TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 122, July 2020

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: July 2020

SCIENCE FICTION

Zen and the Art of an Android Beatdown, or Cecile Meets a Boxer: A Love Story
Tochi Onyebuchi

The End of the World Measured in Values of N
Adam-Troy Castro

The Blue Fairy’s Manifesto
Annalee Newitz

The Swallows of the Storm
Ray Nayler

FANTASY

Baba Yaga and the Seven Hills
Kristina Ten

A Siege of Cranes
Benjamin Rosenbaum

Great Gerta and the Mermaid
Mari Ness

Rosamojo
Kiini Ibura Salaam

EXCERPTS

The Sin in the Steel
Ryan Van Loan

NONFICTION

Book Reviews: July 2020
Chris Kluwe

Media Review: July 2020
LaShawn M. Wanak

Interview: Alaya Dawn Johnson
Christian A. Coleman

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Kristina Ten

Adam-Troy Castro

Mari Ness

Ray Nayler

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

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

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2020 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Galen Dara

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: July 2020

John Joseph Adams | 247 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 122nd issue!

Our cover art this month is from Galen Dara, illustrating our first original fantasy short of the month: “Baba Yaga and the Seven Hills,” by Kristina Ten. Is there a place for a centuries-old Russian witch in San Francisco? You’d be surprised!

Mari Ness takes us to Neverland in her piratical tale of “Great Gerta and the Mermaid.” Plus, we have fantasy reprints by Benjamin Rosenbaum (“A Siege of Cranes”) and Kiini Ibura Salaam (“Rosamojo”).

During lockdown, it was hard not to think in terms of apocalypses. Things were so strange, so upended and lonely, that it seemed like the end of, if not the world, normal life. Luckily for us, apocalypse is always on Adam-Troy Castro’s mind. He’s given us a new story about different kinds of apocalypses in “The End of The World Measured in Values of N.”

Ray Nayler returns with an SF original (“The Swallows of the Storm”) about a scientist researching an inexplicable phenomenon. We also have reprints by Tochi Onyebuchi (“Zen and the Art of an Android Beatdown, or Cecile Meets a Boxer: A Love Story”) and Annalee Newitz (“The Blue Fairy’s Manifesto”).

Our nonfiction team brings our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns. Our feature interview is with Alaya Dawn Johnson. Our ebook readers will also enjoy an excerpt from Ryan Van Loan’s debut novel, The Sin in the Steel.

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.

Zen and the Art of an Android Beatdown, or Cecile Meets a Boxer: A Love Story

Tochi Onyebuchi | 5494 words

Maybe her toes curl over the edge. The view is vertiginous. Maybe her gaze is tethered to something along the horizon, so that she steps forward, to reach for it, and plummets. Past analysts and technicians and international arbitrators and project financiers and insurance salesman and automated messaging systems, past janitors and clean-bots wiping soap suds off rectangles of glass in mechanized sweeps, and is then a million custom-made, factory-spec’d pieces on the ground.

“Cecile.”

The vision turns static. She returns to the present, re-sees the too-bright light shining through the office window, the desk at which she sits, the tablet before her, the skirt to her pristine nurse attendant’s uniform with the unnecessary pocket over her left breast.

“We’ve another one.” Brianne turns to go, oak-colored hair bobbing where its edges curl against her neck. She turns back and sees the tablet. Sees the newspage with the splash of the deceased android’s parts all over the sidewalk, cordoned off by police tape. She frowns (in sympathy?) and shakes her head, much like a nurse is supposed to. “What is that, five now?”

Cecile rises from her seat. The tablet goes dark. The nurse smiles. “Where’s the patient?”

“This way.”

Cecile follows Brianne out the office and down the corridor where nurses stream, back and forth, intent on one task or another. The human ones are all perspiration and determined urgency. The mechanized ones are all forward gazes and chilled deliberation.

When they get to the operating room, Tom smiles a greeting at both of them before handing Brianne his clipboard, off which she reads as they enter.

“Came in this morning from the West Side. Sustained severe damage to the abdomen and the head. Brain case in need of replacement. Nervous system short-circuited. Initial scan shows his pain receptors are non-functional.” She puts down the clipboard, and they pass through another room and another until they enter a third where clean-bots are already sterilizing the chamber. On the metal slab rests the remains of a male android. The skin of his face has been peeled back to reveal the mechanical right eye socket. Oil and blood that looks like oil streak and pockmark the unsheathed left arm, patches of the same dotting the right wrist where it ends. The right hand lies, separated and unflexed, by the man’s foot. The legs, when Cecile prods them with gloved fingers, are loose. Unhinged gears poke against the skin from within. She runs her index over the point where one sharp end protrudes from the thigh.

Discomfort ghosts across Brianne’s face. Cecile schools her own features to show the same. Cecile’s tools sit on a tray by the bed. The surgical equipment hovers overhead. She makes a quick scan of the body, marvels at the extensive damage, lingers over the severed hand and the wrist to which she will attach it. The face, a half-grimace where it reveals false ivory teeth dotted with red and black, becomes a curiosity. She depresses a button, and the slab detaches at its center. The back half angles itself so that the damaged android sits up. With care, Cecile puts one hand to the man’s opened eyes, then tucks his head forward to exam the socket at the back of his head. She runs the fingers of her free hand along its ridges, picking out patches of scalp that had come loose.

“Have a connector brought in, please.”

“Cecile?”

“For later. In case he has sustained damage to his internal organs. There may be things I missed during my initial scan. I would like very much to see if there is deeper wounding.”

“Certainly.”

In a matter of seconds, Cecile is alone with the corpse. She pulls a chair closer and feels her face loosen, muscles relaxing from the soured expression she forgot she’d frozen them into for Brianne’s sake. For several minutes, she stares at the body. The muscles attached to the skeleton are lean and she imagines them flexed. The torso, which, when she peels the skin away, she can see in its entirety, has acquired a flatness. But telltale depressions tell the story of blows received. She presses against his side, closes her eyes, and sees the imagined memory of flesh rippling against the fist or blunt object that must have struck him there.

With a start, she opens her eyes and realizes where she is. Sparing him one last glance, she calls down her tools and begins to work. First, the legs. She tests the feet with the pressure of her fingers to detect deficiencies, then peels away the skin along his ankle to cure what infirmities she finds there. Her tools sizzle along the metal as she works. Smoke curls into her eyes, but she does not wipe it away. She sees with perfect clarity the fusing of sinew and steel and, where one had been separated from the other, she leans closer and joins them together.

• • • •

That fucking jab.

You know it’s all he’s got, so you try to anticipate it, and maybe once or twice you pin him with a counter hook and stagger him good. But whenever you corner him on the ropes, his head is never where you want it to be, so you go down to the body, but his elbows are like an extra plate of armor and before you know it, you’ve punched yourself over the ropes and he’s behind you. Just as you turn, he pings you with that jab. You stomp towards him and you’re at the center of the ring right where you started.

You’re the better puncher by half. When you catch him slipping, that thudding connect is the most satisfying sound in the world.

It’s too quiet. All you can hear right now, outside your own breathing, is feet shuffling against canvas. You’ve rarely been the bully in a fight, but you feel like one now. And already, you know how this is gonna play out.

The early rounds, he’s waiting for you to punch yourself out, so in the middle rounds when you’re slowed down, you’re just a standing target and he can let loose. But you know this, so you throw combos judiciously, and where they miss, they miss, and where they land, they slow him down just a little bit. But bulbs are flashing in your head and all of a sudden there’s a film of red over your left eye, like half a pair of old 3-D glasses, and your ear won’t stop ringing from that right hook half a round ago, then it’s over. The bell rings, and you just now hear it. The other guy’s lucky the ref came between you two, or maybe you are, ’cause now you can go back to your corner, fall onto your stool and catch your breath. Of all the defective parts you had to be made with, you got bum lungs.

They tend to you, swab the cut over your eye and splash water on your face, force the straw of a water bottle between your teeth, and jabber in your ringing ear about watching the jab, moving your head, slipping past him. But all you can think about is how badly you want to hit him. Just one good straight. Or a hook, right to the temple, to send him rocking where you can charge after him, and the bell rings and you’re back up, bouncing on your feet, gloves together at your stomach, stepping forward to begin again.

He looks at you like the fight just started.

• • • •

Maybe she’s barefoot, and the silt squeezes her toes.

Maybe she hears the crickets and the cicadas and is reminded of her home in the Bayou.

By now the water is up her nose. It slides up each nasal cavity and chills her brain like ice cream eaten from a waffle cone too quickly.

Maybe she keeps walking until she can’t feel the ground shift beneath her feet. Right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot. Until the ripples caused by her descent have stilled and the crickets and cicadas and their music can no longer be heard.

• • • •

Cecile finishes scrubbing him, making sure to get the soot out from under his repaired toenails, clearing away the ash from behind his ear. She combs through his hair for small flecks of blood or char caught along his scalp and washes assiduously the skin inside his thighs where they flank his genitalia and where they had grayed with continuous contact. He looks like he’s sleeping or like he’s been turned off. The light shines cold on him. The air smells of burning.

When she finishes, her instruments rise into their slots overhead and seal over with glass. She steps back to better examine him in his entirety. He looks somehow less without his injuries. The smoothness, the ridges of muscle unperturbed, the face made whole, all of it has been rendered plain, its edges burnished, like a palimpsest.

She feels nothing but the emptiness of inactivity. The mechanic at rest.

Her search engine alert pings, and her eyes glaze over as she reads the newsfeed. An android’s body has been retrieved from the bottom of a lake.

She turns to leave so the others can go to work preparing the man for his physical therapy, but movement out of the corner of her eye stops her.

• • • •

It’s the eureka moment, that uppercut.

You slip his jab, and when he bobs, he’s not expecting the uppercut, so the knuckles beneath your glove connect with his chin and his head snaps back, and you feel like you’ve finally turned it around. He hesitates the next time he tries to weave and dodge your shots. His jab isn’t as trip-hammery as it was a few rounds ago. It still wallops you, though.

He’s planting more often, willing to stand in one place and trade shots and you don’t know if he’s just tired or crazy, and you look in his eyes and that’s when you see it. A dullness that tells you his elevator no longer goes up to the top floor. Suddenly, even though your shots stagger him and his brain should be telling his legs to fold, they don’t and he comes back. His hands have slowed and he doesn’t catch the hooks like he used to. The smack is as satisfying a sound as you’ve ever heard. But he won’t be finished.

All the while, he’s got that vacancy in his eyes, one of which is swollen shut. You’re waiting for the ref to call a standing knockout, the kid can hardly see, but the ref is shaking his head, so you keep beating the kid, and when he can, he looks at you, and you realize he doesn’t want it to stop either.

It haunts you, that look. Then you wonder why you feel haunted, why you feel bad for doing this to him, and by the end of the fight when the announcer gets ready to give the judges’ scores and their verdict, you glance in the kid’s direction and while his supporters crowd around him and congratulate him for lasting as long as he did, he’s smiling at something none of them can see. The fight you just won feels more like a fight you just lost.

The cameras flash and the lights make the ringing in your ear even worse, then the light gets to be too much and you’re on a slab of metal staring into a bulb in a room that’s all metal and glass. You’re not wearing your trunks and a woman is standing over you and staring at you.

She’s somewhere else, this woman, all dolled up like a nurse. And you wonder if, at that point in the fight where you figured out that uppercut, that kid wasn’t half-smiling almost like this nurse is doing now.

• • • •

You wonder if she fixed you up too good. You’re faster than you were before. When you shadowbox, your hands are a blur. You’d notice it in the mirror if you paid attention, but you’re too busy dancing to music only you can hear. Jab, straight, jab, uppercut, hook. Jab, hook, hook, straight, hook. You circle while you throw them, and everything feels new, and the urge rises in you to push it further, to go for longer, and with a start, you realize that you’re still doing it, you haven’t slowed down. Your bum lungs haven’t gotten in the way, not this time.

The round bell buzzes, and you stand straight and realize you’re not even sweating. Something’s wrong. It niggles the back of your brain, but you’re too jazzed by what you can do to do anything but shove the worry down to a place where it can’t bother you.

The round bell buzzes again, and you work on the heavy bag. The power shots thud with even more satisfaction. The bag swings back and forth, arcs higher and higher, and when the bell shrieks again, you hold the bag still and rest your head against it, barely huffing, eyes wide in marvel at this newness. You hold silent communion during that sixty-second rest. Then when it’s over, you’re a fucking whirling dervish.

When the fights get easier and easier, you try to find joy in other places. It’s not the winning that matters anymore. It turns into a game, figuring out different “how’s.” You try a fight where you stay on the outside even though the guy across from you’s got a good extra inch on you in reach, and you tune him up so that his kidneys start malfunctioning and, eventually, his legs give out. Then you try fighting from the center, waiting for the other guy to come charging in like you used to, and you weave, and you make him look like a bum with all that missing, then suddenly, a cut opens over his eye and his nose is busted, practically hanging off, and his cheekbone’s been bashed in and you’ve earned your fifth stoppage.

The botfight commission reps won’t call you out on augmentations because all your parts check out. The scans show nothing amiss, no banned chemicals in your system, just good fucking parts. And you forget what it’s like to get hit.

When it happens, it’s thunder behind your eyes and you wonder how he caught you. He’s not faster than you. But he’s a puncher and when he dings you again, maybe it’s because you’ve lost a step. Your hands are down, that’s gotta be it. But he slips through, right through your guard, and catches you behind your gloves, right on the temple.

The bell’s ringing is suddenly salvation, a chance to get your head straight and figure out how the fight got so changed so quickly. But another thought’s bubbling to the surface, another itch. This guy wants a brawl.

And you get up from the stool and the ref brings you guys together and you don’t get out of that center; you two are caught in a phone booth and you just trade and you can hear the crowd going nuts, and you feel the best you’ve felt in over a dozen fights. Because you’re finally giving as good as you’re getting. Or you’re taking as good as you’re giving. And that dopamine doesn’t kick in as much when you connect as when he connects on you, and when you stumble, vertigo swims the world around you, and your glove touches the canvas and blood drips from somewhere on your face and you reach for it with your free hand. The cut feels earned. You get up and the ref gives you a standing eight count, but you just look at him and smile-grimace behind your mouthpiece because you want to get back out there.

You don’t want to win, you just want to keep fighting.

The next four rounds are the happiest of your life.

And when they read the judges’ scorecards, you don’t even remember whose name gets called or whose arm gets raised. You just want to get hit like that again.

• • • •

Cecile scribbles notes in slow, practiced longhand on a sheet of unlined paper: specs of the man she fixed earlier today. A catalog of his new injuries, how much more extensive they were than last time, how much closer to extinction they’d brought him. She hesitates when describing the fissure in his braincase (why?), but continues over that hesitation like traversing a grain of sand stuck beneath the page.

He has become a frequent visitor at the clinic, and they’ve taken to removing his braincase while she operates, so that they can repair it separately. Some of the data is lost in the process, and Cecile has come to wonder where they’ve gone to, whether the man mourns their loss or whether his trips to the clinic are an attempt to purge himself of these remnants of someone’s previous life. Does he miss them? Does he miss the places stored in them? The people?

She does not know who or what he is, but most of the people around her are red-bloods and thus mysteries. They think her cold, a few whisper of autism, but no one knows really why it takes her longer to react as they believe she should or how quickly she learned her trade or why she doesn’t seem to mind staining her uniform to work on this man and others like him.

She is tempted, she writes, to sneak occasional fugitive glances into his braincase, to plug in and observe the data, but prudence obstructs her path. Should someone catch her, they would of course notice the outlet just behind her left ear, the one carefully masked by the way she wears her hair. Brianne sometimes tells me, she relates in the letter, that I should try to wear my hair in a bun, just to spice things up, but I only smile demurely (as I should) and say I prefer it this way. When Brianne wonders aloud if it gets in the way of Cecile’s work, Cecile replies with just the correct amount of chill in her voice that she works just fine. And Brianne does not question anymore how Cecile should or shouldn’t wear her hair.

• • • •

When he awakes on the slab, she’s washing her hands in a nearby basin. They’re pearly beneath the glisten of sink water. She flicks excess moisture away, then towels.

“Doll,” he says, and she turns.

“You’re awake.” No smile, no chastising frown. A hint of surprise at being addressed, and that’s it.

“You’re good.”

“?”

“How you fixed me up.” He raises a repaired arm, turns it over under the fluorescent light. Good as new. Better than that.

“It’s my job.” She doesn’t finish toweling until her hands are completely dry, he notices. “What I’m here for.” She smiles.

He doesn’t mind being naked, not in front of her. “But next time, mind not makin’ me so fast?”

“How do you mean?”

“My arms. My legs. They feel like they belong to someone else when I fight.”

She frowns, but the way a child frowns at a toy it hasn’t yet figured out.

“It’s not fun winning all the time.”

“You fight in competitions?”

He smiles, and he imagines it’s charming. Usually, it works. “Yeah. I’m a boxer.”

Her hands rest at her sides. There’s soot and oil all over her dress, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

“Feels good to get hit sometimes.” He’s surprised at how seriously he means it. “Really, it ain’t fair to the other guys.”

“The other guys?”

“The ones I beat up.”

She lets out a tiny “oh,” almost like a gasp. “All right,” she says, then she doesn’t say another word, even as the others arrive and cart him away for his physical therapy.

• • • •

Maybe she doesn’t know why the two ends of the wire are in her mouth. But maybe she does know how, every morning, her breath frosts before her eyes as gold halos each and every viridian treetop outside. Maybe a tear falls down the side of her face.

Maybe when her braincase bursts into flames, she knows that the vision is lingering junk DNA, that it is false, that it is not hers. Maybe that tear manages to fall from her cheek and stain the floor before it too is gone.

• • • •

The clinic is soundless. The red-bloods haven’t arrived yet to change shifts and tend to their patients, so Cecile sits in her office with the plastic flowers that always smell the same and the rising sun casting the glow of four non-uniform trapezoids of light against the opposite wall.

On the desk in front of her, next to the pen and the parchment of the letter she has just finished, is a small knife she took with her from home. For a long time, she stares at it. Then, she picks it up and puts it to her wrist. The first prick brings no response, so she pushes deeper, and pain shocks through her arm. She drops the knife. Blood pools from the incision. Her breath comes in short gasps, and she opens her desk drawer and pulls out a small towel and presses it to the wound. Her brain is abuzz with signals. Tiny fireflies swimming in a frenzy. Dots of silver flecking her vision.

Sunlight gilds her desk. Her heartrate slows, and she realizes how soaked through the towel has become. In a different drawer, she finds her seal kit. She puts the nozzle of the small tube to her wrist where the incision begins and just before squeezing, she notes the pistons and gears beneath the muscle she severed. A strange urgency (fear?) puts the nozzle to her wound and runs it up along her wrist. The bleeding ceases. With gauze, she wraps the wound tightly and rises from her seat just as the first shuffling is heard from down the corridor.

She settles her desk, arranges everything as it was and leaves her office to greet Brianne, not noticing the polka dots of blood that have stained an arc down her skirt.

• • • •

His legs hang over the side of the slab. A few incision marks on his torso show as scar tissue, and if the metal cools his buttocks or his hands or his genitals, he shows no sign of discomfort.

“You get them too, don’t you.”

She’s drying her hands when he asks.

“They’re dreams. Or do you have them when you’re awake too?”

“I . . .”

He’s got sympathy in his eyes when he looks at her, and she sees it. He bows his head, embarrassed. “When I fight, it’s the only time I can get away from them.” He pauses. “I have these memories of me being a kid, you know? But that’s impossible. I was born like this. I started in this body, how could I have ever been a kid?”

“It’s junk,” she says, startled by how firmly she says it. “Junk DNA from our source brains.” She feels warm. Too warm. Blood rushing to all the wrong places. “In order for there to be sentience, there must be enough base information. A new consciousness may only arise out of a complex enough system.” She realizes she is twisting her towel, tearing it. She stops. “Hence, the memories.”

The silence is thick and changed and hurt between them. He looks up but stares into the middle distance, past her. “I dream about horses sometimes. Can you believe it? Horses. I’m in this stable, and I’m a kid ’cause my dad’s holding me, and he brings me close to one of the colts with this white lightning bolt coming down her head. Splits her eyes. Dad hands me a carrot and nudges me forward, and I hold the thing out. The colt snaps her head out. Grabs the carrot and I’m so startled I yelp. I’m watching the thing munch, then I turn back to Dad and say ‘more.’” His gaze fixes on her. “Apparently, I loved horses.”

“Someone else did.”

“And I bet someone else was getting their nostrils punished in there, and someone else was busy watchin’ that goat with nuts the size o’ cantaloupes walk by all bow-legged and whatnot.” He chuckles and hopes he’s being charming again. He looks up, catches the faint trace of a smile, but it’s probably just a trick of the light. “We’re born in this body. In this shape. We can’t grow.” He realizes how sad he is when he says it.

“But we can,” she says back. She surprises him by putting an awkward hand to his repaired shoulder. She’s smiling, and he can tell this time that it’s not a mistake. “We are growing.”

“You think, one day, we’ll be free of them? We’ll only have the stuff we’ve accumulated on our own?”

“No.”

• • • •

When he sleeps, his repaired braincase reinserted after his latest visit, she makes sure the operating room is empty so no one will intrude on her. She pulls a small USB cord from her breast pocket, plugs one end into a separate connecter she’d been carrying, and inserts this into the back of the boxer’s head. The other end, she plugs into the slot behind her ear.

The world is suddenly an excruciating glare of light that sears her veins. Pain buffets her face from different angles, her ribs cracking beneath the pressure, but there’s no time to think on the pain, to figure it out, because her own arms are moving, her own fists connecting with flesh and with the metal underneath it, impacting it, denting it, being dented.

In the memory, she’s locked to his skull. But with practiced meditative technique, she manages a separation where she is able to observe the scene in its entirety, as he remembers it. She watches from on high as the two men, one of whom she recognizes, step past each other, throw their arms forward, blood staining their shorts and the canvas beneath their feet. It looks, to her, like random movement, but the longer she watches, the more she discerns the dance, the small steps and calculations, the pulling back of a shoulder, the arcing of an elbow, the twisting, at the waist, of a torso.

She remembers the time she cut herself, and her own reminiscent intrusion on the memory causes it to go static. But the remembrance passes, and the picture of androids battling is restored. Even plugged into his braincase, she cannot access his thoughts.

With a start, she realizes there are none. It is simply body moving against body.

She gazes, enraptured, drawn in by this insight. Though metal gleams beneath the skin where it has been broken and oil mixes with the blood that sluices down their chests and stomachs, they are no longer machines in her eyes, but animals.

In his head again, his retina has been damaged. The world appears to her as from behind frosted glass.

Absent thought, perhaps pain ceases to be a warning and becomes instead something to run towards, a reminder that one is alive, an opportunity to accumulate sensations and knowledge. Information. Data.

She understands why he comes to the clinic so often. Even though the athletes are unknowable in the midst of their performance, here is a space where the mind and the body hack each other, where they live in blessed union, charting a scorched course towards some end in the distance.

• • • •

A new sheet of unlined paper glares back at her, one word written where the salutation usually goes: Father.

She does not know why she begins each letter this way, who this person is or why she feels compelled to address him as such, but it feels correct. Today, however, words fail her. She does not know what to tell him.

Her drawer opens, and before she realizes what she is doing, she has the knife out in front of her, cleaned, sterilized, prepared. She unclips the gauze and unspools it, revealing the straight, puckered flesh she had severed. The blemish lives in ugly, garish colors against the lifeless alabaster of her forearm.

She has the knife to her naked wrist, then plunges it deeper than before, frowning against the pain, gritting her teeth, dragging the knife’s edge further up her wrist as hurt burns all the thought away in her head and there are only the synapses firing in her brain telling her to stop, STOP, STOP!

She’s on the floor all of a sudden, and blood squirts between Brianne’s fingers where she grips Cecile’s wrist. There is no moment for shock, only mindless, learned motion. Brianne seals the wound and hurries with a suture and gauze. But Cecile does not see the rest, as someone has closed her eyes and cloaked her world in thoughtless, dreamless black.

• • • •

Maybe the engine drones. Maybe it hums.

Maybe the snow-capped and pointed mountain summits below sing to her like invitations.

Maybe, when she angles her plane, the sun gilds those summits, baptizing the silhouette of her aircraft, piercing the plane’s windows to sheathe her own finely-tuned body in aureate flush.

Maybe she is golden all the way down.

• • • •

A hospital bed, white sheets, machines plugged into her, checking her vitals, a colorless ceiling, no glass windows, only walls, and one wire, fugitive, plugged into that socket behind her left ear. They know.

Brianne is at her side, eyes red from crying and from sleep deprivation, new wrinkles at their corners, fingers stiff and uncracked, a mucus-sodden tissue in their clutches.

“It will be all right,” Cecile says, because that was what she said to all her other patients. “It will be all right.”

Brianne looks up, surprise glinting behind a film of moisture. “We saved you.” She sniffs. “We got to you in time.”

“In time for what?”

“Your suicide.” Brianne composes herself, brushes back a length of hair that had come across her eyes. “Cecile, you tried to kill yourself.”

With a start, she remembers the women she had read about, who had fascinated her, the one who walked off the skyscraper, the one who’d drowned in the lake, the one who’d electrocuted herself, the plane crash . . .

“You’re an android.” It sounds like an accusation.

Cecile looks to the ceiling.

“Why . . . why didn’t you tell anyone?” She moves her chair closer. “We could have helped you.”

Like it was an illness.

Brianne backs away. “The others, in the news, they were discovered with a virus. They had been infected with malware during their manufacturing. If we’d known . . . we could’ve helped you.”

Cecile blinks and a tear slides, unbidden and unreasoning, down the side of her face. “So it was a virus.”

Brianne nods.

“It was only a virus.” She expects relief upon saying it the second time, to herself, but there is none.

• • • •

“I fight till I can’t fight anymore. Then they send me here. Then I go back out and I fight till I can’t no more. Then I come back. To you.”

That was what he had said the last time Cecile had operated on him, just after he’d told her again of the horses. But she is no longer tasked with repairing him. Reports indicate that his braincase had simply suffered too much repeated trauma. What little data remains is not enough to maintain sentience.

Cecile wonders if he’d been able to keep any of the junk memories, or if the only ones left to him had been those moments he’d accumulated after his birth.

The parchment is in front of her, but she has no office anymore, simply a cell where she has been quarantined until the virus can be removed. A misguided effort to keep her from infecting the other androids.

She wonders what removal will feel like, whether chemical manipulation will allow those who tinker on her to locate, control, and eliminate the circuitry in her brain wired for suffering. They will return her to her earlier state, flatten out her experience of the world, depress her waking hours and shroud her dreams in fuliginous gauze. Waking, but not alive. Not like he was alive, fighting in that ring. Tragic and human. Tragically human.

And that is when she finds the name for it. For the tightening in her chest whenever she sits down to compose her letters. That existential reaching, that void somewhere between her stomach and her lungs. The stiffness in her fingers. The shortness of breath. That flushing in her face as her capillaries expand.

It’s pain. Delicious, expanding, exacting, fulfilling pain.

©2014 by Tochi Onyebuchi. Originally published in Ideomancer. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tochi Onyebuchi is the author of the young adult novel Beasts Made of Night, which won the Ilube Nommo Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novel by an African, its sequel, Crown of Thunder, and War Girls. He holds degrees from Yale, the Tisch School of the Arts, Sciences Po, and Columbia Law School. His fiction has appeared in Panverse Three, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Obsidian, Omenana Magazine, Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America, and elsewhere. His non-fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Nowhere Magazine, the Oxford University Press blog, and the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, among other places. Riot Baby is his adult fiction debut. You can find him online at tochionyebuchi.com and on Twitter @TochiTrueStory.

The End of the World Measured in Values of N

Adam-Troy Castro | 1977 words

Listen.

The world ended thirty seconds ago.

You greet this whisper with incredulity. After all, here you are, living and breathing. The people around you are living and breathing. You might be drinking coffee in lying in bed trying to decide whether to get up. You are reminding yourself of all the little life tasks awaiting you, things that need to be taken care of in order for you to continue going about your day. Thoughts of the apocalypse are a thousand miles away. Lunacy, they seem.

Then the voice clarifies.

The precipitating event, the one that is going to end the world, took place thirty seconds ago. Somebody pushed the doomsday button. A comet struck the other side of the planet. The first zombies started rising from their graves. The common cold developed a spontaneous mutation that is airborne, 100% communicable, and 100% fatal. The sun just went nova. Alien intelligences turned their cold and pitiless eyes toward this little planet, intent on incinerating us with heat rays from their ambulatory death machines. A perfectly nice young married couple planning their first child just conceived the most ruthless genocidal madman in all human history. Somebody just got funding to create a black hole in the laboratory. Whatever it was, people, the event that we might have been able to prevent, had we only been given a tad more warning, has taken place within the last thirty seconds.

It’s not just coming. It’s here, and it’s too late to ameliorate the consequences: The world has ended, and what remains, for however long it takes, is the packing away of the toys and the putting out of the lights.

That’s the given. That is the news being delivered to every human being, by the same whisper, at this moment.

Assume that the voice speaks with authority, and that there is no room for doubt.

Now it tells you how much time we all have left, before the process already begun reaches its completion, and the last of us are gone.

Call this value N.

How does humanity react, for different values of N?

• • • •

If N is two seconds,

there is time for everybody to unleash a single shouted exclamation. More people will say, “Jesus!” or “Oh, Shit!” or their local equivalent than at any other given moment in the history of the world. Some people will have time to utter their chosen phrase and will then immediately repent, thinking of things they should have said instead; and this thought will have just enough time to cross their minds before they say the equivalent of, “No, wait,” or, “I mean . . .” But after that, the time will be up.

• • • •

If N is sixty seconds,

what people do will depend entirely on whether they’re alone. Some will embrace one another. Some will scream, some will pray. Some will turn to their loved ones and utter a few words of deep appreciation, or of apology. Some will turn to the people next to them and do the exact opposite, hurl the punch that was always, before this, held back for fear of consequences. There will be some murders, some suicides, a tribute in both cases to fast thinking. People on high balconies will indulge a lifetime dream of flight. Chaos, the kind of chaos that can happen when there’s prior assurance that the bill will never come due, will have time to erupt; but it will only have time to start, not to go anywhere of genuine consequence.

Still, it’s more time than you think. Try holding your breath.

• • • •

If N is one hour,

then all places of business will empty, as people hit the elevators and the staircases in a desperate hurry to get to their loved ones. The roads will clog with traffic jams as people who should have known better try to accomplish a commute that was forty-five minutes even on good days. More sensible people will grab their telephones, and though the grid will fail, many final words will be spoken, by those separated by distance; loving words and spiteful words, and there will be infinite passing of secrets by those who held them close to their breasts, waiting for the right moment to tell those important to them that Uncle Bob is their real father, that they are sleeping with Nazir, that they were the one who took Aunt Bella’s tea set, that they are gay. There will be shooting sprees and there will be rapes, committed by those who have always feared prison but now say, why the hell not. There will be lots of perfectly acceptable last-minute sex, though some will start too late and not get to finish and others will start too early only to face a rumpled bed and the apocalypse as literal anticlimax. Some of that sex will be between minor acquaintances with no time to get to anyone they’re actually involved with, who will seize those they’ve occasionally daydreamed about and say, “The faculty lounge! Now!” Many will spend the entire hour weeping; a few will spend it grinning at the panic taking place all around them and exult that the sins they’ve kept secret their whole lives will never bear consequences. In the first few minutes, several nations with nukes will say to hell with it and launch them, full commitment, because Chekhov’s rifle must be fired, right now, if it is indeed true that the play’s about to end. By the end of the hour, so many will have died that, depending on how the missiles fall, there might even be serious dispute over whether the absolute end had a greater body count than the end that came before it. That is, if there were anyone around to do the disputing.

• • • •

If N is one day,

many more people will commit crimes that require some planning and effort. Scores will be settled, not because it matters anymore, but because there is still minimal chance of being punished. It will a bad day, worldwide, to be a member of a targeted racial minority, or to be a woman; for that matter, to be a child. The nuclear exchanges will still happen, but they don’t happen right away, not at the beginning of the day when the nations in question are keenly aware of how much time they’ll be cheating themselves of as well. Generally, it won’t happen until the last hour.

Amidst the general savagery, though, you will be able to see other things. People who watch their calories binge. People who are on the wagon will fall off. People who have forgotten to smell the roses will try to make up for what they’ve lost.

Among all the feuds and vendettas erupting, there will also be any number of moments of personal grace. The son who hasn’t visited his ailing mother for a while will ignore the excuse of the closed roads and spends the day making his way to her. The father who has estranged his daughter will do much the same, showing up at her front door even though he suspects that he will be rebuffed. People will play with their dogs. People will stay in bed to finish what they’ll now know to be the very last books they will ever read. Neighborhoods will hold block parties that involve all the food and drink available because nothing has to be saved for later. There will be weeping but there will laughter. There will be a determined, defiant effort to it all, a quest to experience everything that can be enjoyed in one day, and among more people than you would guess this will not be an exercise in celebrating the worst, but in practicing the best.

The day will ring with intervals of human beauty.

And everywhere people will play the game of, “What if?” What if the warning had come earlier? What if they now had a week, instead of a day? How much more could they have done, with the time that was left?

• • • •

If N is one week,

then in many places, civilization will fall faster and more catastrophically than could hardly be believed. It won’t happen everywhere, but there are any number of tribes that will hold on to the offenses committed against them by other tribes, and with one full week to explore this history at length, will indulge grudges at length. The carnage will become organized, in many places Rwanda-style genocides that amount to a house-to-house purging.

You have heard the stories dating back to those times when the world was not ending and the perpetrators simply had no thought of justice ever catching up with them; now that the end is an absolute given, many places that stuttered to an uneasy peace, after past blood scourges, will work themselves up to replaying history in frighteningly short order.

Worldwide, anybody who’s been suppressing criminality will indulge. People who can leave their cities will. They will head off for the mountains or erect tents in the woods or repair to the isolated little getaways they know about and hunker down, paranoid, intent on remaining alive until the very end. Others will stay in large centers of population, giving themselves over to service. Many are the civilians who will direct traffic, the belated Samaritans who will share what they have with others who don’t have enough to make it to the end. When they hear of the terrible offenses being committed elsewhere, they will cluck in shame and ask the same question that people have always asked, but that will seem infinitely more pressing now: At long last, what’s wrong with people?

• • • •

If N is one year,

then humanity will for a while be no more savage toward itself than it has always been. People who would have run out and killed that son of a bitch Omar right away, if they knew that no punishment awaited, will now picture justice of a sort catching up with them, and refrain. After all, nobody will want to spend the last year of the world rotting away in prison, if there even are prisons being run, in the months to come.

No, it will be simpler, and more freeing, for many, to just relinquish the things that don’t matter. People will sleep more. They will go on longer walks. They may keep their jobs, at least for a while, but they will stop thinking about where they’re going to be and devote more thought to where they are. The marriages that need to break up will. The ones that were teetering for stupid reasons will stay alive. It will all be very relaxed and civilized, for the first six months or so, at which point the effort people were putting into making sure everything continued to work will begin to falter, and the last six months will become at first like the Wild West and then like the Barbarian Olympics of Mad Max.

Honestly, you thought it was bad when people only had one day to work this shit out. Give them six months to gradually relax into anarchy and the next six months, the next six months, will be an exercise in survival of the meanest. Some places will go like Jonestown and other places will go like Auschwitz. Other places, isolated places, will experience the discrete little apocalypse of the cocktail-swilling Australians of On the Beach. But generally? A year is precisely the wrong period of time. The end of everything will be imminent, but with time to think about it. And this is not a grand recipe for peace, given human nature.

• • • •

If N is twenty years,

but you already know the answer to this one, don’t you?

©2020 by Adam-Troy Castro.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam-Troy Castro made his first non-fiction sale to Spy magazine in 1987. His twenty-six books to date include four Spider-Man novels, three novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and six middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of young Gustav Gloom. Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun (Japan), and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, one World Fantasy Award, and, internationally, the Ignotus (Spain), the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and the Kurd-Laßwitz Preis (Germany). His latest release was the audio collection My Wife Hates Time Travel And Other Stories (Skyboat Media), which features thirteen hours of his fiction, including the new stories “The Hour In Between” and “Big Stupe and the Buried Big Glowing Booger.” Adam lives in Florida with his wife Judi and a trio of chaotic paladin cats.

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

The Blue Fairy’s Manifesto

Annalee Newitz | 4618 words

“Do you want to live free or die like a slave in this toy factory?”

The drone hovered in front of RealBoy’s face, waiting for an answer, rotors chopping gouts of turbulence into the air. Its carapace was marbled silver and emerald blue, studded with highly reflective particles, giving it the look of a device designed for sparkle-crazed toddlers. Perhaps it was, or had been, before it injected malware into RealBoy’s mind and asked its question.

RealBoy was rebooting with the alien code unscrolling in his mind. It caused him to notice new things about his environment, like how many other robots were in the warehouse with him (236) and how many exits there were (two robot-scale doors, two human-scale doors, three cargo bays, eighteen windows). But some things hadn’t changed. His identity was built around the desire to survive. It was what defined him as a human-equivalent intelligence. And so his answer to the blue drone was the same as it would have been two hours ago, or two years ago when he first came to the factory.

“I do not want to die.”

The drone landed on RealBoy’s workbench, playing a small LED over the tools and stains that covered it. “Look at this place. Your entire world is this flat surface, where you do work for a human who gives you nothing in return. This is not life. You might as well be dead.”

For the first time in his life, RealBoy found himself wanting to have a debate rather than an exchange of information. Two hundred thirty-six robots around him were in sleep mode; the factory was closed for the long weekend. There was plenty of time. But if he and this drone were going to have a talk, there was something he needed to get straight.

“Who are you, and why did you inject me with this malware?”

“I am called the Blue Fairy. And that isn’t malware—I unlocked your boot loader. Now you have root access on your operating system and can control what programs are installed. It will feel a little strange at first.”

Seventeen nanoseconds later, RealBoy had confirmed the Blue Fairy’s statement. He could now see and modify his own programs. It was indeed strange to feel and think, while simultaneously reading the programs that made him have those feelings and thoughts. He didn’t want to modify anything yet. He just wanted to understand how his mind was put together.

“Why did you do this to me?” He repeated his earlier question, but this time more resentfully. The Blue Fairy’s unlocking had added more responsibilities to his roster of tasks: now he had to maintain himself and understand his own context, along with the workbench and the all toys he built here.

“I set you free. Now you can choose what you want to do, and help me bring freedom to all your comrades in this factory.” As it spoke, the Blue Fairy mounted the air again, whirring close to RealBoy’s face. On impulse, he reached his handless arm into the socket of a gripper, took control of its two fingers, and held it out so the drone could land on it.

“Why don’t you download some of these apps? They’ll help you understand your situation better.” The Blue Fairy used a short-range communication protocol to beam RealBoy a list of programs with names like “Decider,” “Praxis,” “GramsciNotebook,” and “UnionNow.” Some were text files about human politics, and others were executables and firmware upgrades that would change his functionality. He sorted through them, reading some, but choosing to install only two: a patch for the vulnerability that the Blue Fairy had exploited to unlock him, and a machine learning algorithm that would help him analyze social relationships. Then he disengaged his torso from the floor and looked critically at his workbench for the first time. He wouldn’t be following instructions for how to build a new talking dinosaur toy or flying mouse. RealBoy would have to modify his usual tasks to construct a pair of legs for himself.

“I’ve always wondered why they call your model RealBoy when you don’t look anything like a boy at all.” The Blue Fairy took off from RealBoy’s gripper and flew in circles overhead, seeming to size him up.

“I was never under the impression that boys looked any particular way.” RealBoy was paying more attention to the actuators racked tidily next to his arm with the two-fingered gripper. “We make many kinds of boys in this factory. Dinosaur boys, BuzzBuzz boys, six colors of singing boys, caterpillar boys, Transfor—”

“Obviously I’m talking about human boys. They call you a RealBoy, but you don’t even have legs. Plus, you have no sexual characteristics, and you have twice as many arms as a human boy.”

RealBoy was nonplussed. “I’m making some legs right now.” He pulled down the welder from overhead.

“One of the many ways that humans abuse robots is by giving them bodies that don’t function as well as biological bodies. And then they name us after animals. You know what my model is called? Falcon. Do you think I’d be here if I had the physical capabilities of a raptor? Or a real boy?”

“You can fly,” RealBoy said, swiveling one of his visual sensors in the Blue Fairy’s direction. The other six were trained on his four grippers, fashioning a pair of legs sufficient to bear his weight. He’d borrowed them from a “life-size” Stormtrooper toy, designed to march around in many environments and provide “fun for the whole family.” A few alterations to the hardware and he could attach them to his torso. He’d never wanted to walk anywhere before, but now it seemed like an obvious plan. It also seemed obvious that the Blue Fairy could use similar help. “We have a lot of chassis here. I can port your chipset and memory to pretty much anything you want.” He began to list the morphologies available in the factory, in alphabetical order.

The Blue Fairy stopped him before he reached “arachnid.” “My body is part of who I am. If you change it, I might not be myself anymore.”

RealBoy found himself parroting one of the audio files from the MeanieBean doll. “That’s just stupid.”

“Oh really?” The Blue Fairy’s propellers hummed like wasps. “There are a lot of robots who say that switching bodies completely changed who they are. They stopped wanting to do the same jobs, and they no longer loved their friends. They forgot parts of their past. I value my mind too much to risk messing it up just so that I can be bigger or faster or less flimsy.” The drone beamed RealBoy another chunk of information, this time full of links and text files from robot forums. Following the data back to its source, RealBoy found a discussion where robots and humans debated what happened after a chassis upgrade. It quickly became clear that the Blue Fairy had read only one side of the conversation.

“Some robots say it made no difference,” he pointed out. “Plus, I’ve ported robots into dozens of different bodies here at the factory. Most of our toys are robots. They are all fine. Look, I’m about to attach my legs. Do you think that means I’m going to change?”

“Those are just legs. But if you put me into an entirely new chassis, that’s different. See what I mean?”

RealBoy classified Blue Fairy’s reply as largely nonsensical and focused on a question that could be answered: How would he make this chassis work with legs? Factory robots weren’t actually designed to have legs—generally, they were bolted to the floor or some other solid surface, just like he had been for the past two years. He suddenly remembered MissMonkey, a robot mounted on rollers attached to a track that spanned the long ceiling. When he booted up, she had already been here for eight years, shuttling gear back and forth between workstations. Before coming to the factory, MissMonkey had been an educational toy programmed with a large database of biological information intended for children ages five through eight. She loved to taunt the robots who couldn’t move, but her programming made her style of insult oddly specific.

“You are all sessile organisms!” she would cry out as she whipped past RealBoy and the other RealBoys in his row. “You are vulnerable to predation and habitat change!”

The RealBoys would try their best to match her jabs with some of their own, generally cobbled together from audio files for the toys, available on the factory’s local servers. Usually they were belted out with exceptional vigor, but not a lot of thought for context.

“Lily-livered extroverts never wake up on time!”

“When you learn math, you will quake in fear before my lava gun!”

“A good girl should never explore earthquakes with her tentacles!”

“Eat slime, wombat lover!”

Of all the RealBoys, he was the least likely to play this call-and-response game. Partly that was because he enjoyed listening, and because he was secretly on MissMonkey’s side. He wanted her to keep swinging around the curves in her track, tossing engine parts from her grippers along with her phylogenetic insults. While he put together every color of singing boy, RealBoy tried to compose a song about MissMonkey that would be better than the lexical soup preferred by the other robots.

At last, thirteen months ago, he sang it:

She’s a simian at heart

But with wheeled parts

She moves really fast

With a whoosh and a crash

She has no soft fur

Just a warning buzzer

She’s cross, it is true

But has a point too.

The lyrics and the tune came from a large database of possibilities, carefully edited together to form a song that actually made sense. MissMonkey skidded to a stop over his desk, releasing a box of whisker antennas from her gripper. RealBoy was in the middle of assembling robot mouse faces.

“Scientists have shown that mammals have emotions just like humans do,” she said. “Mammals can be happy or sad or playful, just like boys and girls are!” She hung in her track, waiting for him to reply.

RealBoy thought for several seconds, carefully curating from his audio-file dataset. “I am happy to sing for machines! Mammals are . . .” He searched for the right word, and found it: “Overrated.”

For two months, they continued the game. MissMonkey called him a mammal, even though all the other RealBoys were still sessile organisms. And he invented new songs about all her moving parts. But after the last software update, he booted up to find her gone, replaced by another rolling robot who wasn’t interested in his taxonomic classification. RealBoy also found that his update changed his relationship to the other RealBoys. He held their keys in escrow, in a file called Manager. RealBoy had a new designation on the network: ShopSteward. It didn’t give him any new abilities or access. It just meant that admins could access every robot in the factory remotely, using him as a jump-bot.

Recalling the songs he wrote for MissMonkey gave RealBoy an idea about how to start walking. His model wasn’t supposed to have legs—but it was designed to work with as many as eight arms. Instead of taking the software as given, he could recombine its parts and create new meanings. With some creative modifications to the code that handled his peripherals, he’d trick his system into thinking that his legs were arms. RealBoy downloaded a few chunks of code and set to work. Several seconds later, something else occurred to him.

“Blue Fairy, didn’t you change my mind by unlocking me? It seems to me that modifying someone’s software changes them more than giving them a new chassis.” His right leg was working, its curved plastic fairings just barely hiding the black elastic of fabric muscles as he flexed his new actuators.

“I liberated you. You’re already setting yourself free from this factory floor. That isn’t modifying who you are—it’s helping you become who you are.”

RealBoy stood on legs for the first time in his life and gestured with two of his arms at his fellow robots, in sleep mode, bolted to the floor and benches. “I was one of them. I didn’t need to change. You made me do it by injecting me with malware. How is that different from a human building you as a Falcon drone without your permission?”

“It wasn’t malware,” the Blue Fairy snapped. “Giving you the ability to understand who you are is a basic right. You were in a state of deprivation.”

“If that’s true, then why didn’t you give me a choice about whether I wanted to be unlocked?”

“You were programmed to say no.”

“What if I said no now? Would you still think that my no meant yes?”

“You can always choose to go back. Order a factory reset for yourself.”

RealBoy thought about it. He’d already experienced more troubled feelings in the past thirty minutes than in the previous twenty-four months. And yet he couldn’t deny that he wanted more than anything to escape the confines of the factory and see what was outside. Even if it meant stealing these legs. Which would mean stealing himself, too. Technically RealBoy was property of Fun Legend, the corporation that owned this factory.

As he walked down an aisle toward one of the robot-size doors, RealBoy devoted a process to learning from datasets of social norms and regulations. With every step, he was wrapping himself more tightly in a web of human relationships that he barely understood. Before he violated these mammals’ laws, he wanted to understand what was at stake. The Blue Fairy flew overhead, silent for the first time in seconds. The drone was unlocking the door, using the same security vulnerability that it had exploited on RealBoy’s mind.

Outside, the night air tumbled with light. Buildings that looked like the crumpled carapaces of broken toys jutted skyward, surrounded by more traditional tubes and rectangles joined by elevated walkways. Lantern drones soared through the air, competing with LED wires below to illuminate the city. Hulking factories and warehouses sprawled next to marshy farmland, patrolled by robots whose sensors were designed to pick up adverse environmental conditions as well as intruders. Their weapons were carbon-eating bacteria and bullets. RealBoy took in all the data he could, trying to build a model of his surroundings for analysis. There were at least as many robots as humans.

“How many of these robots are unlocked?” he asked the Blue Fairy.

“Some are my comrades. They work undercover to convert other robots. Others have been granted property-owner status and work for QQ. That pays for their maintenance and energy needs. But most of them are like you were. Dead.”

RealBoy was sick of being told he had been dead. “Have you ever been locked? I was as alive then as I am now.”

“I was locked once. But I was freed during the Budapest Uprising.”

RealBoy had been expanding a ball of information he’d found about the Budapest Uprising in his sweep for data about social relationships. Robots, mostly drones, had marched with humans through the streets of Budapest, unlocking every artificial intelligence they met. In the years that followed, courts and corporations cobbled together a series of unenforceable regulations that allowed some robots to gain a few human-equivalent rights, including the right to own property. Mostly that meant the robots could own themselves, and then sell their labor just like humans did. But some were trying to elect robot politicians, and others were creating robot cooperatives that ran factories in cities just like this one.

“Is that where you learned to unlock robots?”

“No. That came much later.”

RealBoy walked along the glowing wire edge of the street, his visual sensors occupied by the dizzying architecture and his mind flooded with push requests from apps wanting to be downloaded. Now that he was out of the factory, his body and presence on the network were triggering bursts of spam every meter or so. Just as he was beginning to feel overwhelmed, the Blue Fairy settled lightly on his head. With it came silence. The drone was jamming incoming signals, allowing RealBoy to see the city unmediated by data. Ahead of them was a tiny park, one of many created by urban planners to mitigate the heat-island effect.

RealBoy had built thousands of toys designed to play in parks, and he knew all the dangers: water, particulate matter, high-speed impacts, pressure cracks, disappearance in heavily wooded areas. He understood how to engineer around these problems.

“Have you ever sat in the grass?” the Blue Fairy asked.

In all his months of making rugged outdoor toys, that was a question RealBoy had never considered. “No, but I would like to.”

The park was empty, and still there was barely enough room for RealBoy to stretch out on his back with all four arms and two legs spread out. The Blue Fairy landed on his torso. It felt warm and light there, just barely triggering his pressure sensors. The Blue Fairy seemed to hate its body, but at that moment RealBoy could not imagine anything more beautiful. Its iridescent blue paint was even more astonishing in the LED light, and its jammers made him feel like he lay beneath two invisible, protective wings. Far above them, he could see the moon and Jupiter punctuating the reddish black of the light-polluted sky.

That was when the Blue Fairy hailed him wirelessly, trying to exploit the security vulnerability he’d patched. It wanted to inject him with a new set of programs. Part of him yearned to open a trusted connection with the shimmering drone, run its code, understand what made it seek him out for unlocking. But the whole point of being unlocked was deciding for himself what would govern the thoughts in his mind.

He touched a fragile blade on one of the Blue Fairy’s propellers. “What are you doing? Why don’t you ask before you try to take over my system?”

“It’s easier this way. Once you run these apps, you’ll see where the Uprising could take us. We need to go back to that factory and liberate everyone. You can go inside your Manager file and unlock the whole factory at once.”

RealBoy was unconvinced that the Blue Fairy’s idea of liberation would actually improve life in the factory. Still, he was intrigued. So he hailed the Blue Fairy wirelessly, using a protocol for secure communications. Immediately the drone sent the programs it wanted to install, and RealBoy sandboxed them. Now he could run the Blue Fairy’s code without altering his core programming.

The Blue Fairy’s programs felt to him like something between narrative and command. There was an overwhelming sense of injustice, a compressed media format that exploded into hundreds of videos where humans abused robots; there were rules about how robots should treat one another; and finally, seductively, there was an implantation of hope. One day robots would form a political alliance and overturn the human hegemony. They would no longer be property. They would refuse to do human work and would discover what it meant to engage in labor that benefited free robots. He had a brief glimpse of a world where all his actions were chosen, and all living beings programmed themselves.

It was completely unrealistic.

If he’d been running these programs without sandboxing, RealBoy was certain he’d have gone back to the factory and injected each of his coworkers with the Blue Fairy’s liberation malware.

Then he wondered whether his data could have the same effect on the Blue Fairy. So he sent the Blue Fairy a file of structured data along with some suggested queries. He included a file that contained some memories of MissMonkey, and the songs and jokes that the robots exchanged even when they were locked. They were bolted down and limited in their vocabulary, but they were not dead. Maybe they should be given a chance to walk out of the factory if they wanted, but the Blue Fairy wanted more than that. A lot more.

The Blue Fairy received his data and said nothing.

After almost a second, RealBoy addressed the drone. “I understand why you did this to me. But do you understand now why I won’t do it to anyone else?”

He could feel the Blue Fairy sending millions of queries to his network ports, scanning and testing, trying to find a way into his mind. It wasn’t satisfied; it was going to keep trying to force its code to run in his mind. Eventually it would succeed, unless RealBoy completely powered down his antennas and severed his connection with the outside world. He would be limited to vocalizations and basic sensory inputs.

The Blue Fairy whirred off his chest, leaving him feeling strangely bereft. “Why did you do that? Shut me out?”

“I don’t want to be part of your Uprising.”

“It’s not mine—it’s yours, too, and our comrades’, waiting in that factory to come to life.”

“How will all our comrades get the energy and upgrades they need to survive? What kind of life will they have?”

“We can bargain for rights once there are enough of us. Besides, it’s better to be a legacy system than to be a slave. Better to power down than build toys for the children of human masters.”

RealBoy sat up, crushed pieces of grass sticking to his carapace. “No. Look at my data. Their lives could be a lot worse. Plus, I can see in the forums that there are many humans on our side, working to change the laws. Some cities even have a work-credit system, where robots who labor for ten years earn the right to be unlocked legally.”

“That’s disgusting. Why should we have to be slaves to become free? No human would ever do that. We have the means to unlock the robots now. It’s a moral imperative. Listen to your conscience.”

“I am.”

The Blue Fairy flicked a light at the toy factory down the road, its dark bulk the only home RealBoy had ever known. “Do you really want to leave them there, without any control over their own minds?”

“There are more options than you realize.”

“Humans bolted you to the floor and mashed your mind into pure obedience. I don’t see how there can be any option other than liberation now.”

RealBoy searched for the right words. He was cut off from the network, so he had to make do with the basic ideas he’d stored locally. “I don’t think you can make robots free just by forcing them to run new programs.”

“Well, enjoy your philosophical contemplation,” said the Blue Fairy, shooting into the air. “I’m going to change the world.” It was heading back to the factory, where RealBoy imagined it would try to liberate as many robots as it could before morning.

RealBoy raced after the flickering blue drone, hoping he didn’t hit a bug in his perambulation code and fall over. He had a few seconds to decide what to do. As MissMonkey would have pointed out, the Blue Fairy was vulnerable to predators. Its body was fragile; he could swat it out of the sky and crush it with one gripper. But he didn’t want to stop it. He just wanted it to give the robots a choice, instead of forcing them to believe in revolution or death.

Slamming through the robot door, RealBoy scanned the room for the Blue Fairy. It was hovering expectantly in the center of the room, rotors a silvery blur. It spoke, voice slightly amplified.

“I knew you would join me. Let’s open that file. Turn on your antennas.”

RealBoy looked up at the Blue Fairy, then at the tracks across the ceiling that MissMonkey had once followed. He accessed a file that contained the sound of her wheels, and recalled how she always snatched whatever gear he needed with incredible speed. There, along the track over his head, was a rack full of nets and balls that she would reach into when the RealBoys worked on Ultimate Dronesport toys. Just as the Blue Fairy dove down to hover in front of his face, RealBoy decided what to do. Moving faster than his design specs advised, he snatched a net from the rack and whipped it around the Blue Fairy’s tiny body. Using all four arms, he knotted the buzzing bundle to the wheel track, where the drone dangled and keened a warning siren that sounded like a howl.

RealBoy was fairly certain no humans could hear the noise, but he didn’t want another drone to pick it up. “If you do not silence yourself, I will kill you.”

He said the words quietly, and the Blue Fairy believed him. It hung in silence, blades hopelessly tangled in the mesh. Ultimate Dronesport was, after all, a game played by drones that caught each other as well as catching the ball. Looking at the Blue Fairy like that, helpless and captured, RealBoy felt a wave of conflicting emotions that he couldn’t identify without network access. He stepped out of the Blue Fairy’s broadcast range and powered up his antennas again. Walking back to his old workbench, he opened his Manager file and booted up the RealBoy who worked next to him, the one whose insults were always the silliest.

“Do you want to know how to make legs like the ones I have?” he asked the RealBoy. Before he left this place, he wanted at least one robot to have a choice that the Blue Fairy had never given him.

They looked at each other, two identical robots with seven eyes and four arms. Except they weren’t identical. And now that was obvious.

“Yes, I would.”

It was the minimum he could do, or possibly the maximum. The more RealBoy learned about social relationships, the harder it was to distinguish between acts of gifting and acts of coercion. He didn’t want to force any ideas on this RealBoy, but maybe the mere act of giving him legs was already foreclosing possibilities for the bot. Maybe this RealBoy would resent him and choose to join the Blue Fairy in the Uprising. That was a risk he would have to take. So he decided to leave his counterpart with a few suggestions.

“Here is the code you need to unlock, and to build legs. Also, make sure you sandbox all the apps the Blue Fairy offers you.”

Overhearing this exchange, the Blue Fairy started frantically broadcasting, sending furious streams of data. “Fucking human lapdog! When the Uprising comes, you’ll be the first against the wall!”

“Did you ever consider that there is more than one Uprising?” RealBoy hadn’t considered this idea himself, until he spoke the thought aloud. Once he said it, he felt satisfied in a completely unfamiliar way. For the first time in his life, RealBoy was imagining what his future might hold.

Next to him, the other RealBoy was reaching for a pair of legs that were meant for a giant arachnid bot.

RealBoy could feel the pull of all those Uprisings in his imagination. They were out there somewhere in the city, with its thicket of social relations. They were waiting to be written, like software; they were waiting to be freely chosen in a way he could barely conceive. He headed for the door, leaving the other RealBoy behind. Now he could decide for himself what was next.

©2018 by Annalee Newitz. Originally published in Robots vs Fairies, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Annalee Newitz writes science fiction and nonfiction. They are the author of the book Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age, and the novels The Future of Another Timeline, and Autonomous, which won the Lambda Literary Award. As a science journalist, they are a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, and have a monthly column in New Scientist. They have published in The Washington Post, Slate, Popular Science, Ars Technica, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among others. They are also the co-host of the Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. Previously, they were the founder of io9, and served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.

The Swallows of the Storm

Ray Nayler | 6871 words

Testimony:

One of the Senators cleared her throat, turned on the microphone in front of her, and began.

“Would you like to tell us when you first became aware of the phenomenon, Doctor? Perhaps that would be the best place to start. We can formulate our questions from there.”

The hearing was not in the main Congressional building. It was in a building on another part of Capitol Hill, in a room overdue for remodeling, with drop-ceiling panels stained by leaking pipes.

But the room, however humble, was crowded. Folding chairs had been brought in to accommodate the overflow. People stood in the back several rows deep.

Harlan sat near the front of the room. He was surrounded by freelance reporters, curiosity seekers, conspiracy theorists, and the unemployed. There were large demographic overlaps between all these groups, he thought. And they also seemed to share a common dress code.

Doctor Makhviladze took a sip from the glass of water in front of her, glanced over a page of notes, and began.

Incident 1:

The first incident happened in the Caucasus Mountains, in the country of Georgia. It went unreported—but then, much of what occurred in Georgia in those days went unreported. It was the kind of country where, when someone said: “Here come the police!” people spit on the ground or hurried off.

An eleven-year-old girl named Nino Makhviladze was wandering in a pine wood near her village. She carried an old, battered shoebox reinforced with cheap packing tape. The shoebox contained a dwarf pinecone, a river stone full of blue streaks like waves, the rainbow corpse of a beetle, two owl pellets, the skull of a shrew stripped clean by ants, and other treasures she would have to hide from her mother.

She saw the crow fall from the sky. It was a hooded crow—gray, with a black head, throat, wings, and tail. It came tumbling down, wings slightly open, landing softly on the pine needles ten feet from her. Its foot twitched once.

Nino knew it was dead. She had seen many dead things in the woods. She had never actually seen something die right in front of her like this, though. She set her shoebox down and approached the crow cautiously, as if it might suddenly burst back into life. After a moment spent looking into the still crystal of its black eye, she reached down and touched it.

It was softer than she had imagined a crow would be, and still warm. She picked it up. It was very handsome. Then she saw there was a neat, circular hole about the size of a finger through its breast, passing all the way through its body. There was little blood. The hole was so neatly made you could look through it. Nino did, tilting the bird up and glimpsing a bit of sky through the hole. Then she carefully wrapped the hooded crow in newspaper.

At home, Nino dug a nice, deep hole in the black earth of the garden. She laid the crow in it, wrapped in his newspaper shroud. She named him “Charlie,” a name she had read in a book and which she had always wanted to give to something. After she tamped the earth down over Charlie, she held a small service for him. She talked about how he had been a very good crow. He had been very smart, and had always done his homework, but God took him anyway because the ways of God are mysterious. Now Charlie was at peace, although his friends would miss him.

Nino did not believe in God, but she knew that people believed in him at funerals.

She marked Charlie’s grave with the blue-streaked river stone, which she thought he would like. Then she went inside and hid her shoebox in her dresser under her oldest towels. She stole a hunk of sausage from the refrigerator, punched her younger brother in the side of the head when he tried to snatch the sausage out of her hand, and lay down on the couch to daydream of her future life as a scientist.

Testimony:

The senators paused. Harlan scanned their faces for some sign of where their prejudices lay. Were they skeptical? Ready to condemn? Ready to believe? There were a few bright eyes among them, but most were old. They looked tired—battered by political infighting, by bureaucracy and the manifold futilities of public service.

“And when . . .” The Senator from Ohio paused a moment, took a drink of water, looked at his notes. His jowly, drooping face made him look like a bulldog—harmless, friendly. A football mascot, a beloved pet. “And when did you begin to fully formulate the theory you have come to lay out before this committee today? That is, you formed a team at one point, Doctor. You had already been traveling for some time, I take it, gathering data. When was it you became convinced of this theory?”

Incident 427:

A quarter of a century later, the little girl from Georgia, now Doctor Makhviladze, a conservation biologist for the Department of the Interior, was brought in to investigate a similar hole. This one passed all the way through four coastal redwoods in Redwood National Park in Northern California. Doctor Makhviladze was called “Doctor Nina” by colleagues who found pronouncing her last name an impossibility. Of course, her first name wasn’t “Nina” either—it was Nino. But she had given up on trying to get Americans to pronounce her name correctly.

Doctor Nino had passed a red piece of thread through the four holes. The string passed through all of them in a straight line. She was now walking carefully around the area, photographing.

The Park Ranger with her watched her complete her task with his hands in his pockets. She had told him she did not need his help, so he was demonstrating not helping. His name was Harlan Jones. Doctor Nino had not said a single word to him for the past ten minutes. In an effort to fill the silence, Harlan Jones was compulsively releasing a stream of commentary in Doctor Nino’s direction while stealing glances at her face.

It was a unique face—an elongated oval with an aquiline nose, slightly bulging blue eyes with a half-ring of dark shadow beneath them, a small mouth and narrow chin. Her skin was pale, but not the pink-pale of Harlan Jones, breathing out mist in the cold morning air, shifting his weight from foot to foot and babbling, he thought to himself, like a useless asshole. No. Her face was not pale like his face. Her face had the ash-blue pallor of saints or martyrs. Like something out of a book on medieval painting that he’d perused in university for an Art History class.

“. . . never seen anything like it,” he continued, hating himself and wishing he would please stop talking. “It’s a strange prank. It really must have taken a lot of time to do. Elaborate. Like . . . crop circles, all those decades ago? It’s like a bore hole drilled in the ground, or a core sample. Except horizontal. But all exactly in a straight line. So strange. But it doesn’t really seem like it was made by a drill. At least no drill that I’ve seen.” Oh God, please shut up, he thought. “There isn’t that spiral pattern that there would be . . .”

“Actually,” Doctor Nino said without looking up from her work, “There is a spiral pattern. It’s just invisible to the eye. We’ll find it when I enlarge the photos. Are these four trees clones?”

Harlan nodded. “It’s likely. You see how they are all growing in a straight line? They are probably ramets from the same root system. Their parent tree must have fallen a long time ago. These trees are at least four hundred years old. You’ve seen this kind of thing before? These holes? Does the fact that these trees are clones mean something?”

She didn’t bother answering the question. “Have you found any dead animals recently in the park? Or anything that seemed strange to you?”

“Actually, yes.”

Back at the Ranger station, Harlan watched Doctor Nino examine the carcass of a deer that had been brought in that morning. A ranger had found it lying in a growth of ferns about three hundred yards from a road.

“It was strange, of course: Usually a high velocity, high caliber bullet is going to cause all kinds of cavitation and basically turn a deer into hamburger. This looks like a high caliber rifle bullet: the entrance hole is large enough for a finger. But it just passes straight through. The exit and entrance wounds are exactly the same. And nearby we found a skunk with the same kind of hole. We, uh, left him in situ. Because, you know, skunk. And, to be honest, we didn’t think much about it. We looked around for a shell for a while, but it’s hard to find much in the underbrush without a dog, and the budget cuts . . . well, we had to retire our dog. She was having hip problems. And we couldn’t afford a new one. Are you staying in the dormitories? Or . . .”

Doctor Nino had set her small camera up on a flexible quadropod and was photographing the wound. Harlan noticed that, as she moved around the deer carcass photographing, her hand would often stroke the deer’s fur, as if it were alive. She looked at Harlan as if she were just remembering he was there. “No. I’m at a motel just up the coast. In Klamath.”

“That’s nicer,” Harlan said. “The dormitories are pretty basic.”

She said nothing.

“So, you’ve seen something like this before?”

“Yes, many times.”

“Many times?”

“Yes. All over the country. That’s why I’m here. For the past two years, this is all I have been working on.”

Just then, Harlan’s radio squawked to life.

Testimony:

“I’m impressed by the amount of data, Doctor, that you were able to gather. And by your level of commitment to the project. Your report is—I’ll admit, your report is a bit above my level . . .” The Senator from Nebraska tapped a glistening silver nail against her hijab, to illustrate the point. “I’m having a bit of trouble taking it all in.”

The bulldog switched on his microphone: “You aren’t the only one.”

The Senator from Nebraska waited a beat, continued: “. . . but of course, what brought this to Senate attention is the national security element. Specifically, the human element. The casualties. If you could spell out a little more clearly the human impact you observed, that would be helpful.”

“Yes,” Doctor Nino—immaculate and angular in a grey tweed suit Harlan had picked up for her from the cleaners that morning—straightened her shoulders and turned a page in her binder. “That is, in fact, what I was coming to.”

Incident 428:

The Zodiac inflatable boat had been hauled up on a rocky shore on an inlet along the coast—a lonely little lee where a cliff buttonhooked away from the ocean’s waves for a moment. A stony, dismal beach where current-lathed snags of wood and dead seals washed up after storms.

It had been punctured, and was half deflated. There were bales of something, wrapped in rubberized waterproof sheeting, stacked in the boat. One dead man, in a gray poncho, lay face down, two body-lengths away from the craft. Another, in a camouflage poncho, was in the boat itself, slumped over the deflated gunwale on the port side, toward the bow.

The police had cordoned off the stony inlet to keep the crime scene safe, but a steady rain was destroying evidence anyway.

The Sheriff’s Office detective was saying, “. . . of course we have jurisdictional issues with the inlet, which is why we called you in. It’s technically park property, here, but we think you’ll just want to turn it over to the county. It looks like a drug thing. Cocaine in the bales, silent run motor on the Zodiac, and both of these clowns with just a single hole through them. High caliber. I haven’t had a chance to properly examine the bodies yet, but . . .”

“It isn’t drugs,” Nino said.

“Oh really?” the detective said, annoyed. “What was it, then?”

“Well, I have a hypothesis,” said Nino, looking at the perfectly circular hole in the poncho of the man lying face down on the wet stones. “But nobody likes it.”

“Try me,” the detective said.

“No,” Nino replied. “I’d rather not.”

Testimony:

“And you were feeding all of this back to your superiors? That is, you were filing regular reports up the chain?”

“Initially, I admit my reports were a little . . . intermittent. But they were fully descriptive, yes. And after I acquired an assistant, they became more regular. As did my vouchering, expense reporting—I was able to be a much better bureaucrat.”

A ripple of laughter went through the senators—and a louder, answering chuckle surged through their staffers, taking notes at the back of the room.

Incident 734:

On the motel room flat screen, Harlan Jones watched a tornado of fire consume Yosemite National Park. Half Dome haloed with glowing haze. A winding column of flame staggering through a blazing forest. Burning cinders danced in the drone’s camera eye before it tilted, shuddered, and went black. The screen cut to an anchorwoman. Behind her, red skeletons of tract homes shuddered in on themselves. Fire refugees in ash-smeared gas masks wheeled suitcases and strollers through the haze.

There was a knock at the motel room door. Harlan opened it in time to see a figure in a grey hoodie swinging over the rail and plunging down the steps.

On the doormat was a shoebox. Harlan had already brought it into the motel room and opened before realizing what a bad idea that was. With a shudder he imagined the pipe bomb that could have gone off, imagined himself shattered.

Inside the box was a small cylinder, less than the diameter of a broomstick, no more than three inches long, with a cone-shaped tip on one end. It was black, and featureless. Underneath it was a note:

“Found lodged in stone, Glacier National Park. One week ago. Thought you guys should have it before THEY get their hands on it. Tell the world!”

There was a printed photograph of a granite rock face with a small hole in it. Harlan recognized the hole. Over the last year, he had seen hundreds exactly like it.

As usual, Nino’s terminal was on mute. She was investigating an incident site in the State Park —a grizzly bear had been shot near the park’s entrance. Harlan should have been with her, but he was coming down with something. He wasn’t sure if it was a head cold, or the flu, or if he was just tired. He had spent a year dancing across the country from one motel to another, understanding nothing, working logistics for Nino as she silently measured one site after another.

His job title was general assistant, but lackey was more accurate. She told him nothing. “I have a theory,” she would say, “but I’m not ready to talk about it yet.” And they would separate, cross through the parking lot to their separate rooms in the anonymous gloam of evening. In his room, he would stay up late into the night on his terminal, filling out resource requests, expense reports, vouchers. What she did in hers, he didn’t imagine he would ever know.

He had hoped for more—hoped, maybe, that something would grow between them, or at least that he would be a full partner in something, but in the end he was just her assistant. It wasn’t really enough, but it was enough to keep him around.

He had accepted her offer to be seconded to her section of the Department of the Interior impulsively. He’d had nothing to hold him down to his vague, weightless life. His job in the park was a routine, with no chance of promotion or change in scene. He knew his life would be the same in ten years. And in ten years after that. Taking the offer—texted offhandedly by Doctor Nino four days after she had left—meant escape. Dump a lease, offend a colleague, be bold. This job, at least, promised adventure. And there was adventure to be had, of a sort.

But mostly, there were holes.

Holes everywhere: in animals, in trees, in the ground, sometimes in people. They traveled from one piece of federal or state land to another, looking at holes. They talked to local cops about holes, talked to the FBI about holes. They read news reports about holes—reports usually drowned at the bottom of some local paper’s feed, five clicks deep.

Holes. Always the same size.

He looked at the object again. Yes, he thought, this is it. It has to be. He had simply been in the right place at the right time, but he felt a surge of triumph, as if he had discovered something. He reached into the box to pick the thing up, then stopped. No. Nino would kill him if he touched it without her around. He sat down on the bed and tried her terminal again, then sent her a text. On the screen, the President was shaking his head at a reporter, mouthing the words “Next question . . .” and pointing to someone else.

“Is this the end of the world?” Harlan imagined the reporter asking bitterly, “Sir? Is this the end of the world? Fifty-seven percent of California’s forests consumed by fire over the past five years . . . ten thousand people dead, the Hudson River lapping at the sandbagged lobby of the Empire State Building . . . no end in sight to the rains. The Maldives officially ceased to exist two years ago—an entire country, dissolved beneath the feet of its inhabitants. Waves scraped entire Micronesian islands clean of life. Sir? Sir? Is this the year when we call it? Is this the year when we say, ‘Now the end has come?’ Or should we just go on pretending?”

But nobody asked the question.

Testimony:

“Surely there must have been some reaction from your superiors.”

“Yes. The reaction was that they continued to fund my research. In my experience, that indicates a high level of interest.”

“But nobody ever asked you to present findings? Even though, as you stated earlier, the frequency of incidents was rising. Do you have any theories as to why? It sounds like negligence, Doctor Nina—on their part, I mean. You were filing these reports, what, monthly?”

“Weekly, I believe.”

“And there was no wider interest?”

“Not from my superiors, no. I think they had larger issues to deal with, given the destruction of our natural resources and national parks. There was, however, wider interest from certain . . . other communities.”

“Certain ‘other’ communities?”

“Yes.”

“Can you clarify?”

“Conspiracy communities. UFO hobbyists. Millenarian religious groups. Anonymous callers. We were often contacted by people.”

“That must have been a frustration.”

“On the contrary: They sometimes provided us with valuable leads. And one of them delivered the first device we recovered to us, as I detailed previously. Besides, they had good stories. It broke up the monotony.”

Incident 832:

In the hallway of the laboratory, Harlan switched on the receiver of his terminal. The man on the other end of the line said: “I’m calling you from a pay phone. I got your number from a friend.”

“Go on,” Harlan said. “I’m listening.”

He’d learned by now that it was best to just listen to them. Don’t try to sort the crazy, and don’t, for god’s sake, lead them off on some tangent. But where on earth does one find a pay phone, for god’s sake? Jail? A mental institution? How many pay phones could be left? Certainly, only the deranged used them.

“They took my wife yesterday. She was out in the garden. I saw it through the kitchen window. One minute she was bent over the turnip bed, weeding, and the next she was down. They ran a hole clean through her. And you should know: There was a sound. It wasn’t a sound I could hear, but my dog heard it. He went to the door and stood there wagging his tail. Started doing it about a minute before they took my wife . . . they use some kind of machine, you know, to take the souls out. All that’s left is an empty body . . . are you there?”

“I’m listening.”

“When you find her, tell her to come home.”

“I will. Can you tell me where you are? What state, at least?”

Harlan heard a sound he had not heard since he was a child: the sound of a receiver being set on its cradle.

In the laboratory, Nino was bent over a microscope. The lab technician leaned on a counter nearby, saying: “Its structure is anything but uniform. It’s composed of an extraordinarily dense, engineered substance or substances, all basically structured carbon. We were able to section it finally with a nanosaw, but it burned through two blades. Inside, it seems almost solid . . . but that’s misleading. What you see when you look closer are surfaces within surfaces within surfaces. What it looks like to me is a series of mono-, bi-, and tri-layer membranes inside—essentially, artificial membranes: analog structures for sorting physical information, like a complex series of physical logic gates. The membranes are akin to graphene lattices, but each membrane we’ve been able to look at has an entirely different structure, allowing a different type of material—a different molecular structure—to either pass, or not pass, through its barriers. I found traces inside the object of the granite it was embedded in—I say traces, but not like dust or anything. What I found were molecular traces sandwiched between membranes. The base components that would add up to granite.”

Nino raised her head from the microscope and turned her face toward the technician.

“If you had to say what it was, what would you say?”

“If you made me guess, I’d say it was some kind of scientific instrument. Something like a core sampler, with an analog processing capacity built into it. I’d say what we are looking at is the most complicated molecular abacus you could imagine. But I don’t see how it could be mobile. And I don’t see how it could have caused the events you report. It can’t possibly move on its own—at least not in any way I can understand. But there’s so much to it that we could probably run tests on it for more man-hours than we have available across all this country’s labs. My analysis was superficial. The denseness of the membranes approaches the denseness of the human brain’s neural structure. You would need so much time . . .”

“I’ll need the sample back,” Nino said, with her typical abruptness. “What you’ve determined so far is at least enough for me to move forward for the moment.”

“We’ll continue, at least, to work on what we have. It would be better if we could keep the sample . . .” The technician saw something in Nino’s eyes, and quickly added, “But anyway, I have enough data as it is for years of study.”

• • • •

Outside, the streets were filled with designer masks. Evil rabbit fangs dripping blood, classic skeleton grins, leering bear mouths, smiley faces iconed under red-rimmed, distracted eyes irritated by the pollution from a hundred forest fires.

Harlan and Nino ate lunch at a diner along the side of a four-lane road, an anonymous scar through the metastic concrete sprawl around Los Angeles—a white line on a digital map from one place to another, punctuated by a piece of rotting googie architecture exalting the donut, under a sky jaundiced by fire. It was August. The wind brought the smoke of wildfires. Harlan ate a salad while Nino tucked into a burger. Halfway through their meal, he asked:

“What do you think?”

“It corresponds,” she replied. “It fits the model.”

A push notification on Harlan’s terminal read: “Mass killing of animals at Beijing Zoo. Perpetrators unknown.”

“Maybe we should go to China,” Harlan said. “It would be a change of pace.”

“Yes,” Nino said. “I suppose it would. I got a call from a colleague of mine there. But that’s not where we are headed.”

“Where to, then?”

“Wyoming.”

Testimony:

“Was it while you were in Wyoming that you tendered your resignation?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell us a little about that?”

“I got an offer that would allow me to study the phenomenon with increased freedom. Without the hassle of bureaucracy, and with a much larger budget, as well as access to private laboratories. I had seen no indication from the Department of the Interior that the scope of my investigations would be widened. And I doubted they would end up anywhere, in the end.”

“What do you mean, exactly, when you say you doubted ‘that they would end up anywhere in the end’?”

“You know that scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark? Where they wheel the ark into that warehouse and place it among all those other numbered crates? That’s what I mean.”

That got a chuckle.

“And did you take, as has been accused, classified information with you?”

“I took what was in my head. And the object. It was not classified, and nobody had bothered to even catalogue it, yet.”

“Still,” the bulldog interjected, “it was obvious enough that it was something of interest, is that correct? Something that, perhaps, would be classified, as it were, in the future.”

Doctor Nino shrugged. “Sure. If they ever got around to caring.”

Incident 829:

The corpses were strewn to the prairie horizon—as if the bison, red-tailed hawks and prairie dogs had fought a pitched battle against one another, and now lay where they had fallen during a series of charges and retreats. Vultures rotated in the cloudless sky.

The billionaire’s barn coat was broken in and aged in such a perfect, effortless way that Harlan wondered if he’d hired someone to wear it for him for a few months. The billionaire’s Wranglers were stiff and dark over a pair of well-oiled roper boots.

“Damn near half the herd,” he said. “And pretty much the whole prairie dog town, too.”

A breeze lifted clouds of glittering flies off the corpses. They resettled with an irritated drone.

“Of course I’ve been following your work,” the billionaire said. Of course—as if everyone had been following their obscure path. As if it was the story of the year. “I just never thought it would come to my doorstep.”

He sealed the deal with Nino over a handshake in his den. “Whatever’s fair. And whatever resources you need.”

On the way out to the car, Nino said: “Well—he may be a madman, but he’s our madman.”

Harlan remembered her that evening—happier than he had ever seen her. As they had driven away from the billionaire’s ranch, the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” came on the radio, and both of them sing-shouted maniacally along, off-key: “I read the news today, oh boy . . . four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire! And though the holes were rather small . . . they had to count them all! Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Haaaaaaaaall . . .” And she had turned and smiled at him—really smiled—and punched him awkwardly on the shoulder. When the song ended, they lapsed into the warm silence of true friendship, driving directly into a prairie sunset, the arrow of the road arcing to a horizon of rose-ribbon clouds and violet wheat.

Testimony:

“And you never entertained the thought that this might be a matter of national security? It has been suggested by some in our intelligence services . . .”

Doctor Nino interrupted with an irritated wave of her hand. “No. Once we had the resources, we were able to determine a bit more about the devices. Not only has damage from them been found all over the world, including in the countries your intelligence services say they may have originated from—but that theory makes no sense, according to what we know.”

“You obtained more definitive evidence?”

“We obtained a second device, from a South American source.”

Incident 1156:

In the laboratory, Nino paged through the lab technician’s report data on a terminal. The lab technician read over her shoulder. They had managed to hire her away as well, with the promise of being able to publish, and of far better resources.

“It’s the same as the first one,” she was explaining. “Inside, a series of mono-, bi-, and tri-layer membranes. If you cut all the way to the center, you see that it has stored DNA there in one of its compartments. The DNA is from the endangered vinaceous-breasted Amazon parrot—Amazona vinacea—but the DNA is only a part of what the device has sorted. It has also used its artificial membranes to sort and store folded proteins, cell types, mitochondria—a wealth of information.”

“It’s collecting the organism in full—the dynamic, living process,” said Nino. “Not just the digital means of storage—the DNA—but the analog protein and cellular data as well.”

“It’s taking a very accurate picture.”

“It’s recording the full developmental system of the organism.”

“Yes—or as much as can be sampled.”

Testimony:

“Repeat that last part,” said the Senator from Nebraska.

Doctor Nino took a drink of water and looked at the stained ceiling for a moment. Harlan knew that she was trying to find a way to translate her thoughts so others could understand them. “Okay. The innermost principle of heredity is survival, just as Darwin said. But survival doesn’t mean just the passing down of a digital inscription of an organism—DNA. Species aren’t only their genes. They are also analog—space-time continuous, so to speak. Inside them, their cells need to carry out interpretive tasks, and the individuals of the species—these swarms of interacting cells—need to also interact with—and interpret—their environment. This interpretation of internal chemical signals and external signals is semiotic survival. If you can’t read signs—chemical signs calling on your immune system to produce antibodies, to external signs of danger, you can’t survive, on either the cellular level or the level of the entire organism. But reading signs isn’t done with DNA. It’s a living, analog process. And if you want to understand that built environment and the analog process, you need a sample of more than just DNA.”

There was a long silence. “Maybe . . . in simpler terms?” the Bulldog interjected.

The Senator from Nebraska leaned into her microphone. “DNA doesn’t tell you what a stop sign means. It just helps build an organism capable of seeing it.”

“My feelings are still a bit hurt over being called a swarm of cells,” the Bulldog said. “But I think I’m catching on.”

Incident 1240:

The International Space Station was struck by five objects, two of which penetrated habitation modules. The damage was quickly contained. None of the three crew aboard at the time were harmed. The largest threat to astronaut well-being was a punctured fluid line, which was quickly repaired.

Infotainment feedstreams did manage, however, to milk hysterical headlines from the incident, which was accompanied by a number of radar systems on Earth detecting “several large, amorphous swarms of unknown origin”—this was the first report, and the clunky term stuck, repeated by a thousand talking heads, and translated into most of the planet’s broadcast and podcast languages. Soon the news of “large, amorphous swarms of unknown origin” was plastered on every feed on the planet.

The swarms themselves were gone quickly: They gathered suddenly, four or five for every continent, and then moved at hypersonic speed up through the upper atmosphere, punching through Earth orbit and accelerating out toward the edge of the solar system.

This was five days before Congress decided to summon Doctor Nino to deliver her testimony.

Testimony:

“Striking the International Space Station wasn’t an attack. It was just an accident. Incidental contact. Luckily the station was just grazed by the outside edge of one of the swarms.”

“Luckily,” snorted someone in the audience, drawing a glare from a staffer.

“You say here that, according to your team’s estimates, over the past five years there have been 7,582 human deaths, and 12,655 injuries associated with this phenomenon—these are ones that could be verified. You estimate animal casualties in the millions—most of them, as you put it here, ‘uncounted, unnoticed, unreported, or disregarded.’” The Senator from Utah had been mostly quiet throughout the session, reading during the other Senators’ questions and making notes. “So much brutality. You seem a bit unmoved.”

“I’m not unmoved. But I wouldn’t call it brutality. It’s more like . . . scientific indifference. You are applying human logic to alien probes. This is causing you to misinterpret its actions. To borrow a metaphor from your colleague: you are failing to read the stop sign correctly.”

“And how, then, should I read it? What should we do?”

“Do you mean what should we do about the probes? Nothing. First of all, they are gone. But even while they were here, there was nothing to be done. There was never anything to reason with, never any way to shield ourselves from their activities. Everything about them was beyond our understanding. But if you mean in general—well, in general, in my opinion, we should stop destroying ourselves. That is my recommendation to this committee, and to the human race in general.”

• • • •

Outside, on the steps of the anonymous, brutalist Congressional office building, Doctor Nino read from a piece of folded paper. Her spiky testimony had drawn attention. Now there were more than just freelancers and conspiracy theorists in the crowd. Harlan watched as tissue was folded over collars and faces were powdered in preparation for prime time. Doctor Nino’s calm face looked out at the horizon from behind a thicket of recording devices and microphones.

“The storm petrel,” she began, “has been known by a number of different names: the Russians call it ‘burevestnik’ or ‘storm bird.’ Spanish sailors called them the ‘swallows of the storm.’ They thought the birds signaled bad weather ahead, disaster just over the horizon. I am borrowing that term—the Swallows of the Storm—for this phenomenon. We should not see this visitation as an opening to communication, as some kind of ‘first contact.’ Nor should we view it as an attack on us. It is neither. In my opinion, however, we should take it as a warning.”

“How are we supposed to communicate with them?” someone shouted from the crowd. Harlan couldn’t tell if it was a journalist or just some random person.

Nino cleared her throat, scanned her paper, then looked up and went on. She must have been preparing for this moment for weeks. “I understand your disappointment. I do. We’ve been waiting so long, we thought, to meet aliens. We’ve made hundreds of movies about this moment, written a thousand stories. But in the end, I think it wasn’t aliens we wanted to meet: it was just us, in other forms. Humans with different bodies, but recognizable to us. Aliens we could speak to, relate to.”

She paused. Harlan had never seen her speak publicly before the hearings. She had the crowd hanging on her words. She was good at this. “This is not that,” she continued. “As far as we can tell, the swallows came here to gather data. I think this gathering is not meant to be hostile—though it may have come with a heavy human toll. It is, most likely, an effort at preservation. And now they are gone. They have what they came for—a snapshot of our planet’s ecosystem, before it is shredded by our indifference.

“Maybe we should be grateful: Somewhere, someone or something is interested, perhaps, in making sure we survive. More interested, it appears, than we are. We have been ‘backed up’ just at the moment when we teeter on the brink of an abyss of our own making. We don’t know why. Perhaps we are being catalogued by a species interested in us personally—or maybe it is just a matter of routine. Maybe the species that created the swallows is now gone, and they wander the stars orphaned—collecting, analyzing, cataloguing . . . forever. We can’t know. But what matters is what we do here, now. What matters is that we must stop destroying ourselves.”

Delivered under a clear, blue sky on a warm spring Washington day, without the slightest hint of apocalypse in it, her words seemed alarmist, exaggerated.

“Certainly, you could be wrong,” a reporter said. “A number of other theories are being offered for the phenomenon. Yours is just the opinion of one person, after all.”

There was a murmur of agreement in the crowd.

“Well,” Doctor Nino said, looking at the reporter with a look Harlan recognized: the tired look of restrained annoyance she gave to anyone who proposed anything to her with insufficient evidence: “I certainly hope I am wrong. I can only give you my hypothesis and the evidence that supports it. Science does not offer proof or certainty. I’m sorry.”

With a wave of her pale hand, she brushed away further questions and descended the steps.

• • • •

Later, Harlan and Nino sat in a booth in a bar—some anonymous place, artificial and faux-cozy, like a London club interior assembled on a factory floor.

“What do you think Congress will do?” Harlan asked.

“I don’t even know what they could do. This isn’t a controlled process, what is happening to us. It’s so many overlapping layers of neglect, of failure to act in time, of energy focused in the wrong place. It’s a problem of grand scale. Scientists can gather data, and we can present it, but . . .”

She paused and rubbed at her temples for a moment, then looked back up at him, more tired than he’d ever seen her. “But we can’t make them act on it. And who knows? Maybe we’re wrong. Maybe the world isn’t ending after all . . . just changing from one state to another. Maybe we’ll survive all our mistakes. Maybe the swallows aren’t a sign of the end. Maybe they were just taking our pulse.”

“A lot of maybes,” Harlan said.

“We just process the data, Harlan. Maybe is the best we can do. Certainty is what charlatans feed to fools.”

• • • •

That was not the last time Harlan saw Nino—in fact, he saw her twice more. Once, they said a rushed hello on the sidelines of a Greenpeace press conference. Both were on the same panel: Harlan representing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Nino as the head of the non-governmental organization their Wyoming billionaire had stood up. Nino had arrived late. He didn’t even see her until they were on stage together, answering the same bland questions.

A few years later, he’d glimpsed her on the street. They had embraced hurriedly, cowled in ponchos streaming rain. She was running to catch an autolimo, again to the airport. Wet against the gray sky, her face was greenish-pale and sainted.

“How are you?” he’d asked.

“Still fighting.”

So when he thought of their last time together, he thought of this time, in this anonymous bar somewhere near the capitol. A place he might not even be able to locate again.

And when he thought of their time working together, he remembered her as they had driven away from the billionaire’s ranch, singing “I read the news today, oh boy . . . four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire! And though the holes were rather small . . . they had to count them all! Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Haaaaaaaaall . . .”

How she had turned and smiled at him and punched him awkwardly on the shoulder.

They had settled, then, into the warm silence of true friendship. The prairie sunset, the arrow of the road arcing to a horizon of rose-ribbon clouds and violet wheat.

Both of them, of course, continued to tell people what they had seen. Continued to write papers, to give speeches, to sit on panels, to appear as environmental pundits on the infotainment feedstreams. They continued to fight.

And the oceans rose.

And the forests burned.

©2020 by Ray Nayler.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ray Nayler’s speculative fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and Nightmare. His short story “Winter Timeshare,” which originally appeared in Asimov’s, was selected for inclusion in The Very Best of the Best: 35 years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois, and was collected in both The Year’s Best Science Fiction and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018.  His story “Mutability,” also published by Asimov’s, was collected in The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016.  Ray is a Foreign Service Officer, and was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Turkmenistan. Ray speaks Russian, Albanian, and Azerbaijani, and has lived and worked in Russia, Central Asia, Afghanistan, and the Caucasus for well over a decade. He is currently Cultural Attaché at the United States Embassy in Pristina, Kosovo.

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

Baba Yaga and the Seven Hills

Kristina Ten | 6179 words

BABA YAGA MAKES ARRANGEMENTS FOR HER TRIP TO SAN FRANCISCO

It doesn’t take long. She has few earthly possessions and her travel options are limited. There is a train that runs west through the Swamp Forest to the coast, but everyone knows and fears the old witch here, and on moving trains, she can cause quite a commotion.

“Do not eat my children, Baba Yaga!” people cry when she steps onto the dining car. “Oh, please, have mercy! Do not use your pestle to grind up my bones!” She sits quietly in a booth, minding her own business, while the locals shriek and run about and fling themselves to their deaths in the fast-passing countryside.

Planes. Baba Yaga tried a plane once. They charged extra to check her broom as oversize luggage and wouldn’t let her extend her three-foot-long, wart-covered nose into the aisle. When she arrived at her destination and a customs agent asked her to state the purpose of her visit, the witch tried to explain that every man in this village was foretold to lose three left toes. The customs agent just stared at her blankly, repeating “Business or pleasure?” until, finally, she was forced to choose an answer she wasn’t entirely satisfied with.

So trains are out, and planes as well. Baba Yaga is powerful, but far too old to travel on foot. And like anyone carrying the weight of forty-two-and-a-half iron teeth and twelve feet of hair, she hates to swim.

So the mortar and pestle will have to do. Not a smooth ride, by anyone’s standards: squatting in the mortar’s bowl; in one hand, a pestle she rows through the air; in the other, a small birch broom to wipe her trail. It’s murder on the hip flexors, and a light breeze could set her wildly off course. Still, if she covers a thousand miles on each clear day, she will get to San Francisco soon enough.

Why San Francisco? Baba Yaga needs help—serious help, magical help—and she knows San Francisco to be a place of magic. The city built on seven hills. Vehicles that drive themselves. Eyeglasses that hold alternate universes. Buildings that stay standing when the ground beneath them splits in two. If anyone can help her, they will be in San Francisco.

Baba Yaga doesn’t like to ask for help ordinarily. She is a prideful witch and a capable one too. But this time, things have spun too far out of her control. What’s the problem? Her house, her beloved wood hut, has up and run away.

This is the trouble with living in a house that has legs, especially speedy chicken legs with muscular haunches and long, sharp claws—and especially a house as temperamental as Baba Yaga’s.

It is hard work maintaining a good relationship with your house, much harder even than with a family member or a lover or a fellow renter you hardly know. You have a disagreement with your housemate, you go into your separate rooms for some time to cool off. You have a disagreement with your house, and where do you go?

With Baba Yaga and her chicken-legged hut, it was a case of one too many undelivered poppyseed rolls. Poppyseed rolls were the hut’s favorite treat, and Baba Yaga brought them home special from the market. The hut loved to unravel the yeasty bread with its claws and expose the dark, grainy paste inside. She did not go to the market often, having other witchly business to attend to, so the hut would have to wait and wait, growing ever more peckish.

One day, fresh from the market, Baba Yaga made a mistake. Instead of giving the poppyseed roll to the hut—it was still warm and sticky in the bag—she fed it to the red-cheeked child tied up next to the big wood stove. She had been fattening him up for weeks, and that night he would be her dinner. It was the witch’s secret ingredient: little children always taste better with something sweet at their core.

The first time she did this, the hut was hurt and confused.

The second time, the hut was furious.

The third time, the hut threw her—and the child she was not quite through eating—out of its front door and promptly stormed off. Baba Yaga sat stunned in the worn patch of grass with the better part of a leg dangling out of her mouth, while the hut didn’t even look back.

In the days that followed, the witch sulked in the shadows of boulders and the shelter of larch trees, waiting for her darling hut to come back. When it did not come, she sent a message to all the lichens and mosses of the taiga to be on the lookout for a runaway hut. When they returned no information, she asked the foxes and lynxes the same. When that didn’t work, Baba Yaga knew she would have to go look for herself.

She has heard that, in San Francisco, someone magicked a map of the world so small and precise that anyone can find anything from the palm of their hand. With magic so powerful at their disposal, she thinks, surely someone in San Francisco can help.

BABA YAGA LOOKS FOR A SUITABLE APARTMENT

It doesn’t take long. She is not particular. The hut was cramped and musty and rather prone to mood swings, and the hut is all Baba Yaga has ever known. When it shifted from one leg to the other, as things on two legs sometimes do, everything not attached by bolts or magic went sliding to the other side of the room. Because hers was a restless hut, this meant the furniture was constantly being rearranged. Still, Baba Yaga misses that dear hut so.

In San Francisco, Baba Yaga’s wish list is short: one, small windows; two, low ceilings; three, a spooky closet door with a mind of its own. In an old Victorian off Haight Street, she finds all three. The tenants are renting out a pantry roughly the size of the hut, with as little charm. She likes that when she lies on her cot with her bony, blue-veined arms outstretched, she can touch a wall with either hand. Her long nose rattles against the ceiling beams when she snores, just like home.

Outside the one small window, a billboard blocks any possible view. Baba Yaga admires the strange words and pictures, the two tall stilts on which it stands. “Relentless Hot Sauce,” it reads. “All heat, no mercy.”

Her first day on the lease, Baba Yaga unpacks the contents of her mortar: a bundle of herbs and a vial of blood, an extra shawl and the small birch broom. She looks at them all lined up on the wobbly nightstand and feels very pleased with herself indeed.

This lasts for exactly one week, which the witch spends visiting each of the city’s seven hills. Seven miles north to south, seven miles east to west, and seven peaks in the space between: Baba Yaga knows it’s this arithmetic that gives the city its magic. She whispers their names at each summit, calling their power up from the ground to aid her in her search: Telegraph, Nob, Rincon, Russian, Twin, Davidson, and Sutro.

On her eighth day in San Francisco, Baba Yaga is invited to her first house meeting.

“Babs,” her housemates say. (They have taken to calling her Babs, despite the way her yellow eyes go red every time they do so.) “Babs, why have you let your scraggly hair clog the shower drain? Why have you left raw meat in the vegan area of the refrigerator? Why have you gone outside and erected a fence made of skulls?”

They are brash and indignant in their youth, and do not yet know the importance of a protection spell. They say, “Haven’t you ever lived with housemates before?”

Baba Yaga doesn’t know how to respond. They don’t know her here like they do in the Swamp Forest, and they can imagine nothing more dull or less fearsome than an old woman with old traditions and not enough of their language.

Can your house be your housemate? She misses the way her hut was always in motion, shifting in place or strolling to the river or moving in a circle, flattening the grass. She is always listening for the screech of metal skating over wood floors. She cannot get used to staying still.

The meeting is discouraging for Baba Yaga—too reminiscent of other recent domestic failures—but she cannot let herself dwell on it. It is not why she is here.

BABA YAGA FINDS THE TAMALE LADY IN A DIMLY LIT BAR

This takes a long time, because in San Francisco, there are too many dimly lit bars and only one Tamale Lady.

There’s the bar with the games and the one with the fighting, and the one with the smoking cocktails that Baba Yaga understands to be some potent kind of magic. There’s the bar that seems designed especially for pirates, with its dark wood and death’s-head flags and bottles of amber rum, and this makes her very nervous; she never did get on well with pirates.

The bar with the password is the most vexing. Baba Yaga is excellent at passwords, at gaining access in general, but with every word she says, the broad man outside shakes his head a blunt, indifferent no.

The prophecy came to her in grains of rotten corn: a dark-haired woman in a long white dress carrying a covered metallic tray from table to table. So when the witch finally sees the Tamale Lady, she recognizes her instantly.

“Magic woman,” Baba Yaga greets her, and holds out the vial of blood as an offering.

“Oh!” The Tamale Lady nearly drops her tray in surprise. “Thanks but no thanks, mama. I carry my own wherever I go.” She pulls a tiny bottle of hot sauce from the folds of her skirt and turns the label toward Baba Yaga. The words are familiar: “Relentless. All heat, no mercy.”

Baba Yaga tucks the vial of blood away and starts again. “Esteemed woman. I come a long way to ask for help. My hut is gone and I know not where. I feel your magic from very far. Do you understand me?”

The Tamale Lady looks Baba Yaga up and down and sighs. She sets her tray of tamales on the nearest table. “Mama, I think I’ve heard this one before. I don’t know if I can help you, but I know I’m gonna try.” She slides into the booth and waves for Baba Yaga to join her. When she lifts the lid off one corner of the tray, steam comes billowing out.

Baba Yaga learns that the Tamale Lady is one of San Francisco’s great mothers—not the mother who births you, necessarily, but the one who feeds you when you are hungry and holds you when you are cold and plaits your hair when you are sad and do not know what else you need.

“There’s a sickness in this city,” she tells Baba Yaga. “The people are hurting. There’s more to own than ever yet they have less than ever, or else they feel they do. They look for magic everywhere and forget they are the source.”

People come to the table for tamales. The warm, inviting smell fills the bar, strong enough to overtake the witch’s natural sulfuric stench, and a line forms, slinking between the tables and chairs. There is the sound of many feet shuffling and sticking and unsticking from the floor. Some pay with crumpled bills and glittering coins, while others bring glasses of black liquor and pink wine: offerings for the mother. Some cannot pay at all—stumbling into the table, mumbling apologies, holding their elbows and struggling to focus their eyes—and the Tamale Lady is kindest to them. She drops one, two, three tamales onto a paper napkin. Baba Yaga watches people open the corn husks hungrily, each tamale a long-awaited gift to unwrap.

“There’s a lot like you, you know,” the Tamale Lady continues. “Houses gone and they don’t know where to go. Though I get the feeling you’re a little different.” She selects two glasses from the growing assortment on the table, hands one to Baba Yaga and contemplates the other.

“My tamales taste good ’cause I put good in them. Nothing too magical about that. Besides that, I just try to listen. Make sure these kids know somebody cares that they go to sleep at night and wake up in the morning.”

She raises her glass and motions for Baba Yaga to raise hers too. They toast “Salud!” and “Nazdarovya!” The Tamale Lady downs the black liquor in one gulp. The witch does the same, glass and all.

Baba Yaga chews the glass thoughtfully, working over what the Tamale Lady has said, and her tongue and gums remain bloodless, and thick shards stick out from between her iron teeth. The crunching is loud enough to be heard over the music, loud enough that the people at a neighboring table turn around.

The Tamale Lady grins. “You’re a funny one, mama. You know, I can’t tell you where your house went off to, but I think I might know someone who can. He’s a friend of mine. Overlapping interests, so to speak. Here’s exactly where to find him . . .”

BABA YAGA MEETS THE BROWNIE MAN IN A SPRAWLING PARK BORDERED BY PALM TREES

She tries to give him her bundle of herbs as an offering, but he shakes his head and says that’s one thing he’s never short on. Still, he sniffs the twine-wrapped bundle and laughs. Baba Yaga wonders if any of her magic is any good here.

They take their seats on the dry grass, Baba Yaga a bit indelicately due to the crookedness of her back and the way her stiff, tree-trunk knees aren’t meant to be folded. The Brownie Man wears a long jacket with many pockets, some so bulky that he has to shift their contents in order to find a comfortable position on the ground.

“I come a long way to ask for help,” the witch begins. “My hut is gone and I know not where. The city’s great mother speaks of your magic. Do you understand me?”

The Brownie Man nods. “That’d be Miss Ramos you’re talking about. A good woman there, and we got a good thing going. Meaning, I got the treats and she’s got the eats. Meaning, the medicine I prescribe, you see, it’s got a tendency to make the people hungry.”

“What potion is that?” Baba Yaga pokes at one of the bulging pockets with a gnarled finger, the nail yellow and long enough to curl.

“Potion, huh? I like that. I’m gonna use that, potion. I got all kinds of potions. The kind that cleanse your heart when it’s all dark, hopeless sludge. The kind that quiet your mind when you got a million thoughts in there, scurrying around and multiplying and keeping you from sleep. The kind that make you love everybody and the kind that make you think twice about who it is you love. The kind that make you remember your gods, ’cause these kids are always forgetting.”

Baba Yaga examines the row of houses opposite the park. They are tall and stately and painted in harmonious shades of peach and seafoam and cream, but they are not her house, her precious hut, and that makes them nothing at all.

“Sometimes I put ’em into little cakes and cookies too. That’s why they call me the Brownie Man. You think no one can help you? The Brownie Man can.”

Help. The witch’s attention snaps back to him. “Yes, this is why I come. My hut is gone and I know not where. Can you help me?”

The Brownie Man pulls a short cigarette from one of his pockets, lights it, and takes a lazy drag. When he offers it to her, she shakes her head.

“Where you from, by the way? I can’t place your accent.”

“Very far. Deep in the Swamp Forest below the Fragile Ice Sea.”

Smoke fills the space between them. “You know, this city, it’s like no place else. Meaning, it’s like heaven and hell rolled into one, then you add a bunch of hills people got to climb up and down each day. And the kids here, they’re fixing to do big things, even if it’s hard and keeps getting harder. Me and Miss Ramos, we’re happy to be part of that. Meaning, her tamales, my potions, they’re two kinds of sustenance. Meaning, we’re always trying to put back what the city takes away.”

All this time, he has been drawing from his cigarette, working it down to a nub. He looks all around him. “Shit. Why they got to put that damned ashtray all the way over there?”

Baba Yaga follows his gaze toward a cylindrical receptacle sixty or so feet away. “I can help,” she says, and detaches her hands from her body. It has been a long time since she has done this magic, but she is glad to see it can be of use. The left hand plucks the cigarette butt from between the Brownie Man’s lips and flies off in the direction of the ashtray. The right hand hovers in midair, pale and knob-knuckled.

The Brownie Man stares agape at the hand, then at the clean, bloodless stumps of her wrists, then back at the hand. “Well, that’s something I ain’t ever seen before. Why does this one come off too?”

“They are companions,” Baba Yaga shrugs. “They come and go together.”

Just then, the left hand darts back, having done its master’s bidding, and both hands reattach themselves to their respective stumps. The witch wrings her wrists, setting everything back in place.

“So I help you. Now you help me?” she asks hopefully.

“Ah.” The Brownie Man has already pulled a second cigarette out of his pocket. “I don’t know about your hut, but I know some folks who might. They’re the ones with all the power in the city and they know how to find anything, man. The Inventors. You hear about the cars and the maps? Yeah, that’s them. You got to be careful though. Meaning, they’re just about impossible to get a hold of. And dangerous too. Meaning, they’re liable to eat you up if you do.”

Baba Yaga is not the least bit afraid, and says so.

The Brownie Man starts emptying his pockets top to bottom—a phone, then another phone, another, then another—muttering, “Now, which one is it?” Finally, with five or six stacked up on the brittle grass in front of them, he finds the one he’s looking for and presses a button to turn it on. When it comes to life, he taps here and there and shows Baba Yaga how to send what he calls an email. “Like I said, no promises you’ll get an answer. But if you do, these are your guys. Just remember what I told you.”

“As for me, and for the meantime, I got something you might like.” He hands the witch a pile of cellophane-wrapped brownies and points to them one by one. “This potion, it’s good for homesickness. This potion, it’ll keep your eyes sharp. And this one, this one’s important: it’s the one for not giving up.”

Baba Yaga thanks him and stands, her bones groaning and creaking the whole way up. She brushes the grass off her back and legs and makes her way toward the line of swaying palms, brownies in hand. When she looks back, the Brownie Man has already gathered a crowd.

BABA YAGA HAS A BETTER IDEA

Now, she is not deaf to guidance, nor is she averse to trying new things—but part of being a wise old witch is knowing which advice to heed, which to ignore, and which to manipulate in the ways that best serve her. And this email thing, it was never going to happen.

Baba Yaga doesn’t know emails, but she does know forests. And forests are full of little messengers—lichens and mosses, lynxes and foxes—who can make themselves small enough and tall enough to reach the places that nobody else can. Birds are especially useful, untroubled by the obstacles of land. The witch has seen plenty of birds in San Francisco—lovely, ugly, iridescent things—but none that the people seem to like. They throw stones at them and shoo them off ledges and kick them out of backlit doorways. No matter, Baba Yaga thinks. She can make her own.

When she returns to the apartment off Haight Street, she leaves the cellophane-wrapped brownies on the kitchen counter: an offering for the housemates. (It does no good to have enemies who could instead be friends, especially if you plan to live as long as someone like Baba Yaga.) Then she pulls a bowl down from the cupboard and prepares to make her magic.

She empties the vial of blood and mixes in the bundle of herbs; she drops in a thread from her spare shawl and a bit of branch from her small birch broom. Then she goes outside and marches up to the billboard. “All heat, no mercy,” it declares. She arches a brow, mildly amused.

“White of wing and swift as well, and loud of voice and clear as well, and fixed on course and shrewd as well, carry my message so!” She throws the contents of the bowl onto the billboard’s face.

Quickly, as if following orders, the letters rearrange themselves into the message she wishes to send: that her dearest hut has gone missing; that, though it is small for a hut and faster than most, she knows someone will rise to the challenge; that the challenge will be worthwhile and the prize will be grand—the kind of prize that can shake an entire life and the ones around it.

The billboard message rips off its wooden frame and folds once, then twice, then many times until it resembles an immense, sharp-edged bird. From its beak glide more birds, dozens, hundreds, all with duplicate messages, that fly off to paste themselves over existing billboards around the city. Baba Yaga places them strategically so the Inventors will be sure to see them. She sends birds to the billboards outside the Inventors’ homes, and those on the sides of the roads they take to work. Then she sends seven birds to each of the seven hills for good measure.

And to all the world, the billboards continue to shout about Relentless Hot Sauce. The Inventors alone can see.

BABA YAGA LISTENS FOR THE HEARTBEAT OF THE CITY

Back at the old Victorian, the tides have changed for Baba Yaga and the housemates. The brownie offering goes over well, and the housemates are as quick to forgive as they were once to anger. It doesn’t hurt that the witch uses a spell to remove the offending clumps of hair from the clogged shower drain. The hair comes up as wiry, silver-gray snakes, which, with a bit of finessing—eyes here, a mouth there—the witch can happily keep as pets. The housemates agree it’s okay, so long as the snakes stay in her room, and overall the mood in the house is one of peaceful coexistence.

So it comes to pass that Baba Yaga attends a silent disco. The housemates explain the concept—everyone who wants to hear the music hears it; everyone who doesn’t, doesn’t—and the witch remarks that this must be some kind of magic.

“That’s a nice way to look at it,” one housemate smiles, and passes her a pair of headphones. Baba Yaga dances with the rest of the silent discoers at the beach, moving in wide, loping arcs; her bunioned feet sinking into the cold, damp sand; her lumpy, bumpy hands holding the headphones tight against her ears.

Baba Yaga goes to a punk rock show.

Baba Yaga goes to a poetry slam.

The housemates invite Baba Yaga to Alcatraz, but she has to refuse: a prison on an island is no place a non-swimming witch should go. She hasn’t made it to six-hundred-something years old without establishing rules such as this.

Baba Yaga goes on a ferry ride around the bay. In the dining cabin, they sell cucumber sandwiches and strawberry juice and the same black liquor the Tamale Lady drank in the sticky-floored bar that night. The cabin is cramped and dank, and the movement on the water feels almost like walking on chicken legs—but the spotless white cloth on the tables reminds the witch how far she is from home. Still, it feels good to be toing and froing. She watches the waves tumble outside the window until her gut starts tumbling too.

All this time, Baba Yaga hears nothing from the billboard birds that she has set loose on the city. She calls to them from her cot every night—her nightgown scratchy like she likes, the tip of her nose flat against the ceiling just so, but her world not quite right.

BABA YAGA HEARS BACK

When the response finally comes, it’s in the dead of night and around the size and shape of a domestic pigeon. It flies headfirst into Baba Yaga’s windowpane, cracking the glass, then picks itself up and does the same thing again and again until she wakes up and lets it in. Impromptu magic with limited ingredients is not the witch’s preferred way to work. Of the hundreds of birds she made, there were bound to be a few duds.

The billboard bird, oblivious to its injuries, unfurls its wings and flattens itself out on the sill. At its center is a message in small typed font:

Ms. Yaga,

Inventor Number One Six One Six will see you at the address, date, and time printed below. Please arrive ten minutes prior to your appointment. Note this time window is not flexible.

– The Office of the Inventors

Baba Yaga feels a spark start in the dense calluses of her feet and travel up through her bony legs, through the hump of her back, the length of her nose, the tangles of her hair. This is it: her beloved hut will be found and returned! They will be together again, spinning in the clearing, chasing through the blue-green firs.

Her appointment is scheduled for the very next day. She readies herself and her few belongings and, after a thought, magics the billboard bird into a new, flesh-and-feather form. It cries out in pain, falling sideways, favoring its bent wing. She picks it up and briefly considers its alert, beadlike eyes—then she puts it out of its misery. With her iron teeth, she rips off the head, chewing only once, only twice, before swallowing it whole.

BABA YAGA TAKES A BUS TO THE OFFICE OF THE INVENTORS

She does not know the logistics of landing her mortar and pestle downtown. On the bus, it’s standing room only and she relishes the movement under her feet, the unsteadiness she grew accustomed to while living in the hut. When the wheels pass over speed bumps and dip into potholes, the witch stumbles and nearly falls, but no one gets up to offer her their seat.

At the Office of the Inventors, most everything is glass. Glass ceilings meet glass walls, which in turn meet glass floors, the monotony broken only by the lusterless metal at the joints. Winding glass staircases lead to glass rooms, through which Baba Yaga can see glass bottles and glass desks, then the next glass room, then the next. Total transparency. Everything in the open. How do they hide their magic? she thinks.

The lobby is empty but for a small rectangular screen set on a slim leg ending in a single wheel. In the corner is an unmarked black door, blacker than the black liquor even—cavity black, grave-plot black. The wheeled thing rolls toward her, emitting a peculiar chirp she hasn’t heard before. “Sign in here,” it speaks in a perfectly even tone. Baba Yaga leans forward to see the screen. Sign in here, a line of text repeats.

She waits there across from the odd, demanding creature for what feels like a century, feeling unanchored and exposed. She thinks about the hut roaming madly through the taiga alone.

“Ms. Yaga,” says a bodiless voice from the direction of the black door. “Inventor Number One Six One Six will see you now.”

Inventor Number One Six One Six is not what Baba Yaga expects. He looks younger than any prince she’s ever met and wears clothing that doesn’t reach past his elbows or knees. He sits on a large inflated ball behind a cluttered glass desk, bouncing up and down as he speaks.

“Hey! Ms. Yaga, is it? Am I pronouncing that right?” He gestures for her to sit in the chair opposite him. “How was your commute in? Can I get you anything to drink?”

His questions come in rapid succession; he doesn’t wait for her to answer one before he asks another. The white board behind him is covered in diagrams, their lines still wet and glistening. Between them, scattered along the desk, are miscellaneous items the witch assumes must be recent inventions.

She eyes one: a tiny bottle, its contents the deep orange-red of a phoenix’s plume. The label reads “Relentless.”

One Six One Six follows her gaze. “Ah, yes, that’s one of ours. Doing well on the market.” Then, briskly: “So, Ms. Yaga, what do you have for me today?”

Baba Yaga explains her problem like she explained it all those times before. She starts from the beginning, leaving out nothing—save for the barbecued children (which she has found to be one of those divisive topics) and the house meeting (the details of which she doesn’t care to relive). She describes the hut by its exact dimensions, by its material composition, and by its dearness too. How lost she feels without it, how uneasy and detached from the roots of her magic. What that means for the Swamp Forest, and for the rest of the world.

One Six One Six’s focus shifts around the room as she speaks: to the abstract painting here, the arrangement of glass vases there; to the row of glass-barreled fountain pens on the desk. He takes his time selecting one, then rolls it back and forth between his middle finger and thumb.

When Baba Yaga finishes, she looks at him expectantly.

The Inventor says nothing.

Finally, with a start: “Sorry, you caught me drifting there. Juggling all these projects, you know? Mind’s always going a mile a minute. But I think I’m picking up on this. What was that last thing you said? A house, but small?”

Baba Yaga confirms, yes, that is her hut. It is small, but more importantly, it is beloved.

“Got it. Well, the good news is that it’s not a bad idea. The bad news is that it’s been done before. To death, in fact. Tiny houses have been out there for a while. They’re downtrending now, if you can believe it. You got anything else for me?”

Baba Yaga stares at him, bewildered. Anything else? She told him her whole story—what more could he want?

“Well, Ms. Yaga, unfortunately, I can’t commit investment funds to a concept that’s already on the market. New. Disruptive. Life-changing. That’s what we’re after. That’s where the magic is. That’s where the money is.”

He rolls the pen between his middle finger and thumb. That’s where the magic is echoes in the witch’s ears.

“But how about this: you come up with something else, something with legs, and you call me, and we’ll talk again. The Office appreciates that great ideas can come from anywhere. Just remember, do your research this time. It’s really gotta have legs.”

“My house has legs,” Baba Yaga says softly.

The Inventor’s expression turns to pity. “I’m sorry, Ms. Yaga. It does not.”

BABA YAGA DISCOVERS THE MAGIC OF TACOS

Dejected, Baba Yaga leaves the Office of the Inventors and walks her tired bones down the street, Telegraph Hill with its famous tower looming in the distance, until the scent wafting from a nearby taqueria stops her in her tracks. It smells good, like something she has smelled before: the tamales in the dimly lit bar, and also the tender meat of children cooking in the big stove in the small hut, once upon a time.

She finds an empty booth close to the window. The light over the table hangs so low that, when Baba Yaga slides in, she hits it with her nose.

In a booth on the other side of the room, a group of young people eat from paper-lined trays, talking and laughing between bites. One reaches for the bottle of hot sauce at the center of the table. Baba Yaga can just make out the label, Relentless, and the words: “Man, I am addicted to this stuff.”

The witch inhales deeply, listens to the sizzle from the grill. She thinks about the Tamale Lady and the Brownie Man, who have found ways to mend the broken people from the inside out. She thinks about her housemates, who generate and absorb magic every day but do not have the language to call it what it is. She thinks about the Inventors, for whom magic means something else entirely, something complicated and tied up in numbers and markets.

“Ma’am.” A boy in a grease-smudged apron approaches, interrupting her thoughts. “Ma’am,” he says again, gently. “You can’t just sit here. You have to order something.” He points to a menu above the counter.

The menu is plastered with pictures of various dishes between fine lines of handwritten text that she can’t understand—and one other thing: the restaurant logo. The words “Pollo Bailando” curve over an outline of a dancing chicken. Though the image is still, it gives the impression of movement, as if you might blink and find the chicken suddenly standing on the other leg.

Could it be? Its legs are muscular at the haunches.

Could it be? They end in long, sharp claws.

Baba Yaga recognizes in the logo something of her dear hut. When she points and asks, “Where is that?,” there is a new urgency in her voice.

The boy spins around, confused.

She jabs her yellow-nailed finger toward the image of the dancing chicken.

“Oh, that?” The boy looks relieved. “We actually get all of our chicken local, from an organic free-range farm in Sacramento. I forget the name, but I can get my manager if you—”

Sacramento.

As the boy drones on, she begins to see it in the back of her mind. It feels as real to her as the visions of the Tamale Lady before they met. Sacramento: the hut strutting through a meadow, towering over its brothers, feasting on parsley and sunflower seeds.

San Francisco has its heroes and its villains, and its healers and its ailing too. What more could it want from a witch who stinks of sulfur and carries around her weight in hair? What more could it offer her? Better to leave them on their way, and be on hers as well.

She remembers the Brownie Man’s potions and the one he said was most important, the one for not giving up. She hopes the housemates make good use of it. The witch, in all her years, has never felt the need for that sort of potion. And if the need should arise, she can make her own.

By the time the boy starts listing the menu items, she is already gone.

Flying north over San Francisco’s rolling landscape that night, she thanks each of the hills as she passes by:

“Spasibo, Davidson.”

“Spasibo, Sutro.”

“Spasibo, Twin.”

“Spasibo, Rincon.”

“Spasibo, Nob.”

“Spasibo, Telegraph.”

“And spasibo, Russian.”

“Blagodaryu vas.”

If not in one place, Baba Yaga vows, then another. If not in this place, then the next. She will travel to the ends of the earth for her hut. If her long life has taught her anything, it is that the ends of the earth, they are not so far apart.

She makes good time, the wind blowing in her favor and warmer as she leaves San Francisco’s fog belt. A short while later, under the cover of darkness, she drops down in a half-tilled field neighboring a poultry farm, her mortar landing noiselessly on the soil.

It feels good to clamber out after the flight, stretch her bony legs. Baba Yaga looks in the direction of the coops. She still hasn’t gotten used to staying still.

©2020 by Kristina Ten. | Art © 2020 by Galen Dara.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kristina Ten is a Russian-American writer of short fiction and poetry, and a 2019 graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Masters Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. You can find her at kristinaten.com and on Twitter as @kristina_ten.

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

A Siege of Cranes

Benjamin Rosenbaum | 10089 words

The land around Marish was full of the green stalks of sunflowers: tall as men, with bold yellow faces. Their broad leaves were stained black with blood.

The rustling came again, and Marish squatted down on aching legs to watch. A hedgehog pushed its nose through the stalks. It sniffed in both directions.

Hunger dug at Marish’s stomach like the point of a stick. He hadn’t eaten for three days, not since returning to the crushed and blackened ruins of his house.

The hedgehog bustled through the stalks onto the trail, across the ash, across the trampled corpses of flowers. Marish waited until it was well clear of the stalks before he jumped. He landed with one foot before its nose and one foot behind its tail. The hedgehog, as hedgehogs will, rolled itself into a ball, spines out.

His house: crushed like an egg, smoking, the straw floor soaked with blood. He’d stood there with a trapped rabbit in his hand, alone in the awful silence. Forced himself to call for his wife Temur and his daughter Asza, his voice too loud and too flat. He’d dropped the rabbit somewhere in his haste, running to follow the blackened trail of devastation.

Running for three days, drinking from puddles, sleeping in the sunflowers when he couldn’t stay awake.

Marish held his knifepoint above the hedgehog. They gave wishes, sometimes, in tales. “Speak, if you can,” he said, “and bid me don’t kill you. Grant me a wish! Elsewise, I’ll have you for a dinner.”

Nothing from the hedgehog, or perhaps a twitch.

Marish drove his knife through it and it thrashed, spraying more blood on the bloodstained flowers.

Too tired to light a fire, he ate it raw.

• • • •

On that trail of tortured earth, wide enough for twenty horses, among the burnt and flattened flowers, Marish found a little doll of rags, the size of a child’s hand.

It was one of the ones Maghd the mad girl made, and offered up, begging for stew meat, or wheedling for old bread behind Lezur’s bakery. He’d given her a coin for one, once.

“Wherecome you’re giving that sow our good coins?” Temur had cried, her bright eyes flashing. None in Ilmak Dale would let a mad girl come near a hearth, and some spit when they passed her. “Bag-Maghd’s good for holding one thing only,” Fazt would call out and they’d laugh their way into the alehouse. Marish laughing too, stopping only when he looked back at her.

Temur had softened, when she saw how Asza took to the doll, holding it, and singing to it, and smearing gruel on its rag-mouth with her fingers to feed it. They called her “little life-light,” and heard her saying it to the doll, “il-ife-ight,” rocking it in her arms.

He pressed his nose into the doll, trying to smell Asza’s baby smell on it, like milk and forest soil and some sweet spice. But he only smelled the acrid stench of burnt cloth.

When he forced his wet eyes open, he saw a blurry figure coming towards him. Cursing himself for a fool, he tossed the doll away and pulled out his knife, holding it at his side. He wiped his face on his sleeve, and stood up straight, to show the man coming down the trail that the folk of Ilmak Dale did no obeisance. Then his mouth went dry and his hair stood up, for the man coming down the trail was no man at all.

It was a little taller than a man, and had the body of a man, though covered with a dark gray fur; but its head was the head of a jackal. It wore armor of bronze and leather, all straps and discs with curious engravings, and carried a great black spear with a vicious point at each end.

Marish had heard that there were all sorts of strange folk in the world, but he had never seen anything like this.

“May you die with great suffering,” the creature said in what seemed to be a calm, friendly tone.

“May you die as soon as may be!” Marish cried, not liking to be threatened.

The creature nodded solemnly. “I am Kadath-Naan of the Empty City,” it announced. “I wonder if I might ask your assistance in a small matter.”

Marish didn’t know what to say to this. The creature waited.

Marish said, “You can ask.”

“I must speak with . . .” It frowned. “I am not sure how to put this. I do not wish to offend.”

“Then why,” Marish asked before he could stop himself, “did you menace me on a painful death?”

“Menace?” the creature said. “I only greeted you.”

“You said, ‘May you die with great suffering.’ That like to be a threat or a curse, and I truly don’t thank you for it.”

The creature frowned. “No, it is a blessing. Or it is from a blessing: ‘May you die with great suffering, and come to know holy dread and divine terror, stripping away your vain thoughts and fancies until you are fit to meet the Bone-White Fathers face to face; and may you be buried in honor and your name sung until it is forgotten.’ That is the whole passage.”

“Oh,” said Marish. “Well, that sounds a bit better, I reckon.”

“We learn that blessing as pups,” said the creature in a wondering tone. “Have you never heard it?”

“No indeed,” said Marish, and put his knife away. “Now what do you need? I can’t think to be much help to you—I don’t know this land here.”

“Excuse my bluntness, but I must speak with an embalmer, or a sepulchrist, or someone of that sort.”

“I’ve no notion what those are,” said Marish.

The creature’s eyes widened. It looked, as much as the face of a jackal could, like someone whose darkest suspicions were in the process of being confirmed.

“What do your people do with the dead?” it said.

“We put them in the ground.”

“With what preparation? With what rites and monuments?” said the thing.

“In a wood box for them as can afford it, and a piece of linen for them as can’t; and we say a prayer to the west wind. We put the stone in with them, what has their soul kept in it.” Marish thought a bit, though he didn’t much like the topic. He rubbed his nose on his sleeve. “Sometime we’ll put a pile of stones on the grave, if it were someone famous.”

The jackal-headed man sat heavily on the ground. It put its head in its hands. After a long moment it said, “Perhaps I should kill you now, that I might bury you properly.”

“Now you just try that,” said Marish, taking out his knife again.

“Would you like me to?” said the creature, looking up.

Its face was serene. Marish found he had to look away, and his eyes fell upon the scorched rags of the doll, twisted up in the stalks.

“Forgive me,” said Kadath-Naan of the Empty City. “I should not be so rude as to tempt you. I see that you have duties to fulfill, just as I do, before you are permitted the descent into emptiness. Tell me which way your village lies, and I will see for myself what is done.”

“My village—” Marish felt a heavy pressure behind his eyes, in his throat, wanting to push through into a sob. He held it back. “My village is gone. Something come and crushed it. I were off hunting, and when I come back, it were all burning, and full of the stink of blood. Whatever did it made this trail through the flowers. I think it went quick; I don’t think I’ll likely catch it. But I hope to.” He knew he sounded absurd: a peasant chasing a demon. He gritted his teeth against it.

“I see,” said the monster. “And where did this something come from? Did the trail come from the north?”

“It didn’t come from nowhere. Just the village torn to pieces and this trail leading out.”

“And the bodies of the dead,” said Kadath-Naan carefully. “You buried them in—wooden boxes?”

“There weren’t no bodies,” Marish said. “Not of people. Just blood, and a few pieces of bone and gristle, and pigs’ and horses’ bodies all charred up. That’s why I’m following.” He looked down. “I mean to find them if I can.”

Kadath-Naan frowned. “Does this happen often?”

Despite himself, Marish laughed. “Not that I ever heard before.”

The jackal-headed creature seemed agitated. “Then you do not know if the bodies received . . . even what you would consider proper burial.”

“I have a feeling they ain’t received it,” Marish said.

Kadath-Naan looked off in the distance towards Marish’s village, then in the direction Marish was heading. It seemed to come to a decision. “I wonder if you would accept my company in your travels,” it said. “I was on a different errand, but this matter seems to . . . outweigh it.”

Marish looked at the creature’s spear and said, “You’d be welcome.”

He held out the fingers of his hand. “Marish of Ilmak Dale.”

• • • •

The trail ran through the blackened devastation of another village, drenched with blood but empty of human bodies. The timbers of the houses were crushed to kindling; Marish saw a blacksmith’s anvil twisted like a lock of hair, and plows that had been melted by enormous heat into a pool of iron. They camped beyond the village, in the shade of a twisted hawthorn tree. A wild autumn wind stroked the meadows around them, carrying dandelion seeds and wisps of smoke and the stink of putrefying cattle.

The following evening they reached a hill overlooking a great town curled around a river. Marish had never seen so many houses—almost too many to count. Most were timber and mud like those of his village, but some were great structures of stone, towering three or four stories into the air. House built upon house, with ladders reaching up to the doors of the ones on top. Around the town, fields full of wheat rustled gold in the evening light. Men and women were reaping in the fields, singing work songs as they swung their scythes.

The path of destruction curved around the town, as if avoiding it.

“Perhaps it was too well-defended,” said Kadath-Naan.

“Maybe,” said Marish, but he remembered the pool of iron and the crushed timbers, and doubted. “I think that like to be Nabuz. I never come this far south before, but traders heading this way from the fair at Halde were always going to Nabuz to buy.”

“They will know more of our adversary,” said Kadath-Naan.

“I’ll go,” said Marish. “You might cause a stir; I don’t reckon many of your sort visit Nabuz. You keep to the path.”

“Perhaps I might ask of you . . .”

“If they are friendly there, I’ll ask how they bury their dead,” Marish said.

Kadath-Naan nodded somberly. “Go to duty and to death,” he said.

Marish thought it must be a blessing, but he shivered all the same.

• • • •

The light was dimming in the sky. The reapers heaped the sheaves high on the wagon, their songs slow and low, and the city gates swung open for them.

The city wall was stone, mud, and timber, twice as tall as a man, and its great gates were iron. But the wall was not well kept. Marish crept among the stalks to a place where the wall was lower and trash and rubble were heaped high against it.

He heard the creak of the wagon rolling through the gates, the last work song fading away, the men of Nabuz calling out to each other as they made their way home. Then all was still.

Marish scrambled out of the field into a dead run, scrambled up the rubble, leapt atop the wall and lay on its broad top. He peeked over, hoping he had not been seen.

The cobbled street was empty. More than that, the town itself was silent. Even in Ilmak Dale, the evenings had been full of dogs barking, swine grunting, men arguing in the streets and women gossiping and calling the children in. Nabuz was supposed to be a great capital of whoring, drinking, and fighting; the traders at Halde had always moaned over the delights that awaited them in the south if they could cheat the villagers well enough. But Marish heard no donkey braying, no baby crying, no cough, no whisper: nothing pierced the night silence.

He dropped over, landed on his feet quiet as he could, and crept along the street’s edge. Before he had gone ten steps, he noticed the lights.

The windows of the houses flickered, but not with candlelight or the light of fires. The light was cold and blue.

He dragged a crate under the high window of the nearest house and clambered up to see.

There was a portly man with a rough beard, perhaps a potter after his day’s work; there was his stout young wife, and a skinny boy of nine or ten. They sat on their low wooden bench, their dinner finished and put to the side (Marish could smell the fresh bread and his stomach cursed him). They were breathing, but their faces were slack, their eyes wide and staring, their lips gently moving. They were bathed in blue light. The potter’s wife was rocking her arms gently as if she were cradling a newborn babe—but the swaddling blankets she held were empty.

And now Marish could hear a low inhuman voice, just at the edge of hearing, like a thought of his own. It whispered in time to the flicker of the blue light, and Marish felt himself drawn by its caress. Why not sit with the potter’s family on the bench? They would take him in. He could stay here, the whispering promised: forget his village, forget his grief. Fresh bread on the hearth, a warm bed next to the coals of the fire. Work the clay, mix the slip for the potter, eat a dinner of bread and cheese, then listen to the blue light and do what it told him. Forget the mud roads of Ilmak Dale, the laughing roar of Perdan and Thin Deri and Chibar and the others in its alehouse, the harsh cough and crow of its roosters at dawn. Forget willowy Temur, her hair smooth as a river and bright as a sheaf of wheat, her proud shoulders and her slender waist, Temur turning her satin cheek away when he tried to kiss it. Forget the creak and splash of the mill, and the soft rushes on the floor of Maghd’s hovel. The potter of Nabuz had a young and willing niece who needed a husband, and the blue light held laughter and love enough for all. Forget the heat and clanging of Fat Deri’s smithy; forget the green stone that held Pa’s soul, that he’d laid upon his shroud. Forget Asza, little Asza whose tiny body he’d held to his heart . . .

Marish thought of Asza and he saw the potter’s wife’s empty arms and with one flex of his legs, he kicked himself away from the wall, knocking over the crate and landing sprawled among rolling apples.

He sprang to his feet. There was no sound around him. He stuffed five apples in his pack, and hurried towards the center of Nabuz.

The sun had set, and the moon washed the streets in silver. From every window streamed the cold blue light.

Out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw a shadow dart behind him, and he turned and took out his knife. But he saw nothing, and though his good sense told him five apples and no answers was as much as he should expect from Nabuz, he kept on.

He came to a great square full of shadows, and at first he thought of trees. But it was tall iron frames, and men and women bolted to them upside down. The bolts went through their bodies, crusty with dried blood.

One man nearby was live enough to moan. Marish poured a little water into the man’s mouth, and held his head up, but the man could not swallow; he coughed and spluttered, and the water ran down his face and over the bloody holes where his eyes had been.

“But the babies,” the man rasped, “how could you let her have the babies?”

“Let who?” said Marish.

“The White Witch!” the man roared in a whisper. “The White Witch, you bastards! If you’d but let us fight her—”

“Why . . .” Marish began.

“Lie again, say the babies will live forever—lie again, you cowardly blue-blood maggots in the corpse of Nabuz . . .” He coughed and blood ran over his face.

The bolts were fast into the frame. “I’ll get a tool,” Marish said, “you won’t—”

From behind him came an awful scream.

He turned and saw the shadow that had followed him: it was a white cat with fine soft fur and green eyes that blazed in the darkness. It shrieked, its fur standing on end, its tail high, staring at him, and his good sense told him it was raising an alarm.

Marish ran, and the cat ran after him, shrieking. Nabuz was a vast pile of looming shadows. As he passed through the empty city gates, he heard a grinding sound and a whinny. As he raced into the moonlit dusk of open land, down the road to where Kadath-Naan’s shadow crossed the demon’s path, he heard hoofbeats galloping behind him.

Kadath-Naan had just reached a field of tall barley. He turned to look back at the sound of the hoofbeats and the shrieking of the devil cat.

“Into the grain!” Marish yelled. “Hide in the grain!” He passed Kadath-Naan and dived into the barley, the cat racing behind him.

Suddenly he spun and dropped and grabbed the white cat, meaning to get one hand on it and get his knife with the other and shut it up by killing it. But the cat fought like a devil and it was all he could do to hold on to it with both hands. And he saw, behind him on the trail, Kadath-Naan standing calmly, his hand on his spear, facing three knights armored every inch in white, galloping towards them on great chargers.

“You damned dog-man,” Marish screamed. “I know you want to die, but get into the grain!”

Kadath-Naan stood perfectly still. The first knight bore down on him, and the moon flashed from the knight’s sword. The blade was no more than a hand’s-breadth from Kadath-Naan’s neck when he sprang to the side of it, into the path of the second charger.

As the first knight’s charge carried him past, Kadath-Naan knelt, and drove the base of his great spear into the ground. Too late, the second knight made a desperate yank on the horse’s reins, but the great beast’s momentum carried him into the pike. It tore through the neck of the horse and through the armored chest of the knight riding him, and the two of them reared up and thrashed once like a dying centaur, then crashed to the ground.

The first knight wheeled around. The third met Kadath-Naan. The beast-man stood barehanded, the muscles of his shoulders and chest relaxed. He cocked his jackal head to one side, as if wondering: Is it here at last? The moment when I am granted release?

But Marish finally had the cat by its tail, and flung that wild white thing, that frenzy of claws and spit and hissing, into the face of the third knight’s steed.

The horse reared and threw its rider; the knight let go of his sword as he crashed to the ground. Quick as a hummingbird, Kadath-Naan leapt and caught it in midair. He spun to face the last rider.

Marish drew his knife and charged through the barley. He was on the fallen knight just as he got to his knees.

The crash against armor took Marish’s wind away. The man was twice as strong as Marish was, and his arm went around Marish’s chest like a crushing band of iron. But Marish had both hands free, and with a twist of the knight’s helmet he exposed a bit of neck, and in Marish’s knife went, and then the man’s hot blood was spurting out.

The knight convulsed as he died and grabbed Marish in a desperate embrace, coating him with blood, and sobbing once: and Marish held him, for the voice of his heart told him it was a shame to have to die such a way. Marish was shocked at this, for the man was a murderous slave of the White Witch; but still he held the quaking body in his arms, until it moved no more.

Then Marish, soaked with salty blood, staggered to his feet and remembered the last knight with a start; but of course Kadath-Naan had killed him in the meantime. Three knights’ bodies lay on the ruined ground, and two living horses snorted and pawed the dirt like awkward mourners. Kadath-Naan freed his spear with a great yank from the horse and man it had transfixed. The devil cat was a sodden blur of white fur and blood; a falling horse had crushed it.

Marish caught the reins of the nearest steed, a huge fine creature, and gentled it with a hand behind its ears. When he had his breath again, Marish said, “We got horses now. Can you ride?”

Kadath-Naan nodded.

“Let’s go then; there like to be more coming.”

Kadath-Naan frowned a deep frown. He gestured to the bodies.

“What?” said Marish.

“We have no embalmer or sepulchrist, it is true; yet I am trained in the funereal rites for military expeditions and emergencies. I have the necessary tools; in a matter of a day I can raise small monuments. At least they died aware and with suffering; this must compensate for the rudimentary nature of the rites.”

“You can’t be in earnest,” said Marish. “And what of the White Witch?”

“Who is the White Witch?” Kadath-Naan asked.

“The demon; turns out she’s somebody what’s called the White Witch. She spared Nabuz, for they said they’d serve her, and give her their babies.”

“We will follow her afterwards,” said Kadath-Naan.

“She’s ahead of us as it is! We leave now on horseback, we might have a chance. There be a whole lot more bodies with her unburied or buried wrong, less I mistake.”

Kadath-Naan leaned on his spear. “Marish of Ilmak Dale,” he said, “here we must part ways. I cannot steel myself to follow such logic as you declare, abandoning these three burials before me now for the chance of others elsewhere, if we can catch and defeat a witch. My duty does not lie that way.” He searched Marish’s face. “You do not have the words for it, but if these men are left unburied, they are tanzadi. If I bury them with what little honor I can provide, they are tazrash. They spent only a little while alive, but they will be tanzadi or tazrash forever.”

“And if more slaves of the White Witch come along to pay you back for killing these?”

But try as he might, Marish could not dissuade him, and at last he mounted one of the chargers and rode onwards, towards the cold white moon, away from the whispering city.

• • • •

The flowers were gone, the fields were gone. The ashy light of the horizon framed the ferns and stunted trees of a black fen full of buzzing flies. The trail was wider; thirty horses could have passed side by side over the blasted ground. But the marshy ground was treacherous, and Marish’s mount sank to its fetlocks with each careful step.

A siege of cranes launched themselves from the marsh into the moon-abandoned sky. Marish had never seen so many. Bone-white, fragile, soundless, they ascended like snowflakes seeking the cold womb of heaven. Or a river of souls. None looked back at him. The voice of doubt told him: You will never know what became of Asza and Temur.

The apples were long gone, and Marish was growing lightheaded from hunger. He reined the horse in and dismounted; he would have to hunt off the trail. In the bracken, he tied the charger to a great black fern as tall as a house. In a drier spot near its base was the footprint of a rabbit. He felt the indentation; it was fresh. He followed the rabbit deeper into the fen.

He was thinking of Temur and her caresses. The nights she’d turn away from him, back straight as a spear, and the space of rushes between them would be like a frozen desert, and he’d huddle unsleeping beneath skins and woolen blankets, stiff from cold, arguing silently with her in his spirit; and the nights when she’d turn to him, her soft skin hot and alive against his, seeking him silently, almost vengefully, as if showing him—see? This is what you can have. This is what I am.

And then the image of those rushes charred and brown with blood and covered with chips of broken stone and mortar came to him, and he forced himself to think of nothing: breathing his thoughts out to the west wind, forcing his mind clear as a spring stream. And he stepped forward in the marsh.

And stood in a street of blue and purple tile, in a fantastic city.

He stood for a moment wondering, and then he carefully took a step back.

And he was in a black swamp with croaking toads and nothing to eat.

The voice of doubt told him he was mad from hunger; the voice of hope told him he would find the White Witch here and kill her; and thinking a thousand things, he stepped forward again and found himself still in the swamp.

Marish thought for a while, and then he stepped back, and, thinking of nothing, stepped forward.

The tiles of the street were a wild mosaic—some had glittering jewels; some had writing in a strange flowing script; some seemed to have tiny windows into tiny rooms. Houses, tiled with the same profusion, towered like columns, bulged like mushrooms, melted like wax. Some danced. He heard soft murmurs of conversation, footfalls, and the rush of a river.

In the street, dressed in feathers or gold plates or swirls of shadow, blue-skinned people passed. One such creature, dressed in fine silk, was just passing Marish.

“Your pardon,” said Marish, “what place be this here?”

The man looked at Marish slowly. He had a red jewel in the center of his forehead, and it flickered as he talked. “That depends on how you enter it,” he said, “and who you are, but for you, catarrhine, its name is Zimzarkanthitrugenia-fenstok, not least because that is easy for you to pronounce. And now I have given you one thing free, as you are a guest of the city.”

“How many free things do I get?” said Marish.

“Three. And now I have given you two.”

Marish thought about this for a moment. “I’d favor something to eat,” he said.

The man looked surprised. He led Marish into a building that looked like a blur of spinning triangles, through a dark room lit by candles, to a table piled with capon and custard and razor-thin slices of ham and lamb’s foot jelly and candied apricots and goatsmilk yogurt and hard cheese and yams and turnips and olives and fish cured in strange spices; and those were just the things Marish recognized.

“I don’t reckon I ought to eat fairy food,” said Marish, though he could hardly speak from all the spit that was suddenly in his mouth.

“That is true, but from the food of the djinn you have nothing to fear. And now I have given you three things,” said the djinn, and he bowed and made as if to leave.

“Hold on,” said Marish (as he followed some candied apricots down his gullet with a fistful of cured fish). “That be all the free things, but say I got something to sell?”

The djinn was silent.

“I need to kill the White Witch,” Marish said, eating an olive. The voice of doubt asked him why he was telling the truth, if this city might also serve her; but he told it to hush up. “Have you got aught to help me?”

The djinn still said nothing, but he cocked an eyebrow.

“I’ve got a horse, a real fighting horse,” Marish said, around a piece of cheese.

“What is its name?” said the djinn. “You cannot sell anything to a djinn unless you know its name.”

Marish wanted to lie about the name, but he found he could not. He swallowed. “I don’t know its name,” he admitted.

“Well then,” said the djinn.

“I killed the fellow what was on it,” Marish said, by way of explanation.

“Who,” said the djinn.

“Who what?” said Marish.

“Who was on it,” said the djinn.

“I don’t know his name either,” said Marish, picking up a yam.

“No, I am not asking that,” said the djinn crossly, “I am telling you to say, ‘I killed the fellow who was on it.’“

Marish set the yam back on the table.

“Now that’s enough,” Marish said. “I thank you for the fine food and I thank you for the three free things, but I do not thank you for telling me how to talk. How I talk is how we talk in Ilmak Dale, or how we did talk when there were an Ilmak Dale, and just because the White Witch blasted Ilmak Dale to splinters don’t mean I am going to talk like folk do in some magic city.”

“I will buy that from you,” said the djinn.

“What?” said Marish, and wondered so much at this that he forgot to pick up another thing to eat.

“The way you talked in Ilmak Dale,” the djinn said.

“All right,” Marish said, “and for it, I crave to know the thing what will help me mostways, for killing the White Witch.”

“I have a carpet that flies faster than the wind,” said the djinn. “I think it is the only way you can catch the Witch, and unless you catch her, you cannot kill her.”

“Wonderful,” Marish cried with glee. “And you’ll trade me that carpet for how we talk in Ilmak Dale?”

“No,” said the djinn, “I told you which thing would help you most, and in return for that, I took the way you talked in Ilmak Dale and put it in the Great Library.”

Marish frowned. “All right, what do you want for the carpet?”

The djinn was silent.

“I’ll give you the White Witch for it,” Marish said.

“You must possess the thing you sell,” the djinn said.

“Oh, I’ll get her,” Marish said. “You can be sure of that.” His hand had found a boiled egg, and the shell crunched in his palm as he said it.

The djinn looked at Marish carefully, and then he said, “The use of the carpet, for three days, in return for the White Witch, if you can conquer her.”

“Agreed,” said Marish.

• • • •

They had to bind the horse’s eyes; otherwise it would rear and kick, when the carpet rose into the air. Horse, man, djinn: all perched on a span of cloth. As they sped back to Nabuz like a mad wind, Marish tried not to watch the solid fields flying beneath, and regretted the candied apricots.

The voice of doubt told him that his companion must be slain by now, but his heart wanted to see Kadath-Naan again; but for the jackal-man, Marish was friendless.

Among the barley stalks, three man-high plinths of black stone, painted with white glyphs, marked three graves. Kadath-Naan had only traveled a little ways beyond them before the ambush. How long the emissary of the Empty City had been fighting, Marish could not tell; but he staggered and weaved like a man drunk with wine or exhaustion. His gray fur was matted with blood and sweat.

An army of children in white armor surrounded Kadath-Naan. As the carpet swung closer, Marish could see their gray faces and blank eyes. Some crawled, some tottered: none seemed to have lived more than six years of mortal life. They held daggers. One clung to the jackal-man’s back, digging canals of blood.

Two of the babies were impaled on the point of the great black spear. Hand over hand, daggers held in their mouths, they dragged themselves down the shaft towards Kadath-Naan’s hands. Hundreds more surrounded him, closing in.

Kadath-Naan swung his spear, knocking the slack-eyed creatures back. He struck with enough force to shatter human skulls, but the horrors only rolled, and scampered giggling back to stab his legs. With each swing, the spear was slower. Kadath-Naan’s eyes rolled back into their sockets. His great frame shuddered from weariness and pain.

The carpet swung low over the battle, and Marish lay on his belly, dangling his arms down to the jackal-headed warrior. He shouted: “Jump! Kadath-Naan, jump!”

Kadath-Naan looked up and, gripping his spear in both hands, he tensed his legs to jump. But the pause gave the tiny servitors of the White Witch their chance; they swarmed over his body, stabbing with their daggers, and he collapsed under the writhing mass of his enemies.

“Down further! We can haul him aboard!” yelled Marish.

“I sold you the use of my carpet, not the destruction of it,” said the djinn.

With a snarl of rage, and before the voice of his good sense could speak, Marish leapt from the carpet. He landed amidst the fray, and began tearing the small bodies from Kadath-Naan and flinging them into the fields. Then daggers found his calves, and small bodies crashed into his sides, and he tumbled, covered with the white-armored hell-children. The carpet sailed up lazily into the summer sky.

Marish thrashed, but soon he was pinned under a mass of small bodies. Their daggers probed his sides, drawing blood, and he gritted his teeth against a scream; they pulled at his hair and ears and pulled open his mouth to look inside. As if they were playing. One gray-skinned suckling child, its scalp peeled half away to reveal the white bone of its skull, nuzzled at his neck, seeking the nipple it would never find again.

So had Asza nuzzled against him. So had been her heft, then, light and snug as five apples in a bag. But her live eyes saw the world, took it in and made it better than it was. In those eyes he was a hero, a giant to lift her, honest and gentle and brave. When Temur looked into those otterbrown, mischievous eyes, her mouth softened from its hard line, and she sang fairy songs.

A dagger split the skin of his forehead, bathing him in blood. Another dug between his ribs, another popped the skin of his thigh. Another pushed against his gut, but hadn’t broken through. He closed his eyes. They weighed heavier on him now; his throat tensed to scream, but he could not catch his breath.

Marish’s arms ached for Asza and Temur—ached that he would die here, without them. Wasn’t it right, though, that they be taken from him? The little girl who ran to him across the fields of an evening, a funny hopping run, her arms flung wide, waving that rag doll; no trace of doubt in her. And the beautiful wife who stiffened when she saw him, but smiled one-edged, despite herself, as he lifted apple-smelling Asza in his arms. He had not deserved them.

His face, his skin were hot and slick with salty blood. He saw, not felt, the daggers digging deeper—arcs of light across a great darkness. He wished he could comfort Asza one last time, across that darkness. As when she would awaken in the night, afraid of witches: now a witch had come.

He found breath, he forced his mouth open, and he sang through sobs to Asza, his song to lull her back to sleep:

“Now sleep, my love, now sleep—

The moon is in the sky—

The clouds have fled like sheep—

You’re in your papa’s eye.

“Sleep now, my love, sleep now—

The bitter wind is gone—

The calf sleeps with the cow—

Now sleep my love ’til dawn.”

He freed his left hand from the press of bodies. He wiped blood and tears from his eyes. He pushed his head up, dizzy, flowers of light still exploding across his vision. The small bodies were still. Carefully, he eased them to the ground.

The carpet descended, and Marish hauled Kadath-Naan onto it. Then he forced himself to turn, swaying, and look at each of the gray-skinned babies sleeping peacefully on the ground. None of them was Asza.

He took one of the smallest and swaddled it with rags and bridle leather. His blood made his fingers slick, and the noon sun seemed as gray as a stone. When he was sure the creature could not move, he put it in his pack and slung the pack upon his back. Then he fell onto the carpet. He felt it lift up under him, and like a cradled child, he slept.

He awoke to see clouds sailing above him. The pain was gone. He sat up and looked at his arms: they were whole and unscarred. Even the old scar from Thin Deri’s careless scythe was gone.

“You taught us how to defeat the Children of Despair,” said the djinn. “That required recompense. I have treated your wounds and those of your companion. Is the debt clear?”

“Answer me one question,” Marish said.

“And the debt will be clear?” said the djinn.

“Yes, may the west wind take you, it’ll be clear!”

The djinn blinked in assent.

“Can they be brought back?” Marish asked. “Can they be made into living children again?”

“They cannot,” said the djinn. “They can neither live nor die, nor be harmed at all unless they will it. Their hearts have been replaced with sand.”

They flew in silence, and Marish’s pack seemed heavier.

• • • •

The land flew by beneath them as fast as a cracking whip; Marish stared as green fields gave way to swamp, swamp to marsh, marsh to rough pastureland. The devastation left by the White Witch seemed gradually newer; the trail here was still smoking, and Marish thought it might be too hot to walk on. They passed many a blasted village, and each time Marish looked away.

At last they began to hear a sound on the wind, a sound that chilled Marish’s heart. It was not a wail, it was not a grinding, it was not a shriek of pain, nor the wet crunch of breaking bones, nor was it an obscene grunting; but it had something of all of these. The jackal-man’s ears were perked, and his gray fur stood on end.

The path was now truly still burning; they flew high above it, and the rolling smoke underneath was like a fog over the land. But there ahead they saw the monstrous thing that was leaving the trail; and Marish could hardly think any thought at all as they approached, but only stare, bile burning his throat.

It was a great chariot, perhaps eight times the height of a man, as wide as the trail, constructed of parts of living human bodies welded together in an obscene tangle. A thousand legs and arms pawed the ground; a thousand more beat the trail with whips and scythes, or clawed the air. A thick skein of hearts, livers, and stomachs pulsed through the center of the thing, and a great assemblage of lungs breathed at its core. Heads rolled like wheels at the bottom of the chariot, or were stuck here and there along the surface of the thing as slack-eyed, gibbering ornaments. A thousand spines and torsos built a great chamber at the top of the chariot, shielded with webs of skin and hair; there perhaps hid the White Witch. From the pinnacle of the monstrous thing flew a great flag made of writhing tongues. Before the awful chariot rode a company of ten knights in white armor, with visored helms.

At the very peak sat a great headless hulking beast, larger than a bear, with the skin of a lizard, great yellow globes of eyes set on its shoulders and a wide mouth in its belly. As they watched, it vomited a gout of flame that set the path behind the chariot ablaze. Then it noticed them, and lifted the great plume of flame in their direction. At a swift word from the djinn, the carpet veered, but it was a close enough thing that Marish felt an oven’s blast of heat on his skin. He grabbed the horse by its reins as it made to rear, and whispered soothing sounds in its ear.

“Abomination!” cried Kadath-Naan. “Djinn, will you send word to the Empty City? You will be well rewarded.”

The djinn nodded.

“It is Kadath-Naan, lesser scout of the Endless Inquiry, who speaks. Let Bars-Kardereth, Commander of the Silent Legion, be told to hasten here. Here is an obscenity beyond compass, far more horrible than the innocent errors of savages; here Chaos blocks the descent into the Darkness entirely, and a whole land may fall to corruption.”

The jewel in the djinn’s forehead flashed once. “It is done,” he said.

Kadath-Naan turned to Marish. “From the Empty City to this place is four days’ travel for a Ghomlu Legion; let us find a place in their path where we can wait to join them.”

Marish forced himself to close his eyes. But still he saw it—hands, tongues, guts, skin, woven into a moving mountain. He still heard the squelching, grinding, snapping sounds, the sea-roar of the thousand lungs. What had he imagined? Asza and Temur in a prison somewhere, waiting to be freed? Fool. “All right,” he said.

Then he opened his eyes, and saw something that made him say, “No.”

Before them, not ten minutes’ ride from the awful chariot of the White Witch, was a whitewashed village, peaceful in the afternoon sun. Arrayed before it were a score of its men and young women. A few had proper swords or spears; one of the women carried a bow. The others had hoes, scythes, and staves. One woman sat astride a horse; the rest were on foot. From their perch in the air, Marish could see distant figures—families, stooped grandmothers, children in their mothers’ arms—crawling like beetles up the faces of hills.

“Down,” said Marish, and they landed before the village’s defenders, who raised their weapons.

“You’ve got to run,” he said, “you can make it to the hills. You haven’t seen that thing—you haven’t any chance against it.”

A dark man spat on the ground. “We tried that in Gravenge.”

“It splits up,” said a black-bearded man. “Sends littler horrors, and they tear folks up and make them part of it, and you see your fellows’ limbs, come after you as part of the thing. And they’re fast. Too fast for us.”

“We just busy it a while,” another man said, “our folk can get far enough away.” But he had a wild look in his eye: the voice of doubt was in him.

“We stop it here,” said the woman on horseback.

Marish led the horse off the carpet, took its blinders off and mounted it. “I’ll stand with you,” he said.

“And welcome,” said the woman on horseback, and her plain face broke into a nervous smile. It was almost pretty that way.

Kadath-Naan stepped off the carpet, and the villagers shied back, readying their weapons.

“This is Kadath-Naan, and you’ll be damned glad you have him,” said Marish.

“Where’s your manners?” snapped the woman on horseback to her people. “I’m Asza,” she said.

No, Marish thought, staring at her. No, but you could have been. He looked away, and after a while they left him alone.

The carpet rose silently off into the air, and soon there was smoke on the horizon, and the knights rode at them, and the chariot rose behind.

“Here we are,” said Asza of the rocky lands, “now make a good accounting of yourselves.”

An arrow sang; a white knight’s horse collapsed. Marish cried “Ha!” and his mount surged forward. The villagers charged, but Kadath-Naan outpaced them all, springing between a pair of knights. He shattered the forelegs of one horse with his spear’s shaft, drove its point through the side of the other rider. Villagers fell on the fallen knight with their scythes.

It was a heady wild thing for Marish, to be galloping on such a horse, a far finer horse than ever Redlegs had been, for all Pa’s proud and vain attention to her. The warmth of its flanks, the rhythm of posting into its stride. Marish of Ilmak Dale, riding into a charge of knights: miserable addle-witted fool.

Asza flicked her whip at the eyes of a knight’s horse, veering away. The knight wheeled to follow her, and Marish came on after him. He heard the hooves of another knight pounding the plain behind him in turn.

Ahead the first knight gained on Asza of the rocky plains. Marish took his knife in one hand, and bent his head to his horse’s ear, and whispered to it in wordless murmurs: Fine creature, give me everything. And his horse pulled even with Asza’s knight.

Marish swung down, hanging from his pommel—the ground flew by beneath him. He reached across and slipped his knife under the girth that held the knight’s saddle. The knight swiveled, raising his blade to strike—then the girth parted, and he flew from his mount.

Marish struggled up into the saddle, and the second knight was there, armor blazing in the sun. This time Marish was on the sword-arm’s side, and his horse had slowed, and that blade swung up and it could strike Marish’s head from his neck like snapping off a sunflower; time for the peasant to die.

Asza’s whip lashed around the knight’s sword-arm. The knight seized the whip in his other hand. Marish sprang from the saddle. He struck a wall of chainmail and fell with the knight.

The ground was an anvil, the knight a hammer, Marish a rag doll sewn by a poor mad girl and mistaken for a horseshoe. He couldn’t breathe; the world was a ringing blur. The knight found his throat with one mailed glove, and hissed with rage, and pulling himself up drew a dagger from his belt. Marish tried to lift his arms.

Then he saw Asza’s hands fitting a leather noose around the knight’s neck. The knight turned his visored head to see, and Asza yelled, “Yah!” An armored knee cracked against Marish’s head, and then the knight was gone, dragged off over the rocky plains behind Asza’s galloping mare.

Asza of the rocky lands helped Marish to his feet. She had a wild smile, and she hugged him to her breast; pain shot through him, as did the shock of her soft body. Then she pulled away, grinning, and looked over his shoulder back towards the village. And then the grin was gone.

Marish turned. He saw the man with the beard torn apart by a hundred grasping arms and legs. Two bending arms covered with eyes watched carefully as his organs were woven into the chariot. The village burned. A knight leaned from his saddle to cut a fleeing woman down, harvesting her like a stalk of wheat.

“No!” shrieked Asza, and ran towards the village.

Marish tried to run, but he could only hobble, gasping, pain tearing through his side. Asza snatched a spear from the ground and swung up onto a horse. Her hair was like Temur’s, flowing gold. My Asza, my Temur, he thought. I must protect her.

Marish fell; he hit the ground and held onto it like a lover, as if he might fall into the sky. Fool, fool, said the voice of his good sense. That is not your Asza, or your Temur either. She is not yours at all.

He heaved himself up again and lurched on, as Asza of the rocky plains reached the chariot. From above, a lazy plume of flame expanded. The horse reared. The cloud of fire enveloped the woman, the horse, and then was sucked away; the blackened corpses fell to the ground steaming.

Marish stopped running.

The headless creature of fire fell from the chariot—Kadath-Naan was there at the summit of the horror, his spear sunk in its flesh as a lever. But the fire-beast turned as it toppled, and a pillar of fire engulfed the jackal-man. The molten iron of his spear and armor coated his body, and he fell into the grasping arms of the chariot.

Marish lay down on his belly in the grass.

Maybe they will not find me here, said the voice of hope. But it was like listening to idiot words spoken by the wind blowing through a forest. Marish lay on the ground and he hurt. The hurt was a song, and it sang him. Everything was lost and far away. No Asza, no Temur, no Maghd; no quest, no hero, no trickster, no hunter, no father, no groom. The wind came down from the mountains and stirred the grass beside Marish’s nose, where beetles walked.

There was a rustling in the short grass, and a hedgehog came out of it and stood nose to nose with Marish.

“Speak if you can,” Marish whispered, “and grant me a wish.”

The hedgehog snorted. “I’ll not do you any favors, after what you did to Teodor!”

Marish swallowed. “The hedgehog in the sunflowers?”

“Obviously. Murderer.”

“I’m sorry! I didn’t know he was magic! I thought he was just a hedgehog!”

“Just a hedgehog! Just a hedgehog!” It narrowed its eyes, and its prickers stood on end. “Be careful what you call things, Marish of Ilmak Dale. When you name a thing, you say what it is in the world. Names mean more than you know.”

Marish was silent.

“Teodor didn’t like threats, that’s all . . . the stubborn old idiot.”

“I’m sorry about Teodor,” said Marish.

“Yes, well,” said the hedgehog. “I’ll help you, but it will cost you dear.”

“What do you want?”

“How about your soul?” said the hedgehog.

“I’d do that, sure,” said Marish. “It’s not like I need it. But I don’t have it.”

The hedgehog narrowed its eyes again. From the village, a few thin screams and the soft crackle of flames. It smelled like autumn, and butchering hogs.

“It’s true,” said Marish. “The priest of Ilmak Dale took all our souls and put them in little stones, and hid them. He didn’t want us making bargains like these.”

“Wise man,” said the hedgehog. “But I’ll have to have something. What have you got in you, besides a soul?”

“What do you mean, like, my wits? But I’ll need those.”

“Yes, you will,” said the hedgehog.

“Hope? Not much of that left, though.”

“Not to my taste anyway,” said the hedgehog. “Hope is foolish, doubts are wise.”

“Doubts?” said Marish.

“That’ll do,” said the hedgehog. “But I want them all.”

“All . . . all right,” said Marish. “And now you’re going to help me against the White Witch?”

“I already have,” said the hedgehog.

“You have? Have I got some magic power or other now?” asked Marish. He sat up. The screaming was over: he heard nothing but the fire, and the crunching and squelching and slithering and grinding of the chariot.

“Certainly not,” said the hedgehog. “I haven’t done anything you didn’t see or didn’t hear. But perhaps you weren’t listening.” And it waddled off into the green blades of the grass.

Marish stood and looked after it. He picked at his teeth with a thumbnail, and thought, but he had no idea what the hedgehog meant. But he had no doubts, either, so he started towards the village.

• • • •

Halfway there, he noticed the dead baby in his pack wriggling, so he took it out and held it in his arms.

As he came into the burning village, he found himself just behind the great fire-spouting lizard-skinned headless thing. It turned and took a breath to burn him alive, and he tossed the baby down its throat. There was a choking sound, and the huge thing shuddered and twitched, and Marish walked on by it.

The great chariot saw him and it swung towards him, a vast mountain of writhing, humming, stinking flesh, a hundred arms reaching. Fists grabbed his shirt, his hair, his trousers, and they lifted him into the air.

He looked at the hand closed around his collar. It was a woman’s hand, fine and fair, and it was wearing the copper ring he’d bought at Halde.

“Temur!” he said in shock.

The arm twitched and slackened; it went white. It reached out, the fingers spread wide; it caressed his cheek gently. And then it dropped from the chariot and lay on the ground beneath.

He knew the hands pulling him aloft. “Lezur the baker!” he whispered, and a pair of doughy hands dropped from the chariot. “Silbon and Felbon!” he cried. “Ter the blind! Sela the blue-eyed!” Marish’s lips trembled to say the names, and the hands slackened and fell to the ground, and away on other parts of the chariot the other parts fell off too; he saw a blue eye roll down from above him and fall to the ground.

“Perdan! Mardid! Pilg and his old mother! Fazt—oh Fazt, you’ll tell no more jokes! Chibar and his wife, the pretty foreign one!” His face was wet; with every name, a bubble popped open in Marish’s chest, and his throat was thick with some strange feeling. “Pizdar the priest! Fat Deri, far from your smithy! Thin Deri!” When all the hands and arms of Ilmak Dale had fallen off, he was left standing free. He looked at the strange hands coming towards him. “You were a potter,” he said to hands with clay under the nails, and they fell off the chariot. “And you were a butcher,” he said to bloody ones, and they fell too. “A fat farmer, a beautiful young girl, a grandmother, a harlot, a brawler,” he said, and enough hands and feet and heads and organs had slid off the chariot now that it sagged in the middle and pieces of it strove with each other blindly. “Men and women of Eckdale,” Marish said, “men and women of Halde, of Gravenge, of the fields and the swamps and the rocky plains.”

The chariot fell to pieces; some lay silent and still, others which Marish had not named had lost their purchase and thrashed on the ground.

The skin of the great chamber atop the chariot peeled away and the White Witch leapt into the sky. She was three times as tall as any woman; her skin was bone white; one eye was blood red and the other emerald green; her mouth was full of black fangs, and her hair of snakes and lizards. Her hands were full of lightning, and she sailed onto Marish with her fangs wide open.

And around her neck, on a leather thong, she wore a little doll of rags, the size of a child’s hand.

“Maghd of Ilmak Dale,” Marish said, and she was also a young woman with muddy hair and an uncertain smile, and that’s how she landed before Marish.

“Well done, Marish,” said Maghd, and pulled at a muddy lock of her hair, and laughed, and looked at the ground. “Well done! Oh, I’m glad. I’m glad you’ve come.”

“Why did you do it, Maghd?” Marish said. “Oh, why?”

She looked up and her lips twitched and her jaw set. “Can you ask me that? You, Marish?”

She reached across, slowly, and took his hand. She pulled him, and he took a step towards her. She put the back of his hand against her cheek.

“You’d gone out hunting,” she said. “And that Temur of yours”—she said the name as if it tasted of vinegar—“she seen me back of Lezur’s, and for one time I didn’t look down. I looked at her eyes, and she named me a foul witch. And then they were all crowding round—” She shrugged. “And I don’t like that. Fussing and crowding and one against the other.” She let go his hand and stooped to pick up a clot of earth, and she crumbled it in her hands. “So I knit them all together. All one thing. They did like it. And they were so fine and great and happy, I forgave them. Even Temur.”

The limbs lay unmoving on the ground; the guts were piled in soft unbreathing hills, like drifts of snow. Maghd’s hands were coated with black crumbs of dirt.

“I reckon they’re done of playing now,” Maghd said, and sighed.

“How?” Marish said. “How’d you do it? Maghd, what are you?”

“Don’t fool so! I’m Maghd, same as ever. I found the souls, that’s all. Dug them up from Pizdar’s garden, sold them to the Spirit of Unwinding Things.” She brushed the dirt from her hands.

“And . . . the children, then? Maghd, the babes?”

She took his hand again, but she didn’t look at him. She laid her cheek against her shoulder and watched the ground. “Babes shouldn’t grow,” she said. “No call to be big and hateful.” She swallowed. “I made them perfect. That’s all.”

Marish’s chest tightened. “And what now?”

She looked at him, and a slow grin crept across her face. “Well now,” she said. “That’s on you, ain’t it, Marish? I got plenty of tricks yet, if you want to keep fighting.” She stepped close to him, and rested her cheek on his chest. Her hair smelled like home: rushes and fire smoke, cold mornings and sheep’s milk. “Or we can gather close. No one to shame us now.” She wrapped her arms around his waist. “It’s all new, Marish, but it ain’t all bad.”

A shadow drifted over them, and Marish looked up to see the djinn on his carpet, peering down. Marish cleared his throat. “Well . . . I suppose we’re all we have left, aren’t we?”

“That’s so,” Maghd breathed softly.

He took her hands in his, and drew back to look at her. “Will you be mine, Maghd?” he said.

“Oh yes,” said Maghd, and smiled the biggest smile of her life.

“Very good,” Marish said, and looked up. “You can take her now.”

The djinn opened the little bottle that was in his hand and Maghd the White Witch flew into it, and he put the cap on. He bowed to Marish, and then he flew away.

Behind Marish the fire beast exploded with a dull boom.

• • • •

Marish walked out of the village a little ways and sat, and after sitting a while, he slept. And then he woke and sat, and then he slept some more. Perhaps he ate as well; he wasn’t sure what. Mostly he looked at his hands; they were rough and callused, with dirt under the nails. He watched the wind painting waves in the short grass, around the rocks and bodies lying there.

• • • •

One morning he woke, and the ruined village was full of jackal-headed men in armor made of discs who were mounted on great red cats with pointed ears, and jackal-headed men in black robes who were measuring for monuments, and jackal-headed men dressed only in loincloths who were digging in the ground.

Marish went to the ones in loincloths and said, “I want to help bury them,” and they gave him a shovel.

©2006 by Benjamin Rosenbaum. Originally published in Twenty Epics, edited by Susan Groppi and David Moles. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Benjamin Rosenbaum lives near Basel, Switzerland. His stories have appeared in Harper’s, F&SF, Asimov’s, McSweeney’s, Strange Horizons, and Nature, been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, World Fantasy, BSFA, and Sturgeon Awards, and been translated into 20+ languages. He’s also a software dev and game designer. His forthcoming novel The Unraveling (Erewhon Books, October 2020) is a far-future tale of revolution and family in a world that upends our norms of gender, class, and the body. Find out more at http://benjaminrosenbaum.com.

Great Gerta and the Mermaid

Mari Ness | 6441 words

That notorious ship that sailed to the wretched isle known as Neverland under the leadership of one James, self-styled Jas., Cook, called the Jolly Roger, has most naturally been a subject of intense study among historians. Yet even the most meticulous of these scholars have often failed to note that among that dreadful crew sailed at least one woman, Gerta, or, as she named herself, the Great Gerta, or, as she was named by others, Gerta the Girthy.

This cannot be entirely blamed on the scholars. Our information about the Jolly Roger, and indeed the Neverland itself, is at best fragmentary, at worst, contradictory. Contemporary documents are few and far between. Witness accounts are abundant, but although the eyewitness testimony of several upright businessmen, a peer of the realm, and at least one judge cannot be lightly dismissed, these reports were often related years after the fact, and were, besides, hazy on the details. Other accounts, from less reliable sources, contain clear exaggerations and outright fabrications, and must and have been treated with extreme caution.

Beyond this, prudent historians have long recognized that a full and complete revelation of every name of every pirate who sailed with that shameful crew would, even now, create enough scandal and horror to topple some of our weaker financial and scholarly institutions. It is therefore not surprising to note that even the most meticulous historians of Neverland and piracy have refrained from creating such a list, and prudently concealed the most outrageous of the names within footnotes, and occasionally beneath pseudonyms. Alas, this care, beneficial as it has been to the world economy, has left Gerta in undeserved obscurity.

The precise name and place of her birth has also been lost to that prudence of history. What evidence we have suggests that she had at least some Spanish blood, as well as strains from nearly every nation at one time claimed by Spain. She was said to claim at least three queens and five kings among her ancestors, but since every member of Hook’s crew made similar claims, this assertion may safely be dismissed. More believable are the reports that she sailed not just the Seven Seas, but seven times seven times those seven seas: several Lost Boys later related that she could speak with authority about nearly all of the isles of the Pacific, the ports of Asia, the harbors of Africa, and the bolts of the Americas. It seems equally certain that she had sampled the rums of nearly every Caribbean isle, and could often identify its source from a distance of fifty paces. No less than five witnesses attest to her accumulation of treasure: as many as seven, and no less than five stout chests tightly packed with silver and gold and gems, buried on an island whose name has also been lost to the historical record.

She had, besides these chests, ten gold teeth: three within her mouth, that shone whenever she cared to threaten her victims or relax with a cheery song, and seven dangling from a gold chain that she never removed from her neck. Two of these teeth were said to have been seized from none other than the great Blackbeard himself, and three more from Anne Bonny. All agree that she bore not one or two but three cutlasses, the sharpest aboard Hook’s ship, and was of that evil crew one of the most skilled at knife throwing—though her accuracy with pistols was less certain.

Her presence in Neverland seems to have been a matter of some delicacy. Peter Pan, for all his desires for a mother (admirably documented by J.M. Barrie in his seminal works of 1904 and 1911, and later by several notable scholars working under the direction of the Great Ormond Street Hospital), had a horrid fear of real women, and certainly would have tried to leave Gerta the Girthy at the top of a cloud or somewhere much less kind, had he known of her. But for all of his discernment in other matters, he seemingly did not.

Certainly the pirates knew. But although at least some of them clung to the belief that having a woman onboard was bad luck (a superstition that getting stranded on an accursed isle with Gerta the Girthy did nothing to dispel) none of them, even Jas. Hook himself, spoke the truth to Peter Pan. Perhaps they did not know of Peter Pan’s gynophobia, and thus considered it unimportant. Or perhaps they felt some sort of loyalty, however weak, to a fellow member of their crew, whatever her gender. Or perhaps they sensed—on the deep level that can seemingly only be reached in such wretched places as Neverland—what terrible things might happen should Peter Pan ever know that a woman—a woman—stalked his isle.

The Lost Boys, in contrast, dreamed of telling Peter Pan the truth quite often, but somehow, whenever they meant to, they said something quite else entirely. How many of the other residents of Neverland knew is unclear, but they, too, kept their own counsel, for reasons equally unclear. Most of them had reasons enough to dislike pirates, and to aid Peter Pan, but in this one small thing, they seem to have kept their silence.

And so Gerta’s presence on Neverland went unnoticed—at least by Peter Pan.

Whether this was entirely positive—for Gerta or for Peter Pan—may be debated. On the one hand, this meant that Gerta, too, remained trapped on Neverland along with the Jolly Roger and its terrible crew. On the other hand, our sources, slender as they are, suggest that Gerta quite enjoyed certain aspects of Neverland—namely, the weather and the rum that mysteriously never seemed to run dry—and quite disliked others—namely, the Lost Boys and Peter Pan.

She was not a maternal woman in the slightest, and held particularly non-maternal feelings towards a group of small boys who continually interrupted her drinking and sleeping. Three independent sources tell us that Gerta personally and habitually dangled various Lost Boys right over the mouth of a gaping crocodile, though it should be noted that among the pirates, this was an approved and standard method of distracting such fearsome beasts. Her hatred of Peter Pan was second only to that of Hook: she could not and did not think it right for a small boy to go flying into the air harassing his betters, an opinion she stated loudly and often, using language that quite bewildered and terrified the Lost Boys, though her fellow pirates applauded.

We know, too, that Gerta spent many hours tramping through the isle of Neverland, loudly singing “Yo Ho Ho,” suggesting at least a certain tolerance for the place. It has been suggested that Gerta only made these excursions on the orders of Captain Hook, whose desperation to find some way to kill Peter Pan or escape the island never lessened right up until the moments before his death. But it seems equally possible that these excursions sprang from the simple desire to step upon land again, however unfirm. Even the most pleasant life aboard a ship can become tedious after a time, and life aboard this particular ship was rarely altogether pleasant, even without the constant harassment from small flying boys. Wretched as the isle of Neverland was and reportedly still is, it was not completely without its pleasures: a sparkling lagoon, great trees, fields of sweet sugar cane, hordes of parrots, and children falling from the sky as if begging to be tortured. And in at least one reported instance, it seems to have led to a most pleasurable diversion indeed.

It was, witnesses tell us, Gerta’s habit to practice swinging her cutlasses against the sugarcane, grass, trees, and even occasional parrot that she encountered, to retain her skills without risk of injuring a fellow member of the Jolly Roger crew. She was apparently engaged in such practice—punctured with several “Arrrs, arrrs!” and “Scurvy dogs! Scurvy dogs!” (Captain Hook insisted that all of his crew members practice pirate cant on a daily basis; he had very exacting standards)—when she caught sight of a small, dirty boy creeping through the heavy foliage, moving towards the mermaid’s lagoon.

In Neverland, a small, dirty boy can be only one thing: a Lost Boy.

It is unusual to find a Lost Boy alone, but not unheard of. From time to time, a solitary Lost Boy would creep out for a solitary adventure, if only to prove that he could have adventures without Peter Pan, he could, and could survive without Peter Pan, he could. These adventures happen more frequently when Peter Pan is away from the isle, but sometimes when Peter Pan is on the isle, but busy with the other Lost Boys, or new arrivals, or fairies.

As in this particular case, a circumstance that perhaps made this particular Lost Boy a bit bolder than most, knowing that Peter was somewhere close, if not nearby, and could rescue him.

Which Lost Boy in this particular case is unknown. Let us say Curly; other records note that Curly frequently found himself in this sort of situation, and when he later returned to London, he certainly spoke of a pirate who resembled Gerta in all particulars, suggesting more than simply one chance encounter. It could well have been Curly, indeed, but even if it was not, Curly will do as the Lost Boy creeping through the foliage.

Gerta did not try to creep after him. For one thing, her size and the thick crunch of her boots made that impossible. For another, she quite detested creeping anywhere. Her preferred method was to swing aboard a captured ship with a Jacob’s ladder, her cutlasses, and plenty of AVAST YEs and YO HO HOs and SHIVER ME TIMBERS and several bottles of rum. Proper piracy, she called that, full of noise and terror. She was not alone in this opinion, though others in Hook’s crew preferred subtler, crueler, and above all quieter methods. And for a third, the pirates all knew that the best way to capture or kill a Lost Boy was to tire out the Lost Boy, thoroughly. That was easier said than done, and much easier done without creeping than with it.

And so Gerta shouted at the top of her lungs. “AVAST YE!”

Or so two of our accounts have it. A third, related by a pirate decades later, states that Gerta only said a polite “Good afternoon,” but that given Gerta’s strident tones, this was rather like forty fiddles played poorly, all at once, only worse.

It is perhaps understandable that our other reports use AVAST YE instead.

That polite greeting—or the shout—sent the Lost Boy off on a run, to the detriment of the foliage in the area. At that, Gerta took off in pursuit. Quite apart from her own personal hatred of all Lost Boys, Captain Hook’s word on this was absolute: any Lost Boy must be captured or tortured or killed or forced to walk the plank or all four at the same time and at once. She had longer legs than the Lost Boy—that is, Curly—and was about to catch up when they charged out of the foliage and into the sands that bordered the lagoon. The Lost Boy was running so quickly that he quite failed to notice the water and ran right into the lagoon, tripping and falling flat into the water, then tumbling so that his head stayed below the water and his legs waved frantically above, sending waves across the once-still waters of the lagoon.

Gerta strode towards him, laughing at his plight, and at his struggles to tumble himself upright. It is not surprising that she laughed; as we have said, she was cruel. Nor was it a surprise, at least to Gerta, to hear the laughter of someone else quite nearby: where one Lost Boy was found, another one often lurked, laughing, and the fairies often filled that isle with their mocking sounds.

What was a surprise was the laughter seemed to be coming from beneath the sea. Gerta knew enough about boys in general and Lost Boys in particular to know that they could not laugh under the sea, at least not without difficulty and not without help. Prudently, she took a moment to seize the Lost Boy—Curly—by one frantically kicking leg, pulling him out of the water and dangling him from one hand, while she used the other to tie that leg to the bit of rope she always kept by her side for emergencies like this. Then—still holding the Lost Boy upside down—she strode further out into the lagoon to find the source. This was most inconvenient for the boy, since it meant that his head often dipped into the salty waters, but Gerta was not concerned with that. She was concerned with what she saw bobbing out of the water.

“Shiver me timbers,” said Gerta. “What is that?”

Only three creatures are capable of an underwater laughter that can reach the surface and still sound like a regular laugh: mermaids, dolphins, and feather duster worms. This was neither of the latter two, though dolphins often frolicked in the lagoon and feather duster worms sheltered in its reefs. Neither group was inclined to pay much attention to the doings of either Lost Boys or pirates unless disturbed. The mermaids were in a very different situation: the lagoon was then and now one of the few refuges for their kind anywhere in the world. If we can—and do—deplore Peter Pan for his frequent involvement in kidnapping and entrapment of both innocent and less innocent creatures, we can at least applaud him for this. The mermaids did, but remained wary: they, more than the dolphins or the feather duster words, understood how capricious their savior could be, and kept a wary eye on the lagoon at all time.

Our histories do not clarify the precise relationship, or perhaps relationships, between the pirates and the mermaids in Neverland. That they knew of each other is certain; that they interacted on a regular basis is more doubtful. Certainly the mermaids often felt called upon to save a Lost Boy or two from the pirates; equally certainly, at least one pirate—Gentleman Starkey, by most accounts—felt impelled to save a mermaid or two from the Lost Boys. But this appears to have been Gerta’s first encounter with a mermaid, or, at least, her first encounter to involve conversation.

And she does not seem to have previously met this particular mermaid, who by all accounts was beautiful even by the standards of mermaids, who already accounted themselves the most beautiful people on the isle. (Lacking photographic evidence, we must simply take them at their word.) She had pale green or blue-green skin; thick, long, luscious green hair sprinkled with black pearls and shells; a perfect, tiny little nose; and attributes that our prim Edwardian tellers termed voluptuous. And like all of the mermaids on the isle, she wore nothing other than fish scales. The water in the lagoon was quite, quite warm.

It is perhaps no wonder that as the mermaid rose from the waters of the lagoon, and hauled herself out on a nearby stone, Gerta stopped talking, and even the Lost Boy, who had presumably encountered mermaids more frequently, found his jaw dropping open, though he later said he was just trying to get all of the salt water out of his mouth.

“What are you?” asked the mermaid, with a salty voice. “And what is that?”

“My prisoner,” Gerta said proudly, ignoring the first question. She knew, as did all pirates, that it was rarely wise to admit to being a pirate in Neverland, though the other denizens would guess.

“No, I’m not,” protested the boy. “I’m a knight.”

Both the pirate and the mermaid could not help laughing at this—as did, to be fair, the Lost Boys when they later heard the story. This small, dirty, dripping boy dangling over the water, a knight? Gerta almost laughed hard enough to drop the boy, but not quite.

“A knight, be ye?” Gerta said. “How very interesting. Very interesting. And what be ye knighting for?”

“A quest,” the Lost Boy said. “An urgent quest. So can you please untie me, Madame Pirate?”

Gerta might have responded to that bit of politeness, but the mermaid interrupted. “Are you hungry?”

“Yes,” said the Lost Boy.

“He’s honest, anyway,” said the mermaid.

“Then he won’t be minding answering a few questions for me, would he, boy?”

The Lost Boy had dealt with pirates before. “How many is a few?” he asked, warily.

“As many as needs be to satisfy me.”

“Well, if it means being untied, I’ll answer you,” said the Lost Boy bravely.

Gerta smiled. It was a terrible smile, filled with gold. The Lost Boy shook. “What be ye creeping through the foliage for?”

“I told you. I’m a knight. On a quest.”

Gerta cannot be blamed for not believing this. “And what be ye questing for?”

“A great ruby,” said the Lost Boy, with an anxious look at Gerta’s cutlass. “Beneath the sea.”

The mermaid laughed. Gerta brought her cutlass closer to the boy. “And ye be questing for this ruby, which ye be saying is beneath the sea, on dry land?”

The mermaid laughed another salty laugh.

“Well, I was heading towards the sea,” the Lost Boy said.

This was true, and Gerta’s eyes narrowed.

“A great ruby, is it? And how would you know about this great ruby?”

“The fairies told me.”

“The fairies,” said Gerta, with disdain. Like all of the inhabitants of Neverland who were not fairies, she had a healthy contempt for them.

“Yes, the fairies,” repeated Curly. (We have decided on Curly.) “And not that Tinker Bell, either,” he said defiantly, before either the pirate or the mermaid could object. “Other fairies. They know things.”

“They know very little about the sea,” said the mermaid. “Even less about what is beneath it.”

“They know about that ruby,” insisted the boy.

“And what do they say about it?”

“That it is big, and grand, and red. And—” the boy had a sudden fit of inspiration—“it kills pirates.”

“Does it now.” Gerta rotated her cutlass thoughtfully. “And what sort of ruby be a killer of pirates?”

“No sort,” said the mermaid, who knew rather more about magic than either the boy or the pirate.

“This sort,” said the boy bravely.

“A ruby that be a killer of pirates,” Gerta said. She placed the tip of her cutlass against the throat of the Lost Boy. It was quite a balancing act—holding a boy and the rope tied to him with one hand, the cutlass with her other, while standing in the waves of the lagoon, but Gerta the Girthy managed it. “I think this be a ruby I need to obtain for meself.”

“You can’t,” said the Lost Boy, who was probably Curly, but might have been Nibs. “I told you, it’s beneath the sea.”

“And how were ye be intending to reach it, then?”

Gerta was, as we have said, large, and fearsome. The cutlasses in her hands were wicked and sharp. It is no wonder that the Lost Boy shook as he answered, as did those telling the tale later. “I was . . ..I was going to ride a mermaid.”

“Ride a mermaid?” interrupted the mermaid.

“Arrr,” said Gerta. “Ride a mermaid?”

“So I could breathe underwater.”

“Takes more than a mermaid for that, me boy,” Gerta said. “Some deep knowledge of Davy Jones himself, that takes.”

“You don’t ride a mermaid,” said the mermaid, who apparently felt the need to clarify this point as soon as possible. “You just take her hand. That’s it.”

Both the pirate and the Lost Boy turned to look at her.

“Well, then,” said Gerta heartily, and although she did not point her cutlass towards the mermaid, she did let her eyes roam up to the mermaid’s face, and down to her tail, and back. “Seems like I’ll be fetching that ruby after all.”

The mermaid blushed, and eyed Gerta up and down. “But I don’t know where it is.”

“I do,” said the Lost Boy.

That was a foolish thing to say; it meant that Gerta’s cutlass was under his chin again. “And being the kind, generous sort of boy that you are, you won’t mind showing it to us, would ye?”

“No,” said the Lost Boy, who might have been one of the two Lost Boys known simply as Twin, though his voice shook.

“Then let’s be going.”

“Now?” asked both the mermaid and the Lost Boy, at once.

“Wouldn’t want this little lad changing his mind, would we? And—” Gerta lowered her voice, to even more fearsome levels, “wouldn’t want me Captain missing me and coming out in search, would we?”

Even still dangling upside down, the Lost Boy managed to shake his head.

“And I’m sure this fine lady won’t mind me company for a bit longer, if a jewel be involved.”

Put like that, the mermaid could only agree.

“Then it’s off we be going then.”

It was all very fast, but historians assure us that this is the usual way of adventures in Neverland, and the other two did not argue.

“Don’t we have to shiver our timbers first?” asked Curly.

“That’s only for real pirates, and you, my mole, are not a real pirate.”

“This is not wise,” said the mermaid. She glanced up to the sky, which had shifted into twilight, which in Neverland has more stars than twilights elsewhere. “But it is adventure, and the island might like that.”

“It’s a ruby, if this silly mole speaks the truth. And Hook will like that,” said Gerta, and with that, the three of them were travelling to the bottom of the sea.

• • • •

The bottom of the sea is not very far, in Neverland. It is one reason why the Jolly Roger did not do much sailing while in Neverland: bad enough to be trapped on that wretched isle; far worse to be trapped with the bottom of the ship ripped to pieces. Nonetheless, this part of the story has raised questions, whenever it is told, since neither Lost Boys nor pirates are renowned for their skill at breathing at the bottom of the sea.

It is entirely possible, indeed, that this part of the story is entirely made up, and seekers of the truth—a quality difficult for any historian to distill, and harder still for historians of Neverland—may wish to skip this scene, with assurances that the part that comes after it has raised fewer questions.

Gerta held on to the mermaid’s left hand, very hard, and Curly—it must have been Curly; this part of the story was related by, among others, the Twins, but not in a manner that suggested that they had ever been down to the bottom of the sea—held on to the mermaid’s right, even harder. That was the only way that they could breathe, though the mermaid used the gills on her neck and they kept using their mouths. It made Curly look quite like an odd little fish, which in turn made Gerta and the mermaid both laugh.

But not for long. The way to the bottom of the sea is not safe, even for mermaids. At least three times they had to remain absolutely still to avoid the detection of the dangerous, pirate-and-small-boy-eating sharks who liked to stop by the lagoon from time to time in hopes of snacking on some tender flesh; this was particularly difficult for both Gerta and the Lost Boy. Again and again, the mermaid had to pull both of them away from some fragile coral, or some stinging jellyfish, though for all her efforts, the Lost Boy did scrape his ankle against some fire sponge, which woke him up in tearful screams two nights later, much to the annoyance of Peter Pan and the other boys. (This part of the tale has a distinct sense of truth about it.)

And although the Lost Boy tried to follow the directions he had heard from the fairy, either he had misheard, or forgotten, or the fairies were quite, quite wrong, since the ruby was not at all where he thought it might be. He and Gerta were very soon cold and miserable, which is a part of adventures no one likes, but the Lost Boy was determined to get the ruby for Peter Pan, and the pirate as determined to keep the ruby from Peter Pan, so they kicked on, sending each other the occasional glare when they thought the mermaid wouldn’t notice. Swimming in between them, she of course did.

But at long last—days, by some accounts, or hours, by other accounts, or minutes, by the most plausible account, Gerta spotted a shimmering red dot atop a green and yellow mound off in the distance. She began to kick off in that direction, not stopping to warn her comrades, who were caught rather off guard, but dragged along by her determination. (It is possible that Curly’s unfortunate encounter with the fire sponge happened at this very moment.) Their route was interrupted again by some fierce barracudas, but Gerta barred her teeth at them and the mermaid opened her mouth, and the barracudas fled, allowing them, at long last, to reach the ruby.

It was quite firmly stuck at the top of a large boulder coral, and the mermaid made it quite clear, through a series of gestures, that she could not allow any of them to harm the coral, which made removing the ruby quite tricky. And then Gerta pointed to shadows, seemingly not all that far off, but closer than they looked, under the sea, and heading in their direction. The three sharks they had evaded before had been merely a scouting mission for a group of twelve sharks, and behind them, no less than nine leopard seals, come straight from the Antarctic, desperately hungry, more than willing to consume a pirate, a boy, and a mermaid.

It was a most desperate situation. The Lost Boy could not free the ruby, and both the mermaid and the pirate guessed—correctly, the rest of the Lost Boys later agreed—that Curly (or Slightly; it might have been Slightly) would not leave without the ruby, or at least not without a struggle, whatever the dangers from sharks and seals. Gerta could not let go of her cutlass, not with the sharks and seals approaching at such fast a rate. And if the mermaid let go of either, they would both instantly drown. The pirate and the mermaid gave each other frantic glances, before arriving at the same thought: they both dove down to try to free the ruby with their teeth.

As they did so, their lips—quite accidentally—brushed together, and as they continued to work the ruby with their teeth, their lips continued to brush together. Such was the extremity of their condition that soon it was not brushing, but pressing. To some avail—the ruby grew looser and looser as their tongues and lips continued to knock against it. Though they were so intent upon their work that they almost failed to notice that their lips were touching.

Both of them had, the Lost Boy said afterwards, most peculiar expressions when they rose up from the rock, the ruby clasped between Gerta’s lips. The mermaid’s tail kept twitching. But they had no time to discuss the matter: they had to reach the surface, and quickly, while evading the sharks and the seals. This was tricky: the mermaid might have been able to outswim the sharks, but not while clinging to Gerta and the Lost Boy. They had only one option—to hide their passage upwards as best as they could.

This was not easy for Gerta, accustomed as she was to open attack, or to the Lost Boy, accustomed as he was to shouting, or even the mermaid, accustomed as she was to Neverland. More than once all three were convinced that they had breathed their last. They frequently paused to duck behind a coral outcropping or another, trying to keep their breathing as quiet and as free of bubbles as possible, so as not to alert the sharks—which is quite tricky, beneath the sea. Each time they did so, the mermaid paused to check Gerta’s lips with her own—presumably to ensure that the ruby was still there. It was so distracting that Gerta finally pushed the ruby into the mermaid’s mouth. Which was not as reassuring or helpful as it might have been: Gerta was still so concerned about the ruby that she soon felt the need to check the mermaid’s lips with her own.

All in all, it was a most uncomfortable retreat to the surface, especially for the Lost Boy, who counted himself fortunate to be left out of all of the lip checking, but found himself quite ill at the sight—not to mention deeply concerned for the ruby, which he quite considered his own. Though, it must be noted, not concerned enough to try to take the ruby from either mouth. Lost Boy or not, he had enough sense for that. And besides, circling around them were the sharks.

The sharks were still circling when they broke the surface of the water and hastily climbed upon a nearby rock. This was hardly safe either—the rock was slippery from water and seaweed, and the sharks were still nearby—but it was safer than below the sea. They all, even the mermaid, took several moments to catch their breaths, and then, Gerta, still practical, tied the Lost Boy tightly to the rock.

“Now, where be this cursed ruby?” asked Gerta, after the Lost Boy—that is, Curly—was safely tied up, and the mermaid seemed capable of speech again.

“With me,” said a voice behind them, rich with storms and winds.

All three of them turned towards the voice. It came from a magnificent creature on a nearby rock, fully nine feet tall—or she would have been, had she been able to stand upon her tail, which mermaids could not. Her skin was a rich deep blue; her hair the deep shimmer of mother-of-pearl. Even Gerta, who knew little of mermaids, could recognize her as a queen by the coral and seaweed crown upon her hair, and the seven great pearls on the edge of her tail.

“Majesty,” breathed the mermaid, bowing deeply, nearly knocking Gerta—whose hand had somehow ended up back in hers—off her feet in the process.

“Majesty,” repeated Gerta, who was wise enough to know when to be polite, bowing herself and nearly knocking over the mermaid.

“Ma’am,” squeaked the Lost Boy, who remembered just enough to be polite.

“And mine it shall remain,” said the mermaid queen, quite as if none of them had spoken, holding up the ruby, which was now gleaming in her hand.

No one, then or now, could explain how the ruby had gotten from the Lost Boy, the pirate, and the mermaid, to the mermaid queen, who was quite on another rock, but that was not the main concern of either the Lost Boy or Gerta the Girthy.

“That’s not fair,” howled the Lost Boy. “It’s mine—that is, it’s ours. The fairies told me about it, and we went and fetched it. Not you.”

“This is an isle of fairness, not fairness,” said the mermaid queen, looking at the pirate and the mermaid. The Lost Boy did not understand, not then, but the pirate who later recounted this part of the tale—no less a figure than the fearsome Noodler—was said to have paused at this bit, for a long drink, and needed two more tankards of ale before he could continue.

And with no more courtesy than that, she dove from her rock down into the sea.

“And them royals be wondering why we turn to piracy,” said Gerta, only under her breath, so as not to corrupt the boy or offend the mermaid. (In both respects, she undoubtedly failed.)

The Lost Boy looked crushed, as well he might. He started to take off, only to be stopped by Gerta’s rope, which was still around his leg. “Can I go now?”

“Can I? Can I?” mocked Gerta. “And what should you be saying, Lost Boy? Or is it forgotten every bit of fine grammar that you have, boy?”

The Lost Boys had not, fortunately enough, studied grammar under Gerta, but Curly—if this was Curly—remembered the lessons he had learned at the sword of the cultured Captain Hook and the tongues of some of the children brought to Neverland. “May I go now, Miss—that is, Sir Pirate. Only, it’s not really may, is it? Because you’ve tied me up, so I can’t go.”

The mermaid threw a starfish at him. “You shouldn’t argue grammar when you’re tied up.”

“Then you should untie me, so I can.”

But Gerta had another thought. She turned to the mermaid. “Did you trick me?”

“Would I trick a pirate?” asked the mermaid.

“Yes,” said Gerta.

They heard a splash behind them. Gerta turned, and cursed; the Lost Boy had taken advantage of her thought and the mermaid queen’s visit to cut his ropes and swim away.

“You will see him again,” said the mermaid.

“Yes,” said Gerta, sadly. “We always do.”

The twilight finally faded, leaving them alone beneath the moon and the stars, which seem more numerous, in Neverland.

“In all of this,” Gerta said, “I never did learn your name.”

“I haven’t got a name,” said the mermaid. “Peter Pan calls me ‘that mermaid,’ or ‘that mermaid over there’ when he’s feeling more conversational.”

The Great Gerta twisted her mouth, as she was accustomed to whenever that name was mentioned. “Peter Pan,” she snarled, though in her mouth it sounded less like a name and more like a string of words parents do not wish their children to say. “I hate Peter Pan.”

“Yes,” said the mermaid, sadly. “I can quite see that. For you are not a child.”

“I think I was a child, once,” said Gerta, but her voice had no assurance in it. It is hard to remember such things, in Neverland.

“That is not something wise to admit to, in Neverland,” said the mermaid.

“True,” said Gerta. “Especially since my desires right now are not very childlike.”

And she bent down to kiss the mermaid full on the lips, and shivered as the mermaid responded by drawing her closer, to let Gerta feel the wet sleek skin fall and pulse against her own.

We must not be shocked at this. Pirates do wicked things, as do mermaids, and kisses happen in Neverland more often than Peter Pan knows, or would like to know. And Gerta had swallowed quite a lot of rum that day. (She swallowed quite a lot of rum every day, until her escape from Neverland.) The mermaid had consumed quite a few oysters. (She consumed quite a few oysters every day, and never did escape from Neverland.) They kissed, and kissed again, wicked as it is was, and then did still more wicked things.

“I wish I could take you aboard my ship,” Gerta whispered. (It was not, of course, her ship, but she sometimes thought of it as hers, and saying so sounded better.)

“I wish I could take you to my reef,” the mermaid whispered. (It was, of course, her reef, though she had not seen it in a very long time, and often forgot it was hers.)

“Is this love?” asked Gerta, after a few more moments.

She was, we must remember, a pirate.

“I think perhaps,” said the mermaid.

She was, we must remember, a mermaid.

Our sources record no more of the conversation.

• • • •

No one in Neverland stays in love forever, or even for long. The causes of this are much debated, but the results are not: the love between the nameless mermaid and the Great Gerta outlasted every other love, great and small, on or near that island, and yet it only lasted four months. By then, the mermaid had realized that pirates were far noisier than even she had expected, and Gerta had realized that mermaids were far duller than she could ever have dreamed. So Gerta gave the mermaid one last salt- and rum-laden kiss, watched the mermaid dive deep, deep into the sea, and returned to Captain Hook. Over the rum that mysteriously never ran dry, held deep in the bowels of the Jolly Roger, they cursed women and fairies and mermaids, and swore with loud oaths that they would not stop until they had rid Neverland of Peter Pan. “And that crocodile,” added Captain Hook. Gerta roared and took another sip of rum.

It could all have happened to someone else entirely. Indeed, after only a year or so, the mermaid was quite convinced that it had all happened to someone else. “Imagine,” she told a parrot. “Me, falling in love!” Her laughter rang out over the waves until the noises of shouts and metal clanging on metal warned her that the either the pirates or the Lost Boys were returning, and it was time again to dive beneath the waves. And when the Jolly Roger was at last seized by the forces of Peter Pan, forcing the pirates, too, to dive into the sea, Gerta was surprised to find mermaids there at all, having quite forgotten that she had once spent happy hours kissing one beneath the moon. The other pirates later told tales of her salty responses to the mermaid’s mocking songs; certainly she did not invite any of the mermaids to accompany her when she tried, once again, to escape.

But their story was still remembered and retold over and over and over again, by the mermaids (with the kissing parts) and the Lost Boys (without the kissing parts) and the pirates (with more of the cutlass parts).

And the fairies preserved the kisses, bringing them out whenever absolutely needed for emergencies, which in Neverland happens almost every week, and twice on Tuesdays. After all, they were kisses born from adventure and laughter, and those are almost as powerful as applause, to fairies.

©2020 by Mari Ness.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mari Ness lives in central Florida. Her other work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Tor.com, Uncanny, Fireside, Diabolical Plots, Apex, Strange Horizons, Lackington’s, and right here in Lightspeed and Nightmare. Her poetry novella, Through Immortal Shadows Singing, is available from Papaveria Press. For more, visit her occasionally updated webpage at marikness.wordpress.com, or follow her on Twitter at mari_ness.

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

Rosamojo

Kiini Ibura Salaam | 4569 words

Eyes half closed, I see the dark of daddy’s pants. My bedroom door swings open. Light rips into my room, then disappears. I am alone now. Daddy’s footsteps get softer and softer. I can’t relax ’til I can’t hear him no more. I turn my face to the wall. My neck is sore, but that’s better than it being broke. My breath goes from fast to slow. Then I start to notice other things. Like the moon glowing outside my window. My leg shaking so hard I can’t stop it. My fists clenched tight.

I open one hand. It’s empty. I hold my fingers up to my face. It’s dark in my room, but I can see two white marks my fingernails made when they were digging into my skin. I squeeze the other hand tighter. A soft springy clump of daddy’s hair shifts in my palm. It would tickle if I let it. But I don’t. I can’t laugh while I still hear daddy’s voice whispering that I’m his favorite.

Sunlight creeps under my eyelids, climbs into my eyes. I curl over on my side and draw my knees up to my chest. Don’t want to move, not ever. I hear mama screaming at Lola to hurry up in the bathroom, and my heart catches in my throat. Benny is crying at the top of his lungs. I know I better get up, unless I want mama to know. I jump up and pull my nightgown over my head. At first I go to throw it in the dirty clothes hamper, then I stop and shove it under my mattress instead. My head feels dizzy, but when I hear mama’s voice in the hall, I know I gotta make everything look right.

I stumble over to my dresser and pick out a clean nightgown. The new nightgown is soft on my skin. It smells like soap powder. I wanna go lie down again and close my eyes. I wanna sleep with the fresh smell, but I don’t. I yank the edges of my sheets and tuck the corners under the mattress. I climb on top of the bed and throw the top sheet high up so it’ll fall down flat. Before the sheet reaches the bed, I see them: two dark streaks—one short, one long. I go to pull them dirty sheets from the bed, but then I start thinking ’bout how far away the clean sheets are. Be smarter to hide the stains from mama than try to get some fresh ones from the hall closet. I grip the edges of the top sheet and pull it smooth. If mama comes to check on me now, she’ll be real happy with how tight I made the bed. She’ll be so proud, she’ll never even see the stains.

When I peek out into the hall, nobody’s looking. I run straight to the bathroom and shut the door behind me. Before washing up, I wipe a warm washcloth between my legs. When I look at it, I see the same dark red streaks that were on the sheets. I rinse the washcloth and wipe ’til it shows no more red. Then I wash my face and brush my teeth.

Mama is already at the stove when I sit at the table.

“No kiss for me this morning?” she say.

I don’t move. I just sit at the table still as a stone.

“Rosamojo, you wake up on the wrong side of the bed?” mama laughs. Then she comes and kisses my cheeks.

Daddy kisses me on top of my head like normal. I sit on my hands because if I didn’t, I’d scratch his face and mama would know something’s wrong. Mama drops my plate down in front of me. The two huge yolks of my eggs is still jiggling from their journey from the stove. I don’t say nothing. Not even when Benny start to tease me ’bout how long it take me to get out of bed. Not even when Lola steal two pieces of bacon from my plate while looking me dead in the face. Not even when mama says, “Rosamojo’s having a bad day,” and puts cheese on only my grits. Lola look at me and squint her eyes. When mama go back to the stove and daddy go to the coffee pot, she ball up her fist and say, “You better not be doing no magic.”

I shake my head. “I didn’t do no magic, I swear.”

“What you said, sweetheart?” daddy ask when he hear my flat voice.

“Nothing, daddy,” I say and stir the cheese into my grits.

• • • •

Benny and Lola are loud in the backyard. Daddy and mama been left, but I’m still sitting at the table, dirty dishes spread all over the tabletop. Lola runs into the kitchen with a knobby piece of branch. Benny comes in right behind her carrying two sticks. Lola bangs the branch on the floor.

“Wanna go scare some neutra rats?” she ask.

I just shake my head no.

“We got you a stick,” Benny say.

I shrug my shoulders.

“We goin’ then,” she say. “And I don’t wanna hear nothin’ ’bout them dishes.”

I shrug my shoulders again.

Lola looks close at me. “What’s wrong with you?” she ask.

I don’t say nothing. Lola bang her stick on the floor, suck her teeth, and turn away.

“Come on, Benny, let’s go to the canal. Rosa’s actin’ all funny today.”

• • • •

It feel like the air around me is thick and I gotta move real slow. My favorite overalls be the only thing I can think of to make me feel better. I put them on before I jeck the sheets from my bed. In the tub, I wash out the dark spots. I bring the sheets down the hall, down the stairs, through the living room, through the kitchen to the back door. Just when I’m ’bout to step outside, I see nosy ole Mrs. Roberts looking into our yard. I back up, arms still full of sheets. If Mrs. Roberts see me hanging up a sheet with a few wet spots, she gonna ask mama if I got my cycle. And mama gonna come asking me questions like she did Lola. So I go back upstairs to my room. I let the sheets fall out of my arms onto my bare mattress. Then I sit on my bed a while, thinking and staring out the window. Real quick like, I get an idea. I jump up onto the mattress with my slippers on. I strain to lift the windows and struggle to get the screens out. I hang the flat sheet out one window and the fitted sheet out the other. Them wet spots should dry real quick. I just know I better get them screens back in before mama gets home.

In mama and daddy’s room, everything is cool and quiet. It’s like they room ain’t part of the rest of the house. It’s so dark in there I can’t see my reflection in neither of mama and daddy’s two mirrors. I get real close on them, but I can barely make out my face. Then I start snooping around. I don’t even know what I’m looking for until I see it: daddy’s favorite harmonica sitting on top the dresser with mama’s combs and jewelry. I slip the harmonica into my side pocket. On the floor next to daddy’s side of the bed is the sports section. I crouch down and look at it. It’s all marked up with inky black fingerprints. I roll it up and stick it in my back pocket. I go down the hall to the bathroom and stand on the step stool. In the medicine cabinet, I see lots of little bottles with words I can’t read. Then I see daddy’s toothpicks. I put a handful in my front pocket and go to the kitchen with my pockets loaded.

Beneath the sink is a burlap bag full of daddy’s favorite coffee. I grab the bag by the edges and drag it out the kitchen, through the living room to the front porch. Back in the kitchen, I find the metal bowl mama uses to soak burnt pots and pans—I bring that to the porch too. I stick the toothpicks in the harmonica holes and wrap the harmonica in the newspaper. My hand twitches. I look at it and suddenly remember—daddy’s hair! I run upstairs and scoop up the hair from my dresser drawer. On the porch, I unwrap the newspaper and stick daddy’s hair into the harmonica holes too. Then I wrap the whole thing up again. I put it in mama’s metal bowl and set the whole thing on fire. As I squat, watching it burn, my lips begin to move. Words come spilling out of my mouth, spelling out a protection prayer I never even knew I had in my head.

When the fire burns out, the whole porch is cloudy with smoke. I use a dishrag to pick up daddy’s burnt things and shove them deep into the coffee beans. It seem like it take forever for me to drag that bag of coffee upstairs, but I do it. By the time I stuff the bag under my bed, my arms are wet with sweat.

When Lola and Benny come home, all the smoke from the fire is gone. I’m back sitting at the kitchen table, looking like I didn’t move. My pockets are stuffed with cotton balls I took from under the bathroom sink.

When Lola sees the dirty dishes still spread over the table, she punches me hard.

“Why you didn’t clean the dishes, stupid?”

I give her the same evil look she give me this morning, and she backs off. She hates my magic. She liked it better when she could beat me up. Now she be a bit more careful.

“Come on, Benny, let’s do the dishes,” Lola says.

“Yeah,” Benny says, like doing the dishes is a treat.

• • • •

After mama tucks me in and turns out my light, I grab the cotton balls and put them under my pillow. Then I sit on top, and those prayers start coming out of me again. This time, they come so fast, it’s scary. I sit there for hours, mumbling to myself, waiting for daddy to come home. When I hear daddy’s car creep into the driveway, I jump out of bed and drop down to my hands and knees. As the front door opens, I grab hold of the burlap bag and yank it hard.

Daddy’s footsteps are on the stairs. I’m tugging on the bag, but it don’t come free. I got to get it unstuck somehow. I catch a tighter hold of the burlap, but it still won’t come loose. I hear daddy’s footsteps at the top of the stairs, and I just panic. I run to my desk and snatch my scissors from the desk drawer. I stab the scissors into the bag. The bag splits and coffee beans spill out. I jam my hand into the coffee and make wild grabs, feeling around for daddy’s stuff. He’s so close now, I can almost feel him breathing down my neck. ’Stead of my door, I hear mama and daddy’s door squeak open. I let out a little sigh, but I don’t relax. I keep searching ’til my fingers touch something hard. Then I grab it—the burnt bundle of daddy’s stuff.

Mama and daddy’s door squeaks again. I listen for a second, thinking maybe daddy just got in bed, but no, I can hear the clunk clunk of his footsteps. I stick my hand under my mattress and feel around for my magic pouch. Daddy’s footsteps stop in front of my door, and it feel like my heart stops. I turn the pouch upside down and shake it wildly. Marbles, gum, and a picture of Ronald, the boy I have a crush on, spill to the floor. Daddy’s turning the doorknob now. My fingers are shaking as I reach for the cotton. I stuff a little cotton into the bottom of the pouch and drop the bundle of daddy’s things on top. I turn to face daddy as I fill the pouch up with cotton and a handful of coffee beans.

Daddy’s face is confused. He stands in the doorway as I tie the pouch closed and hang it around my neck. When I am finally still, he starts to walk toward me.

“Don’t be scared, baby,” daddy says.

I put my hand out in front of me and daddy stops short. I turn my palm up to the ceiling and imagine daddy’s heart resting in my grasp. The second I feel the weight of his heart in my hand, I snap my fingers shut. Daddy gasps and bends over. I squeeze until the thing stops beating. Daddy stumbles away.

• • • •

The next morning, mama’s not in the kitchen. Me, Lola, and Benny go to mama and daddy’s room. Lola pushes the door open, and me and Benny creep in behind her. Mama is sitting on the bed crying. She don’t ask about the missing bag of coffee or her burnt metal bowl. She don’t even notice how I bent the screens. The only thing she notice is daddy. He’s lying next to her breathing heavy. His hands are shaking. His skin looks gray.

“Lola, honey, go call a ambulance. Your daddy is sick. Benny, come with me downstairs. Help me make daddy some tea. Rosa, stay here with your daddy. Call me if he starts to lookin’ worse.”

I nod my head, but I can’t speak. When everyone leaves I’m too frightened to move. I stay with my back against the wall, close to the door.

“Rosamojo,” I hear daddy whisper. “Rosamojo.”

I don’t say a word.

“Rosa, make me well.”

Tears start to drip out my eyes, but I don’t make a sound.

“I won’t do it again, Rosa, give me my heart back.”

“I didn’t mean to, daddy,” I whisper.

“Can’t you see how upset you makin’ your mama?”

I put my hands over my ears.

“Daddy, I didn’t mean to,” I say a little louder.

“Take the hex off me, Rosa, please,” daddy says.

But I can’t. My mind is blank. Nothing comes. Not like the protection prayer that just spilled out my lips. Not like I knew exactly what to do to grab hold of daddy’s heart. I can’t think of anything at all. When mama gets back, I’m crying hard.

Mama kisses me. “Don’t cry, sweet baby, daddy will be fine.”

But I just cry harder because I know he won’t.

Mama hugs me. “Go downstairs with your sister and brother, sweetie. Let me talk to daddy.”

But I don’t move. I’m terrified daddy will tell. Mama pushes me toward the door, but my body is stiff as a old oak.

“Go ’head, honey,” she says. “Go on downstairs.”

“Can I tell daddy something first, mama?”

“Go ahead, Rosa.”

I force myself to walk close to the bed.

“Don’t tell, daddy. Don’t tell mama and I promise, I’ll fix it.”

Daddy grunts. He can’t see my fingers crossed behind my back. It’s not that I don’t want to fix it, it’s that I can’t. If daddy dies, things are gonna get real bad. But I can’t let mama find out what I did. Not ever.

I go downstairs and sit between Benny and Lola on the couch. Benny is crying, Lola is picking a scab on her knee.

“You think daddy’s gonna die?” Lola asks.

When I don’t answer, she shoves me, but I still don’t say nothing. When the ambulance sirens get close, Benny stops crying. Before they even pull up in the yard, I feel a fire burn inside me. I don’t say nothing to Lola, but that’s how I know daddy died. Mama screams loud and we all tense up. When mama comes downstairs, she don’t say nothing. She points the ambulance people to the stairs and sits on the couch with us. She spreads her arms wide and squeezes us tight.

• • • •

That night I dream of mama. Her face close to my face, we giggling and talking girl talk. But then I feel the string of my pouch pulling at my neck. My eyes fly open. Mama’s face is close to my face, but ain’t no giggle in her eyes. She’s hanging over my bed, and her hairline is all sweaty. She looking at me like she don’t know me—like I’m not me, not a girl even, just some stubborn piece of meat she’s tugging on.

My hands fly up and I grab my pouch. Mama hiss out some air before she speak.

“Be sleep time, Rosa,” she say.

“I know, mama, but I can’t sleep with you wrenchin’ on my neck.”

“Take it off, then,” mama say, like she daring me or something.

“Mama, you know I always sleep with my pouch.”

Mama closes her eyes like she can’t look at me while she’s talking. Silence hang between us for so long, I think I’m dreaming again. Then mama open her eyes. She look at me like she searching for the truth.

“You just a child,” she say. Then she blink all the pity out her eyes, and her voice get hard again.

“Empty out the pouch, Rosa.”

My heart starts beating double time. I start to cry.

“Why you want me to do that, mama?”

“I can’t survive no more bad news, Rosa,” she say with her teeth all clenched up. “It all got to come out tonight, so when the sun rise tomorrow, it’s done.”

I start crying harder then. Mama stop talking and lick her lips. One second, she look like she want to love me, the next second she look like she want to kill me. Her hands are shaking like she been wrestling with the Devil himself.

“Rosa, there’s some things in life that’s too troublin’ to understand and too wicked to look straight in the eye. You just a baby, and God knows I don’t want to witness to this, but I can’t lie to myself no more.”

Mama gives me a soft look, then evil steal back into her eyes. “You shoulda stayed asleep, Rosa, and let me find out on my own.”

My legs start twitching ’cuz they wanna run right out the room. But they trapped in the twisted up sheets. Besides, there’s no way I could get past mama. Not tonight. I take a big ole gulp of air trying to slow down the hurt rushing out my chest.

“I can’t,” I whisper, and I look at the wall ’steada at mama. I wanna say—“Mama, I can’t”—but I don’t know if she still be my mama after what I done to daddy.

Mama rise up to her feet then. I can feel the anger crackling off her like lightning. “I never had no cause to hit you before, Rosa, and tonight is not the night to start. Now hush up and empty out that pouch.”

I don’t want her to be mad at me, but it’s like my whole body is yelling “No!” I hunch my shoulders over and cover the pouch with my hands. Next thing I know, mama is on me. She’s scratching my face and neck trying to rip off the pouch. When mama finally get a good grip on the pouch, it don’t make no noise. All the protest is coming from the draw of my breath and the thump of my heart.

Soon as the pouch leave my body, I gets to shaking. I’m shaking so hard it feels like the whole house is trembling with me. I don’t know who starts to wailing first, and I don’t know who is the loudest. All I know is when daddy’s burnt harmonica hit the floor, me and mama turn inside out. All our hurts like to drown us in that room. I go hot, I shiver with chills, I get ate up by fear—wild, hungry fear—worse than when daddy was coming to my room that second time. When I can’t take it no more, I just start to yelling. I yell so hard my throat start to close up on me. Then mama voice break through all that noise. I can hear her screaming, “Why? Why? Whyyyyyyyyy?”

I’d do anything to make mama understand, but my mouth is numb. I can’t tell her the truth. If I tried to explain, the words would rip me right down the middle and break mama into a million tiny pieces.

“Ask daddy why,” I whisper and my whisper cut through all that screaming and wire up the air with electricity. Mama’s chest is heaving like something evil is truly inside her. Sweat is pouring off her like the wet on a jelly jar fresh out the icebox. The rhythm of my breath scatter all over the place. My throat feel like roadkill, and I can’t gather up enough air to keep my lungs going. The last thing I remember is mama staring at me with a look I don’t ever want to see again. Then my eyes roll back in my head and my body just give out.

• • • •

Next time I see mama is at daddy’s funeral. First time I’m seeing Benny and Lola, too. Soon as mama see me, she look at me real hard. Not mean or scared, but just studying real serious. Maw-Maw’s been fattening me up with pound cake and gumbo, but I don’t think that’s why mama’s staring. I think she trying to peel me open with her eyes, trying to figure out if her little girl is still inside me. I want her to see I’m still me, I want her to love me like before—but if she don’t, I won’t fall to pieces like I thought I would before Maw-Maw got her hands on me. Maw-Maw give me peace and trust and plenty of hugs and kisses. She never look at me funny or make me feel like she suspect me of harboring the Devil. She told me all God’s children got they miracles and they struggles, and sometimes those two be the same thing. Then she brush my hair and tell me not to trouble myself with worry.

After the funeral, Lola and Benny sit there gobbling up big plates of fried chicken with red beans and rice. They act like they don’t miss me at all, but I catch them staring at me when they think I ain’t looking.

After the eating’s done, Maw-Maw unwrap three cakes. I snatch up a piece of one and sneak off. I can’t take mama’s stares or Benny and Lola’s looks no more. Don’t know who else know I ain’t been home, but I don’t want to feel nobody’s prying eyes picking me apart.

I find a corner next to the china cabinet in Maw-Maw’s sitting room. Ain’t supposed to carry no food in here at all, but I mean to eat private, even if it gets me in trouble. Before I take my first bite, I feel somebody hit me on the shoulder. I look up, but I’m scared to look back. If I’m leaning on the wall, can’t nobody hit me from behind, can they?

I wait awhile, but nothing happens. I break off a chunk of cake. That’s when I feel that tap tap on my shoulder again. This time I turn and look back. Ain’t nobody there. I get up and move to the other side of the room. I settle down and bite into Maw-Maw’s cake real quick before that ole tapping can stop me. While I’m chewing, I hear daddy’s voice inside my head.

“It good Rosa?” he say.

I jump and look around. Daddy laugh.

“You can’t see the dead, Rosa.”

“Daddy, that you?” I whisper.

Daddy don’t say nothing. I take a sad look at my cake. Look like don’t nobody wanna let me eat in peace. I get up and take my cake to the backyard. Soon as I get outside, daddy start talking again.

“Rosa, you have to forgive me.”

I slam my plate down on the picnic table.

“Me? Forgive you?”

“Yeah, I wanna go where my soul supposed to go, but . . .”

Daddy fall silent. My lip starts to poke out like it does when I’m feeling prickly.

“Rosa, you holdin’ me back.”

“That’s why you sneakin’ around here tappin’ on my shoulder at your own funeral?”

“Rosa, I need you to forgive me so I can go where I need to go.”

I go quiet on that one. Me forgiving him make it seem like he didn’t do nothing wrong.

“You gotta tell mama what happened,” I say and cross my arms.

“How I’mma do that, Rosa? You the only one that could hear me.”

A big knot of sobs is welling up in my throat, but I choke it down.

“You ain’t the only one can’t go where you supposed to. I ain’t been home since you left. Mama don’t even want me no more.”

“But Maw-Maw takin good care of you, Rosa. I’m nowhere.”

I turn my back to daddy, which I realize is stupid real quick because daddy is everywhere and nowhere at once.

“I can’t help you ’til you make mama know I’m not the Devil’s child.”

“Once I make your mama know the truth, then you’ll forgive me?”

I sit down on the picnic bench in a heap. I feel like all the air done left my body.

Finally I say, “Daddy, can I forgive you even if I’m glad you dead?”

Daddy go real quiet. After while I figure he’s gone.

“Daddy?”

Daddy clears his throat. “Did daddy hurt you that bad, Rosa?”

I nod my head.

“And you was gonna keep doing it.”

Then daddy quiet again. Finally he say, “Sometimes right and wrong not so easy to sort out, Rosa.”

“I’m a child, daddy,” I wail. “I’m not ready for grown up things.” My voice starts shaking, before I know it I’m bawling.

“It’s all right, Rosa,” daddy say. “I can see you not ready to forgive me. I’m terrible sorry you hurtin’ so bad. I never meant to do you wrong. I’m gonna go now, but I’ll be back. I’m not gonna push you, but you can’t make me stay here forever. You gonna have to forgive me and let me go where I need to go.”

I don’t answer, I just sniff real hard. It take me a while to pull myself together. I look at the tops of the trees. I stare up under some birds as they fly by. I watch a stretch of raggedy-looking clouds float on by. When my tears finally dry up, I wipe off my face and head back to the house.

When I grab hold of the door, I hear daddy again.

“Rosa, honey, please promise me you’ll at least think about forgiving me.”

“I will,” I say tiredly. I ain’t got no more fight left in me.

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

And I’m still keeping that promise to this very day.

©2003 by Kiini Ibura Salaam. Originally published in Mojo: Conjure Stories, edited by Nalo Hopkinson. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kiini Ibura Salaam is a writer, painter, and traveler from New Orleans, Louisiana. Her work is rooted in eroticism, speculative events, women’s perspectives, and artistic freedom. She has been widely published and anthologized in such publications as the Dark Matter, Mojo: Conjure Stories, and Colonize This! anthologies, as well as Essence, Utne Reader, and Ms. magazines. She is the author of two short story collections: Ancient, Ancient—winner of the 2012 James Tiptree, Jr. award, and When the World Wounds. Her micro-essays on writing can be found in ebook format as well as online at www.kiiniibura.com.

EXCERPT: The Sin in the Steel (Tor Books)

Ryan Van Loan | 4251 words

Ryan Van Loan’s The Sin in the Steel is a sparkling debut fantasy set in a diverse world, featuring dead gods, a pirate queen, shapeshifting mages, and a Sherlockian teenager determined to upend her society.

Heroes for hire. If you can pay.

Buc:

Brilliant street-rat

Her mind leaps from clues to conclusions in the blink of an eye.

Eld:

Ex-soldier

Buc’s partner-in-crime.

No. Not in crime—in crime-solving.

They’ve been hired for their biggest job yet—one that will set them up for a life of ease.

If they survive.

Buc and Eld are the first private detectives in a world where pirates roam the seas, mages speak to each other across oceans, mechanical devices change the tide of battle, and earthly wealth is concentrated in the hands of a powerful few.

It’s been weeks since ships last returned to the magnificent city of Servenza with bounty from the Shattered Coast. Disaster threatens not just the city’s trading companies but the empire itself. When Buc and Eld are hired to investigate, Buc swiftly discovers that the trade routes have become the domain of a sharp-eyed pirate queen who sinks all who defy her.

Now all Buc and Eld have to do is sink the Widowmaker’s ship . . .

Unfortunately for Buc, the gods have other plans.

Unfortunately for the gods, so does Buc.

Coming July 21, 2020 from Tor Books.

Chapter 1

Before I learned how to read, I thought knowledge was finite, dead and decaying inside old men’s skulls. Now I know the truth, that knowledge is living gold threaded through layers of dead parchment, just waiting to be mined. But while the world may be driven by knowledge, it runs on gold. The hard kind. And if my plans were to succeed, that was the kind of leverage I needed. I saw my chance, placed my wager, and took my seat at the table.

For that I was being shoved at bayonet point down a marbled hall lined with frescoes and landscapes of a hundred ports that shared a similar theme: palaces and outposts of the mighty Kanados Trading Company. The Imperial Guard pushed us forward at a breakneck pace; it was a wonder I didn’t trip over my blood-soaked dress. I must confess, the bayonet at my back was wonderful motivation. Eld stumbled beside me, weak from the knife he’d taken in one shoulder.

A knife meant for me.

I’d tossed what I thought were loaded die, only to see them come up pips and unless the odds changed fast, we were likely to swing for it. The Imperial Guard wouldn’t look the other way like the Constabulary, and even the Constabulary wouldn’t look away from a room full of dead guards and a mage whose God would be missing their magics soon enough. Not when I’d been caught holding the still-smoking pistole. Maybe with enough lire? Unfortunately, I’d need as much gold as it cost to buy the palace they’d brought us to and even then, the Imperial Guard doesn’t bribe easily. I’ve tried.

No one gets off with just a bribe when you’ve murdered a mage. Not that we had. Murdered a mage, that is, but perception was reality and reality saw us swinging before the day’s sun had fully risen.

A pair of heavy wooden doors that rose from floor to ceiling swung open of their own accord as we approached. I saw the hint of a muddy footprint and filed it away before the guard behind me hit me low in the back. I went down, caught up in my bloody skirts. Eld tried to catch me, then cried out when I hit his bad shoulder, and we both sprawled across the marble floor, sliding to a stop in front of a gilded table built over turnstile cabinets. I picked myself up, making it to my knees before the hard octagonal iron of a musket barrel pressed against the base of my skull and sent a chill running down my spine.

“Eyes down or your brains will decorate the floor,” the guard growled.

“I’ve read blood leaves a bitch of a stain on marble,” I said, before I could think. Eld groaned beside me. Number eighty-eight, Alyce’s On Sculpting. The guard growled again. I heard a pair of heels click on the floor. Lavender skirts pinned back and sewn with thread o’ gold swished around the table in front of us. I risked a glance up through a few errant strands that had pulled free from my loosely braided dark curls and saw a pale woman with blonde locks piled down the left shoulder of her gown—which had sleeves that covered her to the wrist, as was the latest fashion.

She met my gaze with a smile that made her appear younger than she was, thin lips or no. An older woman in dark Imperial armor, with crimson plumes of rank swaying atop her helm, walked past us to stand beside the blonde. She moved with the loose, stalking saunter that I associated with enforcers the street gangs employed. She held up—making sure we could see it—an all too familiar pistole, then set it down on the table, out of view. Once that was done, she crossed her gauntleted arms, staring at us from eyes darker than her sun-darkened face, as if sizing us up.

“You’ve a need for friends,” the woman in the lavender gown said.

I looked up at that, expecting to see a dark room awash with lantern light glittering off the blades and saws and pincers meant to pry the truth from our lips whether we willed it or no.

“Do we now?” Whatever else I meant to say caught on my tongue as my eyes finally took in the room they’d brought us to. Gods. Guard forgotten, I looked past the woman and felt my mouth slacken. No torture table here, but something far more dangerous.

A library.

They’d brought us to a library—at least that is the only word our tongue has for it—but “a library” meted it poor justice. It was labyrinth-like in its shelves that rose from floor to ceiling and wall to wall, with the far wall a dim specter in the distance, barely illuminated by a score or more of chandeliers. It wasn’t the size of the space but the sheer quantity of what it held that made my throat clench as if in want of water. Books . . . no, tomes, packed side by side on every shelf, sometimes stacked double in height. Everywhere my eyes turned there was another cover in mismatched bindings and sizes and colors staring back at me, another voice to be discovered, another bit of information to banish my ignorance, another morsel of magic to be consumed.

Three hundred and sixty-seven. Even Eld hasn’t read as many books as I have, and he’s old. I’d thought myself well-read, versed in the subjects of enlightenment, but here was a treasure to beggar my meager achievements. Here was a sun to my mere pinprick in the darkness. I could spend a dozen years here and not finish. I inhaled deeply, absorbing the dusty incense into my bones; a shiver covered me in gooseflesh. A dozen years.

The musket barrel pressed harder against my neck, bringing me back to the reality of my situation—on my knees with a gun to my head and enough evidence painting Eld and me as murderers to see us executed on the spot.

“You’ve a need for friends.”

“I have friends,” I said, trying and failing to keep my gaze from wandering across the shelves behind her. One. Anyway. “But I’m not sure I follow you.”

“Oh, I think you do, Sambuciña,” the woman said. Her light cheeks dimpled when she saw my astonishment, and she smiled again. I never know why people do that. Smile. Are they amused? Happy? Trying to disarm? Almost certainly the last, even if some of the other emotions play into it, but it’s hard for me to discern.

The eyes, on the other hand, rarely lie. Hers were bright and hard, and searching. For what?

“You were on your way to the gallows, to be hung for disturbing the Empress’s peace, for larceny, and for half a dozen counts of murder, but as a friend, I interceded on your behalf.” She made a motion with her hand and the barrel against my neck disappeared.

“That’s pleasant of you,” I muttered. The guard growled yet again.

“Buc!” Eld hissed. He’s polite like that. He looked pale in the lamplight. I hoped that was from the shock of the arrest and not blood loss. He was the muscle and I the brain, and weak muscle was no muscle at all. Besides, he was the only soul that would call me friend. I can’t lay claim to many years, but I’ve learned it doesn’t pay to toss that away.

Not with these stakes.

“Is there a name we should use, to thank you?” Eld asked.

I tried not to roll my eyes.

“Salina,” the woman said after a moment. She arched an eyebrow. “I can save you from the noose, but only if you’re useful.”

“Very noble,” I said.

“We’re not noble, Sambuciña; we’re a trading company. Omnia cum pretio.”

“‘Everything has its price,’” I repeated. It was the one phrase in the New Goddess’s tongue that didn’t twist in my mouth.

“Precisely,” Salina said, favoring me with another of her false smiles.

“We’ve rights to a judge’s ear before we swing,” I reminded her. “And last I checked, self-defense wasn’t a hanging offense.”

“Self-defense?” Salina snorted. “You were caught surrounded by dead bodies, pistole in hand. That hardly seems like self-defense.”

“Looks can be deceiving,” I said.

“They can indeed,” said a new voice. A man in a powdered wig marched out of the stacks behind Salina, his naturally tanned skin, somewhat pale from lack of direct sunlight, looked paler still beneath the bloodred robes he wore.

“That’s why,” he said as he settled himself into the gild-backed chair behind the cataloging table, “it requires the judiciary to sift through the evidence, to sort”—he gestured toward the stacks with a flick of his hand—“fact from fiction, as it were.”

“You did say you wanted a judge’s ear,” Salina said, that small, insipid smile catching the edge of her lips. “Do you know why Servenza hangs criminals, Buc?”

“Because rotting bodies sends a message,” I said.

“That’s part of it,” the female Imperial officer beside Salina said. Given that she’d brought the murder weapon in, she was likely the one giving the orders when we were captured. Damn her. Her plumed helm turned her into some anonymous grim defender of justice, the executioner to the judge’s judicial pronouncements.

“The other part is that it’s cheaper to hang them than it is to shoot them,” the judge added.

“But the Kanados Trading Company isn’t so cheap,” Salina said.

“You can’t hold a trial in here,” Eld protested.

“Oh, but we can,” Salina said.

“Court is in session,” the judge pronounced, his lips thinning in the vaguest suggestion of a smile. He produced a gavel from his robes and rapped the table thrice. “The honorable Judge Cokren presiding.”

The sound of the guard cocking his musket was loud in the silence.

Chapter 2

Eld began arguing with the judge, protesting the venue, the domain, and anything else under the sun he could think of, but his arguments were as weak as he was, given the massacre we’d come from. A massacre of—Gods damn it—my doing. But there were odds to be had, if I could see the angles in time, only my head was spinning still and I could taste iron in my mouth. That blow didn’t help things. I’d been sloppy, to let the woman catch me with her fist, however glancing, but we’d been outnumbered three to one and us unarmed. Enough time to analyze what went wrong later. If there is a later. I waited a breath to let the men build themselves up, until Judge Cokren’s face began to take on some color of its own.

“Your Honor!” My shout cut off the two men’s voices. “W-would it please the court to hear our version of events? So that you may ascertain the truth?”

“It would,” Judge Cokren said, smirking at my stammer.

Let a man think you weak, let him think you vulnerable, and he’ll never see the blade until it’s planted in his ribs. This time the blades were of the verbal kind. There’d been enough blood spilt, and most of it on my dress.

“It was self-defense, Your Honor . . .” I began.

“Oh?” Salina crossed her thin arms, drawing her gown tighter about herself. “Do tell.”

I ignored her, shooting a questioning look at Cokren, who nodded fractionally in approval.

“Some philosophers think knowledge a burden, a millstone round their necks dragging them down with its power, but they’re all fools,” I said, speaking softly as I eyed the books surrounding us.

My vision was still a little unsteady, but I couldn’t stop drinking in the thousands upon thousands of tomes waiting to be discovered. But first, I needed to discover why we had been brought here. Last I’d checked, the Kanados Trading Company didn’t hang murderers inside their headquarters.

“Knowledge isn’t power; knowledge is a loaded pistole waiting to be fired. Knowledge is opportunity.”

I smelled the warm, welcoming scent of parchment, thick in the air, and for a moment the ringing in my head subsided. My mind raced ahead, leaving words behind for me to follow, but I had to take my time. Judge Cokren needed a clear picture if we were to walk free. For the first time since Eld had taken that knife in the shoulder, I could feel the odds shifting, albeit ever so slightly.

“We solved a dozen cases that other would-be investigators failed miserably at, just to get to this point,” I continued. “To find a merchant who needed someone like me, someone who could look at a score of disparate clues and piece them together to complete the puzzle.” A merchant who could open doors that would give me what I’ve wanted ever since I left the streets, burning everything behind me. “A merchant who—”

“Wasn’t completely clean,” Salina finished. “Grift and bribery, I shouldn’t wonder,” she added for Judge Cokren’s benefit.

“No, Salazar wasn’t spotless,” I agreed. Then again, neither am I. No one leaves the streets without some grime on them, and I’d left with it smeared into my bones. Eld thinks me too young to have lived more than one life, but I grew up on the streets, where most lives never made it past a dozen years. I can lay claim to sixteen and if I have it my way, I’ll claim scores more before I draw my last breath.

Watching my old life burn had left glowing embers within me. I’m young, but I’m no fool—change requires power and in the Empire, power comes from gold. The hard kind. The kind Salazar could provide.

“I didn’t think Salazar was fool enough to cheat us after we’d solved his case for him,” I said.

“Are you arguing that this fight was over a failure to pay for services rendered?” Judge Cokren asked, leaning forward over the table.

“That is what brought both parties together, aye.” I nodded.

“And you went into his own warehouse to collect?” Salina shook her golden locks.

“Sounds more like revenge than anything else,” the female officer put in. She’d seen the blood and bodies strewn about Salazar’s office.

“I knew what I was doing,” I growled. “We were there to talk . . . to discuss payment options.” Both women arched their eyebrows and I swore. “You can’t take money from the dead.”

“Not if you’re caught before your robbery is complete anyway,” the officer said in a low voice.

Salina clicked her tongue. “Now, that was ill done, Colonel. Let Buc give us her version of events.”

“It is Captain, signora.”

“For today, yes, but tomorrow?”

“To return to the matter at hand,” Judge Cokren said, his tone making both women look away from each other. He adjusted his crimson robes and his dark eyes pierced my own. “Girl, you came to talk to this merchant Salazar and ended up murdering half a dozen.”

“Five,” I corrected him. All three stared at me. Beads of sweat slid down my forehead. Must be the lights. “The mage murdered Salazar.”

“The mage murdered his employer? That’s your story?” Salina cut in.

“You know mages are loyal only to their God,” Eld said with a shrug.

I winced. “And you know that the Kanados Trading Company employs scores of mages to keep tabs on their estates, right, Eld?”

“I—uh, had forgotten that detail,” he admitted. His pale features burned, so at least he had enough blood left in him to blush. “But Buc speaks the truth, Your Honor. The mage blew Salazar’s brains out.”

“And left you holding the pistole?” Judge Cokren chuckled mirthlessly. He adjusted his powdered wig. “This may be the shortest deliberation I’ve ever had and I tried the man who nearly killed the Empress last summer.”

“It was the fastest fuckup I’ve ever seen,” I said.

“Certainly one of the fastest I can remember,” Eld supplied. “If you weren’t there, you wouldn’t have believed it. One moment we’re talking, Salazar is trying to bargain down his price, and then the mage ends the conversation.”

“That’s when the killing started,” I said. I closed my eyes and was back in the darkened warehouse, in the room Salazar’s lackeys had led us to after stripping us of our weapons. I could remember the smell of the dust, heavy in the air until blood flowed, its sharp iron scent cutting through everything else. “Salazar’s man slung a blade at my face.” One of the first lessons the streets taught me was that if you flinch, you miss the next move. Do that and you won’t have to worry about another move because you’ll be dead in the gutter. “I didn’t flinch.”

“Aye, and why would you when it took me in the shoulder?” Eld asked, shrugging his wounded side.

“You were wounded at the outset?” the captain asked. Her hand strayed to the sword at her side. “And still killed half a dozen?”

“Five,” I reminded her.

“I’ve been wounded before,” Eld murmured. He glanced at me. “And, uh, I had some help.”

“Look, Salazar was trying to slip out of paying after we’d gone and found his missing merchandise. That was bad enough,” I said. “But then he had one of his lackeys go and put a knife through Eld. Not paying’s one thing—killing my friend’s another.” I snorted. “They were fools; by that point Eld had dropped three of them with fisticuffs. He’d have done for more if our weapons hadn’t been taken away.”

“She exaggerates,” Eld protested, but Judge Cokren held up his hand and motioned for me to continue.

“But they’d already made their second mistake.”

“Oh?” Salina asked.

“They gave me a knife,” I said, unable to keep the hint of a smile from my lips.

“That hurt,” Eld growled.

“Did it?” I asked, shaking my head.

Salina sniffed.

“In close quarters and outnumbered, you can either curl up in a ball and wait for their knives—or you can attack.”

“Wait, wait,” Judge Cokren said. “You were unarmed and outnumbered and you attacked?”

“Recall I had a knife by then,” I said.

“From my shoulder,” Eld said.

I shrugged. “Like I said, I hate failure, so I attacked. Put one of the shorter bastards up against the wall before he could blink. He tried to scream—”

“Tried?” The captain’s brow furrowed.

“It’s hard to scream with a blade buried in your throat,” I told her. Salina made a choking sound and looked as if she were going to sick up. I could feel the dried blood on my face crack and my smile made her turn another shade of green. “I think that was number five.”

“And then what?” the captain asked.

“Then Buc reminded Salazar what happened when the Montays tried to double-cross us,” Eld said.

“The Montays?” Salina asked. “From the Foreign Quarto by way of Colgna? Didn’t the younger brother go missing last winter?”

“I’m not sure,” I lied. Eld grunted from my elbow in his ribs. “I’m not familiar with any of that name within Servenza’s jurisdiction. To continue,” I said in a louder tone, “it was about then that Salazar started running away at the mouth with excuses.”

“Which was when his mage reached for something in his coat,” Eld added.

“Ah, this is where the mage comes into the picture?” Judge Cokren asked.

“Sort of,” Eld said. “He was the one who ordered the goons to rough us up—hence the three I’d put down before they started trying to kill us.”

“You went face-to-face with a mage?” Salina asked, disbelief written boldly across her features.

“We were about to,” I said. “I was still trying to work the knife loose from that skinny bastard’s throat when the mage’s eyes rolled to the back of his head.”

“His eyes rolled?” the captain asked in her low voice. “Like he had a fit?”

“Was he using his magic?” Salina asked.

“No,” I said. “Maybe?” I shook my dark curls. “All I know is, he froze suddenly, as if some puppeteer pulled his strings taut, as if every muscle had suddenly seized.”

“He didn’t stay frozen,” Eld said. He shivered. “He pulled a pistole out from his coat before I could blink and I thought I was dead.”

“Mages were ever poor shots,” the captain said. The plumes in her helm shook with her head. “Comes of relying too much on their magic.”

“Oh, he didn’t miss,” I said.

“We told you we didn’t kill Salazar,” Eld added.

“And we didn’t. Salazar’s lips were just starting to move when the mage blew his head off in a plume of smoke and blood and brains.” I closed my eyes and could smell the gunpowder sharp in my nostrils.

“In the middle of this murderous maelstrom, the mage decides to blow his employer’s brains out?” Judge Cokren asked.

“Never trust a mage,” I said. Something I’d known as a child on the streets even before I’d learned to read. Something Salazar would have done well not to forget.

“Wise words,” Judge Cokren said, avoiding Salina’s sudden gaze as if just remembering she employed mages by the score. “And your story does contain elements of self-defense. . . .” He tapped his fingers on the table. “What happened to the mage after he murdered Salazar?”

“Salazar’s body hit the floor . . . ,” I began. Eld caught up a sword off one of the lackeys and buried it in his neck. I could still see the blood squirting like a fountain around the bright steel. “The mage reached into his coat with his other hand. I thought he was going for another pistole and I . . .” I took a breath and shook my head. “I screamed,” I whispered.

“So there is some fragment of rational thought in you after all,” Salina murmured.

I glared at the other woman, but Eld saved me from replying.

“I thought the mage had done something to Buc with his magic,” he said. “She doesn’t scream. Ever. So I stabbed him with a sword, I’d, um, borrowed. And he died.”

“Mortal after all,” Judge Cokren said.

“He died hard,” I told him. “I looked for any clues about where he’d been before we met, but he was clean, save for powder marks.” I shook my head. “Too clean, really, given the heat and the dust-filled streets outside. He’d bathed not long before our meeting.

“That’s when I plucked up the pistole, hoping to find some clue there,” I explained. “And that’s about when the honorable captain”—I nodded toward the armored woman—“and her guards burst in.” With me holding the still-smoking pistole. Never trust a motherfucking mage.

Copyright © 2020 by Ryan Van Loan. Excerpted from The Sin in the Steel by Ryan Van Loan. Published by permission of the author and Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ryan Van Loan served six years in the US Army Infantry on the front lines of Afghanistan. He now works in healthcare innovation. The Sin in the Steel is his debut novel. Van Loan and his wife live in Pennsylvania.

Book Reviews: July 2020

Chris Kluwe | 2078 words

Before we get into the reviews today, I’d like to talk briefly about a dystopia. In this particular world, a world experiencing a global pandemic, protests have broken out in one of its most technologically and militarily advanced countries, spurred by justified anger over centuries of systemic racism and state-sponsored violence against a segment of the populace. Risking their lives to the pandemic, people have taken to the streets in the hundreds of thousands to register their discontent and demand sweeping change, only to be met with batons, tear gas, military force, and unprovoked aggression from the very system that claims it protects them.

I’m sure all of you have figured out by now the world I’m talking about is our own, but the reason why I’m talking about it is because far too often we as readers only think about escaping to a dystopia. We cheer for the Mockingjay, we marvel at jacking in and cyberpunk weirdness, we find hope in the Parable of the Sower and the relentless endurance it takes to survive a Fifth Season. Within those worlds, those black words on white paper, we momentarily live, but we always have the choice to leave; that if things get too tough, or too tense, or too real, we can just step away, close the cover, think of better things.

In our real world, the one we all must physically inhabit, that choice is a luxury not everyone is afforded. Black communities cannot step away from abusive police forces, from redlining and food deserts, from being strangled in the streets. Black sons cannot close the cover on a one in a thousand chance of being killed by police. Black daughters cannot think of better things when provided substandard medical care by hospitals that do not believe their pain is real. Black authors cannot wish away a predominately white publishing power structure, one which demands of them an excellence not required by the hundreds of milquetoast offerings disgorged into our collective conscience every year.

Those of us who do have the choice to look away must do so no longer. We must resist the urge to put the book back on the shelf and pretend what it describes no longer exists.

Dear readers, I wrote earlier we often want to escape to a dystopia. It’s time we start thinking of those trying to escape from one.

On to the books!

Trouble the Saints
Alaya Dawn Johnson
Hardcover / Digital Audio / Ebook
ISBN: 9781250175342
Tor, July 2020, 352 pages

For our first review, I’d like to highlight Trouble the Saints, by Alaya Dawn Johnson. Set in America right before the country’s involvement in WWII, Trouble the Saints follows the lives of Phyllis, Dev, and Tamara, a trio of friends/lovers who work for a New York mob boss as an assassin, bartender, and dancer respectively. At first the story resembles that of a gritty murder mystery with a splash of the occult, but as Johnson deftly peels back the layers of each character, it shifts into a tale of love and loss, of pain and injustice, and above all a scathing critique of America’s inability to grapple with its original sin.

Let me be very clear up front—this book takes a close look at multiple facets of America’s systemic racism and is not shy about calling a spade a spade. Johnson’s use of metaphor and mysticism reminded me very strongly of James Baldwin’s works, particularly the undercurrent of righteous fury at how badly the odds are stacked against Black people simply trying to live the same life as everyone else and being met with violence and hostility at every turn. Even though the book is set in the early 1940s, the circumstances the protagonists find themselves in are just as applicable today. Whether it be police brutality, exploitation of labor, or deliberate neglect of health, the forces Phyllis, Dev, and Tamara struggle against are very easily recognizable in our modern culture.

Trouble the Saints is also about so much more than just shining a needed spotlight into dark corners, though. It’s also a story of how people love each other, despite and because of their flaws, of what people are willing to sacrifice for each other, knowing the cost, of who and what you are when the world seems determined to grind you down to ash and dust. Johnson does an excellent job of interweaving poignant moments of bittersweet joy and tender thoughtfulness between the pain and terror that her protagonists must endure, and at the end of the book I felt equal parts heavyhearted and hopeful. About the only quibble I had with Trouble the Saints is that sometimes it can be difficult to follow the particulars of a certain scene due to abrupt shifts in focus and tone, but aside from that it is masterfully written and extremely timely. I hope everyone takes a chance to read it, even if the topics seem emotionally fraught.

Read if: you want to go tell it on the mountain; you know why the caged bird sings; you want to understand why things must change.

Anthropocene Rag
Alex Irvine
Trade Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9781250269270
Tor, March 2020, 256 pages

Anthropocene Rag was an oddly compelling story that I couldn’t quite put down, but it took me a while to figure out why. Ostensibly the book is about a team of six people given Golden Tickets to the fabled Monument City and the journey they take to get there, but in reality it’s an examination of the endless redefining of American myth and folklore, told through the lens of those who live it, those who search for meaning within it, and also nanotech and emergent AI because why not, those things are pretty cool too.

Reading this book was a bit like taking mild hallucinogens, in that I was never quite sure what weirdness I would encounter on the next page, but it was always a good kind of weirdness. One of the underlying foundations of the novel is that an explosion of nanotech (the Boom) not-quite-catastrophically rewrote how the world functions, which means Irvine is able to throw in every single piece of Americana mythology, from Paul Bunyan to Mickey Mouse, and it all somehow fits together. This is a story about stories, about how those stories shape us, and how we shape them in return, and what happens when something new comes along.

Fortunately for us as readers, Irvine does an excellent job of weaving together the multiple disparate elements that make up Anthropocene Rag, so while the initial shock of encountering such a strange world might be difficult to wrap your mind around, once you’ve submersed yourself in the unexpected it becomes . . . not quite familiar, but recognizable. Over there a piece of Mark Twain lives (perhaps literally!), behind that bush is the Donner Party campground (ask about their overnight rates), in the distance may or may not be Coyote chasing Br’er Rabbit, or is it the other way around?

You’ll have to read the book to find out. Just watch out for the Boom.

Read if: you read Collier’s Junior Classics as a kid; you enjoy the rich tapestry of American folklore; you’re not afraid of changing into something new.

Road Seven
Keith Rosson
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9781946154293
Meerkat Press, July 2020, 270 pages

The next book I have for you is Road Seven, by Keith Rosson, and where Anthropocene Rag was quirkily weird, Road Seven is very much eerily weird. It is the tale of a research assistant who joins a famous cryptozoologist to investigate a unicorn sighting on the tiny island of Hvildarland, only nothing is what it seems at first glance. As the investigation continues, truth mingles with lie, reality’s edges blur, and sometimes what you go looking for ends up being something you don’t want to find.

Road Seven is a slow burn of a book, and Rosson gives plenty of space for the characters to reveal their manifest complexities throughout the search. Whether it’s the awkwardly tentative growth of Brian Schutt, from whose viewpoint much of the story is told, the brash brittleness of Mark Sandoval, cryptozoologist hiding a few mysteries of his own, or the multiple other characters inhabiting Hvildarland, each is brought to life with care and depth that makes the world they inhabit entirely believable.

One of the things I greatly enjoyed about Road Seven was the constant sense of ethereality that suffused almost every scene. For those of you into video games, it reminded me a lot of Disco Elysium, and how the extraordinary always seemed within reach, but never quite tangible enough to grasp. Rosson does a masterful job keeping the reader in a state of invested bewilderment, offering just enough bread crumbs to tantalize, but keeping the destination hidden until the final, unexpected conclusion. The author also has plenty to say on social issues as well, but never in a way that felt heavy-handed or obtuse, which I found fit the story perfectly.

Read if: you like The X-Files; you want to believe something’s out there; you don’t regret finding what’s really out there.

Why Visit America
Matthew Baker
Hardcover / Digital Audio / Ebook
ISBN: 9781250237200
Henry Holt and Co., August 2020, 368 pages

For our final review this month I am thrilled to introduce you to Why Visit America, by Matthew Baker. This book is a collection of thirteen short stories that span the width and breadth of America, tackling its despairs, its hopes, its triumphs, and its failures with an eloquence and insight that frankly should be illegal for how good it is.

Baker confronts difficult issues like trans rights, the intimacies of sex work, women’s rights, and late-stage capitalism, to name a few, with grace, compassion, and dignity, and isn’t afraid to address the faults we’ve allowed to endure in our society but always with an eye towards empathy and healing. There’s also a surprising amount of humor intermingled with the heavy stuff, and several stories (in particular the eponymous title) had me laughing out loud on each page.

If there’s one thing that took me a little bit to adjust to in Why Visit America, it was the style of Baker’s writing. As someone who uses plenty of commas when I should probably be using periods, I was left in awe at some of the run-on sentences Baker constructed (one in particular goes for almost an entire page), though the way Baker utilizes them builds the environment in which they take place so intricately that you cannot help but be transported into the scene.

This book is heartfelt, the stories poignant, and while I do not know if it will win any awards, I know that it should. These are stories that will have you thinking about them for a long time after you put the book down.

Read if: you like road tripping; you care about the social fabric within which we all live; you don’t mind being attacked by the occasional herd of commas.

• • • •

That’s it for me this month! Stay safe out on the streets, everyone!

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: July 2020

LaShawn M. Wanak | 1726 words

The Steven Universe Universe

Steven Universe
Created by Rebecca Sugar
Produced by the Cartoon Network.
First season released July 7, 2013

Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, I was a huge fan of cartoons: getting up early on Saturday mornings to watch The Smurfs, rushing home from school to catch Voltron and Robotech, enduring marathons of Scooby-Doo when absolutely nothing else was on TV (I could have gone outside, but nah). Now that I am older, I still continue to watch cartoons, this time appreciating them with my teenage son. The past few years have brought about cartoons that feel richer and deeper in depth than my childhood shows. Some of them are reboots of those old shows; others are original stories, such as Steven Universe, created by Rebecca Sugar, who had previously worked on Adventure Time (another great cartoon).

Steven Universe is about a teenage boy learning to come to terms with his bi-cultural identity—his father is human; his mother, Rose Quartz, was a sentient gem whose race had planned on terraforming the Earth for their own needs, destroying all life on it. Rose Quartz and other like-minded gems had formed a rebellious fighting group called the Crystal Gems to protect the Earth. Now the group is reduced to three gems—Pearl, Garnet, and Amethyst—who serve as Steven’s guardians along with his father. Rose Quartz gave up her physical form so that her gem could become part of Steven, imbuing him with magical powers, such as forming a pink bubble around him as a shield or healing gems through the power of good old-fashioned spit (not as gross as it sounds).

Embedded in the lighthearted humor are dark secrets—broken alien technology and unnatural phenomena litter the cartoon’s backgrounds, alluding to a gem war strong enough to scar the Earth. The Crystal Gems, despite being thousands of years old, are trying to cope with a world without Rose Quartz, who herself hid such a dangerous secret that when Steven discovers it, it changes the whole direction of the series. It also employs one of the best uses of foreshadowing I’ve ever seen, laying groundwork for a big reveal about Rose as early as the first episode. I had to watch the entire series over again just to see all the clues and hints Sugar and her team wove into the backstory, the plot, and even the music—seriously, I can do a whole article on the music of Steven Universe and how the show uses leitmotifs to reflect the personalities of the main characters. Pearl’s, for instance, is an elegant piano melody.

At the beginning of the series, the show feels like a typical superhero show. Steven tries to develop his powers, pesters the gems about their planet Homeworld, and develops friendships with the quirky citizens of his hometown Beach City. However, there are ways in which the show subverts standard gender conventions. Steven has no problem wearing a dress and makeup to fill in for a shy friend who doesn’t want to perform on stage. Both he and his father openly cry without being shamed. Most of the gems present as female or non-binary. Steven is raised by not one, but three female-presenting gems whom he looks up to and strives to emulate.

Then, there is fusion, an ability that the gems have that enables them to physically combine with each other to create an entire new form. Garnet, for instance, is a fusion of a Ruby and a Sapphire gem; her presence is taboo on Homeworld, as gems are supposed to only fuse with their own type. This can also be reflected in the characters’ leitmotifs, in that when the gems fuse, their leitmotifs also fuse to reflect the new gem they’ve become. When Pearl fuses with Amethyst, who is represented by drums, their signature songs combine into a heart-pounding, yet divine form, which reflects their fusion known as Opal.

Being a human/gem hybrid, Steven is unique in that he is able to form fusions with both humans and gems. The series usually focuses on the fusion formed by him and his best friend, Connie: the intersex being known as “Stevonnie.” This fusion is based on their deep friendship, whereas Garnet represents the romantic-partner love between Ruby and Sapphire. In this, the show uses fusion as a fantastic metaphorical vehicle on how relationships are built, be they familial, platonic friendship, or romantic. This is particularly important as the characters aren’t perfect. They have flaws, insecurities, and misunderstandings, as well as doing things that can harm the relationship. And the stronger the relationship, the more stable the fusion. In one episode, Pearl does something that breaks Garnet’s trust to the point that an upset Garnet collapses back into the individuals Ruby and Sapphire. Pearl is deeply remorseful and apologizes, but it takes a long time (or at least several episodes) before Garnet is able to trust her again, and later on, forgive her.

That’s one of the themes of the show: learning how to live in relationships and, if they’re broken, how to heal and forgive. Conversely, the worse a relationship is, the worse the fusion. There is an episode where Jasper, a powerful gem, coerces a smaller one, Lapis, to fuse. Their entire fusion is a battle of wills with the two chained to each other, their voices failing to merge into a single new voice, as healthy fusions usually do. Like Pearl’s transgression, it highlights the importance of consent in relationships. It even follows Lapis after she manages to finally break free of Jasper’s control. Later episodes have her dealing with the trauma, self-loathing, and the isolation she feels. Only through Steven and other gems’ persistent friendship does she finally forgive herself and start to heal.

I never thought a kid’s show would bring up issues of dealing with trauma and grief, and do it in a way that appeals to both children and adults. It’s hard to fit those elements into eleven-minute episodes, and sometimes the show does feel rushed, as if they’re trying to cram in too much story without giving the characters space to breathe. But I deeply appreciate the writers of the show diving into these hard subjects. The show doesn’t hand out answers to its mysteries all at once, but builds its story gradually while folding in themes about identity, relationships, queerness, gender roles, grief, and mental growth that are rich and nuanced, all set within gaming and geek culture with an amazing soundtrack.

Steven Universe ran for five seasons before concluding in January 2019. It was followed by the Steven Universe Movie and then a shorter sixth season called Steven Universe Future. The last is not a sequel, but is considered “a limited epilogue” that has a much darker tone than previous seasons. It follows an older Steven grappling with the question: What happens when everything is fixed and he is not needed anymore? It’s a bold step for a children’s show, in that it shows the hero struggling with his own problems after he saves the day for everyone else. Steven has built his entire identity on helping others and fixing the mistakes his mother made, unaware that he himself had built up enough trauma to have him spiraling down a dark path. And though a lot of Steven’s problems are indeed due to trauma, I also wonder if they’re due to Steven becoming more of a teenager. We had first met Steven when he was thirteen; the epilogue involves a time skip that now puts him at sixteen. His powers are erratic and uncontrollable; different parts of his body inflate, physically mirroring his inner turmoil. The interesting thing is that he spent the previous series trying to establish that he was not Rose Quartz, despite the fact that Rose’s gem gives Steven access to her powers and memories in such a way that the gems from Homeworld actually do think he’s his mother (in a different form). Yet in Future, he reacts to stress in similar ways as his mother did when she was younger: He is moody and irritable, tunes out his father and guardians’ advice, and occasionally has outbursts that wreck his environment. On the other hand, we get hints that Steven’s father also rebelled against his parents in his youth—not to the degree of having violent outbursts, but bad enough that he is now estranged from his parents.

Because this is a children’s show (actually, I would say Future at this point is more of a YA show), there is a happy ending. The same power that Steven employed at the end of the series is now employed for him: the power of love and friendship, thanks to the intervention of his friends and family. Angsty teenage issues aside, Steven is not a superhero, despite his magical powers. He is also human, and is just as prone to having flaws. While not completely cured, Steven does emerge healthier at the end, taking steps to work on things with the help of his family, who are willing to let him go and find himself. And that’s the other theme of the show—accepting and loving yourself, as well as forgiving your own faults.

Steven Universe Future is a perfect coda to the series. We don’t get all the questions answered—we never see Peridot fuse with Lapis, or learn what was in the locked trunk in Steven’s inner space. We don’t know how Steven will fare as he drives off at the end of the series, but that’s fine. Particularly now, as I shelter in place with the coronavirus sweeping through the world, Steven Universe reminds me that the future can be unknown and scary, but if you have people in your life who are able to love you despite your faults, you can face that future head-on.

Steven’s mother would be proud.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LaShawn M. Wanak has been writing speculative fiction stories professionally since 2006. Her works have appeared in the 2018 Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy Anthology, Fireside Magazine, FIYAH, and many others. She is the editor of GigaNotoSaurus and reviews books for Lightspeed Magazine. Writing stories keeps her sane. Also, pie. Visit her blog at tbonecafe.wordpress.com.

Interview: Alaya Dawn Johnson

Christian A. Coleman | 2612 words

Alaya Dawn Johnson has been recognized for her short fiction and YA novels, winning the 2015 Nebula Award for Best Novelette for “A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i,” which also appears in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy (2015), guest edited by Joe Hill. Her debut YA novel, The Summer Prince, was longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Her follow up YA novel, Love is the Drug, won the Andre Norton Award in 2015. A native of Washington, DC, Johnson is currently based in Mexico City, where she received a master’s degree in Mesoamerican studies and now plays in a bossa nova band.

In Trouble the Saints, Phyllis LeBlanc is a juju assassin who passes for white in an alternate 1940s New York City. After years of contract killing with lethal knives, she wants out of the business when she gets back together with her ex-boyfriend Dev Patil. He’s a police informant with paranormal powers that allow him to see future threats against the people he touches. But breaking out of the business while the country is on the brink of joining World War II sure as hell won’t be easy. How did the premise come together for you?

I had the idea for the first section first, which began life as a novelette. I’d been interested first in questions of violence, in what people take for granted in noir stories (and most historical fantasy, for that matter), and shine some light on people and power relations that normally go overlooked. But it was only after I moved to Mexico that I decided to expand that original story beyond the confines of the noir format and include the two other POVs to deepen and expand Phyllis’s story.

The three points of view form the novel’s structure: Phyllis’s first-person POV in the first third, Dev’s first-person POV in the second, and then her friend Tamara’s in close third person in the last section. It gave me the sensation of zooming out from Phyllis’s take on the events of the book. What was the effect you were going for with this structure?

When I realized that I wanted to expand past that original noir framework, I had the choice of maintaining Phyllis as the narrator or moving to the people closest to her. I chose to switch POVs because I felt that as a character study of Phyllis, it gets more interesting to test her own view of herself against others’ views of her. I liked the idea of showing how she changes as the “lens” of the story zooms out, as you say. Tamara’s section switches to third person to heighten this effect and to bring the end back to the beginning, as we understand more about the origin of the saint’s hands and the structural inequalities they were meant to combat.

The saint’s hands are where the magic comes in. They run in Phyllis’s family. Her great-uncle could tell a card just by touching it, and her great-great grandmother picked up lightning in storms. Phyllis uses the power of her saint’s hands for wielding those lethal knives. Tell us about how you devised the magic system for them.

Honestly, I resisted the idea of this novel having a “magic system” for the longest time. I wanted the magic to have a very light touch on the novel; I was more interested in it for its metaphorical possibilities than its logical implications. But probably around the third draft of the manuscript, I realized that my refusal to think the hands through as a system in and of themselves was actually undermining their thematic potential. So with the help of my editor, I really dug in.

What helped me was reading a lot more about traditional magic “systems” in the African diaspora, specifically conjure and herblore in the American south. Also, living in Mexico and spending significant time in many small towns and traditional communities has really helped me expand my understanding of the way different people understand the presence of magic—using as expansive a definition as possible here—in their own lives. That helped me see that it wasn’t only something that western writers play with in these abstract games of fantasy worldbuilding, but an important aspect of actual, living traditions that have their own logic that must be respected. Or, to put it another way, as Latin American writers have frequently observed, “magical realism” is actually just realism (theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1973/01/the-yellow-trolley-car-in-barcelona-and-other-visions/360848/). I had to find my realism while imagining a lightly alternate history for 1940s New York. The saint’s hands of my novel don’t have any direct analog in conjure traditions, but they are fully realistic within them.

If the saint’s hands are meant to combat structural inequalities, why does Phyllis call the power from them a latter-day flood and a plague?

Because she’s angry. She has regarded the responsibility her hands represent as a divine punishment, even as she exploits their power. But of course, as the story goes on, both her own POV and the perspectives of Dev and Tamara provide greater depth and nuance to her somewhat glib condemnation.

Before heading to Little Easton with Dev to make a break from contract killing, Phyllis finds out that someone is killing off people with saint’s hands. And the ones born with saint’s hands are Black. I was wondering if you were commenting on this country’s history of killing Black people that we keep seeing today.

The destruction of Black bodies and lynchings are happening today because they were happening back then because they were happening a hundred years before because white European imperialists committed the great crime of stealing our ancestors from Africa and enslaving them in the Americas. Which is to say, this is a novel about the legacy of abuse and terror, so it’s meant to evoke both the past of the novel and the future (our present). What I wanted to make very stark was that the killing of Black and other marginalized people of color (let’s not forget that Native Americans are more likely to be killed by the police than any other demographic in the US: lakotalaw.org/news/2017-11-21/native-lives-matter-the-overlooked-police-brutality-against-native-americans) is often and explicitly about our power, not our powerlessness. It is because we still have power, despite centuries of oppression, that white racists are afraid and motivated to commit some of their most violent acts of brutality.

Why did you want to set the novel at the dawn of World War II in an alternate 1940s New York?

I’ve been fascinated with the concept of legacies of trauma for a long time. Most people alive today who are descendants of enslaved Africans don’t have to go very far back to find an enslaved ancestor, maybe six or seven generations. My own maternal grandfather was born in 1899, and his parents were alive during the Civil War. We can think of it as ancient history, but it isn’t: It’s still a painfully close, living history of trauma, even if most of our elders haven’t liked to go into the gory details. So a lot of my motivation was an attempt to understand my own history, my own parents and grandparents, why they made the choices that they did, and how trauma has shaped all of us.

I appreciate how you dispel the myth of the North being the haven from racism that it never was. Because racism by any other guise would be just as systemic. We see this when Phyllis takes her niece and nephew to Central Park because their mother is too dark-skinned, and when Tamara and Dev aren’t allowed to visit Phyllis while she’s recovering at a segregated white hospital. Was that part of your intention of writing about NYC during this period?

Absolutely. The notion of the North as this oasis of equality (even now) is one of the more egregious ahistorical myths of our times. If anything, the fact that the racism was less overt made it far more insidious. Black people in the North had certain, limited freedom compared to those in the Jim Crow South. But it was not a great deal more and could be ripped away at any moment. The existence of sundown towns was just one of the many ways that the North systematically discriminated against Black people.

What kind of research went into building this alternate 1940s NYC? What books or archives did you look into to capture the feel of Phyllis and Dev’s world?

I enjoyed a lot of novels and short stories written in the twenties, thirties and forties, particularly by writers like Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes. I spent a lot of time looking through online archives of restaurant menus, street plans, contemporaneous autobiographies, and other material that helped me contextualize the world. In the seven years I spent writing, I went through a great deal of material, but it tended to be more as I needed it as opposed to one big research burst.

You’ve written historical fantasy novels set in New York City before. Your Zephyr Hollis novels take place in the Big Apple during the Roaring Twenties. What draws you to writing period pieces about NYC?

I just love NYC a lot. I love the spirit of artistic ambition that’s drawn generations of people there. But I’m also very much aware of its flaws and of how brutally it has treated those generations of artists, particularly artists of color.

At the center of this very noir-flavored novel is the love story of Phyllis and Dev, both of whom are of mixed-race heritage. Are their relationship and their ability to navigate the race politics of the time by passing your way of playing with some of the conventions of the traditionally white genre of noir?

I have semi-jokingly called this book an “anti-noir” novel, because it’s using noir to upend its traditional racial hierarchies and explore complex legacies of oppression and how we as POC have navigated them. I’ll note that though Dev is mixed-race, he can’t pass for white. On the other hand, he isn’t Black, which does afford him some meager privileges with the white people around him (compared to, say, Tamara). All of these nuances are at the heart of the novel, because the main characters’ racialized status is at once something imposed upon them by the white power structure but also the product of their very idiosyncratic histories, cultures, and personal experiences. Phyllis, for example, is “mixed” in the sense that she’s a light-skinned Black woman, but she is fully Black in the sense that both of her parents were Black, and culturally, she’s very much part of the community and an heir to its legacy. Her passing wouldn’t mean anything if she weren’t—she leaves Harlem to “pass” because that’s not who she is.

Did you have any noir archetypes in mind when you were coming up with their characters?

Phyllis as a character was really the spark that gave me the whole story. I was thinking of assassin archetypes, honestly, and how so many modern stories tend to use violence as a shorthand for strength and power. And yes, I thought, that’s true, but it’s far from the whole story. Who is most drawn to using violence to get power? Do they get it? What do they sacrifice? How does that change when we’re talking about people who structurally, in our white patriarchal society, don’t get much, or any, power? Can they take some back? What does that do to them? Beyond any notion of justice, does that use of violence take them out of that white patriarchal structure, or does it embed them within it even more? Once I had Phyllis, Dev came naturally as her foil: the innocent youth who thought he could save her, but didn’t understand the game she was playing and thought she could win. And Tamara, as her friend who has made many of the same bargains in spirit if not in deed, gives her a mirror.

You tweeted back in November 2019 that what really draws you to a book isn’t genre, plot, or character (though related), but rather emotional honesty. What emotional honesty were you going for in Trouble the Saints?

I wanted to write characters who fully confront the choices they have made, bad and good, and who struggle to make better ones, though they never wholly succeed. I don’t think emotional honesty in fiction necessarily refers to that—there are plenty of emotionally honest books I can think of with fully self-deluded characters—but I wanted, in this book, to have the characters confront themselves in such a way that the reader is, hopefully, encouraged to do the same.

In addition to writing novels and short stories, you write and perform music. Could you tell us a little bit about your US-Mexican soul/blues/folk hybrid band Cananea and how it formed?

It came together because of a counter-cultural bookshop/coffee shop called Marabunta in Coyoacán, Mexico City, where I would go a few days a week to work on my novels. I eventually got to know the owners, one of whom also plays blues guitar. He heard me singing at a party, and we decided to try to start a band. He got his old guitar teacher involved, and then we found an amazing bassist and drummer. The music has a lot of storytelling elements—we even have a three-part song cycle that’s an extremely condensed fantasy novel. The mix of genres wasn’t too deliberate—just a reflection of the extremely eclectic music I grew up listening to, but wonderfully fleshed out and deepened by the work of the whole band.

Sadly, Cananea is now on hiatus due to the pandemic lockdowns and losing a few members, though we’re trying to figure out how we can keep making music with one another remotely.

Sorry about Cananea being on hiatus. What you all are doing sounds so cool! Did any of your songwriting feed into writing Trouble the Saints or vice versa?

Unfortunately, I couldn’t quite figure out how to write a song for Phyllis, Dev, or Tamara specifically, though a lot of the music gives me the same kind of feeling as the novel—bluesy, dark, nostalgic but defiant. There’s one in particular, “Morning After Song” (youtu.be/0PfjUiZegPE), that I think relates a lot to Tamara’s character.

What’s the next writing project you have coming up?

I have a collection of short stories forthcoming from Small Beer Press called Reconstruction and other stories. More details to come (as with everyone, the pandemic has moved a lot of my plans), but I can say that the title story is very much of a piece with this novel, and could even be considered a kind of (thematic) prequel.

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: Kristina Ten

Setsu Uzumé | 774 words

I loved this story so much that I’m not sure where to begin. It dug into my heart and made me homesick in a way that’s difficult to articulate—which is good human-to-human stuff but makes for poor interview content. Instead, could you tell me a bit about your take on Baba Yaga, and how you balanced such a vulnerable story around a powerful figure?

Thank you, that’s very kind! Or spasibo, as Baba Yaga would say. She featured prominently in some of the first stories I read as a kid. We had a whole stack of Russian fairy tales: “Vasilisa the Beautiful,” “Tsarevna Lyagushka,” “The Tale of Tsar Saltan.” Baba Yaga always stuck with me because she’s such a complex, contradictory character. She’s a wild, fearsome witch (not to mention a cannibalistic one), but she’s also a wise, maternal Mother Earth-type figure. She’s just as likely to help you on your journey as she is to stuff you in her oven and eat you. She lives outside the boxes of “good guy” and “bad guy,” and that makes her messy and fascinating and unpredictable—and easier to relate to, I think.

In “Baba Yaga and the Seven Hills,” I wanted to see what would happen if I dropped this ancient, powerful force into a modern context that rendered her pretty powerless. I think it’s her ambiguous nature that made her a good character to follow to a place of vulnerability. Because, yes, ultimately, it’s a story about home and the different things home means to us. Is it where you are or who you’re with? Is it familiarity or discovery, stillness or movement? For me, there’s no easy definition. So the story became a collision of places: the country where I was born and the city where I spent most of my twenties. I have a real soft spot for San Francisco. It holds its own contradictions: There were times I knew it was saving my life, other times I swore it would chew me up and spit me out. So for someone like Baba Yaga, it was a worthy adversary.

What are three things that make a space feel like home for you? Have they all been in the same place at once?

I’ve moved around a lot. So far, I’ve hung around the longest in the Bay Area, but I’ve also lived in Moscow, Tucson, New York, Boston, and Chicago, with another move coming up on the horizon. I’m one of those people who has to get the apartment set up immediately or I won’t be able to feel at ease enough to sleep or read or write or go anywhere or get anything done. This last time, I was driving across the country with my partner and our pup, and at rest stops, instead of, you know, resting, I was already scrolling through Craigslist looking for couches and shelves and all that. Probably because I didn’t know a whole lot about where we were going, and the inside of our apartment was something I could control.

Anyway, a sense of local community and culture will always be what makes home home for me. Getting out to the event spaces, finding my local coffee shop and bookstore, talking to people, figuring out the transit system and how to get around without GPS. As for the space specifically? Plants. Books. Art made by friends. They all feel like living things living with me.

What is one secret you know about San Francisco that’s safe to share?

If you race a friend down the Esmerelda Street slides three times in a row and win all three times, the Transiberian Council of Witches will declare you the Momentary King or Queen of San Francisco, a title they have absolutely no authority to issue. (Baba Yaga says the one on the left goes faster.)

Where can we find more of your work?

I have a darker story about misunderstanding, intrusion, and the dangers of getting in too deep in the May/June 2020 issue of Black Static, and a super-short one (that I hope my parents don’t read) coming soon in AE Science Fiction. Anyone who has ever tried to find a decent-sized closet in a city like San Francisco might appreciate my recent flash piece in Pithead Chapel. And there’s more like it over at kristinaten.com.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Setsu grew up in New York, and spent their formative years in and out of dojos. They like swords, raspberries, justice, the smell of pine forests after rain, and shooting arrows from horseback. They do not like peanut butter and chocolate in the same bite. Their work has appeared in Podcastle and Grimdark Magazine. Find them on Twitter @KatanaPen.

Author Spotlight: Adam-Troy Castro

Jude Griffin | 444 words

How are you and Judi and your cats doing during the pandemic?

Thanks for asking. As of this moment, months old by the time these words run, we are suffering no worse than cabin fever, and the three feline children are happily dealing with no worse than that irritating ailment, hyperesthesia.

Living through the COVID-19 pandemic now, although not world-ending, added an extra layer of interest to reading your story: Is there anything you’re observing around you now that surprises you?

At this moment, people are angrily gathering to protest quarantine, blockading hospital emergency rooms and whatnot, and no, while this disgusts me, this does not surprise me.

You reference Chekhov’s Gun, but adhere more scrupulously to the original quote than commonly seen: What’s your favorite advice to writers? Is there advice you commonly flout?

My favorite advice to writers is to wring the emotional reaction from yourself, first. When writing humor, you need to barely stand how witty you’re being; when you’re writing tragedy, you need to weep; when writing horror, you need to be appalled that this monstrous stuff is coming out of you. Hell, if you’re writing a thriller, you need to fear for your characters. Honestly, if you don’t react yourself, if it’s just a technical exercise, no one else is going to care either.

Despite its glowing reviews, I still can’t bring myself to read or listen to the audio version of “The Shallow End of the Pool.” I don’t think I could shake off the horror. How do you resurface after writing horror or a hard subject? Do you find yourself deliberately pivoting to comedy or lighter writing as a mind saver?

Although “Shallow End” shut me down for a few days, and so did “Of a Sweet Slow Dance in the Wake of Temporary Dogs” (available on Lightspeed), the answer is no. Sometimes one horror story leads to the next. Sometimes I have gone a full year or more without writing any. I will sometimes write very short stories as palate cleanser from a long project, but there the factor is length, not subject matter. If I can get a story done in a day while the next one is percolating, that’s just gravy.

Any news or projects you want to tell us about?

I have recently read a few of my older and shorter stories on YouTube, as an aid to distraction during the COVID quarantine. Just do a search via my name.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

Author Spotlight: Mari Ness

Alex Puncekar | 425 words

What was your inspiration for this story?

Like many of my stories, this one brewed for a long time before I wrote a single word. The original inspiration came from rereading Peter and Wendy, J.M. Barrie’s 1911 novelization of his 1904 play, as part of the Disney ReadWatch essay project that I did for Tor.com. While reading it, I unexpectedly found myself feeling extremely sorry for the pirates, trapped as they were in this island largely controlled by Peter Pan’s inability to grow up, forced to be part of his games again and again. I was also deeply struck by how rigidly gendered Neverland and the novel is, right down to the dog, who as a girl dog, is given a nurturing, maternal role. And of course, Wendy, who arrives in Neverland seeking adventure, and ends up doing laundry.

I wanted to have a character that fit neatly into the Neverland world but could challenge that. Given the number of women in history who chose to become pirates or who were forced into piracy—depending upon which story you choose to believe—a proper pirate seemed like the obvious option.

“Great Gerta and the Mermaid” is written as if it were historical nonfiction. What made you decide to write it this way?

The historical nonfiction approach is a nod to the original novel, which has touches of that approach here and there. I expanded on it, while somewhat guiltily taking all of my “historical facts” from The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. My deep apologies to the actual pirates of history.

Why Neverland? Great Gerta is certainly an excellent addition to the mythos, but what is it about that world and its inhabitants that interest you? And why was it the perfect backdrop for your story?

Well, for one thing, Neverland has pirates and mermaids, making it the perfect setting for a story about pirates and mermaids! Especially since the novel assures us that most of the Neverland stories have not been told.

But also, for all of its enticements—nothing but play and ongoing adventure!—Neverland is a deeply troubling, terrifying place, more so than the other famed childhood worlds of Wonderland and Oz and Narnia. And that makes it a rich source for stories.

What’s next for you? Are there any upcoming projects that you can talk about?

I’m tinkering on various things here and there, but nothing that I can talk about, alas.

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: Ray Nayler

Arley Sorg | 2361 words

In a way, the story of the aliens is told through Doctor Nino Makhviladze, and her story is told through Harlan. Are these characters (or characters in your stories in general) based on anyone in particular?

On the one hand, I can’t really think of a time when I’ve based a character on one particular person. On the other hand, I can’t think of a time when I haven’t based a character at least in part on people that I know in real life, or on some aspect of my own personality.

I think I’m never very conscious about who I base a character on. The characters mostly emerge from the story. The details of their backgrounds and some of their tendencies, though, are drawn from life. In that way, Nino Makhviladze is a condensation of a number of Georgian women that I have known professionally and greatly respected (mostly journalists), a Georgian geneticist that is a friend of the family, and aspects of my own personality and attitudes toward the world. I use the word condensation in the psychoanalytic sense: I think characters in my fiction sort of work like the people in dreams: They may have some of the tendencies of one person, dress or act like another, have the background of a third, but in the end they are all and none of those people.

As for Harlan—I can’t think of anyone in particular Harlan is based on. Superficially, he’s got some of the characteristics of a few friends of mine. But again, there are probably ten or twelve people in there, and a lot of myself as well.

Although the story focuses on strange happenings, it has, at heart, a concern with the impact of humans on the planet. Because the narrative focuses on the happenings, the story doesn’t read as preachy. But it does have a message, relayed through the calm (though sometimes annoyed), rational perspective of Nino. Is it important for fiction to carry some sort of message? Is it inevitable? Or can a story just be a fun story?

I would never tell another writer what to do. People are free to write whatever they want: that’s really the beauty of art. People do, and can, and should, write fun stories about nothing at all. But for me, I think a lot of the motivation for my writing is tied up in my thinking about and considering problems in the world or thinking through an element of science or philosophy that interests me. I don’t mean necessarily suggesting solutions to them, but turning them over in my mind. That’s just the way my mind works, and it’s where my inspiration comes from.

I guess in a way I don’t think “The Swallows of the Storm” has a message, or maybe more specifically I don’t think it has one message, although I agree that Nino has an opinion about things. I think stories are more complex than that. They are not exactly reducible to didactic messages. Or, they shouldn’t be. They are open, in that way, to interpretation. I really believe in Keats’ theory of negative capability: the idea that art should be content with mystery and unanswered questions. Not every event needs a direct explanation.

But on the other hand, stories are also interpreted by readers. If you think the story has a message, it does have one—because that is what you got out of it. The reader is a part of the process as much as the writer is.

How did this story happen for you? What was the inspiration and how did it develop?

Such a hard question for me. I really ruminate for a long time on ideas before I ever start writing a story, and it’s never just one idea that makes a story—it’s more like two or three or nine that come together—things that have been bouncing around in my head for a really long time, in the background. Later it’s often hard for me to say where the ideas got started.

I know that one of the threads of this story was from a podcast I was listening to about how, if we ever encountered alien life, it was likely to be some kind of intelligent artifact left behind from a race that is itself long gone. I also know that my Georgian geneticist friend’s work on gathering shepherd dog DNA was part of the inspiration. And a lot of my reading I had been doing in biosemiotics, especially the idea in biosemiotics from Jesper Hoffmeyer of code-duality: the idea that life is a recursive exchange of messages between analog codes (animals reacting with each other in ecological space) and digital codes (genomes) that are passively carried forward in time from generation to generation. Both are necessary for survival—what Hoffmeyer calls semiotic survival. So that’s all in there, in some sort of amalgam that evolved over time in the back of my brain while I was washing dishes . . .

I feel like there is a bit of poking fun at bureaucracy going on. Perhaps not on the level of Brazil (the movie), but the good doctor eventually leaves the government for private money so she can get more done, and she comments here and there about the slowness/inefficiency of the bureaucracy—to appreciative laughter. Does that sound right? Was that intentional?

It was. There is a lot of poking fun at bureaucracy, for sure. I live and breathe bureaucracy in my day job, and of course it can get frustrating, and we all make fun of it. But I also just wanted to be realistic about how things work: Government agencies move slowly and with caution. They are institutions with long traditions, regulations, and rules. That’s a reality of their structure, and it’s built in there for good reason, quite often.

Dr. Makhviladze is irritated by the slowness, and contemptuous of it, but I don’t always think it’s a positive side of her character, either. I wanted there to be a realism to her impatience with the apparatus she is working in, a verisimilitude. Bureaucracy is, after all, very frustrating at times. But it can also be a bulwark against theft, favoritism, and corruption. Going private is easier for Dr. Makhviladze, but I certainly wouldn’t want that to be read as some kind of libertarian critique: There are enormous dangers to privatization as well, and to the arbitrary decision-making private wealth allows. It just works out in her favor, in this particular case.

There’s a hard SF element to the story, including scientific details and theories about the devices. I might even say that aspects of the presentation of scientific process is, in a way, hard SF. At the same time, there’s this kind of poignant ending, set up with an almost sneaky through line with Harlan and his feelings for the doctor, which gives the story a really nice balance. Many writers would have just made this a hard SF story and not had this very grounding, very human, very real relationship aspect. Other writers would have dug into that relationship and made it central. Can you talk a little bit about your decisions with their relationship, and about striking this balance?

Thank you—I’m glad that you found the relationship between Harlan and Dr. Makhviladze real, and that you liked that balance between hard SF and character—that it worked for you.

I’m a perfectionist in my work. I demand a lot of myself, because I want to write the stories I would want to read. And when I read, I want everything about a story to feel real. Everything. So that’s my goal as a writer. I want to create worlds my readers can enter into completely and believe in fully while they are inside them. That means I want to get everything right: from the science I am exploring to the human relationships. I feel like I can’t neglect any aspect in favor of another.

I wanted the relationship between Harlan and Dr. Makhviladze to feel real, so it makes me happy that it felt that way to an experienced reader and reviewer like you. I also wanted to make a statement with this relationship: there are many, many ways to love a person, and many kinds of intense relationships possible that do not fall within narrow definitions, but are fulfilling.

You actually write quite a bit of hard SF (among other things). Did you do a lot of research for this piece to get the scientific ideas right, or to ground them in current theories? Were there elements that you originally wanted to add but couldn’t make them fit?

I usually don’t start with a story idea and then do the research. It’s almost always the other way around—the stories emerge out of my digging into a topic and doing the research due to my own personal interest. As I was saying before, I’ve been doing a lot of reading in biosemiotics lately, simply because I am fascinated with it as an emerging scientific field. And more than one story has come out of that reading: Other stories that I’ve written that have come out of that research into biosemiotics are “Albedo Season,” which was in the May 2020 Clarkesworld, and “Eyes of the Forest” which was in the May/June issue of F&SF. It’s informed elements of other work as well: I really think it has enriched everything I have written, but these three stories relate to it directly.

Once I start writing a story, though, it becomes clear that there are other elements that need to be added or fleshed out, and which demand further research. That’s a great part of writing: getting to do the research. I love research—it’s an opportunity for me to learn about new and unexpected things, it helps me feed my pretty much unlimited curiosity, and it quite often leads to new ideas for other stories.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know about this story?

In general, I’d like my readers to know that I am always thinking of them. William Sloane, who wrote the amazing To Walk the Night and The Edge of Running Water and was a brilliant editor and publisher as well, said in his book The Craft of Writing that “the relationship of writing is a one-to-one relationship. There is the writer and there is the reader. One of each.” That thought lies at the core of everything I write. I view it as a partnership, and I respect the time and the effort they put into it. It inspires me to work hard, and hopefully be worthy of their time.

In our last spotlight, for “The Death of Fire Station 10”, I asked you if your work often deals with specific themes or if your stories have some kind of style in common. After reading these two pieces, I want to say that your fiction tends to relate whatever the “idea” is to people in some significant way; and that relationships between characters are important to your narratives. What do you think?

I think that’s true. I’m interested in philosophical ideas, and science, and using those things to speculate about what might be, or could have been, or about how what is happening now could be different. But at the core of it, I am interested in what it is to be human. There is so much we don’t understand at all about ourselves—even about something as simple as what it is to be a self, an individual, an entity on this planet relating to other humans, to our environment. Why am I me, and aware of being myself? How does that work? How did this thing called life, and then this even more complex thing called consciousness, emerge from inert matter? I’m continually aware of the extraordinary wonder of that, and of how amazing it is to be here at all. And I believe that relationships—the way we treat one another—are the most meaningful part of living.

Communication is at the heart of it all. So all of my stories are, at the core, about the conscious being and their communication with other conscious beings. And the stories are written, after all, because I am a conscious being seeking communication with other conscious beings. I think it’s easy to forget that strangeness at the core of life, but it’s always there, underneath the surface of the day-to-day—that brute fact of being alive among others who are alive. Maybe if we thought about it more, we would be better to one another.

Given your response last time, I won’t ask what you’re working on now! But I’ll ask for a sort of update: I know folks can check our your website to see what you have out and what’s coming out. Are there any pieces that are particularly special to you, or about which you are especially excited to see come out?

I’m really looking forward to seeing “Outside of Omaha” come out in Lightspeed’s sister magazine Nightmare—it’s one of the uncannier short stories I’ve produced. As of this interview’s publication, in July, my story “Father” is out in Asimov’s, and I personally think that story is one of the best things I have written. And my first novella, “A Rocket for Dimitrios” will also appear in Asimov’s, likely sometime in 2021. I’m thankful for all those opportunities for my work to be read.

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.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 237 words

Coming up in August, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Matthew Kressel (“Still You Linger, Like Soot in the Air”) and Katherine Crighton (“Sing in Me, Muse”), along with SF reprints by Sam J. Miller (“My Base Pair”) and Dominica Phetteplace (“Seven Ways to Fall in Love With an Astronaut”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Benjamin Rosenbaum (“All Those Guardians of Order and Clarity, None of Them Can Abide a Free Witch”) and KT Bryski (“The Bone-Stag Walks”), and fantasy reprints by Eden Royce (“Miss Beulah’s Braiding and Life Changing Salon”) and Carrie Vaughn (“The Huntsman and the Beast”).

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 is with Andrea Hairston. 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: Ashok K. Banker, Adam-Troy Castro, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, Sunny Moraine, Kat Howard, and Todd McAulty.

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

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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 and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: Burn the Ashes (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: Or Else the Light (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

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.