TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 117, February 2020

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: February 2020

SCIENCE FICTION

Ark of Light
Victor LaValle

How We Burn
Brenda Peynado

Dying Light
Maria Romasco-Moore

The Gamecocks
JT Petty

FANTASY

Noah’s Raven
Kij Johnson

A Statement in the Case
Theodora Goss

Toxic Destinations
Alexander Weinstein

A Stranger at the Bochinche
Daniel José Older

EXCERPTS

The Unspoken Name
A.K. Larkwood

NONFICTION

Book Reviews: February 2020
LaShawn M. Wanak

Media Review: February 2020
Jeremiah Tolbert

Interview: Nino Cipri
Christian A. Coleman

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Kij Johnson

Brenda Peynado

Alexander Weinstein

JT Petty

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2020 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Grandfailure / Fotolia

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: February 2020

John Joseph Adams | 250 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 117th issue!

Our first SF short of the issue (“How We Burn,” by Brenda Peynado) takes us into a future where helicopter parents have gone way too far. How are kids supposed to rebel when they have the expectations of four generations weighing on their shoulders? Then we swoop a little bit closer to our own future in JT Petty’s “The Gamecocks,” which explores what will happen to America’s working class once self-driving vehicles become commonplace. We also have SF reprints by Victor LaValle (“Ark of Light”) and Maria Romasco-Moore (“Dying Light”).

The multi-award-winning Kij Johnson brings us a brand new fantasy short from the perspective of a bird: “Noah’s Raven.” You might remember Alexander Weinstein’s travel guides from last month’s “Destinations of Joy.” Well, for every great travel adventure, there’s an equally terrible one, and this month he’s bringing us a new short called “Toxic Destinations.” You might want to cancel your magical plane tickets! We also have fantasy reprints by Daniel José Older (“A Stranger at the Bochinche”) and Theodora Goss (“A Statement in the Case”).

Our interview this month is with author Nino Cipri, discussing all things labor union and IKEA (yes, IKEA). Of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns. Our ebook readers will also enjoy an excerpt from A.K. Larkwood’s new novel, The Unspoken Name.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Joseph Adams is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, a science fiction and fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, as well as the bestselling editor of more than thirty anthologies, including Wastelands and The Living Dead. Recent books include Cosmic Powers, What the #@&% Is That?, Operation Arcana, Press Start to Play, Loosed Upon the World, and The Apocalypse Triptych. 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 a finalist twelve times) and an eight-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of the digital magazines Lightspeed and Nightmare, and is a producer for WIRED’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. He also served as a judge for the 2015 National Book Award. Find him online at johnjosephadams.com and @johnjosephadams.

Ark of Light

Victor LaValle | 1016 words

“Bones?”

“What about them?”

“Our data suggests you’ll feel a great deal of pain in them after you transmit.”

“Oh? Like how much, a lot?”

She shifted where she stood and I sensed she was annoyed with me. It’s funny how much you can understand from body language. I couldn’t really tell from looking at her face, since the room was almost entirely dark.

“All of this is covered in the manual. Didn’t you read it?”

I didn’t answer her because the answer was obvious. Instead I started taking off my clothes. She saw what I was doing and said, “Well, I can see you read the first page at least.”

She left to get me a containment suit. In the movies, a woman like her—Transmission Liaison—would be wearing eight-inch heels and a tight dress, and I’d be listening to her click-clack across the hard floor of the chamber. But instead I heard nearly nothing; this Transmission Liaison wore flats.

“Does everyone read the whole manual?” I asked as I took off my pants. I felt stupid, unprepared.

“They’re supposed to,” she called out from farther away than I’d expected. Because of the near-dark, I couldn’t get a sense of the limits in this place. I might as well have been floating in outer space.

“They’re supposed to,” she repeated, right up close to me again, “but I’ve been the Transition Liaison for almost 3,000 people and I’ve only met three people who read the manual all the way through.”

With that she tore open the sealed packet that held my containment suit and, I don’t know why, I leaned forward to inhale the smell.

“It’s not a bouquet of flowers,” she said, but it wasn’t mean. Maybe lots of other people had done that before.

Putting on the suit felt like pulling on a sock that’s a bit too small.

“You listed yourself as a medium,” she said.

“I’ll fit,” I told her, but that was never going to work. She gave a soft laugh and finally, after giving up, I laughed too.

“I’m nervous,” I said. Then I kicked off the containment suit like a kid struggling out of his pajamas.

She crouched and when I saw the contours of her face, I realized that my eyes had adjusted to the dark.

“It’s normal,” she whispered. “But this is the hardest part. I promise you.”

She placed a hand on my shoulder and guided me back to the lockers where the containment suits were kept.

“Has anyone ever come back?” I asked.

“Why would they? The point is to leave.”

“I know, I know. But if no one ever comes back, how do you know it’s any better over there?”

She slipped the right-sized suit from a stack. I wondered how she could see something as precise as the sizes. Maybe she never left this room? I tore open the bag myself this time. I didn’t sniff it.

“We do receive data,” she said. “We’re in constant communication. That’s also in the manual, by the way.”

Now the suit slipped on as easily as a pleasant lie.

“And I only get the helmet when I step into the Ark?”

“That’s right.” She patted me on the shoulder.

She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a tiny device no larger than her thumb. She pressed something—a button, I assume—and the sound of droplets falling to the floor played throughout the chamber. She didn’t wait for me to ask, no doubt that was covered in the manual too.

“Our data suggests the climate of the planet, or at least the part where you’ll arrive, is in a perpetual mist. Early Travelers had trouble acclimating to the new environment, so we began doing this—it helps the mind to prepare.”

She walked away from me, toward the middle of the room, but held her hand up when I tried to follow.

“Transmitting doesn’t take any ‘time’ as we’d understand it, but it will seem to take longer to you. This portion of the trip will lack light, that’s why the chamber is kept so dark. So you’ll adjust.”

I went back to where I’d left my clothes, picking them up and cradling them in my arms. I had to go, but I didn’t want to leave a mess.

“They’re saying the federal government is going to follow through on their threat,” I said. “They’ll recolonize the sanctuary cities, they’ll find us.”

“Yes, people are saying that, which is why we’d better not waste any more time.”

She held up the small device and pressed the button a second time and then there it was, the Ark of Light.

I hadn’t realized the light would be green, but as I soon as I saw it I knew it was exactly right. Something soothing about it, though of course the Ark ran the length of the room. If it hadn’t been a device to transport human beings off the planet, I would’ve called it a work of art.

“It’s time for your helmet,” she said, but I didn’t move. I couldn’t.

A low, regular hum echoed in the room, or was it playing inside my rib cage, within the ventricles of my heart?

“When will you go through?” I asked.

“When everyone is safe.”

I stuttered some kind of argument but she grabbed my right hand and held it. “When everyone is safe.”

In the light of the Ark, I cried, quietly.

“I hope that’s soon,” I whispered.

She gestured for me to come closer. I’d have to step into the light at the far edge. Then I’d be thrown forward, de-atomized, or some other scientific concept I didn’t truly understand, shot forward on the beams, out of our solar system, farther than humanity had ever gone before. Who cared if we were still welcome in this country? Let them keep it, we never wanted to inherit a failing empire. We had bigger dreams, and now we had the rest of the universe in which to dream them.

©2018 by Victor LaValle. Originally published in Particulates, edited by Nalo Hopkinson. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Victor LaValle is the author of seven works of fiction and one comic book. His work has been awarded the World Fantasy Award, British World Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award and Shirley Jackson Award, among others. He has been a finalist for the Nebula and Hugo Awards as well. His new novel, Lone Women, will be published in 2021. He teaches writing at Columbia University and lives in New York City with his wife and kids.

How We Burn

Brenda Peynado | 10400 words

Look at how bright we burn. I’m driving my spaceship with a hacked joystick and my friends in the side-seats: Tiger, Grizzly Bear, and Joshua Tree, my boyfriend. And me, Sequoia—all named after extinct species, as if our light could bring them back. The spaceship is an older model we stole from a junkyard, souped up and kept at an abandoned building in the Park Zone so our parents wouldn’t confiscate it when they saw all the mods. I’m sitting backwards, straddling the inward-facing seat. The windows are down, and wind undulates in and out, hurting our ears. There’s smog and the dopplered roaring of the other ships. My friends’ hands are outside the windows, trying to touch the zombie ships that zip by at two hundred miles an hour. We’re on Z, which makes everything go in slow motion, which is how I can pilot the ship at a few hundred miles an hour in crowded traffic. It was invented for fighter pilots years ago, before computers started navigating everything.

We’re laughing. We’re throwing off the burdens of hope the olds have placed on our shoulders. Despite four generations of the one-child policy—fourteen of them going into making every one of us: eight great-grandparents, four grandparents, two parents—it’s still so easy for us to do all the things our families forbid. We hack the autopilots faster than they can update the security patches on our ships, our blind desire faster and smarter than their fear. We install joysticks and pilot ourselves into the Park Zone, skip school, go wherever we want. We pry the glass from our spaceships and hang out the window while zombie-pilots zoom between buildings. We do the drugs named for each letter of the alphabet. We cut our palms with knives and mix our incompatible blood types and call each other siblings.

There’s a fear in their eyes when the olds talk to us, when they chastise us, when they control where we go. They’ve programmed our spaceships’ autopilots to do nothing but shuttle us from school to music lesson to singing lesson to private tutors. Our parents try to keep us in line with prevention programs and shame. Mothers Against Doing Drugs, Grandparents Against Going into the Park Zones, Fathers Against Cutting School. They’re against everything. Drones patrol the streets. Even our supposed spaceships can’t go into space, staying firmly within two hundred feet of the Earth’s ruined, crowded ground. Even there they’re ruled by fear.

How do you get that way? They’re zombies, going through the motions in their safe and perfect lives. My father’s the worst of them. I know he knows how to drive—all the high-ranking police officers do so they can go outside the law as they need to uphold it—but he still zombie-drives to work, where he forces all of us to comply. I asked him to teach me how to drive once, and he just shook his head and closed the door on me. After work as Chief of Police, Chief Zombie, he tosses his zipties and badge on the counter, he rubs his forehead and his shoulders sag, and I just think, Where did you go, Dad? What happened to you?

They’re so worried about our lives, keeping us safe, but why not live as brief and bright as a flame?

I’m trying to steer us clear of the drone cameras, locations I picked up from hacking my father’s work-tab while he slept. This morning my dad’s messaging vid blared him awake and I heard him whispering intensely. I swear I heard him say Procreators through the wall. So I knew police had found them in the city.

“I can’t believe we might finally meet a Procreator,” Josh says over the wind, his eyes lit up with his big dreams, “and we can finally join up with them.”

“And get to Mars,” Tiger says. She’s the best hacker of the four of us, coding-wise, whereas I’m the best social engineering-wise. Give me code to hack and I know where the people were careless, where they left their backdoors, how they can slip, how I can make them slip. Give Tiger a logic problem without people and she can solve it faster than anyone we know, code circles around it. She knows that if the stories Josh has spun are true—about the Procreators making their own mission to Mars to populate the ruined bio-domes after the last mission reported a malfunction and the planet lost power—and they saw what she could do, they’d get her on the team coding the next Mars mission. Meanwhile, our zombie parents and zombie government say that we should focus our resources on saving what we have instead of ruining another planet, playing it safe because that’s all they know.

Grizzly stays quiet, laughing, his hand out the window, his fist trying to grab the fin of a ship I’m keeping pace with, though his fist curls around just air, around the ripping sound of our speed. His mother is a judge for the district, and his judgment’s all black and white, just like his mother, except his white would tarnish hers an inky black. He’s trying not to get his hopes up about finding the Procreators, because once activated, he cannot be dissuaded.

“Down there!” yells Josh. But there’s nothing below us except floodwater glistening between buildings, the abstract reflection of a thousand ships.

A ship zooms by. I know that we are talking a million miles a minute from the Z, that no one can understand us but us, and this makes me smile. I love all of us, and my time-bomb heart races, and Josh can see it in my eyes. He climbs into my lap, blocks my view to press his lips to mine, wraps his arms around me. He’s our storyteller, the one who tells us everything will be okay, but in this moment, I want not to be okay. His kiss is like the slowest jump into a pool, the wetness fresh and inviting. Do I dare swim further in? Always. The kiss lasts maybe a second, but on Z it lasts nearly forever. Josh’s dark eyes hold me, like a few years ago when we all would hold hands underneath the dinner table at each other’s apartments with the parents and grands, sly glances to remind us we were still alive in this world drowning with ancients.

Then Josh is off my lap, and the traffic lane blooms in front of me, and I yank us up from the family-sized ship we were heading toward. Tiger moans from the back that she’s blind, which means she’s had too much Z, but this has happened before, and, sib, that first glance of the world you get after going blind, everything slow and full of light—it’s like being born.

In school, they tell us what this world has lost. They tell us the species we were named after, what they were like, how they died because we took over all viable habitats. They show us pictures of how big sequoias were, the orange stripes of tigers, the teeth of mammals we will never see again, and they use them as threats. Like, look what will happen if you don’t comply. But here’s what we learn instead: This planet doesn’t need more humans, not even any at all. Did the last animals know they were the last? Did they savor those moments, the last grizzlies on Earth? Did the animals in the zoos comply with their trainers, or get sick with sadness at their bars, or did they do what they’d always done: teeth flashing, ignoring the humans who’d doomed them all? And if we lived in their memory, shouldn’t we celebrate being the last of a dying breed? Shouldn’t we burn bright for them?

“Sibs! Sibs! Sibs!” we yell from the ship window, because the whole world is full of our siblings.

That’s when we hit the hologram. I have the locations of all of Josh’s holo-graffiti memorized, and I should have remembered this other one, having passed it on the way to school, but then I was on zombie-pilot, when hitting a hologram doesn’t matter because a zombie nav doesn’t react. Now, a blacktop road floats in the middle of the sky. Out of thin air, an ancient car from the time before spaceships careens out into the hover-lanes. Then another old car weaves between the spaceships, and they’re about to collide. I can tell the Z is wearing off; things are moving fast. I jerk my wheel to avoid them, even though I know it’s impossible for those old junk cars to be flying, for that ancient road to be floating. Everyone is smashed against the side of our ship, and for a moment I lose grip of the joystick. Behind me, Tiger asks what’s happening because she still can’t see. The ancient cars smash together in an explosion of parts, one car flipping in the air, the driver launched through the windshield—and you can see her, this ancient woman dressed in museum clothes, arms spread before she hits the impossible pavement.

Then the woman and the cars disappear, and we’re back to being several hundred feet above the ground. It was one of the holograms that Mothers Against Taking Your Spaceship Off Autopilot have put up to show us how bad things were before.

I grab the joystick again, steer us away from the building looming ahead. But it’s too late. A drone shines its laser on us from around the corner. Then its lights disco and sirens blare, and I can feel my ship jerked toward it, grabbed in its magnet.

• • • •

When the cops arrive, the Z has mostly worn off, although everyone talking still sounds muffled and deep, like they’re underwater. Most of the officers know me, and some of them smile with sadness because they remember me as a cute kid who played between their legs. Others are angry, like they would do worse to me if I were someone else’s daughter. They’ve pulled us all out of the ship, which still hovers, attached to the drone. They’ve zip-tied our hands and taken our statements, or tried.

I taunt them. “Haven’t you driven before?” I say. “Don’t you know what it feels like? Sib, the thrill. To make your own mistakes.”

Is that longing I see in their eyes, or is it the zombie taking over, yelling comply comply comply?

One older cop, a woman I know my dad had passed up for promotion, says, “I’m not your sib. Idiots like you don’t get to go off autopilot. If everyone tried to drive, the system would fall apart.”

Grizzly behind me laughs, the judge in him warring with what she’s said, and the rest of us take up his chant, all low and garbled like we’re an engine churning underwater, “System, system, system, system . . .”

Why are we even alive, anyways, just to perpetuate this crap? Maybe one day, once we’ve had enough single children, there’ll be a generation down the line that can do whatever they want, because there will be too few of them to matter. If they throw trash out the window—if every single one of them does—it would be only a fraction of the garbage we produce now, and the newly abundant green would take it back. Why do we have to take responsibility for what other generations have done? The Procreators hidden deep in the Park Zones don’t; they have as many children as they want and live outside the law. If all the greats and grands died, we’d have less than a fourth of the population left. If we were left alone. Wouldn’t that make us free again?

• • • •

My father is waiting for us on the arrival pad at the police station. His jaw is hard and he’s gritting his teeth. The door opens and the zombie-pilot says, You have arrived.

I don’t move. My father reaches in and drags me out by the arm. My friends climb out willingly. I’m sure they expect to get off easy like last time. But my dad has been changing his tactics lately; following his own advice, my dad, the very guy that started Dads for Scaring Children Straight. One of the smartest guys in the world, except I’m smarter, and look at him—black uniform pressed defiantly crisp against the flood-damp, wasting everything he taught me on punishment and order.

Other officers are arriving on the hoverpad, and we’re in their way. I can hear the gargling automatic voices, Please step away from the vehicles, and the airy whooshes as they fly by. My father yanks all our zipties to be sure they’re tight. I remember when he used to tuck me in at night, swaddling me in the covers so that I couldn’t even move my arms, and this feels surprisingly like that, the same rage and joy as I struggle against what binds me. I want to laugh.

“Book them,” my father tells the junior officers. He turns away from me. “Put her in cell B075.”

My friends protest and yell. Josh tries to hold my zip-tied hands so we won’t be separated. I stay silent. I know my father’s password is still based on my name. Keep hitting your head against a brick wall, and either you cave or it does. But the thing is, how far can even my father go? How much can any of them punish us, when all their hopes rest on one kid? If they break us, they can’t have another. If our lives are wasted, so are theirs.

• • • •

There’s a girl in the cell already, sitting on the floor with her back to the door. When the plexi doors open, she doesn’t even jolt or turn around. Her red hair frizzes out down to her waist like it’s never been cut or combed. The doors close behind me, and through the glass I watch the officer walk down the hall.

“Hi,” I say.

She’s humming a song I’ve never heard, almost like folk songs from the old days.

“I might be here a while,” I say.

I walk in front of her, but she’s still humming, eyes closed. Besides the head of crazy hair, she’s dressed strangely, in a shirt made of burlap and old-timey jeans, instead of the stretchy sim spidersilk material that my friends and I wear. The stiff waistband cuts into her stomach.

“What are you in for?” I try again. “I took my spaceship off autopilot.”

Her eyebrows rise, but she doesn’t seem much impressed. I nudge her with my foot.

Finally, she opens her eyes. “What do you want?” she says with a strange accent. When she opens her mouth, I see that half her teeth are gone, her gums checkerboarded in white and black, even though she’s young, just a few years older than me. My own teeth ache at the sight. I’ve never seen anyone look so neglected.

“I’m just talking,” I say, backing away. “I just said, what did you do?”

“I exist,” she says, and closes her eyes again.

Suddenly I get it. She’s a Procreator, born outside government quotas and the law, except they caught her. Behind her, beyond the plexi, other officers push other zip-tied prisoners in the same old clothes as my cellmate. They smile without teeth and have bruises all over their skin. My cellmate can’t see them with her back turned, but I realize maybe that’s the point.

A storm of questions comes out of my mouth, and the last of the Z in my system makes it seem like a flurry of words. I want to know what the Procreator compounds are like, whether they have spaceships they can take wherever they want, how they forage and farm, if she has a brother or sister, how many kids she’s had.

She says nothing.

“Look, you’re in jail—at least we can talk to pass the time.”

“Who’s in jail?” she says.

“We are?”

She scoffs. “You may be in jail. You’re the ones who put up walls around me and you’re the ones calling it jail. I’m just sitting here, same as always. You build these walls, and the only thing you’re doing is keeping yourself out from where I am sitting. You’re so afraid of us overrunning you—that one day there will be more of us than you.”

I only want know where they live and how. To join them. To make it clear that me and my friends, we’re not like the officers.

“Sib—” I start.

“You are not my sibling,” she says. “You are one of the wall builders.”

And then she gets quiet again and no matter what I ask her, she won’t respond, except for once, when she says, “Be quiet. Are you on drugs or something? Slow down and listen to yourself.”

I lay down on the bench, nauseous from my comedown. Please, I want to yell, we want to join the next Mars Expedition. We want to live free. My friends and I, we’ve been trying to live free.

In the watery light down the hall I make out lab-coated people I don’t recognize, accompanied by officers. They’re pulling a gurney out of a cell with one of the Procreators on it. This is the first time my Procreator has been facing the plexi. I sit up.

“What’s going on?” I say.

She lies back on her bench. “They’re sterilizing us,” she says, looking at the ceiling.

I shrug, since everyone gets sterilized after having their one kid, but I know that this goes against everything the Procreators believe in.

“Is that your friend?” I ask.

“My sister,” she says.

I look back to the gurney rolling in our direction. The same frizzed red hair cascades toward the floor. Her eyes are closed, and she doesn’t move. Sister. I cannot possibly know what that word means.

“Why are you just lying there?” I say. “Fight back.”

“Against what? You’re a dying breed, you wall builders. You’re afraid. Do you even know how much you’ve lost?”

I want to kick her, to make her look at what is being done. “You don’t know me. I’m not afraid.”

“We will overrun you,” she says.

I bang on the plexi. Officers Gerel and Miliero barely glance at me as they escort the gurney down the hall.

I feel sick again, and I hug my knees on the floor. My sibs should be here, and I feel them missing. “Have you . . . procreated already?” I ask.

“No,” she says. She rolls over and faces the wall. “I wanted to have four.”

I imagine me, Josh, Tiger, and Grizzly all real siblings, all her kids even though she’s our age. Sister. Brother. We would sleep every night together tangled like a nest. Our blood would rage on across the history of the earth and we would never die. The Earth would never die.

“How did they catch you?” I ask.

“We were pulling food from the flood trash dump in just outside the Park Zone when the drone caught us.”

“You forage for trash?” I say.

She’s silent.

“But we don’t have much trash. Most everything is designed to be recycled.”

“Yes,” she says. “I’m often hungry.”

Cold sweats rack me and I start to tremble, coming down from the Z. When I open my eyes, the Procreator is standing over me with her checkerboard mouth open.

“What’s wrong with you?” she says.

“It’s nothing,” I say, rolling over, but then I start to shake harder. My stomach hurts sharp, and I know I’m supposed to have food right after Z but we haven’t been fed since we got here. I clutch my middle and bring my knees up. Then I have to lunge for the toilet in the corner.

I’m heaving up nothing, holding my empty self against the cold toilet. The Procreator’s fingers cup my forehead, sliding over my hair, pulling it back. This is the closest she’s been. She smells like trash and mold, and it makes me gag more. She hums an old song into my ear. All bile is coming out of me, my mouth infinitely open, and everything is so slow I will be in this moment forever, remembering when my father would toss me in the air over the couch and I’d gasp, flying until my mother caught me. When I can finally close my mouth, I lay my head down on the toilet. The Procreator lets my hair down gently so that it falls over my shoulder. She’s stroking my head, and I think, Sister. I want to rub her trash smell all over my hair, and I want to hold her hand.

“Please,” I say, “take me back with you.”

“Shhh,” she says, hand in circles on my back. “I can’t go back. I’d lead them to the rest of us.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. I feel emptied out.

“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “We all see each other again on Mars.”

That doesn’t make sense. My heart sinks, and I just want to drown in the crete of the floor. “But how are you going to get there if you can’t go back to the expedition?”

“Expedition?” She snorts. “We go to Mars when we die.”

She drops my hair and backs away, and I feel more alone than a star in space. There’s no way off this dying planet, no way through but fighting. I want to claw the tattoo of Mars off my wrist.

Officers and lab coats are walking up to our cell. I’m ready to fight back. I will be testing my father’s limits. If they tase me, it’s because he ordered them to, otherwise they wouldn’t have the guts.

“What’s your name?” I say, before the plexi opens.

“Thalia,” she says.

Then the lab coats come in. I lunge at them, but they tase me and I crumple to the floor in a ball of pain and shakes. They inject her and wheel her out. Thalia, I say to myself. She was not named after dead things.

• • • •

All the greats and grands are standing on my shoulders. They’re stomping their feet, boots on my scalp and heels in my mouth and my eyes, and then they stomp me underground where I can’t breathe.

I gasp awake. I open my eyes and it’s morning. My father is at my cell door, but the plexi isn’t open.

He stays on the other side, rigid in his uniform, looking at me, the vomit on my shirt, my hair smashed on one side with trash smell from Thalia threaded through it, the shaky tattoo of Mars my friends and I gave each other on my wrist. He’s wearing the face that often is paired with him saying, You’re breaking my heart, Quoia. But you know what, I just don’t buy it. He doesn’t have that much heart anymore to break.

So I get up from the bench and look at him with the same face to let him know what I think of him. I punch the plexi where his face is. His eyes shut, but he doesn’t flinch.

I call his bluff, turning around before he can, before he can threaten me with leaving me in here for days. I lay down on the bench like I’m ready to stay. I hear the plexi doors whoosh open.

“Don’t push me,” he says. “Why do you always have to push me to the end?”

“Where are my friends?”

He throws my study tab at me. “We let them go last night. You’re going to school.”

I’m silent as we walk down the hall, the row of doors on my right revealing mostly empty rooms or young people like me with their heads in their hands, imagining what they’re going to tell their fourteen parents and grands. I don’t see any more Procreators. And what good would it do me if I did?

A squad ship hovers on the landing pad with both doors up. My dad makes me get in the back, behind the divider. The spaceship snaps off as soon as I’m in my seat. I can barely look at any of the buildings we pass when we’re going two hundred miles an hour before it’s whipped away from me. But I know from piloting myself that it’s bombed-out buildings that linger in the corners of my eyes, leftover mistakes from generations ago when they were fighting for food—mistakes that my generation is supposed to fix.

My dad is looking at me across the plexi. His password is still quoifish, and I remember the day we went to see the last living koi, its fins a deep purple, delicate as tissue, and they let our hands in the tank to feel its scales. “The last of its kind, just like you, the last Sequoia, the last of our family. Quioa-fish,” he called me, and my mother yelled at him to get my hand out of the filthy tank, and he said that he wasn’t going to stop me. The fish died soon afterwards from captivity, and there went the kois.

He breaks the silence first. “Didn’t you see how terrible they have it? That’s what you and your friends want to be?”

“She hasn’t had any kids yet. You didn’t have to sterilize her.”

“Is that what she told you? She lied. It doesn’t matter anyway; they’ve had more than their fair share. And if you keep going the way you are, you might end up that way too.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “I’ll join them.”

“You’ll never see her again. Did you not take a good look at her? They don’t have teeth. They don’t have doctors. They have all those kids and then half of them die. The women do most of the work and they’re pregnant and saddled with children all the time. For god’s sake, don’t you get it? They eat our trash.”

“So I’ve saddled you? Then just let me go.”

“Disease, death, squalor, everything halved and divided until a little postage square of air is all you get. You want to go back to those times?”

“These aren’t those times,” I say, but I already know now I can’t be a Procreator. We’d thought they were going to Mars. That still doesn’t mean giving into my father.

The squad ship halts quickly and descends to our apartment building. When it lets us out, Dad tries to hug me, but I flinch.

“Please,” he says. “I’m trying. The least you can do is try too.”

• • • •

When we open the door, the grands and my mother, all thirteen of them, are collected in the living room, waiting. There’s a young officer just inside the door. I have to walk past each of them to get to my room. They’ve formed the line of shaming.

“You have ten minutes to get what you need before breakfast,” my father says. “And Officer Rexen here will be your permanent escort at school.”

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” my mother starts.

Grandpa Ano says, “I will not let our entire lineage culminate in a waste.”

“I still remember what it’s like to be crowded elbow-to-elbow,” Great-Grandfather Fidelio says. “If these were the old days, you would have been dead by now.”

“And what if you’d died, hmm?” Great-Grandma Celesta says. “Can you imagine? All of us in mourning, the end for us, our family’s own apocalypse.”

“We do all this for you,” Great-Grandfather Javier says. “And you throw it away. You throw all of us away.”

“And your father,” Grandma Elena says, “who will take care of him when he is broken and old? There’s no one else. You want that your parents will die in a gutter?”

And so on down the line, six more times, each of them getting in a jab. They’re creative; each shame ritual they come up with something new. And then I get to Great-Grandma Nifel, my favorite, who looks away. It’s worse than all the words of shaming. I can feel the tears welling, but I’m trying not to blink any out.

When I reach the safety of my room, I change into new clothes and crumble the dried vomit from my hair.

“Glad you survived,” Grizzly says, lying back in my bed. Tiger is curled on one side asleep against him, but she starts to wake up. Josh is on my floor waiting for me like a dog. Their images shimmer as they move. One of Tiger’s first hacks when we were little was unlocking all of our room feeds so we could project our holograms in and talk all night without our parents knowing. Had any of our parents caught us, they would have seen three glowing forms curled around their child. We can’t stand to be apart.

Tiger says, “Sibs, my parents said I’m switching schools after this week. Homeschooling. They’ll never let me out.”

Grizzly says, “That’s not right. They think they can just break us into what they want us to be?”

“Well, they can’t keep us apart,” Josh says, rising from the floor.

“That’s it,” Grizzly says. “We’re leaving, this time for good.”

“Wait,” I say. “What if we don’t have anywhere to go? What if we never find any Procreators, or if they don’t exist like we think?” I know each of our weaknesses like the back of my hand. Grizzly, who can take years to change his mind once he decided. Josh, whose dreams and visions are bigger than even our hearts, who deflated would be nothing.

“I don’t have any other options,” Tiger says. “We can live on our own if we have to.”

And my weakness: my sibs and keeping them safe, always being the leader, the driver. Not telling them about the Procreators is my burden, what will sustain us.

It’s that I’m hesitating to go that scares me. Finally I say, “I’ll go anywhere with you. We’re leaving for good.”

They all nod.

I download the new assignments for school that I already know I won’t need, like a new, reformed Quoia. I brush my teeth. My sibs log out, heading to school.

Outside, I can hear my family playing home vids from when I was little, a favorite pastime of the greats. I know all the vids by heart, and from my screams of joy, it’s my dad taking me to the glass park, me jumping off a translucent, tinkling tree—not alive and therefore not something that can die, not something we need to preserve, not something we can ruin—and him catching me, the greats and grands lounging on the grass, fighting as usual, bickering as terrible roommates. But I remember flying through the air, how grateful I was when my father caught me. They’re remembering me at an age they can pretend I was innocent, even though just by being alive we are guilty.

Someone knocks on the door.

Great Nifel pokes her head in, sits on the bed. “Quoia,” she says, “I’ve been there.”

“Don’t start, Great. You led a revolution.”

“And it gave us park zones and minimal housing laws and city bombings. It gave us new laws, not no laws. You have to fix things, not break them.”

“You made your own mistakes. You resisted.”

“And how many people died?”

I don’t answer because the truth is, I don’t remember. I’m sure I skipped that day at school. I hug her because it could be the last time. I hug her gently because of her brittle bones, her body that can break so irrevocably, the torn shoulder from the war. We burn, we break; we’re still alive.

• • • •

On the way to school, Officer Rexen escorts me in his squad ship, which means there’s a plexi between us, though we have to stare at each other. Instead of scrambling to do my homework, I study him. Every human, every system, has a weakness. A grief or a desire. For almost all of the olds, it’s us—the young. For every human, it’s simply the desire to live. What right do we have to breathe and waste, to spew the poison that comes from everything made easy for us? But we want it, more than anything. The olds want to live through us, keep us going. I want to live a life worthy of extinction.

But Rexen wants neither. He doesn’t wear a wedding band and looks too young for it, besides. He has dark hair, dark skin like Josh’s, and there’s contempt on his face. He keeps pushing his hair back from his eyes; he’s nervous. I can guess that he’s fresh from officer training, that it will be hard for him to get ahead. I know what I have, what I want to throw away; while those of us whose parents matched well have great-grandparents accumulating and pooling their wealth into us, people like him whose great-grandparents had nothing keep pooling that nothing down the line. Unless he marries someone with money or performs well—not just the job of four olds that’s expected of all of us, but beyond that, a string of impossible missions pulled off against all odds. Everything is against him. Including that he got picked for this babysitting job.

And I intend to ruin him. I can already guess his weakness, the worm in him that begs him to persist.

He breaks the silence first. “He still has your pictures all over the office, you know. I know you’re smart. If you just played nice, you could have the world at your feet.”

“It must be hard to be you,” I say. “You played nice, did you? But there’s more that you want.”

He sighs. “All right. Are we going to do this the easy way or the hard way?”

“For you, seems like you need easy. I’ll play nice. But me, I’ve been told I like hitting my head against brick walls.”

He purses his lips and turns off the intercom across the plexi.

When we land, he follows me at a regulation four-foot distance through the stream of sibs taking the elevator down to flood levels. Far enough to be nonthreatening and appropriate, close enough to intervene. It’s this correctness that will take him down.

• • • •

In biology, Rexen stands towards the back, while Tiger and I huddle over a holo frog, black ooze from life in the flood waters seeping from its liver. They don’t trust us with real knives. The dissection tool they’ve given us is blunt, but the holo-tip on the end adds pressure feedback when it touches the hologram of the frog, and it feels like slicing through tough chicken. We’re supposed to identify the cause of its failed systems: Which human waste-product killed the animals this time? The cameras in the corner of the room deliver our images to approved watchers. The greats too broken and old for jobs spend their days watching their descendants for any mistake, any wrong answer. Often I make an ugly face just to prove that that’s worth watching too, the ugliness and the failures. Every once in a while, you see a sib jerk back from their frog, usually from an overachieving ancient patching into their personal device, yelling or chastising them from doing something wrong.

Josh and Grizzly are near the front. We’re messaging them with extra flicks and waves of our dissection knives, a fidget code we programmed to spell a message, the only way to talk right under the camera or our teachers’ noses. To Officer Rexen, all of us must look like twitchy overworkers.

Meet after lunch on the roof hoverdeck.

Your babysitter?

I’ve got him, I say.

My mother screams into my school tab, “PAY ATTENTION!”

I flinch.

For some sibs, the pressure is too much, fourteen sets of eyes watching what you do, telling you that you can do better. The sibs that can’t take it eat an E pill—E for Ender. When we were ten, Grizzly had one in his back pocket every day—his mother, the judge, being the worst of them. He had decided it wasn’t right, that he should live. Why was he taking up the air, tossing packaging, consuming electricity, if he wasn’t the best student in his violin lesson, if he wasn’t the one with all the answers at math? “All of us should E,” he’d said then. “It’s only fair to everything else alive on this earth.” That was the year Tiger coded our holograms into each other’s rooms, so we could watch him all night, so we could sleep together and tell him we needed him still. That was the year we made the pact to live the way we do, to live like it’s already over, to not be like the olds.

One of Josh’s holo-graffiti creations blooms in the air next to the teacher’s desk. It’s probably one he put in the system months ago. He deploys his creations periodically all over the school and installs them on congested shipways. This one is a dragon, a creature that never existed and so we weren’t the ones to kill it. It rears in the air with its neon rainbow scales glistening, breathes fire at the teacher, who blusters and leaves the room for the IT department. It will take them half the day to figure out where his code is and scrub it from the holo-projection. It’s beautiful, the intensity of his visions, and for the next period we will slice open frogs attended by a dragon, raging. Josh sits with a straight face for the watchers.

In gym, we play dodgeball, the holo-balls shimmering through the air as we duck and catch them. We hold them with our palms cupped. Times like now, I want to squeeze, I want to feel their weights in my hands. But they haven’t let kids use real balls for a hundred years. We’re too precious to let us play with real things. Sometimes I want to scream, just to remind myself that I’m real. I want to punch someone, push someone, just to feel their flesh against mine. Meanwhile, we play pretend, the balls giving us no resistance. I toss one at Josh, who’s on the team against me. I know he’ll duck in time. Behind him, Officer Rexen leans against the back wall, startled by the ball of light headed towards him. Now he’s on alert. He moves towards the dividing line, close to my position.

The balls can’t hurt us, but we can use ourselves as obstacles. I see two sibs collide, toss a ball at them while they’re stuck together. The sib to my left moves right every time she dodges. All I have to do is turn at the right time, and I’m colliding with her, her elbow in my stomach. I go flying towards Officer Rexen.

I hear olds from all the school tabs yell, Watch out! Then his hands are under me and he’s lifting me up, and this is exactly what I wanted. He can’t afford my harm under his watch. “Thank you,” I say breathlessly, my hands on his back as I right myself. “Nice reflexes.”

After gym, I twitch my message to Tiger, Josh, and Grizzly. I head towards the bathroom. There aren’t any cameras in there.

Officer Rexen follows at his four-foot distance. He comes into the bathroom, even. I turn around.

“Thank you for catching me,” I say.

He just looks at me. He takes a position against the sink. His back up against a wall.

I walk towards him, put my hand on his chest. I unbutton my shirt as I kiss his neck, run my hands through his carefully combed hair, leaving it in disarray. He can’t back up. He’s frozen, so I kiss him on the lips and it takes a second before he throws me away from him.

I fall to the floor, grab my ankle. “Sib, my ankle!”

He’s panicked, I can see it in his face, eyes wide, hope drained. All his perfection, his best-laid plans, and he’s screwed it up. The cameras will catch him emerging red-faced and hair awry from the bathroom.

He backs away. “Nothing happened. You’re fine. I’ll wait outside.”

I’ve got maybe five minutes for him to grapple with his panic, dread, and guilt, run through scenarios of what anyone watching through the cameras might have seen, before he realizes I’m taking too long.

As soon as he’s out of the bathroom, I pull the grate off the air vent, crawl to a hallway on the other side. I keep my face down so the camera’s face recognition can’t track me. I sprint to the elevator, and when I emerge onto the roof hover-pad, my sibs are already there.

They’ve snagged another ship. Tiger and Joshua Tree handle it with the super-magnet we picked up from a decommissioned drone, and Grizzly is hacking the warning system. I run up to the keypad they’ve plugged in and hack the autopilot. I’m breathing hard from the run. In my back pocket I have controls from the electronics lab and an extra joystick that I stash in my locker. We hack the new ship in under two minutes.

I’m the driver, as always, and I pull us into the traffic blotting out the sky above us. We don’t have any drugs on us, so I need all my attention just to keep up with the zombie ships, trying to stay in the hover-lanes and not attract notice until we get to the Park Zone. We left the advertising module unhacked in the interest of time, so ads for adult diapers and walkers and canes keep popping up on the windows. It’s no wonder we feel like we’re dying all the time.

Now that we’re free, I should tell them about the Procreator. Josh, Grizzly, and Tiger are all lying on the floor of the spaceship laughing and whooping, rolling from side-to-side and into each other and their packs with my less-than-smooth piloting. I want one of them to touch me, but they’re touching each other, Grizzly’s hands pushing Tiger into a lazy roll, her hair twisting above her on the felt. Sister. Brother. Suddenly I can imagine the three of them without me, the three of them happy, laughing like they are now, burning incandescent and together and holding each other’s hands. If anyone can get to Mars, it would be them, with all their hopes unbroken.

Josh’s eyes lock on mine. He fingers the double taser burn on my shoulder, giving me the touch I’ve been craving except it hurts. I know he’s not sorry, he’s proud. I whip us to the right to avoid an incoming ship, and he stumbles and falls to the floor with Grizzly and Tiger.

It would be easy, so easy, to say the words. I met a Procreator. There is no Mars Mission.

Instead, I keep our dreams alive. I keep my eyes in the air, and I manage to avoid all the holograms on our way into the Park Zone, where the gray and white of crowded buildings fade into various shades of green. Every year, as more of the greats die off and families combine, people are relocated further interior, and more streets on the outskirts go back to green. The buildings crumble; green ivy and mold take over the structures and crawl down the street. Most of the old avenues are flooded with the sea level rising, but that’s no different than the interior—why they invented spaceships and rooftop landing pads to begin with.

I slow down as we get close to Building Lake, one of those high-rises that was erected in the National Park Zones and then evacuated. The inside walls and floors and ceilings are rotted through. Rain collects in what used to be the basement and bottom levels. We can park our spaceship near the top and hang out in the old window grooves, then jump down and scream with the thrill of dropping down several stories into that green-brown water. The adults don’t know about Building Lake. The police, the parents, my father—all dying to find the places we go to when we cut school so they can drag us out again.

We’re not the only ones playing hooky. I see other souped-up junk ships hovering outside the building’s upper windows.

Tiger gets up and hangs over me while I fly, her black hair waving over my shoulder. For just a moment, I imagine what it would be like to be real sisters, to sleep in her room, every night combing her hair, to feel like fifty years from now we’d still be skin-to-skin, holding tight.

“We’re never going back,” she says, and something inside me cringes. Where will we go, now that there’s no great cause to join, just ourselves and our love and our rage? I pull the joystick down to park us, hovering by a fifth-story window.

• • • •

The water is cool and dark below us, lapping at the building’s walls, where other sibs float, the pocking of the crete serving as fingerholds. The four of us stand on the busted-out window’s ledge, holding hands. We don’t know what’s down beneath that green-brown. Old merchandise, extinct animal bones, new green creatures crawling to life from the depths? But the old feeling is back. Nothing can stop us.

We jump, screaming the whole way down into the plunge of cold and churn.

Underneath, we release hands, the cold water separating us. Where their fingers had touched, my skin throbs hot as brands. It always feels like this when we come apart again, like I’m letting them go, really letting them go, and I almost sob instead of gasping for air. When we reach the surface, I cling to Josh’s back, his warmth radiating on my chest.

“Careful with the waves,” says one of the sibs by the walls. They’re in a circle around a girl floating on her back, her hair splayed out around her face. They are trying to keep her head above the waves that still crash past them from our jump.

“Let’s join the bonding circle,” Tiger says, swimming towards them first. I read in books that hundreds of years ago people used to have a tradition called trust falling, where you fall backwards and you’re supposed to trust that your friend would catch you. But we need more than that, we sibs. We need K to paralyze one of us for five minutes, we need the rest of us to be sure the limp one doesn’t drown, we need one-by-one to touch them while they’re paralyzed. Trust we won’t do something horrifying to their bodies and we won’t let them die.

The girl floating in the middle has her eyes open. Everyone’s hands are underneath her. The other sibs make room for us as we swim in, and I place my hands under her knee. They’re still going around the circle touching her, rubbing their palms on her stomach, running fingertips along her cheek. One sib puts the girl’s foot on his face. When it’s my turn, I lift her leg by the knee and kiss the back of it. We keep going down the line, and then the girl’s eyelids start to flutter and her arms spasm in the water, and then she starts swimming again.

“You next,” the girl says to Josh, when she’s got control of her limbs back.

“Me too,” I say. Two of us is harder, is everyone touching both of us at the same time. I have something to prove—that I can trust my sibs, that they will hold me through this too, that the knowledge about the Procreators will not break us apart. Does our love have limits?

I tell everyone my name and then Josh does. We eat the sticky pills a girl offers us from a plastic bag, the red candy coating already melting into our wet palms. Josh squeezes my shoulder, and we swim into the circle to float on our backs.

My blood feels hot, like I’m a burning crash, like I’m that woman shoved through the air of the hologram. My legs and feet start to get heavy, and I can’t swim as well. I sink into the water level just above my chin. My heart catches in my throat a little, but then I feel Tiger and Grizzly cup under me with their hands and hold my head up until I’m floating on my back. Josh slips under me, my head on his stomach, and I feel the twenty other sibs put their hands under me. My arms stop moving. There’s nothing left to do but let go and trust.

The first person closes my eyes, thumbs on my eyelids. The next tickles my toes. My stomach is kissed. A line is traced along my throat. The water slaps against the walls and trickles like bells as each person raises their dripping arms. To be truly alive, we must feel no fear. To be alive, we must find sisters and brothers where we can. Someone laces Josh’s pruning fingers between mine. To be alive, we must hold each other in the dark of this one planet. We must rage together in the light. We must feel no fear. This is the mantra I always spin, and I believe it again.

I feel a soft brush on my earlobes that reminds me of last night, my hair brushed back from my face. Then I feel the secret I’ve kept from them, my siblings. Thalia. I feel heavy in the water. I’ve brought myself apart. Josh floats curled around me, but it feels like a lie.

Because my eyes are closed and my hearing is heightened, between the slaps of water I can hear the far-off whirring of drones coming towards us. I need to warn the sibs. Someone kisses me on the lips.

I hear the metal clang of magnets latching onto spaceships, police sirens wailing in the distance.

Some of the hands fall away, and the other sibs start to yell.

“Swim to one of the windows!” says one of them.

“Let’s go!” says another.

The water licks at my face.

“Don’t you dare leave,” says Tiger. “They’re paralyzed.”

“Sorry.” More hands vacate.

“Get her head,” says Grizzly to Tiger as I feel myself go under and then up again. Josh’s body is buoyed up underneath me. They start pulling us towards the wall, all together. Nobody has opened my eyes. I hope I don’t have long left of my K paralysis before the police get here, but those things must have been in turbo drive because already the blue and red flash behind my eyelids.

I hear human-capture drones lowering themselves, the sibs who swam away yelling as they’re plucked from the water and walls and windowsills. The drone’s turbines push waves higher on my face and into my mouth. My body coughs, autonomic responses the one thing K can’t kill. Tiger’s holding my head, clutching at my shoulder with her fingertips as she swims.

Have no fear, I tell myself, have no fear.

“Hold on tight!” Grizzly says.

I feel Tiger hook her arms under my armpits and her wrists behind my head. She’s trying to hold me hard enough that I’ll be taken up with her. Grizzly must be doing the same to Josh. Then Grizzly yells. He’s being pulled up. A loud splash rocks us, and Tiger’s grip loosens. It must have been Josh falling back in the water, and I feel his paralyzed arm slip across my legs.

I will myself to swim, tell my arms to start churning, but my limbs won’t respond. Then Tiger’s hands are pulled away, and Tiger is gone.

I float for a second because my body’s breathing in. I can hear the officers telling everyone to stay where they are and no one will get hurt. Tiger is screaming that we’re in the water, that the chief’s daughter is in the water. Then I exhale and I go under, water clutching at my face.

There’s a moment everything is still. Josh and I are sinking curled around each other, and I can feel his heat when his body bumps into mine. My body is still exhaling, bubbles pouring out my nose, the screaming above muted and everything dark. Fear swallows me up. For the first time, I don’t want us to die. I stop feeling his arm on my leg. I am alone. We have been pulled apart.

Then I inhale and it’s all water, all slime and ooze down my throat, my lungs full of it. My body tries to explode it out of me, the cough that just pulls more back in, and I’m fighting. In my mind, I’m kicking and thrashing and clawing my way back to the top, but my legs and arms are dead.

Hands on my face and around my neck pull me up, and I’m at air again, sucking it in and retching it out.

A ribbed tube is shoved down my throat. A vacuum pulse sucks out the water, and I can breathe again. My body is gasping. A drone pulls me out of the water by my middle, so I’m doubled over, arms dangling, and dropped onto a spaceship deck.

I can hear the other sibs in other ships, officers beginning an interrogation. Tiger and Grizzly are yelling Josh’s name and mine and banging on windows. They don’t know if we’re alive.

A loud slap hits the deck beside me. Josh.

I’m crying. I can feel the sting in my eyes. Out of nowhere, it feels like a rock has been launched at my stomach, and my body moans. I’ve been kicked. Someone says, “Saved the Chief’s daughter first. What a waste, you stupid punk.” It sounds like Officer Rexen, but I can’t be sure.

I hear an aid drone pumping Josh’s heart and trying to breathe for him. And then he’s transferred to a different ship that zips away.

My cheek pressed against the spaceship floor, face kissing boot dust, eyes leaking a puddle, my fingers start twitching and my whole body convulses. Then my eyes open, and I can sit up slowly.

I’m alone in a ship with the door raised. No Josh. Tiger and Grizzly are sitting with their hands ziptied in another ship across from me, legs hanging off a deck with some of the other sibs. The siblings on another ship are being interrogated.

They’re staring at me in shock.

“Where’s Josh?” I call. But I already know.

“He wasn’t breathing,” Tiger says.

Is this what he wanted for himself? Would he have been proud? Would he have coded himself a neon holo-graffiti memorial so everyone would know of his drowning? For a moment I feel nothing.

“He’ll never get to Mars,” Tiger says.

This makes me want to sob. I take a deep breath. “There’s no Mars Mission,” I tell them.

“Yes, there is,” Grizzly says.

“I met a Procreator in jail. They’re just barely subsisting. They don’t have any mission except trying not to starve.”

“Maybe she just told you that,” Tiger says.

“You didn’t meet her,” I say.

We’re silent and we’re crying. We’ve lost Josh but we’ve also lost ourselves. Grizzly is leaning on Tiger’s shoulder.

“I would have gone anyways,” Grizzly says.

“It’s my fault,” I say, and they don’t respond.

An officer jumps through their ship to mine, registers a destination into the ship, and steps out before the door lowers.

Zombie pilot says, Watch your arms and legs, and then the door shuts. Then it tells me we will be arriving at an address, my own, in ten minutes.

• • • •

My father is waiting at our apartment’s hover pad. He doesn’t open the door. This time I’m wet with snot and tears and moldy water, but I sniff up as much as I can and cross my arms.

The zombie-pilot opens the door.

“I’ve been briefed,” he says. “Are you sorry now?”

I spit at his feet.

He lunges for my arm, holds it with a steel grip. I fight him in the elevator, all down the hallway into our apartment, where he flings me into the living room.

My mother is crying. The grands and greats are grim, holding their heads in their hands or knuckles white on a glass.

“You could have died,” my mother says.

“Can you see me?” I yelled. “I’m here. I’m alive. You haven’t lost anything.”

“You respect your mother,” my father says.

“How can I respect you when you’re so pathetic?” I say. “He’d still be alive if you hadn’t come after us. Just give up and die so the rest of us can live.”

He raises a fist in the air. That fist is shaking, trembling, a threat. He wants me to worship my fear, bow to it.

“I dare you,” I say. “I’m not a little girl anymore. I’ll hit you back.”

The fist comes down on the side of my head. I’m dazed, but I lunge for him and try to take him to the floor. He’s built like a bull and only stumbles. He’s pulling me off him by my hair, and all the grands and greats are yelling, but none of them gets in the way. I kick him in the balls, and he releases me. I pick up glasses from the kitchen table and start throwing them at him wildly, the grands trying to get out of our way. But then he grabs me by the ribs where I was kicked and the pain takes the breath out of me and I can’t move. He’s smacking me in the face, slamming me against the floor, moans escaping me again. My mother’s begging him to stop.

My father yells as he’s beating me, “Do you know how you’re hurting us? You’re so selfish. Why can’t you just do what you’re told? You could have died. We would have lost you.” When my moans finally drown him out, he stops. His eyes are wet.

“It’s for you that I live this way,” he says, unclenching his hands.

My mother and her parents pull me up from the floor and guide me into my bedroom.

“Fear is what tells us what we love,” says Grandma Quileña.

“You just keep hitting your head against the wall,” Grandpa Fidelio says.

My room is empty, and no one else has logged in.

“We love you,” my mother says, as she closes the door and locks me in.

• • • •

An hour later, I’m crawling up the side of our building with fire escape suction pads strapped to my hands and knees. It’s slow going, and my body screams pain every time I twist the wrong way. I avoid the windows of other families, all those greats and grands waiting for the other sibs to come home from school, waiting for the parents to come home from work, waiting to die. They’ve already lived their lives, breathing our air, and they’re keeping the rest of us young apart. I’m not even thinking, I am so full of burning, and I want to kick each of their windows in and tell them to go ahead and jump.

I pull myself into the top floor of parking garages. My dad’s ship stands out with his cop markings, stored three ships up by the exit. I pull myself under it while it floats, standing on the ship underneath me to open the hatch where the zombie pilot is kept. See, the thing about cop cars is that they’re easier to hack than any other spaceship, because they’re already made to be driven. Cops already know how to drive, so all they have to do is deactivate the autopilot with their code. I already know my father’s code; all I have to do is damage the voice-recognition chip. I take a pen from my pocket and stab it into the connection, close the hatch. I tell the ship to open and the autopilot to disengage. I pull myself up into the ship with a jump, and I don’t even try not to bang myself on bruises forming.

I guide the ship out of the garage. The joystick never felt this good in my hands, the ship underneath me never so responsive, though the rest of me feels like razors. I pull the ship up into traffic, weaving and darting between ships, concentrating so hard without Z to slow the world down. I don’t even care where I am going, this last ride, this last lap. Out or In or Up, there’s no difference.

And because I’m turning instinctively, I hit a traffic hologram, those ancient cars spinning in a tragic carousel, colliding, the plastic and metal crunching, one woman thrown out of her car into the holo-grass. Josh would have made a hologram that gives us beauty, neon and blinding, instead of this death. In this crumpling car, a baby in a car seat collapses, the expected world ending as quick as a light turning off. The woman is still in the air and flying beside her in the hologram is a Mason jar that the woman had kept in her cupholder, filled with ancient dimes, now exploding, throwing coins all over the road, these silver coins that she’d saved up all those years for the baby, glinting in that holo-sunlight, worthless to her now because she’s lying on the holo-pavement, dying. She’s looking towards the baby. None of us deserve to live, and yet it’s love that keeps us breathing, keeps forgiving us so we can do worse, later. Finally, I can feel the sorrow and fear heavy like a rain of silver coins descending on me, my grief wanting to gather back in my arms everything I’ve lost, everything beautiful we’ve just lost, wanting me to turn back home before the hologram disappears.

©2020 by Brenda Peynado.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brenda Peynado’s stories have won an O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, a Dana Award, a Fulbright Grant to the Dominican Republic, and other prizes. Her work appears in magazines such as Tor.com, The Georgia Review, The Sun, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review Online, and The Threepenny Review. She’s currently writing a novel about the 1965 civil war in the Dominican Republic and a girl who can tell all possible futures, and she teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida.  

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

Dying Light

Maria Romasco-Moore | 4888 words

She was using an ice-cream scoop this time. I came home to find her slumped in the deck chair out back, scoop in one hand, other hand holding open the skin of her abdomen.

“That is disgusting,” I told her.

She scooped out a lump of guts and dropped it onto the tiles beside her chair. Already there was a significant mound of the stuff, coiled like pale snakes. Blood seeped out and trickled along the grooves between the tiles.

The cat padded over and licked at a rivulet. I tried to kick it, but it jumpcut to the left, vanishing and then rematerializing a few feet away. Glitchy little bastard.

“Mag,” I said, “can you knock that off for a second. We need to talk.”

“I can’t talk now,” Mag said. “I’m busy.” She hummed while she scooped. An old folk-tune about flowers or drowning or something like that.

“Mag,” I said once more, but she ignored me.

Some part of me still ached to run to her. To grab fistfuls of her insides and stuff them back into her chest where they belonged, hold her shut.

Instead, I went into the kitchen for a beer. I’d spent the day running flight simulations like always. The highlight was when I’d briefly monitored a proxy sent out to buff some micrometeroid scratches on the ship’s hull. The real ship, that is, out in heavy space. I always find the heavy work thrilling, even though it’s usually just a matter of monitoring automated processes. There isn’t a whole lot going on out there in the real world, on the real ship—we’re all still slumbering away out there, still a decade away from the colony, still accelerating every day.

I was headed back out to the deck with my beer when the doorbell rang. Our house didn’t usually have a doorbell, so I knew it must be Angelica. She was never content with just knocking. “Hey, Ruth,” she said when I answered the door. “Is Mag here?”

“No,” I said. Angelica frowned over my shoulder. “She’s busy,” I amended. “She’s in the shower.”

“But we’re supposed to go browsing. Do you mind if I come in and wait?” She was already pushing past me. “Roberta says she has a huge batch of new skins.”

I followed her into the living room. Mag was still humming. Angelica gave me a dirty look and headed for the back deck.

I should have tried to stop her, or at the very least warn her, but I didn’t. She stepped through the door, silhouetted for an instant by the afternoon sun. A moment later I heard a shriek and then the sound of the ice cream scoop clattering onto the tiles.

Angelica jumpcut back into the living room, appearing beside me suddenly with an ostentatious flash of light.

“Oh, Ruth!” She gripped my arm. Her face had drained of all color. I wanted to point out to her how stupid it looked—faces don’t really do that—but Angelica had never much cared about realism. “I thought she’d stopped all that nonsense.”

I shrugged, more to shake her off than anything else.

“Oh, Ruth,” cried Angelica again, as if she herself were in some horrible pain. I doubted whether Angelica even knew what real pain was. She’d been born with a bank account bigger than our ship. She was used to living light.

“Maybe you should come back later,” I said, and she said maybe that would be best and left in rather a hurry.

I went back out to the deck, but the deck was gone. In its place was an Olympic sized in-ground pool. Mag was floating face down, apparently drowned.

“We agreed to consult with each other before changing the house,” I shouted down at her. “Remember?”

Her hair fanned out around her head. There were pieces of seaweed tangled in there. Her body was slightly bloated, as though she’d been dead for days already.

“Fine,” I shouted. “I guess this means I can finally get rid of those stupid curtains.”

Mag gave no indication that she had heard me. The cat rubbed against my legs. I picked it up.

“You’re a dog now,” I told it, and it was.

Long ago, when there were whales, their bodies would apparently sink to the ocean floor after they died and there become ecosystems unto themselves, both food and dwelling for thousands of smaller lifeforms.

So it is with the constellation Cetus, space whale, skin made of stars. Nestled in what could, by those with sufficient imagination, be called his flipper is a red dwarf star and orbiting that dwarf is a planet which we on this ship have been instructed to think of only as Home.

We are the fifth colonist ship sent off to the whale carcass. The fourth is out there somewhere ahead of us. The sixth was scheduled to launch two years behind us. Whether it actually has I could not say. We’re travelling too fast for messages now.

Our ship, the real ship, mostly flies itself. I spend my days piloting far smaller craft, zooming past lights cliffs and over light seas, approximations modeled from scans beamed back years before. It is practice for the work I will do when we finally reach Home. And I do need to practice. I’d been piloting professionally for less than a year when I was accepted to this voyage. I wasn’t accepted because I was the best. I was accepted because I was adequate, sure, but also because I was young and I was female.

When we reach the colony, Mag and I will both be expected to carry children—as many as we are able to for the rest of our lives. They are all on the ship here with us, vitrified oocytes and spermatozoa, near infinite combinatorial permutations.

For now, we wait. We try to stay busy to the extent that we can, asleep out there, but awake in here, living light.

The morning after the incident with Angelica, I went to see the ship’s doctor. In the three years we’d been traveling, I hadn’t visited him once, but I knew he kept tabs on me anyway. He kept tabs on all of us. It was his job to detect irregularities in behavior, to correct them.

Mag saw him once a week. She was required to as a condition of her acceptance, due to some distant family history. She told me that if she tried to skip a session, she got a persistent buzz in her left ear until she complied.

The doctor’s office was at the west end of our town, down a street that nobody actually lived on. The street led to the forest, which surrounded our town and which was, as far as we were concerned, the end of the world.

The inside of the office was bare apart from two cushy chairs, facing each other. The walls glowed a gentle sunrise color and buzzed faintly with white noise.

The doctor himself was pale blue. The exact shade shifted from moment to moment, responding, presumably, to my own mood.

“You’ve got to make her stop,” I told him.

“Have a seat, please,” he said, gesturing to the open chair, “and tell me what’s troubling you.”

“Oh, quit it with the protocol,” I said. “You already know all about it.”

“True,” said the doctor. He steepled his fingers and raised an eyebrow.

“And quit that, too. It’s unrealistic.”

“I’m sorry, Ruth. It’s in my code.”

“Whatever.” I sat down. “You’re supposed to be fixing this. I trusted that you would fix this. But she just keeps getting worse.”

“Worse?”

“She’s doing it three or four times a day now, and probably more when I’m not around.”

The doctor stroked his chin. He didn’t have a beard—and actually his face had softened somewhat since I first walked in and he was no longer identifiably male—but I suppose that gesture was coded in, too.

“She told me she had cut back to every other day,” he said.

I snorted. “And you believed her? Some doctor you are.”

“I’m not omnipotent, Ruth. What you do inside your homes is private data.”

“Really?” I hadn’t known there were limits to his surveillance. Mag must have known, though, or figured it out. Had it been in our contracts? I’d read most of mine. Skimmed it, at any rate. But I probably would have signed away every human right I had, knowingly and gladly, if that’s what it took.

“She doesn’t really want to die,” I said. “She’s just bored, right?”

The doctor steepled his stupid fingers again. “Have you asked her that?”

“Jesus, of course I have.”

“And?”

I sighed. Mag had told me once, a little over a year into the trip, that she’d changed her mind. That she didn’t want to go to the colony. That she wanted out.

Well, it’s too late now, I’d said, uncomfortable.

I thought it would go away, she said. I thought if I ran far enough, fast enough, it wouldn’t follow.

What are you talking about?

This, she said, and she pointed to her chest. But I didn’t understand.

When I got home from work, Mag was in the kitchen, slicing an onion and her fingers.

“I talked to the doctor,” I said. Mag stopped slicing and looked up. “About you. Now I understand if you’re mad, but I—”

She launched the knife at me and it lodged itself in my left shoulder. It bled, but I felt nothing. We’re automatically thresholded for pain in here. Scrapes and bruises hurt a little so we don’t get too careless, but anything worse than that and the sensation will just cut off.

“Sorry,” said Mag.

“It’s okay.” I pulled the knife out of my shoulder and set it gently in the sink. “But you’ve got to start talking to me. I want to help you, but I don’t know how.”

“I’m fine,” she said.

“Fine? Jesus, look at yourself, Mag. You’re bleeding all over the counter.”

She just stood there, staring at the floor. A slice of onion circled the stump of her middle finger like a ring.

“I love you,” I said, but it came out wrong. Like an accusation.

“You shouldn’t,” she said.

No one on Earth lives light nonstop. Even the sickest and the richest stop sometimes. Stretch their legs a little. Remind themselves that they exist.

Most people can only afford it a few days out of the year. When I was a kid we couldn’t even afford that. I can still remember my first time: a special field trip for at-risk youth sponsored by the city museum. It was the most blissful half hour of my life. We were supposed to be observing the flora and fauna of an early twenty-first century forest, but all I could think about was how my feet no longer ached. How I no longer felt tired or hungry. When they unhooked us, the trees blinking away in an instant, I suddenly understood why people call the real world the heavy world. It was like stepping out of a pool, your body suddenly leaden, gravity pulling down on your bones.

I met Mag light, actually, at a big benefit shindig Angelica’s family threw for investors and potential colonists. Angelica didn’t have to go through the same ten-tiered application process as the rest of us. She just bought her way in.

The party was held in a light mansion which was modeled after Angelica’s real mansion which was modeled after Versailles. It was the fanciest place I’d ever been in my life. Everyone was skinned up crazy. Some people were animals, some had planets for eyes, some were mirrors or fractals or abstract concepts.

Mag was pretty plain, really. She had on a white sundress with little pearl buttons down the front. I could see the outline of her bra beneath it.

We talked. About me, mostly. I bragged about flight school, about my future, about how I’d made it to the fifth tier in the race to qualify for the voyage. I made it sound like I was a sure thing, like I wasn’t sick every night thinking about it. Off this dying rock for good, I said, that’s me. I was drunk on light wine. I was an abstract concept: idiocy. When Mag leaned forward and kissed me, I almost fell backwards into a fountain full of stars.

Later, she took me by the hand and led me through the crowd, through a door hidden behind some potted palms, to a little room with one window and a twin bed.

She told me that this was her room, a replica of a room in the real mansion. She told me she worked there as a maid. She told me she and Angelica talked sometimes, briefly, when they passed in the hallways. Told me she’d put in a good word. I wasn’t really listening because while she talked, she was also undoing the buttons on her dress one by one.

Between her breasts there was a small door. It was the same color as her flesh, but hinged. She kissed me again and then she pulled the door open and I could see her heart, a glistening fist of pulsing tissue. She pulled my hand towards her chest until my fingertips brushed the surface of it, soft and warm as bread dough. I pressed my fingers into it. I could barely breathe. Mag laughed and laughed.

“We’ve talked about turning her off,” said the doctor when I went to see him again the next day.

“Isn’t that dangerous?” It had been done that way on some of the old research voyages—passengers placed in artificial comas, defrosted on arrival. No matter how carefully refrigerated they were, though, a few always spoiled.

“It’s safer than it used to be.”

“Is that what she wants?”

The doctor shook his head. “She wants me to wake her up.”

Of course she did. Then she could do it for real.

There are provisions in place for emergency waking. A few key members of the crew first, then everyone else in waves. We’d done simulated drills for it. I’d be in the second wave, if it ever came to that. Mag would be in the last. She is inessential personnel, accepted only as my spouse. When we reach Home, her job will be basic childcare.

As I was leaving the doctor’s office, I saw her coming up the path from the forest. Except it wasn’t her, not really. She was standing up straight. She was smiling. She was wearing a white dress with pearl buttons down the front. She waved at me.

I turned and ran.

In the first year of the voyage, many of the single passengers on the ship met light matches, though we were warned to keep things casual. Roberta is known for having a different guy each week. Light children are strictly forbidden. Pets are okay because their natural lifespans tend to be about the length of our trip anyway.

Mag had a light friend for a while in the first year. John. He taught her and Angelica how to grow hydroponic vegetables. When the doctor told Mag she needed to get out of the house more, she and John got jobs at a restaurant downtown. Mostly they served light food to light customers. Mag said it was fun, like a game.

Then John died. Apparently he cut his arms open with a butcher’s knife in the kitchen of the restaurant and bled out on the floor. Which would never happen on its own. The AI for the light townies is not that deep. They can all manage intelligent conversations, sure, and they’ve got a variety of personality types, but they don’t get depressed. They don’t get violent. So it must have been Mag’s idea. She must have convinced him to do it. Later that same day, she told me she’d changed her mind. About the voyage, about everything.

After that, she started starving herself. Or pretending to, anyway. The nutrition system out in heavy space is automatic—we get our daily allotted drips, no more, no less—but Mag stopped eating light food. She lost weight, or appeared to, at any rate. She kept it up for months, until her skin was pulled so tight against her skull I thought it would snap. One Sunday morning she collapsed and lay on the dining room floor for the rest of the day without moving, curled up like a corn husk. I stepped over her on my way to bed, annoyed.

From then on, she died regularly. At first I thought she wanted attention. It seemed like a childish way to get it, but I played along. I mourned her every time she died, rejoiced every time she returned. When that changed nothing, I tried ignoring her instead. I figured maybe I’d made it worse, that I’d rewarded the behavior. So I pretended not to notice. I looked away. I read a book.

I knew the doctor was adjusting her dosages, pumping this and that into her little vat out in heavy space. He’d hit on the right combination eventually and she would stop.

I remember one night she crawled into bed beside me, naked. She had that door in her chest again. I opened it up, eager, but instead of a heart she had a rotten peach, sunken and gray with mold. She pulled it out, squished it in her fist. The juice ran down her wrist and I laughed at her. I laughed! I told her she was such a cliché. And after a moment she laughed, too.

When I got home from work that evening, Mag was out back again. The pool was filled with piranhas and she was sitting at the edge of it, feeding them. I sat down cross-legged beside her.

“Mag,” I said. “I need you to stop.” I put a hand on her arm.

“Stop what?” she said. She kicked her feet in the water. Little ribbons of red unfurled from her toes.

“Oh, come on, Mag. I’m tired. I’m so tired of this.”

“Go to bed then.”

“Dammit, Mag,” I said, digging my fingers into her arm, trying to pull her back from the edge of the pool. “You can’t keep doing this to me. It’s selfish, okay?”

“It’s a compromise,” she said, coolly.

“Compromise?” I said. “Compromise! I don’t think you even know what that means.”

“I get part of what I want and you get part of what you want.”

“What is it that I get, Mag? Huh?” I couldn’t help it, I was shouting now. “I’m not getting a damn thing out of this.”

“You get me.”

“Barely.”

“Isn’t that better than nothing?”

She looked me right in the eyes and it felt like a punch to the gut. All I saw in her eyes was hate. For who, I couldn’t say.

“Mag,” I said, but I had no follow-up.

She yanked her arm away and slid off the side of the pool into the water. The piranhas flashed silver in the sun.

I watched them converge. I didn’t want to watch but I did. It felt like I still owed her that much.

“I was on the first colony ship, you know,” said the doctor the next morning.

“What?”

“They sent me back. My memories.” He tapped the side of his head.

“Oh,” I said. I’d forgotten for a second that he was pure light. “Did any of them . . . were any of them like her?”

“There was a rash of murders towards the end,” he said. “I had to facilitate quite a few group therapy sessions.”

“But no suicides?”

“No.”

“Well then, why the fuck are you telling me about it.”

He blinked at me, seemed to shrink. “I’m sorry, Ruth, I just want you to understand.” Yes, he had definitely shrunk. He looked almost like a child, dwarfed by his cushy chair. “There is no precedent for this. I’m doing the best I can with what they gave me, but this is all new.”

“This is fucked up,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “It is.”

It isn’t healthy, what we’re doing. We know that. We’ve got our little holding vats. We’ve got vitamins and drugs and intermittent electric pulses. It’s enough to keep us alive, but they warned us of the risks, too. Our lifespans will be shortened, our muscle tone diminished. There may well be other, unforeseen consequences. I knew all that. But I didn’t know anything. I was eighteen when I signed the contract. Eighteen when I left that hot dry husk of a planet I was never again supposed to think of as home.

“Mag and I have been talking,” said the doctor. “She’s come up with an idea, a compromise.”

“I doubt that.”

“It’s a tricky situation,” said the doctor. “Part of my job is to keep you all happy, but there are limits. You each represent a significant investment, you know.”

“I know.”

“Your lives are no longer merely your own.”

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

“So from her perspective,” he said, “everything is a compromise.”

Mag and I had been dating for only two months when I proposed. I knew it was quick, but I was up to the seventh qualifying tier by then and I didn’t want to go to space without her. That’s what I said, “I don’t want to go to space without you,” and that made her laugh. There was no sound I loved more than the sound of her laugh. I heard it often back then. She seemed happy. She seemed normal. She said yes. We filed right away.

I made it through the rest of the tiers, and she made it through the screening for spouses. The psych tests, too, of course. Maybe she lied. I don’t know. But we were accepted, both of us.

We went through training together, boarded the ship together, woke up together on a plot of land lusher and greener than any on Earth. Everything was sweet and new and terrifying and full of sun.

In my worst moments, now, I wonder whether it was all a lie. Maybe Mag was just using me to get on the ship, to get away from a lifetime of scrubbing other people’s tubs. To follow Angelica, even. To live light.

But I want to believe that Mag truly meant it when she’d said yes. I need to believe that she was happy. That she loved me, or that, at the very least, she had loved me once.

I still love her, as much as ever. But it’s not enough.

Why isn’t that enough?

Sometimes it is like she is in love with someone else. I imagine death as a woman, breasts like the tops of mushroom clouds, eyes empty. I imagine walking in on her and Mag kissing. I imagine walking in on them fucking.

And I wish it was as simple as that. I’d forgive her. It would be fine.

I agreed to the new compromise, the terms of which the doctor relayed to me. I told him fine, go ahead, tell her I’m too tired to fight, tell her I don’t care anymore.

She did it pretty simply for the big finish. Just a gun to the head. She did it in the middle of town so people would know. Some light police showed up and zipped her into a body bag.

At the funeral the next day, I thought I saw her peeking—one eye open just a slit, just for a second. I don’t think anyone else saw. And it was so quick that afterwards it seemed possible that I’d only imagined it.

Roberta designed an entourage of light mourners for the funeral; they stood in a circle around the casket, wearing black lace veils and wailing in a language I did not recognize. Angelica, draped in black velvet, kept shooting me glances.

I hoped Mag was pleased with the service. I leaned over her casket and kissed her on the forehead. Her eyes were firmly shut. A light attendant eased shut the lid.

The dirt was light. The ground was light. We might as well have been children, playing pretend. Mag’s casket was slowly lowered into the ground. I looked past the graves to where the forest began. I watched the tree line until it was my turn to throw a handful of dirt down the hole.

Later, I lay on the grass beside her grave and dug my fingers into the freshly turned soil.

It was a balmy night. Crickets thrummed from the tall grass beyond the churchyard and fireflies blinked among the gravestones. Nice touches, I suppose. I’d never seen fireflies in my life before the ship, never heard anything at night but sirens and the groan of machines.

“Mag,” I whispered into the ground. “Mag, can you hear me?”

She was still awake down there, that much I knew. Or if she slept, it was only light sleep. She wasn’t in a coma. She wasn’t dead. Her neurons fired as fast as mine.

I figured she was probably decomposing herself, filling herself with worms and maggots, letting them slurp her eyes out of their sockets. Becoming an ecosystem unto herself. I pictured her sinking slowly through the earth like it was water, pictured her falling through an ocean of darkness. I felt sick.

“Mag,” I said again. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I still care. I care so much.”

I wiggled my fingers deeper into the dirt. I wanted to wriggle all the way down and pound on the roof of her coffin.

“Can we go back to how things were?” I said “Please? We could work out some kind of schedule, maybe. Half the week you could be dead and the other half you could live. Please? Mag?”

There was no answer. I could have dug her up I guess, but I didn’t know if she would forgive me.

I went to the doctor the morning after the funeral.

“It’s humiliating,” I told him. “Everyone’s pretending like things are fine, like this is all normal, but I can see it in their eyes when they look at me.”

“Do you think they blame you?”

“Shit, I don’t know. Maybe. Has anyone talked to you about it?”

“You know I can’t tell you that.”

“What the hell am I supposed to do now?”

“Well,” said the doctor, “there are five stages of grief.”

“But she isn’t even dead. This is idiotic.”

“Of all the available options,” he said. “It seemed best.”

“What will happen when we get to the colony?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, fuck you,” I said. “Fuck you and your stupid blue face.” He turned pink, quick as a wink, but I was so sick of it.

“Ruth,” he said, “anger is a normal—” but I didn’t care what he had to say. He was light, pure light. He’d never felt a real thing in his life. He’d never even had a life.

I jumpcut straight to the sidewalk outside his office. Behind me, the building burst into flames. I could feel the heat on the back of my neck. It was melodramatic, I knew that, absolute overkill, bad as Mag and her piranhas, her thousand little deaths, but I didn’t try to stop it. Instead, I willed the flames hotter, higher. The other houses on the street ignited one by one like a row of birthday candles.

And there was Mag, in her white dress with the pearl buttons, coming down the thin dirt path from the woods. She smiled at me. She waved. She hadn’t smiled like that in ages. I’m not sure she had smiled like that ever.

“Ruth,” she said when she was close enough, and in a moment I had my arms wrapped around her and I was holding her as tight as I could. She didn’t slip away. She was there and she was—

Light. She was only light.

But she felt solid. Her skin as soft and warm as bread dough.

“I’m sorry,” I told her.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I forgive you for everything.”

I told myself to let go. To go home. To wait.

I held on tighter instead.

“Jeez,” said Mag, “are you trying to crush me?”

“This is a compromise,” I whispered into her shoulder. “It’s only a compromise.”

She laughed. “Whatever you say.”

I pushed my hand up under her shirt. She laughed again. I ran my palm up her stomach, until it reached the little hollow between her breasts. I felt the lines of the door, which I knew would be there. Mag, this light Mag, this nothing which I could not let go of, laughed again.

“I love you,” I said.

“I love you too,” she said quickly. Too quickly, maybe.

“And you are happy?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said. “Very happy.”

I didn’t try to open the door. I just put my hand over it and pressed down, hard, as hard as I could, keeping her together, holding her shut.

©2018 by Maria Romasco-Moore. Originally published in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maria Romasco-Moore is the author of Ghostographs, an interconnected collection of flash fiction inspired by vintage photographs. Her first novel, Some Kind of Animal, is forthcoming in 2020. She currently lives in Columbus, OH, and teaches writing at Columbus College of Art and Design. Find out more at mariaromascomoore.com.

The Gamecocks

JT Petty | 6499 words

Leslie Anne Moore had known Hardy Devine since second grade, when he had bloodied her nose in a game of dodgeball and then the other boys caught him crying about it and beat him pissy.

By the end of the school year, Hardy had picked a fight with each one of those boys individually and found more satisfactory results. He didn’t look Leslie-Anne square in the eye again until seventh grade when he asked her to the Boone County Middle School Homecoming Dance and she said no.

When she was nineteen, she moved to the Tennessee end of Bristol for a job at a fulfillment center where she met Hardy’s little brother, Woodrow. She kind of remembered him from school; he knew exactly who she was.

Woodrow Devine looked like something you’d beat a horse with, all bone and gristle and home-cut hair, eyes bloodshot he said because he had been up all night studying.

“Studying what?” Leslie Anne said.

“Computers.”

It sounded made up. It sounded like an excuse. Woodrow Devine seemed like the kind ready-made for the Risen Again, marching drunkenly toward the most generous death possible, wrapped in improvised explosives and the Confederate Flag. Woodrow Devine said:

“Hardy’s gone off to the army. He was real interested when I said we was working together.”

“To war?”

“He’s in Honduras right now, getting hound-trained.”

A friendly blue light ignited above their station and chimed like somebody’d forgotten to turn the headlights off. Even as they glanced up, the blue was warming towards red, the machine intelligence monitoring the camera feed unsatisfied with the slackened pace of their work.

“Too much chit-chat.” Woodrow grinned and redoubled his speed, stacking bunched bananas into the shipping pods, alternating stems up, stems down, moving with a speed and concentration to prove his labor was more efficient at the cost of his salary than it would be to build and program a robot. At least until they could engineer uniform-length bananas.

Turned out Woodrow really had been studying all this time, and he moved to Richmond for a job programming grocery store Stockboys, and then a job in Hoboken where he was far enough away that the ladies at the Kroger stopped talking about him.

• • • •

A year later, Hardy came into the titty bar where Leslie Anne was waiting tables and definitely not stripping. The carnival lighting of the place hid the scarlet flush of his embarrassment, and he stared unmoving at the mouth of his Budweiser for a full five minutes, bare flesh dancing in his peripheral vision.

“Hey, Hardy. I know you saw me.”

“Hey, Leslie Anne.”

“I only serve drinks here.”

“I only come here because it’s the one bar that doesn’t have TV’s up all over the place.”

“It’s all right if you want to watch the girls dance.”

“I just don’t want to have to look at all the TV’s.”

“How long you been back?”

“I don’t know. Couple months, I guess.”

“I think I’ve seen you driving around. In your mom’s old van.”

“Yeah.”

“Were you goin’ somewhere?”

He smiled like an apology and looked at his hands.

She had seen him half a dozen times in the last few months, aimlessly meandering in the rusted-out red minivan every member of his family had serially owned before him, crossing and re-crossing his own path, directionless and fast. It was an uncomfortable question with too long or too short of an answer. Hardy went to the titty bar for the titties, Hardy drove to drive.

Anyway, they fell in love.

They’d dance in the parking lot behind Hank’s Saloon, because the music inside was too loud for Hardy. The army was still experimenting with custom-printed amphetamines and Hardy felt certain one of the speeds they had tried on him had clocked his brain for an amplified sensitivity to certain frequencies. A snare drum, scissors closing, or torn paper just about killed him. The hum of an engine was warm water on a cold day. The sound of Leslie Anne’s limbs drowsily sliding across cotton sheets was so pleasant that it just about broke him in half.

• • • •

Leopoldo had been in Kashgar with Hardy. A tattoo of a fanged skull decorated with the Confederate flag covered his back above scrolled text reading “Let Us Go Home and Cultivate Our Virtues.” Leopoldo had bought the ink when he got back to the States, tired of being mistaken for an Arab.

He said to Hardy, “Trucks, man. Easiest money in the world. Just like the ’dillos in the Basin but lighter. Listen to your phone, watch the road go by.”

“I don’t got a CDL.”

“They’ll give you a loan, they’ll even pay you a little bit while you’re taking the classes. Them trucking companies in serious shit. Hey, girl, get me another Coke?”

“You can get it,” Leslie said. She was lying in the grass, eyes closed, listening to the water in the creek and the wind moving the kudzu.

Leopoldo was right, the trucking companies were in serious shit.

Three years earlier, the industry had attempted to move into driverless rigs with catastrophic results. In Tempe, Arizona, an autonomously piloted Heartland Express semi filled with frozen tubes of Finely Textured Boneless Lean Beef Trimmings mistook a buzzard picking at roadkill for a human child and swerved across the median into oncoming traffic. Five people were killed in the collisions, and hundreds were sickened when the pink slime thawed into the Salt River, where it festered and spread. Less than a week later, an autonomous casino bus was involved in a crash that killed nine. All evidence pointed to human error as the cause in the second crash, but public panic and political hyperbole had risen to a point that some sort of hammer had to come down on robot drivers.

Laws changed. Stocks fell. Truck drivers who had been lucratively bought out of their union contracts decided they enjoyed retirement and the hauling companies were forced to seek out a green workforce with offers of generous salaries, benefits, and training. Hardy asked:

“Even fucked up vets with more debts than prospects?”

“Fucked up vets especially,” Leopoldo said.

“My dad was a trucker,” Hardy said. “Weekends, me and Woodrow would help him wash it.”

So Hardy put in an application at Boone America Long Distance Hauling. The mascot on every truck was a “B.A.L.D. Eagle,” grinning with human teeth in its beak, eyes narrowed against the onrush of wind.

Hardy got a loan to train and was paid nearly enough to make it up. He took CDL tests until he passed, he did time in simulators, he trained at the Boone site in Arkansas for two weeks, then drove with a trainer for two weeks more, and then he was a driver.

Boone gave him a contract with a three-year minimum and crisis medical, with riders for non-compete and non-labor.

A couple good years passed. Hardy and Leslie Anne got a little apartment in town and then his brother Woodrow helped them put a down payment on a little house that got steadily prettier as they fixed up what they could. Leslie Anne sewed curtains.

Hardy didn’t talk much, but Leslie Anne had lots of friends now and she’d tell them she didn’t mind a quiet man.

They were eating cereal in front of the TV and Hardy was looking at her.

“What?” she said.

“Hey.”

“What is it, Hardy?”

“Can we get married?”

So they got married.

Woodrow came back to town for the wedding. Leslie Anne’s mother spent five days making a cake. Her father said he couldn’t make the drive up from Florida but sent as gift some Jehovah’s Witness tracts he found a comfort.

Hardy took a week off work, but Leslie Anne’s boss at the fulfillment center said the algorithm wouldn’t allow more absence until the autumn. She told him she guessed she’d quit then and the next day she drove with Hardy down to the Gulf of Mexico and spent four days drunk and screwing.

• • • •

Driving sometimes, Hardy could feel the inertia of eighty thousand pounds behind him, seventy miles an hour. It felt like the illusion could break at any moment and the terrible onrush of potential explosive violence would envelop him in crushing glory. Every load delivered felt like a bullet dodged.

Truck stops were edgy and lonesome places at night, the implied violence of strange men in the dark, pimps whispering promises of trailer bunny tail over the CB. Hardy walked with his keys starburst between his fingers and his attention at the peripherals and made sure to be in his locked cab by ten.

Sometimes he’d be gone for weeks at a stretch and Leslie Anne would flirt with men at Hank’s but never let it go further than dancing.

Hardy’s silences were often anger; he never hit her, but he would break things around the house, slowly, deliberately. He liked the sound of shattered pottery.

Leopoldo had an easy time making friends; he knew a lot of other drivers. Hardy said he liked driving because he liked being alone, but Leopoldo would keep at him until Hardy would come along to soccer matches and card games and nights drinking. There were times it would almost get easy.

Once, when Hardy was away, Leslie went to Hank’s with a friend who had just left her fiancé.

“Marryin’ that man would have been a disaster,” she said, “I thought I loved him, but I was just lonely and young enough to believe in made-up things.”

Leslie Anne felt blue hearing it.

• • • •

When the wheels came off, they came off fast. It started with a clever piece of marketing. AI had been flying airplanes for half a decade with a spotless safety record, even landing with zero fatalities a half dozen aircraft catastrophically depressurized by Risen Again martyrs. So when they claimed that aircraft AI had been altered and would replace the faulty and unfortunate intelligence that had failed the trucking industry, they called it “The Pilot Program” and folks swallowed it whole.

It was mid-September at a gravel yard outside Memphis that Hardy saw his first Autonomous Rig, the oddly squished cab, like a boxy horseshoe crab painted a pink that was meant to make it seem innocuous but mostly suggested the domed sex organ of some deep sea leviathan.

The autorigs were already built, thousands of them sitting in lots, mothballed and just waiting for new operating systems. They were activated in droves, released to drive themselves to work across the country.

By March of the following year, Hardy’s boss told him he’d only be needed for short-haul runs. He went the entire month of June without driving, and he and Leslie Anne had to clean out their meager savings to cover the credit cards and utilities. A kitchen renovation formerly just within their means was necessarily abandoned midway and Leslie Anne had to carry water in from the garden hose.

• • • •

Hardy and Leopoldo drank a case of beer on the pedestrian overpass to the interstate, watching the autorigs barrel up the highway in the dark of night, sometimes twenty of them spaced close as train cars, drafting for the efficiency. Bullroarers toned off the fairings as the electric engines were deadly silent. Autorigs didn’t swerve, or even slow for animals on the road; a deer struck by autorig would be near-liquefied.

Hardy hung against the chain link covering the overpass and pissed drunkenly down onto the machines.

“What are we gonna do, Leo?” he said.

“We almost had it, didn’t we? Like our daddies and granddaddies, a good job. A fair wage. We could have worked.” He pronounced “worked” like it was capitalized, like it was an element of doctrine.

There had been meetings. Drivers gathered at events carefully referred to only as drinking, as card games, carefully avoiding any legally provable union activity. All of them, by contract, could be fined a half-year’s average salary for breaching their Labor Rider.

Hardy said: “They’ll grind us down.”

“Not if we can’t be ground.”

“You got an idea?”

He did.

• • • •

The next day, both of them red-eyed and raw with dead alcohol, Leopoldo took Hardy to the parlor where he had gotten his ink, past the empty chairs, and into a back room where nine pale and heavy men sat drinking Styrofoam cups of pale and sugared coffee. The skylights were covered with Confederate flags. They all talked on top of each other, in the tones you’d use to lecture wicked children, about Jews and Blacks and Arabs and Robots. It could have been funny without all the loaded guns around.

The Risen Again. A new Confederacy of the violently-inclined dispossessed. A movement careful not to too clearly state an ethos, lest they reveal the inner contradictions that would drive them to bloody disillusion.

A frog-shaped man with a beard like rangy moss that could thrive in the shade of his neck but never face the daylight of his cheeks showed Hardy a homemade kitana he claimed to have used to cut the leg off of a dark-skinned home invader, “clean as a snapped Slimjim.” The man was a government informant, as were two others. Another was a corporate informant. Far distant machines monitored their conversation via tiny microphones, culling relevant and inflammatory phrases to forward to the appropriate departments.

They talked about bombs and arson. The cleansing and holy fire. Protecting their hyperbolically infantilized wives and children. They talked about church and didn’t mention God.

It all made Hardy very tired.

He and Leopoldo left and Hardy said he didn’t intend to come back.

• • • •

Hardy and Leslie Anne had a bad couple of months. Summer was brutally hot and tropically wet. Hardy took jobs fixing houses or clearing debris, working alongside Guatemalans and Salvadorans who didn’t have to question why exactly Hardy got to eat lunch with the boss. Leslie Anne took a second job working nights at the Waffle House and still the debts just grew. Hardy’s work paid in barter as often as cash.

An investigator scanning machine-curated surveillance found footage of Hardy gainfully employed and Boone Hauling found him in breach of his still-exclusive contract. The company fined him two month’s average pay. Debt piled upon debt; Hardy’s credit card stopped working and Leslie Anne’s was maxed.

Leopoldo kept coming around to collect Hardy and Leslie Anne for parties and picnics that only celebrated charity, a dozen unemployed truckers making stone soup. They began to attend church twice a week; there was a pancake breakfast after the Sunday service and a spaghetti dinner after Friday prayer. Hardy recognized a few men from the back of the tattoo parlor.

• • • •

They had to ask Leslie Anne’s mother for a loan. The old woman’s pity was worse than scorn. A week later she died.

Leslie Anne cried when the medical examiner at the county coroner’s office named the price for releasing the ashes, and he let her carry them away for free so long as they weren’t in the county-provided cardboard urn. She took the ashes in a gallon milk jug Hardy cut with his pocket knife into a pitcher. The gray dust was speckled with chips of her mother’s bones like baby teeth.

Woodrow came down for the funeral. He spent more on a rental car than Leslie Anne and Hardy had made in three months.

Leslie Anne realized she had never seen the brothers together outside of school. They didn’t know each other much as people, Hardy couldn’t have named Woodrow’s friends or lovers, had almost no idea what he did for money. But they knew each other like animals, a physical ease impossible to quantify. They tumbled into each other like dogs.

Woodrow was shocked at their poverty. How Leslie Anne had to go out to the yard to pull a glass of water from the hose. Tea sun-brewed from raspberry leaf and sassafras to save the expense of store-bought.

They scattered her mother’s ashes in the mountains, and then Woodrow took them out for dinner. Woodrow filled a room now like he never had before; money and life in the city had made him confident. He flirted with the waitress. He knew this town and all of its customs down to the last button, but wasn’t held by any of it.

Leslie Anne left the boys with their bourbon and walked home in warm moonlight, pleasantly drunk.

At dawn she found Hardy asleep on the front porch with dried blood on his knuckles.

She bicycled into town and found Woodrow asleep in the back of his rental car. He looked like he had been used to beat a horse, one eye nearly swollen shut, lip split, hair matted crimson-brown.

He looked at her with that old embarrassment, like he was a boy again.

“Does Hardy ever hit you?” he asked.

“No. Never.”

“Are you sure?”

“I guess I’d know.”

She helped him to the apartment he was renting and made coffee while he cried in the shower.

She called through the door, “I’m gonna leave.”

He called back, “Don’t.”

She heard the water stop.

He put on more clothes than the weather called for and they sat on the porch. Leslie drank the coffee and Woodrow sipped at a bottle of frozen water as it thawed.

“I’m not The Guy,” Woodrow said. “There isn’t A Guy, it’s too large a project, based on too many other people’s work. The earliest bits of the algorithm are from drones. Like. Toys you get at the pharmacy. Or for delivery. Took bits from that, from cars, from airplanes, video games. It was more collage than anything.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Woodrow.”

“The mind that drives the trucks. The programming. I helped make that.”

“Get the fuck outta here.”

“It’s not like it’s the only thing the company makes.”

“You made the computer that got Hardy fired.”

“I only said I worked on it. A lot of people did. I just do safety.”

“Jesus Christ, Woodrow.”

“I know.”

“I mean, Jesus.”

“Hardy wasn’t happy about it either.”

She stood up and hung her head, laughing without mirth, looked at her empty coffee cup.

“The world’s just too small.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“I mean, God damn.”

Small world. Woodrow went back to Jersey without saying goodbye to Hardy.

• • • •

Leslie Anne said to Hardy: “I saw your brother. He was in pretty bad shape.”

“That’s all done.” And he turned away.

• • • •

Three days later, Woodrow sent Leslie Anne ten thousand dollars. She and Hardy were sharing a phone, and Hardy saw it first and sent the money back. He didn’t tell her about it.

A month after that, Boone Hauling sent somebody to take Hardy’s car. Hardy knew the man.

“Sorry about this, Hardy.”

“Ain’t you, Bill.”

Leslie Anne tried to sell her mother’s house, but nobody was buying.

Leopoldo kept calling, but Hardy wouldn’t answer.

And Hardy’s silences were growing. He’d spend days sober on the side of the highway, equally comforted by the sounds of the engines and tormented by their lifeless pilots.

Leslie Anne dug into their bank account records, looking to prove a bill had already been paid, and discovered the three times Woodrow had sent them money and Hardy had refused it.

She confronted Hardy and they fought. She yelled and cried and shoved him. She called him proud, and he just quietly repeated that word as he moved through the house and broke things.

“Proud. Proud. Proud.” A teapot. A lamp. Every one of the porcelain lambs Leslie Anne’s mother had left behind.

She walked out of the house and away as things shattered and ground behind her. She slept in her mother’s empty house, which she hated for its memories of her father.

She went back the next day and Hardy was gone.

Turned out he was at the crime scene.

• • • •

Leopoldo had walked into the Boone Hauling Lexington Branch offices and detonated a homemade explosive, killing the receptionist and himself, and causing light hearing damage to a regional manager.

He posted a video online trying to describe the desperation of his life, the corruption and greed of the military, his employers, the medical industry that was letting popcorn lung kill his son, but it was a jumbled diatribe with too much emotion and too many facts. Life was not fair and he could not bear it.

Hardy watched the law pull zipped vinyl bags and opaque plastic buckets away from the burn-scarred regional office.

Hardy went to the tattoo parlor and found its entrances covered in plywood. One of the workers converting the old library to a private residence a half-block away told him federal agents had raided it just yesterday. He said: “Lucky ones got took by the government. That big boy got took by something private, looked like. His ass gone.”

At Leopoldo’s funeral, Leslie Anne watched Hardy talk quietly with a dozen other men she had never seen before. When she asked about them, Hardy only said, “They’re drivers.”

Leslie Anne left. She stayed at her mother’s house, which she emptied out and scrubbed and painted.

Hardy stayed at the house they had bought for a few weeks until the bank took it, and then he went into the woods.

Leslie Anne didn’t know where he was, or what he was doing.

Woodrow called once, saying that he had talked to his brother on the phone and he was worried. Hardy kept asking exactly how safe the autorigs were. Woodrow asked him if he was planning to do something stupid, and Hardy had said, “Not anymore.”

• • • •

Leslie Anne saw Hardy on the news, just like everybody else did.

Autorigs had more eyes than a spider, and most cars had at least a couple cameras. Dozens of points of view were edited together, one vantage after another roaring at eighty miles per hour towards a tiny figure a hundred yards down the highway, in a matter of seconds close enough to make sense of his face and then blasting past him.

The videos show Hardy walk along the edge of the road, up an overpass where three highways overlap on the outskirts of Knoxville, within five miles of three enormous fulfillment centers, close enough to be thick with autorig traffic but far enough away for the vehicles to have reached full speed.

Hardy steps across the white line and out onto the road. Horns immediately blare, panicked from the human drivers and steadily from the machines.

Human-driven cars swerve and skid; one car accelerates and pulls hard to the left lane, its driver communicating anger with the tone and duration of the heel of his hand on the horn. Every autorig within line of sight sharply decelerates, an uncanny effect of Hitchcockian visual vertigo from the view of their onboard cameras, as a dozen enormous objects slow at the exact same pace against a visual field, like an optical compression of the world.

Hardy walks into the path of an autorig hauling ten tons of stripped and treated pine, maybe sixty yards or so up the road. It has less than four seconds to react.

The lumber rig’s horn sounds, loud and steady, the brakes clattering like gravel in a tin cup, irregularly, at a frequency algorithm-determined to most efficiently slow the vehicle, but there’s no fighting inertia.

Every muscle in Hardy’s face is clenched with anxiety, jaw locked. A child watching the hypodermic needle descend.

The truck swerves left, the algorithm choosing the safest path.

And Hardy makes a choice on some deeply subterranean level, stepping to his right, the autorig’s left, more centrally in death’s way. And all the anxiety evacuates his expression, just like that and just for a moment, leaving only peace and certainty.

And then.

The autorig pulls hard left and brushes violently against his side. Furiously spinning vulcanized rubber singes the legs of his cargo pants, air pressure shoves into him like a friendly and enormous dog.

The truck smashes through the central barrier and into oncoming traffic, the squat nose of the cab breaking and lifting an SUV that spins in midair so that its roof is struck like a billiard ball by the chained logs, caroming ahead in an explosion of safety glass. Its only passenger is a woman returning from the night shift at a television station, her life momentarily preserved by the remarkable engineering of her vehicle. She’s alive after the two-story fall from the overpass onto the eastbound highway below. But when the autorig breaks through the steel-and-concrete barrier lining the overpass, the chains on its bed snap and a volley of eight-hundred-pound javelins soaked in pentachlorophenol are loosed.

The impact so thoroughly muddles the woman into the machinery of her vehicle that, despite the best efforts of the medical examiners, her casket would contain as much metal and plastic as flesh.

Already Hardy is walking back down the side of the overpass. Wood shatters and metal screams beneath him. Three more people are dead by the time he’s back on flat road.

Hardy breaks into a jog, the easy pace of a Marine covering ground. Over thirty on-board vehicle and security cameras catch a glimpse of Hardy before he makes it to the edge of the trees, and once he’s in the woods, he’s gone.

• • • •

Pinkertons on a Boone payroll showed up first. They were still questioning Leslie Anne when the police came.

She said “I don’t know” every way she could think to. She took too long to answer when they asked if Hardy was violent and suffered their significant looks.

She was still talking to them when the second truck was driven off the road.

Another driver had walked into the path of a speeding autorig, this one carrying eight thousand gallons of milk. The vehicle had no chance to control its evasion, the liquid in its tanker smashing against internal baffles but still amplifying motion in successive waves, lifting the tanker off the ground before it sailed over the edge of the overpass. Two more people died. The man in the road, later identified as a long-haul driver out of Memphis, walked into the woods and vanished.

The third truck was driven off the road a week later, described in news as a “Deadly Game of Chicken.” Then somebody called the men putting their bodies on the highway “Gamecocks” and it stuck.

The Gamecocks never released a statement, never made a demand. They never came in from the woods. Law enforcement would find evidence of encampments, but could not reliably separate them from the expected mountain indigents. Leslie Anne told the police that she didn’t know about the others, but Hardy had been trained to survive in the wild.

A Pinkerton Detective who went up into the mountains never came back, though who could say what happened to him?

Sometimes the Gamecocks would wait a week before de-roading the next truck. Sometimes a month. Sometimes a day. Body counts varied. Nobody knew how many they were. Hardy walked out four times.

People would leave crosses on the side of the road where victims of the Gamecocks’ stand had died. But they would also leave food and gifts on the wood’s edge where a Gamecock had vanished into the trees. As winter came, they left blankets, coats, and fuel.

They left Leslie Anne gifts, too. She’d find a casserole on her mother’s doorstep, a loaf of bread, garden-grown flowers.

Besides which, she was making okay money again. The town was hopeful and busier than usual. Somebody had to feed and care for all this new law enforcement, all these tragedy tourists.

The FBI tried to get Leslie Anne to go on TV and ask Hardy to come home, but she refused.

• • • •

Leslie Anne saw stickers on car windows, a silhouetted rooster lifting a barbed claw.

She started to see the Gamecock on protest posters at anti-automation rallies on the TV; in Richmond, in Boston, as far away as Paris, France. A rapper in Atlanta got the cock tattooed under his eye.

• • • •

In November, Woodrow drove down from New Jersey and knocked on Leslie Anne’s door.

She made them lunch and they ate on the back porch.

“You gotta get Hardy to come back in,” Woodrow said.

“I ain’t lying to you, Woodrow.”

“Or at least get him to stop.”

“I can’t get in touch with him,” she said. “I haven’t talked to him in . . . shit. Five months, I guess?”

“The algorithm is changing. It’s already written. They just gotta get the law changed a little bit and with what they’re paying, it won’t take long. Maybe Hardy can’t come home, but he’s gotta stop walking out in the road.”

Leslie Anne looked at her hands and waited for him to keep talking.

“They’re calling the Gamecocks terrorists. They killed too many people. The algorithm won’t dodge them anymore. If Hardy walks back out in the road, any truck will run him down rather than risk hurting another innocent.”

“What,” she said, not a question.

“It’s Trolley Problem shit. They killed too many people. Killing Hardy is a less lethal option than letting him live. There’s people saying we’re setting a dangerous precedent, but none of those people have money.”

“And you helped build this.”

“Leslie.”

“You’ll kill your brother.”

“That’s why I’m down here. Listen. Near the whole industry is automated. The trucks run twenty-four hours, there’s no reset. They’re making so much money. They can’t go back. My brother and the others, they’re not going to get what they want. There’s no version of the world where the bosses go back to hiring people to drive.”

“It’s evil,” she said.

“It’s money,” he said.

“Would you drink something?”

He said he would and she got a jar she’d been gifted of homemade infused with apples. It made the stuff smell sweeter but it still tasted like lamp fuel.

“You sure you haven’t heard anything from him?”

“Not a word. Not since July.”

“He’s your husband.”

“Well, he’s your brother.”

“How are you doing?”

“I can’t complain,” she said.

“Go on ahead and complain if you want to.”

It took her a second.

“I’m lonesome here and there, but I’m all right. Me and Hardy, we weren’t really doing so hot in those last few months before he left. We never talked much.”

“He’s got some walls,” he agreed.

“Not that I don’t miss him,” said Leslie Anne.

They sat on the porch dinking liquor.

“I’m not sure I can just sit here,” Woodrow said. “I think I’m gonna drive around.”

“Looking for Hardy?”

“Just driving. I’ll call it looking for Hardy, I guess.”

“Can I come?” Leslie Anne asked.

They drove for hours. They listened to the radio in his rented car. Leslie Anne dozed against the window, waking to watch trees flicker past.

He dropped her off after dark and headed for the room he’d rented in town.

And he stayed. He would type furiously in the coffee shop downtown, still working for the company up north that was intent on killing his brother. He would walk in the woods. He made himself visible; some idea that he would be a beacon Hardy could not help but be drawn to. Blood would out. Leslie Anne saw him most times she went grocery shopping, or collected her mail from the post office. He would wave, and watch her until she was out of sight.

He’d come see her at the house a couple times a week. She asked him:

“You think you’re gonna catch Hardy here?”

“I’m just coming around for the company.”

“It’s nice.”

He looked at the books on her shelf; they listened to music.

She realized what was going on and just let it happen.

New men were vanishing from their lives and joining the Gamecocks. People were writing songs about them. In the month Woodrow had been in town, Gamecocks stood two more autorigs off the road, with one fatality.

Woodrow came over to Leslie Anne’s for lunch. It was cold and raining and she told him she wanted him to stay.

It felt natural, as if they had been lovers for a long time.

He never spent the night, and anybody in town who would judge them had assumed they had been sleeping together since long before.

• • • •

Boone leaked the footage of the first terrorist death, then expressed official outrage at the leakage. Their statement talked about respect for the dead, about a return to normalcy.

The man’s face was familiar to Leslie Anne; she tried to remember him without the beard. He had been at Leopoldo’s funeral. He had stood trucks off the road before.

It was the same edit of furious forward motion from a succession of onboard cameras. The man walks out into the middle of the road, grinning with the confidence of somebody performing an old trick. There’s not time for him to realize it’s gone wrong, but the frame rate on the camera is high enough to catch the last half dozen moments of Zeno’s paradox. The man’s assured, excited face all but fills the screen in the moment before it goes red.

Only his feet remained intact inside his boots, flung more than fifty yards from impact.

“It’s all different now,” Woodrow said, watching it again on his phone.

“You have to stop this,” Leslie Anne said.

Woodrow shook his head.

They slept together one more time, but they could both feel the expiration date. The warmth had gone out of it. It was like sleeping with his brother.

The whole town, people all over the country waited for the next move. It could have been a mistake. It wouldn’t be allowed to happen again.

Three days later came the next impact.

Leslie Anne checked her phone automatically, tension that hadn’t been there returning. An element of lottery added to atrocity. An as-yet-unidentified Gamecock killed by a truck. She saw his face, his posture, the way he carried tension, arms cradled before him like a wrestler.

Hardy.

He’s terrified, tears on his face, walking out to his death. He cringes despite his best efforts, but keeps his pale brown eyes focused on the autorig’s forward lens right up to the moment they meet.

There’s a final frame before the pink wash, capturing a ninetieth of a second, showing Hardy’s face broken, bones cracked and disfigured inside the bag of his skin, eyes still alert though no longer pointing in the same direction. To everyone but Leslie Anne, it’s absurd in its horror, impossible to empathize, some deep sea creature dying of depressurization. To Leslie Anne, she sees this frame and thinks of Hardy half-waking in the dark from a nightmare, not conscious enough to explain his fear, clinging to her like a child.

Leslie Anne found Woodrow standing on the sidewalk, red-eyed and breathless.

He said: “There’s nothing I could have done.”

It didn’t sound like he was talking to her. It didn’t sound like he even knew the meaning of the words, had memorized some foreign phrase.

He drove away that afternoon.

The medical examiner brought Hardy’s ashes to Leslie Anne’s door.

She said, “Thank you.”

He said, “Whore. To this man’s own brother,” and poured the ashes on the ground.

She tried to stop watching the video footage, but all the bars except one had screens everywhere.

A week later, three Gamecocks came out of the woods together and stood in a line on the road before an onrushing autorig. One of the men’s knees buckled and the other two caught him. The algorithm made thousands of decisions in a split instant and then swerved into the trees at seventy miles an hour where it was demolished. Two cameras were still live long enough to capture the three men’s weeping jubilation, before the spreading fire destroyed all electronics.

When they attempted the same thing two days later, the three Gamecocks in the road were utterly pulverized. The algorithm had been changed. A company crew met the autorig thirty miles up the road to hose it off before it completed delivery.

So a month after that, it was six Gamecocks. Four of them were killed instantly, the fifth left broken and bleeding on the road, the sixth escaping unharmed.

The FBI got enough information out of the broken man to find an encampment of Gamecocks in the mountains on the North Carolina border. Two agents and eight terrorists were killed in the gun battle. No arrests were made.

As Hardy’s widow, Leslie Anne bore his debts. Posthumous civil suits brought against him by the families of people killed by de-roaded auto-rigs. The bank sent somebody to her mother’s house to tell her they were taking it.

A Gamecock walked into the highway wearing a policeman’s uniform, but the autorig’s facial recognition matched the man to a known domestic terrorist database and ran him down.

A month later, the bulge in Leslie Anne’s belly was plainly visible. She could only afford a visit to the automated clinic, where the machine probed and scanned her with lubricated metal and polymers, bombarding her unborn child with safe levels of radiation, proclaiming them both healthy and viable with sterile cheer.

There was protest and sabotage everywhere. People in cities were walking in front of taxis. Shooting delivery vehicles out of the sky. Demonstrators were carpet bombed by drones with irritants and soporifics; they were forcefully dispersed by algorithm-piloted armored motivational vehicles so that no human police would be put in harm’s way. Fewer protestors were injured by machine displacement than those faced with human law enforcement; it was empirically safer, more efficient.

Laws and regulations had been holding the machines back, not technology. We could have built them for years, and now that the field was open, the floodgates poured.

It was hard to stay mad about with everything else going on.

The last time Leslie Anne talked to Woodrow was by telephone. She didn’t tell him how pregnant she was, or that the child was his.

“How do they decide?” she asked him, over and over again, never getting a satisfactory answer.

• • • •

She climbed up the ditch to the edge of the interstate. Three lanes in either direction.

They had raised the speed limit again, now ninety-five miles per hour for anything autonomous, eighty for operated.

When the autorigs blasted northward past Leslie Anne, the slipstream tugged her toward the road, a sensation like vertigo. She swayed on the balls of her feet and held her fingers interlaced beneath her navel, feeling the weight of the unborn child.

She looked south, squinting against the sun and the dirty air and the heat radiating off the asphalt, and when she saw the right truck coming, stepped out into the road.

©2020 by JT Petty.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JT Petty is a writer and director of movies, video games, and television. His movies include the horror-western The Burrowers, and documentary S&Man (Sandman).  His work in video games includes Splinter Cell, The Walking Dead, and Outlast. 

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

Noah’s Raven

Kij Johnson | 3086 words

Ten months after the ark first floated, and forty days after its keel snagged on a drowned mountain peak, Noah released a raven to look for land. Her name was ungraspable by humans, but might be translated as Bessary, plus a term ravens used for the taste of three-day-dead goat when the temperatures have stayed just above freezing, plus a color at the 327-nanometer wavelength, plus a sensation along the rictal bristles in a particular sort of cool air. Her feathers rustled like silk, and the arch of her beak was very beautiful.

The other raven had been called something roughly translatable as Arum/the 11th day of the moon/the taste of iron-rich water/fourteen young raised to adulthood.

• • • •

If Noah had asked, the local ravens would have met and determined a good pair: old enough to have sense but still young, strong and with a successful nesting history: smart ravens, good at problem solving. If Noah had asked—and if he had been right that the entire world even could be covered in water. But that was nonsense: even a young raven knew this. A flood only covered parts of things. Fly high enough, and you would see something, somewhere. And Bessary and Arum were not even paired. Arum had eased into a slightly tufty, late middle age with his partner, Tanipelis, whereas Bessary was flapping enthusiastically toward full adulthood, and spent her time with a crew of similarly light-winged adolescents who ate and played together, and slept in comfortable rows in the communal night-trees.

But Noah did not ask, not the ravens, not anyone. He had been told: seven of each clean animal, two of each unclean, which was a lot of work in a hurry. God had implied that the animals would come to Noah, but that’s not how it worked out. Some did come, or maybe were just wandering past the ark site on their way to someplace else. Others had to be hunted out.

By the end, Noah was getting sloppy. If he didn’t have enough of an animal, he killed what he did have, and hid the bodies in an ever-growing corpse pile on a hillside nearby. What, was God going to check up on every single vole? Would He even notice the absence of the rose-beaked wren or the ghost mouse? If He liked them so much, He should have made sure they showed up on time. Some animals, Noah never caught even one, and these he treated as children’s tales and legends, even if in his youth he had thrown sticks at them and stalked their woodland nests.

The birds were a special challenge. Noah did his beleaguered best: set snares in trees and beside marshes and in fields, then assigned his daughters to sort and cage the captured birds. There were mistakes, of course. They could not always tell the difference between this sparrow and that, plus females and males often did not resemble one another. Noah’s daughters gave it a good try, but in the end, they caged what seemed a reasonable number of small brown birds all together and left them to sort it out amongst themselves. If they got more than they needed of something, they freed the extras, but any birds injured in the nets were killed and their bodies tossed into a sinew- and feather-threaded heap.

The bird-corpse pile was how Arum and Bessary were caught. The vultures and other carrion birds went to Noah’s larger corpse pile, but the ravens were curious. So much carrion in a single place was surprising, but all birds? It was not at all a known thing and surely merited a look. And so it was that Arum and Bessary were squabbling over the corpse of a white-capped nightfisher when a concealed net snapped closed. A few yards away, Tanipelis had been plucking the feathers from a dead red-tailed hawk. Rattling with fear, she tore at the net, and when Noah’s daughters approached, she attacked them. Protecting their heads, the daughters shoved the tangle of birds and net into a bamboo cage painted with tar, and fled. They left the cage in the staging area for birds, and a day later, when they at last risked returning, they found that Bessary had bitten the net into shreds, and the ravens now huddled in opposite corners of their cage. Arum was silent; Tanipelis was gone.

Crates and coops, stakeout lines and fences, nose twitches and goads, ever more noise and smell. The largest cages were pushed up the long ramps on cedar-log rollers, then lowered into the ark’s deep hold. The animals that could be led were dragged into the stenchy dark and tied, struggling, into their stanchions. Noah had plans for which animals went where, but by the end there was no order to any of it: antelopes stacked atop cheetahs next to newts; beavers by wolves beside a dirt-filled crate for the star-nosed moles; smaller cages crammed into every crevice and corner.

Bessary and Arum were placed on deck, part of a stack of cages tied down tightly beneath a oilskin tarp, where the larger birds were kept.

• • • •

The rain started; the rain kept on. In a series of shuddering jolts, the ark lifted at last from its blocks and was afloat. It had been hastily made, and water came in everywhere, seeping up through the ballast, and down from the hatches, and between the planks of the deck and hull. Noah’s sons set the oxen to the treadmill pumps that would keep the ship afloat: As long as they were here, they might as well make themselves useful.

The rain kept on, and kept on. Water seeped through the oilskin, down past the skysweeps in the cage above. Bessary and Arum crouched on the rotting remnants of the net until the shreds slipped at last through the floor and fell onto the giant petrels beneath them; then they slept on the cage’s bare bars. So much water rinsed the tar from the cages, and after a time, Bessary saw it would be possible to bite through the cords that secured the bamboo. But why? The rain kept on and kept on. Where would they go? At least there was plenty to eat.

Every so often Noah or one of his sons staggered along the rain-swept deck to slop a rank stew that changed every day into wooden bowls in the cages. The stew was delectable, Bessary thought, but Arum only picked at it, sunk into a lethargy she could not stir him from. She prruked and rattled and knocked and sang at Arum, but he would not speak, just gave the sound that meant back off, and after a time, not even that. When he slept, she groomed him delicately, so as not to awaken him.

Nothing at all, until a day when he said: The snow markhors are gone.

What do you mean? she asked, but he said no more. And she in any case knew, because now that he had said it, she could taste their death. Somewhere in the ark’s reeking belly, the male snow markhor had died, shaking his heavy-horned head and coughing. And in the cold counting-game of the ark, one of a species was the same as none of a species, and so the female was killed as well, and both were thrown together into the stewpot.

The rain kept on. Four days later, Arum said: The reticulated honeydrinkers. After that: The crested aurochs. Arum collected the names of the dead like shiny objects found on the ground, then dropped them into the nest of her mind. The giant pangolins.

Bessary, with all the time in the wet world and the taste of the dead on her black tongue, thought it through. She knew what Noah believed was going on, because he talked about it all the time: the world swept bare by water and wave, this fat floundering ark containing the last creatures in all the world. But that was nonsense: no flood could cover the earth. So Arum must mean that all the reticulated honeydrinkers here, on the ark, were gone. There must be others, on high lands Noah had no notion of.

The rain kept on. The paladin shrews. The speckled skinks.

The fieldcats. Ravens had a practiced palate, but Bessary, each day tasting a mix of creatures she had neither seen nor known of, was becoming an expert at fathoming the truth of what she ate. That’s how she knew that the fieldcats were really gone. Floods might not cover the earth, but they had covered all the fieldcat ranges. These two fieldcats really had been the last two, until they were dead. It was all perfectly clear in the stew’s flavor, as clear as the alpha-keratin of fur, the iron of blood. The fieldcats were gone. Extinct.

The hemippes. The monkeyface wallabys. The rain stopped, and the wind began. The ark was a graceless vessel, toiling across the waves in juddering heaves. The great gnidans.

The skysweeps. Their cage above the ravens was taken away, and now Bessary and Arum were the top of the stack, the tarp pressed against their cage. Bessary tore free a piece of oilskin that she pulled in through the bars, giving them a patch of coarse cloth to sleep on, and incidentally leaving a hole through which she could see the world outside: red-eyed Noah or his sons when they stumbled along the heaving deck, beyond that the broken gray sea—and beyond that the sky: a sharp thin blue, layered with stratus clouds and high, thin cirrus like lost, ragged veils.

The gray efts. The cryptic treehunters.

The wind. Arum had always taken their situation harder than Bessary. After his molt, his feathers grew in ragged and raw-edged, no longer smoothly nestling into their places. He ate so little that Bessary wondered how he knew who had died.

She was afraid. They were not even friends, let alone mates; but if he died, into the stewpot he would go. And then so would she—and it would not matter whether there were other ravens in the world, because there would be no more Bessary. Extinction can be as global as all, or as personal as me.

• • • •

The sea starlings. The scimitar oryxes. The bennū herons.

• • • •

The rain and then the wind, the cage and Arum dying beside her and the growing list of the lost. It had been going on forever when the ship gave a deep wooden shout and staggered to one side, like a dog writhing away from a wasp sting. The waves changed gait, and instead of tossing the vessel, they slammed against it. It had been so long that even Noah did not understand it immediately. The ark had grounded on a crag a few fathoms beneath the waves. The waters were dropping.

The sea otters sensed new-growing seaweed and young shellfish just on the other side of the hull, and squealed in excitement. They could survive—if anyone could have gotten to them to release them. For everyone else, land underwater was no land at all, and waters dropping were not waters gone. And the waters, they stayed and they stayed, perhaps a little lower each day but still: not land.

The queen vultures. The passenger pigeons. Gone: gone from the ark, or gone entirely, if not this time, then the next.

By the fortieth day of the ship’s grounding, Noah was nearly mad with exhaustion and despair. Plus winter was coming, again. He came on deck. The tarp over the birdcages was worn thin by sun and wind and rain, so it was no great labor to pull the oilskin away and unveil his biggest birds. He looked them over. Gone: the skysweeps, the ordinal phalaropes, the desert condors. The remaining birds were a draggled lot, many ill, others hard to rouse from their anomie or despair.

The ravens’ cage was eye-height. Noah contemplated Bessary, clinging to the side of the cage, disheveled but alert and watching him with one bright eye. Arum lay flat on Bessary’s scrap of oilskin, unmoving except for an occasional flick of ragged feather; but that might have been the wind.

Noah said, “Well, he’s dead, but you look strong enough.” He pulled out a small hand axe and began to chip at the bamboo of their cage.

She said, “He’s not dead.” This is before the Tower at Babel fell and words between tribes and species failed, but anyone could have read the mantling of her wings and her fierce stance for what it was.

Even so, he misunderstood. “Don’t worry, it’s not about that.” He meant the stewpot and the taste of Arum and Bessary in tomorrow’s meal. “I need something.”

She waited: wings still half-mantled, a skeptical eye.

He said, “There’s land somewhere, I know it. I need someone strong to fly high, look around, and then come back and tell me whether this is almost over.” Even to a raven, he sounded weary and sick at heart.

“Why would I do that?” said Bessary.

He had returned to breaking open the bamboo cage. “Why wouldn’t you? It’s what animals are for, doing things.” He meant: doing things for us. “You’re worried you’d come back and be killed since the other one’s dead? I swear I won’t.” He looked solemn; he thought he spoke the truth. “Come back, and even if you don’t find any land, we’ll keep feeding you. We’ll feed you extra, so you can try again in a week or two. In fact, you could even stay with us. After, I mean.” He put down the hand axe and bent back a wall of the cage. “You’re smart and good at things, right. You’d be useful.”

Bessary tried to hop out, but it had been a long time since she had moved more than a wingspan in any direction, and instead she fell gracelessly. Noah caught her and placed her on the deck, then stepped back quickly. Free, she was as tall as his thigh, a hook-beaked, taloned shadow the color of an oak tree killed in a lightning strike.

She looked around. Even from his safe distance, he towered over her. But beyond him, and past the railings and structures that had hemmed her in for so long, the sky was enormous. She cupped her wings to the tiny drift of air along the deck, flicked them out to full extension and then preened, settling each feather into its right place.

He was still talking, still thinking it out. “Yeah, you’d be as good as a dog. Better. Smarter, and you can fly. You could herd, or guard, or even just keep an eye on things. Too bad about that mate of yours, though. Maybe you could have young with someone else, a crow or maybe an eagle? That would be something.”

She hopped to the railing and extended her wings experimentally. They were weak but good enough.

“Bring us good news, raven.”

“I’m gone,” she said, and she was.

• • • •

At first, Bessary was clumsy. She stepped off the railing and, where her wings should have caught her fall and lifted her without thought, she tumbled instead, fast toward the water. But her muscles remembered their work in time. Her wingtips flicked out and she powered up, past the railing, past gaping Noah and the tower of cages, past the birds as they blinked in the unaccustomed light and called to her.

When she was clear of it all, she hovered, tipping from side to side as she read the bright particularities of the air until she located the ark’s updraft, shaped by cookfire and the effluence of a thousand breathing lungs, and cedarwood warmed by the morning sun. Slanting across, she slipped into the sweet spot and began to ease upward in tight circles.

Up and up. When she had been on the ark, her existence had contracted to the single point that was the cage, but now it unfurled until she flew in a three-dimensional foam of air, rich with variations in texture and temperature. The horizon rose as she climbed, a pale thin line, ever more distant. Beneath her, the world looked like a vast bowl brimming with water. Blue sky and clouds stuttered on the rough waves so far below, but she could also see through, into the water, and there she saw the land that Noah craved and would eventually claim: the puckers and wrinkles of mountains, paler where the water was shallower; the valleys, still only deep blue mysteries. Such a pointless errand: a month or two from now, the flood would have receded anyway.

From this height, the ark was the size of a wood chip, a thing so small that a pebble might crush it. A disk of soiled water haloed it, jetsam and effluvium half-concealing the mountain on which the ark had snagged. In the northeast, a vague discoloration still dirtied the water over which it had passed; to the west, a current dragged a broad stain from the ark, extending as far as she could see.

If Noah was right, this flood had been God’s judgment on humans as a species, and the very last of them lived on that flake of bark below her. If he was right—but of course that was nonsense; even a young raven knew that. Of course there were others. The humans would keep doing what they do: the quaggas, the thylacines, the burrowing boas, on and on, an unending list of their killings. But Bessary had grown expert at tasting the dead. Eventually the humans also would be gone, she knew: if not this time, then the next. And the world would rebuild itself along new lines, without golden toads, without warrahs, without lesser gray-winged tierces, and without humans.

And without Bessary—but that time was not yet. She was very high now, the sun hot on her wings. She saw a dark fleck in the air a little distance away, so she flicked her wings to slide across and inspect it. It was a small brown spider, suspended from a thread a thousand feet up, sailing the sky to a new home it had never seen. Another time, she might have eaten it. But today, Bessary slanted away, and flew back along the wind, toward a green moment barely visible on the horizon.

©2020 by Kij Johnson.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kij Johnson is a winner of the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Sturgeon Awards, among others. She teaches creative writing at the University of Kansas, where she is also the associate director for the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction.

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

A Statement in the Case

Theodora Goss | 4603 words

Sure, I know István Horvath. We met about a year before Eva died. That’s my wife, Eva. You knew that? Yeah, I figured you were pretty thorough.

It was the year of the blizzard, when snow covered the cars parked on the streets and even the Post Office shut down. I didn’t have to go to work for a week. So one night, I think it was Thursday, Eva says, “Mike, I only have one of the blue pills left.” This was when we still thought the chemo was doing something. When we discovered it wasn’t, she turned her head toward me on the pillow—she was so beautiful, like the day we got married—and said, “Mike, I think the Lord wants me home.” After that, she refused to take the pills. But I couldn’t throw them out. Every morning I opened the medicine cabinet, and there they were, the blue ones, the orange ones that made her throw up, the green ones that made her hair fall out, the purple ones that caused constipation. When she died, I flushed them down the toilet. But you don’t want to hear about Eva. I was talking about the day I met István Horvath.

Well, there she was saying there were no more blue pills, and how was I going to get to Walgreens? The snow was up to my armpits, and the subway wasn’t running. Then Eva said, “What about that store around the corner?” Now, we always went to Walgreens. You know the guy in Alabama who sold aspirin as that stuff you take for cholesterol? So we were always careful. We never went to the store around the corner. For one thing, the sign said Apothecary, which looked kind of foreign, and we wanted our pills one hundred percent American. For another, the front of the store was kind of dirty. You know, like nobody washed the windows.

But we had to have the blue pills. So I put on my boots and walked through the snow to the Apothecary. And I tell you, it was just around the corner, but by the time I got there I felt like I was going to have a heart attack. It was some work, walking through all that snow.

I figured the store would be closed, and I’d have to knock on the other door, the one for the apartment above the store, which had a sign on it that said Pharmacist. But the sign in the window—which was written in magic marker, can you believe it—said Open. So I walked in.

When the bell on the door rang, István stood up from behind the counter. Not that I knew his name, then. He was wearing a white coat, so I figured he was the pharmacist. “Hello,” he said, in a foreign kind of voice, like I’d expected. I figured he was probably Russian. We had a lot of Russians in the neighborhood, in those days. Nothing wrong with that. My grandfather came through Staten Island. We’re all immigrants, right? Even the Indians came from someplace else. Now Gorski, what’s that, Polish? Ernie at the Post Office, he’s Polish. Do you mind if I get some water, Sergeant Gorski? I’m not used to talking so much, since Eva died. Nowadays, you get these lawyers and doctors moving in. They like the “neighborhood atmosphere.” Then the old people can’t afford it anymore, so they go to Florida, to the retirement communities. And suddenly there’s nobody to talk to. But Eva and I had some savings, and with my pension—well, I’m not ready to leave the neighborhood yet.

So István stands up from behind the counter and says, “Hello. Today, I did not expect customers. I was setting traps for the mice. Not to hurt them, you understand. I take them outside, to the cemetery.”

Later, I told him they would come back. Mice are smart, they know their way home. But he said, “Then I will trap them again. It is pleasant in the cemetery, with the grass and trees. I will leave them bread, and perhaps they will learn to like it there.” Can you imagine? A regular mouse vacation. But that was István all over. He wouldn’t swat the flies on the walls. He’d catch them and put them outside, and half an hour later they’d get in again through the holes in the screen. So you’re not going to convince me that he murdered his wife.

Now, I have to admit I didn’t like the look of the place, when I first came in. There was dust on the shelves, and the boxes of Ace bandages looked like they’d been there a while. Toward the back there were bottles of what looked like dried leaves and flowers, with labels—in magic marker, what did you expect—saying things like Tansy, Agrimony, Rue. But the bottle of blue pills he gave me looked just like it came from Walgreens. When he handed it to me he said, “Tell her to take it always with a piece of bread, so the nausea is not so bad.” And you know, he was right.

I won’t say I stopped going to Walgreens after that, but I got to buying little things at the Apothecary. Tweezers, antacids, Vicks VapoRub. One day I noticed a chessboard on the counter. “Colonel Borodin, she left it,” he told me. He could never get his genders right. To him, everyone was a she. “She has a problem with the liver, all that vodka. But she cannot pay the bill, so she gives me this. It is beautiful, no?”

It was beautiful, with ebony and ivory pieces. My grandfather taught me to play chess. He said in Italy all the men would play in the park, while the women were cooking Sunday dinner. That was the way to live, he said. I sure wouldn’t mind living that way.

So István and I started to play together. Usually we played in the Apothecary, on the counter, but a couple of times I invited him over to meet Eva. That was when I found out he was Hungarian. Eva’s grandmother was Hungarian, and she knew a few words: yes, no, hello, goodbye, thank you. I think he liked to hear them. Once, he brought a plastic bag full of yellow and white flowers. “Chamomile,” he said. “It helps the stomach.” Later, he showed me where he dried things, in the basement. He had racks down there, with plants hanging from them. I know that’s not what you found. Don’t they teach you patience, at the police academy? Chamomile tea was the only thing Eva drank, the month before she died. Toward the end, when she couldn’t talk, he told her stories. About girls who lived in rivers, and hens that laid eggs covered with diamonds and rubies. They were so fancy, they were sent to the Russian Tzar. He said he had learned them from his mother. Eva loved those stories. She would smile, and then for a while she’d be able to sleep. She didn’t sleep much, in those days.

Before she died, we didn’t have a lot of friends. She hadn’t gone out for a long time, except to the hospital, and I didn’t want to invite the guys from the Post Office to the funeral. Ernie, for example, he can’t stand hallways, especially if they’re narrow. Stan doesn’t like bushes. And none of us likes going to funerals. Your father was in Vietnam? Yeah, you know what I’m talking about.

Our parents, they died a while back, and her brother was out in Tucson. So it was just me and István at the cemetery. He brought a bunch of Easter lilies, exactly the kind of flowers Eva would have liked.

I didn’t see him for a while after that. I felt like keeping to myself. I went to work, came home, opened a bottle of beer, and watched TV. I didn’t even answer the telephone. It was always someone trying to sell me something, like a timeshare in Florida, or asking what I thought about the mayor. And István left me alone. That’s the kind of guy he was, sensitive. Like Eva.

But one day, he knocked on the door. “Mike,” he said, after I’d let him in and asked if he wanted a beer, “I have to go to Budapest. My mother, she is dying. The doctors are not so good there. And now I think they will not put me in prison.”

See, the Berlin Wall had come down. I watched them take it down on TV. I figured, this was what we had fought for. To defeat the Commies, right? That’s what Ernie said: The day that wall came down, we won the Vietnam War. I don’t know. It didn’t feel won to me.

“The first time I tried to escape,” he told me—I was drinking beer, he was drinking chamomile tea—“they found me. I was stupid, I tried to escape on the train. I was only fifteen. The guards, they laughed and beat the soles of my feet. They sent me back to my mother and told her I would not run away any more. The second time, I was a pharmacist, finished with university. A German friend came to Budapest on vacation. His car, the back seat, it was hollow. I stayed there until we crossed the border into West Germany.”

He sat with his hands wrapped around the mug. “I wonder if I was wrong to leave my country. A pharmacist, she is useful everywhere.” He looked down into his tea. “I do not know what my mother looks like, now. When I left, her hair was brown. Perhaps it is white.”

“You can’t change the past,” I said. And you can’t. It’s the one thing you can’t do.

He asked if I would take care of the store, just check on it once in a while to make sure no one broke in and the mice didn’t eat everything. Then he gave me the key.

I didn’t see him again for a couple of months. Then one day I heard a knock on the door. It was him, even thinner than usual, like he hadn’t been eating. And standing next to him was this girl.

Of course it was her. Don’t worry, I’m getting to that. She had on this coat that looked like it came from the Salvation Army, and a cap on her head that was the color of—well, anyway, it was brown. She was ugly, then. Pale, like she hadn’t been out in the sun in years. And she had dark circles under her eyes. I mean, she looked like she’d been raised in a box.

István said, “My friend Mike!” and kissed me on both cheeks. Now, I don’t hold with men kissing, you understand. But he’d been away for a while, and they do things different in those foreign countries.

“This is Ildiko,” he said, “my wife.” She’d been taking care of his mother, he explained. After his mother died, she had nowhere to go. She had no family, and there were no jobs in Budapest. If the country became Communist again, the borders would close, and she’d have no way out. Now isn’t that István all over. He marries this girl because he feels sorry for her. He might as well have invited the flies into his apartment.

The first thing I noticed, when I went to the Apothecary for some Pepto Bismol and maybe a game of chess, was the sign. It wasn’t in magic marker any more. It was one of those regular signs that other stores had, the Pizza Express and Lou’s Shoe Repair and the Vacuum Emporium. The window had been cleaned. In it were a row of combs and brushes, and some of those plastic things women put in their hair. Clips and things. Not the sorts of things Eva would ever have worn. Though toward the end, she almost always wore a turban.

Ildiko was standing behind the counter, with her hair back in one of those plastic clips. “István not here,” she said, and rang me up. She was looking a little better, like she’d gotten some sleep. But I don’t like skinny women, or ones that don’t say hello or thank you. She stared at me like I had no right to be in that store. I tell you, I knew even then that something was wrong. You don’t believe me? Well, you’re the one trying to figure out who burned down the Apothecary.

About a week later, István invited me over to play chess. He told me he’d been at a pharmacist’s convention. It had been Ildiko’s idea, like the combs and brushes. Everything was Ildiko’s idea, then.

This time there was a rack of magazines by the register: Woman’s Day, Soap Opera Digest, The National Enquirer. Those bottles of leaves and flowers that he’d dried himself—they’d been replaced on the shelves with soap and shampoo. There were jars of face cream. It was cleaner, sure, and more like Walgreens. But I didn’t like it.

Ildiko was behind the counter again, but I almost didn’t recognize her. For one thing, she’d dyed her hair. It was blond, like Marilyn Monroe, though you could still see the roots. And she was wearing bright red lipstick. Her fingernails were bright red, too. She was something to look at, all right. But I sure wouldn’t have wanted to be her husband.

István, he thought she was wonderful. “She loves America,” he told me, setting up the chess pieces. We were upstairs, in the apartment. She didn’t want him playing chess on the counter. It would make the customers think there wasn’t enough business. “She wants this to be a real American store. She thinks we should name it Drug Mart. You see, she is so clever about the window. We need a display, she says. Something to bring in the women. And her Russian is better than mine. The old men, the majors and colonels, they like her.” I bet they did. “I wish she and Eva could have met. I’m certain they would have liked each other.” I wasn’t so certain. Eva was—well, she was a lady, if you know what I mean. And Ildiko Horvath—well, I don’t want to say what she was.

At that moment we heard her laughing, and a “Da, da” coming from downstairs.

You think I’m being unfair? One night, this was about two weeks later, I was walking down the street, smoking a cigarette. Eva would never let me smoke in the apartment, and I still go outside. I don’t know why. I guess I imagine her saying, “Mike, you’re going to get that smoke all over my curtains.”

Anyway, when I passed the Apothecary, I heard her voice from the upstairs window. “Do you think I enjoy taking care of that stupid woman? Do you think I enjoy cleaning up when she cannot go to the toilet? And then I find out she doesn’t leave me a forint, not a forint!” She was shouting so loud I thought she would wake up Lou. He still lives above the Shoe Repair, though he retired last year. István answered her in Hungarian, or that’s what I figured it was. “Why you think I marry you?” I had to give her one thing, her English was getting better. “I deserve—yes, deserve, every forint of that money!”

So don’t get on your high horse to me about Ildiko Horvath. The Herald can go on about the tragic story: young wife found in a basement, burned to death. But I know what kind of woman she really was.

We started playing chess every week, me and István, and every week there was something new at the store. Boxes of Whitman’s Samplers. Marlboro Lights. Those pantyhose in eggs. Ildiko sat at the counter with her blond hair and red nails, in dresses I’d be ashamed to see on Eva.

All right, all right, I’ll stick to the facts. That day, I went over to play chess. She wasn’t at the counter. István was there instead, with a liquor bottle open beside him. I’d never seen him drink anything stronger than chamomile tea. “Come join me, friend Mike,” he said, and poured some into a glass. It was called—now, what was it? Pálinka. Peach brandy, though it didn’t taste much like peaches. It burned my throat going down.

Yeah, I guess it could account for the smell. So the firemen noticed that, did they?

“We’ve been friends for a long time, no?” he said, and I nodded. I guess he was as close to a friend as I had. “I can tell you, things are not well.” His speech was slurred, and it was hard figuring out what he was saying, with that accent. He was drunk of course, and I figured I was in for the whole story. That’s what guys do when they’re drunk, they tell you the whole story. And then they cry in their beer. Waste of good beer, if you ask me. But he got up from the counter and said, “Come, I will show you. She said she will shop for dresses at Filene’s, and then she will watch a movie. She said I should not expect her until evening.”

He was swaying from side to side, like one of those toys that kids punch, and they don’t fall down. But he managed to unlock the door to the basement. I followed him down the stairs.

When he switched on the light, I saw that the racks of drying plants were gone. Instead—how can I describe it? Eva liked movies where people wore costumes. You know, Dr. Zhivago. In those movies, rich people always have tables with things on them, like statues. That basement was full of tables and chairs, and on them were statues, of women dancing, and all kinds of dogs. There were pieces of lace, just lying on the tables. Silver teapots and trays, piles of teaspoons. Glass bowls and vases, dark red and that yellow color, what do they call it? Amber. The legs of the tables were carved so they had feet, and the backs of the chairs were inlaid. You know, where they use a different wood to make designs, like birds or flowers. Stan does it as a hobby, but I’ve never seen him do anything like that. On one table there was a box filled with jewelry, rings and necklaces and what looked like a crown. The kind Miss America wears. On another there was a collection of eggs, and I knew what those were. Eva took me to the museum once, to see those eggs. Fabergé, they call them. The most expensive eggs in the world. The whole room looked like it belonged in Las Vegas.

“What the hell?” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“My country is poor now,” said István. “Many people sell what belonged to their parents or grandparents. And Ildiko knows people who will carry these things across the border. I don’t know how, she does not tell me. Mike, how can she know such people?”

“What the hell is she going to do with all this?” I couldn’t stop staring. I picked up the crown. It was heavier than I’d expected.

“She sells to Americans. First she sold only a few pieces, then with the money she bought more, and now she sells the treasures of my country.” He held out his hands, as though he didn’t know what to say. “She tells me, this is America, land of opportunity. I have been here so long, I should be rich by now. But this is not the worst. No—”

Above us, I heard the store bell ring.

“I must go see the customer,” he said, “or Ildiko will be angry.” He swayed up the stairs, leaving me in the basement.

I looked around me. All that stuff in the light of one bare bulb, shining off the carved wood, the polished silver. It was like being in Aladdin’s cave.

Then I heard something. Don’t ask me to describe it to you. It came from the back of the basement, behind the tables. Where the light didn’t exactly reach. I heard it again.

You think it was Ildiko Horvath? You mean, you think he knocked her on the head, hid her in the basement, then took me down to see what she’d been doing? What kind of fool would do a thing like that? No offense, Gorski, but I don’t know how you made sergeant. Sure, he might have been too drunk to care. But that’s not what happened. I told you she’d gone to the movies. I saw her come home myself, around six o’clock.

No, what I saw were cages. Cages stacked on top of each other, in the darkness. Now, I’m going to tell you what was in those cages. But I want you to remember, I’d been drinking that pálinka. I was probably drunk. Would a sober man have seen a goat with the head of a boy, maybe fifteen, sixteen? Or a girl, but only about three feet tall, and covered with scales? She had gills on the sides of her neck, just like a fish. There wasn’t enough room in the cage for her to stand, so she sat there, rocking back and forth like a monkey at the zoo. There was a cage full of snakes, except they had wings, a bunch of them on some of the bigger ones. There wasn’t room to fly, but they beat the air with their wings, and hissed at me. There was a hen with only one leg, not on one side as though the other had been chopped off, but right in the middle. When I looked in that cage, I realized where all those Fabergé eggs had come from. Then the goat boy bleated—that was the sound I’d heard—and something in a cage I’d thought was empty, except for what looked like a rubber poncho on the floor, opened its eyes. Its hell of a lot of eyes, all different colors, blue and gray and green. I turned and ran out of that basement, up the stairs and past the counter where István was ringing up a customer. He looked up, startled, as I ran past him and out the door. I didn’t stop until I was across the street and smoking a cigarette. I stood there, across the street from the store, until it got dark, smoking most of a pack, not wanting to go home to the empty apartment, not wanting to return to the Apothecary. I think István realized why I had run out of there, because after that customer left, he went upstairs to the apartment and sat at the kitchen table with his head in his hands. Yeah, he went down again once, but then he went back to the kitchen. A couple more customers came by, but he didn’t answer the bell.

That’s how I saw when Ildiko came home, right around six o’clock as I said. She went upstairs and said something to him. When he didn’t answer she threw her coat down on the chair, and her purse on top of it. Then she turned on the stove and started cooking dinner.

Now what you want to know is, how did the store burn down, with her body in the basement? I’ll tell you what I’m going to swear to in court. I’m going to swear that I saw Ildiko Horvath go down to the store and open the basement door, then go down to the basement. You can see the door through the store window. And I’ll swear that I saw István fall asleep on the kitchen table, spilling the bottle of pálinka. Remember, the stove was on. It was a small kitchen—easy enough for some of the pálinka to spill on the flames. That would explain why the firemen smelled peaches. You don’t think I could see that far? Check my army record. I was a sniper in Vietnam. My vision’s still better than twenty-twenty.

Oh, but I wasn’t drunk by then. I’d been standing out there about an hour. I’d had plenty of fresh air. All right, so Ildiko had a bruise on her head. Maybe she got that trying to escape the fire. It spread so fast, I barely got István out. Someone should talk to the mayor about these old buildings.

I thought you would find the cages. Of course they were empty. You don’t think I actually saw those things? István probably kept the cages for catching raccoons.

But I’m going to tell you something, Sergeant. Off the record. You don’t have one of those wires, do you? I’ve watched cop shows on TV. That’s why I wanted to meet here, instead of at the station. István Horvath, he wouldn’t hurt a fly. Those things—I don’t know what they were, but I think he cared about them. Remember the stories he told Eva. I think that’s what he really meant, when he talked about the treasures of his country. I mentioned how he let the mice out in the cemetery? Once, when I was sitting there by Eva’s grave, I saw her. The scaled girl. She was sitting on the grass by the pond, and sort of humming. And once I saw the biggest bat I’ve ever seen. Two feet across, it must have been, like a black kite. I don’t even want to talk about its eyes. But it was getting dark, so I could have been mistaken.

What if, off the record now, István did start that fire? First, he would have set those things free. Some things shouldn’t be in cages. You can understand that, right? You’re Polish, your people are from the old country. And Ildiko Horvath? Like I said, István wouldn’t hurt a fly. But she wasn’t a fly, more like a spider in her web, or a cat waiting for the mouse to come out of its hole. What if, when she went down to the basement, István followed her, with the bottle of pálinka in his hand? What if he showed her the empty cages, then poured what was left in the pálinka bottle over those pieces of lace, and told her he would burn the things in the basement before he’d let her sell them? And then he lit a match. I figure she would fly at him with those red nails of hers. If he hit her with the bottle, well, that’s self-defense. It wouldn’t be his fault that the fire spread so quickly. But hey, I’m just telling a story. There are no windows in the basement. If something happened down there, I wouldn’t have seen it, even if I wanted to. Anyway, I tell you, whatever she got, she deserved. And I think Eva would agree.

But that’s between you and me. István’s not talking. I told him, this is America. We have rights in this country. So I’m your only witness. As far as I’m concerned, the fire was an accident. And I’m not going to say different, not if I have to swear on the Bible, so help me God.

©2005 by Theodora Goss. Originally published in Realms of Fantasy. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Theodora Goss is the author of the novels The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (which was a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy awards) and European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman. Her other publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting (2006); Interfictions (2007), a short story anthology co-edited with Delia Sherman; Voices from Fairyland (2008), a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems; The Thorn and the Blossom (2012), a novella in a two-sided accordion format; and the poetry collection Songs for Ophelia (2014). Her work has been translated into ten languages, including French, Japanese, and Turkish. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, Locus, Seiun, and Mythopoeic Awards, and on the Tiptree Award Honor List. Her short story “Singing of Mount Abora” (2007) won the World Fantasy Award. She teaches literature and writing at Boston University and in the Stonecoast MFA Program.

Toxic Destinations

Alexander Weinstein | 2310 words

from The Lost Traveler’s Tour Guide

Since the discovery of the Eighth continent, your Tour Guide writers have received many letters from travelers and concerned individuals. We have heard, for instance, from the embattled New Zealand geologists who have long attempted to gain traction for their theory of the unrecognized continent of Zealandia. These hardworking scientists argue that the collection of partly submerged fragments off the coast of New Zealand comprise a much larger landmass, claiming this fits within standard definitions of continental attributes. They cite in their defense (1) Zealandia’s high elevation relative to regions floored by oceanic crust; (2) a broad range of siliceous igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary rocks; (3) thicker crust and lower seismic velocity structure than oceanic crustal regions; and (4) well-defined limits around a large enough area to be considered a continent rather than a microcontinent or continental fragment (e.g., Holmes, 1965; Christensen and Mooney, 1995; Levander et al., 2005; Kearey et al., 2009; Condie, 2015). If their claims are accepted, Zealandia is certainly the true inheritor of the eighth continent title, and none of your guidebook writers are against this. We are, as a group, in favor of the world having more continents, and if the world comes to accept Zealandia as our eighth continent, we’ll happily accept the continent of Triol’s ranking as ninth. (However, let’s admit that it’s one thing to seek reputation of a continent based on crustal regions, and quite another when the continent of Triol provides us evidence of its bakeries, souvenir shops, urinals, and logoed refrigerator magnets).

More concerning to us, however, are the reports of missing travelers. Since Triol’s discovery, our newspapers have been filled with photos of calamitous study-abroad excursions, and our cable stations report the near-death escapes of travelers visiting dangerous destinations in the eighth continent. And while it may be in the travel writer’s interest to paint a flattering picture, to entice, in short, to sell destinations to future travelers—we would feel criminally remiss if we didn’t admit that there are hotels and cities, whole countries even, to avoid.

For this reason, we present to all of you, who long to see the new world, an addendum to our original Tour Guide, containing both updated descriptions of previous destinations and warnings of newly discovered locales. As always, we wish you safe travels, and most importantly, safe returns.

The Town of Gerholtz

We’re sad to report that the town of Gerholtz, once a starred destination, can no longer be recommended for travel. We’re not sure when Gerholtz took a turn for the worse, but in recent years thieves have broken the windows of hotels, the dump is overflowing, the rivers have become toxic, and the shingles are rotting on foreclosed homes.

And yet, it wasn’t always like this. Your guidebook writers recall a time when Gerholtz decorated their public park with golden bulbs for the holidays, and lights filled pine boughs like a flock of starlings. The town would shine in those winter months, illuminated as if with a dusting of snow. One might pass the gazebo where the small lights flickered like fireflies in the night. The heart would soften, your pace would slow, and you’d take your spouse’s hand as if for the first time. Yes, even though the town now has more liquor stores than family restaurants, we remember those lights like beacons on a sinking ship.

Who ordered the lights to be strung? Had an official declared the park should be a kindly sight during the long winter? Was it a town council resolution? No one recalls. There was simply an old man who appeared in the fall with a wagon of lights and spent the afternoon stringing them up. Then he’d reappear in spring to wheel them away—to a shed, or a basement, or the back of his closet. No one knew; no one asked.

Then, one autumn, the old man passed quietly in the county hospital, and the lights remained where they’d been stored until they were sold at a yard sale or tossed into a dumpster. Soon the town grew dark. Houses were foreclosed and the liquor store was robbed. A woman’s body was found in the river. Teenagers overdosed behind the abandoned fire station, flowers were replaced by weeds, and Gerholtz became the town we find today: a place where no one performs a kind gesture anymore. Parents don’t push their toddlers on swings but sit on benches smoking cigarettes. Everyone inspects receipts, expecting to be overcharged, and they stiff their servers. And when children lose baby teeth and place them beneath pillows, they awake to find their molars where they left them.

Alas, the city has become a truly wretched place. Walking its streets, we’re filled with loathing for all those we pass—the fighting couples, the ugly locals, the beggars, the drunks in the park. And while it might be true that a single sweet word would lighten a passersby’s mood, or a simple act of kindness might restore the town’s spirit, we’re too sick of the place to bother. There isn’t a nice thing we can say about Gerholtz. Even if there was, we wouldn’t do it. Not one generous word.

The Hotel Aranche

Crouched along the southern coastline, as though hiding from the rest of the continent, sits the town of Aranche. Here clouds hang low, and the sharp eyeteeth of volcanic deposits rise from the ocean to chew through the bottoms of docking boats and leave snorkelers bloody. Wind whistles a melody against the cliffs, mournful and uninviting—a song which has chased local fishermen from its shores. This is a coast for fools and the guests of The Hotel Aranche, which we urge you to stay away from.

We extend this warning before describing its many pleasures. And if you’re wise, you’ll read no further, simply accept the advice of your guidebook writers and seek a different hotel. Because, like the stonefish of Indonesia, whose camouflage conceals a poison which kills within minutes, The Hotel Aranche has adapted itself to devour guests over a week-long stay.

Note the softness of the hotel’s carpets which welcome your feet when you emerge from the hot tub (every room comes with one), or the view of the sea which dominates the horizon. There are complimentary massages and facials, a bar with sugarcane liquors, Michelin-rated three-star dining, nightly magic shows for the kids, and an in-house theater—all included in the cost of your stay. As for budget travelers, the reception desk seems to anticipate the financial woes of backpackers, who upon seeing the crystal fountains or chocolate-dipped strawberries, begin to turn away. Come, the concierge says, we have special rates for you. Are you a student? American? Under twenty-one? Over twenty-two? If so, they extend a price which can be found at no other hotel. As for those who wish to prolong their stay, the staff willingly offer additional nights at reduced costs. Stay, they tell you, we’re happy you’re here.

There are those who claim no human hands built the hotel—that it was constructed by the Devil himself—and while your guidebook writers don’t believe such tales, we are aware that there are unnamed beasts which roam this earth, creatures to which humans are but food. Any objective observer would note the odd behavior of the guests. How they forget their original urge to leave. How they extend vacations indefinitely, emailing jobs back home with delay after delay. How enamored they are by the charming bellhops and massage therapists whose faces stretch into smiles as the hotel draws guests further into its belly.

If you’re presently sitting on your king-sized bed, only now consulting this description, we wish we had better news for you; the sheets you’ve slept beneath have already released their neurotoxins. Note how—even as you read this—you’re already thinking of returning to the pool, or how you eagerly anticipate tonight’s concert in the atrium. Is that room service knocking at your door? Tonight, when you slip beneath the covers, it’s not the cool of Egyptian cotton you’ll feel but the engulfing flesh of the hotel’s large intestine. You’ll smile, stretch out your arms, and welcome it. You’ve never been happier.

The City of Nacht

It’s common knowledge that the city we see in the day is never the same one we encounter at night. Windows are shuttered, toy shops roll down gates, flower sellers lock front doors, and in their place, nightclubs, bars, and pool halls open their doors. All this we regard as commonplace, but even the most seasoned traveler will be surprised by the city of Nacht, which, like the moonflower, uncurls its nocturnal petals only after the clock’s hands have reached their peak.

Sitting by the fountain at the center of town, one hears the clang of midnight bells, and then the city’s machinery begins to turn. Apartment buildings curve toward streets, church steeples arc to the cobblestones, and new buildings ride upon their backs, circling high into the night sky. Their windows open to release dark music, and from these buildings, Nacht’s citizens emerge, their eyes ringed with mascara and sleeplessness.

It’s true that a city’s treasures can often only be found after the sun goes down. In restaurants, knives are sharpened, steam rises, and sauté pans clang like evening bells. A jazz band tunes up. Soon tables will be filled, wine bottles uncorked, glasses emptied, and the band will play far into the night until the ashtrays are full.

For these pleasures alone, one would be remiss not to venture into the city of Nacht. But, let us warn you: for all its pleasures, the doorways of Nacht open to rooms where shadows spread. Within pubs are women who despise the birdsong of morning. Men, who masquerade as businessmen during the day, morph into dangerous lovers in the bar’s yellow haze. Close your eyes and they’ll lead you to ballrooms where there’s always someone new to kiss and a card game ready to take your wedding ring. Which barroom do you find yourself in, prepared to abandon all that gave life meaning? Whose eyes do you see staring back at you from the dirty bathroom mirror? Live now, Nacht whispers. And we, who have cast ourselves into its trap, listen.

Of course, Nacht isn’t the only city to spin such webs. Let us mention the city of Dhlwak, where drowned men stumble from the sea, break barnacles from their knuckles, and speak with tongues sweet as oysters to our daughters before dragging them below. Or Luskitch, where beautiful women as hollow as reeds emerge from riverbanks, call to our men, and lead them away.

Every one of us has strayed close enough to the edge to know there’s a world far from sunlight out there. And night reveals that all cities are Russian dolls, their center a hidden place which closes around us with morning. Perhaps you’ve already been there, trapped within its smallest figurine; perhaps your guidebook writers are there now, calling out from its belly in warning.

The Country of Phôtl

The country of Phôtl is filled with broken people who have used their last dollars to make its capital their home. Everyone in this miserable destination slumps home in the dark autumn light, or sits along the city’s steam grates, extending coffee cups for change. Riding the subway in the early evening, one encounters the broken birdcage of a woman as she looks at the city’s passing lights, her body rocked by the train and the weight of shopping bags in her hand. Across from her is a man who lost his husband to illness; another lost their brother to war. And while it’s true that butterflies still appear amid these gloomy streets, and springtime flowers bloom, such sights go unnoticed. Instead, every night, when the inhabitants lay their heads against pillows, they breathe a final sigh and settle into a few hours of sleep before their days begin again.

Perhaps, as some say, we go to Phôtl as punishment for the wrongdoings of our past, or maybe, as the preachers speculate, Phôtl is the country we go to when we die. All we know is that most tourists come to Phôtl only after some great loss, and they seek out the solace of Phôtl’s bars, where couples dance drunken waltzes on sticky floors and offer their bodies to one another like spare change. In the bathroom, men in disheveled suits inhale white lines off dirty counters, while beneath the strobe lights, old men, laid-off from jobs, sit at the bar watching the dancers sway. Widows arrive, drenched from downpour, dragging their empty purses alongside them. Long ago, they lived in houses filled with children, worked in offices with large glass windows, shared apartments with those they loved. Who took everything from them? A friend crawling into bed with their spouse, a loan officer asking for a signature they could never repay, the hand of illness filling their mailboxes with bills. If you ask the bartender, he’ll say the immigrants are to blame; the banker says the poor; the drunk at the bar says the rich; and the waitress says every man in this city is to blame.

For those of us fortunate enough to leave, we depart the country with sighs of relief, thankful to have escaped. We arrive home pitying the people of that faraway land. How can their lives be filled with such sorrow, we wonder as we place our luggage in the darkened hallways of our homes. Why don’t they have any friends, we ask ourselves as we turn on our televisions. How can they survive with such little joy, we say, as we refill our refrigerators with just enough food to last another week.

©2020 by Alexander Weinstein.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alexander Weinstein is the author of the short story collections, Universal Love (2020) and Children of the New World, which was named a notable book of the year by The New York Times, NPR and Electric Literature. He is a recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and his stories and interviews have appeared in Rolling Stone, World Literature Today, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and Best American Experimental Writing. He is the director of the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and an associate professor of creative writing at Siena Heights University.

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

A Stranger at the Bochinche

Daniel José Older | 2498 words

Gather, my children, I have a story. This was many years ago, before the Four Corners War, before steel towers devoured the sky, back when Brooklyn’s gaslit avenues dipped and curved around great oak trees, and long-necked sauropods loped glumly in the East River, dangling steel rails from their harnesses for the brand-new suspension bridge. These were days of revelry and masquerades burning through the wide-open nights, when we were flickering shadows burgeoning along the dawn streets.

But this story isn’t about us, of course. It’s about you.

And on this night, a group of you gathered as you always have, night upon night, here at a dim saloon in old Crow Hill called the Bochinche, a few blocks from the penitentiary. And Ramses Garcia Garcia sat in his same spot as always, silent as always, and just seventeen, hands plunking away on the congas, eyes scanning the crowd.

There was a different face amid the revelers this night: a white face, which was unusual enough at the Bochinche, but also with large, bulging eyes and tiny beads of sweat trembling upon his upper lip. The stranger wore a rumpled pin-striped suit, and an ascot that seemed to clamp the folds of his fleshy throat. When Oba Ade Iku took the stage to begin another round of stories, the stranger glared at him, and Ramses Garcia Garcia glared at the stranger.

Rosie Gene Selwin sat in the crowd that night, and everyone knew her being there made Ramses play with that much more fire. Rosie sat just a few tables away from the stranger. She had her quill out and was jotting down sketches in a leather-bound tome. Rosie was the inventor of the crew; most nights she would spend at her regular table, dreaming up ideas for new machines and weapons to the strains of that sweet music. During the day you could find her in the workshop behind the Bochinche, tinkering and drilling, bringing those dreams to whirring, clanking, steaming life.

Ramses kept steady time on the congas, a gentle tap-tapping bolero strut, but his eyes tracked the stranger’s every move. Oba Ade Iku sliced his hand through the smoky air, a warrior king chopping off his enemies’ heads, and launched into another part of the tale. The stranger scribbled notes on a scrap of paper, his big eyes glued to Oba.

Ramses glanced at the girl he loved, and then returned to the stranger. Who was this man? Oba’s story reached another height: The warrior king gazed over the shattered remnants of an army from his mountaintop. The stranger stood, his teeth clenched, fingers squirming like fattened bloodworms after the rain. Ramses stopped drumming. The stranger reached into his jacket, threw two small packets to the floor. Ramses launched across the stage, spilling the congas to either side.

He bolted toward the stranger just as a billow of smoke unfurled from the ground. The Bochinche began filling with a thick shroud of gray. The stranger ducked past Ramses’s swinging arms, dashing toward Rosie Gene. Ramses saw the move, and he hurled toward them as Rosie cracked a bottle across the stranger’s face.

The gray smoke thickened. Ramses lost sight of Rosie, the stranger, everything. He pressed forward, shoving through the crowd, feeling for Rosie, coming up short. Nearly overwhelmed by coughing, he found his way outside, stumbled against a wall, and turned toward the masses fleeing the club. Rosie stood beside Oba. “I’m okay,” she insisted as Ramses ran up. Ramses hadn’t said a word in as long as anyone had known him. Rosie knew how to read the tiny details of his face like it was a language of its own. He started to shake his head. “Stop, Ramses. I’m fine. But . . .”

“That man got away with Rosie’s notebook,” Oba said. Ramses reeled, caught between good news and bad. That notebook was covered with Rosie’s secret designs, pages and pages of mechanical weaponry and flying machines, transporters, intricate technologies Ramses couldn’t begin to make sense of. “We have to stop him,” Oba said. “I suspect he belongs to the Olritch Scourlings. If they get ahold of Rosie’s plans, things may become very dire indeed.”

The Olritch Scourlings: an age-old fraternal order that had spent generations trying to open a gateway for their foul gods to worm through into this world. The Scourlings would’ve been another hilarious cosmic joke if they didn’t command such vast wealth. They recruited their brotherhood from the upper echelons of Manhattan’s elite, and met in a high-rise downtown that they’d gutted and turned into a shadowy temple. We used to sneak in and laugh at them, rich kids playing silly games, but Oba was right: In the past few years, the Scourlings had taken leaps and bounds toward opening their gateway, and their gods—the Visitors, they called them—were capable of unleashing catastrophe upon us all.

Ramses took Rosie in his arms, kissed her. She whispered a tiny prayer to him: “Take the skies, my love. I’ll take the streets,” and then turned and hopped on her unimotor. Ramses ducked back into the club as the sound of Rosie’s revving engines filled the night. The smoke had mostly cleared out now, and he retrieved his pack.

Fifteen minutes later, he stood before the long, deserted stretch of President Street, strapped up, armed and ready to fly.

The half-moon hung low over Brooklyn tonight, illuminated the shuttered storefronts and a small park. Ramses took a step, then another. Inside him, a tiny list unraveled as he broke into a run: our names, his dead parents and grandparents, the elders in his spiritual house. He gunned the tiny motor Rosie had pulled from the junk lot. A warm vibration thrummed to life against his back. He leapt once and hit the power charge. Flame exploded from the pack as the mechanical wings unfolded to either side. The ground fell away. Ramses flew.

Scattered gaslights illuminated the winding Brooklyn streets below. Flatbush Avenue sloped away from the dark trees of Prospect Park. It was four a.m., almost no one out but the night watch and a few straggling drunks. Airships hung just beneath the clouds like great, weightless whales. A mournful horn sounded from the harbor, but otherwise, Ramses’s puttering engine was the only noise. He banked northwest toward the bay. Manhattan loomed tall beyond the Brooklyn clock tower. A single sauropod stretched its long neck out of the dark river: the bridge crews working late. No stranger stalked the streets, though. Almost no one at all.

Ramses swooped low over the tight alley labyrinth of the Harbor District, a clutter of apartment houses squished between the bay and the river. A movement caught his eye and he veered left and cut his engine, gliding along between the dark building fronts. Silence in the streets. Then a clatter of footsteps on cobblestone. There. The stranger stormed along an alleyway and ducked out of sight. A few moments later, Rosie, now on foot, crept along through the shadows after him.

This was back before the bombings; the Brazenvurst Cathedral still reached its twisted spires skyward. Ramses landed on a buttress and waited beside the snarling ’goyles and gnarled saints. Within minutes, the stranger darted from of his hiding place and down the cobblestone street. Ramses slid back into the sky, catching a salty updraft from the harbor, and soared through the alleyway and around a corner, following the echoing footfall. The stranger ran into a tenement and slammed the door.

Ramses grinned, eased toward the ground, and landed running. Rosie would be crouched in wait somewhere, preparing. The wings folded back into his pack as he stepped into a dim front room. He took his time on the rickety stairwell. There was no point in showing up out of breath. He let another silent prayer rise inside him, the one said to call on one’s warrior spirits before battle, and we gathered in the thick air around him. He unsheathed the machete as he walked into the corridor. At the far end, a single line of light cut the shadows from under a closed door. Ramses walked slowly to it, took a deep breath. And then, with a single kick, he flattened the door and sidestepped in, blade first.

Piles of magazines and ancient books cluttered the tiny room. No stranger. The bathroom, a mildewy disaster, was also empty. A single filth-covered window looked out on the dark sky over the river, the construction lights’ glum miasmas in the night. No stranger, but there on the writing desk near the window—Rosie’s notebook. Ramses snatched it, threw it in his pouch. Stacks of parchment lay on the desk, messy, ink-blotched writing splattered across page after page.

’Twas two-fold, the insult, Ramses read, and soon Frederick took it upon himself to find the blasted monstrosity and destroy it, but alas it lurked deep in the Morgath Woods, where its villainous acolytes patrolled and genuflected alongside the hulking, tentaculous mass, inventing stories and casting shells with trembling brown hands.

Mouth hanging open, Ramses sat. The stranger’s story went on, terrifying and achingly familiar, a broken, mutant version of one of Oba’s tales: Frederick huddled in the bushes as the devilish acolytes prepared their sacrifice, grabbing its horns and subjugating it swiftly upon the killing floor. The monstrosity writhed with pleasure, its cackles echoing into the thick swampy night and mixing with desperate mewls from the goat.

Ramses shook his head, shuffled through the papers. Story after story formed a glimmering, twisted reflection of the tales Oba recited each night at the Bochinche. But these weren’t Orishas or ancestral spirits, they were monsters, demons, phantoms of the deep.

Ramses went to stand, but something wet tightened around his ankles. Two greenish, pale tentacles, dripping with thick ichor, had emerged from the underside of the chair and now held each of Ramses’s ankles fast against the wooden claw-foot chair legs.

Frantic, he reached for his machete. “Stop!” yelled a voice. The stranger stood in the center of the room. His trembling hand held a revolver at Ramses’s face. “Don’t move.”

The stranger eyed him. “You’re the . . . the drummer, aren’t you? You’ve come for the notebook, I presume.”

Ramses cold-stared him.

“Well?” the stranger yelled.

The tentacles tightened around Ramses’s ankles.

“I don’t know anything about it, really. I’m just a writer. I listen. I’ve been there before, you know, your little club. In disguise, of course. The Scourlings are a benevolent fraternity, mostly. We are curious. The elders sent me, gave me the smoke bombs. They want to know more about you, you know. They think your stories can help usher in the . . . the Visitors.”

The Visitors. He looked down at the tentacles that wrapped ever tighter around his legs. Clearly, the stranger’s stories had helped him begin to open the portal. That, combined with the technology plans in Rosie’s notebook, would allow the Scourlings and their mutant Visitors to rampage through the streets of New York unchecked.

Ramses’s fingers were a few centimeters from the machete handle, but then what? He couldn’t chop the tentacles away without getting shot. He kept his expression tight, ignored the beads of sweat that trickled down his back.

“The Visitors will come through regardless, yes? We’re just here to help them along, really. But you have been here now, you’ve seen them, the gateway.” The stranger nodded at the tentacles. “They like me. I can come and go as I please. But they are upset with you, I’m afraid.” The stranger grinned. “Terrible things happen when they’re upset.” He took a step toward Ramses, gun shaking. “So give us the notebook, yes? And then we’ll see if they like you better.”

The apartment door swung open; Rosie barged through. The stranger spun around, gun in hand, and in that split second, Ramses Garcia felt his heart crumble. The girl he loved would be blown away before his eyes, all while trying to save his life. But instead of a gunshot ringing out, the whole world dissolved into a bright white.

The stranger yelled and then something collapsed with a thud. The room was still empty, a pale blur with only the slightest hint of movement in its midst. But Ramses could smell Rosie’s perfume and then he felt her climb onto his lap. Her flash cannon. Of course.

“Stop!” the stranger yelled from somewhere on the floor.

“You have my notebook?” Rosie whispered.

Ramses nodded, barely suppressing his smile. He knew what to do.

“Then let’s go,” Rosie said, clutching him tightly.

Ramses leaned forward and slammed back against the chair, tipping it toward the window, and then clicked the ignition boost on his jet pack.

“No!” the stranger yelled, but his howl was cut short by the roaring engine and then the shattering of glass.

“Ay, m’ijo,” Ramses’s abuela used to say, her breath thick with tobacco. “Never leave a place the same way you enter.”

Ramses thought of these words as he and Rosie exploded through the window and out into the midnight sky over the East River. His vision gradually returned, and the dark city came to life around him. Up, up, up they surged, the chair trailing beneath him as tentacles clenched and squirmed against his legs. Flames danced along the wall of the tenement. He caught a glimpse of the stranger’s bulging eyes staring out at him before smoke engulfed the whole facade. He handed his machete to Rosie. She held tight to him with one hand, and with the other she hacked once, twice, then three times at the seething tentacle. It screeched, squirted ichor from its gashes, and then released. The chair tumbled for an instant through open sky, and then a sauropod’s gigantic head rose to meet it, mouth open. The chair disappeared with the snapping of those great jaws. The beast paused, its huge eyes wide and then, as if in slow motion, its neck seemed to become boneless. It crashed into the dark waters of the East River and disappeared.

“A close one,” Rosie said, surveying the city around them.

Ramses nodded, watched the plume of smoke rise toward the stars.

“If they had gotten those designs . . .”

Another nod.

The still-dark world around them seemed to be quietly careening toward some unknown catastrophe. They sensed the coming war, could almost smell it, felt their hidden enemies churning in the shadows. But they knew we moved with them as well, felt our strength and the wisdom of the ages course through them. There would be turmoil and strife ahead, but there would be also be stories and music; many long, joyful nights at the Bochinche awaited them, and there were still so many new machines to invent.

Ramses and Rosie held each other close and hurtled through the sky toward Brooklyn.

©2018 by Daniel José Older. Originally published in Fresh Ink, edited by Lamar Giles. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Daniel José Older is the New York Times bestselling author of the Middle Grade historical fantasy series Dactyl Hill Squad, the Bone Street Rumba urban fantasy series, Star Wars: Last Shot, The Book of Lost Saints, and the award winning Young Adult series the Shadowshaper Cypher, which won the International Latino Book Award and was shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize in Young Readers’ Literature, the Andre Norton Award, the Locus, the Mythopoeic Award, and named one of Esquire’s 80 Books Every Person Should Read.

EXCERPT: The Unspoken Name (Tor Books)

A.K. Larkwood | 5914 words

A.K. Larkwood’s The Unspoken Name is a stunning debut fantasy about an orc priestess turned wizard’s assassin.

What if you knew how and when you will die?

Csorwe does—she will climb the mountain, enter the Shrine of the Unspoken, and gain the most honored title: sacrifice.

But on the day of her foretold death, a powerful mage offers her a new fate. Leave with him, and live. Turn away from her destiny and her god to become a thief, a spy, an assassin—the wizard’s loyal sword. Topple an empire, and help him reclaim his seat of power.

But Csorwe will soon learn—gods remember, and if you live long enough, all debts come due.

Coming February 11, 2020 from Tor Books.

Chapter One: The House of Silence

In the deep wilds of the north, there is a Shrine cut into the mountainside. The forest covers these hills like a shroud. This is a quiet country, but the Shrine of the Unspoken One is quieter still. Birds and insects keep away from the place.

In the valley below the Shrine is a temple known as the House of Silence. Its acolytes leave offerings at the foot of the steps that lead up to the Shrine, but they do not come any closer.

Every fourteen years, in spring, when the streams in the hills began to thaw, a procession leaves the House of Silence. The Prioress rides in a palanquin with six bearers. Despite the cold these bearers are naked from the waist up. Every other day of every other year they are farmers and woodsmen, but on this day they have an ancient purpose to serve. They walk the road of white stones that leads into the hills.

Going before them all is a girl of fourteen, wreathed with flowers and veiled in white. At her side she leads a spotless bull calf on a gilded chain.

The procession halts at the foot of the steps to the Shrine. Here is a stone altar, in which a channel is carved. Here is a vessel set at the lowest point of the channel. Here is a bright, sharp knife.

The girl leads the calf to the altar and they cut its throat. The blood runs black in the dim spring light. It splashes on the frozen stone and flows into the vessel.

She takes the bowl of blood. She climbs the steps to the Shrine. She is never seen again.

• • • •

One month before the day of Csorwe’s death, a stranger came to the House of Silence. Csorwe did not see him arrive. She was down in the crypt, listening to the dead.

In the underbelly of the House there were many cellars, hollowed out in the grey strata of the sacred mountain. Deepest of all were the crypts, where the eminent dead among the Followers of the Unspoken Name were sealed to strive for rest. Rest was not something that came easily here, so close to the Shrine of the god. The dead scratched at the walls and cooed in sad imitation of living song.

Csorwe was sitting in the antechamber trying to pick out the words, as she did from time to time, when she heard someone coming down the passage. She drew her feet up into the alcove, hoping she might not be noticed. A bubble of candlelight approached and opened. It was Angwennad, one of the lay-sisters.

“Csorwe, dear, come out from there, you’re wanted upstairs,” said Angwennad. The other lay-sisters called Csorwe miss or, unbearably, ma’am, but Angwennad had been Csorwe’s nurse, and there were certain liberties permitted to her.

Csorwe slipped down from her perch. She didn’t think she was late for afternoon prayers, but it was easy to lose your place in time—even, as she knew, when you only had so much time to lose.

“There’s a pilgrim here for you,” said Angwennad. “Very foreign. Shabby looking, although I can’t say I’m surprised about that. They’re saying he came through the hills on foot.”

Pilgrims visited the House of Silence every now and then. Most of them wanted nothing more from Csorwe than a blessing, but Angwennad was looking at her with a soft anxiety that suggested this visitor needed something more demanding.

Upstairs, Angwennad took her place at the back of the hall. The priestesses were already kneeling in rows down either side. Prioress Sangrai took Csorwe aside and explained that the pilgrim required a prophecy, as was his right.

The acolytes set out lacquered trays and tapers, and the Keeper of Black Lotus went from tray to tray, tipping out dried leaves and stems of lotus from her censer.

When it was time, Csorwe set off alone down the centre of the hall, toward the dais at the far end. The hall was lit only by candles, and by the dim glow of the lotus as it began to smoulder. The faces of the others were like pale thumbprints in the haze.

At the dais, the Prioress and the librarian stood to one side with the stranger. Csorwe got a brief look at him as she approached, but she kept her eyes down and her pace stately. On the dais was a high-backed chair. Csorwe took her place here, holding her head high, looking straight ahead. The rows of priestesses and acolytes, the Prioress, the librarian, and the stranger, all blurred and faded at the periphery of her vision. All she could see was the darkness and the empty air occupying the great vault of the hall.

The fumes of the lotus rose among the pillars, sweet and elusive. Once the Keeper of Black Lotus had completed her round, she came to Csorwe with a porcelain cup, in which the seeds and petals of lotus gleamed in resin. It gave off a fine, black, coiling smoke.

The Followers of the Unspoken Name bowed their heads all at once, repeating in one murmuring voice:

“Unspoken and Unspeakable One, Knight of Abyss, Overseer of the Eaten Worlds, praise and reverence unto your Chosen Bride. May she intercede for us.”

Csorwe raised the cup and took a breath. Cedar, pepper, incense, and underneath it all the irresistible perfume of the lotus. Her sight darkened, and a pleasant ache crept up her limbs, followed by a numbness. The lights in the hall were very far away, and they shimmered as though underwater. With each breath, they dimmed a little more.

In waking life, Csorwe had walked every one of the crypts and cellars beneath the House of Silence. She knew them by sight and by experience, by touch and by heart. Under the sway of the lotus, she felt the shape of them as though she had them in her mouth. The whole mountain was riddled with hollows, and at the heart of the mountain was the greater void.

She plummeted through the dark, and felt the eyes of the void upon her.

The presence of the Unspoken One crept in slowly at first, like the first reaching wavelets of the tide, rising gently, prying into the burrows of sand-creeping things. And then all at once it was impossible to ignore: a vast invisible pressure, a single focused curiosity that weighed her with impersonal hunger.

Then, a voice, and a face. Back in the hall of the House of Silence, the stranger was kneeling before her, making the salute of sealed lips in respect. His face rippled and gleamed, swimming as though reflected on the surface of a pool. Although he must have been at least forty years old, he had no tusks at all. He was the only foreigner Csorwe had ever seen, and she wished she could see him more clearly.

“Chosen Bride, I most humbly ask a boon of the Unspoken One,” said the stranger. He spoke Oshaaru with a curious accent.

“What is it that you desire?” It was Csorwe’s own voice, but, of course, she did not feel her lips move. The Unspoken One held her in its grip.

“Knowledge,” said the stranger.

“Knowledge of that which has passed away, or that which is to come?” said the Unspoken One. Its attention flickered over Csorwe’s thoughts, testing. It found no resistance. She had been schooled for this. She was a clean vessel for the voice of the god.

“Knowledge of that which lives in the present moment,” said the stranger.

This was unorthodox. Disrespectful, even. Csorwe braced herself for the anger of the Unspoken One. It seemed to notice her attention, and she felt a kind of reassuring caress, like the chill that rises from an open tomb.

“Speak, then,” it said, still using Csorwe’s voice.

“Unspoken and Unspeakable One, where is the Reliquary of Pentravesse?”

Csorwe had the same familiar feeling of plunging uncontrollably through nothingness. Bright objects flickered and passed out of sight. And then she felt the touch of the Unspoken One again, turning her attention.

She saw a rosewood box. It was eight-sided, inlaid with gold, about the size of a man’s clenched fist. It seemed close enough to touch, but this wasn’t Csorwe’s first time prophesying and even through the fog of lotus she knew it was only a vision.

A close, thick darkness gathered around the box, like a velvet bag drawn tight, and then the box itself disappeared from view. The vision ended, as though deliberately snatched away. She reached for it again, fumbling into the dark, but couldn’t reach it.

“It is hidden from my sight,” said the Unspoken One.

Disgust and disbelief were emotions unbecoming of a god, but the Unspoken was certainly capable of displeasure.

“But it does still exist?” said the stranger. He did his best to keep his voice level. Csorwe did not miss the note of satisfaction.

“It is intact,” said the Unspoken One. That was as much as the stranger was going to get, it seemed. The Unspoken One drew back from her, like a wave falling back down the shore, leaving only a sheen of brightness where it had touched, and then nothing.

She was herself again, on the dais, in the House of Silence, with the bitter aftertaste of lotus in her mouth. Her head swam, the cup fell from her fingers, and she fainted.

• • • •

Csorwe slept through afternoon prayers, woke in her own cell, and stumbled down to the refectory for dinner. The black lotus was not known for its gentleness after the fact. Her head felt both thick and fragile, like a hard-boiled egg, and her throat burnt as though she had been screaming.

A group of novices—Csorwe’s agemates—were clustered around a single table. Some of them looked round when she entered, but most paid no attention.

Until Csorwe’s thirteenth birthday she had lived and studied with the novices. Still, she had no friends among them. The Chosen Bride of the Unspoken One was set apart by protocol, but also by pragmatism. There was no point cultivating the friendship of a Chosen Bride. Most of the novices came from farming families; they understood that it was no good getting fond of the pig before the season of butchery.

Csorwe took a bowl of cabbage soup and sat at another table. The others were all talking about the stranger. He was a wizard, it seemed, from a far-off city that none of them could pronounce. They got quieter and quieter until the whole group was gathered around Ushmai, who was whispering that she thought the stranger-wizard was good-looking.

Csorwe sat and ate her soup, thinking it through. In thirty days it would be the time. That meant twenty-nine more dinners after this. She tried to pay more attention to the soup, to take her time with each bite and savour it properly, but the lotus made everything taste like rust.

Her thoughts kept wandering back to the stranger. If he was a wizard, why was he so shabby? Where were his servants? What was it he wanted so badly that he had come all this way alone? The box she had seen in her vision must be very valuable, or very sacred, or both.

The novices fell silent in unison, and Csorwe looked round to see what had startled them. The stranger was standing in the door to the refectory. He had to stoop to enter.

Csorwe peeped up at him, pretending to eat her soup. He had dark brown skin, a huge amount of hair bound up in a clasp, long pointed ears, and a full beard. She had never seen anyone like this before. Oshaaru such as Csorwe were grey-skinned and golden-eyed, and the few men she had ever seen were clean-shaven.

He wore a long, ragged, outlandish coat, patched all over so that it was impossible to tell what the original cloth had been. There were traces of embroidery in among the patches, threads of gold and silver that glittered when he moved. It was possible he had been a rich man many years ago, but only if he had been a beggar since then.

Still, he didn’t look like a poor man, at least not like the poor country men who lived near the House of Silence. Stooping was not a habit for him.

He looked around the refectory for a while, and then, to Csorwe’s horror, he sat down opposite her.

“My name is Belthandros Sethennai,” he said. “I believe we’ve met, though I didn’t have a chance to introduce myself at the time.”

She said nothing, looking down at the half-eaten bowl of soup.

“There’s no need to worry. I did check with the Prioress. She finds it theologically permissible for you to speak to me.”

It wasn’t the theology that had been bothering her so much as the watching eyes of the novices, but she looked up at him. It was very odd to see an adult without visible tusks. His face looked so innocent and unguarded without them that it was difficult to gauge his expressions.

“I wanted to thank you for your indulgence of my curiosity, earlier on,” he said.

Csorwe stared at him. It was both absurd and improper to accept thanks for prophecy. She imagined him pouring a glass of wine and thanking the bottle.

“I hope the experience was not too draining for you,” he said. She shook her head. “I wish I could express how much the information means. I spent so many years investigating the history of the Reliquary without even beginning to imagine it might still exist in fragments, let alone intact—but I won’t bore you with ancient history. I always manage to believe people are interested in my research, despite all evidence to the contrary.” He smiled. “If you can spare me a little more of your time, the Prioress tells me you might take me to visit the library?”

In the library of the House of Silence, there was a book bound in the skin of a murdered king, or so it was said. There were books in cipher, books in obsidian, books in whale hide. There were atlases of ruined cities and blighted worlds. There were useless maps to every treasure ever lost to time, and lexicons of every forgotten language. The library of the House of Silence was a monument to entropy.

It was also beautifully warm, because the librarian had bullied Angwennad into bringing her twice the usual allotment of firewood.

The librarian was sitting at her desk when Csorwe came in with Belthandros Sethennai. Her name was Oranna. She was young enough that Csorwe remembered her initiation from acolyte to priestess. Her eyes were the colour of beeswax, and she wore silver caps on her tusks. She didn’t look up as they came in, but knew exactly who was there; she had perfected this trick as an acolyte and it served her well as librarian.

“So,” said Oranna. “The Reliquary of Pentravesse. If you’d asked me yesterday, I would have said you’d come to the right place.”

“But today . . . ?” said Sethennai.

“Today, it transpires, though contrary to all logic, that the Reliquary still exists. That which lives in the present has no place here. Here you will find the truth only about those who are dead, and that which is dust.”

“That’s a pity,” said Sethennai, wandering down a row of shelves. His hands were stuffed in the pockets of his awful coat, as if he had to restrain them from touching the books. “Still, I’d like to see what you have on the Reliquary. Even if it’s nothing but lies.”

Oranna’s brow twisted with suppressed aggravation. “Csorwe,” she said. “Stop hovering by the door, will you, and come and sit by the fire.”

Csorwe did as she was told, and settled down to watch a phalanx of sparks creep up the side of a log. When Csorwe was little, Angwennad had told her about imps who lived in the hearth and warred over the ashes. It was painful to remember that now. She should have put those things behind her.

She sat and half listened to Oranna and Sethennai. The librarian was never eager to take down one of the books, and her distaste for the stranger was palpable, but she had opened a heavy folio and was looking for her place.

“The Reliquary of Pentravesse is said to mark its passage through the world, in the sense that a scythe marks its passage through the grass,” she read. “Seek patiently. Listen for strange accidents, disastrous coincidences, events that slip their reins. You may chart the progress of Pentravesse’s final work through an unsuspecting world. This is the nature of the curse upon the Reliquary.”

“Greed and ambition pursue it,” said Sethennai, as if he too were reading aloud. “Bad luck, ill judgment, and unintended consequences follow in its wake.” He smiled at her. “But the idea is irresistible.”

Csorwe happened to look up just as Oranna did, and saw the look that passed between the librarian and the wizard. Imagine two spies who pass in the street and recognise one another, before each disappears into a different crowd. Ordinary wariness is replaced with shock, delight, terror—and then the moment passes.

• • • •

Csorwe saw Belthandros Sethennai only once more in the House of Silence. He stayed in the guest wing, visited the library from time to time, and troubled nobody, as far as Csorwe knew. Her time was taken up with preparations for the day that was to come. There was no ceremonial name for it. Csorwe thought of it as THAT DAY. She prayed and meditated for hours each day. She studied The Book of Unmaking and The Dream of Fly Agaric with the Prioress. She fasted and burnt lotus as the books required.

These preparations were tiring. At first, she slept each night as though she were already dead. Then she began to wake in the small hours, and lie awake, in the grip of a sickly fear, as though just realising what was going to happen to her. As though she hadn’t known since she was old enough to understand it. On her fourteenth birthday she would go up to the Shrine of the Unspoken One and that would be the end of her.

The summer would come. There would be another Chosen Bride. The novices would get their adult tusks and make their vows as acolytes. The world would continue, but she would be gone.

One night she got up from her cot, unable to stand it any longer, and let herself out into the corridor. Here I am, she thought. This is me, in two weeks’ time. Here I am, walking up to the Shrine. This is the end. This is how it will feel at the end. Thy name shall be forsaken and thou shalt be my bride.

The flagstones were ice cold underfoot. There was no light, but she knew the House of Silence too well to trip. She climbed the stairs to the library, at first thinking only of the steps in the mountainside. Then she saw the line of golden light under the double doors of the library, and thought of the warmth of the fire and the comforting smell of pine smoke, the truth about those who are dead and about that which is dust.

She went into the library as quietly as she could, avoiding the door that creaked. Somehow, she hadn’t thought there would be anyone inside. She had imagined the fire wasting all that heat and light in solitude.

She knew at once that she had made a mistake. The librarian and the wizard were there. Sethennai sat by the hearth, as though bathing in the glow of the fire. His ragged coat hung on the back of his chair. Oranna was taking a book down from a high shelf, and froze as Csorwe came in, like a cat surprised in the act of stealing scraps. Csorwe stepped back, let the door swing shut, and scuttled back into the dark.

She knew at once that she had seen something she should not. Whatever the meeting in the library had meant, it was not for her eyes, and the punishments for idle curiosity were severe.

Hasty footsteps followed after her. Incoherent flashes and shadows fluttered over the walls: the light of a lantern carried by someone in a hurry. Oranna caught up to her without much difficulty.

“What are you doing, Csorwe?” she said, in a low voice, careful not to wake anyone else. Csorwe was beginning to realise that she wasn’t the only one here who had broken the rules. “It’s the middle of the night.”

Csorwe couldn’t explain. She shrank back into the darkness. A moment later, Sethennai appeared at Oranna’s shoulder.

“Couldn’t you sleep?” said Oranna, and then her face cleared, as though she understood, and was somehow relieved. “You’re afraid.”

Csorwe nodded. At that moment she couldn’t have said whether she was more afraid of Oranna or the Shrine.

“Ah. The Chosen Bride,” said Sethennai. He hung back behind Oranna, in the dark, and Csorwe couldn’t tell from his tone of voice whether he was suspicious or just curious. “Having doubts?”

Oranna ignored him, still looking down at Csorwe. “Fear is no fault,” she said, quoting the Book. “It is right to fear the Unspoken One. The only fault is to seek out consolation in falsities.”

Csorwe nodded, staring down at her bare feet.

“I knew the Chosen Bride who came before you,” said Oranna. Csorwe startled. This topic was not forbidden, but it was almost unthinkable. Csorwe thought she was the only one who had ever wondered about it. “We were novices together. She was afraid at first, but when the day came she was quite calm. You will find the same peace, I’m certain. Remember your meditations.”

Csorwe assented, and Oranna led her back to her cell. The librarian was not known for such considerate gestures. Csorwe wondered whether Oranna meant it in honour of the Bride she had known. She wished Oranna had said more about her. What was her name? What had she said and done? Perhaps Oranna was the only one who remembered.

By the time she got to sleep, she had almost forgotten about Sethennai.

• • • •

Another sleepless hour suspended between midnight and dawn, one week before the day of sacrifice. Csorwe wrapped herself in a blanket and went down to the crypts. Her slippers scalloped the dust as she wandered.

The dead were never quiet in their cells, but they were loudest by night, singing their tuneless, wordless song and battering at the doors. Csorwe went on past the smaller cells, toward the grand, central chamber where the Prioresses of ages past were buried, sealed behind a great iron door.

Some of the old Prioresses had been so virtuous they had sewn up their mouths; they died from thirst rather than utter a blasphemous word. The door was marked with the sign of sealed lips, and Csorwe made the salute automatically: three fingers pressed to her lips, between her tusks.

The iron bolt was so cold it ached to touch, as though it drew the living warmth from Csorwe’s bones. Metal shrieked on stone as she drew it back and lifted the latch. At the noise of the door opening, the dead fell silent.

She saw the revenants at the edge of the circle of candlelight, standing among their biers like dinner guests waiting to be seated. Slowly, as though they were shy, they began to approach her. There were dozens of them, wrapped in their shrouds, reaching and watching. She stepped toward them, shutting the door behind her, and walked out into the gathering crowd of the dead. Their bony fingertips ran through her hair and brushed against her bare skin with a kind of desperate gentleness.

Csorwe sat down on the edge of a bier and they gathered around, as though she had brought news from the living world. The Prioresses had lived and died here in the House of Silence, and though the presence of the Unspoken had revived their bodies, their souls had returned to the earth. Their eyes were empty sockets. There was nothing they could tell her.

• • • •

That day arrived. Csorwe moved like a mannequin from one place to another, not really noting where she was or what was happening. They dressed her in white silk and lace, and crowned her with white dog roses. Angwennad told her that she was a brave girl, that the years had passed so quickly, that she had never really believed the day would come.

She was anointed with resin. The scent of lotus mingled with the animal smell of the sacrificial calf. Everything was set in motion. This was the end. It was almost over.

The procession reached the altar at the foot of the steps. The priestesses came forward to kill the calf, their yellow habits blazing against the mossy stone of the hill. Csorwe stared directly ahead, and saw the knife as a flash of light in her periphery.

The blood of the calf filled the bowl to the brim and spilled over. They held out the bowl to her and she took it, clasping the slippery metal in both hands with difficulty.

Then they drew off to each side, and all—the priestesses, the acolytes, the Prioress and the bearers of her palanquin—bowed, once. The librarian watched as Csorwe turned to face the steps.

The way rose steeply. If she had looked back she would have seen the tops of the priestesses’ heads, and the House of Silence below them, and beyond that the forests, rising and falling like black waves, far into the distance. Perhaps as far as the village where she was born. She did not look back. She looked down at her reflection, as it rippled in the bowl of blood.

She reached the top of the steps. The wind plucked at the hem of her dress, raising goose pimples on her calves. Her shoulders ached. Weeds blew in the wind where they grew between the slabs of stone. There were mosses, and small grasses, and flowers that had survived the frosts.

Nobody had walked here for hundreds of years but those who were chosen as she was chosen.

She tried not to think about the flowers. They were scentless. She had seen them so many times. She had seen as many flowers as she needed to see. She had eaten enough cabbage soup. She had listened to the dead scratching at the walls for long enough. It was time. If she faltered now, she would never go on.

She turned her eyes to the doorway. It yawned in the side of the mountain, raw, open, and lightless. Neither moss nor grass grew close to the rock face. No living thing was permitted to pass through this way but she who had been chosen. She walked toward the door, and stepped through.

She came into a round chamber, whose walls were hollowed with passages that led deeper into the mountain. In the middle of the chamber was a shallow pit, faintly delineated by the light from the doorway.

At the edge of the pit was a notch of smooth stone, wide enough for her to kneel comfortably. It was impossible to tell whether the place had been smoothed as a kindness or simply worn down by centuries of use.

She thought of the girls who had come here before her, and brought with them the offering of blood for the Unspoken One. If they were so chosen, so perfectly selected for this honour, perhaps they had known the same uncertainty, here in the silence of the halls under the hill. Perhaps they had spent the last minutes of their lives like this, lost in apprehension in the dark. But perhaps it had been easy for them. Perhaps they had done what had to be done, and gone straight on into the deeper places, to find what waited for them.

She knelt down by the edge and tipped up the bowl; the blood ran into the pit, gleaming in the darkness. At once the interest of the Unspoken One closed on the room, and again she felt the full force of its regard pressing in on her. It knew her. It recognised her. The room was empty; nothing breathed here but Csorwe herself. The Unspoken One waited farther on, deeper down in the mountain.

Soon she began to feel self-conscious. Her knees and shoulders ached from long kneeling in one position. The pit had been sucked dry of blood. The Unspoken One was there, but it offered no guidance. The chamber was still dark; the passages beyond were even darker.

“This isn’t supposed to happen,” she said, out loud. “Where am I supposed to go?”

“An excellent question.”

There was a man in one of the passages. She jumped to her feet, and the empty bowl clattered on the rock with a blasphemous jangle.

“Where do you think you are supposed to go?” said the intruder. It was a voice that suggested power and confidence, but it was not the voice of a god. Her fear gave way swiftly to outrage.

“It’s you—I know you,” she said, bracing her hands on her hips. “You can’t come here. Come out of there. You’ll die.”

Belthandros Sethennai stepped out into the chamber, smiling mildly. He held a lantern in one hand, and he watched her almost as intently as the Unspoken One did.

“So you can speak,” he said. “I did wonder.”

“If you don’t leave here it will kill you,” said Csorwe. The Unspoken One was in the room all around them, in the very weight of the air. “This is blasphemy. You can’t be here. Nothing alive is allowed to leave this place.”

There were laughter lines bracketing the man’s mouth, and they deepened as she spoke.

Csorwe crossed her arms and dug her nails into the soft flesh of her inner elbow. “Don’t laugh at me. How dare you. This is my death. It was marked out for me.”

“Yes, I know,” he said. He strode across the room to get a better look at her, stepping lightly over the pit and raising the lantern. She saw that the sleeves of his coat were rolled up and he was wearing a pair of heavy leather gauntlets. “Death awaits us all, O Handmaid of Desolation. But I don’t have to die here, and nor do you.”

She had hardly dared to dream that something like this might happen, that someone might decide there had been a mistake. It was blasphemous even to imagine it.

“I’m not coming with you,” said Csorwe. “This is a false consolation. You can’t make me leave.”

Sethennai leant back against the wall nearby. “I won’t make you do anything,” he said. “If you want to go down into the cave and see what the Unspoken One makes of its offerings, please yourself.” He took a breath, steadying himself against the wall as though concentrating. “It’s unfair of me, I know, to spoil the crowning purpose of your young life by turning up and making cruel remarks. If you’re certain that this is what you want, I’ll make myself scarce, and leave you to your transcendent experience.”

Csorwe knew when she was being made fun of, and clenched her hands in her skirts. “This was my honour,” she said. Tears of anger prickled in her eyes. “I was chosen for this.”

“Well,” said Sethennai. “Now you have been chosen for another occupation, unless you prefer to die in the dark rather than work for me. Do you imagine you are the first Chosen Bride to doubt the fate assigned to her? Plenty of your predecessors ran away rather than face the Unspoken in its lair. Most of them froze to death in the woods, and their remains still lie where they fell.”

Csorwe turned her back on him. This was a mistake: now she was facing the way back out onto the hillside, back to the weak sunlight and the frozen grasses. The Shrine was too high for her to see even the roof of the House of Silence, but she saw the distant shimmer of mountains, the forest, the hills, the white arcs of birds rising on the wind.

“I can’t,” she said. “Where could I go? I would freeze to death too.”

“It’s very difficult to run alone,” said Sethennai. “You would not be alone. You would be with me.” The laughter was gone from his face; his brows drawn together in concentration. His gauntleted hands were clenched tight at his sides. Deep in the mountain, the Unspoken One was beginning to notice him.

“The Prioress—” said Csorwe.

“She will never know you’re gone,” said Sethennai. “Make your choice, Csorwe. Stay here, or come with me. We are running out of time.”

“But the Unspoken One will know,” said Csorwe. She could feel the beginnings of its outrage already, building and crackling under the earth.

“Yes,” said Sethennai. “It will. The secret of greatness is to know when you should risk the wrath of god.”

He took off his gauntlets and held out a hand, and she took it. His hand was smooth, long-fingered, bearing a gold signet; hers small, blunt, and stained to the wrist with calf’s blood.

“Come along, Csorwe,” he said, “and let the Unspoken One cry for you in the pit.”

Copyright © 2020 by A.K. Larkwood. Excerpted from The Unspoken Name by A.K. Larkwood. 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

A.K. Larkwood studied English at St John’s College, Cambridge, and now lives in Oxford with her wife and a cat. The Unspoken Name is her debut novel.

Book Reviews: February 2020

LaShawn M. Wanak | 2088 words

Mazes of Power
Juliette Wade
Hardcover / Ebook / Audio
ISBN: 978-0756415747
DAW, February 2020, 416 pages

With our country the way it is today, one would think that a fantasy novel focused on political intrigue wouldn’t be so much escapism, but more like reading today’s news. Yet Juliette Wade’s debut novel, Mazes of Power, not only dives deep into political intrigue, it focuses a sharp lens on the relevant issue of what one can do with power, for good or for ill.

As the oldest son of the First Family in the Grobal Caste, Tagaret just wants to hang out with his friends and try to catch a forbidden glimpse of the beautiful girl, Della. However, after a fever epidemic kills the current Eminence, Taraget’s father plans to nominate Taraget as a candidate for the next Heir to the throne. Eleven Families are also vying for their sons to become Heir, so Taraget must be ruthless, relentless, and possess the sharp, cutting wit of a rapier to win allies who will vote for him.

Unfortunately for Taraget, he possesses none of those attributes. His younger brother, Nekantor, does. Unfortunately, Nekantor is a sociopath.

Nekantor is obsessed with power, both the gaining and the wielding of it. But he also obsesses over rules. Doors must always be unlocked. Glasses should be full or empty, never between. Everything must remain in its proper place—servants, the lower castes, women, even his own mother. Nekantor will do whatever it takes to play the game, as he calls it, and Taraget slowly comes to the realization that only he could stop Nekantor from his ambitious plans.

Wade’s novel is being promoted as sociological science fiction, and after you read it, you can see why. Mazes of Power contains an underground world strictly drawn along class, race, and gender lines. Crossing any of those boundaries can bring dire consequences. Loving someone of the same sex or of a lower caste is seen as betraying the pure blood of the Grobal caste. However, this society doesn’t function as well as it would like. Inbreeding among the Grobal caste has made them susceptible to disease. Bare touch is taboo, becoming either a sign of intimate vulnerability or a risk of contagion. Toxic masculinity abounds. The castes do not encourage true friendship, but token alliance for the sake of gaining prestige for your own caste.

But there are those who are fighting to change the culture, such as Lady Sekemi, Taraget’s cousin, who is attempting to use her influence to push for equality for women. There’s Aloran, a servant/bodyguard assigned to Taraget’s mother, who does his best to serve and protect her from her abusive husband. And there’s Taraget himself, who begins to see the inequities around him, particularly as it not only affects Della, but also his best friend and secret lover, Reyn.

However, the strongest character is, surprisingly, Nekantor. While he is cruel in his quest for power, Wade also includes scenes that make him vulnerable. His obsessive-compulsive disorder can drive him into frenzies that isolate him from his friends and family. Instead of disabling him, however, it helps him detect patterns that no one else can see, and it allows him to take chances that Taraget would never consider. He is brilliant and he is dangerous. Taraget knows this, yet if he is to stop him, he must learn how to play the game as well. But that doesn’t mean, however, that he has to play by the same rules.

Here is where Wade truly shines. Every action Taraget and Nekantor take is a play for power in a system that’s rigged for the privileged. Is it possible to break that system and bring in something new, or is it doomed to break under its own weight? She could have easily written the two brothers as one fully good, one fully evil. Yet she intertwines the strengths and flaws of both, bringing the story to a captivating and complex ending that made me eager to read the next book in the series.

Finna
Nino Cipri
Paper / Ebook
ISBN: 978-1250245731
Tor.com, February 2020, 144 pages

I have a confession to make: The reason why I picked up Finna is because, growing up on the south side of Chicago, kids around my neighborhood used the word “finna” all the time (I finna go to the store, you need anything?). The novella Finna, written by Nino Cipri, has nothing to do with Black slang, but is a story about second chances and multiverses that also pokes fun at big box stores. So it’s still a win for me.

Ava and Jules both work at LitenVärld, a Norwegian furniture store that bears a certain resemblance to another gigantic blue-and-yellow store in this world. At the start of the story, they are in that awkward, unpleasant stage of breaking up with each other after a brief but intense dating relationship. When a young woman loses her grandmother in the store, Ava and Jules are given the task to find the lost customer. They also learn, to their surprise, that their store has a problem with wormholes, and the only way to track the grandmother is a device called the finna, which is used to find a target in multiple dimensions.

The story is told from Ava’s perspective, who, on top of dealing with feelings of insecurities and anxiety, has to deal with being around Jules, who is still sore from the breakup. Their bickering is painful to read, as neither can say anything without hurting the other.

But as Cipri shows, relationships don’t have to remain stuck in one place. There are infinite choices and infinite ways things can change. Ava and Jules learn that they themselves are constantly in flux, and it’s the choices they make that can determine how their relationship goes. As they move from one world to the next, and their surroundings turn surreal, they get to see their true selves and learn how to interact based on that. This is particularly true for Jules, who has always felt out of place back in their own world, being a transgendered child of immigrant Jamaican parents who uses the pronouns they/their. The worlds become a reflection of the different possibilities that are out there ready to be explored.

Truth be told, I wish the story was longer so we could explore more store universes. There’s one that’s downright Lovecraftian that was simultaneously horrifying and hilarious. But overall, this was a story about Ava and Jules, and I enjoyed it. Relationships are indeed messy and they can be filled with regret. I’ve had my share of times when I thought, “If I only did this, I could be doing that.” I’ve even wondered if there is an alternate me out there living out my best life . . . or worst life (although I’m pretty sure there’s a me out there who is playing bass in an all-woman band called Unbelievably Pregnant). But possibilities are everywhere, not just after the choice has been made. And though there may be some who would find the ending not all that happy, I found it very optimistic and positive. The only person you can change, really, is you.

Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation
Damian Duffy (Adaptation), Octavia E. Butler, John Jennings (Illustrations)
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 978-1419731334
Abrams ComicArts, January 2020, 272 pages

The first time I read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower was back in 2012. I thought I had read it in college, but as I noted in my Goodreads review (bit.ly/2QbW7Io): “If I had, I would have remembered sitting up all night unable to sleep.” The book unnerved me mainly because of how plausible it could be in real life. To take another line from my review, “Butler’s dystopia is a lot farther, and yet a lot closer, than we think.” These days, I feel that statement even more.

This is why, when I learned that John Jennings and Damian Duffy were adapting the book into a graphic novel, I rushed to immediately get a copy. Jennings and Duffy are the team who brought Butler’s book Kindred to graphic form, and the artwork in that was so haunting, so visceral, it enhanced the story in a whole new way.

A quick caveat: The review copy I received was unfinished—some scenes were still sketches, and the book was in black and white, unlike the finished copy, which will be in full color. But even unfinished, I could read the full story and get the gist of what they were going for, particularly the emotion in the characters’ eyes.

For those who have not read the book, Lauren Olamina is a teenager who lives in a walled neighborhood on the West Coast. The cost of gas is too high, so nearly everyone walks or bikes. Employment is hard to come by, and crime has ramped up to new levels. Lauren and her family do their best to get by in their neighborhood with their own garden and homeschooling, but Lauren foresees disaster and tries to prepare everyone for the day when their home would be breached. No one believes her, however. Not until it is too late.

Seeing the hard parts of the story in graphic form drives home the tension and the dread, but also the fierce will to survive and even thrive in a world gone mad. We see the stubborn will of Lauren’s father to provide his children a safe and a mundane life, even if it is short-lived. We see Lauren’s desperate attempts to save her family as well as wrestle with the burgeoning faith within her. We see the disaster that breaks her family apart and sends Lauren on the run. It’s one thing to read the story, but it is particularly chilling to see Lauren’s horror upon viewing the flames of her home. But we also see tenderness between her and the older gentlemen Bankole, as well as the protective grace as she gathers new friends and family after losing the old.

Of course, Earthseed, the formation of her religion that will eventually take mankind to the stars, is splashed all over the pages. Here, it’s a teenage girl’s musings, scattered along with thoughts from her journal, which is used as narration. One nice touch in the graphic novel is that these appear handwritten on blue-lined school paper; reassuringly familiar and yet a disappearing resource in this world where many people are illiterate. Also, I never appreciated just how diverse the characters were in their ethnicity and backgrounds until I saw them in the graphic novel. Jennings does a wonderful job in capturing their distinct personalities—from Lauren’s tough-as-nails visage that masks a frailty in her hyperempathy disorder, to her younger brother’s brashness, to Zahra Moss, one of Lauren’s neighbors who is initially shown to be quiet, but displays street smarts when she and Lauren are driven from the neighborhood.

These days, when I walk around my neighborhood, I wonder how long it will be before things will get bad enough that people start erecting their own walls for protection. Parable of the Sower is a frightening read, and yet, reading it again in graphic novel form, I can now see that no matter how bad things get, you can still cultivate hope. And that’s something we definitely need during these turbulent times.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LaShawn M. Wanak is a graduate of the 2011 class of Viable Paradise. Her fiction has been published in Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, and Ideomancer. She served as Associate Editor at Podcastle, and has written nonfiction for Fantasy Magazine, the Cascadia Subduction Zone, and the anthology Invisible 2.

Media Review: February 2020

Jeremiah Tolbert | 1071 words

Control
Written by ‎Sam Lake, Anna Megill, and Josh Stubbs; directed by Mikael Kasurinen
Developed by Remedy Entertainment, published by 505 Games.
Worldwide release August 27, 2019, for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One

Control begins with a wide angle shot of the facade of a mysterious concrete office building stretching high into the night fog. A woman’s voice deadpans that “this is going to be weirder than usual.” For reasons that become clear over time, our protagonist, a young woman named Jesse, walks into the building and into the lobby of something called the FEDERAL BUREAU OF CONTROL, or so says a sign behind the lobby desk, flanked by American flags. Anyone who has ever entered a U.S. federal building recognizes the style, lighting, and design of the space. The eerie soundtrack undercuts the normalcy of it, however.

As Jesse explores the building, things indeed get weird. She discovers (or, perhaps, rediscovers?) a government branch tasked with protecting the public from supernatural events, only the Bureau has been invaded by a body-snatching evil force Jesse calls the Hiss. In the first few minutes, Jesse picks up a shape-shifting, mysterious gun, an object of power important to the story of Control. Powerful supernatural entities known as the Board inform her that she is now the new director of the Bureau of Control, and it is the director’s duty to save the Bureau from the Hiss infestation. This plays well into Jesse’s personal mission, but to say more about that would be spoilers.

Control has some of the most innovative and interesting visual design, setting, and storytelling elements of any video game I’ve played since the bar-setting Half-Life 2. The developers and writers at Remedy have invested thousands of hours into creating the Oldest House, the enormous, Brutalist-style government building that seems to have no end to its rooms, and the Bureau of Control that resides within it. Background details are scattered everywhere artfully, and the setting is most often explored in short films, documents, and audio recordings. The Oldest House contains countless mysteries.

Mostly, you shoot at the mysteries.

Control would make an amazing setting for a movie or a television show, and I believe the depth of its storytelling is definitely inspired by those mediums. Unfortunately for us, Control is a video game, and modern developers struggle to provide players with something to do besides occasionally pressing an “activate” button and pumping bullets into various human-shaped bad guys. Thankfully, the gunplay is spiced up with a series of psychic powers that Jesse can unlock, and the gravity-gun-inspired telekinetic powers are very satisfying to use. This is good, because to complete the storyline of Control, you will be using those powers hundreds, if not thousands of times.

A little shooting gameplay is fine by me, and the game does its best to break it up with other mechanics and truly genius level design here and there, but predominantly, the actual gameplay mechanic it leans most heavily on is the shooting. Worse, Control’s difficulty spikes in odd ways. I was thankful some boss fights were optional because I couldn’t beat them despite dozens of attempts. Given Control’s rich back story and setting, it’s a shame that it doesn’t have a difficulty slider to allow busy adults with families (like me) the opportunity to experience the story without being forced to shoot several hundred Hiss-controlled FBI agents. There’s an RPG-style experience system like most shooters have these days to unlock upgrades, but I found the need to grind and upgrade mostly annoying. I forced my way through the story only fighting when it was required to advance my current mission and the story.

My frustration with endless gunfight was only matched by my obsession with learning more about the Oldest House, the Bureau, and the characters Jesse meets along the way. The Oldest House is a fascinating setting for a video game, and it’s a real testament to the design team that I was able to push through my frustration and complete the game. The ending was, as to be expected, somewhat unsatisfying, as Remedy already has plans for several expansions and probably even sequels in the works. That said, there are clever twists and turns to the story that deserve mention without spoiling them.

Despite my complaints, I did enjoy my time with Control. I enjoy shooters, so don’t think my dissatisfaction comes from not enjoying the genre. I think my frustration with the gameplay comes from the success of the other elements. The world here is so rich and interesting, I wish I had been provided more tools to interact with it beyond bullets and telekinetic fits. I would love a game in which I play a field agent of the Bureau hunting down objects of power, interviewing witness—perhaps something akin to L.A. Noir. I’m happy to shoot at bad guys sometimes! I just want to do more than that in games today.

There were times that I feel like the game hinted at its own faults, like when Jesse’s dry narration describes the metaphor of a poster on the wall in a room, and how an occupant of the room stares at the poster until they believe that the poster and the room are the whole world. But if one pulls the poster back, there’s a hole, perhaps a passage out of room to the “real world.” The metaphor represents the known world that we all believe in in Control. Remedy wants their game to be like pulling back the poster and revealing the hidden real world. In this, it’s only a partial success. The worldbuilding and setting evoke that sense. There is a greater world inside of Control, but when you pull back the poster, what is revealed is not only the clever setting and the Bureau’s history; it’s also is the mostly unsatisfying gunplay of a standard-issue modern shooter.

I will return to the Oldest House when expansions are released because I still hunger for information about the world of the game. If you can stomach the gameplay, your time there will be rewarded.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeremiah Tolbert has published fiction in Lightspeed, Fantasy Magazine, Interzone, Asimov’s, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Shimmer, as well as in the anthologies The Way of the Wizard, The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Seeds of Change, Federations, Polyphony 4, and Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. He’s also been featured several times on the Escape Pod and PodCastle podcasts, and his story “The West Topeka Triangle” was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award. In addition to being a writer, he is a web designer, photographer, and graphic artist. He lives in Kansas, with his wife and son.

Interview: Nino Cipri

Christian A. Coleman | 2720 words

Nino Cipri is a queer and trans/nonbinary writer, editor, and educator. They are a graduate of the Clarion Writing Workshop and the University of Kansas’s MFA program. Their award-winning debut fiction collection, Homesick, came out from Dzanc Books in 2019, and their novella Finna will be published by Tor.com in the spring of 2020. Nino has also written plays, poetry, and radio features; performed as a dancer, actor, and puppeteer; and worked as a stagehand, bookseller, bike mechanic, and labor organizer. One time, an angry person on the internet called Nino a verbal terrorist, which was pretty funny. You can talk to Nino on Facebook or Twitter @ninocipri, or on their website, ninocipri.com.

In your novella Finna, your protagonists Ada and Jules work at a big-box furniture store and have to rescue a customer’s grandmother who gets lost after slipping through a portal to another dimension. All this for minimum wage and all the while nursing the wounds from breaking up with each other. How did the premise come together for you?

I made a couple of trips to IKEA with my older sibling when they moved a couple years ago. It’s a super-disorienting place—I get lost easily—and the sales floor really is laid out like a labyrinth. So the logical conclusion was that big-box furniture stores are places where reality is thinner and apt to tear. Later, I posed the question to a group of writers, “Where would a wormhole in IKEA lead to?” And Lara Elena Donnelly had the perfect answer, which was: “To more IKEAs.”

The big-box furniture store where Ava and Jules work, a hilarious spoof of IKEA, is called LitenVärld. How did you pick this name?

I liked the idea of calling something “Little World,” because it worked as a metaphor on multiple levels. It’s cutesy and redolent of the Disney “Small World” ride. The showplace apartments are sanitized, consumable versions of small worlds. And LitenVärld’s MO seems to be about taking something large and chaotic and beautiful, and reducing it into something controlled and marketable. After that, I plugged it into Google translate, asked a Swedish friend (thanks, Karin Tidbeck!) if it made sense, and called it good.

The grandmother they have to save from the store’s multiverse is named Ursula. Ursula Le Guin is one of your main influences. Did you name the grandmother after her?

Yes. I met her at a reading she gave in 2007 or 2008. She looked a lot like my own grandmother, and they were from the same generation. This is a story that’s at least partly about that relationship, and it felt like a very small way of honoring her.

Wow! What are some of Le Guin’s most influential works of for you?

Her short fiction collections, definitely. When I was trying to teach myself how to write short stories, she was literally the first author I turned to. I have a signed copy of Birthday of the World that’s one of my prized worldly possessions. Her stories are where I first encountered a writer seriously thinking about relationships, sexuality, gender, and community, and the ways that all of those things inform each other. The book Changing Planes was particularly influential on this book. It’s a collection of travelogues from a nameless narrator who realizes she can shift into other planes while at airports, thanks to the magical combination of stress, discomfort, and indigestion that’s endemic to waiting for a flight. It was the first book of Le Guin’s that I encountered.

Reading your novella, I was thinking of the famous quote from her 2014 National Book Awards speech: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted by human beings.” Since Finna is an anti-capitalist romp, what does her quote mean to you?

In 2014, I was stuck in a terrible job where I experienced regular sexual harassment, was underpaid and denied full-time work, and didn’t feel like I could be out as trans. I felt like I’d never escape the terrible post-recession grind of low-paying work. That speech came two weeks after a coworker and I filed a petition to have a union vote and in the midst of a nasty union-busting campaign from my employers. I’m pretty sure I watched her speech and just . . . cried. Change feels impossible sometimes. People talk about “the market” or “the economy” like they’re universal laws instead of human-made systems. And I can’t change them, not by myself; change doesn’t happen through individual action, but through collective action. But her words were, then and now, a really necessary bit of perspective. Capitalism is not an omnipotent system or natural law; it’s a flawed human one, and we can change it.

There’s lots of absurdist humor in Finna: a cheesy, poorly dubbed, and obnoxiously heterosexual instructional VHS tape about wormholes; carnivorous furniture; spot-on snarky showplace apartment names like The Nihilist Bachelor and Pan-Asian Appropriating White Yoga Instructor. I was wondering if you could say more about your approach of using humor to comment on the horrors of capitalism.

Late-stage capitalism seems to be trying to become an affable old uncle that wants consumers to think it knows how to laugh at itself. I see that in a lot of branding and advertising now: the official Twitter of a potato chips company making jokes about fisting, or the KFC dating sim where you can seduce a swole Colonel Sanders. Companies want consumers to laugh at them, as long as they’re in on the joke. Compare that to the ways that companies treat their employees. Your employers want you to treat your job (and them) with the utmost seriousness. Like working is a sacred duty instead of a transactional relationship. Being laughed at implies an equal relationship, or at least a different kind of relationship to authority. I’ve never worked a job where real subversiveness was accepted, and good humor is always at least a little subversive.

I just read a long Twitter thread about why conservative humor—both “anti-PC” humor that the conservatives employ to be edgy, and the kind of humor that takes little risks, like Garfield comics—generally fails: at its heart, it’s either authoritarian, or it does nothing that authorities wouldn’t approve of. It works as agitprop, but not as humor, which is at its most delicious when it feels both risky and illicit; when it basically yanks down the pants of authority, shows its pasty, pimpled ass, and then runs like hell.

I was trying to get that kind of humor into the story. Ava and Jules are snarky, but they’re also the straight men—should you pardon the phrase?—in this story, naming the hollowness at this company’s center for what it is, and letting us see how laughable it really is.

The old, cheesy instructional video on wormholes cracked me up! It reminded of the Don and Wendy video from Being John Malkovich. And the fact that LitenVärld has wormholes reminded me of the portal to Malkovich’s head. Was that film an influence on the novella?

Maybe subconsciously? I haven’t seen it in ten or more years, but that and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind were some of my favorite films when I was younger. I definitely imprinted on Charlie Kaufman’s writing style when I was trying to develop my own.

That video talks about quantum entanglement and the many worlds theory. Yet Jules says, “It’s a creepy Scandinavian Narnia” in reference to the first wormhole they and Ava come across in the store. Would you consider Finna to be an example of portal fantasy as well as SF?

Definitely! This is much closer to science fantasy than hard SF; the technology and physics of this probably don’t pass muster, and I’m fine with that. (I also liked the idea that the company itself doesn’t understand the phenomenon but decided to capitalize on it rather than try.) I love portal fantasies, at least partly because they’re such an apt metaphor for fiction itself. Books can be portals to new worlds and new ways of thinking.

While there’s humor, your main characters are dealing with some heavy personal issues, too. You write very frankly about Ava’s depression and anxiety and Jules’s constantly being misgendered at the job by superiors and customers. On top of that, they have to come to terms with their shortcomings, which led to their breakup. How did these characters come together for you?

I wanted to write about queer breakups, and the kind of breakups that happen because people are intrinsically unsuited to being romantically involved, rather than because one person did something wrong. Pairing that with an adventure/mission plot gave it a lot more depth than the average buddy cop story, because no matter how amicable a breakup is, so much is left unresolved. I’ve been dumped plenty of times, and done my own share of it, so I drew a little bit on past experiences, a little bit on friends’ experiences, and then had to tweak Ava and Jules’ characterizations so that their interactions felt grounded and messy, but not overly antagonistic.

There’s a line about one of their running jokes that goes, “Much as ‘Ugh, capitalism’ was a running joke between them, their system was too big to do anything but joke about it. It’s not like they had a plethora of options waiting for them out there.” Do you feel this way or have you felt this way, too, especially since you helped unionize one of your previous jobs?

So I just ranted about humor as an anti-authoritarian tool of subversion, but . . . the opposite is true as well. Laughing is a coping mechanism when everything is terrible and it feels like it’ll never change. This was an attitude that I butted up against constantly with union work at Divvy Bikes and later with grad students at the University of Kansas. Fighting back in those circumstances—getting a reputation as someone who rocks the boat or is hard to work with—can be very fraught. As an example: My teaching assistants union called a meeting to issue some demands to a provost at KU during his open office hours, and the man literally called in the campus cops to be on standby. Because we were going to talk to him in a very stern voice! He made $34,000 a month while most of the TAs on campus had to live on $16,000 a year. But we posed enough of a threat to him that he called the cops. It’s fucking ridiculous.

So you turn it into a joke, because joking minimizes both your own feelings of powerlessness and the overwhelming nature of what is harming you. If you can’t risk your job—and most of us can’t, since having a job is the only way we can get health care, food, shelter—laughter seems like the only recourse we have. Laughter and crying in the bathroom at work.

I was interested in writing a story about a couple of people who are pushed right up to the edge of that. Laughing and crying is a good place to start, because you know something is wrong, something is ridiculous, that the situation is fucked and you cannot go on like this. So what comes next? You have to start imagining a way out, or at least a way forward. That’s the book in a nutshell.

Finna originally started as a screenplay. Tell us a little bit about what that looked like compared to the completed novella. How much of what’s in the book came from the script?

The screenplay was the bones of the novella, almost like an extensive outline with dialogue, plot beats, and visuals. The bulk of the work came in filling out the characters’ interiority and worldbuilding. On screen, you can trust that the actors and production design will visually translate a lot of information: how the characters are feeling, what emotional weight is being carried in dialogue, what the store looks like, whether an alien orchard full of plant furniture is safe or strange. With fiction, the prose has to do all that work.

What made you decide to rework the story from screenplay to prose?

I had no idea what to do with the screenplay itself. It was too short for a feature, too long for a short film or a pilot, plus it would have needed a budget for effects that seemed unrealistic to risk on a first-time screenwriter. When I reread it, I realized that it was the perfect length for a novella. There were also a couple open submission periods for novellas coming up, so I decided to rewrite it as prose and see if I could get it out into the world that way.

You’ve said that writing is a collaborative and community-oriented process. Did you come upon this realization about your own during your time at the Clarion Writers’ Workshop?

No, I came to it a little earlier than that. Most of my early writing classes were in play and screenplay writing, which is, by necessity, a much more collaborative process than writing prose. The final product doesn’t rest with the writer, but with an entire company of other artists. When I did start writing prose, it was mostly nonfiction where I received training in gathering info from primary sources, oral histories, or others’ research—or in fanfiction, which was hugely community-oriented. Clarion, though, is where I found my SF/F community. It changed a lot for me.

You had a book published before this one, your short story collection, Homesick, which won the Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize. What was it like for you to win this prize?

It was wild. I was in shock. I sent a screenshot of the email from Michelle Dotter, Dzanc’s publisher, to my partner and was like, UMMM???? WHAT DOES THIS MEAN????, and then we both yelled for a little while. I submitted the manuscript with zero expectation that it would actually win—maybe get an honorable mention, which I could put on a CV while trying to find a job. It didn’t feel real for a long time, probably because the announcement came when I was horribly busy: thesis year at my MFA, teaching, union work, and about six weeks from top surgery. But it’s slowly sunk in how big of a deal it is. It led directly to getting an agent, DongWon Song, who helped me maneuver Finna into Tor.com’s hands. Dzanc has also been really delightful to work with. So yeah: It was huge.

Congratulations! Now that you have a short story collection and a novella out in the world, what future projects do you have coming up that you can tell us about?

I’m in the final stages of revising a YA horror novel that’s loosely based on my story “Which Super Little Dead GirlTM Are You?” and a short story in an upcoming anthology. I’m writing up a bunch of different outlines for possible projects after that.

Is there anything else you’d like your readers to know about Finna?

Don’t wait until you’re forced to venture into another universe to push back against exploitative labor practices! You don’t have to be in a labor union to organize with your coworkers; it just helps a lot. But you gotta start somewhere.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Christian A. Coleman is a 2013 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. He lives and writes in the Boston area. He tweets at @coleman_II.

Author Spotlight: Kij Johnson

Setsu Uzumé | 690 words

This story is beyond carrion birds as sin eaters—the ravens are in the same fix, and potentially on the same menu as all the other creatures. What drew you to explore these layers of extinction?

I have been thinking through a space opera novella where the worldbuilding all stems from the idea that high intelligence in primates is a failing (and eventually failed) experiment, and that the high intelligence that would arise (or further develop) in other animals to fill the gap we leave will operate radically differently than ours. If technology and science are developed, they will be understood differently, and they will likely be used in entirely different ways. The novella is a real challenge to think through (how do I capture nonhuman speech patterns in a way that keeps the the characters relatable and understandable, yet authentically nonhuman?), and meanwhile, all these side ideas start to come out, as well. This was me thinking specifically about how we have been here on the brink before: In fact, we have thought about all this before (in myth, anyway) and even recognized it as an extinction event—and yet the lesson we focused on turns out to have been the wrong one.

Did you do research for this story or did it come out of a pursuit you’ve had for a while?

Yeah, it’s based in research I was already doing. I’ve been reading a lot about corvid intelligence and doing thinking about how they would develop as thinkers. When I am doing something like this, I end up trying to create the art of the creatures I am hoping to understand. What does a dog riddle look like? What is squid poetry? What myths do crows tell one another? Some of these are accessible, but most are opaque to anyone but me, so I never show them to people. “Noah’s Raven” is not a myth a crow would tell—anthrocentric and not based on the things that crows would actually care about, and Bessary thinks much too much like a human—but thinking about crow myths took me to thinking about human myths with corvids in them, and then I realized I wanted to tell this particular story.

Are there any Easter eggs in this story? Your work is famously open to interpretation, but what do you think the ideal reader might notice or take away from this?

There are lots! I always pile a lot of references of every sort into my stories. Talking about them takes some of the fun out of them being there, but I’ll tell you that there are references to Julian Barnes, Stephen King, Bernt Heinrich’s prose, Narnia, and ancient bestiaries, just off the top of my head. There are some specific phrases which hat-tip to authors I love or have been reading. And of course Bessary and Arum are also the Norse ravens who advise Odin, Huginn and Muninn, Thought and Memory.

What kind of class would you most like to teach? Or attend? Doesn’t have to be writing-related.

I would love to take a really deep dive into writing about nonhuman intelligences from a craft standpoint. How do I balance the reader’s ability and willingness to read with the requirements of a truly alien voice and perception? I do most of this work alone, but wouldn’t it be great to have a roomful of peers thinking about the same stuff? I am lucky, though, in that I teach writing every year in venues that allow me to do whatever I like. I would love to take Icelandic classes, though I am not great with languages.

What are you working on? What can we look forward to next from you?

I am slooooooowly writing a short story to get it out of my hair before I start really drilling into the space opera. I am thinking a lot about another Vellitt Boe story, as well, but this one is waiting in the wings.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Setsu grew up in New York, and spent their formative years in and out of dojos. They like swords, raspberries, justice, the smell of pine forests after rain, and shooting arrows from horseback. They do not like peanut butter and chocolate in the same bite. Their work has appeared in Podcastle and Grimdark Magazine. Find them on Twitter @KatanaPen.

Author Spotlight: Brenda Peynado

Jude Griffin | 2473 words

How did this story come about? What else would you like readers to know about “How We Burn”?

I’ve had for a good while a deep anger about environmental issues. The animal population has dwindled to half in just fifty years, while humans are multiplying. I’ve witnessed green spaces decimated and paved over for suburban expansion, cheap houses, and strip malls. We’re told not to eat fish often any more because of mercury, micro-plastics, other pollution. Air quality is leaving a yellow haze like dirty dishwater over some cities. Water is contaminated with lead and any number of chemical and agricultural runoffs. Some of the most beautiful beaches are covered in plastic trash. Even tourism to appreciate the remaining natural wonders can devastate an environment with carelessness. Cities and coastlines are drowning while sea-levels rise. I could go on. (Not to mention inequality driven by social policies and structural racism.)

I’m not the only one who’s angry. It’s hard, if you’re aware of what’s happening, to feel good about humanity’s place in the world. With so much tragedy, so much ruin, why are we still chugging forward into the future? There’s not really a coherent argument for humans as a fundamental good, not without relying on magic or magical thinking.

So I wanted to write a story driven by that anger, that sense that the people who have come before us have ruined everything, that reveals what we’ve lost. But I also wanted to see a generation that tried to fix some things. People resist so many arguments to fix things because of the short term. We’d rather poison ourselves, kill what sustains us, if short term it gets us something good. Population growth boosts economies even while it pushes communities to pave over green spaces, pushes agriculture to keep up with increasing demands, forces people to live on less and less space with more and more traffic. So if a generation tried to fix it, even though long term this would be a great thing, that would mean down the road there’s a generation suffering for the sins of the father, so to speak.

And that’s interesting to me, that sticking point, that contradiction. What would it mean to be aware of everything humanity has done wrong, be angry about about what our forefathers had done at our expense, but feel crushed by the burden of what needs to be done to fix it at the same time? What would it mean to be a teenager rebelling against everything, both humanity’s crimes against the planet and the reparations needed for the penance for crimes they didn’t even have the chance to commit? And rebelling against the parent’s generation, who are aware, who know the cost, who have internalized the fear of a ruined world, who are trying to save what’s left?

That’s where the story came from, that rub between the generations, between that anger and that burden.

I don’t think there’s a good answer to that feeling. We are proceeding into a catastrophe, blindly and willingly, at the moment. Anything we do to avert it will be painful for someone.

And that’s why I didn’t want to give Quioa an easy epiphany, an easy answer to her character arc. She has every right to feel angry, to want what previous generations had. And yet, it’s not until she feels her own loss that she’ll begin to understand how much more there is to lose, how to save what’s left. And with that comes fear. Is that a heroic character arc? No. The heroic character arc has the hero defeating an evil force with bravery and abandon, through action, through rebellion. At the end, while they emerge changed, they have hope.

Instead, Quioa’s character arc is one of responsibility. She has to be the opposite of a hero, act without abandon or rebellion. The best thing she could do for her world is (literally) stay in her lane, act carefully, take responsibility. What she has to conquer is within all of us: the hunger to get more from the world, the hunger to selfishly take it, to confuse virtue with the freedom to harm everything around us. And yet, fear is not a pleasant emotion, is not hope, and her anger remains justified. This is why I gave her an ambiguous ending. That moment she feels fear for the first time, that she understands what she’s lost, that she understands responsibility . . . it’s bitter. It’s necessary. Does she crash? Does she pull up in time? Neither of those are happy endings, easy endings. And neither are as important as the crystallized moment in the hologram. It also has to do with my own fears and uncertainties about where we’re going. Will we realize what’s happening to our planet in time? Who can say. We need that moment in the hologram.

There were so many worldbuilding and character-illuminating gems layered throughout the story, it’s like story-as-masterclass. You don’t use, or use sparingly, a lot of commonly deployed character/worldbuilding details like physical looks, cultural markers, instead relying almost exclusively on individual personality traits to build out each character and their world: was this deliberate?

I like to build character through the internal self and only mention in passing, when it’s relevant to the plot and themes, physical appearance. Too often, people are contrary to their appearances, and the temptation to make the physical primary can mean simplifying the way that people may present themselves and making their physicality central to the plot. There are absolutely stories for which physical characterization is important and stories that include themes revealed on the physical level, like beauty, race, dysmorphia. To a certain extent, those themes are driven by the character’s own obsessions.

For these particular characters, I didn’t think their obsession would be about their appearances. What does it mean that Josh is black, that Sequioa has long dark hair that hangs over her shoulder like a curtain, that Quioa is part Latina, to characters who are railing against what it means to be alive? To them, it’s more important that they are healthy, that they are alive, that they are lonely and desperate and angry. Plus, they’ve known each other all their lives. To a certain extent, with friends that close, you start being invisible to one another, except when something changes. You’re so used to each other, and physical appearances matter less than the habits and memories you’ve built over the years. So you’d only mention appearances in passing, when there’s reason to pay attention.

When Quioa sees a Procreator for the first time, appearances matter very much because of how different the Procreator is from her friends, how shocking it is to see someone who looks malnourished, under-protected. In a longer version of this, perhaps novel-length, that continues after Quioa’s whole world has changed, things will start to look very different to her and come into focus in a different way, and I think she’s going to start questioning appearances that maybe she’s been taking for granted.

You’ve taught writing across genres (screenwriting, fiction, and science fiction and fantasy writing). What’s one piece of advice you often give them?

I start off every class by talking about my definition of what makes a story (“meaningful change—be it in the reader, a character, or a world—driven by a series of linked events”). From there, we talk about subjective drama versus objective drama.

Objective drama is something that could happen to anyone and it would be dramatic. Death and maiming would be sad no matter who it happened to. Births, marriages, graduations, etc. would be happy occasions no matter who they happened to.

Most of my students reach for the most objectively dramatic things. However, because these situations could happen to anyone, and many of them do happen to most of us—we all are born, we all die, we all likely get broken up with at some point—these don’t on their own actually create much emotion in an audience.

Subjective drama, on the other hand, depends on the subject—that is, the character. Subjective drama is only dramatic because it happens to that particular character with that particular history.

For example, a teacher takes a desk out of a classroom. Boring, right? Not objectively dramatic. But I’ll give you more information: There was a student in that teacher’s class. This is the last class of his college career, and he’s been struggling to pass. He’s pretty much given up. Over Thanksgiving break, his father—who doesn’t know his kid might fail this class—tells him he’s proud of him that he’s going to graduate college like his father never did. So, the student returns from Thanksgiving break, determined this time to pass and make his father proud. But there’s an accident on the way to the final, and he arrives late. Just before he arrives, the teacher, figuring that thirty minutes into the final no one else is coming, gives the only empty desk to another teacher who is missing a desk for her finals. The student arrives just in time to see the teacher place the desk in another classroom. He stands at the door, sees there’s no place for him. Suddenly his worst fears are confirmed. There’s no place for him here. He walks away, dejected, knowing he’s failed and let down his father.

Suddenly, a teacher taking an empty desk out of the classroom is pretty dramatic. That’s subjective drama.

Sometimes as fun exercises, I hand out index cards with some pretty every day occurrences on them: spaghetti is served on a plate, a car is parked, someone plants a tree in front of their window, a crossing guard asks a driver to slow down. Students can use any genre they want, but they have to build a backstory to the event that would make it subjectively dramatic. Some of the stuff they come up with is really heart-wrenching.

The best stories always use subjective drama, even if there’s objective drama mixed in there. Even if someone dies, what makes it powerful is not the fact that someone died, but that it happened under those specific circumstances, what it meant to the surviving characters, how they got to that point. That’s what I tried to do with the death in this story. It’s important because of Quioa’s part causing it, because her friends believed in what they did, and because the death means that everything they believe in is shattered.

For my students, I tell them they can’t use objective drama in the class. No death, no maiming, no rape. If they’re going to get drama, they have to rely on the subjective. This hand-tied-behind-their-back constraint means that they are working hard to get at character, and they absolutely have to or there’s no drama at all. Once they leave the class, I tell them they may include plot points that are objectively dramatic again, but they need to convert them into subjective drama.

Whose writing do you find surprising/inspiring?

There is so much gorgeous fiction that I find inspiring. Just with what I’ve read in the last month in fantasy: Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria, Indra Das’s The Devourers, and Susan Palwick’s A Necessary Beggar. The first two are doing such gorgeous things with language, submerging the reader in a fever dream of magic, myth, and incantatory rhythms. A Stranger in Olondria is a secondary world fantasy like I’ve never read before, the worldbuilding so complex, emotional, dictated by memory. I’ve never read anything that has felt so real, so truly lived, rather than authorially created. The Devourers mixes the myth of the werewolf with that of the djinn and other shapeshifter myths, and manages to throw away every trope and expectation associated with them to create this beautifully heart-wrenching tale about what it means to have a self, a human self, and have that contain multitudes. The last, A Necessary Beggar, is a portal fantasy, but from a secondary world into ours instead of the usual vice versa, and says some pretty important things about kindness and love while touching on real world problems like immigration, capitalism, and the American Dream. All three use magic to say important things about the world, about what it means to be human, eschewing the typical hero’s journey into something so much more complex and real, so beautifully rendered. If I could do in my next books what they have done, I would be super happy.

When will your short story collection, The Rock Eaters, be available? Where can we read the title story about children who eat rocks to keep themselves from taking flight? What other projects are on the horizon for you? (I was delighted to see you are working on a craft book on the writing and story techniques of unreal genres. How close to completion/release is this? I need it.)

Thank you for asking! I’m working on a novel, The Furious Branches, set during a 1965 civil war in the Dominican Republic. In it, a girl who can see all possible worlds must enlist a soldier who can trade places with his shadow, the strongest man in the world, and a woman who can bring people back to life to save her mother from her many deaths as a guerrilla fighter in the war.

I’m also working on a craft book called The Art of the Unreal, about the techniques of unreal fiction across the genre spectrum, and what they have in common with realist fiction. This is a couple of years away, as I keep interrupting it to work on the novel and more short stories.

My forthcoming short story collection, The Rock Eaters, will be out from Penguin Press in February 2021. It includes stories from across the genre spectrum. Virtual reality, aliens, narcotraficante agents who get superpowers, prodigals who can fly, ghosts, and disappearing relatives are just a few conceits of the stories. You can read the title story reprinted and on podcast in Lightspeed here: lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-rock-eaters.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

Author Spotlight: Alexander Weinstein

Sandra Odell | 1229 words

“Toxic Destinations from The Lost Traveler’s Tour Guide” is filled with rich, intricate sensory details, everything from the “the engulfing flesh of the hotel’s large intestine,” to drowned men who “break barnacles from their knuckles,” to “waltzes on the sticky floors.” Much like a traditional travel brochure, these details offer an intriguing view of the unknown even as they seek to warn the traveler away. How did you come to pen this particular exploration of the shadows that fill the world inside and out?

I’d been reading a lot of great formal experimentalists—like Borges and Calvino, and Michael Martone’s book Michael Martone (which takes the form of contributor’s notes) and Seth Fried’s Animalcula stories—and I was very interested in exploring a non-traditional approach to storytelling. I was traveling with my son in Europe at the time, and I began to get the idea of a tour guide to foreign destinations that could also work as a kind of autobiography/guide to the emotional locations we all visit. Soon cities, museums, and hotels were arriving as though my imagination had landed on a new continent—and the voice of the collective Tour Guide writers came nearly automatically. Here were destinations of love, of loneliness, of joy and illusion. And among these destinations, I found that there were plenty of dark ones. For example Nacht—where the city transforms into a dark-world in the late hours. I was traveling through Paris, my son was ten, and I think one becomes particularly sensitive to the shift that happens in cities at night when you’re traveling with a child. Suddenly the drunken college students began to emerge, and the rowdy soccer fans threatened violence, and around a corner came wily saxophone music along with the smell of hashish—and I sensed night as a kind of tentacled creature which can pull you into its grip.

The other cities/hotels in “Toxic Destinations” came from delving into emotions such as loneliness, rejection, depression, hedonism, and the way we sometimes hide from the sadness of the world (Gerholtz/Phôtl) rather than opening our hearts to those who are suffering. These are more unsavory emotions—but I believe that part of the persistence of darkness is our refusal to bring it into the light—and so the stories are a way to use the lens of fiction to explore what these emotions are made of.

When you wrote “Destinations of Joy,” did you intend to write a second installment? Do you see a third or perhaps fourth installment?

Yes! The series is actually a wide reaching work-in-progress. To date there are nearly seventy destinations and the series continues to expand—(particularly when I’m visiting new countries/museums/hotels). I’m also beginning to find stories that deal with lost paper arts, or local customs and dice games, or invasive plants and poisonous animals. It’s a really exciting project for me, especially as it draws from the fairy tale tradition and engages my imagination in the childhood wonder/exploration that first drew me to fiction writing.

The story resonates with elements of The Eagles’ “Hotel California,” The Twilight Zone, Snow Crash, major depression, and all of the deadly sins. Why do you suppose people are intrigued by the darker elements of life? What is it about such miseries that draw our eyes and imaginations? Is it easier to see ourselves miserable than happy?

That’s such a fascinating question! What draws us toward darkness? The answers are likely as varied as our personal individualities. I do think for many people (self included) it’s easier to tack toward darkness than joy, and this may be a culturally learned phenomenon. I think there’s something within Western culture that trains us toward a kind of cynicism from an early age. Perhaps it’s the way we’re advertised to from the cradle with a survival-of-the-fittest ethos (Leggo my Eggo, Who ate all the Cracklin’ Oat Bran, Silly rabbit! Trix are for kids). Or the dog-eat-dog capitalism we witness adults subjected to. Or the Kafkaesque bureaucracy we sense beneath standardized testing. Or the massively depressing “classics” we’re given to read in public school. There’s also the specter of hunger, poverty, and ruthlessness beneath so much of the media we consume. Our biggest blockbusters deal with death and revenge, murder and betrayal, hyper-sexualized objectification and empty consumerism. This is not to mention the toxicity of many of our current politicians, including the impeached president, or the soulless CEOs, bankers, and lobbyists. So I think an industrialized society that is focused on GDP rather than Gross Domestic Happiness ends up cultivating systems which continually dull our individual sparks of creativity/awe as a deliberate way to ensure profit. One might say that misery is a symptom of a society suffering from a deep economic/social/psychological/spiritual sicknesses—and perhaps our attention/intrigue is indicative of our wish to heal that sickness.

Making art about pain/suffering/misery can be in hope of transforming that suffering. Of course, transformation isn’t the only reason people are drawn toward misery and darkness. And I think this is a crucial distinction when it comes to the quality of how one relates to suffering. The hedonism of Nacht, for example, is based on how we’re drawn toward our darkest selves though things like alcoholism, drugs, and infidelity. And perhaps the most compassionate view is that such examples of hedonism are simply failed attempts at healing our inner wounds.

A question I think about a lot in regards to making art about misery/pain is whether the aim is to heal/transform that pain, or whether it’s to dwell/exploit/cultivate more of it. I’m with the Buddhists on this one—I think it’s vital that we work to ease suffering rather than contribute to it. This then becomes part of the larger transformational work for us as artists/humans—creating a world where happiness/peace/healing receives our focus and energy more readily than the exploitation of darkness/misery.

If you were wandering the shadowed roads and happened upon this simple little brochure, which of these destinations would you decide to visit? Why?

That’s such a hard call! Probably Nacht—simply because there still seems to be the possibility of harmless enjoyment there (though isn’t that always the lure of darkness?) I think if I kept to the restaurants with the chef pans clanging and the jazz club with its good music, and then made sure to stay away from the bars and head home at a reasonable time, I could traverse that destination safely!

You have received dozens of accolades for your incredible work. Are there any writing projects you would like to tackle, something new that calls to you in particular?

You know, I’ve always considered myself a short story writer, but there is the secret project of a novel shimmering in the distance, so that’s exciting. And presently I’m working on my third collection with stories in the magical realist/fabulist tradition—it has working-class trolls, and suburban witches, and carnivorous plants—so I’m very excited to be exploring that new terrain as well!

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: JT Petty

Alex Puncekar | 427 words

What inspired this story?

About a year ago I was having lunch with a friend and journalist who mentioned that trucking was one of the largest employers of non-college-educated white men in America. A little while later, he made a completely unrelated comment about the best cures for terrorism being employment and purpose, while its most effective instigators are idleness and injustice. About half of “The Gamecocks” came together walking away from that lunch.

The other half was borrowed and embellished from stories I heard from an uncle of mine in North Carolina who drove long-haul trucks for a couple years and is one the most talented storytellers I’ve ever known. A lot of the world, tone, and details came from my Uncle Dave.

I like the dynamic between Leslie-Anne and Hardy. They feel like the average worker dealing with a layoff or a sudden loss of work, yet they’re also capable of fighting a system that they deem to be unfair and unjust, which makes what happens to them all the more tragic. Is there a chance of more stories in this world?

I generally love the idea of Southern and Appalachian science fiction. There’s a lot of grist in imagining futures and alternate histories for places so concerned with tradition, with so much forensic evidence of the past. Maybe there’s more to tell there.

Automation is one of the key themes here. Do you think there’s a time and place to implement automation in the workforce? You’ve convinced me that automated semi-trucks aren’t going to go over well if brought to reality, at least at the outset.

I can’t think of a time humans figured out a technology that worked and set it aside without use. But the effects of automation are anybody’s guess. I assume automation generally devalues a worker’s skills, and increases profits for the few at the top. The invention of the cotton gin reduced one kind of human labor, but created an overwhelming demand for another, slave labor fueling the suddenly increased profits of the plantation owners. It might be that automation tends to increase inequality.

What’s next for you? Is there a project of yours that you’d like to talk about?

I’ve been seduced by the vague and unreliable promises of Hollywood, so there are all sorts of projects I would love to talk about, but none you could depend on.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Alex Puncekar is a writer, game designer, and editorial assistant for both Lightspeed and Nightmare. His fiction has appeared in Aphelion: The Webzine of Science Fiction and Fantasy and Jenny Magazine. He lives in Cinncinati, Ohio. Follow him on Twitter @AlexPuncekar.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 205 words

Coming up in March, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Russell Nichols (“Giant Steps”) and Adam-Troy Castro (“Many Happy Returns”), along with SF reprints by Alyx Dellamonica (“Living the Quiet Life”) and Charlie Jane Anders (“Reliable People”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Kristina Ten (“Tend to Me”) and Tahmeed Shafiq (“Love and Marriage in the Hexasun Lands”), and fantasy reprints by Aimee Bender (“Viewer, Violator”) and Alex Irvine (“100 Sentences”).

Our interview next month will be with debut novelist K.M. Sparza. Of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns. Our ebook readers will also enjoy a book excerpt.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

• • • •

Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got a veritable plethora of stories forthcoming. We’ve got work from the following authors coming up over the next couple of issues: Ray Nayler, Rati Mehrotra, Julianna Baggott, Matthew Kressel, and Marie Vibbert.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Lightspeed:

Website

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Destroy Projects

www.destroysf.com

Newsletter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2

Podcast Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/itunes-rss

Twitter

www.twitter.com/LightspeedMag

Facebook

www.facebook.com/LightspeedMagazine

Subscribe

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe

Subscriptions and Ebooks

The Editors

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes more than 100 stories (about 700,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain!

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe for more information, including about third-party subscription options.

Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so.

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

• • • •

All caught up on Lightspeed? Good news! We also have lots of ebooks available from our sister-publications:

Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11 off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price).

Fantasy Magazine Ebooks & Bundles: We also have ebook back issues—and ebook back issue bundles—of Lightspeed’s (now dormant) sister-magazine, Fantasy. To check those out, just visit fantasy-magazine.com/store. You can buy each Fantasy bundle for $24.99, or you can buy the complete run of Fantasy Magazine— all 57 issues—for just $114.99 (that’s $10 off buying all the bundles individually, and more than $55 off the cover price!).

Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

The Editors

If you’re reading this, then there’s a good chance you’re a regular reader of Lightspeed and/or Nightmare. We already offer ebook subscriptions as a way of supporting the magazines, but we wanted to add an additional option to allow folks to support us, thus we’ve launched a Patreon (patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams).

TL;DR Version

If you enjoy Lightspeed and Nightmare and my anthologies, our Patreon page is a way for you to help support those endeavors by chipping in a buck or more on a recurring basis. Your support will help us bring bigger and better (and more) projects into the world.

Why Patreon?

There are no big companies supporting or funding the magazines, so the magazines really rely on reader support. Though we offer the magazines online for free, we’re able to fund them by selling ebook subscriptions or website advertising.

While we have a dedicated ebook subscriber base, the vast majority of our readers consume the magazine online for free. If just 10% of our website readers pledged just $1 a month, the magazines would be doing fantastically well. So we thought it might be useful to have an option like Patreon for readers who maybe haven’t considered supporting the magazine, or who maybe haven’t because they don’t have any desire to receive the ebook editions—or who would be glad to pay $1 a month, but not $3 (the cost of a monthly subscriber issue of Lightspeed).

Though Lightspeed and Nightmare are separate entities, we decided to create a single “publisher” Patreon account because it seemed like it would be more efficient to manage just one account. Plus, since I sometimes independently publish works using indie-publishing tools (as described above), we thought it would be good to have a single place where folks could come to show their support for such projects.

Basically, we wanted to create a crowdfunding page where, if you enjoy my work as an editor, and you want to contribute a little something to help make it easier for us to produce more cool projects, then our Patreon is the place to do that.

What Do I Get Out of Being a Patron?

Well, you get the satisfaction of helping to usher the creation of cool new short fiction projects into the world! Plus, the more support we get, the better we can make the magazines and compensate our authors and staff. By becoming a supporter via Patreon, you help fund our growth and continued publication of two award-winning magazines. Of course, if you’re already one of our ebook subscribers (thank you!), you are already supporting us. This is for those who prefer to read the issues each month on our free websites, or wish to support our efforts more generally.

By becoming a supporter, you are also bestowed a title, such as Dragonrider, or Space Wizard, or Savior of the World and/or Universe, thus making you instantly the envy of all your friends.

Thank You!

If you’ve read this far, thanks so much. We hope you’ll consider becoming a backer on Patreon. That URL again is patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams.

Thanks in advance for your time. We look forward to hopefully being able to make the magazines—and my other publishing endeavors—even better with the support of people like you.

About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

Managing/Senior Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Editor & Book Reviewer

Arley Sorg

Reprint Editor

Rich Horton

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

John Joseph Adams

Assistant Editor

Laurel Amberdine

Editorial Assistant

Alex Puncekar

Reviewers

Arley Sorg

LaShawn Wanak

Chris Kluwe

Carrie Vaughn

Christopher East

Violet Allen

Interviewer

Christian A. Coleman

Copy Editor

Dana Watson

Proofreaders

Anthony R. Cardno

Devin Marcus

Webmaster

Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects

Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher

Robert Barton Bland

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

The Editors

If you enjoy reading Lightspeed (and/or Nightmare), you might also enjoy these works edited by John Joseph Adams:

ANTHOLOGIES

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 and Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (with Karen Joy Fowler)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 (with Charles Yu)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 (with N.K. Jemisin)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (with Carmen Maria Machado)

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live

Cosmic Powers

Dead Man’s Hand

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: Ignorance is Strength (with Hugh Howey) [Forthcoming 2020]

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: Burn the Ashes (with Hugh Howey) [Forthcoming 2020]

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: Or Else the Light (with Hugh Howey) [Forthcoming 2020]

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)

A People’s Future of the United States (with Victor LaValle)

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

Wastelands: The New Apocalypse

The Way of the Wizard

What the #@&% is That? (with Douglas Cohen)

NOVELS and COLLECTIONS

Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey

Shift by Hugh Howey

Dust by Hugh Howey

Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn

Sand by Hugh Howey

Retrograde by Peter Cawdron

Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer

The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp

The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty

The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn

The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette

In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead

Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

Gather the Fortunes by Bryan L. Camp

Reentry by Peter Cawdron

Half Way Home by Hugh Howey

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear [forthcoming]

Creatures of Charm and Hunger by Molly Tanzer [forthcoming]

A Dark Queen Rises by Ashok K. Banker [forthcoming]

The Conductors by Nicole Glover [forthcoming]

The Chosen One by Veronica Roth [forthcoming]

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.