the most worthy of my good companionship?” The Prophet said: “Your mother.” The man said, “Then who?” The Prophet said: “Then your mother.” The man further asked, “Then who?” The Prophet said: “Then your mother”. The man asked again, “Then who?” The Prophet said: “Then your father.”

—Hadith from Al-Bukhari

©2016 by Jaymee Goh.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jaymee Goh is a writer of fiction, poetry, and academese. She is currently a PhD Candidate at the University of California, Riverside where she is affiliated with Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies and Southeast Asia: Text, Ritual and Performance. Her work has been published in Expanded Horizons, Stone Telling, and Crossed Genres. She is an editor of The Sea is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia (Rosarium Publishing). She has written on racialized and postcolonial steampunk for the WisCon Chronicles (Aqueduct Press), co-written an essay on steampunk fashion and race for Fashion Talks (SUNY Press), and contributed to Tor.com, Racialicious.com, the Apex Book Company Blog, Beyond Victoriana.com, and Steampunk III: Revolution (Tachyon Publications). She tweets a lot: @jhameia.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

What We Know About the Lost Families of —— House

Christopher Barzak | 8220 words

But is the house truly haunted?

Of course the house is haunted. If a door is closed on the first floor, another on the second floor will squeal open out of contrariness. If wine is spilled on the living room carpet and scrubbed at furiously and quickly so that a stain does not set, another stain, possibly darker, will appear somewhere else in the house. A favorite room in which malevolence quietly happens is the bathroom. Many speculate as to why this room draws so much attention. One might think that in a bathroom things would be more carefree, in a room where the most private of acts are committed, that any damned inhabitants could let down their hair or allow a tired sigh to pass through their doomed lips.

Perhaps this is exactly what they are doing in the bathroom, and we have misunderstood them. They turn on the shower and write names in the steam gathered on the mirror (never their own names, of course). They tip perfume bottles over, squeeze the last of the toothpaste out of its tube, they leave curls of red hair in the sink. And no one who lives in the house—no one living, that is—has red hair, or even auburn. What’s worse is when they leave the toilet seat up. They’ll flush the toilet over and over, entranced by the sound of the water being sucked out. This is what these restless inhabitants are endlessly committing: private acts.

The latest victims

Always there has been a family subject to the house’s torture. For sixty-five years it was the Addlesons. Before that it was owned by the Oliver family. No one in town can remember who lived in the house before the Olivers, not even our oldest residents. We have stories, of course, recountings of the family who built —— House, but their name has been lost to history. If anyone is curious, of course there is the library with town records ready to be opened. No one has opened those records in over fifty years, though. Oral history, gossip, is best for this sort of situation.

Rose Addleson believed the house was trying to communicate something. She told her husband women know houses better than men, and this is one thing Rose said that we agree with. There is, after all, what is called “Women’s Intuition.” What exactly the house was saying eluded Rose, though, as it eludes the rest of us. Where Rose wanted to figure out its motivations, the rest of us would rather have seen it burn to cinders.

“All these years?” Jonas told her. It was not Rose Addleson who grew up in the house, after all, who experienced the years of closeness to these events, these fits that her husband had suffered since childhood. “If it’s trying to communicate,” he said, “it has a sad idea of conversation.”

Rose and Jonas have no children. Well, to be precise, no living children. Once there had been a beautiful little girl, with cheeks that blushed a red to match her mother’s, but she did not take to this world. She died when she was only a year old. On a cold winter’s night, she stopped breathing, when the house was frosted with ice. It wasn’t until the next morning that they found her, already off and soaring to the afterlife. “A hole in her heart,” the doctor said, pinching his forefinger and thumb together. “A tiny hole.” They had never known it was there.

After their first few months of marriage, Rose and Jonas had become a bit reclusive. Out of shame? Out of guilt? Fear? Delusion? No one is able to supply a satisfactory reason for their self-imposed isolation. After all, we don’t live in that house. If walls could talk, though, and some believe the walls of —— House do talk, perhaps we’d understand that Jonas and Rose Addleson have good reason not to go out or talk to neighbors. Why even Rose’s mother, Mary Kay Billings, didn’t hear from her daughter but when she called on the phone herself, or showed up on the front porch of —— House, which was something she rarely did. “That house gives me the creeps,” she told us. “All those stories, I believe them. Why Rose ever wanted to marry into that family is beyond me.”

Mary Kay has told us this in her own home, in her own kitchen. She sat on a chair by the telephone, and we sat across the table from her. She said, “Just you see,” and dialed her daughter’s number. A few rings later and they were talking. “Yes, well, I understand, Rose. Yes, you’re busy, of course. Well, I wanted to ask how you and Jonas are getting along. Good. Mm-hmm. Good. All right, then. I’ll talk to you later. Bye now.”

She put the phone down on the cradle and smirked. “As predicted,” she told us. “Rose has no time to talk. ‘The house, Mother, I’m so busy. Can you call back later?’ Of course I’ll call back later, but it’ll be the same conversation, let me tell you. I know my daughter, and Rose can’t be pried away from that house.”

We all feel a bit sad for Mary Kay Billings. She did not gain a son through marriage, but lost a daughter. This is not the way it’s supposed to happen. Marriage should bring people together. We all believe this to be true.

Rose heard a voice calling

She has heard voices since she was a little girl. Rose Addleson, formerly Rose Billings, was always a dear girl in our hearts, but touched with something otherworldly. If her mother doesn’t understand her daughter’s gravitation to —— House, the rest of us see it all too clear. Our Rose was the first child to speak in tongues at church. Once, Jesus spoke through her. The voice that came through her mouth never named itself, but it did sound an awful lot like Jesus. It was definitely a male voice, and he kept saying how much he loved us and how we needed to love each other better. It was Jesus all over, and from our own sweet Rose.

We do not understand why, at the age of twelve, she stopped attending services.

But Rose also heard voices other than the Lord’s. Several of us have overheard her speaking to nothing, or nothing any of us could see. She’s hung her head, chin tucked into breastbone, at the grocery store, near the ketchup and mustard and pickles, murmuring, “Yes. Of course. Yes, I understand. Please don’t be angry.”

Rose heard the voices in —— House, too. This is why she married Jonas: The house called for her to come to it.

It was winter when it happened. Rose was eighteen then, just half a year out of high school. She worked in Hettie’s Flower Shop. She could arrange flowers better than anyone in town. We all always requested Rose to make our bouquets instead of Hettie, but Hettie never minded. She owned the place, after all.

On her way home from work one evening, Rose’s car stalled a half mile from —— House. She walked there to get out of the cold, and to call her mother. At the front door she rapped the lion-headed knocker three times. Then the door opened and wind rushed past her like a sigh. She smelled dust and medicine and old people. Something musty and sweet and earthy. Jonas stood in front of her, a frown on his sad young face. He was already an orphan at the age of thirty. “Yes?” he asked in a tone of voice that implied that he couldn’t possibly be interested in any reason why our Rose was appearing before him. “Can I help you?”

Rose was about to ask if she could use his phone when she heard a voice calling from inside. “Rose,” it whispered. Its voice rustled like leaves in a breeze. “Please help us,” the house pleaded. And then she thought she heard it say, “Need, need, need.” Or perhaps it had said something altogether different. The walls swelled behind Jonas’s shoulder, inhaling, exhaling, and the sound of a heartbeat suddenly could be heard.

“Are you all right?” Jonas asked, cocking his head to the side. “Rose Billings, right? I haven’t seen you since you were a little girl.”

“Yes,” said Rose, but she didn’t know if she was saying yes to his question or to the house’s question. She shook her head, winced, then looked up at Jonas again. Light cocooned his body, silvery and stringy as webs.

“Come in,” he offered, moving aside for her to enter, and Rose went in, looking around for the source of the voice as she cautiously moved forward.

Mary Kay Billings didn’t hear from her daughter for three days after that. That night she called the police and spoke to Sheriff Dawson. He’d found Rose’s car stuck in the snow. They called all over town, to Hettie’s Flower Shop, to the pharmacy, because Rose was supposed to pick up cold medicine for Mary Kay. Eventually Rose called Mary Kay and said, “I’m okay. I’m not coming home. Pack my things and send them to me.”

“Where are you?” Mary Kay demanded.

“Have someone bring my things to —— House,” Rose said.

“—— House?!” shouted Mary Kay Billings.

“I’m a married woman now, Mother,” Rose explained, and that was the beginning of the end of her.

Jonas in his cups

He had many of them. Cups, that is. Most of them filled with tea and whiskey. Jonas Addleson had been a drinker since the age of eight, as if he were the son of a famous movie star. They are all a sad lot, the children of movie stars and rich folk. Too often they grow up unhappy, unaccustomed to living in a world in which money and fame fade as fast as they are heaped upon them.

Jonas Addleson was not famous beyond our town, but his family left him wealthy. His father’s father had made money during the Second World War in buttons. He had a button factory over in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It’s long gone by now, of course. They made all sorts of buttons, the women who worked in the factory while the men were in Europe. Throughout —— House you will still find a great many buttons. In the attic, on the pantry shelves, in the old playroom for the children, littered in out-of-the-way places: under beds, in the basement, among the ashes in the fireplace (unburned, as if fire cannot touch them).

This is not to say Rose Addleson was a bad housekeeper. In fact, Rose Addleson should have got an award for keeping house. She rarely found time for anything but cleaning and keeping. It was the house that did this eternal parlor trick. No matter how many buttons Rose removed, they returned in a matter of weeks.

When Rose first arrived at —— House, Jonas showed her into the living room, then disappeared into the kitchen to make tea. The living room was filled with Victorian furniture with carved armrests, covered in glossy chintz. A large mirror hung on the wall over the fireplace, framed in gold leaf. The fire in the fireplace crackled, filling the room with warmth. On the mantel over the fire, what appeared to be coins sat in neat stacks, row upon row of them. Rose went to them immediately, wondering what they were. They were the first buttons she’d find. When Jonas returned, carrying a silver tray with the tea service on it, he said, “Good, get warm. It’s awfully cold outside.”

He handed Rose a cup of tea and she sipped it. It was whiskey-laced and her skin began to flush, but she thanked him for his hospitality and sipped at the tea until the room felt a little more like home.

“The least I can do,” he said, shrugging. Then remembering what she’d come for, he said, “The phone. One second. I’ll bring it to you.”

He turned the corner, but as soon as he was gone, the house had her ear again. “Another soul gone to ruin,” it sighed with the weight of worry behind it. “Unless you do something.”

“But what can I do?” said Rose. “It’s nothing to do with me. Is it?”

The house shivered. The stacks of buttons on the mantel toppled, the piles scattering, a few falling into the fire below. “You have what every home needs,” said the house.

“I’m no one,” said Rose. “Really.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Jonas said in the frame of the doorway. He had a portable phone in his hand, held out for her to take. “I mean, we’re all someone. A son or daughter, a wife or husband, a parent. Maybe you’re right, though,” he said a moment later. “Maybe we’re all no one in the end.”

“What do you mean?” asked Rose. She put the teacup down to take the phone.

“I’m thinking of my family. All gone now. So I guess by my own definition that makes me nothing.”

Rose batted her eyelashes instead of replying. Then she put the phone down on the mantel next to the toppled towers of buttons. She sat down in one of the chintz armchairs and said, “Tell me more.”

The first lost family

Before the Addlesons, the Oliver family lived in —— House. Before the Olivers lived in —— House, the family that built the house lived there. But the name of that family has been lost to the dark of history. What we know about that family is that they were from the moors of Yorkshire. That they had come with money to build the house. That the house was one of the first built in this part of Ohio. That our town hadn’t even been a town at that point. We shall call them the Blanks, as we do in town, for the sake of easiness in conversation.

The Blanks lived in —— House for ten years before it took them. One by one, the Blanks died or disappeared, which is the same thing as dying, if you think about it, for as long as no one you love can see or hear you, you might as well be a ghost.

The Blanks consisted of Mr. Blank, Mrs. Blank, and their two children, twin boys with ruddy cheeks and dark eyes. The photos we have of them are black and white, but you can tell from the pictures that their eyes are dark and that their cheeks are ruddy by the serious looks on their faces. No smiles, no hint of happiness. They stand outside the front porch of —— House, all together, the parents behind the boys, their arms straight at their sides, wearing dark suits.

The father, we know, was a farmer. The land he farmed has changed hands over the years, but it was once the Blank family apple orchard. Full of pinkish-white blossoms in the spring, full of shiny fat globes of fruit in autumn. It was a sight, let us tell you. It was a beautiful sight.

The first to disappear was one of the boys. Let’s call him Ephraim. He was the ruddier of the two, and often on his own, even though his parents taught him not to wander. One afternoon, he and his brother went into the orchard to pick apples, but in the evening, when the sun began to set, only Ephraim’s brother returned to —— House, tears streaming down his face.

“What’s the matter?” asked Mrs. Blank. “Where’s your brother?”

But the boy (William, we’ll call him) could only shake his head. Finally he was able to choke out this one sentence:

“The orchard took him.”

Then he burst into tears again.

This, of course, sparked a heated debate around town. We who live here have always been a spirited group of people, ready to speculate about anything that might affect us. The general consensus arrived at was that the boy had been taken. Someone must have stolen him, like the fairies did in the old country. A stranger passing through, who perhaps saw the perfect round ruddy globes of Ephraim’s cheeks and mistook them for apples. It is a dark thought, this possible narrative. But dark thoughts move through this world whether we like it or not.

Mr. Blank died soon after his son’s disappearance. He died, as they say, of a broken heart. Mrs. Blank found him in the kitchen, slumped over in his chair, his head on the table. She thought he was crying again, as he often did after his son’s vanishing. But when she stroked his hair and then his cheek, she found him cold, his heart stopped up with sorrow.

They buried Mr. Blank in the orchard, beneath the tree where William last saw Ephraim. And only two years later Mrs. Blank woke one night to find that she was alone in —— House. She searched every room twice, but could not find her last remaining family member, her young William.

It was the middle of winter, in the middle of the night, and when Mrs. Blank stepped outside onto the front porch, she found a set of footprints in the snow that gathered on the steps. She followed them down and out the front gate, around back of the house and through the orchard, where they came to a stop at her husband’s grave, at the tree where William last saw Ephraim. Mrs. Blank called out for William, but she only got her own voice back. That and the screech of an owl crossing the face of the moon above her.

Suddenly a rumbling came from inside —— House. Mrs. Blank looked at the dark backside of the house, at its gingerbread eaves and its square roof, at its dark windows tinseled with starlight, and shuddered at the thought of going back in without anyone waiting for her, without her son beside her. The house rumbled again, though, louder this time, and she went without further hesitation. Some women marry a house, and this bond neither man nor God can break.

William’s body was never found, poor child. Like his brother, he vanished into nothing.

But we say the orchard took him.

Everything you need

It took Rose and Jonas Addleson less than a year to make their doomed daughter. Full of passion for one another, they made love as often as possible, trying to bring her into this world, trying to make life worth living. This was perhaps not what Rose felt she needed, but Jonas wanted children, and what Jonas wanted, Rose wanted too. That’s the thing about marriage. Suddenly you want together. You no longer live in desire alone.

What Rose wanted was for Jonas to be happy. She would marry him within a day of meeting him on the front porch of —— House during that fateful blizzard, knowing this was to be her home. The house had told her. And soon it had become apparent that Jonas didn’t want her to leave either. When she went to call her mother, he had interrupted to say, “Would you like more tea?” When she had moved toward the front door, he’d stood up and said, “Would you like to lie down and rest?”

They shared more whiskey-laced tea, and before the night was over Rose found herself sitting next to Jonas on the sofa, holding his hand while he told her his family’s story. How his grandfather had owned the button factory during the war, how his father had killed himself twenty years ago by placing a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger. How his mother had worked her fingers to the bones taking care of everything: the house, Jonas, his father’s bloody mess in the bathroom. “I found him,” Jonas said. “I was ten. On the mirror in the bathroom. There was blood all over it. He was lying in a pool of blood on the floor. Mama scrubbed and scrubbed, but it wouldn’t come out. Not until she asked the house to help her.”

He paused, gulping the story down again. Rose watched the way the column of his throat moved as he swallowed. She wanted to kiss him right there, where the Adam’s apple wriggled under the skin. Instead she asked, “What did the house do?”

He looked at her, his eyes full of fear. “She told me to leave the bathroom. So I left, closing the door behind me. I waited outside with my ear against the door, but I couldn’t hear anything. After a few minutes passed, I knocked. Then a few more minutes passed. I was going to knock again, but before my knuckles hit, the door swung open, and there was Mama, wringing her hands in a damp rag. There was no blood on her, not even a speck. And when I looked behind her, the carpet was as clean as ever, as if no dead body had bled to death on it.”

“The house loves you,” Rose said.

Jonas looked at her curiously. “What do you mean?”

“It loves you. Can’t you feel it? It’s trying to tell you something.”

“If it’s trying to communicate,” said Jonas. “It has a sad idea of conversation.”

She held those words close as soon as he said them, she pressed them to her chest like a bouquet. This was why she had been brought there, she realized. In this instant, she knew she would translate for him. She would bring back all that he had lost. She’d be his mother, she’d be his father, she’d be his wife, she’d have his children. A family, she thought. With a family, he’d never be alone.

She leaned into him, still holding his hand, and kissed him. Without moving back again, she looked up through her eyelashes and said, “I have everything you need.”

A child bride

The story of the Oliver family is a sad one. No, let us revise that statement: It is not sad, it is disturbing. We don’t like to talk about it around town anymore. We are all glad that —— House took the Olivers, for they were a bad lot, given to drinking and gambling, as well as other unwholesome activities.

The Olivers moved into —— House just past the turn of the century, after Mrs. Blank died. Our grandparents found Mrs. Blank several weeks after her passing, due to the smell that began to spread down Buckeye Street. It was one of the only times they’d gone into —— House, and we remember it to this day: the hardwood floors, the chintz furniture, the stone mantel over the fireplace, the stairs that creaked as you stepped up into the long hallway of the second floor, the second floor itself, the lower half of the hall paneled with dark polished wood. And the bathroom, of course, where all of the trouble eventually focused its energy. It was a fine house, really, with wide windows to let light in, though even with all of that light the house held too many shadows. Our grandparents did not linger. They took Mrs. Blank’s body to the county coroner’s office in Warren and left the doctor to his business.

Less than a year later, Mr. and Mrs. Oliver came to —— House with their three children: two boys, one nearly a man, one still muddling through adolescence, and a girl about to bloom. At first our grandparents didn’t think badly of the Olivers. It takes a certain amount of time for a family to reveal its secrets. So for the first few years, they welcomed the Olivers as if they had always lived among us. The Olivers began attending the Methodist church on Fisher-Corinth Road. They sent the younger boy and girl to school with our children. The oldest boy worked as a field hand for local farmers. His work was good, according to Miles Willard, who paid the boy to clear fields those first few years, before all of the madness started to happen again.

How to tell about that madness. We suppose we might as well start with Mrs. Oliver’s murder. Two of our children found her body in Sugar Creek. They had been going to catch crayfish, but found Mrs. Oliver’s body tangled in the roots of a tree that grew out of the bank instead. She had been severely beaten: her face covered in yellow-brown bruises, her skull cracked on the crown. Dark fingerprints lingered on her throat, so we knew she had been strangled. We still do not forgive her murderer for leaving her for us to find. People should take care of their own dirty work.

Since they had a murder on their hands, our grandparents called on the sheriff to deal with the matter. They marched him right up to —— House expecting trouble. But what they found was the front door open and, inside, Mr. Oliver’s body spread out on the dining room table, a butcher knife sticking straight up out of his throat. The sheriff asked several of our grandfathers to back him up as he explored the rest of the house. And so they did, each carrying a rifle as they descended into the basement, then up to the second floor, finding nothing suspicious. It was when the ceiling creaked above them that they knew someone was in the attic.

They tried opening the attic door, but it had been locked from the inside. So they busted it down, only to be met with a blast from the rifle of Mr. and Mrs. Oliver’s middle child. The sheriff took the shot in his shoulder. He fell backwards, but our grandfathers caught him. Several of them returned fired at the boy. He left a smear of blood on the wall as he collapsed against it.

They found the oldest boy and the girl bound and gagged in the attic. They were wild with fear. Their brother had killed their parents and was going to kill them, too, they said. This was all over a fight the boy had had with his parents about a debt he’d run up over in Meadville, playing poker with older men who knew how to outwit him. He wanted his parents to pay his debt, but they wouldn’t. They insisted he work to pay for his debts and his drinking, just as their oldest son did. After he killed his parents, he wasn’t sure what to do with his siblings, so he tied them up, and there they still were, alive and none the worse for wear, and we thought perhaps we had salvaged something from that house’s evil.

The oldest Oliver boy and his sister stayed on at —— House. They had nowhere to go, no people. Just each other. The boy kept working as a field hand, the girl continued her schooling. But soon her attendance dropped off, and then she stopped coming altogether. She started working to help with the keeping of the house and the paying of her brother’s debts. She took in wash if people gave it to her. She mended stockings. She raised chickens, selling eggs at the general store to make extra money. Anything she could get her hands on she turned into cash.

At first she seemed awfully hard-working and a good girl, but we soon discovered not only was she working to pay off her brother’s debts, but to prepare for the child growing inside her. When her stomach began to round out the fronts of her dresses, we knew what was going on up at —— House. This was something our grandparents could not abide, so they stopped giving the girl work. They stopped buying her eggs, and the farmers released her brother from his duties. In no time at all, the brother and the child bride packed up their things and left. Without the aid of our grandparents, they could not live among us. This is the way all of the families that lived in —— House should have been dealt with all these years, maybe. Without mercy. But Lord knows we are a merciful lot.

Word came several months after the siblings left that they had been seen in Cleveland, living together, posing as a married couple.

The baby’s room

Here it is, in the same condition as when the baby was living. The crib with the mobile of brass stars still spinning in space above it, the rocking chair near the eastern window, where sunlight falls in the morning, the walls painted to look like the apple orchard in summer, the ceiling sky blue, as if the baby girl had lived outdoors forever, never inside the confines of —— House.

We know the room is still like this because Mary Kay Billings has seen it. Twice since the baby died, she has gone to visit her daughter, and both times the baby’s room was as it was during her last visit. Two years after the child’s death, it begins to seem a bit odd, really. She suggested changing it into a sewing room maybe, but Rose shook her head. “No, Mother,” she said. “That’s not allowed to happen.”

Mary Kay Billings has no patience with her daughter. We all understand this. If our daughters had married into a family that lived in —— House without our permission, we’d have no patience either. Poor Mary Kay is one of the pillars of our community. She is one of our trustees, she sings in the church choir. At the elementary school, she volunteers her time three days a week, three hours each of those days, to aid in the tutoring of our children. Mary Kay Billings has raised her daughter, has lived through the death of her husband, God rest his soul (for he would roll in his grave to know what happened to his child), and yet Mary Kay still gives to others for the good of her community. This is the way a town works, not how Rose would have it. We all think Rose is a bit selfish, really, leaving her mother to struggle alone, leaving Hettie without any warning (we liked her flower arrangements better than Hettie’s and better than the replacement girl’s, so it’s even more selfish of her to have done this). Leaving the community altogether, to go live in that place.

We must mention that not all of us think she is selfish, but only has the appearance of selfishness. Some of us (the minority) believe Rose is noble. A bit too noble, but noble nonetheless. Who else but a self-sacrificing person would take on —— House and its curse? We say a crazy person, but some of us say Rose is doing us a favor. If it weren’t Rose, who would the house have brought to its front door when it needed another soul to torment?

But the baby’s room is a bit too much really. We asked Mary Kay Billings what the rest of the house was like and she said, “Buttons! Buttons everywhere, I tell you! I said to Rose, ‘Rose! What’s the matter with you? Why are all these buttons lying about?’ and she says to me, ‘Mother, I can’t keep up with them. I try, but they keep coming.’ And in the baby’s room, too, I noticed. Right in the crib! I said to Rose, ‘Rose! In the crib even?’ and she says to me, can you believe this, she says to me, her own mother, ‘Mother, I think it’s best if you go.’”

“And Jonas?” we asked, leaning in closer. Mary Kay narrowed her eyes and sucked her teeth. “Drunk,” she told us. “Drunk, as usual.”

Life during wartime

In the nineteen-forties, most of our men had been taken overseas to fight against the devil, and our women stayed behind, keeping things about town running smoothly. All over America, women came out of their houses and went into men’s workplaces. We still argue about who was made for what sort of work, but in the end we know it’s all a made up sort of decision. Nothing fell apart, nothing broke while the men were off fighting. In fact, things maybe went a bit smoother (this of course being an opinion of a certain sector of our population and must be qualified). In any case, the factories were full of women, and in Pittsburgh, just across the state border, James Addleson, the grandfather of our own Jonas, had his ladies making buttons for the uniforms of soldiers.

The Addlesons had bought —— House several years before the war had broken out, but we rarely saw them. They were a Pennsylvania family and only spent part of their summers with us. Occasionally we’d see them in autumn for the apple festival. The Addlesons had money, and —— House was one of their luxuries. They had passed through our town during their travels and Mrs. Addleson had seen the house and wanted it immediately. James Addleson didn’t argue with her. Why on Earth she would want to buy a house in the country, no matter how stately and beautiful, was beyond him. But he had gotten used to giving the woman what she wanted. It was easier. And it soothed any guilt he might have felt for other, less attractive activities in which he participated. Especially later, after the war started.

Now, Mrs. Addleson was a beautiful woman. She had a smooth complexion, high cheekbones, and a smile that knocked men over like a high wind had hit them. She wore fire engine red lipstick, which we must say is a bit racy but something to look at. Occasionally she’d come to town without Mr. Addleson. She’d bring their children, a girl in her teens and the little boy who would later grow up to be Jonas Addleson’s father. During the war, we started seeing her and the kids more often. We’d find her shopping in the grocery store, or coming to church on Sundays, sitting in the last pew as if she didn’t want to intrude on our services. Eventually we got used to her being around, and some of the women even got to be something like friends with her.

Mr. Addleson often stayed in Pittsburgh to look after his factory. We felt bad for the Addlesons. Even though James Addleson didn’t go to war since he had a business to manage, his family suffered like anyone’s. Whenever we asked Mrs. Addleson how her husband fared, she’d say, “Buttons! Buttons everywhere!” and throw her hands in the air. She was a strange lady, now that we think about it. Never had a straight answer for anyone.

For a while we thought perhaps —— House had settled into a restful sleep, or that even the spirit that inhabited the place had moved on to better climates. We hoped, we prayed, and during the war, it seemed our prayers had been answered. Finally a family lived in —— House without murdering one another or disappearing altogether. We thought perhaps we’d been foolish all those years to think the house haunted. We shook our heads, laughing a little, thinking ourselves to be exactly what everyone who makes their homes in cities considers us: backwoods, superstitious, ignorant.

But then our peaceful period of welcome embarrassment broke. Like a cloud that’s been gathering a storm, holding inside the rain and lightning and thunder until it bursts forth, flooding the lives of those who live below it, so —— House released its evil upon our town once more.

This time, though, we realized its hand reached further than we had previously thought possible. This time we knew something was wrong when detectives from Pittsburgh began to appear on our doorsteps, asking questions about the Addlesons. How long had they been living in our town? How often did we see them? Did they go to church? Did they send their children to school with our children? What were they like? What did we know about their doings? In the end, we realized we knew little about the Addlesons. As we have said already, it takes time for families to reveal their secrets.

They found the first body in the basement, the second in the attic, the third buried in the orchard, and the fourth stuffed in a defunct well on the property. All women. All girls from Pittsburgh, the detectives told us. All pregnant with James Addleson’s babies.

We were disgusted. Oh, but we were disgusted. Never had the house erupted with such evil before. Never! We thought the Oliver family massacre and the decline of its surviving children to be the worst, the worst possible manipulation the house could imagine. And here we were faced with something even more despicable. While Mrs. Addleson raised her children in the quiet of our country town, James Addleson had been manipulating his women workers into sleeping with him. At first we assumed the women were a bad sort, and possibly their lust had gotten them into this trouble (as any of the great sins will surely do) but then we heard the news that seven other girls in the button factory had come forward. He had threatened to take their jobs away from them, they said, if they wouldn’t give him what he wanted. They had been lucky, they said. They hadn’t gotten pregnant. “It could have been us,” one of the girls said in an anonymous interview. “It could have been any one of us.”

It took the police a week to find the bodies of all four girls. The one in the well was the hardest to locate. We all prayed for their poor families back in Pittsburgh, for their poor husbands at war, off fighting that devil while another devil pursued their wives at home.

We had a notion to burn down —— House then, and were going to do that. We were gathering, the old and the young and the women left behind by their husbands. We were gathering to destroy the place when word came that Mrs. Addleson would not be leaving. She was going to stay and raise her children here among us. Her husband’s factory would be closing; he’d be going to prison. She needed a place for her children. The children, we thought, oh what sacrifices we make for our children! This we understood all too well.

So we left the house alone, and her in it. And even after her daughter grew up to be a fine, respectable woman, graduating from our very own high school, and went off to college to marry a doctor, even after Mrs. Addleson died and left her son, the heir of James Addleson, alone in —— House, we allowed him to live there without any interference as well.

He was smart enough not to court our daughters. He went to college like his sister and came back a married man, his wife already expecting. This was in the nineteen-seventies, mind you, and such things happened among our children, it seemed, without them thinking much about it. We said nothing. We scolded ourselves and told ourselves it was not our business, and to stop caring.

But if it is not the business of one’s community, whose business is it?

If we’d have intervened, if we’d have tried to get the Addlesons some other living arrangement, perhaps poor Jonas would not have walked into the bathroom at the age of ten to find his father’s dead body, the blood spilling out of his shattered skull.

Why did the son of James Addleson kill himself? You are probably wondering. The answer is simple. It was those girls his daddy murdered. We have seen and heard them ourselves on occasion, wandering through the orchards, climbing out of the well, beating on the windows of the cellar and attic. We have seen and heard them, and continued on our way, ignoring them.

James Addleson’s son was not so lucky. He lived with them. He heard them day and night, talking about his father’s evil. In the end, they convinced him to join them.

A visit

But not our own sweet Rose! How could this have happened? We often wondered where we went wrong. Through all the years of that house’s torments, never did our own children go near it. We taught them well, or so we thought. But that house would get what it wanted. Our own sweet Rose. How we have fretted these past three years she has been gone from us. How we pray for her and for Mary Kay Billings nightly. And how Mary Kay suffers. How she holds herself together, never mentioning her daughter unless we ask after her. Never wanting to burden us. And how we all have our crosses. Which is why we did what we have done.

We had let the Addleson family linger under the spell of the house’s evil, and because of that Jonas’s father took his own life, and Jonas himself became the wreck he is today. We thought we were doing best by them, leaving them to their own choices, trying not to interfere with the lives of others. But we saw how wrong we were when —— House took our Rose, when it took our Rose’s little girl. And then, recently, when Mary Kay Billings mentioned to one of us that Rose had been asking after her cousin, Marla Jean Simmons. “Could you send her on up here, Mother? I’m sort of lonesome. And I could use some help around the house.”

It was then we decided to take action. Not one more of our children would we let that house ravage.

We approached Mary Kay Billings with our plans, and tears, buckets full of them, were shed that day. Poor Mary Kay, always trying to be the tough woman, the one who will not be disturbed, yet when we came to her and said, “We shall make that house a visit,” she burst, she broke like a dam.

“Thank you,” she told us. “Oh thank you, I can’t do it alone any longer. Maybe with all of us there she’ll let us talk some sense into her.”

So we selected representatives. Mr. Adams, the town lawyer. He inspired fear in his opposition, so we chose him hoping the house would fear his authority. Mrs. Baker, the principal of our elementary school, who Rose once respected as a child. Pastor Merritt, since a man of God in cases such as this is necessary. Tom Morrissey, the undertaker, who has dealt with death long enough not to fear it. And Shell Richards, one of our school bus drivers, because she is simply a force to be reckoned with, and we all of us stay out of her way, especially when she’s been drinking.

Together, led by Mary Kay Billings, we trudged up the road to —— House on a cool spring evening when the buds were on the trees, the sap rising. At the gate, we hesitated for only a moment to look at each other and confirm our convictions by nodding. Then Mary Kay swung the gate open and up the path we went.

As soon as our feet touched those porch steps, though, we felt the life of whatever lived there coursing beneath us. We shuddered, but continued. Since it was not a social visit, we didn’t bother knocking, just opened the door and went straight on in. “Rose!” we called loudly. “Rose!” And soon enough, she appeared on the landing above us, looking down at us with a peculiar glare, icy and distant.

“What are you all doing here?” she asked. Her voice sounded far away, as if she were speaking through her body, as if her body were this thing that came between her and the rest of the world. Her hand rested on the newel post of the landing, massaging it as she waited.

“We’ve come to help you, darling,” Mary Kay said. We all thought it best that she spoke first.

“I don’t need any help now,” said Rose. “What help would I be needing, Mother? Why didn’t you send Marla Jean like I asked?”

We immediately saw Mary Kay’s resolve fading, so Mr. Adams spoke up. “Dear,” he said. “Come down to us. We’re taking you out of this place. We’re taking you home this very instant.”

Rose cocked her head to the side, though, and slowly shook it. “I don’t think so,” she told us. “I’m a grown woman. I can make my own decisions. And my home is here, thank you very much.”

“Where’s your husband?” asked Mrs. Baker. But Rose didn’t answer. She only looked at Mrs. Baker suspiciously, as if a trap were being set.

“We’re going to help him, too, dear,” said Pastor Merritt. “But we need to get you both to safety. We must ask God to help us now.”

“God?” said Rose, and we shivered. We’d never heard a word so full of goodness said in such a way that it sent chills up and down our spines. “God?” she said again, then started down the stairs toward us. “I haven’t heard Him in a long time,” said Rose. We nodded. We remembered. She hadn’t come to church since she was twelve.

“He is always listening,” said Pastor Merritt. “All you have to do is ask for His help, and He will provide.”

“I don’t talk,” said Rose. “I’m the one who listens.”

We didn’t nod this time. We weren’t sure what to make of what she was saying.

“Enough of this,” said Shell Richards suddenly, and we all, even Rose, looked at her, puzzled by her outburst. “Enough dilly dallying,” said Shell. She stepped right up to Rose, grabbed her arm, and said, “You’re coming with us, little girl.”

Mary Kay ran up the stairs to gather a few things for her daughter while Rose fought to free herself from Shell’s grip. “Stop struggling,” Shell warned, but Rose struggled. She slipped, and as she fell, buttons poured out of her sweater pockets, scattering across the floor.

Then a scream spilled down the staircase and we knew Mary Kay Billings was in trouble. We abandoned Rose on the floor and rushed up the stairs, one after the other, the steps creaking beneath us, until we came to the baby’s room with the mural of the orchard painted on the walls and the sky on the ceiling. Mary Kay stood in the center of the room, near the crib, staring apparently at nothing. We followed her stare, and in the mural we saw the Blank boy, Ephraim, sitting in an apple tree, looking out at us. You could tell it was him by the dark eyes and the ruddy cheeks.

We took Mary Kay Billings by the arm and led her back down the stairs then, only to find that Rose had disappeared on us. “Who saw her last?” we asked each other, but no one had stayed with her. We had all gone running to Mary Kay when she called.

We searched the house from top to bottom, shouting for either of them to come to us. “Rose!” we called. “Jonas!” But all we found were buttons, and all we heard were the screams of dead mothers, and all we smelled was the house’s evil circling us like a dark cloud.

We were too late. Our chance had come and we had failed her. The house had taken her and Jonas before we could free them, and so we left, defeated, not bothering to close the door behind us. Let the wind have it, we thought, let the rain flood it, let it all fall down in ruin. For that was the last family that —— House would take, we decided at that very moment. Never again would we allow anyone to go near it.

If walls could talk

And they do talk, if you know how to listen. If you know how to pay attention to the way a roof sighs, or a window slides open with relief, or a step creaks its complaints out. If you know how to hear what those walls are saying, you will hear unbearable stories, stories you would never imagine possible, stories we would rather turn away from. But we cannot turn away, for they will only follow us. They will find us, one by one, alone and frightened, and tear us apart if we try to stop our ears up.

The Blank family is still with us. The Olivers, too. And those poor dead girls from Pittsburgh still linger, howling through the night as we try to sleep. And Jonas’s father, the gun cracking his life open like a pocket watch, to let all of the time spill out of him. And now Jonas, too. Wherever he is, we hope he’s restful. And Rose. Poor Rose. We don’t hear from Rose, though. She never talked to us. She only listened.

©2007 by Christopher Barzak. Originally published in Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing, edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christopher Barzak is the author of the Crawford Fantasy Award winning novel, One for Sorrow. His second book, The Love We Share Without Knowing, was a finalist for the Nebula and Tiptree Awards. His short fiction has appeared in a variety of venues, including Asimov’s Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy.  He grew up in rural Ohio, has lived in a southern California beach town, the capital of Michigan, and has taught English in suburban and rural communities outside of Tokyo, Japan, where he lived for two years. His most recent book is Wonders of the Invisible World. Currently he teaches fiction writing in the Northeast Ohio MFA program at Youngstown State University.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

Horn

Peter M. Ball | 22240 words

One

The phone call came at three a.m., about a half-hour after the body arrived at the morgue. It didn’t wake me. I don’t sleep well, not anymore. I used to work Homicide back when my life made sense and insomnia’s one of those bad habits I picked up on the job, right up there with the cigarettes and the tendency towards one glass of gin too many. It’s just another little twitch to remind me that my body doesn’t pay attention to the lies I tell myself about the past.

My name’s Miriam Aster. Ask most of the cops I used to work with and they’ll tell you that now I’m a freelance detective, an ice-hearted bitch, or a fucked-up lush who killed her own career. Pick one, they’re all right. I was busy feeling sorry for myself when the call came through. The phone went to voicemail and I ignored the insistent beep that told me they’d left a message. They rang back. Twice.

I watched my phone vibrate along with the ringtone, rattling across the bedside table. It should’ve been a relief to hear it—a three a.m. call meant a desperate client, and I knew the kind of money the desperate threw around. I spent two minutes pretending I didn’t care about paying rent before I rewarded their persistence and flipped the receiver open.

“Aster?” It was a man’s voice, surly and brusque; familiar enough for me to figure it for Tim Kesey. A bad feeling twisted into my stomach and stuck there like a fishhook. Kesey hadn’t exactly approved of me since I was booted off the Force. He hadn’t actually liked me since I slept with his sister, but you know the old saying: Some mistakes you regret, some mistakes you celebrate.

“Tim?” My voice snarled, anger seeping through.

“Aster, we need you.” Kesey sounded older, a little more worn around the edges and wary about talking to me. I double-checked the caller ID to be sure it was him. “Listen Aster, I know it’s late, but Heath’s insisting. We need to bring you in, off the books, as a consultant. You up for it?”

I groped for the rumpled soft pack of Camels by my bed, then realised my lighter had fallen off the bedside table. I sighed, letting the weariness creep into my voice. “It’s still early by my watch. Intrigue me.”

“We’ve got a body. A kid.” I could hear the buzz of a crowd filtering in from his side of the call, the momentary chirp of a police siren as a car pulled in. “Heath says we need you on it. Wake the fuck up.”

“I’m awake,” I said, and I was. The old instincts still triggered when someone mentioned a body, even if it’d been a decade since corpses were a part of my daily business. “How old’s the kid?”

“Ask Heath when you see him. If you’re on the job.” My searching fingers found a glass instead of the lighter. There was a shallow mouthful of gin settled in the base. I took the cigarette out of my mouth and drank instead, a precaution against the way Kesey’s tone was setting my teeth on edge. He was the kind of cop who was big on protocol but it wasn’t like him to be evasive. Half the reason he avoided calling me in was his dislike of ambiguity on his paperwork—the Department tended to list me as a consulting specialist and leave the details blank when they filled in the books.

“Sure, I’m on the job,” I said, “if you’re willing to pay the consulting fee. I don’t work cheap anymore. Not even for old friends.” Then I named an hourly rate, a big one. I expected Kesey to swear at me, fuck off, and let me get to sleep, but he didn’t. “Fine,” he said. “Come in on this, play it by the book for once, and log your time with the precinct. I’ll pay you any fee you want, Aster. Just get to the morgue. Fast. Got it?”

“You’re getting soft, Tim.”

“Don’t give me shit unless you’re here, doing the job. The money doesn’t matter, not this time.”

I figured that for bullshit. I’m not the kind of girl who believes anyone when they say that, least of all a bastard like Kesey. “The money always matters,” I said. “Tell Heath I’m on my way.”

I hung up and considered the bottle sitting on my bedside table. Decided against it and pulled on one of my better suits, a charcoal pinstripe over a black turtleneck instead of a button-down shirt. It’s my meeting money outfit. The one I break out to give an illusion of respectability around clients who were nervous about airing their dirty laundry with a stranger. Not the kind of look you needed when consulting on a murder case, but I figured what the hell—if Kesey’s got money to throw around, I might as well look the part while putting my two cents in.

• • • •

The early hours of the morning are a bad time to hit the city morgue, but I tend to hate it more than most. If you dig beneath the t-shirts and turtlenecks that make up my wardrobe, there’s a big Y-shaped scar running down my chest, the two arms starting beneath my collarbone, meeting the downward cut between my breasts. It’s a big, ugly thing, thick and purple; a lingering reminder of my first-hand experience with the autopsy slab. Don’t get too curious, there’s not much of a story behind it; once upon a time I fell in love and got involved in some trouble on her behalf. When I ended up dead, she pulled some strings and got me back. It seems like a good deal on the surface, but you don’t bounce back from something like that. My life turned to shit afterwards and my heart got broke. The rest just isn’t worth talking about.

I sat out front for a bit, putting it all off with another cigarette, watching the glum square of light spilling out of an office window on the top floor. The morgue and I have had plenty of chances to get reacquainted under better circumstances, but it hasn’t done much to help my nerves. Something bad was going down inside. I could feel that familiar itch on the back of my neck, the same one I always got when the weird shit started. I smoked, hoping the itch would go away, and wished I’d asked Kesey for more money.

I was looking for Heath Morrow, a morgue institution. Heath was bottom of the whole freaky pile when it came to the city coroners. He preferred working the late shift and had a fetish for the odd cases, which meant he called me in every chance he got. I should have hated Heath, but we got on okay. For all his ambient creepiness, he never assumed I was crazy, and he’d become a lot more bearable since I’d come back to life on his autopsy table. His tendency to talk to my chest vanished after he’d cut me open. Apparently it’s hard to objectify someone once you’ve had a scalpel poking around their innards.

I found him sitting in front of his computer, hunched over the keyboard like a wire-thin mannequin with too-long arms. He was transcribing autopsy notes in one window, fingers hammering the keys as he listened to the mp3 recording of his own voice explaining his actions. Another open window streamed grainy, grayscale porn from one of those poorly dubbed Russian sex sites, filling the computer speakers with tinny moans and the wet slap of flesh on flesh. One of the black-and-white nudes started groaning, heading for climax, and a second figure turned to smile at the camera. He had ridiculous fangs, probably fake. They hung down from his gums like cigarettes, but the blood trailing down the nude girl’s neck looked real enough for video; black ink on white flesh, it did the job. I rolled my eyes and coughed, just loud enough to warn Heath I was there. He bounced, startled. “So,” I said. “How’s things?”

He spun on his office chair, all smiles and crazy hair. “About fucking time,” Heath said. “We got a live one for you.” In Heath’s world, this passed as a joke, but I was too tired to offer a courtesy laugh. I gave him a beat to realise the comment had flopped, then asked the question of the hour: “Where’s Kesey?”

“Back at the crime scene.” Heath switched off the porn and his smile stretched out a little, showing off the bad teeth. “You know how he gets. Things are a little too weird here for his taste, plus, you know—” He nodded at me and spread his hands. “I kinda had to push to get you signed on to this one, Aster.”

He tossed a thin folder on the bench, started twisting in his office chair as I picked the paperwork up and flicked through. Sally Crown, age fourteen. Reported missing a year back, found facedown in a dumpster, wearing baby doll makeup and a plastic tiara, a little under an hour ago. Nothing in the file made it worth paying the kind of money I was asking. I looked up over the edge of the folder, flicking through the crime scene photos without really looking.

“You want to summarise, Heath?”

He shrugged. “External bruising suggests she’s been the victim of blunt trauma to the back of the head and shoulders, the kind of impact you’d get if you were dropped. No broken bones, so I’m assuming it was a short fall. If it was a fall. There’s some doubt there. It doesn’t quite add up. She’s got some fresher lesions on her scalp and neck, consistent with being dragged by the feet or scraped along the ground, probably posthumously.”

“And I’m here because?” Heath’s grin threatened to slit his face open.

“Mystery details,” he said. “I didn’t want to write them up until you had a chance to look at them, just in case and all that. Follow me.” He led me down the dark corridors into the bowels of the morgue, stepping into one of the sealed autopsy rooms that they used for infectious work. Heath hadn’t bothered to put the warning light on, but I worried just the same. The room was a frozen box that stank of formaldehyde and stale blood. Sally Crown was laid out on the table, street-kid thin and pale even before she’d become a corpse. Heath had her opened up already, ribs folded back like origami wings. My chest twinged in sympathy, my scars itchy. “Meet Sally,” Heath said. “She’s our little conundrum for the evening. Take a look.”

I snapped on the latex and looked. I’m no expert, but I’ve watched enough autopsies in real time to know the basics. Her abdomen was distended and firm to touch, her upper thighs and lower stomach marked with thin red lines. It wasn’t a good sign. I glanced over at Heath. “You find any trace evidence?”

Heath grabbed a clipboard, paging through his notes. “Powder beneath the fingernails, probably makeup. Some white fibres caught in the toenail, probably fur. Lots of body glitter, all over. Not just the face. We’re still waiting on the lab reports, but they take time. You know how it is.”

I grunted and the suspicion in my gut started to spread, flowering into real fear. I patted down my pockets until I found my cigarettes. I tapped one out and flipped it into my mouth. Heath started to say something, then thought better of it. “Let me guess,” I said, lighting up. “There’s evidence of bruising and internal bleeding in the vaginal cavity, injuries consistent with rape victims assaulted by a sharp object?”

Heath nodded, grinning. He was enjoying this a little too much. “It gets weirder.”

“I’ll bet.” I closed my eyes and went with my gut. “Scars on the hymen, like it’d healed up after it had been ripped. Glitter in the vaginal cavity? Glowing maggots in the uterus?”

Heath’s smile vanished. “Yeah,” he said. “How’d you know?”

“I’ve seen this before,” I said. Heath grabbed a pair of forceps and folded back the cut along the uterus. You could see the formless shapes within, tumbling and wiggling in the fleshy sack of the womb. The largest of them was already glowing, its sulphurous light disguising tiny arms and legs as they grew from the pearlescent blob. Another hour and it’d be done, a wisp of malicious magic in an inherited human form. “Fuck.” I breathed against the cigarette so I didn’t have to smell the noxious, sugary scent that rose up. “She’s been raped by a unicorn.”

Heath dropped his gaze into the squirming mess, frowning. “You can tell that from maggots?”

“A unicorn in heat is basically a big dick,” I said. “That’s why they have the horn. Fey, unicorns, the lot of them, they procreate using belief, and it’s fucking hard to avoid believing in something that’s sticking twelve inches of horn inside you.” Heath was still frowning at me, and I shrugged. I’ve been around, but I’m far from an expert. I shouldn’t have been his first port of call when it came to stuff like this and we both knew it.

“You’ve called her?” I asked, and Heath nodded. “She have anything to say?”

He didn’t need to ask who I was talking about. “She recommended calling you.”

“Figures.” I shook my head. “You’re going to have to burn the body. Fast.”

“Why?”

One of the glowing maggots started to crawl free of the mass, its tiny form shuddering as the mutation began. I swore and buried it beneath the tip of my cigarette, the smell of burning sugar mingling with the formaldehyde stink.

“Because an hour from now every one of those maggots will look like a six-inch human with wings,” I said. “And every single one of the fuckers is going to be hungry for blood.”

Two

I got coffee while Heath did the disposal, punching the buttons for black with two sugars into the vending machine in the foyer. My hands shook when I lifted the paper cup, the room eerie and silent once the coffee was brewed. Part of me was back in my shitty apartment, still woozy from an evening with too much gin and too little sleep. The rest of me was pretending I hadn’t just told Heath to commit another felony. Somewhere in the bowels of the building, he was feeding the corpse of Sally Crown into the morgue incinerator and hundreds of newborn fairies were dying. By the time he rejoined me, I’d emptied my first coffee into the wastepaper basket, undrunk, and started feeding change into the slot so I could order a second.

“I’ve got a percolator in the office,” he said, hovering by the door.

I shook my head. “I’ve drunk your coffee. It tastes like tar.”

“The machine stuff’s not much better.”

It wasn’t, but I wasn’t really after coffee. The solid clink of coins nesting inside the machine soothed the jagged edge of my nerves. I could imagine the parts inside, working to a coordinated rhythm to deliver my coffee and add the sweetener. Given enough time and access to a computer, I could find out how it worked on the internet, understand all the science and engineering behind it. The machine was rational, understandable, and real.

“I’ve got donuts, if you’re hungry,” Heath said.

I ignored him, busied myself with the fresh paper cup. “A unicorn.” The scar running down my chest ached, the pain dull and insistent. “Fuck, another one.”

“I called Kesey and passed along the good news. He threatened to fire me for destroying evidence in an ongoing investigation.”

“Had to be done,” I said, and Heath shrugged. There was a smudge of ash on the edge of his cheeks, a thin crease of black in the crevice of his nails. Stuff like this was done off the books, and Heath knew better than to leave the ashes where they could be found. “I was going to call Anya,” he said. “Keep her informed, since it’s her purview and all. Unless you want to do it?”

I shook my head. “I’m done with the fey. I’m working for you and Kesey,” I said. “I’m an advisor, nothing more. I came, I saw, I advised.”

Heath nodded. He was fresh to the job last time there was a unicorn loose in the city, a gangly kid straight out of medical school and obsessed with the dead. Good at what he did, sure, but kept in the dark more often than not. He never would have heard of Anya Titan if he hadn’t been on duty the night I turned up dead. She called him while he was doing the autopsy and suggested putting me back together and stitching me up before I came to. Anya frightened him, back then. I had a sneaking suspicion that these days he had her on speed dial.

“I gotta tell you, Heath, it worries me that you keep in touch with her.” He retreated into his office, and I trailed along behind. Heath busied himself with scrubbing the ash off his hands at the small sink in the corner. I angled myself to glare at his reflection. “Anya isn’t safe.”

“She’s safe enough as long as I don’t get too close, and she needed a new pair of hands after you were turfed out.” He soaped up, watching my reflection in the mirror above the sink. “House of secrets and all that. Even she needs a favour done every now and then.”

I shook my head to shut him up. I knew the drill, had recited it myself when I was the one keeping Anya’s secrets. That’s the way she worked; you kept secrets for the common good, traded favours with her because that’s the way it had to be. It’d cost me my job when I got in too deep, cost me even more than that in the long run. “The favours you end up doing for her are rarely the problem.”

I scratched at my chest, my smile grim. I told myself Heath was a big boy and tried to let the past go. “Fuck it, if we keep this up, I’m going to need a drink.”

“Scotch in my desk drawer,” Heath said. “Help yourself.”

If I was smart, I would have taken him up on the offer. “No, I’m working. You’re a bad influence, Heath Morrow, and it’s late. I’ll give you a list of people to chase down who can help you find the fairy horse; pass it on to Kesey.”

Heath turned, wiping long fingers on a grubby towel. Scrubbing had done little to remove the black ash under his fingernails. “You’re seriously going to sit this out?”

“I seriously am. I’ll send Tim the bill.”

Heath scrubbed a hand through his hair, refusing to meet my eyes. “Listen, before you clock off, Kesey called—he wants to see you.”

“He never wants to see me.”

“This time he does.” He gave me the address of the crime scene, grinning. “I guess hell froze over or something.”

His good humour faded the moment I checked the details and started swearing.

• • • •

They found Sally Crown in an alleyway off Carmody Street, her corpse discovered by a pair of beat cops who lucked onto it while chasing a purse-snatcher. Heath’s directions to the crime scene were vague, but I knew the area well enough to place it. It was a little dogleg laneway tucked behind a row of Asian restaurants and cut-price liquor stores. It smelt of rot and cardamom and cinnamon-sharp curry powder. The entire place gave me a bad feeling of déjà vu.

I showed my ID at the crowd control perimeter and walked in, found Kesey giving orders to a pack of uniforms. “Aster,” he said, nodding. He straightened up, doing his best to loom. I shuffled into his shadow and lit another cigarette. Kesey never changed, not where it counted. He just replaced the size and stiffness of the stick up his arse and put on a little bulk around the stomach every time they gave him a promotion. He glared at me. “Thanks for coming.”

“Good to see you again, Tim,” I said. “How’s your sister?” I watched what little goodwill he had left for me drain out of his face, his mouth twisting into a stiff sneer. I gave him a bland smile, sweet and innocent.

“The morgue called,” he said. “Heath was saying something about fairies.”

“Unicorn,” I told him. “You’ve got a problem with a unicorn. A big one.”

Kesey leaned over me. He had a mean face, the kind that accepted years of weathered abuse and locked itself into a permanent frown as an act of self-defence. I stood my ground; Kesey was a foot taller than I was and had plenty of extra weight to throw around, but we both knew who’d win if it came down to a fight. He believed in rules and I didn’t. That’d come in handy the last time he’d pushed the issue. “I hope this isn’t a joke, Aster,” he said. “This is a dead girl, and if I find out you’re stringing this along because you need to make rent—”

I held up a hand. “You called me, Tim. I can walk, if you want. I was ready to, back at the morgue. If not, I’ll give you what you paid for. You got unicorns, okay? White horse, big horn, nasty attitude. I guarantee you it’s worse than you’re thinking.” Kesey fumed. I ignored him and looked into the alley, watching the flashlights strobe as the cops searched for clues. “Is it safe to go in, or is forensics going to jump all over me?”

Kesey lifted the tape. “Just put out the cigarette before you stomp around. The entire scene’s been contaminated enough.” He rolled his eyes. “Beat cops.”

The smell hit me twenty feet down the alleyway, a subtle blend of hickory smoke and hothouse flowers. Anya’s smell, distinctive as a fingerprint. For a moment I felt like I’d stepped back ten years; cutting through the alley after an Indian meal, our bellies full of korma and our hands beginning to wander. I’m twenty-eight again, in love and full of promise, the youngest homicide detective in city history. Three steps later I was back in the present, years settling over me with the stench of rotting vegetables and week-old naan. Kesey looked at me, scowling, his mouth open and working. I couldn’t hear a damn thing he was saying. I shook the feeling off, focused on his face. “I missed that.”

Kesey gazed into the gloom of the alley, his flashlight a bright sheen as it worked its way across the garbage bags and chipped backdoors. He rolled his eyes and sighed. “Bad place for a kid to die,” he said. I gave him a grim smile through the gloom.

“She didn’t die here.” I fished a penlight out of my jacket pocket and clicked it on, joining the searchers as they scoured the grey concrete. “This is just the place they dumped her body.”

Kesey’s eyebrows shot up. “They?”

“They,” I said. I pointed my flashlight at the dumpster. It was squat and rusting, stained with red streaks in the light blue steel. I tried to imagine Sally Crown’s body inside it and shuddered. “No unicorn is dumping a body in a thing like that on its own.”

“How do you know?” Kesey frowned. I held both hands up in front of his face, waggling my thumbs in tandem.

“No thumbs,” I said. “It makes lifting lids hard, and the report said it was closed when the body was found.”

“Could have nudged it.” Kesey threw his hip against the steel, checking the weight. “Dump the body while it was open, then shove it until the lid fell.”

“Doesn’t wash either.” I rapped the side of the dumpster, listened to the muted bong it made. “Steel. Your average exile can handle it, if they have to, but the unicorn’s pure fey and they treat the shit like poison. Can’t touch anything that rusts; the sensation is supposed to be kinda like pushing your hand down on a razor blade.”

“Christ.” Kesey killed the light on his torch and leaned up against the wall, hand running through his thinning hair. “I’m getting too old for this bullshit, Aster. It was bad enough the first time around.” He said it calm, casual, but it was a baited hook and we both knew it. Kesey wasn’t big on trust at the best of times, and I’d violated his a dozen times back when I carried a badge.

“You could sink the file,” I said. “That’s what they do, most places. Write it off, bury it as a cold case, forget it ever happened.” Kesey shook his head, an angry gleam in his eyes. He was old school, in more ways than one, the kind of cop you always dream of when you make up something like “to protect and serve.” The way he figured, his city wasn’t going to run like most places, even if he didn’t always understand what happened inside the city limits. That’s the only reason he tolerated having me there, earning my fee as a special consultant by giving him the lowdown on things he didn’t want to believe in. I left him to his angst and started poking around the alley. “Have you found anything else out here? Fur, glitter, bone fragments. Anything but the body?”

“It’s clean.”

The itch came back, the same one I always got when magic was around. I closed my eyes and breathed in, tasted a lung full of hickory smoke, felt the ghost-memory of Anya’s hand working its way down the length of my spine. I gritted my teeth and ignored it. Kesey stepped towards the police line, right into a puddle of day-old curry sauce.

“Listen, Tim, I got a bad feeling about this one.” He looked at me, shaking curry off his foot. “I’m not saying I won’t work it, but I’m not doing it hands-on, okay? I’m here to advise, to give you what you need, and your boys handle it from there.”

“Right.” Kesey gave me a long look, calculating, and walked away. I followed him back to the police line, watching the puke-yellow footprints he left behind as he scraped his shoes across the bitumen. “Advise and let us do our jobs,” he said. “That’s the point of consulting, anyway, isn’t it? Just do the fucking job, Aster. I want this shit put away—get me a lead and point me in the right direction. Then you can tell your friends that it doesn’t ever fucking happen here again.”

I opened my mouth, ready to tell him they weren’t my fucking friends anymore, caught the whispering press of a phantom tongue writhing against mine. I started, surprised, and Kesey was gone before I recovered. Sunlight crept up over the horizon as I climbed into my car, still feeling the faint press of Anya’s kisses brushing against my lips.

Three

I spent about twenty minutes sitting in my car, watching the uniforms work crowd control as the early morning joggers and dog-walkers started wandering over to check out the commotion. I’ll never understand people who get up before five. My eyes hurt from too little sleep and my stomach churned with an oily fusion of bad coffee, gin and hunger. I should have gone home. I don’t make good decisions in the early hours of the morning and Kesey would’ve had my licence if he knew where I was going instead. I stalled for time, counting the number of day-glo jogging suits in the crowd. Three blue, one pink, two a sickly shade of yellow. Eventually I dug my phone out of my pocket and dialed the direct line to the morgue office.

“This is Morrow. Go.”

I took a deep breath. “Heath, I need her address.”

“Aster?” He sounded wary.

“She’s all over the goddamn crime scene, Heath. So many memories of Anya it could have been an episode of This is Your Life.”

“You told Kesey?”

“What do you think?” The silence on the end of the phone said everything that needed saying. My gut said putting Kesey and Anya together was a bad idea. Kesey’s approach to the weird stuff had always been complicated, and Anya had a way of making expediency sound more attractive than procedure. “Kesey wants the horse gone, he doesn’t care about the paper trail. I wouldn’t be here otherwise, yeah?”

“Maybe. Maybe you just want to see her. It could be wishful thinking; a unicorn shows up, you see all these signs—”

I smashed a fist into my steering wheel, pain sparking down my arm. “I don’t think about her, Heath,” I said, my voice cold and even. “Ever. Got it?”

“Whatever you say.” I could tell he was smirking. “She hasn’t moved; same address as before. I’ll send it over if you don’t remember.”

I hung up before he had a chance to become a complete idiot. I remembered how to get there well enough.

• • • •

The last time I’d been to Anya’s place, I was three days away from losing my badge and the spectre of internal affairs hovered over me while they investigated a shooting I’d written up as self-defence. It didn’t go well. We’d dated for three years, me doing favours for her the entire way, but the shooting was the first time I felt like I’d crossed a line. Maybe I’m wrong about that. When you ask questions for a living, you get used to truth being fluid.

Think of it this way: Most people get through their entire lives without encountering something big, something that rewrites their perceptions and tells them they’re not alone in the world. We call those people lucky. Some people brush up against the strangeness and disregard it as unimportant; you see them at parties, talking about how their flat is haunted or they think they saw some strange lights while they were cruising the highway at four in the morning. Humanity, as a species, is fucking aces at denial, and you can tell those people talking about their haunted flats don’t really believe what they saw. If they did, they wouldn’t be talking about it, bragging about it almost, like they wanted it to happen again.

Other people get touched by the strangeness, up close and personal. Usually they end up in morgues; the rest of us learn to cope. That’s why I worked with her. Anya-fucking-Titan was my first brush with strangeness, as up close and personal as it gets.

She lived in the kind of building estate agents described as full of bohemian charm, which largely meant it was an old thirties motel that’d become dilapidated enough to rent the rooms on the cheap permanent lease. Ten years back, it’d been full of junkies and heavy metal drummers, but Westbury had flourished and become the hotspot for young up-and-coming artists of all stripes. I guess it cut down on the number of drummers in the area, but there were still plenty of drugs. I climbed up the rickety stairs that linked the long halls full of revamped art deco doorframes. Anya was on the fifth floor, her door painted the same shade of candy-pale green as I remembered. I started wearing my knuckles thin on the woodwork. It was early, just coming up on five-thirty, but Anya wasn’t big on sleep. It took ten minutes of hammering before she came to let me in, but she was well-dressed and perfectly coifed as she opened the door. “Aster,” she said. “You look like shit.”

“Late night,” I told her, and we stood there for a while, watching one another and letting the silence stretch out. I drank in the details of her: the moor-wild hair, the mismatched eyes in two different shades of violet, the sharp points of her nose and eyebrows. I felt a sting in the part of my heart that never really healed after I left her, just scabbed over while I got on with things and tried not to pick at the wound. “It’s business,” I said. “And, to be honest, I’m too tired to fuck around with this. Let me in and give me coffee.”

Anya shrugged and stood aside. Her apartment was gaudy, but comfortable enough once you got used to the clashing colours. Antique furniture, vases filled with snapdragons and daisies, her coffee table overflowing with books and shiny baubles. Anya disappeared into the small kitchenette. I could hear water running as she filled up the jug. Everything smelt of her; hickory smoke and perfume.

“A unicorn killed a fourteen-year-old girl this morning,” I said. I didn’t get an answer. “Her name was Sally Crown, a runaway. Turns out it was in heat. There were spawn in her womb, but we got to them in time.” I looked up and Anya was standing at the doorway, watching me with her mismatched eyes.

“What’s that got to do with me?”

I quirked an eyebrow. “You’re kidding, right?”

She blinked and her eyes changed colour, the violet turning turquoise in the dim light. “This sounds like you’re on a case, Aster. You weren’t doing that anymore. No more chasing the fey, no more coming around here looking for favours, no more compromising the truth to keep people safe. Isn’t that what you told me?”

“Things change.”

“Yes,” Anya said. “They do. You stopped investigating murders and I stopped working as the gatekeeper when they closed the gate. I’m barely involved in anything these days, and I’m exiled now, remember? There are limits to what I can do, and we aren’t going back to the good old days.”

I snorted and reached over the coffee table, flipped one of her books so I could look at the photo on the back cover. Anya in a white suit and scarf, looking away from the camera and smiling. She hadn’t aged since I left her. “It’s a unicorn,” I said. “They gave the case to Kesey, and he knows just enough to know he hasn’t got a clue how to stop the damn thing, which means it comes down to me. They need someone to handle the weird shit and I got lumped with the job.”

Anya stared at me. She didn’t blink. I stamped down on a pang of guilt. “I didn’t get you exiled,” I said. “Fuck, Anya, I barely knew what that meant. I never wanted this job, you know; you were the one who started asking me for favours.”

“And you got what you asked for in return.”

“Bullshit.” Anger spiked deep in my stomach, boiling up out of the guilt. “I didn’t know.”

Anya shrugged and disappeared into the kitchen, giving me the time to compose myself. When she came back she was carrying two coffees on a tray, milk in its own jug and old-fashioned sugar cubes piled up on a plate. She put it down and curled up on the armchair, legs tucked beneath her. “You wanted it,” she said. “We needed someone with talent and connections to keep things secret; the job was there for the taking and you showed up to take it, whether you know that or not. You’ll have to accept that, one of these days. You were made for this, Miriam Aster, the fey and everything else. You adapted too well for it to be otherwise.” She smiled at me, her lips tight. My coffee cup hovered around my chin as I wondered whether I should be throwing the hot liquid in her face. I didn’t; Anya always had good coffee and I needed the kick more than I needed petty satisfaction.

“I don’t want to rehash the past,” I said. “I just need some information. You had fingerprints all over that crime scene.”

“Fingerprints?” She smiled, cocky, and fluttered her fingers. “We don’t leave prints, remember?”

“You know what I mean.” I scratched the back of my neck and sniffed, watching her reaction. She sipped her coffee.

“I can’t help you on this one, Aster.”

“Right.” I put the coffee cup down, fighting the temptation to really let loose. “Anya Titan, fairy scholar extraordinaire, queen in fucking exile, the woman who closed the great gate to Faerie. Are you really telling me you don’t know anything?”

“There are other scholars,” she said. She looked away, just like the photo on her dust jacket. “And there are others who could tell you what you need to know.”

“Yeah, there are,” I said. “But I know you, you’re the best, and you still fucking owe me a favour. I’m not looking to cut a new deal here, Anya. Your people don’t give anything without taking something in return, and I’m sick of playing that game. That’s why I walked, remember?”

I fidgeted in the awkward silence that followed. Anya didn’t. “There are rules,” she said. “Even for us, even after we leave it behind. That means there are consequences, just like last time.” She looked at me with clear, violet eyes; those changeling eyes that were green as emeralds when we first met, gray as gunmetal during the years we spent together. “Are you ready for that, Aster? Is it really that important?”

“I’ve lived through consequences before.” I scratched at my chest, just below the collar. Her blush was like watching the sun rise. “There were ghost-memories, Anya, clear as anything. One minute I’m looking through a crime scene and then all I can see is you and me together. I trust that, and it’s your fault I trust that. If you don’t want to help me, then I’m fairly certain someone else is setting it up. Someone wanted me to come here, and it sure as hell wasn’t me.”

“Talk to one of the others.” She stood, headed for her bureau. I watched her pull a pencil out of a drawer and go searching for some paper. “I can give you a list. Reputable academics, other exiles with a grudge, the usual type you’ll need.”

“I’m still a virgin,” I said, keeping my voice low. Anya froze, turned, and a small smile crept across her face.

“I seem to remember that part a little differently,” she said. She gave me a look and I felt the quick thrill of a younger woman’s desire. I scowled at her until the smile faded. “Untouched by man,” I said. “That’s what you always told me, and fucked up and archaic as the definition is, that’s all it takes when dealing with your kind. I’m still a virgin, Anya. In every way that counts to your folk, I’m still considered pure. I could compel you, if I wanted to. You taught me that.”

“And you’d do it?”

I shrugged. “If that’s what it takes. She was just a girl. She deserved better than a gutful of fairy spawn and a long sleep in a dumpster. I don’t have time to wait for the white horse to knock up some other kid, and I can’t risk a plague of pureblood fey swarming across the city. So yeah, I’d compel you, if it came down to that.”

I waited, letting the silence work on her. Eventually she nodded. “Hobb,” she said. “The gates closed, but there are back ways, secret ways through. He’s the only one going back and forth these days, the only one who’d even have access to a unicorn. Go find him and compel him to get your answers.”

I stood up and drained my mug. “Thanks for the coffee,” I said. Anya didn’t look at me, just watched the black grounds floating across the surface of her untouched drink. I headed for the door and let myself out. She came after me while I lingered in the hall. “Aster,” she said. I stopped walking, but I didn’t turn around. “If you need me,” Anya said. She tripped over the rest of the words, took a deep breath and forced them out. “Do what you need to do, okay. For old times’ sake, for that last favour, I’ve got your back on this one.”

My stomach went cold, but I nodded. I went down to my car and took a couple of long, deep breaths before I started it up.

Four

In theory I was going home to sleep; the job should have been over once I got Kesey his lead. I phoned through to his desk at the precinct, rattled off Hobb’s description and a list of known haunts while Kesey took notes on the other end. When I was done I poured myself a fresh gin and nursed it in bed, still wearing my suit as I crawled under the covers. Nothing I’d done since telling Heath to burn Sally Crown’s corpse was going to do a damn thing to stop the unicorn—Kesey would put out a BOLO on Hobb, setting the uniforms on the search for guys matching his description while Homicide tried to chase down a paper trail. The fact that Hobb barely left one wouldn’t matter to Tim; it’s what you did when you were looking for suspects, fey or no fey. Maybe they’d get lucky and find him before sunset, but odds were they didn’t have the resources to hold him. My gut said another body would turn up full of spawn before anyone on the Force got the job done. I knew Hobb, had worked with him a couple of times doing favours for Anya, had worked against him as many times yet. It was going to take more than cops on the lookout and good luck to catch up with him.

It had barely gone six-thirty when I rolled out of bed and geared up, ditching the suit for something comfortable and swapping out the steel caps for sneakers. Heavy boots made a great impression when standing my ground against someone like Kesey, but this time I planned on running from any trouble. I could handle myself, if it came to it, but when you’re working alone and without backup, discretion is always the smarter fucking choice. I loaded up on the usual barter tools—spare cash, hipflasks, a pair of brass knuckles—and unlocked the safe in the bottom drawer where I kept the revolver.

Do a search of my flat and you’ll find plenty of guns, all of them neatly locked away despite the message sent by the piles of clothes and dirty dishes. Working Homicide makes you nervous at the best of times, and nothing I’d seen since the days I left the Force did anything to dissuade me when it came to being armed.

I had a lot of guns, but there was only one revolver, an archaic chunk of blue metal with as few moving parts as I could get away with and still have it fire a bullet. There was nothing special about the gun, but I understood how it worked. Clean parts, a basic mechanism; science I could understand. Ten years back I’d trained with it every week, getting used to the heavy kick and the strange pull of the custom ammo that I’d commissioned two cities over so it was less likely to be traced. Since then, it’d been locked away, a private insurance policy I assumed I’d never use again.

Outside, the city was winding into action, sunrise drawing out the first signs of traffic. I got changed in my cramped bathroom, ignoring the scars when I looked into the mirror. Jeans, a black t-shirt, my favourite jacket.

“You really going to do this?” The jacket was bulky, the fabric heavy enough to swamp my figure and give the illusion of mass across the shoulders. It was a habit I’d picked up when I still worked Homicide, fighting the macho pricks in my department to get cases and respect. It was Kesey who taught me the trick after I first got out of uniform; mass is a weapon when you’re dealing with the old boys club, a threat you can throw around if you’ve got the guts or the chops to back it up. It wasn’t a pretty look, but it did the job. I slid the revolver into a pocket, checked the bulge to make sure it wasn’t too obvious. I stared at my reflection. “Right, then.”

I left.

• • • •

The stone cold truth about fey is this: They’re a race of goddamned parasites. I can list you a whole mess of reasons why I don’t like getting involved in their business, some of which are personal and some common sense, but that’s the reason that sits at the heart of all the others. Once upon a time, they fed on belief, and there’s enough people out there with Tinkerbell on their t-shirts to make me think they still do. But a fey cut off from Faerie is left with limited options. Exiled fey tend to run low on juice unless they’re drawing power from something else; some emotion that’s raw and human and easy to soak in.

Hobb liked older women, single and a little desperate. Knowing his habits made him easier to track, and I’d seen his charm in action enough times that I knew what to look for. I wasn’t immune, but I could put a bullet in his arm the moment he tried something and that’d work well enough.

The rain hit as I drove down to Chalke Street. It was one of those places that didn’t look right during daylight, all those dull and dead neon lights hanging forlornly over the footpath. I pulled up in an empty space and sat for a while, the rain splattering the windshield. Just coming up on breakfast and the street was still crowded, the last remnants of the dusk-to-dawn party kids stumbling out of the clubs and heading off into the dreary morning. Most of them were happy to stumble through the downpour, dancing in the streets as the rain bounced off the pavement. I lit a cigarette and waited, not bothering to be inconspicuous; I drove a Chrysler Sigma I’d picked up cheap, a rusting car built around hard, black angles that stood out against the wet light of morning. I turned the stereo off and listened to the rain rattling on the roof.

Hobb appeared right on nine o’clock, splashing down the footpath with a woman nestled under his arm. She was middle-aged and crumpled, the sharp cut of her business suit turned shabby by the rain and the night of carousing with a hobgoblin. He looked like one of those guys you see from time to time, too damned ugly to have landed even a rumpled woman like her, but somehow capable of making it work. You could write it off as confidence, but it took more than that. Hobb was a twisted stump of a man with a lecher’s grin and a teenager’s hubris. He sang as he walked, swinging a wine bottle in his free hand. His date was holding him upright, sagging a little under his weight. I wound down the window.

“Hobb.” My voice wasn’t loud enough to carry through the rain, but Hobb’s head snapped sideways regardless. His beady little eyes locked onto the car, glinted red and green as he blinked against the water. His date stumbled as he halted. The wine bottle shattered against the concrete.

“Miriam Aster, I’ll-be-fucking-damned,” Hobb said. He untangled himself and crept forward, leaning over to stare through the open window. He took care to hover, not touching the car door. Rainwater ran down his face, causing the pockmarks to gleam. “I thought we were done with you. Should have known we weren’t that lucky.” I dug a cheap, plastic hipflask out of my jacket pocket and waved it in his face. Hobb licked his lips, fingers flexing. “What do you want, Aster? It’s raining, and I’ve got places to be.”

He flicked a glance over his shoulder, towards the giggling woman, and I shook my head. “Ditch the girl, Hobb. You and I need to talk.” Hobb sneered, giving me an eyeful of the sharp teeth he hid behind his lips. I gave him a cold smile for his effort. “Now.”

“Bitch,” he said, but staggered over to the girl and whispered something into her ear. I watched her body language change, stiffening, her eyes glazing over like he’d just fed her a roofie. Hobb staggered around to the far side of the car. I opened the door and he slumped into the passenger seat. “It’s been a long time, Aster. You going to give me that flask or what?”

I flipped the hipflask into his lap and watched him scramble at it, gulping the bourbon in a long, smooth motion. He finished with a satisfied sigh, licking his lips with a pale tongue that reminded me of a slug. “So, what the fuck do you want?”

“Information,” I said. “There’s a unicorn on the loose, in heat and dangerous. It’s already killed its first virgin.” Hobb flashed me the teeth again, passing the flask back.

“Bully for the white horse,” he said. “Nothing to do with me, though. I’m not responsible, not this time.”

“Bullshit.” Hobb cocked his head to one side and stared at me, examining me with mismatched eyes; one blue, one grey, both too large for his squashed features. His hand strayed for the doorhandle, skittered along the metal handle. He was cornered and he knew it. “People have pointed me at you,” I said, “and I’ll compel you if I have to.”

Hobb laughed. “You’ve been out of the game too long, Aster. No one compels me, remember? ’Specially not a two-bit ex-cop who retains her virginity on a technicality. It’s a loophole, m’dear, and I’m the master of loopholes. You can compel me all you want, but it ain’t gonna do a damn shit. Perhaps you should go chat with Her Majesty again, ask her to point fingers in another direction. Hell, maybe you should just ask her for a target, get her vengeance all fired up and go marching off into the night. You liked being her instrument last time, gunning someone down on her say-so. Maybe you liked it a little too much?” I flinched and Hobb belched. The car filled with a stench like rotting fish. “I bet that hurt, going to see her, after all the trouble she caused. Did she tell you she loved you again?” His laughter turned into a cackle, a horrid sound that echoed above than the rain-rattle on the roof. I pulled the revolver out of my right pocket and pointed it at him. His nostrils flared as he caught the scent, the laughter going dead as his eyes went wide.

“Raw iron,” I said. My voice was calm. “They’ll hurt like hell, even if it isn’t enough to kill you. Tell me about the unicorn, Hobb.”

“I don’t know nothing.” Words tumbled out of his mouth, rushing after one another as his eyes locked onto the gun barrel. “Honest, Aster, I didn’t do anything. I heard some rumours that folks were selling the horn-horses, but that’s it. I don’t know who they’re selling to, and I don’t know who did the selling.” He whimpered and shrank back against the car door, leapt forward again as the metal bit into him. His eyes watered. I watched him for a long time, then nodded and put the gun away. Hobb started clawing for the door handle.

“If you’re lying,” I said.

“I’m not,” Hobb said. “I swear, Aster. I swear.” I leaned over and opened the car door. Hobb scrambled into the rain, leaving his date behind as he disappeared into the downpour.

I gave him a twenty count and went after him. You spend enough time around fey, even exiles like Hobb and Anya, and you get used to hearing half-truths and outright lies every time they open their mouths. You don’t question a guy like Hobb to get answers, you question him to get him panicking and hope he leads you somewhere useful. Years on the Force had taught me that much, and working with Hobb had proved its value more than once. I watched him scurry down the street, fleeing into the wet dawn like a frightened deer. I abandoned the car and followed him on foot. Hobb was short and fast, graceful in a way that didn’t fit his twisted frame. I lumbered along behind him, wincing every time I heard the wet slap of my sneakers on the pavement.

Tailing someone properly takes two people and it works better if the guy you’re following doesn’t know you. I was alone and Hobb could ID me on sight; in theory, it should’ve been difficult to tail him, but whether you’re a fairy or not, a drunk is still a drunk. If you scare them, they drink to cope. Hobb was half-gone when we started, kept drinking as we walked. I stayed a few blocks back, kept him in sight as he stumbled his way towards a strip club on the river.

It was one of those hole-in-the-wall places, access via a cramped alley with loose bricks in the wall and bad lighting. He knocked for maybe a minute before the door swung open and a solid lump of bouncer emerged. I wasn’t close enough to hear the conversation, but the buzz of Hobb’s quick sentences echoed for a moment before he disappeared inside.

I retreated to a bus stop across the street, watched the flashing neon sign bolted into the brickwork. It lost impact in the daylight, but it still had a dim glow in the shadows of the alleyway. I snapped a shot of the sign with the camera in my phone: The Hot House. I knew the place. It was bad news, but it wasn’t usually a hangout for guys like Hobb. I contemplated calling Kesey in, doing it by the book, but suspicion didn’t make for a search warrant and Hobb didn’t exactly exist in city records anyway. I was still in the process of deciding my next move when someone stepped behind me and pressed a gun into my back.

“Waiting for a bus, miss?” It was a soft, slithering kind of voice, deadly as a sniper-shot.

“Waiting for a friend, actually.”

A hand clamped down on my shoulder, pulling me upwards. The gun barrel in my back didn’t move. “Maybe he’s inside,” the voice said. The hand on my shoulder drifted down to my jacket pocket, removing the revolver. “You and me, we should take a look.”

He pushed, urging me forward. I went; it seemed safer than arguing.

Five

It was a short walk down the alleyway and the gun never wavered. If the bouncers noticed me coming up to the entrance at gunpoint they didn’t make a show of it. We were waved through, quick and easy, the quiet menace of the gunman always behind my right shoulder.

The Hot House had a morning shift, but it wasn’t the kind of place that drew a large crowd, just a small group of dedicated perverts. The club smelt of desperation, a sick reek of stale sweat and whisky that seemed perverse given the early hour. There was a teenage girl on stage, throwing herself about to a disco beat and staring down the audience with a bored expression that seemed to dare the patrons to watch her. I spotted a handful of dockworkers: fresh, big men looking for a place to have a stiff drink and wind down after work before heading home to crash. The rest of the patrons were the same fringe-dwelling nightmares you find lingering in any bar that’s open after sunrise. The gun at my back disappeared, but the hand clamped down on my shoulder clawed me hard enough to leave a bruise.

“Sit,” the voice said, and pushed me down onto a bar stool next to a black plastic table. “Hands where we can see them, okay?” I put both hands on the tabletop. It was sticky and unpleasant. The soft voice sat down next to me, one hand disappearing into a menacingly full pocket. He was thin and sharp, like a whip crack given form. “Call me Slick,” he said, raising his voice just loud enough to compete with the thump of the music. “I’ll be your babysitter til Mister Drabble is done talking to your friend.”

He nodded to the far side of the room where Hobb sat talking to a man in a black suit, a cadaverous rake with oversized eyes that threatened to pop out of his face as he stared at the stage show. Hobb sat next to him, drink in hand, talking fast as Mister Drabble watched the show. Drabble was flanked by a bodyguard, a slab of meat built for some serious looming. Hobb kept throwing nervous glances at the meat-slab, flinching whenever he tossed a glare in my direction. Drabble looked bored. I stared at him, hoping for some sign that he was fey, but Drabble and his boys seemed dangerously mundane.

“Shouldn’t stare,” Slick hissed. “It makes Mister Drabble nervous.” His eyes flicked over me, lingering on my chest. They narrowed to dangerous slits and he smiled. “You have pretty hair. You should grow it out. It’d make you look like a lady instead of a dyke.”

I didn’t dignify that with a response, and Slick let loose a tinny laugh. The music changed, picking up pace. The girl onstage finished her dance and another one came out, dressed up like a schoolgirl with braces on her teeth. Mister Drabble held up a hand to stop Hobb’s rambling and nodded to his bodyguard. The slab of meat lumbered over. He moved like a boxer that’d taken a couple of shots too many, his right lip busted open and already starting to crust. “Boss’ll see you,” he slurred, and helped Slick get me to my feet. Together they hustled me towards Drabble’s table, sat me down, and held me in place while Drabble ignored my presence. Hobb gave me a smug smile, leaned across and whispered in my ear. “Fuck you, Aster. You shoulda known better than to try following me.”

Drabble hissed, soft and sharp, and Hobb drew back, cowed into submission. That wasn’t a good sign. Slick turned his attention to Hobb, giving him the evil eye. Drabble’s attention was locked on the schoolgirl, ignoring all of us. It wasn’t until the music thumped to a halt and she skipped offstage that he turned to face me, his leer drooping.

“Well, what are we doing with you?” He had a high voice, a whiner’s voice. “You’re too old to work here, love, and too plain to do well in any of my other places. That doesn’t leave us with too many options.” He smiled, showing off a mouth full of teeth straight out of a soap opera, white and perfect. His breath stank of peppermint.

“I already have a job,” I said. “I’m looking for a unicorn.”

Drabble laughed. “Well, you won’t find one here, love,” he said. “But maybe we could find you a horn or two, if you’re willing to give the boys a show.” He grinned a little, rallying behind the joke as he looked me over. “Then again, maybe not.”

“Not interested in horn,” I told him. “Not unless it’s attached to the horse.”

Drabble’s eyes narrowed, dangerous and angry. “So what’s your name, love?”

“Aster,” I said. “Freelance detective.”

“Not what Hobb here says. He says you’re a cop. Told us all about you.”

“Used to be, when Hobb and I first met,” I shrugged. “But that was then. Freelance investigation pays better.”

Hobb snickered, leaning forward to whisper in Mister Drabble’s ear. Drabble’s smile was all thick teeth and minty menace. “Freelance is dangerous work, isn’t it? No backup, no check-ins, no law to protect you if things go wrong. Perhaps you should just fuck off, used-to-be-a-cop Aster, and forget all this bullshit they got you looking into. Not worth it, yeah? You’re better off taking another job.”

I looked around the empty club, the small crowd and the skeleton staff, a new girl doing a half-hearted bump and grind on stage. “’Fraid I can’t,” I said. “There’s a unicorn in heat out there. Hobb knows what that means, but I’m guessing he hasn’t told you. It isn’t pretty, Drabble. Fuck it, it’s more trouble than you can handle.”

I was pressing buttons, trying to get him riled up. Drabble didn’t take the bait. “I said fuck off, love. I can get Vin and Slick to kick you out, if that makes it easier. Look elsewhere for your white horse, and leave Mister Hobb out of your investigation. Do you understand me, Miss Aster?”

I stood up, keeping my hands visible. Hobb grinned at me, smug. “Obviously we had a misunderstanding,” I said. “Sorry for the inconvenience.” I started towards the door. Vin and Slick dropped into position beside me, hands on my shoulders. It was smart positioning, professional; get behind someone and they can bolt for freedom, but they closed down my angles and left me nowhere to go except the way they wanted me too.

They didn’t want me going out the front door, and I knew right then that there was going to be trouble.

• • • •

They pressed me against the door of a black Ford Falcon while Vin patted me down, his busted lip twisting into a smirk whenever he started pushing his hands somewhere private. He had a boxer’s hands for sure, great paws with malformed knuckles, large enough to squish my head like a grape. He wasn’t built to do anything gently; by the time he hustled me into the back seat I was covered in bruises.

I didn’t recognise the driver, but Slick sat in the passenger seat, a pomaded madman in a cheap suit who grinned as Vin manhandled me. Slick held a Beretta in a loose grip, the steel black and oily against the pale pink of his manicured hands. He had my revolver in his other hand, flipped it open and emptied a bullet into his palm. He gave it a quick sniff, grinning. I sat still, hands on my lap, waiting for them to give me a move I could make without ending up dead. Vin handed my ID over and Slick read the details as the Ford started and drifted along the dock roads, cruising like we weren’t really going anywhere important.

“Interesting ammo,” he said, eyes flicking over my license. “Wouldn’t have thought of that, me.”

“I like to be prepared,” I said. A smile tugged at the edges of his mouth. He folded my ID back into the wallet and tossed it into my lap.

“Just like a fucking boy scout,” he said. “Would have cost you a bundle, getting them done up like that, making sure they work. Custom job. Very pretty. D’ya mind if I keep them?”

“I’d prefer to have them back,” I said. “As you said, they cost a bundle. I’d hate to fork out that much cash again.” Vin coughed, choking on his laughter. Slick gave me a dirty grin, spun the chamber on my revolver and flicked his wrist a second later, clicking it into place. “Mister Drabble wants you dead,” he said. “The runt says killing you is a mistake. That you’ve got friends who can make life miserable.”

“Maybe,” I said. “I used to be a cop and all. Someone on the Force still likes me.”

“The runt ain’t talking about friends on the Force,” Slick said. “The runt is talkin’ about special friends, friends like him. Says they’ll raise your ghost and send it after us if we kill you, all death curses and vengeance.”

“He could have a point, there,” I said. “I’ve been dead once before, after all.”

Slick pushed at the collar of my t-shirt with the barrel of his gun, stretched it far enough to see the scar. “So the runt said.”

The car took a tight corner, wheels hissing on the wet road. The sharp turn tipped Slick off-balance and he dropped the gun down as he steadied himself. I let the momentum carry me sidewise, the point of my elbow caught Vin in the ribs. He grunted, sprawling against the door as my weight crashed into him. As moves go, it was pretty weak, but I wasn’t going to have any other opportunities.

I pushed upright, one hand reaching for the door, and came eye-to-barrel with Slick’s gun. I blinked and forced myself to look past the gun, to stare Slick down. He had brown eyes, both of them the same shade.

“I like to be prepared too,” Slick said. “Remember that.”

Vin’s chest was heaving as he tried to breath again, his big body shaking against the door. Slick stared me down, the gun never wavering. “Kill you or don’t kill you,” he said. “I don’t much care either way, Miriam Aster, but I’m a pragmatist at heart. The boss gives me the job and I do it, no questions, no complaints. If you come back, well, I guess that just means we have to keep on killing you, again and again, until it takes.” He pulled back on the pistol, chambering a round. The Ford pulled up on the riverbank, a deserted car park surrounded by warehouses. Slick weighed my revolver in his off hand, as though trying to make up his mind which to use. “Iron bullets,” he said, shaking his head. “Really, it’s like you think you’re hunting werewolves.”

“Silver,” I said. Slick cocked his head. “It’s silver for werewolves.”

Slicks eyes reduced to slits. “Funny thing, you having bullets like this. The runt said you used to work with him, playing nice with the fairies. Said that you used to bump uglies with some kind of queen.”

“Used to. Past tense,” I said. “She wasn’t a queen then, either.”

That earned me a smile that gave me chills. “Runt said I should check that, if I was gonna kill you,” Slick said. He shook his head, adopting a rueful expression with all the sincerity of a bad actor. “You could have been a nice looking woman. Pity.”

Vin pushed me out of the car and lined me up on the riverbank. It was a short drop to the rocky shore and the dark water. In the end Slick went with his Berretta. I heard the sharp crack, the sting of something hitting me right under the collar. I was still conscious enough to hear the second shot, but I was gone before the pain registered, disappearing into the white light and the soothing calm.

I fell back, twisting. I don’t remember hitting the ground.

Six

I know what it’s like to be dead, and I’m not a fan of the experience. The saving grace is that you don’t remember all of it afterwards, just little bits and pieces that come back to you in flashes. You’re dead, you know you’re dead, but it feels like a dream. There’s a bullet hole in your chest and nothing hurts, which is how you can tell it’s for real. You’re dead, kind of; maybe not quite dead enough to go wherever you’re supposed to, but it’s close enough for horseshoes. Close enough for the morgue and a scalpel and the bag-and-tag of your organs.

The bits that I remember go something like this:

I’m back at the club where we first met, a hole-in-the-wall that smells of cigarette smoke and beer. I smell her before I see her, sweet and tender as honeysuckle. She’s tall and proud. Her eyes don’t match. She’s a femme. Not my type, not really, but it’s enough to get me interested. She wasn’t Anya-fucking-Titan then, not yet. She walks towards me and sits down. She asks me for my name. I tell her. She buys me a drink. I buy one for her. I’m still a uniform, just starting to angle for detective. She seems interested in my job. A few hours later she lets me take her home.

I’m walking down Carmody Street with my arm around Anya; six months since our first date and everything’s going good. We’re celebrating my promotion, talking and laughing, our bellies full of korma and beer, my fingers slowly inching their way towards the nape of her neck. Anya plays with my hair, boy-short and spiked, a little too extreme for my colleagues on the Force. “I love you,” she whispers. I shake my head. “No, you don’t,” I tell her. “Loving me is a very bad idea.” And I’m right, we both know I’m right, but sometimes the brain doesn’t pass those messages on and my body is young and stupid and too in love to care. When Anya kisses me, I kiss back. She hooks an arm around the small of my back. I purr. She pulls my hand to hers, holding it against the curve of my belly. She holds tight, possessive, like I’m going to run away. We cut down the alleyway behind the Indian restaurant. “You shouldn’t be a cop,” Anya says. “It’s dangerous; there are dangerous people out there, and worse things besides.” We’re in the alley. We find the corpse of Sally Crown, facedown in the dumpster, her blue-white body covered with fairy dust and her broken tiara shattered against the concrete. “I can keep you safe,” Anya says. “If you say you love me, I can keep you safe from harm.”

That last time we saw each other, on the steps of her apartment. I’ve shot a man, killed him, on Anya’s say-so, her anger ringing in my ears as I pulled the trigger. She tells me she loves me. It’s the last time I let her do that. I’m burned out and afraid. My career is over. I don’t want to do favours for her anymore.

“I don’t want to love you,” I tell her. I’m lying through my teeth.

“That doesn’t mean you don’t,” Anya says.

“It doesn’t mean that I do either.”

Anya smiles. Her eyes sparkle. “That’s close enough.”

She kisses me again. She tastes like lavender. “I can help,” she tells me. “Let me help, okay?”

There’s blood spilling out of my shoulder wound. Even more spilling out of the hole in my chest.

• • • •

I woke up in the morgue, lying flat on Heath’s autopsy table. My chest ached, the kind of pain that comes with broken ribs and displaced organs. My shoulder ached, a purple mess, flesh battered like a heavyweight’s punching bag and a fresh bullet scar just below the collarbone. Heath hovered beside the table, reading a magazine, long hair dangling over his eyes. I moaned and he raised an eyebrow. “You went to see her again, didn’t you?” The sticky sensation of drying blood and river water clung to me despite the pre-autopsy clean up. I breathed in, my first real breath in a few hours, and I caught Anya’s scent in the air. It felt good to breathe, normal. Heath let out a short sigh of relief. “Fuck, Aster. Kesey’s going to be pissed.”

“Time?” My voice was an urgent mouse-squeak, still weak and raw. “How long?”

“About a day.” Heath’s face appeared in my field of vision, a little blurry around the edges. “You were the only job tonight, if that’s what you’re wondering. No need for the furnace. Not yet.”

I sat up, twisting my shoulder to stretch out some of the pain. Keith had draped me in a spare shirt from his office, left it dangling open and undone. My numb fingers fumbled with the plastic buttons, trying to close it up. Eventually I gave up; there were stitches in my chest again, so it wasn’t like I was hiding anything. Modesty seemed stupid after Heath had removed and weighed my lungs. “Another fucking autopsy?”

My stomach rolled. The novelty of breathing wore off and I noticed how my lungs hurt. I coughed up dry blood, spat it into a tray Heath shoved in front of me. He put it down amongst the scalpels, secateurs, and rib-spreaders. I wiped my mouth with the back of my sleeve. Heath threw me a jacket and I pulled it on, shivering.

“I didn’t think you were coming back from this one.” Heath shook a steel tray and two bullets rattled inside it. “And I wanted the bullets.”

“Forceps,” I croaked. The stitches in my chest stung, but they hurt far less than they should have done. I was healing fast, but that would end soon enough. “Pull them out like I’m an injured person.”

“It’s not like you’ll notice another scar.”

“I notice the first one, Heath. Trust me, I’ll notice a second.”

“She didn’t call to tell me.” He looked away, embarrassed. “Hell, Miriam, I didn’t think she still had the power to do something like this. Not without, you know . . .”

“I don’t love her.”

“You’re back from the dead,” Heath said. “She’s an exile. She doesn’t have that kind of power anymore, not on her own.”

“We’re taking her word on that,” I said. I lay back on the slab, closing my eyes. My head hurt. “I don’t love her, Heath. Not anymore.”

“Yet here you are.” He handed me a cigarette and lit it. “So. Kesey?”

“I was thinking we didn’t need to tell him.”

“You were shot.” Heath rolled his eyes, slapping both hands on the slab. “Hell, you were DOA, Aster. Homicide cops tend to hear about that, and you know he was waiting for this the moment you signed up for the case.”

“Kesey doesn’t want to know,” I said. “You wouldn’t have a job if he did. Neither would I.”

“Even Kesey has limits.”

That was true enough, and I figured we were coming up against them fast. “Get the slugs to the lab.” My hands were steadier, so I tried my shirt again. “They come from a nine millimetre carried by an arsehole named Slick, works for some big shot who runs a club by the river—The Hot House—a guy named Drabble. It’ll keep Kesey distracted.”

“The strip joint?” Heath’s grin went snarky. “I thought you were looking for a unicorn.”

“Fuck you too,” I said. I could stand up, but my legs were shaky. Heath had to help me through the first few steps. I lit a second cigarette, trying to drown out the taste of being dead. “I need a drink,” I said. “What you got?”

“Coffee, tea, half a bottle of scotch, and some beer.”

“That’ll do for starters,” I said. “Start with the tar and use the scotch for flavour. We’ll get to the beer soon enough.”

We drank. Whatever magic had me back together after Heath had cut me open left me feeling anxious, and the whisky took the edge off the discomfort of my internal organs settling back into their proper places. When Heath suggested going home and getting some sleep, I sent him out for more beer instead. “Death’s sobering,” I told him. “I’m drinking my way back to normalcy.”

He wasn’t happy about it, but he went. I marked it up as an improvement. The last time I died, he’d insisted on checking me into a hospital and the questions the doctors asked got awkward. The morgue was empty in his absence, the cold room devoid of new deliveries. It made me nervous. A unicorn in heat wasn’t stopping at one victim, so there’d be another body showing up before the night was over. I thought about ringing Anya and decided against it. It was bad enough, owing her a favour this big again. I didn’t want to talk about it. Instead I made a list of the various ways I was going to take last night out on Hobb’s hide when I found him.

By the time Heath came back, I was puking up blood, making a mess of the sink in his office, and clawing at the stitches in my chest. He made a point of ignoring the tears, just cleaned me up and handed me a fresh beer. “You should get some sleep,” he said. “Sooner or later.”

I didn’t much feel like it. “Last time I didn’t lie down for three days. Hell, I barely even sleep anymore. Bad dreams.”

“You can’t just wait around for a body, Aster. And you can’t run on booze and fumes.”

“I’m not. I’m thinking.” I drank my beer. “On a scale of one-to-ten, Heath, on a scale like that, what’s the odds that Her Majesty knew nothing about this?”

Heath looked away, hiding behind his fringe. He opened a beer. “I don’t know her that well,” he said. “It’s just phone calls, favours. Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

“What’s your gut say?” I glared at him, forcing him to answer. It took a while before he broke.

“Pretty good,” he said. “On a scale of one-to-ten, I figure the odds are pretty good.”

I hauled back on the dregs of my beer, my stomach churning. “Me too,” I said. “Fuck it.” I wobbled back over to the sink and let loose. Eventually I passed out and he set me up on a couch in the foyer.

I didn’t wake up until four a.m., when my phone started blaring in my ear. The hangover was there already, a sharp headache and a queasy feeling that wasn’t just caused by liquor. Heath had given me a lab coat as a blanket but I was still cold and shivering. I checked the display and saw Kesey’s name written in block capitals. I groaned, answered it anyway. “Yeah?”

“Get moving,” he said. “We found a new body.”

Seven

Twenty minutes later, I was back on the waterfront, not far from where Slick had dumped my body the day before. You couldn’t miss the cop cars, the yellow tape stretched out to mark off the empty stretch of shore. My stitches itched like crazy. I scratched and smelt lilac on my fingers, the telltale stink of magic. Bored uniforms swarmed along the police line, protecting the crime scene from the occasional seagull. One of them recognised me from the search at the alley, waved me through before the others could ask for ID. I ducked under the tape and wandered in, weaving through the yellow spotlights and their whining generators. The light was cold and clinical, filling the crime scene with long shadows. No sign of Kesey, but there was a team setting up a winch by the riverbank. I ambled over and took a look.

The corpse lying in the mud might have been the unicorn we were looking for, but it’d seen better days. There was pale blood spread across the unicorn’s forehead, just below the pale stump that used to be a spiralling ivory horn. Black mud streaked the dead beast’s fur, soaking in like ink stains. Heath was a pig in shit, merrily prodding and poking his way through a virgin crime scene. I stood at the top of the riverbank, trying not to throw up, trying not to shudder when I saw the revolver sunk into the mud next to the corpse. “What you got?”

Heath turned and looked up, squinting into the long shadow I cast under the spotlights. “Iron bullets,” he said. “Someone wanted the damn thing dead. No track marks through the mud, so I figure someone just dumped the body over the edge.” He stood up and cocked his head to one side. “Know many people who carry cast iron bullets in their gun, Aster?”

I ignored him. “Where’s Kesey?”

“Out interviewing locals.” Heath shrugged and went back to his corpse. “You know Tim. He hates seeing this shit up close. He’s not open-minded and adaptable like you and me.”

“That’s because you’re both freaks.” Kesey appeared out of the darkness, lurching up and looking over my shoulder. He let out a slow breath between the gaps in his teeth. “So that’s a unicorn,” he said.

“Not quite, but it’s close.”

“What’s the difference?”

“About twelve inches of horn and a mean look in its eye,” I said. “Someone did a number on the poor bastard.”

Kesey gave me a look, trying to work out if I was kidding. “You look like shit,” he said.

“I had a rough night. You can ask Heath for the details, if you really want to know.”

He looked away, studying the skyline. “Do I want to know?”

“Shit, Tim, I’d rather not know.”

“Damn.” He folded his arms, blinked a few times as though that would change the scene. “Damn it. I really didn’t want to believe in this shit.” He walked back to the police line and I tagged along behind him. I offered him a cigarette as soon as we were clear.

“The unicorn’s dead, you can let this slide now.”

Kesey stared, trying to read my face. “I guess you’re done then,” he said. “I’ll clear your fee in the morning and leave it with Heath. You can pick up the cheque at the morgue.”

I cleared my throat. “When they run ballistics on the bullets in the horse, they’re going to be from my gun.” I said. Kesey kept his cool better than I was expecting, but the veins still popped in his neck. “I got a lead last night; a guy named Drabble at a club called The Hot House. It was one of his boys who roughed me up and took the gun. Dollars to donuts he’s mixed up in this, somehow.”

“Tony Drabble?”

“You know the name?”

Kesey grunted. “Small time thug turned big time entrepreneur. I’m sure you remember the type.”

“Trailed Hobb to his club, they’re up to something together. His boys had a go at me when they realised I was there on business.”

“You were supposed to be advising.”

“I was. I am.”

Kesey sighed. “We’ll need more than that to move on Drabble. He has lawyers, these days.”

“Fuck, Tim, you need more than that.” My right hand scratched at my chest, right above the scar from the bullet, then went to work on the stitches. “This guy’s a bastard and I’m not quite as burdened by the need for hard evidence these days. Call it the joys of working freelance.”

“You aren’t working freelance,” Kesey said. “You’re working for us.”

“I’m a consultant,” I said, grinning at him. “I figure I stopped the moment the unicorn was found and I confirmed you had your killer. Unless you’re planning on going after whoever put the bullets into the white horse, I figure we’re done.”

Kesey shook his head. “Christ, you used to be a cop, Aster. A good one.”

“I used to be a lot of things,” I told him. “These days, I’m a little more pragmatic.”

Kesey turned on me, giving me one of his famous looks, dark eyes blazing with barely controlled anger. The man was fifty-six and hard, the kind of detective they used to terrify raw rookies, but I was a little more jaded than I’d been back when we first met. I smoked my cigarette down to the filter and watched as they hauled the corpse up the steep incline. “You don’t get to do this one by the book, Kesey,” I said. “A rogue unicorn, that’s one thing. A rogue unicorn showing up dead, that’s something else. You’ve basically got two options; you pin this on me when the ballistics report comes in and pretend it never happened, or you go after the bastard responsible before he tries bringing in something that’s even worse.”

Kesey simmered, trying to stay in control. “You got an alibi if I try the first option?”

“I was busy being dead,” I said. “As alibis go, it could be difficult to prove in court, but Heath’s resourceful and I’m confident he’s up to the challenge.” I dropped my cigarette and stomped on it. “Tell me about Drabble. You said he worked small.”

“He did, once upon a time,” Kesey said. “Now he’s your basic sleazebag success story; turned one club into a small chain. Got big into computers, I think; runs a dozen porn sites, uses the money for less legit business when he needs to. Vice wants him taken down, but Drabble’s got lawyers upon lawyers these days. His own little army of trained attack dogs with degrees. We don’t even get him to trial.”

“What’s he doing with a unicorn, then?”

“Aster, I don’t even fucking know what I’m doing talking about one.” Kesey closed his eyes and leaned back, turning his face to the night sky. “Hell, I don’t even want the damn thing to exist.”

He took a deep breath. “I think you’re done on this,” he said. “The unicorn’s gone, so we play it like we should. We get Drabble for a real crime, none of this fairy shit, and we take him down proper.”

I nodded. “If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure,” Kesey said, “Leave it. Don’t go looking for a problem that isn’t there.”

I took it as good an excuse as any to go home and catch up on sleep.

• • • •

Kesey cut me a cheque the next day. I picked it up and went drinking, blotting out twenty-four hours so I didn’t have to think about the job or Sally Crown or whatever the fuck Hobb and Drabble were doing with that unicorn. It’s dead, I told myself. No unicorn, no case. The citizens are safe and no one’s paying you to keep on poking. I dreamt of Anya. I didn’t go and see her. I spent a few fruitless days trying to track down Hobb, but the runt had gone to ground. I drank more to pass the time.

I was still drinking a week later when Heath called me and told me to drop by the morgue. “It’s about that last consult,” he said. “Kind of. I think. You’ll want to see this. Not want, I guess, but—”

I wasn’t in the mood. “What, you found something during the autopsy on the horse?”

“Not quite.” Heath sounded choked up and lost. “Just, come down, okay. I need to show you something. You need to see it.”

He hung up on me. Heath wasn’t one for hanging up on someone, and given his proclivities, I didn’t want to think about whatever had him rattled. I ignored his second phone call, and the third, but the calls didn’t stop and eventually I agreed to meet him.

I took my time getting to the morgue and did the usual procrastination I always did before heading inside. Heath didn’t wait for me, just walked out to the parking lot with his white coat pulled tight while I was finishing my cigarette. “Sally Crown,” he said. “I lost her goddamn records, Aster. I incinerated her body and pretended it never happened.” He pushed a photograph of Sally into my hands, her dead face serene as she lay on the slab. “We shouldn’t have let this one go. She was a kid. Her parents still think she’s missing.”

“I didn’t think you were one to care, Heath.”

“I talked to her,” he said. He wasn’t talking about Sally anymore.

“Your call,” I said. “But I’m done with the job. No more unicorn, no more Anya. Kesey officially called it closed and I got paid for consulting. I got rent to pay, Heath. You know that.”

“It’s not that easy, Aster.” He fished a DVD case out of his pocket and gave it to me. His hands were shaking, and he looked a little green. “I had to give a copy of this to Kesey,” Heath said. “Had to, you got that? He’s in the loop on this one, whether you want him to be or not. He didn’t want you having a copy of it, but, you know, I just thought, I guess, that you should know.”

I opened the case and looked at the disc inside, a silver circle with the case number written across it in Heath’s jittery handwriting. “What the hell is it?”

“Just, you know, watch it,” Heath said. “It’s an internet thing. People have been posting it around on the fringe porn sites, real sick fuckers, you know? A friend mentioned it to me and, well . . . I had to pay a couple hundred bucks to get a copy, all under the table shit. And when you watch it . . . listen, I want these people taken down, yeah? You work with Kesey and you take them down, right?”

“Sure.”

“I asked her,” he said. “I mean, there are favours and there are favours, yeah? She says she didn’t know about this one, Aster. She promised. She swore.”

Heath lingered for a moment, his eyes locked on the disc. I raised an eyebrow at him, but he turned away. “Don’t watch it on a full stomach,” he said. “Trust me, just don’t.”

Eight

I fed the DVD into my computer. It took a couple of seconds to pull up the file—video, no file name, just a string of numbers. I double clicked and watched the footage bloom to life, a grainy shot of a girl’s bedroom done up like a doll’s house. The colours were washed out, but you could see lace and feathers and the frilly curtains over the windows.

The camera focused in on a red-headed woman, her right hand slowly working the unicorn’s horn with a fistful of Vaseline. The beast nickered, rolling its eyes back in pleasure, its expression too inhuman to be fake. Somewhere behind the camera someone yelled, “You ready, love? Okay. Action,” and the fluffer disappeared off to the right side of the shot. My breathing stopped when the camera scrolled across, focused in on the naked girl in the background. She was sprawled out on the edge of the bed, face lost amidst a burst of static as the camera refocused. The unicorn’s horn shone, radiant in the spotlight. I could see rainbows playing off the slick surface as it approached the bed. I watched the horn lower, teasing the flesh of her inner thigh, gently forcing the girl’s legs to separate. “No,” I said, but the horn slipped in, penetrating the soft fold between her legs with a single, slow thrust.

I try to forget that video, but I can’t. The camera glides in. Close up. Close enough to show the corn silk hair, the green eyes, the plastic tiara covered in glitter. The face of Sally Crown without the stain of rigor mortis. Her features contort. She gives the camera a theatrical gasp. The horn furrows between her legs. A real gasp, the sharp point digging into sensitive flesh. She screams, her voice filled with pain, and the unicorn’s horn starts pushing deeper and deeper.

I could hear the director’s voice off-camera, still giving orders, taking it for granted that he’ll be edited out in post-production. No one onscreen is listening to him; beauty and the beast are already beyond the possibility of control. I paused the video, leaned in, recognised the gleam of lust and madness in the unicorn’s eyes. “Shit.”

I hit play and Sally started screaming again. It takes too long for the crew to recognise the difference between her fake cries and the real ones. I could hear them muttering, a blur of voices behind the camera. I got up, knocking over my chair. The horn forced its way deeper; squelching. The unicorn raised its head, lifting Sally. More memories that don’t go away. She bounces, impaled, a china doll taped to the head of a hobby-horse. The computer speakers fill with screaming; a deep voice yelling directions, ordering the unicorn to stop; someone else calling for a tranquiliser, anything to put the unicorn down. Sally Crown screams and screams and screams, tears flowing. She’s caught. The unicorn bobs and thrusts. Sally flails, trying to push free. The horn too deep for her to escape.

It all ends with a wet pop, and Sally Crown is a dead balloon. The unicorn lowers its head, scrapes her limp form free, holds its bloody horn high in triumph. A gunshot, a feathered dart in its flank, the quick spin as it glares at someone standing behind the camera. The unicorn lowers its head and charges. The camera-shot spins, rushing past the crew. I see a flash of familiar, too-white teeth before it tumbles to the floor. Somewhere behind the lens there’s screaming, a director yelling orders, the sound of another gunshot. The camera fixed, at its odd fallen angle, on the blank face of Sally Crown. I stare at the screen, willing her to move, ignoring the muffled thump of hooves. Then the shot dissolves, disappearing into a cloud of static. Eventually I got up and ejected the DVD, snapping the shiny plastic in two. I contemplated the bathroom, but rage ran roughshod over the desire to throw up. I called Kesey.

“You watched it? Heath’s movie?”

“Yes.”

“I want in,” I said. “When you’re taking the bastard down, I want in.”

“You’re a consultant, Aster. You don’t take people down, not on something as big as this.”

“Tim—” I said. He cut me off.

“No. You advised, you got paid, now you leave this to the professionals. We let you handle things your way last time, Miriam. I can’t afford to let you do it again. We can take him on normal charges, the unicorn won’t be mentioned.”

“You can make it stick?”

“We’ll have to.” Kesey’s voice was cold and serious. “This goes down clean and legal, Aster. No favours for your friends, no letting things slide, no hiding the truth when someone gets shot resisting arrest.”

“I can help. I want to help.”

“You’re not a cop, Miriam,” Kesey said. “If you were, I’d let you handle this in a second, but you made that call ten years ago. There’s no way in hell you’re coming in on this.”

I told him to go fuck himself and hung up. Then I drove over to Westbury, a gun in my jacket pocket.

• • • •

She was standing in her doorway as I hit the top of the stairs, a scarecrow in a black jacket that didn’t quite fit her shoulders anymore. I stormed towards her, trying to look threatening. She knew it was bullshit immediately; if I hadn’t hit her during our breakup, I wasn’t going to start now.

“Come in,” Anya said. “I’ll make tea.”

She looked withered, dishevelled in a way I’d never seen her. I looked just as bad; I’d been crying on the way over, but the tears were gone, only the salt smear on my cheeks remained. “You look like shit,” I said.

She gave me a wan smile. “Thanks. Sit.”

I sat and watched her go through the fastidious ritual of making tea, the slow accumulation of loose leaves and a copper kettle and stove-boiled water. She moved slower now, her gestures less precise. Magic, I guessed. It would’ve taken a lot out of her, bringing me back. There were rules about it, big ones. “The unicorn’s dead,” I said. “They found it by the river.”

She paused, hands on the side of the stove. The kettle sat on the hotplate, steam rising out of its spout. “Who did it?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know for sure, but there was a guy named Drabble. He was behind it, working with Hobb. They took the horn after it was dead.”

Anya’s face twisted. She coughed, covering her mouth with one hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. She didn’t turn around. “Was it bad?”

I said nothing, waiting for her to look at me. When she gave in, I nodded. “It was bad.”

“But you stopped it?” Her voice was a whisper, her eyes wide. Anya tended to play sorrow like a pantomime actor, but I knew her well enough to know that part of this was real.

“No,” I said. “I haven’t.”

The kettle whistled while she stared at me, trying to read my expression. I closed myself down, kept the anger huddled below the surface, waiting. We were in familiar ground now, just like old times. She removed the kettle without looking at it, her eyes locked on mine.

“I want answers,” I said. “The right ones, this time. Did you know?”

“Know?”

“The unicorn. What they were doing.”

She had the grace to blush, her cheeks turning a dusty rose, but she didn’t look away. Anya didn’t do contrition any better than she did sorrow. “No.”

“But you knew it was here?”

“Yes.”

“And you helped Hobb get it here, from the other side?” She busied herself with the tea, refusing to answer. I shook my head. “Figures.”

Anya looked up at me, hands still, her face calm. “So what happens now?”

“The law,” I said. “Kesey’s got a warrant and a hard on to take Drabble down. It’ll probably happen, if the State lawyers are any good.”

“Probably?” Anya cocked her head to one side, staring at me like a bird. She lifted the kettle onto a wooden tray, arranged cups from the row on her windowsill.

“The unicorn presents a problem,” I said. “Kesey wants to take Drabble down for underage porn, but there’s nothing on the books about unicorns and minors, and Drabble has good lawyers. He’ll go away, but there’s no chance it’ll be for as long as he deserves.”

Anya sat the tray down on the coffee table, pouring tea. “You’re not happy.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not. The fucker should be dead.”

She handed me a cup and dropped two sugar cubes into the brown liquid. “Aster, do you still love me?”

“Does it matter?”

“Sometimes.” She blinked, her eyes misting up. “Sometimes it matters more than anything.”

“Why?”

Anya stood up, letting her long hair flare out behind her like a pair of wings. She stared down at me, eyes bright with urgent desire. She’d gotten herself exiled for me, way back when, that first time she brought me back from the dead. It took a lot more out of her this time, but she was still too damn pretty. Still too fucking beautiful. “You’re a virgin,” she said.

I shook my head. “That’s a stupid rule.”

“We didn’t make it.” Anya stared at me, her eyes blazing. “It’s all about belief for my kind, Aster, and men made the rules when they took over the culture. It’s never meant that much to us, gender, but your people think otherwise.”

“It’s a technicality,” I said. “You know that better than anyone.”

“You’re a virgin,” she repeated. “In every way that matters to the magic of my kind. We can destroy him, if you wish it. Annihilate him and make him pay. The curse of a fey is a powerful thing, even when it’s uttered by an exile like me. Ask me, and I can do it.”

I blinked. We’d gone that route before, and it hadn’t worked out. Anya stood, waiting, her body thrumming with power. “You knew,” I said. “You were lying before. You knew what he was doing.”

Anya nodded. “Not at first, but eventually. I moved to stop it.”

I lit a cigarette, watched the irritation flash across her face. “A girl died. Sally Crown. You could have stopped it earlier.”

“It’s not like it was, Aster. I don’t have that kind of power, not without—”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s true,” she said. “Hobb did what he did. I want him to pay for it. But it takes time, now. I can’t just give an order.”

“You asked for me, when Heath called about the girl. You wanted me on this.” This time she paused, face caught in a flicker of hesitation, but she nodded.

“I needed help.” Anya reached out, put her hand on my arm. “Love is a powerful thing, in the hands of the fey.”

I grabbed her hand and lifted it off my forearm. I didn’t trust myself to leave it there. I leaned in, close enough that my cigarette smoke rose up into her face. “You don’t love me, Anya. You use me.”

She withdrew, stung, and I checked my watch. “Here’s how it will go from here,” I said. “Kesey will have raids stationed to hit every warehouse and club on Drabble’s books. They’ll hit them simultaneously, right on dawn. Whole teams of heavily armed, shotgun-wielding cops will go through everything Drabble owns with fine-toothed combs looking for the concrete proof they need to put Drabble away. Kesey will play it by the book. He’ll keep the unicorn out of it. Tony Drabble will be tried by a jury of his peers and rot in jail. Eventually he’ll die, old and lonely and behind bars. You’ll be safe. Hobb too, probably, if he’s smart enough to clear out once the cops move in.”

Anya picked up her teacup and stared into it. “That’s not enough, is it?”

“No. It never is.”

“I’m sorry, Miriam.” It was her first apology. The first I remembered, anyway.

“I don’t want you to be sorry.” I stubbed my cigarette out on my saucer. “I want you to be useful.”

“You know the price,” Anya said. She touched me again, hand on my chest. Her fingers traced the ridge of the autopsy scar under my shirt. “All you need to do is ask.”

“I don’t love you,” I said.

“Yes,” she whispered. “You do.”

“I don’t want to.”

She smiled at me. “That’s not the same thing.”

“No.” I took a deep breath and stared into her eyes, one gold and the other green. I thought about Sally Crown, just ashes in the morgue furnace now, another missing persons case that no one will ever solve. “I guess it’s not. But I heard it was close enough.”

Anya’s smile was eager and terrible. “I could destroy them for you,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be like last time. They hurt you, and I could curse them. If you say you love me, I could demand vengeance for your wounds.”

“I don’t want you to curse them, I just want you to find them. Give me a location and let me handle the destruction.” For a moment Anya’s expression was blank. Then it wasn’t. Something hungry showed up in her eyes; hell hath no fury like a queen-in-exile scorned. She’d expected it to be like the old days and it hurt bad now she’d realised it wasn’t. I clenched my fist, ready to play hardball.

“Just do it,” I said. “I’m still a fucking virgin and I’m fucking compelling you. Fucking do it. Do your thing and tell me where.”

She dipped her finger in her tea, face twisted up in anger. Damp fingertips traced a sign across my forehead, and she leant forward to kiss my eyes. The touch of her lips was far from pleasant. “I make you my instrument and give you the gift of vengeance,” she said, her words winding around me, tight and powerful. “Until you find the man who slew you, and the man who gave the order. Fare thee well, beloved.”

I closed my eyes and I could feel them, Slick and Drabble. They were a weight in the corner of my mind, a presence as easy to read as a compass point. I could feel an echo of Anya’s anger too, her burning need to hurt Hobb and Drabble and anyone else in my way. It pushed against me, hungry for blood. I pushed back, taking steady breaths until the rage was bottled up and corked, ready to explode when I needed it.

“Miriam.” Anya’s breath brushed my face. I opened my eyes and looked at her. “When you find them . . . I need the horn,” she said.

I rolled my eyes. “Of course you do.”

“It’s too dangerous to leave out there.” Anya pulled back. “There’s too many things it can be used for, none of them good. It should be returned back where it belongs. I don’t know if you can get it, but if you can—”

“Don’t.” I stepped in and kissed her, long and slow. “Just wish me luck.”

Anya nodded, eyes shining. I went downstairs and climbed into the Sigma. I pulled the spare gun from my jacket pocket and checked the clip. Ordinary bullets for this one, but they’d do the job nicely on a sleaze like Drabble. They were to the north, out past the suburbs. I could feel the distance like a sixth sense, a twenty-minute drive. I checked my watch. It’d take them another hour to get the warrants signed, even longer before the raids were in place. Even if Kesey and his men knew where to find them, it’d be enough time to get there before them.

I gunned the engine and drove, disappearing into the night.

Nine

I drove north, following the highway out into the hinterlands, up into the smaller estates where the rich folks used to live before the hills were filled with roaming fey and people abandoned the area for less temperamental dwellings. We may have burned the permanent paths between Earth and Faerie, but there were still enough woods out here to ensure fairy circles grew in the light of the full moon. There were still ways through, if you were willing to look for them. Anya’s kiss lay heavy on my eyelids, pulling me forward. I took a turnoff onto a narrow country road, threading through small estates and villas that overlooked the city. I looked behind me using the rear view, watching the city sparkle in the crisp night air, a shadowy mass lit up by twinkling streetlights. My gut said I shouldn’t be out here, so far from the light and backup and the cops Kesey had working the case. I ignored it and followed the pull, turning down a poorly paved driveway that cut through the woods.

When my gut said I was getting close, I killed the engine and continued on foot, following the curve of the long driveway from the edge of the woods. The night air smelled of pine trees and I could hear small things scampering in the undergrowth. I wrote most of them off as insects and vermin, but odds were some of them weren’t, this far out. It was a full moon, light enough to see by. There was a ditch between the driveway and the tree line, a narrow gulch full of shadows. The gun in my hand felt heavy, but it was a comfortable weight. I followed the ditch until I found Drabble’s place, a decaying husk of a faux-Tuscan villa in stained white brick and terracotta tile. Slick and Vin were standing guard at the front gate and an eager need to hurt them leapt up inside me, urging me to lead with the gun. I kept to the shadows, forcing myself to stay calm. I crept forward, sneakers squelching against the damp grass. Slick was smoking, looking idle. Vin scanned the road, watching for headlights, but he didn’t seem to have noticed me skulking along in the darkness.

I stepped out, gun held steady in a standing grip. I had to breathe steady, force myself not to pull the trigger. “Hi,” I said. “Do me a favour, boys; fish the armaments out of your pockets, one after the other, and toss them towards the trees. You aren’t my favourite people right now, so don’t think I won’t shoot you if I have to.”

It was a stupid move when faced with two shooters, but people who think you’re dead tend to hesitate when they see you again, especially when you’ve got a gun. Anya’s vengeance was like a drug. It made me reckless.

Vin gaped at me, his eyes darting wildly as he tried to process my presence. Slick just smiled. “Welcome back, Miss Aster,” he said. “Did you find your white horse?”

“She a ghost, Slick?” Vin whispered, sotto voce, as though I might not hear. I fired a warning shot and he got the idea, reaching inside his jacket and pulling out a heavy .45 that thumped into the grass when he threw it aside. Slick didn’t make a move, didn’t even give Vin an answer.

“I was meaning to ask, Miss Aster, last time we met. What’s it like to be dead?”

“Cold,” I said. “My turn: Where’s my revolver?”

“Inside,” Slick said. “Mister Drabble has it, along with the horn. Some kind of insurance policy, I think, while he works out what to do with the little runt.” He cocked his head to one side, his eyes cold and flat in the moonlight. “You planning on shooting me?”

“Can’t say I haven’t thought about it,” I said. “You planning on giving me a reason to?”

“Like I said, Miss Aster, I’m a pragmatist. The boss says do a job, I do it. Questions just get in the way.”

“You coming back from the dead if I shoot you, Slick?”

“It’s a neat trick.” He shook himself, loosening his shoulders. “Not to my taste. I don’t like the cold.”

Vin lost his nerve at that, roaring towards me with an ugly expression. I could hear his heavy boots crunching against the tiled drive as I fired and caught him twice in the chest. It did nothing to slow him down and Vin crashed over me like a wave, crushing me to the ground. I kept hold of my .38 as I went, tried to fight my way free by slamming the butt of the gun against the side of Vin’s head. I could hear the steady huff of his breath as he swung at me, meaty fists hammering at my face, but he didn’t have the angle for a solid strike. I knew Slick was armed without even looking at him, the tingling sixth sense of Anya’s vengeance marking him, making him as easy to sense as a spare appendage. I kicked free of Vin and rolled away just before Slick started shooting. Vin screamed as I scrambled for the cover of the ditch, the pain of the gunshots finally hitting him. He staggered to his feet and caught a stray bullet from Slick, blood fountaining out of his right arm. Slick kept shooting, bullets sliding past me and cracking as they impacted wood. I fired blind as I scrambled, loose shots over my shoulder that were guided by vengeance and instinct. Slick rewarded me with a long hiss of pain and a soft clank as he fell back against the bars of the gate. I took a peek over my shoulder, saw Slick pushing himself upright, bleeding from a wound to the hip. The Beretta in his fist wove a lazy arc as he scanned the darkness. Vin whimpered, a quivering mess of muscle and blood loss on the ground between us.

I stood up. Slick snapped off a wild shot and I caught him in the stomach, leaving him to scream while I took deep breaths and watched the gun spill out of his hand. I walked over, lowered my weapon, pushed his Beretta away with my toe. Vin whimpered as I kicked down with my heel, snapping his skull into the tiled driveway with enough force to shut him up. Slick’s breathing was ragged, blood flecking his lip in the moonlight.

“Pretty hair,” he said, then there was nothing but the gate and house lights and the slow chirp of the crickets reasserting themselves in the sudden silence.

• • • •

I went over the gate, feet searching for purchase on the iron bars, blunt spikes bruising my stomach muscles as I swung over the top. I watched as the lights in the villa went out, one by one, an obvious precaution given the sound of gunfire. The darkness didn’t bother me. I kept off the path, coming up to the house through the yard, using the trees for cover. I could feel Drabble’s presence upstairs, the weight of it dragging on me like I was a fish caught on a line. I gave the front door a wide berth, picking the lock on a side window and rolling into a powder-pink bathroom.

Drabble’s house smelt like baby powder. The rooms were bare, scattered with the shadowy silhouettes of a few random pieces of furniture. My sneakers squeaked on the hardwood, the sound echoing against the walls. I moved through the murky darkness, gun out, ears straining. I started working my way from room to room, letting instinct take over. The furniture was all cheap and easy to clean, the rooms always arranged so there were beds and broad couches squashed against the far wall. Cheap video cameras sat dormant on flimsy tripods, pointing towards the furniture. Apart from that, the lower floor was empty. There was only one main staircase leading to the upper level. I was expecting a small barrage of gunfire when I tried it, but there was only a single muzzle-flash as I scoped out the upper landing.

Hobb’s voice came out of the darkness. “I told him it wouldn’t be enough to kill you, Aster.” He giggled a crazy laugh. “You and Her Majesty, you’ve still got a thing going, even if you don’t want to admit it.” He was perched on the railing, curled up with one long arm wrapped around his knees, his mismatched eyes watching me as I peered around the corner. Drabble was lurking further back in the shadows, gun in hand. I could see the moonlight playing off the barrel.

I dropped back behind the cover of a candy cane-coloured wall. “Hey, Hobb,” I said. “Just so you know, I’m not letting you off for this one.”

Hobb’s laughter spiralled out of control, his small frame rocking on the banister. It was a brazen position, arrogant, but he knew that Drabble had my revolver and there wasn’t much I could do to hurt him with the peashooter in my hand. “I don’t get ‘let off,’ Aster,” he said. “I get forgiven for the unfortunate things I do in the name of duty. Poor little Miriam, you still don’t get it, even after all these years.”

“It’s just you and me and a sleazebag with a thing for little girls,” I said. “Who, exactly, is going to forgive you, Hobb? You should have been holed up here with an army of thugs, but you aren’t. Drabble’s still small time, really. Still doesn’t think anyone’s coming for him unless they’re the law, hasn’t prepared for the possibility of someone coming in here all crazy and—”

“Shut up.” Drabble took a step forward, the gun steady in his hand. “You should come out, love, or things are going to get messy.”

“Fuck you,” I said. I leaned out, just a little, and let off a quick shot. Drabble shot first, soon as he saw the movement, and a chunk of plaster disappeared just beside my head. “We saw the tape, Drabble. The cops are raiding everything you own, freezing your accounts. You’re fucked, and you know it.”

Drabble fired another round. I heard it thump into the wood-panel wall just a few feet from my hiding space. “The cops aren’t here, love,” he whispered. “You think we didn’t hear about the raid? This place is off the books. Safe. Just the way the crew likes it. Just the way the clients like it. There’s just you and the two of us. Hobb figures if we kill you again, you’ll stay dead for good this time.”

I heard Hobb snickering. “It’s true, Aster. Dead for good, this time. Her Majesty hasn’t got the juice for another stunt like that, not on the scraps of affection you’ve been feeding her.”

“It’s not about affection anymore, Hobb,” I said. “This time I’m here to exact Anya’s vengeances. It seems she’s pissed about what you’ve been up to and she needed someone to relay her displeasure.” The implications were lost on Drabble, but Hobb’s laughter cut short. I heard him slip off the banister, feet scuffing against the floor.

“Bullshit,” he said. “You doing her bidding again? After all this time?” I stuck an arm around the corner and fired blind. I heard wood splintering, heard Hobb swearing under his breath.

“No bullshit, Hobb,” I said. I fired another shot. Drabble fired back. “She wants both of you punished, wants you living a fate worse than death. I’m just here for the mercy killing of the sucker you lured into this.”

They whispered, falling back. I listened to their footsteps work their way across the upper floor. I took the stairs slow, slapped a fresh magazine into the gun. Hobb was chanting in the darkness, doing his best to counter the effects of Anya’s magic. I felt the link to Drabble wane, dribbling away until his presence was like an unscratched itch. There was blood in the upstairs hall; I’d winged one of them. Not dripping fast enough to leave a trail, but I swung right and trusted my luck to hold, worked my way past the doorways one by one, going right door to left and scanning. Long shadows filled the rooms, the hall lit up by the full moon filtering through the skylight.

I found Hobb first, cowering in a bathroom. Everything was cold moonlight through the window and soft shadows on the tile. His shoulder was bleeding, but he didn’t seem to notice. He launched himself at me with his hands spread, going for my neck. I slammed the gun into the bridge of his nose and watched him flail backwards, falling against the sink. His breathing was wet and blood smeared the lower half of his face. Hobb whimpered, letting loose a stream of muffled “fucks.” I put a bullet in his stomach and another in his leg. Lead shot, not iron; he’d heal fast enough, but he wasn’t going to be running anywhere for a day or two. I felt Drabble come up behind me a split second too late, heard the soft click of his gun echoing against the tile walls. “Drop the gun,” he whined. “Get your hands up, love.”

I put the gun on the side of the sink and turned, hands kept out in the open. Drabble flicked the light in the bathroom and I blinked, blinded, as he reached out and snagged the automatic. “It was never meant to happen,” Drabble said. “That girl and the horse, it was never meant to happen. Hobb said it was safe.”

“Hobb lies,” I said. “It’s his one great talent in life. A unicorn in heat has the self-control of a two-year–old.”

Drabble tucked my gun into his waistband, next to a length of white horn and my revolver. He backed out of the room and motioned me forward. The other gun stayed locked on my stomach, his hand steady as he adjusted the .38. His smile was unpleasant as I stepped into the hall. “You should have left it, love,” he said. “We cleaned up after ourselves, we got rid of the horse when it got out of control.” He patted the horn at his belt. “Alive or dead, the damn thing was still going to make us a profit. Nobody got hurt except that girl, and who the fuck cares about another teenage runaway?”

He stepped forward, covering me with the gun, getting ready to shove me towards the stairs. I couldn’t sense him like before, but I could feel the burning need of Anya’s vengeance running through me. I watched him, anger rising up in my eyes. Drabble met my gaze, stumbled, and his gun hand wavered a few inches. I clenched a fist and swung, catching the side of his head. I followed up with a knee to the crotch. Drabble went sideways, face twisting in pain, gun skittering down the hall. I dashed for it, diving and rolling aside. He was upright, drawing my revolver from his waistband. I threw my weight sideways and pulled the trigger. The house echoed with the sound of gunshots. Drabble bled from the gut, folding over as he dropped forward. My arm was stinging, slick with blood. I pushed myself up using the wall and walked over, covering him the whole way. My head pounded, pushing me forward. I put the barrel of the gun to his head.

“You pissed off the wrong woman,” I said, and I could feel Anya’s cool fingers over mine, urging me to pull the trigger. “The vengeance of a fey is a powerful thing.” There was still enough of Drabble not yet in pain that he wet himself at the prospect of what could come next.

“Here’s how it’s going to go,” I said and I hammered a knee into his jaw and felt something break beneath the impact. Drabble went face first into the carpet, bleeding and broken, but he was still breathing through the mess I’d made of his face. “You’re going to be tried, you’re going to be convicted, and you’re going to spend the rest of your life wishing I’d damn well killed you.”

Hobb was gone, slipped out the window while Drabble and I were busy shooting holes in one another. I thought about going after him, decided against it. I slipped the horn out of Drabble’s belt and tucked it into my jacket. Then I fished my phone out and called Kesey to come clean up the mess.

Ten

I hadn’t killed him and Anya’s magic made sure that hurt every moment I sat there watching him bleed over the floor. Drabble sucked in wet breaths for a half-hour before Kesey and his boys arrived. He bled a lot, but he survived long enough for an ambulance crew to handcuff him to a gurney and drag him off under an armed escort. He’d spend a couple of weeks in hospital, but he’d heal up fine for the court dates and Kesey had found enough hard evidence that even Drabble’s team of legal pit bulls wasn’t going to be able to do shit for him. I sat on the front step of the house, letting a paramedic bandage up my arm, ignoring his suggestions that I go to a hospital to have it checked out. I patted down my jacket with my free hand, looking for cigarettes. Kesey offered me one of his instead. I took it, lit up, and watched the ambulance cart Drabble away.

“We would have got him,” Kesey said. He sat down beside me, cigarette dangling from his thick fingers. I winced as the bandage went on. I’d taken two shots to the same shoulder in as many days. It was starting to get old, but at least this time around the bullet had missed anything vital. “You weren’t even advising on this one, Aster. I should take away your fucking license.”

I shrugged and watched the ambulance disappear through the gates, past the white sheets covering Slick and Vin and the team snapping photographs and taking sketches of the bodies. “So you had this place covered then,” I said. “Your crack team was lying in wait, ready to rescue my arse if things got hairy?”

“We would have got him,” Kesey repeated.

“As long as you got a case against him,” I said. “One that doesn’t involve that footage.”

Kesey didn’t say anything, he just sat there and finished his cigarette. When he was done, he patted my good shoulder and stood up, heading inside to supervise the team working the scene upstairs. It was the closest thing to approval I was going to get out of him. I waited until he disappeared through the front door before I called after him.

“Hey, Kesey,” I said, and he reappeared. “Say hello to your sister for me, next time you see her.” The smile vanished and he disappeared again. I got one of the blue-and-whites to drive me home, took a handful of painkillers to dull the pain before I went to sleep.

• • • •

I found Hobb in a Chinese restaurant three weeks later using his charm to impress the waitresses as he consumed vast amounts of food and imported Chinese beer. He was eating alone, so I slipped into the booth on the opposite side of his table and slipped the revolver out of my pocket before he recognised me through the alcoholic haze. Rumour had it he’d been drinking hard since Drabble went down, so it took him a moment to process. Even drunk, I figured I wouldn’t have found him if he hadn’t wanted to be found.

“Miriam Aster,” he said. He belched and I could smell sweet and sour sauce on his breath. “About fucking time.”

“Hey, Hobb,” I said. I picked up a fork with my free hand and speared some honey chicken off his plate. His ugly face twisted up as he squinted at me, swaying in place. “You here to kill me, Aster?”

“If I wanted you dead, I’d have let you finish your meal. The food here is terrible.”

He rolled his eyes. “The waitresses are cute. What more do you want?”

“I’ve been thinking,” I said. “Ten years back, when I was involved with Anya, you used to work for her, right?” Hobb nodded, and I leaned in to make sure I had his attention. “I want to know when you stopped.”

Hobb belched again, and this time it smelled so foul the smell sent me backwards. It stank like mulch, like something rotting in his gut. He patted his belly in the aftermath, grinning like a jack o’lantern. “Officially? I never stopped. A queen of the fey in exile is still, after all, a queen. I may have pushed things a little . . . further than expected . . . this time around, but she’ll forgive me. Eventually. It’s what she does.” He took a long slug of beer and winced, covered it up by squinting at me. “How’s your work, at present, after all this unpleasantness?”

“Good,” I said, and it was only partly a lie. Kesey pulled my license for review, just like he’d threatened to. He wasn’t happy about it, but he wasn’t unhappy either. There was a second cheque waiting for me for the consultancy on Drabble’s capture, paying me for the time put in after the unicorn was found. It was enough to last me a month or two, and I wasn’t worried about work. Even if they took the license away for my shootout with Drabble, they’d reinstate me as soon as they needed someone to consult on the next bout of weird shit that rolled through Heath’s morgue. “I’m taking a short sabbatical. Letting the injuries heal.”

A waitress with chopsticks in her hair bustled past, asking if I’d like to order. I gave her a few bucks and asked for a pot of tea, hoping like hell it wasn’t as bad as the food. Hobb blinked at me a few times, as though trying to fix on my face. I’d never seen him truly drunk before, despite his copious drinking. He sweated badly. “Listen,” he said, “just ask.”

“Ask what?”

“Did she know about the unicorn? Why did she agree to help? Whatever question about Her Majesty that’s got you showing up here, being polite, when we both know you want to break all my toes and fingers. We aren’t friends, Aster, and I’m running out of time and patience; be rude. Ask.”

“Why’d she help you?” I asked. “After all the trouble the last one caused, why’d she help you bring another unicorn in?”

Hobb’s smile showed off a wide half-moon of yellowing teeth. “Because she knows you, Miriam Aster. If there was a unicorn, you’d get involved. You may have bundled yourself up in guilt and denial, but you can’t help yourself when the trouble starts. Eventually you’d investigate, and eventually you’d go see her, and in her heart of hearts, Her Majesty still wants you back.”

It was a smart-arse answer, or maybe it wasn’t, but either way I hauled myself across the table and slugged him for it. It didn’t do much beyond making him laugh, but it made me feel better to have done it all the same.

They found Hobb dead a few days later, facedown in his beer at a bar along the strip. No bullet wounds, no evidence of foul play, just dead and a little bloated from three straight days of drinking. I’m guessing he rotted away, from the inside out. Anya was pissed at him, and I wasn’t much for believing her when she claimed she didn’t have the power to take care of one of her own. Kesey asked me to answer some questions when they found the corpse, but I begged off on that one. All I had were some lucky guesses and they were probably wrong.

• • • •

Anya left messages on my answering machine for weeks, twice a day while the trial went public. I didn’t call her back. I got a phone call from Heath about a month after they put Drabble away, asking me to meet him for a coffee. Part of me wanted to say no, but Heath was the golden goose to my fucked up little business. It didn’t pay to piss him off.

It felt weird going out for coffee; Heath and I weren’t coffee kind of people and the place he picked was tragic. A murky, behind-closed-doors kind of attitude with carefully crafted ambiance straight out of a spy movie. He was waiting for me when I arrived, habitually late and pissed off. “Miriam,” he said, waving me over from the door. “How’s the shoulder holding up?”

It hurt, still, but it was okay. The wounds were scars now, my arm just a little stiff after the injuries it’d sustained. I had a second crease on my chest, one running either side of my belly button. I punched him in the shoulder to prove I was in working condition and ordered an espresso. “What do you want, Heath?”

“She’s been calling the morgue,” Heath said. He blushed as he said it, knowing I’d be pissed. I’d never seen Heath blush; I’d prefer to avoid a repeat of the experience. “Not often, but checking up. She asked me to ditch some files, the autopsy on that Hobb guy, and she asked me how you were doing. Asked if I knew what happened to the horn they cut off the white horse before they killed it.”

“And?” I said. “What, you’re looking for advice?” Heath shook his head.

“I told her I didn’t know,” he said. “And that you were on holidays, just like you said. She sounded worried, Aster. I just figured you should know.”

Our coffees came, hot and steaming. I drank mine without saying anything, and Heath squirmed as he tried to fill the silence with inane chatter and gossip. I watched his eyes, one a little greener than the other. He looked different outside the confines of the morgue, a little less sallow around the edges. “She’s disappointed I didn’t kill him,” I said. “She wanted the fucker dead, just like she took care of Hobb.”

Heath stopped talking, mouth left open. He shrugged and looked into his coffee. “I don’t know,” he said. “Me, I just figure, if she wanted him dead, he’d be dead, you know? She doesn’t seem like the kind of woman who fucks around when she wants something.”

I grunted and dropped a couple of bucks on the table. Then I pulled a brown paper package about twelve inches long out of my pocket and dropped it next to the change. “I’m going home,” I said. “Next time they need a troubleshooter, tell Anya to find someone else.”

Heath stared at the package for a moment. “You should call her back,” Heath said. “Fuck, Aster, she saved your life.”

He’d give it back to her, probably. I didn’t much care if he didn’t. It was a cold morning outside the café, cold enough to make the scars ache. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess she did at that.”

He didn’t mention it again. I left.

© 2009 by Peter M. Ball. Originally published by Twelfth Planet Press. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter M. Ball is an Australian writer and arts-worker based in Brisbane. His recent short fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, the Gods, Memes, and Monsters anthology, and Eclipse Online. His longer works include the Flotsam series, about an occult hit-man exiled to the Gold Coast, and the novellas Horn and Bleed featuring ex-cop Miriam Aster. When not writing stories, he convenes the biennial GenreCon writers conference, manages the Australian Writers Marketplace for the Queensland Writers Centre, and geeks out about comic books and superhero cartoons. Find him online at www.petermball.com and @petermball.

EXCERPT: Everfair (Tor Books)

Nisi Shawl | 2147 words

Burgundy, France, July 1889

Lisette Toutournier sighed. She breathed in again, out, in, the marvelous air smelling of crushed stems, green blood bruised and roused by her progress along this narrow forest path. Her progress, and that of her new mechanical friend. Commencing to walk again, she pushed it along through underbrush and creepers, woodbine and fern giving way before its wheels. Oh, how the insects buzzed about her exposed skin, her face and hands and wrists and ankles, waiting to bite. And the vexing heat bid fair to stifle her as she climbed the hillside slowly—but the scent—intoxicating! And soon, so soon, all this effort would be repaid.

There! The crest came in sight, the washed-out summer sky showing itself through the beech trees’ old silver trunks. Now her path connected with the road, stony, rutted, but still better suited for riding. She stood a moment admiring the view: the valley, the blurred rows of cultivation curving away smaller and smaller in the bluing distance, the sky pale overhead, the perfect foil for the dark-leaved woods behind her and by her sides. Not far off a redwing sang, cold water trickling uphill.

She had the way of it now: gripping the rubber molded around the machine’s metal handlebars, she leaned it toward her and swung one skirted leg over the drop frame. Upright again, she walked it a few more steps forward, aiming straight along the lane, the yellow-brown dust bright in the sun. The machine’s glossy paint shone. Within the wheel’s front rim its spokes were a revolving web of intricacy, shadows and light chasing one another. Tiny puffs of dust spurted from beneath the black rubber tires.

She raised her eyes. The vista opened wider, wider. The road laid itself down before her.

Up on the creaking leather seat. Legs drawn high, boots searching, scraping, finding their places . . . and pedal! Push! Feet turning circles like her machine’s wheels, with those wheels. It was, at first, work. She pedaled and steered, wobbling just once and catching herself. Then going faster, faster! Flying! Freedom!

Saplings, walls, and vines whipped by, flashes of greenbrowngreengrey as Lisette on her machine sped down the road, down the hill. Wind rushed into her face, whistled in her ears, filled her nose, her lungs, tore her hair loose of its pins to stream behind her. She was a wild thing, laughing, jouncing over dry watercourses, hanging on for dear, dear life. Lower, now, and some few trees arched above, alternately blocking the hot glare and exposing her to it coolwarmcoolwarm, currents of sun and shade splashing over her as she careened by. Coasting, at last, spilling all velocity till she and the machine came to rest beside the river.

The river. The comforting smell and sound of it rushing away. Out on the Yonne’s broad darkness a barge sailed, bound perhaps for Paris, the Seine, the sea beyond, carrying casks of wine and other valuables. Flushed from her ride, Lisette blushed yet more deeply, suddenly conscious of the curious stares of those around her: Mademoiselle Carduner, the schoolmistress; and Monsieur Lutterayne, the chemist, out for a promenade during his dinner hour or on some errand, seizing a chance to vacate his stuffy shop. Flustered, she attempted to restrain her hair into a proper chignon, but at only sixteen and with many pins missing, this was beyond her skill. She began furiously to plait her thick blond curls, and the others moved away.

At last she was alone on the riverbank with her mechanical friend. She tied her plaits together, though she knew that momentarily they would slither apart. She stroked the machine’s still gleaming handlebars, then leaned to fit her forehead at their center, so. “Dear one,” whispered Lisette. “How can you ever know how much you mean to me? Who would not give all they could, everything they had, in exchange for such happiness as I have found with you?”

Sans words, the front tire’s black arc responded to her whispers with visions. It preached to her of motion, of travel, of the mysteries dwelling beyond this sleepy, provincial village.

“Ah, yes, and one day, my dear, one day . . .” She raised her head and gazed out again at the river, at the barge now nearly gone from view. “One day we shall venture out and see for ourselves what it is the world holds for us.”

Boma, Congo, December 1889

Horror.

The Reverend Lieutenant Thomas Jefferson Wilson could think of no other word to sum up what he had experienced on this trip. Even now, alone in the quiet, white-walled room provided him by his host, he heard their cries, he saw their wasted bodies, their eyes bulging large in their thin faces, pulsing with defeat, hopeless as marine creatures stranded on a desolate beach. He smelled them, their sores running with blood and infected matter where chafed by their chains at neck and wrist and waist and ankle. Smelled the sweat of their fear, the fear that made them lift up and carry burdens half their malnourished weight till released by death. Smelled their abundant corpses rotting by the trail in the tropic heat.

This land was to have been Heaven.

Restless as ever, he abandoned his seat on the narrow cot to unshutter the room’s one window. A breeze brought some relief from the day’s fierce temperatures. Even up here, on the capital’s plateau, a Pennsylvanian such as himself found the Congo “Free” State’s equatorial climate hard to withstand. But he should not complain.

Or not on his own behalf.

A tapping at the door. He opened it on a child of eleven, the household’s primary servant—a boy named Mola, he recalled. “’Soir,” the boy slurred in French. He entered, bearing with him a tray, the meal his master offered in lieu of the repast shared by Boma’s white residents at the hotel near the river below.

The Reverend Lieutenant Thomas Jefferson Wilson would not be welcome at that hotel, for he was not white.

The dishes on the tray held vegetables, the ever-present manioc, and stewed meat of some sort—probably from a fowl or goat. No doubt this was what Mola himself would sup upon, and Thomas made sure to tender the boy his thanks as effusively as his limited French allowed. When he was alone again he placed the tray beneath his cot, the food untouched. His journey upriver to Stanley Falls and then back here to the port of Boma had entirely wrecked his appetite.

The wine he also set aside, to aid him later in seeking sleep. He drank instead a gobletful of water from a crystal decanter, then set that on the sill to cool and turned again to his work.

To the horror.

At forty a veteran of three wars, Thomas had seen and survived much. Though no more than a child at the American Civil War’s onset, as soon as blacks were allowed to fight he had enlisted and seen action. That must be why his sojourn here in the Congo was affecting him so adversely, he told himself sternly. His reaction was not illness, not pain and anguish, but anger: righteous indignation that the evils of slavery, which he had staked his life to eradicate from the face of the Earth, had sprung up once again. Unprotested and, what was worse, unremarked, they had met him everywhere he journeyed in this supposed Utopia.

A pair of thin pillows lay over his traveling desk, incompletely concealing it. He retrieved it and drew forth the manuscript of his open letter to King Leopold, monarch of this realm and soi-disant benefactor of its benighted native population.

“Good and great friend,” the salutation read. “I have the honor to submit for your Majesty’s consideration some reflections respecting the Independent State of Congo, based upon a careful study and inspection of the country. . . .” So far, he had written five pages and not yet named a third of the atrocities he had been forced to witness. The whippings, the murders committed so casually as if a form of sport, innocents dismembered—Thomas’s gorge rose, but he settled nonetheless to his self-appointed task.

Keeping his intended audience in mind, he aimed for a tone of forthrightness that yet maintained discreet silence on the more repulsive details of what he had discovered. The open letter would be published in his paper, The Commoner, and also as a standalone pamphlet; perhaps in boards as a small book, on the Continent. There he would find support for such an enterprise, translators. . .

The light dimmed rapidly, but not till he heard the clattering racket of the steam-driven trolley climbing Boma’s cliffs did Thomas cease his efforts. That noise, he knew, presaged the arrival of his host, the Anglo-Flemish trader Roger Morel. Thomas didn’t trust him, didn’t trust anyone who profited from Leopold’s reign. He packed away his open letter and went to meet the trolley at the platform mere yards from Morel’s villa.

Four cars comprised the steam train’s entire length. Their iron fuselages had been painted a brilliant yellow with gaudy red, blue, and green trim. This jaunty coloring and the fortuitous semblance of a face in the alignment of their doors and windows lent the cars a charming air much like the illustration in a children’s book. Thomas at first had succumbed to this charm and to the undeniable romance of such a small machine so beautifully built—until his peregrinations brought home to him the human cost involved.

Beneath the leafy serrations of a grove of palms the cars disgorged themselves of their riders, black-clad white men replacing their hats and stepping carefully down the platform’s wooden stairway. Morel bared his head again in salute to his visitor. Exchanging meaningless pleasantries, the two returned to Morel’s home.

Mola took his master’s hat and gloves at the door, handing him a glass half-filled with a greenish liquid. Thomas made as if to return to his room, considering his social obligations for the evening met, but Morel would have none of it. “No, no, my friend, I insist,” he said, indicating with his drink the sitting room’s best chair.

Ensconced perforce on its cushioned mahogany, Thomas accepted from Mola a second glass. He sipped the unknown beverage with his customary suspicion as the boy slipped from the room. It was faintly bitter and contained no alcohol he could detect.

“So.” His host had assumed a seat on the divan. He crossed his legs and clasped his hands over one knee. “You leave the day after the morrow?”

“Yes.” There were other colonies to explore, perhaps more truly paradisiacal, more suited to providing his colored brethren a new home. The ship would stop for Accra and Dakar, and he intended to travel from there to Tunis, Cairo—“That is my plan.”

“I advise you to change it.”

Thomas looked at Morel inquiringly. His eyes held a warning gleam that overrode Thomas’s mistrust of him. Thomas set the harmless glass down on the side table with a steady enough hand and spoke: “I fail to take your meaning, sir.”

“Ah. You have no confidence in me. That is well.” Morel nodded as if confirming a pet theory to himself, his chin doubling. “You are being watched. You must leave to night and go—elsewhere. A different route, more direct.”

A different route? “To where?” No use attempting any further to dissemble.

“To England.”

Not home. “Not to America?”

“In England you will be safe—enough. But this continent—there are large stakes, and the holders of those stakes are at every hand. During supper this evening I overheard enough, my English being supposed more imperfect than it is, to warrant giving you this warning.”

Morel stood. “As well, I have a—a commission of sorts—If you will allow me to retrieve certain papers I wish you to convey—” He left and returned with a sheaf of documents—bills of lading, figures in long columns, maps. Thomas read them in growing dismay. Here was proof, if such would be needed, of what he had witnessed. Proof and beyond proof . . . The scope of the problem far exceeded what he had seen with his own eyes. Not thousands but tens of thousands were doomed unless the abominations practiced so freely in the Congo Free State were to cease, and cease now.

Copyright © 2016 by Nisi Shawl. Excerpted from Everfair by Nisi Shawl. Published by permission of the author and Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nisi Shawl’s collection Filter House was a 2009 James Tiptree, Jr., Award winner; her stories have been published at Strange Horizons, in Asimov’s SF Magazine, and in anthologies including The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and both volumes of the Dark Matter series.  She was the 2011 Guest of Honor at the feminist SF convention WisCon and will be a 2014 co-Guest of Honor for the Science Fiction Research Association.  She co-authored the renowned Writing the Other: A Practical Approach with Cynthia Ward, and co-edited the nonfiction anthology Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler.  Shawl’s Belgian Congo steampunk novel Everfair is forthcoming in 2015 from Tor Books.  Her website is nisishawl.com.

Media Review: Sense8, Season 1

Sunil Patel | 1575 words

The opening credits of Sense8 (2015, streaming on Netflix) effectively convey what sort of show it is. Images from around the world set to calm music that slowly give way to more vibrant scenes of life and love as the music increases in intensity, betraying a hint of darkness. This is the planet Earth and the people who live there, it says as it revels in their beauty. The credits give no indication that Sense8 is a science fiction show, because it’s not concerned with the science fiction of it all: It’s using an SFnal concept for character-focused storytelling. What if you were psychically connected to seven other people around the world? What if you could share their thoughts, their emotions, their dreams? What if you could help each other?

Suddenly and violently, eight people become sensates, though it takes them some time to understand what has happened. Will Gorski (Brian J. Smith), white cop in Chicago. Lito Rodriguez (Miguel Ángel Silvestre), gay Spanish actor in Mexico City. Riley Blue (Tuppence Middleton), white Icelandic DJ in London. Wolfgang Bogdanow (Max Riemelt), German thief in Berlin. Capheus (Aml Ameen), Kenyan matatu driver in Nairobi. Kala Dandekar (Tina Desai), Indian pharmacist in Mumbai. Sun Bak (Doona Bae), Korean kickboxer in Seoul. Nomi Marks (Jamie Clayton), white trans lesbian hacktivist in San Francisco. It’s rare to see character diversity of this level in television, let alone science fiction. Every one of these characters has a compelling story, and the cast is uniformly excellent. While some characters’ stories do fall into stereotypes—the Indian woman has arranged marriage angst, the Korean woman knows martial arts, the Kenyan man’s plot involves drug traffickers, and so on—the characters themselves are rich and complex. Like Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the show uses these familiar templates to ease the audience into accepting something bold and new. On a personal level, I loved seeing India and Indian characters depicted so accurately on a Western show. I’m one of the few people who actually enjoyed Outsourced, but that show was clearly not filmed in India. Sense8 not only went to India, but consulted with locals to learn more about the culture and how marriages and weddings work (yes, we do sometimes burst into choreographed Bollywood routines, though they’re not nearly so polished and smooth).

Juggling eight protagonists is no easy task, and J. Michael Straczynski and the Wachowskis struggle in the early episodes to give them all equal weight. At times, there are a couple of characters with no clear plot movement, which can be frustrating, since the overarching plot—a vast conspiracy involving sensates and also scientific hoo-hah that attempts to explain the concept—moves at such a glacial pace that the character stories must be interesting to keep you watching. But Sense8 is a show obviously designed for binge-watching, as it expects you to give it about four episodes right up front to hook you. Slowly but surely, it reveals itself to the characters and the audience as the sensating—like the music of the opening credits—builds in intensity. At first, it’s a simple bleed-through of sounds and images, but it’s when the sensates discover they can communicate with each other and, even better, cede control of their bodies that things really get popping. The first half of the season teaches the audience the visual language of sensating, how it depicts people from different countries conversing as if they’re in the same room or a Korean woman kicking the asses of Kenyan baddies while simultaneously beating up someone in the ring. The second half then weaves that mechanic into the fabric of the storytelling, recognizing that now these characters are never ever truly alone and can call on each other when necessary. Some of the most incredible scenes in the show occur when all eight sensates experience something together; the “What’s Up?” montage at the end of episode four (the moment I think would finally hook a new viewer) is my favorite weirdo sing-along since Magnolia. Episode six has the infamous That Scene, in which the sensates really do come together. There’s a moment at the end of episode ten that is transcendent, unlike anything I have ever seen on television. These strangers become closer than anyone could imagine, sharing their whole selves with each other, mind, body, and soul.

The sensating mechanic allows the show to tell a truly global story with character connections where you can have amazing action sequences involving multiple people who aren’t even physically there, but also have amazing intimate conversations involving multiple people who aren’t even physically there. Don’t get me wrong, I am here for every exciting car chase and explosion the Wachowskis put onscreen set to Johnny Klimek and Tom Tykwer’s thumping soundtrack, but Sense8 really shines in scenes like Lito and Nomi sitting in a museum bonding over their identity issues. Two people who have never met, never even spoken to each other except in their minds, find common ground in the ways they’ve had to hide who they were, and how hard it is to embrace that, to undo the violence they’ve done to themselves. Though the characters are separated by thousands of miles, the actors are physically together in each space—when Lito opens up, we see them in the museum, and when Nomi opens up, we see them in her home—and that rapport shows. And that chemistry, as shown in the budding romances that feel vaguely incestuous but also perfectly apt: If you can fall in love with someone after sharing their mind, that’s something.

Sense8 says that we are all connected, though our bond is not as strong as that of the sensates. We are all humans inside, but our differences are to be celebrated and embraced; they should bring us closer together rather than tear us apart. In a way, sensating is like an SF version of Will Graham’s hyperempathy, as it allows the characters to literally feel what others are feeling. Their pain, their joy, their heartbreak, their aggression, their arousal, everything. Sensating is also an SF metaphor for social media, which similarly connects people around the world by allowing them to broadcast their emotions and ask for advice, though unfortunately I can’t drive your car from another continent with my Twitter account.

Sense8 is not without its flaws, of course. Despite its impressively diverse cast, the story does seem to favor the white characters as the season progresses, and in a show this queer, it’s disappointing that the climax centers on a heterosexual romance. Is this another case of using a familiar, safe template to give the audience what it is used to as a Trojan horse for all the queer content? Even so, this is a show that starts out with two lesbians using a rainbow prosthetic cock; we can handle far more queerness by the end. And more attention paid to the characters of color. The show mostly forgets that Kala is a scientist who could be helping the sensates out with her science knowledge until the finale, and Capheus (whose actor is sadly being replaced), precious cinnamon roll though he is, feels the most sidelined. As I mentioned earlier, the slow pacing may turn some viewers off, as may the sometimes-clunky dialogue.

But I can overlook all of these flaws because I love these characters so much. In preparation for this review, I read recaps of all the episodes, and I teared up just thinking about the characters because I’d grown so attached them. I rewatched the finale and teared up at a scene of seven sensates appearing in one sensate’s time of distress because they had bonded that strongly. This show is a celebration of life and humanity as an interconnected beautiful experience where coming together to find commonality and connection makes us stronger, and it is what we need right now. We need more character-focused science fiction with this level of diversity that allows so many people to see themselves as superheroes, which is essentially what the sensates are. The first season is their origin story, and I’m so excited to see where they’ll go next.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sunil Patel is a Bay Area fiction writer and playwright who has written about everything from ghostly cows to talking beer. His plays have been performed at San Francisco Theater Pub and San Francisco Olympians Festival, and his fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Fireside Magazine, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Flash Fiction Online, The Book Smugglers, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, and Asimov’s Science Fiction. Plus he is Assistant Editor of Mothership Zeta. His favorite things to consume include nachos, milkshakes, and narrative. Find out more at ghostwritingcow.com, where you can watch his plays, or follow him @ghostwritingcow. His Twitter has been described as “engaging,” “exclamatory,” and “crispy, crunchy, peanut buttery.”

Book Reviews: September 2016

Amal El-Mohtar | 1200 words

Comics!

The summer’s springs are winding down, though you wouldn’t know it from the weather: at time and place of writing heat warnings are in effect, presaging thunderstorms and the roulette-spin of whether or not they’ll break the humidity. In this season of storms I wanted to look at a tempestuous trio of comics ranging from sword and sorcery to space opera to quirky slice of life.

Monstress Volume 1: Awakening
Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda
Trade paperback
Image Comics
ISBN 978-1632157096
July 2016
192 pages

I hardly ever buy comics in single issues, preferring to wait for the trade volumes, but Monstress is so stunningly beautiful that I had to have every piece of story the moment it came out. Sana Takeda’s art is a breath-thieving marriage of Yoshitaka Amano and Sulamith Wülfing, all striking lines and soft colours in an art-deco-inspired wonderland of horrors, gorgeously matched to Marjorie Liu’s spare, understated, and often wryly funny writing.

There’s a war on between the Arcanics and the Cumaean Order—between those whose bodies contain magic and those whose science-sorcery is fuelled by it. Maika Halfwolf is an Arcanic with a secret, one that threatens to destroy her: in order to unravel its hold on her she needs to infiltrate a Cumaean stronghold and confront dimly remembered monsters from her past. Maika soon finds it’s secrets all the way down, and with the reluctant help of a fox-child and a two-tailed, poet-quoting cat, she begins piecing together truths from the shadows of her history.

It’s almost unbearable how beautifully Takeda draws horrors. The Cumaea literally lop limbs from still-living Arcanic slaves to make their lilium; Maika Halfwolf has a destructive appetite she can barely control. Indeed, the whole first issue is variations on the theme of people eating or being eaten: Maika recalls, “When we were slaves and starving, we once ate the contents of a dead boy’s stomach. We said it wasn’t like eating the boy,” before tucking into a feast of freshly slaughtered wild beasts. Neither Liu nor Takeda shy from depicting the vicious brutality of soldiers at war—but the art is so intricate, the expressions so moving, that it becomes impossible to look away.

I was so awe-struck by the visceral unity of beauty and violence that it took me a full two issues before I realised almost all the characters are women. The soldiers, the Cumaea, the chief Arcanic protagonists—all of them are women, tearing each other apart, being magnificent and monstrous together. I can’t easily articulate the effect this has had on me, except that it is desperately welcome and makes me want to stand and applaud. Monstress is far and away the best new comics series I’ve read this year, and an astonishing accomplishment.

Saga volume 6
Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
Trade paperback
Image Comics
ISBN 9781632157119
June 2016
152 pages

Saga is a widely acclaimed, multiple-award-sweeping series, and if you aren’t already reading it I don’t even know what to tell you. Go read it! Star-crossed lovers crossing the stars in a spaceship of living wood, trying to protect their baby! Weird sex planets! Lying cats! Mercenaries whose status is indicated by a definite article! It’s brilliant, moving, harrowing, hilarious, and the best space opera I’ve seen in comics since The Ballad of Halo Jones.

That said, I was getting a little worried about it; after a solid run of each volume surpassing the last, volume 5 made me miserable, and left me feeling as if I’d fundamentally misunderstood its deeper project. But volume 6 blew me away so thoroughly that I felt it deserved a review, even this far into the series.

Alana and Marko were soldiers on opposite sides of a generations-old war between a planet, Landfall, and its moon, Wreath, now mostly being fought by proxy on planets ever farther away from the source of the conflict. They fell in love, had a child, and are on the run from the powers that be, trying to keep their daughter, Hazel—a child born with wings and horns, characteristics of both her parents’ peoples—secret and safe. They’re hunted by princes, mercenaries, tabloid journalists, and intriguing agents of both Landfall and Wreath, all with their own agendas. By volume 6, Alana and Marko have lost track of Hazel but have reunited with each other, and are trying to get their family back together one daring information heist at a time. Meantime Hazel is a few years older, held prisoner with her grandmother on a Landfall-run re-education facility, keeping her wings bound and hidden.

What makes this volume especially interesting to me is the fact that Hazel—who up until now has been narrating the series from an undisclosed future point in time—is old enough to have a voice and agency as an on-screen character. She’s no longer only a wry scrawl of words appearing almost as whimsical footnotes to events—she’s present, active, and interacts with the narration in interesting ways. That alone would have been enough to renew my love for the whole, but the added nuance is combined with perfect heart-in-mouth pacing, wonderful twists and turns, and some amazing shifts in character design from Fiona Staples. I can’t wait for the next one.

Giant Days Volume 1
John Allison and Lissa Treiman
Trade Paperback
ISBN 978-1-60886-789-9
June 2016
128 pages

Susan, Esther, and Daisy are in their first year of university, have known each other for three weeks, and are the best of friends. Together they provoke drama, fight campus sexism, and enjoy autonomous sensory meridian responses in between bouts of campus illness and recreating the early ’90s.

It’s delicious to read a book so thoroughly dedicated to enjoying friendship. In among the hyperbolic shenanigans (always with a core grain of truth about the university experience) is real, lovely affection between three very different women supporting each other against whatever the world might bring. It’s also laugh-out-loud funny: John Allison and Lissa Treiman have between them struck the sharpest comic timing I’ve read in a while, and every single character, hero or villain, is a delight.

Profoundly charming, enormously wacky and completely hilarious, Giant Days is a rare treat. I didn’t want it to end.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amal El-Mohtar is the Nebula-nominated author of The Honey Month, a collection of poems and very short fiction written to the taste of 28 different kinds of honey. Her poetry has won the Rhysling award three times and the Richard Jefferies Prize once, and her story “The Truth About Owls” is presently a Locus Award finalist. Her fiction has most recently appeared in Uncanny magazine and is forthcoming in The Bestiary, edited by Ann VanderMeer. She writes reviews for NPR, Lightspeed, and Tor.com, narrates fiction and poetry for Uncanny’s podcast, edits Goblin Fruit, and has occasionally been known to deadlift genre professionals. She is also, with Scott Lynch, Liz M. Myles and Michael Damien Thomas, part of Down and Safe, a Blake’s 7 podcast. She divides her time and heart between Ottawa and Glasgow. Find her online at amalelmohtar.com or on Twitter @tithenai.

Interview: Kameron Hurley

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy | 9847 words

Kameron Hurley is the author of such novels as God’s War and The Mirror Empire, and her essay on the history of women in conflict “We Have Always Fought” was the first blog post to be nominated for and win a Hugo award. That essay and many others are included in Kameron’s new book The Geek Feminist Revolution.

This interview first appeared in June 2016 on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by David Barr Kirtley and produced by John Joseph Adams. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the interview or other episodes.

• • • •

Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me.

First of all, just tell us about how you discovered Joanna Russ.

That’s a very good question. I went to the Clarion West writing workshop in the year 2000, so a while ago now, but that was when I started exploring some old-school science fiction because I was getting a lot of pushback. All the guys would tell you, “You kids these days, you don’t read the good stuff.” So, I started reading lots of Alfred Bester, and Heinlein, and all those folks. I stumbled across Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Vonda McIntyre, all of those New Wave feminist science fiction writers.

I’m trying to remember the first one I read. I don’t remember which one it was. It might have been We Who Are About To . . .. I own everything that she’s ever written, which was not a lot, unfortunately. She was kind of taken out of the game early due to health issues. But that was my introduction, just me trying to get a better depth and breadth in the field of science fiction.

What was it about her writing that made such an impression on you?

Le Guin is a fabulous writer. She is absolutely wonderful, but she was not as radical as Russ. Joanna Russ was like screw everything, burn it all down, rage against the machine. It took me a long time to read The Female Man because it’s so dense and out there. The second time I tried to read it, I finally got it. What she’s doing there is so incredibly radical. It really does burn it all down.

Le Guin is like, “Hey, let’s all get along, and we’ll change things from the inside.” And Russ was like, “This whole system is screwed. We’re all screwed. Kill them all.” And I admired that, you know? I thought that was cool. I just really loved her attitude toward change, which sounds terrible, but I think sometimes you need to have anger to drive you, because honestly, you get worn down very easily with all of the different things that come at you. I mean, this entire system is in place, made to get you to give up and to accept the status quo. I think she used her anger a lot to get her through that, and to get her through that depression that living in this kind of oppression can give to people.

You talk in the book about how when she died in 2011, you kind of looked around and said, “Hmm, who’s going to pick up this mantle?”

It was interesting. I think it was the last public interview that she did, Sam Delany interviewed her over the phone at WisCon, and she answered a few questions and things like that. Then it was a few years later that she passed away. You always look back to who came before you, and she was just such a great voice, even though she hadn’t written anything substantial since the late ’90s. You can’t just go, “Well, that generation is going to handle it, and it’ll be fine, and they’re still all kicking.” There’s sort of a thing where you go, “Is that us?”

I look around at my peers, the folks that I considered the newbies in the field when I first came up, and now I look ahead at them, and I’m like, “Wow, they’re The Man. They’re the establishment.” Right? Like, Scalzi was the scrappy little internet dude, and now he’s kind like, “Oh, he’s Science Fiction.” You just look at how that mantle gets passed down to people. You can wait for everybody to give it to you, or you can seize it yourself and say, “You know what? These are things that need to be said, and we can keep sharing these same sorts of messages to new audiences in different ways.”

I like this, you say in the book, “I’ve been screaming on the internet for ten years. What’s forty more?”

[Laughter] In whatever form the internet will have, exactly, yeah.

What is the system that needs to be burned down? What are some of the issues that really need to be addressed when it comes to women writing fantasy and science fiction?

I think it’s the same as women of all races, men of color, in any kind of industry. We live within a society that has stratified and codified where people live and how people interact. One of the things, it’s in the book, but I grew up in a very white town, and I thought, “Well, that’s just how it is. It’s just very white.”

That was made that way on purpose. There were no black people allowed in Oregon, Washington, or California for years and years. It was illegal for them to live there. They would be kicked out and burned out. They had people in towns where literally they would go into towns sometimes and they would burn people out. We look at these kind of structures and systems and go, “Well, that was all a long time ago. We’re so much better than that. Blah, blah, blah.” But, we’re living with the historical memory of that and the historical fallout from that.

So we have to then negotiate our entire lives and build new lives based on all that horror that has come before us. That’s really difficult to do. It’s very easy to perpetuate this myth that, well, these things have always been this way. Men have always written eighty percent of science fiction, and women, there’s occasionally an Ursula Le Guin. When in fact, you look at it, and it’s almost at parity. Right now we’re about at parity as far as authors go, but you wouldn’t see that if you look at reviews, if you look at coverage, if you look at all those sorts of things. You run the numbers, and you go, “Well, how do we fix all of that?” The answer is that you have to completely reimagine all of the things that you’ve been told to be true. That’s really hard. It’s really hard to be like, “Wow, all of those things I was told were a lie.”

You say, “I know women who wrote hard SF or epic fantasy who threw in the towel or went to genres like urban fantasy or romance that were far more welcoming to women authors.” When you say it’s hard for women in hard SF or epic fantasy, what exactly are the challenges in those particular genres?

Well, you go to a convention. For years and years, people call them the “whisper networks,” but it’s not. Basically, it’s just like, “Oh, you have a panel with such-and-such a guy who is an editor or an agent, and hey, just so you know, they’re a creeper, and they’re totally going to hit on you or they’re going to say something inappropriate, or they’re going to try to do something awful.” There’s a story from one writer I know, it was her first convention that she went to, and a very established science fiction writer—she’s a little baby writer, she just had her first book come out, and she’s volunteering in the green room—and he goes, “What do you write?” And she said what she wrote, and it was not hard SF, it was a different genre, and he looked at her, and goes, “You are worth less than the shit on my shoe.” She was like, “Okay, thanks! Welcome to science fiction.” We see that all the time, right? We have classic harassers that we’ve been trying to get rid of for years in the field, and of course people keep going, “Oh, it’s not a big deal. It’s dah dah dah.”

But people don’t understand, when you have to deal with that every single day . . . I hear that from guys all the time, “Well, if somebody hit on me, I think that’d be great.” It’s like, you have never been on Chicago public transit for fifteen hours a week and then hit on three times a day. It is exhausting, and it’s scary because you don’t know what people are going to do if you say no. People scream at you. People have pulled knives on people. People could assault you. That happens all the time. And people don’t realize that after a while, doing that again and again, and again, like I talked about earlier, it’s made to wear you down.

Seeing that all the time, and experiencing that all the time, it gets to you. It does get to you. And it ends up meaning that, yeah, you have to fight harder, and it shouldn’t be that way. We shouldn’t have to fight that hard just to have a job or just to write a book and tell a story. But there are those barriers.

As a woman writer, you’ve got to be louder, and you’ve got to put yourself out there more, and you’ve got to do this and this because you’re not going to come first at the top of the mind. I love this exercise to do with people where I say, “Those of you who can imagine things in your mind—recently I’ve read there are some who cannot—but if you can imagine things, say, when you hear the word writer, what is the first vision? What is the vision that you associate with the word writer?” For me, it is an image of Walt Whitman. White man, long beard.

So, we start with that, with our language, with how we learn language. Policeman: What is the picture you see in the little book? Oh, it’s a man, and it is a man who is in a police uniform. That’s how we associate all of those things going forward. So, we’re fighting against all of these things that we’ve been taught from a very, very young age. In order to completely reconceptualize how we think about things is very challenging. I think it’s very useful, but also very challenging. Even now, when people ask me, “Who are your favorite writers?” dude writers go to the top of my list. Does that mean those are only my favorite writers? Absolutely not, you know? I love Joanna Russ. I love Cat Valente. I love tons of writers, but the first thing I do is, “Oh, those top three.” And that’s how we were raised. That’s the world we live in. It sucks. But, if you want to make it better, you actually have to acknowledge that this exists, and then you have to work to change it.

You make the point in the book that when a lot of these hurtful things . . . it’s not just this one incident, it’s this long pattern that really wears people down. You give an example, like, you wrote a story early on where you had a gay male character die, could you talk about that?

Sure, yeah. I wrote a novel called God’s War, and it’s this big old matriarchy, actually, and tons of women in same-sex relationships. I did only have one gay male character in that particular book, and it so happened that as I was working through the plot of the book, there was an incident and he ends up dying. It wasn’t until I got to the end of the book, and then I realized, I was like, “Oh my gosh, there is the kill-the-gay-guy character. Oh, the best friend who dies who’s gay. The only gay male character.” And I couldn’t figure out how to have the plot do the same things it needed to do and keep him alive.

Now I can. Now, five years later, I’ve been thinking about it forever, now I can figure it out. But I was not at the point in my career where I had the technical proficiency to figure out how to get myself out of a plot thing that I had dug. I said, “Okay, I’ll add some more gay male characters. They’re going to have some supporting roles, so at least it’s not the only gay male character.” But it still showed, and it still hurt. This was a thing that I went to, and I knew it was problematic. It’s going out the door, dammit, but that’s how it is.

Sure enough, I went to a convention, and as soon as I got off the panel, I had a young woman come to me, and she said, “I’m in a reading group, we read your book, we all really loved it, but I have to tell you, there were a lot of gay men in my reading group, and it really bugged them that he had to die. It really hurt them. It always happens. The tragic loss of the gay character.” I told her just what I told you. I was like, “I knew it was a problem, and that was stupid, and I apologize. I’m not going to do it again.”

In subsequent books, I was like, “I have to make sure that if I’m going to add in a character that I’m not just, oh, plot reason, I need to kill them.” And I did, going forward, I made sure to be much more aware, and that’s with all sorts of characters. I have to be aware of that. The best way to get around that, of course, is to just have lots of different characters who have lots of different backgrounds and different representations, so it’s not, “Oh, that is the one gay character, and they’re going to die tragically,” or, “The one trans character, and oh, they die tragically, but luckily, our heroes are all fine.” But, if your heroes are gay or trans or whatever, it doesn’t feel like it is a purposeful slap in the face. A lot of what this comes down to, and I tell people this all the time, is not being a lazy writer. Don’t be lazy. Those things we were programmed with, we see these things in media, we see these tropes, and we just perpetuate them. I’m like, “You need to sit down and go: Is this really the story I want to tell, or is this the story I’ve been told I should tell?”

I thought it was interesting that you say, “The solution to this is not just to go through the story and take out anything that people might find problematic, but to understand what’s problematic, and to take responsibility and own the things that you’re choosing to leave in there.”

Absolutely. That’s what gets me all the time. I own up to what I did to that character, because at the end of the day, it went out the door, and I knew what I was doing. It’s all perfectly fine and good for you to get on to the social medias when Twitter comes at you and be like, “Hey, well, I wanted to write a misogynist, horrible society where women have a terrible time. That was my purpose and that was my artistic choice.” Fine. Great. But don’t get up there and say, “It’s not misogynist. And I didn’t write this.” That’s what you wrote, just own up to it. That’s what you wrote. If that is a conscious, artistic choice you have made, and there is a purpose for you doing it, then you go right ahead.

That doesn’t mean people aren’t going to critique you. As an artist, you’re going out into the world. You need to understand you’re going to hear from everybody, and I think that’s the shock that’s happening to a lot of creators; they’re saying, “Oh my gosh, all these people, who I had the privilege of never hearing from before.” Because again, little white town because it was manufactured that way. Now the internet has brought everybody together in wonderful ways, absolutely, because we have not heard those voices. We never had anybody saying back, “Hey, actually, no, that’s totally messed up.” Some people are reacting to that in an awesome way and going, “Oh my gosh, you’re totally right. That’s messed up. I will fix that next time, and I own up to it.” And some are going, “Noooooooo,” like babies. I’m like, you’re not twelve. Come on.

That was one thing that really struck me about this book is how much of it is concerned with how a writer needs to comport themselves online, which I think says so much about what it’s like being a writer today, and how you have to think in terms of your presence and how you interact with readers and things like that.

That clearly is just coming from my own experience. I started my blog in 2004, and I have been waging battles on the internet ever since. Lots of people are like, “Oh, it’s so much worse now.” I would say, “Well, yeah, Twitter can organize mobs a lot faster, but you didn’t see my comments sections in 2004.”

I had a blatantly feminist blog called “Brutal Woman” of all things, and man, the stuff I would get on there was just awful. And, at least with this, Twitter especially, I can mute accounts and mute keywords. I don’t see a lot of things anymore, which is fabulous. When the mob comes, it’s like, okay, I’m going to be mobbed for two days, and I’m going to mute a lot of accounts, and then it’s over.

Whereas, yeah, man, the comments section of the blog was just awful. But, again, I actually felt very fortunate having come up through earlyish internet days. I was on the Blogger platform. Because I got to learn, hey, do I really want comments on my blog? I decided I didn’t. I don’t have comments anymore because I don’t want to go through with that anymore. I’ve been able to look at my social presence and keep it very cultivated and make sure it is working for me, and I’m not being overwhelmed by it. That’s something a lot of women especially deal with. Everybody deals with this to some extent. Women get the worst of it. Women of color the absolute worst.

What I wanted to do was provide some guideline instruction, be like, “Hey, just so you know, you can do this. This is okay. And, yes, we’re all dealing with it.” Clearly, there are lots of problems. You also need to teach people how to respect each other on the internet, and there’s a lot of issues with etiquette and tools to manage harassment, which of course, Twitter fails at completely. But anyway, what I’d say is, “Okay, let’s all work together on this, and let’s strategize.” Because it’s really lonely.

I won’t say who, but there was a creator in the geek space who was very upset by some things that were said in a comment section, and was just crying and sobbing on Snapchat about they were just going to give in and quit, and it just broke my heart because I look at this huge generation of creators who are so talented and so fabulous, and I don’t want to lose them because of some assholes on the internet.

I thought it was interesting because you say on Twitter specifically that you think you should mute people rather than blocking them, because if you block them, that’s kind of a sign that they got to you, in a way.

That’s a personal thing. I know lots of people who are like, “I just block everyone I want.” Unfortunately, what you end up seeing is they get real weird and obsessive. Like, “I won points against her. I really screwed with her.” Because what you’ve got to get, again, with some of these people, they’re sadists and drama queens, and it makes their day when you’re like, “Ahh, you hurt my feelings.” They love that.

So, my personal way to deal with it is I just mute. I just mute like crazy. I’ve had the creepy ones who are like, “I can see that you’re on Twitter. You haven’t blocked me. Why are you not listening?” Which someone else had pointed out to me because, of course, they were muted. And I’m like, “Woah, this dude needs to do something else.” But, again, they’re only going to go at it for so long before they get bored. That’s my approach. Does that work for everyone? No, absolutely not.

But, the real issue of course, is this is a systematic problem that Twitter needs to deal with, and they’re not dealing with harassment in a way that is very beneficial to anyone. So in the meantime, we have to all find our way to make it a useable platform.

There were times before I started muting accounts and muting keywords, especially, where it was just a load of noisy garbage. It was getting so bad for me. The problem is I make so many really great contacts, not just with fans, but with other creators that have led to real life friendships, and I don’t want to lose that. It’s an incredible tool for people. And to drive everybody off it is just, again, we look at systematic issues that lead to lost opportunities for people, and that’s one of them there as well. If women and people of color, women of all races, and men of color, can’t use these platforms, then we’ve cut off this entire area of opportunity, which again becomes a systematic issue of oppression, which we need to really consider and think about.

You say, “I spent a great deal of my life trying to be quiet and nice and not piss anyone off. I was miserable. It served no purpose. And they still came for me.”

I was, clearly, a geek growing up. I was not terribly popular, like most geeks. And I tried to be nice and like the things other people liked and do the things that other people were supposed to do, and what you find out is they’re going to bully you anyway, you know? I thought, “If I’m going to get bullied anyway, I might as well get bullied for making a difference in the world.”

The thing with internet BS is that for every dude that’s like, “kill yourself,” there are literally hundreds at this point, but dozens that I have seen, of women who come up to me at conventions, and who will just start sobbing. And they’re, “I am so happy to meet you. You’ve changed my life. Your work is amazing and inspiring.” I get emails from people all the time who are like, you’ve inspired me to move across the country or propose to the person that I loved or to stop screwing around and go back to school. Those are the things that you live for. You can tell me to die on the internet all day, but doing that kind of good in the world, it just makes all that other stuff ridiculous.

It seems like all the kind of bullshit you’re talking about has inspired you to write these essays about it, but it seems like also a lot of your fiction is inspired by pushing back about this kind of thing. Could you talk about what impact these battles have had on shaping your fiction?

Sure. My first book, God’s War, was actually me saying, “How can I have a matriarchy, but not have all the men be dead?” Because I read a lot of old school feminist science fiction, and a lot of people were just like, “Hey, I’m going to have a disease that kills all the men, and that’s how they have a matriarchy.” I was not buying that. I said, “Well, what if we send them all off to war?” Which is kind of a cop out, a lot of them still die. But then I started saying, “Okay, yes the men are all shipped off to war. There’s a three-hundred-year ongoing war on this colonized planet. It’s 10,000 years in the future. How would that affect everything else in their lives?” I took made-up religions based on a combination of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and I kind of just mashed them all together and made them into their own far-future religions.

Now let’s explore these two characters, one of whom is very privileged. She’s a woman in this society, and she is a bounty hunter. She’s still on the down and out. She’s not politically powerful, but she’s physically powerful, and the law doesn’t touch her because of what she does. She used to be a government assassin. And I said, okay, now I’m going to take a man from the folks that they’re fighting, and I’m going to throw him into the mix and say, okay, how does he live in that society? How does that compare and contrast with the way she lives?

Of course, on the top of that—this is how you make a cool, awesome adventure story that also says things—on top of that, they’re hunting down this alien who may have the key to ending the holy war. So, they’re running around through this contaminated desert. It’s Mad Max in space, basically. It’s really fun. It was interesting, because I did have several readers email me, and they were guys, and they were like, “I didn’t really understand microagressions and sexism until I read this book. I totally empathized with Rhys, the male character, who was going around this matriarchal society where he was open game. Stuff could happen to him and there would be no repercussions.” He had to deal with this constant “is this someone who is just making a comment about me on the street, or are they actually going to attack me?” These readers were like, “Wow, that completely changed my understanding.” That was very gratifying, right? At the same time, it also said many other things.

Then when I went to write my epic fantasy, The Mirror Empire, I said, “I want to make an epic fantasy with actual fantastic cultures.” I don’t just want to be like, “It is pseudo-medieval Europe that is just our idea of Medieval Europe, not how Medieval Europe actually was. And it’s a patriarchy, and horrible things happen to women, and all the menz are in charge, running around with swords that all of them can totally wield.” I’m like, okay, let’s do cool things with consent-based culture that’s polyamorous and matriarchal, and let’s have this violent matriarchy. Then let’s have a patriarchy, but they have three genders.

So, I took that and said, now that I have all those things, I’m going to put this cool plot on top of it, once again. No one wants to read a lecture. No one wants to read message fiction. That was my biggest problem with some of the old-school feminist science fiction is that they were very much think pieces, and they felt a little didactic. I want an adventure story where stuff blows up, which also does cool stuff with social mores. On top of that, there’s the plot where these two parallel universes are colliding. One world will live, one world will die, and all of the people who have to fight in this war, and that’s really fun. I took those things, and I said, “I’m going to pair all of the awesome, kick-butt plots that I love.” I love the old Conan novels. Totally problematic, but I love Conan. And Conan is basically Nyx, who is the God’s War former assassin. Who just keeps up and gets going, and she’s a boxer, and kicks everybody’s butt, and has a great time. They are old-school adventure stories. They fight bugs, and they blow things up—she used to be a sapper. I have a lot of fun, while at the same time actually doing fantastic things with the social stuff, which you don’t see as much, which seems crazy. It’s like, hey, we’re writing fantasy, we’re writing science fiction, we can do anything, and it’s like reading the Ray Bradbury Martian stories.

I tried to get in to them, and literally we’re on Mars and it’s like, “The Martian man reads the newspaper and calls to his wife in the kitchen who is making dinner.” I thought, “Are you kidding me right now?” It’s like 1950s America on Mars. Maybe he meant it in an ironic way, but knowing Bradbury, he’s just having fun. I was like, “No. No, I’m not doing that.” If we’re going to write a fantasy or a science fiction, we are actually going to write a fantasy and science fiction novel.

When you say you’re writing about a consent-based culture, could you say a little more about what that actually means?

That one actually always surprises people. At the age of twelve, for all of the people in this culture, you are not allowed to physically touch them in any way unless you get their permission. So, if you want to hug someone, if you would like to touch their shoulder, if you would like to hold them back from rushing into a burning building, you have to ask for their permission. I said, “Hey, I want to make a fully consent-based culture. I want to know what that looks like.” You could kind of give a blanket consent to someone who you’re in love with and say, “Hey, you have blanket consent. We’ve consented to X, Y, and Z.”

It was interesting because it would turn into these negotiations between characters of what is and isn’t okay. Then having that culture interact with other cultures was explosive, because for them, touching without consent is punishable by exile. You get rid of them. And they’re of course non-violent and all of that, so there’s huge repercussions. So yeah, that was interesting.

Lots of these things I do because, as a writer, it challenges me in how I’m writing, because I didn’t realize how much I’d rely on, “Oh, so and so tapped her shoulder,” or “grabbed her arm,” or did something where you’re actually physically touching someone. I’d have to stop. They’re going to get attention some other way. They might grab a sleeve, but that was like the furthest I could go. It was very interesting for me to give myself those restrictions and see what happened with it.

You mentioned your character Nyx. I was really struck by this description in the book. You say, “What you’d end up with is something like Nyx, the foul talking, head-chopping mercenary from my God’s War series sitting on the toilet, belly fat spilling out, ragged scars, upper thighs, hairy legs splayed. She’d be sitting there with mismatched skin, lined with scars and stretch marks, and maybe paging through some boxing magazine, flabby breasts unbound and spilling on her stomach, and she could give a fuck about you.” This is not a character that we see much in fantasy.

No, unfortunately. She was super fun to write because, again, she lived with absolute privilege. I think it was Adam Roberts who wrote a really great review of that book where he talked about escapism and how she was just such a great character for channeling all of one’s frustrations about sexism in the world.

You’re in this little office cubicle, and you’ve got a boss who asks you to get coffee again, even though you outrank him. All these little microagressions that you deal with every day, and then you can just go home and read about Nyx, who really couldn’t give a crap. She goes off and punches people in the face.

I was writing a scene with her for a novella I’m working on, and it was interesting because I had her kind of drunk and disorderly in a bar, and even the authorities didn’t want to deal with her because she used to be a government assassin. She could do anything. She could literally kill someone and she was untouchable. I thought, “Wow, to live with that kind of privilege.” Which, as we know, lots of rich people in particular live with. It was very interesting to create this society of someone who didn’t have to live with The Gaze. You know, the male gaze or the gaze of society that can tell you what you can and cannot do. People let her be herself, for better or worse, right? She’s not a great person. I want to make sure that’s clear. She’s not great, but she’s different, as you said. She’s not someone that we get to see a whole lot.

Right. There’s a lot of discussion these days about “strong female characters.” You say in the book that you feel like these characters aren’t written for you and you don’t find them too persuasive a lot of the time.

I was reading something recently where the “strong female protagonist” has almost just become a trope in itself, where literally it’s just, “Hey, I am a woman with a gun, and I’m running around in this world full of mostly men, and everyone respects me, and I have lots of sex, and that’s great, and I punch things, and that’s great,” but there’s nothing deeper than that. I felt like it’s almost people going, “Well, but look, she’s strong. She has a gun.” There’s more to those sorts of things. You don’t give a woman a gun and go, “Sexism is over.” It doesn’t happen. There’s no exploration.

I run into this all the time. There’s no exploration a lot of times when I see people go, “Oh, well, women are equal.” What does that mean? Who does the work? It’s like, who is doing all of these jobs that were traditionally gendered jobs that we see in a lot of societies? You need to actually do that work and figure it out economically. Yeah, it’s great, everyone can be what they want to be, but does that mean guys get to stay home and do what they want? Does that mean that there’s a class of people that has to do most of the childcare and the cooking? God, who does the cooking? There’s a lot of work that makes society function that we made into gendered work, so I think that really needs to be explored, and people don’t want to do that. They just want to go, “Woo, everything is equal.” It’s like, ahh, that one little part is.

Then there’s also no deconstruction of masculinity. Is giving someone a gun any better? Again, Nyx: not a great person.

You make the point in the book that I thought was really interesting, that a lot of these strong female protagonists, they’re able to fight physically, but so many of their preoccupations are still preoccupations that come out of living in a society in which women have less power. So, you say, like, “I want to be tough but lovable. I want to be cool but acceptable. I want to be special, but not so special that nobody loves me.” It’s still based on this power dynamic, no matter how physically ass-kicking they are.

There’s very much that, “Oh, she’s tough but vulnerable” thing. Because I think that there’s this idea, especially for male readers, but for female readers as well, because we’re all indoctrinated, right? There’s this idea that if a woman is tough, it can only be in a way that is still sexy, because if she is not still a sexual object, then that’s really scary and that’s abhorrent and that’s monstrous, and we need to get rid of that.

So, what ends up happening is, yeah, you have the “tough but vulnerable” character, and that in and of itself is a fantasy, right? It’s something that we can say, “Oh, this is acceptably strong.” There’s a line, which I think that you see quite a bit. So, yeah, it’s something that I try to be aware of, and it’s something that kind of bugs me when I see it in a lot of books as well, where it’s like, “Oh, she’s tough. She’s great. She’s awesome. And then she’s with the man that she loves and she sobs and cries.” Which, I get it.

Where are all the women friendships as well, right? With a lot of these, you don’t see female friendships. You don’t see female background characters. It’s literally just this woman existing to kind of be a fantasy for guys. I don’t see as much of it where it actually feels like a living, breathing human being.

There were really some things in this book just about the real world that I didn’t know, that surprised me. You were talking about gendered work. You say that actually we have this image of cavemen going off and hunting meat while the cavewomen stay at home and took care of the kids, and that this is kind of a fiction.

That was a fiction developed in the 1950s, actually. If you look at that and you go, “Gosh, that just looks a lot like the 1950s lifestyle,” and in fact, it is. This is the problem that we have when we look back at the historical record, is that we are always going to be trying to evaluate the past from our place in the present. It’s very dangerous to do that, because then we end up doing something called downstreaming (my background is in history), which is when we kind of press all of our social mores and beliefs onto the past.

There’s a great book, again I mention it in the novel, called Blood Rites by Barbara Ehrenreich, where she goes into this thing where she said, “There were not these pair bonds of one man and one woman and their 2.5 children hunting bison. Man goes out to hunt bison, and the woman just sticks around by herself.” You couldn’t survive. You couldn’t have people who were specialists. You had to have generalists, and you would live in a loose family unit where you would have grandparents, and uncles, and aunts, and moms, and dads, and friends, and cousins, and it would just be this web of people.

A lot of this “hunting” was actually a group activity, especially ones where they’re getting all the mammoths to go off the cliff. You had everybody out there with sticks, running around, getting them to go off the cliff. There are all these things that we assume because we learned them from these texts that were initially put together in 1950. 1950 is a great touchpoint, too, because, of course, those were the times where you were all trying to be just the same because we didn’t want to be accused of being communists. So everyone was told to be just this way, and do only these things, and that those are the normal things. When now, even after the economy has tanked and things are crazy, we look back at the ’50s and go, actually that was the unnatural time. That was the most unnatural time, post-World War II, where we were trying to make this world where everyone is the same. And every man gets a house, and every man gets a wife, and they all have these children. My grandmother loves to tell me that. She’s like, “The 1950s was not the way the 1950s is portrayed. It was nothing like that.” But that is our cultural story, right?

There’s a part in the book where you’re in South Africa, and you’re talking to this professor about your master’s thesis. Could you tell us about that?

I lived in South Africa for a year and a half doing my masters. I was very interested in the resistance against apartheid. I had actually done my undergraduate work looking at how students were mobilized by the African National Congress to end the fight against apartheid. I was following up my research there, and I was talking to one of the professors. He was the expert there on Zulu culture.

I said, well, this is really cool. I found this thing that says, hey, twenty percent of uMkhonto we Sizwe, which was the militant wing of the African National Congress, was women. It actually says it in their meeting minutes for the organization. Wow, that seems like a lot. If you look at your picture of revolutionary movements from media, I mean, twenty percent, that’s not an insignificant number. That’s like one in five. If you look in the background of all those revolutionary movements, you’re not seeing one in five of those people being a woman. I said, I’d love to do this because, of course, women haven’t been a part of any fighting or revolutionary movements.

He’s like, “Women have always fought. That’s like the craziest thing. Like, Shaka Zulu had his whole contingent of women fighters. This has always been a thing. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Young person, what are you saying?” That really led me down the path of going, “Oh, this is not an anomaly, what I’m seeing. This is actually something that has happened a lot.”

In fact, once I went through the historical record, especially in resistance movements, it was usually twenty to thirty percent was female. And even, of course, in more formalized armies. The Civil War, World War II, Russia had a huge battalion of women tank operators. I started actually looking at it, and you realize that impression that you’ve gotten from, again, those textbooks written in the ’50s, was that that had not been the case. That things had always been a certain way. In fact, it was all a lie. You have to really dig to get past those stories we tell ourselves.

Right, you talk about how these narratives have so much power, and you suggest that a lot of reasons so many men are willing to abuse women verbally on the internet is because they’ve grown up with these narratives that women are prizes to be won and men are the ones who always deserve the prize and get the prize in the end.

Laurie Penny had this amazing article recently about why it is that we keep having these darn stories that feminize AI. Why is Ex Machina . . .? It goes all the way back to Pygmalion and his statue coming alive and, of course, it’s a woman.

I always thought, “This is men and their fantasies. They just want a woman that they can tell what to do.” She said, “No, this is part of men’s way of trying to understand when it is that women become human and whether or not women are human.” I was like, “Oh my god.” It’s really good. You should read it. I forget the name of it.

But I get into this again in the essay “We Have Always Fought.” We are given these specific words, and we do this in the military. I do a lot of research into military history, and it’s not, “I want you to shoot that man over there.” It’s like, “I want you to hit that target,” right? Then there’s all sorts of terrible names we come up with for the people that we want to kill.

We run into that again with women. People say, “Why do you consider saying ‘bitch’ or ‘whore’ is so bad to a woman?” And it’s like, “Well, the reason is that’s usually the prelude to being assaulted.” Someone says that to you, and they are othering you. They are making you not a human so that they can feel that they can do something horrible to you.

To me, that whole idea is that guys aren’t really taught that women are fully human. You see that with all the segregation that we have, especially in schools. Men don’t need to know things about women’s anatomy or feelings or any of that in order to be successful in life. They just don’t. As a woman, you have to know things about men. The world is literally run by guys. You need to know how to get around in a world of men. Men don’t necessarily have to, so they can kind of get by on going, “Well, I don’t know that women are actually really human.”

I had never heard of this before, but you say in the book that in countries that are more egalitarian, like in places like Amsterdam and Canada, that pick-up artist tactics don’t work.

There was a really great article from a . . . I don’t know who it is, don’t need to mention his name, but he wrote this long diatribe against Amsterdam because he was going around the world and picking women up. He realized that his story about being rich and awesome . . . he couldn’t just go in and neg women and basically tell them they’re crap because they would be like, “So what?”

There was no alpha male thing. A lot of times you’ll see, when you’re in a country that is very hierarchical, it’s like, “Oh, well money is everything,” and you hear all these guys who say, “Well, if I just go in and I say that I have money, I will have all these women all over me.” It’s like, “Well, yeah, because it’s really hard. Women still make a lot less than men.” What he found was that no longer worked. He couldn’t just be a jerk and say, “I’m a jerk, but I have money.” They were just like, “Well, you’re a jerk.” They don’t need money. It was just completely different. And the cultural attitude is just very different. I think, in America, we let jerkdom almost be equated with genius. Steve Jobs, great example. He was a jerk. Brilliant in some ways, but also a jerk. People then equate his brilliance with the jerk part.

I was like, “No, he was successful in spite of being a jerk, not because he was a jerk.” I think that a lot of times we put that on a pedestal, where other places don’t do that. We’ve just got to be like, “No, why would you do that?” Unfortunately, sometimes in our media that becomes the narrative: Well, yes, he’s a horrible human being, but look, look at what a genius he is. A lot of times only white guys can get away with that one. Only white guys, because it’s like, anybody else, man, if you are a jerk, that’s the end. That is the end.

Could you talk about this, you say in the book, “My blog had a lot more fucking teeth before I started publishing books.”

My first interaction with another author was actually, again, early 2004, I wrote a review of his novel. I loved it. One of my favorite books still. I love all of his works. But, I said, “There’s some misogyny issues in here, I feel. And here’s my critique of those particular issues that I saw, and here are the other things that I really liked about it.” Very fair review.

He was so mad. He emailed me. We went back and forth several times. As a new author, I had been to Clarion. I was submitting stories. I was really intimidated. He’s an award-winning author. Now he’s gone on and become a best seller.

I was really freaking out, but I was standing by my guns like, “No, I’m right. This is flawed. These other things are great, but these things are flawed.” Then finally, at the end of it, he was like, “Okay. Actually one of the reasons I responded so strongly to this is that you’re right. It’s something I’ve been dealing with, and I’ve been really trying to address in my work.” And he has since. His stuff has gotten much better.

But that was my first interaction, and it was my first realization, I think, that the authors were reading my blog. No one realizes that, until you become an author. You’re like, “What the hell? An author has all this time to sit around and Google themselves?” Yes. That’s all we do. Now I know.

But, yeah, not long after, I was at a convention, and I had just written a review of Daniel Abraham’s book. Abraham is one half of James S. A. Corey from the Expanse now, but this was his first novel at the time. I saw his name badge, and I liked the book. I just had some critiques. But I saw his name badge, and then he started coming toward me, and I was like, “Oh my god.” So he comes toward me, and he holds out his hand, and he goes, “Oh, thank you so much for that review of my book.” Well, it turns out that again the book didn’t have a lot of reviews and kind of struggled, but he was really thankful for it, and he was really happy.

I started to realize, again, people are reading these, and so I really need to be careful about whether I’m going to burn a bridge, and I really am like, if this is someone who writes awful things, and I’m going to say that it’s awful, then I need to recognize that I’m burning a potential professional contact. And that was hard.

I had a problem with the title of Neil Gaiman’s short story collection called Trigger Warnings, and I went into that going, okay, I could potentially make an enemy by doing this, but I feel really strongly about this. I need to post about this. That was really hard, because he had friends who were other authors who unfollowed me. He retweeted it. He’s a nice guy. I love Neil Gaiman. But you have to be really careful with all the stuff that you do, and you have to speak your truth knowing that you’re going to piss people off. Not even necessarily the people that you’re writing about, but their friends. We all know each other. Once I think I got into blogging a little bit more, I had to be more careful with, “Is this the hill that you want to die on?” Sometimes it is, and I will be outspoken. And sometimes I’m just, “I’m going to let that go.” Or, “I’ll let someone else get that one.” There was one recently where a friend of mine was like, “I can’t believe you haven’t taken that guy to task.” And I’m just like, “It’s not the hill I want to die on. I have other ones I’ll take on.”

I know you’ve been really pretty successful on Patreon, raising funds, I was just curious, as that income directly from your fans increases, do you feel less and less nervous about potentially alienating people in the publishing industry?

No. Here’s my thing, everybody knows everybody else, and it certainly doesn’t stop me from taking a stand, right? There are certain things that I will absolutely take a stand on, but you also just need to go, these are my colleagues, and I’m going to see them all the time.

This is why the recent Hugo craziness is just hilarious. I did a group dinner with Larry Correia at one point, who’s . . . anyway, that’s all crazy. But it’s fine. You’re fine. You sit down at the table with people, and you enjoy yourself, and all of that, but the more fisticuffs that you get into, the more difficult that becomes.

We all interact in those same spaces. I actually have two exes, other writers, who go to certain conventions that I don’t go to anymore because I’m like, they’re my exes. It’s one of those things where you just need to understand that these people are absolutely going to help you, but they can also say, “You know what? Actually, I don’t want to help you because we had a disagreement.” And that’s fine, which is why I piss off the ones that I don’t care what they think of me. If I care what someone thinks of me, then I might be like, “Maybe I’ll talk to them in private. Or maybe I’ll bring this up and buy them a drink some time.”

It’s like with any business, right? You wouldn’t be like, “I’m going to write something about Joe in the cubicle next to me and say how awful he is online.” You have to be like, “Well, that’s great, but Joe is in the cubicle next to you. You have to go to work with him every day.” It’s important, and if there’s a reason to do it, because you’re trying to enact some kind of change and get Joe fired or whatever, then go for it. But if it’s just to be a jerk on the internet, then that’s not helping any conversation.

I wanted to ask you about this. You say, “I can’t guarantee you young women writers that things are going to get better. I’m not going to pretend that you won’t get trolled, harassed, threatened, or stalked. But what I can promise you is that you’re not in this fight alone.”

When I was first coming up through science fiction and fantasy, it was very important to me when I finally found the other feminist science fiction writers and found that there was a history of it. I wouldn’t say it’s ignored, but these sorts of histories where you go, “Oh yeah, somebody was there before me, and somebody hacked through this jungle. That’s why it’s a little bit easier for me to hack through it.” I needed to feel that kind of support and to know that I wasn’t by myself.

This is a very isolating industry. I live in Ohio in a reasonably small town. It can be very lonely. You can feel kind of crazy sometimes. Very disconnected. And I like this book, and I think people have really been drawn to it for that reason, because it makes it clear that we’re all living on a continuum, and we’re all pushing together, and we’re all doing this together. I think that has helped a lot of people. It helped me to write it.

I tell people a lot of times, “I write these inspiring posts and books and things for myself as much as anyone.” So I can go back and be like, “Yeah! We’re gonna do it! Don’t quit!” Luckily, it seems like that’s what a lot of people are taking away from the book, and that’s really fabulous, because that’s why I wrote it.

This book, again, is called The Geek Feminist Revolution. Kameron, I know you have another interview, so I’ll let you go here. We’ve been speaking with Kameron Hurley. Kameron, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is produced by John Joseph Adams and hosted by: David Barr Kirtley, who is the author of thirty short stories, which have appeared in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Lightspeed, in books such as Armored, The Living Dead, Other Worlds Than These, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and on podcasts such as Escape Pod and Pseudopod. He lives in New York.

Author Spotlight: Charlie Jane Anders

Christie Yant | 926 words

Welcome back, Charlie Jane! Your intriguing story “Power Couple” presents a science fictional solution to a problem that many of our readers can relate to, a problem your characters face as “careers designed for single-achiever families.” In more general, perhaps lower-pressure terms, it could be considered a problem of work/life balance. Until we can get the restoration part of the cryonics solution worked out, what strategies do you use to balance your creative work with the rest of your life?

God, I wish I had some secret for balancing work and life. Just making time for writing and everything else is a nightmare—it was hard when I was juggling io9 and creative writing, and weirdly it’s still just as hard now that I’m writing full time. Life just has a way of getting crazy. I often fantasize about having the power to stop time—not so I could rob a bank, or sneak into places, or do any of the things that people do in “time stop” stories, just so I could have a few days of uninterrupted writing time. Actually, if you could stop time you could live in a nice apartment for months without paying rent, and that would be a huge plus. You would just have to stockpile a lot of food in the refrigerator before bringing time to a halt in the outside world.

Cryonics as a trope is a personal favorite of mine—I first learned of it when I was a kid, from Madeleine L’Engle’s A Ring of Endless Light, and my fascination with the subject was renewed with the movie Demolition Man. Do you have any favorite treatments of the trope?

I love cryonics as well, and I did a ton of research before writing this story. My favorite cryonics stories are the ones that involve space travel. Actually, my favorite is probably the Doctor Who story “Invasion of the Dinosaurs,” where people go into suspended animation and think they’re traveling to a new planet—but they’re actually in a vault under London, waiting to go back in time to prehistoric times. That’s such a neat concept. Also, I love Captain America.

Things have come a long way since Robert CW Ettinger first worked to popularize the idea of cryonic suspension as far back as the 1940s. There’s the long-standing Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, among others–and now Timeship in Comfort, Texas, has broken ground on a facility intended to hold up to 50,000 cryonically preserved people. Would you consider cryonic suspension yourself? What would you have to know or be confident in before you’d consider it?

I don’t think I would consider cryonic suspension unless I was dying of an illness that I hoped they could cure in the future—I imagine there would be a huge likelihood of something going wrong and a ton of people dying before they ever woke up. I guess there would have to be pretty impressive proof that the process was safe, before I would consider doing it.

Your characters each go into suspension for seven years. Considering the rate at which technology and society are changing, if you went into suspension yourself for seven years, what do you think you could expect when you came out?

My honest, considered opinion is that after seven years in suspension, I would emerge into a world that would be totally unrecognizable to me. Probably controlled by vicious chainsaw-headed robots, with most of the human race reduced to cyborg vassals, being wheeled along on tank treads, forced to work in a factory where we all make novelty gag gifts, purely because the robots find it amusing to see how many whoopie cushions the humans can produce before we finally die out. When we all die, our remains will be turned into more whoopie cushions. That seems like the most likely vision of the world of 2023, if you were to wake up from a cryogenic sleep then.

Many congratulations from all of us on your novel All the Birds in the Sky, which came out from Tor Books in January. What’s next for you?

Thanks! I have been totally blown away by the response to All the Birds in the Sky. I am now feverishly at work on my second book from Tor, which is going to be much, much weirder and darker. It’s shaping up to be sort of an homage to those early ’70s Ursula K. Le Guin science fiction books like The Dispossessed and Left Hand of Darkness—only not nearly as good as those, of course. It’s a vaguely political book, but my hope is that when it comes out, nobody will look at it and think “Oh this was being revised during the election of 2016.” That’s my hope, anyway—I often think the best political fiction contains little or no specific political commentary. So you won’t read it and think, “Oh, that character is supposed to be Reince Priebus” or anything. It’s more thinking about the ways we organize our societies, and the views of human nature these systems reflect. But it’s early days—I am going to be tearing this novel apart and putting it back together again over and over, for months if not years, until I get it right.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Christie Yant is a science fiction and fantasy writer, Associate Publisher for Lightspeed and Nightmare, and guest editor of Lightspeed’s Women Destroy Science Fiction special issue. Her fiction has appeared in anthologies and magazines including Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011 (Horton),  Armored, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, io9, Wired.com, and China’s Science Fiction World. Her work has received honorable mentions in Year’s Best Science Fiction (Dozois) and Best Horror of the Year (Datlow), and has been long-listed for StorySouth’s Million Writers Award. She lives on the central coast of California with two writers, an editor, and assorted four-legged nuisances. Follow her on Twitter @christieyant.

Author Spotlight: Maria Dahvana Headley

Sandra Odell | 2241 words

“See The Unseeable, Know The Unknowable” is a lyrical, lovely story filled with poetry. It invokes poetry and shadows, hints of Ray Bradbury and Ursula K. Le Guin. Tell us about the inspiration for the style and story.

Thank you! I wrote the first draft of the first half of this story in 2012, while I was in the middle of leaving one life and trying in vain to imagine another. I wanted to write a path: a story about escape, about fleeing the world that everyone else thinks is normal. All I could imagine was a woman in a little house in a woods, a cat, and the feeling that horrible things were on their way. Back then, all the stories of escape I could think of ended in the protagonist being lost herself, or dying in misery. I guess I believed, at that moment, that this was what was going to happen to me. And now, four years later? It really, really didn’t. I ran away to feed the elephants, to brush the lions, to climb onto the high wire, and I lived. It was the right choice to leave. Here I am. It wasn’t stupid. I wasn’t wrong. I picked the story back up, and gave it the ending it always needed.

As much as it came from a moment of abject misery, it also came from a childhood reading of Bradbury, of course. The temptation of writing about the circus, specifically, the way it can cover all kinds of things, horror, hilarity, weirdness, freaks, animals, runaways. I’ve always been interested especially in adult runaways, which is what this story is about. This is the second time I’ve written a story about that—the first one was eighteen years ago—a children’s musical in which a mother runs away from her children to be a disappearing lady. It was lighter than this story, which didn’t mean anyone would produce it! But for me, the notion of writing a story very much for adults, based on a thread typically sold to children, that’s an interesting notion. What if you ran away from home? As an adult, you might run away from home because you’ve committed a crime, or because a crime was committed against you. Maybe you’re a fugitive. Where do you go if there’s nowhere to go? What do you bring with you? (I guess it’s obvious that I’d bring my cat.)

The kid version of stories about running away to join the circus is almost always a morality tale, not a heroic journey. Frankly, the adult version is, too. You’re not supposed to leave things behind, not in this culture of holding onto what you’ve got. You’re emphatically not supposed to leave people behind. I wanted to write a kind of American, lost, fucked-up person on the run story, and see what happened if I pressed that together with a circus. I feel like I’ve talked somewhere about the great Buddy Mondlock song “The Kid”—which I learned from a recording by the trio Cry, Cry, Cry. It’s so bleak and also so yearningly magical. It’s one of the great heartbreaker hopeful songs about running away and discovering the world is both smaller and larger than you thought. It kills me. Go listen to it. The style came from years of listening to that song, combined with years of reading Denis Johnson, whose novel Already Dead: A California Gothic has haunted, frustrated, and inspired me for twenty years, combined with yeah, as you say, Ursula K. Le Guin, whose characters are never not complicated, who writes moralities that stretch my soul out and make me imagine painful and wonderful things in equal portions.

You call upon a number of images that speak to the lives of many modern readers: the strong man pushing the pencil across the desk; the sword swallower walking through the metal detector; the guilt of information that is too much to bear as the world comes crashing down around you; the fear of being spied upon by the government. What fuels your writing? Are you drawn to specific elements of the world around you, or do you piece specific moments together with strands of silver thread?

I have a file in the back room of my brain, and a real file of miraculous weird things, too. The brain’s back room contains panic, poetry, news, headlines, songs, weeping heard on corners, dogs barking, chunks of text from everyone from Shakespeare to Springsteen to Octavia Butler, and as I’ve said before (always trying not to seem entirely crazy), when I’m writing, I just try to sit in the quiet and listen to the voices of whomever happens to be talking in that room. Then I write them down. It’s my job to keep the brain room full of interesting guests, and that’s why it’s necessary to read all the time. It contains everything I’ve ever thought and read, and it recombines regularly, but if I don’t give it new guests, I end up with nothing good to write. My process is that of a frenzied bar owner, constantly trying to keeping the brain’s guests well fed and well lubricated so that they can tell stories, constantly inviting new guests in. It’s basically the Tabard Inn back there, and I’m the sprinting barmaid with a typewriter hidden under the counter. Generally when I tell people this, they just look at me, kind of blank-faced. I know. This is how I’ve always been, though. That’s first drafts. Revisions? The back room shuts up and I’m on my own. That part is much harder work.

I wouldn’t call it silver thread, necessarily, though that’s flattering! I generally pull pieces of story with sutures. I feel like every little scrap of story is a living thing, and the ones that aren’t just one thing? Those are living things stitched together. Sometimes they have a definite Frankenstein’s monster quality. Sometimes they end up bigger and more difficult than I meant them to be when I was sitting there originally. Sometimes I make a mess. Sometimes I write something I didn’t mean to write. Here, I wrote a story I didn’t mean to write. I was trying to write a damnation and instead I wrote a redemption. I didn’t know that there would be people throughout this story wishing they were back with this circus, people pushing pencils instead of lifting the universe. I thought they’d want out. They wanted back in. I didn’t know that when I started. I didn’t know anything would be joy.

How much of Maria Dahvana Headley is on the page with this story? Did you ever want to run away and join the circus?

As noted above, so much, and also none. I grew up in a family that was very circus-y. My little brother actually made a part of his living as a fire juggler for a while. My sister was a dancer. I’ve always been a writer, and my writing has always been wild. Artist mom, newspaper editor/sled dog-breeding dad? I didn’t need to run away to join a circus. They had nothing on us. I think I ran away to join the normals, and then I didn’t belong there. But running away? Yeah, that’s a thing I’ve both thought about and done. I’ve never been good at goodbyes. In this story, Wren does the worst version of running, but maybe the only version that leaves her among the living. She’s had worse luck than I’ve had. It’s coming to me now that some of this story came as well from my hearing the Beth Orton song “Central Reservation” back in the late ’90s. It’s a joyful song about a one night stand, and the chorus is “Today is whatever I want it to mean.” This story begins with the dark reverse of that song, wearing last night’s dress, but on the run, having to start over fast, elsewhere, after something’s gone horribly wrong. Still, it’s about starting over as wholly oneself, surviving. There’s something in that that appeals to me every time. Today is whatever I want it to mean.

Many use genre labels as a means of sticking stories in neat little boxes, categorizing a writer’s works for the sake of comfort. “See The Unseeable, Know The Unknowable” slips in and out of such constraints—here fantasy, there horror, magical realism somewhere else, science fiction tightening the weave. When writing, do you assign a story a given genre or label to your fiction? Why or why not?

Ha! Yeah, nobody knows which category I belong in, including me. All of them. I don’t care where I go. My stories are weird ones. I write them and then I send them off, usually with a note that says, I dunno, do you? I think the world is inherently strange and wonderful, and that’s the way I try to write. I want to write about things you don’t imagine happening, and then, when they happen, you see that they were always there, that everything is possible. That means my work is a wide spectrum of every kind of story about possibility, and that’s how I like it. I try to write wonders and aberrations, monsters and ghosts like they just happened before my eyes, like they’re the headlines, like they’re the person beside me at the bar, telling me a casual story about a bird that burst into flame or popcorn falling from the sky. I try to live that way, too. I listen to liars. I listen to ferocious truth-tellers. It’s all part of the same wide category of story. Sometimes I listen to the people on the subway and pretend all the things they’re saying are part of one huge love letter to one person, their stories of lost dollars and weather, their stories of cheating girls and stupid boys, their stories of stalled trains and benders, of political anger and that one time they kissed a stranger. If you do it the way I do, it swiftly becomes clear that there is no such thing as genre separation. It starts to make very little sense to separate anything from anything.

A playwright, screenwriter, fiction genius, editor, essayist, and now one of the forces behind an upcoming theater musical. Your words are everywhere! Is there a particular writerly pipe dream lurking in the shimmering depths of your imagination?

The musical is being developed right now, and it’s epic. I’ve been having so much fun working with my friend Lance Horne, the composer, on three centuries of story. Next, I want to write an opera. I have career ambitions, too, things I’d love to have happen, but really mostly I just want to write new kinds of things. I’d also really like to write a TV series, but only if I could do all twelve episodes alone, with no one bothering me, and that’s a very unlikely version of reality. You never know, though! I have a thing in mind. That’s like an opera, really, the way TV is now, and it’s so cool to write a twelve- or fourteen-hour narrative, to be able to get to something that huge, in a form that’s not a novel. Which isn’t to say that I don’t have novel ideas, too. I have a draft of a new beast mostly done, and it’s full of creation myths I made up, legends of lost manuscripts, and volcanoes. More to do, though. I think I thought it was a small novel, and really it wants to be a huge, time-traveling multi-century epic. Welcome to my typical mutterings.

To whom do you turn when you want to get your fiction on? What writers excite your sense of wonder?

I could go on for ages here, but a few, all over the map. I gobble, and I just gobble what I like. Which is everything. All these writers are different kinds of stylists, whether poetry or prose or mash-ups, and all deal in extraordinary specificity, which makes me happy: Kelly Link; Victor LaValle; Inger Christensen (especially her book-length poem “Alphabet,” which I just read over and over in perpetuity. It brings me back to life); Helen Oyeyemi; Ali Smith; Kathryn Davis; Joy Williams; Gayl Jones; Liz Hand; Jeff Ford; Frances Justine Post’s collection of poems, Beast; Yusef Komunyakaa; Alice Sola Kim; Carmen Maria Machado; Sarah McCarry; Eduardo Corral; the Icelandic poet and novelist, Sjón (From the Mouth of the Whale, OMG); Ada Limón; Brigit Pegeen Kelly; Lauren Groff; Alice Munro; a billion more, ending up at Shakespeare, who keeps me obsessed.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Sandra Odell is a 47-year old, happily married mother of two, an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. Her work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE, Daily Science Fiction, Crosssed Genres, Pseudopod, and The Drabblecast. She is hard at work plotting her second novel or world domination. Whichever comes first.

Author Spotlight: Sean Williams

Sandra Odell | 1048 words

“The Lives of Riley” is a short, vicious gut punch of a story. What inspired this exploration of identity?

“Riley” has been stewing for a long time. As far back as ten years ago, when I was writing the first book of my Astropolis series, I had a character who (it was implied) routinely cloned himself and conducted vast, onanistic orgies. This side of his personal life wasn’t really explored, which seemed a waste of a good concept to me.

My Twinmaker universe presented the perfect opportunity to come back to it. In a near future dominated by matter transmitters, surely someone would copy themselves purely for the purpose of sex . . . and more.

The thing I really hoped for with this story was to convey the emotional life of a person who might engage in a loving relationship with multiple versions of themselves, the efforts they might go to in order to preserve that relationship, and the personal cost of it all going horribly wrong. Which seemed likely to me. Relationships are fragile enough even between two very similar people; turning the color further up implied that there probably wasn’t going to be a happy ending.

The slow reveal of information through the story kept me reading until the very end, and a satisfying end at that. Every scene leads to the reader’s realization that, yes, the duplicates are Riley, which is why the traitor breaks away to turn the others in. Did you know how the story would end when you started writing? Are you a plotter or a pantser?

I’m really glad you liked the conclusion. It’s fun to let short stories change course without reining them in, and I’ve stumbled on some interesting territory that way, but in general, I’m a plotter. “Riley” was mapped out in advance, more or less. I wasn’t sure exactly how many Riley viewpoints there’d be, but I knew the key flaw that would unite them and I knew how that flaw would tear their relationship apart. The story twists around that flaw in a way that makes it hard for me to decide if it’s an unhappy ending or not. It certainly is for the Rileys left behind, but it may not be for the Riley that escapes—and how can you or I tell them apart? That’s the squicky heart of this story, not all the sex stuff. The past version of me who ate all the chocolate has robbed the present me of a treat (not to mention necessitated my going on a diet) but they’re both still me, by most definitions of “me.” Same with Riley. Isn’t the escapee entitled to pursue his own individual vision, even if it means sacrificing the ones who don’t see that vision? Or has he committed a bizarre kind of suicide? Language struggles with these concepts, which only makes them more fun to explore.

Writing is an exploration of ideas and concepts that often make people uncomfortable. Here you touch on identity, privacy, government surveillance, and the meaning of self. How conscious are you of the layers of inference and meaning in your stories? Do you set out to say X or allow yourself to explore the meaning of X, Y, Z?

Oh, there was so much I wanted to say with this story. So much I despaired of ever getting it down, even covertly. (There’s a bit of a stab at heteronormativity as well.) I despaired because stories don’t start with ideas and concepts, they start with characters, and until I had Riley and his plan to take over the world and his flaw and the terrible threat to his entire being, all I had was some notes in a file about how, gee, it would be cool to write a story about using matter transmitters to have sex with yourself, wouldn’t it? Which might be good for (some) dinner conversations, but isn’t ever going to move anyone to think any differently. I think good SF can and should at least attempt to do that, through the right kind of story. Once I had the vehicle for presenting those ideas, it all fell into place quite neatly, thank goodness.

You are a prolific writer of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. Tell us about your writing routine, the nuts and bolts that keep Sean Williams’ words flowing.

I write what I love. That’s what it boils down to. I write what moves me on an emotional level and what excites me intellectually, and when I’m moved and excited by a project, it’s not so hard to get to work every day. That’s my ideal routine. Some days are tougher than others, of course, particularly the ones where I’m not actually writing. The great secret of being a full-time writer is that you don’t do anywhere near as much writing as you expect. No one told me about that when I was starting out—not that it would have changed how I moved forward. The only thing slowing me down these days is chronic pain, but I’m finding ways to feed that creatively back into my work, so even though I’m slower now, working in short sprints rather than long hauls, I hope that what I’m writing is better, on craft and personal levels.

Wait, that doesn’t really answer your question. Sorry. Chocolate. It all boils down to chocolate.

What’s next for Sean Williams? What can readers look forward to in coming months?

The aforementioned chronic pain has necessitated a bit of a slowdown in my output, so this year sees no new novel, my first “bye” year since 1999. There will be the odd short story, though, including another Twinmaker story in Jonathan Strahan’s Drowned Worlds anthology. I return next year with the beginning of a new middle grade fantasy series co-written with Garth Nix and a YA novel about social anxiety, based in part on my own experiences with panic attacks, called In My Mind.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Sandra Odell is a 47-year old, happily married mother of two, an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. Her work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE, Daily Science Fiction, Crosssed Genres, Pseudopod, and The Drabblecast. She is hard at work plotting her second novel or world domination. Whichever comes first.

Author Spotlight: Tim Pratt

Sandra Odell | 1040 words

It’s not often a story starts out with an unexpected volcano, but “The Wilderness Within” fits the bill and only gets better from there. What inspired this particular tale?

I was reading about the sudden emergence of a volcano in Mexico—like, a sulfurous crack opened in the ground in 1943, and a day later there was a cinder cone fifty meters high, and people were displaced—and I thought, “If that happened around here (in the Bay Area) nobody would even notice the volcano’s appearance because they’d all be looking at their phones.” (To be clear, I support people looking at their phones. I am much happier standing in lines and riding on mass transit and so on when I have a phone to look at. The phone-absorption-is-common thing is an observation without the obvious associated judgment.)

I was also thinking of a great line from a Utah Phillips bit: “Make a break for it, kids. Flee into the wilderness. The one within, if you can find it.” The combination of that line and the thought of a volcano that no one noticed coalesced nicely. The sex part is there because, I dunno, sex is pretty interesting? Like most people, I think about it a bunch.

Helena is a truly believable character, from her emotional breakdown over her break-up, to her justifications when using the phone app for a ride, to how she handles Kilroy’s advances. When writing, how do you approach character creation? Do you have a set idea in mind, or do you let the characters progress with the story to see how things turn out?

Usually I have some weird idea for a peculiar situation, but that doesn’t make a story; characters make story. (“Plot” is just what your characters do, after all.) Once I had the idea of sexually transmitted natural landscapes, I tried to think of the kind of characters who would be most transformed / traumatized / bothered / interested in that kind of thing, and Helena and Kilroy emerged. Then it was just a case of thinking about what they’d do if they met as their conflicting needs and desires collided. For the most part in my writing, I try to create simulations of humans and extrapolate what they’d do in a given strange situation. Ideally extreme situations, because that makes for better drama.

You address Helena’s sexuality and Andi’s gender-identity as a matter of course. Nothing fancy, no presentation for shock value. Such openness lends itself well to the story, adding depth to both the characters and the city of San Francisco. Some writers would be uncomfortable with this portrayal because it challenges the perception of “mainstream values.” How important is representation to you as a writer and reader?

While I grew up in the deep-ish south and things were pretty heteronormative, I’ve lived in Northern California for a good fifteen years, and currently reside in Berkeley. There’s no shortage of bi, gay, trans, asexual, kinky, poly, questioning, genderfluid, etc. people in my life (I may even tick a couple of those boxes myself), and it would be weirder for me to not write about those sorts of people. It would feel pretty strange to create fictional worlds that were less diverse than my birthday parties or backyard barbecues.

Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, you write it all. In an ideal world with your fill of wealth, free time, comfort, and security, what would your writing time look like? Are there any projects you’d like to try?

Perfect world? Most days I’d sleep late, write for two or three hours, and read and drink beer on patios with friends and nap in the hammock, weather permitting, the rest of the day. It may be a good thing that I have more responsibilities than that. Hedonism in excess shortens one’s lifespan. I pretty much do what I want to do, writing-wise, though I would enjoy taking a crack at comics writing sometime. For a while I wasn’t writing enough short fiction for my taste, but in 2015 I started a “new-story-every-month” Patreon, and that helped me prioritize short fiction again.

In your secret identity as Tim Pratt, senior editor at Locus Magazine, you have a unique insider’s view of the ebb and flow of the SF/F/H genres. Are there any recent trends in genre fiction that have sparked your interest as a writer or editor?

Eh. Trend-chasing is a bad idea. By the time you notice a trend and try to write something and get it to market, the trend is probably over, or the market is saturated and the backlash has begun, or something. Better to just write whatever you love writing. You’re vanishingly unlikely to get rich anyway, so it’s best to just take pleasure in the work. I like reading mostly in subgenres I don’t write: grimdark fantasy, crime novels, space opera—okay, space opera does interest me as a writer, too, and it’s nice to see that revitalized in recent years, with fun smart books by James S.A. Corey and Ann Leckie and the like.

What’s next for Tim Pratt? What can eager fans look forward to?

I’m writing Closing Doors, the tenth and final full-length novel in my Marla Mason urban fantasy series, and that should be out late this year or early next; I ran a Kickstarter for it in the spring. That’s my giant brain-eating project for the summer. The next thing contracted after that is a funny fantasy about goblins, which should keep me occupied through the fall and winter. Next year I have some thoughts about weird contemporary fantasy; there are at least two novels I want to write in that space. Otherwise, interested readers should sign up for my Patreon, at patreon.com/timpratt. I publish a new story every month for patrons, and you only have to give $1 month! (Not that I turn my nose up at more.)

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Sandra Odell is a 47-year old, happily married mother of two, an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. Her work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE, Daily Science Fiction, Crosssed Genres, Pseudopod, and The Drabblecast. She is hard at work plotting her second novel or world domination. Whichever comes first.

Author Spotlight: Alec Nevala-Lee

Robyn Lupo | 784 words

What was it that drew you to write a story about Hemingway investigating a miracle? When writing “Ernesto,” were there any surprises in the process?

The most surprising thing about the story was the presence of Hemingway himself. I originally wanted to build a scientific mystery around William Coley’s theory that a bacterial infection, such as erysipelas, could cure certain types of cancer, and I ended up combining it with an unrelated idea about the investigation of a miracle involving a religious relic. I decided that St. John of the Cross, who had died of erysipelas and whose tomb was located in Spain, would make for a promising subject, and it also occurred to me to write it as a period piece, ideally set during wartime, which would allow me to conceal the solution for as long as possible. This led naturally to the Spanish Civil War, and at that point, I really had no choice but to include Hemingway. In other words, Hemingway might seem like one of the first elements that went into this story, but in fact, he was one of the last.

The story has some existential elements, and there’s a real and dismaying veracity that, in some sense, it didn’t seem to matter whether the events at the shrine were miracles or scientific marvels. Where do you go when you want to replenish yourself in terms of new ideas or themes to explore in your work?

The intersection between the scientific and the unexplained is a theme to which I’ve frequently returned, mostly because it’s a wonderful idea engine, especially if you’re trying to write mysteries. Part of this is due to my longtime love for The X-Files, and many of my stories can be described as puzzles in which Scully’s worldview, rather than Mulder’s, is ultimately proven right. But it’s a tradition that goes back at least as far as the work of Eric Frank Russell, whose Sinister Barrier—one of my favorite science fiction novels ever—is the best example I know of a writer using the paranormal as a springboard for a logically rigorous suspense story. Exploring the places where the supernatural shades into the rational is a consistently useful strategy for generating stories, which is one of the reasons why I’ve gone back to that well so often.

You’ve worked in a variety of formats, from blog posts to novels. How conscious are you of selecting the appropriate length of a work? Have there been cases where you thought a work was a novel, but it ended up being a short story, or something similar?

I generally have a pretty good idea before I begin of how long the story will be. Most of the science fiction I’ve published has been in the novelette form, in part because I’m drawn to the suspense mode, and it can take ten thousand words or more to give that kind of plot the setup and payoff it deserves. (On some level, I’m always trying to rewrite “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell, which I still think is the best science fiction story of all time.) “Ernesto” was actually a deliberate departure: it was an attempt to write something relatively short, almost a vignette, and to sustain the reader’s interest with the development of a single idea, rather than with a lot of action. And I’m happy with the result, although I also haven’t been tempted to try it again.

What’s next for you, Alec Nevala-Lee?

I’m currently at work on a big nonfiction book titled Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, which is scheduled to be published by Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, sometime in 2018. (Along with so much else, it will be the first full-length biography of Campbell, the legendary and controversial editor of Astounding.) The story of Campbell, his circle, and their impact on the genre is incredibly timely, and I’ll be talking about it this year at the Nebula Conference in Chicago and the World Science Fiction Convention and Campbell Conference in Kansas City. I’ve also written a radio play, Retention, that will premiere this summer as an episode of an online science fiction series distributed by the Howl podcast network. And I still blog on a daily basis at nevalalee.com.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Robyn Lupo lives in Southwestern Ontario with her not-that-kind-of-doctor partner and three cats. She enjoys tiny things, and has wrangled flash for Women Destroy Science Fiction! as well as selected poetry for Queers Destroy Horror! She aspires to one day write many things.

Author Spotlight: Jaymee Goh

Laurel Amberdine | 563 words

I like how the meaning of the title is inverted in the story. “Crocodile Tears” typically means insincere sympathy, but in this story the crocodile is the truly sympathetic one. Did you know this was the title you were going to use at the start? How did it occur to you?

I am generally inspired by the questions suggested by certain phrases. If a crocodile cannot shed sincere tears, then how does a crocodile mourn?

There are two stories in this one: Si Tenggang is a story about a prodigal son who returns home after a long time with a great fortune, only to deny his mother. She curses him and his ship to turn to stone. Then there is a story about an old woman who, like the mother in this story, loses a grandchild to crocodiles, and the head crocodile asks her to help his grandchild. In exchange, she asks the crocodiles to leave the river.

I thought to myself, where was the grandchild’s father? Also, Si Tenggang’s punishment seems a bit pat. I’m also very interested in recuperating the crocodile as a monster. The crocodile is a monster to us as humans because we are so easily killed by one, but in its element, its character simply fits its nature. I also wanted to explore the narrative of the forgiving crone alongside the penitent adopted child versus the cruel child.

I know you’re a Clarion student this year. What was your writing process for “Crocodile Tears” like, and how has Clarion changed how you write?

Generally my writing process is simple: I stew on an idea for a long time, trying to figure the ins and outs of the story, and then throw it on the page to see what sticks. I usually come up with workable first drafts that just need tweaking here and there. I’ll let it sit for a couple of weeks or months, then return to it with fresh eyes. I’ll find inconsistencies, more questions wherein I decide whether or not to answer them, fix up grammar and spelling, and maybe other stylistic things.

Clarion has changed this process little, except I’ve churned out story drafts at an extraordinarily fast rate. Fortunately I went in with story ideas that I’ve been fiddling around for a long time. The thing about Clarion is that it’s also confirmed for me that I do a lot better with people around me and also that I am not an ogre.

It’s also been good to get some solid instruction on how to streamline stories—specifically genre stories. I did a creative writing minor in undergrad; I was not a good note-taker, and also the expectations were more literary when I was clearly a genre nerd. Clarion being specifically genre has been helpful in giving me questions I need to ask with regards to themes and structure.

Any new projects that you want to share?

I am writing a dissertation on whiteness in steampunk! That has generally been my schtick for the last three years. I’m also editor of The WisCon Chronicles 11, among other ambitious things like more stories. I will be in Hidden Youth: Speculative Stories of Marginalized Children from Crossed Genres.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in San Francisco where she writes science fiction and fantasy and works for Locus Magazine. Her YA fantasy novel Luminator is forthcoming from Reuts Publishing in 2017. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: An Owomoyela

Laurel Amberdine | 1418 words

I am personally acquainted with two people who have been tried and jailed for absurd “hacking” charges because corporations and the government want to make a point. One of them is still there right now. So I really loved “Unauthorized Access.” Were you inspired by any particular cases or people?

I’d say not so much specific cases as the overall zeitgeist. We’re in a time when the internet and all its data and patterns of interaction are powerful, ubiquitous, extremely contentious—and often poorly understood, both by the people making the laws which regulate it and by the people using it as consumers.

Drastic legislative initiatives like SOPA/PIPA (and the vast scope of the backlash against those), governmental and corporate ambivalence about whistleblowers, social movements from Anonymous to Occupy, Twitter-powered revolutions, the explosion of FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) resources and communities, hackerspaces, the claiming and reclaiming of the word “hacker”. . . all of these paint a world much different from the one I grew up in, and I’m still rather young. It’s fascinating to watch. I wanted to play in some corner or other of that emerging culture.

I attended Clarion West 2008 with Douglas Lucas, among many other excellent people, and I know that when I was writing Unauthorized Access, he was putting out a lot of news articles (bit.ly/2bJxPRx) on hacking cases. So that was certainly in my awareness, as well.

I know you have a background in computers, but did you do any additional research for this story?

Nothing really specifically tailored. I do a lot of desultory reading about whatever I’m writing about, and I’ll cast about to answer specific questions and untangle plot snarls, but often the shape of the story takes place after I’ve run into some article or story which provides the seed and most of the information I need. Then, most of the things I need to research are background details—for some reason, I find myself looking up cricket flour any time I write anything in this universe.

(Cricket flour is, for the curious, readily available on Amazon [amzn.to/2bcjw9o], as well as being made into new protein bar products such as Exo bars. I have not personally tried any of these products, as I have yet to convince myself that this is really what I ought to be spending my money on, but I find it vaguely reassuring to know that they exist.)

You don’t mention the actual secret that Cadares is interested in. Did you have something in mind?

. . . I’m sure I did at some point.

Energy distribution, though—in a world in which energy is used for everything from autocabs to lighting and information access—could be used to systematically advantage or disadvantage all manner of people, companies, and neighborhoods. I know I layered in the plot seeds of corruption of some sort. The exact parameters of that corruption may best be left as a sequel hook for myself.

Do you have other stories set in this future, or any planned? I’d like to see what happens with Aedo next!

I do, in fact! I’m working on a story which loops back around to check in on Jace and Culin, from the earlier story set in this universe, Undermarket Data. The plan is to crash the two of them into Aedo and LogicalOR, and watch as hijinks ensue. (These hijinks will probably be somewhat amusing to Jace, and less than amusing to everyone else in the equation.)

I’d also like to explore more of the Undercity, as well as the relationship between Upcity and Undercity and the history of the city in whole. And possibly also figure out if the rest of the world, you know, exists.

Can you tell us a bit about your writing process?

Sure! It’s rather haphazard, but it works for me when it works for me.

I get ideas from all sorts of random minutiae. A few of the more recent ones I’ve been toying with—which may or may not go anywhere—include a riddle-based urban fantasy (because I was curious as to how an early speech syntheziser would read out the initials of the months, “J F M A M J J A S O N D‬”, because there’s a credible ma’am and Jason in there), and some kind of space opera or something exploring the idea of people raised from a young age to be soldiers or assassins who aren’t brainwashed or terribly abused. (Because brainwashed and terribly-abused supersoldiers and assassins seems like a trope that keeps coming up in my media osmosis, and I can’t help but feel that someone has to have looked at that and thought, “That sure seems like it’s set up to backfire spectacularly,” and come up with a safer way to do things.)

Once I have an idea, I’ll usually toss down a few lines either describing the idea or sketching out a scene, an interaction, a bit of setting detail, or whatever catches my eye in either a new sub-folder of my massive Scrivener “short story scratch” document, or in a running Gmail conversation I have with myself. Gradually, the idea bounces off other compatible story seeds or ideas or pieces of implication or subversion (for example, with the month thing, it’d be so much more creepy if one of people finding this old computer was named Jason or had a significant Jason in their past—maybe in her past, because I like female main characters, because why not like female main characters; could be a boyfriend or a brother, but those relationships are frequently overplayed, so what else could I do with that name, hmm . . . ), and those lines of reasoning stick to it and accrete into something resembling a plot. If I’m lucky. Sometimes they just accrete into something resembling a stringy mess of half-finished scenes connected by tenuous threads of implication.

Eventually, either I’ll decide that the proto-story is viable and that I enjoy it. Or an editor will ask me for something. (Frequently, when an editor asks me for something, I’ll jump-start the accretion process by going back through my old Gmail conversation or feeding a bunch of prompts into a Bingo-card generator I built. That can be found at bit.ly/2bcBPgf, and a lot of people who use Bingo cards for creative fun can be found at allbingo.dreamwidth.org if anyone else is interested.) Once I’ve decided to work on something, I’ll hop around in it, writing snippets here and there in no real chronological order, until I get to about sixty percent finished with it and decide that it’s terrible and broken beyond all repair. Then I’ll go and work on something else for a while.

Occasionally, I’ll poke my head back into my terrible, broken story, and add a line here or change a paragraph there, and poke and prod, and then retreat again, grumbling all the while. And then a few days later I’ll do the same thing, until somehow it’ll get to about the eighty-percent-done mark. At that point, I usually decide that if it’s come this far it had better well just become finished, and I’ll bull my way through the writing until it can be read from beginning to end with no giant pits or gaps in the middle.

And at that point, I have a completed short story!

I may go back and re-read and revise it then, but usually by the time I get there I’ve gone back and forth over it so many times in my haphazard, non-linear writing style that it’s effectively had a series of internal revisions during the writing process. So then I usually send it out into the world as-is, which works for me, because I generally don’t want to look at it any more.

And that’s my writing process, in a nutshell.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in San Francisco where she writes science fiction and fantasy and works for Locus Magazine. Her YA fantasy novel Luminator is forthcoming from Reuts Publishing in 2017. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Christopher Barzak

Jason Ridler | 725 words

The narrator’s voice is prim and proper, an outsider who knows everything inside and yet refrains, “After all, we don’t live in that house.” It speaks to knowledge and responsibility. Why else choose this kind of narrator?

The narrator is a first person plural voice, which I wanted to use in order to talk about public versus private dealings, particularly in small rural towns, where the social fabric is very tight in many ways, some good and others invasive, where everyone knows each other’s business, and talks about it, while also often not intervening. I like this collective “we” voice as it embodies that kind of language used in those communities, and it’s not one that I’d seen used in regard to small town supernatural fiction before. Stories of haunted houses are often engaged with what happens to those haunted within the house, contrasting with the normality of the world outside it. This type of voice seemed perfect to amplify that affect.

The narrator also feels like the voice of the community (“We all feel a bit sad for Mary Kay Billings”), which reminded me of Shirley Jackson and William Faulkner (“A Rose for Emily” in particular). What does such a POV character allow you to do that, say, a distant, disembodied third person omniscient narrator cannot?

I think the collective voice rides this really weird line that blurs between feeling intimate and feeling at a distance, whereas the disembodied third person omniscient narrator is mostly just distant. While both achieve the ability to narrate on an omniscient (or almost omniscient, in the case of the collective pooling of knowledge or hearsay in the case of the first person plural), it’s the collective voice that also personalizes that knowledge in the context of a specific community.

There’s a repetitive tone of voids and holes: the bathroom as privacy where things are flushed away, the hole in the dead child’s heart, Jesus speaking through the mouth of Rose, buttons that litter the house without their holes; Jonas’s argument on people becoming “nothing,” the vanishing Blank family members. Hauntings are usually about what is left behind, but here there are notes of what is lost forever. Why make that the focus?

I usually like to invert genre expectations, or at least to put a different spin on them. Since, as you mentioned, hauntings are often about what lingers, I wanted the haunting effect to be about what’s lost irrevocably, which can haunt in a different way. The strong absence of someone or something can sometimes be felt as if it’s a presence.

Rose loves flowers and Jonas loves drink. But the house is the one that seduces her, as if trying to bring life into the dying orphan’s structure, with a tradition of draining families of life. A pattern started with the Blanks. What appealed to you about this common cultural note of intimacy between women and home?

Traditionally the home has been equated with women, particularly in patriarchal cultures where women’s roles have been limited to the running of a household. But homes and houses also function as prisons in this way, where that intimacy can feel oppressive, which I felt was a perfect sort of note for the oppressive nature of haunted houses.

Stories that cover large swaths of time often face the challenge of holding a reader’s attention compared to ones that focus on immediacy and urgency. Here that challenge is met with depth and layers of horror. Were there other advantages for having a generational discourse in the narrative?

I think covering generations in one short story does have the possibility to feel at a distance to readers, but by fracturing the narrative, moving between the time periods, the present back into the past on a loop, I think the story accrues a kind of gravitas that might not have been felt had the weight of the house’s history not been an aspect of the story. The backstories of the previous families in the house are revealed as the present-day story unfolds, and I think this creates an engaging feeling of parallels and concurrent hauntings within the story.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Jason S. Ridler is a writer, improv actor, and historian. He is the author of A Triumph for Sakura, Blood and Sawdust, the Spar Battersea thrillers and has published more than sixty stories in such magazines and anthologies as The Big Click, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Out of the Gutter, and more. He also writes the column FXXK WRITING! for Flash Fiction Online. A former punk rock musician and cemetery groundskeeper, Mr. Ridler holds a Ph.D. in War Studies from the Royal Military College of Canada. He lives in Richmond, CA.

Author Spotlight: Peter M. Ball

Moshe Siegel | 1152 words

What was the genesis of your novella, Horn?

 I wrote Horn on a dare when I was at Clarion South back in 2007. Lee Battersby was coming in as a tutor and one of the other students who knew him gave the cohort a warning before his week started: “Whatever you do, don’t write a story about fourteen year old girls and unicorns. Lee hates that sort of thing.”

My first response to that kind of statement is almost always, “I don’t know. I think we could write one he’d love,” and things snowballed from there. I’d disappear into my dormitory room for an hour, then emerge with a new way of approaching the story: What if it started with an autopsy and the unicorn was the murderer? What if it was a horror story that played with classic noir tropes? What if the fourteen year-old girl was a runaway pulled into a bad scene? Eventually someone dared me to just write the damn thing, and I did.

The result was about six thousand words of novella notes masquerading as a very messy short story, but it achieved the original goal of meeting the dare.

Did you look to any specific stories or ideas as inspiration?

I hadn’t read an awful lot of hardboiled detective stories when I started Horn, nor watched a lot of film noir, but I discovered that it’s a genre you really do pick up through a process of cultural osmosis. You see it parodied in cartoons and sitcoms, or adapted into films like Blade Runner. I think the only two fully-fledged hardboiled stories I knew was Raymond Chandler’s The Goldfish and a slightly off-beat detective novella, Brotherly Love, by an Australian writer named Dirk Flinthart. I re-read both obsessively while writing the first draft, just trying to wrap my head around the voice and the story beats.

I spent about a year working my way through the classics of the hardboiled detective genre after that, before trying to redraft and expand Horn into a novella. And I developed a mild obsession with forensic-investigation TV shows like NCIS and the various CSI spin-offs.

Have you visited these characters, or this world, in your other work?

There’s a second Miriam Aster novella, Bleed, which started when a friend of mine had a short rant about their hatred of fantasy stories with talking cats. I keep threatening to write a third novella one day, but I am eminently distractible on the writing front, and find myself working on other projects instead.

This novella features some rather graphic imagery and a dark spin on what may otherwise be whimsical content (à la Who Framed Roger Rabbit?—that’s a compliment); was it challenging to blend this material and tone?

Honestly, I never gave it much thought. I always considered Horn to be one of those stories that was never meant to get published. I wrote the first story with a very specific audience in mind, and I figured it would be an experiment in seeing how dark I could take things and proving a point in regards to the original dare. It would be read by seventeen or eighteen people, maximum, and then I’d file it away as a learning experience and go write other things.

Then those seventeen or eighteen people suggested it should be a novella, and I had no experience in writing anything longer than six thousand words, so I figured it would be an interesting experiment in expanding things and making the story longer. A lot of the really dark content was already in place after the story draft, which meant I could play around with tone and structure because no-one would be crazy enough to publish a story about unicorns and murder and underage pornography, right? In the end, I only submitted it because my friend Angela Slatter had read a draft and recommended it to an editor she’d worked with.

You can do some very strange things when you are young, assume no-one is looking, and don’t think too much about the consequences. It’s like being a cartoon character that runs off the edge of a cliff, but doesn’t yet realise that they should be falling because they haven’t yet looked down.

Speaking of blending, Horn spans many genres (urban fantasy, dark fantasy, noir, classic frightening fairy tales); do you find yourself drawn to any particular genre when reading/writing?

I read across the board when it comes to genre. Name a genre category and I can rattle off a half-dozen of my favourite authors or books in that area, although I’ll admit to a particular fondness for hardboiled pulp, regency romance, and things towards the slipstream end of the fantasy genre.

The thing that is virtually guaranteed to win me over as a reader is the seamless blending of genre tropes, particularly when it asks you to go back and look at the original genres in a new light. There’s nothing I love more than that moment where you have to pause and ask yourself where, exactly, something fits on the bookshelf and not being able to come up with a definitive answer.

Do you have any fiction idols?

So many. I will try to restrain myself here, but Caitlín Kiernan is probably the finest writer working today and is particularly spectacular in the short form. I’ve spent the last few spec-fic conventions I’ve attended sitting in the bar geeking out with fellow fans of Australian regency novelist Anne Gracie, who is one of my go-to writers I’ll foist on people who think they don’t like romance as a genre. And, in terms of blending genres, I am an enormous fan of Christa Faust’s lucha-noir novel, Hoodland, which is an absolutely incredible book for anyone who is a fan of pro-wrestling or hardboiled crime.

Do you have anything upcoming or in the works that you’d like to share with us?

These days my major projects are more writing-adjacent than anything else. I run the biennial GenreCon Writers conference for the Australian Writers Marketplace, and we’re currently gearing up for the announcements for of the fourth conference that will take place in late 2017.

GenreCon’s an incredible project to be part of for someone with my interest in writing and genre, since it’s largely an excuse to gather together groups of very smart writers and get them talking about the craft and business side of what we do.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Moshe Siegel interviews at Lightspeed, works in the New York State library system, and hatches indie publishing plots from his Hudson Valley home office. Follow tweets of varying relevance @moshesiegel.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 149 words

Coming up in October, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Stephen S. Power (“Fade to Red”) and Mary Anne Mohanraj (“Plea”), along with SF reprints by Julian Mortimer Smith (“Come-from-Aways”) and Fran Wilde (“A Moment of Gravity, Circumscribed”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Jeremiah Tolbert (“The Cavern of the Screaming Eyes”) and Kat Howard (“The Key to St. Medusa’s”), and fantasy reprints by Aliette de Bodard (“The Dragon’s Tears”) and Will Kaufman (“October’s Son”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns.

For our ebook readers, we also have an ebook-exclusive reprint of the novella “The Stars Do Not Lie,” by Jay Lake, and an excerpt from Will McIntosh’s new novel, Faller.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

Thanks for reading!

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About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

Managing/Associate Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects

Christie Yant

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Robert Barton Bland

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Rich Horton

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Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

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Henry Lien

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Robyn Lupo

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Laurel Amberdine

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Andrew Liptak

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Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

The Editors

If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, you might also enjoy these anthologies edited (or co-edited) by John Joseph Adams.

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: The End is Nigh (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: The End is Now (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: The End Has Come (with Hugh Howey)

Armored

Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill)

Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 (with Karen Joy Fowler) [forthcoming Oct. 2016]

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live

Dead Man’s Hand

Epic: Legends Of Fantasy

Federations

The Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes

HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects

Lightspeed: Year One

The Living Dead

The Living Dead 2

Loosed Upon the World

The Mad Scientist’s Guide To World Domination

Operation Arcana

Other Worlds Than These

Oz Reimagined (with Douglas Cohen)

Press Start to Play (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Robot Uprisings (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Seeds of Change

Under the Moons of Mars

Wastelands

Wastelands 2

The Way Of The Wizard

What the #@&% Is That? (with Douglas Cohen) [forthcoming Nov. 2016]

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above. Each project also has a mini-site devoted to it specifically, where you’ll find free fiction, interviews, and more.