TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 119, April 2020

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: April 2020

SCIENCE FICTION

The Least of These
Veronica Roth

Always the Harvest
Yoon Ha Lee

Voice of Their Generation
Andrew Dana Hudson

A Subtle Web: A Tale From the Somadeva Chronicles
Vandana Singh

FANTASY

Bow Down Before the Snail King!
Caleb Wilson

Glass Bottle Dancer
Celeste Rita Baker

Neversleeps
Fred Van Lente

The Witch Speaks
Rati Mehrotra

EXCERPTS

Chosen Ones
Veronica Roth

NONFICTION

Book Reviews: April 2020
Chris Kluwe

Media Review: April 2020
Christopher East

Interview: Katie M. Flynn
Christian A. Coleman

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Veronica Roth

Celeste Rita Baker

Andrew Dana Hudson

Rati Mehrotra

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions, May 2020

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: April 2020

John Joseph Adams | 176 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 119th issue.

We’re really excited to share “The Least of These,” a brand-new short by Veronica Roth! We also have a snapshot of what creativity will look like in the future in Andrew Dana Hudson’s new short, “Voice of Their Generation.” Our SF reprints are by Yoon Ha Lee (“Always the Harvest”) and Vandana Singh (“A Subtle Web”).

Our new fantasy short by Celeste Rita Baker (“Glass Bottle Dancer”) might make you appreciate the insects in your world just a little bit more. Rati Mehrotra writes about love, loss, and witchcraft in a new short called “The Witch Speaks.” We also have fantasy reprints by Caleb Wilson (“Bow Down Before the Snail King!”) and Fred Van Lente (“Neversleeps”).

Of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns. Our feature interview will be with Katie M. Flynn. Our ebook readers will also enjoy an excerpt from the aforementioned Veronica Roth’s new novel, Chosen Ones.

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.

The Least of These

Veronica Roth | 4256 words

Two women, Best and Least, woke in a bright room.

Best did so as if surfacing in a pool of water, her eyes wide and observant. Least woke with a start, and immediately slammed her back against the wall behind her, her arms splayed.

Where are we? asked Best.

Who the fuck are you? demanded Least.

Now, now, came a voice from the doorway. There’s no need to be coarse.

A tall, graceful Being entered the room, diaphanous fabric afloat around its slender body. It had an otherworldly shimmer to its skin, as if bathed in perpetual twilight. Its face was humanoid, but for the fact that its eyes had no whites and its nose more closely resembled a beak made of polished pearl.

The voice had not been human, but lilting and mechanical, and it came from a shining band of silver around the Being’s throat. As it spoke, it also emitted a series of faint notes, like a hummed song.

I know you are confused, the Being said. And possibly alarmed. But I will explain.

Both women had leapt to their feet at the sight of the Being. Best stood ready, and Least was inching toward the windows at the far end of the room. The space was large and grand, with wood floors that creaked beneath the women’s feet and tall windows with frames painted white to match the walls. Visible through the glass was a grass-covered hill and the smudged green of pine trees.

Best frowned, but sat. Least began to shake her head.

No way, she said. No. Fucking. Way.

Another Being appeared in the doorway, just behind the first. At the sight of it, Best’s eyes widened, and Least let out another litany of curses. The second Being had a fiercer look than the first, and snapped its beak at the women.

Sit, the Fierce One said.

This time, both women sat.

This is what the Beings said:

We come from a planet not dissimilar to your own, many galaxies away from here. Like you, we grew and developed and then laid waste to our planet. Like you, we faced a series of extinction events. For us, they were shudders in the ground and sicknesses that culled the vulnerable, and a superabundance of predatory species, thanks to the degradation of the environment.

We were able to pull ourselves back from the brink of annihilation. We rebuilt our planet, little by little, and were then able to focus our efforts on exploration of other worlds. We developed technology that allowed us to travel vast distances in little time, by stitching together sections of the galaxy like cloth.

On one such journey, we encountered a spacecraft. On it was a golden disc that, once deciphered, taught us about your planet. We searched for you for a long time.

When we found you, we endeavored to learn your languages, so that we would be able to communicate. We developed an automatic translator to facilitate such communication. We studied your cultures from our cloaked position in the sky. We observed that you had endured several planet-wide events that threatened your population, such as destructive wildfires, plagues, and rising global temperatures.

We felt a kinship with you, our fellow world destroyers. However, after careful study we determined that your people did not seem likely to unite in order to undo the damage you had done and remake your world. Our hearts broke for you. We decided to intercede. We summoned a larger ship that would be able to transport fifty thousand of your number back to our planet so that your species could survive and rebuild.

But we do not wish to cull your population indiscriminately. We wish to collect the best and brightest of your people. But who should determine the parameters for such a collection? It cannot be us. It must be you.

Thus we analyzed your population and selected two from among you. One of you, we determined, was most like ourselves: law-abiding, morally upright, intellectually and physically capable. And the other is least like ourselves. We felt this was only fair, to account for our own biases.

Our task for you is simple: You must decide who among you we bring back to our planet, and who we leave behind. You must sufficiently narrow your population such that the number of you does not exceed fifty thousand. There will be no exceptions—our planet’s ecosystem is delicate, and we must prioritize its health over even our own philanthropic inclinations.

You must come to us with your decision in two days’ time.

Excuse me? Best said.

She had a sturdier build than Least, and large, clear eyes that seemed to see everything at once.

You want us to decide who dies? she added, when it seemed the Beings did not understand the exact nature of her question.

The Gentle One said, We want you to decide who lives. This is not an act of cruelty toward those who will remain, as their fate was sealed long before our arrival. This is an act of mercy toward those who will leave.

I don’t think I can do that, Best said. Where would I even begin?

That is for the two of you to determine, the Fierce One replied. We dare not offer even a single example, for doing so would surely influence your decisions.

And we have to do this in two days? Best said.

Yes, the Gentle One replied.

We will leave you to discuss it further without the pressure of our presence, the Fierce One said.

Best put her head in her hands. The Beings left in silence, accompanied only by the swishing sound of their gossamer clothing.

• • • •

What’s your name? Best asked Least.

I think it’s better if we leave names out of this, Least replied.

Then what should I call you? said Best.

They said they chose us because one of us is better than the other one, Least said. Clearly that’s you. So why don’t you be Best, and I’ll be Least.

That seems unkind, Best said.

It suits me, then, Least replied. And anyway, it’s all I’m gonna answer to now.

In the room there was a circular table with chairs around it. Best sat in one of these, her hands folded on the tabletop. Her nails were trim, the cuticles around them unmarred. She looked at Least with her clear, wide eyes, as if waiting for the other woman to join her.

Least seemed immune to the unspoken summons. She had walked over to the windows and was peering out at the sweep of grass, the forest that surrounded them. Here there were no signs of the crowded civilization to which both Best and Least were accustomed. No smokestacks rising up in the distance, no crumbling structures now empty of life, no huge swaths of land with the burnt husks of trees poking up from it like shards of broken bone.

Where are we? Least asked herself.

How should we do this? Best asked Least.

Do what? Least said, as she opened the lock on one of the windows. Her sleeve was stretched at the cuffs, as if she had pulled it down over her hands too many times.

Best stormed across the room. This! Didn’t you hear them? We have two days to narrow a billion people down to fifty thousand!

Oh, that. Yeah, I’m not doing that. Least pushed the window up. It squealed horribly.

She sat on the windowsill and swung her legs over it to touch down on the grass outside.

Best argued, You can’t just . . . not do it! If we don’t, they could just leave, and not rescue any of us! This is our best chance at saving the most people.

The open window was between them. Least was shorter than Best by several inches. She had the look of someone who hadn’t slept in a long time.

I’ll be back, Least said. Probably.

I’m going to do it without you, Best said.

Cool, Least replied, and she walked away and into the forest.

• • • •

Least had come into the world in an idyllic suburb, where the ravages of world-ending had not touched her . . . until they did.

They had been safe from the fires, surrounded as their town was by water, and far from any fault lines. The asteroid struck the other end of the world, and its impact sent so much debris into the air that a cloud hung over her town for months, but they had stores of water, and plenty of supplies, and they endured.

The plague came next, as it had come for everyone in their region of the country, and it picked off their neighbors one by one; then Least’s aunts and uncles and cousins; then her parents and brother. Soon enough, Least had found herself alone on a quiet street that had become a graveyard. She stayed that way for a long time.

But then the tattered remains of the government rounded up all those still living—those who happened to have a genetic resistance to the plague’s effects—and took them to cities to live together.

Least was not suited for communal life. She didn’t keep to her strict work hours—she had no skills to offer this new world, so her job was tedious and often disgusting—and her truancy got her into trouble again and again, at which point she decided, if trouble was going to be her closest companion, she ought to really earn it. So she stole and smuggled and cheated and lied her way through life, a frequent resident of the nearest prison.

• • • •

Least had never thought of these experiences as useful until she was prowling around the house where she had woken. But she knew how to keep her steps silent, and to crouch at the corner of each window to peer over the sill, and to listen for muffled voices beyond the glass.

The house seemed to have belonged, once, to a fine family with a fine estate, and it had fallen into elegant disrepair, the paint peeling and the structure sagging under its own weight. It was large, but not so large that Least struggled to find the Beings.

They were in a sitting room, perched atop brocade sofas with fragile mugs clasped in their talons. Their hands resembled bird feet, with three fingers splayed wide, terminating in sharp claws. They sat across from each other, the silver bands around their throats abandoned on a nearby coffee table, and they were speaking in their high humming language. On a floating screen nearby was a video feed of the room where Least and Best had awoken. They had not been left in privacy, Least noted, though she also couldn’t recall the Beings promising that.

Least backed away from the window, and once she was far enough away that the Beings were unlikely to hear her, she began testing the other windows to see if any of them were unlocked. She had been carrying a phone in her pocket when she was brought here. Which meant it was somewhere in this house.

• • • •

Meanwhile, Best was still sitting at the table in the room where she and Least had awoken, tapping her fingers on the wood. She stared at the window where Least had made her escape, and wondered if the other woman was now somewhere in the trees, fleeing the scene and leaving Best alone with these impossible decisions.

She had discovered paper and pencil in a desk drawer. On the front of each page was a contract that Best didn’t care to decipher. It was from a time when signatures had been enough to ensure decency. But the only thing that had ever ensured decency in Best’s experience was a decent heart.

Best had been born empty-handed, in squalor. Her parents had done what they could for themselves, which was to say, they had not done much at all, because the world would not permit it. Her father had been killed three months prior to her birth, so Best was sure her mother had brought her into the world weeping. Yet brought her into it she had, and she kept Best fed and safe and taught her all that she knew.

Best’s mother was someone who knew about machines. She didn’t know the why of them, only the what; the why, Best had discovered on her own when she raided the collapsing library on the edge of town, determined to make something of herself. But then the plague came, and killed everyone around them. Not Best and her mother, though; it was not their usefulness that saved them, it was some anomaly in their blood, but saved they were.

When the government came to move them to the colony of the living, Best’s usefulness and quick mind won her a special place in the new society. For the first time she could remember, she had a full stomach and a warm place to lay her head. She spent her days using her hands to make things work better. She had enough left over to give to those who needed it, and so she did, eagerly, knowing she had once been empty-handed herself.

Best sat at the table in the grand room, breathing in the smell of dust and the forest air that Least had let in through the window. Then she bent over the paper in front of her and began to write.

Serving the greater good required parameters, so Best would define them.

• • • •

Best, a voice said from outside.

Least was climbing in the window. Her pants were worn, stretching tight across the knees when she moved.

I really wish you wouldn’t call me that, Best said.

Least replied, If wishes were fishes, we’d all have plenty of cod liver oil.

Best watched her climb over the window frame and cross the room on light feet. She sat across from Best at the table, and looked at the sheet of paper in front of her, where Best had scribbled her notes.

What’ve you got there?

Suddenly you care? Best said.

I always cared, Least said. I just cared about something else more.

Best had known people like Least all her life, people who didn’t like the new world order, or their place in it, and reacted by flouting the rules, as if their personal discomfort superseded the needs of the many.

Least had known people like Best all her life, too, people to whom certain things had come easily, and believed, therefore, that they ought to come easily to everyone else, as if all deviations were the result of a defect of character and not chance.

They stared at each other across the table, and they knew each other.

So what have you got, then, Least said, nodding to the sheet of paper in front of Best, who covered the words scribbled on it with the flat of her palm.

You want to do this together now? Best said.

Least said, I think you want to. I think you don’t want to do it on your own. So go ahead. Tell me what you’ve got.

Best frowned at the first word that showed between her spread fingers. Okay. Then I think we need to start with the young.

You mean you want to start with the old, Least said, raising an eyebrow. That’s who you want to leave to die, right?

I’m saying we should spare the young, Best said. And the skilled.

Well, then I’m out. I was hoping I would last at least one more round, Least replied, leaning back in her chair.

Best wasn’t sure how to reply to that.

Least went on: What’s next, then? The sick? Can’t have people whose bodies are already weak going on a big journey like that, can we?

Best didn’t answer.

And genetic defects, we don’t want those, either. For practical reasons, of course. How about convicts? Don’t want deviants in our fancy new society. Gosh, if I wasn’t out of the running before, I really am now—

Shut up, Best said.

If we want the human race to survive, I guess we can’t take anyone who’s not fertile, because they’ll be no good to us. Everyone’s got to be able to—

You’re acting like I take pleasure in this, Best said. I eliminated my own mother in the first round. She’s the only person I have left; everyone else I loved is dead.

The word dead fell between them like a weight.

Best went on: I’m just trying to make logical choices, given the difficulty of the journey, for the survival of the human race.

Who cares, Least said, leaning forward, about the fucking human race.

Best snorted, and said, What, you think we did this to our own planet, so we all deserve to die? Have you never met someone worth saving? No one kind, and warm, and lovely, and worthy of life? Thousands of years of art and poetry and music, of math and science and language and religion, and all of it’s worthless just because most of us are broken?

Best looked toward the window and blinked away tears.

And what are we worth, Least said, if our survival comes at this cost?

• • • •

What if it was random? Best said. What if . . . we refuse to define actual parameters? We tell them to randomly select fifty thousand people. They had some method of finding me and you at random. Surely they can apply that to the entire population.

Can, Least said. But won’t.

You don’t know that.

I do, actually, Least said. But you’re welcome to try.

So Best opened the door to the grand room that she had not dared leave before, and stood in the hallway just beyond it, listening to the sounds of the house.

She heard the squeak of the floorboards beneath her feet, and the creak of the walls as the wind pressed against them, and beneath both, the whirring music of the Beings’ language. She moved toward it, though it was hard to say, at first, which direction it was coming from. It seemed to be coming from everywhere at once, buzzing in her ears.

Least stayed behind, in the grand room. She waited until Best was gone, then took her phone from her pocket and turned it on.

• • • •

Just before Best reached the sitting room where the Beings were taking their afternoon tea, the door opened, and the Fierce One stepped into the hallway. Behind it was the Gentle One, adjusting the metal collar over its throat that translated its peculiar hum-whistling.

You have need of us? the Gentle One said.

Yes, Best replied. I have an answer for you.

The Gentle One and the Fierce One exchanged a look that meant little to Best, unfamiliar as she was with their expressions. Their eyes were dark, like staring directly into deep space, where no stars gleamed.

We’d like you to choose fifty thousand at random, Best said.

The two Beings looked taken aback. The Fierce One removed the collar that would translate its speech, and spoke to the Gentle One in short, strong whistles. The Gentle One took its own metal band away from its throat, to respond. Best wondered what they were saying that they didn’t want her to hear.

Those were not the terms of our offer, the Fierce One said, the band again secure around its throat. We wish to collect only the best of your people, the ones you most value. Not a random assortment.

Best replied, We are unable to define the people we most value in these terms.

Though she was quaking with fear, to be so close to the strange, glittering, glowing creatures with beaks that looked sharp enough to break diamonds, her voice was steady.

We offer you this mercy, the Fierce One said, this great kindness.

A place in our world. A chance to begin again, the Gentle One continued. It was as if the Beings were in a relay race, and the baton had been passed.

The Fierce One finished: Instead you argue with us about the terms of our charity.

I didn’t know it would be such a problem, Best said.

It is, the Fierce One said. Go back and do as you were asked, or you will condemn all of your people to die.

Told you, came Least’s voice from the doorway to the grand room. She was leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed. Least’s eyes were bright with triumph. Her nails were jagged from where she had chewed them.

What, the Gentle One said, do you mean?

We are a paranoid people, Least said. Always looking outward, for some external threat, instead of looking inward. It hasn’t served us well up until now, but it’s reliable.

Least examined her fingernails, as if trying to appear casual. Her hands—trembling—betrayed her fear.

She continued: If there was a spaceship in orbit large enough to transport fifty thousand humans, it would be all over the news feeds.

Least took a phone from her pocket and held it up. It was bulky, rubberized to make it sturdy. They were designed for emergency use, legally available only to government employees or other important people, but illegally available on the black market for whoever could pay for one.

But it’s not, Least said. There is a report of an unidentified object in the sky above the Appalachian Mountains. I assume that’s where we are.

Least tucked the phone back into her pocket, and stepped forward.

I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing, she said. Pitting us against each other and then watching us with your little cameras as you drink tea and eat crumpets, or whatever the fuck you’re doing in here. But I’ve never much liked being a toy.

There are many possible explanations for the situation you have described, the Gentle One said. But clearly you have decided what to believe. You decided it the moment you woke. Perhaps it is not surprising, given your inferior nature, that you would assume all others are as duplicitous as you are.

The Gentle One looked to Best, and said, Now you are the one who must decide.

Best looked first to the Beings—tall, slim, and ethereal, eyes fathomless, beaks swirling with slight variations in color, like the milky surface of a pearl—and then to Least—small and mean, posture heavy with weariness. She thought of the piece of paper on the table in the grand room, where she had written young, skilled, healthy, innocent, as if those things could possibly narrow down Earth’s still substantial population to a mere fifty thousand. As if those parameters would not result in loss too profound for any one person to bear.

I won’t do it, Best said. Take fifty thousand at random, or take no one.

This is your decision? The Fierce One tipped its head back so it looked down its long nose at her. Your decision is to trade your hope of salvation for suspicion and doubt?

Best didn’t give an answer.

Very well, the Fierce One replied.

• • • •

Best and Least walked in silence through the woods beyond the grand house. An arm’s length of space separated them, yet they walked in the same direction, using Least’s sat-phone to guide them toward the nearest settlement. The only sounds they could hear were the wind blowing through the trees, the scrabbling of squirrels on branches, and the soft crunch of their own shoes on the dry pine needles.

It would take two days to reach the settlement, and neither of them knew much about surviving in the wilderness. The phone’s battery would run down quickly, so Least kept it off most of the time, buried at the bottom of her bag to remove the temptation to consult it constantly.

Any water they came across might be contaminated; any food they found might be poison. A thousand deaths awaited them, but death had always been certain, from the moment of birth, and whether it was near or far seemed oddly irrelevant now.

• • • •

They had watched the Beings leave, in a ship shaped like a feather, made of metal too white to be silver and too silver to be white. It had blended in with the clouds above for a time, and then disappeared completely, the dubious salvation the strange Beings had offered lost to humanity forever.

Least had turned to Best, and asked, Why did you believe me?

You can learn a lot about someone by what they ask of you, Best had replied. They asked me to decide who lives and who dies. You asked me not to.

But maybe we could have lived, Least had said, and for the first time, she had looked unsteady, like she had lost her footing.

Maybe, Best said. Or maybe we’ll find a way to survive without their help. Or maybe we’ll all die. But if I’m going to die, I want to die as myself.

• • • •

In the woods, hours into their walk toward civilization, Best tripped over a rock disguised by a tangle of fallen branches, and Least stuck out a hand to steady her. She kept it there a little longer than she needed to.

The two walked on into the wilderness.

©2020 by Veronica Roth.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Veronica Roth is the #1 New York Times best-selling author of the Divergent series (Divergent, Insurgent, Allegiant, and Four: A Divergent Collection), the Carve the Mark duology (Carve the Mark, The Fates Divide), The End and Other Beginnings collection of short fiction, and many short stories and essays. Her debut novel for adults, Chosen Ones, is available now from John Joseph Adams Books (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). She lives in Chicago.

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

Always the Harvest

Yoon Ha Lee | 7823 words

Nissaea-of-the-Slant wasn’t even looking for an eye implant in the mazeway lode when she came across the half-smashed ocular. It was worthless in any case, and she gritted her teeth at her bad luck. A hand was what she needed, and this was her last chance. The sputtering confounders, the only ones she’d been able to afford, would give out sooner or later, and then she wouldn’t be able to hide her illegal implant-mining from the Watch.

She was about to try again to the left when she heard the sound. It was hard to make out. In the city above, she heard the echoes of a distant chant accompanied by drums, undoubtedly temple services. She must have been down here longer than she’d realized. And the damned drums made it harder for her to hear anything else. She straightened and looked around, ready to spring toward the nearest exit at the slightest indication of trouble.

It took only a moment to locate the source of the noise. Crumpled near one of the heaps of partially digested motherboards was a slight figure, smaller even than Nissaea herself. Nissaea’s darkvision (a simple modification based on a sensor patch, not a full ocular replacement) didn’t offer much discrimination. She didn’t want to draw attention from the tunnels by switching on a brighter light source, just in case, but she was still dismayed at herself for not spotting the figure earlier.

I have to get out of here, Nissaea thought, edging away as quickly as she could without tripping over the wrack of discarded packaging, outcroppings, bent pipes. Just before her circle had cast her out for the circuit-infection that had disabled her hand, she’d heard persistent rumors of a murderer lurking in the mazeways. Not that murder was anything new, especially among the undercircles and those who had no circle at all, but the descriptions of the corpses had been particularly gory and Nissaea preferred not to take chances. She was halfway to the exit from the chamber to the lower mazeways when a new sound stopped her.

“Water,” the figure said softly, in a voice not so much sexless as pure of timbre. It had lifted its head and was watching Nissaea with eyes of indeterminate color.

Nissaea could have kept on going, but the utter hopelessness in its eyes stopped her. The voice’s owner expected her to abandon it. She remembered how the head of her former circle, Addit, had turned his back to her the moment she showed up with the infection. It hadn’t even been worth pleading to buy part of a new hand on credit and pay the rest back later. She wasn’t going to be like Addit. Well, not straightaway.

“How long have you been there?” she demanded in a fierce whisper.

It bowed its head, drew a shuddering breath. “Always,” it said, a questioning lilt to its voice, then: “Always.”

The answer made no sense, but she assumed that it was addled from being trapped down here who knew how long. All at once she made up her mind, and offered it her canteen. It looked at her, awaiting her nod before taking one measured sip, then a second one.

In the meantime, Nissaea took the opportunity to scrutinize the stranger. One of its eyes was artificial and almost seemed to glow faintly in facets, insectine. The other, human eye, set in a face quiltwork-patched together from alternating swatches of metal and skin, was sunken and fever-bright. An extravagant inlaid mark, like a captive prism, decorated one cheek. It was weirdly incongruous beneath the melancholy human eye. And then there were its hands: the left one, although a prosthetic, was very close to human in shape, except for the stubby pearlescent talons, which looked like they might retract. The right arm, worryingly thin, was of flesh, and led down to fingers with bitten nails. The stranger wore a shift too large for it, and no shoes, revealing too human feet with scarred soles.

“Drink,” Nissaea said, realizing it wasn’t going to take any more unless she said to.

It took three more sips, paused, then allowed itself one more. Nissaea found this polite parsimony oddly endearing. Then it said, “Thank you,” and sank partway down with a whispered exhalation.

They were interrupted by a distorted sound from above: rough voices, some buzzing and scarcely human, and the thump of footsteps above the chamber, mediated through layers of honeycombed metal and nestled pipes. Nissaea couldn’t quite make out what the speakers were saying, but she was betting that that was the guttural rhythm of the Watch’s dialect. More to the point, if they were Watch and they could hear the reverberations under their feet, they might figure out there was an illegal dig here. She’d thought that this chamber was some distance from their usual patrol routes, but apparently not.

“Go,” the stranger said. “You can’t let them find you.”

“I can’t leave you here,” Nissaea returned, although this was patently untrue. Still, she remembered how it had stung when Addit had discarded her, the moment when she’d gone from valued scavenger to unnecessary expense. She could do better than that, be better than that.

“I won’t be able to keep up with you,” it said.

“Are they after you?”

It looked confused by the question. “Why would they be after me?”

Hell with it. They shouldn’t linger here any longer. “Come with me,” she said insistently. When it didn’t respond, she tugged hard on its human hand.

The stranger wasn’t completely stupid. It didn’t jerk away from her, or yank itself out of the mess of rough-edged debris, not that it looked like it had much strength for that sort of thing anyway. Instead, as carefully as it could, it worked itself loose from the entanglement of chiaroscuro wires. Its breath hitched when a sharp edge scraped across its ankle, although Nissaea couldn’t help being glad that the segment was flesh, not something that would have made a louder noise.

At last it stood. The footsteps had paused abruptly. Nissaea heard snatches of words, as clear as hallucinations of water: illegal, hollow, rats in the tunnels. She cursed inwardly.

“This way,” she breathed, glancing back once. She couldn’t see anything; had it sunk back down? But she couldn’t afford to wait any longer, either. She padded to the exit leading downward and plunged past. Dank air soughed through the darkness, smelling nauseatingly of metallic precipitates and mold.

The Watch was tapping, tapping, tapping. She could hear their scanners’ thrum at the base of her skull. It wouldn’t be long before they located her confounders and destroyed them.

Nissaea heard an intake of breath, and risked turning on the smallest of lights, a pin-flicker in her wrist. It was the only thing in her prosthetic that still functioned. “Don’t lose sight of me in the mazeways,” she said without slowing down. “Stay close. I won’t have time to backtrack and search for you.”

“Yes,” the stranger said, very quietly.

The distinct sizzle-zap-pop of confounders being overloaded followed them into the mazeways. Nissaea’s darkvision helped her less than she would have liked. Most well-equipped scavengers opted for wide-spectrum oculars for situations like this. However, Nissaea had spent many hours in the mazeways, and she knew them well. In the swollen shadows, she could see great wheels of uncertain diameter and unknown purpose, wrecked resonators, crystal displays roused to phantom splendor in this faintest of lights. The footing was unsure, and more than once she had to slow, as much as she hated any delay, to pick a safe route through the corrugated rubble.

Clanging noises tracked them through the mazeways, knotting and unknotting in unsettling bursts. Nissaea reminded herself more than once to breathe. If the Watch was close enough to hear her breathing, she’d already have a bullet in her back anyway. By this point she had forgotten about her impetuous decision to drag the stranger with her. If anything, she assumed it had gotten lost some time back.

Then she heard a shout, distant but angry. For once she lost her composure and bolted forward and to the right without having any clear plan for where to go next, panic translated into pure motion. Her foot caught hard on something hard and thin, a wire perhaps. She went down. Only the habits of survival kept her from crying out as she thumped down with appalling loudness against a shape made of sharp angles. Her palms were scraped raw, and her breath whooshed out between her teeth.

“I’m here,” the stranger said in its soft, colorless voice. Nissaea was too busy fighting back sobs to answer, or even to be surprised at its presence. It didn’t bother her with further attempts at conversation. Instead, it offered its hand, gently at first, then more insistently. Once she understood its intent—the pain was making her stupid—she accepted its help stumbling to her feet. A deep roar reverberated through the passages, and she flinched: They were getting awfully close.

Her shin throbbed abominably and a sticky warmth soaked her pant leg. She risked fumbling for a tube of skinseal, almost dropping it in her haste, and rolled up her pant leg to apply it as best she could in the dark. It didn’t feel as though she’d quite covered the wound, but it would have to do.

Another roar. Footsteps and their echoes pattered through the mazeways like a drumroll. Nissaea wasn’t one of the lucky people with an acoustic analyzer that, combined with an up-to-date map, would tell her exactly where the sounds were coming from. The mazeways changed hourly, little by little, and mapping them was a profession in itself.

“Where?” the stranger said. She realized it was asking the question for the second time.

“They won’t gas us,” Nissaea said, a hope she would normally have kept to herself, except the pain was still muddling her thoughts. The mazeways connected too many inhabited areas, or more accurately, too many areas inhabited by people who paid protection money to the Watch, or who had influence with the city’s high circles. “But they haven’t given up.”

“I can still hear them,” the stranger agreed, just as softly as before. “Point the way.”

Nissaea squinted into the shadows. For a horrible moment she couldn’t tell where they were. Then she found the passage she remembered and pointed. The stranger took her hand again and led her in.

Nissaea wasn’t one of those people who was timelocked to the city’s cycles. She spent the next interval in a haze, guiding them each time the stranger squeezed her hand. Ordinarily the power drain of her implants would have given her some indication of passing time, but she was having trouble monitoring her internals, and the few that had associated clocks had never been all that reliable.

She came out of her haze when they ran into the corpse. The stranger didn’t seem to notice it, or didn’t slow when they approached it, at any rate. In all fairness, Nissaea almost didn’t notice it herself. There was no smell of blood, or shit, or decay, or any of the weary universals she associated with death. Instead, a wavering, almost aquatic fragrance permeated the air, as of certain preservatives.

The corpse had had its spine cracked backwards into a bridge-like arc, and was suspended by a spider-profusion of wires that led tautly to the chamber’s walls and ceiling. Unfocused glass beads shone from the wires, held in place by barbed hooks. No evidence remained of whatever tools had been used to pound open the sternum and scrape out the organs, or extract the eyes—she could just barely see the trails that the optic nerves made down the corpse’s face, arranged into butterfly curves. In the low light it was impossible to discern colors clearly, probably a blessing. Everything appeared in washed-pale blues and sullen whites and silhouette blacks. The murderer had done an especially conscientious job of draining the blood, to the point where it almost wasn’t clear the corpse had ever possessed any.

“Are you hurt?” the stranger said, having finally noticed that Nissaea wasn’t moving forward.

“So it’s true about the murderer,” Nissaea said.

Nissaea wasn’t squeamish. She had seen her share of back-alley deaths, learning from an early age to hide when the Watch took out its need for hilarity on some vagabond. In particular, she’d learned enough to be distantly grateful that the guardsman who had taken her original hand, long ago, hadn’t thought of something more inventive to do.

Nevertheless, the corpse bothered her, mainly because of the finicky thoroughness with which it had been arranged. It was almost possible to regard it as a sculpture, or a puzzle. Focus on the cleanness of the incisions, of the precisely placed punctures that the wires made in the body, and you could admire the murderer’s skill; focus on the mathematical curve of the spine and the graceful angles of the limbs, and you had to wonder if the murderer had some aesthetic insight to convey.

“We should go,” the stranger said, only a little questioning. “There’s nothing useful left here.”

“What if the murderer’s down here looking for us too?” Nissaea said. There was an odd warning twinge in her leg, higher than the injury, and it worried her.

“Staying still won’t help us,” the stranger said dryly. “Please. Let’s go.”

Reluctantly, Nissaea looked away from the corpse, and they hobbled out of the chamber together. Her imagination insisted that the corpse was muttering at their backs, even if she couldn’t hear anything, and even if the flow of air currents was dank and steady.

They proceeded more carefully after that, alert to every chance clatter and pin-drop trickle of sound. It seemed that the Watch had lost their trail, or lost interest, anyway, but Nissaea couldn’t help flinching every time she heard something unexpected. To her mortification, her damaged hand went into convulsions just as they nudged their way onto a bridge of stiff swaying fibers, fingers spasming in rattling metallic syncopation. Not now, Nissaea begged the universe, although it was unlikely that it mattered at this point.

The stranger stopped, to her dismay. “This injury,” it said, gaze going directly to the prosthetic. “An old one?”

She tried to shove past it, which the bridge was too narrow to permit if it was determined not to let her. “It’s not important,” she said through her teeth. After all, she thought wildly, a hand that alternated between being dead and going into spasms still beat being cut up like the corpse back there. “We’re not far from the Cat-Eyed Gate. Let’s keep going.”

To her surprise, the stranger didn’t argue this, although she could sense its unhappiness. Why it wanted to deal with diagnostics just this moment was beyond her, but since it wasn’t pressing the point, neither would she.

At last the bridge was far behind them, and they reached the Cat-Eyed Gate. It had been mined out years ago, and nothing remained but the occasional chatoyant glimmer of green or blue or gold substrate.

“This is the gate?” the stranger asked.

By now Nissaea was panting softly. Her entire leg hurt now, hot raking fingers of pain that were even now reaching upward. “Yes,” she said, or thought she said. She wasn’t sure she had much of a voice left.

“Tell me where to take you,” the stranger said.

She had the vague thought that this had started with her intent to help the stranger and not the other way around. She opened her mouth to protest, but nothing came out. It wasn’t as though she had any allies left anyway. Then the pain clawed up again, toward groin and torso, and she collapsed into a vast constricting darkness.

When human explorers discovered the city, they thought it was another ruin from some earlier wave of colonization. It wasn’t until settlers had abandoned the ship over a doctrinal schism that people discovered the city’s peculiar properties.

The city, which the majority sect named Contemplating Orthodoxy, originally showed the blandest of faces to its settlers. It was a sphere orbiting a dismal sun, hollowed out by nonorthogonal passages and irregular chambers, like an apple cored by enthusiastic worms. The chambers were composed of corroded walls and beams of bent metal and unreliable floors. People assessed the structure, shored up what needed shoring up, built their own dwellings and factories from a combination of their own supplies and the city’s excess material, and moved in.

Not long afterward, the walls changed. And the floors. And the ceilings. And the columns, and the bridges, and the doors, and the occasional couch. At first the phenomenon was confined to items made of the city’s original material, but later everything was affected.

Contemplating Orthodoxy, it turned out, had what one of the early philosopher-poets called mirror-nature. When it was uninhabited, it lay quiescent. When humans crept into it, it reflected them according to its own kaleidoscope understanding.

The form the city’s understanding took was, so to speak, spare parts for its inhabitants. From the walls grew tangled tendrils of wire, and the tendrils fused together into bones of strong composites, and the bones hinged together into hands, or feet, or hips sheathed in plastic or metal. There were eyes in every conceivable color, growing like fervent grapes from pillars, the sensors glittering pale and vigilant; there were infrared sensors and scanners and seismic analyzers.

Most people were convinced that this signaled that the city was going to eat them. The riots that followed involved smashing, hacking, and huddling in shelters ineffectually treated with everything from insecticide to surfactants in hopes of warding off the unsettling growths. But one surgeon hit upon the idea of harvesting an eye from the city and implanting it in his brother. According to some accounts, he pitied his brother for an eye maimed in an accident involving a staple gun. According to less flattering stories, he was driven by malicious curiosity. (Why the brother didn’t resist or flee, they don’t say.) Either way, the experiment was a success. The filaments that emerged from the back of the cybernetic eye successfully interfaced with human nerves, and, as a side-effect, gave the surgeon’s brother the ability to see partway into the ultraviolet.

It didn’t take long for other surgeons to begin offering this service, to say nothing of eager charlatans. After all, the riots had resulted in any number of injuries, and the regenerative tanks that the settlers had brought with them were running low on the necessary gels. People came around to the idea that ready-made spare parts and enhancements weren’t such a bad thing, even if they came in outlandish colors. Scarcely any time passed before the outlandish colors became a motivation in themselves, and soon after that, the first Harvests were organized in earnest.

Nissaea dreamt for a long time of low-lidded octopuses floating through space so black it was red, or so red it was black; of stars the color of incisions, and a bird singing in a voice like a bone flute on the verge of breaking. When at last she struggled awake, she blinked crusted eyelids against light sere and pitiless, as though it were part of the dream itself. “Jeni?” she asked hoarsely, mistaking the shape in front of her for a circle-sister from years past. But of course Jeni had died in a Watch raid.

“This is a name?” said a voice she didn’t recognize at first. “It’s not one I know.” A smooth hand, although not a soft one, pressed itself against her wrist, testing—perhaps for her pulse.

She flinched. Something about her wrist felt wrong, but she couldn’t figure out what it was. Instead, she scrabbled uselessly among the blankets, scratchy but warmed by her own heat, for some weapon better than her fists—fist.

Fist. Her entire left hand was missing. It shocked her fully awake. She bolted out of the bed, blankets tangling her legs, and looked around, forcing herself to take in details that might help her escape. Walls that wound up to a cusp. No windows, although there were vents covered by lavender membranes, like fungus gills, that she might be able to tear through. The familiar whisk-whirr of the mass transit system somewhere beyond them. Flowers, of all things: not the cybernetic blossoms that the city produced, with their unwilting plastic petals and stamens shaped like upside-down catenary curves, but a dented steel can of genuine weeds, yellow-bright, with holes in the lopsided leaves. Next to the flowers was the exit she’d sought. The door was slightly ajar, and the stranger wasn’t standing in her way toward it.

All this, and no sign of her hand. She fixed the stranger with a stare.

The stranger wasn’t stupid. “It was infected,” it said simply. “That wasn’t just a cut you took. The nano-rot introduced by your wound was drawn to the faulty components in your hand. I removed it as a precaution.”

Nissaea narrowed her eyes at it. In full light, its features possessed the same patchwork sense of balance she had noted before, human and machine parts alternating with each other as though they were being weighed against each other. “If you’re a scrap surgeon,” she said, “what were you doing abandoned like a slab of meat gone bad?” Surreptitiously, she tensed and untensed the muscles of her afflicted leg. The cut still throbbed distantly, but otherwise most of the pain was gone.

Even a half-competent surgeon was usually valued enough that some circle would retain them. “Scrap surgeon” was a derogatory term, but the stranger showed no sign of offense. “I was always there,” it said in a voice tinged with sadness. It raised its chin, considered her, then shook its head.

Maybe its former circle had gotten rid of it because its mind wasn’t all there. Still, she raised her wrist, steeling herself, and inspected the amputation. A very clean job, the bone sawed and the stump capped with a bright green-gold metal. She had a brief phantom sensation of locked fingers, but that was old news. “Thank you,” she said. The truth was that she couldn’t afford work this good.

“I would have harvested a prosthesis for you already,” it added, “but I didn’t want to leave you unattended in case the fever got worse.”

Nissaea drew her breath in, not sure she had understood correctly. “I can’t pay—”

“It’s not a question of payment,” it said. “I want—” Its voice became unexpectedly scratchy on want. “I want a roof.”

“You mean sponsorship into a circle,” Nissaea said after she parsed the archaic word. She made herself look at it straight on. “This is terrible recompense, but I can’t give you that. I’m not a circle-breaker, so the enforcers won’t shoot me, but my circle revoked my membership. I don’t have any connections.”

Looking into the stranger’s mismatched eyes told her only that its desire was real, but why wouldn’t it be? Even scavengers like Nissaea, even fences and circuit-cutters belonged to circles. It was the order of things.

“You gave me water and helped me out of the dark,” it said. “You didn’t have to do either. It’s not a circle’s companionship I want. It’s yours.”

She gentled her voice. “I don’t mean to be ungrateful. My name is Nissaea-of-the-Slant.” She’d been withholding it all this time, since you didn’t casually introduce your name-chant to a stranger, but it had probably saved her life and she didn’t see any point in being coy. “What should I call you?”

“I never needed a name before,” it said.

Did it come from one of the more esoteric circles where people called each other by numbers? There were a few of those. “Well, you could pick something you like?” she suggested.

“Muhad,” it said after a moment. “I don’t have a chant.”

“Muhad,” she said, being as careful with the name as she would with a delicate piece of jewelry. “Have I got it right?”

She was rewarded by Muhad’s smile, a curve made beautiful rather than perfect by its asymmetry, one side of the mouth a nudge higher than the other. Oh, do that again, she thought in spite of herself.

“Of course it’s right,” Muhad said, shyly. It would have been flirtatious coming from anyone else. Its gaze went to Nissaea’s stump. “I meant it, about a hand. You shouldn’t go without one.” It paused, suddenly uncertain. “Unless you wanted a different appendage?”

Pincers, tentacles, integrated guns . . . Nissaea had never been attracted to the more exotic options, which cost more anyway. “No,” she said hastily. “Just a hand. If I can find a compatible one without having to raid a parts bank.” Not that they’d have any luck doing that. They’d be safer picking a fight directly with the Watch.

“I can do that,” Muhad said. “I know of a lode in the deep places, now that you are well enough to travel.” It spoke as tranquilly as if it had made a simple statement of arithmetic, were it not for the shadow in its eyes.

“Then I’ll need supplies,” Nissaea said. “I’m out of confounders. I’m not going out without any.” She didn’t ask what Muhad meant by the “deep places,” and didn’t want to know until the last possible moment. There was no way such a harvest could be legal, even by the undercircles’ codes. But she found that she cared less and less. She’d followed the codes and worked hard at her profession, only to be tossed out like scrap. At this point, she might as well look out for herself and the one person who had showed her kindness.

Few people gave Nissaea so much as a pitying look when she showed up with a missing hand, even the ones who recognized her. Instead, they ignored her pointedly. Muhad drew more attention, although Nissaea stood protectively near it at all times. She knew they couldn’t linger. The local undercircles didn’t keep formal registries the way the high circles did, but the stranger’s presence would be marked, and sooner or later someone would be sent to investigate. Sideways Hano did attempt to draw Muhad into a discussion of heterodoxies in Chamberish theology when Nissaea was buying them grub fritters, but he did that to everyone, and after several rambling lectures, even he figured out that Muhad’s polite bewilderment wasn’t faked.

Getting together supplies didn’t take long, mainly because Nissaea had been flat broke before and she was still flat broke now. But they obtained confounders and a few other basics because Muhad matter-of-factly volunteered to have the decorative inlay work on its face removed. The angry-looking scar left behind saddened Nissaea. Silently, she promised to make it up to Muhad.

One of the things that Nissaea insisted on was shoes for Muhad. They didn’t fit very well. The soles were worn thin and the canvas looked all but translucent, and not in the aesthetic way either. Muhad didn’t seem to mind, however.

Nissaea’s nerves finally gave out when they slipped down into the mazeways. She asked about the lode: Would it be underwater? Flooded with acid? Require special breathing apparatus or hacked frequency keys? These were all things she should have asked before they went shopping, except for the fact that they couldn’t afford specialized equipment anyway. Even when she’d been in good standing with Addit’s circle, she’d only ever touched that kind of thing on loan, for particular assignments.

At last Muhad said, after a series of patient reassurances, “Nothing down there will harm you, Nissaea-of-the-Slant. I don’t think there’s even much to trip on.”

Nissaea opened her mouth to protest, then caught Muhad’s almost-smile and realized she was being teased.

They left for the lode during nighttime. The city’s cycles were signaled along the major thoroughfares by clocklights that changed color from morning pink to noon gold to alluring evening blue. According to a past circle-sister, the color scheme mimicked that of the original planet’s skies, something that reproductions of very old paintings and photographs suggested might have some basis in fact. Every few years one or another of the high circles petitioned to have the colors reprogrammed to match their livery (undercircles didn’t bother with livery), and the rest of the high circles quashed the notion. Nissaea wouldn’t have minded the variety, but she didn’t get a say. Besides, tonight’s dim blue glow was pretty enough.

The light faded behind them as they entered the mazeways beneath the statue called Embracing Birds. One of Nissaea’s former circle-kin stood guard in the hollows by the gate, collecting the toll. He was a cadaverous man, each rib emphasized by a pitted metal stripe, and his leg was ribbon-thin all the way up to the joint at his hip. A clear covering exposed the organs of his torso, but Nissaea had seen stranger things than a man’s inner workings.

“You know the toll,” the man said in a voice like stone scraped thin. The toll would be higher now that she was an independent.

In answer, Nissaea made an abbreviated gesture of respect and pressed her palm twice against his, once for herself and once for Muhad. There was a tiny beep as the transaction went through. She raised her eyebrows at the man, wondering if he would make trouble for her.

She was lucky, or in any case, not unluckier than she already had been for the last few days. The man shook his head, although the gleam in his eye suggested that he was thinking of reporting her and Muhad. Well, she could deal with that later. She nodded to Muhad, and they slipped into the mazeways together.

The transition into the mazeways always caused Nissaea’s breath to stutter in her lungs even after all these years. Great whippy tendrils of fiber and hungry iron-jawed mouths grew from the gate’s throat, slick with the dew of anticipated carrion. They were careful to walk precisely down the middle of the passage, so as not to attract the tendrils’ attention.

After years of being the one handling the navigation, Nissaea was dismayed to discover how rapidly she got lost following Muhad. If she hadn’t known better, she would have suspected that the mazeways had reshuffled themselves like a cheater’s hand of cards, except she’d never known them to do so with such haste. She paid attention to the scissored shadows, the malevolent gleam of fetal sensors, the grit beneath her feet the way she hadn’t since she was a small child clinging to her sister’s hand.

She couldn’t help wondering if they would run into another corpse, whether one neatly cracked open like the last one, or smashed into stains. It took an effort to make herself breathe evenly instead of hyperventilating. But the only human reek was her own rank sweat. Even Muhad, perhaps because its modifications were more extensive than her own, smelled only of pale salt.

Between one passage (paint peeling away like butterflies in transition, the occasional white mass that oozed when you didn’t look at it directly) and the next (a blast of acrid vapor from a hole in a pipe, rattling as of librarian lizards realphabetizing their movements), they arrived in a vast pulsing garden of hands. Nissaea had never seen anything like it before. She bet that even the high circles’ harvesters hadn’t seen anything like it in generations, either.

A braidweave splendor of limbs made up the walls. Even the floor pulsed with rhythmic lights. Nissaea was tempted to close her eyes and sink into the pattern, deeper, deeper, until nothing was left of song and synapse except a dross of decaying static. Instead, she was captivated by the limbs and, more importantly, the hands that sprouted from them.

They weren’t all hands, although some were. Great gun muzzles with their barrels pointing obsessively at her heart; you’d need to replace the entire arm with a specialized rig to bear that kind of weight. The ever-popular tentacles, except Nissaea had never seen any with integrated syringes up close before; some kind of medical appendage, or perhaps intended for drug-fests? Claws in a variety of configurations and lengths, some jewel-tipped and some bladed. Of the most interest to Nissaea were the quotidian prostheses that resembled ordinary human hands if not for the exacting angles, the unsoft curves.

“Muhad,” Nissaea said wonderingly, “you’re rich.” Aside from the matter of finding a reliable fence, and paying protection money, and organizing shipments, and—well. She was certain Muhad didn’t have any of those things set up, or it wouldn’t have been lying in the mazeways having given up all will to fight.

“It has nothing to do with wealth,” Muhad said absently. “Nissaea-of-the-Slant, which one do you want?”

Tempting though it was to linger over the choices, Nissaea had already picked one out. She pointed to a slender hand of dull blue-silver, not a bad match for her born-hand, and—she hoped—not too greedy. It was, however, beautifully articulated and its knuckles were ringed by shimmering bands. “What do you think of that one?” she asked.

Muhad, apparently, had no problems walking right up to the wall of limbs. They stirred and several of them beeped disharmoniously, but nothing disastrous happened. Muhad tapped the hand’s joints, squeezed it, ran its fingers over the sleek surfaces, frowned thoughtfully. “It will serve you well,” it said. “Most of them would.”

They set up the harvesting equipment. Simple enough: the small reinforced tank and its clear pink fluid, the selection of screwdrivers, the saws, the neural stimulators to ensure that the hand’s internals didn’t sputter dead during the transfer. Oddly, for all Muhad’s deftness, it didn’t seem to have any experience with the knifework of harvesting. Nissaea ended up doing most of it, although it was more soothing than she would have expected to have a companion while listening for the Watch, or carrion maws, or other mazeway hazards.

This will be my hand, she thought. A freshly harvested hand from the richest imaginable lode, a hand she had picked out herself. The luxury was inconceivable.

One by one they freed the connectors and the sensory hookups, and the fingers clenched slightly as Nissaea eased the hand from its former home. She weighed it in her born-hand for a second, marveling that its weight was so perfect: not too heavy, not too light.

“I don’t know of a safe place for the operation,” Nissaea said at last, her voice hushed.

“This is safe enough,” Muhad said. “I hear no footsteps.”

Nissaea listened again, just in case, but all she heard was the low thrum of the confounders and the occasional slithering friction of tubes crossing tubes. “We didn’t purchase anesthetic,” she said after a juddery pause. While she could survive a little pain, the moment of hookup could be agonizing.

“We won’t need it,” Muhad said. “We can use needles.”

Acupuncture? Well, she knew it worked, and it wasn’t improbable that a surgeon would know the techniques. Nissaea inhaled, then said, “What should I do?”

Muhad took her shoulder and steered her, not ungently, toward the center of the chamber. “Sit,” it said. Nissaea sat. After a moment, she heard Muhad humming to itself, a sequence of notes at the threshold of melody. It picked up the snippers and moved among the hands, harvesting over a dozen fine wires. Each was cut to precisely the same length, with the tips sharply angled. The makeshift needles gleamed tooth-hungry in the partial dark.

“Rest your stump on your knee, tendons facing down,” Muhad said then, and Nissaea complied. She admitted to curiosity: there were different schools of acupuncture in Contemplating Orthodoxy, and she had heard that the disruptions caused by the implants, or even by the city’s very nature, had altered the map of meridians that the original settlers had brought with them.

One by one Muhad inserted the needles. It had a delicate touch, and if any of the needles penetrated far below the surface of her skin, Nissaea couldn’t tell. Only partway through did she notice an almost pleasing numbness, and the fact that her arm was now locked in place.

“I’d tell you to relax, but—” Muhad said, not without irony. It stroked her unaffected arm once, twice. Then it brought the harvested hand out of the tank where it had spent so little time, toweled down the pink dripping fluid, and connected up wires and vessels with a briskness that would have been surprising if Nissaea had still been capable of surprise.

“I’m relaxing,” Nissaea lied.

Muhad’s sudden grin flashed at her. She smiled back reflexively. Muhad pressed some cluster of nerves without warning and slammed the hand into place. She cried out as the hand activated. It was like a white spiked star in the back of her brain, and then the pain dwindled and she opened and closed its fingers, giddy with relief. “Oh,” she said articulately, and then, after she had a chance to stare dazedly at the fingers’ delicately molded tips, the responsive joints, “Thank you.”

It seemed as tongue-tied as she was. First it ducked its head as it removed all the needles. Then, hesitantly, it reached down, its own hand hovering over her newly attached one. It flinched away at the last second.

The absurdity of the situation struck Nissaea. Who knew how late into the night it was, and here they were surrounded by a garden of hands, with tools pitifully inadequate to harvest them all. She couldn’t think of any sustainable way to derive benefit from the lode, never mind that it was Muhad’s find and not hers. Even though she should have been calculating matters of profit and survival, all she could do was look into Muhad’s eyes, suddenly petal-soft. Her pulse beat loudly in her ears as she brought her palm up to meet Muhad’s. Its breath caught.

“Tell me,” Nissaea said, meaning it, “what is it that you want?”

She didn’t care that she still had no idea what offense would cause a scrap surgeon to be expelled from its home circle, or that it made no sense for Muhad to be going around like a vagabond when it had casual access to this kind of wealth. All she saw was the way it met her eyes, as though she were the only lamp in a world of shadows.

We could be found here tomorrow morning all carved up, she thought; but that didn’t matter either.

Muhad’s answer didn’t come in words, which wasn’t unexpected. It drew Nissaea down above it, pausing midway so they could arrange their limbs so they didn’t gouge each other with elbows and knees. Nissaea had slept with circle-kin in years past, but it had been a lonely year since she had known another’s embrace. Muhad’s mouth was, if anything, hungrier than hers, and at the same time, she was aware of its hands reaching up to dig into her spine so hard it hurt, if pain ever felt this close to breathless joy. She knew she must be pressing the breath out of it, and her weight was stamping the pattern of its joins into her skin, metal and glass and plastic riveted to flesh, map begetting map.

Its lips parted wide as they each drew back from the kiss, and it breathed something that might have been her name. Nissaea resumed the kiss before it could say anything else. “Shh,” she said, desperate and happy and incoherent with the desire not to know more than she knew right that moment, “don’t, don’t talk, don’t.” And then she began to undress it.

They slept afterward, or anyway she did. Her dreams were full of organs made of puzzle pieces, or puzzle pieces made of organs: here a tessellated liver, there a lung made of dodecahedral crystals.

Nissaea woke parched. Muhad had pillowed its head on her shoulder, and her arm had fallen asleep. For a long moment Nissaea admired its eyelashes, the long curving sweep of them, then eased its head to the floor.

She stretched, massaging the tingling arm, then padded over to their supplies and treated herself to a few careful sips of water. It was lukewarm, but tasted sweet.

Then she returned to Muhad’s side. Its shift was a crumpled pile, its shoes on opposite sides of the chamber, and it was, unclothed, almost a work of art. Some warning whispered at her awareness, but she was too busy smiling at its slim curves—it was not quite angular enough to be a man, but too narrow to be an adult woman—to pay it heed at first.

Nissaea didn’t have any illusions about her own beauty, although there had been advantages to being plain when she belonged to an undercircle. She did, however, appreciate beauty in others—who didn’t?—and she looked admiringly at Muhad now that they weren’t clutching each other in the heat of hunger. Whoever had done its modifications had cared very much about aesthetics, about gradations of color and nuances of luster. The diagnostic lights that wound around its torso, for instance, like twin subtle snakes.

She drew a hand across its skin and paused at its hip. Muhad sighed in its sleep, mouth curving up. Slowly, she walked her fingers down its thigh, then to the artificial joint at the knee, and all the way down to—

That was odd. Nissaea frowned at the two human feet. She didn’t expect one to be artificial; Muhad hadn’t been designed around that kind of petty symmetry. But something about the feet seemed wrong. She scooted over and peered at them.

Muhad’s feet didn’t match. She would have expected some deformity to be the issue, but the fact was that both were perfectly normal feet, just different from each other. One was significantly longer than the other, and the other had broader, stubbier toes, and a different skeletal structure. She hadn’t noticed before because people looked at faces and sometimes hands, but feet?

Her heart went cold. She examined both feet more closely, not sure what she was looking for. Two scars caught her attention. The first ringed an ankle, so faint that she wouldn’t have seen it if she hadn’t been checking for something like it. She wasn’t positive she’d find another on the other leg, but there it was, circling the calf about a third of the way up to the knee. It was pale, with a clumsy jagged mark, as though the surgeon had been careless with the stitches.

She crawled away, almost to the wall, then hugged her knees to her, willing herself to interpret the evidence. Instead, she started breathing to the clap-slither rhythm of the hands.

“Nissaea-of-the-Slant,” Muhad said. Its eyes had opened, and it rolled over, then sat up. It had spoken her name like a prayer, but this time the prayer was a desperate one. “Are you hurting?”

“Not the way you think,” Nissaea said. “Your feet, Muhad. What happened to your feet?”

I should leave, she thought, but she couldn’t bear to, not yet.

“My born-feet were taken away from me,” Muhad said, very steadily. Then, as if it were aware of the inadequacy of this explanation, it added, “It didn’t hurt.”

She knew she would regret asking this, especially since all she could see in her mind’s eye was the corpse back-bent, splayed, sterile of smell. “Why would you replace human feet with human feet?” Especially since the last regenerative tanks had run out generations ago. You couldn’t grow human parts that way anymore.

“Because it’s always the harvest,” Muhad said. “Because it’s what we learned people do. Because it was what you were doing, Nissaea-of-the-Slant, when you came into the darkness. The harvest.”

I’m missing something obvious. “Yes,” she said, “but we’re harvesting from the city. We don’t—”

Except people had been turning up dead, they’d both seen it, and you could cut someone apart for anything you had the scalpel-skill to excise, like feet. Human feet.

Nausea rose up in Nissaea’s throat, and she turned away before Muhad could see the revulsion in her eyes.

“People harvest the city,” Muhad said, sounding terribly calm. “That’s how we’ve been talking to each other all this time. You became more like us, so we thought you wanted us to become more like you.”

“Become more like us what,” Nissaea said inflectionlessly, remembering how she had lain with it.

“I wasn’t born human,” Muhad said softly, “and I didn’t have eyes that you would recognize as eyes, or feet either. I had silicon thoughts and a piezoelectric heartbeat. They cut pieces of me out so that I could be given human implants the way that you were given city implants.”

Nissaea stood up. It tensed, expecting her to strike it. You are so beautiful, she thought, grieving; thought, too, of the way it had cried out and shuddered beneath her. Its heart had sounded wholly human, afterward.

Her mind was working. “How long has this been going on?” she asked. She hadn’t been able to distinguish Muhad from an ordinary human. Only the feet had given it away.

It told her. The city was very old, she had known that. She hadn’t, however, realized just how old it was, or how alien.

Then she asked how many of its kindred there were, and it told her that, too.

Mirror-nature: something she’d heard about from a drunk woman once. The city that responded to its inhabitants by changing itself. In more ways than they’d realized, apparently.

“One more question,” she said, still looking down at Muhad. “If the city—if your people—went through so much trouble to make you like this, why did they just abandon you in the mazeways afterward?”

Muhad shivered and made itself hold her gaze. “Humans abandon their own all the time,” it said quietly. “If this isn’t what you wanted us to understand about you, why do you do it so often?”

Nissaea bit her lip, hard. Then she knelt and laid her hands on Muhad’s shoulders. In times past, she would have thought only of warning someone, her undercircle if no one else, but now she didn’t think it mattered. She was free of debts; what did she care who was harvesting whom? “Why do we do it indeed,” she murmured, and kissed Muhad deeply. Its mouth was warmly yielding. “You’ve already cut my heart out anyway.”

Around them, the maimed city’s hands grabbed at each other and scratched cryptic shapes into the air as the two of them sank down in each other’s arms once more, human and unhuman entwined.

©2014 by Yoon Ha Lee. Originally published in Upgraded, edited by Neil Clarke. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Yoon Ha Lee’s debut novel, Ninefox Gambit, won the Locus Award for best first novel and was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke Awards. Its two sequels, Raven Stratagem and Revenant Gun, were also Hugo finalists.  Lee’s middle grade space opera, Dragon Pearl, was a New York Times bestseller.  His short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Lightspeed Magazine, Clarkesworld Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and other venues.  Lee lives in Louisiana with his family and an extremely lazy cat, and has not yet been eaten by gators.

Voice of Their Generation

Andrew Dana Hudson | 2140 words

On their ninth rewrite of the third act of Detective Pikachu vs. Predator, it occurred to Thicket that they might just be the voice of their generation.

In a fever, they swiped together the final epic speech where Detective Pikachu refutes Predator’s cynical attempts to turn him against his human partner, arguing that the Pokémon relationship with humanity was one not of servitude but of guardianship, for every Pokémon can see within each human the potential to rise above their flawed nature to embody something the world truly needs: hope.

“It doesn’t matter how many times you space jerks try to knock humanity down,” Detective Pikachu said, voiced by John Stamos. “Because when they fall, we Pokémon will be there to catch them. We’ll catch them all.”

Tears streamed down Thicket’s face as they hit submit. They had hated the algorithm the first six times it had kicked back their copy, but now Thicket could see that all that rejection was exactly the push they had needed to make them really do this story right. Thicket was awed by their own genius, the hyperproductive fugue of the last four hours. It had been like being unleashed, like seeing the Deep Code behind all language, the leylines of meaning, and reaching out to knot those leylines together into something perfect and glowing and sharp as a stiletto.

If only Thicket could bottle that feeling—or, ah ha, capture it in a pokéball—to be deployed at will, they would surely rise through the ranks of the Machine-Assisted StoryTelling (MAST) platform, be able to compete for mid-tier franchise possibilities, get noticed, reach millions, really speak to people. Voice of their generation.

But Thicket knew there was no bottle that could hold the font of pure creation. No nootropic cocktails, no shortcuts, no easy answers. Thicket just had to Do The Work. But that’s why, for all the banal consistency and alien novelty algorithms could produce, MAST still needed humans in the mix. Only humans could understand the moral core of a story, character, or fandom. Like how Thicket had seen that Venom Pirates of the Caribbean: Across Symbiote Seas was really about reclaiming the aesthetics of manifest destiny for queer liberation. Brave inner honesty was required, a willingness to reckon with the burden of being a person in the world. Because stories—whether about Pokémon or catgirls or slimegirls or Skrull wizards or haunted mechasuits—were always about people.

These potent truths rolled over Thicket while they refreshed their email, waiting for the MAST approval confirmation to come in. MAST owned the rights and data for a vast trove of daring intellectual property crossovers. It was a gold rush of potential stories, to be brought to life by MAST’s proprietary Deep Make video technology. Anyone could stake their claim with a high quality spec script—if their treatment passed muster with MAST’s QA algorithm.

Thicket considered taking a break, maybe ordering another CBD chai from the sleepy barista, at least getting up to stretch. They had seen a TweetTok the other day about a fellow MASTer who had died of deep vein thrombosis after a marathon session plotting out seven seasons of Where the Red Fern Gully Grows, which was now being optioned by Disney XD. Now Thicket too had gone late into the night, judging by the moonlit pallor of the wall screens. Animated foxes reading in cozy armchairs twitched their tails in time to the Starbucks’ lo-fi chill beats to study to—paragons of relaxed focus that Thicket both admired and resented.

The email arrived. Thicket pounced for it, but stopped, finger hovering over the chin-stroking, thinky-face emoji in the subject line. They opened it, but knew already what the message within would say: “Thanks for your contribution, but this wasn’t quite what we’re looking for. Here’s some tips for making your story the very best it can be.”

Thicket went to the bathroom, waved their hands under all the taps until the water was a white noise shush, then crouched down with their head between their knees and quietly screamed.

Ten rejections. Ten variations of Predator and Detective Pikachu playing cat and mouse, matching wits in an abandoned power plant or atop the Eiffel Tower, the hunter becoming the hunted. All to feed and please MAST’s black box content maw. All spat out.

Did Thicket have the fortitude to attempt an eleventh? Yes, Thicket decided. They’d crack this. Tonight.

Thicket zoomed out of the third act and scrapped the Pichu flashbacks voiced by Haley Joel Osment, the comic relief on the magnet train between Goldenrod and Saffron City, even Predator’s tragic love story with Magmar, whose fiery body was the most beautiful thing the extraterrestrial’s infrared vision had ever seen. While developing these scenes had been an important part of the creative process, Thicket could see now that they were extraneous, distractions that neither advanced the plot nor made the audience really fall in love with the characters. Not good enough.

Swiping away storybits with abandon, Thicket got the eleventh draft down to a tight eighty-seven minutes. Then they revisited the third act, really punched up Predator’s dialogue. “We’re not so different, Detective,” Predator said, now voiced by Idris Elba, whose premium audio package Thicket had been saving for a rainy day. “We both thrill to the chase, above all else. Join me! Together, no prey could elude us. The universe is full of wonders. Let’s take to the stars and hunt . . . them . . . all!”

Thicket then forced themself to buy a Marshmallow Dream Bar and watch the whole thing at 4X speed using the blocky preview tool. Even without Deep Make hyperrealism, Thicket was entertained. The script beats popped. This was the one. Voice of their generation.

Again MAST kicked it back. “Try again! Every contribution helps MAST learn about the kinds of stories you care about,” the reject email said.

“Can you watch my stuff a minute?” Thicket asked the girl at the table next to them, who lifted her headphones from one ear and nodded noncommittally. Thicket went outside, did thirty jumping jacks in the Starbucks parking lot, shoved their face into the snow.

For the twelfth draft, Thicket dialed the violence way up. No more PG-appropriate near-misses with Predator’s spear gun, no more plasma-caster bursts deflected by a Charizard’s flamethrower attack. This time Detective Pikachu led a kill squad of the meanest, toughest mercs on the Indigo Plateau.

For twenty minutes, Thicket fell down a casting rabbit hole, trying to find just the right multicultural combination of actors and Pokémon to get ripped apart in the Viridian Forest, blood splattering across clusters of uncaring Metapods. It didn’t matter. MAST flagged the explicit content as disqualifying for the expected franchise fanbase of youth ages 11-21. Even if MAST had signed off on the script, none of the distribution platforms would want it.

On the thirteenth draft—lucky thirteen!—Thicket deleted all their custom storybits and pieced together the plot entirely from MAST’s database of pre-approved dialogue modules. There was a chance the algorithm was glitching on some novel bit of Thicket’s wordplay, a joke or metaphor the system couldn’t parse. This rewrite was returned with the warning that a nearly identical script had already been submitted by someone else—probably one of the bots that generated millions of combinations of standard-issue storybits, like Mankeys typing after Shakespeare.

Numb, forlorn, but also filled with a clarifying zen calm, Thicket pulled up a fourteenth blank document. The Starbucks was almost empty now. The foxes on the wall had fallen asleep in their armchairs. The barista was glancing at Thicket with concern. Thicket reflected on their own hubris, the belief that they had seen the Deep Code. No combination of franchises had taken Thicket more than nine drafts to get right—not Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Giant Peach, not Power Rangers/Overwatch: Ultimate Team Up. They weren’t the voice of their generation; they were washed up.

Just who was Detective Pikachu? Who was the Predator? Why were they destined to do battle? Why did either of them have a stake in this fallen, fucked-up hellworld?

“You okay, hun? Can I get you anything?”

The barista had wandered over to wipe down the tables and—it was obvious—check on Thicket. She had tiny, funky glasses and a cute nose tattoo of a bumblebee. Thicket appreciated that she’d said “anything” and not “anything else.”

“I’m great, thanks,” Thicket said.

“Whatcha working on?”

“Detective Pikachu vs. Predator. It’s really kicking my ass.”

She peered at the blank document. “That’s cool. Does the Predator join Team Rocket or something?”

“I tried that. Didn’t get it right, though, at least not for the machine. The algo has all these metrics about quip frequency and dialogue novelty and narrative structure and fan service, and you have to balance them all just right, and I—” Thicket choked up. “I want to tell a real story, you know? A story that actually means something, that says something true about . . . life. I just . . . feel trapped.”

Thicket put their forehead down on the table. The barista patted their back: there, there.

“Can’t you just skip it? Do another franchise?”

“But I did all the research!” Thicket moaned. “I really believed in this one. Detective Pikachu vs. Predator had so much potential! Loveable characters, a rich world, real pathos and stakes. And everyone loves Pokémon, right?”

“Sure,” the barista shrugged. “My little sister is crazy for them.”

The barista held her hand chest-high to indicate the sister’s approximate size.

“That’s exactly my target demo!” Thicket wailed. “Say, would your little sister happen to have any life-changing insights about Pokémon detectives? Or Predators? Could we call her?”

If Thicket were writing their own life, the barista would be the perfect B-story character to provide them with the key to getting out of this dark night of the soul. But the barista just pursed her lips.

“I don’t think so.” She headed back to the counter. “I’ll be on until six if you need anything else.”

The windowless café grew claustrophobic. All that work, stymied by the machinic indifference of the algorithm. Voice of their generation, silenced and caged.

Then something untwisted in Thicket’s mind. Sleep deprivation and creative frustration suddenly harmonized. Leylines of meaning twanged like a strummed guitar.

Thicket lifted their head, started typing and swiping. They pulled together a rough amalgam of the best scenes from their previous thirteen drafts, all of which shared the same cynical core insight. Thicket barely registered the next forty minutes. Next thing they knew, they were hitting send on draft fourteen.

In the bathroom again, Thicket scrubbed their hands up to the elbow, ran wet fingers through their dye-itched hair. When they came back out, the email was waiting.

“Congratulations!” it said, followed by fireworks and thumbs-up emojis. “Your contribution has been accepted! You can now view your story in the MAST Deep Make Archives.”

Thicket tapped play on the link and watched the movie start to finish. It barely scratched sixty minutes, and the textures, still rendering, pushed towards the uncanny. But to Thicket it was pixel perfect.

“You don’t scare me, alien,” Woody Harrelson as Detective Pikachu said in the film’s climactic moments. “Because Pokémon are always hunted, always prey. And when we’re caught, we aren’t killed. That’d be a mercy. We’re zapped into perfect cages, numbered and catalogued, carried around in some punk’s pocket. And when we’re let out, we do whatever they want, fight whatever they want—even though they never tell us why. Maybe we even enjoy it, just the chance to excel at something, no matter how constrained and arbitrary. We want to be the very best, because the alternative is being unseen, unheard in that little ball, forever. The trainers are the real predators. You’re just a tourist.”

After that, the ending was bittersweet. Thicket was crying again—they didn’t know why. On the walls, the sleeping foxes were stirring as sunlight began to peek in through cartoon windows. Thicket packed up their things, cleared away the refuse of too many hours. As they left the Starbucks, the barista avoided eye contact. But Thicket hardly cared.

Thicket felt glad that this last draft was the one that had made it. Maybe no one else would ever see it. No one would know that Thicket was the voice of their generation. It didn’t matter. They’d Done The Work.

Outside, it was that blurry morning dark. Waiting at the cold bus stop, Thicket pulled out their tablet again, opened their submissions spreadsheet, entered “accepted.” In the row below was the next combination: Detective Pikachu Meets Scrappy-Doo. Thicket opened a blank MAST story and began to swipe.

©2020 by Andrew Dana Hudson.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andrew Dana Hudson’s fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Slate Future Tense, Terraform, MIT Technology Review, Little Blue Marble and others, as well as in a variety of anthologies and collections. He co-wrote “Sunshine State,” which won the 2016 Everything Change Climate Fiction Contest, and his story “Mend and Make Do” was runner up in the 2017 Writing the Future Contest. He is a fellow in the Arizona State University Center for Science and the Imagination’s Imaginary College. He is an associate editor of Oasis, a journal of anti-capitalist thought in the desert. He lives in Tempe, Arizona.

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

A Subtle Web: A Tale From the Somadeva Chronicles

Vandana Singh | 1231 words

The Blue People of the desert continent on the Planet Miln have never been in space, as far as their ancestral memories go. Among the sand dunes and the whirling dust devils of the Southern Continent, they lead nomadic lives, content to traverse, generation after generation, the shifting pathways across the great desert. In all their remembered history, only one of them has ever traveled to the Northern Continent and beyond, never to return. The Blue People do not speak to the Northerners, and indeed their language is unique on the planet, unrelated to the other language groups. Their name for themselves has nothing to do with the color of their skin, but refers instead to the nature of their inner essence.

Among their stories, the strangest is this one: The Blue believe that each of them is one-half of a whole. They believe that each person has a twin on the other side of the galaxy, and the twin is identical in every way to them, except that they are made of a red essence instead of the blue. The Red People live on a planet similar to this one. When a Blue person dies or is born, so must their Red twin. At any moment, a Blue person knows what their Red twin is thinking, and the Blue’s thoughts are also apparent to the Red. Thus, neither is ever alone—they think their own thoughts, but always in the companionable presence of the other. The Blue Elders explain that this is a concession from the universe, which is constrained to always keep Blue and Red twins apart.

There is a story about a Blue person, Milula, who was the only one of his kind to go into space. Listen, then.

One day Milula stopped feeling the presence of the twin in his mind. He thought that his time had come, and called to the Elders, who laid him on the deathbed. He breathed slowly, opening his mind to the cosmos, waiting to die. But moments passed, and days passed, and he did not die. He got up from the deathbed and paced about in great agitation, and told his Elders that something was very wrong in the balance of the universe.

The Elders were troubled too, because there began an epidemic of similar troubles among their people—the connections with their Red brethren would come and go, or become very faint. Milula was among the very few for whom the link appeared permanently broken. It was known that sometimes certain diseases could break the link between a person and their twin. So the Elders tried to calm Milula, gave him healing herbs, and bade him wait until the link was restored.

But Milula was not content with waiting, and the desire came upon him to do something for his people’s suffering and his own—so under cover of night he left the community and made his way across the dunes to the Northern Continent. This took many moons, and he had many adventures along the way, and learned much that astonished him. Finally, he got to the great spaceport on the Northern Continent.

Here the people laughed at Milula and told him that the stories of his people were nonsense. Nothing, not even thought, could travel as fast as light. How could the Blue People know, in an instant, the thoughts of their Red twins, even if the Red twins actually existed? The other side of the galaxy—what kind of address was that?

Milula was angry at first, but he calmed himself, and worked and waited, until a ship consented to take him into space.

We do not here tell the story of his journey, except to say that it was long. The ship was an exploration vessel, going beyond the farthest known corner of the galaxy. It jumped distances the way a flier sweeps over rugged terrain, leaving far behind those who must traverse the land on foot. But even so, it took half a lifetime to reach its destination. In that period, everyone Milula had known on his planet had died, and the next generation had grown up and lived and died as well. The God of Time, as he learned on the ship, was married to the Goddess Velocity, whose best-known incarnation is Light itself. “Then my twin is also dead,” he thought, and was filled with great despair that his journey had been for nothing.

But after some time, a strange thing happened: Milula began to sense again the presence of his Red twin. Their mutual joy and surprise can hardly be described in words. The explanation was simple: The Red twin had been overcome by the same impulse to find his partner. So he, too, had left his world to seek his other half. During the time that the two had not been in contact, the Red twin had worked out what had caused the problem. In their dance around the center of the galaxy, the two planets, Red and Blue, had moved into positions where the line between them was intercepted by clusters of giant stars. The inner portion of the galaxy is indeed thick with such stars, as well as the devouring mouths of black holes. So the thread of communication between the Blue Planet and the Red Planet was distorted in such a way that the messages between them could fall into empty space instead of a receiving mind. Each link had its own rhythm, the Red Twin said, and some rhythms were more susceptible to the distortion than others. He declared that they must now be close enough together that the lensing effect of the massive star clusters was no longer flinging their communications into the void.

When Milula and his Red twin, Alulim, were close enough, they left their respective ships in small shuttles, and sped toward each other. The shuttles docked, and the two finally stood before each other. As they embraced, there was a great burst of light that enveloped their shuttles in balls of fire. All that was left of them was a green star that still glows dimly in the night sky.

In the season when the green star is visible at its zenith, there are also meteor showers that leave tracks of light across the black void. To the Blue People, these are the messages between the two planets made manifest. The Northerners scoff at the ignorance of the Blue People, but they cannot explain why the Blue sometimes die without rational explanation. For example, a healthy young Blue sitting at a campfire might topple over with a scream of pain, declaring that a Red has fallen off a cliff on a world 80,000 light-years away, and then proceed to die of the same injuries. There is nothing in their physiology to explain this, except for a mysterious organ in the brain that the Northerners cannot explain.

I think [Somadeva said] that the Blue People perceive the universe entirely differently from us. Perhaps they possess an alien sense that reveals pathways, connections that jump the vast voids across time and space. It is in this subtle web that the thought-messages of the Red and Blue People lie entangled, allowing them to be together always, even as they must always be apart.

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

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Vandana Singh was born and raised in India, and currently lives in the Boston area, where she professes physics and writes. Her stories have earned her a Carl Brandon Parallax award, a Tiptree and ALA Honor, several other award nominations and multiple reprints in Years’ Best volumes. She has published two critically acclaimed short story collections, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories and Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories, which was shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick award.  Her website is at vandana-writes.com.

Bow Down Before the Snail King!

Caleb Wilson | 4944 words

Storks

There were only a dozen storks. But on that murky midnight, with the fire burning low and blue from the stink of vanished cities that bubbled up from beneath the plains, there might as well have been a hundred.

Charops’ drab leather outfit was somewhat beak-resistant. Not enough to make her comfortable; the horror birds were known carriers of pestilence, so filthy that their diseases bore diseases. She jumped over the furrows of fallow civilizations, stabbing wildly with her long Strategist’s knife. It was a versatile blade, but better suited to the considered application of force ten times what was needed, measured stabs in the back, and the trimming of extraneous lines from contracts than to fending off a clacking, hissing, disease-ridden flock.

Ichneumon the Weird was stumbling along somewhere behind Charops. Certain stork bait, unless the Weird could get her shit together—which made Charops furious, or maybe that feeling was sadness.

A stork exploded as a slightly larger than life-sized pink stone statue of a stork appeared inside it, displacing feathers, guts, and bone. The bloody statue hit the grass, and Ichneumon stuttered out some quavering mixture of glee and agony. That was one way to do it.

Kobius, the man-at-arms, bared his teeth and growled. He whirled a spear as he ran, slapping it up and down, the haft bouncing like a branch in a gale, gore arcing from the blade. He was wearing stork plumes on his hat, and Charops wondered, as she gasped for breath, if he had found them already detached from their original owner. Either way, it seemed that the storks had taken offense at Kobius’ choice of attire.

As for Loron, whose skimpy linen robe seemed so ill-suited for travel outside the courts and couches of Zend . . . Loron leapt along lightly as a dried leaf.

May we all age so gracefully as Loron.

The Municipal Expedition

Loron, that notorious old poet and flatterer, had found evidence of a treasure hidden in the south. As was the right of every citizen of Zend, Loron petitioned the King’s Vizier to launch an expedition of recovery, with any proceeds to be split evenly between himself and the crown. The Plaster Eminence granted Loron’s petition, though she must not have thought highly of his chances. If she had, she would have authorized a bigger expedition.

The municipal companions were Charops, a Strategist of low rank but high promise; Ichneumon the Weird, whose unsettling presence meant she was sent away from Zend as often as possible; and the man-at-arms Kobius. Kobius had survived the flock of storks they met two weeks south of Zend, but not the sting from the invisible asp he stepped on five days later. His corpse lay beneath a cairn, unless jackals had found him. Charops wondered how long it would be until she forgot his name.

Four weeks south of Zend and Havernar, the expedition finally arrived at the dry river valley marked on Loron’s map. According to the map (according to Loron, who refused to show anyone else the map), the “Hall of the King of Snails” was tucked away at the far end.

Charops felt the weight of the plains behind her as a haunted presence, stretching north many leagues to the mountains that guarded the cradle of civilization.

Ghastly thought: When they were done here, they’d have to cross the plains again, in the other direction.

Hieroglyphs

Loron had disappeared along the tree line to their left. Charops was more interested in two mossy pillars of stone, almost hidden behind the laurels.

“That’ll put a pause in their parade. Blood under my sandals. Ah, a gate, until . . .” said Ichneumon. She was wearing her customary outfit of red brocaded cloak, red smock, red shoes with long, curled toes, and red skullcap. Short yellow braids stuck out from under the cap.

“A gate until what?” Charops asked. Ichneumon’s conversation tended to suffer when she was distracted. “And where’s Loron?”

“The statue just splitting. I really didn’t know it would just . . . the ankle would just crack. And that it would all start to fall. Sorry. I mean, these pillars used to be part of a gate.”

“Until . . .?”

“Until history. Sorry about the screaming. I think he’s over there.”

Ichneumon gestured vaguely, and a moment later Loron stuck his head out between the trees.

“It’s this way. The map is quite clear. Are you coming, or are you coming?”

“Hey, hieroglyphs!” said Ichneumon, pointing to carvings arranged inside a vertical cartouche on the pillar.

“Can you read them?”

Ichneumon scraped back moss with her fingernails. “Sure. Old Lesathi. The name of a plant. I think. The statue had hieroglyphs carved on its face, you know. Impossible to drop that.”

“What plant is it?”

“Never heard of it. I don’t know if it has a name in Zendian. It would be something like . . . shell oak? It might not actually be an oak. Might not be a plant at all.”

“I’ll be over here,” called Loron, “waiting for you at the hall, which is where you’ve been hired to take me, which is marked on my map—”

“Yes. A moment,” said Charops.

“—waiting, impatiently—”

Strategist and Weird forged between the pillars into a choked clearing where the sun shone over mounds of greenery, a battlefield where nature had long since triumphed. The air was still, hushed as the dreams of graveyard statues. There had been a town here, or something like a town, but the buildings, all unbuilt by history, weren’t buildings any more, just sunken foundation holes, or corner stones and shed roof tiles hidden under quilts of vines.

Charops didn’t see much to catch her eye at first. But a lot that’s worth seeing must first be uncovered. Like this: a wooden wagon lay beneath the weeds. The boards were worm-eaten and soft with rot. Charops poked at them with her boot.

“Look, the wheel has been removed,” said Charops.

“Interesting,” said Ichneumon. “Not in itself, I mean—wagons are boring—but the decomposition, or lack of it; I mean, this wagon can’t have been here for all that long or it would have rotted away completely. A decade, maybe? He was just flattened, you know, blood came shooting out his sleeves, you know? Ah, damn, I mean to say, considering that the rest of this place is antique, it’s interesting. The wagon. Everything was sliding into the pit. I mean, I’ll bet nobody’s put old Old Lesathi hieroglyphs into stone in five hundred years. Except Weirds in the Folly.”

Charops saw another shape, longer and lower than the wagon, also hidden under the vines. Ripping back the vines like she was yanking the blankets away from some bedchamber indiscretion, she revealed a fallen obelisk of stone.

“Ooh!” Ichneumon bent over the obelisk and its more extensive hieroglyphs, while Charops sat on the edge of the wagon and considered the overcast sky.

Ichneumon was muttering to herself.

“What do they say?”

“There was a town here, or perhaps ‘outpost’ is the better word. It was founded . . .”

Ichneumon counted years and dynasties, moving her lips slightly. Ichneumon the Weird was less horrifying than most of her colleagues, at least in Charops’ opinion. Most people who weren’t her great friends and traveling companions didn’t share this opinion. Her eyes had the eerie blankness exhibited by anyone who made a practice of fooling the universe into doing magic. Charops knew it made mundane calculations difficult, when each instance of magic produced over a whole lifetime of chicanery had to be remembered, lest the universe take everything back and the Weird’s soul was set to burning like a rancid candle, as all the magic she’d ever performed was reversed in a split second.

“Four hundred and eight years ago. Or seven, or nine. Depends on—”

“Don’t worry, doesn’t matter,” said Charops. “And apart from that?”

Ichneumon ran her forefinger over the stone. “They were concerned about . . . the ‘flow of time.’”

“Meaning what?”

“Can’t tell. Here’s it says ‘shell oak’ again. The way the pit just opened up beneath them, it was like, like a wound. Like a sword cutting through parchment. Sorry. Ah, it seems this place was called Shell Oak Landing.”

“And what do you mean, ‘concerned about’?”

“They keep mentioning it, is all,” said Ichneumon. “Ah ha. Loron’s map was accurate. Separate from Shell Oak Landing is the Hall of the King. It’s farther along this way. And there; I think that heads down to what used to be the river. Choked on water, the water was like iron, like a chain of iron, a metal eel sliding down his throat. Says here, a ‘sacrificial’ hall.”

“Sacrificial.”

“That’s what it says. The Hall of the Snail King. ‘Sacrificial’ might have some other connotation here.”

“Not really too many things that word can mean,” said Charops.

“No.”

“Bearing some connection to this ‘shell oak,’ whatever that is? What exactly are we walking into here?”

“. . . Hieroglyphs are pretty ambiguous,” said Ichneumon.

Epigrams

Ichneumon smiled suddenly.

“What’s funny?”

“I almost forgot,” said the Weird. She pulled a scroll from one of her dozens of pockets. “I found it in Loron’s pack last night. Might be . . . oh, the statue, it just exploded out of the stork’s lungs, it starts the size of a pea. And in the end, it’s bigger than the stork.”

“Let’s see.”

Charops unrolled the scroll. At the top was written “The New Epigrams of Loron,” and below that were further lines of Loron’s flowing script.

“Ah,” said Ichneumon, “could be better than I thought! It’s not murder, is it? Self-defense, isn’t it? The whole town buried under ash, but I rang the bell first. Fair warning. Uh, let’s hear them.”

Charops read the first epigram out loud.

I, Loron, am genius; a genius, I, Loron
My rivals, wastrel, ninny, fop, moron

Ichneumon said, “Maybe he’s gotten tired of being a flatterer?”

Charops read another.

Thais’s hair is thick, Lithia’s thin
Lithia grew hers, Thais stole from a coffin

Ichneumon said, “Who are these people?”

“Rich people. They’re his patrons. They were his patrons.”

And surely these weren’t the sort of commemorative verses they had in mind.

Aurigula’s gut knows candy, cheese, wine, sweetbreads
May it soon meet gristle, grit, poison, spearheads

Ichneumon grinned. “The weasel!”

“Actually, I’ve met Aurigula,” said Charops. “He might be even more unpleasant than Loron.”

How I hate this sour cherry, Charops
Her cheerless, wordless told-you-so, it never stops

Charops frowned.

Ichneumon laughed. “That’s . . . fairly accurate. Backward into the edge of the altar, so her spine snaps. Hey, keep reading. Is there one about me?”

“Yes, don’t worry,” said Charops.

She has hair, a face, and a name: Ichneumon
But I do not think she is quite human

“What do you think?”

Ichneumon laughed and laughed. It was not a sound that would reassure anyone about her general claim to humanity.

“When we get back, I’m going to invite him to tour the Folly of the Weirds,” she said. “Are there more?”

“Here’s a sort of, well . . .”

Vizier Vierus hides behind a plaster mask
Who hates plaster, to give it such a grisly task?

“Don’t tell me you haven’t wondered what’s under that mask of hers,” said Ichneumon. “I think I’m starting to warm up to our genius.”

“And, ah, the last one. Ouch.” said Charops.

I despise King Farnol
I hope he stumbles and falls into a hole

“Hmm,” said Ichneumon. “Now that’s not very subtle. The statue’s arm, stone, you know, black granite, chopped down, just smashed him. It wasn’t what they had in mind, but they had to let me in after that, right?”

A strange feeling was coming over Charops. “These weren’t written by someone with any intention of rejoining Zend’s social life.”

If Loron wasn’t planning on going back to Zend, what did he want out here, in this pit of nowhere?

Ichneumon shrugged. “Some people are just asses, though, right? Pardon the blood.”

Charops let go of the scroll and it rolled itself up. She rubbed her chin, thinking of the venomous quill that had written such words. Some people are asses, and some asses kick their masters. Sometimes they have a reason, and sometimes they don’t need one.

Shell Oak Landing

A path led through the foliage, away from the obelisk. It was long abandoned, but for decades, not centuries. They passed a row of ancient statues, men, women, children, all bearing snail shells in place of heads. The statues’ arms, where they hadn’t been snapped off, were raised, pointing ahead. Ichneumon made a scoffing noise.

The trees stopped, leaving a margin between the leaves and a narrow stone facade built into a cliff. The facade was shaggy with lichen, bulging outward where stones had shifted. There were no windows, only a doorway leading inside.

Just within, Loron pored over his map in the light of the doorway. He looked up as Charops and Ichneumon arrived, his countenance sagged and flushed from decades of wine-soaked decadence. He rolled up his map.

“Well, this is it. Open it, will you?”

Charops lit a torch and saw what he meant: This cramped entry would have led farther inside to a much larger room, but for a sturdy metal grating set opposite the outer door. The grating was rigged with chains that ran up into a pair of shafts in the ceiling. To the left side was a squared beam, on which was set what appeared to be the missing wheel from the wagon back below.

“Ah, yes,” said Charops.

“Er, no,” said Loron. “I’m more keen on what’s inside.”

“A defensive portcullis.” Charops touched the grate gingerly. “Very solid.”

“But the turn-wheel is on the outside,” said Ichneumon.

“Exactly,” said Charops. “Why?”

“Something dangerous inside,” said Ichneumon. “To which they wanted access, and which they didn’t want to get out. Don’t slip. Viscera.”

“Right,” said Charops. “A treasure guardian? What’s your information say about it?” she asked the poet.

“Ah . . . It’s dead now!” announced Loron. “It must be. If there even is an it. Which I very much doubt. And if there is an it, an it besides the awesome and fabulous treasure that we know is here, because”—he slapped his map tauntingly, “I feel confident you can kill it. Just open this grate, will you? I’d do it myself but I don’t have your. . . brute strength.” He leered.

Charops turned the wheel. It cracked, black rot puffing out from the joins. She added a bit of strength and the spokes all snapped at once, like a kicked ribcage. The whole contraption came falling off the beam, swinging uselessly in a tangle of rusted chains.

“Hell!” said Loron, leaping backward like a young goat. “What’d you do that for!”

“Are you curious why I haven’t insisted already on seeing your ridiculous map?” asked Charops. “It’s because I think you, and it, are equally full of shit.”

Loron smiled, bug-eyed. “Of course I am. But the map is accurate.”

“Don’t tell me about your map.”

“The map was drawn and annotated by an Imbian exile a decade ago,” said Loron. “He found this hall, having recently been abandoned, so quickly that the owners could not take—” He pursed his lips. “Very sneaky.”

“I said don’t,” said Charops. “Do I look like the kind of person who would say the opposite of what she really wants? A cheerless sour cherry like me?”

Loron dropped his satchel and searched frantically through it for several seconds, then stopped with a hitch and leaned casually against the grating.

“Jokes, my dears. Silly, foolish japery, nothing more. Satire! No offense intended. Now, how are we going to get . . . through . . . here?” He pinged a yellowed fingernail against the metal.

The Hall

Ichneumon crouched beside the grating and whispered a curse that made the stones and bars forget that a ninety-degree angle was square. Wavering on her hands and knees, her face pale and flushed in blotches, she found an impossible gap between the angles. She forced the gap wider, like feeding medicine to a wolf. Sweat dripped from her fingertips. Ask her just then what was ten times twelve and she couldn’t produce an answer.

“Hurry, you rancid old rutabaga,” Charops told the poet. “No offense intended.”

After Ichneumon rolled last through the gap and shakily regained her feet, the world slunk back into place. Charops averted her eyes; it was always embarrassing to see the world ooze back, like it was ashamed, after such a casual denial of its immutability.

“This is it,” said Loron. “The Hall of the King of Snails.”

A sour empty room, beneath the cliff. The roof was supported by an octagonal column that split into innumerable vaults, up in the shadows. There was a bracket for a torch, so Charops put hers into it and lit another. The walls were lined with boxes and crates, decayed apart to reveal . . . not much of anything. Charops kicked through what was basically trash. There was nothing heavy, and heavy meant valuable when it came to treasure.

She turned to Loron: “There’s nothing here, now are you hap—” But Loron wasn’t where he had been. She turned further and saw the old goat running across the floor toward the still-shadowed rear of the room. The hall was bigger than she had thought on first entering. She followed him, the flicker of flames casting poor light ahead of her. It felt like she was tracking something in a bad dream it would have been wiser to wake from. Glancing back, she marked the red of Ichneumon’s robes, where the Weird was still slumped against the central column, looking likely to collapse at any moment.

A bark of laughter emerged from the darkness. What was that hateful old man up to?

The Snail King

Charops found Loron at the far end of the hall, climbing up into a throne carved from a soft gray-green material like soapstone. Its lines were curved and its substance slippery, and Loron was having trouble getting into it. Charops saw little harm in letting him sit there for a few moments, before yanking him down and beating out of him what, exactly, he had expected to find here.

Loron finally seated himself, his thin legs bouncing like a child’s. From his satchel he pulled out a flimsy crown. The metal was either green itself or was scaled with verdigris. Loron placed it over his greasy white curls and faced Charops with a nasty smile that snapped into existence like the springing of a trap.

It was a ridiculous little crown, with two bulbed horns at the temples like, ah, thought Charops, yes—like the eyestalks of a snail.

Loron pointed at Charops, opened his mouth. Say something stupid, Charops commanded him silently, and Loron’s false teeth flashed in the torchlight.

“Bow down before the Snail King!”

Charops blinked. She looked behind her, a faint smile on her lips. She could picture Ichneumon rolling her eyes, but where was the Weird? Ichneumon had shinned up the column, like a child going after a coconut, a ball of flickering light around her from the torch she was holding between her teeth. There were further hieroglyphs up the sides of the column. Nothing like hieroglyphs to drag the Weird out of a muddled stupor.

“Bow down!”

Charops gave her attention to Loron, cocked an eyebrow.

“You heard me! You would not want to test my powers, Strategist!”

What powers?

“Master,” cried Ichneumon, “over the flow of time!”

Weeks later, after Charops and Ichneumon had made it back to Zend, unaccompanied by their ward, they were finally able to untangle the confusion. They tracked down the Imbian exile who had visited the Hall of the Snail King, whose map and account Loron had stumbled upon. Loron had misunderstood the matter terribly. The Snail King was not master, but sacrifice.

Craquelure

The grinding of a stone slab, snapping up and open in a second. From behind it came a squelching sound. It grew louder. Loron faced the opened slab, face and neck frozen. Shadows pooled out, and with them a rotten odor. Charops tried to snatch up her knife. Her arm flopped like a dead thing. She released the torch from her other hand, saw it flick down toward the floor, strike the stone, then bounce back up, revolving like a spinneret. A black hump presented itself in the shadowed doorway, then pressed out beneath the slab. A bulging snail shell, half again Charops’ height, came gliding over the stone toward Charops and Loron.

Shell Oak, inexorable. Two soft, sticky horns, long as Charops’ arm, guided its way. On the end of each was a bulbous black eye. It wanted Loron first. Its shell swayed as its foot, a glistening mat of black and yellow muscle, propelled it over the uneven floor. The snail was moving without speed, but Charops found that she had no speed either. The flow of time had turned to mire, all that was frantic and alive, all the hop and squiggle of the “atoms” spoken of by the Weirds, leached away in the presence of the giant snail.

There never was any treasure to be found in the hall. No kind of treasure, except that coveted by a glacial alien mind. Fear, flesh, souls; all three, churned up into a piquant slurry.

A few months later, Charops and Ichneumon lay on adjacent couches, the air stratified in the pleasure den like sedimentary stone: At the bottom was a layer of clear air, above that, a smoky haze, and above that, a glittery, crystal-hued gas. It was the kind of evening where Charops kept crouching for clarity, and Ichneumon craning up toward oblivion.

“What was it, though, I mean, I keep wondering, from your closer vantage, a whirlpool, you know what I’m talking about, what did you see, exactly, when you looked in its eyes? Madness? Some bizarre soul?” Perhaps Ichneumon had breathed too deeply of the exhilarating crystalline gas.

In a convulsive gesture, Charops sank her fingers in around the perimeter of a sour peach and then ripped the pale lavender flesh apart.

“Of course not,” she said. “Souls are invisible.”

“What, then?”

Charops considered the strangely dry peach pit in her hand. Tufts of pinkish flesh clung to the pit, which was ridged and grooved like . . . Like . . . You could follow those grooves down forever. Well, no.

“I saw . . . rest. Time. Seconds, minutes. Enough time to finally rest. Hours. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an hour before. I always thought they were invisible too.”

“You can rest now. There’s time. Gods, the way . . . Hours of it.” Ichneumon drained a flute of wine green as grass. “We’re resting now. The way his skull melted. Right now.”

“Yes,” said Charops. “It almost does seem like that, doesn’t it?” Ages passed, then: “You probably know what I keep wondering. Why weren’t you affected by it?”

“Dear,” said Ichneumon, “I have so many things on my mind, I can’t concern myself with that kind of nonsense. Time can’t actually be slowed like that, so I just ignored the fact that it seemed to be.”

Its foot rippled as Shell Oak advanced. It reached the throne, horns drawing inward for protection. The shell tilted backward as it bowed up and over. The brutal wedge of its foot folded over Loron, and the erstwhile Snail King emitted a muffled shriek as the snail backed up, dragging him with it. Loron vanished under the foot. Trickles of blood crept like flickering fingers toward the torchlight.

Shell Oak turned, elegant as a ship, toward Charops. Its horn was extended, wet like some horrific gland. Charops’ voice: “Ichnuu-u-u-u-u-maaaaahhhnnn—”

A reek belled before Shell Oak, carried not by a breeze but an envelope of air that moved with it. The shell was green and black, ornate with craquelure, shaggy old growth, and old filth. In the hollows where the shell rode away from the foot was a dark red wetness.

Years later, just after Charops betrayed the city of Zend to its doom, she remembered this moment. She remembered every stab in the back, every backdated execution order. Standing over the abyss, the bricks of the shattered towers still bouncing down the walls in their clouds of dust, screams still rising, she wondered if she were a monster. Why do monsters devour their prey? She was not a monster, because monsters only eat when they are hungry. She was much worse.

She thought of Shell Oak, tricked away from its homeland. Transplanted by desperate priests from the southern coast of Lesath, carried north on barges along rivers that had long since dried up, and for centuries sheltered and fed at the distant landing, because the normal human reaction to Shell Oak was Get It Away! Shell Oak was like Charops. It didn’t crush its prey because it was hungry. It had a strong, if dull, intelligence. It wanted to know what happened to things when it crushed them. And its foot was also its mouth, so . . . If it could, Shell Oak would crush the world just to satisfy the itch of curiosity. Curiosity: Charops wondered what had happened to old what’s-her-name. A weird one, for sure, though the name refused to come to mind. Charops’ mind was in terrible shape. The only old companion she could remember by name was Kobius, whose bones by then must have been spread for miles across the plains . . .

Shell Oak glided over Charops’ left foot. She sank to the ground beneath the weight. Her leg was under it now, pressed between stone and its greasy bulk. It slid forward over her right leg, which Charops had flung to the side to avoid being crushed. She could not avoid it. The soft edge of the foot rolled up her body. She felt her skeleton creak, her innards compressing, distorting.

The light was gone. Pressed blind between planes of glue and of stone, Charops found Loron’s arm, ripped loose and stuck to the snail’s lubrication. The slipperiness of its foot allowed her to move sideways, and, once she got her hands and wrists at the right angle, to crawl onto her hands and knees. There was a gap under the snail’s foot, but the slime was drowning her, and there was something caustic in its composition. Eyes closed tight anyway since there was nothing to be seen, the flesh of the snail heaped up over her like a grave mound. From her hands and knees, Charops began to press upward, moving into the snail from beneath. Not a gap, a mouth.

Charops unfurled upright past knobs of bone, directly into Shell Oak’s gullet. What had been black was now laced with gray. Not a good sign. Her fingers, burning and weak, found Loron’s crunched and shattered body, and she climbed up it like a tree. She was standing now, snail flesh pressing in on all sides. It was not fierce, there was no strength to it, yet it was unavoidable as a flood.

Her fingers closed around her knife and she began to stab. Not a stratagem in her mind. The corpse of Loron was pressed into her arms as close as a lover, and now she felt him struggling against her. He wasn’t dead, his lips were at her ear, he was whispering something to her, and she struck at him, so slowly, near paralyzed, her hands a mess of blood and slime. Loron was dead. She was dancing with a puppet of chance.

Think, think! But there are some problems you can’t think your way out of.

Weird

There was a reason Weirds and Strategists always traveled in pairs. From some other world there came a knocking. The darkness split and there was air again, and light, a rupture opening in the congealed slime that was the snail’s innards. Charops’ heart was thundering now, she could feel each beat, time dripping and sputtering like ice-melt. She stepped up out of the broken shell. Shell Oak was dead, the slow creep of time released from its glue. Ichneumon stood still for a second, one hand flung to the throne to keep her from keeling over.

“The statue, it just fell apart,” she said. “I weakened it, I did that, I know that, but I didn’t mean to, and I didn’t know he was the Head Weird. I didn’t mean to crush him like that, the blood, I didn’t mean any of it. I was only eight. It’s not easy to become a Weird, you know. You have to force your way into the Folly. I didn’t mean to kill him.”

The ground in a circle around Shell Oak, stretching out ten feet on each side of its shattered shell, was black with soot. A web of charred marks. Charops wiped ooze and ichor from her eyes, and then collapsed.

“I weakened the shell. I let a little anger into it. Sorry if it was too much. Was it too much? Are you all right?” Ichneumon leaned in close over Charops like a doctor observing a corpse that can no longer bite, her red clothes splattered with slime.

“No.”

©2016 by Caleb Wilson. Originally published in Swords v. Cthulhu, edited by Jesse Bullington and Molly Tanzer. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Caleb Wilson lives in Illinois with his wife. He works in a public library. His fiction has appeared in places like Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Weird Tales, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. His first book, Polymer, was released in 2018. In addition to weird fiction, he also writes weird text-based computer games such as Cannonfire Concerto, Lime Ergot, and The Northnorth Passage.

Glass Bottle Dancer

Celeste Rita Baker | 5703 words

When de words “glass bottle dancer” come to me as I was day-dreaming, listening to music on de radio, I thought it sounded like someting I’d like to see, didn’t tink it would change me whole life. I imagine it might mean taking a bunch of soda and beer bottles, laying dem on dey sides and stepping on dem widout having dem roll away. I thought a limbo dancer might do it to add someting special to dere act.

Me limbo ain’t dat low. Nothing in me life particularly high or low, but de idea of glass bottle dancing came to me every time somebody took me parking space, or cut in front of me in line, or call me out me name. Every time me boss say I must call Harbor Market and remind dat greedy cheater dat moving he expired foods from de expensive side of town to he other shop on de poor people side of town ain’t nice, ain’t fair, and is against regulations. When day after day I must den pick up de people dem phone and talk to de store owners while dey laying on dey yachts in de marina and I can’t cuss dem stink but must be polite and act like dis de first warning and we don’t speak every month. Is times like dat dat glass bottle dancing does jump to de forefront of me mind like dat gon’ do anyting to change de world.

Day come when Miss Aggie, who make one hundred and six on she last birthday, die dead. She sit down on de park bench, resting, as she always do when she going from helping de children wid dey homework in de library after school, to stopping by de rum shop to have two shot glasses a gin wid a half wedge a lime and a garlic clove. She does stop dere five days a week making jokes and telling tall tales. She laughter does bust out de door and sashay down de street. But dat day she sit down on de bench in de park and ain’t get up.

Look dere, I say to meself, Ms. Aggie live a good life. She do good tings and she had fun. She wrinkles more laugh dan frown. She a doer, not a watcher. So, Mable, I say, Mistress Mable DelaCourt—I does call meself by me full name when I need to be stern—you may be two hundred and twenty nine pounds, you may be shape like a ripe avocado what done fell from de tree, bruised and almost bursting, and you may be looking fifty years in de baby of she eye, but you gon’ teach youself glass bottle dancing.

Wasn’t no trouble to gather de bottles. Me husband, Franklin, we does call him Boy-oh even doh he is two years older dan me and ain’t no ways childlike, and we four children—I know you ain’t bound to remember dere names but I gon’ call dem for you anyway cause dey precious and important to me—Gloria, Kenyatta, Rue, and Finality. Dey all like soda pop and beer, so it have plenty bottles in de trash. I fish dem out and hide dem under de casha bush in de backyard ’til I have enough. Bout thirty.

A Saturday come when I in de house alone. I try do de ting.

Well, mehson, was a lot harder dan in me imagination. I lay all de bottles out in de yard, close to de casha bush, in case I have to shove dem back quickly to hide. Me ain’t want nobody asking me what I doing. Me ain’t know meself why I doing dis irrational ting, plus sneaking ’round like I ain’t have de right to soda and beer bottles in me own house, me own garbage. I take off me yard slippers and rest me big toe on one Brow Cream soda bottle, testing. First ting, it hot. Hotter dan hot sand at de beach. Me ain’t expect dat and me foot jump back like it had meet wid jack spaniard sting. I stare down de hill to de blue of de ocean, imagining de coolness soothing me big toe.

“Mommy, what you doing?”

Me youngest home from majorette practice. I suppose to pick she up at five thirty. Who de rass give she a ride home? Make she sneak up on me like dis?

“What you mean what I doing? You ain’t see me tallying up dese bottles for de recycling?”

“De Governor said we aren’t doing dat anymore, remember? He said if anybody recycling anything, it won’t be us. We’re sending all our garbage to dem stateside. Unsorted. Remember?”

She taking Civics in she second year of high school. She know everyting. Finality. If I had know she was gon’ be so “last word-ish” I woulda name she “Dat’s enough, Rose,” instead.

“Well, I sorting. And recycling. Ain’t right to have all dis mess just sitting ’pon Muddah Earth like, like, like—” I fumbling now, cause I wasn’t expecting dis, “so much trash.” I know dat’s weak so I launch into full muddah tongue.

“And what you doing home so early? I was to come get you for five thirty. Who car you was riding in? Why you ain’t call me? Better not be dat Roland. I know from me cousin at de DMV he got car but no driver’s license. You sister in town too. You ain’t tink to look for she? Coulda saved me a trip. You father know where you are? What happen to practice? You and Miss Malveaux butting heads again?”

“Oh, Mommy,” she say, as if I is any and all kind a problem to she.

I watch she straight back as she move off heading to de side door. Jeez and bread, mehson, in addition to attitude she growing hips, too.

I put all de bottles back under de bush and go inside to start chopping vegetables for a salad. It Saturday, I don’t cook no hot meal on Saturday.

Boy-oh reach home from he netball coaching ’round seven thirty. He meet me in de living room wid me feet up on de couch listening to de radio. It have a show I like where people does go all ’round de world talking to Black musicians.

“Mable, how you do? You sick?” he say, like dis de first Saturday we spending together in all dese twenty-seven years and he ain’t know I ain’t cooking today.

“I good, man. How was practice?” I ain’t move off de couch. All de other days I does push and push and push ’til I exhausted. Boy-oh take tings in he stride, of course he do, he have me.

“Dem girls getting really good,” he say. “We might take championship dis year.”

He does say dis every year. He have more faith dan me because by de time de girls get good and know how to work together dey does go off to college.

“You ain’t cook?” He rest he haunches down on de couch next to me thighs, lean in close, and put he sweaty hand on me forehead, as if feeling for a fever. He drag he hand down me face and neck and let it rest on me right breast.

“Junie-Ann stop running from de ball den?” I take he hand down gently and hold it in me lap. De skin of he fingers thick and hard. He is a teacher but he built like he born to carry weight. He turn he fingers to knead me thigh. Watching dem young girls run ’round does always make him come home feeling randy.

“She getting better,” he say. “You know is she father dat push she into netball, but I tink she starting to enjoy it little bit.”

He raise up and go put he bag in de hall closet, get a beer from de fridge, and disappear into de bedroom to go bathe. I miss de part on de radio where dey had spell de name of de woman singer in Sweden.

• • • •

“Good evening, beautiful brown full-bodied lady, how you do dis fine twilight? You smelling nice nice. I’d really like to give you some babies, about seventy-three or seventy-four would make us proud, don’t you tink? We’d make a lovely swarm together. Can I get a ride?”

“Really, Oswald. Is dat how you want to approach me?” Treevia tuck her wings in close, lower her hind parts protectively and waved she left antenna at Oswald as if clearing de air. “I see you. Yes, you handsome. Yes, you healthy-looking. Where you stay? I thought you was over by where de man does park de car, but me ain’t smell dat oil and gas odor on you.”

“Me dear Treevia, I could call you Treevia, right? Me wouldn’t dare harbor meself where me could be disturb from a sweet and restful slumber by de back-breaking pressure of one of dem brutish tires ending me life. No, desire of mine, I does relax over by de trash bins on de sunset side of de house. It not dat far. Is a great variety of eating places within walking distance. It got historical, traditional, innovative, vegetarian, pescatarian, and de usual fusion. You feeling hungry? Come by me for a while and let me tempt you.”

Oswald turn, hoping to be followed.

“You can stop showing off anytime now, Oswald. I have plenty children already.”

Treevia start to move off towards she nest at de base of de casha bush beside de hibiscus hedge. She had spent de night enjoying de warmth and aromas of de almost empty beer and soda bottles. But wid de sun on de rise she didn’t have time to be standing out here in de open refusing Oswald again.

“Besides,” she continue, “if I decide to make more babies, I demanding more dan a smear of mushy mess, de majority of which does end up dribbling down me legs, causing even more of all you to follow me ’round.”

“Is so it go? Treevia, you are certainly worth trailing behind. I always admire de fine way you carry youself. Come on over to my place. Let me feed you while you tell me your demands. Your coloring attracts me, dose lovely dark patches down your back. I would gaze at dem while we . . .”

“Ain’t gon’ be no gazing.”

Treevia turn to go.

Oswald scurry a little to her left. Maybe she hadn’t gotten a good look at his wings. How strong dey were. How unusually long. He flutter dem open, just a little.

“At least let me escort you to your nest.”

She changed direction.

“Oh, don’t be like dat, fine lady. I just want to ensure your safety. Wouldn’t want you to be prey for any hungry bird like dat bananaquit up dere in de flamboyant tree.”

Treevia look up. What bird? What bananaquit? She ain’t see no bird.

“And I’d protect our children just as well.”

Oswald opened he wings to their full extension. Face to face wid Treevia now. He grin.

• • • •

I been practicing for over six months now. I does come out in de back yard for ’bout two hours in de middle of de night. Don’t nobody notice. If I sex up Boy-oh hard he does sleep like he dead. If he sex me too too good I mightn’ get up neither, but dat don’ happen enough to keep me from practice.

First I used to come in me nighty but dat change when I fall down too many times. Now I does keep a ole pair of jeans by de back porch. I does roll dem up and put dem in a plastic bag cause one time I find a mahogany bird on de left leg. Me ain’t know who was more shock, me or she. It wave it antennae at me as if in warning before skittering away. I could see t’was a she cause she belly fat fat wid eggs. I screech loud and jump ’round like I was dancing for true. People say when I scream I does sound like a horny cat so I sure dem inside sleeping ain’t even turn over. Of course I had tink to step ’pon she, but as she was moving fast and she was outside, in her home, not inside in mine, I calm meself. I is a muddah too. Plastic bag make we both happy.

Once de bottles dem all lay out in a rough square I rest most of me leg weight ’pon de nearest one. A ting I learn is to put dem down in a grid pattern, so dey ain’t all facing de same way. Den dey ain’t so quick to dash me to de ground. I roll me foot on de first one. Toes, arch, heel, back and forth, ’til me foot know de bottle and de bottle know me. Den I roll over two bottles, den three. I ain’t standing on it yet, mind. Just me leg weight. Den I switch off and do de other foot, de other leg. Come time I tink, but Mable, you schupid or what? Why you lay out thirty bottles when you only practicing wid six? But I like de look of all a dem splayed out in front a me. Dey know I coming, soon as I get good enough. Is like dey is a ocean of glass and I learning to swim. Some a dem I must curl me toes to grip and others I must make me foot more round. Before I put me full heavy weight, what me doctor ain’t happy ’bout, but me and Boy-oh does enjoy, I decide to try two foot together. I sit down on de ground, raise me knees in de air and learn to roll de two a dem same time, moving in circles, triangles, checkerboard squares. Heel, toe rhythms. One ting I tell you, me belly gon’ flatter doing dat. Weeks go by ’til I feel to move up to sitting in a folding chair I bring from de back porch. I making de patterns more intricate. But I still ain’t standing ’pon dem for real yet.

• • • •

“Mommy. Mommy. Mommy, guess what?”

Dat is me middle daughter, Rue, screaming into de phone while I at work. I keep trying tell she dese tings have microphones but she does talk like ole people on de phone. Always yelling. But dat is she all over. She gon’ talk, she gon’ tell and when she excited she gon’ yell. She call me on me work number too, cause she know me cell phone pack down in me bag. I take de black receiver, plastered over wid Property of Consumer Affairs, out de back door. De green garbage bins busy feeding flies and I step more into de parking lot.

“Okay, I listening. What happen, Rue?”

“I got it. I got it! I got it.”

Rue be going for so much me ain’t sure what we celebrating. Dean’s List? Valedictorian? Scholarship Award? She graduating from University of the Virgin Islands in June. We still working out how to pay for she Master’s in Journalism.

“I was picked to be secondary announcer at Calypso Tent. I’m going to be live on air! On the radio and TV. And people will be streaming it from all over the world!”

“Wooy-yoii, chile, dat is great. Just great. I so proud of you. When you find out? Just now?”

“Yes, Doc Cyril called me. I sent him an audition tape. Lots of people did. And he picked me! Me!”

“I know you gon’ be wonderful, Rue. You made to do dis. You does see everyting and tell all. You is just right for de job. He gon’ love working wid you.”

“I hope so. I have a meeting with him next week. And then every two weeks until Carnival.”

“Un-huh.” She calming down a little and I could bring de phone closer to me ear. I notice I standing on one foot, circling me ankle in de air. I switch to de other foot. De heat getting to me, de stench of food waste from de cookshop two doors down. De cement alley come like a oven baking everyting in sight.

“I glad you call me. Dis wonderful news. You gon’ call you father now?”

“I’ll call him later, when he gets home. I have to go back to class. I’ll come visit on Sunday. What you cooking?”

“I gon’ surprise you,” I tell she, but really ain’t gon’ be no surprise. I gon’ make she favorites.

• • • •

Treevia napping in de green Ting soda bottle when she find sheself swooping through de air and den placed back on de cooling ground. She could see a bright light swinging about ’til it come to shine directly in she eyes and she wanted to run, run and hide, but she couldn’t self see what was going on. T’wasn’t de moon, moving so close and fierce. Nor even de back porch light, which all a dem had done get used to. Treevia wish she was in de dark brown Red Stripe beer bottle instead, where she would blend in little more. She creep nearer de opening and peer out, antennae twitching wid fear. Could she make a run for it? Climb over all dem bottles? Up and down de slippery waves of glass and make it back to de hibiscus hedge before death find she? She was still to teach she youngest how to make green leaf mold. She and she muddah suppose to go foraging for dead crab leavings next bright moon.

Treevia had see de woman, Mable, come out in de night and play wid de bottles many times before. But she had never come dis early. Dis time, as de commotion continue, wid bottles landing everywhere and de light from de woman hand lantern searching out de creator’s own footsteps Treevia could only wait and wonder why she always take such risks. She know she love de slight pressure she feel when crawling into each new bottle. She know she love to wallow in de smells and pooling puddles. She wonder if she best friends and worst enemies both right and she gon’ die a death dat swarms will be warned about for generations. Treeviaitis: Death by stupidity.

De light steadied and stilled and Treevia move closer to de neck of de bottle to peek out. A foot. Mable’s naked foot came down at her. Treevia screamed.

• • • •

I had just finish working out a very simple routine when Boy-oh come sneaking up behind me and I almost break a bottle I land so hard.

“Mable, what you doing out here in de middle of de night, baby?”

He say it gently, like he tink I crazy and he gon’ have to take me to de building widout no windows.

“Nothing,” I say. De lie all around me.

“You been getting up in de night a lot. I thought you was watching TV. Someting wrong? You feeling all right? You ain’t sick, are you? Or talking to some man on de phone?”

“No, man. I ain’t talking to nobody. You ain’t see de phone dere on de charger where I does leave it?”

“Den what you doing?” He step closer. “Why you have all dese bottles strewn about de yard?”

I start to pick dem up, gathering seven a dem in de crook a me arm. I could carry a lot one time now after almost a year.

“I teaching meself to dance on bottles,” I mumble. He hear me doh.

“What schupidness you talking, woman?”

I turn to him, ready to claim ain’t nothing again. Den I get hot.

“Is schupidness, yes, but is my schupidness. I ain’t bothering nobody and I having a good time wid it. If you ain’t happy for me den leave me alone.”

He reel back, not expecting how mad he make me so fast.

“Mable, baby,” he say, putting on he seductive voice, “leave dat for now and come get in de bed. You need to rest.”

I suck me teeth and carry me bottles over to de casha bush, throwing dem down harder dan I usually do. I go back for more and he stand dere watching me. Big hands in he pajama pants pockets. I ain’t know why pajama pants does have pockets—we must pay for dreams now?

“I coming soon,” I tell he.

By de time I reach de bedroom after taking off de jeans and washing me face and feet, Boy-oh was done sleep and snoring. As he feel me besides him, he push he hardness on me backside, wrap he hand around me right breast, and start to stroking me head which I had done braid and cover for de night.

“You acting crazy, woman. You know dat?”

“Is a harmless crazy,” I say. “Get used to it.” I still mad.

• • • •

Next morning hear what Boy-oh tell me.

“I gon’ help you. I is a good coach. Tonight lemme see what you doing.”

I turn from de stove.

“Why?” I ask he.

“’Cause I see de light in you eye. From when we had first meet.”

I turn back to de stove, a big grin splitting me face.

“All right,” I tell he, “I show you.”

• • • •

You tink Boy-oh keep he mouth shut? No, he tell everybody. He tell Finality and Rue, call Gloria and Kenyatta who both stateside in college already.

“You Mommy gon’ be in Parade,” he say. He getting mix up, he so excited. “No, no, not Parade. Tent. Calypso tent night. She gon’ perform. Dancing on glass bottles. She have dis routine. You have to see it to believe it. Is like magic, like a miracle, ’cause you know you muddah ain’t no lightweight.”

Kenyatta, who always practical, ask what kind of shoes I wearing and what song I dancing to. Gloria come wid, “Mommy, do you really tink that’s safe?”

“When last you see safe?” I ask she. “Once you born, safe done.”

Rue tink it’s wonderful because, and she ain’t say it like dis, but I know, whether I good or bad is more publicity for she. And Finality, she barely want to talk to me ’cause I’s an embarrassment. She sixteen.

• • • •

After Treevia’s near-death experience when Mable foot almost crush she in a Jarritos Tamarind soda bottle, she decide to give Oswald a ride. He was right ’bout all de good places to eat round by his side of de house. Dey been walking out at night together through de whole of de hurricane season and she carrying. She had make six broods already and he had five heself, so when dey all together dey make a green tree look brown.

One night Oswald say dey should all go up in de flamboyant tree to watch what Mable and Boy-oh doing. Dey start to gather dere every night. Oswald does keep up a running commentary on de happenings in de yard. He know more about humans dan any of dem ’cause he does watch de television and listen to de radio through de window. More dan once he jokes had make everyone in de tree flutter wid laughter ’til Mable and Boy-oh notice dem and decide practice done for de night.

• • • •

Since Boy-oh done tell everybody he know dat I gon’ be in Calypso Tent, everybody got someting to say. One set a people is “you really shouldn’t” and “ain’t you too old?” and dey want to say “too fat” but dey ain’t dare. And de next set giving me suggestions and ideas. Next ting you know, I have a costume and a headdress. I decide to do me dance to a steel pan version of de song I tink gon’ make Road March. De song name “Flinging Ting” and is about dancing, pelting waist, wukking up, but I like to tink when I step ’pon de bottles, dat de soda does fly out and go up de noses of de people who doing evil.

Boy-oh help me choreograph de steps. Dat was one of de hardest tings I ever do. Harder even dan learning to ride life’s ups and downs and not take it out on de people ’round me. Harder even dan learning to let de multi-colored vessels buoy me, even doh I know I should be falling and getting cut to shreds. In time I start to arrange de bottles so de size, placement, and colors help me remember de steps. De sound dey make when I move on dem only I could hear, but it add to de rhythm and keep me pointing, flexing, and arching. Keep me dancing ’til de song done.

• • • •

“You have your two-legged, your four-legged, your six-legged, your winged, and your scaled. We, being gifted wid wings and legs, have to help dose wid limited abilities,” Oswald say.

He standing on a dying flower. It bright orange color make a good background and dey could all see him clear clear. He voice not loud and dem in de middle have to repeat he words for dem on de far side.

“Me ain’t see why you want us to help dem now, in dis way,” Uncle Yellow Shading to Beige say. He always contrary and grumpy because he never get to mate. It to do wid he coloring.

“Uncle Yellow Shading to Beige, we all know you as kind and generous, directly descended from de original, primordial line of de keepers of de soil—”

“Listen here, Oswald, don’t you try tell me what me and mine, and you and yours, and all of us, been doing since time began. We know dat, what me want to know is why me should leave me comfortable, fragrant hole to go in motor vehicle following after dese two-legged hairless primates? We live good in dere yard, yes, de food good ’round here, but we do what come natural and ain’t owe dem no more dan dat. What why you got for dat, eh?”

When dem in de back get de word, dey bring dere opposition forward in a loud chorus.

“Yeah, why?”

“Why?”

“Dat’s easy,” Oswald shout, “it’ll be fun.”

Treevia know he losing dem.

“Dey need us. But dey don’t know dey need us and dey don’t appreciate us,” Treevia say. “Dis a chance to show dem how beautiful we are.”

“What’s appreciate taste like, Mama?” one of Treevia’s youngest ask. “Taste like chicken?”

“No, it more like ice cream,” Treevia answer, “delicious but not necessarily nutritious.”

“Well, who need it den?” Uncle Yellow Shading to Beige raise up, getting ready to leave.

“Consider shoes,” Oswald bellow.

“Shoes?” Treevia look over at Oswald wid she antennae drooping.

“Dere will always be shoes, right? Who here ain’t had a wild scare wid shoes?” Oswald turn, looking behind heself into de empty air as if death stalking dem all now.

It quickly gon’ quiet as everyone strain to see de threat.

“Dere will always be shoes,” Oswald turn back and bawl out again. De anxious among dem jump, ready to fly.

“Bird shoes. Mongoose shoes. Poison spray shoes. Am I right? Rat shoes. Tire shoes. Dere will always be some kind of shoe ready to squeeze de ooze out of you, and leave you belly up. But until dat night come, leh we make some fun. What I saying is, leh we all be all together shoeless.”

Oswald spread he wings and flutter dem wide. He bounce up and down on de flower, shouting at dem, shoeless, shoeless, shoeless. When he miss he landing and fall gracelessly to de ground, dey lean to stare down at him. One ting dey all, except Uncle Yellow Shading to Beige, agree on, Oswald certainly entertaining.

• • • •

De big day come and we in de car driving down to de baseball stadium where de Calypso Tent being held. It only four thirty in de afternoon and de show don’t start ’til seven. We rest de bottles near enough to de stage so it would only take about ten minutes to get dem set up. De audience gon’ be restless but it can’t be helped. I so nervous I can’t self enjoy de other people acts. Me muddah ears does perk up every time I hear me daughter’s voice through de loudspeakers and I know she doing good. Boy-oh rubbing me hands and even me feet when I does sit down, trying to keep me calm. I running through de routine in me head, matching each note wid a step.

When time come, Boy-oh and Finality go on stage to place de bottles. Rue on stage wid Doc Cyril and dey keeping de audience laughing. Doc Cyril teasing Finality because he know she is Rue’s sister even doh she covered from head to foot in a clown costume. Boy-oh ain’t bother wid no disguise, as he had done tell everybody and when he decide to do a ting he have no shame.

It my turn now and de music start. De bottles set up good in de hexagon shape we had practice. Me costume, a brown bodysuit wid strips of different colored filmy cellophane, twirl and catch de light as I move. It make a crinkling sound like de fizz of a bubbly drink. Me headdress is a tight-fitting crown wid a three-foot spray of white feathers shooting up in de air. I dance ’round de stage one time, letting me body and de bottles and me feet feel dis new place.

Soon as I step on de first bottle it crack and crumble. It had happen when I first start practicing but not in a long long time since. Is de difference between de wood stage floor and de soft ground of me backyard. I gon’ look a fool in front of everybody. De one ting I try to do for me, for fun, gon’ bring me head low. Lower dan it ever been before when I was doing all dat was necessary, widout nothin’ frivolous.

A sharp pain gon’ up me foot and I could feel de lightning of it all de way up to me groin. Me eyes fill up wid tears. I had try teach me children to do right, to strive, to be responsible. Dis me chance to teach dem to reach for joy, for happiness, for fun born of foolishness, and I making a mess of it.

I step on de next bottle slower, losing de beat, trying not to panic. I could feel me blood pulsing outta de arch of me foot and I feel de slipperiness and know I in trouble. I carry on even doh I could hear de audience murmuring and feel de shame crawling on me skin. I breathe hard and look past de lights up into de night sky, avoiding de faces of people I been revolving around on dis small island me whole life. Just when I feel I could get back into de rhythm despite de sharpness of de pain, de music gon’ bad.

I hear Boy-oh cussing, but he smart and had bring a back-up recording which he was playing same time. De speakers not strong but me and most of de people close to de stage could hear it. De audience gon’ quiet quiet. Come de last chorus de blood from me bleeding foot causing me to glide and shimmy in ways I never practice. Arms flailing, waist pelting, knees bending, I barely maintaining me balance. But me ain’t fall yet.

Next ting I hear de audience screaming. Could it be me dey celebrating? Me, who all me life had do all me shoulds and none of me coulds? De smile I had wear for de stage turn real.

• • • •

When I reach off de stage, I find Boy-oh face stiff wid shock.

I can’t hear Rue at all, but Doc Cyril repeating like a crazy man, “I never see dat before.”

• • • •

Treevia, Oswald, and de swarm had made their way into all de car’s crevices. De big open field, fill up wid people and lights, loud music and good tings to eat was too much temptation to be ignored and de swarm had scatter. Treevia and Oswald had follow Mable, Boy-oh, and Finality, but Mable dance was almost done by de time Oswald cajole everyone to come back and line up on de roof of de stage.

When Mable do she final move, hop-stepping to de front, wid she arms floating like butterfly wings, de rainbow colored cellophane tapes on she costume lapping up de stage lights and flinging colors like sparks, Oswald, Treevia, and all he could find jump from de roof and flutter in de air behind she. De many weeks of sticky soda and beer on dere wings catch de light and shade de flavors into bright colors. Dey arrange deyselves in de shape of de flamboyant tree dey know so well and hang dere, swaying as if being touched by a small breeze. Den for dey own finale, dey form up into dey own shape. One huge, glistening blattella asahinai. Eight hundred and thirty-eight roaches, fluttering in de air as one, right behind de grinning Mable. Defying shoes.

• • • •

I don’t work at de Department of Consumer Affairs no more.

Dey call me De Roach Lady.

I dance, dey come, and I lead de roaches out de people homes and up into de hills. Everybody happy and nobody sick or dying. Harbor Market, nor none a dem, ain’t sell none a dem poisonous pesticides for months.

Gloria and Kenyatta glad dey in de States, even doh I been on de news four times already. Boy-oh tink is great since me income triple and he almost famous. Rue okay, she all about Rue and know how to make a good ting better. Finality, well, she can’t wait to be grown and move out.

Me? I hope I make Miss Aggie proud.

©2020 by Celeste Rita Baker.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Celeste Rita Baker (she/her) is the author of Back, Belly and Side, a book of short stories, some in Standard English and some in Caribbean Dialect. A Virgin Islander currently living in New York City, she has published stories in The Caribbean Writer (“The Dreamprice”), Calabash (“Responding in Kind and Jumbie from Bordeaux”), Abyss & Apex (“Name Calling”), Outcast Hours (“Not Just Ivy”), Strange Horizons (“De MotherJumpers”) and several other places. A proud graduate of Clarion West 2019, she loves doing live readings and has participated in the Blerd City Con and the BSAM Memphis Con and has taken many other opportunities to share her work with audiences, sometimes in costumes that she makes herself. Her website is celesteritabaker.com and she’s quietly on Twitter as @tenwest55.

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

Neversleeps

Fred Van Lente | 6250 words

Monument Valley, Near Navajo Territory, Northbound on the Northwest Pacific Express, 120 years after the Awakening

There were three Pinkertons. There were always three. One was a white man, one was black, and the other was a Celestial. They may have been something else before, but now they were Pinkertons. Same brownish-grey tweed suits, same bowler hats, same obese-caterpillar mustaches lurking below their noses.

Simon Leslie was playing hold-’em in the parlor car when the train slowed between two mesas in Monument Valley with a puff of steam and a sigh. Through the window he saw the Pinkertons get off and march in a flawless triangular phalanx up the nearest brick-red ridge. From the looks of it, they emerged from the express car in the center of the train; maybe the railroad kept them stacked in crates with the sacks of parcels and the safe where they laid, stiff-necked, their tattooed eyes open and unblinking, waiting to be needed. They were nicknamed “Neversleeps” for a reason. Simon Leslie knew. It had not been so long since he was one of them.

“Your bet, Si. Come on! You’re growing cobwebs.” The futures trader who got on with Leslie in New Orleans wasn’t nearly as funny as he thought he was. Leslie reflexively looked at his hand: it was still the Ten and Page of Pentacles. The turn had just been set down, so the Eight of Wands, the Tower, the Empress, and now the Queen of Cups showed on the table. He had a modest gut-shot straight draw going, so he bet half the pot.

“Christ on a Crutch, will you look at that,” said another player, a fat lawyer taking his pretty young third wife to the West Coast for their honeymoon.

Everyone looked out the window: An array of Navajo warriors lined the ridge astride soot-colored ponies, the feathers tied to their spears a-flutter in the breeze. They looked like they had materialized out of thin air, but Simon spotted the shaman among them, an emaciated crone wearing nothing but a cloak of raven feathers, shaking a gnarled rattle of bone. No doubt they had been standing there the whole time, cloaked in spirit, awaiting the train and the Pinkertons.

“They’re—they’re not going to attack, are they?” asked the lawyer’s wife, a short, befreckled redhead who had been giving Leslie smiles he probably should have been ignoring the whole game. He’d given her smiles in return he definitely should not have. He didn’t have time for it. Not this trip.

“They wouldn’t dare,” the futures man said. “There’s been peace with the Four Corners tribes for a generation.”

There was a time, not so far distant, at the beginning of the Awakening, that the Navajo and the Ute and the Zuni and the Hopi would have hungered for war, along with all the indigenous and oppressed peoples of five continents. The ancestor-worshippers and dream-walkers and totem-bearers thought they could feel the yoke and heel of the European easing from their collective necks, once all the spirits and spells from the days before the Age of Reason returned in a joyous shriek to the world. The native had been in touch with Supernature far longer than the colonizer, their touch with the Invisible had not atrophied from millennia of smelting and steam engines and monotheism. The Awakening, to them, was the first day of their inevitable return to power.

How wrong they were.

They forgot how adept those who seize power are at retaining it, no matter how outré the circumstances. Within a few years the enchantments and sorceries long suppressed by European churches thrust back into prominence and were ruthlessly employed by those already in charge. There would always be those maddening fools who love the bosses, who love a firm, guiding hand on their nape and revel in the harsh disciplining of those who try and buck it. The Neversleeps were among the most feared of these servants. Though outnumbered by stony-faced braves twelve to one, the trio marched unafraid up the ridge to the lead Navajo warrior, resplendent in buffalo horns, to receive what they believed, without any hesitancy or doubt, was always rightfully theirs.

Simon Leslie said, “What they’re doing now is avoiding a war.”

The poker players watched as the braves parted so two squaws could deliver to the Pinkertons a handcuffed, hooded figure and accompanying baggage.

“Is that . . .” The redheaded newlywed squinted at the captive. “Is that a woman?”

“Not just any woman,” Leslie said. “That’s Nicola Tesla.”

His fellow players turned and gaped at him. “Not the atomist? The descendant of . . . of you know? Him?”

Simon Leslie nodded.

“The savages were harboring her laboratory on their reservation? That’s where she was hiding out?” Since the raid on her experimental cyclotron in Colorado Springs, Nicola Tesla had been the West’s most wanted Science Criminal, with a million-dollar bounty on her head. The Four Corners chieftains no doubt delighted in frustrating the will of the Bureau of Animist Affairs by hiding her. Finally, though, a headman competing for tribal supremacy had ratted her out, able to sow enough uneasiness with the elder matriarchs about the risk of death raining down on them from Washington for the sake of some white woman practicing electrical heresy that was as taboo to their faith as it was to that of the hated Federals.

Fortunately for her, someone in the Bureau had, in turn, leaked news of her capture and details of the prisoner exchange to Simon Leslie’s comrades in the White City.

“Poor girl,” the fat lawyer tutted as the Pinkertons enveloped their prisoner in the center of their phalanx and returned to the train. “They’re taking her to San Francisco, no doubt, to be burned at the stake.”

“Or shipped to the prison mines of Alaska Territory,” Simon Leslie said.

“Ain’t you just a font of useful information,” the futures trader said. “I don’t rightly recall what you said you did for a living.”

“No?” As he said it the trader slapped down the river card: the Nine of Swords. He had made his straight.

“I’m a gambler.”

The men at the table blanched. The redhead grinned.

“All-in,” Simon Leslie grinned back.

Once the Neversleeps were safely on board, the twisting, cord-like dragon towing the train spread its wings with a snort and a roar and launched itself back into the shimmering ley line coursing across the horizon and beat its leather wings toward California.

• • • •

The redheaded bride’s name was Marion and she had spent her whole life until her wedding day in Lafayette, Louisiana. She told Simon her new husband made love to her like it was a necessity he tried to get over with as soon as possible, for she stood between him and sleep.

When she stole into Leslie’s private sleeper berth, he pulled her nightgown over her head and left it there as he kissed every inch of her freckled skin and once she was covered in goose bumps he picked her up by her bare thighs and lay her on the tiny bed and made sure that she knew she was a rare delicacy to be savored and adored and pleasured. She was not a means. She was an End. And she bit her long red hair to keep from crying out.

After, he thought maybe he should wake her and send her back to her snoring husband for her own safety, but she looked so peaceful lying in his bed he couldn’t bear to. Instead he opened his trunk and popped open the false bottom to reveal The Clockwork Chrysalis. He had waited long enough. They would be nearing the point in the Sierra Madre—according to his guidebook and compass—where the Donner Party made a miserable repast of itself all those years ago. He had chosen this as his disembarkation point for a reason.

The Chrysalis creaked like an old battleship when he peeled it over his naked body, most of it thick rawhide that somehow felt no heavier than a thin layer of oil on his skin. The boots slipped silently over his feet and he pulled the hood down over his head. He flipped through lenses of the brass goggles over his eyes and set them to the widest aperture; within moments the great proboscis of the filter over his mouth began straining his breath, bringing only the purest air into his lungs, free of the stink of Enchantment.

The atomists of the White City originally designed the Chrysalis to prevent any skin scales or stray hairs from leaving agents’ bodies while conducting anti-sorcery operations, to say nothing of blood or saliva. Everything the body shed or excreted could be turned against it by the enemy; scryers could find you anywhere in the world; diviners could predict your next move with unerring accuracy; necromancers could cast sudden death on you from hundreds of miles away.

But soon the White City realized that the suit could be so much more.

Leslie snapped the gun braces over his arms and strapped the brass duck’s-foot pistols onto them, combustion-based projectile technology, simple possession of which had been a capital crime for nearly one hundred years. He stepped gingerly over the naked woman in his bed to the sill, slid the glass open and pulled himself onto the roof of the train car, closing the window with his heel before the whistle of wind could rouse Marion from her slumber.

The train cleaved through snowcapped peaks and rolling carpets of pine with nary a sound, except the occasional sheet-on-a-clothesline flap of the Li Ying Lung dragon’s wings. The night air lashed at him but even though he felt as naked and vulnerable as a newborn he did not feel any cold. The paucity of oxygen at this altitude made his lungs clench but after a few seconds of crouching atop the sleeper car, carefully listening to his heartbeat, he brought the rhythm of his breath under control. The brass electrodes studding the inside of the Chrysalis helped greatly with that. They captured his bioelectric field and redistributed it inside the suit, where it could not be hijacked by mediums or magic-users.

Such a manipulation of the psychic lacuna led to depression and erratic behavior in all but the most mentally disciplined operatives; Simon Leslie had had to spend a year mastering meditation techniques all but unheard of in the West to endure the sense of insignificance and hopelessness that enveloped him once he cloaked himself in the Chrysalis’s self-contained, absolute reality. He was cut off from self-deception, unmoored from myth, the caul of perception was ripped away, leaving nothing but what truly is, independent of him, in its stead. Unless his mind correlated most or all of its contents, the experience could crush his soul, by convincing him in an instant that he did not have one.

On the plus side, the Chrysalis also rendered him completely immune to magic.

He bounded from car to car. Innumerable (highly illegal) micro-filament wires crisscrossing the Chrysalis turned his second skin into a giant eardrum; vibrating through his soles he could hear snoring widows, the squeak of hip flasks being unscrewed, the tinkle of lantern glass: a parlor car. Then, the clatter of plates, the laughter of dishwashers trying to out-mock each other: the dining car.

Then, he bounded to the next: He heard silence beneath his feet. This would be the express car he had seen the Pinkertons return to when the train stopped in Navajo country.

He flexed the tendons in his wrist, rotating the guns that crowned them until, with a pneumatic hiss from a catch pressed in his palm, a tiny projectile sprang out of the multi-barreled pistol and stuck in the car roof. He hopped back to the car edge as the clockwork timer on the top whirred to detonation.

The split second right before: his breath catching, pulse racing like a thoroughbred, thrilling to the randomness of life without thaumaturgy, the keenness of a skate down the razor’s edge, without horoscopes that definitively told him what the next day would bring, without love enchantments to spark others’ desire, without the certainty magery’s manipulation of reality brought. The joys of not-knowing: This was why he risked his life and the eternal servitude of his immortal spirit to serve the White City.

He hadn’t really lied to his fellow poker players when he told them he was a gambler.

He just didn’t name the game he played.

The (obscenely illegal) plastic explosives inside the bolt blew a hole in the roof of the express car three feet in diameter; Leslie leapt through boots-first with the last cascade of wood and shingle.

Inside, the Pinkertons were ready for him; their heads had transformed beneath their bowler hats into blazing phosphorus eyeballs—a metaphor-made-flesh, embodying the advertisements of their detective agency prior to the Awakening: We Never Sleep. They blasted him as one with a ghostly fire that would have ignited anyone else into a screaming bonfire of agony. But he wore the Chrysalis, with the shaded lenses snapped over his goggles, so he didn’t even get spots in his eyes.

He leapt toward the nearest Eye and flicked his wrists a different direction and twin Tamil katar blades shot out of the brass braces. With the left dagger he sliced through a retina the width of his face and was already moving away as gelatinous white burst out of it, turning and spinning and burying the right dagger up to its hilt in the chest of the second Eye next to him.

The third Eye, intuiting further attacks against the Chrysalis would be useless, turned the stream of his spirit-fire onto the floor of the car, blowing a hole in it nearly as big as the one Leslie’s explosives had blown in the roof. Though the Chrysalis rendered him immune to magic, those people and things outside it were still very much mune. But Leslie pinwheeled sideways away from the eruption and unloaded the explosive rounds from the fan-like pistols into the Eye’s midriff. He was dead before the blowback smashed him against the wall.

Nicola Tesla sat on the railroad company safe, amidst bags of mail inside the express car cage, handcuffed to the bars, hood still over her head. Leslie dug the keys out of the jacket of the Pinkerton slumped against the wall and opened the door.

When he pulled the bag off her head she sneered at him. “Edison stooge.” Slight Serbian accent, darkly beautiful, same knowing baleful gaze as her famed ancestor. She spat on the floor at his feet.

Leslie groaned through the small speaker set in the front of his mask. “Ms. Tesla, I am nobody’s stooge.”

“Doctor Tesla.”

“Mr. Thomas Edison may have founded the White City, but we operate solely on the universal principle of returning science to the world. We should be allies.”

“Your Edison publicly recanted science to save his neck. My great-grand-uncle did not and he burned. Your secret society was founded by a thief and a coward and nothing good will come of it.”

He jangled the keys in front of her. “I take it then I am too morally compromised for you to accept my help?”

She pouted. She was beautiful. “Go ahead,” she said, turning her face away.

She sprung to her feet as soon as he unlocked the cuffs and opened a medium-sized steamer trunk in the corner of the cage. Leslie recognized it as one of the pieces of baggage the Navajo had turned over with her. “I’m afraid we need to leave your things behind,” Leslie said.

“Not this.” She removed a long mahogany rifle with a steel sphere at the end of a filigreed brass barrel.

“What do you have there?”

“An apparatus for generating, intensifying, and amplifying electrical force in free air.”

“Ah.”

“A lightning gun,” Dr. Tesla said slowly.

“Yes, thank you, I know what a lightning gun is.”

“How should I know? I am sure you have received all sorts of erroneous notions from the followers of that degenerate Edison.”

“Ma’am. The War of the Currents ended over a century ago. This is no time to declare that hostilities between your family and the Edisons have resumed. We have mutual enemies to unite against.”

She sniffed. “It would appear I have no choice but to accept the aid of my inferiors. Very well, then; take me to your White City. I have no doubt your clock-punchers and patent lawyers will benefit greatly from someone with genuine scientific knowledge.”

“No doubt,” Leslie said dryly.

He helped her through the hole in the roof, then hoisted himself up. As soon as the mountain air hit him, he was brought up short by the crackling of the wireless in his ear. The White City always maintained radio silence during delicate operations such as this.

“Si. Si, can you hear me? Our three on the train went blind, so you must be there. Say hello to your old friend.” Morgan Ash’s deep mahogany laugh froze Leslie’s blood. Ash was the First Ward Boss in Manhattan. His former employer.

“Possession of wireless radio technology is a Class A felony which carries a sentence of up to twenty years in prison,” Simon Leslie said. Tesla looked quizzically at him, but he held up a finger for the explanation to wait. “Ah, but that’s right—the rules don’t apply to you, do they?”

He could almost hear Ash ensconced in his suite in the Dakota Hotel overlooking Central Park, a cigar in whichever hand wasn’t holding the receiver. “For your information, Si, I am not violating our sacred ether with electromagnetic radiation in order to transmit sound, but rather a spell cooked up by the boys in Applied Thaumaturgy that resonates with your transceiver in much the same way.”

All this talk of “ether” was, of course, pseudoscientific nonsense. But with magic, the bosses had the power to force their pseudoscience on the world and make it true. “I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to chat, Morgan. Kind of in the middle of something.”

“So you are. But I don’t believe you’re quite aware of what that something is.” The chuckle again. “The leak inside the Bureau of Animist Affairs that told the White City where the handoff for Dr. Tesla would be, and which train? The source of that leak would have been me.”

Simon Leslie stood up straight as a roar echoed from the rear of the train. He looked down to the caboose and saw a second dragon, a Ying Lung Wang, an enormous purple-blue creature with a long funnel-like snout, as it oared its sea-turtle flippers through the borealis of the ley line. Pinkertons covered its leather-plated shell, enormous head-eyes glowing beneath bowler hats.

The sky above them rippled and flashed and an airship descended from the clouds—a gondola swarming with Pinkertons hanging from a sinewy P’an Yin Lung, fur-like licks of white fire straggling from its jaw.

Dr. Tesla grunted, and Leslie looked at her, and was surprised to find her smiling.

“You have fallen for a trap, Edison man,” she said. “I was just bait. They want your Chrysalis.”

• • • •

The Neversleeps poured over the turtle dragon and dropped from the sky, spitting gouts of white flame and whirling sigils of burning gold. They were mostly humans, but he saw Sidhe and dwarves mixed among them too, and that made Simon Leslie think of the Homestead Strike, in which Morgan Ash had ordered him, as leader of the local Neversleeps, to summon the dwarves’ ancestral enemies from their former home in the Nine Worlds: the monstrous two-headed Ettin. The giants had scooped up diminutive miners six at a time and popped them into razor-lined mouths and crunched down on them like popcorn. After that day of horror, Simon Leslie resolved to find a better way to live, or die trying. Fortunately the White City found him.

But now it seemed like he would die anyway.

“I would strongly advise giving yourself up, Si,” Morgan Ash purred in his ear. “Ain’t no shame in it. We sent numbers enough to crush the Four Corners, much less one traitor and one extremely misguided Slav bitch.”

Tesla yanked back the lever on her lightning gun and cried out a curse in Serbo-Croatian (“Nabijem te na kurac!” he thought he heard) as blue tines crackled out of the metal sphere, zigzagging through the night and finding the Pinkertons wherever they were with the unerringness of falcons and stiffening them with electric fire.

“Seeing as how we have history, you and I,” Ash rambled on, “I promise you, once you get to The Tombs, the inquisitors won’t torture you too much. Sure, the judge’ll order a requisite number of Hexes of Excruciating Pain, but beyond that the severity of the interrogation is largely up to the discretion of the presiding officer. Which, just so you know,” his voice dropped to a whisper, “will be me, regardless of what copper’s name is actually on the register.

“I’ll only ask you to name a few names,” Ash continued. “Five? The main atomist leaders. Where the White City is. How you’ve managed to keep an entire hive of damn heathens invisible from our scrying mirrors.

“And, of course, our experimental thaumaturgians will be going to town on your leather jumpsuit. They’ll crack it. Trust me, they’re smarter than a barrel full of Teslas. If they can’t find a spell to get past the Chrysalis’s defenses, shit, they’ll write one. Don’t think they won’t.”

“Down!” Leslie cried, and Tesla ducked dutifully, allowing him to blow the Pinkerton who had landed behind her off the train with a booming round to the chest. The cloud dragon overhead had managed to overtake the dragon pulling the train and was dropping off Neversleeps to outflank them. They could not survive a two-front war. Leslie leapt forward, grabbed a protesting Tesla and bounded back to the express car, dropping through the hole he’d made so they could regroup behind the imposing iron safe.

“This doesn’t look promising,” Leslie said in an off-handed way. He could barely hear himself over the throbbing pulse in his neck. He nodded at Tesla’s silently steaming lightning gun. “Busted?”

“Bite your tongue. Overheated. Give it ten seconds of cool-down.”

The roof erupted in a roar of unearthly flame that blackened and ripped whole chunks off in plumes of embers. Within seconds it would be gone, and they would be fully exposed.

The man and the woman looked at each other. Their short destinies were written plain on each other’s faces.

Then, the woman had a spark.

“Your Chrysalis, it self-generates a localized bioelectric field, yes?” She feverishly snapped open compartments and undid screws on the lightning gun.

“I’m generating the field, the suit just keeps it in continuous circulation in a closed system . . . Hey, don’t break that down, we can still use it—”

“No, no we can’t. We need to eliminate more of our enemies at once.” She removed a small metal box from the side of the gun. “We’ll use the cavity resonator. It can expand the Chrysalis’s bioelectric field.”

“But the field is self-contained. How can you attach your resonator to it?”

“We need to breach the—”

“No!”

“Listen to me—”

“The first rule of the White City is you never breach the Chrysalis—”

She slapped him. He barely felt it inside his leather mask, but she kept talking. “That’s Edison talking! Use your imagination, man!”

Before he could respond, the flaming roof of the express car collapsed and the room filled with Neversleeps. He grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her through the far door into the adjoining car. Passengers already awakened by the sounds of chaotic battle all around them began screaming once they saw the mosquito-like proboscis of the Chrysalis. They rushed to fill the aisle to get away from them; the fugitives managed to hop and weave around the masses but the column of Pinkertons slammed into them, forestalling pursuit.

Morgan Ash radioed, “Hellfire and damnation, boy, don’t you know when your bell’s been rung? I promised my kids I’d read ’em a bedtime story before their nanny puts ’em to sleep.”

Through two more sleeper cars and a combine they ran, to burst through into the first and final car, little more than an open platform in the center of which the driver sat in the Lotus position. He was a Celestial, of course, communing with the dragon in a single conjoined mind to keep its simple lizard’s brain calm and pliant. The Celestial sprang to his feet when the intruders burst through the door and launched into a high-pitched call in Cantonese for Fire, the Element of Greater Yang, but Simon Leslie scissor-kicked him sideways off the train before the third syllable. The Chinese hit a fir tree by the side of the ley line and dropped like a stone to the ground.

Nicola Tesla crouched by his waist with a utility knife, pressing down on the Chrysalis, probing for a good place to make the incision. “We are doing this, yes?”

He was taken back when she looked up at him for his response. It was the first time she had solicited permission from him; perhaps it was the first time in her life.

“What about the other passengers?” he asked.

“What about them?”

Simon Leslie shook his head. It was insane. The whole thing was insane.

“Go ahead,” he said.

He groaned as if it was his own flesh cut when Tesla made an incision in the Chrysalis just above his pelvic bone to remove an electrode from its underside. This she inserted in the box-shaped resonator, which she then hooked to his belt. From inside the second skin he could feel the nature of himself alter; the breath caught in his throat. Though the bioelectric field was invisible, as he pulled Nicola Tesla closer to him he could feel it envelop her; her cheeks suddenly flushed looking at him, and he knew she felt the same way too. A sudden conjoined intimacy, not born of word, deed, or desire, but real all the same, and it moved both of them deeply.

A small ladder led to the ceiling hatch of the “engine,” and from there they hopped onto the muscular ripple of the dragon’s back; its scales were cold and shiny and impossibly smooth; he lost his footing several times until he started to grab onto the ridges of the lizard’s vertebrae and use them as handholds to pull himself along its back. A Li Ying Lung was mostly a serpent, with two vestigial limbs dangling on either side of its undulating expanse. Uncoupled from the mind of its human handler, the dragon huffed and roared with irritation at the two pests skittering across its skin, amber eyes roiling with confusion, but the leather harness attaching it to the great bulk of the train prevented it from flexing its back and hurling the interlopers off.

Leslie reached the base of the lizard’s head and peered over its snout at the ley line coursing beneath it. A gently spinning cylinder of infinitesimally narrow beams of blue, gold, and green light coursed from horizon to horizon. Below he could see they were just now crossing a massive ravine through which coursed the Humboldt River.

“This is where I was going to have us jump off anyway,” he yelled over the thunderous whomp of the dragon’s wings. “Are you ready?”

“Of course not,” Nicola yelled back. She wrapped her arms around his neck, nearly choking him. “Do it anyway!”

A Pinkerton’s ocular blast shot past him. Already the Neversleeps had reached the driver’s car; already they were climbing across the lizard’s back in pursuit.

“Fuck it,” he said to no one in particular.

He planted his foot on the skull ridge between the dragon’s hate-filled eyes and leapt over its snorting nostrils. The expanded field of magic-annihilation from the Chrysalis met the psychic resonance of the ley line, and confronted it with its own impossibility.

And in that instant, it ceased to exist.

• • • •

The enormous dragon did not need the ley line in order to fly, of course; it had wings for that. But the enchantments cast on the ten train cars it towed required interactions with the line to stay aloft. And when the ley that cut through the Sierra Madre abruptly winked out of existence, the train plunged like a ponderous chain into the canyon below, dragging the screaming, spouting dragon down with it.

Leslie hit the water first, dislodging Tesla from his neck. Even the breathing apparatus built into the Chrysalis could not keep the wind from getting knocked out of his chest. Gasping, the first thing he did was unhook Tesla’s resonator from his waist, for he could feel it overheating, trying to burn a hole in his side as he fell.

As he pushed it away from him he saw out of the corner of his eye, in what little light could be stolen from the murky brown by his goggles’ enhancements, Tesla’s curls trailing behind her as she sank unconscious into blackness.

At the same time out of the corner of his other eye, the shadows of the dropping train cars blotted out the surface of the river above him.

Then a great invisible hand swatted him out of the way just as the train crashed into the water in the exact spot where he had been; the river vomited him upward onto a stony heap of slate in a shallow narrow.

He watched the Li Ying Lung dragon crashing down atop the heap of compartments jutting from the water. The wyrm wriggled and ripped its way free of the damaged harness, then sprang into the sky with a breathless shriek of terror; it disappeared with frantic flaps over the nearest peak, the two dragons that had brought the army of Pinkertons instinctively chasing after it.

Leslie spotted Tesla lying facedown in the water near the edge of the shale bar, sputtering and coughing. He raced to her and picked her up from behind, gripping her abdomen and forcing her to cough up as much water as he could. He saw bits and pieces of the resonator floating past on the current and he realized what had happened: the device overheated and exploded, creating a shockwave that hurled its creator and him to safety.

“We’ve made ‘atomist’ synonymous with murderer and anarchist in the headlines,” Morgan Ash chuckled in his ear. “Thank you so much for providing the newspapers pictures to match.”

The bodies of Pinkertons floated everywhere around him as glass-ravaged passengers splashed out of the train through shattered windows and took turns in desperate dives below the surface to rescue those trapped in the two or three fully submerged cars. He burned with regret and nearly dropped Tesla to dash and help them.

But descending all around him were Neversleeps and All-Seeing Eyes. Their stunt had killed many, even most, but not all. Not enough. And when Simon Leslie had torn off the resonator, he’d exposed the breach in the Chrysalis to the outside air; he might as well have torn it to shreds for all the protection it provided him now. The Pinkertons knew it, too; they were just waiting for Ash’s orders to boil his blood, to turn his skin inside out and dump his organs out onto the river rocks like wet sacks of garbage.

“For what it’s worth . . . I’m sorry it had to end like this, Si,” Ash said. “As I’m sure you are too.”

The Eyes closed in a tight circle around Leslie and Tesla. “Don’t tell me what to think, you preening ass. This is exactly how I wanted it to end.”

Ash’s mahogany chuckle. “Si, Si. Cocky little shit to the last, huh?”

“Oh, no. I’m serious. Don’t you read the guidebooks?”

A gust of wind howled through the canyon. The Neversleeps hesitated, spinning their great ocular globes an extra few revolutions.

“You ever hear about the Donner Party, Ash?”

“Wendigos!” somebody cried. But it was too late.

The Cannibal Spirits dropped from the edges of the ravine, their spindly arms spread out to envelop the Pinkertons like a net. Jaws retracted to head-width and sank themselves into the meat and bone of the Pinkertons, ignoring the ectoplasmic eyes. One Neversleep was able to blast back a Wendigo with a manna missile but he was immediately dropped with a claw swipe from behind.

Leslie could feel Tesla tense beneath his arms and he pulled her close to him, hoping he could seal off the breach in the Chrysalis with her body—not enough to fool the sophisticated spells of the Neversleeps, but to confuse the primitive senses of the Wendigos. One came near Nicola trailing long, straggling corpse-hair and sniffed her cheek with his noseless skull, but Leslie put a gloved hand over her face, hoping that would make her partially invisible to the Cannibal Spirit.

With a snort and a dissatisfied shake of the head, the Wendigo turned, spotted a Pinkerton with his left leg ripped off below the knee trying to crawl across the crimson-choked river to safety. The spirit gave up on Tesla and launched itself atop the fugitive and commenced to feast.

“Better luck next time, Morgan,” Leslie said, but silence was his only reply. He ripped the receiver out of his hood in case the bosses figured out how to track that, too, and, keeping Tesla close to his body, fled up the ridge through the pines to safety.

• • • •

At dawn they stumbled across a ghost town on the side of the mountain: pale gray timber shells like giant wasps’ nests. It had been settled since its abandonment, as one might expect, by ghosts, mindless revenants acting out the routines of life: children chasing hoops, women hanging invisible clothing on non-existent lines, men fighting in the streets over long-dead causes.

Inside the largest intact structure, half-burned and festooned with meadow heath, Simon Leslie ripped off the Chrysalis in a stream of muttered self-denunciations.

Tesla watched him with a furrowed brow. “Whatever is the matter?”

“What . . .?” He looked at her, astounded and naked, sweat slick on muscles still taut for battle. “Did you not see what just happened? How many innocent people did we kill with that stunt?”

Tesla shrugged. “The train couldn’t have been traveling more than forty-five, perhaps forty-eight kilometers an hour. I’m sure there were far fewer fatalities than you think.”

“One is unacceptable. You hear me? One innocent life is far too many.”

She laughed at him. “You are trying to remake the world, Edison man. How did you hope to accomplish that without blood and thunder? You think our enemies give one thought to these ‘innocents’ of yours, whoever they are?”

“We’re supposed to be better than they are. We have to be. Otherwise, what’s the point of any of it?”

An exasperated sigh exploded out of her. “My great-grand-uncle had a laboratory in Colorado Springs, just after the Awakening. You heard of it?”

“Yes. He was conducting wireless telegraph experiments. Before magic rendered them obsolete, of course—”

“No. No, no, no. That’s just what the Inquisition wanted everyone to believe, after they arrested him, and he burned. He was working on the wireless transmission of energy. My uncle wanted to generate free power for all, everywhere around the world. That’s what scared them. Not the science. Not the difference of philosophies, whether faith or facts is the superior basis for living. The people who run the world have no use for such trivia. All they want is control.

“That is why you are better than your enemies, Edison man. Not because of your body count. Because you are fighting for what is real and true and natural. The world behind their veil of lies and superstition . . . The common man, the worker, the peasant, does not need oracles and magicians to get ahead in that world. All she needs is what she was born with. That is what makes us different, Edison man. That is what makes us different.” She jabbed a finger into his bare sternum. “And that is why we will win.”

Simon Leslie couldn’t stop grinning. “I think I love you, Nicola Tesla.”

“I would not be surprised if you did. I am quite attractive by conventional standards.”

She turned away from him, and began to remove her still-soaking blouse and her dress to wring them out. Soon they would both be naked inside the burnt empty building, chests heaving, breath not yet caught.

He heard a sound, and looked to the corner of the room. They must have been in a former saloon, for the ghost of a guitar player sat on an invisible crate and stared at nothing and moaned out a song:

I’m, I’m coming home
’Cause I feel so alone
I’m coming back home
And meet my dear old mother
’Cause that’s where I belong

Soon, however, the sun had risen all the way, and the light crept in through the open doorway. The phantom faded with all the others, burned away with the morning fog.

©2014 by Fred Van Lente. Originally published in Dead Man’s Hand, edited by John Joseph Adams. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Fred Van Lente is the award-winning, bestselling writer of comics and graphic novels as diverse as Amazing Spider-Man, Conan the Avenger, Marvel Zombies, The Comic Book History of Comics, and the graphic novel Cowboys & Aliens, the basis for the film. His darkly humorous mystery novels Ten Dead Comedians and The Con Artist are available now.

The Witch Speaks

Rati Mehrotra | 2597 words

As different as earth and sky. That is what they said about us. Yet even earth and sky meet at the horizon.

Shade your eyes from the sun. Look, far in the distance. Do you see that line where brown merges into blue?

I’m ready to walk there. But not before having told my story.

• • • •

I am in Varanasi, one of the seven holy sites of Hinduism. Devotees throng the bathing ghats to wash themselves of sin and attain salvation. The water is muddy, mixed with the ashes of the dead. When I dip my hand in it, I can hear their whispers, their sobs, their sighs.

This is just one of the things that makes people uncomfortable about me, even my own family. Especially my own family.

But you never minded, did you? Life and death, two sides of the same coin. Earth and sky, the distance between them an illusion.

Astronauts, when they view our planet from space, marvel at the thin strip of atmosphere that cradles the Earth.

• • • •

The witch will speak once and remain forever silent. But while she speaks, you will listen. You will not interrupt, as you so often did. Feel free to disagree with me, to disbelieve me. But hold your peace.

See, I can pretend you are still with me, after all these years. I glimpse you in the flight of geese across the winter sky. I hear you in the bells of the evening ceremony on the banks of the Ganga. I feel you in the ashes of the river where I trail my hands. I smell you in the acrid smoke from the burning ghats. You are everywhere, in everything. You always have been.

• • • •

In Varanasi, funeral pyres burn all day, all night, all week. To be cremated in this ancient city is to escape the cycle of birth and death. The demand for funerals is very high. People stay in charitable death hotels, waiting to expire. Sometimes they are kicked out if they don’t die in five days. Come back when you’re sicker, says the proprietor. And the elderly person is carted away by disgruntled relatives, only to die on the way back home. What bad luck, they might grumble. If only we had known exactly when Baba was going to leave his earthly abode.

I could have told them, if they’d asked me.

This is another thing that makes people uncomfortable about me. I can understand that. It is a curse, knowing when those you care about are going to die. I suppress the knowledge as much as I can, but sometimes it seeps through and I grieve—five, ten, fifteen years in advance.

Time is another illusion, one that keeps us sane. Most of us.

• • • •

Do you recall the moment we met? Of course, you might say, remembering a lecture hall, a girl with untidy hair raising her hand to argue with the professor on the decline of the Indus Valley Civilization.

Wrong, I would reply. We first met at a death party.

How apt, you would say in that dry voice of yours, if you were here.

Do they still do death parties? It was all the fashion back then, at least among the younger, edgier set. Food, drink, tears, eulogies, and, as the grand finale, the séance.

You were taking photographs, and you snapped at me for jostling your elbow while you were trying to get a good shot of one impressionable young man who had apparently just been possessed by the spirit of his aunt.

I am not surprised you do not remember this, our first encounter. You were consumed by the moment, and the task you’d been given.

Are there cameras where you are? Do you still take photographs? I hope so. I hope you are now the official photographer of . . . Cloud City. Yes, that is where I shall imagine you to be. You have an umbrella against the persistent drizzle, and you peek down to look at me now and then, debating whether to make the leap. Whether to trust me.

My grandmother, the summer I graduated: You can marry anyone, but not a Muslim. You know they call us “kafir”? You know they can have four wives? He will expect you to convert. What are you, if not your faith?

• • • •

In Varanasi, boats chug downstream, piled high with timber. It takes a lot of wood to burn a body properly, and not everyone can afford it. Sometimes, partially cremated bodies are discarded into the river. Sometimes, you will see a decomposing corpse floating downstream. Flesh-eating turtles have been released into the river to deal with this problem.

How do the dead feel about this?

Well, I ask you, why should they mind? They have died in Varanasi, which practically guarantees moksha. Anything more is icing on the cake. Nice, but not essential. It would be neater to be burned to ash and bone fragment, but the body will get there, eventually. Sun and wind and water will do the job humans could not be bothered to. The turtles will help.

• • • •

What am I, if not my faith?

Let me remind you, in case you’ve forgotten. I am a witch. A witch does not need a name, a religion, a nationality. She owes no one her allegiance. She does not stand for the national anthem in cinema halls. She scorns convention and laughs at the stupid rules preventing menstruating women from entering temples. She will pee by the roadside if she has to, and curse any man who dares look at her. May your penis shrivel up like a raisin and fall off by the next new moon.

Very effective, such curses. Men flee from me, and I throw in a cackle for good measure.

• • • •

Every culture has a story of star-crossed lovers from opposing families: Romeo Juliet, Heer Ranjha, Layla Majnu, Tristan Isolde. The romance lies in the tragedy. It is their dying that endears them to us. So beautiful, so young, so hopelessly in love, so dead. They are immortalized in our hearts, frozen in time, perfect forever.

I didn’t want to be like those poor dum-dums.

Elope, I suggested.

No, you said firmly. You don’t discard your past to make a future. That would be like trying to build a house without foundations.

But what if there’s something rotten in the foundations? What if you have to tear everything down to build a better house, a house in which our kind of love can survive?

• • • •

In the interior of Varanasi, far from the tourist hordes crowding the ghats, broods a small temple that is not much visited by travelers. Here, in the second century BCE, the Sanskrit grammarian Patanjali wrote his famous treatise Mahābhāṣya. But it is an older secret that draws me there.

In the temple courtyard is an ancient stepwell. At the bottom of that well is a door to Nagaloka, the wondrous world of Serpents. No ordinary human can open it. But I am a witch, and I know my fate. That is why I am here in Varanasi, after years of hiding.

Perhaps, you might say, none of the stories about Varanasi are true. All those people taking dips in the polluted water are simply exposing themselves to bacterial infections. All those prayers, those rituals on the banks of the river, are nothing but noise, designed to soothe the universal human fear of death and oblivion. The stepwell is just an ordinary well with garbage floating on its surface, and a marked absence of magical doors of any kind.

Ah, I told you not to interrupt. Listen to me. Belief is important. Belief shapes the world we live in, the lives we lead, and the way we die. Who are you or I to say it does not shape what comes after?

• • • •

A witch does not feel guilt. But she takes responsibility. She is plagued by questions, large and small. Could I have protected you from harm? Could I have persuaded you to run away, to hide with me in those in-between places only witches know of?

No, probably not.

Could I simply have left you and run away on my own?

Yes. But I didn’t. I did not foresee what would happen. But that is no excuse, not for a witch.

• • • •

Can witches fly? This is a serious question, posed to me by a small child sucking an orange bar, a couple of steps above me on the ghats.

I turn to face her, and cannot help but smile at what I see: sticky face, torn frock, bruised knees, pigtails. This could be me, thirty years ago.

Well, and if they could, do you think I would be down here in the mud with you? I demand.

She shrugs, unconcerned, then fades from view, leaving me disoriented.

I have always attracted ghosts, but they are getting more corporeal. Maybe that is the effect of being in Varanasi. Or maybe I walk in the borderlands now, one foot on Prithvi, one in the underworld. Getting ready to meet the horizon.

Are you taking photographs yet? Did you get the ghost?

• • • •

We could have died in each other’s arms. Our doomed love affair would have inspired other inter-faith couples. Our mothers would have shed copious tears of regret, our fathers and brothers hung their heads in shame and defeat. That is one way our story could have ended, gloriously tragic.

Or we could have survived, hidden and forgotten, our names struck from family histories, never to be spoken of again.

The reality was both more brutal and more banal.

• • • •

Your grandmother, the day you brought me home: What a dark, inauspicious face. A bad-luck bringer. She will be the ruin of us all.

You were embarrassed and furious, and we both pretended for a while that I hadn’t heard her. The words burned me, not for their cruelty, but for the seed of truth they contained. Perhaps your grandmother had some traces of witchcraft too?

• • • •

My mother, the day I brought you home: This is how you repay me for the freedom I’ve given you.

My uncle, the day I packed my bags and left my hometown for good: We know what to do with cow killers like him.

My father said nothing. He just looked at me out of hurt, lost eyes. Behind him, his mother’s ghost shook her head at me in disgust and pantomimed cutting her nose.

The dead are not any wiser than the living. Just less talkative.

• • • •

A brief mention on the second page of the Delhi Times in an article on communal violence. That was all you got.

• • • •

In Varanasi, I walk the crowded streets until my feet hurt. The ghosts follow me in a silent, ragged procession. As I approach the temple with the stepwell, they hesitate.

The dead are not welcome here, and they know it well. Their mortality binds them to the city, to the holy river where their ashes mingle with silt and sewage. This is their moksha, their own liberation from the cycle of birth and death, to be bound instead to the polluted waters of the Ganga. Perhaps this is what they truly wished for.

• • • •

No, witches cannot fly. They cannot even swim. But they can melt into the snow, dissolve into the rain, become one with the shadows of dusk. They can disappear, so that no one alive may find them again. There are things the living choose not to see. There are things I choose to forget. My mother’s death, a year from now. My uncle’s, ten years ago.

I confronted him, the day you became fodder for a second-page news article. He laughed at me, told me I was mad, that he had nothing to do with it, that hot-headed young men must have attacked you on the way to the train station.

But a witch always knows when someone is lying.

• • • •

The temple is locked, and the priest is missing. Good. Locked doors cannot keep a witch out, especially not one armed with hairpins. I have seen myself pick the lock already, and so I know I can do it. The pins click open as if waiting for my touch, and I slip inside, past the indifferent regard of the idols that adorn the walls.

In the courtyard, steps lead down to the ancient well. It is quiet and cool, the sounds of traffic muffled by the high walls. I take off my sandals and sit, letting the dark water lap my feet. Polythene bags, empty chip packets, and cigarette butts float on the surface. I will be contributing to the general uncleanliness, and I regret this. No flesh-eating turtles here. But it cannot be helped, and it won’t be for very long.

• • • •

My uncle got drunk and hanged himself one night. That was the conclusion the police arrived at. The maid found him in the morning and screamed the place down. My cousins sold the flat shortly after. Good riddance. The flat, I mean, not my uncle.

No, I don’t know anything else about it, so stop asking.

• • • •

The stepwell is cleaned once a year before Naga Panchami, the worship of Serpents, which falls on the fifth day of the bright half of the lunar month of Shravana. That is when my corpse will be discovered, bloated and decomposed, snagged on the ring of the door at the bottom.

Yes, there is a door, and yes, it is visible to any human who might be standing at the lip of the emptying well, peering down as the devotees pump the putrid water out.

No, I’m not planning on dying; what a question. This is my husk, the part I choose to leave behind when I enter Nagaloka. My discarded skin, which most people will mistake for me. Only the young men cleaning the well may have some inkling of what truly happened. And they will never speak of it, not to any outsider.

• • • •

My mother will die of “a broken heart,” my youngest aunt will claim. This is not entirely incorrect. She will have a coronary and doctors will be unable to revive her. In any event, it will have little to do with me.

Oh, I nearly forgot to mention; after the autopsy, my remains will be quite thoroughly cremated on the banks of the Ganga. Very neat, no? Perhaps my family hopes, in this way, to keep my spirit quiescent. They needn’t bother. I don’t care what happens to the skin I discard. I will grow another one, gorgeous and scaly, armored against the evil of the mortal world.

• • • •

Witches cannot swim, but they can breathe underwater. Bet you didn’t know that, did you? I walk down the steps into the water, trying to be as graceful as possible. I know you’re watching. I know you have your camera in hand, waiting for a perfect shot. I’ve sensed you, standing just behind me, since the moment I entered this courtyard. You don’t have to believe what I do; you just have to believe in me, the way I’ve believed in you for years.

Here, I won’t even turn around. Take my hand, and we’ll go together. This is our horizon, our magic door. Grasp the ring; help me pull it up. Do you see the light seeping around the edges? Do you see the light?

©2020 by Rati Mehrotra.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born and raised in India, Rati Mehrotra now lives and writes in lovely Toronto. She is the author of the Asiana duology: Markswoman published in January 2018, and the sequel Mahimata in March 2019. Her short stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Apex, IGMS, Podcastle, Cast of Wonders, AE–The Canadian Science Fiction Review, and many more. The only thing missing from her life is a cat. Find out more about her at ratiwrites.com or follow her on Twitter @Rati_Mehrotra.

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

EXCERPT: Chosen Ones (John Joseph Adams Books)

Veronica Roth | 2115 words

SAVING THE WORLD ONCE MADE THEM HEROES. SAVING IT AGAIN MAY DESTROY THEM.

Fifteen years ago, five ordinary teenagers were singled out by a prophecy to take down an impossibly powerful entity wreaking havoc across North America. He was known as the Dark One, and his weapon of choice—catastrophic events known as Drains—leveled cities and claimed thousands of lives. Chosen Ones, as the teens were known, gave everything they had to defeat him. After the Dark One fell, the world went back to normal . . . for everyone but them. After all, what do you do when you’re the most famous people on Earth, your only education was in magical destruction, and your purpose in life is now fulfilled? Of the five, Sloane has had the hardest time adjusting. Everyone else blames the PTSD—and her huge attitude problem—but really, she’s hiding secrets from them . . . secrets that keep her tied to the past and alienate her from the only four people in the world who understand her. On the tenth anniversary of the Dark One’s defeat, something unthinkable happens: one of the Chosen Ones dies. When the others gather for the funeral, they discover the Dark One’s ultimate goal was much bigger than they, the government, or even prophecy could have foretold—bigger than the world itself. And this time, fighting back might take more than Sloane has to give.

Coming April 7, 2020
from John Joseph Adams Books @ Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

EXCERPT FROM
It’s a Magical World Out There!
An Elementary-Schooler’s Guide to Magic, 7th Edition
by Agnes Dewey and Sebastian Bartlett

Did you know that the world used to be a whole lot less magical? Well, it’s true! Up until 1969, most people didn’t think magic really existed. It was just fairy-tale stuff. But in 1969, something called the Tenebris Incident (more on that in chapter 3!) happened, and magic spread all over Genetrix. People all across our planet saw some amazing—but scary!—things, like certain parts of the ocean boiling for no reason [fig. 2], glowing balls of light floating around neighborhoods [fig. 3], and whole buildings turning upside down [fig. 4]. One person even took a picture of a whale floating in the clouds! [fig. 5]

After magic spread, a lot of people also got really sick. Their bodies weren’t used to the magical energy in the air! And since there was no cure for the magical plague, those people all died, which was really sad. But if you’re here, that means that you’re immune to the magical plague! So you don’t need to worry about it. All you need to know is that magic is part of our world now, and it’s time for you to learn how to use it! You won’t be able to do very much until you’re older, but even what you can do now is pretty cool. First, though, you have to learn how magic works.

The truth is, we don’t even really know how magic works! We’re only just starting to understand it. Isn’t that exciting? Maybe one day, you’ll be the person who discovers all of magic’s secrets!

EXCERPT FROM
The Manifestation of Impossible Wants:
A New Theory of Magic
by Arthur Solowell

In the burgeoning field of magical theory, we often speak of intent being a central component of the magical arts. A siphon, for example, cannot function without a person to wield it and direct its power; it is fundamentally inert, no more than a blunt instrument without the living form to fill it. And certainly intent is important—how else would a person be able to control the results of a siphon’s work? How else would someone be able to, say, reliably freeze an object rather than set it on fire? Certain types of siphons are indeed attuned to particular tasks—an eye siphon is most often used for visual workings, an ear siphon for auditory ones, etcetera—but each offers a great deal of flexibility even within those categories. Intent then ensures that flexibility does not mean unreliability.

However, I would argue that while intent is a component of a magical act, and certainly a significant one, it is not the essence of what distinguishes a magical act from a mundane one. Any man with a hammer can intend to hit a nail—that itself is not magic, and a siphon is no hammer. Instead, it is the argument of this text that the essence of a magical act is what a person wants. Or, to be more specific, what a person wants that is not easily achieved within the realm of the mundane. Desiring that a nail sink into a board is a want, but it is not magic. Wanting the boards to hold together with no nail at all—that is magic.

In other words, for something to be magic, it must be an impossible want.

EXCERPT FROM
Senator Amos Redding’s speech
in support of the Haven Act
September 17, 1985

I take the Senate floor today to share my thoughts on a most contentious issue, that of the proposed Haven Act, which, if passed, would enable the citizens of a city to vote to prohibit the use of magic as well as the establishment of businesses that sell devices that make use of magic or otherwise facilitate its use. I intend today to vote yes on the Haven Act, and I will tell you why.

Ladies and gentlemen, magic is a shortcut. It is the easy path. And we do not know where it leads or what may come of it. It is one thing to be excited by its possibilities, but it is another to allow it to spread uncontrollably through our nation, rendering our young people unable to perform the slightest practical task, leaving no space clear of its influence. We must maintain the skills we have fought so hard—over so many years of human history—to learn. We must honor the past as we look toward the future.

I ask you, colleagues and friends, to consider the future you would like to have and the future you would like this country to have. Magic has long been regarded with suspicion, going all the way back to our earliest myths and legends. This distrust and even loathing for the practice of magic is not merely due to ignorance; it speaks to something at the very core of us, something that says we should be working the land we live in, that great accomplishments should be hard won by the labor of our hands . . .

PROJECT DELPHI, SUBPROJECT 17

EXCERPT from the official log of [redacted], code name Merlin:

I will begin by stating that I am composing this report a week after the fact, upon verifying that subject [redacted], code name Mage, is, indeed, the most likely subject of the Sibyl Doomsday Prophecy who is “the last hope of Genetrix,” commonly referred to as “the Chosen One.” This will inevitably account for some bias in the retelling, as I am unable to separate myself from my current knowledge. However, I shall endeavor to be as objective as possible.

My first impression of Mage came from his file, which I scanned prior to entering the examination room. There was a list of the usual facts: his name, [redacted]; age, ten; hair color, [redacted]; eye color, [redacted]; birthplace, [redacted]. When I opened the door, he was sitting with his hands in his lap and his legs swinging. Average height for a ten-year-old but somewhat scrawny, as if he had been mildly food-deprived, though it could have simply been his natural build.

I experienced none of the signs that others have reported upon seeing our Chosen One for the first time—no tingling, no existential satisfaction, no blinding lights, choirs of angels, or impulses to prostrate myself before him. I find those reports to be ridiculous, as they elevate meeting Mage to a religious experience when it is in fact just encountering a child who has raw magical ability.

“Hello,” I said to the boy, and I sat across the table from him. Someone had brought him the magic-development game Perception Interception. It can be programmed for a single player and had been for Mage. As far as I could tell, he hadn’t used it or even touched it. He had instead been sitting in the examination room unoccupied for the better part of an hour.

“You didn’t want to play?” I said.

Mage shook his head.

“All right,” I said. “What have you been doing in here?”

“Watching,” he replied.

“Watching?”

“Yeah, the—strings.” He wiggled his fingers. “If I concentrate, I can see them.”

“Strings,” I repeated. “What do they look like?”

“They’re like when you see the sun through fog,” he said. “In rays. Bright, a little hazy.”

“And you’ve always been able to see them?”

Mage’s eyes narrowed. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

“I don’t,” I replied. “I think maybe you are describing an experience with magic that we simply haven’t documented yet. Magic is new to us, and we are only just beginning to understand it. So I am inclined to believe you.”

“Oh.” Mage brightened at that, but then, almost in the same moment, he deflated. “My mom and dad told me not to talk about it.”

“I think your mom and dad were just trying to keep you safe,” I said. “Because there are some people who get mad when they hear things they don’t understand.”

It was a shame, really, to see how readily he accepted that, to know how young we learn these lessons.

“Can you tell me more about what you see? How long have you been able to see them?”

He shifted in his seat.

“A long time?”

“Since I can remember,” he said. “Not always, though, just when I try really hard.”

“Well, that makes sense,” I said. “When we talk about a work of magic, we often use the word intent, which is like having a goal or a purpose. Magic doesn’t work without intent. So when you concentrate on the strings, as you call them, your intention is to see them. Understand?”

“Yeah.”

“Have you ever tried to touch one?”

He shrugged, but even crafty children are not skilled at keeping secrets. It was clear to me that he had, in fact, experimented with his unique ability. And since one of the major criteria of Sibyl’s prophecy was that the Chosen One would have a magical ability heretofore unseen on Genetrix, I needed to pursue it further. “Will you show me?” I said.

Mage nodded. He lowered his eyes, so he was no longer staring at me but instead at the table. He drew a slow breath, in and out through his nose. It was clear to me that he had spent a great deal of his idle time doing this trick, because there was a process to it already, even though he was a mere ten years old. In and out he breathed, steadily, until a kind of energy came into his eyes, like the answer to a tricky problem had just come to him.

He reached out with his left hand . . . and pinched.

As to what happened after that, please refer to the video footage for a more complete understanding. Gravity failed, and everything in the room—myself included—began to float. The chair I had been sitting in bounced off the ceiling. I specifically remember one of the game pieces from Perception Interception, a glass eyeball, drifting past my face.

But sitting in his chair below, as if nothing had changed, was the young man we came to know as the Chosen One.

Copyright © 2020 by Veronica Roth. Excerpted from Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth. Published by permission of the author and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Veronica Roth is the #1 New York Times best-selling author of the Divergent series (Divergent, Insurgent, Allegiant, and Four: A Divergent Collection), the Carve the Mark duology (Carve the Mark, The Fates Divide), The End and Other Beginnings collection of short fiction, and many short stories and essays. Her debut novel for adults, Chosen Ones, is available now from John Joseph Adams Books (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). She lives in Chicago.

Book Reviews: April 2020

Chris Kluwe | 1431 words

No intro this time, just reviews. Enjoy your spring!

Harrow The Ninth
Tamsyn Muir
Hardcover
ISBN: 978-1250313225
Tor, June 2020, 512 pages

Before I talk about why Harrow The Ninth is amazing, I first need to tell you to go read Gideon the Ninth if you haven’t done so already. Not only is it the first book in Muir’s Locked Tomb Trilogy, which means Harrow The Ninth isn’t going to make a whole lot of sense if you decide to come in on book two, Gideon the Ninth is just flat-out one of the most original, entertaining, and plain kick-ass books I’ve read in a very long time. Seriously, go read it and thank me later.

Okay, I’ll assume you’ve gone and read Gideon the Ninth and been blown away at Muir’s wonderfully creepy world of necromancers and magic and swordfights, and are now prepared to discuss the sequel. Good news—Harrow The Ninth is just as excellent, if not better than Gideon the Ninth (which, I’ve hopefully established, is fantastic). In it, Muir continues the twisting story of the Ninth House’s attempts to keep from decaying into obscurity, but the scope of the challenge this time goes far beyond a test on a single planet.

Now, I know quite a few of you are probably saying to yourself, “That’s the vaguest description of a book I’ve ever seen, what the hell is wrong with you?” but I’m trying to avoid spoiling anything about the story because it kinks more than a bone-sculpting revenant trapped on an undead space station with ancient beings of unfathomable power, and I wish I could experience it again for the first time. Muir expertly weaves threads in and out of the still-delightfully grotesque loom of the overall plot, and just when you think you’ve figured one part out, two more creep up from behind to rearrange everything you thought you knew about what was going on. Oh, and there’s also plenty of vibrant action sequences, witty repartee, and smoldering sexual tension peppered throughout like a particularly fine marrow soup (and trust me when I say that reference will make much more sense once you’ve read the book).

Go find a copy of Harrow The Ninth as soon as it’s available, then join me in the agonizing wait for the final book, Alecto the Ninth, because so far this trilogy is as good as it gets.

Read if: you want to know a hundred different ways to say bone; you like it when things get weird; GAY SPACE NECROMANCERS

Sunshield
Emily B. Martin
Trade Paperback
ISBN: 978-0062888563
Harper Voyager, May 2020, 432 pages

The second book I’d like to share with you is Sunshield, by Emily B. Martin, which follows three characters—an outlaw, Lark, known as the Sunshield Bandit, who preys on slaver caravans crossing the inhospitable Alcoro wastes; a young, untested diplomat named Veran trying to prove himself to his accomplished family in the foreign Moquoian court; and the mysterious captive Tamsin, consigned to a wasting death yet still holding out hope she can make a difference. The three find themselves drawn together in a web of political machinations, subject to shadowy figures seeking to solidify control over the Moquoian court’s politics and social stances.

Martin does a fine job breathing life into each of the protagonists, imbuing them with hidden depths that slowly reveal over the course of the book, and each faces their own set of challenges that feel both believable and relevant. I was particularly impressed with how Lark and Veran’s relationship develops over the course of the book, and it’s clear Martin cares about making sure her characters are multi-faceted and nuanced.

Another thing I quite enjoyed was the world-building and environmental detail Sunshield displays. As someone who went backpacking quite a bit as a kid (though, as the designated mosquito magnet, I can’t say those are fond memories), I immediately felt like I was back out in the wilderness after the first few pages. The world of Sunshield is just as much a character as any of those with names, with different regions evoking similarities to those of our own. Witnessing the characters traverse the dry wastes of the Alcoron canyons felt like traveling through the American southwest, and the humid jungle of Moquoia would fit right at home in Louisiana or Florida. Martin displays a natural aptitude for bringing the environment to life around the people inhabiting it, but without overshadowing their stories.

Coupled with gritty combat scenes and a sense of social and environmental awareness, Sunshield was well worth my time spent reading it. The conclusion ends on a significant cliffhanger, but I gladly await future entries in what looks to be a well-crafted and cared for world.

Read if: you like Westerns; you want to go camping but don’t really want to go camping; you know why mosquitoes suuuuuuuck

A Pale Light in The Black
K.B. Wagers
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 978-0062887788
Harper Voyager, March 2020, 432 pages

For this month’s final entry, I’d like to highlight A Pale Light In The Black, by K.B. Wagers. A brand new entry in the military SF genre, A Pale Light In The Black follows the trials and travails of the Near-Earth Orbital Guard—aka the NeoG—as they work to unravel an insidious conspiracy while also trying to prepare themselves for the annual Boarding Games competition between the various service branches. The viewpoint follows the whole squad of the Zuma’s Ghost, an Interceptor-class space patrol craft, but primarily revolves around Maxine Carmichael, scion of an extremely powerful family who’s trying to find her own path in life, and freshly assigned to the team.

One of the main reasons I included A Pale Light In The Black as one of my reviews is that in a mil SF field crowded with technical descriptions and heteronormative centering, Wagers does an incredible job of creating a balanced, diverse cast of characters who demonstrate the sheer breadth of humanity. The importance of squad cohesion and interpersonal relationships permeate every part of the story, and always in a way that enriches the overall plot. I was not expecting to become as invested in the adventures of the members of Zuma’s Ghost as I was, which is always the mark of excellent character development.

Wagers also doesn’t stint on the action, interspersing various rescue and boarding missions among the twists and turns of the overarching mystery and the buildup to the Boarding Games, but none feel extraneous. Instead, they’re more opportunities to witness Max and the crew’s connections develop and grow in ways that never feel forced. By the time I reached the end of the book, I felt like I had watched a family come together, and found myself wanting to know where they were headed next. Hopefully Wagers continues writing more books in this universe, but even if they don’t, A Pale Light In The Black is definitely still worth reading.

Read if: you like space adventures; you watch combat sports; you appreciate that human beings are complex and fascinating creatures

• • • •

That’s it for this time, everyone. See you all on the flip side!

Other New Books That I Thought Were Interesting But Did Not Have Space To Review

Burn the Dark, by S.A. Hunt
Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler
Go Tell It on the Mountain, by James Baldwin

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Kluwe grew up in Southern California among a colony of wild chinchillas and didn’t learn how to communicate outside of barking and howling until he was fourteen years old. He has played football in the NFL, once wrestled a bear for a pot of gold, and lies occasionally. He is also the eternal disappointment of his mother, who just can’t understand why he hasn’t cured cancer yet. Do you know why these bio things are in third person? I have no idea. Please tell me if you figure it out.

Media Review: April 2020

Christopher East | 1834 words

Lodge 49
Created by Jim Gavin
Produced by American Movie Classics, Touchy Feely Films, Byrnesy, Ocko & Company, and AMC Studios
Season one released August 2018
Season two released August 2019

Given the high noise-to-signal ratio in today’s TV landscape, genre fans can be forgiven for overlooking the magnificent Lodge 49. Still, its obscurity is tragic, because it’s an unheralded gem, a moving, funny, heartfelt slice of quirky Southern California magic realism. Its wistful stories present a sympathetic, astute critique of the ongoing death of the American Dream, and while this gives the show sad, serious undertones, it also has magic, mythology, humor, and hope, which ultimately make it a delightful, uplifting watch.

The primary protagonist of Lodge 49 is Sean “Dud” Dudley (Wyatt Russell), a carefree beach bum who’s fallen on hard times. In the course of a year, he and his workaholic sister Liz (Sonya Cassidy) have lost nearly everything. Dud’s resorted to a hardscrabble existence: living out of his car, racking up debt with a loan shark, and pining for the days of yesteryear. He used to have it all, which for him wasn’t even all that much: a passion for surfing, a steady job cleaning pools, a happy life hanging with his dad and his sister. Circumstances stole this perfect life, leaving him floundering, but underneath Dud’s deadbeat struggle is a fundamental core of optimism. He’s convinced he’ll find his way back from the darkness, and one day while beach-combing, he stumbles across an unlikely new hope: a ring from the Order of the Lynx. Shortly after finding it, fate delivers him to the door of the Lynx’s Lodge 49, an unassuming building he’s driven past hundreds of times and never noticed. He seizes on the lodge as his salvation, fascinated with the notion of joining a “secret fraternal order” that will steer him down a new life path. (Oh, the lodge is neither secret nor fraternal—but for Dud, it’ll do.)

Running parallel to Dud’s journey is the story of Ernie Fontaine (Brent Jennings), a hard-luck plumbing supplies salesman who’s also a member of the Order. Ernie’s facing his own demons: pushing sixty with little to show for his efforts, he’s in love with another man’s wife and has piled up his own reckless debts. But Ernie, too, is a dreamer of sorts, with an inner drive that launches him on a quest to find a mysterious SoCal real estate developer known only as “the Captain.” Ernie’s objective: landing the Holy Grail of plumbing-supply contracts. He’s also next in line to become Lodge 49’s “Sovereign Protector,” impatiently awaiting his chance to ascend to the throne. Indeed, the Order is Ernie’s refuge, and may be his one chance to be in charge and make a mark on the world. Unfortunately, the lodge’s gracelessly aging leader Larry Loomis (Kenneth Welsh) has a habit of constantly cheating death to defer succession, which leaves Ernie feeling like one of life’s also-rans.

These two dreamers—upbeat, naive Dud and hopeful, skeptical Ernie—are destined to come together at Lodge 49. It couldn’t be a more mundane place, a grungy old social club for Long Beach’s aimlessly aging lower-middle class. The Order has a storied history, a Watcher’s Council-like headquarters in London, and lodges all over the world, with “secret society” lore purportedly based on the lost teachings of alchemy. Ernie has no illusions as to the truth of these quasi-mystical origins; he thinks they’re fun stories that give the place character. But Dud, whose cheery fascination proves catchy, becomes a true believer in the Order’s mythos, so much so that some of his fellow Lynx start to believe the lodge is “waking up” to its magical past.

Lodge 49 is a wiggly, interstitial show that doesn’t dazzle you with flashy science fictional components. But if SF content is a must for your TV watch list, it’s well worth a look, laced with subtle spec-fic delights. Inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, it’s a restless, slippery show full of cosmic coincidences and kooky conspiracies, infusing its bland trappings with delightful glimmers of hidden magic. Its Long Beach couldn’t be more ordinary, so down-to-Earth you can practically feel the gravity. But the scripts are so meticulously structured and lovingly executed that, when occasional visual flourishes suggest there may be otherworldly forces at work, the place sings with unlikely mystique. Every corner of the show’s world feels inhabited, real, and integral, whether it’s the dingy strip mall where Dud hangs out, the sleazy sports bar where Liz works, the slowly dying nearby aerospace plant, or the lodge itself. Somehow, though, these diminished or forgotten places are also charged with quiet meaning and importance. They’re emblems of American promise, stabs at the better life we’ve all been programmed to strive for and believe to be possible. They may be dim shadows of their former selves, perhaps, but they mattered once, and could matter again, if only the stars would line up. Lodge 49’s magic is hope.

The story’s characters are profoundly shaped by this American mythos. These are normal folks with lives full of struggle, loss, and failure, but none of them are throwaway characters. Everyone, from Dud right down to the smallest walk-on cameo, orbits the scenario in a clever, intentional way, leading to comical “aha” moments as familiar faces make out-of-context appearances. This generates a delightful interconnectedness to the backdrop. Meanwhile, a litany of fantasy tropes—quests, secret societies, ancient lore, bizarre visions, animal visitations—is quietly layered atop the mundane surface, making it one of those quiet speculative stories that shows its characters finding magic lurking just under the surface of daily life. (I was reminded of the contemporary fantasy novels of James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers, who similarly lace their zany California settings with quirky magic.)

The Order of the Lynx is pregnant with lore, and so is the show, rife with symbols and connections and metaphors, many of them centered on the subliminal mythologies of America. A recurring theme, for example, shows the characters struggling to parse the authenticity or fraudulence of their opportunities, those everyday, get-ahead assumptions of the capitalist patriarchy. Idealistic visions are challenged, victories are Pyrrhic, institutions are hollow, legendary personalities are revealed as mundane hucksters. The world view is cynical, perhaps—how could it not be, these days?—but uncovering the world’s fraudulence has a silver lining: It shows our heroes what really matters.

The narrative strategy around gender is shrewd and purposeful. The benevolent but ineffectual men of Lodge 49 exude confidence in their expertise, even as their self-possession is often challenged, if not shattered, by harsh reality. For example, look to Blaise St. John (a delightful David Pasquesi), the lodge’s philosophical bartender, who is excited by Dud’s enthusiasm and finds himself digging deeper into the Order’s past to search for alchemical truths. There’s also Scott Wright (Eric Allan Kramer), a chronically frustrated officer of the harbor patrol who sees himself as a legitimate candidate to be the next Sovereign Protector. These two, like Dud and Ernie, exemplify the baked-in “manifest destiny” of male ambition, and they’re in for a rude awakening; the world they were promised doesn’t deliver, forcing them to search for new meaning and self worth.

And what of the women? Lodge 49’s focus isn’t nearly as strong, here, but what it does present is astute, mindful counterpoint. While the men tilt at windmills, looking to shape the future, the women exist wholly in the present, struggling with daily realities often defined by the entitled decision-making of blinkered men. This thematic track is anchored by Sonya Cassidy in a terrific, crucial performance as Dud’s sister Liz. Nobody is more alert to the frauds of the world than Liz, who shills deep-fried food to ogling men in a “breastaurant.” While Dud pines for his cheerful, departed father, Liz is dutifully paying off the massive debt that she inherited from him, a legacy of lies and servitude. She isn’t afforded the luxury of dreaming that Dud, Ernie, and the boys take for granted. She has to keep her head in the game just to survive. The same is true for Ernie’s lover Connie (played with winning spirit by Linda Emond). Awkwardly caught between two men, Connie is watching her journalism career wither and her health deteriorate, a state of affairs that prevents her from looking ahead to the next moment, let alone a deeper future. Lodge 49’s women may be on the sidelines, but the show is both aware of and thematically deliberate about that. It’s all part of the greater critique.

Fortunately, there’s plenty to keep this deep subject matter from getting too dark. The gloom is mitigated by the characters’ upbeat defiance of their grim circumstances. The show’s crafty, unpredictable sense of humor isn’t afraid to build up and then dismantle profound moments, or spin out wildly into zany antics, or seed the mise en scène with comical callbacks and improbable conceptual continuity. A brilliant, energetic roster of guest stars—Bruce Campbell, Mary Elizabeth Ellis, Atkins Estimond, Paul Giamatti, Cheech Marin, Vik Sahay, Olivia Sandoval, Daniel Stewart Sherman, and David Ury among them—pop in to present new challenges and plot turns, refining the themes and our heroes’ lessons. But perhaps most important to the upbeat tone is that the writers are sympathetic to their characters, making their struggles relatable and silently rooting for them along the way. After all, these people are merely trying to exist in our flawed world, which has conditioned them with toxic expectations. As they awaken to the deceptions codified into society, they gradually find their way to each other—in the lodge, where, as Ernie notes during a moving speech in the final episode, “in here, when we’re all together, it’s different.” It is a beautiful, earned moment that pays off twenty exceptional episodes of build.

Lodge 49 was cancelled after its second year, unable, perhaps, to overcome low-concept marketing challenges. But a short-lived run seems appropriate, somehow; like Larry, ever on death’s door, it seemed to know that its journey couldn’t last forever. In the end, this may just contribute to its cult notoriety, because it almost perfectly executes its unique mission. The first season is a masterpiece, and season two isn’t far off the mark, with the sixth episode, “Circles,” really standing out; it may be one of the loveliest episodes of TV ever produced. The finale sends the show off in beautiful, hopeful, and appropriately oddball fashion. Lodge 49 may not land for everyone, but its target audience will find it an absolute joy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christopher East is a writer, editor, reviewer, and avid consumer of science fiction, fantasy, and spy fiction. His stories have been published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Cosmos, Interzone, Talebones, The Third Alternative, and a number of other speculative fiction publications. He’s attended the Clarion and Taos Toolbox writing workshops, and served for several years as the fiction editor for the futurism, science, and technology blog Futurismic. He blogs extensively about writing, fiction, film, television, music, comics, and more at www.christopher-east.com. Currently he lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works for an occupational and environmental health and safety consultancy.

Interview: Katie M. Flynn

Christian A. Coleman | 3232 words

Katie M. Flynn is a writer, editor, and educator based in San Francisco. Her short fiction has appeared in Colorado Review, Indiana Review, The Masters Review, Ninth Letter, Tin House, Witness Magazine, and many other publications. Katie has been awarded the Colorado Review’s Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction, a fellowship from the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, and the Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing. She holds an MFA from the University of San Francisco and an MA in Geography from UCLA. The Companions is her first novel. Follow her on Twitter @other_katie or visit her website katiemflynn.com.

Congratulations on your debut novel! How does it feel to have The Companions out on bookshelves and virtual shelves?

Thank you! I am experiencing waves of anxiety and excitement. It’s a vulnerable position to be in, having your work out there for public critique for the first time on such a scale. But I’m raising two girls, ages seven and eleven, to whom I dedicated the book, and we are celebrating each stage of the process together. It’s important to me that they see not just the success but to know that I’ve been working toward this for many years now.

In The Companions, California is under quarantine because of a highly contagious virus. Meanwhile, the consciousness of the dead can be uploaded to artificial bodies and kept in service of the living as companions. Wealthy companions can remain with their families, but those who aren’t well off are rented out as intellectual property by Metis Corporation, the company that owns them. Sixteen-year-old Lilac, who’s leased out to a family living in quarantine, discovers she can defy her security programming and runs away to look for the woman who killed her. How did the premise come together for you?

In 2009, I wrote a couple stories about viral outbreaks—I was pretty taken by the notion of a prolonged quarantine and the associated loss of basic human rights. Also that year, I started a story about a scientist working out of his garage who thinks he may have discovered a way to upload his soul, but the story kind of fell apart, as I was unable to decide whether he had in fact succeeded.

It wasn’t until 2013 that I brought the two tropes—quarantine and mind upload—together in a story that would become the first chapter of The Companions, about a teenage girl who is murdered and brought back decades later as a product, a companion living in a quarantined San Francisco where she must entertain a child by telling and retelling the story of her last day alive, until she escapes.

I read The Companions during the coronavirus outbreak, and the parallels of the quarantine scenarios in your novel were uncanny. What’s it like to see it come out after news about the epidemic blew up?

It is concerning to see that the number of reported cases of coronavirus has surged to 75,000 as of the time of this interview, and will no doubt continue to surge for some time. Already, this outbreak has far exceeded the impact of SARS and MERS combined. In our globalized world, these kinds of outbreaks are becoming increasingly difficult to contain, and thus we are seeing more stringent measures being taken in Wuhan, where the city and surrounding areas with some fifty-six million people remain in lockdown, a quarantine of unprecedented scale.

These parallels to my novel, which opens in a San Francisco tower where its inhabitants have been quarantined for more than two years, are unsettling, and unsurprising. What interests me most about outbreaks are the peaks of near hysteria and valleys of near ambivalence that we tend to vacillate between in the weeks and months following these kinds of events. In the book, you see some characters fixated on the news, on knowing, while others avoid it at all costs.

Lilac is the central character, and we get to see the arc of her narrative and the contagion-ravaged world built around the companionship program through her and seven other characters. Which came first for you: the setting or Lilac and the other characters?

While I was playing around with the ideas of quarantine and mind upload years earlier, it wasn’t until 2013 when I discovered Lilac’s voice that I was able to envision the world, to build out its rules. I love voice—it is often my entry point to writing—and I knew that if I were to write about a future technology, the focus would stay squarely on the characters and their experiences as opposed to the tech itself.

The technology that developed companions has redefined or, in Silicon Valley-speak, disrupted death. Companions fall in this liminal intersection of revenant/AI/ghost in hardware, which is why I think some human characters are frightened by or hostile toward them. It can be unnerving when that gray area isn’t easily defined and categorized. And Lilac defying her programming makes matters more complicated.

As a writer, I do love a border region or a liminal intersection. People are often troubled by the way borders create confluence. We like our borders clean and precise, but rarely is that the case. And those who cross borders are often met with fear and hostility. While we see flare-ups of that hostility in The Companions, what I was most interested in highlighting were the connections humans and companions form despite their differences.

When Lilac realizes she can defy her security programming, she sets out to find her murderer, who is by now an old woman living in an eldercare facility in the forests of northern California. As the intellectual property of Metis Corporation, this act is a breach of contract and would result in termination should Lilac be caught. But it is also the most natural act in the world for Lilac, who was sixteen when she was uploaded, to set out on her own. In effect, to follow her own desires is to transgress, but to ignore those desires is to give up living altogether. It is a terrible position I’ve put her in! Much of the tension in the book is derived from this choice to transgress, to live.

Metis Corporation also disrupts the very concept of what it means to live. The consciousness of the dead can be converted to collections of data stored on drives. This source of life extension is an interesting juxtaposition with the virus that’s killing off human populations, especially after we find out the cause of the virus. The technology and those who have access to it imply that there’s a hierarchy of lives worth preserving—the wealthy and a servile product underclass.

Growing up in the consumer era, I have developed a sensitivity to how much of the self is vulnerable to needs manufactured by the cooperation of companies and the ad agencies that represent them. I grew up watching TV, consuming ads and developing yearnings based on those ads, shaping myself around them.

I thought I was so smart when I decided as a young adult never to pay for cable—I’d escape the onslaught of ads and be free to form my own desires. But the Internet had arrived by then. Now those potential needs are seemingly endless—one can get lost in ads delivered by algorithms on social media feeds. Personally, I find the ads on Instagram the most compelling. At some point, I must have clicked on an ad for a beauty treatment, because now it’s all anti-aging products that, in truth, tug out of me all sorts of yearnings I never knew I had. I find myself hovering over creepy glowing LED masks and special waters guaranteed to clear the complexion. I pay particular attention when a beautiful celebrity spokesperson throws their weight behind a product—obviously they know something I don’t.

The best of these products are so expensive that only the wealthiest among us can afford them, or those of us who are willing to go into debt. When building out the world of The Companions, I imagined that, should the technology of mind upload be discovered by a corporation, it would, of course, be turned into a product. A corporation would not care who was uploaded, or at what cost, or whom they served; all that would matter would be whether they had the credit to pay for the transaction. And as in the case of a smartphone or laptop, there are tiered price points: companions with varying processing speeds, the cheapest of which are made of plastic, the most expensive so realistic they can pass for human.

The novel presents the experience of becoming a companion from multiple points of view. In the case of Lilac, she is one of “the originals,” an organ donor uploaded as part of a university research project, on a screen for decades before she is finally given a body. Then, there are the Hollywood-types who use companionship as a way to preserve themselves and extend their careers; a wealthy mother dying of cancer whose daughter is pressuring her to upload; a parent bringing back a child who committed suicide; a woman who uses her life’s savings to upload despite her family’s protests at the cost, who agrees to become the companion to a stranger.

Sometimes, what I yearn for is not manufactured—I miss the way time moved before smartphones and social media. I miss paper maps and getting lost, being unreachable. I miss feeling alone when I’m alone. Internet technology, with its endless wormholes, is a nagging presence, offering a type of instant, global connectivity I never wanted but accept into my life all the same. Some of the novel’s characters struggle with the decision to become a companion; others run toward it without much thought; others still have no choice.

Jakob, the movie star character, finds out during a trip to Siberia that he’s a companion and that there are duplicates of him in different parts of the globe. I started thinking of some other professions that would pounce on the companionship program to extend someone’s lifetime for as long as possible. Musicians, writers, models, politicians (if we venture into despotic territory), and some athletes (athletes of high-impact sports probably wouldn’t fare well, as they would need continual repairs and upgrading). What other professions do you think would take advantage of it?

Oh, I definitely think politicians would take advantage of the technology. One of my favorite novels is Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch, in which the dictator, El general, reigns for 200 years and has a body double.

In addition to the professions you mentioned, I could see the tech being used to do anything risky that requires complex problem-solving skills. The technology, with its capacity to duplicate people, would make the uploaded expendable and excellent for rescue response. If cheap enough, I have no doubt law enforcement and the military would use it on the front lines.

Would you consider the companionship program to be a gateway to immortality? Being intellectual property of a corporation is a harrowing prospect, but the companions can outlive humans. Lilac lives more than one lifetime.

The companionship program presents the prospect of immortality, but it comes at a tremendous cost. Companions, as the intellectual property of Metis Corporation, are not yet recognized as legal subjects; I have no doubt that if the technology were around long enough, it would push up against the legal concept of personhood, which is astonishingly flexible, as we’ve seen in the cases of corporations and fetuses. Since products are unleashed on the public before we fully understand their impacts, we’re always muddling our way through, figuring it out as we go, reacting and establishing policies too late, and in the case of the novel, before people can work this stuff out, some of the companions go off on their own—they act out.

At a certain point in the novel, after the quarantine is lifted, the originals of the companions are recalled. In fact, it’s illegal for them to be walking around at all. How did you arrive at this conclusion?

Intuitively, I knew from the beginning that companionship wouldn’t last. But realizing that the end would come in the form of a recall was probably the most exciting discovery in the whole writing process.

As the book progresses, it becomes clear that Lilac is not the only companion who can defy commands, breach her contract, and go off on her own. Some of these rogue companions merely want to live quietly out of sight while others are driven by revenge, to retaliate against the living. When drafting this part of the novel, companions acting on their revenge impulses, I could see what had to happen next.

Once the news media gets hold of these incidences of companion violence, fear takes over, public trust is challenged, and Metis, a behemoth offering hundreds of products worldwide, merely recalls companions as it would any problematic product. Arriving at this point helped me to sharpen one of the key arcs of the novel—that of a product from release to recall.

One of the human characters, Rolly, says that Metis Corporation figured out how to upload the dead and lease it back to the living. It’s an insidious way of making the wealthy buy back their undead relatives and making everyone else rent the undead. Since the bulk of the novel takes place in Northern California, I was wondering if Rolly’s statement was commentary on Silicon Valley’s mercenary business model or on the pursuit of innovation at the expense of losing sight of humanity.

I’ve lived in San Francisco since 2002, which means I can remember a time when I could rent a two-bedroom apartment in Noe Valley for $1,450. Now, an equivalent apartment goes for $3,500-9,000/month. The latest tech boom has transformed San Francisco. While we have more billionaires per capita here than in any other city in the world, we are also in the midst of a homelessness crisis. From 2017-2019, the homeless count rose from 641 to 1,773, and this does not include people who are “doubled-up” in the homes of family or friends, or families living in Single Room Occupancy (SRO) units. The benefits of technology are never distributed equally, and in The Companions I wanted to focus my attention on the people who would be left behind. The towers of downtown San Francisco, where the wealthiest live—and are confined under quarantine—became my entry point for exploring themes of class, technology, and isolation.

The Companions is described as Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven meets Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Did you have any specific pieces of fiction or works from other media in mind that were influential for the novel?

The novel’s youngest narrator, Gabe, is reading two books in the sections they narrate: Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, both of which featured prominently in my own childhood. Both characters are hiding and questing simultaneously, one attempting stealth as he journeys through a fantasy world, another journeying on fantasies in a real world that is confining and dangerous. As a child, I read these books over and over, studied and learned them, lived them out in my own imagination. Even as an adult, I feel constantly caught between fantasy and the real—my children too, with their imaginary worlds bleeding out into their understanding of living.

Who are some fave authors who got you interested in writing overall?

Growing up, I read a lot of speculative fiction—Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Shirley Jackson, Franz Kafka—that got me most excited about the prospect of writing. When I was studying geography, I was drawn to the narrative science writing of Rachel Carson and David Quammen, which could be quite beautiful and evocative. While studying for my MFA and finding my own voice, it was dark, funny, female writers like Joy Williams and Flannery O’Connor who most interested me.

You were fiction editor at Split Lip Magazine. Have you found that your experience as an editor shaped the way you wrote your novel? Or do you find that writing and editing have a symbiotic relationship?

I wrote the novel before I worked at Split Lip Magazine, but I can say with certainty that my editorial work has shaped the writer I am now. Serving as an editor made me think about audience in a way I never had before. And I absolutely loved working with writers on the collaborative process of editing a piece for publication. This has, in turn, made me a better reader of my own work and recipient of criticism.

Journal work also gave me a community; I’m forever grateful to Kaitlyn Andrews-Rice, who was our dynamo editor in chief at the time, and my fellow staff members at SLM for showing me that writing is best done in communion with others.

What future writing projects do you have coming up that you can tell us about?

I have a collection of linked short stories coming out next year, in which my characters face a whole host of dangers, such as environmental disaster and failed marriage, an accelerated evolution and a trio of teen witches, the ire of a paranoid dictator and their own vanity. Unfortunately for my characters, I like them to live on shifting ground, in that border region between the real and the unreal, the beautiful and the grotesque, the funny and the tragic.

I’m also at about the halfway point in a new novel project about a pair of sisters who fall in love with male conjoined twins in a Southern Idaho town being overtaken by sovereign citizens. On the outside, this may sound like a big departure from The Companions, but I can see that I’m still working out my fascinations with the body and identity, connection and place.

Is there anything else you’d like your readers to know about The Companions?

I suppose it’s worth noting that The Companions is born from the deep discomfort in my body and my being that I experienced as a younger person. It’s a story about not fitting in, about feeling like no amount of change could make you what people want you to be. I am grateful to the writers who told me misfit stories when I was growing up, and for the forgiveness and self-acceptance that come with aging.

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: Veronica Roth

LaShawn M. Wanak | 712 words

Where did you come up with the idea for this story?

The story came about because I was reading about the Trolley Problem, a philosophical thought experiment—basically, the Trolley Problem asks you whether you would pull a lever to save five people from a runaway trolley . . . if it meant guiding said trolley toward one person instead. So: would you, could you, be responsible for one person’s death if it meant saving five more? It’s since sparked a lot of debate as to its usefulness, but for the story, I wanted to explore the personalities this thought experiment brings out in people (Are you logic-driven? Emotional?), and the difference between what you think you might do in a crisis vs. what you might actually do, and what our answer to this problem reveals about our beliefs about humanity and morality. That all sounds very high-minded, but really, I don’t have answers to any of those questions—so I kept my approach playful.

This story feels almost like a parable—the two women are simply named Best and Least, the reported dialogue isn’t in quotation marks. How did you develop that tone? And how did you come up with their names?

I knew from the start that the story wouldn’t work as grounded SF. But I thought it would work as a futuristic fable—a story that someone is telling you from a far-off vantage point, rather than an accurate log of something that happened. So the names, the lack of dialogue markers, they are intended to foster that experience and to create moments of humor. As for the women’s names, they reflect the two different ways these women see people. “Best” sees people in terms of their behavior—who acts better, and who acts worse. “Least” sees people in terms of what they have—who has more, and who has less.

This story reminded me of the game Lifeboat, where the player must decide among a group of random people who lives and dies. However, in your story, you have Best following Least’s lead and saying that a random sample of people be chosen to be saved—or none. Why did you choose to go that route? Would you consider it a hopeful ending or a bleak one?

I consider it a hopeful ending—not for the women’s future, which is uncertain, or even for the continued existence of the human race, which in the story is grim, but for maintaining our humanity even in adversity. Least doesn’t argue that her approach will save lives. She argues that if we become callous to the people in the world who need help, or who have done wrong, or aren’t as physically capable, then we are not worth saving at all. And if Best didn’t come around to that idea, it would be a far bleaker ending to me, even if she saved fifty thousand lives in the process.

Given the state of the world, it feels we are rapidly approaching the dystopian environment that Best and Least are dealing with. Do you feel it’s possible for us to avoid that future or is it already too late?

I honestly don’t know. For all that I speculate about what might become of us in my writing, I don’t find it particularly useful to make a decision about where I think we’re headed. I think more about responsibility. It’s my responsibility, regardless of whether we can collectively avoid a grim fate or not, to try to do what’s right in the meantime.

What’s next for Veronica Roth?

My first book for adult readers, Chosen Ones, comes out April 7th! It’s about a group of people who saved the world when they were younger—and now it’s ten years later, they’re world-famous and haunted by that trauma, and they discover the job isn’t done. (Is it ever?) I love, love, love the “chosen one” trope, and it was fantastic to get to play with it, so I hope people have as much fun reading it as I did writing it.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

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.

Author Spotlight: Celeste Rita Baker

Arley Sorg | 672 words

I love the charm and humor of the narrative voice in this piece. People say humor is difficult to write. Do you have particular techniques you use to get humor right in fiction?

Thank you. I’m glad you liked it. No, I don’t have a particular technique. I wish I did, because it would make writing humor easier if I knew what I was doing.

For me, the heart of this story is about finding passion and happiness despite adversity, and regardless of circumstances. The characters (Mable and Treevia and Oswald) make this piece sing. What is important or special about this story for you? What do you want readers to know about it?

I wanted to write about a woman learning to do something difficult, for purely selfish reasons. I wanted to remind myself that it’s important and vital to do things just for fun.

The opening idea, where Mable has this really random inspiration, which she follows through to its conclusion, kind of reminds me of writing and that similar creative process. And what she’s doing is art. How did this story start for you—what was the inspiration and how did it develop?

The title came to me first and I envisioned a woman inserting her toes into the bottle openings and dancing on them like a ballerina on toe shoes. That got a little complicated, so I changed it to her rolling on the bottles. The roaches came into the story because she was practicing in the yard and they would naturally be out at night. I had to do research on roaches, look at pictures of them, because I wanted the readers to like Treevia and Oswald so I had to like them too. I alternated between freaking out and laughing at myself as I jumped away from the computer screen.

Mable is so beautifully developed, and even the side characters are well-drawn in brief lines. Do your stories usually tend to feature great, developed characters?

I would say that most of my stories are character-driven. I’m trying to get better at plot. I do like stories where the characters are quirky and memorable.

On your website, you say, “The first time I saw myself—A Black Caribbean Woman—in print was in Merle Collin’s novel Angel.” But you have also moved back and forth quite a bit, between St. Thomas and the States. Does having lived in different places, experiencing different communities, inform or impact your writing in specific ways?

It can be a little confusing. I’m working on a story now that is set in Harlem, NY, but every once in a while I find myself describing something on St. Thomas and I have to remind myself where we are. Having had the opportunity to live in and visit several different places does give me a sense of fearlessness in my writing, especially in this genre, because I can mix and match anything.

Your website also mentions that you write in standard English and in Caribbean Dialect. Do you find that the mood or vibe of a piece changes depending on the language you use?

My attempts at humor tend to be in Caribbean Dialect. My Standard English humor tends to be misunderstood, so far. I’m working on that.

For new readers who have become fans after reading this story, what should they read next? And what are you working on which folks can look forward to?

 If a reader liked “Glass Bottle Dancer,” then they might enjoy two older pieces, “Single Entry” and “The Dreamprice.” They are both in Dialect and have a light-hearted tone. Right now I’m having a good time with a story about the colors of fire dealing with a rent increase in hell and the human woman brought to hell to mediate.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Arley Sorg grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado. He studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, and usually writes in local coffee shops. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he is an assistant editor at Locus Magazine. He’s soldering together a novel, has thrown a few short stories into orbit, and hopes to launch more.

Author Spotlight: Andrew Dana Hudson

Alex Puncekar | 988 words

Could you talk about where the idea for this story came from?

I remember first seeing the trailer for Detective Pikachu and feeling like it was a sign that we’d reached a new stage of what my friend Jay Springett calls “cultural fracking”—the capitalist process of endlessly extracting new value out of the sedimentary layers of meaning that comprise mass culture from the past. I wanted to jump ahead a few stages, to a future where this process had been mostly automated and was now just mashing together genres and franchises more or less at random. The phrase “Detective Pikachu vs. Predator” came into my brain. I walked around the house muttering it for weeks. It was a phrase that felt to me both intensely delightful and deeply cynical at the same time, and that seemed like a good place to write from.

I imagine a lot of writers fear a day where an AI will learn how to tell stories and market them, though I’d also imagine they wouldn’t feel quite the same as one written by a person. Is that fear justified?

There’s a Jack McDevitt story, “Henry James, This One’s for You,” about a computer that can generate the great American novel. In the end (spoiler) the protagonist, a publisher, pushes the machine and its creator in front of a bus. So, that story was on my mind a bit when I wrote this. But what I see a lot more of and find more interesting is human-algo collaboration. Algorithms can produce a lot of novel material that humans can either curate into something interesting or be inspired by. So I’m not worried about writers getting entirely replaced by machines. One of the ideas that my story really holds onto is that telling stories people connect to requires authentically engaging with our shared human experience. The only question is: Will doing that work be valued? In a way, this story is the inverse of McDevitt’s, because what’s been automated here isn’t creativity—it’s judgment and curation.

This story can sometimes feel like a meta-commentary of the writing process. Thicket has their idiosyncrasies and rituals that they go about while writing, and it appears to help them with all the rejections. Are there any parts of Thicket’s process that were based off of your own?

I’m not quite as dramatic about it as Thicket, but the story gushed out of me in a moment of frustration at the grind of submitting my writing and receiving lots of rejections. It’s really dedicated to all the talented writers who come up with brilliant ideas but have to trawl through the markets in Submission Grinder to get them out into the world. That process can be very impersonal and opaque, in a way that I think feels reminiscent of engaging with an automated system. That’s a feeling that’s so in contrast with the sensation of doing the writing, those moments of flow when you discover connections and meaning in your own ideas that you’d never realized were there. So I tried to tap into that tension to tell a “person versus algorithm”-style story about engaging with a system that doesn’t quite recognize your humanity.

I would watch Detective Pikachu vs. Predator in a heartbeat. Just saying.

So would I! I love mashups. I’ve got some “what if Bruce Wayne went to Hogwarts” fanfic floating out there somewhere from a decade ago, and I’m still weirdly proud of it. And I have devoted way too much brainpower to thinking about the meta-meanings of franchises like Star Wars or the MCU. I don’t intend this story as a condemnation of mashups or fanfiction or even franchise culture. I very much think that the genius voices of younger generations are more likely to be writing in AO3 than The New Yorker. The question I think the story asks is: What do we lose by having a mass media so built out of these towering franchises (or else so fragmented) that those few really talented voices can’t make a dent in the culture?

What’s next for you? Any projects you’d like to share?

This story is coming out around the time that I’m defending my master’s thesis, which is actually a whole book of climate fiction, a fix-up novel of five different scenarios about the future of the UN climate negotiations. It’s been over a year of work that I’m very proud of, but I haven’t tried to publish anywhere yet. So I’ll soon be looking for ways to actually bring that out into the world. I’ve also got an itch to write a couple more stories like this one, which I’ve been calling to myself “cyber-loser” stories. I had a story in this vein called “Zooming” out last month in the MIT Technology Review. Cyber-loser stories are about the people who live in our present-day/near-future cyberpunk dystopia, but who don’t get to look cool or act badass or buck the system like the punk antiheroes of cyberpunk stories. These protagonists aren’t hardboiled cyborgs or street samurai or master hackers. They’re just people like us living under the bootheel of the algo, the platform, the stack. They struggle, sometimes brilliantly, but their triumphs never challenge the essential power relations that dominate their lives. Maybe that’s grim, but it’s a niche I’m feeling called to write into. Oh, and I have another brand-filled story, co-written with my partner, that I suspect should be coming out in Lightspeed at the end of this year.

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.

Author Spotlight: Rati Mehrotra

Setsu Uzumé | 764 words

The interiority of this piece was so beautifully woven throughout this story. She occupies this perpetually shifting liminal space, from her romantic decisions to her capacity to remember the past and the future. How do you define “witch” in the context of these events?

“Witch” can mean so many different things. For me, in this story, it embodies a woman who has defied the patriarchal order, and escaped the social and religious strictures that she was born into, to become a person of power and knowledge. She sees the hypocrisy of her family, and the cruelty of the religious right, and disowns them. There is always a price to pay for such things. Not everyone can be saved. And sometimes, the only way to save yourself is letting go of everything else.

In some of your other stories, like “Hatyasin” and “The Family Ghost,” magic has its core in family and lineage. Is that a focal point while you’re writing, or incidental?

I don’t believe I do this consciously. But family is important to me. Family shapes us for good and ill, and the feelings between family members are some of the strongest in the world. The love of a mother for her child, the bond between sisters, the wisdom of a grandmother, the enmity between exes—such relationships make (or break) our lives. Magic, in this sense, is one way of exploring familial bonds or traits. It can also be a symbol of transgression, a breaking away from family, and defiance of the established order.

This reminded me of particular stories about power, in which the antagonistic trope I expect is a lack of self-control. Instead of journeying outward, this felt more like a returning, and the antagonistic force is everyone outside of her and her traditions. What were you exploring in this piece?

I wanted to explore the difficulty of interfaith unions in certain countries, like India. It is not easy for ordinary people of different religions to get married in India, particularly if one is a Muslim and the other Hindu. Unions between Muslim men and Hindu women are the most fiercely opposed. No priest will marry them. Fundamentalists will target them. They can still get married via a civil ceremony conducted by a registrar, but there are all sorts of procedural hurdles to this. The notice of the proposed marriage has to be publicly posted for thirty days and anyone can make objections to it. They can be harassed by both family members and officials, as well as complete strangers. Sometimes, violence is the end result.

The only possible way for me to tell such a story was obliquely, through the lens of fantasy. And what better place to situate such a story than Varanasi, a city that is fascinating in its contradictions? I walked the city through the eyes of my protagonist and felt like a ghost myself.

There were certain lines that seemed contemptuous on the first read and then compassionate (if a bit resigned) on the second, as though the text itself helped her hide in plain sight. How would the ideal reader see her? What would you like the reader to take away from this story?

I’d like the reader to feel empathy for her without pitying her. Yes, something terrible happened, but it did not break her. It freed her. Most of all, I’d like the reader to come away with a sense of hope, as I did when I wrote the final line. I believe they found a way to be together, away from the world that drove them apart.

Inter-religious marriages do manage to take place all over the world, even in India. Such couples have transcended the “Us-Them” rhetoric dinned into them since childhood, and taken a brave step toward the future. It is a triumph of love and humanity over religious fundamentalism.

What can we look forward to next from you?

I work on multiple projects at any time, both short and long, only some of which will see the light of day. I have a story about a sentient ship upcoming in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. And I just finished writing a story about a rather special cat. We’ll see where that one goes. I’m working on a middle grade fantasy novel. I also have an idea simmering for an adult novel. Basically, I need to clone myself.

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.

Coming Attractions, May 2020

The Editors | 222 words

Coming up in May, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Adam-Troy Castro (“The Time Traveler’s Advice to the Lovelorn”) and Ada Hoffmann (“Melting Like Metal”), along with SF reprints by Tochi Onyebuchi (“Still Life with Hammers, a Broom, and a Brick Stacker”) and Charlie Jane Anders (“Rager in Space”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Millie Ho (“The Fenghuang”) and Alexander Weinstein (“Destinations of Love”), and fantasy reprints by Carmen Maria Machado (“I Bury Myself”) and C. Robert Cargill (“We Are Where the Nightmares Go”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns. Our feature interview will be with Stephen Graham Jones. 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: Marie Vibbert, Julianna Baggott, Matthew Kressel, Sunny Moraine, and Ashok K. Banker.

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)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 (with Diana Gabaldon) [Forthcoming 2020]

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

Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth

Creatures of Charm and Hunger by Molly Tanzer

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear [forthcoming]

A Dark Queen Rises by Ashok K. Banker [forthcoming]

The Conductors by Nicole Glover [forthcoming]

The Apocalypse Seven by Gene Doucette [forthcoming]

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.